Master of Shadows (24 page)

The imagery was vivid and uncompromising, as Constantine had learned it had to be if memory was properly to be stimulated, goaded into recall.

‘Nay more, a certain harlot, a sharer in their guilt, a minister of the furies, a servant of the demons, a worker of incantations and poisonings, insulting Christ, sat in the patriarch’s seat, singing an obscene song and dancing frequently …’

Outside once more, the defiled church behind him, he made his way back home, taking this turn and that at random, sure that he would encounter all he needed to summon the rest of the words of the long-dead scribe.

In a doorway a couple struggled. A man, clad in mail, had the near-naked woman by the throat. His free hand held a cruel blade, the point drawing blood from a spot beneath her ribcage. Her skirts were forced up around her waist and he had forced himself between her legs. His hips were grinding against her and into her and his gaping mouth was at her neck while her tears fell. Elsewhere, wailing fathers were dragged from their wives and children and carried off, or cut down before them. Children begged and wept and howled, and mothers tore at their clothes and hair and fell upon the ground.

‘No one was without a share in the grief. In the alleys, in the streets, in the temples, complaints, weeping, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity, the separation of those most closely united.’

His recitation at an end, he felt the city of his imagination disappear behind him. Ahead of him was his bedroom, always his bedroom. He saw himself upon the bed, his teacher beside him. He closed his eyes.

‘Excellent, my dear Costa,’ said Doukas, turning from the painting and looking into his student’s eyes. ‘Most excellent.’

After a minute or so, the prince opened his eyes and fixed them squarely upon those of his friend.

‘The Turks encamped before the wall – how many?’ he asked.

Doukas looked down at his lap for a moment, and then back into Constantine’s face.

‘The word from our lookouts is that they number perhaps five thousand,’ he said.

Constantine smiled as he considered the frown lines etched deep into his teacher’s brow.

‘But …?’ he said, raising his chin to emphasise the question.

‘But there are many more on their way. Of that there is no doubt.’

Constantine said nothing, just kept his eyes on Doukas’s plump face.

‘Many, many more,’ said the scholar. ‘Mehmet advances from his capital at Edirne with every man available to him. Those of our people who have already faced them say the assembled host is … uncountable.’

Constantine nodded. ‘I am sure that is how it appears,’ he said. ‘I must admit that part of me would relish seeing such a gathering at first hand.’

‘I have no such ambition,’ said Doukas. ‘Unfortunately we will both have the opportunity to gaze upon them in their glory before the week is out.’

‘What keeps them?’ asked Constantine. ‘I’m sure they’re more than keen to get on with it. What do the heathens call our wall … the bone in Allah’s throat?’

‘Indeed, my prince – the bone in Allah’s throat,’ said Doukas. ‘Sad to say, he hasn’t actually choked on it yet.’

‘Now, now, Doukas,’ said Constantine, raising an eyebrow. ‘Are we not all people of the Book? Muslims, Christians, Jews – same father, different name.’

‘Different people,’ said Doukas sadly. ‘I doubt if Allah means us any harm. But Mehmet and his hunting dogs?’ He left the thought floating in the air between them, like a bad smell.

‘Dogs? Dogs? Come, come, Doukas – first you wish harm on our Father in heaven, and now you call his children names.’

‘All his children,’ said Doukas. ‘And therein lies the disgrace of it. There may be as many Christians as heathens marching towards us, under the sultan’s banners. Perhaps it is the end of days, right enough.’

‘Faith, my friend,’ chided Constantine, placing a hand gently on one of Doukas’s chubby thighs. ‘Now is the time for faith. How many sieges has our city faced in a thousand years?’

‘More than a score,’ replied Doukas, without looking up.

‘Twenty-two,’ said Constantine. ‘Allah has been trying to cough up the Wall of Theodosius for a thousand years. I fail to see why you should imagine the twenty-third will end any differently from the others.’

Doukas looked calmly into his student’s face.

