Emperor's Winding Sheet

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

  The Emperor asked nobody’s advice. His soldiers stood waiting, looking at him expectantly, anxiously. An expression of distress and distaste showed on Phrantzes’ face. Theophilus had turned away. Notaras looked resolved, but tense. The Emperor sat staring at the Turkish officer, who stood defiantly, his swarthy face set, his head held high. He was sweating visibly, and a muscle in his cheek twitched. “He is afraid,” thought Vrethiki curiously. It had not struck him till then that one of them might be as afraid as he.

  “Why is he here?” whispered Vrethiki to Stephanos, but he got no answer. The Emperor looked grieved. He rested his forehead in his hands, and then looked up again at the prisoner.

  Then, “God forgive me, but he must be persuaded,” he said. Vrethiki saw the relief on Grant’s face, the flicker of faint surprise but approval on Justiniani’s. They dragged the Turk away. Only Theophilus challenged the decision with his eyes.

  Next morning Grant came to report that all the mines were found, blocked and destroyed.

  IN THE AFTERNOON THE EMPEROR WAS CALLED TO CARDINAL Isadore’s position. The men on the sea walls had sighted a ship, a small ship, coming alone. She was flying Turkish colors, but keeping well off the Asian shore, and setting a course as if for the Golden Horn. Horses were brought, and the Imperial party made ready to go and see what was happening. But though he was briefly tempted by the thought of the open dewy air blowing off the sea, Vrethiki was so chafed and fretted by this life of continuously riding, continuously walking, like a captive in chains, just behind the Emperor, that he pretended to be having trouble with his stirrup, and as the others moved off he dismounted and fiddled with the strap. Then, remounting, he followed some distance behind. As soon as they started down the Mese, he turned off down a side street, and a feeling of freedom and joy swept over him straight away, to be just once on his own, deciding where he would go, what he would do.

  Almost at once he found himself in a street of wooden houses. A little way along was a small church made of the palest possible rose-pink brick, its walls all patterned and embossed and its little domes nestling together above. A trailing plant festooned with purple flowers hung over a garden wall beyond it. The noise of the guns was distant; Vrethiki could hear the bees in the blossoms at his side. The street was empty, though behind the lattice shutters of upper windows Vrethiki discerned one or two shadowy movements. And these houses were not tumbledown at all, but rather neat and pretty; just the kind of thing, Vrethiki thought, that his own family might live in, a house of the middle sort, neither grand nor miserable. And this wasn’t what he was looking for at all. He needed somewhere scruffy, somewhere a trifle villainous; for, it had come to him all at once, what he wanted was food. Of course, all the food in the City was rationed, but Vrethiki knew enough of life to know that even so there was bound to be somewhere where things could be had. He slipped his hand inside his shirt, where he had sewn the little red bundle with the coronation bounty in it, and the coin he had been given for nursing the Emperor—how long ago!—on the voyage from the Morea. He grinned to himself a little, thinking how eagerly he had hoarded it, and how it had been donkey rides and ships’ passages all the way home to England, and how now, if he could get a fish for it, or a chicken … And all the while he was riding on.

  He passed a water-seller, leading a donkey with great clay jars slung on its either flank, and then the road wound downhill, descending gently to the Marmara shore. It seemed as if good luck had brought the boy to the sort of place he was looking for: the streets opened out here, there was a lettuce plot, and a man with a flock of four or five skinny sheep. Beyond was a house with a goat tethered at the door. Vrethiki looked into the courtyard of this house, and saw three hens pecking in the dust. His mouth watered. He had found the quarter where farming folk lived, and none of them looked peaked or starving, he remarked. So he dismounted, and leading his horse by the bridle, walked over to an old woman, sitting in her doorway, and with his halting Greek, and an elaborate mime of eating and paying, asked if she had food to sell.

