Emperor's Winding Sheet

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

  The Emperor rode on. And along that middle stretch of wall he found half the sentries sleeping at their posts. Some of them were literally asleep on their feet, leaning forward through the battlements, or slumped on their cannon, where cannon there was, on the towers of the outer wall.

  “Shall I dismount, and wake them, Sire?” asked Don Francisco, when they found the first few sleeping men.

  The Emperor looked at his soldiers with a certain weary tenderness in his eyes. It happened that the sentry they were standing over had a gash in his cheek, and blood crusted his hand, where it lay flung out beside him, fingers lightly curled round the grasp of his bow. “They sleep the sleep that will not be denied,” said the Emperor. “If you woke him, he would sleep again before we had ridden as far as the next tower. Leave him be.”

  And, indeed, a slowness and weariness seemed to hang over the tents of the enemy also; there was no stir or bustle over there, only, in a little while, the melancholy howling of the call to morning prayer.

  THAT WHOLE DAY WAS QUIET. THE VENETIANS CAME TO THE Emperor, saying they thought it was no longer safe to keep powder and arms in their ships on the Golden Horn. For some reason the Turks had not yet attacked the boom from the Bosporus and at the same time from the Golden Horn, but if they did … It would be better to shift the Venetian armaments to the Emperor’s arsenal at Blachernae, and their ships into the harbor called Neorion; they would bring the crews to help the defense of the walls. The Emperor thanked them. Every man was needed. He asked them to go to the section of wall that was being pounded by the guns on the pontoon bridge.

  Days passed. The Venetian captains had trouble persuading their men to move—they were used to sea fighting, and preferred to remain afloat. Besides, hardly a day went by without some sort of demonstration from the great fleet in the Bosporus. The infidel ships would sail out bravely toward the boom, trumpets and drums sounding; the weary Christian sailors would muster, at the alert, and then without so much as a shot fired, the Turks would with draw. This ludicrous performance was yet enough to fray men’s nerves, especially since everyone was hungry—however fairly shared out, the rations were small—and tired, and suffering from a special kind of irritability and weariness. Vrethiki, who felt it himself, understood it well enough. It came from being always tensed up to meet a crisis—to face disaster—and then finding that the crisis had passed, and the same readiness must be kept up another day, another night, another day. It made everyone heart sick. It was like watching at his father’s sickbed, and coming slowly, and guiltily, almost to wish for what one feared—the end.

  The Emperor drove himself ceaselessly. He hardly ate, he scarcely slept. He kept up his endless touring the walls. He encouraged his soldiers, he gave them his thanks, he remained practical and cheerful with his captains, shrewd and diplomatic in his council. But when the long day was over, and he sat toying with his supper, too tired by far to eat, or when he slept at last, then his two quiet slaves could see the truth on his face. The hollows of his cheeks had so deepened that the lower edge of his cheekbones stood out clearly. The rims of his eye-sockets circled his hollow eyes. One night Stephanos found him already asleep, leaning against the bed, having slept while he still prayed. He fetched Vrethiki to help him lift the Emperor onto the bed and cover him up. Then the two of them stood looking down at the ravaged face of the sleeping man. He had not woken even when they lifted him. “Oh, if only what must happen would be soon—would come tomorrow!” said Vrethiki.

  “It won’t come tomorrow,” said Stephanos somberly. “The moon is still waxing. And this is the City of the Moon, they say, and will fall when the moon is on the wane.”

  “I can’t make you out,” said Vrethiki, when they had withdrawn from the Emperor’s bedside, the boy having seized the bread the Emperor had not eaten, for he was ravenous. “One day you scorn all this prophecy; the next day you don’t.”

  “When prophecies speak for the future,” said Stephanos, who was sunk in gloom, “what use are they? But what is left for us now, except all those threatened fulfillments?”

  “There’s the one that says all will be well while I am close by the Emperor,” said Vrethiki. “There’s that one.”

  “They are all uncertain,” said Stephanos, refusing to smile.

