A Place Called Armageddon

by C. C. Humphreys

  He’d halted before an especially crowded tavern. Then, with barely a pause, he began to push his way in, jostling through the mob at the inn’s door, ignoring the curses. She bit her lip. But she had no choice. She tied her hair back, pulled her wide-brimmed hat lower over her eyes, her cloak tighter about her. Most of the drunkards would barely glance at the small, stained workman in their midst, not with the painted, flounced whores shimmering before them.

  Slipping around the group that Gregoras had pushed through, Leilah entered.

  *

  He’d found a three-legged table in a corner, far from the fire and the light and so deserted. He’d found a servant who had brought him a flagon of wine and was given a Ragusan libertine, silver coins of whatever nation assuring that he would return often to check on its emptying. Now, disdaining the goblet provided, Gregoras raised the flagon and drank half of it off.

  He was going to get drunk. He’d come to a Venetian tavern to do it because he did not want to run into any Genoans who might know him. He hated Venetians with a virulence near equal to his adopted comrades’ – another reason he’d come to one of their taverns. If the wine slipped down as easily as he hoped, then it would have one of two effects. He would either fall asleep there at the table, or he would seek to fight the largest fucking Venetian he could find.

  Neither oblivion nor a victim appeared in the first flagon. But a third of the way down the second, another face appeared and would not leave. His son’s, with the only expression Gregoras had ever seen on it – horrified fascination. Amidst the babel of the inn – and there were three men by the fire who were making the noise of an army – one voice would seem to rise up, one word shouted in Greek: prodotis.

  Traitor.

  He pushed aside the flagon, put his head into his hands. Why had he not listened to himself? Why had he let the Fates blow him back to Constantinople? For money? Gold he knew he’d never get, as soon as the Commander told him that he did not have it in Chios? No. He’d come because of her. Sofia. Some vestige of hope he thought he’d drowned in a thousand inns like this one. Some memory, like an itch in the nose he no longer had. The plot was worse than any of the comedies he’d laughed at with her on feast days in the Hippodrome. Yet who was the fool now, who the cuckold, who the gulled father?

  Father! A title he’d never sought to own. One his brother did own. Falsely.

  He lifted his head, took another swig. Theon had not denied that he’d … tarried. Let his brother be marred, let his own family name of Lascaris be for ever blackened, for … for what? Revenge for all the losses he’d had over the years to a twin brother who was faster, stronger, more beautiful?

  Yes … and no. All that paled beside the real reason.

  Sofia.

  He pushed the flagon away, stood, wobbled. The wine had worked some magic after all. Not enough to bring oblivion … Good! For that would have interfered with his plan, his new plan. Vengeance wasn’t something only one brother should own. He could master it too. Return now to his family home. Shout the truth in the street. That would change the expression on the face of his son – his son! A face so like his own, yet different too. Himself … but someone else as well. Someone else.

  Sofia.

  He fell back onto his chair. Reached for the flagon, brushed it, missed it, knocked it over. It did not matter, there was not much left. Just a thin stream of red to flow across the table and drip upon the floor, like blood from a sawn-off nose.

  Gregoras began to slowly lower his head to the table, to the beckoning darkness.

  Another eruption of shouts and oaths from the fireplace. Gregoras jerked up, focused, looked at the three men there. Boots off, feet up on chairs before the flames, bare toes wiggling through rents in their stockings. One was banging an empty goblet on the table; another had a pot boy by the collar and was shaking him. The third and largest was just rising and, in a strong voice from the Veneto, linking Giovanni Battista, patron saint of Genoa, in an unseemly act with a donkey. His friends, most of the tavern’s other customers, cheered.

  Gregoras reached up beneath his mask to his ivory nose. He’d told the girl in Ragusa – and where was she now, that girl? – that he only took it off for two things. He’d taken it off for her, and he took it off now because he’d left it on once in a brawl and been staggered by the pain when someone punched it; that and the blood. He slipped it into his pocket. It clinked there, and he withdrew what it clinked against, slipping the brass knuckles over his own with a smile.

