Free The Sacred Scroll by Anton Gill Page A

majority on foot.
    Fires were started and became ferocious conflagrations as the keen breeze from the north encouraged the flames. By dawn, the Genoan community was no more. Just a few buildings and streets remained intact. Most of the district was reduced to ashes.
    Manuel I Comnenus, fifty years old and a seasoned ruler, stroked his beard thoughtfully. The thing had been unpleasant but necessary, and it had been a complete success. Even his grand vizier, who, he knew, had his own network of spies, was in ignorance of it. The last piece of the mechanism in his plan to crush those upstart Venetians was in place. Rumours about who was responsible for the atrocity were already in circulation. Meanwhile, nothing had been spared to give help and sympathetic succour to those Genoans who’d survived. Genoa would be grateful. They’d be eating out of his hand.
    ‘They say it was the Venetians who did it,’ continued the grand vizier smoothly.
    ‘Well, they’ve gone too far this time,’ replied the emperor.
    The grand vizier watched his master’s face. There were a lot of Venetians in Constantinople, and to move against them might be – unwise.
    Manuel’s face was impassive as he continued: ‘They’ve been getting above themselves for too long. This, we cannot tolerate.’
    ‘What do you intend to do?’
    ‘Listen closely.’
    It took a little time to prepare, but when the Greek blow fell, it fell heavily. On 12 March Manuel’s soldiers moved against all those Venetians who lived within his territories. There was very little destruction this time, and almost no slaughter, but the effect was devastating.
    The following day saw a long caravan of Italians, the few possessions they’d been allowed to keep piled on handcarts or carried in bundles, streaming westward out of the Golden Gate. They had no horses with them, nor donkeys; not even oxen.
    ‘Was it wise to expel them without anything?’ the grand vizier had wondered.
    ‘Certainly! We have to teach these dogs a lesson,’ replied Manuel. ‘They can count themselves lucky we didn’t kill them.’
    ‘But their homes and all that is in them – their ships, their goods,
everything
?’
    ‘Confiscation is confiscation,’ said the emperor.‘Besides, you should be pleased. It’ll be a little something to top up your coffers.’
    They were watching the stream of refugees from a tall tower above the Gate. One of Manuel’s concubines fed him sherbet figs as he looked down on the slowly moving column of people. He sucked the sweetmeats idly. He and the grand vizier shared a common thought: most of those straggling along a hundred feet below them would never reach their home town.
    They both knew, too, that Venice would not take such an affront lying down.
    ‘They will come for us,’ said the grand vizier.
    ‘Let them. We’ll be ready for them.’ Manuel Comnenus stroked the hair of the girl who was feeding him. Everything was falling perfectly into place.

13
     
    Venice, the Same Year
     
    ‘They’ve done
what
?’ snarled Doge Vitale Michele when the news reached him.
    His right-hand man and head of special operations, the hawk-eyed sixty-year-old Enrico Dandolo, spread his hands. ‘We cannot say we did not see this coming. But we were over-confident.’
    ‘It’ll be a disaster for trade. Already the city of Zara has rebelled against us and sided with the Hungarians. And as if losing our principal port on the Dalmatian coast weren’t enough, now we face the enmity of the Greeks.’
    ‘We must seek other routes to the East. Egypt –’
    ‘Too far! Too costly! Anyway, they’re not even Christians, and now that bastard Saladin’s virtually in control down there …’ The doge lapsed into a brooding silence. Saladin. Not a man to trust. Far too ambitious. Far too intelligent. Wouldn’t get
him
to kowtow to anyone. God, he thought, just when everything was going so well – what was the world coming to?
    ‘Then what do you suggest,
Altissima
?’