Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  How had he been so blind? How had he not realised that this rotten hulk of a house was not a clever disguise for old-money wealth but exactly as it appeared. Indeed, the only thing here that was as it appeared.

  ‘This must be destroyed,’ he thought. ‘All of this and every scrap of evidence to do with that ikon must be erased!’ He found a pot of turpentine and sloshed it generously about the paintings before hurling the burning rags in among them and setting the whole cellar aflame.

  Then he ran off, back towards the riot, desperate to ensure that among the chaos, one more Venetian property should burn, and with it, all trace of his terrible mistake.

  XIV.

  The season of Great Lent fell less than three weeks after the riot, and fittingly, the eve of Clean Monday was known as the Sunday of Forgiveness. With that in mind, the ceremonial logothetes made certain that the festivities of Apokries would that year pay honour to the Latin customs of carnival, and not solely the Greek form. There would be a masquerade, they announced, one in the Venetian style.

  It would be staged within the hippodrome, as if to exorcise the ghost of the anti-Latin riot, and to that end, under the clever hands of many craftsmen, a shrunken replica of Venice sprang up from the racetrack dust.

  All Sunday long the sound from the racetrack had drifted across the hilltop and in through the windows of the Rose Palace. The hubbub of a large, joyous throng, the occasional strain of a tune escaping clear of the general din; it had driven Anna Notaras half-mad to remain inside the walls of her home, wishing away the time until the twilight procession, when the megas doux and his family would make their appearance.

  Then, at last, the daylight began to weaken, and it was time to slip on the high-collared pellanda, to shake out the hanging sleeves and have Zenobia tie the belt artfully high, accentuating the girlish bosom into something more ample; it was time to sit meticulously still while the busy hands of her women took up the dark auburn tresses, plaiting and securing them with pearls and ivory combs into a bronzen coronet above her temples; it was time to don the colombina mask of golden macramé and join her father and the other men, with whom she would parade to the centre of the carnival. At last, it was time.

  Almost the entire Notaras household had gathered in the yard. The male servants, each in pressed livery and equipped with torches, formed a perimeter around the group.

  The chariot would go first, painted up and garlanded and drawn by four strong men who laughed and pranced like horses beneath the mimed whip of her brother, Jacob, standing like Porphyrius in the car.

  As this moved through the gates and into the street they danced after it, even the megas doux. Only her mother had refused the parade and would remain, deep in prayer, with her woman and the seneschal, Baltus, in the dark house.

  The other chariots of the procession were coming down the Mese from Blachernae. In the wide space of the old forum it was easy enough to slip their own small throng into the pageant traffic and dance the last quarter-mile between the joyous, noisy walls of onlookers towards the silent dome of Hagia Sophia.

  Holding Zenobia’s hands and twirling about, Anna could gaze back along the rank of processing masks to the towering straw effigy of the carnival king bringing up the cavalcade rear. They had crowned it with a turban of old rags and the men marching beside its cart each wore tall white hats, like the borks of janissaries.

  ‘Look Zen!’ she said, pointing back. ‘What a fire that sultan shall make.’

  ‘How welcome to see you laughing again, kyria. You had seemed struck down with melancholia these past months,’ a familiar and unwelcome voice said at her shoulder.

  It was Manuel Iagaris, the stratopedarch of her father’s armed retinue, a swart muscular man whose late father, Markos, had been a close political ally. His unsubtle leers had always made her skin crawl.

  Now they were through the gates of the hippodrome, moving over stones still browned by the scorch marks of paraffin.

  The miniature reflection of Venice lay before them with its meandering canals, humped bridges and shrunken piazzas. Water had been pumped in from the Marmara through an elaborate set of plumbing, which had lain dormant for centuries. Once, ancient crowds had enjoyed mock sea battles in this grand old stadium.

  The invention and ingenuity ought to have delighted Anna, but this pantomime Venice only served as portent of her impending marriage and exile to the real lagoon and drove her to be ever firmer in her intentions.

