The Unhappy Medium 3: Wretched Things: A Supernatural Comedy, page 10
Who else, then, but Enrico Pescatore, the newly promoted Count of Malta, to lead this great expedition and secure the relic of the True Cross for Genoa?
Pescatore’s sleek personal galley at its head, the task force set sail for Corsica.
Fortis, convinced he was safe in ‘rock-girt’ Bonifacio, must have been pretty shocked when the Count of Malta and his many ships hove into view. Caught napping, the pirates were in disarray as the Genoese stormed the beach, The Fish in the lead, blade flashing. Unable to mount a meaningful defence, Fortis and his pirates heroically fled inland, leaving Bonifacio and the True Cross … to Pescatore.
*****
Yes, Pescatore carried the relic back to a triumphant Genoa, but he did it in his own sweet time. Stopping in the Cretan city of Candia (Chania), the Count of Malta added a fortnight to his journey, something that raised a few eyebrows amongst his Genoese paymasters. But when Pescatore did finally turn up, it was to a harbourside alive with celebration. Clergy, merchants, petty officials and a general population half-mad with Christian devotion and spiritual neediness, Genoa was a city as pleased with itself as it was with Enrico ‘The Fish’ Pescatore. Taken in triumph to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, he handed the relic of the True Cross to the Bishop of Genoa in a solemn ceremony, while outside, the crowds swarmed in a religious frenzy.
After that, life for Pescatore just got better and better. From bad boy pirate to Grand Admiral, the former privateer was given free rein to range across the Mediterranean, causing mischief, each raid more glorious than the last. Tripoli was wrested from the Venetians, the Pisans were driven from Syracuse; there seemed to be nothing Pescatore couldn’t achieve. Financiers threw money at him, desperate to invest in whatever adventure he planned next. As is the way of things, the less Pescatore needed the money, the more it seemed to be offered to him.
The talk of Genoa, troubadours wrote songs extolling his virtues.
‘He is generous and intrepid and chivalrous, the star of the Genoese, and makes all his enemies tremble throughout the land and the sea … Count Henry [AKA Pescatore] has destroyed all his enemies and is so safe a shelter to his friends that whosoever wishes may come or go without doubt or fear.’
From the records, we can see that Crete now grew to obsess the Count of Malta. Again and again, Pescatore lobbied for the funds to stage an expedition to wrest control of the fateful island from the possessive Venetians. Given his status, the cash was instantly forthcoming.
It was 1206. Hubris in overdrive, Enrico ‘The Fish’ Pescatore landed in Crete.
With an army large enough to take control of a sufficient number of forts to make his stay on Crete permanent, Pescatore and his men pushed the Venetian garrisons aside, then dug in.
Two months later, furious at the Genoese expansion, thirty-two Venetian warships attacked Pescatore’s fleet north of the island. They sank a few of his ships, ventured ashore to burn down a garrison, and made a bit of noise, but that was about all. Instead of toppling the bold Count of Malta, the Venetians had done little but rattle his outer defences before sailing away again. The emboldened Pescatore, delighted at the weak Venetian response, then attempted to rubberstamp his invasion, sending a request to the Pope, suggesting he be made the King of Crete. It was pretty cheeky, and it nearly worked, but when it was pointed out that the Pope technically owned the island himself already, the request was quietly rejected.
History shows us that occupations are an expensive pastime. Taking land is often the easy part; keeping land is costly, a neverng drain on men and supplies. Crete isn’t small; it needed troops … lots of troops, if it was to withstand Venetian pressure. The money that Pescatore had raised to take Crete didn’t cover keeping it. It wasn’t nearly enough. His pockets emptying, Pescatore began to tax the locals, eroding Cretan support.
Desperate to hold on to his conquest, Pescatore dashed back to Genoa on a fundraising drive. Packed end to end with fickle bean counters and jittery speculators, Genoa suddenly didn’t want to invest a florin more in the venture. When the investment had seemed certain, they’d loved it, of course, but now that clouds were gathering, they didn’t want to know at all. Income from the island wasn’t going to appear anytime soon, they argued, especially with the Venetians back in the picture. Why throw good money after the bad? As is also the way of such things, the more Pescatore needed the money, the less the fat cats of Genoa were willing to offer it. Frantically pointing at the medieval equivalent of a flipchart, Pescatore presented himself again and again to the bankers, his sales pitch becoming ever more frantic as the rejections mounted. Pescatore’s grand Cretan adventure had become a bad bet, a dead-end, a road to nowhere.