  She jumped up, shaking her head, and waving her arms, and let loose a great stream of Greek of which he under stood not a word. It was very clear though that she was saying no. But why was she advancing on him shaking her fist? He backed away, and turning to a man in the little crowd that had gathered, he began to make the request again, only to meet the same infuriated outburst. This time they made it plain by gestures that he had better be off, and when he mounted his pony, and rode smartly away toward the Marmara, glittering in the distance, he was followed by catcalls, and handfuls of pebbles thrown after him.

  Still determined, he rode on, till he reached the sea wall, and turning, followed a road that led along it. This soon came out on one of the harbors in the southern wall where he found an old man sitting, splicing rope, and two small children throwing pebbles in the water. The boy asked again for food, this time showing his money. The old man shook his head. He waved an arm toward the arches that led out to sea, and said, “Turki!” Vrethiki said, “Basileus”—the Greek for “Emperor” at least he did know. Then he put his hands on his stomach, and grimaced sadly; then he pressed his fingers into his cheeks to make hollows in them.

  The old man looked shrewdly at him from under bushy brows; then he simply got up and walked away. Vrethiki gloomily stayed looking at the water, baffled, but unwilling to give up. Presently he saw the old man returning, accompanied by an equally elderly monk, who walked on two sticks, and whose legs seemed to bend at every step. The two came slowly toward him, and the newcomer asked in a quavering voice, in Latin, “You want food?”

  “Yes,” said Vrethiki. “I can pay.”

  “Did the Emperor send you?”

  “No, no,” said Vrethiki. “He doesn’t know where I am, and neither does anyone else. But he looks so tired and thin … I would like to find him some supper.”

  “You have not come to spy on us?”

  “No, I swear it,” cried Vrethiki, light dawning. That was what the fuss had been about; everybody knew he was the Emperor’s page, and they thought he was tricking them, to catch them out in shady dealing.

  The monk stared at him for a long time. Then, “We will catch a fish for you,” he said, “but you must swear not to say where you got it.”

  The old man stared anxiously up at the wall, where one or two soldiers stood. “Give us the money now,” the monk said to Vrethiki. He offered his hoard. They took the bronze coins and one of the silver. Then the monk led Vrethiki to a tiny boat tied up in the harbor while the other climbed up the sea wall, and talked to the guard there, and, Vrethiki guessed, bribed him. Then the three of them, with Vrethiki and the fisherman paddling, put out to sea through a narrow low archway in the fortified quay, for the main entrance to the harbor had been blocked with balks of timber and scuttled ships.

  They put out only a little way. Behind them, the gray mass of the sea wall with its bands of red loomed up out of its own wavy reflection. The fisherman cast his nets, and the monk kept a watch out for Turkish galleys. They landed a large fish almost at once, but the monk said they could not go in till they had got three—“One for you, one for us, one for the sentry.” And there were not so many fish to be got like that, hugging the foot of the wail where the water was shallow. While they waited, trailing the net, the little boat edged along, drifting toward the tip of the City. “Paddle harder,” said the monk to Vrethiki. “We mustn’t be far from that arch if a Turkish galley comes.”

  “The current is strong here,” said Vrethiki.

  “Not as strong as over there, where the Bosporus flows out,” said the monk, bending over the net so low that his beard was almost in the water. “This current along the wall is only an eddy, my brother tells me, made by the suck of the stronger one. Out there it goes so fast on the surface that an orange thrown overboard will catch up with the ship, and knock against it.”

  “The current would speed the ship also,” said Vrethiki, grinning. “Tell your brother that’s a re
al fisherman’s tale!”

  “Deeper down there are cross currents. A big ship, riding deep, is pulled several ways at once.”

  “That sounds like perilous water,” said Vrethiki, looking at the serene surface of the sea.

  “You have seen the little birds on the water at evenfall?” said the monk. “Souls of dead sailors. Souls of the drowned.”

  At that moment the net tugged a little. They drew it in with three more fish tangled in it, and then paddled for safety, not before time, because the venal sentry on the walls above them began just then to call out that an enemy vessel was coming.

