Emperor's Winding Sheet

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

  “I haven’t any money,” said Vrethiki, backing away. The man’s long beard had been oiled with some strong sweet-smelling preparation. The wrinkles that lent a little wisdom to his face had been painted on. “Money?” hissed the fellow, grabbing Vrethiki’s arm. “Why, such a sweet child as you should not bleed for lack of such a trifle as money … Here, young master, yours in exchange for your dagger …” and still holding Vrethiki with one hand, he began to unbuckle the dagger with the other.

  “No!” cried Vrethiki, struggling in the man’s grip. “No, no, no!” And Manuel turned round, and came to Vrethiki’s aid. “Get off, away with you, or I’ll report you to the market archon!” he cried, waving a clenched fist under the ruffian’s nose. “After your dagger, was he?” he said to Vrethiki, mockingly. “It sounded as though he was murdering you at the least!”

  They made their way homeward. First they had to struggle round the press of women at the silk stalls, and there they saw Theophilus Palaeologos, standing waiting for his wife. “Will there be time to have the dress made up?” he said, smiling wryly toward her curtained litter, to which bale after bale was being carried for her approval. “You well may wonder. The world is coming to an end, and my wife is still buying new clothes!”

  Out on the Adrianople road, going toward Blachernae, they came upon a procession. “There seems to be one every day!” thought Vrethiki, and this one was going to St. Saviour in Chora, just within the walls, to beg the Lord God that the citizens might at least be allowed to celebrate Easter in peace.

  THE DAY OF PALMS CAME. THE CITY WAS FULL OF TERRIFIED rumors about the size of the Sultan’s fleet, that was sailing up from the Hellespont. Even so the streets were decked with green branches, myrtle, laurel and olive on every column, every post along the road the Emperor took. He carried a cross in his right hand, and a mantle of acacia-leaf damask wrapped round his left, in which he held a candle. A great procession of priests and noblemen escorted him, on foot, to the Church of the Holy Wisdom. And when, after the Liturgy, he left the church, a little boy in a white garment came running, and seized a branch with a loud cry, and then all the people took branches, and waved them, and trooped home like a garden on the move.

  Maundy Thursday came. They brought twelve paupers to the Emperor’s throne room, clad in new white tunics. The Emperor tied a towel round his waist, poured water into a basin, and knelt on the floor. A reader declaimed in a loud voice the passage of St. John in which it is told how Christ washed the feet of His disciples. The Emperor washed and dried and kissed the right foot of each poor man in turn. Then he gave them three golden coins each, put off the towel, and went to hear the Liturgy. And he neither slept nor ate that day, or the night following, for twelve readings from the Bible were intoned in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and during each of these the Emperor stood before the altar, holding a great candle. And between the readings he withdrew to his own part of the gallery and rested, while glimmering portraits of earlier Emperors stared down on him. A great marble door divided the Emperor’s part of the gallery from the rest, and while the Emperor was within, Vrethiki stood at this door, holding the candle ready for his master to take again as the next reading began. The candle stood half as high again as the boy himself.

  Dawn was breaking before they returned to Blachernae; and even then some ineffably holy icon was being brought in procession, with banners and singing, to the palace, and the Emperor had to stand in the gate and receive it, as though it were an ambassador, or a prince of high rank.

  On Holy Saturday the Emperor sat enthroned in the Great Church, while the priests brought armfuls of laurel, and white lilies, white daisies, piling them in a great mound all round his chair. A huge heap of white and green surrounded him. Then someone cried “Christ is risen!” and the Emperor and his attendants picked up leaves and blooms and threw them left and right at the congregation, and the people ran forward, and taking handfuls of the flowers and branches pelted each other with them, hurling them everywhere in showers, laughing like children in a pillow fight, and shouting “Christ is risen, is risen!” with all their might. And when the service was finished the church floor was littered all over with petals and leaves.

