The Green Count

by Christian Cameron

  He raised an eyebrow. I noted that all of our Greeks were gone.

  ‘There was a misunderstanding,’ Prince Francesco said. ‘Which by now has been dealt with, I hope and pray.’

  We rode all the way to the north end of the wall, and there we entered at the Blacharnae Gate, where the emperor has his palace, and we were all alert. I saw Sir Richard loosen his long war sword in its scabbard and I did the same, pulling the emperor’s sword a finger’s width from the throat of the scabbard to speed the draw. I nodded to l’Angars, and my men-at-arms duplicated the action all the way down the column.

  There were men on the gate in plate and maille and red silk surcoats worked in gold, carrying axes – some like Swedish axes, and some like our poleaxes. They were all big men.

  ‘Hey, Syr Christos!’ Prince Francesco said to one man with blond hair and a fuller beard than most Franks. ‘A chance to practise your father’s tongue.’

  The man so named made a reverence to Prince Francesco. And then to me, he said ‘The sele of the day to you, My Lord,’ in London English. Miles Stapleton laughed aloud; there really isn’t anything more remarkable than being addressed in English at the gate of the emperor’s palace in Romania, is there?

  So the emperor’s inner guard is English. They have a proud history; their banda or company has served the emperors since Charles the Great ruled the Franks and Roland fought the Saracens, or so they say – six hundred years. Some say that they began to be English when Earl Sigurd fled after Harald’s defeat at Hastings. And I will say out of place that later, when I stood on the balcony at Hagia Sophia, I saw where Englishmen had carved their names in the railing; by God, it did me good to know that there were bored, blasphemous louts among them even then.

  Syr Christos, as he proved to be, was Greek; but his mother was Russian and his father English, and Constantinople was the only home he’d ever known, for all he could sound like a lad from Cheapside if he wished. We clasped hands, and I relaxed, and introduced him to Miles Stapleton and Diccon Crewel and Red Bill, and then we were accused of blocking the gate, and all our men rode in. Syr Christos seemed curiously hesitant, or perhaps taken aback, by us. I found him difficult to read. But any doubts I might have entertained were blown away by the palace.

  The Blacharnae palace is probably the finest palace I’ve ever seen; built of brick and stone and marble, it rises in striped glory to a height as great as Westminster, but it is not a church. The hall is vast, and outside are three churches and a double garden, all walled, with a small monastery and a vast block of stables, and all enclosed in a double wall that is gated in four places. The walls have their own towers, and the whole is as fine a fortress as Caernarvon or the Tower, but the gardens and stables and religious buildings are each more marvellous than the next, and as beautiful inside as out – perhaps, if possible, more beautiful inside. I have heard many men tell me that the Empire is in rude decline – and indeed, I can see the signs myself – but the frescoes and the mosaics are so wonderful, so fresh, that it is difficult to imagine that this is not a people at the very peak of their strength.

  The army paraded two regiments for the Prince of Lesvos’s arrival: the Varangians, who, as I have said, are mostly axe-bearing Englishmen, and the Vardariotes, who are ‘sons of Turks’. In fact, while that might once have been true, most of them are Kipchaks like John, with a sprinkling of Mongols from even further to the east, and a superb and barbaric spectacle they make in red silk kaftans and white turbans.

  But I noted there were fewer than two hundred Vardariotes and not even that many Varangians. The emperor’s ‘army’ wasn’t as big as John Hawkwood’s ‘Compagnia di Aventura’.

  Mind you, if I could only have four hundred men, I’d take Englishmen and Mongols. I might conquer the world with such an army.

  But they saw us to quarters with efficiency and courtesy. I saw the Bretons bedded down in a tower on the outer wall; the Italians rode off under Ser Maurizio to three towers by the Genoese and Venetian Quarter where they could find taverns and friends, taking with them both Francesco Orsini and his German squire. I was hesitant, and told Sir Richard as much; we were being broken up and scattered across a vast city, and I misliked it, and Sir Richard and Sir John liked it no better, but the prince would hear nothing of our suspicions,

  Syr Christos took me himself, and led me, as well as most of our English, Scots, Welsh and Irish, into the great small town beyond the palace. All my friends stayed with me, whereas Sir Richard and Sir John stayed at the palace with the prince. First we crossed farm fields, while Syr Christos explained that where once five hundred thousand people had lived in the city, nowadays only seventy thousand lived there, and that the Imperial complex had been moved from the Golden Horn to the Blacharnae district. But the land enclosed by the walls was so vast that we saw fields, and then a village, to the south, and beyond, to the east, another wall, and beyond the wall an endless profusion of tile roofs.