After a few humiliating weeks of begging, the would-be King of Crete gave up.
The Fish sailed back to Crete to face the music.
What Enrico Pescatore found when he got back were Venetians … lots of Venetians.
With Henry away in his home city, the enemies of Genoa had made their move, regaining a foothold back on what they considered to be their island. Over the following months, more by trade than military action, the Venetians bought out Henry’s impoverished bastions, shrinking the Genoese presence on the island inexorably until by 1211, the embattled Pescatore was in a state of siege. His last strongholds surrounded, his supply ships ambushed by Venetian pirates, Enrico Pescatore bowed to the inevitable and gave in.
In mind-numbing debt to his Genoese masters, the crestfallen Pescatore returned to Malta to brood.
Needless to say, those who had financed Pescatore’s Cretan adventure in the first place were now very interested in Pescatore and his estates. In no time at all, Pescatore’s creditors cleaned him out. Stripped of most, if not all, of the wealth he had accumulated, the Count of Malta became a shadow of his former self. Reluctant to show initiative, his fingers burned, his shoulders bowed and very nearly broken, he vanished from public life to face his demons. Though Pescatore eventually regained a little of his influence in subsequent years, Crete hung over the Count of Malta like a cloud of flies, haunting his dreams, taunting him with lost possibilities and failed responsibility. His standing as a commander ground into the Cretan dust, his decisions forever in doubt, Pescatore never reclaimed his stellar reputation. Lost to himself, he changed paymasters like socks, less and less willing to stick his neck out. Imprisoned briefly for the lack-lustre suppression of a Saracen revolt on Sicily, Pescatore withdrew still further.
Treading water in obscure public offices, his glory days long behind him, Enrico Pescatore, Henry the Count of Malta, ‘The Fish’ faded away. Bitter, laden with regret and obsessed with his Crete, Pescatore trudged through his middle years until 1239, when the one-time pirate finally vanished from the historical record.
*****
Years had passed, turning into centuries. Andronicus the Terrible, far from fading away as all had hoped, was still as fresh as a plastic daisy.
Much to the annoyance of all that had had to deal with him over these tiresome centuries, Andronicus not only remained as a fixture in the cells of Purgatory, but he was also very much reverting to type. He had tried to escape at least a hundred times, attempting to bribe his gaolers, pleading for clemency or, bizarrely, on one occasion, pretending to be dead.
At least forty times, he had begged to use the toilets, even though the dead neither ate food nor visited the bathroom.
There were no bathrooms.
The health ruse had been his favourite. Andronicus had feigned stomach cramps, eczema, fibromyalgia, chest pains, tapeworms and social anxiety, all of which meant he needed to ‘pop outside for a bit’ … unsupervised. Eric and his team, who’d seen it all by this time, weren’t fooled one bit, of course, but it was an irritant nonetheless.
Meetings were called.
What Eric and his colleagues wanted to know was why Andronicus, who was hardly a household name by this time, was still as vivid as a fast-food advertisement. Huge effort had been put into making sure Andronicus would be sandblasted from the historical record, effort to ensure he would be rendered a mere footnote in the annals of an Empire that had been duly obliterated. The mausoleum Andronicus had decorated with scenes of his shabby life? Well, that had long been reduced to rubble, as had the self-aggrandising histories he’d had written, torched just days after his lurid execution.
People had wanted to forget Andronicus the Terrible.
More importantly, no one wanted to remember.
He wasn’t a Hitler, a Bin Laden or a Stalin. No one lamented him on any level. He wasn’t even a popular hate figure anymore. The population had thrown his horrors out with the trash, then got on with life. The only visual record of him in the here and now was a solitary coin and a fairly gleeful portrayal of his horrendous execution in an obscure illuminated manuscript. These were pretty hard to find, even on the comparatively new and largely annoying internet.
