Thief's Tale

by Turney, S. J. A.

  Some time in the early hours, before the window had broken, still restless and unable to find the elusive peace of slumber, Skiouros had wandered into the north chapel and pulled out the reliquary box from the altar, sitting cross-legged before it in silence, unable to bring himself to open it. Ridiculously, it seemed that the strange and eerie one-sided conversation that followed had been the longest and calmest the brothers had shared since reaching Constantinople all those years ago.

  One-sided in a way, at least.

  Whether it was the power of this once important and holy place influencing his thoughts, or just the fresh grief playing tricks on his mind, he almost could hear Lykaion's voice taking his part in proceedings, barely audible above the storm outside; an echo of thoughts in his head. No matter how much he looked around, there was no physical sign of the unfortunate brother, though.

  "Why could you not leave with me?" Skiouros had pleaded at the plain wooden box, its surface marred only by the scars of forced entry and the removal of the decorative metalwork. In a way, the box, with its lack of frippery, stripped down to its honest essentials, was a suitable analogy for Lykaion's physical presence.

  "Because it would not have been the right thing to do… I know" he replied to the ghostly, imagined voice. "I know that, and so does God. And because you chose the right path, are you rewarded, brother?"

  He paused, listening to the voice that could be the wind forming words.

  "Some reward" he spat in the end. "And whose God, anyway? Yours or mine?"

  He looked up at the altar and the carved cross in the lip, wondering whether the workers would simply sling out the holy table or whether it would be reused for the greater glory of Allah.

  "'Does it matter?' is the question, I suppose. Those who quibble over the details and kill on the urging word of an overzealous priest are missing the real word of God - people like your friend Bin Murad who can't tolerate differences and fall prey to the sheer love of death that tarnishes their souls. We do what we must so that men like Bayezid the Just can change the world, one step at a time and so that men like Hamza Bin Murad fail to do so."

  He shook his head to some unheard reply as the wind howled its fury around the church.

  "No. It's what you would do, Lykaion, but I must go - away from here, I mean. I can't finish this without you - I don't even want to. It was your quest, this; not mine."

  He cocked his head on one side, listening to the vehemence of his dead brother's reply in the howling of the storm.

  "'I will do what I must'? Lykaion, what I must do is leave this place and take you too. Beyond that? Even God doesn't know. Time and fate will tell."

  Skiouros lowered his eyes, perturbed at the strangeness and the frankness of the ethereal conversation. "Have I offended you with all this?" he asked quietly, gesturing at the altar. "This box, I mean? This altar? This church? No. I suppose not. You always did see things in better perspective than me. I assume you're with whatever God wants you, and I'll be content when I'm sitting in a taverna in Crete. I'm taking you with me when I go."

  'I cannot leave and nor, I suspect, can you.'

  The words were so suddenly clear, Skiouros spun sharply, expecting to see his brother standing behind him, but there was nothing there. Perhaps the words had been his own, unintentionally voiced aloud.

  "I think you underestimated the strength of my survival instinct, Lykaion. I should have gone days ago, and I should have taken you with me. There is nothing here for me now. The man who killed you is dead, so vengeance is served. I am gone with the afternoon tide at the latest."

  And yet now, with the advent of dawn, as Skiouros clambered upright from his makeshift bed and pulled his doublet tight, lacing it up and pulling on his fine boots, he began to wonder about that vehement decision of flight. He was determined to go, but something about those words of Lykaion's ghost - if that's what it had been - had settled into him.

  'I cannot leave and nor, I suspect, can you.'

  The phrase formed a couplet with an earlier memory of his brother's advice: 'I, for one, would suffer with a dreadful conscience for the rest of my life.'

  So it came down to whether Skiouros had the mastery over his conscience that he hoped. He would go; had already decided that, with no possibility of changing course. But would he live easily with having made the decision? As Lykaion's unseen spectre had said, only time would tell - not fate though. Fate could go hang.

