A Place Called Armageddon (59 page)

‘But what of your city?’ Constantine pleaded.

‘I will stay. I will give my life for it. But I cannot ask him to do so. He who has already done so much.’ He looked down at the hand on his arm. ‘
Basileus
, please. If I do not fetch the key, someone else will.’

The emperor held him a moment longer then released him with a sigh. Gregoras ran to the base of the bastion. Men were craning over the crenels, staring at the huddle below, and he spotted the young archer to whom he’d passed on the task he’d been given. ‘Throw down the key,’ he called. The man gasped, then obeyed. A moment later, a glitter fell from the tower and Gregoras caught it. ‘Now, keep shooting,’ he yelled before turning back.

Enzo and two other black-armoured Genoans had raised the Commander, who sagged between them. Constantine stepped between him and the gate, his face under his raised visor blanched. ‘Brother, where do you go?’ he cried.

Giustiniani raised his head. His voice suddenly was calm, almost normal. ‘Where God and the Turk would send me,’ he replied.

The gate was opened. Enzo helped him through it, but returned immediately. ‘Others will see to him,’ he said, picking up his sword and shield. ‘I stay and fight with you.’

Constantine was staring at the gate. Men had tried to reclose it but a stream of others slipping through prevented them. Now he turned back. ‘For God and Constantinople,’ he cried, dropping his visor, hefting his sword, charging back to the stockade.

Mehmet despaired.

Was now the time? To take off his sumptuous robes, his gold and silver helm, all marks that distinguished him as sultan? To strip to his
jelabi
, leave his father’s sword for his infant son, pick up a battered shield and a pitted scimitar and charge into the battle, a simple
gazi
offering himself to Allah, most merciful? Across the bridge of Al-Sirat, paradise awaited the martyr. If he could not have what he most wanted on earth, he could have what was beyond it.

He had failed. Here, at the last, with every man in his army who could bear a weapon attacking every part of the walls, still they held. Each wave he’d sent in had been repulsed. Even the very best of his army, his janissaries, fighting like the heroes they were, even they had not forced the breach. The double-headed eagle still flew over the stockade. The banner with its red cross marked where the lion of Genoa yet roared.

He looked at the men around him. Most avoided his eyes. Only one, Aksemseddin, his spiritual guide, returned his gaze, spoke. One word.

‘
Inshallah
.’

Mehmet turned back. Yes, it
was
God’s will. It was time to go and greet Him.

And then he started, peering harder at the rough line of the stockade. To many it was only a seething mob; but Mehmet had stared at it for seven weeks, and his gaze had barely left it in the hour since sunrise. Like a fisherman who knows the different surges of a sea, and what its shades betoken, he knew its infinite variety. And it was … different. There was a giving, there, right in the centre where his cannon had pounded most, where the fight had always been the fiercest. A few less defenders. His men lasting moments longer atop the rampart before they were felled.

He sensed it as much as saw it. Leaping onto his white horse, he drew his scimitar. He would not strip off his splendour, not yet. Not when he had the three
ortas
of the household janissaries as yet unblooded beside him. He would lead them himself, the very elite of the elite, right to the fosse. Only if they failed would he climb over their bodies and cross the bridge of Al-Sirat.

‘They falter,’ he cried, his voice strong. ‘A thousand gold pieces to the man who plants our standard in their hearts.’

And with that, the
mehter
band, whose playing had slackened in ardour, struck up vigorously again. The cry came, ‘
Allahu akbar
!’ as the household
orta
, following their red and gold standard and their sultan, swept down the slope and charged the stockade.

He took blows upon his breastplate, on helmet, vambrace and greave. Flesh opened but he lived. And while he lived, he would kill.

Enzo was beside him, killing too. And the Sicilian would know the same as he. The band of Genoans was diminishing with every assault. More Turks were atop the stockade, or through it, each taking longer to kill, their lives, sold slowly, allowing still more of their fellows to step up.

Yet, along the bloody way, the double-headed eagle still flew. While it did, Gregoras would not slacken. He had been on a wall that collapsed, seven years before, at the Hexamilion in the Morea. He had seen the rout that followed. Been blamed for it, lost his nose for that mistaken blame. He had turned away from his city then, his emperor, everything he’d ever loved. But he was here now, and he would not turn again.

