A Place Called Armageddon

by C. C. Humphreys

  Gregoras rubbed his eyes and looked around the table again. The faces of the men at it, awake or asleep, had become a little clearer. He knew this could have nothing to do with his senses, as dulled by the night’s debates as any there. Glancing up to the windows, he saw them etched now in light, and then, as if in confirmation of the hour, he heard the bells of the monastery of Manuel, the nearest of the religious houses, summoning the monks to dawn prayer.

  He looked back. The sleepers were mainly elderly and had dropped off in order of age – the Castilian Don Francisco had been the first, rapidly followed by the emperor’s older advisers – George Sphrantzes, John of Dalmata, Loukas Notaras. The clerics had followed, Leonard and Isidore, then Minotto, the Venetian baillie. Last was the Commander himself, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, whose vehemence had kept him awake even though he was as old as most there. It was hard to tell he slept, as his head rested on one enormous hand and one eye was half open. But Gregoras had seen him sleep thus on their many campaigns together, snatching moments to fuel the next bout of fighting. He would be awake the moment he was called, sword in his hand a moment later.

  Sleep was a dream, the temptation to rest his head almost overpowering. Gregoras did not, for two reasons: the only other men still awake. His emperor. And his own brother.

  Constantine had perhaps slept less than any man in the city for weeks now … because it was his city. It was he who had led the debates that raged through the night, ever since the captain of the brigantine had been brought before the Council at midnight to tell his sad tale. He who had maintained, with all his quiet dignity, that whatever choices were made, surrendering Constantinople to the Turk was not, could not, be one of them. How it was to be saved, what options military, religious, logistical, all those he would listen to. And somehow he had kept his temper while others repeatedly lost theirs and accused their fellows of lack of true faith, of true courage, of true loyalty; while Papist denounced Orthodox, Venetian insulted Genoan, most despised the Greeks. Gregoras had, in his heart, always thought that Constantine was competent and no more. But he had seen the man grow with his mission. Not puffed with arrogance. Filled with his inheritance. He had been placed there at this time of crisis to do all that he could. And he would do it.

  More than his emperor, the other man awake was the real reason Gregoras could not sleep – for how could he close his eyes before his brother? Theon sat opposite him, barely glanced at him, never spoke to him. Indeed neither of the Lascaris said much. They were not leaders in the defence – but they would put the decisions made by the leaders into effect. Yet as the night slipped towards dawn, Gregoras found that he was staring more and more at his twin, almost daring him to look up, to meet his gaze, to see the questions in his eyes, perhaps to read the truth there. Exhaustion, and the realisation that the siege was approaching its climax, that all their fates would be decided in the next few days, was making Gregoras reckless. He wanted to reach across the table, snap his fingers beneath his brother’s eyes, force them to meet his and say, ‘Your son is mine. Your wife still loves me. And I am going to take them back.’ Amidst all the long night’s talk of the crisis that approached, of no rescue fleet on the horizon and the failure of Pope and kings to come to the city’s aid, of a defence stretched to breaking point and an enemy that would not stop, this had become the most important thing: to claim what was his again. To defeat not the Turk, but his own brother.

  Perhaps he would have done it, in the silence that followed Constantine’s last, quiet vow to continue when all around him stopped, if it hadn’t been broken instead by the opening of the hall’s door once more, and the entrance of the steward, who stared in some surprise at a table of largely sleeping men before approaching the emperor, bowing, whispering in his ear, handing him a scroll. Constantine broke the seal, rubbed his eyes, read. ‘You were right, Theon Lascaris,’ he said. ‘If the sultan did not already know by his own intelligence that Christendom has forsaken us, he has learned of it through ours. But I marvel. Was it ten hours ago that the brigantine docked? Can rumours truly spread so fast?’

  ‘They can, basileus.’ Theon shook his head. ‘Though the sailors were commanded to silence, yet they are men. They will have told their families, who would have told their neighbours, who would have told the shopkeepers, who would have told the Genoan merchants from Galata who supply them … who supply the Turks as readily as they do us. More readily, since the Turks have more gold.’ He sighed. ‘And may I ask how you know that Mehmet knows already, sire?’

