The Tournament (25 page)

‘The bear is slow to anger but when angry, by virtue of its size and strength, it is a force to be reckoned with.’ Ivan grinned. ‘Much like the Duchy of Muscovy.’

The Sultan smiled indulgently, appreciating and allowing Ivan’s show of pride.

I was aware that Suleiman’s armies had had skirmishes with the Rus peoples to the north of his empire, but it was not an area that the Moslem sultan seemed interested in conquering. As Ivan had intimated, the population there was large. The Rus people were also notoriously tough folk, hardened by their bitter climate.

Crown Prince Selim, however, was not so indulgent. He said, ‘Your duchy still pays us tribute, little prince. Mark your words or my father may decide to send a governor there. When I am Sultan, I might just do that.’

Ivan’s face went red, but he bit his tongue.

The Sultan saved him. ‘Come now, Selim, the lad meant no offence. He was merely speaking out of pride, pride for his homeland and for this magnificent beast. Thank you for this gift, Prince Ivan. I shall treasure it.’

A short while later, the Sultan departed and with him the Crown Prince and most of his entourage. As he left, the Crown Prince smiled at Elsie and she returned his smile brightly; then he was gone. The remaining guests, perhaps twelve of us, were left to stroll through the wonderful menagerie at our leisure.

Elsie and I were peering into the monkey cage when Ivan came up beside me and said in English, ‘I have heard stories of your father, King Henry. He is a great man, a king who will be remembered as . . . I do not know the word . . .
grozny
.’

‘
Grozny
?’ I said.

‘It means, how do I say this, to inspire fear or awe in one’s enemies. Terrible—wait, no. No, that is wrong.
Formidable
.
Grozny
.’

My father certainly met those requirements, at least in my eyes.

Ivan went on: ‘By breaking from the Roman Church and taking its lands, your father announced to the world that he was a true king, one who has no master under the sky but himself. He put cannons on warships and made England a powerful seafaring nation. But most of all, he crushes anyone who opposes him. I am informed that over the course of his reign, he has executed over twenty thousand men.’

I had heard that the figure was almost three times that but I did not feel the need to correct Ivan.

Ivan said, ‘My nation is vast but it is largely populated by peasants. It is backward. If it were united under a strong king, then I believe it would be formidable, a bear among nations. I wish to modernise my lands, based on what your father has done in England. I must bend the Orthodox Church to my will, like your father did; I must build ports and a navy, like your father did; and I must act decisively and swiftly against any and all who oppose me, like your father has done.’

This talk of emulating my father made me uneasy. I would have wagered that Ivan did not know that as he had aged, my father had become increasingly erratic in his behaviour—erratic and paranoid—which in turn had made him even
more
brutal in his suppression of those who opposed him. This was, after all, a man whose capacity for brutality had included beheading two of his wives. And yet as a young man, my father had, by all accounts, been sweet and romantic, a poet, a composer, a dreamer. In those younger days, I was often told, he’d been dashingly handsome, clean-shaven and athletic. Now, as his mind grew paranoid and grotesque, his body followed: he was now hunched and paunchy, with a beard to hide the double chin that mocked his vanity.

‘He is indeed his own man,’ was all I could say.

I looked at Grand Prince Ivan—in his mid-teens, but a few years older than I—and I thought of the two versions of him that I had witnessed: the charming young man on display today and the angry-faced boy of a few days previously. He seemed a lot like my father: two persons trapped in the same body.

And then it occurred to me. My father, for all his marriages and all his power, was miserable. Miserable in a way that only a person with two conflicting selves could be: he wanted to be loved by all his subjects, yet when he was loved by them, he doubted their motives.

I did not wish such a fate on young Ivan—or on myself, for that matter, should I ever become queen—and I was about to say something to that effect when he went on.

‘Despite all his impressive achievements,’ Ivan said, ‘Your father might do well to adopt a technique of the Sultan’s. The Sultan employs a vast network of informants and spies in his city, a clandestine force that reports to him on the moods and actions of his people. I think when I am king I shall create such a force.’

I felt that it was time to leave. I nudged Elsie. ‘Thank you for the invitation today, Prince Ivan. I enjoyed seeing your bear. It is a most remarkable creature and you are a most intriguing young man.’

