His quarry turned to watch in satisfaction as he fell, but despite his desperate desire to do so, Skiouros still couldn’t quite see this hauntingly recognisable quarry, for now he was tumbling, falling into the abyss below. Oddly, he seemed to be falling past a mountain top now, upon which two brothers – one a priest, the other a teacher – sat, scoring him on his failures.
Skiouros woke with a lurch, his back arching in the chair, his clothes and the blanket sodden with warm sweat.
The house was silent barring the snores of dozens of happy, replete occupants.
Apart from the old man with the four teeth, who sat close to the fire, watching him intently.
Skiouros stared in confusion and slight panic at the old Romani, the sweat running down his face in sheets and stinging his eyes. The old man nodded, once, and then closed his eyes and leaned back into sleep.
It was another hour before Skiouros’ heart stopped pounding enough for him to drift once more into oblivion.
Chapter five – Of interment and deepening mysteries
May 18th
THE ‘Country Church’ of Saint Saviour, sitting atop the slope in the shadow of the city walls, did not seem to have changed a great deal from the outside. As Skiouros and his friends stood at the end of the alleyway that led towards the delicate brick structure which had upon a time been one of the most astounding churches of the Byzantine city, his eyes played across the exterior. No. One thing had definitely changed: the belfry had gone. And nearby, stacked in neat piles among other heaps of materials, were the graceful curved stone blocks that would be used to construct the minaret in its place.
‘Are you sure the church will be empty?’ Diego asked quietly, his expression suspicious. ‘It displays all the signs of a building mid-construction.’
Skiouros shook his head. When would the Spaniard let go of his distrust? ‘It’s Friday.’ He frowned. His sense of time and space was still a little twisted after so much sea travel, especially when added to the pounding of his head after the intoxicating introductions to the Romani community the previous night, and he turned his furrowed brow on Dragi. ‘It is Friday, yes?’
The Romani nodded and Skiouros smiled at his Spanish companion. ‘Part of the creed of Islam is that Friday is their holy day, like Saturday to the Jews or Sunday to us. No one will work today. No Muslim, anyway.’
‘Best pray to God that the workers aren’t Christians then,’ Parmenio huffed.
‘Come on.’ Skiouros hefted the bag over his shoulder again, feeling the curiously comforting weight of the head inside, and strode towards the church. A street urchin with bare feet sat atop the boundary wall in the corner of the grassy cemetery, gnawing on a dirty crust and watching them with interest. Skiouros considered shooing him on, but decided against it. He’d been just such a boy once upon a time. The sun was already high in the clear, azure morning sky, and the city was beginning to heat up to levels Skiouros found more comfortable.
The church door was shut and a padlock hung at the latch. Diego pondered the situation and his expression shifted to a mix of concern and disapproval as Skiouros removed his new lock-pick set from his pouch and began to work at the fastener, shifting the three pins with ease until the device clicked and fell open. The Greek pocketed the padlock, unlatched the door and swung it wide, allowing a waft of dusty, powder-filled air to billow out into the open sunlight, where it glimmered in a thousand motes. Once it had cleared a little he peered inside, trying to ignore the disapproval of his newest companion as he examined the Saint Saviour church. All he seemed to get now from Diego was disapproval and suspicion and, though he knew he had brought it on himself, he would have to do something soon to reconcile himself with his former tutor.
The church of Saint Saviour echoed hollowly to his first step.
His heart felt a faint wrench of sadness.
The last time he had been here had, admittedly, been one of the worst days of his life, but he would never let that fact impact on his opinion of the building itself, which had clearly been one of the most glorious and deserving of all monuments to God. The mosaics and wall paintings covered the interior of the church, right into gilded domes, adding meticulous, exotic and complex counterpoint to the simple, marvellous marbles that formed the lower walls and the floors. Saint Saviour’s was a pious maze of colour and images.
Well… it had been.
