The Alchemist's Revenge

by Martin Archer

  “Anything,” I lamented as I looked at the three men intently, “I would do anything if I could afford to leave the Company and live safely in Athens with my wife and children.”

  Then I told them where I spent my time in Constantinople when I was not on duty.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Prisoner Exchanges and fish.

  We contacted the commander of the Greek army in the traditional way—we opened the gate and one of the city’s black-robed Orthodox priests walked out of it along with a horn blower tooting loudly to draw the Greeks’ attention. Adam went out with the priest and so did Michael Oremus. My son, Michael’s apprentice, did not go with them.

  The three men waited for some time amidst the partially restored devastation. Finally, after a long pause caused because the camp dwellers had begun fleeing as soon as the gate began going up, a similarly clothed Orthodox priest from the invaders’ camp hurried forward to meet with him.

  First, the two priests greeted each other with what appeared to be the formalities and fashions of all first meetings between two Orthodox priests. Afterwards they immediately started talking about the possibility of a prisoner exchange. Adam, as he had been instructed, listened carefully.

  “I am Father Innocent from Saint Gregory’s Church in Constantinople,” said the priest who had accompanied Adam. Then he explained why he had come out of the city with two of the Empress’s soldiers, the captain in command of the city’s only usable gates on its landward side and his lieutenant who had the additional duty of being in charge of the men guarding the prisoners in the Citadel.

  “The Empress’s men have captured some of your army’s men including a bishop, a number of priests, and a couple of knights. And your army has captured some of the Empress’s men. I have been ordered to inform you that the Empress, in her great benevolence as a true Christian, is willing to consider an exchange of prisoners right here in front of the only gate that has not been permanently blocked.

  “So tell me Father, how many English archers and soldiers of the Latin states do your masters hold that they are able to exchange?”

  As might be expected, the Greek priest did not have any idea how many prisoners the Orthodox army held. But he instantly agreed that the idea of an exchange that would obtain the release of one of the Patriarch’s bishops and a number of his brother priests was a good idea. The two priests agreed to meet again the next day at the same time.

  The prisoners were exchanged about a week later—after the more distinguished amongst them had spent a five or six days in the cells next to the city’s three Orthodox bishops, and often with no one standing nearby to overhear them.

  Neither of the priests nor the prisoners knew it, of course, but we were also using them to once again inform the Greeks that this was the only gate they could enter. Similarly, in the case of the prisoners, we were using them to inform the Greeks that they could bribe their way into the city.

  ******

  The main body of the Greek army began arriving a few days after the exchange. It was a huge army of men and they were accompanied by numerous horses, wagons and camp followers. They just kept coming and coming until they had filled up a good part of the narrow peninsula and all the available space outside Constantinople’s outer wall.

  Our men watched them arrive and grew uneasy. It was the largest number army of men any of us had ever seen—and they had come to Constantinople to either kill us or make us run.

  Similar to those who had come before them, the new arrivals assumed the moat that protected the city against them would also protect them against the city’s defenders. Accordingly, to the astonishment of the watching archers, the new arrivals pitched their tents and parked their wagons all the way up to the moat just as the late and unlamented early arrivals had done.

  “Some people never learn,” Henry said with wonder in his voice and a disbelieving shake of his head. He smiled as he said it.

  “Henry is right, Commander. We should hit them again with another sally as soon as possible,” said Richard Ryder, the Commander’s number two.

  The men standing with the Commander on the wall above the gate all nodded their agreement when he turned and looked at them with a questioning look on his face.

  “You are right, Henry, and I agree. It is just too good of an opportunity to pass up. What do you suggest? Offer coins to the states’ forces once again for the weapons and high-ranking prisoners they bring in?”

  “Aye, we cannot go wrong using the states’ forces to reduce the number of the bastards we have to fight.”

  And after a brief pause, Henry added “and there surely are a lot of them.”

  ******

  The same group of men were assembled on the wall above the gate and once again were looking out at the Greek encampment when the sun came up over the horizon the next morning. Eric, the captain of the Empress’s guards was also with them and so was Prince Ivan, the commander of the Bulgarians, the largest contingent of the various forces that had come in from the Empress’s vassal states. Prince Ivan had led the second sally; he had obviously decided to only watch this one.

  “Any idea as to how many men are going out this time?” someone asked the prince. I think it was the Michael Oremus, the major captain who was the Commander’s principal assistant.

  It was a good question. Unlike the previous two sallies, the column of salliers did not extend far enough back to even reach the curve in the road. We could see them all. There were no wagons in sight. It would be a significantly less powerful sally than its two predecessors.

  “This time about one hundred of my horsemen and another eighty from the other states, and perhaps thirty-five hundred foot,” Prince Ivan answered.

  And then, after a long moment of looking at the men packed into the roadway below us waiting for the gate to be raised, Prince Ivan added another thought as he used his chin to point at the column of foot soldiers waiting immediately behind the riders.

