The Alchemist's Revenge

by Martin Archer

  ******

  “Will you live long or will you die soon? Your future told by the blind woman from Delphi who sees everything and is never wrong. Only a penny or a piece of bread and it will be returned to you if you do not believe the fate she sees for you or accept the way she says you can avoid it.”

  The man called out the offer as the great army passed in front of the wagon in which he and the woman lived, but only infrequently when she had no custom. Normally there was a line of anxious soldiers waiting to learn their fate and how to avoid it.

  Those who paid were quietly assured of her powers.

  “It is true as God is my witness; she can see a man’s future even though her eyes are blank. All you need is to let her hold your hand and give her one small copper coin or a piece of bread—which she will return to you if you are not satisfied.”

  It was a great story told by the blind woman’s protector and wagon driver—and each and every word in it was selected to convey a specific fact about the man who was anxiously wait to have his fate told to him.

  The blind woman who would soon tell the soldier about his future sat nearby quietly listening to what was being said. A moment later a small coin changed hands and yet another very concerned young soldier was introduced to the blind woman by her assistant.

  “Here is a man come to learn his future, dear lady. Will you hold his hand and tell him what his future holds? He is anxious to know so he can make his plans.”

  “Give me your hand. Hmm. Oh. Yes. You have red hair and are wearing a tunic and you are only carrying a spear since you have no sword or helmet or chain shirt. And you have two of your mates with you and a scar on your face. Oh no,” she said a moment with a tone of despair and a sad shake of her head.

  The woman croaked out every word quite sincerely. Then she leaned forward and quietly gave him the bad news so the others would not hear it.

  “My boy, I am sorry to have to tell you this, but the life line on your hand is short, very short. And the spear you are carrying will not help you and neither will your homemade shield. It seems the angel of death knows your name and the arrow that has your name on it is already nearby.

  “Your only hope is to leave the road as soon as it gets dark and walk straight back to your hovel. When you get there you must stay inside until the next full moon begins to wane. Do that and your red hair will stay on your head long enough to turn grey. If you do not leave immediately, you will soon die a most painful death with an arrow in your stomach. And the same will happen to you if you ever tell anyone I told you how to avoid your fate.”

  And with that she sighed and waved the white-faced and shaking lad away with a gentle and resigned flick of her hand.

  It was quite surprising how many men were convinced by the blind woman’s knowledge of their future and immediately deserted. On the other hand, her story would have been quite different if the words in her assistant’s introduction had told her the client was a suspicious priest or a noble. If he had been a priest, for example, he would have been told that he would live well and prosper if he prayed to Jesus every day and was always loyal to his bishop and the Patriarch. It worked every time.

  How did she do it? Every single word her helper said with his introduction meant something specific. For example, the word “dear” if he addressed her as “dear lady” or “dear one” meant she would be talking to a common soldier; the word “lady” meant he was carrying a spear whereas “one” meant he was carrying a sword. Other words in the introduction told her such things as the colour of his hair or his rank.

  It had taken a while to learn what each of the words in her assistant’s introduction meant, but she had learned them. And then the coins rolled in and she scared the soldiers who talked to her into running.

  The woman and her assistant ate well as a result of the coins she fetched; the bread was fed to the horse that pulled their wagon.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Two weeks later.

  Commander Courtenay and his key lieutenants gathered at the Commandery on the eve of what was shaping up to be a great and decisive battle. Three weeks had passed since two back-to-back sallies had ripped apart the Greek army’s early arrivals, the men who had been carried part of the way by the Venetian transports, and it had been almost two weeks since the third sally by the states’ men had welcomed the newly arrived main body of the Greek army.

  The third sally by the states’ forces had occurred when the main body of the invaders first reached the city walls. The new arrivals had fought back and the states’ men had suffered for it in addition to earning a considerable amount of coins.

  Henry’s current best guess was that there were now only about twenty-five hundred able-bodied states’ soldiers left in their camp inside the walled roadway into the city—and an ever-growing number of camp followers who had been attracted to the coins the states’ men earned. They, as all camp followers inevitably do, wanted the new-found men in their lives to sally out again to earn more coins.

  Equally important, a week had passed since a prisoner exchange had brought back a handful of captured archers and a dozen or so of the states’ forces—and, in exchange, resulted in the archers freeing a number of captured Greeks, including a captured bishop and a couple of knights. If all went as planned, the newly released Greeks would carry false and misleading information back to their fellow invaders.

  It had been time well spent with every archer’s day filled with training and practice on matters such as who and how the companies were to respond if the enemy broke through the wall somewhere, or if the galleys in the harbour were attacked and in need of help at the same time the wall was being attacked.

  One thing, however, had been quite disappointing. I had had high hopes for the false information and offers of assistance we tried to plant by releasing the prisoners, but so far it was not having its intended effect—no effort had been made to contact Adam, the archer who had claimed to be the captain of the gate guards and had offered to open the Farmers’ gates for one hundred pounds of silver coins. That was a lot of silver, of course, but he might not have been believed if he had only asked for a small amount.

