A Place Called Armageddon

by C. C. Humphreys

  No!

  This thought came, clearly: I have lived in bitterness for so long. I will not die in it.

  A little air left. Enough, just, to push the arms, risen above him, up. One hand breaking the surface, jabbing into wood. Something floating there.

  Gregoras used his last, tiny piece of air to kick up to it.

  It was a spar. Rounded, it still had some rope and heavy canvas attached that stopped it rolling as Gregoras flung himself over it, wrapping arms and legs round as waves tried to dislodge him. Taking three deep, hurtful breaths, he vomited a stream of water, coughed violently, then, in a slight lull between waves, reached out and snagged a mess of rope, wriggling his head and chest through a gap, reaching underneath the spar to bind the ends tight. He was just in time, for the next wave crashed big and tried to suck him clear. But his swift knot and returning strength to his arms held him, and further turns of rope made him fast. Now all he could do was cling hard and pray. He thought he’d given up on prayers a long time before. He was wrong.

  The storm, which had come so suddenly and sunk the Ragusa-bound vessel, as suddenly abated. It seemed to Gregoras a living beast that, once it had realised that it could not kill him, drew off and went in search of other victims. Huge waves reduced till they were no longer submerging him each time, but buoying him up. The cold rain that had pounded down for days ceased and the sun returned.

  Gregoras lay still, letting the swell take him. There was little he could do. One swift look about had told him that his was one of the very few pieces of driftwood upon the water, and the only one occupied. Two days out of Crete when the storm struck and there was nothing but water stretching to every horizon. He examined other pieces of wreckage. Not far away there appeared to be a wider tangle of it. He tried to paddle his spar towards it, but made little progress, each swell pushing him back. Finally, he untied himself, slipped into the water, stripped himself of his sodden clothes and started to swim on his back. It took a while, as waves pushed him now nearer, now further away. When he thought that exhaustion would halt him, he was suddenly within reach and then upon it.

  He lay on a mesh of wood rope and three part-planks that the storm had shaped into a half-circle. Some broken glass flagons were caught up in the ropes, and a swathe of canvas was bound to it, spread over the sea, steadying the whole. Briefly making sure that the ropes that joined everything were secure, Gregoras lay shivering on the wood and let the sun warm him.

  He woke, opening his eyes, to others, staring back at him. His start startled the gull, which took off screeching, circled him once then flew away. He pushed himself off the planks, lifted his head – and wished he hadn’t. It felt as if it was a drum being beaten, while his mouth was a desert, rimmed in salt from the sea water he’d swallowed. He was tempted to swallow more, he was so thirsty, but he took some in only to rinse, spat it out. Kneeling on the planks, he shielded his eyes from the sun and looked about him.

  He was no sailor, though he had fought enough times upon the sea. From the height of the sun, he guessed it was about midday, but at all points of the compass and to the limits of sight there was only water, water and nothing else. He sat again. There was little he could do, but that little he did. Unbound the piece of cloth from his face, which somehow had remained tied fast, and retied it over the top of his head, where the sun was burning the worst. His ivory nose had fallen from his face to admit the sea, but it was still attached to its cord and hung round his neck. He let it lie.

  There was little he could do now but think. Why had he been the only one spared? Had God decided drowning was too easy a death for such a sinner? Falsely marked and maimed as a traitor, was he truly not one now for deserting his city when she needed every mother’s son? He’d been still drunk, still furious when he’d chosen to leave with the Venetians. In the two months since, in Chios, in Crete, he had tried not to think of the city or anyone in it. Of Giustiniani, Amir and Enzo. Of the emperor or his old tutor Theodore. Of the Scotsman, Grant. Especially of Sofia and … and his son. Back in his hovel in Ragusa, perhaps Leilah waited for him. There was other gold in the world to be earned to build his house with a view. Other wars to fight.

  As the sun rose higher in the sky, thirst tormented him, yet not so fiercely as memory. He’d been offered a war and turned it down. Offered redemption and spurned it. Inshallah, they said, but he’d ignored God’s will. Now, to give him time to consider his manifold sins, he would be tortured before he died.

