'It isn't,' said Gilles, shaking his head. I peered at him. He seemed to be quite serious. 'Nothing like that. Legend again, but it seems that the Mandylion was walled up somewhere in Edessa, leaning against a tiled wall. And the tile it leaned on received the image of the face of Christ.' 'But ...' I began to feel the ground beneath my feet, so secure for the past two years, begin to tremble.
These are the True Images, Petroc,' he was saying, 'the ...'
‘Yes, I know all that,' I said, worried now. 'The Veronica, the vera icon: True Image. The holiest relics of all. These are things supposed lost, and yet someone - a very strange person, to be precise - has let us know they still exist. And, in fact, where to find them.'
'And the most important thing of all: that their owner may not even know he owns them’ said the Captain. He folded the parchment and handed it back to me.
'Keep it’ I said. But he shook his head.
'I will take a copy’ he said, 'but you should keep it. It was entrusted to you for some reason - something to do with old Gregory, plainly, for it came from his physician. But..’
'It makes a difference, does it not?' I said, brightly.
'A difference?, he cried, then he mastered himself. 'A difference, yes. Certainly. Ah ... perhaps, my lad, things are not as undone as they seem’ He kept rubbing his temples and staring at the little sheet of parchment.
We will leave at once’ he decided. The ship was fitted up and ready, and it was the purest accident - a crewman had lost his hand while loading the cargo and a replacement had just been found - that he was here at all. If I would care to bathe and change my clothes, perhaps we could set off directly?
And so we left the shores of Italy. I embraced Gilles, and bid farewell to Iblis the horse, and to the surprise of us both I wet his soft snout with a couple of hot tears. I had grown extremely fond of the beast during the last few weeks. Poor Iblis! It is an onerous task to bear a man’s weight at the best of times, but I had added to his burden with my incessant prattle, for I had not been alone and beyond human company for nigh on two years and found the solitude maddening. The horse suffered my life's tale a score times and more, not to mention my ramblings on birds, beasts, food, theology and, relentlessly, Anna’s death. If a horse can feel relief, no doubt Iblis did when he learned he would be making his slow way back to Rome in the company of other horses, with no bereaved, raving madman bouncing atop his patient back.
The sweep of the oars and the cracking of the sail was strange music to me that afternoon, for I had barely drawn breath before we were aboard the ship Stella Maris and the master had ordered all lines let go. Galleys can be quick when the wind and tide favour them, and soon the white beacon of the Roman arch had slipped away behind and we were striking out across the ruffled waters towards Dalmatia. In a few days we were running south past Zadar and the Captain was pointing out the nameless little isle where Sir Hugh de Kervezey had undergone his strange transfiguration into Saint Exuperius of blessed memory, and a week later we passed the hog's back of Hrinos and came close enough to the high peak of Koskino Island that we could hear the cicadas and smell the sage and thyme of her hillsides. There was the horseshoe bay guarded by its three windmills, and there the tiny white huddle of the village, sleeping beneath its lemon trees. I felt a little strange, and fancied that the scars on my thigh, where a crossbow bolt had pierced me the night I had been hunted across those barren hills, were aching in some kind of sympathy with the place, but later I decided I had imagined it. But nonetheless I felt better when Koskino's mountain had sunk, in its turn, into our wake, and back into my past.
