Balkans to the straits, and meets up with a seaborne fleet of Venetians and Genoese.”
“And yourself, your majesty?”’ Argyll said, almost forgetting this was simple madness and half seeing the pennants on the ships ready to sail. “You must lead them.”
Father Charles smiled, nursing his secret. “Of course. Of course. Now, I shall tell you a secret. The greatest of them all. And show you God’s goodness. Out of this disaster, this most bitter lesson, goodness shall come. Byzantium fell for a reason. It was His displeasure at our divisions. East and west, spending more time fighting each other than our common enemy.”
He stopped, and cocked his head to one side. “Check the door, sir. I fear being overheard.”
Argyll dutifully got up from his sitting position, joints cracking from the strain of being so uncomfortable, and peered round the door. “No one there,” he said quietly. “We’re not being overheard.”
He came back, and Father Charles, face suffused with excitement, leaned forward to whisper in his ear.
“For the past six months, I have been negotiating the reunification of Christianity. East and west will come together again and act as one. It is a miracle; Christendom will be stronger and more powerful than ever before. I had a sign that day, in the Church of Holy Wisdom, before the walls fell. It was too late then, our contrition, but I knew my task, and I am close to completing it. Callixtus and I, we have reached agreement; he will put his whole weight behind the enterprise. And the first the infidel know of this will be when I appear once more before the walls of Constantinople, at the head of an army of French and German and even English knights. They will be overpowered and swept away.”
“And until everything is ready, you will hide here, pretending to be Brother Angelus? Is that the idea?”’
He nodded slyly. “Good, eh? With only my servant Gratian, who would suspect I would live in such reduced circum stances? Lull them into a false sense of security. And all the while my secret emissaries and those of his Holiness cross Europe, weaving a net to catch the infidel in so tightly he will never escape until he is exterminated utterly. So, now you see the need for the utmost secrecy. Do you see?”’
“Of course. But such a secret cannot last forever.”
“It won’t have to. There is little time. His Holiness is behind the plan wholeheartedly, but he is old and sick. And a faction at his court is opposed, and want to exploit my weakness. Another reason for secrecy. We must strike fast and hard.”
Argyll nodded. Made sense to him. “But isn’t there a bit of a problem here?”’
“What problem?”’
“You’re dead, right? I mean, you’re pretending to be dead. Killed on the walls, and all that. If you are suddenly resurrected, who’s going to believe it? Won’t everyone say you’re just an impostor? And refuse to follow you? Following the Emperor is one thing; following a fake is another.”
Father Charles wagged his finger. “Very astute, young man. But not as astute as I am. Believe me when I tell you; this has been planned well. They will believe I am who I am, but it wouldn’t matter if they didn’t.”
“Why?”’
“Because they will follow her.”
“Who.”
“The Hodigitria.”
Argyll looked at him, and Father Charles chuckled, then turned deeply serious.
“You are stunned into silence. I thought you would be. Yes, young man. Yes. Rejoice at the news. She has survived. The holiest picture in all the wide empire, the Mother herself, painted by the hand of St Luke guided by God, and a true image of her likeness and that of her only begotten son. She lives and is here.” His voice fell to a hoarse whisper. “In this very building. All true Christians will follow her. He who has her blessing is destined to hold the Christian empire in his hands. So it is believed and so it will be. Now, guard my secret until we are ready to act.”
By the time he left Father Charles’s room, the return to sunlight and normality as sudden a shock as if he had suddenly been transported in a time machine across the centuries, Argyll was well off-track. He had found out what the picture was, or what it might be; that was all that was important. He should have got into a taxi and gone straight round to Flavia and told her.
But he didn’t. He was so bemused by Father Charles that he forgot all about what seemed to him now to be a somewhat parochial and trivial aspect of the whole business.
