Emperor's Winding Sheet

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by The Emperor's Winding Sheet (retail) (epub)


  “Come, boy,” said John eagerly. “What did he say his gun would do?”

  “Bring down the walls of Babylon.”

  “No, no, I mean what weight of shot? And how far?”

  “I can’t remember …”

  “Try, boy!”

  “A thousand pounds, I think … and yes … a quarter mile.”

  Someone whistled. “Blood of the saints!” cried Varangian John. “And the Emperor let this man depart in peace?”

  “What else could he do? The man wanted more than he could pay him.”

  “Why, dammit,” cried John in fury, “if he couldn’t be kept by fair means, he should have been kept by foul … he should have been thrown into a dungeon, or even waylaid on his way out of the City by someone with a long-blade knife; anything to stop him reaching the Sultan!” The soldiers all looked grave. They murmured grimly to each other, assessing the impact of that gun. John said bitterly, “When I said we could do with a little incompetence, I meant it on their side, rather than on ours.”

  But Vrethiki, for all that he was ready enough to think ill of the Emperor, and his heart took a familiar downturn at any bad news for the City, could still see that John was wishing his master had stooped to murder. He sighed. Even the Englishmen in this strange place seemed hard to understand. Though doubtless the ugly little gunsmith was a less tender victim than Joan the Maid.

  Chapter 8

  What use is it to keep arguing over hearsay?” cried the Emperor, sweeping a pile of rough maps, none agreeing with another, off the table in front of him. “We must go and see it for ourselves.”

  “But it’s not safe, Sire. Not for you. We could send someone.” That was Phrantzes.

  “I need to see for myself,” said the Emperor.

  Very early in the morning, therefore, in the gray light before dawn, they embarked on a little galley that lay waiting for them in the Golden Horn. John Dalmata came, and another captain called Cantacuzenos, and Theophilus Palaeologos, and the Emperor with Vrethiki. The galley was rowed by forty oarsmen and had no need to wait upon the wind. She plashed gently through the smooth waters of that great harbor, moving along the north shore of the City, while the City itself lay as a long purple shadow against the rising sun. At first the water was fiery with the blaze of dawn; as the sun rose, and the galley rounded the point under the walls of Genoese Galata, and slipped out of the Horn, the sheen on the water thinned to silver in the brightening day, and the City lay far behind, fading to rose and lilac. They moved steadily up the winding waters of the Bosporus, with look-outs fore and aft. They were flying no flag, and the Emperor wore a huge black shabby cloak over his purple garments.

  They had been moving up the Bosporus some half hour when they saw it. They came to a place where a high ridge juts into the narrows, and the Bosporus takes a zigzag round it. On the receding shore, at the mouth of a little stream, the Turks had long ago built a castle; now as the tall ridge on the Roman shore came into view, they could see it topped with towers. One huge tower crowned the slope, another stood far below on the waterline. They were linked with a massive battlemented wall, climbing down the line of the ridge between them.

  “There, Sire,” said the galley captain.

  “Draw nearer,” said the Emperor, staring ahead. The rowers dipped their oars, and the galley nosed cautiously forward. As it did so, more massive towers came into view. Along the waterline stood a line of four towers, the outer two massive beyond belief, and a curtain wall, nearly completed, was rising between them. Behind the shore, the castle straggled and sprawled irregularly up the rugged land, widening out to encircle enough steeply sloping space for a small town. At every turn of the walls a tower was rising. The watchers from the boat could see the encampment of the builders—a patchwork of tents and shacks within the castle. Silently they took it in. Nobody builds such a vast structure as that to serve a small purpose, nor does a man build so vastly at such incredible speed—for these walls were nearly at their tops, these towers were all but finished already—unless he is in haste. Vrethiki shivered.

  That creamy new masonry, standing among the steep woods of the shore in the wispy mists of the morning, had been made to last for a thousand years—as though the land it stood on were already the Sultan’s land, and would remain so for ages to come.

  And remembering the talk among the soldiers about the shot range of guns, Vrethiki eyed the water between one shore and another, on which, oars idle, they were so peacefully now afloat. This was the narrowest point of the strange channel that divided continents; with a castle on either shore, there was no doubt the Sultan could reach any ship, could stop anything passing if he wanted to.

