Emperor's Winding Sheet (15 page)

The Genoese at Pera were adept at both of the ship chandler's skills—trading with the Turks, and letting news slip through. Nobody doubted they carried news the other way, into the Turkish camp. Safe behind their own walls, and not themselves under attack, they were well hated in the City. For the most part they were on the side of their fellow Christians, and many had crossed the Golden Horn to fight on the walls; but because of the careful neutrality of their Podestà, because of others, who had not come, because of whispers and news and rumors of double-dealing, all the Genoese, even those who were fighting gallantly for the Emperor, were under ceaseless suspicion—all except Justiniani. Because he had nothing to do with Pera, but still more because of his vigor and skill, his manly openness of manner, there was not a man in the City who would not trust and honor him. To Vrethiki he seemed so incomparably nobler than his countrymen, he wondered how it was possible he should spring from the same stock.

In the meantime, in the evenings, when the little oyster catchers flew—flocks of shadowy flickering birds, flitting swiftly, skimming the surface of the molten sea—when, among the birds, hundreds of little boats put out on the shining water to catch the silver fishes, the enemy galleys prowling in the sea of Marmara chased them all back into harbor again, and put up the price of fish in all the markets.

 

APART FROM THE BRIEF SALLY AGAINST THE BOOM, THINGS HAD
seemed somewhat quiet that day. But the next morning—it was the morning of the tenth of April, and it dawned into a sweet clear golden day of sunshine and mild breezes—there was a hideous spectacle from the walls. The Turks had stormed and taken, it seemed, two small strongholds out side
the City: a little castle at Therapia on the Bosporus beyond the Sultan's new castle, and an even smaller walled enclosure at the village of Studios. Now the survivors of those two hopeless garrisons were being impaled, one by one, and stuck up in a row upon the earthwork in front of the Turkish lines, in full view of the defenders on the walls. The screams of their terrible agony were wafted on the morning breeze to sicken the citizens. Women climbed up to stare and weep, and call down curses.

At dawn when the impalement began, Justiniani was sleeping. He seemed to need far less rest than other men, but after patrolling and overseeing repairs for half the night, he was resting at dawn. The news from the walls brought him and the Emperor arriving on the scene together. The first sight that met their eyes was a party of priests, with incense and prayer books, stretching out their hands in blessing, and intoning the Mass for the Dying. Grim-faced, they took in the spectacle below. Then Justiniani sent messages to summon the crack bowmen the Emperor had recruited from Crete.

For some reason the arrival of the bowmen infuriated the Turks. They fired their smoky cannon at random toward the walls; they brought up archers of their own who tried to strike the archers on the battlements. Nevertheless, slowly, one by one, the Cretans picked off the transfixed sufferers, taking careful merciful aim. The screams and groans were silenced, little by little, leaving at last the tranquil afternoon to birdsong, and the endless small chinks and noises of armed men moving, on the walls, and on the plain.

Vrethiki saw nothing of this because before they mounted the wall Stephanos had murmured a word or two to the Emperor, and the Emperor had sent Vrethiki home on the excuse that he needed a check made on the number of usable
weapons in his personal armory. Vrethiki, there fore, spent the day heaving bundles of tarnished blades and spears around in a deep cellar, sorting out the fairly straight ones from the dented and the bent, and making a careful tally.

“You think tenderly of that child,” said the Emperor to Stephanos when they had seen an end made of that day's work.

“He has been in the hands of the Turks, Sire,” said Stephanos. “Sometimes he dreams, and in his sleep I hear him talking.”

“God save us all!” said the Emperor, fiercely.

 

THAT EVENING, MANUEL KNELT AT THE EMPEROR'S FEET, AND
asked to be allowed to go. “Let me join the Varangians, Lord Emperor,” he said. “Give me a man's part to play.”

At that Stephanos flinched, and turned away, pretending to occupy himself with the supper dishes, and Vrethiki saw, and his attention was caught. “Who will clean my cup, and bring me wine?” asked the Emperor, gently. He sounded sad and amused at once, and Vrethiki heard the ambivalent tone in his grave voice, and strained to under stand. “Shall I parch with thirst, endlessly riding the walls in the heat of the sun, the dust on the wind?” the Emperor was saying. Vrethiki knew “thirst” and “ride” and “walls.”

“There is Vrethiki,” said Manuel. “He could do it.”

“So he could,” said the Emperor, sadly. “Very well. Go, my son. Take care; sell your life as dear as you can. Stephanos, have Vrethiki bring here the best weapons he found today.”

