“The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars. The owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.”
George Phrantzes and Sir John Page were among the captives led in the wake of the Sultan’s retinue as he toured the city. Their hands were chained, but otherwise they were treated well enough. Phrantzes was devoured by grief for his Emperor and the fall of Constantinople, and worry for his family.
“My wife and children shall be enslaved,” he sobbed as they traipsed down the Mese between companies of musketeers, “and made the playthings of heathen men. Have mercy, Lord Jesus Christ and Madonna Saint Mary, have mercy on my precious ones!”
Page was silent. He had been stripped of his fine armour, and walked in a padded silk doublet, yellow scarf and black and white parti-coloured hose. Even in chains, he cut a dignified figure, and smiled agreeably at his Turkish captors whenever they happened to glance at him.
Mehmed had not yet explained his mysterious reference to Scheherazade, though Page had some vague knowledge of the collection of Eastern folk tales known as the Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade, wife of the sultan of India, was forced to tell her husband a different tale every night, in such an interesting way that he spared her life.
Page had witnessed much cruelty in his time, and considered himself an expert. The Sultan’s decision to let his prisoners stew a while, their lives dangling by the slenderest of threads, was an impressive piece of sadism.
He was surprised to find how much he valued his life, even though he had done his best to throw it away in the Hagia Sophia. Sixty years in this world was more than most career soldiers could expect, yet he wasn’t quite ready to sample the next one.
“How can you remain silent?” cried Phrantzes, “are you made of stone? Do you have no wife or children of your own? What would they think, to see you in chains and doomed to die at the hands of the Turk!”
Page glanced at the little clerk in annoyance. Phrantzes had expressed no gratitude for the rescue of his wife from the janissaries, and his tears and hysterics shamed them both.
“My eldest son is a fat abbé in Normandy,” said Page, “and might say a prayer for me if he ever bothered to raise his snout from the ale-pot. My other boys would probably laugh, and one at least would pay good money to see his father’s head on a platter. As for my daughter...”
Page fell quiet again. He had no wish to speak of her.
Mehmed took up temporary residence in one of the Franciscan monasteries on the northern shore of the Golden Horn. There he started to plan his new palace, and the conversion of Constantinople from a Christian city to a jewel of Islam.
Phrantzes and Page were lodged inside one of the cells, a plain, sparsely-furnished chamber with a vaulted roof, and a latticed window overlooking the Bosphorus. Two halberdiers occasionally looked in at them through a grille in the thick iron-bound door.
Page sat on one of the low benches and studied the window. The lattice was made of iron, and the casement too narrow to squeeze through even if the bars could be broken.
“Ah, well,” he said, “it seems we must be discomfited.”
He leaned his back against the wall, folded his hands behind his head and started to whistle an old crusader’s lament.
Phrantzes, who had slumped onto the other bench, looked up from his misery. “I know that air,” he said, “the Chansons de croisade. It mourns the loss of the shrines and churches of Jerusalem, and pleads for a fresh host of virtuous crusaders to rescue the Holy Sepulchre.”
Page nodded. “This white head of mine is full of old songs,” he replied.
“You chose a most fitting one.” Phrantzes’ red-rimmed eyes filled with tears again as he looked out of the window.
“That I should live to see this,” he said brokenly, “the city of Constantine overrun by the followers of Mahomet. Her walls tumbled down, and her most holy churches defiled and converted into mosques. Her people reduced to slavery, while the rest of Christendom looks on and does nothing! Nothing!”
He wrung his plump hands. “My poor master pleaded the West for aid, and what did he get? Seven hundred mercenaries, the scum of Europe, and a handful of ships. A few ragged hirelings, to ward off all the hosts of Islam!”
“My heart shall break,” he added, “when I hear the cry of the muezzin ring through the streets of Constantinople for the first time. It shall be the end of days.”