  “Yes,” said the Emperor. “I see.”

  Turning the galley, glad to escape seemingly unnoticed from the shore, they rowed away down the channel again, back to the City. The water was choppy now, swaying and sparkling with wind and current, and deepening to ultramarine under a blue morning sky.

  Riding back through the City they crossed the path of a procession of people who were clambering a steep-stepped path up a rocky hill, toward a cluster of rust-pink domes just visible on the crest against the sky.

  “Where’s that?” asked Vrethiki, pointing.

  “The Monastery of Christ Pantocrator,” one of the soldiers told him.

  “I lock Scholarios away, and the people beat a path to his door,” said the Emperor grimly.

  When they reached the palace, he strode through the gardens and ran up the steps to his door. He cast off the black cloak that had covered him from Turkish eyes, and threw it on the marble floor before a servant could advance to take it from him. He sat upon his throne, and beat his fists on the lectern in front of him, shouting for his councilors. His dark eyes flashed, and his voice shook. Whatever it was he was ordering, thought Vrethiki, wide-eyed, his advisers liked it very little. They argued, pleaded, talked, looked sideways their dismay at one another. Phrantzes began to write, to the Emperor’s dictation, but every so often he raised his head, and disputed over some phrase. The Emperor insisted. The letter was written. The councilors departed.

  “What has he done?” whispered Vrethiki to Stephanos. They were standing side by side at one end of the throne room; the Emperor paced up and down below the windows, still agitated and angry.

  “He has sent to the Sultan”—Stephanos broke off as the Emperor approached them, and resumed as he turned his back and paced away again—“to ask for his guarantee that he will not use the new castle to attack the City.”

  “What good will that do?” asked Vrethiki.

  “None,” said Stephanos, choosing his moment to reply. “None. Tomorrow he will see that. Today he is angry at the insolent outrage committed on his lands. Who can blame him?”

  But when the Sultan replied the Emperor blamed him self.

  THAT WAS THE DAY THAT DON FRANCISCO DE TOLEDO ARRIVED. he had brought with him a small party of Spaniards willing to fight the Turk. He came to see the Emperor. When the Emperor received him he did not bow low, but strutting forward seized the Emperor by the shoulders, and kissed him on one cheek and then the other, and then, standing, began upon a long farrago of names, all to prove that he was the Emperor’s distant relative—some sort of cousin. An outraged murmur rose from the assembled company at this unheard-of familiarity. Lukas Notaras cried out to the upstart to bow down, to know his place. The Emperor was clearly very surprised at his guest’s behavior. He stared fixedly at the Spaniard. He was a little man, all hung about with festoons of lace, and jewels, and silken fringes, and carrying a hat with a huge curled feather in it. His beard and mustache were tricked into an elaborate array of points. He seemed not at all abashed by the uproar he was causing but stood pertly before the throne of the Emperor as though he really were simply calling upon a cousin of his in some far barbarian country.

  In the long pause the Emperor’s astonishment made, he said in Greek, with a stumbling lilting accent, “I have come to offer my sword, Cousin Empero
r.”

  The Emperor said, “A man who is cousin enough to come and fight for me is surely my cousin indeed.” And moving forward, he returned Don Francisco’s embrace. And then, suddenly, Don Francisco was on his knees at the Emperor’s feet, kissing the Emperor’s hand.

  “He’s good at that,” thought Vrethiki, watching sullenly from his corner. “He knows how to win people. That cocky absurd little man will fight to the death for him now—and a lot of help that will be! But I won’t be won. I’m not so soft. I shan’t forget he keeps me here against my will, in danger, in a quarrel that is none of mine, for the sake of a sideshow Empire, all paint and paste and ruin. I hate him.”

  A common soldier entered, bowing, and said he was on duty at the Charisian Gate, and a party of Turks had brought something to him, and told him to take it to the Emperor. There were two more soldiers with him, carrying a leather sack.