  Easter Sunday came; and before dawn the Emperor and people were gathered in the Great Church holding candles. Singing, they lit the candles one by one, passing the flame from candle to candle, till the whole church was flooded with starry light. Then the Emperor withdrew to the gallery, and the whole of his court followed him there, and coming they knelt before him each in turn, and saying “Christ is risen from the dead!” they kissed his right foot, his right hand, and his right cheek. Each great man in turn greeted him thus; men of lesser rank drew near, and bowed the knee, and then retired. The Venetians in the City kept this respectful distance, but Justiniani kissed the Emperor thrice like one of his own people, and so did the other Genoese. Only when this was over could the Emperor ride home, and break the fast he had been keeping since Maundy Thursday morn.

  And when they reached Blachernae there was news as well as breakfast waiting. An advance guard of Turks had appeared some five miles from the walls; the Varangian captain had taken his men and led them on a skirmishing party, to see if he could delay them.

  By nightfall he had returned. He had lost none of his own men. He had taken some hundred lives of theirs. But he could no more delay them than he could have dammed up a torrent in spate.

  Chapter 10

  It was on the morning of easter Monday, therefore, an hour after daybreak, that the Emperor ordered the gates of the City to be shut, the bridges over the moat to be hewn down. That same day a party of engineers from Genoa and the crews of four ships fixed the great boom across the Golden Horn. This was a huge chain, stretched from a tower of the City wall at one end to a tower of the walls of Pera at the other. There was some doubt whether the men of Pera would permit it to be fixed, but the engineer, Soligo, managed to fix it working from without, not needing to ask leave to enter Pera to do it; so he was allowed to make it fast. Along the length of the chain wooden rafts were anchored to float it and support it, and between one raft and another ten ships were drawn up, moored to the boom, and ready to defend it against any attempt to cut it and break through.

  Each hour of the morning news came in to the Emperor. The boom had been fixed; the Turks were massing before the walls; the Sultan was pitching his great tent among the anissaries, his crack troops, in the Lycus valley, opposite the weakest stretch of the walls; ships were in sight off the City, making up the Bosporus.

  Vrethiki was in agony that morning. Not since those few moments of tranquillity and joy the Great Church had given him had he been able to work up the familiar brew of rage and resentment against the Emperor. Without it he was like a hermit crab wrenched from its shell: flinching and exposed. That morning he wasn’t exactly afraid; that could be dealt with by fingering his dagger, and thinking how brave and capable Justiniani was; but he was still trembling in the joints and lurching in the stomach with something; like the excitement that had made him sick the night before he embarked on the Cog Anne. At the thought of being sick in the Emperor’s throne room he quailed and gulped; and when the news of the approaching ships came in, and the Emperor dispatched Stephanos hot-foot to the sea walls to make an accurate count of them, Vrethiki went too, unasked, and burst out into fresh air just in time to quell his sickness.

  The ships were galleys, making upstream under oar. They were keeping over toward the Asian shore, and although the beat of the drums they rowed to came faintly across the blue channel, Vrethiki could not make out much about them, so far away, and looked at against the light. The count went on and on, Stephanos and three soldiers each making a separate tally, one to check against another: so many biremes and triremes, and sloops and cutters. It soon became clear that there was a vast number of all kinds, and gloom descended on the watchers on the walls.

  Vrethiki still felt queasy. The heat of the sun and the height of the walls were maki
ng him feel sick again. He left the vantage point, and descending the walls, wandered away alone into a quarter of the City he had not been in before. On these terraced slopes the ancient palace of the Emperors once had been. Now it lay ruined, courtyard after courtyard fallen and overgrown. Here and there a church stood, still precariously kept up. In one great fallen room there was a mosaic floor, with a bear on it, pawing and nosing an apple that rolled before him. Open to the air, and muddy, and covered with weeds, this floor was only visible in patches, here and there. A little way from the bear Vrethiki found two fat boys in short tunics, playing with wheeled hoops. He wandered on. All the rooms and courts of this palace overlooked the sea: the shimmering hazy Marmara with its cloudy dark islands, and the bright deep sparkling Bosporus. “If I were Emperor, here’s where I’d like to live,” Vrethiki said.