Page raised a finger. “Mind your tongue, master clerk,” he said in a friendly tone, “I was one of those ragged hirelings. We kept twenty times our number of Turks at bay, and threw back Mehmed’s janissaries time and again. If Giustiniani hadn’t fallen...but there, it is useless to deal in maybes.”
Phrantzes paled. “My apologies,” he stammered, “I meant no disrespect, or to besmirch your efforts. You and your comrades did indeed fight like lions on our behalf. If a mere seven hundred could do so much, think what five thousand may have achieved - two thousand, even!”
“True,” agreed Page, “Constantinople may have been saved for another generation, if the princes of the West had sent adequate troops and supplies. Yet it would only have delayed the inevitable. The city was doomed. Your master knew that. Some men walk with the shadow of death at their side. He was one.”
His companion started to weep again, so Page rolled his eyes and tried to snatch some sleep. He had been a prisoner before, many times, and knew from long experience there was no use fretting. All a sensible man could was rest, think on happier days, and wait for his opportunity.
Phrantzes tapped his knee. “Sir John,” he whispered urgently, “Sir John, wake up!”
Page slowly counted to five before responding. “Only a fool disturbs the soldier at his rest,” he said through gritted teeth, “what do you want, little man?”
He opened his eyes a crack. The clerk’s moon-round face was uncomfortably close to his own, and crimson with excitement.
“There are two guards on the door,” Phrantzes hissed, “and they mere footsoldiers. I saw you cut down three of the Sultan’s finest in the Hagia Sophia when you so nobly defended my wife. If we lured the guards in here...”
Page nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps if you feigned illness,” he said, “they would come into the cell, and we could overpower them, take their clothes and escape in disguise. Then make our way down to the harbour and bribe a sea-captain to smuggle us out of the city. You had something like that in mind?”
Phrantzes nodded eagerly. “Yes! You think it possible, then?”
“No. I think it’s absurd. Now be quiet and let me sleep.”
He shut his eyes, so he didn’t have to look at the clerk’s dismayed expression, and folded his arms across his chest. Silence reigned in the cell for the next hour, until iron footsteps rang on the stone-flagged floor of the corridor outside.
There was a murmur of Turkish voices, and the scrape of keys in the lock. Page yawned, rose, and stretched until his joints clicked. Phrantzes pressed his short back against the wall. He looked on the verge of rage or panic, like a trapped animal.
“Peace,” said Page, “don’t do anything foolish. We can’t fight our way out, and nothing will be gained from making them angry.”
The nailed and timbered door swung open, and the halberdiers entered with a third man between them. This was a Sipahi officer in late middle age, squat and fleshy, with enormous strength in his heavy shoulders and long, powerful arms. He wore a mail hauberk over a gorgeous green and gold silken under-tunic that reached below his knees, and a tulwar hung in the red scabbard clipped to his thick leather belt.
Page was immediately wary. The officer’s little eyes were like two shards of ice, and his mouth under the drooping grey moustache had an unpleasantly full and sensual look to it. A pale scar ran from his left nostril down to the edge of his jaw, and his mangled nose had been broken at least twice.
The officer stopped, and planted his feet wide apart. His eyes slowly raked the prisoners.
“I come from the Sultan,”
he said in thickly-accented Greek, “Mehmed the Conqueror has not forgotten you.”
His thick fingers curled about the grip of his tulwar. Page carefully judged the distance between them. The officer looked strong, but slow. A sudden spring, a punch to the man’s jaw, a snatch for the sword...
A halberd’s point buried in his flesh. The guards looked watchful, alive to any sudden moves. Page willed himself to be calm.
The officer’s plump lips twitched in amusement. “His Majesty’s wisdom is only matched by his mercy. Neither of you are to die. At least, not yet.”
He raised his free hand and snapped his fingers. A fourth man, previously unseen, darted into the room.
This one was a Turkish version of Phrantzes. He wore a long black robe and a skull-cap, and had a sickly, pinch-faced look about him. Under his arm he carried a black dossier, a bundle of quills and a pot of ink.
