A Place Called Armageddon (46 page)

Strangely, Theon felt no fear. When they were infants, he had learned that he could never better his brother in strength. But he had also learned that there were many ways to defeat a man. ‘Then come, Gregoras. Come at the beginning or the ending of the world. And discover, yet again, that there are bonds not even the strongest man can break.’

With that, he was gone, through the door a servant left ajar. Gregoras let him go, listening to the sounds of the room stirring behind him, of voices he knew, grown men woken suddenly and so as querulous as children. Beyond them, he heard another sound, a rumbling that he took at first to be cannon fire but realised was a low peal of thunder. Storm’s coming, he thought. Shrugging, he moved towards it.

–
TWENTY-NINE
–

Thunder

24 May: forty-eighth day of the siege

‘Does the storm come to fall on us, my friend, or will it pass us by?’

At first, Hamza did not turn at Mehmet’s question. Standing at the entrance to his lord’s great
otak
, he shifted his gaze from the departing Council – from Candarli Halil and Ishak Pasha, conspiring still as they walked away, all smiles – to the west. ‘Lightning plays there yet, noble one. But it does not seem to have moved any closer.’ He dropped the tent flap as another roll of thunder came. ‘Yet I wish it would. The air craves it. It feels like the whole world is about to explode.’

‘You want more rain?’ Mehmet shook his head. ‘Did you not hear that ten of my janissaries died when their sodden trench collapsed on them? Drowned.’ He shivered. ‘A bad sign, when men drown on the land.’

Hamza came back to the table, looked at the two men sitting at it. Zaganos Pasha, most loyal of the sultan’s commanders, most fervent for the war, gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Do not let him read the signs, the shake said. Do not let him plunge further into this gloom.

Hamza looked from one man to the other. To Mehmet. He had changed in the seven weeks of the siege. The strain showed in a face made lean by struggle and doubt. But it was in his actions, his reactions, that the change showed the most. If the two councillors who had just left had spoken to him then as they had just done now, urging an immediate cessation of the siege, a return to Edirne, a dispersal of his army, Mehmet would have driven them from his pavilion with shrieks, perhaps even with blows from his
bastinado
. All had seen how he had treated the disgraced Baltaoglu. Instead he had dismissed Halil Pasha, Ishak Pasha – cautious men he loathed, his father’s men – with a shrug, an
inshallah
, murmuring how he would consider their good advice.

Hamza knew as well as Zaganos that they must not let the sultan dwell on signs like the drowning of janissaries. Like any man, his mood could be shifted with thought, with a focus on what had been accomplished, not what had failed. And in this too, Mehmet had surprised his chief falconer who was also now his admiral. Hamza had believed him to be naïve in the ways of war, book-taught, lacking the practicality of experience, dreaming of the great heroes of the past, of Alexander and Caesar, with no understanding of how to become like them. Yet in seven weeks, in some ways he had shown himself their rival. It was Mehmet who dispersed the forces to pressure all sides of the city, Mehmet who commanded that ships be taken across land to infiltrate the Horn and turn the Greeks’ flank, Mehmet who studied the working of guns and calculated the angles and trajectories needed to fire over the walls of neutral Galata and still hit the ships that guarded the boom. He took advice from experts – another sign of good generalship and of his maturing – but the drive, the impetus, the commands came from him.

He had become a soldier. Grown into a man. And yet, like many who shed the heat of youth for cooler considerations, he was more prone to doubts. Seven weeks, and all his drive and innovation had not led to success. The boom still held his biggest ships from the Horn. The walls his cannons knocked down were patched with a wooden stockade that the Greeks defended as vigorously as any stonework. His tunnels were discovered and blown up, his tower consumed in flame. Wave after wave of Allah’s warriors had hurled themselves forward, and only once had the Prophet’s standard been raised on a bastion … and then but for a moment.

Hamza studied the sultan, wondering how to begin, how to counter the doubts that the two old pashas had left behind them like a sack of ordure upon the table. He hesitated, seeking words … and then, in the camp, two muezzins began to call almost simultaneously. Both had fine voices, one with the fire of youth, a dramatic passion in the rising notes, commanding the faithful to prayer; the other older, his voice like silk, his call almost a seduction. Each had their adherents. And it seemed to Hamza, as the three men removed their slippers, knelt, touched their foreheads to the floor and began their whispered prayer – ‘God is great. God is great. No God but Allah. Muhammad is His messenger’ – that a blend of both their calling was what Mehmet needed now. Fire tempered by consideration. Steel swathed in silk.

