Terror of Constantinople Read online

  CONTENTS

  The Terror of Constantinople

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Epilogue

  The Terror of Constantinople

  Richard Blake

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  Copyright © Richard Blake 2009

  The right of Richard Blake to be identified as the Author

  of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

  without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

  in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and

  without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978 1 848 94828 0

  Book ISBN 978 0 340 95119 4

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To my dear wife Andrea and to our daughter Philippa, without whose patience this novel would never have been written

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The two quoted lines in Chapter 24 are from Antigone by Sophocles (Author’s translation)

  The two abusive epigrams in Chapter 31 are by the Author

  The quotation in Chapter 32 of the lines from Oedipus the King by Sophocles is from the translation by Francis Storr (1839–1919)

  The translation in Chapter 36 of the lines by Sappho is by the Author

  The quotation in Chapter 43 ascribed to Euripides is from A.E. Housman (1859–1936), Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

  The poem in Chapter 59 ascribed to Simonides is by A.E. Housman, More Poems, 1936, XXXVI

  PROLOGUE

  Monday, 16 April 686

  ‘Why are you crying, Master?’ Bede asked me this morning. Though knocking as usual, he’d brought in the hot water before I could sit up properly in bed and compose my features.

  ‘A complaint of age, my child,’ I replied with a weak stab at the enigmatic. The absence of light coming through the shutters confirmed it was raining again. That’s all it ever seems to do in Northumbria. It falls in a gentle mist that blurs the landscape and soaks you before you can notice. I can hardly remember when I last spent a whole day reading in the sun.

  In silence, I washed my hands and face, and stood shivering as Bede stretched up and rubbed at my frail, withered body. Time was – and not too long ago – when that would have banished all misery. Nowadays, the most solitary pleasures often evade my grasp.

  ‘I’ve missed morning prayers again,’ I said, to break the silence.

  ‘My Lord Abbot said to leave you sleeping. He told me you were late to bed.’

  So Benedict had noticed that jug of beer I’d grabbed off the dinner table. I grunted and held my arms apart so Bede could start dressing me.

  ‘There is fresh bread today, Master,’ he added. ‘Even so, I made sure to steep it well in the milk.’

  ‘I thank you, my child,’ I said. I ran my tongue over sore gums and wondered how long before I was entirely confined to curds and stewed fruit. When you reach ninety-five, there are very few teeth you haven’t outlived. ‘But I’ll eat shortly. For the moment, let us proceed with your lesson.’

  I thought briefly, then recited a passage from Cicero at his most rhetorically florid. I paused at every natural break in the flow, letting Bede keep up with me as, eyes squeezed shut, he committed the text to his own memory. This done, I let him continue in the time-honoured manner – parsing and analysis of grammar, rare or difficult words explained, their etymology given, and so forth. Whenever he stumbled, I intervened with just enough explanation to set him right again. My interventions grew decreasingly frequent, and then only on points that would tax a much older student than Bede.

  He’s a bright lad. He reminds me of myself. If he lives, he’ll be the glory of his age.

  As the lesson moved smoothly on like a carriage in the grooves of a much-travelled road, I began to feel better. I hadn’t at first been able to remember why, but I had woken crying. It was the dreams, you see. They’d been in sharper colours and more painful since I arrived here. Memory isn’t like a religious text, where passages are separated into chapters and sections. You can’t have one memory called to the front of your mind and expect all the others to remain buried in the oblivion of time.

  I looked up again. Bede had mistaken two words close to the end of a sentence. There was an arguable ambiguity about this particular clausula, but I took the opportunity to remind him about quantitative prose rhythms that we moderns don’t always hear.

  ‘It is as you say, Master,’ said Bede with downcast eyes. ‘Forgive my slip.’

  ‘It is a pardonable error, my child,’ I said. ‘You will be aware that words are important – their choice and meaning can turn the world from its expected course. Pray continue, however, with explaining the double accusative construction.’

  Bede was still looking down. ‘Is it true, Master,’ he asked, lapsing into English, ‘that you will be leaving us?’

  For the first time, I smiled. I’d seen him yesterday with the other boys and the monks, looking anxiously in through the open doors and windows of the great hall. As discussions had been in Greek, no one could have known about the Emperor’s pardon – witnessed by the Patriarch himself – or about the restoration of my property and status. But the
shortest overland distance from Constantinople to Jarrow is two thousand five hundred miles. You don’t have two senators and a bishop turn up with Easter greetings.