The officer pointed a hairy finger at Page. “You,” he snapped, “say you are a poet as well as a soldier. His Majesty intends to put your skills to the test. The Sultan wishes to know more of the Western arts of war, from one who has spent many years serving in Western armies. You claim to be such a one.”
He grinned. “Let us hope you made no idle boasts. Both your lives depend on it.”
The clerk wordlessly placed the writing materials on the little table in the centre of the room. Then he made a hasty salaam to the officer and vanished through the doorway.
“Write,” said the officer, with a nod at Phrantzes, “write down the words of Sir John Page, and pray he spins a good tale. When you are done, my master shall have it read to him. If the story proves entertaining, you both shall live. If not...”
He ran a finger across his throat. “You have three days,” he added, and showed them his back.
The halberdiers filed out after him, and the door slammed shut like the clap of doom.
“Scheherazade,” remarked Page when the echoes had died away, “now I understand the Sultan’s meaning. So I must tell him a story, and hope he likes it enough to spare us from the headsman.”
Phranztes approached the table. His hands trembled as they picked up the bundle of quills.
“We should tell him something...something that will appeal to his warlike nature,” he stammered, “the legend of Roland, or Arthur and his knights.”
“No,” said Page, “Mehmed is an educated man, and will know them already.”
“What, then?” shouted Phrantzes, “should we treat him to a few of your bawdy soldier’s tales? Some lewd rhyme from Chaucer? I can already feel the kiss of steel on my neck!”
Page rubbed his jaw. “Offhand, I can think of no better story than my own life. I am a soldier, which should appeal to Mehmed, and have seen service in France, Bohemia and the Italian city-states.”
“Your own life?” Phrantzes sneered. “Modesty becomes you.”
“This is no time for modesty. Take up your quill, and pass me that jug of water. I cannot describe the past sixty years with a dry throat.”
The other man looked full of doubt, but did as he was asked. He gave the jug to Page, and dragged his bench up to the table. Then he sat and reached for a sheet of vellum.
When Phrantzes was ready, quill poised, Page took a long draught from the jug and started to talk.
1.
Know, O Shah of Shahs, that I was born in Sussex in England, thirteen hundred and ninety-four years after the birth of Our Lord. My mother was Margaret Daubeney, a widow and lady of the manor of Kingshook.
Her late husband, Sir John Daubeney, was not my father. He died of dysentery at the siege of Nantes, fourteen years before my birth, and left his wife alone and childless. She inherited his house and lands, and spent much of her time repelling offers of marriage from the young lords of Sussex.
“I will have a husband who loves me for myself,” she used to say, “not for the sake of a dead man’s acres.”
My mother was proud, too proud for her own good, and never remarried. That is not to say she was always alone.
In the spring of the year before my birth a stranger came to Kingshook. He was a wandering mercenary, full of dark passions and secrets, his skin burned brown by foreign suns. All he owned in the world were the clothes he stood up in, the ring on his finger, the sword at his hip, and a packet of letters he never let anyone read, even my mother.
He was my father. Thomas Page, remembered in snatches of song as the Half-Hanged Man or the Wolf of Burgundy.
In return for bed and board, Thomas offered to knock into shape the handful of servants and verderers who guarded my mother’s lands. In truth, they required little knocking - several were, like him, hardened veterans of the French wars - but she was happy for the excuse to keep Thomas in her house.
She was thirty by then, still beautiful, and lonely. Thomas was a charming, handsome brute, and my mother cared little for her reputation. She took him to her bed, and for some months they enjoyed each other.
I don’t hesitate to call my father a brute. He used my mother quite shamefully, sated his lusts on her, ate her meat and made free with her wine, and then abandoned her. One morning in late summer she woke to find him gone from her bed, and her best horse taken from the stables.
He left her with nothing, no trace of himself save bittersweet memories. And, it soon became apparent, something more. Something unwanted. Me.
