"I will give you two for a bundle, but I will take all seven bundles."
The merchant feigned a horrified expression, his shrewd eyes making a calculation even as he blustered. "My poor wife who waits for me in Dimashq would never stop screaming at me. For two akce a bundle, one of my children starves for a month! Could even a Christian stoop to starving a little girl just to save a measly coin?"
Skiouros pursed his lips. "I've never met your children, but if they are as untrustworthy as their father, they will undoubtedly steal whatever else they need to survive. Sixteen akce for the lot, then?"
"Thirty for all seven bundles. Then my child will eat and honour the name of the Christ prophet in thanks."
"I don't give a swollen fig about the Christ prophet's name in Syria. Twenty."
"Twenty six."
"Twenty Three."
"Done."
The two men clasped hands in agreement and the merchant, grinning like a man who had pulled off a great trick, bagged up the cinnamon bundles.
"Is there anything else you seek, my Greek friend?"
"Yes, but I doubt you'll have it. I look for khave?"
The merchant nodded sadly. "I wish I had such a thing. It is a rare commodity here and those who bring it from Arabia go home bedecked with gold. Half a dozen traders I have spoken to came with it but mostly it is sold to the Kiva Han - the coffee house near the great mosque. You might find some here, but only on the expensive stalls and even then it will be the floor sweepings that the Kiva Han would not take."
Skiouros smiled. "Floor sweepings sounds just right for me. Thank you my friend. May your return journey be smooth and calm."
The merchant gave him a sour look. "Not from what I hear. Across the straits the lands are wracked with terrible storms. I might just have to spend much of my profit wintering in this northern hole."
Skiouros frowned as he suddenly pictured the Romani witch and her warning outside the ruined baths three days ago. A shiver ran through him.
"Perhaps the prophet will be kind and send the storms elsewhere so that I may take my earnings home" the man added with upcast eyes.
"Well it's important to worship the profit, eh?" Skiouros smiled, though with little humour.
The Syrian laughed and passed over the bag of cinnamon. "Good day. May Allah and his prophet smile upon your endeavours this day."
"I would like that. Goodbye."
Trying not to think too hard on the storms across the Hellespont, Skiouros moved on through the stalls until he spotted an Arabian merchant with what looked suspiciously like a khave sack beneath his table, a measuring scoop jutting from the top. That it stood open, unprotected from the elements confirmed its low quality.
Quickly, Skiouros approached the merchant and began the process of haggling once more, though his attention was quickly divided. A chance mention of the word 'Janissary' at the next stall drew his ear. Rattling through the sales routine automatically, failing to achieve the best deal with the merchant and not really paying attention, Skiouros concentrated on the two men chatting at the other stall.
"How?" asked one.
"Poison, they say" said the other in hushed tones.
"Fucking Janissaries deserve it. Someone should poison the whole bunch." Skiouros felt his heart start to beat faster as he listened to the two Greeks.
"I don't disagree; they'd gut you as soon as look at you, but you're missing the point, Andros. We're not talking about some piss-filled little convert carrying a cooking pot. This is the damned agha we're talking about!"
Skiouros felt his blood run cold and finally stopped paying any attention at all to his transaction. The merchant had finished anyway and was tipping two measures of the brown powder into a bag for him. The Janissary agha! Poisoned?
"It means they'll be all over the city trying to pin it on someone, and it's always a Greek. We'll have a hundred Janissaries on every street by tonight, beating people to death just for fun."
"Don't panic" the stall owner interrupted, leaning forward and lowering his voice conspiratorially. A Slav with a stall of garlic and precious paprika, the man was likely no lover of his Ottoman overlords. "They say it was an inside job; one of his own men."
The two shoppers leaned back in surprise.
"It's true" the trader hissed. "I heard it from three different sources. They're hunting some rogue soldier for it."
"Holy mother! That must be the one they were stamping around shouting about yesterday."