'I fear to tell you anything of Constantinople’ said the Captain, when I pressed him. He had been there, he said, but would not tell me more. If you find it one way, you will think I embroidered my account and be angry, and if another, you will say I was too mean and sparing and again I will be blamed’ he laughed. It is a very great city, as great or greater than Rome itself, for it is her sister. But time has used her very harshly, and ..He shook his head and sighed. 'Perhaps her fortunes have changed’ he said, 'although all news that comes from there says otherwise. I have no expectations, so that I will not be confused and diverted from our task when we arrive and things are not as I thought they would be’
It was all very mysterious, but I could extract no more from him. Instead he laid out our mission. We were required to secure the Crown relic and also to verify it, negotiate the transfer with Emperor Baldwin's Regent, and await the arrival of the French Kings emissaries. Our key to the Chapel of Pharos was Pope Gregory's decree, which I handed over to the Captain with huge relief. Not for the first time, I pondered the strangeness of our lives. How could it be that we, who practised nothing but deception, find such willing accomplices amongst the great of this world, and how could it be that we now had the complicity of the Holy Father himself? And our business now was with an emperor, no less, or at least his Regent. No matter that the empire was a sham, an old sheep with its throat already in the wolf's jaws. What cared I for such distinctions? I was still, at heart, a shepherd's son, and my fortune was becoming such a thing that I would never have dared imagine in my deepest summer daydream. But the Captain was expecting trouble. What had been a simple job had become not so simple, for now we would have to persuade the emperor's barons that King Louis' offer would be worth the waiting, and that they should not be sniffing around in their treasure house yet.
So I burned with anticipation as we inched our way across the Aegean into the teeth of those Greek breezes that blow clean and steady, driving salt into the skin and making every piece of rigging hiss like a nest of snakes, but which barely ruffle the surface of the water. Our oarsmen sweated and groaned, but I tucked myself into the bows each day and dreamed of Constantinople. I had heard so much of the city from Anna that I could all but walk a maze of her streets in my mind, which was a little strange in that Anna herself had never set foot there, for her family had gone into exile long before her birth. Nevertheless, for her - as for all Greeks - it was the navel, the lodestone of her world, the true Rome, of which the great city I had just left was a pale, barbarian, and heretical counterfeit. But further, I still clung to the notion that I might find some answer there to the riddle of her death, though I had no idea how that might come about. So I burned to see Constantinople for myself, and as we at last put Samothrace behind us and inched into the great passage of the Hellespont, and when we burst out into the Sea of Marmara beyond, even my dreams had become infected with the place. My night-self inhabited a landscape of vast buildings: gigantic cathedrals shimmering with gold and gems, statues and monuments of pure marble rearing like great phantoms from amongst palaces sheltered by gilded roofs. And the people of this dream city were giants too: Constantines and Justinians, grave and terrible; white-clad empresses; warriors in the image of the Angel Michael and Saint George with flaming swords and armour of golden scales. And around every corner, someone with Anna's face. Sometimes this sprite fled from me, sometimes she beckoned me into some dark and secret place, but always I awoke as my hand reached for her.
So I was in a ferment when the cry finally came from the top of the main mast: 'Constantinople!' Yesterday the Stella Maris had rounded the island of Marmara and sailed into a placid inland sea, and I knew that we were almost at our destination. But according to the crew we were still a good twenty sea leagues away, and all that day we sailed towards a bank of heat shimmer that revealed nothing. Now, straining my eyes through the golden haze of morning I saw nothing, then a line of low hills that seemed to close off the way ahead, still many leagues off.
'There is the Long Wall’ said the Captain, coming to my side. I followed his outstretched arm and saw a great fortification snaking down to the waters edge. It was high and strong, and punctuated by sturdy battlements and towers, but looking closer I saw it was all abandoned, and that vines and small trees had taken root in its cracks. The land on either side of it seemed deserted too. There was no one abroad, and the
farms were empty of people and animals. The fields stood fallow and the vineyards were choked with weeds. A pack of wild dogs was just visible on the long white beach. This had been rich land once, a garden of men, for every slope was terraced and the olive trees grew thickly. As the rowers bent into their work and the breeze, our friend for once, fluttered out of the north-east and gave a breath of life to the sails, we began to make headway, and by midday I could make out a blackness on the skyline which, with agonising slowness, resolved itself into the shapes of buildings. We had passed a small town that had seemed populated, although much of it was clearly ruined. The wind blew steadily, and was heavy with the scent of rotten fruit, for it was the end of summer and there was no one to harvest the great garden. It soon became cloying, and I pictured swarms of wasps consuming the bounty that men now ignored. When I asked the Captain what had caused all this desolation, he scratched his nose wearily.
