‘What is your name?’
‘Leilah,’ she replied. ‘And how are you called?’
He hesitated. Everywhere he was known as Zoran. It was a mask, just like the other. Yet here, now, with her, he wanted to reveal the truth of himself. For some reason, for the first time in the six years since he’d put them on, he wanted someone to see behind the masks.
‘My name is Gregoras,’ he replied softly, and as he spoke, he reached up and pulled aside the cloth that covered his face.
Even in the shadows by the door, there was light enough to see. He waited for the usual reactions, those he’d seen on the few who’d looked before, the physicians, the whores, the mercenaries. Shock, followed by – depending on who looked – either pity, fascination or mockery. The last two he could handle. It was the first that he had never been able to stand.
He saw none of them now. All he saw was something he’d not seen in anyone’s eyes in six years.
Desire.
‘Well,’ she said, closing the small gap between them, till their clothes touched, ‘I have seen wooden ones before, but never … is it ivory?’
‘Yes.’ He reached up, touched the tip of the false nose. ‘The carver was a sculptor of Thessalonica. He made me three, for ivory yellows. It is nearly time for me to exchange this one.’
‘And it is held on by …?’ She looked to the side, to the twin leather straps that braced it high and low and went around his head above his ears. ‘It looks tight. Do you ever take it off?’
‘When I am here, alone. When I sleep. Sometimes when I fight, if I am not wearing a helmet.’
‘A soldier? But of course I knew that.’ She took his hand, raised it to her mouth, kissed it. Her eyes never left his. ‘Take it off,’ she said.
The shock ran through him at her touch, at her command. It was, for him, a mask within a mask. The last concealment. No one saw behind it.
He said nothing. Just bent his head, reached behind to the catches that held the leather straps, flicked them, put the ivory in a pocket. Searched her gaze again.
No shock. No revulsion. No pity. The excitement never wavered in her eyes.
She still held his hand. She tugged it now and, wordlessly, led him to the bed.
Leilah woke to shuttered sunlight striping the man beside her, his face buried in a sprawled arm. She raised herself to stare … and smiled. Not at the memory of their lovemaking, intense though it had been. No, it was something else, something even more powerful.
For how often does one gaze upon one’s destiny?
She’d had the dream again, in the brief time of sleep. A man, cloaked and hooded, leading her. A locked door. ‘Do you have the key?’ she’d ask. Only then would he turn to her. Within the hood, he was masked. ‘Here,’ he would reply, reaching up, pulling the mask away.
Mask falling, door opening, she’d stumble forward, past him, fall onto her knees, reach, finally touch what she’d sought from the moment she’d heard of it, in another man’s bed – Isaac’s, her previous lover; Isaac the Alchemist, his grey eyes lost to a greater lust than he’d ever felt for her. Lust for the manual of alchemy written by the great Jabir ibn Hayyan, whom others called Geber. The Arab’s hand-written notes in the margin. Answers to questions that every alchemist sought. Answers to life itself.
It was in a monastery in the city known as the Red Apple. It would reveal to her the secrets of the world, secrets she could sell to some man for the fortune that would free her of all men. And this one, who stirred beside her now, was going to get it for her.
She always woke from the dream wet with desire – of every kind. ‘Heya,’ she called softly.
Gregoras woke. Had he slept? A stronger light was in the sky than the last he remembered and she was against it, her face in shadow. He could see her hair, unbound and flowing over her bare shoulders. See one breast, silhouetted against slats.
She bent to him now, breasts falling onto his shoulder, brushing his bare chest as she kissed him. Her nose pressed into his cheek … and he remembered. He was naked before her. Not unclothed, he was not concerned about that. Unmasked.
Yet before he could slip from the bed and seek his protection, she had slid down, curved around him, drawing the covers they’d thrown off over them again. ‘I’m cold,’ she whispered. ‘Warm me.’
Then he remembered that with her, he didn’t care about masks.