Vrethiki chose a good sword. He chose a chain-mail corselet, a small one that he thought would fit Manuel's slender frame. And, especially pleased with it, he found a shiny breastplate, and, staggering under the weight of it, he clambered up the stairs back to the Emperor's room.

“He can't have that one, Vrethiki,” said Stephanos, looking at the breastplate. “It was made for an Emperor. Look, it has the two-headed eagle upon it.”

“Made for an Emperor, and worn by an Emperor's man,” said the Lord Constantine, lifting the bronze himself, and holding it against his cupbearer, to examine the fit. “It will do very well,” he said. Together, he and Stephanos did up the leather straps. “Well, then, man, be off with you, and see if Varangian John will have you.”

Manuel hesitated a moment, as though he would have said something, then bowed low, and clattered away down the staircase. And Vrethiki had to find his way to the cellars, and asked the aged keeper of casks down there which tap to turn to bring wine for the Emperor's supper.

 

THE NEXT MORNING VRETHIKI WAS ALMOST BLASTED OUT OF
his bed by a vast clap of raw sound like preternatural thunder. For a moment this sound brought a vibrant silence with it, a sort of singing numbness in his ears; then a detritus of ragged noises came behind it: glass rattled in the windows, tiles slipped, dislodged, and scraped down the roof, there was a wild cawing of frightened birds, a howling of dogs, people screaming, running feet all over the palace, cries of alarm, and then the clang clang of a silly cracked high-pitched church bell, to be taken up in chorus by a hundred others. Through the bells came the repeated thudding of other explosions. The Turks had opened up their guns on the walls in the Lycus valley, beginning with a blast from the great gun Basilica that Urban had cast for them. It was two hours before they got it ready to fire again, but the smaller guns were fired without cease all day long; a continuous thunderous noise could be heard all over the City.

The people brought mattresses and bales of wool and sheets of leather to hang over the walls, to deaden the earthquake impact of the huge stone balls. Still the walls cracked and crumbled. The balls shivered into a thousand fragments when they struck solid masonry, flying in all directions and showering the defenders with sharp-edged splinters. And the Turks were learning fast to point their guns upward. Remorselessly, as the day wore on, they continued to batter at the same section of the wall. Behind the wall, in the streets leading to Blachernae, to the Studion Monastery, and through the fields and gardens to the gates in the wall, little processions of people wound along, carrying not icons, but stones and rubble, earth and timber, for the repairs that would be done under cover of night. Women carried heavy burdens beside their menfolk; even the children could bring pebbles or earth by the handful, and the mules and donkeys of the poor were ruthlessly overladen and worked half to death.

 

THE SHIPS FROM THE BLACK SEA, THOSE THE TURKS HAD BEEN
waiting for, arrived at the Turkish admirals' station, on the Bosporus, a little beyond Pera, the same day the great gun was first fired. Bad though the state of the walls was, it was the defense of the boom that seemed most urgent. The moment the new ships were sighted—for the enemy station could be clearly seen from the tip of the City—Lukas Notaras had come to the Emperor, asking permission to move his reserve contingents to help the sailors at the boom.

The naval attack was formidable when it came. Vrethiki, standing in the Emperor's party, watching from the battlements, found himself shivering in the warm sunlight. The Turks had brought up larger ships than before, with decks loaded with cuirassiers and archers. The moment these drew
within bowshot, they let fly arrows tipped with burning cotton. The arrows beat down on the Christian decks like burning rain. Barrels of pitch and torches blazed ready on the Turkish decks to set fire to anything within reach. In the bows of their galleys heavily armed men stood with huge axes, ready to cut hawsers, or hack at the boom itself. They even had light cannon mounted on their vessels that threw stone shot at the Christian ships, and added to the confusion and fear of the onlookers by wreathing the whole scene in veils of dispersing smoke. Straining their eyes, the watchers on the walls saw grappling irons hanging ready amidships on the gunwales of the Turkish ships, and thickly packed soldiers ready on the middle decks to board at the first chance.

The Emperor watched this terrible massed attack approach his people, churning the blue Bosporus to white foam with beating oars. He stood calmly, seeming un moved and immovable, watching from the battlements of the walls, and only Vrethiki beside him could have seen his thumb constantly rubbing and twisting the great Imperial ring on the first finger of his clenched hand.