He didn’t even doubt it, or not much. He headed back to the university library for one reason only: to confirm Father Charles’s story. He knew it was true, or at least a reasonable interpretation of events. Father Charles was completely out of his mind, but he was still intelligent. Somewhere in his brain all sorts of connections had short- circuited, probably at the shock of the painting being stolen. The tale of the Emperor, the loss of the picture had all become jumbled up in his head, causing him to identify too much with those subjects he had studied in the past. But just because his method of telling it was a little unorthodox, didn’t mean the tale was senseless; it had just come out in an odd way.
But first he could at least see if there was anything on record which contradicted the story. He collected piles of books; built himself a small fortress of volumes in one corner of the library before opening them and starting to read. Ouspensky on Icons. Runciman on the siege. Pastor on the Popes, Ducas for an eyewitness account of the fall. Then dictionaries and encyclopaedias and digests. Enough to be getting on with.
He read furiously, then got up for more, and started again, reading incredibly quickly andwitha level of concentration he could rarely manage. An hour passed, then two, and still he found nothing, not a word, to make Father Charles’s madness seem impossible. The Emperor was said to have fallen on the last day of the siege, but no one ever properly identified the body. The Turkish Sultan Mehmet II impaled a head on a stake, then stuffed it and sent it round the courts of the Middle East to show his victory, but there was never the slightest proof it was the right head. The Emperor Constantine vanished, and was never seen again. There was no body, no eyewitnesses to his death. That didn’t mean that the Greek Brother Angelus was the Emperor, but it didn’t prove that it could not be, either.
So what about the painting, the Hodigitria. It was easy to establish that this was the most venerated icon in the whole of the east; a Virgin, left hand outstretched, with a child on the right arm. Paraded around the walls in 1087 and credited with saving the city from disaster, and brought out from the church in times of war and emergency. Traditionally said to have been painted, from the life, by St Luke. The special symbol uniting Emperor, city, empire and Christendom. The Turks had destroyed it, in the orgy of looting and violence that was their right when a city which resisted was taken by siege. But again, no witnesses. No one saw them do it. And on the evening before the final assault, the painting was not brought out and paraded around the walls as was the custom. If ever divine help was needed it was then. Her failure to appear would surely have demoralized the troops terribly. So why not? There could be no reason—unless it had already left the city, smuggled out on one of the Venetian galleys that were already slipping out of harbour and running the gauntlet of the Turkish siege to get to safety. Perhaps the Emperor had laid his plans well in advance, and realized that not even the Virgin Mary herself could save his city from its own foolishness. So he made sure she was safe, and set up his own last-minute escape, already thinking about his counter-attack. Then he came to Rome, to plot and wait.
But the counter-attack never happened. No massing of armies, no reunification of Christendom; nothing. Nobody lifted a finger, and Constantinople became and stayed Istanbul. Argyll began on his pile of books about the popes. The name was right, at least; Callixtus III was pope from 1455, and dedicated his papacy to recovering the east. But nothing came of it. The only attempt at reunifying Christendom had been years before, at the Council of Florence, and it fizzled out in mutual acrimony. And Callixtus himself died in 1458, to be replaced by a new pope more interested in building projects and artistic patronage. Certainly, if the Emperor had survived, then his chances of a revanche died with Callixtus.
One final question. Father Charles had talked of the last night in Santa Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, before the final assault. Ducas had an account of it. How in the panic, the remaining population, knowing the end was near, went to the Church of Hagia Sophia to pray, and had to make do with whatever priests were around. Catholics submitted to Orthodox priests, the Orthodox to Catholics, neither caring which was which, for the first and possibly last time. The Emperor was there, before the battle trumpets sounded and summoned him to the walls. Perhaps such a sight could inspire a man; certainly he was right in saying it was too late. A few hours later the troops burst in; many of the congregation were killed, the rest enslaved, and the next day the most venerable church of all became a mosque.
Argyll yawned and looked at his watch, then started with alarm. Six-thirty already. He’d been there for nearly