  He stood, and when he was steady enough, he walked across. By the time he reached the fireplace, his head was clear. Enough, anyway. As was his voice, when the men finally looked up. ‘Your feet stink worse than your mother’s crotch,’ he said, in an accent located squarely on the docks of Genoa, pointing at the biggest man’s toes.

  *

  Leilah had watched him drink his way through two flagons, watched him rise, sit, finally rise again. She’d hoped that he was about to leave, so she could talk with him. She wanted to find out more about the woman he had visited, what she was to him. She surprised herself at how much she wanted that.

  But then he walked over to the three noisy men at the fireplace, spoke. They were getting to their stockinged feet now, and one of them was bellowing, loud enough to still the hubbub, ‘What did you say, you Genoan turd?’

  Gregoras took a moment, till all noise finally ceased, then repeated it. And Leilah was up and moving, grabbing the flagon she’d been nursing in one hand, pouring out the wine as she crossed, reaching for the dagger at her waist with the other. She’d covered maybe half the distance when the first man drew his knife.

  ‘Bastard,’ he cried, having to step round his bigger companion, his sight blocked until it was too late, Gregoras stepping into him, his arm coming up, over and hard down, armoured knuckles smashing the man’s wrist. There was a snap, a howl, the man falling onto a table, bringing it with him to the floor.

  As other tables and chairs were knocked over, men clearing to look or to avoid, the middle man moved, a long, thin-bladed stiletto before him now, reflecting firelight; moved fast for a big, drunk man, set Gregoras weaving to avoid three swift slashes. They drove him sideways, into the last of the Venetians, who was just bringing his own knife out.

  Leilah stopped five steps away, bent back, and threw. The flagon’s flight did not have the elegant parabola of one of her quarrels, but her aim was still good. The vessel took the man in the side of the head, hard enough to shatter, knocking him backwards and into the fireplace. Sparks flew, he screamed, everyone was shouting, the landlord running forward with two of his men, all three wielding brooms like quarterstaffs.

  In the centre, though, all was quiet enough, if not still. The big, nimble man feinted, flicked, lunged, a forearm’s length of steel thrust before him. But Gregoras had just had time to do what he probably should have done before he’d spoken – he drew his own dagger left-handed, cut down, putting blade to blade, guiding the other’s past his left side. Then he raised his boot and slammed the heel hard down onto the man’s unshod toes. As he screamed, Gregoras drove his right hand up his hip, curling his hand over, bringing the brass knuckles uppermost just when the force of the blow was at its height.

  They took the man on the cheek, snapping his head across. He was big and heavy enough not to move for a moment, then when he did it was silently, and straight down, eyes already closing.

  ‘Brutes! Ruffians!’ The landlord and his men had arrived and were striking out with their brooms at other men who were lurching in, and at the sparks that had scattered from the fireplace. Chairs were flying too, aimed indiscriminately. Gregoras fended one off with one arm, just as the other was seized by a masked youth. ‘This way!’ came the hissed command, and seeing no more Venetians standing to hit, he obeyed, stumbling, laughing.

  There was a back entrance, and Leilah found it. Men screamed behind them, a goblet smashed against the door as she opened it, and then they were through and running down an a
lley. Shouts pursued them and they took another alley to the left, then another. Somehow they ended up back on the larger street, near the tavern’s doors, a crowd spilling out before it. ‘Come,’ she said, moving the opposite way. Gregoras followed for a few paces, then lurched suddenly sideways into a doorway. ‘You know,’ he giggled, ‘I feel a little strange.’ And saying it, he sat down hard on the step.

  ‘Oh good,’ she said, staring at him, then looking back along the street. Any pursuit had stopped. A crowd was still shifting before the doors. Someone within was wailing. A man. She looked down again. ‘Can you walk?’

  He squinted up. There was a shifting shape above him, speaking from a blur. It sickened him. ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘I know a place.’