  They had arrived the day before yesterday. They’d outrun the message of warning Bishop Theodore had sent out from Canterbury, and had caught me as I was finishing Advanced Theology with the novices. No journey is kind on the baggage, and the finery they had taken care to put on before knocking at the gate would have raised eyebrows anywhere east of Ravenna. But in Jarrow it had set the whole monastery and school afire with wonder and with concern.

  ‘What do you suppose I shall do?’ I asked Bede in Latin.

  ‘I suppose, Master,’ he replied in a small voice, ‘that you will return to the Great City at the end of the world.’

  End of the world! That isn’t how they’d see it back in Constantinople. But I let that pass.

  ‘Bede,’ I said, still smiling, ‘for all that I have lived in the Empire, and become great in its councils, I was born like you in this land of England. And it is to England that I have returned at the end of my life.’

  That’s the truth so far as it goes. I wasn’t going to admit that nothing but extreme necessity could have parted me from my snug palace and the company of my books.

  I got up and pulled one of the shutters open. It was still raining, but the sky was growing brighter.

  I turned back to the boy.

  ‘What would you have me do?’ I asked. ‘I can see the Lord Bishop Alexius lurking under cover in the yard. He’ll be on me the moment I step out. Speak openly, my child – what would you have me do?’

  ‘I would stay, Master,’ Bede straight away replied, now fierce and looking up at me. ‘I’d stay among my own, and be looked after and always revered.’

  That was all this morning. It’s now much later in the day. I’m back here alone in my room to gather my thoughts and set them down in the privacy of Greek. I know I should begin with Alexius and the exact nature of his promises. But those words of Bede keep coming back into my mind: ‘I’d stay among my own.’

  Well, who are ‘my own’? Is it these monks and semi-barbarians in the rain-soaked wilds of northern England? Or is it a pack of shifty Greeks who only want me back because the Saracens are on the march again?

  Age hasn’t answered the question for me. Alexius may be telling the truth for the first time in his career when he talks about the state of the roads to Marseilles, and the comforts of the armed convoy riding there at anchor to take me ‘home’. Even so, I’m barely worse for travel now than when, two years ago, I hobbled here alone through the ruin and desolation of the West.

  So do I stay among those who love me? Or do I go back to a world I thought I had lost for ever?

  What was it I said to Bede earlier? ‘Words are important – their choice and meaning can turn the world from its expected course.’

  God, how right I was.

  1

  I first saw Constantinople on Monday, 6 July 610. I was twenty at the time. We’d set out from Rome by barge, changed to a ship at Ostia, and then to a larger ship at Naples. We’d stopped for supplies at Palermo and again at Corinth, where the ship had been dragged across the narrow spit of land. I’d fancied a further stop at Athens but the Captain was muttering something about prevailing winds and his ‘instructions’.

  Most likely, I’d said to Martin, he was scared of putting in anywhere north of Corinth. The Slavs were now raiding at so many points that almost nowhere could be counted safe. Every night, after we’d passed Corinth, the sky was lit up by the fires of captured cities.

  Once, sailing north along that silent coast, we’d come upon a whole band of Slavs together with their booty and their captives. They’d raised their spears at us and shouted something incomprehensible. We’d tried to shoot at them with our bows, but always without success. After that, we’d made sure to stand well out from the shore at night, with guards posted on the main deck.

  From Euboea, we’d struck out for the East, straight through the Aegean. Every day, the sun had burned down from a sky of darkest blue on to still waters of blue and silver. We’d then entered the main shipping lanes, and were passing trading ships and fishing boats and war galleys. We’d passed little islands, sometimes putting in to shore. On some I saw abandoned temples gleaming white in the distance, and monasteries and fortifications of various kinds. To the bemusement of the crew, I’d scampered about the remnants of more civic and more populous ages, chasing away the queer lizards that darted all over the ruins and filling my head with details of inscriptions and building styles.

  On days when we hadn’t landed, I’d swum in the warm salty waters, with Martin’s voice calling out every so often he might have seen another dolphin. Despite the clear assurance of Aristotle and of the sailors stood beside him, he couldn’t be brought to believe the things weren’t dangerous.