  Walking beside Anna, the unwanted groom was even more aloof than usual. His choice of mask, for reasons she could not begin to guess, was a hideous confusion of black feathers from which a beaked nose thrust like Priapus.

  The riot against Latins appeared to have unsettled his Venetian nerves and, in the weeks since, he had grown insistent about sailing for Italy earlier than planned.

  Her father, who had spent no little resource to secure the safer passage among the muda convoy, was exasperated by Barbo’s sudden desire to leave, but his attention was demanded by many heavy matters and so he had conceded to be free of the distraction.

  In a matter of days, she would leave Constantinople forever.

  Much to Jacob’s dismay, the chariot was abandoned with the others by the gates, and the party moved down the sides of the impermanent canals towards the hippodrome’s centre through a mass of colour and form.

  The sound of musicians rang all around, competing with the booming laughter of drunk and happy revellers and childish squeals of joy. Dancers and acrobats merrily twirled around the boarded streets, singing the paschal song, with its thoughts of spring and resurrection.

  As dusk began to deepen, the natural light found support from the flame-wreathed wicks of a forest of lamps. They hung from every bridge and false palazzo wall, reflecting their glow in the moonscape of passing masks and ribboning light across the waters of the busy canals.

  Boys were working the water’s edge with large copper vessels of warmed wine strapped to their backs. Ferrymen, taking a holiday from working the crossing to Pera, instead offered pleasure rides along the glassy waterways in their shallow skiffs.

  Towards the centre of the festive maelstrom, a counterfeit Piazza San Marco thronged with mercenaries drinking themselves stupid on ranks of benches. The group of Genoese was unmissable – unmasked and singing bawdily to passing girls like sailors in port preparing for a long and dangerous crossing.

  Anna felt the song of her blood pressing about her veins at the sight of Grant. He looked very fine under that curling halo of sulfur, in high-waist doublet and a pair of hose that showed the world the shapeliness of his calf and thigh.

  ‘And they say that some stranger has come, a sorcerer, a conjuror from the Lydian land, fragrant in hair with golden curls, having in his eyes the wine-dark graces of Aphrodite.’

  ‘Did you speak?’ said Barbo, turning towards her.

  ‘Euripedes,’ she said and saw the name fall like a seed tossed onto stoney, barren soil.

  The podesta of Pera was sat beside the Scotsman, red-faced with drink. ‘Ho! Is that our friend Messer Barbo?’ Baldo Maruffo shouted. ‘No wonder they favour masks in Venice, you all look far comelier with your faces hidden away.’

  Barbo feined to rush at Maruffo but was held back by the watchful Notaras servants.

  ‘Go drink and be merry!’ Maruffo shouted at the backs of the party. ‘I will dance with you later my sweethearts.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ Iagaris said to Barbo as they moved away. ‘That fool’s a sot and a sodomite.’

  ‘He may be both, but he is certainly no fool,’ said Loukas Notaras in a low voice. ‘Somehow he has learned over much of matters I would prefer to remain quiet. I had to pay him off. I should like to know from where the leak sprang.’

  ‘I believe, Your Grace, I know a line of inquiry that deserves pursuit,’ said Iagaris with a predatory glance in Anna’s direction. She had feigned disinterest in this masculine conversation but feared the rigid line of hairs down her exposed nape would g
ive her sudden discomfort away.

  A new song had struck up to their right, a memento mori, sung with heavy irony and contrasted to the Easter song’s message of rebirth. By the time it had faded behind them, their procession had reached the centre of the track where the imperial enclosure lay.

  Beyond the enclosure’s broad silk canopy lay a roped-off square of ground where the Turkish effigy was being wheeled into position for its grand finale. Looking out at it brought into her mind her tutor’s sardonic amusement at the trappings of Easter. ‘A divine son of a god, born to a mortal virgin and possessing the power of resurrection; it is Dionysus, all of it, right down to the carnival debauchery. The old mysteries in new clothing and nothing more.’