  She couldn’t take him back to her lodgings in the Turkish quarter, to the bed she shared with the daughters of the house. But in her wanderings through the city, she’d explored some empty warehouses on the wharf. No one would disturb them there. ‘Come,’ she said, stooping to him.

  He used her arm to pull himself up. ‘Do I know you?’ he whispered.

  She did not reply, just half carried him down the street.

  The Venetian quarter was flush to their docks, the warehouses she’d discovered not far. But it was no easy thing to aid a large man whose every third step was sideways. She leaned into him, like a restraining prop preventing the falling of a branch, and they made a crabbing progress forward. There was a gate, the Porta Hebraica, but being on the Golden Horn side and the docks beyond, there was no one to guard it. The refuge she had in mind was a short stumble away, the spill from the gate lamps faintly lighting its entrance.

  Just before they reached it, she lowered a mumbling Gregoras onto a pile of stones on which, with some dignity, he managed to balance. She slipped ahead, turned the corner, found the unbolted door she’d found before. Beneath its archstone, she unslung the small satchel from around her shoulder and delved inside it, removing the objects, laying them by her feet: a purse of coin, blue beads against the Evil Eye, a jade amulet in the shape of a dragon’s claw, a Christian cross, a pentangle made from mother of pearl, a rosary, her divining cards, all stock for her trade. There were two other objects – a quarrel, for she always carried at least one, and the feathers for its flights, to work on when she had time; and a tiny bottle. This she did not set down. She unstoppered the bottle, sniffed, wrinkled her nose. The fish oil was on the turn. Yet it was still essence of beast, and when she’d extracted it, certain incantations had been chanted. It had a number of purposes, for hex and the lifting of curses especially. But its prime use was the one she put it to now, the one her mother had taught her, for she had used it to make certain of Leilah’s father, as her mother had before her, on and back to the time when her family first became sorcerers.

  Swiftly she poured the oil into her hands, and while they dripped she rubbed them around the doorframe, making sure the smear was unbroken from lintel to kerbstone. As she did, she chanted: ‘He is come and he is mine. Let him enter and let him never leave.’

  She rubbed her hands on her cloak, corked the bottle again, replaced it in her pack. A groan came from round the corner, and she swiftly gathered up the objects she could barely see before backing away from the sealed doorway, making sure that no part of her, no swing of cloak, touched it. The spell would envelop the next person who crossed the threshold.

  Gregoras had slipped off his pile of stone. ‘Come,’ she said, and with her aid he managed to scramble up and stagger forward the way she directed him. A few paces short of the door, she slipped from under him, giving him a little shove as she did. ‘Go,’ she whispered, ‘enter of your own free will and stay.’ It seemed to her that the entrance shimmered, blocked by a plane of light, which Gregoras broke as his hands met the door and he stumbled in. She watched the gloom swallow him. He’s mine now, she thought, whoever you are, O beautiful bitch of Constantinople. Mine.

  She followed him. Gregoras had found a pile of sacks to sink onto. She came and lay beside him, her hands reaching up to free the mask at his face and help his breathing, which had become laboured. His forehead wrinkled as her fingers passed his face. ‘Stinks worse than those Venetians’ feet in here,’ he mumbled.

  She laughed. ‘Sleep,’ she said.

  ‘But you,’ he grunted, reaching for her.

  It was as she suspected. Her first lover, the janissary, had often been this drunk. He’d attempt to love her, have as little success as Gregoras had now. His hands moved over her even as his eyes closed.

  ‘Sleep,’ she said, taking a hand, kissing it.

  ‘All right,’ he replied, pulling her a little closer, laying his head to her breast.

  She lay there as his breathing eased. He began to snore. She was a little disappointed. She had been surprised by the passion of that night in Dubrovnik. More than surprised, for with her other men, Jew and janissary, lovemaking had always seemed much for them, little for her. With Gregoras, though, it had not been like that; he had given as much as he had taken. And though she knew that the fish oil around the doorframe had bound him to her, she would not have minded the different spell further lovemaking would cast. Wouldn’t have minded the pleasure he’d have given her either!

