Master of Shadows (19 page)

27

From high above it looks like an anthill, clinging to a precipitous slope. A white structure, rising into the sky and surrounded by tiny creatures, thousands upon thousands of them, moving in ordered lines or gathered in clumps. Hither and thither the lines weave and criss-cross, filled with purpose and intent. Not a moment is wasted as they work tirelessly in concert, inspired it seems by a common goal.

Closer to the ground now, hurtling down towards the mass of it, and we see the creation for what it is – a castle of pale stone surrounded by massive walls. The creatures moving busily in all directions around it are not ants but men. This is Rumelihisari, a great fortress of the Turkmen that erupted almost overnight, like a puffball in a field. Since the work began a little over four months ago, the hubbub of frenzied activity has never stopped. By day the men toil beneath the unforgiving sun. Stonemasons and the lime burners tasked with making their mortar; carpenters and joiners, and the smiths to make and sharpen their tools; hod-carriers and labourers and practitioners of another score of trades besides.

Such is the Ottomans’ desire to raise this clenched fist into the sky, so as to cast God’s shadow over what remains of the Byzantine Empire, even the sultan’s nobles toil ceaselessly alongside their underlings. From behind the walls of Constantinople itself – only six miles downstream from this latest audacity of their Muslim foes – the Christians can only watch and pray.

In their eyes it is a monstrosity. Its growth is frighteningly fast, like that of a cancer, and there is a rumour that even Mehmet is to be seen there, stripped to the waist and heaving stones into place with his bare hands. By night, their efforts are illuminated by a thousand fires and a hundred thousand lamps.

Like all of his ancestors, this latest sultan has spent a lifetime dreaming of Constantinople. The Prophet promised the city to his followers long ago, and it has been part of Islam’s destiny ever since, an article of faith. They must place their hands around the Christian neck and throttle the life out of it …

From the windows of Prince Constantine’s apartments in the Blachernae Palace in Constantinople, the tops of three lead-roofed towers – the threatening pinnacles of the new Turkish fortress – could easily be glimpsed. Its walls reached from the very waves breaking upon the shore of the Bosphorus to the summit of a ridge more than sixty yards above the water.

The prince lay in his bed, propped up on many pillows, but his teacher Doukas stood at one of the tall windows, the only one not shuttered against the sunlight. Constantine had already complained about the light, and Doukas was careful to allow only a sliver of bronze to intrude. In fact he was standing upon the window seat, the better to survey the distant scene.

‘How far, would you say?’ asked Constantine.

Doukas turned from the window and was silent for a moment while he allowed his eyes to adjust to the gloom of the interior.

‘No more than six miles, Costa,’ he said, turning back and continuing his observations on tiptoe. ‘I have thought about this and I believe the infidels must have chosen to squat upon the ruins of our Church of St Michael.’

‘Nice spot,’ said Constantine. ‘Lovely views.’

‘Just so,’ said Doukas. He was as plump as a pot-bellied pig and Constantine smiled at the sight of him, his rotund silhouette like a child’s spinning top.

‘This sultan of the Ottomans fears nothing and no one,’ said Doukas. ‘He does as he pleases while your father, the emperor …’ His voice trailed away.

‘Does nothing, Doukas?’ asked Constantine. ‘Is that what you were about to say?’

The teacher pretended he had not heard the question.

‘Do not forget that Constantinople has shrugged aside the shadow of the Muslim scimitar for century after century,’ said Constantine. ‘Why should my father doubt the strength of the city’s defences now, after all this time?’

Doukas did not answer and instead began listing the statistics of the new fortress.

‘Walls as wide across their tops as three men laid head to toe,’ he said. ‘And as tall as eight men standing on each other’s shoulders. The towers are greater still. Truly it is a marvel.’

‘I hear talk of magic in the mix as well,’ said Constantine. Doukas turned to look at him, saw that the prince’s eyes were wide, his teeth glinting.

‘I wonder about you sometimes,’ said the teacher, resuming his survey and squinting into the sunlight. ‘Where you find pleasure.’

Constantine warmed to his theme. ‘They say the mortar was mixed with ram’s blood, for strength and good fortune.’

‘There’s hardly anything magical in that,’ said Doukas. ‘Heathen superstition – no more and no less. Damn them all.’

‘What about the layout of those walls you’re so impressed by, then?’ asked Constantine. ‘I have heard their lines trace the shape of two names intertwined – the sultan’s and the Prophet he serves …’

‘For one who spends so much time in a darkened room, you don’t miss out on idle gossip,’ said Doukas.

‘God forbid my father’s subjects should keep me in ignorance,’ said Constantine.

Doukas clambered down from his perch at the window and crossed to the bed.