One of the requirements of the mosques of the new Ottoman regime was a lack of such depictions, for images of God and his prophets were not to be countenanced, in a strange cultural echo of the iconoclastic era of Byzantium when biblical personages had been covered with plain painted crosses. And so the workers had done their duty liberally with their trowels, covering all the beautiful decoration with a layer of plain plaster and then a thin coat of white paint, prior to adding the complex patterns that would give the building colour and grace without the need for ‘blasphemous’ images.
With a sad air of loss, Skiouros stepped into the building, his feet kicking up plaster dust from the marble floor. Behind him, Dragi mumbled quick words with the other two, and then he ducked inside with his Greek friend. ‘What was that about?’ Skiouros whispered.
‘The others will stay outside and watch for potential interruptions.’
Skiouros’ eyes narrowed. ‘On a Friday? You expect interruptions?’
‘Just a precaution.’
The young Greek gave his Romani companion a suspicious look and then shrugged and peered off to the right. Access from this first exonarthex to the side chapel where he had fought a life-and-death struggle with an assassin was impossible due to the scaffolding and boarding supporting the ceiling of the former belfry’s lowest level, preparing for the minaret to go in its place. Ducking through into the inner narthex, he noted with interest that some of the mosaics had yet to be covered. Work had apparently only reached here yesterday, and there was a pervading smell of drying plaster. Passing through, into the parekklesion, he missed out the construction works in the corner and entered what had been the most beautiful side-chapel in the world. Now, it was a cold, echoing white space with splats of plaster and whitewash on the marble floor. But that didn’t matter to the workmen. Parts of the floor were being taken up and replaced anyway.
He noted with interest that the hole where he had left a Mamluk murderer with a crushed torso five years ago was either open again, or had remained open this whole time. He wondered what the workmen had thought those years ago when they had found the body.
Dragi was watching him with interest, and the Greek cleared his throat in a business-like manner and crouched by the hole. A step-ladder led down into the gloom, and he quickly slid down it into the darkness of the substructures. The huge chambers beneath the church were no longer used as a crypt and had not been for a long time, simply remaining as vaulted supports for the building above. The workmen were clearly engaged in re-mortaring various sections of brickwork in the foundations, but that would be the grand extent of the work down here – mosques had no use for such subterranean features. The light from above was surprisingly bright, the high windows’ radiance reflected in so much white wall surface as to positively glow, and a shaft of bright sunlight illuminated a circle in the crypt beneath the hole. But beyond that circle of light, only the nearest wall was visible down here – the darkness marched off oppressively in all other directions.
Skiouros downed his bag and retrieved his flint and steel from his pouch. Fishing around, he removed his tiny oil lamp, purchased back on Crete, which was a copy of the very same style oil lamps used by the Romans a thousand years ago and yet still functioned just as well. Filling the lamp from the minute oil flask in the pouch, he lay some tinder and a small taper on a piece of broken marble, striking the steel and flint until the tinder took, glowing, and then bursting into orange, fiery life. As the small, dry taper caught, he touched it to the oil at the lamp’s spout and the light source bloomed slowly into a golden glow, illuminating the dark cellars. Sure enough, as he t
ucked away the tinderbox and oil flask once more, he could see the tell-tale signs of patchwork repairs on some walls, and other, more crumbled sections yet to be dealt with.
Snatching up the bag with his free hand, he stamped out the small conflagration on the floor and moved to one of the sections where the work was clearly complete, an entire wall and its vaulting and free-standing brick columns all newly-mortared and dry. Crouching, he examined the ground. Bedrock. There would be no digging, then, to inter his sibling. Still, the work down here was almost complete, and this particular section was already finished. The workmen would have no cause to come to this corner again, and very soon they would remove their ladder and seal in the sub-vaults again. There was probably only a day’s work left here, and the crypt would need to be completed first so that the floor could be replaced to be worked upon.
Not a grave, then, but a tomb. A vast, spacious tomb, formed from the entire sub-level of the church. A tomb befitting a great man, really. Skiouros nodded his satisfaction and carefully tucked the bag containing the head and various stench-nullifying spices in the darkest corner, behind a pillar and well hidden from the centre or any part of this level where work might still be carried out.
