Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  ‘It’s true, kyria, hard to believe, but true.’ He had a suspicion where this was leading and no desire to visit that ground.

  ‘And were you not part of the army she defeated? Is it also true that you were once beaten by a woman? I find it very hard to imagine that.’

  She knew too much of his past not to have put a good deal of effort into digging it up. The thought made him equal parts excited and wary.

  ‘You seem cannie on my history too. Is this a study of particular interest to you?’

  He thought he detected the pale neck colour a fraction. ‘Well, I had thought amazons the stuff of legend but now you prove them to be real.’

  ‘It happens,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Only last august the Venetians stripped the armour from a dead defender at Castelleone and found a woman beneath. They say she’d made a career among mercenary companies for decades. A good swordmaster can teach technique to a woman as much as a man, and technique will overcome strength every time.’

  Anna turned to the woman sat beside her. ‘Did you hear that, Mother? Perhaps we should cut our hair short and put on armour in readiness to fight the Turks. It sounds as if women are more capable in the art of war even than men of kyr Grant’s stature.’

  ‘I wouldn’t council for that, kyria,’ said Grant. ‘The tale of the French warrior maid didn’t end happily for her.’

  ‘And you saw it? So, you admit to having been bested by a woman.’ She kept her smile friendly, but he saw in those changeable eyes the pleasure his discomfort brought. She was toying with him like a cat’s ball of yarn, teasing at his masculine pride to see how tender a spot it proved.

  He laughed. ‘Oh, I’ve been bested by women many a time, but not with a sword. I was only a wean of twelve when she died, so I didn’t witness her victories, only her end. They clapped her to a stake and told lads like me to keep the fire well stoked while they drank and hurled insults and she writhed in agony, howling her lungs empty. A worse death – Lord be thanked – I’ve not witnessed since. So, I’d council you, kyria, not to follow in that brave lass’s footsteps. Leave the killing and the dying to men, as God intended.’

  He sat back and realised that the whole table had been listening to him. The megas doux wore an expression of amusement – doubtless his wife and daughter had not been treated to such talk before. Theodosia Notaras was pale with shock and her mouth hung open like a dead fish. Anna by contrast was flushed, her foot no longer toying with Grant’s ankle.

  ‘Forgive kyr Grant, ladies,’ the emperor said. ‘We expect he is not used to the company of such delicate creatures.’

  Grant began to feel uneasy. The focus on him only served to highlight his lack of grace. ‘Basileus, I apologise if my tale gave offence. As you say, I’m more accustomed to eating with swordsmen and horses.’

  Strangely, it was a Venetian, Minotto, who came to his rescue by changing the subject. ‘Your Imperial Majesty, I had news this morning from Venice. The doge is to send Admiral Trevisano with three heavy galleys to the Bosporus in light of the attack on the Rizzo ship.’

  ‘That is good news indeed,’ said Constantine. ‘We know nothing of this Trevisano, but we trust he will be a welcome addition to the cause.’

  ‘He is a good man, Basileus,’ said Minotto. ‘A brave man. I think you may be able to call upon his aid, even if it is in an unofficial capacity.’

  ‘Just what we need,’ muttered Loukas Notaras. ‘More armoured Latins on unofficial crusades.’

  ‘We shall need every man they can provide, Loukas,’ said the emperor.

  ‘From Venice? Will God not provide all that is needed?’ said Kallinikos archly, ‘After all, there’s no point in omnipotency if you never put it to use.’

  Theodosia shook her head in disgust. ‘There is much of such heresy about,’ she complained. ‘Increasingly people seem to be wavering in their faith. I hear rumours of strange cults emerging in the city. There has even been talk of an angel appearing to people at night.’

  ‘Mass hysteria,’ Kallinikos said. ‘I too have heard the angel rumour but of course it is total nonsense.’

  ‘For once I agree with you,’ said Theodosia. ‘People remember the old prophecy that the Archangel will come to the city’s defence in its hour of need and it soon becomes an obsession.’