We started to leave.

‘Princess Elizabeth!’ Ivan hurried after us. ‘May I be so bold as to ask something of you?’

‘What?’

‘May I write to you? In England. After this tournament is over.’

I looked at him for a long moment. It couldn’t hurt and I imagined my teacher would certainly approve. ‘You may,’ I said, and then Elsie and I left the menagerie.

We returned to our rooms around lunchtime to find Mr Giles practising chess moves and Mr Ascham standing at the window, staring out over the Sea of Marmara, so consumed by his thoughts that he did not even notice our arrival.

‘Mr Ascham,’ said I, ‘You really must see the Sultan’s menagerie before you leave Constantinople. It is a truly exceptional collection of animals laid out in a most ingenious fashion.’

My teacher smiled tightly, but he did not answer me.

‘Whatever is the matter?’ I asked.

‘I went to see Maximilian of Austria in his rooms this morning,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘And I found him dead.’

MY TEACHER EXPLAINED
.

After breakfast, he had informed Latif that he desired to visit Maximilian of Austria in his rooms, to interrogate him about his multiple conversations with Brunello the chef: Mr Ascham was still very suspicious of the meal that had killed Cardinal Farnese and thus equally suspicious about anyone who had a connection with its preparation.

Like most of the other players, Maximilian had been quartered in a special pavilion of rooms that backed onto—but did not have access to—the Harem. With Latif at his side, my teacher knocked on the Austrian player’s door but received no reply.

He knocked louder. Still no reply.

Inquiries were made: Maximilian had not received breakfast in his rooms that morning. Nor had he been seen that morning by the guards stationed at the various palace gates. The night guard for the players’ pavilion was found and he reported that he had seen Maximilian return to his rooms very late last night, with a veiled girl in his company, presumably a prostitute. Having been beaten in the first round of the tournament, Maximilian of Vienna did not need to worry about retiring early any more.

But that was the last anyone had seen of Maximilian. He had returned to his rooms with the girl and neither of them had emerged.

A key to the pavilion was found and two guards were brought to act as witnesses. Then Latif unlocked the outer door to Maximilian’s rooms.

My teacher entered behind the eunuch and immediately beheld a grisly scene.

Maximilian lay spreadeagled on his bed, stark naked, his bloodshot eyes wide with apparent shock, his mouth open, his wholly black tongue visible for all to see, an opium pipe lying askew on the mattress beneath his outstretched open hand. There by his side in the bed, equally naked and equally still, was the virgin girl, Helena, who, two days earlier, Maximilian had presented to the Sultan as a gift from his master, Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria. She, too, had a blackened tongue and was also dead.

‘You, sir,’ I said, ‘are starting to look like a curse. Anyone to whom you desire to speak is suddenly found dead.’

‘It would seem so,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘And this one was a player in the tournament. It would seem no-one is safe in this palace.’

‘Were there any wounds on their bodies, as there were with the cardinal or the chef and his wife? Could you determine how they were killed?’

‘There was no evidence that they
were
killed, Bess,’ my teacher said. ‘The scene bore all the signs of a simple clandestine love affair: the player from Austria had fallen in love with the virgin “gift” he had brought to Constantinople for the Sultan. They frolicked in his bedchamber, yet from the way we found them—naked with blackened tongues—it was clear that their intimate activities were accompanied by opium use. And as far as I could tell, it was the opiates that killed them. Either they imbibed too much or perhaps the local variety of opiate was too powerful for their constitutions.

‘One of the guards went and fetched the sadrazam. He arrived soon after and just shook his head sadly when he saw the bodies. It was something he had seen before: foreigners overindulging in the potent local opiate.’

I said, ‘So you are saying that there have been two further deaths but they are unrelated to our investigation. An unhappy coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.’

‘So it would seem . . .’ my teacher said slowly.

‘You do not appear convinced.’

