The Walls of Byzantium tmc-1

by James Heneage

  The Walls of Byzantium

  ( The Mistra Chronicles - 1 )

  James Heneage

  James Heneage

  The Walls of Byzantium

  PROLOGUE

  CONSTANTINOPLE, 12 APRIL 1204

  At first he didn’t hear them.

  Alexios V, Emperor of Byzantium, heard only hoofbeats from his balcony overlooking the Hippodrome. The ghosts of charioteers past.

  The cough came again and the Emperor turned.

  Standing between the pillars were four men of his Varangian Guard. All were over six feet tall and had fair hair that fell in plaits either side of faces cracked with fatigue. They carried axes and their armour was spattered with blood.

  The Varangopouli. Thank God for the Varangopouli. Give me an army such as these.

  ‘Where are the Franks?’ he asked.

  A Varangian stepped forward. His voice was hollow with exhaustion. ‘Within the city, Majesty. They managed to enter through one of the sea gates. They got behind us.’

  There was a pause. Metal scraped on metal as one of them shifted pressure from a wound.

  ‘The Guard stood firm, lord.’

  The moon emerged from behind a cloud and its light fell upon eyes that hadn’t closed in days. Alexios had known the commander of his guard for thirty years. He put his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t doubt it, Siward. When has it not?’

  A woman’s scream came from below, then the crash of a falling building. The Emperor looked down.

  ‘A hundred and forty years, Siward. You, your father, his father … all those years.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘Now your Emperor needs one more service.’

  Alexios stepped forward and looked at each man in turn. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  The five men’s footsteps echoed through the corridors of the empty palace until they arrived at a courtyard silhouetted by flame. They walked across it to a small door. The Emperor pushed it open and led them down a steep flight of steps, worn with age.

  At the bottom, Siward took a torch from its sconce and lit their way across a hall to a door in the far wall. The Emperor reached up to the heavy lintel and moved a stone engraved with a double-headed eagle.

  Slowly, slowly, the door creaked open and they entered a large, circular room fetid with dust. Lifting the torch, Siward looked around him and saw dismembered heads stare out from the shadows. Constantine, Gratian, Justinian and Basil the Bulgar-slayer. Eight centuries of emperors looked out from their plinths with disdain.

  In the centre of the room was a plain altar.

  The Emperor turned. ‘Move the altar. There’s a passage beneath.’

  In a square next to the great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople stood the much smaller church of St Olaf, the church of the Varangopouli. Beside it was a narrow street that led to the Harbour of Hormisdas.

  The Franks had yet to reach this part of the city, but they were near. Sounds of fighting were coming from the direction of the Iron Gate, where they’d made a second breach in the walls.

  The church door opened and, one by one, the Varangians stepped into the street, silently fanning out to form a wall of shields. Then a single casket appeared, supported on poles carried by four palace servants.

  Siward brushed the dust from his cloak and raked the street with his axe-head. He looked behind. The casket had reached a small square and its carriers were hurrying towards a sea gate that opened on to the harbour jetty beyond.

  But someone was there before them.

  A merchant and his wife were on their knees, pleading with the soldiers guarding the gate to let them through. The woman held part of her dress to her mouth against smoke that billowed from a street behind.

  Siward backed towards them, then stopped to listen. There were men on the other side of the smoke.

  ‘Saint Denis et Montjoie!’

  A score of wraiths rose up, monstrous, metal figures emerging beneath a banner of lilies. They held shields and maces and fierce animals reared high on their helmets. The four Varangians were outnumbered five to one but there were no better soldiers in the world. Their axes swung and sliced their way through the finest Milanese armour and the Franks fell at their feet, their skulls crushed and their limbs pumping blood on to the stone. And as they fought, the men backed inch by inch towards the open gate. The casket was through but they were running out of time.

  The merchant and his wife were pressed against the wall between the Varangians and the gate, transfixed by the slaughter.