  Biting down on his lip, he threw the cloak about his neck and fastened it, turning to face the door of the north chapel.

  "I'll be back for you before I leave, Lykaion. Be sure of that."

  With a last sad smile, he took a breath and turned to the main door and the potential of a new world. Time to see what that fate had in store for him. Down to the harbour to book a passage; Crete if possible, but he would accept Cyprus, Venice, Genoa or even Athens if that was the only voyage available. What mattered most was to leave Constantinople as soon as possible. Then, with the voyage organised, he would hie himself to Ben Isaac to collect his money. Finally: back here to pick up Lykaion's remains, and then the journey could begin.

  Crossing through both the inner and outer narthex, Skiouros approached the door with trepidation, the memories of the last time he had opened it all too clear. Outside, the rain had let up again, but the winds were howling and clattering the timbers of the city, threatening a new downpour. A storm had hit the city, but he had seen much worse in his time - some storms that had almost ruined the farmers of Hadrianople. This was more of a gale with bad squalls. Gritting his teeth, Skiouros pulled the door open and surveyed the scene.

  The ground was soaked, much of the grassy area waterlogged, and rivulets of mud ran through the rest. Two blackened stumps of torches sat on the ground to either side of a faint stain that had been almost entirely erased by the rain.

  Nothing to keep him here.

  Taking a deep breath, he shut the door behind him and strode across the ground outside, subconsciously taking a gently arcing path that avoided the torches and the stain they guarded, bringing him by a circuitous route to the road.

  Skiouros prided himself on his alertness and care. They were the traits that had seen him survive his chosen path in the streets of one of the world's greatest cities these past eight years. And so it almost threw him when, as he passed from the former church cemetery into the narrower street beyond, a cough rang out from the side of the street only a few feet away. He'd seen no one…

  His head shot round to the featureless wooden wall of the nearest house and his eyes dropped to ground level, to where a sack of something best unexamined stood, surrounded by debris.

  The black garbed figure of an old woman with ragged black hair and a leathery, weather-beaten face crouched in the lea of the sack, nominally out of the wind.

  The Romani witch.

  Skiouros' blood ran cold.

  "You!"

  The old woman raised an eyebrow as she regarded him the way a surgeon looks over the corpse he's about to dissect. As her head moved there was a hollow clatter and Skiouros noted with some distaste the bones of a bird woven into the gnarled tresses of her hair. His mind leapt back a few days to a scene of the old woman boning a crow and he shuddered.

  "Are you mocking me?" he snapped, referring to her repeated presence at the worst moments of his life.

  The old woman frowned and shrugged, reaching down to a small bowl between her feet that contained some form of dried plant life. Producing a piece of flint and a chunk of red-gold rock, she proceeded to smash the two together over the bowl until sparks fell and caught in the fibrous material, causing a tendril of blue smoke to rise. Throwing him a strange look, the old woman bent over the bowl and breathed in the smoke heavily.

  "I said: are you mocking me?" he repeated. "I pick a purse that causes all hell to break loose and you're there with your cryptic yapping. Then my brother dies and I'm forced to kill someone - something that I hope never to have to do again - and here you are
again."

  The old witch remained silent, breathing in the blue smoke until she gave a rasping cough and sat up, her eyes fixing him with a disturbing scrutiny that felt as though she had just seen through his eyes and into his soul.

  "No one is to blame for your predicament but yourself, farmer-thief. You were warned away from this path, but you took it anyway, and now that the path has you, it will not let you wander off it."

  "How did you know about the storm? It's just a bit of wind and rain, I know, but how did you see it coming in clear blue skies?" He narrowed his eyes. "You talked to the spice merchants, didn't you?"

  "I know the signs" she replied quietly. "This storm will damage the city, and it will damage you. And you will damage the city, too. But do not try to fight your path now. Follow it to your final destination."

  "My final destination is far from here."

  "Yes. But not today."

