The Tournament (34 page)

As it turned out, the cistern world was a far different place in daylight than it was at night.

While it was still a dank and dark maze, it was less sinister. This was largely thanks to small cracks in the ceilings of its many chambers—from these cracks tiny shafts of sunlight lanced into the gloom like diagonal lengths of thread pulled taut. While Mr Ascham and Zubaida still carried flaming torches aloft, these thin shafts of light gave off enough extra illumination to actually make certain chambers seem familiar. Finding one’s way back out through the maze would certainly be easier so long as it was done while the sun was still shining outside.

Led by Zubaida, we navigated the early chambers—including the first two with their piles of rubbish and dangerous submerged holes—until after a time the three of us came to the cistern where Zubaida and I had encountered the feral children.

Of course, they were nowhere to be seen.

I called out, ‘Pietro! Pietro! Do not be afraid, this man means you no harm! He is my teacher, the one I told you about, and he has a question for you! I have also brought’—I held up the sack of roasted chickens we had taken from the kitchens—‘some food.’

Heads appeared from the various shanties and rubbish burrows in the cistern. The children edged forward, tentative at first—they eyed Mr Ascham with much fear—but the smell of freshly cooked chicken was too much for their starving bellies.

Pietro appeared from behind a column.

‘Why have you returned here? What do you want?’

Mr Ascham stepped forward. ‘Blame me for this intrusion, young man. It was I who compelled these girls to bring me here. I have one simple question for you: on those occasions in the past when Cardinal Cardoza took his meals in his embassy, was it your little brother Benicio who delivered them to him?’

Pietro’s eyes snapped up.

He looked as if my teacher had slapped him in the face.

But then—taking me completely by surprise—his entire face crumpled.

‘Yes, yes he did,’ Pietro said, before he fell to his knees in front of my teacher and broke down entirely, sobbing. ‘Oh, sir! Good sir! That cardinal, that cruel bastard Cardoza, he did things to my brother! And Benicio was a dullard, slow but sweet and as innocent as the day is long. And that wretched cardinal had his way with him, night after night, and Benicio, sweet little Benicio, slow little Benicio, not even comprehending that these perversions were not of his doing, did not tell me what had happened until the night I found him dying in a puddle of his own blood, distraught and ashamed, his wrists slashed by his own hand.’

I shot a look at Mr Ascham but he shook his head.

‘Did you tell your father?’ Mr Ascham asked.

‘What could I have told him! Should I have told my father that, night after night since we had arrived in Byzantium three months ago, he himself had dispatched his weak-minded son into the hands of a rapist? No, I didn’t tell him. I took matters into my own hands and on the night of the grand banquet I delivered a fateful meal to the cardinal, but then . . .’

Mr Ascham said, ‘But while you left the poisoned meal in Cardinal Cardoza’s private rooms, it wasn’t Cardinal Cardoza who ate it, it was Cardinal Farnese. You killed the wrong man.’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t know Cardinal Cardoza had been delayed?’

‘No.’

‘And you didn’t know the visiting Cardinal Farnese was staying in Cardoza’s private rooms?’

‘No.’

‘And when you went to check a short time later to see if your plan had worked, you found the wrong man dead, and so in an attempt to throw off any investigators, you mutilated Farnese’s face in the manner of the insane fiend known to be on the loose in this city and hurled the body into the reflecting pool.’

The boy nodded sadly. ‘Yes.’

Mr Ascham said, ‘You told Elizabeth here that your father argued with Cardinal Cardoza about the cardinal’s refusal to bury Benicio with holy honours.’

‘It was the height of hypocrisy. The monster drove my brother to suicide and then he himself denied Benicio a Christian burial on the grounds that by killing himself
Benicio
had offended God. It was the final insult.’

‘It surely was,’ Mr Ascham said quietly. ‘It was also, I believe, the reason why the cardinal had your parents killed.’

‘The cardinal did
what
—?’

