Ayios Petros

By Chris Wolsey

In this book Philip Trevasco, an Edinburgh archaeologist, and Rosalind Bernaud, an Australian artist, meet again on the excavation of Ayios Petros, a beach promontory in northern Cyprus. An amber ring discovered by Philip guides Rosalind into the dark world of Comtesse Marie during the collapse of the Crusader kingdoms of Outremer. How are the K

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Wolsey
• Release date: Jun 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9780995409439

Chris Wolsey

Chris has written much of this book from personal experience. Born in Stafford, England, he studied Archaeology and Fine Art at Edinburgh University. During the 1970s Chris worked on excavations in Italy, Cyprus, Turkey and Iran. His last excavation was at old Kandahar in Afghanistan, just before the Russian invasion. It is this excavation life that he has reworked into historical fiction. Chris discovered Australia after Kandahar, and moved there in 1978. Since then he has taught Ancient History, English and Philosophy in Brisbane. Along the way he completed post graduate diplomas in Russian (Strathclyde university in Glasgow), Teaching (London university) and a degree in Journalism (QUT in Brisbane). He has always thought of life as an adventure. So his gaining a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and a stint of hang gliding, would come as no surprise. Life is so rich that one needs several lifetimes to catch a part of it. How does one limit oneself to one interest, one existence, when there is so much out there for the next challenge? `Kara Tepe', and `Ayios Petros', drew on experiences in Iran and Cyprus. `Nardoo', the third in the series, reflects his fascination with the Australian bush. After raising two sons, their greatest adventure, he and his wife now live in the hills north of Brisbane.

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AYIOS PETROS

AUTHOR CHRIS WOLSEY

Copyright © 2014 Chris Wolsey

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

My family, Jill and our boys, Philip and Peter, have always supported me in this endeavour. As have my parents, Bill and Veronica, and my departed sister and brother, Shirley and Steve.

The EBook adventure was triggered by friends, Roger and Anne. But it was greatly advanced by Dane and the team at EBook Launch, who designed the cover and format.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

POSTSCRIPT

SOURCES

CHAPTER 1

I, Comtesse Marie, wife of Comte Alenard de Flandre et de Hainaut, journeyed to Cyprus from Acre in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in the dreadful year of twelve hundred and ninety one. This is my true account of events, for the future my children will never see. This is the true record of our betrayal and sure death. This is the secret of wealth beyond dreaming which I pass on to those of God-fearing mind. Lord keep us.

My beloved Alenard and I took the cross seven short years ago. After months at sea on a Genoese trading vessel we arrived at Tripoli on Saint Mark’s day, shortly before Easter, lighter in purse but exalted in mind. It took two days to unload our knights, their great horses and armour, sergeants and all the needs of war.

For the Kingdom of Tripoli, now my husband’s fief with the death of his uncle Geoffrey, was hard-pressed by Saracens on all sides. Without the great service rendered to us by crucesignati knights of the Temple Order the infidels would have swept all before them within weeks of our arrival. Only their timely presence on a scorched plain five leagues from the city saved us.

My husband left Philippe de Valenciennes in charge of Tripoli while he and his Marshal, Jean de Soissons, surveyed the northern reaches of his domain. With twenty knights, a force of sergeants, and a troop of Turcopole cavalry from Syria, we would return to the city by nightfall.

‘Look. Our captain from Genoa,’ he said, pointing to the distant ship as I rode up by his side.

Beyond the glancing light of the breakers the laden galley seemed motionless in the mid-day sun. From the vantage point of his mighty destrier stallion Alenard could see two more merchantmen following.

Before my first confinement I often accompanied him on such tours. The Constable was always uneasy until we were both safely within the city walls again. It was more usual for a lady to defend her husband’s interests there until he returned, and Philippe believed in the principle.

‘Comtesse Marie endangers herself and your lineage, my lord,’ Philippe would entreat.

‘She is my charge,’ was always Alenard’s reply.

