A Place Called Armageddon

by C. C. Humphreys

  He slipped it into a pocket, where its head clinked against something. He delved, found coins, brass knuckles – and his ivory nose. It reminded him of the fight, and his rescue by the strange masked youth. Had he even been real? Where had he gone? He would have liked to have thanked him.

  He heard more voices from the docks. He had no time to wait for his benefactor. But in case he returned, he stepped back to the entrance of the warehouse and threw a silver Ragusan libertine onto the pile of jute sacks. A reward, should the youth come back and find it.

  He tied the false nose, then his mask, into place as he walked the short distance to the docks. Men were holding a rowboat close to the jetty. ‘A place for one more,’ he said, adopting the accent he hated.

  One of the holding men looked up. ‘What ship?’

  What was the name the captain had said? ‘The Raven,’ he answered.

  ‘That’s her weighing anchor now,’ the man said, nodding to the water. ‘But we’ll likely rendezvous in Chios or Lesbos. You can catch up with her there.’

  Gregoras nodded, took the man’s hand, stepped aboard, dropped onto a bench. Two men came running down the dock, and when they were seated too, the boat shoved off. They made good speed across the waters of the Horn towards the black shapes further out. It was light enough now to make out the city walls behind him. A little west of where he’d embarked was the gate of Theodosia. If he looked hard, he would have been able to spy a little platform of rock before it. Ghosts upon it. His. Sofia’s. Who they’d made there.

  Gregoras closed his eyes.

  Leilah watched the last of the seven ships dance as it entered the waters where the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara all met, causing chop that was called anafor in the Turkish tongue. If Gregoras had woken as wine-heavy as she expected, his stomach would not relish the lurching.

  It was the ship he was on; she’d seen him board it, her crossbow eye spotting him, recognising his black cloak and hat as he climbed up the rope ladder. When she’d returned to the warehouse, found him missing, she’d run where she’d thought he might go, in search of what she’d gone to fetch for his awakening – water, in a skin under her arm. But he wasn’t in the shack of a tavern on the dock. He was already upon the sea.

  The ship rounded Acropolis Point and was gone. Still she didn’t move, stood squinting against sunlight reflecting off water. The sun had cleared the rain clouds away, and sparkled now on the rooftops and towers of Galata across from her. All was bright – except in her heart.

  With a curse, she shut her eyes to the sunlight, tried to think. She’d been foolish to consider stealing the book now. It was clear, in the charts she’d drawn – her own, Mehmet’s, Gregoras’s – when it would be hers. After the city was taken, not before. But still Gregoras had to be there for that. He was not meant to leave.

  And yet? That he had gone did not mean he could not return. Ships put about. Ships … sank.

  She smiled, as her shoulders eased. He had walked through the door lined with fish oil. He was hexed, was and would for ever be hers. And there were other hexes she knew, to do with everything from love to finding a lost comb. Curses too, which could be laid on man or anything he wrought. Including what he sailed in.

  All she needed was something of his, something from his hand. In her trade, silver was always preferable.

  She opened her eyes, turned away from the water to the land, into the sun. Laughing, she spun high into the air the coin she’d found where he’d lain, watching as it flashed and sparkled, rose and fell against the walls of doomed Constantinople.

  – FIFTEEN –

  The Laughing Dove

  Constantinople

  11 April 1453

  It was such a familiar sound. Yet it always surprised her, that chuckle right outside her window, high-pitched, staccato. ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha,’ it came again, caught between a call and a croon, the middle of the laugh as if the joke had only then been fully realised.

  ‘Swiftly! Minerva! Here! Here!’ Sofia called softly.

  Her daughter looked up from the floor and the sprawl of wool poppets she had there. ‘I am teaching,’ she said, frowning at the interruption.

  ‘And will again, my duckling,’ Sofia whispered. ‘But come here now. I have something lovely to show you.’

  Minerva rose, danced over. ‘A sweetmeat?’

