SOLDIER OF FORTUNE (I): THE WOLF CUB
By David Pilling
Copyright 2015 David Pilling
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The White Hawk (II): Loyalty
Folville’s Law (I): Invasion
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Caesar’s Sword (II): Siege of Rome
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Robin Hood (II): The Wrath of God
Robin Hood (III): The Hooded Man
Robin Hood (IV): The King’s Pardon
Nowhere Was There Peace
The Half-Hanged Man
Co-written with Martin Bolton
A World Apparent Tale (I): The Best Weapon
A World Apparent Tale (II): The Path of Sorrow
Follow David at:
www.pillingswritingcorner.blogspot.co.uk
www.davidpillingauthor.com/
Or contact him direct at:
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Author’s Note:
This tale is an indirect sequel to an earlier novel, The Half-Hanged Man. They can be read together or as stand-alones.
Glossary
Chevauchée - An organised system of plundering and devastating enemy territory
Bascinet - type of open-faced military helmet
Destrier - Medieval warhorse, ridden by knights and men-at-arms
Rouncy - a common, all-purpose horse used by poorer soldiers, and as packhorses
Routier - French term for a mercenary soldier
Sipahi - Freeborn Turkish cavalry, split into feudal and household troops
Springald - A device for hurling large bolts, and less often stones and Greek Fire
Tulwar - Type of Turkish sword, usually with a curved blade
Verderer - a forest official, responsible for protecting and administering parks and forests
Constantinople, May 29 th 1453
One cannon-shot decided the fate of the city. The ball tore into the battlements, ripped through the ancient stonework and flung up a cloud of debris.
Part of the debris hit Giovanni Giustiniani, a young Genoese mercenary captain. His finely-wrought armour, already dented and battered by Turkish blades, offered little protection against the hail of shattered stone.
The force of the blast knocked him down. His bloodied sword dropped from his hand, and he fell onto the walkway, half-buried under the rubble.
Two of his soldiers rushed to their captain’s aid. One knelt beside the body and sought frantically for a pulse.
Giovanni was still conscious. “Get me out of this,” he murmured feebly, “back to our ships.”
His voice was almost drowned by the thunder of cannon and the frenzied screams and war-yells of Turkish janissaries. The Sultan’s elite infantry swarmed about the walls, flung into battle in a titanic effort to overwhelm the stubborn defenders.
Between them the soldiers managed to drag Giovanni clear. More Genoese ran to help. Four of the strongest lifted his body and carried him down into the city.
Too late, they realised their mistake. In the weeks since the siege began, Giovanni had fought like a lion, and become a symbol of resistance to soldiers and citizens alike. So long as he lived, there was hope.
Now a great cry of panic and terror rippled through the streets as news of his fall spread like fire. The few Genoese left in defence of the Gate of San Romano, where Giovanni had made his stand, abandoned their posts and fled for the harbour. There galleys waited to carry them to safety.
San Romano was the weakest part of the city defences. Pounded for days by Turkish cannon, much of the wall was already flattened, the gaps shored up with mattresses, baulks of timber, piles of loose earth and stone - anything the defenders could find.
The Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed the Second, rode close behind his janissaries as they flooded towards the gate. A brave man, he had no fear of the occasional pot-shot aimed at him from the walls. He kept a sharp eye on the Gate of San Romano. Once the courage of the Genoese was broken, Constantinople would be his.
Mehmed saw the gate abandoned, and beckoned to one of his officers, a huge black-bearded jannisary named Hasan.
“Hasan,” he said, “take your company forward and secure the gate. The first man to raise my flag on the battlements shall win his weight in gold.”
Hasan and his men greeted the Sultan’s promise with a cheer, and stormed towards the broken, shell-pocked ruin of the gate. They met no resistance, and swept on into the streets. Hasan himself was the first man onto the battlements. There he cast down the banners of Saint Mark and the Greek Emperor, and raised the Ottoman standard in their stead.
Everywhere the resistance of the defenders collapsed. Final disaster struck when the Turks overran a small sally-port, the Kerkoporta, and set up their flags on the tower. Seeing this, the last defenders scattered. The Greek soldiers ran to their homes in a vain effort to save their families, while the Genoese and Venetian mercenaries made for their ships in the harbour of the Golden Horn.
The hapless citizens fled like sheep before the onslaught of the Turks. Bells and tocsins rang through the city, heralding the death of Constantinople. A few wretched souls preferred to jump from the walls rather than die on Turkish swords, and so committed suicide.
One man did not run. Constantine the Eleventh, last of the Emperors who had ruled the city for over a thousand years, reached the Gate of San Romano in time to see it overrun by the enemy.
A gaunt, sad-eyed figure, stooped under the weight of history, Constantine knew his time had come. “The city has fallen,” he murmured, “but I am still alive.”
He unclasped the brooch at his shoulder and let his purple cloak fall to the ground. Then he removed the imperial diadem from his head, let that fall too, and all the other jewelled ornaments on his person. Now he looked like a common soldier, and would die like one.
