Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

When I got back to my room, as hungry and thirsty as when I’d left, but colder, I found I’d been locked out.

My landlady answered her door at the first knock. “Don’t try to apologize,” she croaked before I could speak. “This time you have to leave. I’m a charitable woman, young man, but I need to eat too.” Her face was as brown and wrinkled as her robes.

“But I’m sure to have the rent soon, Macedonia. I’ve almost finished a new icon. All I need is a buyer.” I had begun to shiver. I didn’t want to go back out into the wind.

Macedonia only frowned, deepening the creases in her face.

“I’ll give you the icon,” I told her. “It’s worth far more than a month’s rent. Or will be, once this all passes.”

“Another icon? My back room already looks like the Great Church did before that devil Leo got started. This folly won’t pass until the emperor does.”

“In dark times those of the true faith find comfort in the glow of sacred images,” I argued.

“Especially an admirable pious woman such as myself. Isn’t that what you always tell me? I’m surprised you don’t gild your paintings with your tongue!”

“This new image is a fine portrait of the saviour. But if you’d prefer, say, John the Baptist, I can easily change — ”

“I already have a room full of saints. Every morning and every evening I pray to Saint Paul and Saint Stephen and all the rest: ‘Please let my lodger the painter of icons pay his rent, Amen.’ And look what it’s got me.”

“Maybe the Lord means for you to have this new image, rather than a few paltry coins?”

Macedonia laughed. She sounded like a starving gull. “And you think I shouldn’t question the will of the Lord? Do you know what I heard about that earthquake a few weeks ago? The ground started shaking at the exact moment the workmen put their hands on that statue up by the amphitheatre — the one everyone says is Empress Theodora.” She lowered her voice, as if we might be overheard. “Really, it’s some pagan goddess. Athena, probably. Been there forever. She likes looking out over the sea. Didn’t like the City Prefect trying to move her; the fellow who repaired the crack she put in my kitchen wall told me. That’s what a thousand-year-old goddess can do. Your painted saints can’t even find my rent.”

As I left the apartment building a figure leapt up from the doorway and lurched off out of sight.

Only a beggar, I told myself, to judge from the man’s rags. I could feel my heart leaping against my ribs. Why should I be startled at a beggar who’d taken shelter? If I was going to start being alarmed by beggars, I’d be jumping out of my skin every time I turned a corner.

I was gutless was what it amounted to. If I had any courage I would have acted by now. Then again, if I had any courage, would I be making my living by lurking in my room painting saints on boards?

I had always thought of myself as a Christian. I even went to church sometimes. And where had it got me — or any of the thousands of other good Christians trapped in the rotted carcass of the empire?

It started to rain. Black clouds rubbed their bellies against the countless crosses bristling from Constantinople’s rooftops — a view of Calvary multiplied a thousand times.

And here I am imagining I’m being crucified, I chided myself. Macedonia was right. Icons wouldn’t put a roof over my head or food on my plate, or even supply me with a plate.

Not the icons I painted, at any rate.

Now that I didn’t even have a room to shelter in, maybe the time had come to take the chance I’d been holding in reserve for weeks. What choice did I have?

I cut through a square I crossed almost every day — a deserted place surrounded by boarded-up shops — and went towards a sculpture that stood under one corner of the square’s colonnade.

For once, the stylite who lived atop the granite column rising above the two-storey brick buildings was silent. Probably he was too cold to cry out to humanity or heaven, or both. If it got much colder, with the rain coming down, he’d be covered in a glimmering sheen of ice, like the gold leaf I put on my images.

Living in the city, you learn to ignore holy men the same way you ignore stray dogs, gulls, and beggars. Not to mention I was busy looking over my shoulder in case those clerks — or whoever they were — had followed me from the tavern.

Which is why as I ducked under the colonnade I ran smack into the girl. She would’ve ended up on her backside but she grabbed two handfuls of my cloak and clung to me, radiating warmth and exotic perfume.

“Sorry,” I said, disconcerted. “I was thinking.” As if I couldn’t watch where I was going and think at the same time.

The girl smiled faintly. There was just a touch of red on her slightly parted lips. Beneath a sodden blue wool cloak she wore a stola of faded green silk. Not a whore. A servant wearing household hand-me-downs who’d stolen a couple of dabs of her mistress’s make-up and perfume.

Her triangular little face was nothing special except for the enormous brown eyes. They were outsized, their gaze piercing.

An icon’s eyes.

I’d seen her before. How could I forget a face like that? But where? It came back to me. At Florentius’s house. Yes, the last time I’d futilely tried to sell him one of my icons.

I kept the knowledge to myself.

The wind picked up, blowing rain under the colonnade.

The girl glanced around. Her gaze slid over the metal sculpture in front of the spot where we had collided.

“What is that thing?” she asked. “It’s horrible.”

“It’s a hound. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.” The larger-than-life image, made of iron and covered with rusty mange, didn’t look like much of anything. Its shoulder was roughly the height of my shoulder. It wasn’t doing anything, just standing there looking out into the square towards the stylite’s column.

The girl frowned. “Was it stuck in this out of the way spot to keep anyone from having to look at it?”

“Not very handsome, is it? They say it was once part of a group with a hare and a statue — said to be of Pan — but the last person who knew why it’s here or what it represents probably died decades ago.”

The girl wrinkled her nose. “What an eyesore. Someone ought to remove it.”

“Might not be a good idea. You can never tell how these old statues are going to react.” I didn’t mention Macedonia’s tale about Athena and the earthquake.

It was making me nervous, the way she kept examining the hound. Was it that interesting? “Look,” I said, “Let’s find somewhere dry. I know a place.”

I started to walk away, expecting her to follow. Instead I heard a clatter. When I whirled around the girl wasn’t in sight. I saw a board lying underneath the hound. The board I’d used to cover a gap in the wall.

I scrambled under the statue and through the gap, ripping the sleeve of my tunic on a sharp-edged broken brick.

She was already at the bottom of the rubble incline leading down from the gap, on the floor of what had been a shop that had collapsed, so that watery light and rain poured in.

She pointed to an archway in the far wall. “We can stay dry in there,” she called up to me.

“No, wait!” I yelled. I slid frantically down the rubble, hoping to stop her.

Too late. By the time I’d reached the archway she had vanished through it.

After hundreds of years of fires and earthquakes, not to mention emperors intent on remaking the city in their own images, Constantinople sits atop a labyrinth of abandoned foundations, sub-basements, tunnels, and cisterns, many linked together over the centuries as a result of incessant construction and reconstruction. There are entrances to this vast underworld hidden all over the city — some man-made, but mostly being the result of accidents, fires, earthquakes, decay.