It was so unexpected that Anna almost dropped her basket. ‘What? Why in God’s name!’
‘Baltus had been spying on your father. On my life I knew nothing at the time! He was informing on who came and went from the house. Easy money, he thought, couldn’t see the harm in it at first.’
‘Sphrantzes!’ Anna spat the grand logothete’s name out like a gypsy curse.
‘No, not him. Baltus would never have trusted Sphrantzes. It was that Genoese gentlemen. The podesta. The one that got stabbed on the night of the masquerade. He used to meet Baltus at… at the bathhouse.’ Anna stopped in her tracks. ‘I’m quite sure it is a coincidence,’ said Zenobia quickly. ‘Probably guilt at betraying his master drove Baltus to suicide. Like Judas.’
‘Probably,’ said Anna quietly. So, the Genoese had been spying. Her mind began to whirl with dates and questions.
‘They say drowning is a peaceful way to go,’ said Zenobia. She was talking without purpose now, her discomfort spilling out in a torrent of words. ‘He tied a stone on a rope about his waist and stepped into the frigidarium. No blood, no pain. He always loved the baths. It hardly bears the hallmarks of a vengeance killing.’
‘Let us speak no more of it then,’ said Anna with a cold smile as she approached the next doorway. ‘This one looks to be unlocked.’ There was a hint of disappointment in her voice as she pushed on the chipped paint of the boards.
The rusted hinges gave a deep croak, and the wooden door swung aside.
The garden was modest, fringed by a slate path and a border of herbs. The centre was a lush green lawn, the grass now a little overgrown and unkempt with its tenders away. Across the grass towards the rear wall were the olive trees, eight gnarled specimens, the branches thick with freshly budding leaves.
In among the olive grove one trunk of wood stood straighter than the rest. Only two branches spread from its bole and bore no leaves: a crucifix. There was no effigy of Christ nailed to the cross beam, but a body lay prostrated in the grass at its foot.
For a moment both ladies stood frozen in the doorway, thinking they had intruded on a most unusual tonsuring rite. Then a breeze, released into the garden by the newly opened door, stirred over the grass, and from beside the static body, two black crows cawed angrily at the intruders and flapped away.
Zenobia dropped her basket in shock. ‘Oh child, I told you we should not be here! This is what comes of trespasses.’ Her eyes jumped like a scolded cat from the corpse.
In contrast, brave, curious Anna stepped forward, crossing the apron of grass in a few strides.
‘It’s not a monk,’ she called back to Zenobia. ‘It’s a woman.’
Reluctantly, the handmaiden moved from the doorway and joined her mistress beside the body.
Anna was right, she could tell from the frame it was a woman, although the features of the face were hidden beneath a mass of dark hair, which splayed across the grass like a shadow.
The delicate dark hands and bare feet bore no stigmata, and the white robes lay pristine across her back.
There was a strange smell about the corpse, not the rot of decay but a sweet resinous odour. ‘Careful, Despoina, it may be the plague,’ said Zenobia, but Anna was already crouching down and gently turning the rigid corpse over onto its back.
The front of the plain robe was equally unmarred, but the grass beneath was black, as if singed.
‘Did the body make that!’ said Zenobia in alarm. It seemed unlikely; the blackened grass did not correspond to an imprint of the body, instead an unnatural pattern was formed by a series of curves and wavy lines in four rough groups.
Anna cast a withering look at her handmaiden and knelt beside the singed grass. Craning her neck, she detected the cloying smell was from the ground and not the body.
‘Turpentine, at a guess,’ said Anna. She summoned her nerve and reached to brush the hair away from the face.
The eyes, dark of life, held such an uncanny stare that it sent Anna reeling back over her heels.
Zenobia gave a cry of alarm.
The lack of marks on the body, the quietness of the garden sanctuary, it had lulled them, perhaps; it had brought the calm sense of a stranger’s panikhida or a graveyard memorial service. The countenance of the corpse robbed them of that serenity.
Whatever the circumstances of her death, it was clear from the rictus of torment on her face that it had not been a peaceful end.
