Revelations

by Oliver Bowden

  Ezio was traveling light. In truth, he expected to find Masyaf, if he succeeded in reaching it, deserted. At the same time, he admitted to himself that he was uneasy at the scarcity of Assassin intelligence about Templar movements in the present days of apparent, or, at least, relative, peace.

  As far as this second leg of the journey, which would take him to Corfu, was concerned, he knew he had little to fear. Piri Reis was a great captain among the Ottomans, and had once been a pirate himself, so his men would know how to handle them if fear of Piri’s name alone didn’t keep them at bay. Ezio wondered if he’d ever meet the great man himself one day. If he did, he hoped Piri, not known for his easygoing nature, would have forgotten the time when the Brotherhood had been constrained to “liberate” some of Piri’s precious maps from him.

  The Ottomans themselves now held sway over Greece and much of eastern Europe—indeed, their territories almost touched those of Venice in the west. Not everyone was happy with the situation, and with the presence of so many Turks in Europe; but Venice, after a standoff, had continued to trade with its Muslim neighbors, and la Serenissima had kept control of Corfu, Crete, and Cyprus.

  Ezio couldn’t see the situation lasting—the Ottomans had already made unfriendly advances on Cyprus—but for the moment, peace held, and Sultan Bayezid was too preoccupied with internal family squabbles to make any trouble in the west.

  The broad-beamed ship, with her great sail of white canvas, cut through the water more like a broadsword than a knife, but they made good time despite adverse headwinds, and the short voyage across the mouth of the Adriatic took little more than five days.

  After a welcome from the governor of Corfu, a fat Italian called Franco who liked to be called Spyridon, after the local patron saint, and who long since had clearly abandoned politics for lotus-eating, Ezio had a talk with the ship’s captain as they stood on a balcony fronting the governor’s villa, and looking out over palm trees to the harbor, which nestled under a sky of blue velvet. In exchange for another pouch of Venetian soldi, they agreed between them that Ezio should continue on to Athens.

  “That’s our destination,” the captain told him. “We’ll be hugging the coast, I’ve done the trip twenty times, there will be no problem, no danger. And from there it will be easy to take a vessel bound for Crete and even on to Cyprus. In fact, I’ll introduce you to my brother-in-law Ma’Mun when we reach Athens. He’s a shipping agent. He’ll take care of you.”

  “I’m obliged,” Ezio said. He hoped the man’s confidence was well placed. The Anaan was taking on an important cargo of spices for transfer to Athens, and Ezio remembered enough from his early days when his father was one of the major bankers of Florence to know that this cargo would make the Anaan a tempting target for any pirate, no matter how great a fear the name of Piri Reis might strike in them. If you fight on a ship, you need to be able to move fast and lightly. In the town, the following morning, he went to an armorer and bought a well-tempered scimitar, beating the man down to one hundred soldi.

  “Insurance,” Ezio told himself.

  The following day at dawn, the tide was high enough for them to begin their voyage, and they took advantage of it, together with a brisk northerly wind, which filled their sail immediately. They coasted south, keeping the shore about a mile to their port side. The sun sparkled on the steel blue waves, and the warm wind caressed their hair. Only Ezio could not quite bring himself to relax.

  They’d reached a point just south of the island of Zante when it happened. They had pulled out farther to sea to take full advantage of the wind, and the water had turned darker and choppier. The sun was dipping toward the western horizon, and you couldn’t look in that direction and see anything without squinting. The mariners were casting a log over the starboard side to take the speed, and Ezio watched them.

  Afterward, he couldn’t have said what it was that had caught his attention. A seabird, perhaps, dipping along the side of the ship, attracted his eye. But it was no bird. It was sail. Two sails. Two seagoing galleys, coming in out of the sun, taking them by surprise and almost upon them.

  The corsairs had lain alongside almost before the captain had had time to summon his crew to arms and action stations. The pirates threw grappling irons on ropes over the Anaan’s sides and were soon scrambling aboard, as Ezio raced aft to arm himself. Luckily, he had the scimitar already at his side and was able to put it to its first tests, slicing his way through five Berber seamen as he struggled to reach his goal.