‘It is my theory that Cardinal Cardoza—having realised that the poison that killed Cardinal Farnese was actually intended for him—erroneously believed that your
father
, having somehow learned of Cardoza’s sodomising of your brother, had poisoned his meal, and so Cardinal Cardoza had both your father and mother murdered.’

The boy looked horror-struck as he realised the depth of his error: his failed attempt on the cardinal’s life had led to his parents’ deaths.

‘Oh, Lord in Heaven . . .’ he breathed, his eyes staring downward but seeing nothing.

My teacher gazed at him with a look of great kindness. ‘You couldn’t have known this chain of events would happen, Pietro. You couldn’t.’

The boy said nothing.

‘You understand, I must tell the Sultan about all of this,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘Which means staying within the palace walls could be dangerous for you. It might be wise for you to leave this place and disappear into the larger city for a time.’

Still Pietro said nothing. He just stood there, head bent.

‘I am truly sorry, Pietro,’ my teacher said. ‘Be at peace.’ And with those words Mr Ascham led Zubaida and me out of the cistern.

As we made our way back through the maze of high-ceilinged chambers, Mr Ascham said to me, ‘I made the same mistake Cardinal Cardoza did: I thought that Brunello had attempted to poison him. But it wasn’t the furious father who had laced his meal with poison, it was the furious brother.’

Sloshing through the water, we came to the second-to-last cistern.

‘I need to speak with the Sultan,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘Cardinal Cardoza must be arrested for the murder—or at least for ordering the murder—of Brunello and his wife. I will tell the Sultan that it was the boy Pietro who was responsible for the visiting cardinal’s death.’

‘Will the Sultan want to arrest Pietro as well?’ I said.

‘I would imagine so,’ Mr Ascham said.

As we were passing through that second-to-last cistern with its dangerous submerged holes, so engaged was I in the conversation with my teacher that I made a misstep and my right foot went plunging into one of those concealed holes.

My foot struck something. Something soft.

Something that felt like . . .

I squealed. ‘There’s something down there!’

Zubaida and Mr Ascham grabbed my arms and righted me. Then we all looked down into the hole that had swallowed my errant foot. It was illuminated by a thin shaft of outside light, just enough to enable us to see what it was I had touched.

The drowned face of Darius the wrestler stared up at us with wide unblinking eyes.

He stood upright in a seven-foot-deep hole, his hands bound behind his back, his hair floating in the watery haze, his feet presumably weighted down with chains or something similarly heavy.

‘Darius . . .’ Zubaida gasped.

‘So this is where he went,’ Mr Ascham said.

‘Is the wrestler’s death connected with our puzzle?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he replied firmly. ‘His death is another matter. But that can wait. Now it is time to confront the cardinal.’

Mr Ascham strode into the last cistern, toward the steep stone stairs at the far end that led up and out into daylight. I hurried after him and we arrived at the base of the stairs together, only to stop short as we were suddenly confronted by a figure blocking our way.

I saw the fellow’s feet first and I noticed immediately that his left sandal had a prominent V-shaped nick in its wooden sole beside his big toe.

My gaze rose upward and as it did I beheld the owner of those mysterious sandals—sandals that had left their mark in the slaughter room where the chef and his wife had been found hanged and in the fresh mud outside the menagerie after my teacher had been lured there to die—and as my eyes came up I found myself meeting the cold impassive stare of Sinon, the towering manservant of Cardinal Cardoza.

‘SINON,’ MY TEACHER SAID. ‘I had wondered if the cardinal would send you to kill me.’

The manservant said, ‘The cardinal says you know too much, Englishman. He has ordered you and your girl to die, and I am here to carry out the sentence.’

He loomed above us, his face completely devoid of emotion. He stood with an unnerving stillness, a stillness, I realised with a start, that I had seen before: on the night my teacher and I had observed the cardinal’s debauched gathering in his embassy, I had glimpsed a tall shadowy figure observing us from behind a lattice screen by the lawn, standing with a similar eerie stillness. It had been Sinon watching us that night.