So, who, Eric and his team wanted to know, was keeping this monster alive? The danger, and it was a real danger, was that sooner or later, someone was going to bring whatever relic of Andronicus the Terrible was lurking out there in the shadows into contact with the means of necromancing the ghastly bastard back into being.
Andronicus himself was in no position to know, so there was no point in even asking. Instead, Purgatorial teams in modern Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean were dispatched to comb the antique shops or tasked with monitoring the more fringe collectors, eyes out for any trace of the Terrible Andronicus I Comnenus.
As Eric the Greek loved to point out, the Purgatorians in this part of the world were, like everywhere else, not very good. As had been the case since ancient times, their ranks were filled with the superstitious and the bat-shit crazy, not the logical or the rational, leading to what should have been predictably messy results. What Eric failed to concede was that it was the new, more analytical approach pioneered by Newton Barlow in Southern England that did yield results, something he had insisted rather loudly wouldn’t happen.
Implementing this in the Eastern Mediterranean, however, wasn’t going to be easy. The Middle and Near East, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the last two thousand years of history will know, is hardly the sort of place where cool heads tend to prevail. Finding living agents with a taste for deductive reasoning in the region had proven elusive. Nosing about the sensitive worlds of the spiritual and the political was pretty much a death sentence; recruits were hard to come by, let alone keep.
With Byzantium having been toppled and then assimilated by Islam, the relics keeping the Terrible Andronicus alive could be anywhere, spread across the world by war, opportunism or accident. International collectors’ catalogues revealed nothing; there were simply no grapes on the grapevine. Despite the resources thrown at the problem, Andronicus’ passport to the world of the living remained live.
Andronicus the Terrible was still there, being terrible, looking for ways out of hell’s waiting room.
Chapter 10
Awash
Crete’s mountains rise sharply the moment you head south from the coastal plain. Monumental, they rear up, stark and bright against the intense blue of the Cretan sky, giving them their name, the Lefka Ori - the White Mountains. In antiquity, many climbed up into these majestic peaks on religious business, seeking out remote caves to worship their pagan gods, leaving votive offerings for their deities in their moody interiors. Many of these caves were discovered and excavated in the 20th century, but a few … a very rare few, lay undiscovered into modern times, unknown even to the local shepherds.
One such cave was now the subject of intense scrutiny.
This was no official dig; the solitary archaeologist was working alone with neither Greek nor international permits, his methods laughably unscientific. As the sun blazed down outside, he laboured in its chilly depths, pushing past the cobwebs and pungent dampness to test the extent of the interior. Much to his frustration, some 100 feet in, it unarguably ended. Enraged, he swore robustly in German, and when that failed to make him feel any better, he kicked a Mycenaean oil jar into fragments.
‘Verdammte Scheisse!’ he swore, booting the head off a statue of Zeus. ‘Für’n Arsch!’
Cursing some more, he stomped brattily back through the cave, crunching across a sea of shattered pottery and amputated statuettes before bursting into the sunlight and squinting. Muttering angrily, he beat the cobwebs from his linen suit, then held up his Panama hat as a shield against the relentless Cretan sun.
‘Fizlaus!’ he bellowed, looking into the tree line. ‘Useless old man. Where are you?’
His watering eyes back online, the German peered into the surrounding foliage. There, in intense shadows beneath a gnarled fig tree, he found him. Sitting impassively upon a rock, was an impossibly old man in traditional Cretan dress: black knee-length boots, an embroidered blouse and a tasselled hat. His blind eyes were glazed with thick, milky cataracts, and his tanned face was traced with a thousand lines, indicating a life filled with way too much drama. Far from jumping to the German’s attention, the Cretan remained where he was, looking intently into his own blindness, crossed hands resting atop his cane.
‘No need to shout, Doctor Kraakenhausen,’ answered the old man. ‘I’m right here. What did you find?’
‘Nothing, dammit,’ said Dr Kraakenhausen angrily. ‘It’s the same as all the others.’
‘The cave we seek. It is … close,’ insisted the blind man.
‘Bullshit. You old fraud!’ snapped the German. ‘It’s always close, isn’t it? Ja, but never close enough, damn you. Is that your game here? Playing with me. I think so … ja?’