  He was somewhere in the heart of the labyrinthine ruin now. On his right rose the great bulk of the Church of the Holy Wisdom; ahead, the massive curved tiered arches of the Hippodrome, crumbling at the top like a row of bad teeth, but below still grand and solid. A light cool breeze blew off the encircling sea. He was standing in a place that had once been rich; there were columns, some fallen, three still standing, of Thessalian marble, cool and green as shal low water. Broken marble lay around. A wide flight of steps led down from what must have been a columned portico, and a little way from the foot of the steps was the round marble parapet of a well. Vrethiki leaned on the parapet, and looked down. The black shaft was impenetrable at first. But as his eyes dilated he could see far down into the dark. Set in the green mossy masonry of the shaft wall there was a row of iron bolts—footholds to climb down there. “Ugh!” said Vrethiki, shuddering at the thought. And then he saw, far far below, a tiny spark of light. He could not think what it could be. He moved round the rim of the well a bit, and at once the spark was extinguished. He moved again. Whatever it was could be seen from only one angle. Of course—the well must be dry, and something shiny was lying at the foot of it, catching a stray gleam of sun. Vrethiki tossed a lump of stone down, and listened. No splash; only, seconds later than he had expected it, a just perceptible thud.

  “Dry as dust,” he said. “I wonder what it is down there.” And then he heard his name called, and here was Stephanos coming. The last of the ships had passed upstream, and they must return to the Emperor with news.

  “This is finer than Blachernae,” Vrethiki said. “Why did the Emperors move?”

  “It’s long ago,” said Stephanos abstractedly. “How would I know?” He was glancing anxiously at his lists as he walked.

  “You seem to know such a lot of things …” murmured the boy.

  “Well, then, let me think,” said Stephanos, suddenly pleased, “What do I know about this place? There was a throne room somewhere here, built for the Emperor The ophilus, that had a throne mounted on golden lions, so made that they opened their mouths and roared. And the throne rose upward toward the roof, levitating the Emperor far above the heads of his prostrate visitors. And in the room itself there was an avenue of golden and silver trees, with fruit and flowers made of gemstones, and little golden birds, which flapped their wings and sang.”

  Vrethiki gaped. “What happened to it all?” he asked.

  “The Crusaders looted it, I suppose,” Stephanos said. “Anything that was left. The Emperors had already gone to the other palace. And when we got the City back it was too late to save this place because they had sold the lead off the roof to pay their debts, and it was all too far decayed. Come now, we must make haste back with this news, little comfort though it will bring.”

  •

  LATER THE WHOLE COURT, ALL THE EMPEROR’S ADVISERS, rode the length of the land walls, to see the enemy. The Turkish battalions were drawn up before the walls, patterning the land with lines of tents, with banners and standards from end to end of the walls, and as far as the eye could see. As far as they could see across the rolling hills outside the City stretched the hordes of the enemy, and how far beyond who could say? Standards stood planted before each unit, topped with plaques of brass, and bearing horsetail plumes. The Turks’ bright armor, their fluted, pointed helmets, glittered in the slanting evening light. The Sultan’s tent, of red cloth with golden fringes, stood shining, with all its tent poles fluttering banners on the wind. Already they were building an earth wall in front of their camp, running the length of the land walls, just beyond the moat. And the party on the walls could see them bringing up great guns; huge guns. All along the wall the black muzzles of their artillery pointed at the City; in the Lycus valley guns were being massed, row upon row. And one cannon was being dragged into position that was taking fifteen pairs of oxen to bring forward into place. It was still golden from the casting, not tarnished green yet.

  “Urban’s work, no doubt,” muttered Stephanos to Manuel. It made the culverins and catapults mounted on the walls look like toys.

  The Emperor rode on the wall, looking. The fiery light of sunset cast a lurid glare over the gaily clad horde and their gear. Then darkness came, swiftly, as always surprising Vrethiki, and making him wistful for the long gray evenings of a northern land. Still the Emperor rode the walls in the darkness. The plain was murmurous; a whisper of myriad noises ceaselessly jumbled reached their ears. A horse neighed. A voice called. The campfires of the count less enemy were lit one by one, a scatter of scarlet sparks on the invisible fields. Far across the land they clustered as thickly as the stars in the brilliant sky above.