  “I’ll make you a prophecy certain of fulfillment,” said Vrethiki, “Tomorrow will be a horrible day!” And washing down his bread with a gulp of wine, and wishing it were good English ale for once, he took himself to bed.

  •

  YET IT WAS A FINE DAY, AS FAR AS WEATHER WENT. BUT WITH noise, and dust, and hours and hours on horseback, and little time to rest or eat, and continuous agitated talking in foreign tongues, it was, as far as Vrethiki was concerned, as horrible as any other. At sunset the Emperor took a few hours’ rest before going to the night service in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, where those priests who would accept the Union were keeping almost as remorseless a vigil as the fighters on the walls. So the Emperor’s party put on state robes again, and set out by torchlight through the dark streets, under a sky thickly encrusted with stars, and a bright moon, nearly at full.

  In shades of gray and silver the configurations of the City, its soaring columns, and swelling domes, passed by them as they rode, the arches brimming with shadows like silver cups with wine. Ahead, the enormous bulking mass of the Church of the Holy Wisdom, flooded with moon light on the arc of its mighty dome, rose up before them, like a ghost of itself. Within, all was golden: warm lamp light, faithful and hopeful candlelight, the floating odor of incense, and the sonorous mournful music weaving structures in the formless air. And, “How huge it is, and beautiful!” thought Vrethiki, entering. “I always think I have remembered it, and yet always find that I have shrunk and diminished it in memory.”

  The service was long, and after a while the Emperor withdrew to the gallery to rest a little.

  The Emperor’s gallery was richly adorned with mosaic. All round were portraits of earlier, happy Emperors and their consorts, gleaming. On one wall, in a wide bay of the gallery, head and shoulders against a ground of gold, a huge figure stared down at Vrethiki. In one hand it clasped a jeweled book. The bearded face was hollow-cheeked, saturnine, like the Emperor’s; the forehead was grooved. An expression of ineffable sternness, muted ferocity, suffused this visage, and its large dark eyes were fixed on Vrethiki. Wherever he moved in the space of the wide gallery, still the eyes fixedly stared straight at him.

  “Who’s that?” whispered Vrethiki to Stephanos in an interval when the choir’s song was hushed.

  “It is Christ,” said Stephanos. “Who else could it be? Do they not picture Christ in your miserable churches?”

  “Not like that!” murmured Vrethiki. He shrank from that stark fierce image. “We would show Him crucified, or with His disciples, or in the manger …”

  “This image does not mean that Christ was once in Galilee,” Stephanos answered. “It means that He is here, now.”

  Shuddering at the thought, Vrethiki raised his eyes again, timidly, to that fearful picture; and saw that the expression seemed, now, to be not fierce, but pitiful, not remote and stern, but melting into compassion for some thing terrible that it looked upon.

  “Oh, what will happen to us,” cried Vrethiki in his heart, “that it looks on us like Christ looking on Jerusalem?”

  ALMOST IN ANSWER TO THIS THOUGHT CAME THE SOUND OF running footsteps along the gallery toward the Emperor’s marble doors; an agitated messenger brought news of an attack, not in the Lycus valley but at Blachernae, where the wall turned. The Emperor sent Vrethiki to fetch Phrantzes and Notaras, who were praying in the nave of the church, and the little group galloped frantically toward the far end of the City.

  They reached the walls at the same moment as Justiniani, arriving from his section. The Turks were hurling thou sands of men at a breach that had been made just before sunset. They had crossed the fosse and forced their way over the outer wall; a desperate fight was going on alo
ng the line of the fallen inner wall. If the defenders failed to hold them they would be through into the City at a bound.

  “The Kerkoporta!” cried Justiniani. “Out and we’ll take them in the flank!” Shouting and yelling above the chaos, he collected a few of the reserves and disappeared round the corner of the palace buildings, making his way to the sally port. Spurring his horse, the Emperor rode after him, crying words that were lost in the ear-splitting din. Stephanos rushed after him, and Vrethiki followed Stephanos. But when they reached the descent to the Kerkoporta, through which Justiniani’s men had just surged, yelling wildly, they found Varangian John there, holding the Emperor’s horse by the bridle, and shouting, “No, Lord Emperor, no!”

