The Tournament by Matthew Reilly Read Free Book Online Page B

teacher.
    Mr Ascham said, ‘Every nation thinks their own culture is the pinnacle of civilisation and that all other cultures are primitive and barbarous. It is a sad but natural prejudice of the human mind. This is why one must travel as much as one can. Travel is the finest form of education.’
    Soon after arriving in those lands, I beheld for the first time a Moslem place of worship: the peculiar style of domed church that the Moslems call a mosque. I would see many more and they all followed the same basic architecture: each had a slender tower rising from it called a minaret and at prayer times, a male singer would mount this tower and from its summit call the faithful to prayer with a most unsettling elongated wail.
    I was now truly in a foreign land.
    Although I would never have admitted it to my teacher, I must confess that he was right: travel was the finest form of education and I was experiencing a tremendous thrill from our journey. Travelling abroad, and so very far from England, had shown me how cloistered my life back home was. Later in my life, a life during which I would encounter many kings and dignitaries, I often wondered if the difference between great rulers and poor ones was the amount of travel they had done before their coronation.
    And then one morning, after four weeks of overland travel, we crested a rise and my breath caught in my throat. I was looking at the great city of Constantinople.
    It was a stunning metropolis—a rolling sea of cream-coloured buildings and white-painted mosques, all interspersed with high trees and the odd taller Roman structure. Bathed in the dusty light of the Turkish sun and framed by the glittering golden waters of the Bosphorus Strait, the pale buildings of the city took on an almost heavenly appearance. My first glimpse of Constantinople was literally a breathtaking experience.
    The core of the city was nestled on a sharp peninsula that lanced eastward into the Sea of Marmara—into which the Bosphorus flowed—and it was protected by a massive eighty-foot-high defensive wall that had been built by the Roman Emperor Theodosius a thousand years before.
    The mighty wall—it looked like one wall, but it was, in fact, actually two walls—ran from north to south, cutting the peninsula off from the mainland. At each extremity, the great barrier extended all the way to the water’s edge. There were several fortified gates spaced at regular intervals along the wall, but the primary one was an immense portal known as the Golden Gate even though its thick studded doors were made of bronze (the original golden ones were long lost to history).
    In the far distance, obscured by the hazy air peculiar to the lands of the East, I observed a great hulk of a building that made Theodosius’s wall look puny: it had a colossal dome and a towering minaret that soared into the sky and was easily the largest structure in the city.
    We left our guardsmen at the Golden Gate: foreign troops were forbidden to enter the city. Once inside, as distinguished guests, we would be escorted by the Sultan’s crimson-robed palace guards.
    But the city’s guards stopped short at the sight of Primrose Ponsonby.
    Concerned that she might be bringing plague into their city, they refused outright to admit her. No argument or exhortation could sway them. In the end, Mr Ascham decided that Mrs Ponsonby would lodge with our soldiers at an inn in the ramshackle market village that had attached itself to the outer side of the massive gate. Her doting husband, clearly distraught, would remain with her until she recovered.
    Yet even in her feverish state, Mrs Ponsonby found the energy to ask Mr Ascham: ‘But who will watch over Miss Elizabeth?’
    ‘I will,’ Mr Ascham said.
    I had to turn away so that none of them could see the smile that had arisen unbidden on my face.
    Inside the walls of Byzantium, my teacher would be my chaperone.

PAWN
    IN CHESS, QUEENS, KNIGHTS , rooks and bishops can make powerful