‘Holy Theotokos!’ Zenobia whispered.
‘Blood,’ said Anna as she caught her breath.
‘Despoina?’ Zenobia came creeping a step nearer but appeared ready to bolt for the doorway.
Anna pointed to the hairline and Zenobia could make out the faint reddish patina dried across the brow. ‘Did she sweat blood?’ said Anna.
‘Like the Lord!’ cried Zenobia. ‘Like the Lord in Gethsemane, before they...’ She glanced around at the crucifix.
‘Well, she certainly appears to have suffered agony in the garden,’ said Anna. ‘But she never made it to the cross.’
‘Despoina, whatever this is, it is not for us. It is not safe for us to be here. We must report it to your father!’
XXIII.
Ten days into the artillery barrage and the impact on the men was as obvious as that on the wall. Fieschi’s hand trembled uncontrollably; although his mind felt no fear – by now it was numb to that sensation – his body was rebelling.
They all experienced it. Day after day. The battle. A battle not with the enemy but with themselves. A personal, inner battle against the basic instinct of self-preservation. To endure it. To hold firm. To somehow gird up what was left of exhausted bodies and shattered wits and remain in that corner of hell, awaiting its next torture.
Every day there would be some for whom the tether’s end was reached. There were desertions, quiet retreats from the line or from the world entirely by self-inflicting hands. The priests would call it a sin and the townspeople might call it cowardice, but no man at the wall judged so harshly. They were all too close to losing the battle themselves.
None were immune. It was merely a question of degree. Bravery did not determine whether a man stood firm or went mad. It struck with the same impartial randomness as the artillery fire. Thus it went on, day after day.
Periodically, the Turks would probe at the defences. Sometimes just a few dozen azaps came at a single position, sometimes a much stronger or more wide-spread force. The fighting, when it did occur, was not one assault but thousands of individual battles stitched together to form a patchwork of combat.
During the lulls, men dug graves for their friends in the floor of the yard, but nothing could be done about the corpses lying beyond the lip of the wall among the debris. The human compost gave rise to a horrible stench.
Now and again a cannon shot, ploughing into the far side of the rubble, sent a decomposing arm or leg cartwheeling over into the yard, forcing someone to retrieve the limb and fling it back. They became hardened to such tasks in time.
Much of the day the men sat huddled in groups, blank expressions masking individual inner turmoil; spent bodies, worn down to the nub of existence.
Each man reacted to moments of respite in his own personal way. Some found solace in prayer, others found their belief in a benevolent God could not stand up to the demonstration of horrors all around.
One way or another, a change had occurred in all of them. Seventeen-year-old boys now looked like haggard veterans. They still might not know how to fight properly, but certainly they knew how to endure like old campaigners. Fieschi had seen that transformation of human clay occur many times before but never in so condensed a span of time; it was the hottest of kilns.
A line of stakes had formed in the mesoteichion – crude baulks of sharpened wood, set deep into the ground to form the base of a stockade and reinforced with whatever could be found. There was plenty of raw material to hand in the rubble piles. They used it all – brushwood, broken masonry, earth – nothing was rejected. All of it
was piled against the stakes until, like the phoenix, a new wall rose from the ashes of the old.
Animal hides pinned to the wooden front of the stockade gave protection from fire and barrels filled with dirt were lashed across the summit to create a ramshackle battlement.
The first night was the easiest, when the Turks had no inclination of their nocturnal industry, but in the subsequent nights they became less accommodating.
From then on, the cannons in that section never ceased to fire.
Sometimes the repeated impacts turned a complete portion of brick to rubble, tearing a shaft of light through the wall’s shadow.
Sometimes a greater part of a tower, or turret or parapet would collapse, falling in an avalanche of dust and brick.
Sometimes the stone balls would bounce harmlessly off the wall – there was no telling what the next shot would bring. Only the furious wrath of the bombasts remained constant.
At the north end of the mesoteichion a pair of Turkish feet stuck out of the debris mound. The Bocchiardi brothers had used bodies among the materials plugging gaps in their stretch of wall. A rat had taken up residence in the belly of one putrid corpse; the men had named it Mehmed and taken to throwing it scraps.