  ‘Get away!’ yelled Siward.

  The woman fell to her knees, clutching his leg in her terror. Siward glanced down at her.

  I cannot save her but I can save the casket.

  He reached down and hauled the woman to her feet. She was pretty enough. He flung her towards the French. She fell at their feet, her dress rucked up to reveal a thigh. It was enough. One of the Franks leant down and tore open her bodice. Wrenching open his visor, he fell on her as his companions roared.

  ‘Now!’ yelled Siward, and the four Varangians turned and ran through the gate, barring it behind them.

  On the jetty, the boat was ready to sail. It was a squat, round-bottomed merchant vessel that flew the flag of Venice. Siward looked up.

  Will it fool them?

  The casket was on board and the sailors stood ready to cast off. The Varangians boarded and the ship was pushed out into the Propontis, the wind snapping its sails taut as they were hauled up the mast. Gathering speed, they passed platforms with giant engines of war manned by half-naked men who cheered as their fireballs exploded against the city walls. Siward saw another part of the sea wall slide into the sea.

  It won’t be long now.

  He looked out to sea. His ancestors had sailed this way in their longboats from an island far to the west, an island shrouded in mist called England. They had passed the deep ruins of Troy and into the Sea of Marmara to arrive at the fabled city of Miklagard as the dawn had ignited the gold of its palaces and churches. They had sailed to escape the Normans who had killed their king, put an arrow through his eye. They had come to seek service with an emperor who needed men of courage and skill to fight his own Normans. They had come with hatred in their hearts and they had become the first English Varangians.

  Now they were sailing away. Siward looked down at his sword, at the dragon’s head that was its pommel. It was all he was taking with him.

  Except the casket.

  A sudden gust billowed the sails and the ship lurched forward. Then it was through the blockade and heading for the open sea. He hauled himself to his feet and called out to the captain: ‘You know your course?’

  The man shook his head. ‘South only,’ he shouted. ‘They said you’d tell me where.’

  Siward took one last look at the city. It could have been the salt spray or tears that clouded his eyes. Then he turned his head to the south.

  ‘Mistra,’ he said. ‘We sail to Mistra.’

  PART ONE

  MISTRA

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE CITY OF MONEMVASIA, SPRING 1392

  For birds migrating south that day, the journey down the coastline to Cape Maleas offered a view unchanged since their species began.

  On one side, the deep, deep blue of the Mirtoon Sea spread its unabbreviated calm out to the horizon. On the other, the Despotate of Mistra offered mile after mile of rugged hinterland, wild with forest and mountain.

  Until Monemvasia.

  There, the Greek Peloponnese extended a crooked finger into the sea and on its knuckle perched a city where twenty thousand souls bustled within walls that seemed to grow out of the rocks beneath them.

  Scattered across the sea were the white sa
ils of merchantmen waiting in the roads to enter the city’s port to the north and, closer in, closer to the rocks on which the city stood, were the figures of four boys lying on their backs in the water.

  One of these was Luke Magoris. He was looking up at the walls of Monemvasia and thinking.

  Twenty thousand of us living in this labyrinth and that many cats. How do we sleep at night?

  It was a thought that had occurred to him before.

  Matthew, Nikolas and Arcadius had for once stopped talking and were too far away for attack. Luke turned his body so that the entirety of the city lay cradled between his feet.

  Above its wall, rising from the rocks from which Luke had just dived, sat the jumble of small houses that made up the lower town, nudged by the splashes of oleander and bougainvilleia that sprouted between. Small rooms led on to small balconies, and the houses crowded the steep slopes like an audience taking its seats. A wash of early sunshine bathed the mosaic of a million terracotta tiles and lit, to a dazzling white, the bell tower of the Elkomenos Church. And above, immense and implacable, sat the pitted rock of the Goulas.

  The Goulas.

  Was there anything so magnificent in the world? Its sheer sides rose from the skirts of the lower town, deep-scarred by the stairway that twisted its way up its face.

