Excerpt: After the Fall

Chapter One – Foundling

I am no judge of horseflesh, but the one that landed on top of me seemed a very fine creature indeed. It was one of the exotic breed only Turks and the Emperor’s retinue rode, with huge, liquid eyes and legs as slender and graceful as a dancing girl’s. I could not tell this from my vantage point underneath it, of course – I could see nothing with my face pressed sideways against the paving stones by a quivering shoulder as its sweat- lathered hair dried in rank, itching bristles against my cheek. No, I only remember flashes of how it had looked as it bore down on me across the square, flowing like a running cat, the horseman’s mouth and eyes open wide. The cloth wound around the base of his tall, peaked helmet was green. The horse had a white blaze on its bay nose.

Voices I had known for years rose around me in a din of fury and despair; metal rang on metal, clanked on stone, thunked into flesh and bone. My comrades, killing, dying. From the Turks I heard no sound, though I am sure they must have been shouting and cursing as we were. I remember the tip of my pike entering the horseman’s mouth, projecting like a long, wooden scream. The shock of the impact carried me backward off my feet. The horse, meanwhile, reared and skidded hard on the blood- slimed stones, its rider stuck fast in the high- framed saddle, his feet still in the stirrups. I thought perhaps I ought to let go of the pike. My hands did not seem to think so, however, and I flew before the careening horse, attached to the rider by the pike.

These images I pieced together slowly upon waking on the sweating stone. The few parts of my body that did not hurt were entirely numb. My mouth was leathery with thirst. I could hear only the frantic beating of my own heart. The horse – I assume it was the same horse – shuddered when I tried to move my twisted limbs. If it tried to heave itself upright, it would crush or break or torque some part of me, so I quickly stilled myself and it stilled too, apart from its constant trembling and the labored heave of its ribcage with each breath. My own breathing was just as tortured. My ribs could hardly move for the animal’s weight, and something hard dug painfully into my belly; the pommel- ridge, I soon realized, of the Turk’s saddle. What had become of said Turk I did not know and did not care to guess.

Hair by hair, I managed to squirm my head out from under the horse’s body. Now the stony base of the plinth flattened the other side of my skull than had been pressed against the ground. I did not care. The sun had gone from the square, but the light still had a burnt gray hue to it. Nectar, the first lungful of cool air was, stink of smoke and entrails and terrified horse though it did. Never have I drawn a sweeter breath, nor ever shall. No friendly, known voice sounded, no Greek at all – it was all a shouted gabble.

And then I heard the screams.

O God, the basilica roared like the mouth of Hell, all the terror and agony, the lust and the rage within amplified by the dome, the holy, ancient dome built to magnify hymns of praise and send them forth to God in His Heaven. Was God listening now? Had He ever?

I wanted to put my head back under the horse. Instead, I lay there weeping as monsters trotted to and fro across the square, boots squelching with blood. The sky grew dark but the screams did not stop.

Eventually, long after midnight, I slept.

When I woke the sky was pink as a baby’s ear. The horse was shaking harder – perhaps that is what woke me. Then it groaned softly and its neck curved upward.
“Ssssaaaa, sssssaaaaa, atijim,” a sad- sounding man crooned somewhere above me. “Basmallah arrahman arrahim, istarah, bebek.” Then he slit the horse’s throat.

The creature spasmed once and went limp. I tried not to choke or splutter as the blood sprayed down on me. The vague idea that when the horse was dead and the man went away, I might be able to wriggle free and escape the square formed and was gone again as the hot red flow filled my nose and ran down my burning throat. Not the thirst quencher I had had in mind at all.

“Vallahi, Ibrahim, bak!” the horse slaughterer cried gaily as I gagged. There came more babbling – everything the men said seemed to rhyme – and soon the man and his fellow had levered the carcass high enough that a pair of rough hands could drag me from under it.

Idiots. Even a first year tyro of the Guild of Thief Takers would know that one does not move someone who has been squashed until the extent of his injuries is known. Had I not been busy trying not to vomit, I would have slapped the hands away and dressed the men down for the bunglers they were.

