Arethusa Part 29

When Zeno slipped from his borrowed charger and ran for his life towards that part of the square that looked darkest, he had no time to choose the direction he would afterwards take, nor to think of anything but covering the ground at the greatest possible speed without stumbling over an unseen obstacle. On those singular occasions when a perfectly brave man has no choice but to run, there is not much time to spare.

The young Venetian strained his strength and his wind to get as far as he could from his pursuers in the shortest possible time, and he was so successful that he was out of their reach almost before they were aware that he had fled.

At first he had run straight across the wide open s.p.a.ce before Blachernae; he had then found the entrance to a street which he had followed for about fifty yards, and he had turned a corner to his left without meeting any one; he had rushed on without pausing till he judged it time to double again and had then turned to the right. A few steps farther on, he stopped short and listened, believing himself alone and not at all sure where he was.

Suddenly a light flashed in his face, very near him.

'Is it time?' asked a low voice in Greek, and the lantern was closed again, leaving him dazzled.

Accident, or his fate, had taken him into the very midst of the men he had enlisted in the cause of the revolution, to storm the palace before daybreak. They had waited two hours and were impatient, and even before Zeno answered the question they saw that matters had gone ill with him.

'There is an alarm,' he said hurriedly. 'I barely got away. Disperse quickly, and get to your quarters, all of you! I will let you know when we can do it.'

A murmur of discontent came from the invisible crowd of soldiers. Zeno knew them to be a desperate crew, who would hold him responsible for failure, and would not thank him for success.

'We must separate at once,' he said calmly. 'I thank you for having been ready. If possible, we will meet a week from to-night.'

He did not choose to let them know that Johannes himself had refused to quit the tower, and he was about to leave them, meaning to find his way home alone, when the sound of feet moving behind him, and of men whispering together told him that he was surrounded on all sides by the soldiers. Then some one spoke in a tone of authority.

'You must stay with us,' the voice said. 'You have our lives in your hand, and we cannot let you go. It might suit your interests to give us up to the Emperor any day.'

Seeing his liberty threatened, Zeno laid his hand to the knife at the back of his belt and was about to try and break his way through. In the dark, a man with a drawn weapon in his hand easily inspires terror in a crowd. But it was clear that the soldiers had determined beforehand what to do, for they closed in upon him instantly, and his arm was caught by a dozen hands when he was in the very act of drawing his knife. He was held by twenty men, as it seemed to him, who all took hold of him and lifted him from the ground, not very roughly, but irresistibly. He had no chance against so many; Gorlias Pietrogliant himself could have done nothing, and he was far stronger than Zeno, stronger perhaps than any man in Constantinople.

Zeno knew that it would be worse than useless to shout for help; at his first cry he would most likely be strangled by men whose own lives were more or less at stake. They carried him quickly along the street and through unfamiliar and narrow ways which he could hardly have recognised even in broad daylight, much less at night. They turned sharp corners to the right, to the left, to the right again, and he thought he could distinguish the broken outlines of a ruined wall against the faint greyness of the ink-and-water sky.

Then all was dark for an instant, and he felt that his bearers were pausing at some obstacle or difficulty. The lantern flashed again, and he saw a rough vault above him; there was a big cobweb just above his head, and a loathsome fat spider jumped out of a crevice and ran along the threads till it disappeared as if by magic in the very middle of the web. He saw it in an instant in the sudden light as some one held up the lantern to show the way. Such things take hold of the memory and stick to it afterwards, as little burs fasten themselves upon one's clothes in autumn fields. Besides, though Zeno was one of the bravest men of any age, he detested fat spiders, and was very nearly afraid of them.

He felt himself carried down an inclined plane at a swinging rate; the air smelt of dry earth, and presently it grew much warmer, though it was not at all close. It seemed a long time until the men stopped, set him on his feet, and left their hold on him. The man who had acted as the leader now pushed the others aside, and stood before him, a broad-shouldered Tartar with a huge tawny beard, dressed in leather and wearing a breastplate embossed with the Roman eagle. Zeno knew him well; he was a Mohammedan, like many soldiers of fortune in the Greek army at that time, his name was Tocktamish, and he had been with Zeno in Patras. He spoke a barbarous dialect, compounded of Greek and Italian.

'Messer Zeno,' he said, 'we are not going to hurt you, but we think it better for your own safety to keep you here for a while, till everything is quiet again. Do you understand?'

'Perfectly,' Zeno answered, with a laugh. 'Nothing could be clearer!

You naturally suppose that if I found myself in danger I would turn evidence against you to save myself, and you propose to make that impossible.'

Tocktamish pretended to be hurt.

'How can you think that I could take my old leader for a traitor, sir?' he asked.

'The idea would occur naturally to a man of your intelligence,' Zeno answered, laughing again. 'Listen to me, man. I am a soldier, and I do not take you for a flight of angels or heavenly doves settling round me for my consolation. You are an infernal deal more like a pack of wolves! So let us be plain, as wolves generally are when they are hungry. You joined me because you hoped to be plundering the palace by this time. As that has failed, you want something instead. You know very well that I am not the man to betray a comrade, and that if I am free I shall probably get Johannes out of his prison in the end. But you expect something now. How much do you want?'

The Tartar looked down sheepishly and pa.s.sed his thumb round the lower edge of his corselet, backwards and forwards, as if he were slowly polishing the steel.

'Come,' continued Zeno, 'what is the use of hanging back? As I could not succeed in turning you all into patriots to-night and regenerators of your country, you have, of course, turned yourselves into bandits; you have got me a prisoner, and you want a ransom. How much is it to be?'

Tocktamish still hesitated, feeling very much ashamed of himself before his old captain.

'Well, sir, you see--there are eight hundred of us--and----'

'And if any one gets less than the rest he will sell all your skins to Andronicus for the balance,' laughed Zeno. 'Quite right, too! I love justice above all things.'

