The Golden Horn (8 page)

“Ah, good!” she said with more enthusiasm than
she felt. “That will cool us splendidly, and blow away any chance of plague.”

He shook his head. “No. It’s the worst thing
anyone could wish for.”

Sophia glanced at Jehan. He watched Alf with peculiar
fixity; in his eyes was something very close to fear. “What is it?”
he demanded. “What do you see?”

Alf shivered convulsively. Jehan’s surcoat slipped
from his hands to the floor. He stared at it as if he had never seen it before,
and bent, lifting it, folding it with exaggerated care.

When it was arranged to his satisfaction, he laid it gently
down upon a table, tracing with his finger the lion rampant that was for
Sevigny, and the Chi-Rho which Bishop Aylmer had placed in its claws for the
young knight who was also a priest. His eyes were enormous, all pupil; by some
trick of the light it seemed to Sophia that they flared red.

He spoke to her and not to Jehan, with quiet intensity. “My
lady, if you love your family, keep the children and the servants in the house.
Let none of them go out for anything. And send for Bardas. Tell him a lie if
you need to. But get him here and keep him here.”

“What—” she began.

He cut her off. “See that you have water. All the
water you can draw, in every vessel you can find. And food enough for a week at
least. Get it now. Get it quickly.”

It was madness, surely. Yet it made Sophia tremble. Jehan
had risen, death-white under his tan; his sword was naked in his hand.

“No,” Alf said to him, “no weapons. Go
back to the camp, Jehan. Stay there. Promise me.”

“Why? What’s going to happen?”

“What you foresaw. But worse. Far worse.” Alf
looked from one to the other. “Why are you wasting time? Go on!”

He himself was at the door, moving with speed that startled
Sophia. Even before Jehan could spring after him, he was gone.

She caught the priest’s arm as he passed her. “Wait!
Where are you going?”

Jehan stared down at her, eyes wild. “After him. My
lady,” he added after a moment.

“Is he mad?”

Obviously Jehan was burning to be gone; equally obviously he
could think of no courteous way to escape her. “Mad?” he echoed
her. “Alf?” He laughed with an edge of hysteria. “I suppose
he is. Have you ever seen his back?”

She nodded, wincing involuntarily as she remembered it.

“He was supposed to be burned for a witch. They
flogged him instead, as a penance. Then the people canonized him. He has his
legend now in the north of Anglia, and even his feast-day.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Nothing. But if he’s mad, then so are half the
saints on the calendar. And all the prophets.”

Sophia could find no words at all. Even as she hunted for a response,
the door flew open. It was not Alf returning to sanity, but her maid,
breathless, disheveled, and scarlet-faced with heat and exertion. “My
lady!” she gasped. “My lady! The City’s on fire!”

There was something inevitable in it, like the climax of a
tragedy. It surprised Sophia that she could think so clearly. She set the woman
in a chair, fanned her and refreshed her with a sip or two of wine, and
extracted the news from her bit by bit.

It was as Jehan had said. The Latins, incensed by the injury
done to their countrymen in the City, had roused to revenge. A troop of them
had come armed from the camp, their target the quarter given over to the Arab
scholars and merchants. They had sworn to kill Saracens; Saracens, then, they
would kill.

The battle had its center in the mosque, the heart of the abomination,
a colony of Infidels suffered to live and worship as they pleased within a
Christian city. Someone, whether Latin or Moslem or Greek—for Greeks had
come to aid their neighbors against the invaders—had brought fire into
the battle. By then the breeze that had come to break the terrible heat had grown
to a brisk north wind; it fanned the flames despite all efforts to quench them.

“You know how narrow the streets are, my lady,”
said Katya, almost calm now. “And all the houses are of wood and half of them
are falling down. They’re burning like logs on a hearth.”

Suddenly Sophia was very tired. The servants would be in an uproar;
the children would be terrified. And Bardas—if he was in his chamber in
the Prefecture, she could lure him home; if not…

The hiss of metal on metal brought her eyes to Jehan. He had
sheathed his sword; his brows were knit. His face, pleasant and rather foolish
in repose, was suddenly hard and Stern. “My lady,” he said, “you’d
best do as Alf told you, and soon. I’m going after him.”

“He told you to go back to camp.”

“He should have known better, and he should never have
left like that before he’d packed me off.”

