Emperor's Winding Sheet (24 page)

“How will your families fare if the defense of the City fails?” he asked them.

“What is it to us, if the City stands, and our families starve?” they muttered.

That night was the night of the full moon. The Emperor was coming away from the night Liturgy in the Church of the Holy Apostles, the streets were full of people dispersing from the churches, and suddenly a great crying and wailing and groaning was set up; everyone was pointing and looking
skyward, with voices full of dismay. The silver moon of Byzantium, shining in her gossamer sky among the stars, was being slowly blacked out, eclipsed. A black shadow crept across half her face; the rest was suffused with a blood-red stain. The Emperor and his party rode home in thickening darkness with random cries of anguish ringing in their ears. At the tent door, Vrethiki paused and looked up. The superstition of the Romans no longer filled him with derision, but with a kind of heaviness of heart. He tried to imagine what he would feel if he really thought the moon was the symbol of his City, and he saw, where the moon should be, a circle of coppery red, glowing somberly like the ashes of a dying fire. He stood looking up for some time, and then as he watched, the darkness began to pass off the moon. A bright silver sliver of clear moon appeared, but between the darkness and the brightness was a wide band of blood-red light.

 

EARLY NEXT MORNING THE EMPEROR SUMMONED HIS COUNCIL
, and all the priests of importance in the City—those who would come when he summoned. “We must do something to steady the people,” he said. “They will become a terrified rabble if we cannot calm and encourage them. We must carry the sacred icon of the Virgin round the City, and to the Church of the Holy Wisdom. The people all together can pray for a blessing. Can this be done?”

“It shall be done,” the priests promised him.

“At this time, above all we should be united,” said the Emperor. “Fathers, will you ask Scholarios to walk with you?” But at this there was an outburst of indignation from Archbishop Leonard, one of those who had come with Cardinal Isadore.

“We can take no part in a ceremony in which that enemy
of the Union partakes—that turncoat, that arch heretic!”

The Emperor sighed. Notaras spoke. “Good Father,” he said to Leonard, “we are all in one peril. Cannot we all pray together, and forget our differences?”

“There can be no differences!” cried the Latin bishop. “The Union of our Churches was agreed, agreed and signed to. Those who will not accept it now are damned heretics! We should spurn them, punish them till they are of a better mind. As for your procession: I will not walk with Scholarios—I would as soon go in procession with the devil himself!”

Cardinal Isadore put a hand on his bishop's arm, as though to restrain him, but Notaras cried, “For my part I would sooner see the Turkish turban in the Church of the Holy Wisdom than the Latin miter!”

And at that a silence fell, and men looked at each other warily. “Oh, Lukas, Lukas,” said the Emperor. “And that wish too likely to be granted!”

“Make your procession, Lord Emperor,” said Cardinal Isadore quietly. “I and my clergy will take part, and look neither to right nor to left to see who else is with us.”

Yet the outburst cast a shadow on the procession; and it was wasted too, for Scholarios would not come, but sent prophetic damnations from his tightly locked cell. And hardly had they got the great icon on its wooden platform, resting on the shoulders of four priests, than someone stumbled, and it slipped, and fell in the mire, face down. A horrified gasp ran round the crowded faithful. The icon had to be blessed before it was lifted, and then it seemed very heavy, like lead, and it took six men to raise it up again. It was a picture so covered and cased in silver and crusted over with jewels that only the Virgin's face was visible, and that was a little brown oval, in which her features could be dimly descried through a coating of hundreds of
years of candle smoke and incense. But it was immensely holy, Stephanos told Vrethiki, because it had been painted from the life, by St. Luke.

After that the procession did start to move, intoning Kyrie Eleison. They had hardly gone a step when the sun went in, and, looking up, Vrethiki saw the sort of thick melted dark-gray cloud that he hardly remembered seeing since he left England, and a large raindrop splashed his cheek. At first, so used had they all become to the sound of bombardment all day, they did not realize it was thunder that rolled overhead, but soon it growled and boomed louder than the guns of the Sultan. Rain pattered down. The icon itself was being carried under a silken canopy, and when the rain suddenly hardened, and changed from gentle drops to a solid downpour, the procession only wavered, and continued onward. The rain daggers churned up the road to puddles and mud in moments, and soaked the worshippers to the skin. Children clung to their parents, pulling folds of their mothers' clothes round their heads. Vrethiki, bare-headed, could feel the rain tapping on his scalp through his hair, and a rivulet ran chilly down his spine. The head of the procession reached a forum, where roads came up from the Marmara, and from the Horn.