  A look passed between the two of them that, unusually, was not the glare of hostility. ‘Yes,’ said Kallinikos. ‘Then one night some drunken idiot spots a large owl and a week later you have a street full of fools who all swear blind that they have seen an angel.’ The ghost of a smile played briefly over Theodosia’s face and then vanished as if she had caught herself acting improperly.

  ‘A pity,’ Constantine said with a smile. ‘An angel would really swell the army’s ranks.’

  VII.

  By December the twelfth, the weather had soured to full-blown winter, but the icy chill off the Marmara was of nothing compared to the reception the emperor would receive once he left the patriarchate palace and processed through Hagia Sophia’s congregation. He would address them from the stone pulpit of the ambo, crying out his justifications like a man on the gallows. Then he would step aside and allow Cardinal Isidore to perform the consecration – the desecration – of the greatest of Greek churches into the Latin faith.

  The nave was a sea of people, jammed shoulder to shoulder, over which the surging sound of the throng in the square outside rolled like breaking surf, across the marbled narthex and up to the women’s gallery where Anna Notaras stood at the railing in brooding silence. To her left, her mother was ostentatiously weeping, as if the entire service was to be a competition in public grieving.

  Unimpressed, Anna turned her eyes upwards to the enormous spreading dome that seemed to hover above them as if suspended from heaven. Rays of sunshine streamed through an arcade of forty lunette windows at the dome’s base, bouncing off the gold-lined vaulting, making it shimmer like a giant golden seashell.

  It was the light that surprised and dazzled any new initiate to the mysteries of Justinian’s masterpiece, thought Anna. One approached the vast church with its buttresses and its bulk and expected to enter a dark cavern, but instead the light poured in, flooding the open nave, turning it luminous with a divine radiance that shone beyond and up and carried a person’s thoughts with it to leave them awestruck and unsure if they were in heaven or earth.

  To this impossibly beautiful illumination, man had added his own efforts, though small in comparison; a thousand lamps and candelabra, and enormous copper chandeliers hung on chains of beaten brass. From these in turn, smaller candle rings and crosses and glass vases of oil were suspended at various levels, each diffusing the light, in their own small way, into the side aisles and dark spaces. Taken together, this circling chorus of illumination formed a coronet above the heads of the people as Anna looked down upon them.

  The gallery made for a convenient perch to people watch. Anna could take in almost all of Constantinople’s male society at a glance; from her father - close to the eastern chancel screen where the emperor would stand - to her fiancé, Barbo, in his blasphemously bright silks among the Venetians.

  Anna cast her eyes along the thick marble columns, which supported the nave, each as green and sturdy as any forest giant. There were soldiers planted like roots at the base of each one, to ensure the crowd remembered decency. She tried to make out, through the wreaths of incense smoke, which if any of them might be John Grant. More shafts of porphyry and veined Jassian marble edged the aisles, each one crowned by a bulging capital, like wool on a distaff.

  He was towards the rear of the church, beneath a silver lamp, which hung on a twisted chain. The wind, blown in from the cold square outside, swung the lamp gently, making it appear like a small ship of silver, bearing a cargo of flame across the gently rolling liquid air. Standing solemnly within Hagia Sophia in the ceremonial armour, he looked even more like the varangians of her more irreligious dreams.

  From her position, Anna could simultaneous
ly view Barbo and Grant. The direct comparison was unkind to the Venetian and only made the prospect of her impending marriage the more unpalatable.

  Of course, she could hardly expect to choose her husband – her duty was to make the best of whatever match her father judged most advantageous to the family – but to Anna, the choice of Barbo reflected an insulting low assessment of her own currency. Was this merchant of Venice really all her hand in marriage could fetch anymore? It was a pride-shattering devaluation from the days when the emperor was considered her potential bridegroom.

  Her pride could not even find consolation in the beauty or character of her future husband. It was clear to her that Barbo was avaricious, uncultured and uninterested in her beyond womb and dowry. He was entirely lacking in physical appeal, the more so when she compared him directly, as now, to the well-made Scotsman. She felt sick at the idea of her impending wedding night. She feared she would dissolve into tears during the ordeal, and her fierce soul hated the thought of betraying weakness.