I studied the brown eyes beneath the hawk-like gaze, and the lean nut-brown face of my lord. A stream of perspiration trickled down his cheek into the neat black line of his beard. Life was hard in this land with its fiery, long summers, arid hills and deserted rocky plains. Only the green orchards along the coast and narrow fertile valleys broke the desolation of this time-scarred land.

But my husband was a warrior, hard to all but me. He was a proud man who revelled in the dangers of his new role. In Europe he was bound by webs of service to those more powerful than he. Here, only a weak young boy and his meddling mother in Jerusalem barred his way. He was lord of all that he could see.

On that day his fierce passion showed in the way he rode the charger, at the head of the column of knights, infantry men, back to the baggage train loaded with newly won tribute. It is something burnt into my mind. The heat of the mid-day sun, the glare of rocks and sand crackling off the horses’ hooves is still with me.

Nearly a hundred years ago, on such a parched day, Saladin had destroyed a mighty Crusader army at the Horns of Hattin. But today my husband rode proud.

The pitiful cry of pain from a horse at the rear of the column cut the breath from the air. It was followed by thundering hooves and more cries, this time of men. Alenard’s horse turned, startling the flightier heart of my palfrey. By the time I regained control of its reins, and my guards closed in, Alenard and the knights closest to him were driving hard towards the stumbling centre and rear of the column.

Amidst the dust and melee were fully six thousand Turkish men on horseback. They wore coloured turbans around their helmets and light white tunics over their armour against the heat of the sun. Most had lances and short curved swords. With round shields on their backs, astride small swift horses, they were formidable. Cymbals and trumpets made them the clarions of hell.

The clash of Damascus steel on chain mail cut to the bone of infantry shoulders and necks. I saw men run through with lances as if for sport, like sticking wild pigs. Only the Turcopole horsemen matched them for speed and ability to turn quickly. But their skill with sword, and thin protection, was no match for this onslaught. Blood flowed freely all along the column as the infidels whirled like some accursed dance, never locked in combat for very long, always striking where we were least prepared.

In the centre the Marshal grouped more than fifty men, crossbow to shoulder, and brought down the first line of a charge. But twenty of their number were cut to pieces while their windlasses pulled back the cord. They were struck down horribly by scything blades, dripping with crimson.

Alenard led a charge of knights into a tight knot of the enemy, apparently unaware of their peril. The score of knights were dressed from head to toe in mail and armour, lance gripped under right arm, emblazoned shields hung ready on their left arm, their faces made more grim by the nose guard and the narrow slits for eyes. At their first few steps I almost feared for the enemy.

Slowly the momentum of the charge increased, each knight talking to his horse to maintain obedience to his voice alone in the heat of battle. Still the Turks took no heed. The ground at my feet shook with the Crusaders’ headlong ride. Their pennants streamed from their helmets; colours and metal and light filled that desolate plain. They were unstoppable, bearing down on the enemy as one man, lance now in hand, like champions at tournament.

But then, from a slight rise in the road, I saw the enemy wheel their horses around and step aside, just before the impact. The knights could not turn. I saw the body of Henri de Montlheri topple headless from a sweeping blow, his head rising in a bloody fountain before being trampled in the knee-high dust. The horse of Thibaut de Navarre ploughed a mighty furrow as the Turkish lance snapped its fore legs. Thibaut’s stunned form never rose above the rain of slashing blows. So many fine mounts were crippled by spears stabbed into leg-joints and eyes.

Amidst it Alenard and the remnants turned those mighty animals as they cut and thrust with swords, and blocked the hail of blows with their shields.

Christians fought like warriors, as only men fighting for their lives know how. But the day was against us. I could not see my husband in the fray of terrified animals, falling bloodied forms and sun-bright flashes from circling swords.

Then I was fighting for my own life. The line of bowmen was cut down in front of me. There was nowhere to turn and only a light sword in my hand. I struck hard at the grinning teeth beneath the blue turban in front of me. There was surprise before the livid cut blotted out his eyes and splattered my tunic, and then he fell beneath the descending hooves of my terrified mount.