Here an icy-cold gust of wind suddenly reached them, and with it came hailstones, huge hailstones as large as eggs, which stung and bruised, and battered the cringing people. The canopy over the icon was ripped to ribbons, the banners the people were carrying were beaten down into the mud, their lamps extinguished. Vrethiki put his hands over his head, trying to ward off the stinging impact of the cascade of ice bullets. For a moment more the great thronging mass of people swayed and bowed under the wrath of heaven; then
everyone began to run for shelter, helter-skelter, each for himself.

Vrethiki turned down a side street, and pressed into the first doorway arch he came to, whimpering from pain and cold. As he stood there, under the columned doorway arch of the house, with the rain and hail lashing down an inch from his nose, a cistern somewhere must have flooded or burst, for suddenly a great torrent of water cascaded past him down the street, and a little girl, washed off her feet, was being dragged slithering in the foul muddy cataract down the hill. Vrethiki leaped after her, and struggling on the slippery roadway, with the fierce pull of the water tugging at his ankles, he dragged her to safety with him. A few moments later a distraught woman came struggling after her. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the hailstorm ceased. Vrethiki emerged from shelter into what now seemed the gentle downfall of rain, and went to look for the Emperor's retinue, leaving the mother comforting her terrified child.

There was nothing left of the procession that was to have calmed and comforted the people. Banners and flowers lay draggled and trampled in the mud. Forlorn little groups of drenched and dripping people stood in doorways, or fled homeward. And a cold wind still blew from Thrace, driving the storm before it. It blew all the rest of the day, tormenting the men on the wall, exposed to its cruel fingering in their cold armor, and their clammy rain-soaked clothes.

 

THE NEXT MORNING VRETHIKI, WAKING, WONDERED FOR
a moment where he was. He looked uncomprehending at the stretch of purple cloth gently sagging overhead. He had thought to see the little casement of the dormer window of his attic at home; and what had come to him so strongly was
the thought of the ripe fruit in the apple orchard. He got up, puzzled. No one else was yet stirring, so he poked up the ashes in the fire, and put fuel on. He went to the door of the tent. Outside the ground was dewy, and the air was thick. White drifting mist veiled everything. He could see only a yard or two, and the noise of the guns—still spasmodic, for the day's work was only beginning—came curiously muffled, yet clear, for all lesser noises had been snuffed out. Fog; the faint smell of it tingled in his memory, like autumn mornings in England.

The moment the others woke up, he gathered that it was an unheard-of thing in the City, in spring. They would have been cast into deep gloom by it, were it not that after yesterday no deeper gloom was possible. The explanation seemed clear to everyone—the Divine Presence was veiling its departure from the City. All day, a still and windless day, the fog lingered. It dissolved the substance of the walls and buildings, which seemed to hover palely, to come and go, to quaver on each movement of the swirling air, like dreams or ghosts. And men loomed up at each other along the walls, all out of scale and context, like ghosts on the march. The enemy could not be seen at all, though they could be heard; apart from gunfire the sound of their voices, of the racket of comings and goings, drifted eerily out of the white emptiness beyond the wall.

At nightfall a wind sprang up and rolled the fog away. Outside the walls the myriad campfires of the enemy sprang into view. And in the sky above, the stars.

 

YET THE ORDEAL WAS NOT YET OVER. IN THE CLEAR NIGHT
that followed the misty day, suddenly the citizens were horrified to see a strange red flickering light that played upon the dome of the Church of the Holy Wisdom. The Emperor
stood at the window of his throne room in Blachernae, and saw it from far off. It seemed as though the base of the dome were circled with a bright fiery band of light, that mounted the dome, flowing upward, and con verging on the great cross at the apex. “What does this mean?” murmured the Emperor. “What does this mean? I am afraid that Heaven itself has turned against us.”

He was still staring out of his high window when a group of his courtiers came to him. Phrantzes, his gray grave secretary, and Theophilus, and Don Francisco, the Spaniard who called himself the Emperor's cousin. Lukas Notaras was there, and Minotto the Venetian, and Jus tiniani, and Cardinal Isadore.

“Have you seen that?” the Emperor asked them. “What can it mean?”

“Whatever it may mean, there is no hope for us now,” said Phrantzes. “We have come to beg you, to implore you”—and at these words they all knelt down suddenly as if in church—“to go to a place of safety while there is time.”

