Faced with this spectacle, he found himself reassessing what he had said back in the palace.
Peace at such a cost? Surely that will gird them to further defiance?
Was it unreasonable to believe that the people who had gone through this nightmare might be willing to pay almost any price to prevent a recurrence?
Lowering his gaze, he closed his eyes and lifted his hand, folding his fourth and fifth fingers back and tracing the sign of the cross with the remaining three representing the Trinity. In low, reverent tones, he began to pray for the welfare of all those whose lives had been touched by this dreadful tragedy.
Arnau’s prayer tailed off, the words scattering into the barely noticeable breeze as he lurched in surprise when something bounced off his shoulder. Deep, thumping pain began immediately to course through the joint. Something had struck him hard enough to bruise badly. Had he not had the benefit of a chain shirt beneath the cloak, the blow might well have broken his shoulder.
He saw a brick rattling to a stop amid the ashes in front of him and turned sharply, trying to identify his assailant, for it had to have been a deliberate act. The angle at which it rolled to rest indicated it had come from behind him, not above.
He felt his pulse quicken. Three men stood in the street behind him. One had another chunk of rock in his hand. Another brandished a short blade, while the third held a hefty length of ash. His alert gaze took in the rest of his surroundings. There was nowhere to go other than past them along the street, or back across that huge and treacherous swathe of ash and rubble where any number of obstacles could be hidden beneath the veil of grey.
Damn it.
One of the men said something to his companions and Arnau missed much of it, though he caught the word ‘Frank’.
Damn it, damn it, damn it. Here he was in a city of Byzantines dressed as a Crusader, more or less. How could he not have anticipated this sort of trouble? For the first time since joining the Order, he truly regretted the red cross emblazoned on his chest and shoulder. For him they represented his place as one of the Poor Knights of Christ and his devotion to the Lord and his Church.
To the locals, they represented the horde of savage invaders who had assaulted their walls, killed their fellow citizens and burned down a huge swathe of their city.
Damn it.
‘I am not what you think,’ he began, holding up his hands in a gesture of peace.
‘Fuck off,’ snapped one of the three men, an oath punctuated with violence as his friend let fly with his half-brick.
Arnau ducked urgently to the left as the missile whooshed through the air beside him and clattered to a halt amid the destruction behind. Still he kept his hand away from his sword hilt. ‘Listen, I’m not a Frank. Templar. See? Templar. I fought with—’
His speech was clearly having no effect, for the three men snarled and shouted and advanced on him, weapons brandished. Arnau noted with some disappointment how the few people in the street behind the men were nodding their agreement and showed little indication of any intention to intervene. He was on his own.
He sized the three up as they stomped slowly towards him, spreading out a little as they came. He could probably manage to overcome them. He had a long sword with a good reach, while they were poorly armed, and they were likely street thugs at best, entirely untrained civilians more realistically. But there was a nagging doubt floating around at the back of his mind. He and his brethren were here under the sufferance of the emperor and his court. If one of the Templars were known to have killed or injured three citizens, how would the court react? He remembered vividly the tales of torturous methods of execution Doukas had listed. And it would be self-defence, for sure, but with the only witnesses clearly sharing the attitude of the three attackers, of what value was Arnau’s word?
‘I have no wish to hurt anyone,’ he tried at last. Still they came on.
Arnau, unsure how best to proceed, stepped a few paces back among the ash and charred timbers. What non-lethal weapon could he employ? His searching eyes played around the ruins, but came up hopeless. There were few items in the wreckage a man could wield, and those he could would be so charred and weak they would break on impact without causing any real harm.
With a deep breath, he unfastened his sword belt and lifted it, still stepping gingerly back to buy time from the advancing citizens. Unthreading the belt, he let it fall away into the ash and lifted the sword, its leather and iron scabbard still covering the blade. It would still cause wounds, but at least not such brutal ones. It was the best he could do.
‘See? I do not want to kill.’