Their lovemaking was sleep-laden, half a dream, gentle, unlike the fury of the night before. He was aware now of each part of her he touched, when last night they had passed before his eyes, under his hands, his mouth, in a trembling blur of delight. Now he took his time to explore them all. Her breasts, their wine-dark nipples growing, responding to his tongue and teeth. The slope of her belly, its rise and fall, down to her loins, which flooded her thighs like a stream its banks at his stroke. He consumed her, tasting in her the same scents he’d received before, fragrance of spices, of cinnamon and clove. With that scent behind them all: sandalwood, its memories ignored now, the past conceded to the delights of the present. While she took an equal delight in him, moving now above, now below, up him and down, tracing his many scars with different parts of herself, running the length of him with fingers, tongue, with the firmness of a nipple, exploring his varied hardnesses.
In the end, their cries came together, but softly, as if daylight restrained their voices, though there was nothing held back, nothing not given.
She lay for a while with her elbows on his chest, studying him. There was a different kind of hunger in her gaze, disturbing him. Despite her protests, he managed to untwine himself.
There was a small porch at the back of his hovel, walled in, but open to the sky. He kept his water there, and a pail to relieve himself in. He did so now, aching slightly, smiling at the ache. Stood there afterwards, staring at the blue sky, despite the chill breeze – until he heard her call from within. Filling a flagon with water from the brimming rain barrel, he returned to the room.
He was disappointed to see her in her shift. ‘Do you leave?’ he said.
‘Soon. And it was cold in here without you.’
‘Well, now I am back. With water,’ he said, lifting the jug.
She was taming her hair, catching it up with pins. ‘Ah, that I would like.’
He rinsed his one goblet out, throwing the dregs of wine out of the window, refilling it with rainwater. Bringing it to her, he said, ‘Shall we return to the bed?’
‘I would like that.’ She pushed the last pin in. ‘But I must go.’
‘Must?’ he asked.
‘The tides. My captain swore he’d abandon me if I was not back at the harbour by noon.’
‘Captain?’
‘Of the ship I came on. I am on my way … elsewhere. We were blown into this port by the storm. I was seeking an inn last night when those men …’ She shrugged.
‘Oh.’ He bent to his discarded clothes, fetched out the ivory nose. With practised hands he secured it.
‘You need not do that for me,’ she said.
‘I do it for myself,’ he replied, reaching for a shirt.
Silence came as they sipped. Of course she is leaving, Gregoras thought. Why would she stay? He didn’t like the feeling he had. Wanted her gone now, so the feeling would go too. But he found himself asking something else. Opposite.
‘Do you have to go?’
‘I do.’ She laughed as she saw the look on his face. ‘But I can return soon. If you would like me to. I do not travel far.’
‘I would like you to,’ he said, too swiftly. Then he remembered. ‘Yet I must also travel today. I will be gone a … a few months. And then I will return.’ He hesitated – then said it anyway. ‘Will you meet me here?’
She considered him – and remembered her dream. ‘Here? Perhaps we could meet somewhere … warmer?’ She looked around and smiled. ‘With furniture?’
He looked around also, saw the room as she saw it. Lost in lust, they could have been anywhere. But in the morning l
ight …
‘Come with me,’ he said suddenly, putting down the water jug, taking her hand. He led her across the room to the other shuttered window. Throwing it back, he said, ‘Look!’
‘At what?’
‘At the view.’
She laughed, looked. It was indeed a sight. They were high up in the town. To their left it fell away in swoops of red-tiled roofs, houses leaning over the alleys that threaded the town. Directly below them, a stone’s throw away, the walls of the city followed the land, dipping straight ahead, giving an uninterrupted view out to a sea that sparkled in the winter sun. Xebecs, with their slanted red-striped sails, and tall-sided carracks tacked against the wind, making for harbour. In the near distance, an island thrust pine-covered slopes toward the sky.