  But we didn’t go further east, but north around the palace walls and to the very edge of the sea where we found a fine neighbourhood, a proper bourg, nestled between the palace and the sea wall. There we found a small church dedicated to Saint Nicholas, where an English priest said Mass for us. And then we went to two big inns and a dozen private homes, and every man and woman in the little bourg of the great city spoke some English, and they came out into the street as if it was a holiday. Syr Christos told us that this little quarter had been ‘English’ since at least the First Crusade and the taking of Jerusalem. He showed me the graves of Englishmen going back to men with Saxon names in the little church of Saint Nicholas and Saint Augustus of Canterbury – a name that was music to my ears so far from home.

  I ate beef and drank good dark ale and was content. My hostess, who was Syr Christos’s lady mother, was charming, and spoke English with a lovely Russian accent. After we had supped, Syr Giorgios came to the hall, and proved to be a friend of the family, and then he promised to take me on a tour of the city the next day.

  Syr Christos gave him a cup of wine, and while he was out of the hall, Giorgios turned to me and Nerio. ‘You know what happened, eh?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He looked at Nerio. ‘I swear, we caught Andronicus in flagrante delicto. About to put on the purple.’

  Nerio raised an eyebrow and watched a serving girl. ‘We’re not supposed to say,’ he murmured. ‘But there’s a rumour at Negroponte that Andronicus intends just that.’

  Giorgios muttered some blasphemy in Greek and drank some wine. ‘Things are not good here – the city is tense, and the patriarch is not speaking to the caesar.’

  ‘Caesar?’ I asked.

  ‘The emperor’s son. Caesar Andronicus.’ Giorgios glanced at Fiore, who was sneezing. ‘Be careful. I’ll come tomorrow.’

  The next morning, I had no duties, and Syr Giorgios came as he had promised. He was good company, if a trifle long-winded, and took us into the city proper, past the outer farms and the inner wall, walking us up the hills, taking all of us through a ruined gate to avoid the toll, and telling me of each church and its particular saint. Nerio came along, and Miles; Fiore stayed abed, having developed a head cold of staggering proportions in the rain.

  Giorgios and Christos spoke Greek, a mile to the minute, as we strolled out into the warm summer day. Mostly they showed us churches, starting with Hagia Sophia, the most staggering sight of the whole day. In the enclosed court outside the magnificent cathedral, Giorgios and Christos had an argument, which I ignored to buy a spiced sausage from a vendor. It might have been London, except for the heat.

  Between churches, I had time to see a little of the great city. The streets were miraculously broad – as broad as ten London streets – but the alleys and warrens that led off the fine thoroughfares were as narrow as anything in London, and perhaps worse. They had the same smells: death, rot, urine.

  A fine aqueduct runs into the cen
tre of the city like a spine, across the hills in the centre of the peninsula. I find I have not really described anything, which is an old man’s reminiscence at work. Constantinople is like a man’s left thumb, if his hand is palm down on the table. It is a broad thumb, I confess it – perhaps more like two thumbs side by side. The nail is the old palace and all the imperial gardens; when I looked over the wall, standing on Nerio’s shoulders, it looked to me like a tangle of untended trees, but with the walls of the old palace rising like a derelict ship and then the bulk of Hagia Sophia like a mountain constructed by men. Just at the lower edge of the nail is the hippodrome – an incredible place, like a vast theatre built for jousting. The old Romans used it to race horses, or so they told me. West and north of the hippodrome the city proper begins, with the ‘Millon’ stone, the first milestone of the Roman Empire, from which other roads were measured. I have seen the one in York; imagine! And imagine, too, that Constantine, who built Constantinople, was crowned emperor at York. He was an Englishman, naturally!