  The three sallies, the fighting in the mountains, the constant attacks by the independent companies of horse archers, and the desertions caused by the warnings of the blind prophets sent out to “see” the future of individual Greek soldiers, had combined to whittle down the Orthodox army. Even so, it still numbered well over one hundred thousand men plus another fifty thousand of so of camp followers and sutlers. It was little wonder that when the wind blew towards the sea we could smell the Greek camp from where we stood on the city wall.

  Holding Constantinople’s walls against the invaders were over three thousand archers from Cornwall’s Company of Archers and their nine hundred locally recruited auxiliaries, the twenty-five hundred or so men remaining from the Latin states loyal to the Empress, and about four hundred of the Empress’s personal guards.

  In addition to the archers manning Constantinople’s walls, what was left of two hundred of the Company’s horse archers were harassing the invaders’ flanks from battle camps secreted in the hills beyond the peninsula and foraging parties and forty-two of the Company’s sea-going war galleys were here with their crews of archers and sailors.

  Many of the Company’s galleys were pulled ashore and others were anchored nearby because their archers were now on the city walls. But others were still crewed and actively defending the water approaches to the city and carrying away its refugees. In essence, the Company was “all in” in an effort to continuing getting some of the Latin Empire’s great and growing riches.

  Unlike the archers who knew they were in Constantinople to earn coins and promotions, many of the lower ranking invaders still had no idea why their lords had brought them to Constantinople. They also had inferior weapons and little or no training in how to use them.

  What the Greek soldiers did know was that they were living and increasingly hun
gry in their army’s huge, crowded, and increasingly foul camp—and that it was damn dangerous to go out foraging for food or get too near to the city’s walls.

  According to the Empress’s spies, the Greek commander and his retinue had finally arrived. If so, he probably could not help but be aware of the size and state of his army. What he would do, however, was totally unknown. Anything was possible.

  ****** Commander George Courtenay

  The reports of my lieutenants were mostly encouraging. The Company had been doing more than just preparing to fight the Greeks for the past several months. Our galleys and transports had also been earning a considerable amount of coins by carrying away refugees who could afford to flee the coming siege and its dangers and hardships. They were mostly the city’s priests, merchants, and money lenders along with almost all of the city’s idle gentry and the Empress’s courtiers.

  It was easy money for us—the refugees did the rowing on each outward bound voyage with each galley’s full crew of sailors working its sails and a token number of archers on board to help to defend it.

  Each galley then turned around and returned to Constantinople from wherever it had unloaded its passengers using paid volunteers to do the rowing. The rowers would join our defence force as auxiliaries when they reached Constantinople.

  So far, we had only lost one galley despite the most popular refugee destination being Athens’ port of Piraeus where a good part the Venetian fleet was based. And the only loss we knew about was a galley full of refugees that was apparently taken north of Cyprus by a fleet of Moorish pirates.

  Venice had not been a problem for the past few months despite the fact that the Venetians hated the Company due to our past victories and support for the Empress. According to what our refugee-carrying captains had been told at Piraeus, the Venetians had been ordered by the Patriarch not to interfere with our refugee-carrying operations because so many of the refugees we were carrying out of Constantinople were Orthodox Greeks.

  The Venetians, as you might expect, obeyed the Patriarch because their goal was much bigger than merely taking a few of the Company’s galleys and transports as prizes—it was to in all ways replace the Company at Constantinople and, additionally and even more important to them, return to its previous domination of the city’s markets and money lending. This, the Venetians assumed, would occur when the Orthodox-praying King of Epirus replaced the Latin-praying Empress on the throne.

  Similarly continuing to prosper was our collection of the Empress’s tolls for allowing transports and galleys to pass through the Sea of Marmara whilst coming to or from the Golden Horn, the Dardanelles, and the Bospherus. If anything, the city’s increased importation of food to build up its siege supplies had caused a minor uptick of sea traffic in the local waters and, thus, of the tolls we had been collecting and keeping in exchange for helping to defend the city.

  That fine state of affairs, the collection of the Empress’s toll coins that is, had not slowed in the past few days even though our galleys and transports had almost entirely stopped sailing with archers on board.

  Similarly, the galleys that had been rotating as toll collectors at the Dardanelles and Bosphorus entrances to the Sea of Marmara had been summoned back to the city. This was done so their archers could reinforce those who were already defending the walls.

  Indeed, some of our galley and transports were still carrying refugees and collecting the Empress’s tolls—but without any archers on board at all. They were sailing without them.

  Sailing without archers on board had worked successfully in the past because they might be on board. Besides, the Company was well known for routinely pretending its transports were unarmed in order to lure pirates into coming alongside and grappling them—so our men could dash out of the deck castles and cargo holds where they had been hiding to throw their own grapples, shoot down the pirates with their arrows, and take their attackers’ galleys as prizes.