‘No game,’ replied the old man, unruffled by the petulant accusation. ‘To find what you seek, and what I must find … it will take time. I have always said as much.’
‘But when? WHEN!?’ exploded Kraakenhausen. ‘We cannot search forever. My masters, they grow impatient.’
‘Your masters,’ said the old man, ‘are not my concern.’
‘If they are my concern, they are yours, old man. Believe me. You cross these people, and you go out of ein fifth-floor vindow. You vanna go first, ja? Be mein guest. Ve need results. You claimed you could find a vay in, and foolishly, ve believed you. Ve have made certain … promises.’
‘I said I could only guide you to the doors,’ answered the blind man, ‘Whether they are open or not is beyond my control.’
‘Goddammit, you old fool,’ railed the German. ‘I am sick of these riddles.’
Exhausted by disappointment, the German leant back against a rock, dabbing the perspiration from his face with a stained handkerchief.
‘Papa!’ came a shout from the hillside below. ‘Papa! Vhere are you?’
Dr Kraakenhausen dropped his scowl, rushing to the edge of the ledge and looking down excitedly to the rocks below.
‘Helena!’ he shouted back, waving his hat. ‘Up here!’
A severe-looking thirty-something woman in combat gear emerged from the coarse vegetation on the slope below, her sizeable black army boots crunching through the scree as she clambered up to her father beside the cave entrance.
‘There you are, Papa,’ said the archaeologist’s daughter, joining him beneath the broad fig leaves. ‘You look exhausted. Here, have some vater.’ She tossed her father a bottle, from which he drank greedily. ‘Vot about him?’ asked Helena, indicating the blind man.
‘Let him sweat,’ sneered Dr Kraakenhausen. ‘useless Flachwischer!’
‘I take it that the cave vent nowhere?’ asked Helena.
‘Yes, dearest daughter, just like all the others. Mein Gott! This old bastard is driving me insane. Insane, I tell you!’
‘Calm yourself, Papa,’ urged his daughter. ‘This heat, the stress, you could have a stroke. You don’t vant to go the same vay as your father.’
‘My father vos a soldier,’ lamented Dr Kraakenhausen. ‘He should have died on the battlefield, not in ein cursed granny ghetto.’
‘This is not a battlefield, Papa. This is a mountain. This is no place to die, either. Your aneurism vill not help our cause one jot. Have you taken your tablet today?’
‘Nein.’
‘Well, take it now, please.’ Helena stomped over to the blind man, then squatted before him in her combats. ‘Now, let’s see vot our old friend here thinks we may be doing wrong.’
‘Your father,’ said the old man, ‘is not a patient man.’
‘Nein,’ agreed Helena. ‘And I … am not a patient woman. Vhy have ve not yet found a vay in?’
‘As I explained to your father,’ replied the old man, ‘there were probably once a hundred of these entrance caves. Most have been sealed, and with great skill, but there are still entrances; they would not have sealed them all. We must try many before we find the one. We have to be patient.’
‘Patience!’ shouted the father. ‘Damn patience. Dammit. I’ve been in eleven of these godforsaken caves, and there’s nothing in them but dust und spiders. They alvays end in … nothing!’
‘The real entrance, it is around here somewhere,’ insisted the blind man. ‘I can sense it. It is … near.’
‘Oh, I am so sick of his bullshit,’ cursed Dr Kraakenhausen. ‘I vish ve’d never started on this damn expedition. You promised me that you vould find a vay in, old man. I think maybe you are ein fantasist. I mean, …. who the hell are you anyway, you old bastard?’
‘I am a searcher,’ said the old man. ‘Just like you.’
‘Well, I’m sick of searching,’ snapped Kraakenhausen, ramming a fist into his palm. ‘You hear me? Sick! I need results.’
‘I will do what I can,’ answered the old man. ‘I want the discovery as much as you. More than you, maybe.’
‘Vot do you mean by that?’ demanded Dr Kraakenhausen. ‘How can you possibly vant it more than me? You verk for me.’
‘Figure of speech,’ explained the old man. ‘Quite right, I work for you.’
‘Then deliver, ja?’ demanded the archaeologist. ‘Because we cannot keep this nonsense up much longer. Understand?’
