‘It’s what the Church tells us,’ he said.
‘The Church!’ She shook her head as though he had mentioned a hapless child.
The voice of her handmaiden, Zenobia, came in warning from their shadows. ‘Despoina.’
‘Fear not, Zen, I am not about to slander the Church,’ said Anna with a glance over her shoulder.
She turned back to Grant. ‘God is not something we can properly comprehend with our imperfect minds. It is everything and it is nothing. God contains every idea, every concept, every thought and yet it cannot be defined by any of these. It is the universal, the unmoved mover, the source of all things and yet it resembles none of them. It is futile to describe it in mortal terms as some father, son or spirit, or to suppose it would show preference or emotion at the actions or inactions of men. To do so is to ascribe an imbalance to the perfect force. If God is wrathful, then it is lacking in forgiveness. If God sets out absolute commandments, then it is lacking in tolerance. If God condemns you, John, then it lacks compassion. God is everything and nothing. It is not a material entity and yet it is the source from which all things flow.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You cannot, but you must try. God has no body, no quantity, no time. It is both an ever-expanding space and the void that comes beforehand; a flash without light, a silent thunder, a form without dimension; it is an ocean without a shoreline, a single word that encompasses all language, all meaning; a flame that cools, a frost that burns, a deafening silence.’ She sighed in frustration. ‘All these attempts to describe God are redundant, for our minds are limited while God is limitless. We can never comprehend the whole. Let us just say that God... is.’
He shook his head. She was more than a decade his junior and already her knowledge was many times beyond his own. ‘You say God’s perfection, but how can a perfect force come up with such an imperfect world?’ Grant said. ‘Look around you, in spring the blossom of these trees will be beautiful, but they’re cursed with mortality. It’s certain that their beauty will wither and die just as even your own will fade.’
‘God did not create this physical realm,’ said Anna. ‘This world is illusory, a phantasm of a higher existence like shadows on a cave wall.’
The chaperone broke her silence from behind them again. ‘Despoina, be mindful not to wander into heresy.’
‘The truth should never be heresy, Zen,’ said Anna over her shoulder. ‘It has been through abandoning the truth of the ancients and embracing false principles that we find ourselves in this vortex of destruction.’
There were so many questions Grant wanted to ask her but what little she had already said made his mind swim in confusion. To fill the silence, he reached for the safety of empty platitude.
‘You’re a pretty lass, Despoina, but you’re even more canny.’
She gave a smile at the compliment but shook her head. ‘I have the wisdom of books but little of the world. The walls of this city are the limits of my experience. I have never been beyond them. When it comes to life, real, tasted, consumed, you are the sage and I the innocent.’
‘Is that the reason you wanted my escort?’ said Grant.
‘One of them,’ she said with a smirk. ‘I have a weakness for chivalric tales. I should like to hear yours.’
‘My story?’ said Grant. ‘There’s not much glory there. My life would have been very different, but for a barrel of herring.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I think perhaps you are having a joke at my expense?’
‘Not a bit,’ Grant said. ‘My father was a man-at-arms for Lord Darnley, the Constable of Scotland. When I was ten, Darnley crossed to France to fight the English. Father took me with him – we were all each other had. It was February, the lenten days were coming and the river around Orleans couldn’t produce enough fish to sustain the English army for a forty-day fast. The dauphin’s spies discovered that a supply convoy would be bringing wagons of salted herring to the English camp. Darnley determined to stop it.’
‘Your father died in the battle,’ she guessed.
Grant nodded. ‘For fish. He died for fish. Darnley too.’ His voice was level but quieter than usual. ‘They were brave men, but their notions of generalship didn’t go far beyond charging and shouting. The English made a wagon fort and picked them off with their bows. It was a slaughter. The survivors gave no thought to camp followers like myself. We were abandoned, in a foreign country, in a foreign war.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Well, the first thing I did was find my father and bury him. I was still struggling to dig his grave when one of the English sutlers found me. He was a good man, thank the Lord. His heart was full of pity. I’d have starved, or worse, without his charity. Instead he put me to work in their camp. That’s how I came to be at Rouen.’