‘I look at the sea and I watch the waves,’ he said. ‘I watch the waves and how they never stop moving. I look at our sea walls and see how they are locked in place. These Ottoman Turks are the sons and daughters of a restless people. They do not love cities as we do – rather they despise them, I think. Just as the sea rolls endlessly, without a moment’s rest, so these Turks remain always on the move. Their hearts are happiest not in palaces or on city streets, but on the journey. We are only in their way. Our walls are an offence to everything they believe, everything they are. The waves must roll and walls must fall.’

‘So why do they tarry on the journey to Constantinople?’ asked the prince. ‘If our presence here is so abhorrent, why don’t they come at a gallop?’

Doukas stood from the bed and walked over to the windows. He looked out for a few moments, his attention caught by a long line of hand-wringing citizens walking in procession, heads down and mumbling, behind a party of priests carrying a life-size statue of the Virgin.

‘They are burdened with great … machines,’ he said, still watching the desperation of the faithful as they begged ceaselessly, day and night, for divine intervention.

‘Machines?’ said Constantine. ‘Of what sort? Catapults, battering rams? All have been arrayed against the wall and always they have failed. The bone in Allah’s throat can neither be coughed up nor swallowed down.’

‘I lack the words to describe these latest creations,’ said Doukas. ‘Our people in the villages beyond the walls – those who have already been defiled by the passing of the Turks – send word of great bombards.’

‘Bombards?’ asked Constantine, frowning. ‘But we have those.’

‘Not so, Costa,’ said Doukas. ‘Those who have seen them and lived to tell the tale describe machines longer than a house is tall, big enough for a man to stand inside.’

Constantine waited for his teacher to continue.

‘The largest of them launches a stone as big as a hay wagon for a distance of a mile and more,’ he said. ‘I have heard them called “city-takers”, and so cumbersome are they it takes a hundred men and as many beasts to haul the things a mile or two a day.’

‘City-takers,’ said Constantine. His tone was all at once dark, like clouds gathered for a sudden storm. ‘Perhaps Allah’s fingers are finally long enough to reach down and pluck the bone out once and for all.’

35

All the while Mehmet and his force are advancing upon the city, a lammergeier soars high above.

Reflected upon the sheen of his golden eyes, the Great City beneath appears a tattered patchwork. The encircling walls still seem immutable as a mountain range, yet even these have been ground down by years, like an old lady’s teeth. Built more than a thousand years before, they defy every attacker that seeks to challenge them. Behind the walls, hunkered in their shadows or exposed to the light of day, the citizens live their lives amid a web of streets and alleyways and ancient buildings. Some structures are grand enough, the churches and shrines especially, but the city now is made as much of empty spaces as anything upstanding. Constantinople is in the process of forgetting herself.

She has never truly recovered, after all, from violation at the hands of Christian men, soldiers of the cross who came by sea in 1204. That rape, and by her own brothers, was more than she could bear, and the hurt inflicted then has never healed. Now, too, the dementia of ages is at work, like a rising tide of darkness and absence.

Where once there were homes and businesses, streets and lanes crowded with workshops and market stalls, places of industry and endeavour, now there are swathes of scrubby heath – grasses, bushes and even trees reclaiming and smothering the work of men. Saddest of all is the mighty hippodrome – once the home of charioteers and baying crowds. What was then a wonder is now in precarious decline. Empty plinths lament the absence of the great bronze horses sculpted for Alexander the Great, trophies of a distant war but looted two and a half centuries before.

Mehmet and his Turkmen might covet the place like no other, but the once perfect picture is growing smudged and indistinct, blind spots fogging and blurring the image, piece by piece. The Great City is like a book left open in the rain, and now half the words are washed away. Some of the loss is the product of neglect, but much is just the merciless erosion of old age, the inevitable failing of one who has lived long enough, or too long.

A city is a dream shared by its inhabitants, and now the blissful sleep of Byzantium is past and cruel awakening morning approaches. In sleep she dreams she is young and lovely, as she was and thought she always would be. But when she looks at herself in the mirror, in the first light of day, she will see that time has caught her.

