The Golden Horn (33 page)
Authors: Judith Tarr
Tags: #Golden Horn, #medieval, #Fourth Crusade, #Byzantium, #Judith Tarr, #fantasy, #Constantinople, #historical, #Book View Cafe
o0o
The ship’s name was
Falcon
;
and she was as swift as her name, her hull painted the steel-blue of the
peregrine her namesake, her prow adorned with a stooping falcon. Alf, remembering
the bird that had pointed his way from Saint Ruan’s to Jerusalem, felt
his heart uplifted by the omen.
The others had embarked already, Thea borne in a chair like a
great lady, angry though it made her to be so helpless. He met her glare with a
smile that spread to Anna. She looked splendid in a gown that had come to her
as a parting gift from the Doge: “For a brave and noble lady,” the
messenger had said who brought it, “so that she need not face the savage
West as she faced the wicked Doge.”
She stood very straight under the weight of the honor and of
the silk; but her eyes were shining and her body trembling with excitement. “Won’t
you hurry?” she called to Alf. “It’s almost time!”
As he set his foot on the gangway, a sudden tumult brought
him about. A troop of horsemen thundered to a halt at the end of the pier, one
already afoot and running. Alf left the gangway and advanced to meet him.
Henry of Flanders came panting to a stop. Somehow, even in his
haste, he managed to preserve his dignity. “Master Alfred; God be
thanked! I prayed I wouldn’t be too late.”
“For what, my lord?” Alf asked, although he
knew.
“To say good-bye.” Henry’s eyes were
bright with more than exertion. “I wish that you could have stayed.”
“To be your prophet?”
Henry shook his head impatiently. “We’ve gained
ourselves an empire,” he said, “but we won’t find it easy to
hold. We need strong men who also have their share of wisdom—men who can
speak to the Greeks as to their own countrymen, but who can speak as well for
us of the West. There all too few of them. And two are leaving on this ship.”
Alf glanced back at Jehan, who stood motionless on the deck,
listening. “My lord, we would stay if we could. And yet—”
“And yet.” Henry smiled a hard-won smile. “I
should know better than to ask for what l can’t have. But it’s more
than your talents I’ll be missing, Master Alfred. Will you say good-bye
to me as a friend?”
“Gladly,” Alf said, coming to his embrace.
He stepped back quickly. “Farewell, my friend, and a
fair voyage.”
The captain bellowed from the bridge, cursing the laggard. Alf
retreated to the gangway. There for an instant he paused. “Farewell, my
lord Henry,” he said. He smiled his sudden smile. “It will be
something to brag of in years to come, that I had the name and the love of a
friend from the Emperor of the East.”
“But,” Henry said, “I’m not—”
“Yet,” Alf said in the instant before he turned
and sprang lightly into the ship.
o0o
They stood at the rail, all of them, even Thea defiantly
erect. Alf took his place beside her; Anna’s hand slipped into his right and
Nikki’s into his left, gripping hard. Smoothly
Falcon
slid from her berth and came about, her
bright sails swelling with the westward wind.
Slowly, then more swiftly, Henry’s figure dwindled
behind them, and beyond and about him all the ruined splendors of Byzantium.
“There never was a greater city,” Alf said, “nor
ever one so beautiful.”
“Even in her fall.” Jehan shook himself and
turned his face toward
Falcon
’s prow.
“Well, we’re done with her. God help her and everyone in her. I’m
for the West and home, and glad I’ll be to get there.” He left the
rail, staggering a little as he found his sea legs, holding out his hands to
the children. “Who’ll go exploring with me?”
Alf watched them go, smiling slightly as Nikki, running, snatched
at his cat. The beast eluded his hands and dove beneath a coil of rope. He
wavered, torn, and sprang forward with sudden decision in pursuit of his sister
and his friend. Alf’s smile widened almost into laughter.
Thea’s arms slipped about his waist. “Well,
little Brother? Has it been worth it?”
“Every moment of it.”
“Even the pain?”
“Even that,” he said. “Out of it, and in
spite of it, I’ve gained more joy than I ever dreamed of: wealth and kin
and friends, and,” he added after a pause, “a lover.”
“Last in your reckoning, I see. But I hope not least.”
“No. Far from the least.” He took her face in
his hands. “Will you marry me, Thea?”
She pondered that with every appearance of care. “Maybe,”
she answered him at last. “Someday. If I’m properly persuaded. Meanwhile
everyone is out and about, and we have a cabin fit for a prince, that’s
cost us no more than an earl’s ransom. And in it...” Her gaze met
his, bright and wicked.
He stared back, all innocence. “Yes, my lady?”
