by Yury Nikitin
Chapter 23
Thomas barred the door, dragged the heavy chest out with a thunder, sneezing of dust, propped up the door with it, piled up the broken fragments of the table, heavy banks and chairs. Oleg laid the coiled rope on the broad windowsill next to him. He smelled the dirty air below, heard a clatter of hooves dying away. Across the wide street, there was a tall, gloomy building with lights in three of its guarded windows.
“Sir wonderer!” Judging by the knight’s face, as grey as ashes, he grasped where his strange friend was going to shoot the bolt. His weakened fingers unclenched, the sword all but slipped out of his iron hand.
Oleg drew the bowstring with force, aimed. His face went crimson, his teeth flashed in a grimace of torment. Thomas heard a ringing click against the leather glove; the wonderer had put it on with forethought. The heavy bolt vanished, the rope started to uncoil rapidly.
In the perfect silence, both heard the barely audible, distinct ringing sound of broken glass. At once, the wonderer seized the end of the rope and pulled. There was a loud knock on the door, an impatient hoarse shout. “Hey, Fish! Antonio, Opudalo!”
Thomas took his sword with both hands, stood near the door. The wonderer stretched the rope, tied its end quickly to the hook that fastened the shutters to the windowsill. They heard an impatient bang on the door. The bar cracked, the heads of thick nails moved out of their sockets.
Oleg jumped off the windowsill, put on his wide baldric with huge sword hastily, snatched the bag. “Sir Thomas! You first!”
Thomas was squatting at the side of the door, his legs half-bent as if riding, his sword raised overhead. The knight’s eyes were fixed on the bending board of the door, pieces of dry paint and small splinters flying sideways from it. In the corridor, there were harsh voices, the clang of steel, the trample of heeled boots.
“Sir Thomas,” Oleg called again in an angry whisper, “even the Holy Virgin would have commanded retreat. Why the hell would she need a dead knight? She doesn’t know what to make of him live! Your life’s worth less than a damned thing, I agree, but who will take your cup to Britain then? I have no need of it. And who will marry Krizhina?”
Thomas shifted his perplexed gaze between the wonderer and the door shaking and bending like a sail. Oleg seized him by the elbow, dragged him to the window. Thomas looked out and recoiled, as though kicked by a horse between his eyes. The night was pitch-dark, the lit end of the rope – so thin! – disappeared into the creepy dark only seven feet below. A fathomless pit! Several floors to fall down to the ground, and no soft grass below, only the street paved tightly with stone slabs, a fool he was to admire it the day before…
Oleg looked back angrily, as he heard the heavy pounding. With a ringing sound, the bar flew out of its hinges, crashed down in the middle of the room. Oleg tore his belt off, made Thomas climb on the windowsill, fastened the belt quickly on both him and the rope. “Quick!” he hissed. “Or we’ll die, like Sveys without butter…”
Thomas peered into the scary darkness with fear. He had stood on the brink of abyss before: on the Tower of David, the tall wall of Jerusalem, but that was in the fury of a storm, the fever of battle… and on a sunny day, after all! His muscles began to turn water, his knees bent, unable to bear the weight of his armor.
Oleg hurried him, pushed on his back. “Quick! Move it! They’re breaking in!”
“Sir wonderer… And you?”
“I’ll follow!”
Thomas hurried to climb down from the windowsill, feeling his courage and manly strength come back to him. “Sir wonderer, I am insulted! The duty of any warrior, a knight in particular, is to protect civilian people. And you are a priest, though I hate your faith!”
The door was shaking. A crack emerged in it, wide enough to drive a finger through, but the heavy chest, with its edge stuck in the hollow between the floor-boards, prevented it from flying open. Someone squeezed his fingers through the crack, fumbled around in search of the obstacle to remove it. Oleg snarled, grabbed Thomas with both arms.
“Sir wonderer,” the knight protested in great indignation, “I can’t leave you!”
With an angry groan, Oleg hurled him out through the window. Terrified, Thomas felt himself falling into the black abyss. He clutched convulsively at the rope, felt a forceful jerk at his iron collar behind; the wonderer kept him from coming down upon the thin rope with all his weight at once….
