A Place Called Armageddon (16 page)

‘Mama!’

The cry startled her, so lost had she been. Yet it was not a surprise. Since she’d returned to the city three weeks before, her daughter had not left her, was always touching her. ‘What is it, lamb?’ Sofia bent and stroked the five-year-old’s soft cheek.

‘You said you would tell me a story, Mama.’ The girl thrust out her lower lip, reminding Sofia instantly of Theon. Minerva took after him in many ways: in her strong will and calmly voiced demands. While Thakos, lost in books in another part of the house, was more like her. Tall for his age. Quick to laugh or cry.

‘A story?’ Sofia knelt, took her daughter in her arms. ‘What kind of story?’

‘A lovely one,’ Minerva said simply, snuggling in.

Lovely? Sofia glanced up at the window. There was a story out there, standing in the rain and the ruin, but it was not lovely and it did not have an ending, which her daughter would not like. She’d thought once that it had a tragic one, fitting the plays of gods and heroes enacted in the Hippodrome on feast days. Now she realised that she did not know the ending, that what had gone before was only a break in the acts. And she knew, strongly, certainly, that she needed to know, and know now.

She hugged her daughter, lifted her as she stood, kissed her. ‘I have to go out, my cherub. Athene will tell you a story.’

The child squirmed. ‘Athene’s stories are terrible. And her voice is like a crow’s.’ She snuggled in closer. ‘I will come with you.’

‘No.’ Sofia set the girl on her feet, extricating her limbs. ‘I have to …’ She glanced at the window. There seemed to be a lightening out there. The hammering of rain on the tiled roof was slackening. ‘The storm is passing. The market will be opening. I need to buy provisions.’

It was not entirely a lie. It gave her an excuse to go out anyway. Athene could be trusted with the cooking of food but not its purchase; she would always be cheated, and they could not afford that now. She would go to the market. But there was somewhere she needed to go first. A place she loved more than any other on God’s earth.

St Maria of the Mongols. The saint for whom it was named was a Byzantine princess, sent to marry a barbarian centuries before. She had returned to found the chapel and Sofia had loved her story and the place since she was her daughter’s age. Now she could not remember a time when she needed the consolation she found there more.

It was not far. She would go by narrow streets that she knew well. Streets that had plenty of shadows to step into and watch a shrouded man pass by.

*

Fool!

So. Another title earned. As if ‘Rhinometus’ and ‘mercenary’ were not disparagement enough. Only a fool would have stayed there staring up, hour on hour, under a chilling rain. Anyone else would have done what Gregoras should have done the hour Giustiniani told him, three weeks after they’d landed, that he still could not find him his gold: head to the docks and take a ship leaving … for anywhere else.

But his foolishness stretched back long before this cold night. Why? Why, in all the scenes he had played out in his head, had he never thought of this? What had he expected Sofia to do, once news of his disgrace reached Constantinople? Take holy vows? Live alone and only for his memory? He had forced himself not to think of her. In the main, lost in war and wine, he had succeeded – at least when awake. But what he had not expected her to do – earning him his new title – was to marry his brother.

When he’d slunk through alleys in the twilight to look at the home he’d grown up in … there she was. Worse, with children too, returning with a boy and a little girl. But worst, far the worst was when his brother opened the door … and pulled her sharply to him.

Theon. If the first sight of her had brought desolation, surges of longing and a jabbing loss that had him bent and clutching his stomach, the sight of his brother had brought something clearer, single, certain.

Hate.

Once it had been little more than distaste, for a twin who was nothing like him – cool to his heat, intellect to his emotion. Their rivalry had been delineated early, ground chosen, ceded: Gregoras would not challenge him in the libraries; Theon would not attempt to rival him in the open air. It was a kind of grudging truce, had worked, after the first excitements of childhood had passed. They ignored each other, made their different ways. But what had happened at the Hexamilion, and after, destroyed all neutrality. Gregoras had begun to loathe his own memory, for the way it would throw up his brother’s face before him – like his, not his, unlike especially in this regard: Theon’s was not disfigured. Elder by a moment, he had not been savaged, marked with disgrace. Still, for the time they were apart, Gregoras could imagine him alone and mostly leave him there. Until …

Until he saw Theon’s hands on Sofia, pulling her to him. Not as a lover, though she must have been; the brats attested to that. As a possession. And suddenly, savagely, he knew: Theon possessed the only person Gregoras had ever loved. There had never been a truce, there had only been a biding. And seeing the victory, knowing his defeat, his hatred, like a newly forged blade, almost had him running across the road, dagger in hand, to slaughter them both before their children.