“You know where he’s gone?”

“To the fire.” Jehan took up the hooded mantle
with which he had concealed his foreignness, and threw it on. “I’ll
come back for my things. Leading Alf, or carrying him.”

The City was deceptively quiet, basking in the respite from the
relentless heat. But beneath the surface, terror had begun to stir. Jehan won
passage through the midday crowds with his size and his determination,
searching with desperate hope for a familiar white-fair head.

He had hoped for it, but he did not credit his eyes when he saw
it under the arch of a portico. For an instant he feared some calamity, illness
or violence or perhaps true madness. But Alf met Jehan with clear eyes and a
forbidding frown. “Why are you following me?”

“Why are you waiting for me?” Jehan countered.

Alf’s frown darkened. “You’re an utter fool.”
He gripped Jehan’s arm with that startling strength of his and drew him forward.
“Stay with me and keep your head covered.”

They heard and scented it before they saw it, screams and cries
and an acrid tang of smoke that caught at the throat. As they rounded a corner,
fierce heat struck them like a blow. Flames leaped to the sky, dimmed and
thinned by the sun’s brightness.

All the strong current of the crowd rushed away from the fire,
carrying everything in its wake. Alf breasted it like a swimmer, battling it,
borne backward one for every two steps he advanced. Once he stopped; Jehan
braced himself, expecting them both to be hurled down and trampled. Yet,
although the panic-scrambling was as wild as ever, Alf made his way forward again
all but unimpeded.

The roaring in their ears, Jehan realized, was not simply
the clamor of many voices raised in terror, but the fire itself as it devoured
everything in its path. He saw it leap from roof to roof across the narrow
street, take hold on dry timbers and flare upward like a torch. Black
demon-figures leaped and danced within it, casting themselves forth, shrieking
as they fell.

Here and there amid the inferno were islands: lines of
people struggling to hold back the flames, beating at them with cloaks and
blankets and rugs, running from the cisterns with basins and buckets and jars;
winning small victories, but losing ground steadily as wind and fire conspired
to overrun them.

Alf passed them. The air shimmered in the fire-heat; as if
by a miracle the crowd had thinned to nothing. Figures staggered about: a man
bent under a heavy chest; a small child clutching at one still smaller and
crying; a charred scarecrow with a terrible seared face, that wheeled about
even as Jehan stared, and plunged into the flames.

Alf halted so suddenly that Jehan collided with him. “God
in heaven,” he said softly but distinctly in Latin. Jehan, peering at his
face through eyes smarting with smoke, saw there neither fear nor pity but a
white, terrible anger. He swept the children into his arms, murmuring words of
comfort, and passed them to Jehan. “Take them to safety,” he said.

The children were limp, passive, worn out with terror. Jehan
settled them one on each arm, with the absent ease of one who had had numerous
small siblings. “And you?”

“I’ll come back to you,” Alf answered.

Jehan hesitated. But the children whimpered, and Alf’s
eyes were terrible. He retreated slowly at first, then more swiftly.

Left alone, Alf stood for a moment, his face to the fire. It
tore at him, buffeted him, strangled him with smoke. He reached inward to the
heart of his strangeness, gathered the power that coiled there, hurled it with
all his strength against the inferno. The flames quailed before it. He laughed,
the sound of steel on steel, with no mirth in it.

Yet the fire, having no mind, knew no master. It surged
forward into the gap it had left, and reached with long fingers, enfolding the
slim erect figure. Enfolding, but not touching. That much power he had still.

He laughed again briefly, but his laughter died, and with it
his anger. Pain tore at his sharpened senses, mingled with terror. There were
people in the heart of that hell, alive and in agony or trapped and mad with
panic. He set his mind upon a single thread of consciousness, and followed
where it led.

Jehan, setting the children down within the safety of the
fire lines, saw Alf cloaked in flames. He cried out and bolted forward; a
stream of fire like a shooting star drove him back.

He would have advanced again, but hands caught him and held him,
in spite of his struggles.

“Will you show some sense?”

The voice was sharp and familiar. He stared blankly at Thea,
who glared back. She was dressed as a boy, her hair caught up under a cap.

“You kept him from being burned,” he said. “Now
he’s gone and done it, and where were you?”

