The Vault of Bones

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  It would be folly to leave my hiding place in daylight, that was plain. Just because I was lost did not mean that my hunters were, and with so few people on the streets anyway, a marked man in nice Venetian clothes would stand out like a sore thumb. I settled down on the bottom step. Perhaps there was some food left in my purse. Rummaging, my fingers found, not the dry bread I had finished hours ago, but my tinderbox. I pulled it out, made a little torch from the litter of dead twigs that covered the stairway and struck a spark. The pithy elderberry twigs caught, but sullenly, and the pithy wood began to smoke. But as the flame grew hotter so the light grew. I held my torch up and looked about me.

  Pillars stretched away out of sight, or at least beyond the reach of the weak flame. The flagstone floor was clear in places, but in others it was mounded with bat-droppings - only now did I hear the creatures cursing me from the roof - and piles of twigs and old rubbish that must have been dragged down here by rats. There was a wisp of red cloth sticking out from one of these rubbish nests, and, not having anything better to do, I went over and prodded at it with my foot. There was a dry rustle and the pile collapsed in on itself. Something large and pale rolled, clacking, at my shoe. Recoiling with an oath, thinking it was a cellar rat or monstrous, pale spider, for was I not sunk part-way into nightmare already, I drew back to kick it, but as I took aim I found myself staring at two great black eyes. Not eyes, though: shadows. It was a skull, a human skull, and what I had taken for a rat's nest was a huddled skeleton.

  I yelped, then stifled it. Looking closer despite my growing horror, I saw that each bundle of rubbish was indeed a corpse. Feeling less bold with every step, but drawn on by that curiosity that forces men to stare, fascinated, at what repulses their every sense, I picked my way further into the shadows. Two skeletons, three, seven, a dozen ... Christ! A score of them. And then I saw it.

  The back wall of the cellar was not so far away, for the space was long but narrow. Piled there were the stores of whatever great house had stood above this pit: barrels, bales and bundles of fuel, stacks of those long clay vessels in which the Greeks store their wine and oil. All was caked in dust and soot, cobwebbed and blotched with bat-piss and mouse-dung. But amongst these things, and piled up against them like a frozen tide, lay bones. Hundreds upon hundreds of bones.

  The close air of the cellar, foul as it was with thirty years of vermin and decay, became suddenly fouler still. Real or imagined, the stink of death stung my nostrils. I held up the torch to left and right: more skeletons stretching away into the shadows. The horror of it all descended upon my shoulders like a torturer's weight and I sank down, squatting on my heels. It was not simple horror that crushed me: each of those empty skulls exhaled sadness and desolation. The flame skipped over their yellowed domes, where patches of hair and tarry skin still clung. Near at hand, a ribcage held three little skulls and a puzzle of smaller bones. There were skulls of every size: families had died here, mothers sinking down across their children in a last, hopeless attempt to save them. Their bones were not charred or broken: I could see no shattered skulls. But, from the way they had huddled back here it was plain they had died in some single, appalling moment. I staggered back to the steps and looked up at the charred beams that framed the entrance. And then I understood what had happened. One of the Cormaran’s men - Dimitri, perhaps - had told me of a siege he had taken part in. A fortified town had held out for days until the besiegers had run out of patience and shot burning pitch over the walls. The town had burned like a pyre for a day and a half, and when the attackers marched in they took possession of a walled mound of ash. There were no people left: they found them when they dug out the foundations of the houses in search of loot. The townsfolk had taken to the cellars to escape the fire, but the raging storm of flames had sucked out the air and every last man, woman and child had suffocated. They had lain in twisted heaps, quite unhurt; but on every face - so remembered the storyteller - was the mark of agony and terror. To die down there in the dark ...we had all cursed and spat, and thanked our fortunes that we lived out in the wind and the salty spray.