  Thus it was that Vrethiki set out to ride back with a fine fresh halibut in his saddlebag. But he thought better of going home again the way he had come, past all those angry folk, especially with a visible bulge in his bag, so he rode along the wall as far as the Studion Monastery, which lay serenely in its gardens on its lovely windswept slope, facing the sea and the prospect of islands, and then he cut toward the wall, and rode back by way of the wide paved road that ran along at the foot of the inner wall. So he came to be riding past Justiniani’s quarters, which were great arched rooms in the thickness of the wall, facing the City, and there he saw standing a cart piled with rubbish, a patient donkey between the shafts. A body was thrown on the tailboard of the cart, among the refuse and the mutton bones. Flies crawled over it. A cannon boomed, and they buzzed a few inches into the festering air, and then settled again. The body was hideous with injury. The hands tied together had no fingernails, the naked feet neither nails nor toes. The ribs were striped and flayed with blows and burns, and even though the head was hanging upside down over the edge of the cart, Vrethiki knew who it was, or had been. It was the Turkish officer they had captured the day before. Vrethiki’s stomach lurched. He turned his eyes away and rode past.

  “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” DEMANDED STEPHANOS, AS HE entered the Emperor’s tent. “Come on at once. The Emperor is going to Blachernae. That ship was the brigantine that left here twenty days ago, in search of news, the one you might have been on. Her captain is on his way to report to the Emperor.”

  The Emperor sat in the great golden throne room of the palace, and the captain and his crew trooped in, and bowed low. In a subdued voice, the captain told the Emperor they had sailed the Aegean for days and days, and found neither a fleet coming to aid the City, nor in any harbor any news of one. “When we thought it useless to search longer, Lord Emperor,” he said, and his voice shook as he spoke, “we debated all together what we should do. And one man said it was useless to return to a City doubtless already fallen and laid waste; but all the rest of us said that whether it was to life or death, it was our duty to return to you, and tell you.”

  The Emperor sank his head in his hands and wept. He rose from his throne, and going to the captain embraced him like a brother. He thanked him for his loyalty, and still weeping silent tears, and still holding the captain’s hand, he said, “No earthly aid, then, will be given us. We must put our faith in Christ, and in His Holy Mother, and in St. Constantine, the founder and helper of our City.”

  That night the Emperor prayed for hours, on his knees before the icon of the Virgin that hung in his rooms at Blachernae. It was late before they rode back in the soft moonlight, to sleep in the tent by the walls.

  “I feel ill,” said the Emperor to Stephanos, as Stephanos drew off his boots.

  “You should eat more, my Lord,” said Stephanos.

  “To cure despair?” said the Emperor, with a trace of a bitter smile.

  “To give you strength to bear it,” said Stephanos almost sternly.

  “I can’t eat more bread than I do,” said the Emperor. “It lies on my stomach like a stone.”

  And just at that moment Vrethiki brought his saddlebag in, and proudly showed Stephanos his fish.

  “But I promised not to say where I got it,” he added.

  So the Emperor had a piece of fish, grilled on the fire in his tent, to fortify him against despair. And when he was in bed and sleeping, Vrethiki and Stephanos ate up the rest.

  Chapter 17

  There was a quarrel the next day. The Venetians had made wooden mantles, covered with skins and padding, behind which to fight where the walls had lost their battlements. They asked some citizens to carry them to the walls, and the Romans refused unless they were paid. Why should they take orders from foreigners, and followers of the heathenish Latin rite? The Venetians fought a whole day without their protective cover, and their resentment knew no bounds. The Emperor patched it up, talked them into making peace with each other, but only with difficulty. The sullen citizens told him they must have time or money, to find food for their families. That was why they would not work unpaid.

  “How will your families fare if the defense of the City fails?” he asked them.

  “What is it to us, if the City stands, and our families starve?” they muttered.