Where once the dream made perfect sense, now many scenes seem meaningless and vague, doomed to the oblivion of forgetfulness. All around the place are statues and memorials whose very names the people have forgotten. Above their sorry heads, on walls and sculpted porticos held aloft by fluted columns, are fine inscriptions, but the origins and meanings of those thoughts and words are mostly lost as well.

The dream, the original, essential truth that bound it all together, as mortar binds bricks, is turning to powder and blowing away on the wind. Since the inhabitants no longer remember, or even care, what stories once explained their city, those have been replaced by superstitions and rumours and by folk myths and tales to frighten children.

This siege by the Ottoman Turks is in many ways the lesser of two evils, for Constantinople is already busy dying from the inside out.

Just visible on the outer edge of the bird’s vision are the incoming tides of two Ottoman armies. It was no accident that set Mehmet out from Edirne on a Friday. Rather, he chose the holiest day of the Muslim week so his soldiers might not fail to grasp the sacred nature of their quest. He rode out from his capital accompanied by his holy men, his sheiks and his viziers, on the crest of a wave of soldiers and animals that seemed, to all who witnessed its passing, to reach from horizon to horizon. Horns blared and men howled and cheered as they poured away from their city and out across the landscape.

Impressive though it is, driving before it a flotsam of terrifying rumour that is itself enough to engulf and sweep away all save those who follow the Prophet, still it is only half the sultan’s army. For every soldier or cavalryman that departed Edirne in the west, the same again flocked to a second mustering station, at Bursa in Anatolia, and those too are on their way to the Great City, from the east. Constantinople is a solitary white rock in the path of an encircling torrent surging towards it from all sides.

Ready for them – as ready as he can be at least – is the Christian emperor Constantine. He is more than twice the age of Mehmet. He has had his chancellor’s office seek out every man within the walls who is fit to fight, and now the task is complete and there are fewer than eight thousand names on the list.

The emperor is a stag at bay, horns lowered towards the snapping jaws of many foes. But he has fought before, and often, and must put his faith in the wall, and in God.

To add to the citizens’ woes, there are Christians by the thousand among the advancing force. At the core of the army are the sultan’s janissaries – professional soldiers, cavalrymen and gunners. Born under the cross, they were captured as boys and turned to Islam under the shadow of the scimitar. There are Christian mercenaries too, soldiers of fortune ready to side with the Muslims or anyone else in return for gold and silver.

Like the emperor, his subjects also put their faith in the wall, and in God. Constantinople is a city built as a heaven on earth, with the emperor as God’s anointed and appointed champion. Prayer and ritual are everywhere. Bells ring and wooden gongs boom and the holiest of holy icons are ceaselessly on the move through the streets, giving hope to the faithful. Here is a stone from Christ’s tomb, his crown of thorns, the nails from his cross. Here too the bones of his apostles and the head of John the Baptist.

While the market squares and taverns of other cities might ring to different talk, in Constantinople every man speaks of religion. Every man knows God’s will better than his neighbour. They bicker among themselves and dismiss as heretic and apostate any whose opinion differs from their own by word or deed. In this way they make enemies of all – especially their fellow Christians in the West. Even as they damn their neighbours, so they are damned themselves.

They look up to heaven, but only the birds look back.

Closest to the city, almost in the shadow of the wall now (having departed weeks before the guns), are the crews tasked with transporting Orban’s bombards. The Great Gun alone requires a team of hundreds of men and scores of draught animals. It takes up the length of three wagons, chained together to support the barrel, its early lustre dulled now to a malevolent glimmer. Oxen moan and haul and their handlers struggle beside them, yard by yard.

Yet more teams of men – labourers, carpenters and craftsmen of every sort – busy themselves further ahead again, levelling a path and building bridges to ease the passage of the Great Gun and the rest of the artillery train.