  Luke’s gaze travelled up the stairs until it reached the walls above. In this light it was difficult to see what was made by man and what by God until armour flashed from the ramparts. Above, on a gently rising plateau, lay the mansions, churches and gardens of the upper town, where the richest of the city’s inhabitants had their homes.

  At the very summit sat the squat, reassuring spectacle of the citadel, home to the city’s small garrison and supposedly impregnable. From its tower flew two standards, limp symbols of the split loyalties of this little city. In a fresher wind, one would show the double-headed eagle of the Byzantine Empire, the other the black castle of the Mamonas family.

  Luke looked down at his body as it was swayed by the passing waves, enjoying the warm current that fingered his back like velvet. He was tall for his sixteen years and had a powerful physique to match. His father’s lessons in the art of fighting had given him broad shoulders and muscular arms. His legs, meanwhile, were long but bowed from time spent on horseback. His father was a Varangian Guardsman and had told him that the Varangians had always fought on foot, surrounding the Emperor with a shield of iron on the battlefield. But, from birth, Luke had shown an extraordinary ability with horses. So Pavlos Mamonas, Archon of Monemvasia and by far its richest citizen, had decreed that his Varangian training should be interspersed with time spent at the Mamonas stud.

  Luke dipped his head back into the water, throwing it forward to look directly into the sun, spray hitting the sea around him like pebbles. He tilted his body, swinging it back round so that his feet faced south.

  South to Cape Maleas and round it to Mistra. Where I should be now.

  Someone spoke.

  ‘Can you see the beacon from there?’

  It was Matthew, closest of the friends and nearest to Luke in age. He had swum up to him so that their heads were almost touching.

  ‘It’s been lit for days,’ he continued. ‘The Turks must be almost at Mistra’s walls.’ He paused to blow water from his nose. ‘Our fathers should’ve let us go.’

  Our fathers. My father.

  Luke had been so careful that morning. He’d taken an age to creep down the wooden staircase, avoiding the creaking step. He’d taken the sword silently from the chest, and then tiptoed through the door of the house on to the steps to the street below. One of his shoes had been loose and, so narrow was the alley, he’d been able to stretch a hand to the opposite wall to pull it on.

  He’d picked his way through the shortening shadows, his cheek brushing jasmine tumbling from a neighbour’s wall, to arrive at a small square where a mulberry tree offered shade to a lizard darting from stone to warming stone.

  Only then had something broken the still of the sleeping city. The voice of his father, Joseph.

  ‘You’ve taken your birthday present early, Luke,’ he’d said, pointing at the sword. His voice was low, always low. ‘Couldn’t you have waited for me to give it to you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Were you going to Mistra?’

  Luke had nodded.

  ‘With the other three?’

  He’d nodded again, and found his voice. ‘The beacon’s been lit for three days. The Despot needs us.’

  ‘You?’ One eyebrow had lifted in surprise. ‘Four Varangian boys barely sprouting beards? You think so?’

  ‘You’ve taught us to fight, Father. We can help. Our loyalty is to the empire.’

  ‘Your loyalty is to the Archon of Monemvasia.’

  ‘Which is part of the empire. Father, we’re not bound by any oath to the Mamonas family as you are.’

  Joseph had nodded then, his hand stroking the enormous beard that lay on his chest like a blazon. ‘But you owe some loyalty to me, Luke. Enough at least not to sneak away like a thief. With my sword.’

  ‘Which was to be mine on my sixteenth birthday. Today.’

  Then they’d stood and stared at each other, Luke seeing the broken nose, the long mane of straw hair that, unplaited, fell to his father’s waist, the blue eyes he’d been graced to inherit which came from some island far, far to the west.

  ‘We are Varangians, Luke,’ Joseph had said quietly, ‘whether sworn or not. I am here to guard the Archon as you will be one day. We’re not free to take sides.’

