A Place Called Armageddon

by C. C. Humphreys

  He leaned forward, took her hand. ‘But, Sofia,’ he said softly, ‘do you not think that the Turk is praying for exactly the same thing?’

  She took her hand back. ‘You cannot liken an infidel’s prayer to ours.’

  ‘And if God, Whose ways are mysterious, has decided that we should be punished and not forgiven?’

  She shrugged. ‘Then His will be done.’

  Gregoras did not reply. It was an argument he had given up having years before. His own faith had been taken along with his nose. But he knew that no words of his would convince a believer. He would have to try different persuasion. ‘And your children? They cannot choose as you choose. And you know the fate that may befall them if God has turned His back.’ He shuddered, for he had seen what happened when the Muslims took a town that had failed to surrender. He had seen what Christians did too. Exactly the same. ‘What then?’

  ‘She rose, went to the fireplace, where the logs had burned low. Stooping, she piled two more on before she spoke again. ‘My parents had a Turkish maid once. She always said, “Inshallah.”’

  ‘It means, “As God wills it.”’

  ‘I know.’ She rose, turned back to him. ‘Inshallah.’

  She looked so lost. He stood, stepped close to her. ‘Sofitra,’ he whispered.

  There was a hammering on the front door. ‘Your son?’ he said, turning towards the sound.

  ‘No. His knock is gentle, like himself.’ She bit her lip. ‘It is my husband.’ He started, turned. ‘There is a back way. Take it.’

  Gregoras took a step, then stopped. He had discovered earlier that there was one reason beyond gold he had come to the city. Now he realised there was a second. ‘No.’

  She came to him, anguish on her face. ‘You cannot stay! You are an exile. It is death if you are found here.’

  ‘It is death only if I am revealed.’

  ‘But …’ Her eyes grew wider. ‘You … you will not hurt him?’

  It was all his dreams, for years, the hurting of Theon. He shuddered. ‘I will not hurt him … within these walls. That much I will promise you. You have my word. Open the door.’

  She did not move. ‘And you will not … not tell him what I told you upon the rock?’

  He took a breath. ‘I will not.’ He watched her hesitate. ‘It is not for me to tell him, Sofia, however much I wish to hurt him. It is for you, if you so choose. If you do not, well …’ He straightened. ‘You have my word again. Now, go and open the door.’

  She looked at him for a moment, then stepped away. When she reached the first step, he called her. ‘Do not tell him I am here,’ he said. ‘I want to see his face when he sees mine. Give me that at least.’

  She did not turn round. But he could see her nod, before she descended the stair, as he tied his mask back in place.

  Theon leaned against the door, but it was only his tired body that rested. His mind seethed, Roman numerals flashing within it, as if laid over the chalked, crumbling walls of Constantinople.

  MMMMCMLXXXIII. Four thousand nine hundred and eighty-three. The number of citizens within those walls able to defend them.

  He’d become light-headed with exhaustion on the ride back from the meeting at the Blachernae palace. He’d begun to focus on the last ‘III’ of the tally. Who were they, those three men that the monk of the area around the Bucoleon palace had added last? Were they, like so many of the total, not soldiers at all? Thanos, perhaps, a cobbler? Markos, the tanner? Loukas, the ropewright? Each able to pick up a slingshot or hoist a spear without any true ability in either? If there had been twenty thousand, as had been hoped when the emperor decreed the secret census, that would have been one thing. Twenty thousand citizens on the walls would have made a fair display. Even ten, if they were spread out enough. But fewer than five?

  Sphrantzes had been right – it had indeed seemed to break the emperor’s heart, to have it confirmed just how impoverished his empire was. It was news that had to be kept to the barest minimum of ears. If it got out to the foreign forces – who, by anyone’s guess, barely totalled two thousand more men, albeit most with some military skill – that they would have so few Greeks beside them in the unequal fight … well, it was suspected that for all their loyal declarations, many would decide not to remain.