Constantine drew his sword and charged at the mob of janissaries clustered about the gate. His escort, all that remained of the famed Varangian Guard, followed. Big men in thick steel plate, armed with double-handed axes, they would fight to the last beside their master.
“Is there no Christian here?” Constantine shouted as he laid about him, “no Christian to take my head?”
His sword drank deep of Turkish blood, while behind him the Varangians wielded their axes with lethal skill and savagery. The janissaries reeled under the furious assault, and then closed in again, eager to stamp out this last ember of Greek resistance.
One by one, Constantine’s guards were slain, until a mere handful of survivors fought around the sacred person of the Emperor. The last of the Varangians chanted prayers even as the halberds and sabres flashed down to make an end of them.
At last Constantine was alone among his enemies. His sword lodged in the guts of a janissary and twisted out of his hand. Sharp steel bit into his flesh. Clubs, tulwars and halberd-butts rained down on his head.
The Emperor fell, and the tide washed over him.
Constantinople was given over to the horrors of the sack. Mehmed wisely allowed his troops to spoil and plunder for the traditional period of three days, knowing that to prevent them was impossible.
“I have come to conquer, not destroy,” he told his generals, “send an advance guard of janissaries to protect the Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Apostles. I wish to preserve them for our use.”
It was done, and companies of his soldier-fanatics sent into the heart of the city to defend these buildings from harm. Mehmed planned to convert
the Hagia Sophia, the enormous Orthodox church that dominated the skyline of the city with its great dome and four tapering spires, into a grand mosque. The Church of the Holy Apostles, meanwhile, would provide a seat for the tame patriarch he appointed to control his Christian subjects.
The rest of Constantinople was allowed to suffer. Mehmed’s soldiers ran wild, as soldiers do in the wake of a victory. They broke into shops and houses, fought each other like mad dogs for plunder, subjected the terrified and helpless citizens to every kind of abuse. Women were raped, children butchered before their eyes, menfolk slaughtered or enslaved. Old men, monks and priests were among those taken into miserable captivity. Those who dared to resist were murdered.
Many of the citizens fled to the churches for refuge, but the Turks cared nothing for Christian laws of sanctuary. They used rams to smash down the doors and poured inside to loot and kill. Shrines were violated, holy icons and vessels burned, broken up or simply hurled aside like so much ornamental rubbish. More valuable objects, such as chalices and cups made of precious metal, were taken as spoil or to be melted down.
Murdered priests were defiled, garments embroidered with gold and studded with pearls and gems ripped from their bodies, to be cast into great bonfires or auctioned off to the highest bidder. Sacred books and texts were also tossed onto the flames, or else trampled, torn up and thrown about as playthings.
The morning of the third day dawned red and heavy over the ruin of Constantinople. Mehmed, who until now had closed his eyes to the atrocities his men committed, was overcome by guilt.
“Enough!” he cried, “let be, let be. What a town was this, and I have allowed it to be degraded. No more!”
He sent more troops into the city, to clear out the looters and punish those who refused to obey with mutilation or death. His men marched purposefully through streets littered with corpses and heaps of discarded plunder. Blood flowed like rainwater in the gutters, and the stench of death hung in the air like a poisonous fume.
When all was safe, Mehmed entered his conquest through the Adrianople Gate at the head of his household guards. Heralds went on foot before him to proclaim a general amnesty to those citizens who had managed to avoid death or captivity. If they emerged from their hiding places and bowed down before the Sultan, he promised to spare their lives and restore their houses and property.
The procession made its way down the great central thoroughfare called the Mese, preceded by the screech of trumpets and the clash of cymbals. Standard bearers advanced before the Sultan on foot, holding aloft Ottoman banners.
Mehmed himself rode at a stately pace on a snow-white gelding, his eyes fixed on the dome of the Hagia Sophia. He refused to look at the smashed windows and ruined, blood-spattered houses, the naked corpses of murdered innocents, the chaos and destruction and misery. All his life he had dreamed and schemed for this moment, the final victory of his people over the Greek state.
His heart swelled when the procession reached the vast central plaza of the Augusteum. The plaza was thronged with people, Turkish soldiers and Greek citizens, and the bronze gates of the Hagia Sophia stood open. They bore the marks of force, the locks shattered and the metal severely dented.
The citizens had been taken captive, chained together and forced to stand or sit in rows. Turkish officers moved among them, inspecting the miserable wretches like so many cattle brought to market.
A group of janissary musketeers, weary and hollow-eyed from the night’s work, came before Mehmed to make their report. They salaamed before him, bowing deeply with their right palms against their foreheads.
“Most Sacred and Imperial Majesty,” said their leader, “all these Greeks gathered in the plaza are your prisoners. They took refuge inside their great church, so we breached the gates with a ram. We have divided them according to the price they may fetch in the slave-markets.”
“You did well,” Mehmed replied distractedly. His eyes searched the ranks of prisoners for people of quality. Most appeared to be commoners, secular and religious persons of middling to low rank.
“Some few resisted,” went on the janissary, “we slew all save one, a nobleman by his dress and bearing. He fought valiantly to defend a woman and her children, himself against five of our warriors, and cut down three before his sword broke. We thought he may be worth a ransom.”