Also on the move, almost insignificant but important nonetheless, are other figures, with other plans. Chief among these, moving like water beetles upon the surface of the Sea of Marmara, is a flotilla of three ships. As they alter course to make for the entrance to the Golden Horn and the imperial harbour within, the lammergeier’s attention is briefly fixed upon them.

Just within reach of his sight, like dots before his wondrous eyes, are the figures moving upon the deck of the foremost vessel.

36

Prince Constantine was hardly alone in mourning all that had been lost to the Crusaders in 1204. The Byzantine heart had broken then, and while it kept on beating, its ancient rhythm was lost for all time.

Aboard the ship leading the little flotilla towards the royal harbour of Constantinople, Lẽna’s mind too was filled with the city’s plight. As a student of war she had been taught the sad tale by her father, so that she knew it by rote; as a willing soldier of Christ, she felt the pain of the city’s wounding like a knife in her own gut.

She breathed deeply, relishing the clean, fresh taste of the salt air and letting it cleanse her thoughts of all the horror that had unfolded in the city in the name of Christ.

She felt as though life itself was re-entering her body with each new breath. It was the first day since their sea voyage had begun weeks before that she had felt anything like well. For almost all of that time she had been beyond miserable, racked by a seasickness that swelled to fill every corner of her being. For more than two weeks, the fat-bellied carrack had wallowed and rolled in the ceaseless swell. Truth be told, her incapacity had served its purpose by keeping her below deck and out of sight. Despite her pleasure and relief in the open air, she took care to keep a scarf loosely draped around the lower half of her face.

She gazed towards a thin white line etched across the landscape in the distance – part, she assumed, of Constantinople’s sea wall. The feature was barely visible through mist and haze, and all the while she peered ahead, she massaged the aching and tender muscles of her stomach.

When John Grant had first informed her that he had secured passage for them both, all the way to the city, her delight had matched his own. The bloodstained angel on the tor had reminded her who she was, after all. While the lightning flashed and the thunder roared, she had seen the path she must follow. Her death postponed – a martyr’s death – had been a near-unbearable burden. She had escaped the flames but had allowed herself to be carried into hell just the same. Her guilt had lain upon her life with all the crushing weight of a gravestone, until everything good had been squeezed out of her like juice from an apple, leaving only a husk.

But the angel had come back for her, had revealed herself and given her the strength and the reason to remember who she was and what she was for. She had been given back her child, the son upon whom she had turned her back, and now she would follow him to the end. He was bound for Constantinople in hope of saving a girl. Lẽna would go there too, and the soul she might save was her own.

The price John Grant had paid for their transport was the promise of their service in the war to come. Their ship would be one of three commissioned to carry a force of armed men to Constantinople, and the addition of two more professional soldiers was apparently welcome. Lẽna had passed for a man before and would do so again provided no one paid too close attention.

John Grant would do the talking and she would provide silent, brooding backup. Given the anonymity afforded by the always grim and dehumanising conditions aboard a troop ship, it would only be a matter of keeping her face obscured, and shunning contact with the ship’s company. As it had turned out, her sickness put her below with all those dozens similarly afflicted. For the duration she had been just another heaving mess curled in a corner and best avoided.

The commander of the operation was a Genoan noble, and the money for the whole enterprise – the private army of eight hundred men, their arms and the vessels to carry them – was coming out of his own purse. All of it was in answer to the latest desperate cry for help from the emperor himself.

It seemed their own need to reach Constantinople was in tune with a greater calling that was penetrating the distant reaches of the world like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond.

‘Badr was right,’ John Grant had said on his return from the harbour and his successful negotiations.

‘About what?’ she had asked.

‘About the Ottomans. Badr said years ago they were on the rise – and we fought for them together more than once. But I wonder if even he would have predicted how high they might reach.’

Lẽna had nodded, her eyes raised so that she looked beyond him.

‘Their desire for Constantinople is as old as their heathen faith,’ she had said. ‘Their Prophet foretold the fall of the city into their hands. They have believed it ever since.’

‘Well it seems a reckoning is at hand,’ he had replied. ‘If the winds of the same storm might drive me where I wish to go, then that is well and good.’