‘You stayed with them! After they killed your father?’ she sounded horrified.
Grant shrugged, ‘I had more English than French. I’d never have made it to Scotland, forbye there was nobody to go back to. It might sound strange, but I blamed Darnley more than the other side for what had happened. Perhaps it would have been different if I’d known exactly which bowman had shot the arrow, but it was an honest battle. I was with the English six years until the Duke of Burgundy made his peace with France. The cannier men knew that was the turning of the tide. Go south, some said, there were private companies forming again and richer pickings over the Alps in Lombardy.’
‘So you became a mercenary in the Italian wars,’ she said.
‘Yes, but I’ve no stories of heroes from those days. In my experience there are only two types of men on a battlefield – those living and those dead.’
‘I’ve heard of men left somewhere between those two states by war,’ said Anna. ‘Broken men, no longer living but not quite dead either. Perhaps your friend is one such. He bears the mark of Portofino.’
‘That was something beyond warfare, Despoina. What was done to him and his fellow survivors was pure hatred. There was no mercy after Portofino.’
‘Then tell me this tale,’ she said. ‘I have heard no end of stories of the triumphs of Giustiniani. I would know the dark side of this man also.’
‘There’s little to tell,’ said Grant with a shrug. ‘To avoid arrest in Genoa, Giustiniani had switched sides and led a Venetian fleet up the Ligurian coast. They surprised his old Genoese comrades in the waters off Portofino. I gather the battle was short and one sided. The Venetians took six Genoese galleys and towed them back to their Florentine allies at Porto Pisano. You’re a historian, Despoina, so perhaps you already know of the hatred the people of Pisa hold for the Genoese?’
‘I confess I do not,’ said Anna.
Grant cocked an eyebrow. ‘Well then, allow this semi-stupid barbarian to educate the Despoina for a change. You see, before Venice was its rival, Genoa had a long and equally bitter struggle with Pisa. They still hate Latins here in Constantinople, two centuries after they sacked the city; well, the Pisans had equally long memories. They remembered how the Genoese had filled in Porto Pisano with soil and sewn it with salt so nothing would grow. So, after the battle off Portofino, the Venetians kept the galleys, but handed the prisoners over to the Pisans.’
‘I hardly dare ask what the Pisans did,’ Anna said.
‘They repaid the Genoese,’ said Grant. ‘And salt was the currency they settled their old grievance in. South of Pisa, at Volterra, the locals mine salt. The Genoese prisoners were taken in chains deep into the hillside caverns. Equipment was set up. A crude wooden table, a fire and, of course, the set of metal brands. The survivors were dragged one by one to the table and held down while the white-hot iron was pressed into their face.’
‘A brand of the letter P,’ Anna said. ‘For Pisa.’
From the corner of his eye, Grant could see even the chaperone Zenobia was straining to follow his words. He nodded. ‘Imagine, a blazing flash of pain, the horrid smell of your own flesh searing and then the mercy of unconsciousness,
only to be woken back to agony by a bucket of cold water on the fresh wound. But the Pisans weren’t finished.’
‘Oh Theotokos! The salt?’
‘Yes, the salt. They rubbed salt into the wounds, into the newly branded faces. It must have stung worse than the burning. Of course, it also cleaned the wound – helped it dry and scab quicker. That was fine by the Pisans; they wanted the Genoese to live. It was all part of their devilish plan. They had salted these men, just as their own Porto Pisano had been salted, leaving them barren and broken; leaving them – as you said – somewhere between life and death.’
‘How cruel,’ said Anna. ‘And Giustiniani did nothing to stop this?’
