Priest's Tale

by Turney, S. J. A.

  Parmenio simply pursed his lips and waited.

  "Because you might sell me passage cheap" Skiouros admitted with a sigh. "I'm fast running out of money."

  "That sounds a little more genuine. How cheap are we talking?"

  "I can spare maybe twelve ducats without leaving myself to starve when I arrive."

  Parmenio huffed and folded his arms. "For twelve ducats I might consider passage for one of your legs!"

  Skiouros grinned. "Let's haggle."

  Nicolo, leaning across from behind where he was busy marking a list as goods were ferried aboard, snorted. "You think you'd be better with an arm and a leg sailing west eh? What about the rest of you."

  "I think the boy means to fleece me in the same manner as my purser" Parmenio grinned. "I've seen him haggle in the market, and he's become something of a master this past year. He could get the undergarments off a nun with just his tongue."

  "I've known men who could do that too" grinned Nicolo, causing the captain to explode in a fit of laughter. Taking a deep breath and still smiling, Parmenio straightened and fixed Skiouros with a straight look.

  "In the long run I'd be better accepting the twelve ducats for full passage now, rather than having to give him the shirt off my back too."

  Skiouros grinned.

  "I'm no shirker, captain. I'll work my passage to pay off the shortfall in my funding."

  "That you will, boy. That you will."

  "You haven't told me where you're bound yet other than 'west'?"

  "You haven't told us where you're going" Parmenio replied archly.

  Skiouros paused for a moment. His ultimate goal was still shrouded in as much secrecy as he could manage. In all his time on Crete, only in whispered conversations with the head of his brother had he even mentioned the Italian peninsula or Prince Cem Sultan. Still, how could the captain expect to give him passage without at least knowing his destination?

  "I'm bound for the Papal States. Rome, specifically."

  "Rome? Then you're in reasonable luck, lad. We're sailing for Napoli and on to Genoa - curse their black Sforza hearts and harbour taxes - and Marseilles. So, while we're not putting in for Rome, Napoli's only a little over thirty leagues from Rome and it's easy enough to cross the border from the Kingdom of Napoli to the Papal region. You could easily find passage from that port and for a good low price. Are you planning on returning to Crete?"

  Again the defensive walls came up in Skiouros' mind, shielding his plans and aspirations from the ears of others.

  "Why?" he asked guardedly.

  Parmenio narrowed his eyes again in suspicion. "Let me rephrase the question: am I taking just you, or you and all your worldly goods?"

  "Everything" Skiouros replied with a slow exhale. "I'm taking everything and leaving Candia behind. Not that everything is very much, in truth."

  "Good, since space will be at a premium on this trip and I cannot afford to pass up possible income in order to store your motley collection of clutter."

  Skiouros nodded. "It will only take me a few hours to organise everything. I'll have to withdraw the rest of my money from the Medici house in the city, pay off my landlord and then gather my things."

  "You've plenty of time" Nicolo interjected again from his list checking. "We don't sail until the morning tide two days from now."

  Skiouros smiled and reached out to clasp the captain's hand. "I'll return at dawn before you sail, then, captain."

  "I'm sure you will" Parmenio replied, sharing a look with Nicolo.

  With a last look at the two men, Skiouros strode off down the boarding plank and to the jetty, turning and making his way back into town. 'A few hours' had been something of an exaggeration. Skiouros was well aware of the pitiful ties and possessions he could call his own and it would take no time at all to clear up matters in the city and prepare to sail.

  He tried to stifle his irritation as he reached the end of the jetty and spotted the gaunt, dusty black figure of the old Romani beggar man standing with a cup held out for coins, leaning on an old cracked barrel and entreating passers-by to save him from abject poverty with the transfer of just a simple copper coin. The beggar gave Skiouros a look that was altogether too penetrative and knowing for the young Greek's liking and he repaid it with a scowl before scurrying past the man and off across the dock, past the sailors, the merchants, the dockers and teamsters and the endless pack animals and carts of goods, towards the Via Porta.

