THE RED STONE
Nikka and I pouched our shares of the loot we had brought in, Nikka
appropriating to himself Watkins's Birmingham silver watch. The
Gypsy girl never took her eyes off him as she absently refastened her
tattered bodice.
"We are ready," said Nikka.
Her face flowered in an instantaneous smile.
"It is well, Giorgi Bordu. Come with me."
She led us across the courtyard to the building which fronted it on
the left and was extended by the brick addition I have spoken of to
shut in partially the rear of the court which abutted on the
Bosphorus. A man was leaning over in the doorway, strapping up a
bundle, and Kara planted her bare foot in the middle of his back,
sending him sprawling. He was up in a flash, with his knife out and
his face distorted with anger; but when he saw who had kicked him,
the anger turned to smiles. He swung the bundle on his shoulder and
swaggered off. And Kara looked at Nikka, with the expectant manner
of a child who has performed a trick and expects to be applauded for
it.
I grinned. I couldn't help it. But Nikka only motioned impatiently
to the doorway. She caught her lip in a pout, dug her toes in the
dust and affected not to understand him; but Nikka took one stride,
with arm extended, and she danced away, all smiles again.
Apparently, she didn't mind as long as she made him look at her.
Inside the door was a big, stone-paved hall. There were traces of
carvings on the capitals of the pillars and a spaciousness that spoke
of ancient glories. The stairs that led to the upper story were
railed with marble and grooved deep by the tread of countless feet.
But the place reeked with the squalor of a tenement. Three old women
were huddled in front of a fire that blazed on an enormous hearth,
and strings of onions and garlic hung from hooks in the ceiling. All
around were scattered dirty piles of blankets and personal belongings.
Kara skipped across to the fireplace, and tapped the oldest of the
three women on the shoulder.
"Hi, Mother Kathene," she called loudly. "Here are two strangers
Beran has taken into the tribe."
The three hags tottered to their feet, and peered at us with bleared
eyes.
"Strangers?" whined Mother Kathene. "Why strangers in the tribe?
Haven't we enough fine young men to stab and steal for the chief?
Heh-heh! I don't like strangers."
"Strangers are bad luck," pronounced a second beldame, whose name was
Zitzi.
"Bad luck," echoed the third, who was called Lilli. "And I suppose
we'll have to cook and scrub for the rascals, too."
Kara pinched her with a viciousness that made the poor old thing
squeal.
"Don't talk of scrubbing to me!" she sneered. "You wouldn't touch
water to a foul pot, let alone a man's clothes. You'd drown if you
were rained on. Bah, Mother Lilli, you are lucky to have a chief
like Beran, who gives the old ones work to do and shelter and food
for the end of their days, instead of driving them out to seek the
bounty of the Roumis and Franks. And you are luckier still to have a
great thief like Giorgi Bordu to cook for. He is the greatest thief
in the world. Why, he even caught me when I would have stolen from
him!"
"If he steals well, he won't be a fighter," mumbled Mother Kathene.
"What about the other one?"
"He took my knife from me without drawing his own," flared Kara. "No
other man in the tribe could do that. The other? Oh, he is a Frank."
"More bad luck," wailed old Zitzi. "Tzigane folk who live with
Franks are always spoiled. They worship the Christian goddess or
they grow clumsy or they lose their courage or they take the spotted
sickness."
Kara clouted her on the head.
"Have done with it," she commanded imperiously. "Where are Giorgi
and Jakka to lie?"
"Where they choose," returned Zitzi sourly.
Kara waved her hand about the chamber.
"Here or above, whichever you say," she announced to us. "These are
the quarters of the young men."
"May we look above?" asked Nikka, anxious to seize this opportunity
to explore.
Her answer was to dance up the stairs--she seldom walked or did
anything slowly.
We followed her. There was a central corridor, and from it opened
various rooms, some of them crammed with all manner of goods,
valuable rugs, bric-a-brac, cloths, and frequently, the veriest junk.
"Beran stores plunder here, as you can see," she said. "The other
rooms are empty. The young men prefer to sleep all together where
they can watch one another."
Nikka realized that if we set up a different standard of conduct from
that observed by our brother bachelors we would prejudice our
position in this strange community.
"What is good enough for them is good enough for us," he decided.
"But is there no more to see? I thought the building ran around by
the water."
"There is no connection," she replied. "The building over the water
is just a storehouse. We are a great tribe, and Beran has agents
everywhere. Never a day goes by that plunder does not come in, and
we store it until there is opportunity to dispose of it."
"He is a master thief," agreed Nikka. "So we had heard. But where
do you live, maiden?"