'Then give us ten ducats each,' cried the clear voice of a Greek from the background.

'Ten ducats apiece will make eight thousand,' said Zeno. 'I am sorry, but I have not so much money at my disposal.'

'You can borrow,' answered the Greek.

'I am afraid not, my friend.' He turned to the Tartar leader again.

'You are a fool, Tocktamish,' he said calmly. 'As long as you keep me here I cannot get money at all. Do you suppose that we merchants put away thousands of ducats in strong boxes under our beds? If we did that, you would have broken into our houses long ago, to help yourselves!'

'What promise will you make, sir?' inquired the Tartar, beginning to waver.

But half-a-dozen voices protested.

'No promises!' they cried. 'Let him send you for the money!'

'You hear them?' said Tocktamish.

'Yes,' answered Zeno, 'I hear them. Their nonsense will not change facts. If you had the souls of mice in your miserable bodies,' he continued, turning to the men with a contemptuous little laugh, 'you would come with me now and seize the palace. The gates are open, and the guards are all beastly drunk. There will be more than eight thousand ducats to divide there!'

The men were silent; many shook their heads.

'The moment is pa.s.sed,' answered the Tartar, speaking for them. 'The whole city is roused by this time.'

'We shall have so many more good men to help us, then,' Zeno said.

'Not that we need any one. A handful could do the work.'

'Send for the money!' cried the voice of the Greek again.

'I have told you that I have not got it,' Zeno answered. 'If you have nothing more sensible to say, go to your quarters and let me sleep.'

'Pleasant dreams!' jeered the Greek; and several men laughed.

'I hope my dreams will be pleasant, for I am extremely sleepy,' Zeno answered carelessly. 'If you cut my throat before I wake you will get nothing at all, not even my funeral expenses! Now good-night, and be off!'

'We had better leave him,' Tocktamish said, pushing the nearest men away. 'You will get nothing at present, and it is impossible to frighten him. But he cannot get out, as you know. It is for our own safety, sir,' he added, changing his tone as he addressed Zeno. 'We cannot let you out till the city is quiet again, but you shall lack nothing. There are two cloaks for you to sleep on and for covering yourself, and I will bring you food and drink, and anything you want, in the morning.'

Zeno had found time to look about him during the conversation, as far as the light of the lanterns and the men who crowded upon him allowed him to see. He had understood very soon that he was not in the cellar of a ruined house, as he had at first supposed, but in one of those great disused cisterns, of which there are several in Constantinople, and of which two may still be seen. Centuries had pa.s.sed since there had been water in this one, and the dust lay thick on the paved floor. Two or three score columns of grey marble supported the high vaulted roof, in which Zeno guessed that there was no longer any visible opening to the outer air. Yet air there was, in abundance, for it entered by the narrow entrance through which Zeno had been carried in, and probably found its way out through the disused aqueduct which had once supplied the water, and which still communicated with some distant exit. Zeno could only guess at this from his experience of fortresses, which always contained some similar cistern; every one he had seen was provided with openings, almost always both at the top; a few had staircases in order that men might more conveniently go down to clean them when they were empty.

His captors left him reluctantly at the bidding of their chief. They set one lantern against a pillar and filed out, carrying away the other. Zeno listened to their departing footsteps for a moment, when the last man had gone out, and then he went quickly to the entrance and listened again. In two or three minutes he heard what he expected; a heavy door creaked and was shut with a loud noise that boomed down the inclined pa.s.sage. Then came another sound, which was not that of bolt or bar, and was worse to hear. The men were rolling big loose stones against the door to keep it shut--two, three, more, a dozen at least, a weight no one man could push outward. Then there was no more noise, and Zeno was alone.

His situation was serious, and his face was very thoughtful as he went back to the lantern and picked up one of the two cloaks Tocktamish had left him. He put it on and drew it closely round him, for he was beginning to feel cold in spite of the heavy guardsman's tunic he wore over his own clothes.

He thought of Arethusa, as he called Zoe; she had been in his mind constantly, and most of all in each of the moments of danger through which he had pa.s.sed since he had left her. He thought of her lying awake on her divan in the soft light of the small lamps, waiting to hear his footsteps on the landing below her window, then falling gently asleep out of sheer weariness, to dream of him; starting in her rest, perhaps, as she dreamt that he was in peril, but smiling again, without opening her eyes, when the vision changed, and he held her in his arms once more. He little guessed what that yielding something beneath the canvas had been, on which he had pressed his foot so heavily when he had stepped ash.o.r.e. She was happily ignorant, he fancied, of the succession of hairbreadth escapes through which he had pa.s.sed unhurt so far. What weighed most on his mind, after all, was the thought that when he met her he should have to tell her that he had failed.

But he was not thinking of her only as he sat there, for his own situation stared him in the face, and he could not think of Arethusa without wondering whether he was ever to see her again. He had heard those big stones rolled to the door, and something told him that neither Tocktamish nor his men would bring the promised bread and water in the morning. They did not believe that he was unable to pay the ransom they demanded, and they meant to starve him into yielding.

But he had spoken the truth; he had not such a sum of money at his command. The question was, what the end would be. For the present they had not left him so much as a jug of water, and he suddenly realised that he was thirsty after his many exertions. He could not help laughing to himself at the idea that he might die of thirst in a cistern.

But it was not in him to waste time in idly reflecting on the detestable irony of his fate, when there was any possibility that his own action might help him. He rose again and took up the lantern to make a systematic examination of his prison. After all, Tocktamish and his soldiers must have acted on the spur of the moment, and though they evidently knew the entrance to the cistern, and had probably been aware that it had a door which could be shut, it was not impossible that there might be another way out which they had overlooked in their haste.