Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

Grant bowed his own head and closed his eyes. He felt once more the emptiness inside himself, deep in his core. A hollowness, born from the brutal years of conflict. The meandering path of his life had left little but misery and destruction in its wake. He feared it had dissolved his soul.

  Now, in this silent corner of the church, he heard himself begin to pray.

  ‘It’s been a while, Lord. Maybe You thought you’d seen the back of me. I’ve been lost like a sheep in highland fog, but Father Bremner always said we’re all lost sheep, waiting for the return of the great shepherd. So maybe I’ve been no more wicked than most, and perhaps I’ve done a good turn once or twice forbye. I know You’ll set Rouen on the scales against me and perhaps there’s nothing I can do to counter that weight, but I’m here to give it a try. They say those who took up the cross for Jerusalem all got passes to heaven, no matter what they’d done before. It’s not Jerusalem, but maybe Constantinople’s near enough, eh? I thought if I tried to save this city for You, then maybe You could forgive Rouen. I’m ready to fight for You, Lord. I’m ready to die here if I must, but please, grant me a sign, Lord. Show me my sacrifice here isn’t vain folly.’

  He crossed himself, kissed the altar, and then a miracle happened.

  A scent caught in his nostrils, a sweet, exotic aroma. Aloeswood. Foreign and yet familiar. There was the rustle of cloth, the clip of shoes on the mosaic tiles, and he opened his eyes to see a figure sweeping past and through the royal doors.

  Although, like all Byzantine women, her head was covered by a veil inside the church, she also wore a gamurra that was cut less modestly than most. He knew instantly it was her. Even before God she walked with a strut of defiance.

  She moved to the bank of wax candles in the far corner and carefully relit one before heading to the front of the nave to bow obediently at the crucifix beyond the sanctuary gates.

  Grant watched her from his knees, determining that this was a sign from God, for why of all the dozens of churches in Constantinople had she come here to this relatively obscure one beside the hippodrome?

  She moved beyond his line of sight, into the shadows, and for a time he began to wonder if she was real at all or had been merely an apparition, a vision, as folk were prone to receive in states of holy rapture.

  But she was certainly real, for a few minutes later he heard the clip of her shoes once more and through the doors she swept without so much as a glance in his direction.

  He gave a last plaintive look towards the great Christ figure painted on the distant apse, whispered, ‘Deliver me from temptation,’ and rose from his knees to follow her out into the daylight.

  A few brisk steps and he had caught up to her. ‘Noble women shouldn’t go around unescorted these days, kyria,’ Grant said. ‘There’ve been riots. The people have forgotten all civility, forbye, there may be robbers loose hereabouts. Allow a concerned knight to escort you to your father’s home.’

  ‘Oh, it is you,’ she said with little enthusiasm in her voice. ‘I wondered who was lurking at the back of the church. There are no robbers in my city, only brawling brutes from Genoa and beyond.’

  Grant smiled to show his good humour and continued to keep pace with her. ‘You’ve me mistaken, perhaps kyria?’

  ‘No, I think not. Or do you suppose there to be two blond ogres stomping about, breaking the noses of respected merchants.’

  ‘Nose you say? Would this respected merchant be a yaldson dog from Venice by the name of Barbo?’

  ‘A knight you call yourself and yet you have added insult to the injury you caused noble Messer Barbo. What chivalry do they teach in Scotland?’

  Something in her tone made Grant suspect she was mocking the Venetian.

  ‘Kyria, you’re truly the flower of the city and wise into the bargain,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s called my nation correctly since I first arrived. Perhaps you’ve been paying a special attention? Is that why you followed me to church today and to the tavern last night?’

  If he had expected to make her blush he was disappointed. ‘I was praying at the church of my saint. She cannot be your saint too, so why did you choose to worship there?’

  ‘I liked the pictures,’ he said with a shrug. ‘It has lions on the floor. We like rampant lions in Scotland.’

  ‘And you are a knight from Scotland,’ she said doubtfully. ‘What knightly order do they have there?’

  ‘The Order of the Unicorn,’ he said, satisfied that he had made no claims to membership.