  Theon continued to stare at wood. His wife was slow at answering, but she was probably asleep at the top of the house. It was the problem of getting rid of most of the servants, selling the slaves, all to amass as much money as possible. In the grain of the wood, he noticed a swirl, like the symbol of the hyperpyron, and it made him think of the money he had sent away, placed with bankers in Florence, used to buy land in Crete, in Sicily. He had precious little left of value in the city, which was good, since that city, after tonight, looked more doomed than ever. The cobbler, the tanner and the ropewright would not save it, and each man must look to his own.

  And his was … ‘Sofia,’ he shouted up at the windows above. He’d sold the glass within them, and his voice should penetrate the cloth that filled them if his hammering on the door did not. ‘Open …’

  ‘Peace, husband. I am here.’

  The bolts were shot back, the door opened, a little light spilling out from the lamp she held. He saw a shape dart out, kicked at it, missed the cat, who limped off down an alley. He noticed something in its mouth. He had always hated the beast, was amazed when he’d shown up again, his leg set in a splint from his ‘accident’, nursed back to health on the voyage home.

  ‘What took you so long?’ he muttered as he pushed past her. ‘Sleeping? Good for some.’ He climbed the stairs. ‘I hope you prepared some food before you retired, at least. Otherwise, there will be …’

  It took him a moment to realise the room was occupied, that there was a masked figure standing by the fireplace. It took him another to realise who the figure was. He thought that surprising, and put it down to his exhaustion. Because, despite convincing himself that he was dead, truly, he’d been expecting his brother to appear every day for seven years.

  ‘Gregoras,’ he said.

  ‘Theon.’

  Sofia stopped at the top of the stairs to watch both men. For a long moment, only the rain beyond and the crackling of logs within disturbed the silence and the stares. Until Theon spoke. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Here in Constantinople, or here in my old family home?’

  ‘Both. But the first will do for now.’ Theon took a step into the room, trying to keep his voice low and firm. ‘You know it is death if you are found within the walls. And that … disguise will not shelter you for long.’

  ‘Truly? Yet it has sheltered me for the three weeks I have already been here. Even when I stood on those walls this day and watched you whisper in the emperor’s ear.’ Gregoras tipped his head to the side. ‘What was it you told him, brother, that made him pale so? Rumours of treason, perhaps?’

  Treason. Theon knew the word had not been chosen without care. Yet he was not ready to speak of it. Not yet. ‘I told him of a census we had undertaken, that was all.’

  ‘I see.’ Gregoras gestured beyond the window. ‘A census that tallied our strength? Or should I say our weakness?’ When Theon did not reply, he continued, ‘Come, brother! I have observed the empty neighbourhoods, the deserted streets. How many of our fellow citizens are there left to fight?’

  ‘That is a matter for the emperor, and the very few he trusts.’

  He knew he should not have used the word. His brother already had enough weapons. ‘Trusts? There would only be a very few so honoured. You. Me, once. No more.’

  Sofia ached. In her stomach, just above, came a jabbing pain. ‘I will leave you,’ she said, moving past Theon, crossing the room.

  ‘Do not.’ Gregoras’s sharp command stopped her at the upper stairs. ‘For at the moment, my promise not to kill your husband within these walls is the only thing preventing me doing it. If you leave, I may forget it.’

  She gave a little cry, turned back to them
, and Theon watched what passed between them. His promise? he thought. How often had he stood in this same room, watching them, with their secrets? And here, so long later, after so much … life, here they stood again, with things he could not share. It reminded him of all he felt then, felt all his life caught between them. Of all he still felt, and the fear that had seized him at the first sight of his brother passed.

  ‘You will not kill me, Gregoras,’ he said, taking another step into the room. ‘You can, of course. I doubt I could prevent you. But you will never make Sofia your wife by making her my widow. If you don’t know that about her, you do not know her. Her and her … God.’ He went and sat in one of the fireplace chairs, two paces from his brother, head lifted, offering his throat. ‘But there is another reason why you will not kill me now.’

  Gregoras had not moved. ‘What reason?’

  Theon leaned forward. ‘If you do, you will never know for certain what happened at the Hexamilion.’

  Gregoras took a step towards him now, hands and anger rising, then stopped, stunned by the sudden collapse of years. Seven of them, since his disgrace, since his loss of all that was his life except life itself; of oblivion sought in wine or fighting and often found. All that gone, and he was standing again in his parents’ house, confronting a brother who would not fight him, could not fight him, yet could defeat him again and again. With his words, with his coolness, with his … logic.