  Constantine raised the cone of paper. ‘Because he says so here. As a brother sovereign, he is sorry for my disappointment. But to cheer me he has sent me an emissary – a Greek, no less, a vassal of his, one Ismail of Sinope, son of the prince of that province. This Ismail brings another offer for peace, one that will gladden my heart it seems. And he asks that emissaries be sent to negotiate.’ A faint smile came, dispelled immediately by a yawn. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘shall we rouse these sleepers and hear what terms Mehmet now offers for our capitulation?’

  Gregoras leaned forward. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘let them sleep. Or rather, wake them and send them to more comfortable beds. And let us go to ours as well. We know what Mehmet wants, however generously he gilds his offer. He wants our city. So let us answer his emissary, not unshaven and unwashed, and with a just rage that exhaustion might bring, but considered, rested and refreshed. Then let this Ismail take back the message that we are strong and united.’ He smiled. ‘And the longer it takes the better. Perhaps the guns will play less upon our walls while Mehmet awaits our response. We can repair the breaches, amass our arms, and let our soldiers rest.’

  Theon nodded. ‘I agree with … I agree, lord. Rest and the full ceremony that an emissary requires might gain us some respite – and show us unwavering. Perhaps other forces are on their way – the Serbians. Hunyadi’s Hungarians. Rumours can be spread that they are anyway. And as for emissaries …’ he licked his lips, ‘send me, lord.’

  Constantine smiled. ‘Ah, my loyal brothers Lascaris. Perhaps I should send you both?’

  Theon stiffened, but it was Gregoras who spoke. ‘Basileus, my brother is versed in the subtleties of diplomacy. He is highly skilled in deception.’ He felt Theon’s eyes come onto him at last, held his gaze for a moment, then continued, ‘Whereas I am a soldier. I can go where he cannot, see what he cannot. Not the nuances of leaders trying to convey an impression, but what the ordinary soldier is feeling. If they have heard tales of us, we have heard of them also. Of men who have sat in a wet field for seven weeks and watched the greatest army ever assembled stumble against our walls, die in their scores, again and again.’ He smiled. ‘Genoan traders work both sides of the walls and I am, at least in part, a Genoan now. Send me, lord, where I can be of most help: discovering just how disaffected many of Mehmet’s army are. Finding where he is weak as well as strong.’

  Constantine stared at him for a moment, then nodded. ‘Let it be so. Rest, then go, both of you to your tasks. I will wake these others and try to sleep too.’ He yawned, leaned on the table, closed his eyes. The brothers began to move to the door … but the emperor stopped them there. ‘Not all the rumours I hear are of war,’ he called. ‘I have heard another: that though you were born almost at the same instant, from the same womb, there is no love between you. That you do not speak. Is it true?’

  The two men froze in the doorway, half turned back. Neither answered.

  ‘So, it is true.’ Constantine moved round the table, came to them at the door. ‘I know what it is to have brothers. I have three … had, since our late emperor, my brother John, is dead. Of the other two, Thomas loves me and ‘Demetrius …’ he sighed, ‘Demetrius claimed the crown. Many a time I have wished he had it now. That he was standing here and I was in the Morea, raising an army to come to this city’s aid. But is he? He hates me, so I doubt it. Would I have done? I would like to believe so, but …’ A half-smile came, fading fast. ‘But if he does come, if he was sta
nding here, I would say to him what I say to you, what I have said to the squabbling Italians, the sundered Christians. There is a time for strife between brothers. But this is not that time. This is the time only to trust in God and defend His city. To ask forgiveness for any harm each has done to the other, for both will have harmed. And to go into the righteous fight with anger only for God’s enemies.’ He stepped closer, put an arm around each of them. ‘Do I not speak the truth?’

  They were trapped, between an emperor and an oaken door. There was little either could do. It was Theon who reached a hand, Gregoras who took it. Brother touched brother for the first time in an age, and Constantine gave a cry of joy and pressed them closer. Yet he could not see their eyes, the gaze that met, held, parted.

  ‘Go now,’ said the emperor, ‘in brotherly amity and about God’s work.’