Her face glowed rosily with satisfaction at this first evidence of
his interest in herself.
"Across the court," she answered. "Come and you shall see."
We descended the stairs into the big hall on the ground-floor, where
the three hags had crouched again before the fire, and crossed the
courtyard to the building opposite on the right of the entrance. It
was long and graceful in appearance, beautifully built of a hard
white marble, which had been coated with dirt for centuries. The
cornices were elaborately sculptured in a conventional design; the
window openings were carved and set with a light mastery that
disguised their bulk.
The door was supported by simple pillars of wonderful green stone
that contrived to show its color through the accumulation of filth
which tried to mask it. How such pillars could have escaped the
antiquary I do not know. They were as handsome as anything in St.
Sophia. But then, as we were to discover, the whole abode of Beran
Tokalji constituted an amazing shrine of Byzantine art, perhaps the
most remarkable non-ecclesiastical remnant in the city.
But of all this I thought little at the time. What interested me
more than anything was that immediately above the door on a panel let
into the wall was carved a representation of a bull, head lowered and
in act to charge. I looked at Nikka, and his eyes met mine with a
warning glance to say nothing. It was a good thing that my knowledge
of Gypsy dialect was sketchy, for had I been able to, I believe I
should have exclaimed over this first clue and attempted to probe our
guide's knowledge of it.
Kara never gave the sculpture a glance; it meant nothing to her. She
beckoned us inside the door. Here again was a spacious, pillared
hall, triple-aisled like a small church, its battered pavement
showing traces here and there of the gorgeous mosaics which once had
floored it. Whatever decorations adorned its walls were obscured by
the incrustations of centuries of misuse. The pillars were of
different stones, many of them semi-precious, and occasionally
glinting pink or red or green or yellow through their drab coats of
dirt and soot. At one end was an apse-like space large enough to
hold a dinner table or a throne, and on the curving wall I fancied I
could discern faint traces of one of those mosaic portraits with
which the Byzantine artists loved to adorn their buildings.
But this superb chamber was littered with the odds and ends of a
people accustomed to dwell in tents. I suppose Tokalji's tribe, by
all accounts we had, had been living here for some hundreds of years,
yet they never adapted themselves to urban conditions. Generation
after generation looked upon this wonderful fragment of one of the
world's stateliest palaces as no more than the four walls and a roof
required to keep out rain and cold. The windows were covered by
wooden shutters. Cleaning was resorted to only when the atmosphere
became unsupportable for the salted nostrils of the tribe.
"These are the quarters of the married people," explained Kara.
"Beran sleeps here." She pointed to a pallet in the recess that I
likened to an apse. "The others upstairs."
"And you?" asked Nikka.
"Oh, I live where I choose, but most of all I like my garden."
"Your garden? Where is there a garden?"
"I will show you, Giorgi Bordu."
At the end of the hall opposite the apse there was a worn stone
stair. The shallow steps descended straight to an opening, barred by
a rude pine door. As we passed it, I noted idly holes in the stone
lintels where formerly had been cemented the bolts of heavy metal
hinges. A gate, perhaps. Beyond the door was a pleasant room in
which several women sewed, and children scrabbled in the dirt on the
floor. The sunlight poured in from windows facing us. I saw trees
tossing, heard the splash of water.
Kara crossed the room, with a nod to the women, and opened another
door. This led to a pillared portico, and I gasped in wonder at the
sheer loveliness of this morsel of imperial Byzantium, buried in the
frowsy lanes of Stamboul. There was a tangled stretch of garden,
weed-grown, of course, and two jade-green cedars that lifted their
heads in isolated majesty. Around the four sides ran the portico,
although in two places the pillars had collapsed and the wreckage of
the roof strewed the ground. But the gem of the place was the
fountain in the center, a lion rearing back on his hind-legs with a
broken spear in his chest. From his open mouth poured a stream of
water that fell into a stone-rimmed pool.
"That is where I swim," volunteered Kara. "It is not far, but I can
beat you across it. Would you like me to try?"
And with that pagan innocence which characterized her, she started to
drop skirt and bodice.
"Another time," said Nikka, laughing, and with a single look to see
if he was in earnest in refusing such sport, she promptly refastened
her clothes. "This is lower than the rest of the house, isn't it?"
She assented, and it was then that I recovered from the bewilderment
inspired by the unexpected charm of the picture, and realized for the
first time what it meant. The bull above the entrance door, the
hall, the stair, the marks of heavy hinges at its foot where a gate
had hung, the room where the women sat, an atrium, in the old Roman
architecture; the garden--by Jove, even the cedars!--the Garden of
the Cedars; and the Fountain of the Lion! It was exactly as the
first Hugh had described it in the missing half of the Instructions
which we had found.
