The Grail of Sir Thomas

  * * *

  After that, nothing hampered their way to the coast of Black Sea. The Greeks called it Pontus Euxine, which meant “the hospitable sea”, or the inhospitable sea at other times. Many other nations inhabiting its shores named it simply “the Russian sea”, for its waves were crowded with Russian ships long since. Ruses traded and robbed, carried goods and people by sea, made plundering raids on the opposite coast, where local tribes, nations, and states changed often. Russian pirates, forders, free daredevils, Cossacks, and other brigand men gave their forays oversea the ironic name of “going for winter coats”.

  All the way Thomas neighed, as he recalled the captives vying with each other in crying out everything they knew, selling and betraying their masters, promising to be good slaves, only to avoid their entrails being pulled out and devoured for them to see… The wonderer rode silent and thoughtful; the captives had revealed nothing worthy.

  Easily, they found Gelong, the shipmaster. He was fierce with hangover, shaggy and violent, his crew avoided him. At first, he went barging to Thomas, filling with bad blood, a happy beast when spoiling for a good fight, but Oleg hurried to interfere. He told Gelong they had come from Samoth, his blood, as his best friends and comrades who’d been drinking with him the day before – and the savage beast of a shipmaster changed to a beaming, happy man who embraced both of them, clapped them on their shoulders. Then he wheeled round to the trembling cook who was looking out from behind a bundle of ropes, roared in a stentorian voice, “Wine to the bottom cabin! Lots of wine!”

  Thomas heaved a sigh. “We’ll be going along the shore,” Oleg cheered him up. “If we get drunk, we’ll feel less of the rolling, as our heads swing and our bellies gurgle…”

  They had to sell the horses. There was hardly enough space aboard for two men, and that they owed to Gelong’s cordiality. Oleg praised Thomas for his wise deed, advised him to keep saving all maidens from beasts, as all of his great predecessors had done: Targitai, Perseus, Ivasik, Beowulf, Sigurd… “They also used to receive a good reward. Sometimes a double one if the girl contributed to it.” Thomas scowled and snarled. He was sad to be parting with his destrier, whom he’d stormed the Tower of David and climbed the walls of Jerusalem with.

  With bags on their backs, they came aboard. At once, the sailors raised a fore-and-aft sail that was strange to Thomas. In the northern seas, a sail is seldom in use. Rowing is more relied upon, and if even they raise the sail, it is a straight and square one. But the oars of Gelong’s ship were in disorder, and her crew started drinking straight off. To be more exact, they resumed doing it. Only three or four men kept a lazy eye on the ship.

  The wind was even, fresh and steady. In case of need, sailors would turn the sail deftly, a skill not known to Vikings. The master informed them they would arrive at Constantinople, the capital of Roman Empire, in a week. Thomas puffed up like a little owl, ready to argue that Rome was the capital, but Oleg intruded and took the conversation away from a slippery road. In fact, the Great Roman Empire used to have two capitals, both Rome and Constantinople, for a long time, and its sigil, the proud eagle, was portrayed with two heads to transmit the idea of Empire having a single body and two heads that would not live without each another. The Western and Eastern Roman emperors (the latter often named basileus) did not make any difference, but the fact that the single Christian Church had divided into the western and the eastern branch did. That difference was still tiny but Oleg had seen much of the world. He’d seen peoples who split amicably but began terrible bloody wars two or three generations later.

  Once, in a vague dream sent by either gods or his soul who had managed a look into the distant future, Oleg saw the emblem of the Russian Empire; a two-headed eagle as a symbol of Russian princes and, later, Russian tsars, but could not fathom how that was possible. Will Rome come and capture the Slavic lands? Or will Russian hosts finally achieve the long-lasting dream of their princes and take Tsargrad with its lands for themselves and their children?

  They shared the cramped cabin under the steer box with three more men: two merchants and a fat idle boy. Those three would enter no conversations but turn away, hiding their faces. They wore the clothing of common men but their faces and hands were too white and well-groomed. Thomas winced, irritated by the company of sleek traders (if those were traders). He spent most of the daytime on deck, watching dolphins. Twice he saw the huge oblique comb of a sea serpent, but it vanished before he could call the wonderer.

  Once a ghostly ship sailed by. The sailors made much ado, shouting of trouble brewing. Thomas moved away with disgust, lest their sweaty unwashed bodies touch him in their bustling about. In wars and travels, he had seen not only ghostly ships but whole ghostly cities, not to mention castles, towers, and minarets! And ghosts of caravans, oases, and lone men could be seen in hot Arabia almost every day.

  Oleg, attracted by the clamor, climbed on the upper deck in haste. “What’s up?”

  “A vision,” Thomas replied sarcastically. “For all to see. But, unlike you, they neither exult nor thank gods. And what do you think? Can a vision do any harm?”

  “Surely it can,” Oleg replied confidently. “To another vision.”

  “I see. But that’s a concern of theirs. Let them fight each other as they like. But can they harm live men?”