Yet he had not. Nor could he leave, despite a night of rain and cold and dawn’s light bringing the peril of discovery. Could only stand there, staring up. And now, when she emerged and walked off, an hour after his brother, alone for the first time, all he could do was follow.

For a fool could not help himself.

And yet … to simply watch her walk! In the time of youth, he had often followed her unnoted, delighting in her sway, the voluptuousness of her gait that was such a contrast to the stiff and proper manners she displayed when he visited her in her father’s house. And in following now, he remembered the last time he’d done so. A different kind of day, sun making warm the new armour he wore so proudly. It was the day before he departed for his first campaign. While she … she had managed to lose her maid within the church she loved, abandoning her watchdog to her devotions. She had burst from the chapel, surprising him waiting outside, then had led him running to a slab of rock on the shore of the Golden Horn. They had spent the day there, dipping toes in the water, telling stories, laughing. And when the sun sank and darkness shrouded them from any eyes, he had kissed her for the first time, a youth’s fumble that became, under her command, something smooth, timeless. Devastating.

Gregoras shook himself. Memory was making him careless. A crossroads lay ahead, and the right fork would take him back to the only place he was truly safe in Constantinople – the barracks of the Genoese mercenaries. His maiming and exile had come with a final penalty: instant death if he should ever be caught within its walls again.

Yet now … now, at the crossroads, Sofia went straight ahead. If he’d been oblivious before, focusing outward on her walk and inward on his memories, he now realised where she was going. To that same church, the one she loved, St Maria of the Mongols. And when it was his turn to stand where four ways met, he did not hesitate. He followed, not far.

There was a small archway in the church’s red surrounding wall. As he passed through it, he saw her cloaked shape enter at the chapel door. The courtyard was ten paces across. He crossed them, and the atrium beyond.

The church was as he remembered it. Small, more a square than a rectangle, its whitewashed walls and three ribbed-vault ceilings a simple backdrop to the splendour of the oaken altar screen, carved with biblical scenes, and the tall ikons set against it, their exquisitely painted faces gilded with real silver crowns and vestments. One, St Demetrios, had thrilled him as a boy – a soldier-martyr, clutching a large bejewelled sword. He’d seen him as a chivalrous knight; and one day, seeking a boon of love, he’d thrown a scroll of paper with his name conjoined with Sofia’s into the narrow gap between ikon and screen.

A service of communion was in progress. To the chant of male voices, the faithful approached, knelt, received the host and the wine the priest brought down from the altar only he could see. The small space was crowded and he did not think she would recognise him, so changed was he from the city’s warrior who’d last seen her here seven years before. He would not partake of the sacred mystery, had not since the last – the only – battle he’d fought for that city, the day of his disgrace. But he crossed himself by reflex, bent his head, lulled by harmonies in half-forgotten prayers.

Perhaps it was the exhaustion of his long vigil beneath her window. But when his head jerked up, the crowd was dispersing and she was gone.

He pushed through dawdlers at the door, ran to the archway, through it into the square. A glimpse of green turning a corner, not the way they had come, the way they’d gone that day, towards the Golden Horn. He ran. Another turn, another … and he had lost her! He ran to one more crossroads, saw nothing but streets of leaning, ruined houses every way, doorways boarded beside the crumbled walls. Cursing, he took the one that led straight on, the one they’d taken all those years before. He was three paces along it, passing the first portico, when a voice came from the shadows.

‘Gregoras.’

He whirled. Thoughts cascaded. Discovery, the penalty of revelation, had his hand upon his dagger and his thoughts on running. But he’d been lost in memory and it was memory’s voice that softly spoke his name.

‘Sofia.’