  He turned back, calling loudly. Their hands sliding away as if from contagion, Theon and Gregoras left the room. In the narrow hallway beyond, servants scurried to Constantine’s call and the two men had to wait for them to pass. ‘Well, brother,’ Theon said, ‘do you heed our sovereign’s words? Will you part from me in peace?’

  Gregoras turned. The servants had passed and they were alone in the lightless antechamber. ‘I heed a portion of them, Theon,’ he replied, as softly. ‘There is only one enemy to be fought – for now. But know this: whether the city stands or falls, if both of us are spared what is to come, I will find you, and there will be a reckoning.’ He leaned closer, took his brother’s arm in a very different grip. ‘For you have what is mine.’

  Strangely, Theon felt no fear. When they were infants, he had learned that he could never better his brother in strength. But he had also learned that there were many ways to defeat a man. ‘Then come, Gregoras. Come at the beginning or the ending of the world. And discover, yet again, that there are bonds not even the strongest man can break.’

  With that, he was gone, through the door a servant left ajar. Gregoras let him go, listening to the sounds of the room stirring behind him, of voices he knew, grown men woken suddenly and so as querulous as children. Beyond them, he heard another sound, a rumbling that he took at first to be cannon fire but realised was a low peal of thunder. Storm’s coming, he thought. Shrugging, he moved towards it.

  – TWENTY-NINE –

  Thunder

  24 May: forty-eighth day of the siege

  ‘Does the storm come to fall on us, my friend, or will it pass us by?’

  At first, Hamza did not turn at Mehmet’s question. Standing at the entrance to his lord’s great otak, he shifted his gaze from the departing Council – from Candarli Halil and Ishak Pasha, conspiring still as they walked away, all smiles – to the west. ‘Lightning plays there yet, noble one. But it does not seem to have moved any closer.’ He dropped the tent flap as another roll of thunder came. ‘Yet I wish it would. The air craves it. It feels like the whole world is about to explode.’

  ‘You want more rain?’ Mehmet shook his head. ‘Did you not hear that ten of my janissaries died when their sodden trench collapsed on them? Drowned.’ He shivered. ‘A bad sign, when men drown on the land.’

  Hamza came back to the table, looked at the two men sitting at it. Zaganos Pasha, most loyal of the sultan’s commanders, most fervent for the war, gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Do not let him read the signs, the shake said. Do not let him plunge further into this gloom.

  Hamza looked from one man to the other. To Mehmet. He had changed in the seven weeks of the siege. The strain showed in a face made lean by struggle and doubt. But it was in his actions, his reactions, that the change showed the most. If the two councillors who had just left had spoken to him then as they had just done now, urging an immediate cessation of the siege, a return to Edirne, a dispersal of his army, Mehmet would have driven them from his pavilion with shrieks, perhaps even with blows from his bastinado. All had seen how he had treated the disgraced Baltaoglu. Instead he had dismissed Halil Pasha, Ishak Pasha – cautious men he loathed, his father’s men – with a shrug, an inshallah, murmuring how he would consider their good advice.

  Hamza knew as well as Zaganos that they must not let the sultan dwell on signs like the drowning of janissaries. Like any man, his mood could be shifted with thought, with a focus on what had been accomplished, not what had failed. And in this too, Mehmet had surprised his chief falconer who was also now his admiral. Hamza had believed him to be naïve in the ways of war, book-taught, lacking the practicality of experience, dreaming of the great heroes of the past, of Alexander and Caesar, with no understanding of how to become like them. Yet in seven weeks, in some ways he had shown himself their rival. It was Mehmet who dispersed the forces to pressure all sides of the city, Mehmet who commanded that ships be taken across land to infiltrate the Horn and turn the Greeks’ flank, Mehmet who studied the working of guns and calculated the angles and trajectories needed to fire over the walls of neutral Galata and still hit the ships that guarded the boom. He took advice from experts – another sign of good generalship and of his maturing – but the drive, the impetus, the commands came from him.