  “Let go!” cried the Emperor. “Let me go!”

  “For the pity of Christ, Sire,” said Stephanos, coming up beside him. “Into that turmoil? Unarmed, and wearing the purple? Keep back, my Lord, do!”

  And even as they argued with him, the Turkish trumpets outside the wall sounded the retreat. The attack melted away into the darkness, the uproar distanced, and faded.

  Justiniani reappeared in a minute or two, grinning widely, saying, “We put a cat after that pigeon then!” His eyes were shining. Vrethiki realized for the first time that Justiniani actually liked fighting; he glowed, he shone with it. Surely there was no braver man in all the world! Soon he had an arm round the shoulders of two Greek captains, and was calling them fine fellows, congratulating them on holding the breach. A repair gang was sent for, and the Emperor rode up and down, talking to soldiers and looking at the gap in the wall with an anxious eye.

  “Too narrow,” said Justiniani. “They need a really big gap to get advantage of their numbers.”

  Just as the Emperor was leaving, the repair gang came up: a long line of citizens carting earth and stones. Vrethiki saw by the light of the torches they carried that half of them at least were women, and some children, younger even than himself. Seeing them staggering, bent under their loads of earth and stone, Vrethiki felt ashamed to be tired merely from long hours riding or standing. And when he returned to the Emperor’s tent, he insisted on Stephanos sitting down while he made the supper himself, and got the beds ready.

  Chapter 16

  The next day, the still-reluctant Venetian sailors were finally talked into leaving their ships; they went to help the defense of the Blachernae quarter, and once they were gone the Sultan moved the guns he had placed at the Valley of the Springs and brought them down to the Lycus valley. His ships were still sailing up and down the Bosporus, making shadow-boxer attacks on the boom.

  A few days after the failure of the assault on the Blachernae walls Minotto came to the Emperor in the early morning, deeply agitated. He said his sentries had heard noises, strange noises, below the walls at night. They had lit flares to see what was happening, and had seen nothing; not a mouse moving. But the sounds went on. And at dawn, when they reported to him, he had seen, some way behind the Turkish lines, a mound of freshly turned earth that had appeared in the last few days. “I think they are digging mines, Sire,” he said. “Tunneling under the walls.”

  At that moment Justiniani arrived, and the tale was told over to him.

  “Tunneling to get in?” asked the Emperor.

  “Perhaps,” said Minotto. “Or perhaps to place explosives under the walls, and blow them up.”

  “What can be done about it?” asked the Emperor in alarm.

  “I’ve got an expert sapper in my company,” said Justiniani. “Brought along on double wages in case of this sort of thing. He’s John Grant. I’ll send him to you at once.”

  “Grant?” said Minotto. “What manner of name is that?”

  “He’s a Scotsman, I think,” said Justiniani.

  JOHN GRANT CAME ONLY JUST IN TIME. HE FOUND A TUNNEL that had nearly reached the wall, near the Caligarian Gate. He got men digging a countermine, broke into the Turkish workings, and threw in Greek fire which burnt the roof props, so that the whole tunnel collapsed, and buried the men in it alive. But any pleasure this achievement gave the Emperor’s advisers was muted by the thought that if there was one tunnel there might be many, and there could be no certainty of finding them all. John Grant with an interpreter was sent to tour the walls, telling all the sentries what kind of thing to watch for, what to listen for; and tired and tense as they already were, that made them still more jumpy.

  IT SEEMED EACH DAY THAT NOT ANOTHER DAY COULD BE borne; yet every day men somehow managed what was needful, somehow lived through it. Then at dawn on the eighteenth of May, excited soldiers arrived to summon the Emperor to the wall. They waved their hands high in the air, urgently describing something. The Emperor, who was at breakfast, put aside the dish, and went with them. “What is it now?” wondered Vrethiki, following. “And I do wish he would eat. He will waste away and die on horseback if this goes on much longer!”