  At any rate, I stood there at noon, with statues of Roman dukes and counts and knights all around me, and thought of roads that ran from this stone all the way to the Pict Wall, past York Minster. One empire. One faith.

  We walked and walked. I ate my highly spiced sausage and listened to the criers; again, they shouted in different languages, but it was not unlike London. The sounds were loud – some in Italian, most in Greek. And in the background, everywhere, the singing of monks.

  Summer gives long days, and most of the markets were open. We saw the emperor’s spice market, and I bought saffron and split a sweet cake with Nerio. The spice market was full of Italian sailors and merchants buying, but Giorgios admitted that it was unusually quiet. People looked at us oddly. A Pisan asked if it was true that the Count of Savoy was coming to storm the city.

  Then we walked back inland, up to the height of the city, where we could see across the strait to the Genoese tower at Pera on the far side, a symbol of the power of that republic within the empire.

  I wanted to see the inside of a church, and Giorgios insisted that we go all the way back out to the area between the two walls – almost an English mile. By then we had probably walked a dozen of those miles, and Nerio was willing to stop and drink wine.

  ‘Where are the women?’ he asked at one point.

  Giorgios shrugged. ‘Women do not come out except for religious observance, and fetching water, and gossip,’ he said, dismissively.

  Nerio sighed. ‘Barbaric,’ he said.

  Giorgios began to explain the beauties of his city while we trudged along what might have been a country road anywhere else in the world, except that in any direction you could see the towers of the great walls, and to the east you could see the roofs of the city.

  Christos fell behind with Miles, and Giorgios took my arm. ‘That man worries me,’ he said, nodding his head at Syr Christos. ‘Why is he staying with us all the time?’

  I thought Giorgios was being rude, and I said so, and he shrugged. I took his shrug to mean that he was not offended because I was something like a fool.

  ‘You are a fine soldier,’ he said. ‘But this is Constantinople, and men were hatching plots here when Rome was in the hands of barbarians.’

  But he went back to speaking of the wonders of the city. I admit that I wasn’t as impressed as I might have been. Constantinople is old and magnificent, but like an old knight, you can see all the scars; you can guess how strong he once was, but you can see the wrinkles in his skin and the loss of muscle, and so it was with the city of Constantine. Nothing was well-maintained, and almost nothing was new. And the people were, to me, shockingly superstitious; every single thing was explained to me in terms that would have made a Venetian snort or an Englishman from Mary-Le-Bon laugh aloud. They’re priest-ridden the way Italians are not; they venerate saint’s relics that are themselves slightly too much, if you take my meaning – milk from the Virgin’s teat?

  Perhaps I am just a doubting Thomas.

  And under every glory there was dirt, or over it: many mosaics were dirty; there was trash in all but the broadest streets, and even Giorgios’s proud guiding could not conceal empty houses and gloomy streets with no children playing.

  There was great beauty too; the Lykos river flowed through much of the town, and we ate grapes along the bank, and I looked upstream and saw trees overhanging the river. Giorgios told me they belonged to an estate of the Komnenos family, and that they were in exile. The stream was beautiful, and the fields on either side beautifully farmed.

  However, we crossed the fields, boiling in the sun, and Giorgios interrupted the flow of his lecture to take us to a beautiful church with many frescoes; the ‘Church in the Fields’. The priest on duty was no friend of Franks or Englishmen, and he followed us as if he expected us to steal the lamps, but Giorgios spoke a few words to him and he smiled at us.

  I stopped under a superb mosaic of Christ Pantokrator – Christ the King, we’d call him. He looked exactly like Giorgios: narrow face, intelligent eyes. I said as much, and Giorgios hushed me with a smile and said this was blasphemy.

  ‘But you are a Latin!’ I said.

  He winced and looked over his shoulder at the priest. ‘Not here, I am not,’ he said, with a smile full of irony that suggested to me that he wasn’t a Latin anywhere, except perhaps while Father Pierre Thomas was alive.

  ‘You don’t like us,’ I said.