  “Definitely! If live men get lost in contemplation, treating it as a circus, and let their ship crash into the rocks or another ship.”

  The ship sailed without letting the shore out of sight. At times Thomas could make out the ruins of ancient towers or remnants of old cities. That fertile land had seen many nations and states changing on for the other. Thomas had heard, with half an ear, only about the most powerful of them: the Hittite Kingdom, Lidia, Midia, Ahmenids. There had been the empire of Alexander the Great, then the Seleucids, the kingdom of Pontus, Pergamum, the possessions of Romans and, at last, the state of Seljukids, which was destroyed a year before by a mighty Crusader host from far northern lands. Nations rise like flowers in spring, their tongues get mixed with the remnants of previous ones and diluted, then they fall under the pressure of newcomers. Last year, the warriors of Christ came here for the first time. Surrounded by alien tribes, they hurry to raise strong castles and fortresses… Will the Crusaders resist?

  All the way to Constantinople, the ship was followed by dolphins, who jumped in the waves and looked with gleaming curious eyes. The sailors told Thomas that dolphins had once been men who went into the sea to avoid war and grief and live happily ever after, with only a vague memory of kinship that attracts them to people. Thomas tossed fish and slices of bread to the dolphins, thinking seriously of whether he would become a careless dolphin to escape the bitter human life where a man had to take each step by fight. He failed to resolve it at once, even as he recalled the immortal magicians following his tracks and the unknown traps waiting ahead.

  As the ship rounded a cape, golden sparkles flashed in the sun far ahead. Oleg heard Thomas sigh loudly at his side. The knight’s face was excited. Those gleaming sparkles are the domes of Christian temples, each one covered with twenty or thirty poods of pure gold. And Constantinople has thousands of such domes. The city was known as Tsargrad to pirates and Varangians, to Artania, Slavia, Kujavia, and then Kievan Rus’, Novgorod, to princedoms of Chernigov.

  Probably, Oleg thought with a thumping heart, it is the oldest city in the world. All the caravan ways pass here, through the joint of two giant continents: Europe and Asia. Since long ago, there had been roaming tribes whose names sank into oblivion. Each of them changed the name of the city, which was burnt down, destroyed, and rebuilt again. Nations would be born, get old and die, their tongues dying with them, but the city kept standing on the bank of the channel, as she was needed by everyone.

  The place was visited by Hittites, Macedonians, wild men of Pannonia, Italy, Scythia, Hyperborea. Everyone who came from the north had to follow the same path, which their feet had trampled into a broad trodden road,
and anyone walking from the south had another path, but both of them were doomed to meet here. By the will of gods, all roads follow the folds of the earth. At the cross of those two paths, a city emerged. It had changed many names, but the first one to be remembered was the last but one: Byzantium. When Constantine, the Roman emperor, was looking for a place to build his new capital, he found no better place than the ancient Byzantium, so the city was given a new name: Constantinople, which meant “the city of Constantine”.

  The Emperor had the city broadened immediately. For a start, he blocked the neck of land between Europe and Asia with a tall stone wall, then raised a hundred and forty large battle towers on it, to protect the wall, to house soldiers, their weapons and provisions. The wall that fenced the new capital off from the sea was guarded by eighty more towers.

  Inside the walls, Constantine built palaces, fortresses, luxurious houses for high officials, massive barracks for his imperial guard, sumptuous temples (those were then ruined to raise churches, no less sumptuous, on their solid foundations), high guest mansions and storehouses. He also built prisons and had broad cellars dug under them: ordinary for plain prisoners, secret for particularly dangerous ones, and the most secret for the personal enemies of the Emperor. The secret torture chambers looked at the bay, and dead bodies in sacks, with boulders tied to their legs, were shaken off into the water. Near the most secret torture chambers, there were secret treasury rooms, also graded by accessibility; the most important ones could only be visited by the Emperor himself.

  During his last visit, Oleg had noticed how thoroughly Constantine had been decorating the capital city, how ruthlessly he ravaged his other lands, driving the best masters and craftsmen together into the old Byzantium – and how fast Byzantium was changing into majestic Constantinople, as polished slabs of marble and basalt, statues of gods and heroes, centaurs and chimeras were brought there from all around.

  Constantinople looked unassailable. The old Byzantium had got shy and lost in the magnificence of the capital city, turned into one of its quarters, neither the poorest nor the richest one. It was Agnir for a thousand years, Oleg thought bitterly, and Kerch for the next thousand and Komonsk for the following ten centuries and Byzantium for the same time and a bit more. For a thousand of years till today, it has been known as Constantinople.

  His shoulders flinched, as though feeling the sudden blow of the cold northern wind. What name will it get for the next ten centuries? Which nations will come to crush its present inhabitants? New Greeks, a mixture of Slavic migrants and remnants of neighboring savage tribes who took the proud name of Romans, but their neighbors call them Romays15 and later will know them as Byzantines? Or will the pointless destruction of one nation by another be stopped someday?