“Don’t be an idiot.” She let him go. “He’s
perfectly safe. The last thing he needs is to have you blundering after him and
getting killed before he can stop you. Here, see if you can talk these people
into getting upwind and staying upwind, and keeping the fire back.”

Already she was drawing away from him. “Where are you going?”
he called after her.

“To be an idiot.” She vanished as Alf had, into
a wall of fire.

o0o

The sun crawled across the sky. Beneath it, steadily,
inexorably, the flames advanced. Not only wood but fired brick and even stone
fell before them. With the sun’s sinking, the City wore a girdle of fire
from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn.

Jehan lowered his burden to the ground and coughed. Pain lanced
through his scorched throat. The woman he had carried from her smoldering house
moaned and twisted, overcome more by hysteria than by the smoke. She could heal
herself, he thought with callousness born of a long day’s horrors. He coughed
again, more weakly, and nerved himself for another foray.

A shape grew out of fire and darkness. Its face seemed vaguely
familiar, but he saw only the cup it held out, brimming with blessed water. He
snatched eagerly at it, caught himself with a wrenching effort, dropped stiffly
to his knees. The woman gulped the water greedily. and cursed him when he took the
cup away half full to give the rest to the boy who lay beside her.

Gentle hands retrieved the cup, returned it filled. “That
is for you,” Alf said firmly.

He drank slowly in long sips. With each he felt his strength
rise a little higher.

When no more remained in the cup, he surrendered it. Alf
hung it from his belt and set his hands on Jehan’s shoulders. They were
warm and strong, pouring strength into him, soothing his hurts.

“Where—” Jehan croaked. “Where—”

“We’ve opened Saint Basil’s as a field
hospital. Thea is there, and Bardas—Sophia had no luck in fetching him to
safety.”

“But you—the fire—”

“We’ve been bringing all the worst wounded to
Saint Basil’s. Come with us and help us.” Carefully, without
waiting for an answer, Alf raised the boy who had drunk the half of Jehan’s
first cup. The woman he ignored, though she tugged at him, whining.

Saint Basil’s lay on the very edge of the inferno yet
separated from it by a circle of garden. Streamers of fire, wind-driven, seemed
to pass over it or else to fall short of it. The air felt cooler there, and
cleaner; even amid the cries of agony and the bodies crowded into every space,
there remained a sense of order and of peace.

After Alf had seen the wounded boy settled, he brought Jehan
to a tall hard-faced man in blue who surveyed them with a grim eye. Jehan knew
how unpromising he must seem to a master surgeon of Constantinople: filthy,
stumbling with weariness, his mantle long lost, the rest of his garb charred,
tattered, and all too obviously that of a Latin priest.

Alf laid an arm about his friend’s shoulders and said,
“I’ve found the man I spoke of, Master. He’s trained as well
as I am, if not better, and he speaks excellent Greek.”

“Do you now?” said Master Dionysios. “Prove
it.”

“He flatters me, sir,” Jehan answered, “but
then, he did the training. I suppose he’s entitled to brag a little.”

The Master glanced from the soot-streaked young face to the one
that was somewhat cleaner and seemed a good deal younger. Whatever his
thoughts, he only growled, “I suppose you know what a bath is for. When
that’s done, you can find work enough to do.”

Jehan bowed.

“And,” Master Dionysios added grimly, “mind
you, sir Frank. If anyone dies here, he won’t be sent to Heaven or Hell by
a heretic. We can use your hands, and your training if you have any. Leave the
prayers to those who can say them properly.”

Jehan’s eyes smoldered, but he held his tongue and
bowed again with frigid correctness.

o0o

Deep night brought no relief, no slackening in the flood of wounded
and dying. With all the hospital’s rooms and corridors filled, Master
Dionysios sent the rest into the garden to be tended by the light of lamps and
of the fire itself, a fierce red glow all about them.

Bathed and shaven and dressed in a fresh tunic that strained
at every seam but was at least clean, Jehan labored in the garden. The scent of
flowers was sweet and strong even over the stench of smoke and burning flesh;
it refreshed him as the water had when he came out of the fire. Sometimes he
saw Alf, marked by his luminous pallor, tending those whose hurts were greatest.
Once he thought he recognized Bardas’ heavyset figure, if truly it was
His Majesty’s Overseer of the Hospitals who held a man’s head while
a surgeon cut away the remnants of a hand.