  Anger, his keen ability to hurt, would not serve him here. He looked at Sofia, unclenched his hands, stepped back. ‘Then you will tell me now, what happened there that day.’

  ‘Tell you what?’ Theon smiled. ‘What could I tell you that you would believe, brother?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘Truth? Whose? Yours? Mine? Sofia’s? I think they would be different, depending on where you stand.’

  Gregoras grunted. ‘Do not try to transform this into an exercise in rhetoric, Theon. We studied with the same tutors, and if I did not master the game as well as you, I can recognise it.’ He bent, bringing his masked face closer to its unmasked twin. ‘Let us be simple and clear.’

  ‘And if we are? If you learn a truth that does not … slake your desire for vengeance?’ He glanced at his wife. ‘You may have made a promise here, this night, “within these walls”, was it not? But a crisis is upon us; there are other nights of danger ahead, and other walls. How do I know that, out of her sight, vengeance will not be taken?’

  She watched the twin faces, one hidden, the other masked. Time collapsing for her, the two brothers she’d known all her life before her still, fighting still, about this or that. She was fourteen before she realised that the fights had all become about her, she the prize. Yet here and now, the game was more specific, the stakes much higher, and it made her tired. ‘Do not,’ she said, coming close to them, ‘make this about me once more. I cannot be won or lost. My life is what it is, in God’s good hands. But what is between you both is between you alone. Speak to that.’

  Theon looked at her, nodded, turned back. ‘Can you do that, brother?’

  Gregoras nodded. ‘I can. I will.’ He took a deep breath. ‘When the Hexamilion fell and the Turks came through the wall, it was cannon that made the breach.’

  ‘It was. Except for one section, where the wall had not been battered and a sally port was left unbolted.’

  ‘The section I commanded.’

  ‘Yes.’ Theon shrugged. ‘Carelessness or treachery? No one knew. But everyone was looking for someone to blame. Not the engineers who did not make their walls strong enough. Not the Turkish cannon that took them apart. Never God.’ He glanced at Sofia before continuing. ‘So when that bag of Turkish coins was found in your sea chest, everyone thought they did know.’

  ‘We know what everyone thought. And we know what my fellow Greeks did.’ Gregoras leaned down, the cloth on his face a hand’s breadth from the other. ‘And we know the story that followed. That once they … they had cut off my nose, you arrived suddenly to save me – from hanging.’

  ‘I did.’ A faint smile came. ‘It is a good story, is it not?’

  Gregoras felt his bile rising, swallowed it down. ‘But that is all it is, isn’t it, Theon? A story.’ He stepped closer. ‘Come! I know what happened. But I would like to hear you say it.’

  The brothers, two fingers apart, stared at each other. Sofia did not understand. She shook her head. ‘He spoke for you, Gregor.’ She lifted a hand towards him, dropped it again. ‘Pleaded for you. Saved your life.’

  Gregoras stood straight. ‘So he did. But did he tell you when he pleaded? That his arrival was not … sudden?’ He reached up, fumbling at the ties of his mask. ‘For as the knife descended, before I became too busy trying not to drown in my own blood, I saw him!’ He turned back to Theon. ‘I saw you. There in the crowd of soldiers. Oh, you came to the rescue of your brother. But after this was done. After!’ He let the mask fall. ‘Deny it. Tell me I was mistaken. You were not there. You could not have intervened until you did. Tell me.’

  Only silence came in reply. Firelight glimmered on ivory as Gregoras turned to her. ‘And you think that this was not about you?’

  ‘What can you mean?’ Her hand flew up to her mouth. ‘You are not saying that … that …’ She dropped to her knees before Theon’s chair, grabbed his shoulders, shook him. ‘Tell him that it is not true. Tell him that you did not … allow this to be done … because of me?’

  He’d always known he’d answer for that moment. That one when he’d stood there in the jostling ranks of soldiers he could have commanded, and didn’t. Not … immediately. Yet now that the time was here, the remorse he’d thought he might feel did not come. Instead, exactly what he’d felt then returned. ‘I have told no lies so far, my wife,’ he said, the triumph clear in his voice. ‘Why should I begin now?’