She had shrugged and set herself to gathering up her few possessions. His casual dismissal of the threat posed to a Christian city by a Muslim horde had caused her pain, but she held her tongue.

Their journey so far, from the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel to the sour-smelling belly of the carrack, had taken most of a year, certainly more months than she had bothered to count, and they carried only what they needed to survive. The miles that remained, separating them from their goal, mattered little. The force that drew her towards Constantinople now was greater even than that driving John Grant, though she would not have revealed as much to him.

She had spent almost the entire voyage in a miasma of nausea, either heaving the emptiness of her insides into a wooden bucket or sipping brackish water that did little more than keep her alive. From within the depths of her suffering she had recalled the long-ago journey with her father to the western isles of Scotland and the home of MacDonald of Islay. She had been just a girl then, and while the necessary sea crossings had made her queasy, out of sorts for their duration, there had been nothing to compare with the misery of this first sea voyage made in adulthood. She would have prayed to God for death except that even in extremis she had been wary of making demands upon the almighty when so much else was at stake.

More than that, seasickness aside, she was somehow at peace.

‘I did not know a person could turn such a colour,’ John Grant had said on one of his regular visits to her side. Despite her suffering, his attentiveness pleased her for reasons she preferred not to dwell upon. That said, if anything could make her feel worse than she already did, it was the presence of someone, anyone, who was so visibly well.

‘Leave me be,’ she had said. She wanted not to talk, but to listen, and the making of words had burned her raw throat so that she felt she was swallowing hot sand.

‘The good news is that the captain says we’ll be in the Sea of Marmara by this time tomorrow,’ he had said.

‘And the bad news?’ she asked.

‘No bad news,’ he said. ‘Giustiniani says the weather is changing for the better at last. The wind is behind us … or athwart, or … on the side of us … or … or anyway it’s precisely where he – that is we, and especially you – would want it to be.’

‘Quite the navigator, you are,’ she said.

‘Indeed I am,’ he said. ‘And I can also tell you that we will be in the city in no more than a day or two.’

Those conversations – only hours before – seemed to her like distant memories already. Whatever storm clouds were building above the Christian empire of Byzantium had apparently stirred the sea for a thousand miles around – but their weather had changed as predicted and she had awoken from her latest fitful sleep to find a sea smooth as oil and the ship steady upon it.

The near-instantaneous transformation of her condition had seemed almost magical to her and she had offered up a silent prayer of thanks. All at once she had felt able to rise – and better yet to climb out of the fetid confines of the cramped and stinking quarters below decks.

John Grant had seen her emerge through the hatchway and had joined her at once. There was still a distance between them – some wariness each retained regarding the other’s intentions – but she detected something in his manner that seemed almost like hunger for her presence.

‘How’s your new friend?’ she asked.

She was referring, he knew, to the man whose personality permeated every inch of the ship – and of the others in the flotilla.

Standing close to Giovanni Giustiniani Longo felt like proximity to a flame; in his presence there was the prospect of both warmth and danger. A head shorter than John Grant, he was as muscled as a cat. He was clean-shaven and his features were fine, with full, almost girlish lips and dark, blue-black hair. It was his eyes, however, that captured and held attention. Large, dark and deep-set beneath heavy brows, they shone with an inner light, suggestive of sharp intelligence but also of sadness, or regret. His clothes, though obviously expensive and well made, were dishevelled and worn. He seemed never to be at rest – always moving among the men, asking questions, checking gear or holding court.

As Lẽna spoke, they both watched their new-found leader busying himself with a mariner’s astrolabe.

‘He is in fine form,’ said John Grant. ‘If we must go to war, then it is good to go with one such as he.’

She said nothing in reply and he turned to look at her, troubled by her silence.

‘Are you sorry you came?’ he asked.

She shook her head. She had already told him she had business of her own in Constantinople. When she had first said it, as they sat drying themselves by a hastily built fire on the riverbank after their flight through the hellish confines of the cave, he had doubted her.