  He had plenty of time, of course. By his estimate, within two hours he could be back at the Isabella's boarding plank with everything he possessed crammed together in a sack, waiting to sail. But if the events in Istanbul that had driven Skiouros and his disembodied sibling to Crete in the first place had taught him anything it was that to be unprepared was to risk utter failure. He would never be caught out again without prior planning. The ship sailed the day after tomorrow, but he would have everything prepared and stowed tomorrow and his room paid up until that final morning in advance, so that all he had to do was stroll down to the jetty and board.

  He eyed the taverns up and down the wide street with some wistfulness. Once he passed up that boarding ramp in a day and a half's time, he knew he'd seen the last of such relaxed social emporia for the duration of the voyage: at least a fortnight. Two weeks of living off whatever tight rations Nicolo had requisitioned and drinking only the cheap, watered muck generally kept on board ship. At least, unlike the trip from Istanbul, he would not have to feign illness this time and could actually enjoy the journey.

  Besides, he reminded himself as he dragged his eyes from the tavern fronts and set his gaze determinedly on the street ahead, his meagre remaining funds would hardly facilitate an afternoon of drinking.

  That thought settled his first port of call. Striding away up the street, he turned right onto another wide boulevard that still displayed the remnants of the once crucial Byzantine walls - a strange echoing ghostly reminder of Skiouros' homeland. Past one of the crumbling towers with its all-so-familiar stone and brick and tile construction, he approached the ornate, arcaded and balustraded white marble façade of the Medici house, the graceful carved architecture and leaded windows almost glowing in the late afternoon sun. The door stood open. The Medici were always willing to receive prospective clients.

  He had been led to believe that in their native peninsula the banking houses of the powerful Medici family seethed with activity like the great spice markets of Istanbul. The house in Candia was considerably quieter. Skiouros had never seen more than one or two other clients at a time and despite its size and grandeur, the bank was staffed by only a half dozen personnel.

  The large hall that occupied most of the ground floor was dominated by a central desk that ran in a square with a solid oak frontage which stated quite clearly: clients outside, staff within. Inside that defensive square of desk stood cupboards and chests of drawers, numerous sets of scales of different sizes, baskets of empty money bags, inkpots and quills and all the paraphernalia of the banking world. The banker himself - along with his assistant - perused a heavy book, while a clerk scribbled indecipherable marks in a ledger.

  Off to the left stood the doors to the three consulting rooms where clients could speak to their banker in secluded privacy, while to the right was the ornate curving, graceful staircase that led to the upper floor where the real work of the banking house went on.

  Where the money was kept.

  Giovanni Bagnara affixed his most welcoming smile as he realised someone had strode into the building, their soft footsteps clicking on the marble. The warm - if fake - smile quickly slid away to be replaced by a resigned frown as he realised which particular client this was.

  In the grand style of bankers everywhere, Bagnara was the soul of grace and attention for a new client - or a rich one - and had been at Skiouros' beck and call in the early months on the island. But as time went on and it became painfully obvious to the Medici official that there would be no fresh injection of coin into the yo
ung Greek's account and that he was simply winding down towards poverty, Bagnara had made consistently less effort, saving his most genuine smiles and his greatest assistance for those whose account had a future.

  "Master Skiouros Nikopoulos. How can I be of assistance?"

  Skiouros felt a flare of minor annoyance at the endless categorization and bureaucracy that seemed to go hand in glove with banking. Bagnara had been flummoxed when presented with an account in the name 'Skiouros' or even 'Son of Nikos'. In his world, such nomenclature simply did not exist, and he had worked hard with his clerk to contort the appellation into a very Italian 'fore-name, last-name' format that fitted his records better.

  "I fear it's time to close my account, Giovanni."

  Bagnara threw him a look of deepest sympathy and regret that had taken only a fraction of a second to rivet to his emotion-free face.