‘Never mind the prattle of hoi polloi,’ he said, taking a seat by the prince. ‘The facts are more sinister than any fancy. Sultan Mehmet has built his own castle within sight of our walls – and no more than six miles from the Golden Horn. He even calls his abomination
Rumelihisari
– the fortress on the land of the Romans!

‘No captain dares pass the Ottoman fort without first allowing his ship to be boarded, the cargo checked and taxed.

‘The walls are festooned with guns – big enough, they say, to hurl stones from one side of the channel to the other. No ship is safe.’

Now that his eyes had properly adjusted to the near darkness, Doukas noticed that the prince was considering a sheet of parchment pinned to a board. On the parchment was a sketch plan of the new fortress and the territory around it.

‘You have to admire the gall of the man,’ said Constantine, tapping his finger on the outline of Rumelihisari. ‘Right where the channel is narrowest – at the Sacred Mouth.’

‘Have you heard what the people have taken to calling the thing?’ asked Doukas.

Constantine looked up from the plan and shook his head.

‘
Bogaz Kesen
,’ said his teacher. ‘The throat-cutter.’

‘Oh, I like that,’ said Constantine. ‘Has a ring to it.’

Doukas shook his head, exasperated.

‘I call it a tumour,’ he said. ‘A tumour in the Sacred Mouth.’

28

Within the view framed by Constantine’s windows, but much too small to be noticed from six miles away, a figure mounted on a fine white mare surveyed the latest symbol of his intent.

He was Mehmet, hero of the world, son of Murat, Sultan, son of the Sultan of the Gazis, frontier lord of the horizons. His age was twenty-one years and he had been sultan for nine of them. His mare, Hayed (which meant
movement
), was on heat and would not settle beneath him. She turned this way and that, even rearing on to her hind legs.

‘Calm yourself now, Hayed,’ he said firmly. He was strong, and a masterful horseman, and the challenge to his authority only made him smile as he used his knees and heels to enforce his commands. She came to a standstill and he stroked her neck, feeling the long, coarse hairs of her mane between his fingers, smelling her sweat.

Suddenly an explosion tore apart the peace of the morning and Hayed reared up once more, so that Mehmet had to rise in the stirrups and lean forward over her neck to retain his balance. When she settled back down on to all four hooves, he turned his head in the direction of the sound. It was the report from one of his heavy guns newly installed along the seaward-facing walls of the fort. A thin veil of dark smoke rose into the sky, betraying its source.

Glancing upstream to his left, he saw why his gunners had sprung into action. A galley, small and slight as a water beetle when viewed from so high above the strait, was travelling downstream from the Black Sea as fast as its oars would propel it. Mehmet counted three sails on the craft as well, all filled with a wind that favoured its line of flight down the channel and on towards the Great City.

Still the little ship came on, and now there were shouted threats as Mehmet’s soldiers warned the crew of the consequences of attempting to evade inspection and the payment of tolls. A second shot rang out, and clearly the time for warnings had passed. A stone cannonball weighing almost half a ton missed the galley’s bow by no more than the length of a man.

Moments later, a second ball, as big as the first and moving slowly enough that its passage just above the white tops of the waves could easily be tracked by Mehmet’s sharp eyes, blasted into the galley. The hull cracked like an eggshell and seawater gushed into the void.

The sultan watched impassively as the shattered vessel began to turn turtle. The tiny figures of men scrambled over the sides and into the water – striking out desperately for the shore or clinging to floating wreckage. Less than a minute later, the galley was gone and only a clutter of men and flotsam remained to show it had ever existed.

Hayed seemed strangely mollified by the display, as though she had watched it as well and found that the outcome suited her mood, and Mehmet had to dig his booted heels into her flanks to get her moving – down the slope and towards an entrance to the fortress.

Armed guards at their posts lowered their heads as he passed, careful to avoid his eyes, but Mehmet kept riding hard, through an elegantly arched gateway in the shadow of the north-western tower, and on down a cobbled thoroughfare. Rumelihisari had been built with all possible speed, but his masons had been under orders to create something beautiful, worthy of God.

He glanced beyond the battlements and glimpsed, shining in the sun on the far side of the strait, Anadoluhisari, the fortress put in place by his great-grandfather, the Sultan Bayezit, half a century before. Now his own work completed the set, a pair of stone hands poised to wring the infidel’s neck.

He spared a thought for Bayezit, whose own siege of the Great City had failed, along with so much else in the end. He thought of him brought to battle by the Mongol Timur the Lame and defeated and kept for the rest of his days in a cage pulled behind the victor’s dogs. Mehmet spat the memory of the khan from his mouth and spurred Hayed all the harder.

By the time he had reached the sea wall, craft crewed by his own men were already fishing bedraggled survivors from the water. Scores of soldiers and robed officials looked on from the battlements, clapping and jeering, and it was some moments before anyone noticed the sultan’s arrival. At once there was a clamour as men ran forward from all directions to help him dismount.

