Anna was half listening, half watching Barbo. The quartermaster stretched and yawned by the fire then shared a joke with Rallis who was the first of the night pickets.
The rest of the stratioti were turning in one by one. The firesides were growing sparse. Sensing her disinterest, Lueger made to stand, but Anna caught him by the arm. ‘You must tell me about the song you are writing.’
It had the desired effect. Lueger sat back down. ‘I have the story fully formed but I’m afraid only a few stanzas are composed.’
‘Well then just give me the plot,’ she said.
‘Certainly. Although it may seem crass compared to Dante. Mine is the story of a mercenary knight.’
‘Of course.’
‘A man of moderate talent who comes across a large wooden stake - like a training pell - while riding through a forest. The pell has a beautiful sword buried in it.’
‘Oh, that sounds not unlike the French ballad,’ said Anna, then seeing his dismay, quickly added, ‘except that ballad’s sword was stuck in a stone.’
Lueger continued, ‘The knight pulls the sword out and tests it with a few strokes against the wooden stake. He finds the sword is perfectly balanced, indeed he finds he can strike it with a dexterity and precision he has never known before. The sword is beautiful too, the hilt is inlaid with green gemstones and the pommel is a polished orb of brass. He wonders how anyone could abandon something so fine, takes it, and continues on his way.’
Barbo had disappeared into the main sleeping tent and Anna began to breathe a little more easily.
‘A few weeks later the mercenary knight takes employment at a duke’s castle and trains in the behourd. There is another pell, the sort they call the wooden man, and the knight wields his new blade against it with such skill and flair that everyone stops to admire his prowess. The duke is so wonderstruck that he hires him to personally instruct his own young heir. Life has never been sweeter for the mercenary, yet at night his dreams start to be troubled by a dark figure in armour following him across the land. Each time he dreams of this figure it seems to be closer in its pursuit of him than on the previous occasion.’
Anna smiled. With Barbo gone she could relax and enjoy listening to the story. She said, ‘Is it the sword’s true owner or the mercenary’s conscience. He feels guilt at being credited with skills which are not his but in fact belong to the sword?’
‘The former is closer to the truth,’ said Lueger. ‘Soon the knight finds no rest in sleep at all. He takes a walk one night about the castle’s outer ward to try and calm himself. Unexpectedly he comes across a training pell. Almost instinctively he decides to hack at the pell, to release some of his insomnia and enjoy the feeling of control that sword strokes now inspire him. Then he returns to his bed and passes the rest of the night in perfect rest, untroubled by the dark pursuer.’
Rallis, who was supposed to be keeping watch, now came over and sat with them. ‘Whatever he’s telling you, it’s half that size and the tip bends at a funny angle.’
Anna gave him a mock frown of disapproval. ‘What?’ said Rallis, grinning from ear to ear, ‘I’m talking about the lute.’
‘Ignore him,’ Anna said to Lueger. ‘What happens next to your knight?’
‘Well, in the morning the castle is in uproar. The body of a night watchman is discovered butchered in the outer ward.’
‘It wasn’t a wooden man he had seen at all.’
‘No. The knight is filled with horror but keeps silent. The dark pursuer returns to his dream and is soon close enough to reveal his face is a death’s head.’
Rallis laughed. ‘Mother Maria’s crotch! A lady wants to hear love poetry not ghoulish stories,’ he got back to his feet. ‘I’ll have the shakes in me if I have to stand guard alone after listening to you.’
‘Be quiet,’ Anna hissed. Rallis ducked as if she had thrown something at him then turned and moved off, whistling to himself. She turned back to Lueger. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Very well. The knight once more cannot sleep. He steps outside and walks the grounds. Presently, he sees two training pells by the path ahead. He turns and flees and these wooden-men begin to come after him, for of course they are not pells at all but extra guards on patrol. As they chase him, the sword seems to command his hands to draw it and cut them both down. Sure enough the severed stakes transform into bodies on the floor before his eyes.’
‘The sword has a madness in it,’ Anna whispered. As the night cool sharpened, she took a blanket from the kit pile and wrapped it around herself.