Mehmed looked with interest at the speaker. “Where is this man?” he demanded, “bring him to me.”
The janissary bowed again. “At once, O Khan of Khans.”
He vanished among the crowd, and returned shortly with two prisoners in tow. Both were male, and escorted by six burly halberdiers.
One of the prisoners was short and plump, and had the look of a clerk. He was fifty or thereabouts, with neatly trimmed grey hair. His plain white tunic, fringed with gold, was stained with the blood from a half-healed cut on his scalp, and his right eye was puffy and swollen. He had clearly been robbed, his outer garments ripped away, rings torn from his bruised fingers.
Terror flared in the little man’s eyes when he beheld the Sultan, but he stood his ground and refused to make any gesture of obeisance. Mehmed smiled at this pointless defiance.
“This one claims to be George Phrantzes,” said the janissary officer, “our men found him hiding behind the altar with his family. His wife is very beautiful. Our men would have violated her, but the nobleman I spoke of prevented them.”
George Phrantzes, a famed Greek historian, ambassador and courtier, and personal friend to the Emperor Constantine. This was a great prize indeed.
“Where is your master, Phrantzes?” demanded Mehmed, “does he live?”
Phrantzes went red as he worked up the courage to speak. “I know not,” he replied in a shaken voice, “nor would I tell if I did. This I do know. Constantine would never allow himself to be taken alive, and paraded through the streets of his own city as a trophy of war.”
Mehmed looked at his companion. “This is the nobleman, Your Majesty,” said the janissary, “he is old, but has the strength of one half his age.”
The second captive towered head and shoulders over the first. Mehmed expected a thickset warrior, and was surprised to find a tall, slender wisp of a man with a strangely boyish face, round and smooth and clean-shaven. His fine white hair was cut in a short military style, and his mild blue eyes and sensitive mouth gave him the look of a poet rather than a soldier.
A person of rank, certainly. He wore a combination of plate and mail armour, Italian if Mehmed was any judge, ruinously expensive and spattered with fresh blood. A single word, ‘Avaunt’, was inscribed in delicate letters on the breastplate.
The old man was bareheaded, and wore a yellow silk scarf about his neck. Taken in all, he looked like a foppish courtier who had accidentally strayed onto a battlefield.
Mehmed was not fooled. “Take off your gauntlets, Christian, and hold up your hands,” he ordered.
He spoke in Greek. The other understood, and obediently stripped off his fine steel gauntlets.
Mehmed nodded to himself when he saw the Christian’s hands. Killer’s hands. Swollen and callused by decades of handling weapons. The nails were immaculately clean, but broken, and the fingers long and powerful, doubtless capable of snapping a man’s neck.
“I’m told you slew three of my best warriors,” said Mehmed, “single-handed, in the defence of a woman. That was a brave act. Your Christian troubadours will sing of it. Tell me your name and degree, so I may consider sparing the life of their owner.”
“I am Sir John Page, O Sultan,” the prisoner answered, “a knight of England. In my time I have been soldier, courtier, poet, outlaw, thief, traitor and play-actor. All the roles a man can play in this world, save priest, which never struck me as much in the way of pleasure or entertainment.”
He spoke bad Greek with an unfamiliar accent. Mehmed knew of the English, that fierce and troublesome race who lived on a cold island in the North Sea and preyed on their neighbours.
“A mercen
ary, then,” he said, “one of the pestilent crew who came with Giovanni Giustiniani to aid the Greeks in their defence of the city. I thought they were all Venetians and Genoese. Most of your comrades managed to escape the sack.”
This was true. The small band of Western mercenaries had steered their ships out of the Golden Horn before Mehmed’s fleet could close off the harbour, and taken their wounded captain with them. They would be at sea by now. Mehmed cared little, so long as they were gone.
“You chose to stay,” added Mehmed, “why?”
Page shrugged his armoured shoulders. “For that, I must blame my conscience,” he replied, “the accursed thing has ever brought me into trouble.”
Mehmed laughed for the first time in many weeks, ever since the siege began. Only now, with the city secured and his enemy cast down, did he feel the burden start to lift.
He glanced to his left, where a gaggle of courtiers and imams and generals hovered anxiously, waiting for the Sultan to favour them with his attention. The final victory over the Greeks had been centuries in the making, and there was much business to attend to.
First he had to decide what should be done with his captives. The joy of conquest was still in his blood, and inclined him to show mercy.
Mercy, and something else. This Englishman had described himself as a poet, among other things. The seed of a whimsical idea flowered inside Mehmed’s head.
“Tell me, Sir John,” he said, “do you know the legend of Scheherazade?”
*
The Sultan meant to reside in Constantinople, the new capital of his empire, but ignored the old palaces of the Greek Emperors. Most had been pounded into rubble by his artillery, and he showed no interest in having them rebuilt.
He paid one visit to the shadowy ruins of the Boukoleon Palace, long-since abandoned by the Greeks and fallen into decay. Those who accompanied Mehmed saw tears glisten on his cheeks as he stood among the fallen stones, and heard him recite lines of verse from the poet Saadi:
The Wolf Cub Page 1