‘I’ve heard it claimed that Giustiniani abandoned Venice because he’d seduced a patrician’s wife, but I prefer to think he regretted the revenge he’d helped inflict. Certainly, it wasn’t long after the brandings that Giustiniani slipped away. By now the Venetians were giving it laldy in the Aegean. Twenty-eight of their galleys had Chios under siege when Giustiniani kythed there and sailed right through the bloackde into harbour. By sunset the Genoese had acclaimed him commander, and a month later the Venetians had been loundered back to their lagoon by a force half their size. Giustiniani was a Genoese hero once more, but he’s never left Chios since then; he’s never gone back to Genoa.’
‘And the men in the salt mine?’ said Anna. ‘The branded survivors, like your friend, what happened to them?’
‘Now that’s a scunnersome tale. The Pisans held the men in the dark salt cavern until they’d grown half-starved and gyte, and their families had given them up as dead. Then they sent them home.’
‘What? Why would they…’
Grant raised a finger and Anna fell silent and listened as he explained. ‘When the first man arrived back, it’s said the noise of the wailing rolled like a tidal wave up from the gates and through the city. He was given no peace. For days women would visit his house and demand news of their own men. Then, each day, more survivors would appear, in dribs and drabs, and their every sight reopened the scabbed wound of their grief. Marked by the brand, it was impossible to go back to a normal life there. The survivors’ curse, Despoina. Incomplete men; some part of them left behind under Volterra.’
‘The widows blamed them for living while their own husbands had died,’ she murmured.
‘Yes, even if they never voiced that thought, it was written in their eyes. My friend Isnardo lasted two months back in Genoa. He said it was as cruel a torture as any he’d known in the mine, and so he left, as so many of the other branded men did. Many hired themselves out as mercenaries to the sultans of Egypt and Adrianople, and of course here in Constantinople too.’
They were deep in the ruined, skeleton streets of the Mangana district and Grant could guess where they were heading. The panorama of the Marmara’s water lay before them, molten in the day’s golden light.
‘Genoa must be a deranged city,’ said Anna. ‘To pray for the return of her sons and then, when that prayer was answered, to drive them away. Constantinople is a deranged city too. We delude ourselves with the trappings of caesars and ignore how withered our empire has become, how practiced we are in lies, and we lie to none more than ourselves. My empire is falling, John, in a spiral of deceit. Never trust what people here tell you; they have more faces than the hydra and the surface of their words always hides a deeper current beneath.’
He was caught off guard by her words. For a moment they both fell silent, then Grant said, ‘Even you, Despoina?’
The flash of a smile crossed her face. ‘Even me,’ she said. ‘You should beware of Podesta Maruffo too. I know you think him your protector, but you are no different to him than the knave of swords to a card player. He will sacrifice you without hesitation to win a hand in this game.’
The words stung like a whip. Maruffo was as near a father to him as any man could be. ‘And what of you?’ he snapped. ‘Are you a card in the hands of the megas doux?’
‘Oh, I have already been dealt,’ Anna said. ‘I am the daughter of the megas doux, a mere counter to be proffered by him to bind another’s loyalty.’
An image of the feast crossed his mind. The painted face sat across the table. ‘Like the Turk grand vizier?’ he said.
The face before him, now stripped of all the glitter and pretence of that feast, held a look of deep sadness. ‘A daughter’s fate,’ she said. ‘I’m a commodity, sold like any of the trinkets in the market.’
‘Well now, I can’t guess what treasure could give your father fair trade,’ he said.
‘My value has fallen a long way,’ said Anna. ‘Once, I was to be Constantine’s bride. Then his minister thought better of it and I was set aside like corked wine.’
‘But the emperor’s still unwed,’ said Grant.
‘Yes, but my time had passed as far as Constantine was concerned. Instead I am to be used to improve Father’s links with Venice. Instead of empress I shall become merely the wife of a… what was it you called him? Ah yes, a yaldson dog.’