Lueger continued, ‘The castle has awakened from the commotion and now as the knight flees for the gate he is confronted by a host of wooden pells. He cuts his way clear and hides in the forest. He stares at the blade that has taken possession of his mind in return for its uncanny skill. He can see only one way to break the curse that he has visited upon himself. He draws the sword and drives it into his own breast.
‘As his lifeblood runs out down the blade, he feels his skin dry and flake. The veins on his hand slowly darken into wood grain and his feet vanish like roots into the soil. The next morning one of the search party from the castle comes across a strange stake in the forest with a beautiful sword buried into it. He pulls it out and tests it with a few strokes against the stake. He finds the sword is perfectly balanced, indeed he finds he strikes with a dexterity and precision he has never known before.’
Anna clapped as Luger finished. ‘Bravo,’ she said. ‘I would venture there is more than an echo of your own life in that story.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Does a dark pursuer haunt your dreams, Erasmus? I think your conscience troubles you in ways it would not for others of your calling.’
He smiled uncomfortably and could not meet her gaze.
Anna said, ‘You told me you are a poet who soldiers to put food on his plate. I think you fear that the longer you ambush merchants, the more that becomes who you are and the less of the poet remains. Being a bandit earns you a living, just as the sword gave one to that knight, but perhaps you fear it is at the cost of your soul?’
His familiar, nonchalant grin flashed in the firelight. He patted the trunk. ‘I sleep like a log.’
But Anna could tell from his eyes that she had not missed her mark. ‘Like a wooden man?’
He gave a nervous laugh. ‘You’re better at playing with words than me. Perhaps you should become the poet.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not brave enough for that. In a way poetry requires more courage than banditry. To pour your soul into a song and expose it to the judgement of others takes real guts. A bandit rarely meets adversity alone and the threat is merely to his body, but no wound stings or endures like injured pride.’
She thought suddenly of John Grant and the day, years before, when he had declared his love to her. She had been indelicate with his feelings. Her tongue, he had said, held a cutting power beyond anything he had suffered on a battlefield.
‘I must remember that argument the next time my father ridicules the art,’ Lueger said.
She was looking up at the field of stars. Was John watching her up there now? ‘I had forgotten the night was this vast and this deep. One could get lost watching the ceaseless procession of heaven. One could lose all hope that anything we did had any significance at all.’
‘You sound as if a dark pursuer haunts your dreams, Madonna.’
‘He does.’ Anna got to her feet. ‘Doubt is my dark pursuer, Erasmus. He rides a black steed named regret.’
‘I don’t think you are his only quarry.’
‘No, I suppose I’m not.’ She turned for her tent.
‘Good night, Madonna. I wish you better dreams than my knight.’
‘Good night, Erasmus. I promise to seek better remedy than he did should I wake.’
She had expected Eudokia to be softly snoring by then, but her niece’s brooding scowl greeted Anna when she entered the tent. ‘Failed again? How sad. Perhaps it’s time t
o admit defeat. It’s me who Erasmus wants in his bed. Not you.’
‘Oh Eudokia, do you still think I would have any interest in that direction?’ Anna said as she unlaced her gown. Eudokia huffed and rolled over to face the tent wall.
As Anna gathered the blankets, she could not escape the thought that she had felt an interest, however fleeting. Most troubling of all, it had not stemmed from animal passion, but a notion of such cool calculation, such disregard for the sanctity of her body, that it immediately brought Mara to mind. Lust, shackled for a purpose. It was exactly the sort of plan Anna thought Mara might hatch to protect herself in the circumstance and the fact it had slipped so easily into her own mind made Anna shudder.
She had been spending much of the journey since Smederevo contemplating what had taken place there. Now, as the minutes lengthened and sleep refused to come, she found her thoughts back there once more. When Anna had boarded the boat across the Danube that morning, she had felt refreshed and invigorated but above all else she had felt connected.
