Maruffo gave up trying to cheer his neighbour and turned instead to Grant, who had not said a word since the council chamber and was now gazing into the distance, twisting a piece of straw violently between his hands.
‘Whatever’s the matter with Scotland’s newest knight?’ asked Maruffo, with a deliberately provocative smile.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Grant, curling his lip into a snarl. ‘What were you thinking, man? La Talpa? What blather was that?’
‘Calm yourself,’ Maruffo said. ‘If you want the emperor to pay good money for your services then you have to promote your stock. Every saint-loving soul does it! Besides, you may be dead long before the Turks start digging their first tunnel.’
Grant found the boil of his anger had been lanced somewhat by his outburst. In a quieter voice he said, ‘Not everything in life’s about getting rich.’
It was Maruffo’s turn to become animated. ‘Then why else are you here? I’ve told you it’s a fool’s contract. The odds are against the Greeks, and even if they find victory there’s nought to pay you with! You’ve seen enough to know that’s true, so why aren’t you on the next boat west?’
‘Can a man not fight for another cause?’ said Grant. He had turned his shoulders away from the podesta.
‘You have no cause, John! You’re a mercenary!’
‘And a camel may not become a horse, I suppose?’
‘Oh Mother! Have the priests been at your mind? I was afraid it might be that,’ said Maruffo with a glance to the heavens. ‘Camels and horses I know not, but sometimes a pig has got to recognise he’s a pig and get wallowing.’
‘Oh, that’s profound! You’re wasted on this soldiering life Baldo, you should become a court poet.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with being an honest professional,’ said Maruffo, giving close examination to the coral buttons on his sleeve.
‘It’s empty work, Baldo!’ Grant said and threw up his hands. ‘A man should be able to look back on his life and say more than “I’ve taken from some and made others the richer by it.”’
Maruffo gesticulated at the modest dwellings they were passing. ‘That’s more than most of these poor fools can claim. You’ve a record to be proud of, John. Don’t hide it from the emperor. He’s looking for men like you. He’s a surfeit of priests and philosophers.’
‘The emperor might want me, but will heaven be so ready to call me forward? There’s talk of declaring her a martyr. They say she was angel sent. They say she was a saint. A man takes part in the killing of a saint – that’s a sin not easily absolved.’
Maruffo sighed and shook his head. ‘And you think throwing your life away in some hopeless defence of a holy city will balance the scales? Madness!’
‘Call it what you will,’ said Grant, turning away once more.
‘Madness then! A thousand times madness! You’ve nothing to answer for. A child’s obedience. The death of a madwoman who by all accounts the world is better off without. Let the French call her saint and the English call her devil, I doubt the good Lord even noticed her wretched end. This trick of the Church has gone on too long. You say you are tired of fighting wars merely for the material gain of others, but what do you suppose a crusade is, if not a land grab?’
Grant’s head whipped around. ‘Is that any madder than your eternal struggle with Venice? You’re still fighting a war that ended decades past, Baldo! You’re living out here, pretending that nothing’s changed, that Genoa’s still something to reckon with, and that vagabond king, Constantine, may be so sore for help he indulges your reveries, but meanwhile in Genoa, Baldo, they’re broken! They can’t pass water without the Duke of Milan’s say-so. You think you put one over on Venice today? You’re winning a race nobody else has concern for. Venice knows which way the wind’s blowing. They’ve written off Constantinople.’
Without waiting for a reply, Grant vaulted over the side of the cart and began to walk away from the bewildered group. ‘Let him go,’ Maruffo said with a shake of the head. ‘A bad case of moral collywobbles.’
As Grant trudged down the Mese and watched the cart rattle into the distance, he almost instantly regretted his outburst. He had aired a few too many home truths to his old mentor and hoped he had not caused any lasting damage to their friendship.
He was in a low mood as he walked down the hill towards the distant, spreading dome of Hagia Sophia.
As he passed into the wide circular forum of Constantine the Great, he tried to rally his spirits. God must have brought him there for a purpose, he told himself. He must discover it and see it through.