  She laughed. ‘Physiologus rejoice! Your legend is affirmed! I have seen a unicorn bound forth to the church of virginal St Euphemia.’

  Grant glanced back towards the elm gates of the church. ‘St Euphemia was it? And there’s me thinking it was dedicated to the Lord our God.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said the girl. She was scowling and smiling all at the same time. ‘Euphemia was a young girl from Chalcedon, across the Bosporus. She had dedicated her chastity to God and remained true to her faith in Christ even when the pagan governor ordered her to sacrifice to Ares. They tortured her on the wheel and fed her to the lions in this arena.’ She pointed towards the hippodrome ruins.

  ‘A salutary lesson for young noble girls to not cling on too tightly to their virginity,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘You have the body of a knight, I grant you, but your tongue is surely that of a jester. Do all Scotsmen speak so coarsely? A knight with proper manners would address me as Despoina.’

  He knew enough to spot her lie. The title of despoina belonged to a daughter of the imperial family and Constantine was childless.

  ‘Forgive me, Despoina, if my tongue lacks modesty. I’m merely an honest soldier without the gloss of a court upbringing. Which means to say I stab through the chest and not through the back.’

  ‘And punch through the nose, to judge by Messer Barbo,’ she said.

  ‘He had it coming, I assure you of that, but if he’s somehow dear to you then I apologise. I’m not sorry to have given him a dunt, merely to have upset a lady – a despoina – such as your good self.’

  The gates of the hippodrome and the remaining whitewashed walls of the racetrack loomed high above them, casting their shadow across the dihippion square just as the track itself lay buried forever in the dark umbra of its history.

  There was no more forlorn an edifice to the crumbling past glories of empire than a space that had once thronged with boisterous spectators but now stood, like the neighbouring great palace, empty and overgrown with weeds, its broken columns pushing up from the earth like the bleached bones of an old, dead monster.

  Through the rusting gates, in the centre of the track, the remaining trophies from past conquests could be glimpsed: heathen idols stacked along the mouldering spina; statues in porphyry and bronze, an Egyptian obelisk, a tripod of serpents; tide marks to the degree of imperial decline.

  A chipped marble scar marked the spot where four bronze horses had once loomed over the starting line. Those horses now pranced on the basilica in Venice, carried away by looting crusaders, and their absence was a psychological wound, which fed the bitterness of the citizens toward their would-be Latin allies.

  Once past the hippodrome frontage, the girl unexpectedly turned down a narrow, cobbled passageway, which disappeared between the exposed brown carpet of the abandoned arena and the tightly packed houses that surrounded it. She neither encouraged nor objected to his continuing to walk beside her, and so he remained.

  ‘I have had cause to know rather too much of Messer Barbo,’ she said. ‘I find it easy to believe that he got his just reward from you. As far as I am concerned, you can splinter his nose as often as you care.’

  ‘I’ll think myself doing your good service, Despoina, when next I come across the rascal.’ Grant gave a comic bow, which she returned with a shallow curtsy and a delightful smile.

  The gradient of the road had become unforgiving, dropping steeply down the slope of the hill towards the sea, but the girl barely broke stride.
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br />   Beside them the curved wall of the sphendome reared up on a series of massive vaults at the southern end of the hippodrome.

  The gradient eased, the road kinked, and the hippodrome was lost behind the stone and timbered frontages of the district they were passing through.

  ‘Where is your axe and your ruby?’ she asked.

  He could tell she was trying to confuse him, and, damn her eyes, she was succeeding. He had suspected from the way she had carried herself in the market that she was not a timid, callow girl, but he had not expected to find her quite this bold.

  ‘I must have dropped them,’ he said with mock alarm. ‘A ruby would be grand, but remind me why I’d want an axe?’

  ‘You are a varangian and varangians are supposed to carry great big axes and wear a ruby in their ear. Everybody knows that!’

  ‘Everybody?’ he said. ‘Well nobody told me. Nobody even told me I was a varangian. My father said I was a Scot. What, may I ask, is a varangian?’