  “Open it,” said the Emperor. Out tumbled two severed heads upon the floor. One lay on its left ear, fixing the Emperor with open staring eyes; the other rolled a little distance on the floor, spilling a spotted trail of gouts of blood. A gasp, then a wail of dismay arose. Don Francisco, at whose feet the rolling head had come to rest, staggered backward, retching into a handkerchief. A whiff of the butcher smell of them reached Vrethiki, and he felt his gorge rising. The Emperor stood stock still, gazing into the glazed eyes of the man whom yesterday he had sent unwilling to the Sultan, with letters asking for peace.

  THE EMPEROR HAD ASKED THE POPE FOR HELP. THE POPE SENT Cardinal Isadore, and two hundred bowmen. They were only two hundred, but they made a goodly show, marching from the Golden Gate down the street called the Mese to the Hippodrome, and from there to their quarters on the wall by Blachernae. They were bravely clad in Papal colors, yellow and white, and armed with breastplates and helms of steel, each carrying a crossbow, and a quiver full of arrows on his back. The sight of them cheered the citizens immensely, and brought the crowd in the street round to the Emperor’s way of thinking, at least for a day or two, though there was still a small group faithful enough to climb the hill of the Pantocrator, and read the note that Scholarios had pinned to the door of his cell there: Woe to those who put their trust in the West, rather than in God!

  The Cardinal was a courteous and reasonable man, though he had come to insist on an immediate end to argument and the proclaiming of the Union of the Churches, and he made himself plain enough, but he had brought with him a fierce little man from Chios, the Arch-bishop Leonard, who made so many and such extreme demands that Lukas Notaras, the Megadux, told him, “Half of this would have the people rioting in the streets.”

  “Less than this,” the Archbishop replied, “and the streets will be in the hands of the Turks!”

  “Peace, gentlemen,” said the Emperor. “Cardinal, I thought the Council of Florence allowed us our own form of worship.”

  “Both Liturgies are equal, my Lord,” said the Cardinal. “So both must be used. You must say a Latin Mass in the Great Church, and proclaim the Union there. The Pope asks only that.”

  So it was decided.

  VRETHIKI COULD SEE THAT HE WOULD HAVE TO WEAR HIS best robe again, so he went and fetched it himself from the wardrobe master the day before. He turned it inside out, laid it across his knees, and spent hours feeling for the sharp ends of wire thread and bending them back with his fingernails, so they lay flat, or jabbed back into the thickness of the purple silk, away from his skin. Then in the morning, when Stephanos woke him, he put it on without a single prick, unflinching, and smoothed it down.

  The fabric was woven all over with medallions between the leaves and branches, and in each medallion was a boy driving a four-horse chariot. Vrethiki rather liked it, if truth were told. And the new day that was just then fingering the rooftops and domes of the City promised at least a ride through the streets, and ceremony to look at, instead of the endless voices of the Emperor’s council room, and, at last, a look inside the famous Church of the Holy Wisdom. But Vrethiki stamped on his lightheartedness. “I should not be here,” he told himself. The anger muscle of his heart was getting tired, but he worked up his rage. “He keeps me prisoner against my will. I am no better off than a young calf driven to the slaughter. I hate him.” Having carefully put himself into a sullen mood, he felt safe again. “Why should I care?” he asked himself fiercely, taking his place at the Emperor’s side and three paces behind him, when the procession mounted and formed up within the palace. “I’m not a Roman, or a Greek. And a lot of difference that will make to a Turk!”

  THEY ENTERED THE GREAT CHURCH THROUGH A HUGE rectangular door. It led into a hall, in which the Emperor’s party halted, while he dismounted. Another vast door faced them, and beyond it another huge hall, running transversely across the church, gleaming darkly with golden mosaic and walled with panels of marble. Here again the party halted. This time a priest came forward, and the Emperor took off his crown, and gave it to him. From this second great hall a third door of towering height led onward; beyond it there was so much light that Vrethiki thought it gave into the open air, except that he could see, seemingly a long way off ahead of them, the sanctuary screen and, beyond it, the altar.