  Thomas watched closely the growing walls, his eyes glittered with professional interest. “No one, for a thousand years, has taken this stronghold by storm… Have you been inside?”

  “I have,” Oleg replied. His voice sounded strangely muffled. Thomas turned to him in surprise. Oleg nodded. “Yes, I have been there! Both inside and outside.”

  “I see a wonderer’s life is good,” Thomas sighed. “You can get where a man with sword is not allowed.”

  The wonderer’s face stiffened as if he tried to recall something buried deep in his memory. Thomas did not dare to break the silence; at times, the wonderer looked very mysterious. The knight would take no notice of such trifles before he’d been dragged by life across different countries, peoples, and customs. Though that had only made the Christian hold on his soul stronger, he learnt to feel the souls of others. Even the souls doomed to Hell’s fires for their unbelief in Christ.

  Oleg came back from his brooding. “If the Secret Seven keep their whim to get your cup, a man of theirs shall be waiting in Constantinople,” he warned Thomas. “This gate from Asia to Europe can be escaped by no one!”

  “There are more people in Constantinople than ants in a forest! We shall get lost to view.”

  “We shan’t if they put a man at the moorings.”

  Thomas put his palm on his sword hilt. Oleg knew it without looking back; hundreds of times had he seen this gesture, habitual for Thomas at every sign of trouble.

  “Whom are you going to slash? There are lots of people on the pier.”

  “Can we disguise ourselves?” Thomas suggested warily.

  Oleg gave a long look over his proud figure, distinctive at any distance in his gleaming armor. “How?” he asked with sullen irony.

  “Er… I could, though I hate it, turn my shield to the other side as we go ashore. I can even put it into my bag! We are searched for by my arms: a sword and a lyre on starry field, aren’t we? There’s no point changing it, The Secret Ones should be experts in heraldry, as it is studied everywhere, before reading and writing, as the most important of sciences. So they will know any move by the starry field of the shield and get the meaning of it…”

  “A good disguise,” Oleg approved, “but let’s forget it. The Emperor has tens of thousands spies in his service. They meet merchants, pilgrims, beggars, settlers, and sailors on the city gates to ransack their belongings and levy a duty, but their most important job – the one for which they get a second salary from a secret pocket – is to watch for the second face of they who look like plain merchants or beggars. For their true face. The city is penetrated constantly by spies and scouts, assassins and agents of remote kings or robber gangs. Almost all of them are outed by sophisticated secret service men easily – but they’re allowed into the city all the same, under covert supervision, to find out all of their links and aims and accomplices. Often they’re allowed out of the city too, with no harm done to them, if that serves some distant purpose of the Empire. And those purposes can be more far-reaching and sinister than the naïve, straight-minded kings of young western realms can even imagine!”

  The ship dropped anchor half a mile from the shore. There were hundreds of other ships, large and small, rocking on the waves while new ships were coming and light fast boats with strong-shouldered rowers bustled about.

  Gelong waited patiently for a port official to come on one of those boats. A stout man, but not a fat one, he walked to the bridge, accompanied by the shipmaster. His mates slipped into the holds, like nimble rats, to leave the two of them in privacy. The official and the master studied the list of goods thoroughly. The official marked some of them as forbidden. The master started to argue, pointing out those things had been allowed the last time, but the official remarked reasonably that even mountains and seas change over time. His assistants came out to collate the lists, and there was arguing again. Gelong was going dark. When the assistants, all together, turned their backs, he sighed and poured a handful of golden coins into the official’s pocket. Thomas winced. The Empire is rotten through! However, the duty became smaller at once and the official left, while his assistant stayed aboard to serve as a pilot.

  The ship approached the close mooring cautiously, choosing her way among other ships. Thomas stood in his full armor, feeling his sword. “A rotten place,” he said with disapproval. “That’s a pity. It’s so beautiful! The Holy Bible tells of many kingdoms: Babylon, Nineveh, Assyria. Where are they now? Once while crossing a desert, I saw some ruins of towers and buildings in the sand. At some time palaces had been rising there and gardens growing and splendid birds singing… And I walked knee-deep in hot sand, only deserts around, and almost squealed like a pig with sorrow for the lost beauty. Though I knew the city must have been inhabited by wicked Pagans, as it died thousands of years before Christ!”

  Oleg peered intently at the approaching moorings crowded with people, carts, bright litters, horses in sumptuous attire, guards with gleaming blades. “To save everything means to leave no room for the new. You’d better watch not beautiful towers but ugly people. Your arrival is already known to all the spies of the Seven.”

  “Do you think they’ll try to take it straight on the moorings?”

  “Be ready
,” Oleg advised. “I think this city will make for your greatest challenge.”

  Thomas’s cheeks went white, his eyes lost reverie and started running over the motley crowd. The ship edged her way between high-sided galleys, a bridge was thrown to the land. Thomas and Oleg were almost the first to come ashore, straight after were the merchants and the strange young boy who, all the three, were twitching with unfathomable fear.