  Here were my Greeks. Here were Anna's people. How many other secret charnel houses were there in this great, empty city? Constantinople was a tomb. The flimsy little torch had burned down until it was singeing my fingers. I flung it away, and it guttered for a while on the floor next to a skull, casting its looming, billowing shadow large upon the wall. I had to escape from here, but to where? I could not leave until dark, but then ... I picked at a scab on my arm. Easy enough to climb out of this hole, but then I would have to leave the city. And perhaps I could slip past the guards: what then? I was a thousand leagues from anything I knew. Constantinople was ringed by enemies. I would fight or lie my way through, and then the whole of Greece was mine to cross on foot, penniless. And then the sea. To the north? Barbarian Cumans. To the east, Turks. To the south, the Greeks: the little empire of Anna's uncle. How far away were their lines? Then, subtle as a fly testing one's skin for signs of life or food, the tiny spark of a plan began to reveal itself.

  It was a torture of high refinement just to wait out the rest of that day. I perched on the lower steps, too dispirited to light another torch, although it would have kept the shadows at. a distance. I did not wish to gaze upon the carnage. The dead were best left in the darkness, and I wished I had never disturbed them. As it was, the darkness lapped at the foot of the stairway like a dismal tide. And so, as soon as the light above me had faded from gold to pink and purple and then a dull grey, for the fog was rising from the Golden Horn as dusk came on, I turned my back on the hidden people of Constantinople and fairly ran up the stairs, the hairs on my neck prickling until they hurt, for I imagined that, as soon as

  I had turned my back, the shades that dwelt there had risen from their inky pool and were following me. I hurled myself over the rotten threshold and into the cold, taking a great gulp of the clean, sharp scent of elder-trees. I pushed my way urgently through the branches, feeling for brambles, and with every snag of their thorns in my leggings a nightmare bloomed in my mind: held fast in a dark thicket while the dead swarmed out of the grave-mouth behind me.

  At last - how many hours were squeezed into those few seconds - I was free, and found myself gasping with relief in the tiny alleyway. The street beyond was deserted, as I knew it would be. The empty shells of the houses that overhung me on each side oppressed me horribly now that I had seen what had become of the folk who had dwelt in them and made this street and a thousand others bright and noisy with their lives. Soon enough I came to the square with the well and the old church. The body had gone, although it had left a dark, smeared trail: the two women must have dragged it off by the feet. I paused here to get my bearings: there was a faint glow in the west, despite the fog, whose tendrils were already exploring the square. Still retracing my mornings path, I jogged down the steps, turned a corner, and there, dark against the sky, were the mounded domes of Hagia Sophia, still a quarter-mile off.

  Once I heard the clank of a patrol moving down a nearby street, but I saw not one soul. Only the cats turned the little lamps of their eyes to me as I crept past them. Soon I was cowering in the lee of the vast church, making sure that the square was empty. It towered above me, taller and more vast than anything in my experience. Arches looped and rolled, rising in tiers, sometimes supporting small domes. The front, before which I stood, resembled a gateway, with two mighty buttresses spanned by an arch, so enormous that a whole cathedral of windows, columns and archways were contained within it. The whole assembly was in thrall to the great dome which it supported. So high that my neck bones creaked as I threw back my head to take it in, it loomed like some unimaginably vast celestial body broken loose from its mooring in the heavens and now rising over the horizon of our world.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I

  do not care for churches, and I like cathedrals even less. They are forever bound up in my mind with the bloody event which wrenched my quiet, unimpeacha
bly mundane life from its pleasant, dull cage and sent it flying into the teeth of the world's storms, a homing pigeon who no longer possessed a home. I saw a man butchered like a hog inside the cathedral that stood in the little English city where I was a student, saw his blood splash and steam on the tiles and caught it in my nostrils as it overwhelmed the comfortable church smells: old stone, beeswax, incense, dust and piety (piety has a smell known to every cleric: a subtle distillation of clothes kept long in chests, boiled food, the hair of infants and the soiled breeches of the elderly; priests afflicted by a congregation of the very pious will always be profligate burners of incense). I had thought to find this one a miracle, for Anna had talked of it as the very navel of the world, but in reality it hunkered bleakly over the ruined city like a heap of giant skulls. So I had avoided the place until now, fearing that the city's melancholy decay would be unbearable here. But when I crept through the great doors, I was amazed.