The last thing Thomas heard was the crack of boards followed by triumphant screams of the legionaries. He slid on, suspended by his belt to the fine thread. It quivered, hardly able to bear his weight. His thick gauntleted fingers slid, as though soaped, on the smooth rope, which rang like a tightly drawn crossbow string. Thomas felt sick as he imagined the thread bursting with a crack and him, a noble crusader knight in his steel, collapsing from the height of the fifth floor on to the stone slabs, crunching against them like a lobster, his brain splashing around…
In terror, he took a firmer grip and dragged himself on into the darkness, along the invisible salutary thread; his eyes burnt with sticky, disgustingly bitter sweat. Then he was thunderstruck by a dreadful thought: was he moving in the right direction? The turns and tugs before… He had to hurry, the rope was too thin to endure two men. Sir wonderer was beating off the legionaries who broke into the room! He might already be wounded or killed. It’s all my fault!
He howled with the terror and impotence of a noble Angle who felt lost in the night over a street in Constantinople. Almost a barbarian city as compared to Rome. He bowed his head, trying to see the wall of the house, but his metal collar, made to protect the neck from swords, impeded him. He heard a patter of high heels far below, a playful woman’s giggle answered by the deep-voiced laughter of a well-fed Romay. Thomas swung over them, his head gurgling, as well as his stomach. He imagined himself falling down before those strolling clods and felt so sick he couldn’t help vomiting. Below, there were still giggles, jokes, the clatter of high heels. With the last of his strength, Thomas dragged himself along the rope. Even if the direction was wrong, he would help valiant sir wonderer in his last mortal battle, instead of hanging on that damned rope like a caterpillar in a spider’s web!
His body struck against a hard surface. He felt it, found iron rods, wriggled to grip the welcoming metal, which the Romays used to guard their windows, with both hands. His foot found a crack between the stone blocks that formed the house. His heart beat fast, thumping not on his ribs but on his iron armor.
On the other side of the metal rods, there was the dark shape of a thick iron bolt pressed tightly against them. The stretched rope was tied to it! Thomas sobbed, leaving his terror behind, muttered a slack curse for the wonderer who told him nothing, gave no warning, so he was pursued all the way by the vision of the arrowhead coming out of the wall and him, Thomas Malton of Gisland, falling like a toad, with his limbs spread wide apart, in the middle of the street… Foolishly, he thought the bolt should have been stuck into the wall, and he could not imagine the force needed to drive it so that it could hold a big man in full knightly armor!
Suddenly, the rope started to shake violently. The figure of the wonderer emerged from the darkness, running on the tightly stretched rope, as if it were a log, his outstretched arms rocking from side to side, the two-handed sword and stuffed bag in hands.
He took a running jump on the grating, clung to it for a moment, the sword flashed and hid behind his back, the bag shifted onto his shoulders. Thomas wanted to undo the belt that fastened him to the rope but he dared not release the rods. He tried to drive away the very thought of himself, an expert in jousting, hanging on the wall on the fifth floor, like a March cat, above the stone-paved street.
A knife flashed in the wonderer’s hand, the rope burst under the blade, fell into the dark. Across the street, there was a shriek, then a heavy stroke on stone, as if a sack of wet clay dropped on the pavement.
“What now?” Thomas asked in a scared whisper. “Gnaw at the grating?”
“W
hat are we to do in a woman’s bedroom?” Oleg grimaced. “If it was the procurator’s daughter… but it’s his granny! We’d be better to get into the window below.”
“The procurator’s daughter is there?”
“Shame on you, Sir Thomas! Krizhina’s waiting for you. Poor girl! If only she knew what you were dreaming of…”
He vanished in the dark. Thomas heard a screech below, as if rust was scratched away, then an irritated whisper. “Sir Thomas, wake up. Stop dreaming of the procurator’s daughter!”
Thomas hung on the tips of his fingers and toes, playing the spider. He was hot in his armor, like in Hell’s stove, his limbs trembling, numb fingers about to unclench. Suddenly a hooked paw emerged from the darkness below, seized him by the leg. He all but fell off in panic, but managed to slide down, with support from below.
The wonderer was on the windowsill. He got a better grip on the knight’s belt and dragged him, with a screech of iron on iron, through the ruined grating; only the topmost and the lowest of its horizontal rods were undamaged, while all the vertical ones had either vanished or got terribly bent sideways.