His words fell upon deaf ears. The bricks cast, the three men now had one short blade and two wooden cudgels. He had to deal with the blade first. The three had spread out, and the outer two were pacing slightly faster now, moving to surround him. A quick flick of the eyes backwards and he spotted one of the rare survivals of a brick wall, little more than five feet high, close by. Praying he wouldn’t stumble over something underfoot, he steadily backed away towards the wall fragment.
It was an immense relief when he felt his back touch the blackened bricks. The three men were advancing slower now, watching their footing.
He found himself recalling all those times he had found himself on his backside in the dust with Brother Lütolf’s blade at his throat. Don’t do anything impulsively. Leave no tells for them. Concentrate and move decisively. This was not battle. This was a duel, just with more than one opponent. He cleared his mind, breathing slowly.
‘Dread I not them, for the Lord our God shall fight with me,’ he said quietly. ‘Deuteronomy.’
He kept his gaze on the central man, but allowed his eyes to defocus just slightly, increasing his peripheral alertness. The man with the sword was to his left. The blade was wavering. He was coming in for a blow at the earliest opportunity. The one in the middle looked a little nervous. He knew he was directly facing Arnau, and by now they must have seen the chain shirt he wore amid the white and red. Good. Nerves would make him slow and hesitant.
He gripped his sword hilt tight, sheathed blade horizontal across his midriff, still staring at the man in the middle. They closed. His anticipation paid off immediately and in the last moment he thanked his departed German brother for all his lessons. The nervous one in front was hanging back a little. The other two were coming in for a strike.
Arnau attacked.
His sword suddenly lashed out towards the man on his right with a short club. The swing was enough to make the man lurch back, which was all Arnau had hoped for, as his sheathed sword continued through the swing, towards his left. There, the man with the blade was taken completely by surprise. The leather scabbard, weighted with the steel blade within, struck the man’s arm with an audible crack and the attacker shrieked, that shining blade falling from his grasp.
A broken arm. Bad enough.
The man backed away, crying in pain, clutching his arm.
Arnau’s attention flitted back to the other two. The man he’d feinted towards was in trouble. He had lurched back from the expected blow and had fallen over something in the wreckage. As Arnau turned towards him, he was floundering in a cloud of ash, shouting angrily and trying to stand.
The nervous man in the centre had swallowed his fear, though, perhaps in the realisation that he was now in a win-or-lose situation. Arnau tried to bring his sword back to bear, but the man got there first, his length of ash smashing forward.
Arnau felt the tip of the club coming for his chest and tried to duck back with the blow and rob it of much of its strength, but he was too close to the wall. His back hit the brick just as the cudgel struck his torso. The mail shirt did much of the job of defence, but he felt a rib crack with a fiery pain that spread across his chest. Roaring angrily, he swiped out with his sheathed sword and caught his assailant on the side of the head. The man spun away in a mizzle of red, jaw probably broken. As he collapsed into the dust, the third man was up again.
Arna
u was struggling now to control his temper, wincing at the pain in his chest. Damn these fools. He was one of the few men actually trying to save them! Before he realised he was doing it, he had ripped his sword from its sheath and was holding the gleaming blade towards the grey-coated figure.
‘Do you really want to do this?’ he gasped angrily, free hand against the pain in his ribs.
The man answered him in a heartbeat, dropping his club and fleeing across the wreckage, careless of obstacles underfoot. The man with the broken arm was gone too, almost back at the street.
Arnau sighed and bent. He yelped in pain as the movement made his rib hurt as though it had broken all over again. Gritting his teeth, he gathered up his sheath and grumbled at the state of it. Coated in black crud. Gripping both it and his sword in his left hand, he braced himself against the pain and reached down, grasping the arm of the man still down there and sobbing.
With a great deal of effort and no small amount of pain, he helped the man to his feet. The attacker reached up and tested his jaw. It had not broken after all, but by God it must hurt. The man made some muffled, pained attempt at speech, then shook himself free of Arnau’s grip and backed away as fast as he could.