  He had become a soldier. Grown into a man. And yet, like many who shed the heat of youth for cooler considerations, he was more prone to doubts. Seven weeks, and all his drive and innovation had not led to success. The boom still held his biggest ships from the Horn. The walls his cannons knocked down were patched with a wooden stockade that the Greeks defended as vigorously as any stonework. His tunnels were discovered and blown up, his tower consumed in flame. Wave after wave of Allah’s warriors had hurled themselves forward, and only once had the Prophet’s standard been raised on a bastion … and then but for a moment.

  Hamza studied the sultan, wondering how to begin, how to counter the doubts that the two old pashas had left behind them like a sack of ordure upon the table. He hesitated, seeking words … and then, in the camp, two muezzins began to call almost simultaneously. Both had fine voices, one with the fire of youth, a dramatic passion in the rising notes, commanding the faithful to prayer; the other older, his voice like silk, his call almost a seduction. Each had their adherents. And it seemed to Hamza, as the three men removed their slippers, knelt, touched their foreheads to the floor and began their whispered prayer – ‘God is great. God is great. No God but Allah. Muhammad is His messenger’ – that a blend of both their calling was what Mehmet needed now. Fire tempered by consideration. Steel swathed in silk.

  When the prayers ended, Hamza was ready. He laughed. ‘Old goats!’ he said. ‘How they can turn good news into bad to suit their purposes!’

  ‘Good news, Hamza?’

  ‘The brigantine, lord of the horizon. It skulks back into Constantinople, bearing its tale of woe – no Christian fleet is coming, popes and kings have deserted them, the starving Greeks are on their own – and Candarli Halil the castrated ram and Ishak Pasha his ewe bleat that just because they were not found does not mean they are not on the way. They prefer what is not to what is.’

  Zaganos leaned in, his face as eager. ‘Bleats indeed! But it was always so with that pair. Baaing “nay” to everything you propose, lord. “N-a-y-ay-ay ay.”’ The Albanian pulled back his lips, stuck out his tongue, in a near-perfect imitation of the animal.

  Both men laughed. ‘It is true. All I have achieved they put down to God’s will. All that has gone wrong is my fault,’ Mehmet said.

  ‘Is it not so?’ Hamza nodded, continued, ‘So why should we pay them any heed now? And even if they do come – though there is no sign of them – what do we care if another thousand Christians show up? What care we for another ten? You slaughtered three times that at Kossovo Pol, lord, to the glory of Allah. Let them come, I say.’

  ‘And I.’ Zaganos thumped the table.

  Mehmet flushed. ‘Kossovo. Yes. We soaked the Field of Blackbirds in infidel blood that day.’

  ‘Did you not, magnificence?’ Hamza leaned in. ‘And we can soak the stones before us too. Zaganos and I have been t
alking. We agree with you, lord. You urged the goats to one last effort, one huge attack. One that will make all others so far seem gnat bites to the savaging of a lion.’ His voice dropped. ‘One more, with all your forces, from all sides. One night attack, and the city falls.’

  Both men stared at their sultan. They could see the conflict playing on his face. Desire, ardour, doubt came and went in succession. At last, he spoke. ‘To do it, those forces would need to believe it could be done. They would have to forget seven weeks of failure and hurl themselves forward again and again, climb over the bodies of their comrades, die in their turn, on and on …’ He faltered, and both men could see the horror come into his eyes. ‘Only men who believe could do this. And I have heard rumours that the army has lost heart …’

  ‘More bleatings from goats!’ Zaganos stood to shout it, banging on the table. He had not risen from slavery to the command of a division to be frightened, even of a sultan.

  But Hamza leaned closer, his voice silk, contrast to the other’s fire. ‘My friend, your loyal subject, speaks truth, lord. But let he and I go amongst your forces, and bring you news of them. Of the strength of their hearts. And remember, lord, that men fight for many beliefs. For Allah, most merciful, and the paradise that awaits should martyrdom call. For the glory of their people, the finest soldiers on earth. And for what the city promises – for they have not sat before these walls and fought as well as they have to return to their villages poorer than when they set out. Let us go amongst them, lord, and confirm this for you. And let us then pay no more heed to the bleatings of goats and listen only to what our hearts tell us.’ He reached then, took the younger man by the arm. ‘One more attack, lord. One more.’