  He was breathing heavily as he hastily strapped on his bracer and his gun. He had enough faith in the scimitar by then to dispense with his hidden-blades, which he stowed quickly in a hiding place in the cabin, and he judged the bracer and the gun the better weapons for this combat.

  He sprang out into the fray—around him the familiar clashing of weapons and already the smell of blood. A fire had started forward, and the wind, which had chosen that moment to turn, now threatened to drag it aft the length of the ship. Commanding two Ottoman sailors to grab buckets, he ordered them back forward to where the ship’s water reservoir was. At that moment, a pirate flung himself from the rigging onto Ezio’s shoulders. One of the sailors yelled out a warning. Ezio spun round, flexed the muscles of his right wrist, and his gun sprang from the mechanism strapped to his forearm, into his hand. Swiftly, with no time to aim, he fired, stepping back immediately to allow the still-falling body to crash past him onto the deck.

  “Fill, quickly, and put out the flames before they spread,” he yelled. “The ship will be lost if the fire takes hold.”

  He hacked away at three or four Berbers who had raced toward him, sensing already that he was the one man aboard to neutralize, if their attack was to be successful. He then found himself confronted with the corsair captain, a burly brute with an English cutlass in each hand—booty, no doubt, from some earlier unfortunate victims.

  “Yield, Venetian dog!” the man snarled.

  “Your first mistake,” replied Ezio. “Never insult a Florentine by mistaking him for a Venetian.”

  The captain’s reply was to bring a savage left-armed blow ringing down toward Ezio’s head, but Ezio was ready for it and raised his own left arm, letting the cutlass blade slide harmlessly the length of the bracer and off into the air. The captain hadn’t expected this and was thrown off balance. Ezio tripped him and flung him headlong into the reservoir in the hold below.

  “Help, effendi! I cannot swim!” the captain burbled as he surfaced.

  “Then you had better learn,” Ezio told him, turning away to cut at two more pirates, who were almost upon him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that his own two sailors had succeeded in lowering their buckets on ropes into the reservoir and that now, joined by a handful more of their shipmates, similarly equipped, they were beginning to get the fire under control.

  But the most ferocious fighting had moved to the rear of the ship, and there the Ottomans were getting the worst of it. Ezio realized that the Berbers had no desire for the Anaan to burn, for that way they’d lose their prize; so they were letting Ezio’s sailors get on with the job of dousing the fire while they concentrated on taking the ship.

  His mind moved fast. They were badly outnumbered, and he knew that the Anaan’s crew, tough men as they were, were not trained fighters. He turned to a stack of unlit torches stowed under a hatchway in the bow. Leaping over and seizing one, he thrust it into the dying flames of the fire, and once it had taken, he threw it with all his force across into the farther of the two Berber ships lying alongside. Then he seized another and repeated the action. By the time the Berbers aboard the Anaan realized what was going on, each of their ships was well ablaze.

  It was a calculated risk, but it paid off. Instead of fighting for control of their prey, and realizing that their captain was nowhere to be seen, they panicked and beat a way back to the gunwale, as the Ottomans, taking heart, renewed their own efforts and launched a counterattack, lashing out with sticks, swords, hatche
ts, bit ends, and whatever else came to hand.

  In another fifteen minutes, they had driven the Berbers back to their own ships and cast off from them, cutting the grappling irons free with axes and using poles to push the burning galleys away. The Ottoman captain barked a number of rapid orders, and soon the Anaan was clear. Once order had been reestablished, the crew set about swabbing the decks of blood and stacking the bodies of the dead. Ezio knew that it would have been against their religion to cast any body overboard. He just hoped the rest of the journey wouldn’t take long.

  The Berber captain, a soggy mess, was hauled from the reservoir. He stood on the deck, abject and dripping.

  “You’d better disinfect that water,” Ezio said to the Anaan’s captain, as the pirate chief was led away in irons.