We were circled by horsemen. The odds were too great for my inadequate guard, as each man blocked two, three, ten blows before being cut down. So many brave men were dying all around me. My time on this earth was short.

In terror I struck and parried, with the strength of any man, at each devilish face around me, almost too desperate to notice that the numbers of these ghouls decreased. Then, through the retreating dust, I saw the cause.

On the far side of the column, closest to Alenard and the mauled remainder of his force, were red crosses on white surcoats. A sizeable force of the fighting monks of the Order of the Temple now, with strong right arms, and no pause in their actions, cut a path through flesh and bone until they fought beside Alenard himself. The ground for thirty yards around writhed in a bloody, seething mass of dying horse and man.

Within what seemed like moments a splinter of this white cleaver of skulls struck towards me, and sent the remaining infidels into panic-stricken flight.

Our brains were dulled by the awful slaughter, and the swift vengeance of the Templars on any wounded heathens. We each thanked God for sparing our lives, and, in our hearts, dedicated ourselves to His continuing service.

That evening in the banquet hall of the palace in Tripoli Alenard pledged help to the Templars whenever their hour of need arose. That night to me he swore his undying love. He did so with this ring, amber formed as a heart with the eye of a cat in the centre. I now remove it from my finger and hold the circle in the palm of my hand.

‘Here is my heart,’ he said to me in the window’s moon light. ‘For my soul is promised to God.’

But I believe the ring contained his soul too, for our love was beyond the understanding of this earth.

That ring I now cast into the sea, for I have no wish to journey further in this life.

‘Alenard, beloved of the hours of darkness, of my dreams, our time approaches.’

Philip Trevasco stepped carefully around the rocks of the Cypriot coastline. In his left hand was a cheap, green, plastic bucket, one of a dozen bought in Kyrenia two days before. In it were pottery fragments, bone pieces and oddly shaped stones. He methodically criss-crossed a roped off area of eroded headland, which dropped forty feet into the azure-clean sea. His Polaroid sunglasses accentuated the clarity of the water, allowing him to spot shivering objects just below the waterline.

A glint of light attracted his eye. It lay amidst fragments of common Alexandrian wine amphorae, which he placed in the bucket with only careless interest. Before the sparkle sank into disturbed sand and wisps of melting red topsoil he grabbed it in mid-flight, as his toe stubbed and his ankle grazed a rock in the deeper water.

With an unspoken curse he removed the caking mud and early encrustation from the gold finger band, with what looked like an amber eye-slit in the centre. The historical ready reckoner of his mind could not place its provenance in time or place, beyond that it was not Cypriot. Amber came from the shores of the Baltic Sea. It intrigued him enough to place it in his shirt pocket, rather than let it scrape against the swirling objects of the bucket.

Above him, on a similarly roped area of the headland, he listened to Malcolm Thurbridge grunt as he sweated contentedly while he repeated Philip’s actions. But there the likeness ended. Without false modesty Philip knew that his tall, lean form was the opposite of Malcolm’s older bearish bulk. His dark hair, eyes and olive skin contrasted with Malcolm’s fair skin, thirties balding hair with pink scalp, and the watery blue eyes of a Cocker Spaniel. Philip knew that his quiet almost aloof manner bothered some people. He was too serious in comparison to Malcolm’s hale fellow well met attitude. Malcolm gave of his opinions freely, requested or not. This extravagance of manner was matched by Sophie, his voluptuous wife.

Camp rumour had it she was once a New York hooker before Malcolm paid his way into her heart. No one faced her with the thought, maybe in deference to her colossal generosity. Sophie was the bed companion of every man’s dreams, except his.

Most of the dig team was on the headland that morning, before the heat of the day built up. They had to finish this primary survey so the trenches could be allocated, each following leads revealed by the buckets’ contents.

Philip glimpsed Alison Hatchett beyond an eroded curve of rock and sliding soil. She was a little larger and more robust than on the Iranian dig last year. Her frizzed black hair blew horizontally almost two feet. Her heavy-boned torso and overly endowed chest were encased in a lime-green top and candy stripe shorts. Her strong views, lusty enjoyment of life, lack of precision in her work, all came back to him in that first renewed glance.