  Sofia shook her head. Since the bridges were broken, and the boom drawn across the Golden Horn, little new food had come into the city. Sweetmeats were in short supply. ‘Something better. Something wonderful. Shh!’ She put her finger to her lips. ‘And look.’

  She drew her daughter a few paces towards the centre of the room, into the rectangle of morning light that came from the open window. ‘There,’ she said, pointing.

  Minerva sucked in a breath. ‘Ooh! So lovely.’ She stretched up, put her lips close to her mother’s ear, whispered loudly, ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s called a laughing dove. Listen!’

  That call came again, a series of notes, another joke understood. Minerva giggled. ‘It thinks it’s funny!’

  ‘Yes. They come every year. It means spring is truly here at last. I was beginning to doubt it would come.’ The bird was rooting in a box of earth Sofia kept on the window ledge. ‘See the head? It’s your favourite colour, pink.’

  ‘Oh yes. And it has spots on its throat. Black spots!’

  ‘It has. And though the wings are red, can you see the blue and grey in them too?’ Sofia sighed. ‘So beautiful. It doesn’t care about anything …’ she faltered, ‘out there. It only wants to laugh. And find someone to laugh with.’

  Minerva looked up. Her mother had stopped smiling. There was some darkness in her eyes. Minerva wanted it to go away. ‘I’ll get you the funny bird,’ she cried. Leaping up, she ran through the sunlight towards the window.

  The startled dove took off. A flash of chestnut underwings and it was gone.

  ‘Oh.’ Minerva stopped, fingers up and into her mouth.

  Sofia rose from her knees, went and put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. ‘Do not worry, child. It will return.’

  She stared out of the window, at a sky clear of clouds, a vibrant pigeon-egg blue. Few sounds came from the street, unusual on such a day and such a busy route to the wharves. But she knew where most of the people were – where she would be, had not Theon forbade it. Upon the walls, looking at what else the spring had brought her beloved city. Waiting for a sound that had no laughter in it.

  The laughing dove flew north-west. Seeking open ground beyond the stones of men, his call changed from coo to the cry of flight, which he hoped would bring him to others of his kind. When he reached the Blachernae palace, an avenue of Judas trees in full bloom within its walls caught his questing eye. He dropped down to settle on a branch, and laughed again.

  Theon glanced up, but could not see the source of the laughter within the pink explosions, or what it was that was mocking him. Yet it seemed fitting that the sound should accompany him as he walked the last stretch of ground before the battlements, deriding his failures. Failures emphasised by the armour he had been forced to don, the weapons he now carried. His true skills – in diplomacy, subversion, manipulation – were to be put aside. The ones he had little skill in were called upon now. He was kavallarios, a knight in the imperial service, of the noble family of Lascaris. The fact that the lowliest bashibazouk in the Turkish forces could probably strip him of his father’s sword and kill him with it was of no consequence. He must be seen to swing it at his emperor’s side.

  His father’s sword! It was a heavy monster, not like the elegant scimitars even Theon could lift and many in the city used. But old swords, like ancient loyalties, had to be borne. It swung from his belt now, slapping his greaves with a repetitive and annoying clang.

  He paused to catch his breath, pulling away the gorget from his throat. Despite all the sewing and padding that Sofia had done, the armour – and especially the domed helmet – chafed.
His brother would love this, he knew, would be bounding up the stairs ahead, eager for the fight. Where was he? He had not glimpsed him since the night of their reunion three months before. Was he now part of the desperately thin line of men that ran the length of the land walls? One of two or three men watching from each tower along the sea? Or had he already slipped away? That was most likely. He was still a fugitive, after all.

  Theon wished he could have slipped away too. Vanished at the same time as his last hope: that Constantine would take his very subtly delivered advice – for it would not have done to be caught advocating this line too strongly – and accept Mehmet’s terms of surrender. The city would have been saved from pillage, its women from rapine, its children from slavery – and Theon could have accompanied Constantine into some very comfortable exile in the Morea. Or stayed, and seen what accommodations could be made with the new masters. Instead … well, he had never had much hope. Constantine was too proud of his family name of Palaiologos, of his title. And too lacking in imagination to heed subtlety, or recognise a good offer. He was a blunt soldier only, entirely without imagination, without any of the true qualities of leadership. He was of the type that had presided over the steady erosion of all Byzantium’s power. And now, lacking the wit to do anything else, he would preside over its inevitable fall.