  "We shall be sorry to lose your business, master Nikopoulos." His eyes suggested otherwise, despite the smile. Skiouros resisted the urge to point out that, regardless of the fact that his account had done nothing but decline, the Medici had made a tidy sum from managing that slide into poverty, and they really had nothing to complain about.

  "And I shall be sorry to leave, but I am bound for distant climes. May I enquire as to the final balance of my account?"

  He braced himself. His leather folder contained last month's balance and he had a reasonable mental note of his spending since then, but one should always be prepared for the news to be worse that one expects - since it almost always is - and the Medici had yet to extract their fees for the final month and the inevitable costs of account closure.

  Bagnara crooked a finger to the clerk, who had already - with typical efficiency - replaced his quill, closed his ledger and opened another from some hidden place beneath the desk. Wordlessly, he dropped the ribbon down to mark the page and passed the open book to Bagnara. The banker frowned at the pages and then dropped the book to the desk, turning it to face Skiouros.

  "Twenty one ducats plus two lira and sundry copper."

  Skiouros tried not to show his disappointment. Lower than he expected. As his eyes ran down the figures, he felt his spirits sink once more as he noted that the last mark was almost a week earlier, meaning that the final deductions had yet to be taken.

  "After the closure and final monthly fees…" Bagnara muttered, "Bernardo?"

  The clerk leaned across and peered at the figures, running calculations in his head before adding a final mark to the ledger and scribbling 'Chiusura' beside it - a word unfamiliar to Skiouros, yet clearly indicative of the account being closed.

  "Eighteen ducats and three lira" Skiouros read with a deflated sigh. And he had yet to pay off his final week's lodgings, too. When he reached the Italian peninsula, he was going to be very hungry. He would probably be walking from Napoli to Rome, as well.

  He ran through his mind a variety of wheedling phrases he might be able to use on Parmenio to lower the fare of his passage as he finalised the account closure with the banker and retrieved his pitiful wealth, before strolling out of the cool shade of the building and into the warm sunlight of the city.

  Before returning to his lodgings and suffering the frustration of watching a few more coins evaporate from his purse, he had one more important stop to make.

  Less than ten minutes later, he pushed open the door to the church of Saint Titus, making his way through the narthex and into the side chapel - the parekklesion - where the heads of the saints, along with numerous other sacred bones and artefacts, rested in glory, surrounded by gold and mosaics that told tales of the Bible - the good, expansive Orthodox bible, rather than the constrained, scant pickings of the Roman one.

  The church of Saint Titus was something of an oddity, though it probably bothered Skiouros less than it did the locals. Created as a good Orthodox church under Byzantine rule, it now housed a Catholic archbishop of the Roman Pope, appointed with the blessing of the Venetian authorities. Its layout and decoration was so achingly familiar to a man of Constantinople, and yet everything was curiously different, as though the whole church had shifted a little to the left of the real world. Moreover, while the clergy of the church were staunchly Catholic, there were small pockets of Orthodox priests who had fled the strictures of Ottoman Istanbul and sought refuge with their distant cousins in a land that was familiar to them in many ways.

  Indeed, Orthodox churches and monasteries still outnumbered their Popish counterparts in Crete, despite the Catholic authorities. A thousand years of Orthodoxy among the population was not something that could easily be pushed aside.

  Even now, while young novices and monks rushed about with their strangely-shaven tonsured heads, preparing for the great Ascension festival, priests tending to their flock in the naos of the church, a small group of exiled Orthodox priests in their black robes and cylindrical skouphia hats stood in a cluster in the parekklesion, paying their respects to the relics that sat behind an impenetrable steel cage, gilded and decorated with silver, several of which they themselves had brought to safety here.

  Skiouros moved past them with a deferential nod, trying not to catch their eyes directly as he walked. It was extremely unlikely that any of them would remember him as the stowaway monk who had accompanied them here a year and a half ago, but if Skiouros had learned anything in his thieving youth it was that a careful man lived longer than an impetuous one.