Skiouros turned back to the khave merchant at his own stall, carefully measuring his breath. To panic and run would be to draw unwanted attention. He wracked his brains trying to remember what price he'd agreed on and dropped the coins into the merchant's outstretched, expectant hand. The man frowned and then passed two coins back suspiciously. Skiouros shrugged an embarrassed apology and took the bag of khave, turning away and striding back through the market, ignoring the interested look on the trader's face.
As soon as he rounded the corner into the street, he took to his heels and ran, making his way down two back alleys before coming out onto another main street down which he could just see the glowering shape of the church of Saint Saviour. As he reached the grassy area around it, he slowed and took a deep breath, wondering how best to approach the coming conversation. Directly was probably the best way. Lykaion was made of stern enough stuff to learn his peril had just doubled without buckling under the weight.
Opening the door, he slipped inside and, bags in one hand, scanned the various junk left by the workmen. Spotting some splintered rotten beams which had been removed from the structure and a wooden crate now lying empty, he moved on into the church's centre, hearing the reassuring tap of Lykaion's boots in the north chapel. Dropping the bags to the floor, he crossed to the straw pallets that he and Lykaion had used - nasty, uncomfortable things that had accommodated the workers while they repaired the place. Very quickly, he removed a few handfuls of straw and started to pile them in the centre of the room.
"Brother?" he called as he strode back to the workmen's junk piles.
Lykaion strode calmly into the room as his brother was busy taking an iron crow to the crate, shattering the cheap, thin wood.
"That was quick."
"It's getting a little dangerous out there" Skiouros replied as he gathered an armful of broken wood. "Can you bring those two pieces of rotten beam?"
Frowning, Lykaion did as he was bade and carried them across to the small fire that his brother had been constructing in the centre of the room.
"Are you serious? You'll fill the place with smoke!"
"I only want to heat up a pan of water. Then we can put it out. Five minutes. I've got news, too."
The ominous tone of his voice made Lykaion pause, and the older brother dropped the two pieces of timber for Skiouros.
"Go on."
"The second assassin's already struck."
Lykaion's face fell. "When?"
"Not sure, but the news is in the streets this morning. The agha was poisoned and - sorry about this, brother - they're attaching the blame to you."
The former Janissary simply shrugged. "They can hardly make things worse for me now. One murder; two? What difference. If they catch me, they'll impale me for either, let alone both. Or we manage to stop them getting their third target and then the Sultan can discover the guilty parties and proclaim my innocence himself. Either way, it makes no matter, though I am sad for the agha. Ahmed Ali bin Nasuh was a good man."
Crouching, he watched Skiouros strike steel and flint, sending sparks into the mattress straw until the small fire smoked and burst into life. For the next minute or so, the thief fed the fire with small pieces of wood, and then disappeared into the exonarthex and returned with a small brass pot.
"Where in the name of the prophet did you find that?"
"The workmen had it in a pile near the door. I don't know what they used it for, but the inside's black. Probably not something you'd want to prepare food in now."
/> "Then what are we doing with it?"
"I told you: boiling water."
Leaving Lykaion tending a fire that was sending a coiling column of smoke up to the beautiful dome, Skiouros took the pot out into the narthex, pausing and tutting at the empty font. Checking for watchers and then ducking out through the door, he made for the small water butt he'd spotted at the church's corner and dipped the pot into it, grateful that the weather was not quite cold enough to have iced the barrel over. A minute later he was back at the fire with the pot of water, forming a frame from two sacks of mortar lime, the iron crow and a long metal piton. Carefully, he balanced the pot on the frame above the fire.
"Keep the fire fed until the pot boils."
Lykaion began to add small pieces of wood to the pile beneath the little cauldron while his brother found two shallow bowls that had been used for mixing plaster, as the remaining crusty mess confirmed. The brothers sat in silence, each with his own thoughts, as the bubbles began to appear in the water. Finally, Skiouros wrapped his cloak around his hands and lifted the boiling pot from the fire, tipping half the water into each bowl. Placing the empty pot back on the frame, he unwrapped his bundles and tipped several dozen cinnamon sticks into it.