It was done. After all this time, Lykaion was home and interred.
He felt a surprising and rather sudden sense of utter loss. Not, curiously, because he was finally burying his brother, and not simply because he had died in the first place, but because he’d become used to Lykaion’s voice in his head over those years, and yet now it had been so long since he’d heard it that he was beginning to wonder whether he’d imagined it altogether. And somehow, despite the time that had passed in silence, he’d clung to the idea that at least here, at the end, Lykaion would talk to him, would say goodbye to him.
Nothing.
With a sad smile he gestured farewell to his brother, muttering a very brief prayer in an archaic form of Greek and adding a shorter one in Turkish just in case. He then extinguished his lamp and packed away his gear, turning his back on the final resting place, scurrying over to the ladder and climbing it with suddenly-tired arms.
Dragi was awaiting him at the top with a patient expression.
‘He is settled?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Have you anything else to do here? We will leave shortly, but events are beginning to unfold, and you are currently where you need to be,’ Dragi replied mysteriously, causing Skiouros to clench his teeth in irritation yet again. With a deep breath, he wandered over to the apse at the eastern end of the side chapel. Here, not long ago, there had been exquisitely rendered paintings of half a dozen important saints, three to each side of the window. Now the room glowed with an unearthly white brilliance, and no sad, ancient eyes peered out of the walls. In a mix of irritation at this iconoclastic destruction and sadness at the final true loss of a brother, Skiouros stepped close to the white plaster. It was still recent, probably yesterday’s work, and while dry, it was also soft. Soon it would harden, but right now…
With an air of personal satisfaction, Skiouros leaned in and used his thumbnail to scratch a word into the plaster.
Λύκαιον
Stepping back, he smiled. Lykaion. You could see the inscription if you approached it at the correct angle and the light caught the marks, though from straight on it was all-but invisible. With luck it would stay there as a grave marker, even when the decorative paints were applied.
Dragi smiled but said nothing. He was almost buzzing as though with anticipation, and Skiouros’ suspicion rose a notch. He was beginning to recognise the subtle signs of the Romani’s machinations at work, and expectant silence and a tension in the air were portentous around Dragi .
Silence reigned in this ancient structure, and Skiouros rolled his shoulders. ‘I suppose, then, it’s time to get going.’
The two men turned and walked back towards the inner narthex, exchanging glances as they heard the door to the church creak open and then shut with a click. The sounds of hurrying footsteps halted the two men in their tracks as Diego and Parmenio rounded the corner with wild eyes.
‘Shit!’ Parmenio explained, unhelpfully.
‘We have company,’ Diego elucidated, as the two men came to a halt beside their friends.
‘Who?’ Skiouros asked, his nerves starting to twang as he cast a sidelong glance at Dragi, who seemed totally unsurprised.
Diego shrugged, effectively reminding them with a gesture that he was a stranger here. ‘No idea, but there’s at least a dozen of them, including the escort.’
Parmenio pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I don’t know who they are, but they’re important. There are soldiers with them.’
‘Janissaries?’
‘I can’t really be sure, since I don’t know them well enough, but to me they have the look of provincial field soldiers. And a couple of high-ranking nobles among them, too. One of them has some kind of standard being carried all ceremoniously.’
Skiouros’ eyes widened. ‘A standard with a crescent and a horsetail hanging from it?’
‘Yes.’
‘More than one of each?’
Parmenio frowned. ‘Yes. Three, in fact.’
Skiouros felt his panic begin to build. ‘A paşa. An important one, too.’
‘What is a paşa?’ Diego asked quietly.
‘Either a high government official or a senior military officer. Or anyone chosen directly by the sultan for merit. No one we want to meet, for sure.’
‘Well that might not be your choice. They‘re coming here and we’re trapped,’ Parmenio grunted.