  There had been a quickening of the traffic as we passed into the Hellespont, and a fair crowding of it as the channel widened out into the Propontis. It was now, looking left across the water, that I first saw the great City. Piled on to a high, central hill, its public buildings looked down over walls of a size and magnificence that came close to topping my wildest dreams. These surround the city, guarding its landward side with a triple fortification that no enemy has ever breached, or can ever breach. The two lengths of wall that front the sea are less elaborate but still provide adequate protection.

  Even if you aren’t allowed inside, the walls give an idea of how vast is Constantinople. The two sea walls are each about three miles long. The land wall is another three miles or so. Beyond the walls, suburbs – though mostly long abandoned – stretch some way into Thrace, and cover the neighbouring shore.

  When I first arrived, the whole blunted triangle and its depend encies may have contained a million people. Even today, it must remain the biggest and richest city in the world.

  ‘Behold the ancient city of Constantine,’ said Martin, sounding glum beside me.

  ‘Come, now,’ I said, ignoring his mood, ‘you know much better than that. Just three hundred years ago, this was a dumpy little town without walls, called Byzantium. Compared with Rome, it’s a thing of yesterday. It was only when the Great Constantine established the Faith, and then wanted a capital he could fill with churches and with better access to the frontiers, that this place became anything at all.’

  Ignoring the challenge to debate, Martin continued leaning on the rail and looked bleakly across the diminishing expanse of water that separated us from the City walls. The conversation of flags between ship and shore was ordering us closer in; I supposed it was to avoid the more important shipping in that crowded channel. Built on the far edge of Europe, the city faces Asia across waters narrow enough to swim, but for the treacherous tides.

  ‘Three hundred years,’ he said at length, ‘is long enough to bring every vice and every crime to ripeness. You wait and see.’

  There was a sudden shouting behind us. Men were running all over the ship, pulling on ropes. The sails came down, and I heard the dull beat of the drum as the rowers took over from the wind and we turned left into the Golden Horn – the long, sheltered harbour that washes the north-eastern sea walls and makes Constantinople a greater commercial centre even than Alexandria.

  I’d never seen so many ships before. Some crowded along the docks that lined an unwalled stretch at the city’s edge and that were repeated on the opposite shore. Others stood out in the channel and little boats darted between them and the docks. On land, I could see row after row of vast warehouses of the kind I’d seen in Ostia. But those were mostly abandoned, crumbling away beneath their vaulted roofs. These were bursting with all the produce of the world – foodstuffs, textiles, spices and drugs and aromatic goods, manufactures of all kinds, works of art. Whatever can be bought and sold, you’ll find in those warehouses.

  The Captain was shouting orders to his men and greetings to other ships as we navigated our way slowly and carefully across the harbo
ur. No longer responding, his signalman was intent on the rapid waving of flags onshore. Every time the message was reported, the Captain would bark another set of orders. Since they all spoke Syriac to each other, I had no idea what was being said.

  From a few hundred yards out, I could see the swarming crowds on the docks – naked porters fetching and carrying, officials and their secretaries consulting lists, men and women of every condition and colour. I made out a line of slaves all chained together, still wearing the clothes of their northern home, their skins red from the burning sun.

  Beyond the docks the land rose upwards. Here, I allowed myself a sight of a jumble of glittering buildings. Some of these looked quite old – at least, they were in the ancient style of the Greeks. The larger buildings were all in the modern Imperial style. I strained to see more of them, but the afternoon sun was in my eyes and it dazzled me. I also couldn’t explain the little dark projections at regular points along an inner wall.

  Partly to rest my eyes, I looked down into the water. Further back, the oars were breaking it into a white foam. Where I stood at the front of the ship, I could see my own reflection, clear but distorted by the parting of the waters. I had put on my best robe for the occasion – yellow with a dark blue trim that gave me a vaguely official look. Because I still wasn’t up to growing a proper beard, I’d let my hair grow very thick and had bound it with a ribbon into a mass of gold.

  I gave myself a little hug as I leaned forward over the rail and looked down at that beautiful reflection. Behind my back, people might well be asking about the exact nature of my citizenship. None could deny that, visually, I was among the most glorious objects they had ever seen. I was like an old statue, with all the paint and gilding still fresh upon it. As ever when I caught an unexpected view of myself, I could feel a stiffy coming on.

  Still beside me, dressed in a suitably contrasting grey, a hat to keep the sun off his milk-white, freckled skin, Martin cleared his throat. It was one of those noises he made when somewhere between moderate concern and paralysing fear.