  It was a while later, a time when sea water became more appealing by the moment – to drink, to sink into – when the gull returned. A gull, anyway, with three companions, which Gregoras thought strange so far from any land. What were they seeking? Perhaps him, recognising a meal. If it came to it, he knew he would prefer to become fish food. Sofia’s parrot would take the only chunk of him a bird would get.

  Then something else made him look up. Some faint noise that just pierced the shrieking. He looked all around, squinted into a sinking sun … and saw them. If he had been studying the horizon the whole while, he would have seen them as specks upon it. As it was, the four ships were clearly distinguished – one long barge and three high-sided carracks. At the main mast of each of these he could even make out a flag. He knew it instantly. He had fought under it often enough.

  It was the red cross of St George.

  ‘Genoese, by God,’ he muttered.

  He knew that he would be a fly upon a vast blue wall to them. They were moving slowly, for the wind that caressed his face was weak, barely stirring the huge sails. Still, he could see they would pass far enough away from him to his left, beyond the sound of his voice and the waving of his hands. Yet if his hands were filled with cloth? His headscarf was too small, so he looked at the canvas that floated beside the planks, bent to it, tugged. It was thick, waterlogged, and he could not rip a piece from it. And then he noticed again the broken bottles caught in the mesh. They glinted as they rose with the swell.

  He reached over, grasped, jerked till one came free. He held it by the neck, turned the wide, jagged edge to the sun. It flashed, dazzling him. Ripping the scarf from his head, he waved it, and directed sunbeams at the ships.

  The ships came slowly closer. Soon he could make out figures upon the rigging. His arm grew weary from waving and he had to rest it for moments. But he always found the sun and kept the bottle flashing.

  The first ship was passing him. His arm sank. And then he saw something as it passed. A small shape that had previously been hidden against the ship’s dark side. A boat was making towards him, its smaller sail angled to the breeze.

  He kept flashing, kept waving until he was certain. Soon enough he could hear the plash of oars, and he lowered both arm and glass and sank onto the raft. He just had strength to tie his nose into place, and the headscarf over it.

  ‘Ragazzo!’ came the call from the boat, a man half standing at the aft, his hand upon the tiller. ‘Where are you from?’

  Gregoras had swilled a mouthful of sea water so at least he could reply. Reply in the tongue and accent of the question. ‘From Genoa,’ he yelled, his voice a rasp. ‘Bound for Ragusa.’

  The tillerman steered his skiff skilfully alongside the raft, three men on the nearest side shipping their oars. ‘A countryman,’ he said, ‘saved by God’s good grace.’ He stared at the mask, then glanced down the naked, scarred body. ‘You’ll want this,’ he continued, handing over a flask, which Gregoras uncorked and drained, before holding out a cloak. ‘And this.’

  Two oarsmen helped Gregoras, part covered, cross from raft to boat. He settled on the strakes near the tiller as the sail was adjusted, oars were put into the water again and men began to pull.

  He reached a hand up and the tillerman clasped it. ‘Thank you, brother,’ he said.

  ‘It was a rare fortune you were spotted,’ the man replied. ‘A miracle. God must have you in mind for a better fate than drowning.’

  ‘Inshallah.’ Gregoras smiled as the man’s eyes narrowed at
the term. ‘And whither is this fine fleet bound?’

  ‘We are about God’s work, sure, brother. We are bound to bring succour to our fellow Christians and damnation to the infidel.’ The man stuck out his chest. ‘We make for Constantinople.’

  The sailor kept a firm grasp on the hand he’d shaken, even leaving the tiller to grasp the other’s shoulder. He wasn’t as concerned about drifting as about the man they’d rescued, who was laughing so hard that his whole body shook, and for so long that he feared they were all going to be tipped into the sea.

  – SEVENTEEN –

  The Standard

  Night of 17/18 April

  It had been the same most nights since the first firing of the great gun. Achmed and his fellows would press right up to the Turkish stockade, a vast mob of men beating their scimitars upon their wooden shields in time to the hammering of a hundred kos drums, the whine of seven hundred trumpets. The cries would erupt from a thousand throats – ‘God is great!’ ‘Muhammad is His Prophet!’ ‘Mehmet, lead us to glory!’