  Then another thought came. She and her man of destiny together in Constantinople … along with the book of the Arab alchemist, Jabir ibn Hayyan. It was kept in the monastery of Manuel. But why wait for Mehmet to break down the walls to get it? Why not find out where it was, go with her lover and steal the book now?

  She laughed quietly. She’d heard that the city was just about to close its gates, break its bridges. She had to leave, and soon, or be trapped. But she could stay one more day, and wait for him to be sober again.

  His snoring grew louder. She pushed him, and he grunted and rolled onto his side. Pulling a few sacks around them, she curled around his back. She felt the strength of him through his clothes. Perhaps, she thought, if he is not too fouled with wine, we will satisfy both my desires in the morning.

  Gregoras awoke alone, to voices and flaring light. He did not know where he was, but wherever he was was dark, though light flickered through gaps and splits in what had to be a wall. He had a vague memory of being brought here, led by some masked youth after the fight, which he remembered only a little more clearly. He knew he’d tackled some Venetians … and it was Italian with a Venetian accent that had woken him now. He sat up swiftly, could not restrain the groan, feeling as if someone had driven a spike through his forehead. He pulled out his dagger and stumbled to his feet.

  His first thought was that the men he’d attacked – or more likely their unhurt friends – had tracked him down. But as he managed to bring his senses into wakefulness, he realised that the conversation beyond the wooden walls was not about him. When he caught a word, he leaned forward till his head touched the wood of the wall. It cooled it a little, and he listened.

  The word was ‘escape’.

  ‘Because the place is doomed, that’s why,’ came the voice again. ‘You want to stay and be a dead hero, you can. But all the other captains are agreed. We get out and we get out now.’

  ‘All of Venice? What of our city’s honour?’ the other man said.

  ‘No, not all. Only us of the Black Sea fleet who were caught here by winds and fate. Most Venetians will remain.’

  ‘I thought all must remain. Didn’t the Council so order?’

  ‘I piss in the water the Council drinks! Most of them don’t have holds full of silks and spices that will make each of us captains a fortune back home – and nothing if the Turks seize them when they take this place. As they will.’

  ‘I don’t know. I …’

  The other man must have walked away, because his voice came from further off. ‘Well, it’s up to you, Enrico. But in another few days the Greeks will have put their damn boom across the Horn and we’ll be trapped. It is agreed. My crew’s already aboard the Raven and we just await the dawn tide. Which comes soon, for the
re is light in the east already. I only came to find you and give you the choice. You decide.’

  ‘Wait!’

  Boot steps receded, along with low voices. Gregoras sheathed his dagger, sat, placing his back against the wall. So the Venetians were fleeing, he thought. Some of them anyway. Before the boom went up and they had no choice but to fight. He lowered his head into his hands. And he? He, who had returned to the city he hated, that had taken everything from him, that he had desired never to see again? And what had he found on his return? A son whose life he could have no part of. A woman he once loved, lost to him for ever.

  He was close enough to the docks to hear commands being given. Hissed, not shouted, urgent for all that. He heard oars going in the water, boats setting out for larger boats offshore. Venetian rats were deserting a holed vessel. And who could blame them? Was it their fight, after all?

  Was it his?

  He lurched to his feet. There was nothing in the city that he needed – except perhaps his crossbow. But he could always get another of those, while the gold he’d come for he knew he’d never see now. That could be found too, probably when he found that crossbow and a war to use it in. Any war but this one.

  As he stepped out through the door, he stumbled on something. It glimmered in the faint light of the approaching dawn and he bent to pick it up, gasped when he saw what he held. A quarrel. A bolt for the crossbow he was going to seek. It seemed like a sign … and an odd thing to find in a doorway near the docks. Odder still when he brought it close to his eyes and saw that not all its flights were there, but the ones that were were made from heron’s feathers – just like the one he’d plucked from John Grant’s satchel in Korcula.