Her smile showed her inward amusement at the unsuitableness of the insult, given Barbo’s mother was the last pope’s sister, rather than a whore. Grant, meanwhile, was realising that he had come down this street before when he had escorted the old engineer Kallinikos home. Now the red bricks of the abandoned monastery loomed before them, and Grant knew the remaining time with her was short. He felt a sadness like sunset.
Beside the monastery steps, a clump of wild flowers bowed their frost-besieged heads. Anna stooped and plucked one.
‘Hellebore,’ she said. ‘The first sign of spring, and early this year; the one time it is unwelcome.’
Her shadow, Zenobia, drifted silently past them and up the steps to open the monastery’s front door, then hovered discretely on the threshold like a spectre. The street was deserted, the buildings all empty of life. Grant considered seizing hold of Anna and kissing her. Who could stop him?
He stopped himself.
She was more than a mere tavern wench to chance his arm with, and not because of who her father was. The shackling of his baser instinct had left him silent, but Anna too had neither moved nor spoken. A pensive look rippled across her face like a sudden wind stirring the calm surface of a millpond. ‘Perhaps war can be avoided,’ she said.
‘The grand vizier's audience with Constantine suggested otherwise,’ said Grant.
‘There is more to Constantinople than Constantine.’ She spat the name out with the acid tone of a discarded bride. Not for the first time on that walk Grant began to see matters cast in a different light.
‘You mean your father,’ he said. ‘Is he treating with the Turks behind the emperor’s back? Is he planning something?’
She appeared to wrestle briefly with her own mind, trying to decide whether to speak it or not. Then the motley eyes, which seemed to contain all the colours between charcoal and amber, slid over the red scabbard of authority hanging from his belt. An inward threshold was crossed, and she spoke, ‘Good day, hero.’
Before he could reply, she had mounted the steps, leaving him in the street. Then she paused at the monastery door, turned back towards him and said, ‘My father is a faithful and loyal Roman. He would do anything to preserve the city from destruction. Anything.’ He thought he saw a glistening on her lashes.
XI.
The winter began to relent, yet better weather brought lower spirits, as every warmer day seemed another step towards the siege. One bright January morning two sails were spotted on the horizon, and the rumour of an arriving papal army swept through the streets like fire. People flocked to the Neorion harbour to view the ships as they arrived, but as the sails neared, they failed to multiply. Yet the crowd’s disappointment was somewhat tempered by the standard flying proudly from the sails, and the news flew on wings around the districts. Just a single word was required.
Giustiniani.
The best view belonged to the balcony of the Keratembolin portico, directly overlooking the qua
yside and – as if precognisant of the ship’s arrival – it seemed that half the imperial court had gravitated there that morning to observe the disembarkation.
Constantine was absent, his ministers having insisted that he stay away; it would hardly be seemly for the emperor to await the arrival of a solider-of-fortune like some lonely sailor’s wife.
There was no reason for the megas doux to be there either, but curiosity at the fabled Giustiniani had infected the Notaras household too. Anna and Jacob followed their father out onto the balcony, past the bronze statue with its four horns, and approached a spot near George Sphrantzes who eyed them coolly from beneath a taffeta hat.
The two galleys remained lying idly in the Golden Horn for some time without making progress towards the quayside. ‘They are taking their time,’ Jacob muttered.
‘Giustiniani must be waiting to ensure a big enough crowd,’ Loukas Notaras said. ‘He belongs on a stage, not a battlefield.’
‘You’re wrong there,’ said Minotto, the Venetian bailo. ‘Giustiniani is a showman alright, but the battlefield is his stage.’
A cheer went up as the first ship tacked before the thick Pera tower and ghosted past the harbour mole. ‘Here they come at last!’ said Jacob.
‘What a pleasant surprise to see kyria Notaras here,’ Sphrantzes said with a glare at Anna. As usual, his words were an inversion of their meaning. She was the sole woman on the balcony, and the grand logothete was not the only one who found her presence there unsuitable, to judge by the looks exchanged around him.
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