The young Templar watched in pained silence for some time as his assailants melted away into the city and the witnesses disappeared indoors, leaving him alone with charred ruins and an empty street. At least he hadn’t been in this fire. That made a change, at least.
With a sigh, he scoured the ash for his discarded sword belt, considering how he would apologise to Sebastian for undoing all his attention to the equipment. Then, with a deep breath, he began the journey to safety.
Back at the Blachernae, after a tense and nerve-racking trek through the streets, he related his encounter to Ramon, who had been about to set out for the sext service. Instead, Ramon helped him to the palace’s resident doctor, who labelled Arnau’s wound ‘non-threatening’, cleaned him up and bound him with lengths of linen. He was given some powdered herb or other to mix into wine for the pain and otherwise left alone. In the continuing absence of Bochard, Arnau spent the next few hours lying in his room, occasionally yelping and wincing, and eventually drifted off to sleep. When he stirred it was dark, and his waking had been caused by Ramon opening the door, remaining silhouetted there in the square of light.
‘Brother?’
‘Good,’ Ramon replied. ‘You’re awake.’
‘How long…’
‘Long enough. The nobles have voted to accept the Franks’ terms. The Crusaders have won. Their deputations are in the city now, and there will be two emperors, the young pretender crowned alongside his father. The Greek Church will be no more and Dandolo will have his money by hook or by crook.’
Arnau sagged. ‘We fought for nothing.’
‘We fought for what was right and for our conscience, Vallbona. That is never a mistake. And while we are seemingly bound to remain for a time, Doukas has pledged to have Warings assigned to us once more to prevent a repeat of your little misadventure.’
As Ramon left him in peace, Arnau sighed and tried not to move in case it hurt.
That was it, then. Byzantium was now under the control of the Crusaders.
Chapter 12: The Blood Money
August 11th 1203
It was over… and yet it also so very clearly was not.
Over.
From this vantage point on the walls close to the so-called ‘Golden Gate’, Arnau could only see the south-western area of the city which was mostly given over to cultivation and dotted with monasteries and small private estates, and the wide grasslands stretching west outside the walls towards Thrace and Greece.
Here was the great decorative three-arch triumphal gate with the shining golden doors through which victorious emperors returned to the city. Here was one of the focal points of imperial power and grandeur. That gate said as much as anything in the city that the emperor of Byzantium was untouchable and powerful and ruled with God-given right.
Which was why it was so heart-sickening to see the new young co-emperor astride his Frankish warhorse and accompanied by steel-clad Westerners in bright colourful surcoats leaving the city on a tour of his provinces. Perhaps half a dozen sycophantic and hopeful noblemen were with him, and Doukas, in his capacity as finance minister, all accompanied by only four Waring guardsmen, for it seemed that the newly crowned Alexios the Fourth trusted little in his imperial guard and far more in his Frankish friends.
The tour was ostensibly to bring troubled cities and regions back under imperial control, and the force of Byzantine cavalry outside the walls awaiting them backed up that notion, though the fiscal situation in the city and the presence of Doukas in the party made it clear what it truly was: a tax-gathering army. Having squeezed the city until it bled silver to pay the Venetian debt, the new emperor was now taking soldiers into the hinterland to bleed them too.
Over.
And the heavy taxation of town and country was not the only reason for the presence of Franks in the city. Arnau couldn’t see them from here, in this more cultivated, less built-up area, but back to the northern side of the city and towards the promontory, where the urban mass lay thickly packed, no street seemed to be devoid of armoured Westerners stomping around and making their superiority known. Having been unable to take Constantinople by force, they had finally gained the city with just demands and threats, and now they were avenging their losses during the earlier struggle by making the citizens’ lives a misery, taking property without payment, ignoring age-old laws and causing violence and misery wherever they went.
Over.