There were terrible moments when the Turkish ships were still standing a little way off. Their cannon balls were striking the Christian ships, and the horrible juddering of the wooden hulls as they were struck could be seen as well as heard from the shore. Fires were burning in the rigging and on the decks, everywhere, and sailors running frantically to and fro. But when the Turks pressed nearer, suddenly the impression changed. For the tall galleys of Genoa and Venice, and the Imperial fleet, were higher than even these largest Turkish ships, and so gave the advantage to their bowmen and javelin throwers. Lukas Notaras had set up an incredible living chain of men, passing barrels of water from hand to hand all along the line of the
boom, from rafts to ships; the deck fires were swiftly quenched. And when the Turkish captains forced their way alongside, trying to grapple and board, they were met with a simple and devastating answer. Slung from the crossyards of the Christian vessels, high up the masts, were huge cannon balls hanging in nets. The moment the yard of a Christian vessel stretched over a Turkish ship, a man in the rigging cut the rope with a yell, and the ball hurtled downward. It crashed through deck and bottom, leaving a splintered ragged hole, and a rapidly sinking ship. Vrethiki, astonished, threw back his head and laughed—it reminded him of the walnut shells he had floated down the stream at home, and sunk by tossing tiny pebbles.

Suddenly a gap opened in the boom. For a horrified moment Vrethiki thought it had been breached by the enemy, but then a great Genoese galley moved through the gap, followed at once by another, and another, and they maneuvered as though they would encircle the tangled group of enemy ships. At that the cries of Allah, Allah! died away; trumpets sounded, and those Turkish ships that could still move began to back water, and slip away. “Hurrah, hurrah!” shouted Vrethiki, dancing like a mad man on the wall, and throwing his cap in the air, and all the solemn foreigners around him, as pleased as he, laughed and smiled at him.

Gleefully they watched the battered enemy struggling back up to their distant anchorages. And before they left their viewpoint, Lukas Notaras, clad in long robes of silk, immaculate and unruffled, came to salute the Emperor, and bow impassively as his smiling master told him he had done well.

 

“THERE WILL BE AN ATTACK ON THE WALL SOON,” SAID JUSTINIANI
. “Their guns have done a lot of damage; they're bound to try to get through.”

In just over a week the Sultan's ceaselessly pounding guns had brought down a hundred yards of the outer wall into the moat, and broken two great towers on the inner wall behind the breach. An earth and wood palisade, repaired every night, stretched across the damaged section, but the fosse was filled right up with rubble, and offered no obstacle at all to an onrushing enemy. For five days running they expected trouble, bracing themselves at dawn, lined up behind the rickety palisade, staring tensely at the enemy lines so short a distance away.

They could see every detail of their assailants' garb and gear. The janissaries, the Sultan's crack troops, lined up behind their tall standards on plumed poles, wore wide helmets that strapped on over their turbans and came so low on their brows that they had two half-circles cut out of the lower rim for eyes, with brazen flanges for eyebrows. The helmets were chased and fluted, and rose to a point on top, from which great plumes curled and fluttered. These helmets gave them, to the enemy view, heads of monstrous size, and ferocious metal frowns. They wore no cast and polished body armor, as the Romans did, let alone heavy hinged steel casings like Western armor; but coats of chain mail, strengthened round the midriff with rings of steel like the hoops of a barrel. Their legs and arms were clad in cloth or leather, and Justiniani had pointed this out to his men, and expounded the value of flesh wounds for weakening the force of an attack. By contrast, their swords were horrific: very long, with double-edged serpentine blades, or nasty-looking scythe-shaped curves.

Peering from behind their battlements, or between their earth-filled barrels atop the palisade, the defenders watched for any sign of the janissaries' standards being carried forward. But for five days the dawn showed them still in place. Pearshaped
plates of gold or bronze, each pierced and fretted with the shape of some word from the Koran, they stood on tall poles before blocks of tents, groups of campfires, with horsetails flying from their necks. Five times a day the camp rang with the coarse raucous howling of the call to heathen prayer. In response the Turks spread the ground with little rugs and handkerchiefs, and, kneeling toward the land walls, they beat their brows on the ground, and remained so for some time, with their heads down, and their arses in the air. At first this performance provoked gales of crude laughter from the Christians, and a shower of lewd remarks, dirty songs and rotting rubbish cascaded from the walls among the prostrate heathen. But as the days passed, and each day, five times a day, the prayers were faithfully said, the jeering died away. It is an awesome sight to see a hundred thousand men at prayer; and looking at a spectacle of such barbaric majesty, the Christians uneasily remembered the ferocity of Islam, and how for the hordes outside the City this was jihad—a holy war. And it was disconcerting to have them facing so, toward the City—as though their great hostile God reigned already within the wall, in the heart of the City, instead of at Mecca, far away.