  ‘What?’ Sofia stared at him for a long moment, the one that passed as all her life crumbled before her. Then she pulled her hand back and slapped him.

  With an oath, Theon leapt to his feet, his own hand a fist. With a yell, Gregoras stepped forward.

  ‘Mother?’

  The cry startled them, froze them, hands raised. They all turned, to the boy standing in the doorway. ‘Mother,’ he said again. ‘Father! What is it? Why are you …?’

  ‘Thakos!’ she cried, running to him. She tried to take him into her arms but he avoided her, stepped to the side to stare at the two men.

  ‘Who are you, sir?’

  Silence, for three heartbeats. Sofia bent. ‘This,’ she said, reaching up to his head, which he jerked away, ‘this is … your uncle. Your father’s brother.’

  Silence again, shorter. ‘Yes! Oh yes!’ Thakos’s cry was excited. ‘For I see his nose.’ He pointed. ‘I see the traitor.’

  Until that moment, Gregoras could not have moved. Not when he was looking into time’s mirror, the shade of the face he’d once had. Until the shade spoke, in the shrill voice of a child, shattering the glass … with a title. Not who he was. As he was known. It was the title that unfroze him, and his son’s eyes – his mother’s, his own – that had him stumbling towards him, past him, down the stairs, through the front door Sofia had forgotten to rebolt. Out into the rainy night. Seeking oblivion.

  – FOURTEEN –

  Gone

  Leilah shifted, trying to find some angle of tumbled stone that the wind did not sweep around. Failing.

  Someone else had waited here, in this freezing ruin. There were boot prints in the stiff, churned mud at her feet. Him? Had Gregoras watched for the woman who’d opened the door for him this night?

  She felt her first flush of warmth, insubstantial as thought. Marvelled at it, at something she had never experienced. Jealousy! She knew this was his city; and the savagery with which he’d rejected it back in Ragusa had told her that there was something here for him, some passion, some hunger unassuaged. More, she had seen her in his chart, where Venus and Neptune conjoined. A woman. This woman who drew him into her house this n
ight.

  Even in the one glimpse, Leilah had seen that this woman was beautiful, in a way she herself was not – tall, noble, elegant. And they were not siblings or cousins. The way they’d greeted each other told her that. The way they did not touch.

  She was used to gauging passions. It was how she lived. Those that passed between her man of destiny and this beautiful woman nearly knocked her down.

  She had to know if he stayed. It was beyond judgement. She knew the heat she’d felt in Ragusa had been matched by his. But here he was, heated for this other woman.

  Heat! She shivered. Yet she knew she’d wait till dawn if she had to.

  Then she didn’t. A man went in, then a boy. Just after, Gregoras came out, almost running, hooded head bent into the rain. So she followed.

  At first, he appeared undecided, took turns off the larger street onto smaller ones, then doubled back. He headed west, as if towards the walls, then south for a while. When he came to the great aqueduct that split that part of the city east–west, he stopped beneath an arch, breathing heavily, looking about him. She nearly called to him then, but he turned suddenly about, and she had to step into a doorway to avoid him, watching him pass by within an arm’s reach, a reach she nearly made – until light from a window reflected in water in his eyes. He dropped to a slower pace and she followed from a little further back. At last, he seemed to know where he was going and stayed straight – back towards the districts occupied by the Italians, from Amalfi, Venice and Genoa. It was in the last that she’d found him, for only that night had she heard the rumour that the Genoan mercenaries had brought a German with them to the city who possessed, many prayed, the secret of Greek Fire. She hoped now that he would return to his barracks. She would see him safely there – and return with the daylight when the heat and the tears had left him.

  A bell struck ten. Most of the city was behind its shutters, the streets near deserted. Yet as they progressed, more men appeared, then some women, with light spilling more frequently onto the cobbles from the open doorways of taverns and brothels. He was leading her into the Venetian quarter, the largest of the alien enclaves. The Venetians had once ruled the city, she knew, the only foreign army ever to conquer here – by trickery and betrayal, the townsfolk said. Some also claimed they ruled there still, so dominant in trade that Greeks struggled to compete in their own city.