Ahead, a towering column thrust upwards from the center of the forum; seven drums of porphyry stacked on a square plinth of marble and capped by a snow-white capital.
He had been told that the summit of the column had once been home to a glittering statue of the city’s founder, decked out like Apollo, but the figure was gone now, and a huge gilt cross planted in its stead.
The shadow of the cross fell like an enormous sun dial onto the canopies of the market stalls that spread themselves around it.
It was busy, and as he squeezed through the narrow lanes of stalls, he breathed in a cornucopia of aromas: crab cooked in olive, mutton roasted in fenugreek; tamarind, lemon, cilantro and nard; sweet cinnamon and sharp pepper. He heard the crackling of scripilita baking in its copper tray and the chatter of old women as they stirred their boiling pots of farro. A soothsayer beckoned and boldly offered to call his destiny. A whore batted her lashes from a crooked doorway, and between his feet a ginger cat slunk past on its ceaseless patrol for rats.
A blind beggar blocked his path and shook a pan in his direction. Several were dotted around the forum, proudly displaying disfigured limbs with toothless grins. He dropped a coin into the beggar’s pan, but his attention did not stay with the wretch for long.
Instead his eyes became fixed down the passageway of stalls onto a far more beautiful creature, and the crowd around her seemed to melt into insignificance. Tall and slender and sheathed in a gamurra gown of crimson silk, expensively embroidered about the hem, a sleeveless white giornea cloak hung from her shoulders, studded with pearls. These luxurious trappings, her intricately woven hair and arrogant swagger suggested she was no peasant stall seller; this was nobility.
She wore no veil, exposing a face of patrician elegance whose features seemed carved from alabaster and whose gaze contained such hauteur as to appear completely untroubled by doubt. He had never seen such arrogance wrapped in such grace. Her hair was dark auburn, her lips pert and carmine red like a ripe summer strawberry.
She glanced Grant’s way as they neared, flicked her eyes away as they met his stare and then took a second look as she passed, accompanied by a teasing smile that left him thirsty for her attention.
Grant turned side on as she went by, nodding his head deferentially but not losing his view of her. Her eyes were hazel gemstones that danced with life above a faintly freckled nose.
She was quite young, perhaps seventeen or eighteen by his reckoning, her beauty fresh as spring dawn.
He caught a whiff of aloeswood perfume on the breeze as she passed and then the beautiful apparition was gone, consumed by the multitude like a perfect snowflake falling into a drift, leaving Grant standing like a slack-jawed child who had just seen magic for the first time.
A late autumn wind came fine and searching, rustling the leaves about the Augustaion by the time Grant reached that square back at the city’s ancient heart. All that remained of the old cloister were the jagged marble stumps marking out a perimeter in the dirt, and the column.
Far thicker than an oak tree and of a dizzying height, the column reached up into the heavens, sheathed in a coat of stamped bronze. Its base was a solid pedestal of marble, raised from the ground by seven steps. At the top of the column the vine-leaf-carved capital supported an enormous figure, perhaps four times larger than life, astride an equally enormous horse.
Craning his neck, Grant made out the fanned h
eaddress of peacock feathers on its crown, the bronze of it warmed to butterscotch in the pale sunlight.
The giant’s left palm lay open and empty where for centuries it had held an orb of solid gold before, inexplicably, it had tumbled to the ground some decades ago. No one could mistake that portent.
The statue was of an emperor, Grant knew that much. It was the emperor who had seen fit to honour God with the great church across the square, the only building that could ever make this statue seem small.
At the basilica of Hagia Sophia, a crowd was gathering around a piece of parchment nailed to the tall public doors. A note, written in scarlet ink and railing against the church union with the Latin faith.
The excited man who read the diatribe out to Grant also told him that its author, a monk named Gennadios, was expected to make a speech there shortly. Grant decided it would be worth hearing and took a seat on the steps of the towering column while the crowd gathered.