He watched it rise, in the jerky steps of a man climbing a wall of bodies. It was a banner, different from those before, this one red and gold. He knew it, had seen it before, from a distance.

The household
orta
of the janissaries had arrived to try their untried strength.

He was enormous, the man who bore it, holding it within the same vast fist that grasped his shield grips. His other held a huge scimitar and he used that to brush away the first Greek who ran at him, dashing the spear from the man’s hands, slashing him across his neck. He fell away; another defender tried, died. The banner was raised high, driven down into the earth, shield and sword now spread wide as the Turk yelled his battle cry and dared any arrow, any stone, any blade.

Enzo was closer and moving fast towards him. He fought with a bastard sword, light and well-tempered enough to be used in one hand, near unstoppable with two. Yet the Turk stopped it, bending to take it on his shield and swat the blow away. And perhaps the Sicilian was surprised, or perhaps just too tired, for he stumbled, and Gregoras, still two paces away, could do nothing to halt the scimitar’s swooping arc.

He was close enough to catch his friend’s body and lower it to the ground, near enough to hear the words he whispered as he died. ‘Tell the Commander …’ was all he said.

The giant was kneeling now, shaking his head as if puzzled. Something had hit him in the forehead, a flung stone perhaps, and blood was streaming. But he wiped it away, smiled, began to rise. Gregoras’s falchion blade was short but Enzo’s bastard sword lay where it had fallen. Snatching it up, Gregoras drove it straight between the man’s knees, up under the mail skirt. The force knocked the giant over, back. He twisted, disappeared, the sword lodged in him and snatched from Gregoras’s weakened fingers. But the planted banner still flew, and Gregoras could not reach it, not with so many janissaries leaping past it over the stockade.

The Muslims had turned like birds in flight, one mind governing the mass. Now the Christians did the same. Where there had been two of the enemy, ten stood. Then fifty. And Gregoras, the falchion he’d dropped lost, gave back as did all there. He did not run to the gate, immediately jammed and blocked by screaming men. Only slaughter awaited there. Besides, over the surge that eagle still flew, perhaps thirty paces away. Somehow he made it, shoving aside men who died beside him, slipping under blows struck or taking them on his hastily raised shield.

Only thirty paces to a different world. Constantine stood amidst the solidity of five armoured guards and his closest companions – John of Dalmata, the aged Castilian Don Francisco, Theophilus Palaiologos, who had come up from the Golden Gate; Theodore of Karystenos, Gregoras’s old mentor, his bow as ever to hand, though his quiver was empty. The stockade before them was still being held. ‘Liege!’ Gregoras knelt, as much from tiredness as respect. ‘It is time to go.’

‘Where, Lascaris?’ Constantine looked about him.

‘Into the city, lord. To a ship. There may still be time.’ He looked at the men about the emperor. ‘Cut our way through …’

Constantine raised his hand, commanding silence. His voice was loud, to rise above the noise, but he did not shout. ‘No. If God decides that the city has fallen, then He has decided that I will fall with it. It is my fate and His will.’ He looked around at his servants. ‘Begin,’ he commanded, ‘for I will not have them desecrate my body.’ They did so, swiftly stripping him of all imperial marks – the gauntlets that bore the double-headed eagle, his cloak where it also flew, the thin circlet of gold round his helm that was his battle crown. As they worked, and his guards held off any who would come near, Constantine looked around. ‘I do not ask that anyone else accompany me. I release you from your allegiance. Save yourselves if you can.’

John of Dalmata stepped closer. ‘I am with you, sire.’

‘Cousin,’ said Theophilus Palaiologos, ‘so am I!’

‘And I.’ The Castilian Don Francisco hobbled forward. His breath came in a wheeze but he spoke clearly enough and with a smile. ‘What unexpected fortune, at my age, to die with a sword in my hand.’ He raised and kissed his bloodied Toledo blade. ‘What better day could I hope to live for than this?’

Constantine was soon stripped of the last of what marked him as emperor. As the eagle flag lowered, he kissed it once, then pushed it away. A plain knight stood there now and his gaze moved to Gregoras. ‘And you, Lascaris? Have you something – someone – to live for?’

Gregoras hesitated. He saw Sofia, Thakos, at the place where they might be safe. But they would need him, to make sure they were. He nodded. ‘I do,
basileus
.’