  ‘Blood of Christ, you’re dense,’ she said with a laugh.

  He tried not to feel foolish. ‘It appears I’m not the only one with a coarse tongue, Despoina.’

  ‘Have you really never heard of a varangian? Do you not read your own histories?’

  ‘I don’t read anything,’ he said. ‘I was never taught letters.’

  She stopped in her tracks and scrutinised him for a moment. He realised she was unsure if he was joking or not.

  ‘Truly?’ she said. ‘Then allow me to educate you, poor, ignorant barbarian. The varangians were mercenary warriors who came to this city centuries ago. The histories give a good description: tall, blond haired and from the cold north; pig ignorant, unable to read or write but with hearts of lions and a love of combat. Now am I not describing a mirror image of yourself?’

  She cocked her head, as if in challenge.

  ‘There’s a resemblance, I grant you,’ he said with a grin. ‘But as you say, I’ve no axe, no ruby, and pig ignorant’s a wee bit harsh.’

  She smiled back. ‘Semi-stupid then. Come on varangian, I cannot dawdle in this slum all day.’

  The street around them was alive with people. Laughing children chased a hen, groups of women stood like court ministers deep in conversation, passing friends exchanged loud, elaborate greetings.

  The air was equally thick with the smell of cooking pots; the sizzling meat, cinnamon and mint of the keftedes; the oily pungency of a pot of boiling kakavia. It hardly seemed a slum to Grant but having just been called ignorant he did not feel like inviting further scorn by saying so.

  The road began to curve, bending itself around the southern slope of the second hill, and they were presented with a brilliant panorama of the Marmara glistening like a scarf of spun silk before them.

  The houses dropped away in terraces further down the hillside, ending in what had once been a small harbour but now was little more than a mud flat fringed by an old stone seawall where the white dots of gulls frolicked.

  A small waterway remained, snaking its way through the stone towers at the harbour entrance and across the mud in a concentric sweep, ending in a pool, which, at a distance, seemed so miserably pathetic in the midst of that brown field of silt that to call it a puddle would have been charitable. A single boat lay at anchor in the pool, lazily swaying on a chain.

  ‘The Kontoskalion,’ the girl said, seeing Grant’s interest in the view. ‘One or two centuries back it would have thronged with boats from all over the world. Now it is practically dried up, like our empire’s fortunes. At least you can still use it, if you know the channel well enough. There is another harbour along the coast that is even worse.’

  There was a sadness in her voice that had not been there before. Until now she had been proud, playful, perhaps even a little haughty with him. For that he could not blame her. He had pressed his company upon her uninvited and she had made him pay for the pleasure of escorting her with mild taunts and barbs. He had suffered them in good humour and, he hoped, won at least a little of her approval in so doing.

  ‘You know your history, Despoina.’

  She gave a sad shake of the head. ‘The curse of being born too late into an empire,’ she replied. ‘All you have left is the ghost-image of greatness. History becomes an opiate to dull the pain of the present. In this I am a sentimental addict.’

  Grant gazed down at the harbour and thought of Fieschi’s story from the previous night. Of Portofino, the doomed anchorage where Genoa’s own dreams of glory had been sunk.

  The whinny of a horse brought Grant out of his reverie. The view of the Marmara still stretched out to his left; a spectrum of blues, dotted here and there by the tiny dark shapes of fishing boats and the larger shadows of isolated clouds.

  ‘How lucky these people are to have so glorious a doorstep!’ the girl said. She spread out her arms like a cross as the wind off the water tugged at her gown, and Grant could not help but notice the way the fabric pulled across her chest. The image of the stern Christ on the church dome flashed across his mind in rebuke.

  ‘I’m sure it’s a comfort to the folk in their slum,’ he said and almost slapped himself. ‘Boccanegra's cynicism must be rubbing off,’ he thought.

  ‘It is more than a comfort,’ she said. ‘The fresh sea breeze keeps the air here clean. Plague is rare in this district.’

  By now the road had looped and they began to climb away from the sea, back up the hill they had come down. Ahead, looming over the lower roofs, he could see the top of the banded column in the old forum where he had first seen her in the marketplace.