I was born the following spring, and named John after my mother’s late husband. Her labour was not easy. More than once, so the midwives told me in later years, she called on Christ’s mercy, and begged to be released from the pain. It still galls me now to think she preferred death over her child.
Christ spared us both. My mother’s initial rejection of me passed, and I was happy enough, doted on by her and the servants. She kept my bastardy a secret from me until I was aged six or thereabouts, when my playmates in the local village started calling me the Wolf-Cub.
One of my earliest memories is of running home and demanding to know what they meant. My mother smiled - she had the warmest of smiles - sat me on her knee, brushed away my tears, and told me the truth of it.
“Dear son, I have lied to you,” she said, “for which I must beg your forgiveness. Your true father was not Sir John Daubeney, as I have pretended. He was a sell-sword named Thomas Page, a man I loved for a time. He ran away before you were born.”
Incredibly, she bore no resentment towards the man who deserted her. “You must not be ashamed of your birth, or your father,” she went on, “he was a great soldier in his time, and performed famous deeds of arms in France and Spain. The troubadours still sing of him.”
She spared me the gruesome final verse of Page’s life until I was older, and more able to bear it. Thomas Page was eventually murdered by his great enemy, Sir Hugh Calveley, another famous English routier, and his corpse hanged in a cage from an oak tree on the border of Calveley’s Berkshire estate.
I was fourteen, on the threshold of manhood, when I learned how my father died. By then I knew all the songs of his exploits, and was set on following in his footsteps as a soldier. I still hated him for deserting us, but took a certain pride in calling myself the Wolf-Cub, and letting others know I was the son of a ballad hero.
Now I shall end the account of John Page as a lad, and move on to the year of Agincourt.
2.
I have no glorious falsehoods to tell of my role in that most famous battle. While King Henry mustered his army at Southampton, and all the youth of England were on fire to join him, my mother lay mortally ill at Kingshook.
She had taken a fever during the summer, and it rapidly grew worse with the onset of autumn. I sent for a physician from Horsham, but none of his purgings and bleedings did any good. Consumed with grief, I swallowed my desire to join the king, and swore an oath to stay by my mother’s side until the end.
She fought her illness with the courage of one whose ancestors had fought at Senlac, Northallerton and Crécy, and lingered well into the autumn. Henry’s arm
y was still camped outside the walls of Harfleur when she finally passed away in late September.
“Dear son, I must beg your forgiveness,” she whispered at the last, “I have selfishly kept you here, beside an old woman’s bed, when your duty lay with the king.”
Weeks of watching her die had worn me away to almost nothing, and this final apology broke my heart all in pieces. “Madam,” I said, clasping her fragile hand, “what is France, what is all the martial glory in the world, compared to you? I would give it all up, just to keep you alive another year.”
Her wan face, racked with pain, twitched into the ghost of one of her old smiles. “Pretty lies,” she replied, her voice a mere tremor, “meant well. You have been my only comfort in this world. Comfort me one last time. Swear you will find peace after I am gone, and be happy.”
I swore, and she was quite mistaken: I would have made any promise, even to the Devil, to save her life.
My body is covered in scars, but no battle-wound ever equalled the agony of my mother’s loss. The moment she breathed her last, I wept like a child, and had to be led away by three of her servants. They made me drunk, those honest men, drunker than I had ever been, until my well of tears had run dry.
I stayed on the manor, and felt honour-bound to help look after the estate instead of riding off to the wars. As a bastard, of course, I could not inherit. Thus I remained in Sussex, chained to a crumbling manor house and a few hundred acres of dirt, while other men won glory in France.
The news of Agincourt was brought to Kingshook by a messenger who rode from Chichester to spread the word among the local villages. He was just a lad, his bright red hair bristling in the wind as he galloped up the lane to the gate, singing as he rode:
“Our King went forth to Normandy,
With grace and might of chivalry,
There God for him wrought marvellously.
Wherefore England may call and cry,
Deo Gratias!
He set a siege for sooth to say,
To Harfleur town with royal array,
The Wolf Cub Page 2