"What are you doing?"
"Disguising you."
"With cinnamon?"
"Yes. And khave."
Lykaion shook his head at the clear idiocy of this and watched as Skiouros tipped his small bag of khave into one of the mixing bowls, where it combined with the water to form a very liquid sludge. The older brother watched with distaste as Skiouros stirred it, making it more liquid as he worked.
"Time to strip down."
"You jest."
"Just to the waist" the younger brother replied, removing his own doublet and shirt and shivering at the cold. "I need to make sure our hair is black enough to pass for a Turk and seriously darken our arms to the shoulder and face right down to below the collar bones. It has to be done right. Too many disguises are undone by cutting corners. Every bit of flesh that might possibly be seen should be uniformly dark."
"And we do that with khave?"
"No" Skiouros said, stirring the cinnamon and watching the oil forming in the bottom of the pan. "We do that with cinnamon. The khave is for the hair. Yours needs to be about two or three shades darker and mine needs to be a lot more."
As Lykaion stared at him, Skiouros returned to the brown sludgy mix and dipped his fingers in the warm mess, pulling them out coated with gloop. Reaching across, he made for Lykaion's hair. The older brother pulled back, but the thief leaned forward and grasped the curly locks in his messy hands. For the next minute or two, he worked at Lykaion's hair, carefully pulling the strands through his fingers, coating every inch with khave mixture and noting with satisfaction the darkening as he went. Finally, after only a short stint, he leaned back, satisfied with his efforts, then dipped his hands once more and began to work furiously at his own, shorter hair, massaging the mess into it, hissing with pain each time he touched his damaged ear.
Once his own hair had achieved the same almost black-brown as Lykaion's, he stood.
"Right. Drain the oil from the pot into the other bowl and then you can tip the used cinnamon on the fire. Try mixing it in, then, and I'll be back in a moment."
"You're going out like that?" Lykaion asked, gesturing to his half-naked brother and the dark brown gloop covering his hands.
"Only to wash my hands." Grasping the bowl of coffee paste he left the room and, striding to the door and checking for observers again, hurried out through the freezing air to the water butt. Bracing himself, he dipped both the bowl and his hands in, rubbing them all until the chilly water cleaned off the muck. When he was happy with the result, he dipped the bowl in, collecting more water, and then scurried inside the church.
Back at the centre, beneath the dome, he nodded his approval of Lykaion's mixing efforts as he tipped most of the cold water onto the fire, sending a thick choking cloud of black smoke up to the dome. The cinnamon oil had combined with the hot water to create a rich, mahogany-coloured stain. Crouching, Skiouros added the last of the cold water to the mix, cooling it to a comfortable temperature.
"Stand straight with your arms out like this" he instructed Lykaion, who did so with a nose wrinkled in distaste.
"I'm going to smell like a khave house."
"Not after a few hours. The smell will dissipate by lunchtime, and by evening it'll only be noticeable up really close. Now don't flex anything unless you have to. I want to get this even."
Dipping a rag into the mix, he stood and began applying it to his brother's face.
The two young men who crouched behind the first level parapet of the Pharos tower that morning would not have drawn undue attention had they been purchasing fruit in the great bazaar of Baghdad, their skin swarthy and dark, their hair almost black. Acquiring native Ottoman dress was not difficult and had taken Skiouros only a minute, his ability to judge the fit of clothing still impressive in his brother's eyes. Now, the only thing that spoke to the casual observer of their Attic ancestry was the pale colour of their eyes, and such a viewer would have to find themselves in very close proximity to see them well enough. The brothers were effectively invisible, dressed as poor Turks.
The morning had passed mostly in silence, though not due to the aftermath of an argument this time, but rather through a sense of tense expectation and the need for something to happen.