They collapsed into the dark room and stiffened. The house was silent, save for muffled bangs on a copper cauldron far below, and a dog barking – an old and lazy one, judging by the sound.
“The hirelings are now running upstairs,” Thomas supposed. With effort, he got up to his shaking feet, brought his trembling hands to his face. He felt cold and heavy in his stomach as if he’d swallowed a block of ice or a frozen sheatfish. Meanwhile, Oleg ran about the room, stepping as silently as a giant cat, touched the door, set it ajar to look out. A strip of crimson light fell in from the corridor. They smelt the smoke of a tar torch.
“They don’t hear,” Oleg said. “First they have to guess where we are. I’ve cut the rope! Its end reaches the ground. That’s what they see from the room – and think we’ve climbed down the rope. And silence below, no shouts or noise, means their sentries have missed us, or we bribed them. While they sort it out and whack the guilty ones, we can take a breath and get away.”
“Sir wonderer, I’d rather get away without taking a breath!”
“Is something up?” Oleg asked.
“Yes. When you cut the rope, someone was climbing it!”
Oleg shook his head in astonishment. “Oh, brave they are… You, sir knight, are a different pair of shoes; a true hero. Another man like you can hardly be found in all Britain, and I can’t believe there are more of such heroes found two thousand miles away… Well, you’re right. We must get away.”
Thomas felt flattered, even his legs stopped trembling. Oleg opened the door wider, looked out and stepped there. The sack on his back made him the likeness of a giant turtle, and the sword hilt and the bow, sticking out on a level with his ears, changed that likeness into that of a scary creature of night.
Thomas slipped out after the wonderer, glancing at him with shame. He took the larger part of our common load again.
They walked along the broad corridor lit by oil lamps in copper bowls on the walls, which were decorated with colored panels, its floor of expensive marble with intricate patterns. On both sides, there were massive doors of valuable sorts of wood, with decorative carving, ornate copper handles, gleaming nails with broad patterned heads. Behind one of them, they heard laughter, merry voices of women. Oleg stopped there and listened – a hermit indeed! – while Thomas all but died of anxiety, glancing back at the long empty corridor, where, despite the late night, a guard, a servant, or a late guest could show up at any moment…
The stairs were at the very end. Thomas ran up to them after the wonderer, trying to be silent the same, but his iron feet made a terrible thunder that caused the whole great bulk of the stone house to shake, the lamps to twinkle with fear, the splendid portraits of noble ancestors to jump and drop pieces of paint.
Thundering like an avalanche coming from the peak of Himalayas, Thomas darted after the wonderer to the floor below. They hid in a draped niche to let some dark figures pass by. It was hot and stuffy there, fine dust filled their nostrils. Thomas tried to hold his nose, but the gauntlet banged, very loud in that deathly silence, on his lowered visor. Thomas froze, not daring to move, heard the steps stop near him. His nose was itching unbearably, and he sneezed with all his might, thinking of nothing in the world but the excruciating itch. I just couldn’t help it.
In the faint light that penetrated through the heavy curtain, he saw the flash of sword nearby, heard the wonderer’s constrained breath. The steps on the other side came close. “Ektius, did you hear it?” a soft voice said in astonishment.
“I’m damned if I didn’t!” a different voice replied. It seemed to belong to an older man. “I told you! And you, with your modern ideas… The other world does exist, and our old house is haunted. Though only at night.”
“Who can it be? Do you have any ideas?”
“A great-grandfather of our master, judging by his beastly bellow. And also a clank of iron, did you hear? He was the curator of Southern moorings and ended his life in chains, beheaded for misappropriation of the duties paid. Or maybe his father who met the same end…”
Thomas slapped on his visor again, trying to hold his nose. The wonderer’s fingers removed the iron plate quickly, squeezed the bridge of his nose painfully. Surprised, Thomas felt that the unbearable itch stop abruptly, like a scream ceased by a sword blow.
“They live their own life there…” a thoughtful voice said on the other side of the curtain. “I think… no, it seems to me that ghosts are strolling about this empty house at night, just like you and me, and one asks another, ‘Do you think we should believe in those tales of live men?’”
Thomas felt his legs numb, his nose itching desperately again. The bitter sweat gnawed at his eyes, tickled his neck ruthlessly, ran down his back in hot, acrid streams, his feet bathed in the heat. Probably a strange puddle was forming around him. And the two insomniac philosophical fools would discuss its origin in a long and tedious way, based on the existence of the other world and the features of ghostly life.