Constantine smiled. ‘Then go. You have given enough to your city.’ His gaze rested for a moment on the ivory nose, then was drawn away by a sudden increase in shouting. All turned, to more janissary banners on the walls. ‘Go. Each man to his destiny. And all of us into God’s hands.’

And with that, the last emperor of Constantinople lifted his sword and, with his closest companions around him, charged into the thickest press of the Turks.

A voice sounded in Gregoras’s ear. ‘I am with you,’ said Theodore of Karystenos. ‘For I have a great-grandchild just born who I would see before I die.’

Gregoras gripped his old mentor’s arm. ‘Come then,’ he said, raising his head above the throng. Everywhere men fought or fled. But the emperor’s last charge had sucked many of the enemy towards it – and away from the bastion from which Gregoras had shot his arrows an eternity ago. From one of its crenels, a knotted rope still hung. ‘Stay close, and follow fast,’ he said, stooping to snatch up a fallen dagger, shifting his shield to his right arm to cover that side.

There was a channel of sorts between him and his goal. And for the Turk, filled with the madness of the conqueror who at last had his enemy by the throat, there were many easier victims than two determined warriors running hard. Gregoras used his strength to shove men aside with his shield, used the dagger only once to open the hand of a man whose own slash he’d just ducked. Used it again to cut the laces between his backplate and breastplate as he had cut Giustiniani’s. ‘Can you climb this, old man?’ he yelled at Theodore.

‘Watch me,’ the old man replied, slipping his bow over his head and then, with the strength in his arms of the archer he’d always been, hauling himself up fast.

Dropping what armour he could, Gregoras steadied the rope and turned each way, dagger before him, warding. But most of the mob was concentrated near the gate, Greeks and Genoans trying to flee through it, Turks striking at their exposed backs, at men who were bunched and could not move. Yet not all fled. Knots of Christians still fought, and the Turks were hampered now by so many men packed into the Peribolos. Many of the living tumbled into the ditch of the dead.

A shout. Theodore had scrambled over the top. Gregoras dropped his shield, put the knife between his teeth, and leapt. As he did, he was aware of a man running at him. He swung to the wall, kicked away from it, kicked the man in the face. The Turk staggered back, came on again – and then an arrow entered his neck. He fell, and Gregoras went hand over hand and fast up the rope as above him Theodore notched a second arrow.

Scrambling over into the bastion, Gregoras lay gasping for a moment. Behind Theodore, the few surviving bowmen stared back, terror on their young faces. The other half were dead. Breath recovered, Gregoras looked to the inner wall, to which the bastion was attached. Some Turks had already swung up onto what their great cannon had all but destroyed. They seemed to be in a race to raise the green banner of the Prophet on the next bastion along, and having to kill the Greeks who were still trying to prevent them.

Gregoras turned back to the survivors. ‘Notch an arrow, if you have one,’ he said, picking up the bow he’d left. There were still two arrows left in the quiver he slipped over his head. ‘And follow me close.’

They descended the stair to the level of the wall. Throwing the bolts on the door, he stepped out. There were Turks along the battlements, and more climbing up the wider stairs below, who yelled when they saw them. But none so far had climbed up the other way. ‘Shoot!’ Gregoras commanded. Of the dozen arrows, three struck home, the others skittering off hastily raised shields or flying wide. The Turks scattered. Gregoras turned and led his men fast the other way.

Soon another stair descended. From its summit, he could see men running into the city. Greeks and their allies now, but Turks would be following soon enough. He had a view both ways along the walls. In some bastions, the defenders’ banners, of the city, of Venice, of Genoa, still flew. In others, the green banner of the Prophet, or of some
orta
, had been raised. News of the collapse had spread fast and men were fleeing or standing according to will or chance.

A voice beside him echoed his thoughts. ‘Each man for himself now,’ Theodore of Karystenos said. ‘Go with God, son.’

With a last squeeze of his arm, the old man was gone. So too the other bowmen, joining those now fleeing the walls for the city. But Gregoras lingered, peering into the Peribolos. It seethed. He knew the sultan had brought a massive army. He had walked among it for a while. But the horde below! It was immeasurable, with every man in it bent on getting into the city; the mass preventing, for the moment, the entrance of the many.