“My dear Lord,” said Theophilus, “think how it has happened before that the Emperor was driven from the City, and yet the Empire continued, and the City was won back again. Go to the Morea; your brothers will come to you, and perhaps Hunyadi, and the Pope …”

Vrethiki, watching the Emperor, saw the color ebb from his cheeks. Beneath his golden sallow skin the pallor gave him a deathly greenish tinge. His lips were white and bloodless. Suddenly the whites of his eyes flashed; his pupils rolled. He bent at the knees, and fell forward with a soft thud on the floor, while Theophilus was still speaking.

They ran to lift him, to lay him on his couch. He was breathing through parted lips; a light froth of spittle bubbled on his mouth.

“Bring water!” cried Phrantzes, wringing his hands in distress. Stephanos came with an alabaster bottle in his hands. He thrust his way through the clustered noblemen crowded round the couch. “He has only fainted, I think,” he said, bending over his master. “Oh, why must you press him so?” And, unstoppering the bottle, he dashed the contents in the Emperor's face. It was rose water. A faint scent of embalmed flowers rose from the pillow. The Emperor's dark lashes flickered, and then his eyes swam open. It took him some moments, staring vacantly round at the circle of anxious faces, to recollect himself. Then he said, “No. If it be the will of God, whither could I fly? It was said long ago this City, this Empire, would make a splendid winding sheet. It shall be mine.”

“Yet, Lord Emperor, hear what we have to say …” began Notaras, urgently.

“I have said I will not abandon you,” said the Emperor. His voice was weak. “Have pity on me—do not urge it further.”

Stephanos was kneeling by the pillow, wiping his master's forehead with a cloth wrung out in rose water. Vrethiki, watching the courtiers, saw them give up, saw the heads bowed, and shoulders drooped. Phrantzes was in tears. And the boy would have liked to take his hand, to embrace these lordly men, each one. They loved their master, and they had tried to save him. Vrethiki knew.

 

IT SEEMED TO VRETHIKI, TOSSING AND TURNING ON HIS
mattress in the tent, watching the canvas shift on the flowing night air, that the guns were worse than ever. So ceaseless was the banging and rumbling that the noise was almost the element he lived in, like air. But usually they were less rowdy
in the night, and that night they were at full force. Hearing him restlessly tossing, Stephanos reached out a hand to him in the dark. The boy held it till he fell asleep.

 

THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNDAY; THE EMPEROR AND HIS ENTOURAGE
went to hear the Liturgy before going to the walls. It was halfway through the morning, in bright clear weather, as though the storms and portents had never been, when they rode down to the wall in the Lycus valley. A great spectacle stretched out before them in the Turkish camp. Line upon line, the mind-numbing hundreds of their hordes were drawn up across the plain, plumed headdresses rippling like ripe wheat in the wind, the kaleidoscope colors of their dress like gaudy flowers. Banners and spears and standards bristled over their heads; their helms and weapons gleamed and glinted in the sun. And along the lines they could see the Sultan riding, on a horse draped all over with embroidered silks. Trumpeters rode before him and behind, blasting discordantly. Every so often the Sultan stopped and addressed his gathered ranks. And a vast cheer answered him, a cheer that came from so many distended throats it seemed not human, but like the shrieking of stormwinds over mountaintops, or the senseless roar of the sea. AllallaaIlaallalaaa! rang toward the silent listeners on the walls.

The Emperor's party halted beside Justiniani, halfway along the stockade. “Whatever pleases them so hugely bodes little good for us,” said Justiniani grimly.

They were all looking intently at what was happening far off. Nearby, Urban's great gun, leveled at the stockade, and loaded, was being fused and fired. They heard the bang, and the whistle of the flying ball. Then there was chaos, earth and splinters flying everywhere, the horses whinnying, rearing
and bolting. Stephanos had leaped for ward, arms extended. Something hit Vrethiki's cheek, like a punch in the face, and his eyes were full of dust and grit. Something wet and sticky was on his collar. He tugged at it, and then rubbed his eyes, blinking. When he could see again, he saw a terrible sight. A stretch of the palisade was down, and the ground was thick with the writhing and groaning bodies of the men who had been lined up behind it. Already their companions were bending over them, and voices were raised, urgently or in distress. A few dazed men were staggering around in a state of shock. A splinter had struck Justiniani's arm, and he was bleeding slightly through his chain mail. The Emperor was standing stock still, covered thickly in dust and grime from head to foot, but unharmed. At his feet, on the ground, lay a body pierced in twenty places by jagged fragments of the shattered ball that had been flying toward the Emperor.