  From that first blinkered glance of a long forward view, Vrethiki unconsciously expected a long church, a marching avenue of columns like the nave of the cathedral at Bristow. Stepping through, on the threshold of the door, he was quite unprepared for the vast width of it—far to his left and right rose the great complex walls—and yet he had seen rightly when he saw that it was very long. Then, looking upward, he was dazzled by the height of it, for the eye of a worshipper on the threshold soared straight to the apex of a vast flattened dome, all pierced with a ring of windows, and shedding angled light—a golden arc, hovering overhead like a dawn; so immense, so brilliantly light, so sky-shaped a building could not seem like inside any where to Vrethiki; and yet it did not seem like outside either, with its dance of encircling columns, cool green, dark porphyry, with its enclosing, billowing, cloudy golden domes and half-domes. It was like some paradisal pavilion—the majestic tent of the Almighty, pitched across the sky. Head in air, gazing round him, Vrethiki blundered up the church, losing his place behind the Emperor, trip ping on someone’s trailing cloak, and then scurrying to catch up.

  “It does look like a tent,” he thought in a little while. “It seems to float, it seems to have no weight.” For where were the massive piers to carry the downthrust? Where were huge columns tensed to carry great loads? Instead he could see only lovely walls, paneled in polished marble, pink and green and yellow, veined and suffused with streaks of creamy white, and bordered with vine-leaf tendrils carved in crisp white glittering stone. The columns were not firmly braced, but seemed delicately suspended, and carried their leafy capitals and the arches above them, all fretted into leaves and flowers and inlaid with purple roundels, as lightly as a dancer wearing a garland. Between the columns were glimpses of aisles and galleries, more light, more surfaces of gold, as though the whole walls were a windowed curtain made of silk rather than stone.

  Yet with all this to look at, the boy’s eyes were drawn upward, rising to the dome. The rim of the dome seemed not quite to touch the tops of the four arches on which it rested; it seemed suspended above them. And under the floating dome, the shining, folded, feathered wings of four dreaming Seraphim drifted shimmering in the angles of the arches.

  The Liturgy was halfway over before Vrethiki came to earth again, and took note of what was happening round him. It was a Latin Mass they were saying. They were saying it to a half-empty church. And most of those present were weeping, weeping and wringing their hands. A wail went up when the Pope’s name was spoken, cries of grief when the priest held up the white disk of unleavened bread. And when Cardinal Isadore mounted the ambo, and began to preach, there were those in the audience who held their hands over their ears.

  “Dearly Beloved Brethren,” said Cardinal Isadore, and then paused for the priest at his side to re
ad the same words in Greek. “I come to you as one who has been chosen by the Lord to gather all His sheep once more into a single fold. I am the legate of the Pope in Rome, and yet I am a Greek like yourselves. Look, brethren, at the great golden roof that stretches above us. It is made of a myriad million tiny pieces of golden glass. Each one of those innumerable pieces is set at a different angle from those around it, so that the whole may sparkle like the stars in the heavens. Even so, beloved brethren, we need not all be in all things the same to be pleasing to God our Father. Our differences may even serve to show forth His glory, if they arise from love of Him, and not from hatred of each other. Let each of us be sure that it is the light of God’s truth that his beliefs reflect, and God in His holy wisdom will unite each different facet in a single eternal refulgence. His will be done. Amen.”

  And, “What does it matter?” thought Vrethiki. “What does any of it matter, compared to this? Churches at home are like hands, human hands laid together in prayer and pointing upward, but this church is like a swelling joy, like the ecstasy of the heart. Compared to this what does a Filioque matter, or a morsel of leaven in bread? Compared to this what do life and death matter, even mine? All that is as nothing, in the eternal wisdom of God.”

  Such a dreamlike peaceful expression lingered on the boy’s face as they departed after the Mass that the Emperor noticed it as he stopped to put on his crown in the outer hall. “God is with you today, my son,” he said. “Stay closely by my side.”

  •

  WHEN THE SULTAN HAD FINISHED HIS CASTLE ON THE bosporus, he announced that no ship should pass it without stopping for his permission. A Venetian galley bringing silk from Trebizond was the first to defy him. His cannon sank it, and his men hauled the sailors out of the fast-running Bosporus current. The crew were decapitated, and the captain impaled.

 

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