It was not the only creature attracted to the battlefield. Flocks of carrion birds darkened the skies, but those distasteful scavengers were nothing compared to the black, buzzing curtains of flies that had no fear of the still-living. Plump insects would skip from a corpse and land without a care on a man’s arm or, worse, his half-eaten meal.
It had been a bad night. The Turks had probed at their section where a cannon shot had shattered a breach. They had beaten them off but not without difficulty, and now, in the morning, bone weary and shaken, they sat and waited for whatever the Turks tried next.
A dice game was under way in the shadow of their tower when a man with a broken arm came by, wailing and seeking sympathy as he shuffled towards the surgeon’s tent. ‘Be quiet, for God’s sake!’ Fieschi called out. ‘How do you have breath to howl if you are really so injured?’
Later, Antonio Bocchiardo stopped at their game. ‘Is Theophilos alive?’ he asked. ‘Has he suffered a wound yet?’
‘I am well, thank you kyr!’ Theophilos, one of the young local boys, called out, and without another word Antonio moved off. ‘He seems kind,’ said Theophilos.
Sambucuccio burst out laughing. ‘You sweet fool. That man has drawn your name in a lottery. He stands to win if you die before the names his comrades drew.’
‘Dear God, the only desire in my heart now is to be done with this misery!’ Theophilos groaned. ‘If my death wins someone some money so much the better. My only prayer is that it be quick and that it be soon!’
‘Worry not, those Turks seem most obliging in that regard. They are sure to launch another assault at us soon,’ said Sambucuccio.
Fieschi shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t wager on us holding back another major attack. Not with the wall as it is and our numbers thinner.’
‘Did you see the captain in the midst of that nightmare? It was uncanny,’ Theophilos said. He was speaking of Grant. ‘When the wall cracked, and those devils tried to come through, he held them back alone as though it were nothing.’
‘Yes, I saw it all,’ replied another of the Greeks. ‘The cannon struck, and I fell back from the wall and looked up through the smoke. For a frozen moment I could see the breach it had made and the enemy swarming at it. He was there alone at that time, he held them back on his own, scything them down like merry death.’
‘You make him sound like St Michael,’ Sambucuccio said with a laugh.
‘I tell you, it was like that! He should have been overrun by them in moments. It was at least six to one and yet he beat them back. He cut them down as easily as you or I would a training pell. It wasn’t natural I tell you. He's not natural.’
Fieschi gave such a broad smile that the sunlight glimmered on the yellow stumps hanging from his gums. He moved away from the dice game towards the dark casemate where Grant lurked alone.
‘The men think you’re not human,’ he said, still grinning as he pulled aside the blanket curtain. ‘They think you fight like the bloody archangel, and after what I saw on the night raid, I’m inclined to agree with them.’
‘They should see the dents in this then.’ Grant was sat with a scutch hammer, mending the plate suit. ‘It’s becoming a fair kerfuffle.’
Fieschi nodded. ‘I’d be lying if I said they don’t have me worried, especially with the bastard wall disappearing about our ears.’
‘I’ll admit it, those cannons are worse than I thought possible,’ said Grant.
Fieschi spat on the ground. ‘Those machines rob a man of all dignity and war of all glory. We’re condemned to sit like animals in a burrow while they claw away their daily toll. Don’t matter if a man’s a swordmaster or a witless churl, the outcome of their bite’s the same for both.’
‘You know grouching about it won’t change a blessed thing.’
‘Got to get it off my chest,’ said Fieschi. ‘Better to you than to those boys. Got to pretend to them this is routine.’
‘How’s Sambucuccio faring?’
Fieschi smiled. ‘Honestly, he’s having the time of his life. I’m worried about Leo though.’
‘Yes. Whatever he and Maruffo claimed, I think we can say for sure he’s as green as any of them.’
‘Worse. He’s a smart lad. His mind works against him, conjuring up ways he might die, while Sambucuccio’s dull brain thinks only of killing.’