  She had been considering the matter increasingly over the past weeks. It was too much to hope that her father would relent and break the betrothal, but she was not one to ever meekly accept her fate, and a plan had begun to form in her mind over recent days. It was a plan she thought the Scotsman might be of unwitting assistance in.

  It was at quiet moments like this, alone with her thoughts and fears, that Anna drew strength from the example of her great hero, Mara Brankovic. She had never met Mara and she almost certainly never would, for, as the daughter of Serbia’s ruler and a Byzantine mother, Mara had been forced into a diplomatic marriage to the previous Turkish sultan.

  Incredibly, it was said that Mara Brankovic had imposed her will upon her husband to the point of remaining a practicing Christian within a Moslem court and not even suffering the degradation of the marriage bed.

  The old sultan was three years dead, but Mara remained within the Ottoman court, chaste and, it was said, highly influential. ‘If she can do that from within the Turk harem,’ Anna told herself, ‘why should I not aspire to do more in Venice.’

  The veiled heads around her turned suddenly towards the triple set of heavy doors at the rear of the nave.

  The middle, imperial door was beginning to creak ajar, and the crowned silhouette of Constantine became momentarily framed within it as the honour guard processed through the flanking doors.

  Blushing, angelic cross bearers and equally cherubic incense wavers led the way, carving the air with censers to leave in their wake a great mist of cassia and frankincense.

  Next, through this sweet cloud, came the bishops and church elders in tall black hats and brocaded robes and, unmissable among them, the scarlet of Cardinal Isidore and purple of Constantine.

  A choir of psalm singers trailed in the emperor’s wake, each chosen for a physical charm to match the beauty of his voice. Anna made out her brother, Jacob, among them and smiled proudly at the elegance of his bearing. She had worked hard to correct his slouch by balancing her favourite codex of Euripides on his head as he strolled around the family palazzo.

  Behind her brother, a long train of churchmen, each buttoned to the throat in fine satin, shuffled across the marble holding aloft ikons of crimson and gold or bearing the silvered coffers of holy relics. All of them called in unison to God the same quarter-tone plea for salvation.

  The face of the emperor was set in stony determination, Anna could see, as the procession passed below her position. Begrudgingly, she had to admire anyone capable of staring down a crowd such as this one. It took a certain measure of resolve to carry on along such an unloved course.

  From the center of the nave’s ocean, the ambo rose like an island, and the wave of the imperial procession broke to either side of its flight of stone steps. Here, Jacob and the other psalm singers gracefully split from the procession and took up their place under the columns of the ambo platform, while the emperor and priests continued along the railed passageway of the solea to the church’s eastern end and the shrine of the Holy Table.

  Finally, the black kalimavkions reached the curving wall of the apse, where tiers of semicircular steps raised the seats of the synthronon, with the patriarch’s empty throne raised highest of all in the centre. The Latin cardinal, Isidore, took this chair, sparking a wail from Anna’s mother.

  Unmoved or unaware, and flanked by solemn-faced clerics, Isidore bowed his head and cried out the benediction. His voice was swallowed up by the great space, a stage made for bigger men. It was an occasion made for the sepulchral voice of Gennadios.

  Anna turned away as the service began and gazed instead at the polished stones of the gallery’s mosaics. The soft light glistened and winked from the gold-covered curves of the vaults and arches, as virgins and emperors, seraphims and saviours looked down at her from the walls.

  In all, there were four acres of gleaming patterns and pictures covering the surfaces of the basilica, inlaid with Phrygian marble, Spartan emerald, Egyptian porphyry and silver from the shores of France. There was nowhere on earth more precious, more sacred, more Byzantine than this hallowed church, and yet today, by their own hands, her people were polluting it with the Latin sacrament.

  In that moment, Anna felt a deep kinship with Hagia Sophia. ‘We are to share the same fate,’ she whispered to the mosaic Madonna behind her.