  Slowly, he approached the wooden pews at the fore of the chapel, brought at great expense and no small difficulty all the way from some important church or other in Venezia and, selecting the one directly in front of the reliquary of Saint Theodoros, he leaned forwards as if in prayer.

  "The time has come, Lykaion."

  He waited for the inevitable reply. The church was in far more of a commotion than usual, the voices of priests trying to organise one of the biggest feast day festivals of the year intruding into every corner of the building and of the soul. And yet, despite the hubbub, he could just hear his brother's voice, reed-thin and distant as though the passing months were taking him ever-further away into nothingness. He listened and pursed his lips before answering.

  "You know as well as I that I have to do it. Would you turn me aside from the path now?"

  He paused.

  "No. I thought not. It is no act of brutality or sin in the eyes of God. It is a cleansing. The healing of a sickness. It is the excising of a boil upon the Earth."

  Skiouros sighed. "I never thought, though, that it would be such a wrench leaving this place. Whether that is because of you or because of the different life Crete offers, I cannot say. But I do know that a piece of me will be torn out and kept by this island when I sail."

  He realised that his voice must have risen imperceptibly, as the small party of monks had hushed their own conversation and were looking in his direction. He shuffled to face slightly further away from them and loudly muttered something in Italian about needing God's guidance - an almost-replica of something he often heard other worshippers mumble.

  Once the monks had lost interest, he returned his attention to the reliquary and bridled at Lykaion's voice echoing hollow in his head.

  "It's no good being angry with me, brother. We agreed on this course of action a long time ago. I cannot back down now until I have completed the task, and I will likely never be more ready than I am now."

  His brow creased as he listened to the silent reply.

  "Well be that as it may," he grumbled, "I have not the time, nor the finances to become any more prepared. I shall just have to rely on the skills I have always had and upon what I have learned in this place. And if I survive this, and if I make it out, I will return to this place, Lykaion, and we will leave Crete and go home."

  The disembodied voice sounded somehow snappy and disbelieving in its reply.

  "Well whether this place could be my home or not, it will never be yours, will it? No. If we are both to be home, it must be where we started this: back in Constantinople. And when
I return we will go there."

  He sighed and leaned back in the pew as though recovering from a soulsick prayer.

  "All I ask is that you think on me and pray for me - if you can do that wherever you are. I go now to gather my things and prepare for the journey. I'll not be back until the deed is done. Wish me good fortune, brother."

  Standing slowly, he turned and made his way across the parekklesion and out through the narthex into the bright sunlight once more.

  A day and a half.

  The Isabella sat heavy in the water, laden more than usual with the supplies and cargo for the journey. The water lapped and splashed around the thick hull noticeably above the load line set by the Venetian port official, as the timbers and ropes groaned like the spectres of ancient ships haunting the jetty.

  The moon shone silver and clear in a sky of deep indigo, creating a glittering carpet across the undulating surface of the water in the harbour. All activity had died away and the only sounds to pervade the night were the noises of the men on board the ships, still awake late into the night, sentries against cargo theft or unexpected trouble. Even the most outlandish carousing sailors were now either safely abed below or draped across one of the ornamental fountains in the streets of the city.

  Unnoticed by all, a dark shape slid between two large piles of abandoned crates whose contents had long been emptied and stored away in the Isabella's hold or that of the Neapolitan cog at the far side of the jetty.

  The sole watchman on board the Isabella strode towards the stern, lurching and flatulating as he moved, before unlacing his codpiece and urinating into the sea with a relieved sigh.

  The figure on the jetty slipped with the grace of a dancer and the silence of a ghost between the empty crates and the freshly-tarred hull of the Venetian caravel. A momentary glance would reveal only a figure clad in black, with a voluminous robe that fluttered about the legs as he moved, other details indeterminable.