  The view of the straw sultan was half obscured by one of the time-eaten monuments that formed a spine down the middle of the old racetrack. It was a sculpture made of bronze, depicting a death struggle between two exotic creatures. The first, stout and fat bellied, might have been an ox but for its lack of horns or cloven hoofs. The other, body bristling with scales, she took to be a basilisk.

  The pair – simultaneously conquerors and conquered – had each inflicted a mortal wound upon the other. The sturdier beast, terminally bitten and clawed by the basilisk talons, sank to its knees with eyes robbed of all vigour, while the long mouth of the basilisk opened in a cry of anguish under the pressure of the mighty tusk teeth, which held and pierced it about both the forefeet and hind quarters.

  ‘Thus, they die,’ thought Anna, ‘the one by the other; vengeance reciprocal, victory equal, death common.’ And this effigy of mutually inflicted death seemed to Anna in that moment a reflection of the entire world. Genoese and Venetian, Greek and Latin, Christian and Turk, each eternally locked in each other’s jaws.

  She turned her attention back inside the enclosure. It was time - if she was bold enough. It was time to cross the threshold and implement her design. The men were all distracted about the enclosure, and soon the spectacle of the burning sultan would grip their attention further.

  Yet she lingered a moment longer. She found herself riled with frustration, just as she had been when her path had last crossed the Scotsman’s.

  She had wanted him to act in that moment by the monastery steps, but instead he had hesitated, and her nerve had crumbled at the reminder of Constantine’s favour, which hung scarlet from his belt. She had fled indoors.

  But now, by God’s blessing, a second opportunity presented itself. She could expect no better. Misery lay ahead, for both herself and her city. She would not, from petulance, forego this small consolation but find the memory all the sweeter for the bitterness to come. She would draw strength from it when most required.

  She glanced once more over her shoulder to where her father stood deep in conversation and stepped quietly past the sculpture of the warring beasts, back into the carnival’s milling crowd.

  Just as she determined in which direction the false San Marco lay, a hand touched her gently on the arm. ‘Despoina, where are you going?’

  A gown of watered silk, wine dark and covered in stars. A bauta concealing her face, pearl in hue and undecorated save for its rouged lips. The rest of the head sheathed by a black hooded cape and capped by a pointed turban.

  Anna had hoped to slip away unnoticed, but deep down she had always reasoned it unlikely that her handmaiden Zenobia would drop her diligence. Zenobia, who knew her better than either parent, who of all people might have guessed the direction of her mistress’s mind.

  ‘It would be a crime, Zen, to remain in that stuffy tent and listen to the men drone on when such life and song is loose hereabouts,’ said Anna.

  ‘It would, Despoina,’ Zenobia agreed. ‘But it would be a crime, also, to let a young, well-bred lady wander unattended hereabouts when such life and song and drink is loose.’

  The bauta mask made it impossible to read Zenobia’s expression. Anna, whose half-mask did not even fully hide her eyes, smiled and said, ‘Come then, let us see what Venice has in store.’

  She set off, deliberately aiming for the tightest knot of bodies she could find in the hope it might snare her handmaid and open a gap between them, but Zenobia, who doubtless already sensed mischief in this venture, doggedly kept at her heels.

  A white, wax-cloth volto mask ghosted past, the wearer a mystery behind the blank face. The dazzling costumes with their mix of shades and shapes fluttered as revellers danced like a coloured curtain caught in the breeze.

  The air seemed full of flare and glamour, sparkle and phantasm. Jugglers, fire breathers, stilt-legged performers tottering like the mystical creatures of a bestiary; laughter, cries of joy and the constant blend of music from kaval, lyra and drum echoed off the immemorial masonry of the hippodrome surrounding them.

  It was not easy to move through the tightly packed crowd at the water’s edge, and the occasional splash and peal of laughter announced another who had lost balance. The press of masked faces began to grow unnerving.

  Instead of stars, she was navigating by the tips of the racetrack obelisks, which marked the limits of the imperial enclosure she had come from, and towering Justinian, mounted on his column beyond the entrance gates. On a line roughly between the two she had reckoned lay the false San Marco where John had been carousing.