'The Franks’ he said simply.
'But this is their kingdom - I mean, their empire!' I said, amazed.
'Such are the Franks’ he said. 'But why destroy it all?'
'It was not the Franks alone who did this. There has been war here - incessantly, really, for many score years. But the Franks aided and abetted the wreckers then, when they did not help. And now they are poor and incompetent. The good people who farmed this land, and who held it, are dead or driven off. Some remain, and they are harried and repressed by their new Frankish masters, who have set themselves up here in the manner they were used to at home, over folk they despise and do not understand. So it was in my land also.' He fell silent.
'But we are Franks too - at least to the Greeks’ I said carefully.
'That is true. We wear Frankish skins’ the Captain replied, his mouth twisted in disgust. 'But underneath ..He spat over the side. I understood. Michel de Montalhac, as he watched the desolated lands drift by, and smelled the scents of neglect and decay, was doubtless seeing his own country. A crusade had laid waste to it, as it had to this country, and his folk had been destroyed or enslaved. I thought of Anna and how her face would tighten with rage whenever she spoke of the crusaders who had taken Constantinople - 'Dandolo's wolves', she had called them, when she was feeling generous. More often she would begin to swear in dense, rich Greek which I could not - perhaps dared not
translate. At such times I felt she saw my Frankish skin and not the man beneath; but then, I was no Greek, after all. The gulf between East and West, barbarian and Roman, Latin and Greek would yawn darkly, but always to be bridged, in the end, with kind words and a lovers touch. But now, as I was slowly realising, I had crossed that gulf. I was in Anna’s world now, and I was a stranger.
The sun was almost setting as the horizon finally resolved itself into shapes that revealed the hand of man. A low spit of land jutted down from the north. It seemed hunch-backed, but as we pulled closer I saw that the hump was a great building, and I knew at once that I beheld the Hagia Sophia.
Now we were passing more great fortifications on the banks of the sea, and these were manned in earnest, although they too were beginning to crumble. The water was growing busy: fishing boats were passing us, heading out to their night-time hunting grounds. I saw many great ships of trade: galleys like ours, and round-bottomed northern ships too. And here and there, prowling like slow but dangerous beasts, ships of war cruised or rode at anchor. A pilot had sailed out in a fast little Greek skiff, and now he and the Captain argued loudly over some complication wrought by the harbour-master. The oarsmen were cursing as they were told this instant to speed up, the next to slow down. I was enjoying the spectacle and turned my back on the approaching city for a while. But then a particularly loud cry from the pilot's mate, who had taken up his position in the bows and was cursing some unfortunate fisherman, made me turn back. Nothing - not Anna s talk, certainly not my own dreams - could have prepared me for what I saw.
The sun was setting behind us, and every brick, every roof-tile of the city before my eyes was bathed in honeyed light. It picked out towers, steeples, domes, turrets, balconies, columns, flying flags and gonfalons, proud standards. And everywhere the gorgeous light was swallowed by black hollows of ruin. The city, as I have said, stands upon a promontory, and we were sailing around it, out of the broad Sea of Marmara and into a narrower estuary, the Golden Horn. From Anna I had learned that, like Rome itself, Constantinople was built on seven hills, but they are low and the great mass of Hagia Sophia looms over everything. The waterfront I saw now stretched away seemingly for miles in either direction, and was studded with jetties and wharfs that in their turn were crowded with ships and boats of every size. But beyond the wharfs something was terribly amiss. As, puzzled, I let my eyes roam from left to right and back again, I saw a mighty wall, high and strengthened with towers and battlements. But it was the ghost of a wall, for it was much breached and here and there it had been smashed as if with a giant's hammer. Beyond it, where the ground began to slope upwards, I began to make out great buildings, or rather their shells. They stood, some roofed, some open to the skies, like the ruins of Rome; save here it was plain that these buildings had been in use until recently, and not abandoned in some remote antiquity. Gutted hulks stood at intervals, and between them lay open spaces, which by the way they lay in shadow and ate up any light that fell upon them I realised were nests of ruin, tumbled and burned wastes of stone and charred wood. The ruined buildings were large and monumental, still clad with the remnants of marble. Some were roofed like Roman temples of the old times and some were domed in the Greek manner. Closer to hand, and standing proud and clean, was an edifice that stood out from its fellows in its newness and the resounding strangeness of its architecture.