  That night was the night of the full moon. The Emperor was coming away from the night Liturgy in the Church of the Holy Apostles, the streets were full of people dispersing from the churches, and suddenly a great crying and wailing and groaning was set up; everyone was pointing and looking skyward, with voices full of dismay. The silver moon of Byzantium, shining in her gossamer sky among the stars, was being slowly blacked out, eclipsed. A black shadow crept across half her face; the rest was suffused with a blood-red stain. The Emperor and his party rode home in thickening darkness with random cries of anguish ringing in their ears. At the tent door, Vrethiki paused and looked up. The superstition of the Romans no longer filled him with derision, but with a kind of heaviness of heart. He tried to imagine what he would feel if he really thought the moon was the symbol of his City, and he saw, where the moon should be, a circle of coppery red, glowing somberly like the ashes of a dying fire. He stood looking up for some time, and then as he watched, the darkness began to pass off the moon. A bright silver sliver of clear moon appeared, but between the darkness and the brightness was a wide band of blood-red light.

  EARLY NEXT MORNING THE EMPEROR SUMMONED HIS COUNCIL, and all the priests of importance in the City—those who would come when he summoned. “We must do something to steady the people,” he said. “They will become a terrified rabble if we cannot calm and encourage them. We must carry the sacred icon of the Virgin round the City, and to the Church of the Holy Wisdom. The people all together can pray for a blessing. Can this be done?”

  “It shall be done,” the priests promised him.

  “At this time, above all we should be united,” said the Emperor. “Fathers, will you ask Scholarios to walk with you?” But at this there was an outburst of indignation from Archbishop Leonard, one of those who had come with Cardinal Isadore.

  “We can take no part in a ceremony in which that enemy of the Union partakes—that turncoat, that arch heretic!”

  The Emperor sighed. Notaras spoke. “Good Father,” he said to Leonard, “we are all in one peril. Cannot we all pray together, and forget our differences?”

  “There can be no differences!” cried the Latin bishop. “The Union of our Churches was agreed, agreed and signed to. Those who will not accept it now are damned heretics! We should spurn them, punish them till they are of a better mind. As for your procession: I will not walk with Scholarios—I would as soon go in procession with the devil himself!”

  Cardinal Isadore put a hand on his bishop’s arm, as though to restrain him, but Notaras cried, “For my part I would sooner see the Turkish turban in the Church of the Holy Wisdom than the Latin miter!”

  And at that a silence fell, and men looked at each other warily. “Oh, Lukas, Lukas,” said the Emperor. “And that wish too likely to be granted!”

  “Make your procession, Lord Emperor,” said Cardinal Isadore quietly. “I and my clergy will take part, and look neither to right nor to left to see who else is with us.”

  Yet the outburst cast a shadow on the procession; and it was wasted too, for Scholarios would not come, but s
ent prophetic damnations from his tightly locked cell. And hardly had they got the great icon on its wooden platform, resting on the shoulders of four priests, than someone stumbled, and it slipped, and fell in the mire, face down. A horrified gasp ran round the crowded faithful. The icon had to be blessed before it was lifted, and then it seemed very heavy, like lead, and it took six men to raise it up again. It was a picture so covered and cased in silver and crusted over with jewels that only the Virgin’s face was visible, and that was a little brown oval, in which her features could be dimly descried through a coating of hundreds of years of candle smoke and incense. But it was immensely holy, Stephanos told Vrethiki, because it had been painted from the life, by St. Luke.

  After that the procession did start to move, intoning Kyrie Eleison. They had hardly gone a step when the sun went in, and, looking up, Vrethiki saw the sort of thick melted dark-gray cloud that he hardly remembered seeing since he left England, and a large raindrop splashed his cheek. At first, so used had they all become to the sound of bombardment all day, they did not realize it was thunder that rolled overhead, but soon it growled and boomed louder than the guns of the Sultan. Rain pattered down. The icon itself was being carried under a silken canopy, and when the rain suddenly hardened, and changed from gentle drops to a solid downpour, the procession only wavered, and continued onward. The rain daggers churned up the road to puddles and mud in moments, and soaked the worshippers to the skin. Children clung to their parents, pulling folds of their mothers’ clothes round their heads. Vrethiki, bare-headed, could feel the rain tapping on his scalp through his hair, and a rivulet ran chilly down his spine. The head of the procession reached a forum, where roads came up from the Marmara, and from the Horn.