As it was, I had no choice but to let them haul me to the basilica steps. They propped me there and pawed through my ruined clothing for weapons, purse and God knows what else, chattering the while. They wore leather aprons and carried long knives. Dingy sleeves, turban windings and skin were uniformly stained with red and rusty brown splotches. Around the square, other men in similar garb heaved the stiffened bodies of my friends and colleagues, and of our victims, into wooden wagons. Several more empty carts stood in a line at the bottom of the square; more arrived every few moments. They had come to clear out the Hagia Sophia.

Apparently satisfied that I was not armed, the largest, measured both in girth and in the breadth of his moustaches, of the grinning men grabbed me by the hair and squirted water from a leather bag onto my head.

“Oy! Leave off!” I shouted soggily. My pin- and- needley hand fluttered up before my face, and to my surprise, the man pressed the water skin into it.

At my no- doubt suspicious look, he laughed. “Ich, efendim! Ichin!” he said, and mimed tipping the skin to his lips. The water tasted, unsurprisingly, like a sheep’s arse. I rinsed my parched mouth, spat, swigged.

More babble. One of the men trotted away across the square. I caught sight of a bright blue sleeve trimmed with five gold stripes on a corpse being tossed into the nearest cart. Yannis Mistriote, Prefect of the Capitoline, my first mentor and friend among the Thief Takers. He landed head down, one booted foot sticking up awkwardly over the vehicle’s side wall.

A lanky newcomer wearing a yellow coat and foppish feathered hat drew near, following the one who had run off before. “Here now, my man, who are you?” he asked. His accent was of the islands, maybe Chios or Lemnos, but he looked like no proper Greek. Too fair. One of those Venetian boys whose merchant families now monopolized the sea routes out of Palestine, no doubt, who infested our shores and imported Italian brides to keep from turning Greek themselves.

I coughed wetly. Pink droplets of spittle spattered my grimy hand.

His too- thin nose wrinkled. “I said…”

“I heard you. Assistant Prefect Constantine Mihailides, of -”

“Polizia,” he interrupted, and began burbling in Turkish at the man who had found me.
The Turk pulled me to my feet and left me standing for a few moments after I shook his hands from my shoulders, then pushed me back down on the step. Within the space of forty heartbeats, the Venetian had passed a gold ducat to the slaughterer, who bit the coin and then tucked it into his shirt. More babbling, and another few silver coins changed hands. The Turk put his hand on a small silver case hanging at his side and muttered something, gave a silver coin to each of the other men, and they all went back to their ghoulish work.

Thus did I become a slave. I hardly would have noticed it happening to someone else, even had the transaction been concluded right in front of me.

“Well then, Mihailides, I presume you can walk,” said the man in yellow, turning to leave. His sandy hair fell in curls at least a hand’s breadth below his collar. Poncy git.
I did not move.

He cast a supercilious glance back at me. “If you sit here long enough, someone else will come along to sell you and buy you again, no matter how sullenly you glare. If you try to leave the square unescorted in that,” he paused and sniffed, “fancy uniform, you will be apprehended and executed on sight.”

“So what?” I was thinking of Yannis in the cart. Why not join him and all my other fine comrades? Why should I be the only Thief Taker left? Who needed a Thief Taker at all when thieves had already taken the whole City?

“Walk with me. See how others in your situation fare this morning. You will be glad yon halak found you first, and that he sold you to me.”

I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back against the step. It was coated in dried gore that had flowed down from the nave during yesterday’s massacre; the sharp stone edge cut into my stiff and bruised lower back, but I lounged as if I were on the emperor’s throne.

The man turned back to me, equally amused and exasperated. “Need I send for shackles and a whip? I have paid thrice the going rate for you – as you may imagine, slaves are a very inexpensive commodity at the moment – and I mean to have you. Civilly if possible, but brutally if not. Come.”

Had he only spoken the threats, I might have sat on the step all day watching the sky drift from red to blue to evening- purple. Who knows how much money would have changed hands while I loitered? But the daemon that had driven me to become a Thief Taker in the first place stirred in the back of my mind.

Why? it hissed. Why pay so much for me? Why no chains?

The daemon could not be denied. I had stopped trying to ignore its urgings long ago. I clambered to my feet.

The Venetian smiled. “My name is Nicolo Giustiniani. I am so glad one of your guild survived!”