When the prayers ended, Hamza was ready. He laughed. ‘Old goats!’ he said. ‘How they can turn good news into bad to suit their purposes!’

‘Good news, Hamza?’

‘The brigantine, lord of the horizon. It skulks back into Constantinople, bearing its tale of woe – no Christian fleet is coming, popes and kings have deserted them, the starving Greeks are on their own – and Candarli Halil the castrated ram and Ishak Pasha his ewe bleat that just because they were not found does not mean they are not on the way. They prefer what is not to what is.’

Zaganos leaned in, his face as eager. ‘Bleats indeed! But it was always so with that pair. Baaing “nay” to everything you propose, lord. “N-a-y-ay-ay ay.”’ The Albanian pulled back his lips, stuck out his tongue, in a near-perfect imitation of the animal.

Both men laughed. ‘It is true. All I have achieved they put down to God’s will. All that has gone wrong is my fault,’ Mehmet said.

‘Is it not so?’ Hamza nodded, continued, ‘So why should we pay them any heed now? And even if they do come – though there is no sign of them – what do we care if another thousand Christians show up? What care we for another ten? You slaughtered three times that at Kossovo Pol, lord, to the glory of Allah. Let them come, I say.’

‘And I.’ Zaganos thumped the table.

Mehmet flushed. ‘Kossovo. Yes. We soaked the Field of Blackbirds in infidel blood that day.’

‘Did you not, magnificence?’ Hamza leaned in. ‘And we can soak the stones before us too. Zaganos and I have been talking. We agree with you, lord. You urged the goats to one last effort, one huge attack. One that will make all others so far seem gnat bites to the savaging of a lion.’ His voice dropped. ‘One more, with all your forces, from all sides. One night attack, and the city falls.’

Both men stared at their sultan. They could see the conflict playing on his face. Desire, ardour, doubt came and went in succession. At last, he spoke. ‘To do it, those forces would need to believe it could be done. They would have to forget seven weeks of failure and hurl themselves forward again and again, climb over the bodies of their comrades, die in their turn, on and on …’ He faltered, and both men could see the horror come into his eyes. ‘Only men who believe could do this. And I have heard rumours that the army has lost heart …’

‘More bleatings from goats!’ Zaganos stood to shout it, banging on the table. He had not risen from slavery to the command of a division to be frightened, even of a sultan.

But Hamza leaned closer, his voice silk, contrast to the other’s fire. ‘My friend, your loyal subject, speaks truth, lord. But let he and I go amongst your forces, and bring you news of them. Of the strength of their hearts. And remember, lord, that men fight for many beliefs. For Allah, most merciful, and the paradise that awaits should martyrdom call. For the glory of their people, the finest soldiers on earth. And for what the city promises – for they have not sat before these walls and fought as well as they have to return to their villages poorer than when they set out. Let us go amongst them, lord, and confirm this for you. And let us then pay no more heed to the bleatings of goats and listen only to what our hearts tell us.’ He reached then, took the younger man by the arm. ‘One more attack, lord. One more.’

Mehmet stared back, then laid his other hand atop of Hamza’s and squeezed before releasing it and rising. ‘Go amongst them, both of you. Tell me their hearts. And if we discover to be true what we all believe …’ he smiled, the first time in a while, ‘then I will lead them myself to the walls and beyond them.’

Both of the other men knelt, each reaching for one of Mehmet’s hands, touching them to their foreheads. ‘As you command.’

A noise from the tent’s entrance. At first Hamza thought it might be distant thunder again. But then he realised that a man stood there, clearing his throat, the sultan’s steward. ‘Lord,’ he said, when beckoned to speak, ‘your emissary Ismail has returned from the city. He brings a Greek with him, one Theon Lascaris.’

‘I know him, lord,’ Hamza said. ‘He is as twisted as the roots of a cedar from Lebanon. And, if I read him right, he has little stomach for the fight. If you were to make of him and his emperor impossible demands …’ he smiled, ‘then let me work on him again; we may have an ally when we need one. Not all goats are on one side of the walls.’

Mehmet nodded. ‘Leave him to me.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Bring me my armour, my sword. Let my household guard surround me.’ Men began rushing to obey his commands. ‘You two go – and find me out my army’s heart.’