‘Because I am not. Because this is a coincidence that is explained
too
easily for my liking. I am starting to see a pattern. Cardinal Farnese’s death was dressed up as the work of a lunatic, because you can’t kill off a famous cardinal without an explanation. Brunello and his wife’s deaths were made to look like suicides. And now Maximilian. He was a well-known chess player, a participant in the tournament. If someone wanted him killed, they would need to dress up his death, too, and I think they did. Which was why, when the guard went to fetch the sadrazam, I examined Maximilian’s and the girl’s bodies, and I found something odd.’

‘What?’ My eyes widened.

‘They both had some subtle but distinct bruising around their nostrils and their cheeks. Here’—he pressed the fleshy part of my cheeks on either side of my mouth—‘and here’—he squeezed my nostrils shut.

‘What do you make of such injuries?’ I asked.

Mr Ascham paused, looked about himself as if to see if there was a listener in the room with us. ‘I do not think they accidentally overindulged in the use of an extra-potent local opiate. I think the opiate was forced on them. I think someone held them down, pinched their nostrils together and forced their mouths open by pressing their cheeks, and made them inhale the opiate in a quantity that killed them.’

I gasped. ‘And yet it would appear to be an accident. Well, to anyone but you.’

‘Yes,’ my teacher said. ‘My suspicions aroused, while we waited for the sadrazam, I examined Maximilian’s bedchamber. I noticed his trunk. It was filled with what one would expect: clothes, shoes, a chess set. But my attention was drawn to a pair of his shoes standing by the door. They were dress shoes, cut in the Austrian style, made of fine black leather with brass buckles.’

I started. ‘Wait. Did they have wooden soles and a nick?’

‘No. They had leather soles with only wooden heels. But the soles of these shoes did bear curious marks on them: dark spots of blood and other patches of wetness, and an odd grey powder. At some point, their wearer—Maximilian—had stepped on wet ground, for the fine grey powder had adhered to the moistened soles. I sniffed the powder: it smelled like charcoal, but infused with a curious salty, fishy odour.’

‘Salt and fish? Like in the kitchen perhaps?’ I said. ‘It would explain the spots of blood. Maximilian may have stepped on animal blood when he was in the kitchen.’

‘Perhaps . . .’ Mr Ascham said, but clearly he thought otherwise. ‘In any case, as I turned the shoe in my hand, something very odd happened: its wooden heel turned outward on a hinge, to reveal a secret compartment inside it.’

‘No . . . !’

‘And in that compartment, I found this.’

My teacher pulled a small folded note from his pocket and showed it to me. It was written in German. ‘At the time I found it, Latif was at the door speaking with the remaining guard, and I had my back turned to them, so I’m certain they didn’t see it. Here, your German is better than mine. Can you translate it for me?’

I did so. It read:

N – 16 K 20 G, 6 R
HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO SEE SOUTH SIDE YET.
HELENA REPORTS SULTAN HAPPY IN PUBLIC
BUT SULLEN AND MOROSE WHEN IN HAREM;
SUSPICIOUS OF OUTSIDERS. EAGER FOR
TOURNAMENT TO SUCCEED; DISTURBED BY
UNEXPECTED DEATH OF FARNESE.

I asked, ‘What do those letters and numbers mean?’

‘I do not know, but I think that Maximilian of Vienna was more than just a chess player,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘Likewise, the girl was more than just a virgin gift to the Sultan. I do not think they were having an affair; they were together for another reason. I suspect they were both spies for the Archduke of Austria.’

‘
Spies?
’ I gasped. ‘And their deaths?’

‘The fate of spies who are discovered. I believe that Archduke Ferdinand saw this tournament as a chance to slip a new spy, the girl, into the Sultan’s innermost circle, his retinue of concubines. Look at the note: Helena was reporting on the Sultan’s moods behind the closed doors of the Harem. I’m guessing that Maximilian was also a spy. Do you remember that Maximilian visited Brunello on four separate occasions? I think Maximilian saw Brunello as an excellent source of secondary information about the Sultan. Brunello cooked for and talked with many of the Sultan’s powerful guests—we ourselves accompanied Michelangelo and saw exactly that. Brunello would have been an excellent repository of various people’s opinions about the Sultan and his intentions in Europe. But Helena and Maximilian were discovered, so their deaths were posed as an opiate accident, so that whoever found them would not suspect anything nefarious.’