  While they cried, over them would fly the balls – great ones of stone, flung with explosions from cannon or hurled from the huge slings called mangonels, smashing into the city walls with a crack like thunder or disappearing over them to destroy whatever lay behind. Smaller balls from smaller guns, from what were called the kolibrina and the culverin – Achmed had learned some of the language of war – were aimed at the heads of Christians glimpsed briefly between the crenels.

  The noise, the incredible level of it, the hours that it lasted, was something he had had to get used to. The loudest sound he had experienced before was that of the men of his village gathered for prayer. And the first night had nearly sent him running mad. But then, after perhaps two hours, his mob was withdrawn, another took its place with fresh throats, and arms to hammer upon drum and shield. Every third night they rested. And Raschid explained what Achmed had already come to understand.

  ‘We can sleep, my farmer,’ he’d said, lying back in their trench, settling his twisted limbs upon a sheepskin he’d stolen, ‘but the Christians? If they do, it is standing up and with armour upon their backs, for they do not know if we will come.’

  Yet this night was different. Even a farmer could see that something else was being prepared. Cords of wood – great stacks bound with rope – were brought up. Scores of ladders were leaned against the stockade. Finally archer after archer, their great bows slung over their shoulders, pushed through the mob of bashibazouks to crouch upon the shooting step of the great wooden rampart, melding with crossbowmen and others who blew upon twines of red-glowing rope, their guns beside them.

  ‘It is an attack, is it not?’

  ‘You were ever quick, giant.’ Raschid squinted up at him. He had managed to buy or, more likely, steal a thick-quilted coat, along with a dented turban helmet. None of his fellows had more than the small wooden shield for their protection, though the coat would have fitted Achmed better and the little man was trying to fold up its width and length so he could still walk. ‘A week of hammering the walls, and that above us.’ He pointed his fingers at the sky, a waxing moon directly overhead. ‘We will be able to look into the Greeks’ eyes as they die upon their walls. And see the plunder lying in the streets beyond once we take them.’

  Achmed grunted. He moved to the top of the slight rise, where he could see over the stockade. The walls in the moonlight looked battered indeed, yet still high and solid enough. The week of shouting, of praising God and ducking guns, of endless waiting, had begun to annoy him. He had come to fight – for his sultan, for God’s victory … and for what that victory could give him. Life and riches – or a martyr’s death and a swift journey across the bridge of Al-Sirat to paradise.

  Raschid was tugging at his ankle. ‘See,’ he said, ‘who comes.’

  Down the little valley between the hill of the stockade and the higher one of the gun battery came a procession of walking men. Some bore torches, their fire reflected off armour and helm, off spear blade and shield boss and swinging scimitar. Much of the light seemed to gather in the man at the centre of the throng, one of the biggest men there, whose steel armour was aflame, whose turban helmet burned. A dozen men his equal in size hedged him in a wall of halberds. Closest and on either side of him, their fingers on their bowstrings around a notched arrow, walked two archers.

  ‘The sultan!’

  Raschid was only one of several who spoke the title. It rippled back along the mass of men on the slopes. The party halted around an upturned barrel, and before that was cut off from sight by the gathering of men, Achmed saw a large piece of parchment raised and placed upon it.

  ‘The men with the halberds are the peyk, his bodyguard. It is said that they have their spleens removed to make them more temperate.’ Raschid was always keen to air his experience of soldiering, and he told Achmed things in the tone of a father to a dull child. ‘The two archers are ever beside him. Did you notice how one drew to the left, one to the right? Of course you did not, ox that you are. Well, he needs left-handed bowmen too, to ward him on that side. And those men, coming in now? They are the leaders of the Anatolians, the belerbey Ishak and Mahmoud. Our leaders, for their divisions are behind us here, waiting to follow us over the walls.’

  ‘Follow us?’ Achmed looked across to the other slopes, filled with ordered ranks of men in armour. ‘Should not they go ahead, since they are so well dressed for it?’