The priests among the Crusader army had been around the city’s churches, knocking the heretical second and third cross piece from every crucifix, confiscating their holy books as unacceptable and replacing them with Bibles written in Latin, which was completely incomprehensible to the local priests. Vows had been forced from people and Frankish and Italian priests had led compulsory masses in open spaces to introduce the city to how it was now expected to worship. Sebastian had been understandably torn in his support, born as he was to the Byzantine world, but a willing convert to Rome in recent years. Perhaps, in some ways, this was a balm to the young man’s soul. An end to the conflict that had been tearing him in two since they arrived. A Venetian priest had even been installed in the city as the patriarch, the old one being kicked out to learn his new faith in a monastery. In some ways, Arnau felt sick over that. Had it been a Frank, he might have been able to accept it more readily, but the Venetians en masse had been excommunicated. Even if this priest had not been, his loyalty and motives had to be considered highly suspect at least. The more Arnau learned about the sea dogs, the more he came to the conclusion that greed alone drove them, and that at the peak of that greed sat Dandolo, using it to steer his people on a track of personal revenge.
Over.
Men like Constantine and Theodoros Laskaris had retreated from their true places in open council, biding their time, unwilling to deal with the enemy leaders as they rewrote the entire culture of Byzantium. Those who made the laws now and administered the empire were those living in the purses of Frankish nobles.
Over.
While the new young emperor drained every coin he found from the city to pay the Venetian doge his blood money, his father, the blind Isaac, simmered in his chambers. He had put in few public appearances. It was said among courtiers that he was ashamed to show his blinded, ruined eyes in public, given the reason for his blinding in the first place. It was said more widely that the ruined man was a quivering wreck, wholly insane and bitter from his years of incarceration. Likely in truth it was both. Whatever the reason, the only man who might have the authority and strength to champion his city’s survival was less than useless, and his son actively promoted its ruination.
Over.
And yet it so very clearly was not. Arnau had realised that within days of the silent conquest. The nobles might fawn over their new lords, and the emp
eror cower in his rooms. The army might submit as expected, and the Warings live up to their vow and obey their new mad emperor. But the people of Byzantium were not done. They suffered the humiliation and violence of their Frankish visitors, but Arnau could see the defiance in every eye. He never left the palace now without at least two Warings at his side – he had argued for the protection – for the atmosphere had changed in Constantinople. As if the day that the three men had attacked him for being a Westerner had been some sort of trigger, a malaise and aura of xenophobia had spread across the city entire. Silent, seething resentment clung to every door and wall, ran through the gutters and aqueducts, blossomed on the trees and settled in the morning air. It buzzed through the wildlife and rumbled along with the carts. It lapped at the shore and hummed as an undercurrent through the new popish songs warbling across the city.
The city waited, but it was not done.
Arnau saw it as a pot of bitter stew. The fire was burning beneath the iron, and the stew was bubbling. Every gobbet of phlegm spat from a Frankish mouth at a Byzantine citizen enhanced the flame. Every incident, every insult, every new restriction fanned those flames and brought the stew to the boil that little bit faster. Arnau could see it, and so could Ramon, as well as men like the Laskaris. What seemed unfathomable was that the Franks appeared to be entirely blind to the danger boiling up around them.
Not so the wily Venetians, mind. While the Franks strolled the city streets causing trouble, the Venetians remained with their fleet on the far side of the Golden Horn, encamped in their own safe little enclave. There they simply took the money being delivered to them in chests and waited. They might be damned by Rome for wicked thieves, but they were not stupid.
No, it was not over. It was just a matter of time.
The pot boiled.
Ramon stood beside him, watching the imperial force depart to squeeze money from the provinces, with Sebastian beyond them leaning on the parapet with a face like thunder. The young man had said little since that day he had fought the Venetians, but his face expressed enough. He felt much the same as any number of his countrymen. He would give every drop of blood in his body to bring down a curse from on high against these men who were oppressing and ruining his city.
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