‘I own the house, but it was this,’ Gregoras said, ‘that I paid so much gold for. Now I need much more, and I will build something worthy of it.’ He swept his arm against the expanse of sky and sea. ‘There was a poet who lived in Byzantium near a thousand years ago. His name was Paul and he said, “A room with a good view is a surer possession than virtue.”’ He laughed. ‘Since I possess few virtues, I will settle for my view.’
Byzantium, she thought, content that he’d mentioned the place of her dream. ‘Why here?’ she said. ‘Why not there?’ She leaned closer to him, continued softly, ‘For you are of Constantinople, are you not?’
His eyes narrowed above the ivory. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I live my life from knowing people,’ she replied. ‘Your accent is from the East, its tone refined. I would guess you are from the city, and well born.’
He grunted his reply. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Then why not return there? The views your poet speaks of are there.’ Her eyes searched his. ‘So is your heart, is it not?’
‘No!’ He was surprised at the savagery with which he shouted it – until he remembered what he’d already revealed to this stranger. And so he did not hold himself back, as he had not held back before. ‘That city took my heart and crushed it. It took my face and destroyed it. It is a sickened place, it is about to receive its mortal wound and I … I could not be happier.’ He turned to gaze out to the east, his voice quietening, yet losing none of its intensity. ‘I will never return there, not even to gloat among its blackened stones. Never!’
Passion again, of a different kind. Leilah liked her men to be passionate. And she was always interested when a man declared he would not do the very thing he must.
In the silence after his storm, a bell tolled. She counted ten. ‘I must go,’ she said, turning.
Anger passed from his face. ‘As must I.’ He reached, caught her hand. ‘But I meant it when I said I would like you to return.’
‘And I was serious when I said I would like to.’ She squeezed his fingers hard, then stepped away. ‘Do you have anywhere for my … relief?’
He gestured to the back door. She picked up her bag, went out onto the walled porch. She squatted, then used rainwater to wash herself, shivering the while.
By the time she returned, Gregoras was dressed. She finished dressing too, and finally they both donned their masks. Once done, they drew back and stared at each other. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘I prefer you bare.’
He chuckled. ‘And I you. But the stone merchants I go to meet might not.’
As he opened the door, he stooped beside it to pick up a bag and something else. She smiled. ‘Will the stone merchants appreciate a crossbow?’
He laughed again. ‘There is good hunting where I will visit.’
She studied the weapon. It was a fine example, plain, unadorned. Purposeful. She had one much like it upon the boat. ‘Are you good with it?’
‘A journeyman, merely.’
They did not speak again as he guided her down the alleys to the harbour, along the docks to her vessel. The captain eyed them suspiciously before taking her bag.
Leilah turned back, but Gregoras was already walking away. ‘You know where I am,’ he called. ‘Return, if you will.’
She did not mind that his farewell was gruff. Besides, she enjoyed seeing the vision from her dream so clearly realised on a sparkling Ragusan dock. She was almost tempted to follow him, to see if he would lead her right then to Geber’s book. But then she remembered: destiny awaited in another city, the one he swore he would never return to, the one that he was walking towards now – though by what path, for once, she could not see.
– SIX –
The Rescue
‘There is only one way for a gentleman of Scotland to face death, you coo’s arse,’ John Grant declared, ‘and that is, once he has made his peace with God, to get completely, utterly and overwhelmingly drunk!’
He spoke it in his native Gaelic, letting his tongue and throat shape and expand the guttural qualities that his audience loved to hear. They presumed him German and would not believe anything else. But as he lifted his goblet high while declaiming it, they took it for the latest in a series of incomprehensible toasts and pledged him back with roars and the draining of vessels.
He sat down heavily. It was getting harder and harder to stand. Next pledge he’d do sitting down. The one after perhaps prone. When he could speak no more, when his eyes closed and his head finally fell onto his arms, someone would come along and cut it off.