“I think… no, it seems to me it’s definitely not our master’s grandfather,” the voice said thoughtfully. “He was hanged, I now remember that exactly! Hanged in accordance with his noble origin: on a silk rope! And this one, I think… no, it seems to me…”
Thomas was about to collapse; standing on one foot is very difficult, especially when you are choking with dust and gushing with sweat. He heard the wonderer sigh nearby, then felt a light push on his shoulder. Thomas took a deep breath and heard, “I think… no, it seems to me…”
The knight tore the curtain off in a jerk, saw two faces recoiling in fright. “What seems to you, fool?” he yelled fiercely. “A bum? If you thought rather than ‘it seemed to you’, you wouldn’t be such an ass!”
The wonderer stepped ahead. “Your Grace,” he told Thomas loudly, “who knew your great-grandson would degenerate into such an ass? I warned you to have less excesses…”
Thomas’s fist darted forward. The poor man flew silently across the corridor and slipped down the opposite wall. The wonderer waved his hand carelessly, the second philosopher gasped and sprawled, like a frog, in the middle of the corridor.
“Run!” Oleg whispered. They darted downstairs, thundering like a herd of shoed horses. Thomas gasped, gripped the walls at abrupt turns, his iron fingers left deep scratches. Oleg rushed like a huge bear, jumped over stairs, went running into the wall, wheeled round silently and dashed on.
It seemed to Thomas they had reached the cellars when Oleg stopped abruptly. “The last flight of stairs ahead,” he said softly. “But the entrance is closed… and guarded. By two.”
Thomas gasped for air, his mouth wide open. “We crush…” he said hoarsely. “Overrun! Only two?”
Oleg shook his head, looking sad and accusing. “Innocent people? In their own house?”
Thomas wiped sweat off his face with his iron palm, turned away, feeli
ng a bit ashamed. He breathed heavily, shot anxious glances around; at any moment, someone could come and see them in that open spot – in the middle of the stairs!
Oleg took a golden dinar out of a small pocket in his belt, swung his arm broadly. Thomas could not see the coin vanished in the dim light, but the far guards alerted, one took his axe and walked briskly along the wall, bending like a predator. He disappeared in the shadow. For a long time, nothing happened. Thomas got all fidgety when finally, there came the guard’s surprised voice. Another guard cried back, they exchanged few words. The second guard checked the door bars quickly, glanced out at the window to see whether some important guest was coming upstairs from the street, and hurried to his comrade, his drawn crossbow with him.
Oleg waited for the guard to disappear in the corridor shadow, then made a sign to Thomas. They darted quickly across the hall, Oleg removed the hooks and bars in a flash. When he flung the door open, there was an angry shout behind, a click of steel bowstring. Thomas recoiled instinctively, a short crossbow bolt went into the massive door near his head. He shook his fist, leaped out into the night street after Oleg.
Oleg dragged the knight quickly along the wall, hiding in the shadows. They turned round the corner, and that was when Thomas felt the cold air, the closeness of the sea, saw the stony space of broad, colossal streets ahead.
They heard a shout behind them, the bang of a door, a clang of steel. Oleg took an idle pace, swaying slightly, his belly thrust out. Thomas also tried to assume the carefree air of a reveler coming back home, though his heart still beat like a sheep’s tail and the smallest muscle under his knees was shaking nastily.
“Now where?” Thomas asked. “Our inn…”
“…said its last cuckoo,” Oleg replied. “Fortunately, we are no Saracens to travel with our harems. I’ve taken all our things. Do you have the cup?”
Thomas grabbed his bag in fright. His fingers felt the familiar prominence; it resembled a woman’s tight breast or her lusty hip curve. The cup replied with a muffled tinkle. Thomas hurried to take his iron fingers off it. “But Constantinople is big!”
“I know plenty of decent inns and hotels,” Oleg said comfortingly. He thought for a while then shook his head with regret. “Though decent ones do not fit… We’ll be exposed there.”
“Let’s go to the port,” Thomas offered.
“Sir Thomas, isn’t Krizhina waiting for you? And I’m too old for such things. We need something in the middle of decency and comfort. Such places can also be found in the city, strange as it may seem.”