Mehmet shook his head at their approach and Hayed, still skittish and ill-tempered, shied backwards, away from the press.

‘Leave me be,’ he said, jumping easily down and straightening his clothing. ‘Let us see who has been first to challenge our authority.’

He received the prisoners in the guardroom on the ground floor of the massive twelve-sided tower that loomed over the waterfront above the middle portion of the sea wall. He was seated on a tall wooden stool, the hem of his sky-blue robe skimming the flagstone floor beneath his feet, so that he had the look of a bird on a perch, with folded wings. His face was long and thin, the profile aquiline. The avian appearance was intensified by a nose hooked like a beak.

Those closest to him might fear him, but they found much to admire as well. For all that he was headstrong and impulsive, he was clever too, and learned. A keen student from childhood onwards, he was a master of languages, a poet and a great reader of books. The exploits of Alexander the Great he had learned by heart, and he knew history and geography, science and engineering.

He was accompanied by a dozen armed guards but his confident air suggested he felt no need of their protection. All was silent, and then the sound of iron shackles dragging on stone announced the arrival of the prisoners. Mehmet was distracted, gazing at the light from a window high in one wall, but turned his hazel eyes to the door as they entered, preceded by two heavily muscled guards armed with scimitars unsheathed.

‘How many are they?’ he asked, as the line of bedraggled figures trooped slowly into the room.

They were chained at wrists and ankles and still soaking wet. One looked to be a boy of perhaps ten or twelve years. While they lined up in front of the sultan, water ran from their clothes, darkening the guardroom floor. The flagstones were red and the spreading dampness had the look of freshly spilled wine, or blood.

Mehmet considered the faces before him. All were dark, save the boy, who was fair, and he detected family resemblances among the group – as though brothers had found places aboard for brothers, fathers for sons.

‘A crew of twenty-five, your majesty,’ said a clerk who had brought up the rear of the line and now stood as close to the sultan as he dared. ‘Plus their captain.’

At the mention of the rank, a prisoner in the centre of the line raised his bearded chin. Mehmet noticed the movement and addressed the man himself.

‘Your name?’ he said.

The bearded man looked the sultan in the eye before responding.

‘I am Captain Antonio Rizzo, your majesty,’ he said. ‘Our home port is Venice and we pass this way many times each year.’

The man looked to be around thirty years old. His dark hair was curly, unruly and just beginning to show grey by the ears. The face was not handsome, but open and pleasant. He had a bangle of silver metal on one wrist. Around his neck he wore a silver locket and on his left hand a silver ring. Taken together, Mehmet thought, the assemblage suggested a loved one, if not a wife.

‘Kneel down,’ said the sultan.

Rizzo looked left and right at his men, and they at him. Mehmet saw trust in the looks they gave him, even affection. They certainly intended to take their cue from him.

‘KNEEL!’ bellowed one of the guards, and all of them dropped, the captain included, as though poleaxed.

There was silence then, broken only by the sound of water dripping from clothes and the ends of noses and unwashed hair.

‘You know it is against our wishes for any ship to pass through these waters without payment of a toll,’ said the sultan. There was no note of a question and he delivered the information as a simple fact.

‘Yes, your majesty,’ said Rizzo.

‘So you knowingly and openly defy us?’

‘We were a week overdue, your majesty,’ said the captain. ‘With a cargo of beef that had already begun to spoil. It was my intention to settle our debt on the return leg of our journey.’

‘Indeed,’ said the sultan. ‘Well the meat is well salted now.’

He turned his attention to the clerk.

‘We have no time for debts,’ he said. ‘They will settle their account immediately. Keep the boy.’

The clerk took a thin wooden board from under his arm and made a swift note on a sheet of parchment fastened to it. Mehmet wondered what it said, but not enough to ask.

‘And put the good captain where everyone may see him,’ he said. He stood up from his stool and walked out of the door, followed by his guards.

Within the hour, all of the Venetians were dead – all save the boy, whose youth and appearance had pleased the sultan. He was Rizzo’s son, and the fair hair was the gift of his mother. He was placed within the harem. Each of the other crewmen was swiftly dispatched with the sword. Rizzo was impaled, however. Before any of the beheadings were carried out, and while all looked on, two strong men held the captain face down on the courtyard in front of the tower, his arms manacled behind his back and his legs spread wide by a length of wood tethered between his ankles. A third man, less heavily built than the other two but with specific skills, then thrust the sharpened end of a long wooden pole as thick as his arm into Rizzo’s anus. He used a heavy mallet next, to drive the point onwards, like a tent peg, into the abdomen. Rizzo was still alive, and bleating like an abandoned calf, when the pole was raised vertically and the tail end slotted into a waiting socket between two flagstones by the battlements. From a distance it might have looked like a toy for a child – one of those on which the arms and legs of a jointed figure jerk up and down when a string is pulled.