  Later, Cardinal Isidore stood before the altar, arms raised to heaven, eyes closed in his moment of triumph. The Nicean Creed was read and the filial inserted – the one-word amendment that had split the church in two all those centuries before. ‘…and the Holy Ghost, who proceeds from God and from the son.’ His voice rose even louder to try and reach the furthest corners of the cathedral. The oak doors had been left open so the sounds of the service could drift out, across those gathered in the square and on towards Rome.

  ‘No!’ Theodosia Notaras shouted beside Anna. ‘Not the son!’ but Isidore would not be stopped and continued the prayer as if he were conducting it alone on a mountain.

  Once the bitter liturgy was over, a great solemnity fell across the congregation. They began to process out in strict accordance to protocol: Constantine first, flanked by an escort of courtiers and bodyguards and trailed by a procession, which had the air of a funeral cortege.

  The noise of weeping echoed around the vaulting of the gallery as if Hagia Sophia itself were sobbing. The violation now performed, she would be abandoned by the population in favour of those churches deemed uncorrupted.

  Theodosia Notaras led Anna and the rest of the gallery’s morose occupents down the ramp and out from the separate women’s entrance of the church. As they stepped into the winter sunshine, they could hear the hailstorm of jeers and howls from the thousand angry throats on the far side of the church. Constantine would be making his way through that crowd, perhaps setting his jaw and fixing his eyes on a distant spire as the royal entourage crossed the Augustaion square to their waiting mounts on the Mese.

  Then a shrill scream pierced the low rumbles of discontentment and made the women glance wide eyed at one another. Immediately there came the sound of a crowd turning to panic, the pounding of feet and the bellow of alarmed voices.

  ‘Theotokos, what has happened, do you think?’ said Theodosia in fright to Zenobia, the family’s most trusted handmaid and Anna’s old nurse.

  But Zenobia was not listening. ‘Mistress!’ she said in alarm, reaching helplessly out towards the back of Anna’s dress as it disappeared in the direction of the stampeding crowd.

  Anna knew the grounds of Hagia Sophia as if they were her family palazzo. There was an atrium between the Augustaion and the women’s entrance with a doorway on this side, a short distance along the whitewashed walls, and another on the far side of the atrium’s neat apron of grass. The noise from the Augustaion grew louder as she pushed open the heavy wooden door and found the atrium was not as empty as she had expected.

  Much of the royal entourage appeared to have taken shelter there. Anna could immedi
ately see that the far door hung off its hinges from where the press of bodies or the halberd blade of a desperate guardsman had sundered it open. Three of the emperor’s bodyguards were now plugging up the doorway to prevent anyone else following from whatever riot was taking place in the square beyond.

  With some relief, Annna spotted the emperor hunched in the shade of the wall. He wore the mark of shock, but aside from rumpled clothes he appeared unharmed.

  Others from the imperial procession were scattered about the courtyard. Sphrantzes, that old survivor, had scuttled in among the soldiers.

  No one paid her any attention as she moved across the grass. She looked about but found no sign of her father or Barbo or John. Were they all still in the human maelstrom of the square?

  ‘Now we look like a coward, running from our own people,’ Constantine was complaining to Sphrantzes and a gaggle of ministers.

  Anna grabbed the arm of the nearest soldier, who proved to be Theodoros Karystinos, the guard captain. ‘Is my father alright? What happened?’

  Karystinos just shrugged and moved towards the Augustaion door where another of the soldiers had been let in and appeared anxious to report to the emperor. Anna shadowed Karystinos across and listened in.

  ‘A stabbing in the crowd, Basileus,’ the soldier said. ‘A known cut-purse. No surprise to see them out in a dense throng like that. Must have chosen the wrong pocket to pick.’

  ‘And he just happened to be stabbed as the royal procession was making its way across the Augustaion?’ said Sphrantzes as he examined the damage to his best kamision cloak. ‘I am afraid I do not believe in coincidences like that.’

  Constantine frowned. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘That it was planned, Basileus,’ said Sphrantzes. ‘That this stabbing was intended to drive the people at us like cattle. To crush us in the rush, perhaps, or at least ruin the day. You said yourself it has made you look like a coward.’

  ‘The Turks?’ asked Constantine. ‘The anti-unionists?’