  Glancing once more over her shoulder she spotted the conical turban still firmly on her heels. Zenobia was not going to be shaken off like this. Anna had always assumed that she would not be able to slip away entirely unnoticed, but how to rid herself of a chaperone had been something she knew would come down to opportunity.

  As she slipped between the bodies lining the longest of the miniature canals, opportunity came floating towards her.

  The skiff bore two passengers, locked in embrace, and a ferryman poling them along from the stern. He was keeping the vessel in the middle of the channel, with five feet of brackish water to either side.

  Beyond them, the canal ran away, with no more bridges spanning it until the channel disappeared down into one of the subterranean cisterns and the toy Venice opened out into its Piazza San Marco.

  Anna stepped around a circle of chattering bauta masks, gathering up the pleats of her pellanda as she did so, and there, heaven sent, the canalside lay briefly empty of bodies. Without hesitation she burst forward towards the water, praying she had judged the passage of the skiff correctly.

  The bow wave of the boat lapped a foot below the lip of the wooden fondamenta as her stride took her clear of firm ground.

  For a moment she hung in the air, the sleeves of her gown billowing like wings, her extended front leg scandalously exposed to the two passengers, but they only had eyes for one another.

  She thought she heard the ferryman blaspheme in shock and the noise of her tumbling shoe hitting the water. Her bare foot slapped onto the flat bow of the skiff and she instinctively drove herself onwards.

  ‘I am Iphigenia,’ she thought ridiculously, ‘sacrificed by my father, now transformed into a leaping deer.’

  She came at the far side of the canal like a cannon ball. The back shoulders of an olive doublet had just begun to turn at the commotion as she crashed into them.

  She would have toppled back into the water had her arms not been quick to wrap around the muscled neck. Her right heel came down on the edge of the canal, and as she began to fall, a hand steadied her beneath the small of her back and brought her upright.

  ‘God’s wounds! The ladies come at you fast, Captain!’ said a voice to her left. She was looking into the half-mask of a lion, the lower jaw hidden beneath a pelt of silvering black hair. Behind him, the skiff lay belly up, its passengers spilled across the surface like waterlilies.

  Anna flashed a smile and rolled from the lion’s embrace. Her other shoe flew away as she slipped between the dumb-struck onlookers.

  There was a ripple of applause mixed in with the laughter – some witnesses had mistaken her reckless leap for the calculated spectacle of an acrobat.

  Now the
race was on.

  It was likely Zenobia had half-suspected Anna’s intentions from the start, but she would be certain now, and she would be moving, with all haste, down the far side of the canal to try and find the Scotsman first, to fix herself to his side and thwart her wilful young charge.

  Anna was unsure what alternative would remain then. Her mind had set itself on robbing Barbo of his rights; even a stranger seemed more deserving, and there would be no further chance to be rid of her gift beyond tonight.

  Her bare soles slapped on the boards of the canal-side as she hastened towards the square. A comb or two had been lost along with the shoes; a tendril of hair dangled and swung before her eyes and the carefully confected coronet now had a pronounced list to port.

  Throwing a glance across the water, she thought she spotted the conical turban making slower progress.

  The end of the canal approached like a finishing line. She crashed past without a glance to see how close Zenobia was. Her only thought was on finding John and snatching him up.

  But there before her stood the ranks of benches where the Genoese had earlier been drinking and now almost all were empty. There was no dandelion flower amid the chestnuts, no Olympian profile studded by twin pastilles of forget-me-not blue, no sign of him or any of the men she had seen him with before.

  She stood beside the nearest bench, where a man lay insensible, and looked frantically around the square. He must be here, he must. If Zen caught her now would she pretend it was all an Apokries prank? Would she go, meek and shoeless, back to the tent and her fate? She would not.

  Now Zenobia hastened into the square, only a few feet from her, the mask and turban long since torn away. Her face was flushed, her eyes, widened to their fullest in fright, fell instantly upon her quarry.

  ‘Anna!’ she called at her mistress with previously unheard-of overfamiliarity. It might be carnival – where all social barriers were technically forfeit – but it was panic that drove her voice to impertinence.