He had long known that the Great City was in peril – that the Turkmen were pressing the last redoubt of Christendom in the East. Every soldier had known it for years – and some had been drawn to the place already in hopes of rich rewards.

Both sides were paying for the services of fighting men after all – Christian and Muslim – and the swords of mercenaries would go to the highest bidder. He had fought for both empires in his time, alongside Badr Khassan, and would have cared little for the outcome. His only motivation now was his promise – the safety of the girl. If that put him on the side of the Christians, then so be it.

But it seemed word of the city’s plight had reached even Lẽna’s hiding place in the convent at the Great Shrine. She knew too – and it seemed she cared, though why or how much he could not tell.

The city walls were growing clearer, rising out of the sea like a cresting wave. Their ship rode up on the back of an unexpected swell and dropped into the trough beyond. Lẽna felt her stomach turn over, and she reached above her head to grab hold of a rope and steady herself.

‘What is your business here – really?’ he asked. ‘Why have you come?’

The nausea peaked and passed, leaving her breathless. She swallowed thickly before answering.

‘I am afraid I have your Angus Armstrong to thank for setting me on the path,’ she said. ‘If he had not taken me, I would not have … I would not have got the message. That is why I spared his life.’

‘Message?’ he had asked.

‘I had been hiding too long, is all,’ she said. She ran a hand through her hair, smoothing it into shape. ‘By taking me he … he brought me back into the world.’

He knew she was leaving something out of her testimony, perhaps a great deal.

‘Why there of all places?’ he asked. ‘Why the shrine of St James?’

‘Patrick Grant’s idea,’ she said. ‘Just somewhere far away.’

‘From what?’

‘From Sir Robert Jardine,’ she said.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

She felt her skin prickle with discomfort. It was all so long ago, and breathing upon the embers of her memories filled her with heat that made her blush. She pulled the scarf up to the bridge of her nose. For all that the story pained her, the need to tell him about herself was stronger still.

‘Years ago – many years ago, when I was young – I went to war.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘I was a better soldier than any of them,’ she said. ‘I had trained as long, or longer. I was born to it, born
for
it. I do not know why – it is only the truth. My father saw to my training, as I have told you, and when we returned from Scotland I was taken before the dauphin, the man who would be king.’

He watched her scarf move as she spoke, found it easier than looking into her eyes.

‘They walked me into a room full of people. I should have recognised no one – I was just a peasant girl and those were great men of the realm. But as soon as I saw him, I knew he was the heir.’

‘How did you know?’ he asked.

‘I have told you,’ she said. ‘God talks to me through his angels, and I listen.’

‘God pointed out the prince?’

She looked at him pityingly, and he regretted his teasing tone.

‘I let go of my father’s hand and crossed the room towards him, and when he turned around I knelt before him.’

‘And what happened?’

‘What happened? People gasped is what happened,’ she said. ‘People gasped and then clapped and the dauphin took my hand and helped me stand.’

‘And what did he make of you – just a peasant girl?’

She smiled at him indulgently.

‘He made me commander of his armies,’ she said. ‘I was God’s instrument, he said, and only I could rid his kingdom of the English.’

‘And my father?’

‘I was accompanied at all times by bodyguards – Scotsmen. Sir Robert Jardine was among them. Serving him – and serving me, as it turned out – was Patrick Grant.’

‘Serving you?’

‘Once we had our victory – when the English were on the run – Jardine saw the bigger prize. He betrayed me – betrayed all of us. He had his men murder the rest of my protectors and took me prisoner – bore me away to my enemies.

‘Because I said I heard the word of God, the English called me a heretic and a witch. They held a trial for me and found me guilty and condemned me to burn in their fire.

‘On the night before the dawn of my execution, Patrick Grant came for me – freed me from my prison and carried me away.’

‘You talk as though the memory of it makes you sad,’ said John Grant. ‘My father spared you a dreadful death.’

‘I do not deny that,’ she said.

‘So what is wrong?’ he asked.