  What we hoped, of course, was that the war for the Empress’s throne would be over and the archers back on board our galleys and transports by the time the Venetians and Moors discovered they had been gulled.

  The reports coming in from the horse archers harassing the Greeks were also encouraging, albeit always late in arriving. Each week two archers from each horse company would ride northeast from their company’s hidden supply camp to the nearest river that emptied into the so-called “Golden Horn” estuary that ran along the city wall on one side of Constantinople.

  When the two archers reached the river, they would hail one of the Company’s three fully crewed galleys that we had constantly moving up and down the river. When the archers made contact with a galley they would report on what their company had seen and done since their company’s last report, and sometimes they would bring prisoners to be taken to Constantinople for questioning or wounded archers who needed barbering. In turn, the galley would give them any new orders that might have been issued and provide them with supplies such as sacks of bread-making grain and bales of arrows.

  The reports from the horse companies operating furthest to the south indicated that they were keeping the road from Adrianople totally cut. Deserters and others moving south away from Constantinople were not stopped or harassed in any way; supplies and reinforcements moving north to join the Orthodox army, on the other hand, were subject to constant attacks and destruction.

  Similar reports came in from the horse companies operating from their hidden bases closer to Greek encampment on the peninsula on which Constantinople was located. They claimed to be keeping the Greeks penned into their camp and preventing foraging parties from foraging unless they were extremely large and looking for a fight.

  Even more important, however, was the information we continued to receive from the prisoners the horse archers were taking about the intentions of the Greek commanders—they had promised their men they would be able to go home in time to bring in the crops they had planted in the spring.

  The promises of the Orthodox commanders to their men were truly important so far as we were concerned. They strongly suggested that the Greek army would attempt a massive assault instead of a prolonged siege similar to that of the crusaders that preceded their final assault. That was what we had always expected would be the case, but it was useful to our plans to have it confirmed.

  Similarly suggesting a massive assault instead of a long siege were the behaviour of the Greek foragers and the statements of the prisoners taken by the horse archers. In addition to foraging for food, the Greek foragers seemed to be particularly focussed on finding tall trees that could be cut down and used to make wall-scaling ladders—not shorter trees that might be used to build siege towers and catapults. The prisoners confirmed that it was only very tall ladders and long wooden foot bridges that were being built in the Greek camp.

  Richard was particularly anxious for the Greek’s big assault to begin because his horse archers were themselves being whittled down during their constant harassing attacks. Every horse company had lost men killed and wounded. Some of them were down to half strength or less. Even worse, there had been no reports from several of his companies for some weeks.

  Although he never mentioned them directly, I understood Richard’s concerns about his men and shared them. If the Greek army broke into the city, we could hastily load the surviving foot archers into our waiting galleys and make a run for it—but it we did that, we would be leaving his horse archers behind. And leaving anyone behind was something Richard and I could not and would not do.

  Amongst the many problems of withdrawing the horse archers if the city fell was that each company’s battle camp was separate and secret so that it could not be betrayed by an archer from another horse company if he was taken prisoner. Only Richard had been present when the horse archers’ many different camps were initially located. In any event, the hidden camps of the independently operating horse companies would have been relocated if they had been discovered.

  Accordingly, the o
nly thing we could do if it looked like Constantinople was going to fall was have our three galleys patrolling the river send the horse company messengers who hailed them back to their camps to retrieve their mates. And then, when and if the men arrived, take them down the river and on to Cyprus.

  Collecting the horse archers was likely to take weeks because it would take that long for the men of the last surviving company to contact a galley on the river and be withdrawn. Worse, we were likely to wait overly long because we would never know when the last of the independent companies had come in if some of them had been totally destroyed.

  And that was only the beginning—because the Company galleys which waited to rescue them would then have to come down the river and fight their way through the Venetians and their allies whose galleys, if the city was lost, would undoubtedly be controlling the river, the estuary, and the Marmara Sea’s exits and entrances.

  In essence, rescuing the horse archers was not impossible even though it would be a nightmare of difficulties and very close to a forlorn hope. But it was the only thing we could do if the city fell.

  In other words, victory was our only real option and we all knew it.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  We are well and truly surprised.

  It was a balmy night and quite pleasant even though it had gotten cloudy late in the previous afternoon and it looked and smelled like there would soon be rain. Our men had been on high alert for several days. It meant that each galley company’s sentries were tripled and all of its archers slept on their company’s assigned stretch of the outer wall with their weapons close at hand and their bales of extra arrows open and ready.

  My lieutenants and I had begun quietly walking along the top of the outer wall as soon the sun finished passing overhead. Initially, during the first hour or so of darkness, the men were sleeping and snoring everywhere, usually with their heads on one of their quivers and always on their backs. They were sleeping that way because, as every soldier knows, sleeping on one’s side on stone often gives a man pains in his hip.