  English cathedrals are generally somewhat sombre. They amaze with their avenues of stone pillars that rear up and divide like tree trunks - so delicate and yet so deceiving - but their great vaults are shadowy and even when the day is bright outside the dust motes dance sombrely in the perpetual twilight within. And so I walked through the grand doors of Hagia Sophia expecting to enter such a night-in-day, to be greeted instead by light: candlelight and lamp light reflecting from the polished stone, gold, and twinkling glass of the mosaics that covered the walls. If from the outside the sheer mass of the church was terrifying, inside there was so much luminous space that I felt almost weightless, as if I were about to rise like a transfigured soul up into the embrace of the dome, where Christ waited with open arms, an indulgent young father perched on a rainbow.

  I made my way up to the southern gallery and cast about for the mosaic Zoe had described, and found it easily, for it was quite new and dazzlingly bright even by candlelight. I sank down on a shadowed bench nearby and watched the candles flickering. Every so often a black-swathed crone would shuffle over to light another taper, but otherwise I was blissfully alone. After a time, my eyelids drooped and I fell into a sort of deep daydream, in which ravens circled over Dartmoor tors and little trout flicked through amber water while sedge waved against an empty sky.

  There was a loud, wet sniff, and it came from very nearby. I straightened up and looked about me. There was no one there, and I was about to lapse into my daydream, assuming my imagination had conjured an intruder, when the sniff came again, just by my left elbow. With a start I turned my head, and found myself looking at a grey head. A low marble sill ran around the base of the walls, and perched uncomfortably on this sat a man in the black robes of a cleric. The cloth was very dusty and full of rents and patches, and the man’s hair was thinning and dirty. His scalp showed through here and there, angrily painted with ringworm, and drifts of scurf salted his shoulders. Feeling my gaze, he turned and looked up into my face. I beheld red-ringed eyes, a doughy boozers nose and ashy skin. A long beard the colour of neglected silver spilled down his front. His neck was knobbed with scrofula, and he evidently had caught cold, for he sniffed again and wiped his nose with a sleeve that was already glistening with mucus. I gave a thoughtless shudder, then remembered myself and stood up. The man looked up at me, pulled at his nose and, using the smooth marble of the wall, slid himself upright. He regarded me with the intense gaze of a moth-eaten owl. 'My name is Walter,' he said.

  'Salve, goodman Walter,' I replied, carefully. The man had spoken to me in English. Walter's red and rheumy eyes explored my face with great care.

  What are you doing here?' he asked brusquely, after an uncomfortable pause.

  Taking comfort in your beautiful Hagia Sophia,' I said, as politely as I could.

  'My Hagia Sophia? Mine’ he replied. I could not tell if he was amused or angry. And I could see that his robes were neither those of a Greek nor of a Latin priest, but seemed to be a somewhat disreputable confection of elements culled from both. An ordinary madman, I suddenly thought. Well, no peace here, then, and he might scare off whoever was coming to find me. Time to go. I was turning, when a gnarled hand shot out and caught my sleeve.

  Wait, Devon lad,' Walter said. I turned and stared at him, mouth open like a codfish.

  'Devon?' I gasped.

  'Certainly. Devon. Devonshire. Well, you are not from Dorset, are you? Or a bloody Cornishman, against whom God defend us all?'

  'No, no -I am from Devon, right enough,' I said, shaking my head. 'But what ... what do you know of Devon, good-man Walter?'

  'None of your "goodman",' he snapped. Walter will do well enough. Quite well enough, thank you kindly. I know of Devon because I am of Devon.'

  'Ah. From whereabouts?' I enquired, knowing as I did so that entering into discourse with the mad can have many consequences, the commonest being deathly boredom. But I could not help myself, for the name of my homeland was a charm strong enough to loosen my tongue even in this strange circumstance. But instead of answering, Walter began to throw furtive glances about the vast cavern of the church. Then he turned back to me, eyes twinkling.

  He laid a finger alongside his nose.