  ‘And I,’ Theon muttered to himself, ‘lacking the wit to do anything else, will fall with it.’

  He heaved himself onto the first of the battlement stairs. Behind him, in the Judas trees, the bird mocked him all the way up them.

  When he emerged onto the palace’s main turret, he was at the top of a flight of three steps and so able to see above the men who crowded at the crenels. See – and gasp.

  He had not been on the battlements since the day, three before, when the word had come that the sultan had himself arrived with the bulk of his army. Theon, like most in the city, had come to view them – and had only seen a blur of movement on distant hills.

  Now he could see men. Faces. Armour. Banners. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of men.

  The Turks had advanced to within two hundred paces of the walls. Behind a trench and a raised wooden stockade, a vast throng that looked a hundred ranks deep spread all the way to the Horn to the north and no doubt over the hill and all the way down to the shores of the Marmara sea. If there were not a hundred thousand men before the walls, he knew it would not be far short. Facing them – and he knew this because he had helped to compile the figures – were fewer than five thousand Greeks and around two thousand foreigners.

  ‘Impressive, are they not?’

  The voice, which seemed always to be gurgled from mud caught in the throat, came from beside him. Theon turned. It was the man all knew as ‘the German’ – all except the man himself, for he would protest that he was from some other, equally barbarous, place. Theon had had dealings with him, because he had been charged with trying to recreate a saviour of the city in previous sieges – Greek Fire – and Theon had tried to find him some scarce, and strange, ingredients.

  John Grant pointed. ‘His Highness is there at the front, as ever. Giustiniani’s renegade Arab has been describing who are ranged against us here. Their strongest forces against our weakest point, or so our leaders say.’ He turned, and spat over the edge of the turret, though a contrary wind took the sputum and flung it back onto his cloak. Theon watched him with distaste as he rubbed at the material, swearing unintelligible oaths that sounded like gravel in a drum, before he looked up. ‘Did you find me that supply of saltpetre yet?’

  ‘Perhaps. Come and see me later. You will excuse me.’

  Theon moved down the stairs, though he tripped the last step when his scabbard swung between his legs. The German’s chuckle came, as mocking as any bird’s, but Theon ignored it as he tapped backs and pushed his way through to the emperor. He arrived as Amir, Giustiniani’s tame Musselman, was describing the standard that flew in the distance before a huge tent.

  ‘It is Mehmet’s tug. As sultan he is entitled to nine horsetails to dangle below the golden globe and the half-moon of Cibele. There are bells too. Silver, with a sweet chime …’

  ‘Balls to bells,’ Giustiniani grunted. ‘We’ve all seen a tug before. Can the keenness of your infidel eyes see what stands before the standard? As near as straight opposite us?’

  Amir grinned. ‘My infidel eyes, gift of Allah, praise Him, and my memory of such things, tells me that it is a gun emplacement.’

  ‘Of course it’s a fucking gun emplacement!’ Enzo, the Commander’s right hand, growled. ‘But how many are emplaced there?’

  ‘In the centre? I see but one eye. One big, most evil eye.’

  A murmur arose, warding gestures were made, halted instantly when one voice spoke. ‘Is that the one our spies told us of? What did they call it?’ The emperor turned. ‘Ah, Lascaris! You are the scholar amongst us. Was it not a scholarly name?’

  Theon shrugged. ‘The Turks named it, so I do not think so, basileus. But they named it in Greek. They call it Heleopolis.’

  ‘“The Taker of Cities,”’ repeated Constantine. He stared in silence for a long moment. ‘Well, that is hubris, I think. At least until we have seen this “taker” try to take. Will we soon, do you think?’