Other voices from behind them. A hand reached out and drew him into the darkness.

Time dissolved. He was a youth again, pressed against his greatest desire. Yet he was himself too and the one he looked at was not a girl but a woman with lines of care carved around her eyes. ‘Sofia, I …’

‘Shh.’

A finger on his lips as voices grew louder. Two men, coming down the alley. One yelped as he saw them. ‘What make you there?’

Death if he was unmasked. Gregoras was about to turn, brazen it out, prepare to fight or flee. But Sofia held him fast, leaned over his shoulder, spoke. ‘A husband off to sea. Give us some peace, will ya?’

She used an accent from the harbour, the fishing fleets. The two men laughed, one bowed and they moved on, ribald suggestions echoing down the cobbles till a corner cut them off. ‘Gregoras,’ she said again, differently, wonder in her voice. ‘How …?’

He stepped away, remembering – this alley was a shortcut between squares. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Come.’

She did not hesitate, came out of the doorway. He led her now, down the steeply descending alley, through the square, into a lane that twisted down to the water’s edge. A house had collapsed, jagged timbers in the path, and he stopped to take her hand and help her over them. A patch of open ground crossed and he found the gap still there that he had found before and squeezed between still standing walls. A tower stood sentinel on the shoreline but no one was in it, and bolts on the sally port to its side slid back easily despite their rust. He led her onto the slab of rock, into sunshine spilling through cloud rents.

She looked around them. ‘But this is …’

‘Yes. I could not think of anywhere else.’ He pointed past her. ‘If you would rather …’

‘No.’ She blurted it, stopping his step towards the doorway. She shivered. ‘It is colder here than … than before.’

He reached up to his neck, unclasped his cloak. ‘Here,’ he said, and swept it around her shoulders.

‘Thank you.’

Silence, and stares. There was so much to say and neither of them could think of one thing. Then they spoke together.

‘I thought you were—’

‘You have not changed—’

Falling silent again. When she saw him breathe in, she spoke. ‘I thought – we all thought – you were dead.’

‘We?’

The word carried a weight. She did not pick it up. ‘Your mother. And I. She is … She …’

‘I know. I did not until I returned.’ He looked away, across the open water to where the Genoese colony of Galata rose to its highest point, the Tower of Christ, insubstantial in the misting rain. ‘Did she die well?’

‘I … I think so. She became a nun, died in a convent. In her sleep, I heard.’

‘A nun?’ It was the usual way for widows, to retire to a life of prayer and contemplation. But his mother had always had a raucous laugh. He could not imagine it contained in a cell. ‘And did she take the vows after the rumour of my death? Or on the revelation of my treason.’

Sofia flinched at his tone. ‘She did not believe … neither of us did. And when Theon returned and said there was doubt—’

‘Theon!’ He shouted the name, interrupting her. ‘My loving brother. My … tardy brother.’ That hatred he’d felt in the doorway surged again and he had to turn his masked face away from her, feeling the absence of his own nose as clearly as he saw hers.

She stepped to him, placed a hand on his arm. ‘No one who knew you believed that the Turkish gold found in your bags was payment for treason.’

He turned to her, spitting words. ‘Well, the soldiers who found it believed it! Wanted to believe it was treason that had caused the Hexamilion, that six-mile unbreachable wall, to crumble in six days. Not Turkish guns. Not someone’s carelessness with a sally port. So the coins I’d pillaged from the enemy camp in our one counterattack confirmed their belief – and the battlefield court passed its sentence. While my brother … my loving brother came just in time to stop them acting beyond the first half of the sentence.’ He gave a wild laugh. ‘Oh, we both know his persuasive ways, do we not? He pleaded for my life and won it. Commuted my sentence. Sent me out into the world without a name. Without a …’

He coughed, broke off. For a moment he was not there, but back in the place and the time he’d see now only when he slept. Felt again his helmet ripped away, the arms that pinioned him, the hands that twisted his face up to meet the butcher bending down. No dark oblivion to fall into, then or since. White agony only that he sometimes still felt, even though the place for agony was gone. As if the saw-toothed blade never stopped grinding down, half drowning him in his own blood, shredding the cartilage, severing his nose.