Robert Lyndon - Imperial Fire

Fists pounded on the door. Voices shouted. Lucas picked up the cleaver, lurched to the door and unbolted it. Faces started back in terror. A woman screamed. He barged through the crowd and stumbled down the stairs into the street. He took the first turning he came to and when he’d put two more behind him he threw the cleaver away.

He slowed to an exhausted walk, holding his ribs, staggering as if one leg were longer than the other. His head was still bleeding. When he felt his scalp he could feel bone exposed by the gash. You’ve just killed a man, he thought. How does it feel? Disgusting. But so simple. Desperation is all it takes. The day’s events galloped through his mind, all funnelling towards that foul deed in that foul room. If that girl hadn’t robbed him, if that overseer hadn’t cheated him, if those two thieves hadn’t menaced him… he would never have been able to summon the animal rage to throttle the man. He leaned and retched, coughing up strings of bile. He’d imagined killing, but only during a glorious encounter on the field of battle, trumpets blowing and banners whipping, a worthy opponent asking his name as they wheeled on their chargers.

Lucas slumped against a wall, threw back his head and groaned. His mind emptied. A shrill whistle brought him upright. It came again, from the vicinity of his crime. The man’s neighbours had seen him; they had his description. His wound was all the evidence they’d need. He pushed away and went reeling down the empty streets, taking turns at random.

One of them led him into a market square lit by a single lamp at the far end. The sweet rot of decaying vegetables clogged his senses. Even injured and hurting, he couldn’t deny his hunger. He advanced, scanning the ground, and then stopped, alerted by faint crepitations and squeaks. The place wasn’t empty. It seethed with rats, a horde without number swarming in clots and clumps and streams.

Trapped in a waking nightmare, he ghost-walked through the silent city, the only living soul abroad in Constantinople. He must have gone half a mile when a shout behind him made him whirl. A watchman with a drawn sword and flaming torch straddled the path. Another silhouette appeared and Lucas took to his heels. Whistles shrilled and feet pattered in pursuit. He darted down an alley.

The wall on one side was about eight feet high, reinforced by buttresses with an angled step about three feet off the ground. The urgent slap of feet drew nearer. Bracing himself against the opposite wall, he sprang forward, leaped onto a step and crooked his arms over the top of the wall. With one heart-bursting heave he dragged himself up just as one of the watchmen ran past the entrance to the alley. Sobbing with effort, Lucas wriggled over the wall and dropped to the ground.

From the other side came voices and the clinking of metal. Lucas pressed against the wall. The voices faded. Lucas waited. He couldn’t work out what manner of place he was in. Perhaps a private garden or paved courtyard. He shuffled into the blackness and had gone about twenty yards when the ground opened beneath him. He tripped down a couple of steps before recovering his balance. He was in pitch black, unable to see a hand before his face. Water dripped with cavernous echoes. He groped his way down the steps until he reached level ground. The atmosphere was cold and aqueous. He felt around until he found a pebble. He tossed it ahead and heard it plop into water.

He was in a cistern, one of Constantinople’s underground reservoirs. He backed away and collided with a pillar. He slid down it, too exhausted to make another move. His bottom jaw juddered with cold. He wrapped his arms about his chest and stared into the dripping blackness.

He slept in fits and starts. When at last he opened his eyes, the cistern had filled with a spectral light just bright enough to show the lacquered surface of the water and colonnades soaring up to shadowy vaults.

His skull throbbed. He felt his scalp. The bleeding had stopped, leaving his hair a congealed and treacly mat. He knelt by the water’s edge and ducked his head under. The pain made him cry out. Three times he immersed his head before he’d washed away the gore. The collar and shoulder of his tunic was stiff with the stuff. He took it off and rinsed it and wrung it out. Quaking with cold, he put it on wet then mounted the steps. Dawn had just broken. The yard around the cistern lay empty. A faint hum told him that the city was coming awake. On this side, the wall offered no footholds. Lucas’s gaze fixed on a flat-roofed hut built into one of the angles of the yard. A window ledge gave him a step up. He crept towards the wall and looked over, ducking down as a man walked by. Next time he looked, the street was empty. He rolled over the parapet, dropped down and set off walking as soon as his feet hit the ground.

A workman walking towards him shied in alarm and gave him the widest berth possible. Lucas glanced back and saw the man staring after him. Lucas understood why when he looked down. His tunic was stained and blotched pink, his breeches smeared red. His wound had opened again. Blood wormed down his neck. He kept his head down.

He passed through a smiths’ quarter where the workmen left off their hammering to watch him pass. He found himself in a thoroughfare where merchants were setting up stalls. He didn’t meet their eye and kept walking. He climbed a hill and saw through a gap in the skyline the dome of St Sophia to the right. The traffic was growing heavier and he tried to blend into it — just another labourer off to a day’s toil.

Three soldiers pushed through the crowd ahead of him. He stopped. They hadn’t seen him yet, but when they did… By now news of the murder would have circulated. He swung on his heel and had retreated only a few yards when the gleam of iron revealed more soldiers. To his right was a taverna — a few tables under an awning and a shadowy room open to the street. He walked in. Faces looked up from platters and backgammon boards. As he walked to the counter, the proprietor watched him with a dark frown. Lucas smiled and grimaced, rubbing his head to indicate that his ruinous appearance was the consequence of a night’s debauch gone wrong. He produced the four miserable coins he’d earned at the docks.

The keeper of the tavern looked at them, then transferred his disbelieving gaze to Lucas’s face. He shook his head in slow finality.

‘It’s all I have. Christ, I worked hard enough for it.’

The taverner poked out his cheek with his tongue and studied Lucas afresh before motioning him towards a table in a corner. Lucas slumped with his back to the entrance. Two curvy young serving girls weaved between the tables, their arms piled with dishes, smiling and chatting to the regulars. After a long interval, one of them appeared before Lucas and set down half a loaf of white bread, an omelette and a jug of wine. Her smile was so pleasant that he almost burst into tears.

He abandoned himself to hunger. It was all he could do to resist tearing at the bread and cramming it down in throat-straining gobbets. When he’d finished, his head felt as if it were floating off his shoulders.

‘I hope you gave the other fellow something to remember you by.’

Lucas started awake. A man had plonked himself down opposite. Lucas realised that the man had spoken in French.

The man waggled a toothpick between his lips. He nodded at Lucas’s head. ‘You’ve been in the wars, my friend.’

Lucas tried to frame a rueful smile, but his mouth just wobbled. ‘I was set upon by thieves.’

‘New to the city, I’ll wager.’

‘I landed yesterday,’ Lucas said, his voice small.

The man was a veteran, his military calling evidenced by a scar from temple to eyebrow and a knot of gristle where his right eye had been. His pugnacious bearing was softened by the humorous set of his mouth.