There was a loneliness to grief; a sudden, disorientating sensation of removal from the familiarities of life and its anticipated future. It felt like a haze or a shroud isolated her, so that regardless the surroundings or company, the world and its people felt removed, as if seen and heard through a muslin screen. The intensity of this barrier was never constant. Sometimes it would leave her as disorientated as a drunken stupor and at others it became only as mildly distracting as the smell of distant smoke, but it was never entirely absent. To one degree or other Anna had felt cut off, ever since the boat had carried her from the Golden Horn and the burning city.
Until Smederevo.
Upon reflection it had struck her that while listening to Mara, talking to Mara, being with Mara, there had been no fog, no distraction, no distance. It had been the clearest, purest connection she had made with another soul for almost a decade.
She felt changed by that interaction and not simply to the tiny degree every new acquaintance might impart. Those were like grains of dust falling onto a set of scales - individually insignificant but cumulatively decisive in where the balance of experience settled. Instead, that single encounter with Mara felt like a hand wiping the scales clean of the dust and recalibrating the weights entirely as it saw fit. And the consequence of that might be an anabasis from her long mourning into a turbulence of an altogether different sort.
Am I ready to begin again? Anna wondered. What am I prepared to sacrifice for Byzantium?
She sat up and slipped the pack of trifoni cards from her pouch. A crossroads was a place of power and so a reading in this location might bring unusual clarity.
The first card was the three of pentacles reversed. Its meaning was clear: a lack of teamwork, the undermining of their mission. Barbo.
She drew more comfort from the next card, the nine of wands. Hope in the face of difficulties. While she was turning over the third card, Eudokia stirred and opened her eyes. ‘What are you doing? What is that?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Anna. ‘It’s not black magic. Go back to sleep.’
She turned over the fourth card as her niece sat up beside her, still perhaps thinking it a dream. ‘The next card is important,’ Anna said as she turned it. ‘It’s in the position that foretells the future.’
It was death.
No skill was needed to read it. The dancing skeleton laughed back at them. ‘Oh God!’ Eudokia moaned.
Anna placed a steady hand on her arm. ‘Don’t worry, it’s never as literal as that. It really only indicates the end of something - of change.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Eudokia. ‘Oh, you should not play around with such things!’
‘Keep calm,’ said Anna and flipped over the next card. ‘This one also means change, see, it’s not so scary.’ It was a picture of a knight on a horse with an outstretched goblet.
She hid it from her niece, but the new card shook Anna far more than the skeleton. The knight of cups: idealist, romanticist, follower of the heart. Anna hesitated, lingering over the card’s portentous possible meaning and so it was impatient Eudokia who flipped over the next card, and was confronted by the image of a tower, sundered by lightning.
‘What does this mean?’ Eudokia demanded when she saw how her aunt had paled.
‘It’s a warning,’ said Anna. ‘Upheaval. Disaster even. It means…it means we are probably going to fail.’
In the dawn the trees and crossroad lost all their foreboding. More than one of the stratioti felt silently foolish at his night terrors, as the millet and water bubbled to porridge in the communal iron pot.
The morning ride was an endless upward climb. The tree variety thinned until it became the universal preserve of conifers. The serrated battlements of the high peaks shone like beacons through the balding canopy. Cuckoo calls dominated the birdsong, replaced by the mournful howl of a wolf pack.
‘The cubs will be reaching maturity,’ the Captain said. ‘The packs will be at full strength and bold. It’s a bad time to ride through wild country. We should appear too much to bother with, but you wouldn’t want to be caught alone.’
‘I’ll stay close,’ said Anna and warily glanced up the steep bank of the wooded slope.
They broke the treeline out onto a wide sloping meadow of long grass. A single tree stood proud and lonely beyond the wood; but it was not a tree. The trunk was solid oak - good for everything indeed, Anna grimly noted - but the four boughs sloping towards the ground like conifer branches were human limbs, and the foliage clustering and spreading about it was a buzzing curtain of flies. A body, spitted on a stake and raised ten foot above the ground.
‘Zalmoxis,’ Anna whispered.
The man’s tattered clothing was the homespun rags of a peasant. His head, which lolled to one side, did not appear to hold the features of a Turk.
‘Poor bastard,’ said Rallis crossing himself. The stake had followed the line of the body’s spine, entering at the anus and re-emerging as a blood-tipped spire from between the shoulder blades. The mess about the base of the stake did not bear close inspection.