  ‘Not even when our Despot has an army of Turks marching to destroy our capital at Mistra?’

  ‘Not even then.’

  Now, he lay upon his back and felt the sun on his eyelids and thought about his father and the complicated business of duty. His head bumped against Matthew’s.

  ‘I must return to the house,’ he said, turning on to his front. ‘If we’re not going to Mistra then I’d better get up to the Mamonas twins. They want to ride out to the stud.’

  Inside the house, his mother had laid out Luke’s riding clothes on the table: leather breeches with an extra layer on the insides to protect his thighs and new boots of untreated hide that still stank of the tanner’s yard. His father had put the sword back in the chest and locked it.

  A lunch of bread, cream cheese and salted pork lay in a napkin next to a bowl of dried figs stuffed with chestnuts: Luke’s favourite. He stretched out to take a handful while his mother’s back was turned and wrapped them quickly in a napkin.

  ‘The figs will make you bilious,’ Rachel said, ‘and I was saving them for tonight.’

  She swung round, laughing. ‘Oh, take them. I can make more.’

  How he loved that laugh. It had cast its spell over the two men of the family since Luke’s first day on earth. In her mid-13 thirties, Rachel’s unlined face still radiated the beauty that comes from inner calm. Everything about her was gentle.

  Luke hugged her.

  ‘Silly boy!’ She smiled, her chin against his chest as she looked up at her son. ‘Joseph, tell this thieving Varangian to get up to the palace or we’ll have no food at all to put on the table!’

  Joseph walked over to his son and put hand on his shoulder before he could leave the house.

  ‘I know that you’re eager to fight for the Empire, Luke,’ he said gently. ‘It’s what you’ve spent all your life training to do. When the time is right you can go to Mistra, but not today.’

  ‘So why not Constantinople? They say there are still Varangians there.’

  Joseph sighed. ‘You know why. We Varangians are here for a reason.’

  Varangian.

  For centuries the Varangians had guarded the Emperor in Constantinople with unquestioning loyalty. In the Great Palace, they’d stood either side of the monumental bronze doors that led into its interior. When the Emperor gave audience, seated on the elevating throne that held ambassadors in such awe, they’d assembled around his sacred perso
n, always bearing those great axes, their distralia, on their right shoulders. The Guard Commander was called Akolouthos, which meant ‘follower’, since he was the person allowed nearest to the Emperor on official occasions. Indeed, so trusted was he that the great keys of the city were given to him whenever the Emperor went away.

  The Varangians had grown rich in the service of their emperor. When a city was taken, it was the Varangians who’d had first pick of the spoils. When a new emperor came to the throne, it was the Varangians who’d been permitted to fill their helmets with gold.

  Luke knew that, on a night of fire and ruin, a treasure had been brought to Mistra by four Varangians, led by his ancestor, and buried somewhere on its hill. It was a treasure they said might save the empire one day, a treasure the Varangians and their descendents had vowed to guard until it was needed. It was the reason why they were still there. When the Norman Villehouardin had conquered the Peleponnese and built his citadel at Mistra, their sons had been forced to go to Monemvasia. But the secret of where the treasure lay buried in Mistra stayed with them, passed from father to son through the generations.

  Until.

  Until when? When had the chain been broken? Luke wasn’t sure. Somehow the secret of where it was had been lost so that now no one quite knew what was history and what myth.

  Tonight, the four Varangians and their sons would meet as they did once a year to talk about myth and history and an island on the edge of the world called England. And they would renew their oath of loyalty to an empire that had given them a home.

  On reaching the alleyway outside his house, Luke broke into an easy run, taking two at a time the steps that led up to the mesi odos, the cobbled central street of the town. The shops and taverns were still boarded up and sleepy traders mumbled greetings as he passed.

  He reached the square that formed the crossroads with the street that led from the sea gate to the upper town. At the church of Christ Elkomenos, he turned left, nearly colliding with a water seller who was filling cups suspended on a rope around her neck.