She tossed her bronze-gold braids and laughed. “Yes
indeed, my lord!”
He swept her up and kissed her soundly, and bore her away.
Author’s NoteThe world of
The Golden Horn
is not precisely the world we know. Yet in that world as in this one, between
spring and spring, 1203-1204, a Western army advanced upon and eventually
conquered the city of Constantinople. Our historians have named this conflict,
with its confusion of aims and motives and its devastating outcome, the Fourth
Crusade.
I have taken few liberties with the framework of my history
or with its major characters. Enrico Dandolo, Doge of Venice, may in fact have
been a mere eighty years old at the time of the Crusade. He was certainly
blind, and he was almost certainly the motivating force behind the diversion of
the Crusade from Egypt and the Holy Land to Byzantium.
The rivalry between Count Baudouin (Baldwin) of` Flanders
and Marquis Boniface of Montferrat simmered throughout the campaign,
culminating some weeks after Easter, 1204, with the election of Baudouin as Latin
Emperor of Byzantium. He was crowned in Hagia Sophia in May of that year.
Boniface, for his part, married the great beauty, Margaret of` Hungary, widow
of the mad Emperor Isaac; and amid much bitter quarreling with Baudouin, established
the vassal kingdom of Thessalonica. Though considerably older than Baudouin, he
outlived his rival by two years.
The climactic battles of
The
Golden Horn
are based solidly on fact; Henry of Flanders did indeed take
the banner of the empire and the icon of the City from the Emperor
Mourtzouphlos in a skirmish. It was not he, however, who pierced the walls of the
City in the final battle and threw open the gates, but Peter of Amiens, among
whose party was an impoverished Picard knight, Robert de Clari—the author
in later days of an account of the Crusade and of his own part in it. Robert’s
brother, the warrior priest Aleaumes, was first to climb through the gap in the
wall, despite Robert’s attempt to drag him back by the foot.
Once the Latin army had entered the City, the Greeks despaired,
although the Emperor strode all but alone through the streets, striving to
rouse them to battle. With his flight and the panic of his people, the enemy
found themselves victorious.
There followed an orgy of destruction; three days of unrestrained
pillage and rapine. Constantinople was stripped bare. Her unparalleled store of
sacred relics was scattered throughout the West; her works of art, both pagan
and Christian, shattered or stolen (the Greek historian and eyewitness, Nicetas
Choniates, bewails the wanton destruction of, for example, the Helen of Phidias;
the four great bronze horses of San Marco in Venice stood once in the
Hippodrome in Constantinople); her vast riches scattered among the Latins,
never to be restored.
The Latin Empire of the East endured a mere sixty years. The
Emperor Baudouin, captured in battle against rebel Greeks and their Bulgar
allies at Adrianople in April, 1205—a year only since his taking of the
City—died a prisoner. Enrico Dandolo, who came to the rescue of Baudouin’s
shattered army, died a month after, to be buried in Hagia Sophia. It was his
great pride and his Republic’s boast that he had ruled a quarter and a
half of the Roman Empire; such is the inscription on his portrait in the Doges’
Palace in Venice. Certainly, whatever evil he wrought against the Greeks, he
insured the hegemony of his city in the East for many years thereafter.
Henry of Flanders succeeded his brother as Emperor; he was,
asserts the historian Donald Queller, “by far the ablest of the Latin
Emperors, moderate, humane, and conciliatory.” He died in 1216, still, at
forty, a relatively young man, accepted not only by his own people but by the
Greeks whom he had helped to conquer.
His successors could not equal his ability. At last, in
1261, Michael Palaeologus of Nicaea restored Greek dominion in Constantinople.
He found the City in ruins and stripped of all its treasures. The empire he
established would endure for two centuries until its final fall, in 1453, to
the Ottoman Turks.
But the greatest glory had long since departed. Byzantium would
never again be the great power she had been before the coming of the Latin
fleet to the shores of the Golden Horn.
My novel owes its background to many sources. I am particularly
indebted, however, to the firsthand accounts of Geoffroi de Villehardouin and
Robert de Clari; to Sigfús Blöndal’s classic text,
The Varangians of Byzantium
, revised and
translated by B. Z. Benedikz; and to that excellent, scholarly, vivid and
detailed historical study, Donald E. Queller’s
The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople,
1201-1204.
The Golden Horn
Volume II: The Hound and the Falcon
Judith Tarr
Book View Café Edition
June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-175-7
Copyright © 1985 Judith Tarr
www.bookviewcafe.com
First published: Bluejay Books, 1985
Cover design by Dave Smeds
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