  “We have enough drinking water for our needs in barrels—they will take us as far as Athens,” the captain replied. Then he drew a small leather purse from the pouch at his side. “This is for you,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m refunding your fare,” said the captain. “It’s the least I can do. And when we reach Athens, I’ll see to it that your feat is spoken of. As for your onward journey, rest assured that everything will be arranged for you.”

  “We shouldn’t have relaxed,” said Ezio.

  The captain looked at him. “You are right. Perhaps one should never relax.”

  “You are right,” Ezio replied, sadly.

  FIVE

  Athens had prospered under the Turks, though as he walked the streets and visited the monuments and temples of the Greek Golden Age, being rediscovered and revered in his own country, and saw with his own eyes the statues and buildings that were inspiring his friends Michelangelo and Bramante in Rome, Ezio understood something of the proud resentment that gleamed unmistakably in the eyes of several of the men and women of the local population. But he was fêted by Ma’Mun, the Ottoman captain’s brother-in-law, and his family, who showered him with gifts and urged him to stay.

  His stay was longer than he had wanted it to be in any case since unseasonable storms had boiled up in the Aegean north of Serifos, battering the cluster of islands to the south of Athens and effectively closing the port of Piraeus for a month or more. Never had such tempests been seen at that time of year. Street prophets inevitably muttered about the end of the world, a topic much discussed at the time of the half millennium in 1500. In the meantime, Ezio, having no time for such things and only chafing against the delay, brooded over the maps and notes he had brought with him and vainly tried to glean intelligence on the Templars’ movements in the area and in the region south and east of Greece.

  At one celebration in his honor, he made the acquaintance of a Dalmatian princess and had a dalliance with her, but it was no more than that, a dalliance, and his heart remained as isolated as it had been for so long. He had ceased, he told himself, to look for love. A home of his own, a real home, and a family—these held no place in the life of an Assassin Mentor. Ezio had read something, dimly understood, of the life of his remote forebear in the Brotherhood, Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad. He had paid dearly for having a family. And even though Ezio’s own father had managed it, he, too, had paid a bitter price in the end.

  But at last—not too soon for the impatient Ezio—the winds and the seas abated and were replaced with the fine weather of spring. Ma’Mun had made all the arrangements for his onward passage to Crete, and the same ship would take him farther—as far as Cyprus. This vessel was a warship, a four-masted kogge, the Qutaybah, with one of its lower decks armed with a line of ten cannon on each side, and more guns in emplacements in the hull fore and aft. In addition to lateen sails, she was square-rigged, European-style, on the mainmast and mizzenmast; and there was an oar deck below the cannon, thirty oars to a side.

  Chained to one of them was the Berber captain Ezio had tangled with on the Anaan.

  “You will be free from the need to defend yourself on this ship, effendi,” Ma’Mun told Ezio.

  “I admire it. It has something of the European design about it.”

  “Our Sultan Bayezid admires much that is gracious and useful in your culture,” replied Ma’Mun. “We can learn much from each other if we try.”

  Ezio nodded.

  “The Qutaybah carries our Athens envoy to a conference at Nicosia, and will dock at Larnaka in twenty days. The captain stops at Heraklion only to take on water and supplies.” He paused. “And I have something for you . . .”

  They were seated, drinking sharbat, in Ma’Mun’s office in the port. The Turk now turned to a huge iron-bound chest that stood against the far wall, taking from it a map. “This is precious, as all maps are, but it is a special gift from me to you. It is a map of Cyprus drawn up by Piri Reis himself. You will have time there—” He held up his hands as Ezio began to object, as politely as he could. The farther east you traveled, the less urgency there seemed to be about time. “I know! I am aware of your impatience to reach Syria, but the kogge will only take you so far, and we must arrange your onward transport from Larnaka. Fear not. You saved the Anaan. We will be suitably grateful for that act. No one will get you to your destination faster than we.”