He stepped down into the shallow water of the cistern, advancing on my teacher and me. Mr Ascham pushed me back protectively. Zubaida just scurried away.

‘You hanged the chef and his wife for your master,’ Mr Ascham said.

‘I do as my master commands.’

‘And you laid that trap for me in the menagerie.’

Sinon kept advancing. ‘I do as my master commands.’

My teacher kept backing away. ‘Including murder?’

Sinon kept advancing. ‘For your murder, he has given me absolution in advance.’ He nodded at me. ‘And for hers. My master says I will go to heaven for this.’

‘Your master is a pederast. There is no place in heaven for him or any who serve him.’

‘We shall let God decide,’ Sinon said, drawing a short glistening sword. ‘The Lord will guide my hands.’

We were now standing among the scattered rubbish that had been carelessly tossed into the cistern: the heaped piles of discarded wooden objects overlaid with rusted iron poles and heavy barred gates.

‘Bess, get back,’ Mr Ascham whispered. ‘If this fellow gets the better of me, flee into the cisterns and get out some other way. Then tell the Sultan everything.’ He glanced at me. ‘And know that I cared for you deeply.’

I backed farther away as instructed, as suddenly, with a great cry, Sinon lunged at Mr Ascham.

But my teacher had been moving with a purpose I had not noticed: as Sinon lunged at him, Mr Ascham found himself standing beside a heap on top of which sat a length of iron piping, and he quickly grabbed it and used it to parry Sinon’s blow and a mighty clang rang out.

The manservant raged and he advanced on my teacher with greater speed, swinging his sword with shocking violence. My teacher fended off his blows with the pipe, backing down an alleyway. Every clang rang out in the vast cistern.

At one point, they came together and Sinon—a full head and shoulders taller than my teacher—used his free hand to punch Mr Ascham in the face most powerfully and Mr Ascham fell into the knee-deep water with an ungainly splash and the manservant leapt forward and swung down with his sword, only for my teacher to roll sideways in the water, spraying it everywhere, and the blade struck empty waves.

Mr Ascham moved desperately, his body now soaked through. Sinon chased him into another alley, yelling with rage, his lusty swipes missing my teacher by inches.

But then Mr Ascham saw that he had made an error. In his desperation, he’d fled into an alleyway that finished at a dead end.

He was trapped.

Sinon now advanced slowly. He regripped his sword menacingly.

Mr Ascham backed up against the rubbish heap behind him, but there was nowhere for him to go.

I watched from the entrance to the next cistern, helpless and horrified.

‘God will decide . . .’ Sinon said in a monotone as he closed in on my trapped teacher. ‘The Lord will guide my hands . . .’

He stood over Mr Ascham and raised his sword for the death blow when suddenly my teacher did something most unexpected: he kicked with all his strength not at Sinon but at the leg of one of the broken wooden tables in the rubbish pile immediately to his left.

The table leg snapped, causing the table to dislodge from its place in the heap and jerk suddenly downward, which in turn caused a heavy iron gate lying on top of the table to slide with considerable force off the pile . . . right into Sinon’s face.

The big iron gate struck him with all its weight and a sickening crack echoed throughout the cistern—the sound of the gate’s leading edge breaking Sinon’s nose and some of his teeth—and the tall manservant fell, his head jerking unnaturally backwards.

The gate’s leading edge drove his head under the surface of the water with a great splash, before the rest of the huge iron thing landed flat on top of his body.

Sinon now lay before my teacher, trapped under the bars of the heavy gate, his face a gruesome mess, his nose smashed inward, bloody and deformed. He was lying in barely two feet of water, but he was gasping for air as the water sloshed over the wreckage of his nose, the weight of the gate pinning him down. Both of his hands were trapped underwater, including his sword hand, held down by the gate.

Mr Ascham stood over Sinon, the cruel assassin now a helpless soul trying desperately to breathe. As the water sluiced over his face, it mixed with his blood and invaded his mouth and Sinon started gagging, coughing.