They left by the rear of the tent. When they were a safe distance from any ears, they crouched, raised their hoods against a spatter of raindrops. ‘Do you think we will find what we seek, Zaganos? Will the army fight in the way we need them to?’

The Albanian nodded. ‘They will. As you said, offer them God, glory and gold, and most men will fight for one of them.’

Hamza nodded. He looked to the west, where thunder rolled and lightning jabbed at the earth. Then he looked to the east. He could just glimpse the top of the tower at the St Romanus gate. Even at this distance it looked huge. He shivered, though the air was close. ‘But can we triumph?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘We can. We will.’ Zaganos rose with a creak of joints, then turned and marched away. ‘Don’t you turn into a goat now, Hamza Be-ey-ey.’

The bleat was perfect. Hamza laughed. ‘Go with God,’ he called after him, then went the opposite way.

Gregoras felt the first of the rain and looked sharply up, glad that the storm was upon him at last, and that the terrible waiting – air growing so thick it began to choke him, lightning jabbing down in vivid spear thrusts, thunder crashing ever nearer like a titan’s approaching footsteps – was over. Yet when he saw clouds that were not grey but a rusty-brown, and that they filled the sky in flat waves from the distant waters of Marmara to the Golden Horn, driving now towards the city, he looked swiftly to the earth again. He was not a man who set much store by signs and portents. But above all the battlefields he’d fought, he’d never seen a sky so full of blood, fat drops of it now thudding into his hood, as if bodies were dangling above him, with throats freshly slit.

He pulled his cloak tighter around him, hot though he was. He wanted air, and lifted his mask to get some, sucking in deep draughts, tasting its foulness, spitting out the iron. He thought of taking it off, didn’t, for the same reason he wore one in most places in the world – his false nose attracted looks, some insults, attention.

He did not need it as a disguise. Not when he was among so many fellow Christians. The first of these he’d accompanied from Galata, joining a party of Genoan merchants of that city, off to trade with the Turk, riding one of their pack horses the long land route around the Horn, abandoning ride and traders before the towering walls of the Blachernae palace, from which he’d set out only eight hours before. And then he was with more Christians, for a good part of the sultan’s army worshipped the Cross. As he’d begun to walk up the hill, unchallenged along the siege lines that paralleled the city walls, he heard Vlach cavalrymen from Wallachia, Hungarian gunners, Serb miners, the guttural bark of Bulgarian
azaps
. At last, when he’d forded the stream called the Lycus, where one hill descended and another began to climb, the languages shifted too, eastwards. To a variety of oriental tongues, most of which were unintelligible to him. But mainly to Osmanlica, which he spoke well. The river marked a boundary, that between the European levies of the sultan’s army and its Anatolian heart.

It marked another boundary too. And Gregoras knew that his one long glance at the city there was as responsible for his shortness of breath as the foul sky above him. The vast numbers of the enemy was one thing. Their mighty cannon, the mightiest of which drowned out the thunder even as his feet got wet at the ford, was another.

But the wall …

He took more breaths, finding enough sweet amidst the foul to steady himself. He could not succumb to despair. He was there to spy, to report. So he looked again …

… at the outer wall, middle of the three, the one the generals had chosen to defend, because the higher, inner one was in such a state of disrepair and the one over the fosse too low. And here, where two hills climbed away from each other and a river ran, here Mehmet had moved his biggest cannon and increasingly concentrated his attacks. Gregoras knew because he had stood there upon the battlements, three hundred paces from where he stood now, could clearly see his comrades, many Greeks with the soldiers of Genoa, under the red cross. He had fought with them, helped drive each assault back.

‘How?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Holy Father, how?’

Because there were no battlements. The middle wall was no longer there.

He knew that already, in his heart. He had seen the damage that the enemy’s huge cannons had wrought. He had helped to repair it. But only standing here, behind their lines, could he see the extent of that damage, those repairs. The wall had been replaced, for a good four hundred paces, by a
stauroma
. This stockade was made from the slabs of broken stone of the former battlements, of timbers from pulled-down buildings and destroyed boats, of the trunks and branches of trees. Crates had been filled with straw and vine cuttings. Earth had been scooped from behind and bound the structure tight, and together with the skins of animals formed a softer surface for the cannon balls to sink into, absorbing some of their ferocity in a way the walls had not. Surmounting it all, barrels filled with earth and stone took the place of the former crenellations.