‘The crypt,’ murmured Dragi, gesturing at the hole in the floor from which Skiouros had recently emerged. The Greek nodded his agreement and the four men scurried over to the hole. As Dragi moved first down the ladder, hooking his feet around the outside of the uprights and sliding freely and swiftly into the darkness, they could hear the door being opened back at the church’s main façade. Skiouros waited for Parmenio to descend as quickly as he could and Diego to slip down with the grace of an expert acrobat, and then dropped down it himself. As soon as he reached the bottom, he gestured to Dragi and the two of them lifted the ladder away from the hole in the ceiling, gently bringing it down into the darkness, taking it away from the hole and lowering it to the floor. Footsteps and murmured conversation echoed down from above, and Skiouros joined the others, lurking close by – but out of sight of – the hole, in the deep shadow.
Two men, from the distinct footsteps. One set of feet clipped on the marble and were clearly clad in fairly soft, high quality shoes. The others clunked with the heavy leather of military footwear. The two voices were as equally at odds as the footsteps: one was quiet and with an almost musical lilt, persuasive and smooth, while the other was slightly hoarse and deep – a voice of power and with a tone that suggested its owner was used to being obeyed. Skiouros would be willing to bet that the soft voice belonged to the soft shoes and likewise the deep one to the boots.
‘This is your idea of a private place, Hadim?’
Skiouros frowned at the deep, hoarse voice’s words. Hadim. The name meant ‘eunuch’ and suggested that its owner was a bureaucrat created by the same devsirme Christian draft that had torn Skiouros and Lykaion from their home. Which one of these men, then, was the paşa? There were plenty of Hadims in the Ottoman court, so the name did little to identify him. And a paşa might as equally be a man in military boots as a bureaucrat.
‘I am having the place restructured and turned into a mosque, Şehzade. On a Friday, where could be more private?’
Skiouros had been trying to place the quieter man’s accent and had decided on somewhere in the western Balkans, before what was actually said settled into his skull and his eyes widened again. This man was the one having the church of Saint Saviour rebuilt? Then he was Hadim Ali Paşa, vizier of the Ottoman court and heroic general of the Mamluk war. He was the senior paşa to whom the standard outside belonged.
But that was
not the revelation that was truly heart-stopping. The paşa’s tone of deference suggested that even he, one of the most powerful men in the empire, felt inferior to his companion, and Skiouros could see why. Şehzade, he had said. The word was one to be feared, for that title was applied only to the crown princes of the empire, the sons of the sultan himself. Skiouros felt his heart skip a single beat and then begin to race dangerously. To be caught listening in on a senior paşa and a son of the sultan would most certainly buy them a slow and agonising death.
‘I am still not convinced of the need for such secrecy, Hadim. I had not intended to leave the palace until the festival. Staying near to my father can only foster a closeness that will pay dividends.’
The quieter voice took on an air of strained patience. ‘My Şehzade, every wall in Istanbul hides the ears of the sultan, and none more so than those of the new palace. And some things are too dangerous to discuss even with dissembling tongues.’
The prince snorted, but clearly the argument had been won by his companion.
‘The time nears, Hadim. Have your emissaries met with any success?’
There was a pause. ‘There are crucial groups who are with us, Şehzade Ahmet – lesser powers who will support you, including one of our most ancient enemies. But there are others who favour your brothers, too. Nothing is certain at this stage. The more time we have, the more secure your position will be. The Khoraxané dede Babik warns us that your brothers’ champions are also moving within the city.’
Something about the way Hadim stressed the three names made Skiouros picture his face twisting sourly in disgust. The paşa clearly held no love for this person. Khoraxané was a name applied to the Romani of the region, and Skiouros glanced across at Dragi to see his companion chewing his cheek with narrowed eyes as he listened intently. Who was this mysterious Romani who dealt with a crown prince and a high paşa of the empire? He could almost sense the prince nodding in the silence. He glanced briefly at his other friends. Parmenio and Diego clearly had no idea what was being said or who these people were, other than that they were important. Dragi was inscrutable.
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