It was not so strange really, merely a large church of the sort one might find in any well-to-do country town in Italy. It was new-built, and the ashlar of its walls gleamed, as if to confirm that here was a building that truly deserved the attentions of the setting sun. But it appeared to have no relation whatsoever to the tottering piles of stone that surrounded it. For my first sight of Constantinople had reminded me of nothing less than a rotten old jawbone, detached from its skull and mouldering alone in some charnel house. And this Frankish church - for I suddenly had no doubt it was exactly that - seemed like a new tooth that, miraculously, obscenely, had sprung up amid the death and decay. Now that we were drawing closer, I saw more new buildings: here a campanile, there a strong-house with the fish-tail crenellations I had seen often in my crossing of Italy. The banners that flew everywhere were all Italian, too. I saw the lily of Florence, the white cross and red field of Pisa, and everywhere, seemingly vying for every high place, the lions of Venice and Saint George of the Genoese. Our own ship had run up a gonfalon which held a cross of gold on red, with crosses in the four corners, and I saw this device echoed here and there, on one great building away to the north, and another, huge and much knocked about, just to the south. I had been wishing with all my heart that Anna could have been with me, but all of a sudden I felt profoundly grateful that she had not lived to see this. For over the whole city, from a mast atop the titanic dome of the Hagia Sophia, the crossed keys of Saint Peter, blazoned on a huge white banner that flapped like an ogre's bedsheet, proclaimed their dominion.
Being an Apulian ship and therefore owned and manned by supporters of the emperor, the Stella Maris docked at a Pisan wharf, which the captain called a skala. The Pisans were in those times allied with the emperor, unlike the Genoese and Venetians, although I noticed that the various communities seemed to live all mixed together here. How strange it was that the poisonous division between supporters of emperor and pope, or Ghibellines and Guelfs as they called themselves, was causing war and murder back in Italy, but here in Greece it seemed to hold little weight. Probably, I told myself, they were all too busy making money to kill each other. It was getting dark, and rather than cast about for a suitable inn, the Captain decided to accept the harbour-masters offer of hospitality and put up for the night at the Pi
san trading-house to which our wharf was attached. There were many of these houses, all with their skalai, packed tightly between the water and the walls, and as the dinner hour approached fires and lamps were being lit up and down the shore. I was impatient to enter the city itself, but as the Captain pointed out, we would be better served by good food and a peaceful sleep. Tomorrow we would find our own lodgings, and seek an audience at the palace. And the Pisans were so friendly, and their food smelled so inviting, that it was far easier not to resist. So we were shown to a room, plain but comfortable, and later shared a meal that, after five weeks of ship's food, could just as well have been manna. The dishes were so savoury, and the company so lively, that it almost seemed churlish to wonder why, after an evening spent at the very centre of the Greek world, I had yet to hear a single Greek voice. But I set these thoughts aside and let the food - richly spiced with pepper and other spices fit to ransom a prince - and the good Tuscan wine lull me, and as the Captain had hoped, we both slept like the dead. But before I laid down my head I put my head out of the small window and craned to look up at the great walls of the city. A little moonlight glanced off the cut stones and sank into the gashes and wounds of siege and time. They had not kept out the robbers, these walls, and perhaps it was their penance to be reduced to a home for ivy and pigeons. Well, tomorrow I too would be inside, yet one more Frankish robber. I let out a sigh, and it was echoed by the breeze stirring in the caper shrubs that hung, lax and abandoned, from the stones above. This city is no longer defended, it seemed to whisper: it bowed down long ago. Downcast, I took myself off to bed, and thought troubled thoughts of Anna before sleep took me.
The Vault of Bones Page 21