It was getting close to that time. He could tell by the way the room shifted to his gaze, and because the dozen faces in the cellar had begun to blur into just one – round, sweaty, flushed with aqua vitae, creased with tears. They were a sentimental lot, the pirates of Omis. They had grown fond of him. Stanko repeatedly declared that he loved the German like a brother, like a son. But Grant knew the pirate leader had killed several of each. They had grown even fonder of what he made them in his captivity – for distillation was an important part of his alchemical studies and he was fond of a dram himself. So now the pirates shed tears for both, liquor and life, coming to an end. They had given him a week, to complete one last batch. It was up.
Moving his head slowly to the left, Grant squinted at the fire beneath the cauldron. Closing one eye, he focused – and saw that the flames had got low. He checked the seals around the main glass vessel, and especially where the alembic joined the stag’s horn; grunted with pride. He had fashioned a fine still. Even Geber, the Arab master whose few writings he devoured, might have been impressed, considering the poverty of the raw materials he’d worked with. Yet now there was only a little more distillation to be had from the fermented oranges in the vessel’s belly. His life would be measured in one last burst of steam collected, in the drops that … dripped.
Life was irksome. He was ready.
He leaned, toppled. Giggling, he righted himself and shoved hunks of wood onto the fire. Bending, he blew exaggeratedly. Stanko, the chief, bent beside him, blew as well, covering the Scot in spittle. Flames grew, lapped wood. ‘Still more?’ the pirate yelled.
‘A little.’
‘Good. Drink!’
They clattered mugs. ‘Craigelachie,’ the Scotsman shouted. It was the war cry of the clan Grant, a rallying call for the men to gather on the hilltop so named and repel all enemies. He hadn’t cried it in his life in recent years. His clan, his family, he was an exile from their lands, from their regard. But now that his life was about to end, he wanted to be connected to them in some way.
‘I love you, German.’ Stanko grabbed him by the back of his head, pulling him close. ‘You are like a son to me.’
The words were kind. But Grant saw the cunning eyes, sunk in the sweaty face like olives in flatbread. Saw where they moved – around his neck, envisaging the cut that would sever. The head Stanko caressed would soon be floating in a pail of the liquor they all craved – though they would lament the waste – and on its way to the sultan.
‘And you are a lover of pigs,’ John Grant replied in English, smiling. He loved to insult them in languages, of which he spoke seven, and of which they understood not a word. He raised his mug aga
in. ‘Craigelachie,’ he yelled, throwing on more wood.
Gregoras was getting increasingly uncomfortable. Not so much with his perch in the bell tower of Santa Emilia, though it was colder than that saint’s tits, the wind finding every scar and ache in his body and jabbing them. What jabbed most was that in the time he’d sat there, close to two hours, at least ten men had gone into the house opposite him and only two had come out. Each time one entered, he would hear bursts of singing, toasts, sentences of execrable Croat poetry. Heat would rise too, making him shiver all the more.
The night had come, perhaps even the hour. The victim’s name was a secret and so, in the taverns he’d visited, it had been proclaimed in the loudest of whispers.
Johannes Grant, German, was about to die. And the site of execution was no secret either. Who was going to tangle with the pirates of Omis in their own nest?
Am I? Gregoras wondered. He’d begun to doubt it as the pirates’ numbers grew with his stiffness. He knew what he should do: return to the vessel he’d hired, make sail for Ragusa. The odds were too great. He was too late.
And if he did? He’d be sailing back to a hovel. The ducats he’d been advanced had bought him the stone for his house. The finest came from Korcula and he had used that business as cover for this other. But he needed the balance for the masons to build it. Besides, the advance would have to be repaid if he failed. One didn’t fail Giustiniani. He would lose all.
He had no choice – and could wait no longer. Cursing, he descended to the ulica and waited till two more pirates came swaying up the hill and went in. Cursing still, he followed.
At first he thought that he’d stumbled into an alchemist’s den. An uncle had dabbled in the hermetic art, and he’d had equipment such as this. But Gregoras swiftly realised that the main scent was not of heated metals, but of oranges. It was not the philosopher’s stone that was being conjured here, but what the Arabs called al-kohl.
He was in a small distillery.