  ‘We’re heading back on ourselves,’ he said. ‘Would it not have been quicker to walk from the church to here along the Mese?’

  ‘It would have,’ she said, managing, just, to keep a straight face. ‘But it would also have made our walk together shorter.’

  ‘Are you going to lead me a merry dance all over the city?’ he said with a shake of his head.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Are you going to follow?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  There were fewer stalls that day in the old forum. A strong smell of chestnuts hung in the air, as clear a signal of autumn’s ascendency as the biting chill off the Marmara. A single stall seller was the source of the aroma, crouched over his roaring brazier, shaking the metal pan back and forth to prevent his precious goods from burning.

  In the past there would have been half a dozen similar stalls, but rocketing food prices had killed off the trade and even the affluent nobles now shook their heads at the sum demanded by the lone chestnut peddler. He would mumble that even at these rates he was barely covering the cost of his brazier fuel and go on shaking his pan.

  Beyond the chestnut stall was a book seller where the girl stopped and picked up a tome from the pile on the stall front. She opened it and lazily scanned a few pages while Grant waited at her shoulder and looked around the square. ‘I could buy you one,’ she said. ‘Do you prefer your poetry Ionic or Iambic? You could ask one of the tavern whores to read them to you.’

  ‘They’d need to have pictures,’ he said. ‘You know my taste – virgin girls and lions. Otherwise, I’ll just stick to haunting churches.’

  ‘I could always find another patron saint,’ she said. ‘Then which church would you haunt?’

  ‘If you’re to abandon poor St Euphemia, I can recommend Mary Magdalene,’ Grant said. ‘She was a tavern whore.’ The bookseller, who had been pretending not to listen, gasped and crossed himself.

  The girl picked up another book and thumped it into Grant’s chest. ‘Petrarch,’ she said. ‘The Triumph of Chastity.’

  He frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound my sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it is time you tried something new? There’s even a picture of a unicorn in it, nation unknown.’ She paid the book seller and began to walk across the forum towards the Golden Horn side. ‘Now, you can stay and look at the books if you like, or you can finish walking me home.’

  He hurri
ed after her. ‘Are we heading to Blachernae, Despoina? It’s a fair way to walk. You might tire of the company before we reach the palace.’

  ‘Just as well my home is nearby. There, up ahead.’ She pointed down the slope of the hill to where a tower rose from a large Italian-style palazzo.

  A rosebush crept across its whitewashed exterior wall. Grant had seen the palace with its distinctive tower before, pointed out by Maruffo as they rode up the Mese towards Blachernae on that first morning. He knew the property and he knew who owned it, and now he stopped in the road.

  ‘Are you playing games with me again?’ he said.

  She kept on walking and called back over her shoulder, ‘I am walking home, not playing games.’

  He stayed still. ‘I may be new in the city, but even I know yon for the Rose Palace.’

  ‘It is,’ she said and continued to walk down the hill.

  ‘You live there?’ Grant said doubtfully.

  She had stopped and turned to wait for him. ‘All my life. Is it so hard to believe?’

  ‘Despoina, who are you?’

  There was a cruelty to her laughter. ‘You really are a slow barbarian. Think on it. Try hard now, that brain must work if you can shake the rust away. What can you know of me? You know I am acquainted with the Venetian merchant Paolo Barbo. Alas, it is more than this; I am to be married to him. Have you still not guessed? My name is Anna Notaras, daughter of Loukas Notaras, the megas doux.’

  Her name rang like a church bell through his mind, and while he might wish it were not true, deep down he had always known it must be this. Her father’s name had been written large in all the arrogance with which she moved about the city; in all her easy air of entitlement – for truly she was entitled.

  ‘This is my hill, Varangian,’ she said as she passed, without him, beyond the iron palazzo gate. ‘This is my city.’

  VI.

  A hammer, pounding stone blocks into shape, beat out a steady rhythm: clack, clack, clack. There were four masons below the land wall tower, each labouring hard on the reworked stretch of the defences.