Presently, a figure made his way to the church doors, wearing the tall black hat and veil of the klobuk and flanked by two other monks. His long grey beard and pale oval face were the only breaks in the blackness from the crown of his hat to the tips of his boots. His nose was thin, and his eyes appeared to bore holes into his audience as he glanced around the square. It was a face closer to Satan than to God.
The crowd fell into silence as Gennadios began to speak and, seemingly without effort, sent his voice booming around the square.
‘My people! I am sad to see you here. I am sad it has come to this. Sad that our very souls are sold to the fires of hell by our emperor in his deal with the devil in Rome.’
The crowd cheered its approval.
‘Even now, the pope’s agent arrives in the city with the false promise of an army to save us from the Turks. And all he asks in return for aid in this life is that we damn ourselves in the next! This is a fool’s bargain, I say!’
He gestured over their heads towards the deserted hippodrome and the enormous ruins of a palace. ‘Do you not recall how this all came about? Do you not remember who it was that first broke our walls, stole our wealth, desecrated our churches? Was it the Moslems?’
The crowd gave a murmured response.
‘No, not even they have abused us so! It was the Latins!’ The voice of Gennadios rebounded off the stone mountain of the great church onto the crowd, who jeered and beat their breasts in return.
‘And who is it that even now encroaches upon our lands with their outposts and their galleys? Who is it that condemns Byzantium to impoverishment through their creeping takeover of our trade? It is the Latins!’
‘We don’t want Latin help or Latin union!’ a voice called out. On his step, Grant subconsciously touched the hilt of the baselard dagger at his hip.
Gennadios was still raving. ‘Now, in a final act of contempt, they seek to debase our greatest church with their unholy sacrament. It shall be no better than a synagogue or heathen temple then, and I will henceforth not venture within its walls! The Latins are not only schismatics but heretics. We did not separate from them for any reason other than the fact that they are heretics. This is precisely why we must not unite with them unless they dismiss the addition from the creed filioque and confess the creed as we do! People of Constantinople, place your faith not in Rum Papa for deliverance but in God and his angels.’
‘Did you ever see a finer gathering of imbeciles!’ said a voice beside Grant.
In his preoccupation with the priest, Grant had not taken in his neighbour mounting the steps, but now he turned and saw it was an elderly man whose head was half-hidden beneath a beehive-shaped skaranikon hat of orange silk. His eyebrows were thick and whiskery and as snow white as the beard that fell from his chin to his waist.
‘That mad monk could waffle the ears off the Holy Ghost. What is it this time?’
‘He’s raw at the emperor’s dealings with the Roman pope,’ said Grant.
The old man spat on the steps. ‘Ha! Same old rot. Souls to damnation, that line of nonsense, I shouldn’t wonder. How convenient, would you not say, that the promises and consequences these monks threaten always fall due in the next life? Never here, never immediately. Pay now, buy later. Take that offer to the market and see how many chickens you sell, but the fools swallow it every time so long as it’s dressed up in joss sticks and ceremony.’
‘You’re not a follower then?’ said Grant in amusement.
The old man grunted. ‘The world is too full of wind to be much impressed by Gennadios.’
Grant was about to reply when his eye was drawn beyond the old man to helmets marching down the Mese. An armoured line upon which the low afternoon sun glinted; an uncoiled serpent of men bright with autumn scales, silver and steel, purple and red. Trouble.
The soldiers were escorting a red-robed figure inside their lines and heading straight for the Augustaion.
‘This could get interesting,’ said the old man, following Grant’s gaze. He pointed to the man at the front of the column. ‘That is Theodoros Karystinos, captain of the paramonai palace guard. The city’s finest bowman. And that,’ he pointed to the man in red, ‘is my old friend, Cardinal Isidore, freshly arrived from Rome.’
Karystinos, reaching the back of this crowd, began to force his way through. Gennadios could not have missed the procession of the tall polearm shafts, then his eyes fell upon Isidore’s cardinal robes.
‘Devil!’ the monk cried with the full power of his terrible voice. ‘Rome’s lackey leads our own troops against us!’
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. The column’s passage became harder. Karystinos began to forcibly push bodies aside and people started to jostle into the soldiers. Very quickly the square became a teeming scrimmage.