  Skiouros pursed his lips, his jaw set firm, as the wind whipped his cloak about him and threatened to extinguish the woman's strange burning bowl, despite her meagre shelter.

  "Do not presume to tell my future, witch. Neither God nor Allah has any say over where I go, so I'm not about to follow the advice of an old woman with bones in her hair!"

  "God and Allah!" the witch cackled. "God and Allah!"

  Skiouros shook his head and straightened.

  "I go now to book passage away from this place, from you and the Janissaries and all that the city has thrown at me."

  "You go to disappointment, young fool. Quo Vadis, eh? Tu Petros, sa-phal Theodoros. Bater, eh?"

  "I told you before: I don't understand your tongue, even when you mix it with Greek names."

  His nostrils flaring angrily, Skiouros turned away from the old woman with her smoke and bones and pagan ways and scurried on down the street, away from the walls and into the Lycus valley at the end of which lay the harbour of Theodosius, the greatest of all the city's ports.

  Turning the corner at the top of the hill to face down the valley, almost directly south, Skiouros' breath caught in his throat. The view here was one of the best in the city, as the valley of the now-subterranean Lycus river ran down between two of the city's most prominent hills to the Propontis sea and the great harbour. It was a view that Skiouros had seen a hundred times in his years in the city.

  But he'd never seen it like this.

  The battering, howling winds were rushing up the valley towards him, stirring leaves and debris into eddies in the side alleys and house frontages, and grit and dust scoured his face and eyes. Scudding clouds above promised more imminent rain squalls, but the horizon…

  Where the steely grey sky above, marred with torn clouds, dipped down towards the horizon, they met a wall of dark purple, so deep it was almost black, obscuring the land not far beyond the Asian shore a few miles south.

  It was a storm, but it was more than a storm. It looked like the judgement of God given form. Even for a pragmatic man like Skiouros, the very sight of that approaching nightmare brought a lump to the throat. The witch had been right, after all…

  His step lent a new urgency, Skiouros hurried down the street, quickly sidestepping passers-by and ignoring all but the great harbour ahead and the promise of blessed escape that it offered.

  Something else was nagging at him as he ran, but he had neither the time nor the attention to devote to it.

  By the time he reached the forum of the Ox, where the slope began to level out towards the shore, he was almost jogging, his eyes repeatedly straying up to the dark band of the approaching storm. He realised he knew nothing about tides other than ships tended to sail on them. Did they have to? Or could they sail between tides? If they did have to sail on them, when precisely were they, and had the morning one been?

  Across the great forum with its somewhat dilapidated arcade and the frontage of the once important Eleutherius palace he hurried, down through the last few streets which were largely clear of the usual bustle of people - not surprising really, given the conditions. Exiting the city proper through the 'Gate of the Jews', he hurried towards the warehouses that marked the landward edge of the harbour complex.

  Finally, with pounding heart and tingling nerves, Skiouros ran into the port and along the main quay, a relatively modern structure that had moved the focus of the port further out to sea to account for the silt build-up around the mouth of the Lycus. A dozen or more jetties jutted out into the water around two sides of the harbour, the third given over mostly to slipways for the construction of ships. Warehouses and offices stood inland, on the silted up area, arranged with the ordered and bureaucratic method visible in all remnants of the former Byzantine Empire.

  Ships of a number of styles and nationalities sat in the water at the jetties, but the something that had been nagging at him suddenly insisted itself into his consciousness and he realised what it was: the harbour was quiet.

  There were the tell-tale sounds of shipwrights at work, and men hauled goods in and out of ships and warehouses, of course, as was normal and to be expected. There were the small groups of soldiers at the end of each jetty with their guardhouses; not Janissaries here, but a lower-grade private force under the aegis of the vizier of trade. They watched the visiting vessels as always, checking crewmen in and out to make sure the city was safe from harm or foreign infiltration.

  But apart from the mercantile, security and construction facets, there was something missing from the port: sailing.