  'Nothing is what it appears, boy,' he rasped. Then he snapped his fingers gently and pointed to the far side of the church. I looked over and saw nothing but a Frankish cleric peering up at the rainbow-perched Christ in the cupola. He was far enough away that, in the hazy golden light, I could make out nothing save that the man was poised and seemed to be concentrating very hard on whatever he was regarding. And he was very well dressed in dark robes, like a scholar or a man of law.

  'Another sightseer,' I shrugged. 'Perhaps he would be happier to join you. As a matter of fact, I have things ...' What things?' asked Walter blandly. I shrugged. 'Business.'

  'Oh. Business.' He sniffed damply. 'He knows about all kinds of business. Perhaps you'd care to talk to him! I glanced down into the church again, but the man had gone. Only a priest, I thought, or a monk.

  Would you care to talk more?' asked Walter. Then, not waiting for a reply, he added, ‘I must retrieve my hat. Wait here.' And he shuffled off with surprising speed, and disappeared through one of the many stone-framed doors.

  His hat, for God's sake? Was I to lose my chance of escape, because of a madman's hat? Cursing my luck, or the ruins thereof, I stood up and padded over to the stairs. Descending into the lambent gloom I cast about for signs of danger, but the body of the church was empty save for a few tardy crones busy with their candles. It occurred to me that I was a fool, for I knew but one way in and out of this place, but there was no choice, and so, skirting the walls and colonnades, I gained the main door. Out of pure habit I glanced behind me before I stepped outside, and noticed a Greek priest watching me a few paces off, arms folded. I gave him a quick, respectful bow, another habit; and when I raised my head, I saw it was Walter. He had donned a priest's high, toadstool-shaped hat. So he truly was a madman. Without further ado I turned tail and trotted - for I did not want to attract any more attention - out into the dusk.

  The square that lies before the Hagia Sophia is a dismal and deserted place dotted with ruins and missing huge areas of flagstones so that gorse and other wild trees and plants have pushed their way into the sunlight. That night it was even more desolate, although the fog was clearing, and the sky was fretted with rags of black cloud fleeing westward from a brisk wind out of Asia. There was not a soul about, and, wrapped in my black cloak, I felt little more than a ragged cloud myself, scudding, dissolving. It gave me an odd feeling of safety, but a slow, creeping dread also, as if I had stepped out of this world altogether into the kingdom of shadows.

  I resolved to make my way back to the ruined chapel. Perhaps the serving girl would come to look for me there. Perhaps, though, the serving girl had been caught, or killed, or worse. I shuddered, the hoar frost of guilt settling upon me. The Golden Horn glittered under a bright sliver of moon to my left, so I turned right. Blocking my way was a thicket of scrubby elder bushes that had grow
n up around a broken pillar and I stepped into its shadow. There was, I remembered, an alleyway that gave off the square and led towards the sea, and through it -I had trailed around all these streets to fend off creeping boredom these past weeks - I could wind my way through ruins and dead houses to the wall of the palace, and there to the chapel.

  Footsteps sounded behind me. A priest was leaving the church. I guessed it was Walter, and stepped back into the thicket, letting the thin, pithy trunks of the elder bend against my weight. A bird fluttered and scrabbled behind me. Do not sing, I begged it, silently. It did not, but flapped its way free and whirred away. 'Thank you’ I muttered. The priest had stopped twenty or more paces away, and seemed to be gazing up at the stars. I sank back a little further into the elder bushes, feeling a branch dig into my back. Then another, and then before I could flinch a hand wrapped itself around the handle of the knife that lay against my spine, and another was clamped over my mouth. I felt the knife being tugged out and I bellowed into the suffocating hand, waiting for the butcher's blade to enter my back. But instead a dry voice hissed into my ear.

  'Keep silent, boy. Turn around’ it ordered, in English. I obeyed. As I turned, there was a crackle of twigs and the hand left my mouth, to land upon my shoulder, thumb digging into the soft flesh beneath the collarbone. I ... I did nothing. Perhaps I was too tired and hungry to resist. I do not - choose not, it may be - recall what I thought in those instants. Be done with me, mayhap: do it fast, and do not turn me over to the braying Franks for their sport. So I did not bolt or even raise my hands, but turned like a child turns to face its father. And found the grey eyes of Michael Scotus staring into mine.