  “They are all that are available of the six thousand or so men who went out on the first sally. They are the best of them though, the thrusters who are willing to fight for more coins. The others have mostly been killed, wounded, or are staying camp because they are too afraid to go out again. Others have deserted to go home with their coins.”

  After a pause, he added.

  “Mostly the men who are not sallying today are missing because they are afraid or deserted.” Then he hastily added, “with the exception of my personal guard of knights and nobles, of course; I ordered them not to go out this time because I cannot afford to lose them.”

  Commander Courtenay nodded his understanding and replied.

  “Well, this is the states’ men’s third sally this week. At least we all have some experience under our belts and are better prepared to see that they get paid, watered, and sewed up when they return. What astonishes me is that the Greek commander does not have at least some of his men standing ready to fight us off. Surely he must know about our first two sallies?”

  The talking amongst the watchers was stopped by the creaking sound of the huge wall gate as it began to rise. Below them the loud talking was fading away, the men with helmets were dropping their visors, and every man was taking a firmer grip on his weapons.

  A moment later the states’ riders ducked their heads and poured through gate, and galloped over the moat bridge and into the Greek camp waving their swords over their heads. What was left of the states’ foot came running out of the gate right behind them.

  The salliers began trickling back about an hour later. This time we were organized with the coins, sail makers, and water carriers waiting when they returned. There were no long lines of desperately thirsty men. And an entire company of archers from a nearby enclosure kept the camp followers, priests, and other coin-seekers well away from the returnees.

  It had been another successful raid in terms of both weapons and prisoners. And this time some of the salliers led in captured wagons pulled by captured horses, sev
en of them in all. Several of the wagons had valuable armour and weapons in them. Their owners had not had time to unpack them.

  ******

  Surprisingly enough, until the two days after the arrival of the main body of the Greek army, the road through the Greek camp had remained open. No one in the Greek army had thought to order it closed. As a result, food supplies of meat, early-harvested grains, and firewood had continued to be brought in to feed the city and build its reserves. So did similar supplies arriving on barges coming down the rivers into the Golden Horn and transports coming out of both the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

  And, of course, there were always the fish. They were the most important food for many of the poorer people of the city. And they continued to be caught by the local people who stood shoulder to shoulder every day all along the miles of shoreline that ran next to the city’s walls. The city’s people had fished along the shoreline to feed themselves and supply the city’s markets since time began.

  The fish catches of the local people were substantial. And little wonder; the number of fish constantly making their way along the shoreline where the city protruded out into the water was astonishing. Fish could be seen and caught everywhere along the miles and miles of city wall, even during a siege. That was significant because so long as there was enough firewood with which to cook the fish, the city was not likely to ever be brought to its knees by running out of food, even if both the land and water approaches to the city were totally cut off.

  Moreover, if push came to shove and a siege lasted many years such that there were not any more wooden houses in the city that could be torn down and burned for cooking, the defenders and the city people could eat the fish raw.

  Indeed, I had been told by no less than Eric, the commander of the Empress’s guards, that some of Constantinople’s people who cannot afford to buy firewood regularly eat raw fish. That, of course, is not likely to be a true story since it is well known that eating too much raw fish can cause fish scales to begin covering certain important parts of your body.

  In any event, the implications of the huge supply of readily available fish were significant—it meant a siege to starve the city into submission would never work. And that, in turn, meant an army attacking the city would either have to launch a great assault and fight its way into the city, as the crusaders had done some years earlier, or it would have to get into the city by gulling or bribing some of the city’s defenders as the crusaders had also done.

  Chapter Thirty

  Whittling them down.

  What was left of Number Nine Company picked its way through the thick stand of trees until Lieutenant Baker raised his hand. His signal stopped the nine tired archers, and one terrified prisoner tied to a horse, which were strung out in a line behind him. The lieutenant, and each of the archers, was leading at least one saddled horse, the relatively fresh “remount” that every horse archer always kept close at hand in case he needed to run for safety or catch a fleeing foe.

  “This will do for our new camp,” Lieutenant Baker announced as he looked around and nodded his head to agree with himself. “We can see the cart path and village from here, and we can run either up the hill or through the trees over there if any of the Greeks are unlucky enough to find us again.

  “Sergeant, post a good man as a lookout at the edge of the trees over there beyond the big rock. That is the way the Greeks will likely come if they try to sneak up on us.”

  Lieutenant Baker was in command because Number Nine Company’s captain had been killed in a skirmish some days earlier on the Adrianople road. Afterwards, when the Greek army finished passing in front of them, the lieutenant had led what was left of the company from its initial “rest and recovery” camp along the Adrianople road to what was intended to be their company’s permanent base camp for the duration of the Greek siege.

  Each of the horse archer companies serving in the Latin Empire had a hidden base camp that, for their safety’s sake, no one else knew about. From their base camps, the companies rode out to pick off the Greek army’s stragglers and chop up its foraging parties. They would then periodically return to their hidden camps for rest and resupply.