  Ezio unrolled the map and examined it. It was a fine, detailed work. He thought that if he was indeed obliged to spend time on that island, he knew from clues he had already picked up in his father’s archives that Cyprus was not without interest to the Assassins, in the history of their eternal struggle with the Templars, and that it could well be that there he would find clues that might help him.

  He would make good use of his time at Cyprus, but he hoped he would not have to tarry there long, effectively controlled as it was by the Templars, whatever appearances might be to the contrary.

  But it was to be a longer journey than anyone might have anticipated. Hardly had they set sail from Crete after their brief landing at Heraklion—a matter of no more than three days—than the winds began to rage again. Southerly this time, fierce and warm still from their long journey out of North Africa. The Qutayah battled them bravely, but by degrees she was beaten back north up the Aegean, fighting her retreat through the tangle of islands of the Dodecanese. It was a week before the storms abated, not before claiming the lives of five mariners and an uncounted number of galley prisoners, who drowned at their oars. At last, the ship put into Chios for a refit. Ezio dried his gear and cleaned his equipment of any rust. The metal of his special weapons had never shown the least sign of tarnish in all the years he had had them. One of the many mysterious properties they had, which Leonardo had attempted to explain to him in vain.

  Three precious months had been lost before the Qutaybah at last limped into the harbor of Larnaka. The envoy, who’d lost twenty pounds on the voyage, through seasickness and vomiting, and who’d long since missed his conference, made immediate arrangements to travel back to Athens by the most direct route, traveling overland as far as he could.

  Ezio wasted no time in looking up the Larnaka agent, Bekir, whose name Ma’Mun had given him. Bekir was welcoming and even deferential. Ezio Auditore da Firenze. The famous rescuer of ships! He was already the talk of Larnaka. Auditore effendi’s name was on every lip. Ah—the question of passage to Tortosa. The nearest mainland port to Masyaf. In Syria. Yes, yes of course. Arrangements will be placed in hand immediately—this very day! If the effendi will be patient, while the necessary wheels are set in motion . . . The best possible accommodations will be at his disposal . . .

  The lodgings arranged for Ezio were indeed splendid—a large, light apartment in a mansion built on a low hill above the town, overlooking it and the crystal sea beyond. But after too much time had passed, his patience grew thin.

  “It is the Venetians,” explained the agent. “They tolerate an Ottoman presence here, but only in a civil sense. The military authorities are, regrettably, wary of us. I feel that”—the man lowered his voice—“were it not for the reputation of our sultan, Bayezid, whose authority stretches far and whose
power is mighty, we might not be tolerated at all.” He brightened: “Perhaps you could help in your own cause, effendi.”

  “In what way?”

  “I thought, perhaps, that as a Venetian yourself . . .”

  Ezio bit his lip.

  But he was not a man to let time hang idly. While he waited, he studied Piri Reis’s map, and something drew him, something half-remembered that he had read, to hire a horse and ride down the coast to Limassol.

  Once there, he found himself wandering through the motte and bailey of the deserted castle of Guy de Lusig-nan, built during the Crusades but currently neglected, like some once-useful tool whose owner has forgotten to throw it away. As he walked through its empty, drafty corridors and looked at the wildflowers growing in its courtyards, and the buddleia that clung to its crumbling ramparts, memories—at least, they seemed to be memories—prompted him to explore more deeply, to delve into the bowels of the keep and explore the vaults beneath it.

  There, shrouded in crepuscular gloom, he found the desolate and empty remains of what had undoubtedly once been a vast archive. His lonely footfalls echoed in the dark labyrinth of rotting, empty shelving.

  The only occupants were scuttling rats, whose eyes glinted suspiciously at him from dark corners as they scurried away, giving him slanting, evil looks. And they could tell him nothing. He made as thorough a search as he could, but not a clue of what had been there remained.

  Disheartened, he returned to the sunshine. The presence of a library there reminded him of the library he sought. Something was prompting him though he could not put his finger on what it was. Stubbornly, he remained at the castle two days. Townspeople looked oddly at the dark, grizzled stranger who roamed their ruin.