  ‘Bah,’ he said, with a frown and a little shake of his head. ‘I am too old to dislike a whole race. Men are men. But the Franks were no friends to us. You are, William. But you are not a typical Frank. Nor Nerio. And it is easy to hate you, when we need you so much.’ He glanced at Christos. ‘There are many here who loathe all the Franks. Some would rather ally with the Turks.’

  We were leaving the Chora church and there was a little rain, and despite the damp I saw a market across the courtyard, full of pottery and saints’ images, and I left my friends and crossed the yard.

  A man in an Italianate half-cloak ducked away into the portico of the monastery.

  If he hadn’t moved so fast, I would never have noticed him. But the Italian half-cloak was the odd thing. The Romanians, or Byzantines, have their own styles: men wear small turbans, and woman often wear larger ones; men favour Turkish or Mongol coats or kaftans, and women sometimes wear kirtles like Frankish women, but more often a shapeless overdress and veils. When men wear hose, they are linen, and quilted. The man I glimpsed was in Italian clothes – jupon, tight wool hose, and a half-cloak – and he stood out. In the spice market it would have been nothing. In a small churchyard, he was as alien as I was myself. And his face – flat, and Slavic.

  Despite which, it’s like seeing a drunkard in the Papal Palace; not your business. I went into the market and bought some fine wares, as good as anything I’d seen in the Damascus Market in Adalia. I bought plates, a few cups, and a big platter which, by God and Saint George, made it to Venice intact, and off which, friends, you may one day eat a meal.

  It was not so far back to Blacharnae and beyond it, our little English quarter. But we were tired, and at Giorgios’s suggestion, we rented horses and rode, with a boy on a pony to take his father’s horses home. As we left the stable, I saw the half-cloak again, this time in the shadows by the stable gate. And I saw him pointing, and the man with his head turned to follow that pointing arm was Greek – nondescript, but he wore a long dagger with a cross hilt. A very workmanlike weapon, in fact.

  ‘I think we’re being followed,’ I said to Nerio, who had been watching a solitary girl get water at a fine well head.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. But his focus changed; the insufferable half-smile left him, and he became a different kind of predator.

  ‘Giorgios,’ I said, putting a hand on our guide’s shoulder, ‘we are followed.’

  He raised both eyebrows. ‘They could be the emperor’s me
n,’ he said. ‘We are very careful of …’ He paused.

  ‘Franks?’ Miles said.

  ‘Foreigners,’ Giorgios said graciously. But he looked at Christos. ‘Except …’

  I thought no more of it.

  Marc-Antonio was waiting for me that evening and gave me a message from the prince, asking my attendance the next day at the palace, dressed for court. Marc-Antonio, with some daring, had gone off with Red Bill and Achille and seen Hagia Sophia, and was full of praise for the church, which he said was far grander than Saint Mark’s in Venice.

  ‘I’m sure I should say that Saint Mark’s is better,’ he said ruefully. ‘But in truth, it looks to me as if Saint Mark’s is merely the imitation of something vast and great.’

  I had seldom seen him so moved. He’d made drawings, which we all admired; indeed, Christos’s mother, who was named Anna, asked if she could keep them.

  ‘It is many years since I have worshipped in the great church,’ she said. ‘They say Justinian built it, with the help of the Archangel Gabriel.

  When we were private again, Marc-Antonio told me that they had been followed.

  I resolved to protest this to the prince, but in truth, in London, the King would have certain dangerous foreigners followed, and I could well imagine that to the emperor, we English were the very archetype of dangerous foreigners.

  And yet, as I told Nerio, the man in the Italian clothes worried me.

  ‘You think too much,’ Nerio said. ‘Do you think that this city has courtesans?’

  ‘Don’t you ever tire of lechery?’ Fiore asked. He was somewhat recovered from a day of our hostess’s close attention. She had fed him Russian soups, and cosseted him, and he was, in fact, much better.

  Nerio looked surprised. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘You may kill me when I tire of women.’

  Miles laughed. He had had a cup of wine or two, and his focus was relaxed. ‘Why is it that I fear Hell every minute, and yet, I assume God will forgive Nerio because he’s Nerio?’