‘Come on, let’s not dawdle,’ said the Captain, but just as he spoke the eyes of the corpse flicked wide, the limbs began to twitch, and the body gave out a dreadful sound like a guttering drain.
Rallis almost fell from his horse in fright. ‘Sweet Theotokos, it’s alive!’
‘What do we do? Do we help him?’ Crocodile asked the Captain.
‘I told you they don’t stay dead!’ said Lueger, just as a crossbow bolt slammed into the impaled body, stapling it through the eye against the stake.
Peregrino Bua, lowered his bow. ‘No whitehorn required.’
There were no more grizzly scarecrows encountered during the rest of the day’s journey. In the afternoon the air grew close and the sky to the east crackle with summer lightning among the jagged peaks. The mountain canyons rumbled and echoed with thunder and as the storm petered out the softer clang of a bell replaced it from an invisible belfry.
‘Seems early for vespers,’ said Rallis.
‘That’s not from a church,’ the Captain said. ‘More likely it’s a watch bell. Someone has seen us. All cats are grey when the candle’s out and all riders may be Turks to local eyes.’ Further along the valley another bell began to toll in reply to the first. ‘Ride ahead,’ the Captain instructed Rallis, ‘Let’s not trot into an ambush so close to our goal.’
Anna pulled her cloak tight around herself and studied the rock-strewn windy heights. It seemed disturbingly like the sort of country entire Roman legions had sometimes disappeared in. These were the very mountain passes which Venice was so anxious for a Turk army not to have free passage through. It had sounded rather abstract before, but here, hemmed in on all sides by a crown of alps, it was all too easy to appreciate how much damage a smaller force might wreak upon a larger one as it struggled through. The bells had stopped tolling. She wondered if that was a good or bad omen.
IV.
&
nbsp; Constantinople, August 1460
The day Michael Szilágyi was sawn in half was blessed with bright summer sunshine and a breeze off the water to keep the spectators in the main palace courtyard comfortably cool. In the shade of a wide canopy, Hekim Yakub found himself sat on a cushion behind the Valide Hatun and her gaggle of harem ladies. At the front, the white turban of the Sultan was a swirl of whipped cream, atop a berry salad of viziers and generals.
Among the Ottoman courtiers there was much enthusiasm for the execution of this famous Hungarian soldier. Szilágyi had been regent, before Matthias Corvinus came of age, and had often bedevilled Turkish ambitions north of the Danube. In particular, Szilágyi had been Captain of the defiant Belgrade fortress during its besiegement, four years prior.
There was no such enthusiasm in the heart of the court doctor. Hekim Yakub had no grudge against Szilágyi and no thirst to see any living human body sundered in two. He was there only because he feared that Sultan Mehmed’s desire for a public demonstration of what defying him led to might cause frailer hearts to have a turn.
‘You are beaming,’ said Gülşah Hatun to the Valide Hatun, Mara Brankovic. His ears pricking, Hekim Yakub studied the sharp-nosed profile as it turned to give an answer, and yes, there was a glow about the high, Slavic cheeks that morning.
‘Would you think it ghoulish of me if I confess a certain relish at seeing this man’s death today?’ the Valide Hatun said. ‘He caused my family some trouble these past years.’
Hekim Yakub studied his fingernails. Which one of your families? Both, I suppose. It must be exhausting to track every feud.
‘But how was he caught? What was he doing, so far from Buda?’ asked Gülşah Hatun.
‘Trying to stabilise Wallachia. There has been some trouble there these past months.’
‘Isn’t there always trouble in Wallachia?’ laughed Gülşah Hatun.
Beyond the front rank of turbans, the wretched Szilágyi, naked as a new-born, was trussed by his wrists and ankles between two thick poles like a pale and hairy starfish. A ring of soldiers formed a perimeter to allow the executioner space to work in and beyond this rank of halberds the far side of the yard was crowded with palace servants and those foreign dignitaries whom the Sultan had invited, keen that their reports home be lurid.
Porphyry and Blood Page 20