Her American footballer beau from last year, now involved in a Wisconsin summer school, was very different from the finely aristocratic features of Llewellyn Grealy-Fitzgerald, the bespectacled, dedicated ostrich studying his survey patch. A Welsh lord whose family castle was listed by the National Trust, Llewellyn was surprisingly unaffected by wealth, and her interest.

Why would this red-mopped, skeletal form brave the dust, heat and graft of a dig given his opportunities, Philip thought? Although archaeology always was the domain of the aristocrat with a private income. Maybe he fitted the discipline better than he, a middle-income working class boy.

Roland Feldburg, the thirty five-year-old eccentric director, was back in the village coordinating labourers and house staff. Beside his Teutonic, blond expanse was Penelope Crantock, a round-faced Colchester farm-girl with enormous brown eyes. Malcolm called her ‘Rolly’s buxom wench’ but her accent hid brains, and a total devotion to Roland. Unpacking was her task, from fine dig equipment and reference books, to toilet paper and Holbrook’s sauce.

And my wench? Philip thought.

After their narrow escape from Iran they’d spent a fortnight travelling in Eastern Turkey, before endemic misogyny and poor hygiene drove them back to Athens. He was as passionate about her as ever, and still amazed that she felt anything towards him. But somehow it went wrong. Was it Rosalind Bernaud’s independent Australian mind or the imminent need for each to return to study at opposite ends of the world? He’d wanted her to come back to Edinburgh, take up an Art course there. She’d interpreted that as ‘Pommy chauvinism’, that she should make sacrifices to follow him.

‘Do I trail you at four paces, effendim? Wash your feet at the door?’

It had all got out of hand. Only now, with a year of his letters, was she willing to try again; to brave again his world of digs, give of her art and photographic skills in return for board and lodging. He’d sent money to help with the airfare, which he’d pretended that Roland had provided. If he’d not bent the truth she might not have come.

Roland had been happy to trust Philip’s word about Rosalind’s abilities, as he lent him the Land Rover to pick her up from Nicosia airport that afternoon. They’d known each other for a long time. Roland had been excavating for nearly twenty years. Philip remembered their first meeting on a Roman site in Northumberland. Scraping the rock hard ground with four inch pointing trowels, the drizzle leaking down the back of their necks, Roland had revealed that his passion was Neolithic. Back in the warm pub Philip learnt that it was not the romantic world of megalithic tombs and stone circles, but the earthy commune of the Neolithic village, egalitarianism before Marx and Engels ever put pen to paper.

‘Then why are you on a Roman dig?’ Philip asked the obvious question.

‘A dig is a dig?’ He raised his eyebrows and scratched the stubble on his chin. ‘Thirty bob a day and I couldn’t afford the petrol to anywhere else.’

Their unlikely friendship was based on mutual respect for each other’s archaeological expertise and dedication.

Stone spindle whorls could no more exhilarate Philip than Roland could be excited by the small change of that ‘pillaging bastard of a Greek fairy’ as he described Alexander the Great. He did not bother to correct him that Alexander was Macedonian.

Even now, as he turned into the neat parochial air terminal, Stanstead with Greek subtitles, Philip hoped his trench would turn up something historical to avoid being bored out of his mind.

He watched through the perimeter fence as the small Air Olympic jet landed roughly and without finesse.

Not quite Qantas, Ros, he thought.

But as she was processed quickly and efficiently he thanked the British military presence on the island. A damn sight pleasanter than Aussie customs, from what she’d told him. I doubt they squirted her with fly spray over the Med the way they would on the approach to Brisbane.

Her tanned features and sun-bleached blonde hair moved leisurely out into the concourse. It was a meeting planned but not quite believed until the tired beauty walked towards him.

‘G’day, Philip.’

‘Good trip?’

‘OK until Zorba took over.’

‘It’s good to see you,’ he said weakly. ‘You look tired. Can I set you up with a tea while I get your bag?’

‘I won’t argue with a coffee,’ she said, pleasantly