  They had only to ride the few yards to the wall to see what was amiss. A huge siege engine had appeared at the St. Romanus Gate, overnight. It was a scaling tower—a great square wooden scaffold, higher than the outer wall. It was weighed down and steadied with a load of earth and stones, covered with bull hides to protect it from fire, and mounted on wheels, so that it could be trolleyed forward. The platform on top was higher than the battlements, and gave the Turkish bowmen and slingmen who were perched there the advantage over the defenders. And from the top of it hung scaling ladders, ready for use. Certainly Vrethiki needed no interpreter. One had only to look, to see what a terrible difference it made. The stockade made so laboriously, night after night, gave no shelter now to the de fenders.

  “All the men in the City could not have made such a thing in a month,” cried the Emperor, in dismay. “And they have made it in a single night!”

  His voice was cut off by the firing of the great gun from across the fosse on their left. The overpowering flash, bang, roar, and cloud of black smoke rolled over them, and hardly had the sound died away when another thunderous roar followed; the ground quaked beneath their feet, and hordes of soldiers rushed frantically toward them, with a great billowing cloud of pinkish dust rising behind. One of the towers of the wall had been brought down into the moat. And this time the defenders could not simply shore it all up again, and shoot down the Turks who tried to fill in the fosse. The tables were turned. The Turks on the scaling tower shot at them when they tried to rig up a stockade, and the defenders could not get near enough to hinder the operations outside. All day, therefore, they watched helplessly as the bustling innumerable hordes la bored to fill up the fosse. The fallen tower helped the besiegers and they brought up quantities of earth and rubble, rubbish and brushwood, everything they could find to lay on top of it, and fill up the ditch, and make a level causeway over which they could push their scaling tower right up to the wall. By nightfall they had succeeded. The ditch was bridged, the scaling tower was within a few paces of the outer wall, and Justiniani had been forced to withdraw his men from a wide stretch of the terrace there, and man the inner battlement instead.

  He summoned John Grant. The Emperor, who had been on the wall all day, would not leave, but stayed and took a soldier’s supper on the battlements among his men, and would have set his hand to carrying rubble for repairs if Stephanos and Phrantzes had not stopped him. He was like Justiniani, Vrethiki observed, in that danger excited him. An almost feverish light burned in his dark eyes.

  Grant surveyed the filling of the moat. Then he asked for gunpowder, and a handful of picked men. He scrambled down into the darkness with them and disappeared. All the while the defenders were at work on the fallen tower on the wall. The left-hand angle of the stonework was still standing to half its original height, and building onto this, using blocks of stone whenever they could re cover them from the moat, the frantic workers produced a stoutly built, roughly finished strong point where the tower had been.

  At two in the morning Grant clambered back onto the terrace and said he was ready; everyone was to take she
lter, heads down. Because the roadway across the moat had been partly laid on brushwood he had managed to set charges underneath it. There was a dull, rumbling bang, and then fire. The scaling tower caught light easily enough; the beams of it blazed above their heads, and they heard it crash downward when it fell. An hour later, when the flames had died to a pile of glowing ashes, work parties climbed down into the moat, and began the task of clearing the fosse again.

  So at dawn there was no scaling tower, no way across the moat, and no yawning gap in the wall. “We too can work miracles in the space of a single night,” said the Emperor.

  But the soldiers were desperately tired. Four more scaling towers had appeared along the line of the walls at other places, though as yet no attempt was made to fill the fosse in front of them, and there was perilously little gunpowder left in the Emperor’s arsenal.

  JOHN GRANT FOUND A MINE ON EACH OF THE NEXT FOUR days. They were all under the wall round the Blachernae quarter, where the wall was single instead of double, and mostly where the wall jutted outward and for a short distance there was no moat. Grant flooded one mine, smoked out another, and blew up two. Then one evening he came to the Emperor at the evening council, bringing with him a Turkish officer in chains. Justiniani explained he had dug a countermine which had cut off a number of Turks in the end of their tunnel, and he had captured them alive. “This man is an officer, Sire,” he finished off. “But we cannot persuade him to talk. If there are other mines, Sire, he knows where.”