‘Make way!’ Karystinos called.
‘Devil!’ Gennadios bellowed once more.
‘Death to the union!’ a voice cried from the crowd.
The column was halted, stuck in the centre of the throng like an ox cart in heavy mud. People jeered, cursed and spat at the soldiers. Hands began to reach out and grab at pike shafts and violently shove the armoured men.
Grant caught sight of Isidore as he slapped aside a fist. His face was an ashen picture of fear.
Something sailed through the air. A shoe perhaps, or a vegetable – nothing more deadly – but it was enough to the spark the powder keg. The square exploded into violence.
The soldiers clubbed down bystanders and shoved back the nearest rank of the crowd, but the mob would not be easily cowed. Stirred by Gennadios’s words and drunk on long-fermented resentment, they began to hurl anything they could find at the troops. Shoes became stones, curses became death threats and shoves became punches.
Gennadios scuttled away at the first sign of violence. His work was done. No matter what else occurred that evening, he had made his point.
The ruckus began to spill back towards the column steps where Grant stood.
The old man did not appear overly fearful, but he turned to Grant and said, ‘I wonder if you might do me a service and escort me the short walk home? My name is Kallinikos by the way. Where are my manners, asking a favour of you without even the good grace to introduce myself!’
‘I’d be happy to,’ said Grant. ‘The name’s John Grant.’
‘Oh, I know that, my boy,’ said Kallinikos. ‘You’re already something of a curiosity in these parts – Maruffo’s big German.’ His whiskery eyebrows shot up with his smile.
‘I’m a Scot, actually, not a German.’
‘You may very well be, but to some cretins around here anyone from north of the Alps is German. Now, shall we get moving before it gets too dark to see what we are stepping in?’
A hard core of rioters remained, hurling rocks at the soldiers, but much of the crowd had melted away. Grant’s right hand rested on the pommel of his sidearm and he glared at anyone who came within a few feet of them, but they crossed the rear of the square without incident, turned down a passageway on Kallinikos’s directio
n and soon the noise of the riot had disappeared altogether.
‘Mercenaries and gulls,’ said Kallinikos, pointing to the seabirds circling overhead. ‘You both come ashore before a gathering storm, under a nimbus sky. It’s a fair distance you’ve travelled to pick a fight with the sultan.’
‘He picked the fight, I’m just here to defend the city.’
Kallinikos shook his head, ‘Too many days like today and there will be no city for you to defend. We shall have done the sultan’s work for him.’
The sky flamed salmon pink as the gloomy half-dark began to creep its way down the Bosporus. The mussel sellers were firing up their braziers for the evening trade, and the soft toll of church bells summoned the faithful to vespers.
The old man steered Grant through a maze of oblique, tenebrous alleyways until they emerged outside what appeared to be a squat monastery complex of lancet windows and scalloped domes.
The main entrance to the building lay up a flight of steps from the street, but Kallinikos stopped instead at the doorway of an annexe building.
‘Here we are!’ he said, pulling a key from his robe and fishing at the lock.
They entered a workshop, although it was like none Grant had seen before. Much was typical – benches strewn with tools, offcuts of wood, a furnace and anvil – but more was unusual: diagrams scrawled onto the brickwork in charcoal, almost occult in their appearance; books and codices stacked like chimneys; triangles of wood and canvas, suspended by rope from the ceiling; but strangest of all, scattered all around the cavernous space, were the most incredible mechanical creations Grant had ever seen.
‘What exactly are you building here?’ said Grant.
‘All sorts, my boy, all sorts,’ said Kallinikos. ‘I have a library, you see, with rather a lot of old books by many great minds. Some of these men were not just theoreticians, but practical engineers. Their thoughts are supposed to be put into construction.’
A man stirred from behind one of the contraptions. He was not as old as Kallinikos, but his hair was grizzled and greying. ‘Ah, there you are Demetrios,’ said Kallinikos. ‘This is my elder son, kyr Grant.’
Porphyry and Ash Page 3