  Chapter 11

  In the emperor’s anteroom a fire basket was lit and glowing gently beneath the lamps. Phrantzes awaited him, his brow knitted up into a despairing frown. There were papers in the secretary’s hands. The Emperor tossed off his cloak, which Stephanos bore away. He came and held his hands out to the comforting glow of the burning wood. He stamped his feet on the floor, shaking off the chill of the cold night ride.

  “I see it is bad,” he said to Phrantzes. “Let me know it.”

  Phrantzes whispered in a hollow voice, like a man who finds it painful to speak, “Six thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three.”

  The Emperor started. “What?” he cried. “How is that possible? That cannot be all!”

  “The number of all the citizens thought to be capable of bearing arms, including monks and priests, is four thou sand, nine hundred and eighty-three,” said Phrantzes heavily. “As to the foreigners, it’s hard to be certain, since I could not compel them to make an exact return. But they number roughly two thousand.”

  The Emperor was silent. At last, “How many do you reckon come against us?” he asked.

  “As near as we can tell, a hundred thousand fighting men, and more supporters. My Lord, if you would retire to a place of safety, there to continue, at least in name …”

  “I would not,” said the Emperor. “But listen, old friend. On your loyalty, let nobody know that figure. Only you and I and these four walls must know it.” Then he turned to Stephanos, who murmured, “My Lord, you know I am trustworthy …”

  The Emperor nodded, and laid his hand for a moment on Stephanos’ shoulder.

  “The boy,” said Phrantzes. “I have seen him often gossiping with the Varangians.”

  “But he speaks no Greek,” said the Emperor.

  And luckily for Vrethiki’s fragile peace of mind, it was true he had not understood.

  “A CIRCUIT OF FOURTEEN MILES,” SAID JUSTINIANI, IN THE war council. “And how many men to defend them?” No one made answer. “Not above ten thousand, anyway,” he went on briskly. “In my opinion we cannot man both inner and outer walls, and must therefore fight on the outer one.”

  “A few bowmen, and some catapults on the inner wall perhaps,” said John Dalmata. “They would be worth sparing from the main force to pick off any very forward Turk.”

  “And fighting between the walls,” remarked Justiniani, “will allow us to lock the inner wall behind the men. That will stiffen their courage. The odds are very long, Lord Emperor. Be it
so; the longer the odds, the greater our glory will be!” and he grinned, unseasonably.

  The Emperor began allotting places. He himself with his own troops, the Varangians, took the Lycus valley, where the battle would be fiercest, with Justiniani on his right, on the slopes rising and then falling to Blachernae. Nowhere were there Venetians fighting next to Genoese, yet the men of various nations were carefully mingled, so that they might see clearly how one depended upon all.

  “We must take up these positions by tomorrow,” said the Emperor. “The Sultan will not join battle till he has offered us the choice of surrender, for his law forbids it. Nevertheless, we would do well to be ready from tomorrow. And Trevisano, will you take your gallant sailors and the Lion banner of St. Mark and march the length of the walls, that the Sultan may see there are Venetians as well as Romans among his enemies?”

  “Gladly, Lord Emperor,” said Trevisano.

  At nightfall came the Sultan’s message under flag of truce. He would spare the people’s lives and property if they would surrender willingly to him. This offer the Emperor and his council refused.

  VERY EARLY IN THE MORNING, VRETHIKI STIRRED IN HIS BED. Something had woken him. What? He could hear nothing now except the startled calling of a bird a little distance off. Pale light and a clear lemon sky showed through the window. Dawn. But he had woken dreaming of something—a nightmare, for he had woken sweating, for a moment relieved to find it was a dream, and then for a fleeting second had thought it real. What was it? His father falling in an upstairs room, the day the sickness came upon him. They had heard the heavy thud upon the ceiling boards; they had run up the stairs, and flung open the door. His father had been lying with a purple twisted face upon the floor, with his arms thrown up, and the coin he had been counting scattered all around him … Or had it been that terrible moment when the Cog Anne was beating through wind and rain, running for shelter to a port called Modon. They saw, or thought they saw, the lighthouse, the great fiery flare set up to warn them, a little way ahead, but to the right, when it should have been on the left. And then suddenly a great jarring shock ran through the ship from end to end, and she keeled over swiftly in the furious seething waters … How had he come to imagine the dream was real?