  ‘Soon, highness.’ Giustiniani raised a large arm, pointed. ‘Even my aged Christian eyes can see that they are busy about it. I wasn’t sure which weak point they would commence at. But they chose to start here, at your palace, where the walls are only two deep and shaped like a dog’s leg, leading up to the Horn.’ He looked that way, towards the right, then straight down, frowning. ‘That door there. The sally port. What is its name again?’

  Reluctantly taking his gaze away from the gun and its preparations, Theon stepped forward till he could also peer down, over the battlements, see the small wooden door set into one wall, just where it joined the other.

  ‘The Kerkoporta,’ Constantine said. ‘It was walled up till recently. Some old men remembered how useful it could be to sally out and strike at invaders. The Bocciardi brothers proved it so again, when the first of the Turks arrived.’

  ‘Glory to our Venetian allies,’ Giustiniani commented drily. ‘It is sealed again?’

  ‘Triply so, Commander.’ It was Enzo who replied. ‘Though we could have it open again in minutes when you order the counter.’

  ‘See that it remains sealed. The days of the sally are passed. And we do not want any doors opening to our flanks, however small.’ Giustiniani looked again to the front. ‘They seem to be getting busier there, majesty. Will you retire?’

  Constantine shook his head. As protests came, he raised his voice over them. ‘My friends, if God chooses to kill me with the first shot of this fight, then He has already given this city over to the infidel. We will see many shots before our deliverance. I will not flinch from first to last.’

  In a new, uneasy silence, all men turned again to stare at the one eye gazing back. But it took only a moment for the silence to be broken – by a screech of laughter. Everyone looked up, shocked – except for Constantine. ‘A laughing dove,’ he said, smiling. ‘It is a little late. But spring is finally here.’

  ‘Do you hear her, big man?’ Raschid whispered. ‘It is the laugh of the first virgin of Constantinople who sees you unsheathe your manhood.’

  Achmed looked down, into a grinning mouth, isolated teeth standing out like yellowed rocks in a red sea. One had grown in before another had left and stuck out through the gum above it. For some reason, his recruiter had never accepted Achmed’s first answer, that he was there for the glory of Allah. Nor his second, given when pressed once on the long march to the city from Edirne – that he needed gold to make sure his family never starved again. For Raschid, these reasons were important, but secondary. What lay within the conquered walls of Constantinople were Greek women, whom he could take at will. Slaves he could use brutally, repeatedly and then, when they were worn out, sell. He could not believe that all others di
d not share his lust. Especially the big silent man whom he had chosen as both his bodyguard and his butt.

  ‘Think of her, Achmed.’ He gripped the man’s arm. ‘Laughing at you, the bitch. She will laugh a different way when you take her, eh? They are all wild, these Greek sluts. Animals, groaning in the dark. Begging us for it. Not like our wives, lying there like stones.’

  Farouk, their bolukbasi, hissed at them, pointing with his bastinado, which he would not hesitate to bring down upon any recruit’s back when the order of silence was upon them. Raschid closed his gaping mouth, and Achmed returned to his search of the sky. He knew the little man had no wife, had never had one. But he had, and he had thought of Farat immediately when he heard the dove’s cry. It had been at this time of year that their families had agreed that they should marry. He knew her, of course, for she was his father’s cousin’s daughter. But he had only thought of her in that way at the time when the doves passed through their village, flying west.

  There! He heard it again, then saw it as it flew up from the stockade before them with a different type of call, a shriek of outrage at a soldier’s flung stone. He followed the bird’s flight over his head, remembered his little Abal’s delight when he’d brought her one he’d managed to snare in a flung net. His wild rose had cooed in imitation, and cried when the little bird had died. He had promised her another. He had promised to save her life. He had failed in both.

  He turned again to the walls before him. The mortar between the stones was not gold, as he had been told, but he still believed the streets beyond would be full of it. Yet though he had stared at them for several days now, still he could not believe that man could have built anything so enormous. And he knew that he was going to be ordered to climb them soon, a feat that would be difficult enough without all the men he saw raining stones and shot upon him as he tried.