I dug my fingers into Nikka's arm.
"Yes, yes," he said quietly in English. "I see it, too. But do not
let yourself seem excited."
Involuntarily I repeated to myself the concluding sentences of the
Instructions which we had all memorized:
"From the center of the Fountain take four paces west toward the wall
of the atrium. Then walk three paces north. Underfoot is a red
stone an ell square."
The center of the Fountain--where could that be? The pool stretched
sidewise to us, as we stood in front of the atrium. Plainly, then,
it was intended to mean from the center of the pedestal on which the
lion was perched. I stepped out from the portico, measured with my
eye the distance from the pedestal west toward the wall of the
atrium, and walked north on the paved walk which rimmed the central
grass-plot.
The flagging here, while naturally worn by the passage of time, was
as even as though it had been laid yesterday. It was composed of
blocks of red and brown granite in a checker-board pattern, but they
seemed to be only a foot square. It was not until I passed the
center of the fountain that I discovered that at regular intervals a
larger stone was inserted in the design. And sure enough, I found a
red one about three and a half paces, as I roughly made it, in a
northerly line from the point I had calculated as four paces west of
the center of the fountain.
Kara had no eyes for any one save Nikka, and I ventured to stamp my
sandaled heel on the stone as I trod over it. It gave back no
different sound from those on either side of it, but when my first
disappointment had passed, I told myself that this was no more than
could have been expected. Had it sounded hollow, surely, some person
in the course of seven centuries would have noticed it, and whether
possessed of knowledge of the treasure or not, must have had
sufficient enterprise to attempt to find what it concealed.
I walked on around the garden, determined to take advantage of this
extraordinary opportunity to survey the ground. But there was
nothing else to see. On one side the porticos fringed a blank wall,
evidently belonging to the adjoining property. Vernon King
afterwards said that at some period this group of buildings of the
Palace of the Bucoleon had been cut up into separate structures and
built together in blocks. On the side toward the Bosphorus a wing of
the building we had traversed intervened. Through the frequent
windows I saw Gypsy men and women and a few children lounging or
occupied with their household duties or playing. One of the men was
teaching a boy to pick pockets. I watched him for some time with
interest.
I finally abandoned my investigations because I gathered from the
tones of their voices that Nikka was having an argument with Kara.
When I came up to them, Nikka was offering her Watkins's watch; but
she dashed it to the pavement, burst into tears and fled back the way
we had come.
"What have you been doing, Lothario?" I demanded in French.
Nikka looked very unhappy.
"She wanted me to kiss her. I--I offered her that watch, in the
first place. To make up for showing her up the way I did; that was
to impress Tokalji, of course. And then I thought she had been
pretty decent to us since."
"I daresay she has been," I agreed. "For a purpose, to be sure."
"A purpose?"
"Well, she asked you for something, didn't she?" I gibed.
"Oh, that!" Nikka's discomfort was heart-warming. "She doesn't know
any better, Jack. I've seen her kind before--at least, none as
bright as she or quite as pretty; but the same kind of untamed
wild-cats. We Gypsies spoil our women if they have any spirit. And
she-- Well, you could see for yourself. She has been brought up in
this atmosphere. Crime is an art with her. She looks upon a clever
robbery as you do on a good job of architecture. She has lived with
men ever since she left her mother's arms. She doesn't know what it
means to be refused any thing. She--she's all right, you know."
"I know she's the prettiest savage creature I've ever seen," I
returned drily. "Since she is the first, however, that may not mean
much. You seem to be very anxious to explain her savagery, my
friend. Why didn't you kiss her?"
Nikka picked up the watch and examined the broken crystal.
"I don't think we'd better stay here," he answered vaguely. "Women's
quarters, and all that sort of thing. Hullo, here's Tokalji, now!"
The Gypsy chief stalked out of the atrium.
"What have you been doing to the girl?" he growled.
"I wouldn't kiss her," said Nikka with a sudden grin.
Tokalji's bearded face was cracked by a burst of gargoyle laughter.
"You are a wise one! I said so! I know men, I, Beran Tokalji! But
hark you," and his tone took on an edge, "be careful with her. She
is all I have, and I give her to no man I do not know. You come in
out of the street, whoever you are. Prove yourself, and I can make
much of you. But until you prove yourself, you and this Frank jackal
with you, you walk carefully and jump when you hear the lash."
"Is she your daughter?" asked Nikka.
"Never mind who she is. What are you doing here?"
"She was showing us the fountain."
"That is all right. But the young men stay out of this house. I
want no troubles over women in the tribe. Remember that, you two."