Lykaion had run over in his head everything that had happened and everything they had discovered time and again, hoping that something useful would occur to him that he had somehow missed before, yet to no avail. The more he thought about the problem, the more it became apparent that the Mamluk ambassador was the only possible lead they had. Of the three assassins one was dead and the location of the other two entirely unknown. Of their targets two were now dead and the third so totally out of their reach they had more chance of a personal audience with the moon. The authorities were out of the question, given the complicity of the Janissaries and the absence of any of the other military aghas, who were serving in Anatolia in the war.
Lykaion had briefly contemplated seeing if Skiouros was in touch with any of the city's more dubious organisations that might be able to provide aid but, not only did activity with such criminal groups come with a price that was usually too steep to pay, it also went against everything that he stood for
And so he sat, and watched, and fervently wished for something to happen.
Skiouros had spent the morning in equally fruitless mental debate, trying to discern any possible way he could persuade Lykaion to abandon this dangerous path and come with him to safety. The problem was that, despite his vehemence in all their arguments, and several ideas that might nudge his brother in the right direction, something Lykaion had said to him had taken root in his soul and refused to budge, infecting his decisions with its oppressive presence:
A conscience.
The thief had worked hard for many years now to eradicate that nagging voice and the many doubts that had assailed him from his early days in the city. A thief who fell prey to his conscience was useless or doomed, or both. He'd never been the most reverential of Christians, and had been cast as a sinner every day of his young life, but he had always been careful to keep his crimes to a misdemeanour level - a social irritant that warranted punishment perhaps, but was never wicked enough to put his life in danger. It was this fine line that he'd walked which kept that nagging conscience quiet, and he had become an expert in keeping it boxed up and silent.
But he knew for certain that Lykaion was right. If they fled the city without doing whatever they could to prevent the coming disaster, he would never be able to silence that voice again and, if it came back in full flow, it might well drown him in the torrents of his past crimes.
Without realising how much damage his argument had done, Lykaion had effectively removed flight as a possibility for either of them.
And so the br
others watched, tense and silent, each face a walnut-skinned mask of self-torture as they tried to solve their unsolvable problems. Morning wore on into afternoon, and the possibility that the early autumn sunset would fall upon a fruitless day was starting to sour the brothers' moods.
Their introspection had become so involving that they did not notice the door of the Bucoleon palace open until the Janissary guard emerged and walked purposefully off towards that dangerously unstable former imperial residence close by. The brothers shared an unspoken question: should they follow? To do so was dangerous and also left them unable to keep watch on the palace door. The question was rendered obsolete a moment later as the Janissary came to a halt in plain sight outside the main door of the crumbling palace shell and waited.
The two observers watched with nervous excitement as, a moment later, a homeless Turkish street boy came running from the door and approached the guard. The big soldier leaned down to the boy and exchanged words, handing over a silver coin. With a smile, the urchin turned and ran towards the Pharos. The brothers disappeared below the parapet, pushing themselves back against the stone, a momentary panic that the boy was coming for them quickly dissipating as the unlikeliness of that became clear. The boy pounded along the street past the tower, heading directly up the hill through small, little-used alleys and roads, up towards the heart of the Ottoman city. By the time the Janissary returned to the palace and closed the door, the urchin was lost to sight and the watchers fumed quietly in the realisation that there was no way they could catch up in time to follow him.
Instead, they returned to watching the palace and were rewarded only a few minutes later when the door opened again and the Mamluk ambassador stepped outside, the two Janissary guards at his shoulder, and walked off towards the headland.
Lykaion and Skiouros shared a look and a thought: the Nea Ekklasia. Despite the fact that it was still a cold, light afternoon with a few locals abroad in the streets, and that the brothers could now easily pass for Turks, it would still be unnecessarily dangerous to follow the Mamluk too closely.
Thief's Tale Page 18