  Despite the two dozen merchantmen of different nations, not a single ship was out on the water of the harbour, each remaining tied up safely to a jetty. The Propontis beyond the harbour walls was empty even of the small fishing craft that perpetually dotted its surface.

  Most tellingly, the great wooden harbour gates were shut.

  Skiouros felt his pulse quicken. Surely this was too much for a mere storm, even one as bad as the lurking nightmare on the horizon? Turning, he ran towards the merchants' hall next to the harbourmaster's office.

  The huge structure, formed of old Byzantine brick and stone was a two-storey building that housed temporary offices which could be rented by the captains of ships or the city's merchants to do business in, and some of those offices had now been taken by traders in perpetuity.

  The door of the building stood open and unguarded, as all were welcome within, especially if they had available goods or a few spare akce to spend.

  Hurrying over the threshold, noting the warm dry interior and the wet footprints in the entrance, Skiouros stepped inside. In his years in the city, he'd been past the merchant's hall numerous times, but had never had cause to enter it. Such a place contained a lot of money and therefore everyone who transacted within it had their wits about them. It was a brave thief indeed who tried for pickings here, as the three spiked heads near the harbourmaster's office attested.

  The ground floor was mostly given over to a social area with seating and tables - a 'meyhane' or wine house, its trade forbidden by religious law but tolerated by the wise Sultan Beyazid as a necessary evil in a cosmopolitan city such as this - another unwelcome reminder of what was coming. Here, traders and their crews and teamsters were able to shelter from the weather and pass information and laugh, sing and drink. Around the edge sat the offices, with two staircases leading up to a balcony that ran around the periphery to another floor of offices, these upper ones more private and exclusive and therefore more costly.

  The social centre was not Skiouros' current concern, and he doubted the top floor would be of much use, so he strode around the edge of the ground floor, examining the boards that advertised each trader's business.

  Without a command of the written word, much of it was gibberish of course, but a lot of information could be gleaned, regardless. Of necessity the offices were also advertised with images, given the low rate of literacy among the sailors and teamsters.

  Those he was interested in, for instance, would have an image of a ship, to denote that they were a trader preparing for an outbo
und journey. They could be further narrowed down by locating a national flag. He was not, for example, interested in any office displaying the Crescent and Stars of the Ottoman Empire. It would be dangerous to try such a route at the moment. He sought the Lion of Saint Mark for Venetian merchants, the Red Cross and Gryphons of Genoa, or the White Cross on Blue of Venetian Crete - the so-called Kingdom of Candia. All might well present an opportunity for transport at a reasonable rate.

  Almost a third of the way around the circumference, he found his first port of call, a Genoese ship captain, but changed his mind and hurried on as he realised that the man was in the throes of a deep argument with a man in the uniform of a Janissary. There was almost no chance that the man was here in any manner connected to Skiouros or his brother, but this was not a time to take chances.

  Moving on, he found a second office in the far corner of the building that seemed more likely: a small room bearing the arms of Candia. At the side of the small office, an ebony-skinned boy from Africa was loading bales of something atop one another in an attempt to make more space, while the merchant himself sat at the rear of the room behind a table, with a set of charts spread out before him and some arcane brass device. Tutting to himself, he gripped the stem of a wooden beaker and drank a draught of something before returning to the chart and frowning at it as though it had offended him in some way.

  Skiouros peered in at the man, sizing up the possibilities before entering.

  The merchant captain was dressed in a purple doublet that had seen considerable wear and was salt-spray damaged. His boots, jutting out from beneath the table, had clearly been purchased for comfort and wear rather than style. His hair was a sandy corn-colour and his face pale in comparison to those around him, adorned by a slightly ragged beard.

  Skiouros nodded to himself. The man called no one master - that much was clear - but was also struggling to maintain a healthy income, as was clear by the fact he apparently did not own a second suit for land-work as so many wealthier captains did, and he wore his sea apparel even here.