  Number Nine Company’s initial base camp had been in the hills just beyond the long peninsula that poked out into the sea with the great city of Constantinople at its very end. Lieutenant Baker had led the men of his company into their ready and waiting first base camp after the company finished harassing the Greek army as it marched past it on the road from Adrianople.

  Lieutenant Baker and his men had begun hitting the stragglers and foraging parties of the Greek-led army camped outside Constantinople’s walls immediately thereafter. And they had continued doing so right up until some Greeks got lost and blundered into their first camp. That is why they had temporarily relocated to their backup camp and spent the past several days looking for a new one.

  The company’s basic assignment was actually quite simple; it was to inflict as many casualties as possible on the Greek army and prevent its foraging parties from bringing in food and other supplies for the Greek soldiers. Hopefully the Greek soldiers who were not killed outright would be weakened and demoralized by their wounds and lack of food and begin deserting.

  In other words, the men of Lieutenant Baker’s company were to act like a pack of a dozen or so of roving English wolves which had come across a great flock of Greek sheep. The problem, of course, was that the sheep had weapons and some of them knew how to use them. The company’s captain had discovered that the hard way when a Greek soldier got him in the stomach with a spear. A mercy put him out of his agony.

  Since Lieutenant Baker had taken over command of Number Nine, two of the company’s archers had been wounded, one fatally and the other seriously enough that he had been evacuated on one of the Company galleys that constantly moved up and down the rivers that drained into the Golden Horn estuary which flowed along one side of the Constantinople city wall.

  The casualty ratios had not been favourable to the Greeks. To the contrary, the archers of Number Nine Company had made the Greeks pay dearly for the men the company had lost; they had over and over again stood off and used their longbows to inflict a large number of casualties on the Greeks marching past them on the old Roman road to Constantinople. They had also either turned back or destroyed a number of Greek foraging parties.

  The Greeks had responded to the way Number Nine Company and the other horse archer companies operating against them by reducing the number of foraging parties and greatly increasing the number of armed men who accompanied each of them. This had not occurred because of a decision by their absent commander, but rather instinctively by the individual Greek soldiers—they had come to understand what would happen to them if they went out alone or in small groups, so they stopped doing so.

  Unfortunately for the archers of Number Nine Company, their initial base camp on one of the hills overlooking the peninsula had been blundered into and destroyed by such a large force of Greek foragers two days earlier. That was why they had been looking for a new campsite, but only after they finished off the foragers who had stumbled upon their old one.

  Lieutenant Baker’s badly outnumbered, but well-trained, horse archers had done exactly what they had been learnt to do when the equally surprised Greek foragers came upon them—they had hurriedly mounted their always-saddled horses and ridden away to regroup. The riders of the foraging party, seeing them flee, had chased after them.

  Several times the Greek riders “almost caught” the company’s stragglers and, as a result, continued pursuing them for some distance in hopes of an easy victory and the acclaim of their commanders. That, of course, was a mistake, and it cost the Greeks dearly.

  The enthusiasm of the Greek riders for chasing the Englishmen changed dramatically when Lieutenant Baker shouted an order and the archers suddenly switched over to the fresh horses they had been leading—and began charging in a line abreast back towards the Greeks whose exhausted horses
had become strung out in ones and twos all along the route of their failed chase.

  It was the English archers’ old and reliable “wounded bird” ploy, the tactic the Company’ greybeards had learned from the Saracens years earlier when the Company was first formed and went crusading with King Richard. And it worked once again as the archers of Number Nine Company turned back on their fresh horses and began systematically shooting the Greek riders off their exhausted horses as they came upon them one or two at a time.

  The archers continued riding on their fresh horses all the way back to where the main party of foragers was resting after looting the company’s camp. They then pulled up their horses some distance from the Greek foot and began shooting them down until they ran out of arrows. Afterwards, they set about collecting as many of their arrows as they could find and selecting a prisoner to be sent down the river to Constantinople for questioning.

  In fact, the fate and failure of the Greek foraging party had been sealed as soon as its men stumbled upon the company’s base camp. It would almost certainly have been no different even if the riders amongst the foragers had not chased after the archers in hopes of an easy victory—for if the Greek riders had not chased after them, the archers would almost certainly have immediately ridden back to surround the Greeks and pick them off one by one using the superior range of their longbows.

  There was one last thing to be done.

  “Eddie, you and Joe are to take the prisoner to the river and wait for one of our galleys. Tell its captain what we have seen and done since our last report and bring back all the arrows you can carry and some grain we can grind for bread. Do not take any unnecessary chances; you know the drill, eh?”

  There was no doubt about what the soldiers of the Greek army were discovering, if they did not already know; going after a company of longbow-carrying English horse archers was like slapping a hungry bear on its arse to get its attention.