‘Well, he was dumb enough to end up here.’ Grant put down the hammer. ‘I should probably have a word with him.’
As Grant emerged from the casemate, he found Sambucuccio leaning near the entrance, rubbing his sword against a whetstone and humming contentedly.
The Corsican seemed unmoved by the bombardment; his eyes betrayed no sign of turmoil, just a fatalistic resignation that the ball or blade with his name on it would come when it came.
‘Where’s Leo?’ said Grant.
‘Up,’ Sambucuccio said and flicked his eyes towards the tower at the rear of the yard.
It was an unpopular duty, but someone had to climb to the roof and give warning if the Turks looked like probing at their section of wall or launching a full assault.
The guns did not restrict their attentions to the outer wall; some directed shots higher at the taller, inner towers, sending showers of debris down on the heads of the men sheltering in the yard.
Anyone standing watch up on the tower tops felt horribly exposed and could only pray the stone did not collapse beneath them.
Grant climbed the tower’s inner staircase as far as he could, up to the point where repeated cannon strike had bitten away a chunk of masonry and caused the last flight to collapse.
A broken ladder, propped against the rubble, allowed the determined to make a precarious scaling of the final ten feet to the rooftop.
He climbed out onto the rampart, which, thanks to the subsidance below, sloped like a palsy to one side. Beyond the battlements, the enemy camp spread out as far as his eye could see.
Boccanegra was huddled beside the remnants of the crenulations, peering out at the besiegers like a child spying on something adult and forbidden.
The unhurried, ceaseless rhythm of the cannons kept time with a slow thud, thud, thud as Grant scrambled on his belly across the crooked rooftop.
‘Well now, Leo. How are you holding up?’
The tousle of chestnut hair shook at him. ‘God has left this place, John. He has turned his face from us when we need him the most. I keep praying, but only the devil is listening.’
‘God’s still here,’ Grant said, as though he had a personal insight.
‘Then why does He rob us of life when we are only beginning to understand it? How does our ruin profit Him? Does it aid the sun to rise, the harvest to grow? Is our blood required to water this garden of His?’
The air whistled out through
Grant’s teeth. ‘I’m just a soldier, Leo, I can’t answer a question like that. Not sure any man can.’
‘I spoke with one of the prisoners.’ Boccanegra nodded towards the Turkish camp. ‘Did you know their holy book and our own is the same in many places? They have the story of Abraham sacrificing his son, they know of Moses and Noah. All my favourite parts.’ He gave a wan grin.
He was a ghost of the confident young adventurer Grant had first encountered in Maruffo’s palazzo not one year prior. Slow panic had carved chasms around his eyes, and the pallor of his skin matched the white dust that billowed up like snowflakes and settled on them with every wall-shivering shot.
‘You’re not going to convert on me, Leo, are you?’ said Grant, trying to lift the other man's mood.
‘Do you not see, John? Our stories, our past, are their stories, their past too. They were us once; we are brethren. How did it get so mixed up? What caused this rift? If their god commanded Abraham, then it is the same god as our own, so where is He standing on this battlefield? Not with us, that seems clear.’
As he spoke there was a boom that seemed to answer his blasphemy. A ball from one of the smaller bombasts shattered into dust on the wall below, causing the foundations to quake.
Instinctively, Grant glanced towards the staircase.
‘There’s something I must confess to you,’ Boccanegra said in a low murmur.
‘I think I know,’ said Grant. ‘You don’t need to say it.’
‘I want to. I want to stop the lies. This is my first time in combat. I was never with condottieri in Italy.’
‘Leo, that much was clear to any trained eye. I just don’t know why Maruffo vouched for you, but I guess I don’t want to.’
‘Simple really – he was my uncle,’ said Boccanegra. ‘He never married, so perhaps I was something of a surrogate son. It was Maruffo who paid for my attendance at the university in Bologna. I messed that up too, by Christ! Stupid me! I was drunk, I was hot and angry over some game of dice – I don’t even recall exactly why. There was a fight, and I stabbed someone in the melee. He bled out so fast.’
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