  ‘No. They will let us do the first attacks.’ When Achmed looked to object, Raschid continued, ‘No, it is good. For when the sleepless Greeks fall to our thrusts, we will be the first into their city. We will have the first choice of the plunder.’ He licked his lips. ‘And their virgins. Besides …’ he pointed to the next large body of men on the slope, set slightly apart from them by a space of earth and by their darker clothes, their longer beards, their hatless heads, ‘I warrant that our sultan who loves us will dispatch those first to die. Christians,’ he hissed. ‘Mostly scum and mercenaries drawn by the promise of booty to fight against those of their own faith.’ He hawked, spat. ‘Let them take the brunt of the first fury. Then let you and I take the glory and the gold.’

  ‘Inshallah,’ was all Achmed could manage, his mouth suddenly dry.

  A loud shout drew their eyes back to the flames below. It was one cry of assent from a dozen throats. The group split up, the peyk with their halberds lowered, parting the ranks of Anatolians to allow the sultan’s party to climb the hill back towards the guns. Other officers came the other way towards them, including the leader Raschid had called Ishak. Still more men were moving through the mob, each bearing a staff from which they were unfurling a long banner. They were shouting out words that Achmed struggled to hear at first above a rising acclamation, and then did, just as he saw the Prophet’s name. He could not read, but he knew Muhammad’s symbol, his tugra, shining silver in the moonlight on the nearest banner.

  ‘A hundred pieces of gold for the first man to raise one of these upon the Greeks’ second wall,’ came the cry, rising above the tumult. ‘Allahu akbar!’

  ‘God is great!’ came the echo from thousands of voices, as men struggled to grasp one of the dozen banners. Achmed took a step forward. A hundred pieces of gold were more than his farm would produce in his lifetime. But a tug at his sleeve delayed him.

  ‘Do not be in such a hurry to die,’ another voice said. It was Farouk, their bolukbasi, the officer to whom they, and a hundred of their fellows, had been assigned. He was a Karaman, who had fought against the Turks and now fought for them. He was distinguished by the body parts he’d left on various battlefields – an ear, a thumb, an eye. He stared out of the unpuckered one at Achmed now. ‘The first who bears the banner will be killed, as will the second and the third, joining him swiftly in paradise.’ He grasped the big man’s shoulder, pulled him lower so he could speak in his ear. ‘This is your first battle, farmer boy, and it will be different than you think. Stay close to me.’

  Small fights
had developed between men who did not have such cautions spoken to them. Officers stepped in and wielded bastinados till the banners were in one grip only. Then everyone moved up towards the top of the hill.

  Farouk halted them about twenty paces behind one of the great gates that punctuated the stockade. ‘Far enough,’ he said, drawing his scimitar.

  Achmed did not have a sheath to draw his from. He just laid the back edge against his shoulder, clutched the small round shield to his chest and stared at the white-clad back before him. Defend me, Allah, most merciful, he prayed silently. And if it is Your wish that I should die this night, let me die well, for Your glory.

  Other men muttered beside him. Then all fell silent as the trumpets called. In that silence, a great kos drum was struck – once, twice, again. Its echo died away, all eyes fixed on the wooden wall before them. In its middle, directly before the gate, Ishak Pasha drew his great scimitar. ‘Allahu akbar!’ he cried, stepping aside. The gates were swept back.

  ‘God is great!’ yelled thousands of voices as, up and down the Turkish line, men charged through the gaps.

  ‘Keep your head down,’ shouted Raschid.

  There was little Achmed could do but obey. He watched the back before him, trudging a few paces when it moved, halting when it briefly did. His sight was that patch of white cloth, the sweat stain, like a lamb’s kidney, already expanding upon it, although the night was cool. His hearing, though, was full. The mad beating of the drums, the wail of the horns, the hammering upon their shields of the warriors up and down the lines was joined by new sounds – the constant thrum of arrows as the archers upon the rampart step notched, pulled, released, notched, pulled, released, a near continuous glint of arrowheads rising into the moonlight, falling into the darkness beyond. Interspersed with them, other men would raise and point what looked like thick sticks, sticks that gave a sharp crack and then ejected flame, the shooter’s head instantly hidden in a small cloud of smoke that joined with others to form a bank along the ramparts. A cloud that Achmed now pushed through, coughing on some sharpness in the smoke, as he and Raschid finally made the gate.