At full sail the Friuli might have ridden clean over a galley, but ill fortune struck and, to Anna’s despair, the wind, which had driven the boats up the channel with such force, contrived to suddenly drop.
The sails went limp and, driven by an evil countercurrent, the becalmed boats began to drift away from shore and into the clutches of a salivating, hostile armada.
Galleys set upon them from all sides, like ants tackling a beetle. Javelins, arrows and stone shot riddled the decks.
The men on the carracks gave back fire in return from castellated poop and foredecks, and a bitter running battle broke out among the congealed tangle of masts, oars and hulls. It was the contest for the land walls, repeated afloat in miniature.
Anna looked on, darkly fascinated. It felt almost like being a spectator in the coliseum; a heady mix of trepidation and exhilaration, at once so close and yet removed from a life-and-death struggle. It was the detachment that she found most disorientating; she had to remind herself more than once that these were real men and real deaths she was witnessing.
That thought, and Plethon’s mischievous assertion earlier made Anna question whether it would be the same if she knew John was on one of those decks. Could she observe the fighting at the wall in equal manner? She realised she could not, and that knowledge made her at once both furious and numb.
As if to punish her mind for bending that way, she turned back to Plethon and said, ‘We were speaking of outcomes. I was reminded the other day of Mara Brankovic and the stories you used to tell me about her.’
‘Mara Brankovic?’ said Plethon, looking across the water towards the faint outline of the Turk banners beyond Pera. ‘Perhaps she is here with the sultan’s retinue.’
‘Do you think so?’ Anna said, her eyes instantly bright. ‘What I would give to spend a day talking with her. What I might learn.’
‘What indeed,’ said Plethon with mild disapproval. The air became suddenly heavy with the moan of rending timbers as the Turk flagship drove its beaked prow into the side of the Friuli. ‘She was not an example I meant you to try and emulate.’
‘And why not?’ said Anna as she watched Turks clambering up anchor cables and grappling hooks to try and board the Friuli. ‘Look what her marriage to the old sultan achieved. Think how much the Serbs have preserved of themselves, despite their kingdom’s decline, because she had Murad’s ear.’
‘I certainly hope you are not proposing to subject yourself to the degradation of the Turk harem in the hope you can bend Mehmed’s ear,’ said Plethon. ‘By all accounts the young sultan is not the gentleman his father was.’
The four carracks had come alongside one another, lashing deck to deck to create a single fighting platform. For now, the heavily armoured Genoese were managing to keep the attackers at bay with lances and iron javelins hurled from the decks and dead-eyed crossbowmen picking off targets from the crow’s nest.
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘I am not proposing that at all.’
‘Then you have managed to completely bamboozle me,’ said Plethon, and with that admission, Anna’s face changed. The leonine defiance that had built in her eyes and the set of her mouth fell away. A smile played across her lips. It was the contented look her face used to take on when he scutinised her work and conceded he had found no errors.
She glanced briefly into the crown-shy canopy of the cedars then dropped her regard to meet his eyes and said, ‘I sat here many times and predicted I would one day be empress. Do you remember the day I told you my dream had come true? Constantine had agreed to father’s proposition and I would be his royal bride.’
Plethon nodded. ‘Yes, my dear. I never saw a bird so enchanted at the prospect of a cage. I must admit what happened next was of some relief to me, although I doubt you can ever see it thus.’
It had been almost four years. He remembered comforting Anna, barely out of girlhood, after news broke of the renounced betrothal. The blow had tempered the steel in her character, he thought. It had been her making.
Now, Anna smoothed the cedar needles from her gown. ‘As I said before, fortunes ebb and flow. Mine own seemed to drain away the day Sphrantzes returned with a better bridal candidate.’
Plethon remembered the Georgian too. ‘A pity nothing came of that. She had the lack-wit simplicity befitting a palace bauble.’
The Genoese were fighting desperately, and with the help of good armour and the advantage of the higher decks they continued to hold the onslaught at bay.
Anna gave the fight a careless glance and then said, ‘Well, perhaps the tide might turn once more in my direction.’
She had begun to feel a release, like a great sighing out of a breath held in too long. Speaking her intentions aloud felt like a confession and Plethon an appropriate geron. Now that she had begun to unburden herself, she found it easier to continue than stop. ‘I can be empress without Constantine. There is another in the city who can make it so.’
Plethon’s mouth set into a smile once more, but there was no mirth in it. ‘Are plots to become the Notaras stock-in-trade?’ he said coldly. ‘Are you hedging your bets, the father negotiating with the Turks, the daughter with the Latins? Poor Constantine sold to both sides at once.’
‘Yes, poor Constantine!’ she snapped. ‘How disloyal of me, after all he has done for us!’
‘He has tried!’ said Plethon, his voice roused with unusual strength.
‘He has failed,’ she said with as emollient a voice as she could manage. ‘Lord knows, the Latins have no need of my help to plot his overthrow; you may be sure that was always Giustiniani’s intention in coming here. But if a Latin emperor must return, the better that a Greek empress sit beside him – to bend his ear, to temper the damage to our religion and our culture.’
Out on the water, a ballast stone swung out on a yardarm and dropped onto a galley, snapping it like a twig, and sent dozens of men into the depths to drown.
Plethon shook his head. ‘Whenever you speak, I hear two voices: that of your mind and that of your soul. They are not always in harmony. They are certainly not in this matter.’
‘You think I should have been satisfied by a toy boat dower,’ she scoffed. ‘Of course you do, you’d make me Diogenes, living in a barrel.’
‘He was happy at least!’ said Plethon. ‘Instead, history repeats. Like your mother, you are about to make an avaricious marriage instead of listening to your heart. Diadem or no, you’ll soon grow miserable, just like her.’
Her eyes narrowed. Even at his most acerbic, Plethon did not usually venture onto the subject of her mother.
Anna knew, of course, about that secret history. At times she had even wondered – in her more fanciful reveries – if the old philosopher might really be her father. ‘You have been championing John for me all along,’ she said. ‘Ever since the grand vizier’s feast.’
‘I have been trying to prevent you making an error of matters, as any good tutor might,’ he said. ‘That Venetian, what was his name? Barbo. That marriage would have made you sick with melancholia, as I think you know. Well, you might swap Venice for Genoa but all you shall achieve is a larger palace to weep in.’
His honesty was as bracing as ice water, and although she blenched with its shock, she had always valued its power to scrub away comforting self-deceit and reveal a remaining truth.
Below them, the flotsam from a wrecked galley bobbed to the surface and was swiftly washed aside by another boat, pushing its prow into the newly opened space. Seemingly without fear, the crew climbed over the slick bodies of the fallen to claw at their prey.
The tide of battle, Anna noted, was turning increasingly towards the Turks. There was always another galley waiting to thrust alongside and pour fresh soldiers at the exhausted defenders.
Seeing the cast of her eye, Plethon struck again. ‘Gaze on, Empress,’ he said. ‘This is the sport of kings. Setting brave men upon one another in a watery bear pit. Is this what you so crave?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘
God forgive me.’
Helplessly, it seemed to Anna, she was being forced to witness a vision of forthcoming doom at the land wall. That thought brought John’s face back into her mind, and a simultaneous rapture and terror seized her heart. ‘It’s pointless,’ she said, soft enough that the sound did not leave her lips.
As if tiring of the bloodshed, the fickle elements began to change once more. The south wind stirred, and the sails of the carracks began to fill, then billow.
The raft of four ships started to gather momentum and move forward, driving the upturned carcass of a galley before their unbroken prows.
The other galleys could do nothing to stop them – their oar banks were either broken or unmanned. In an instant, the beetle shrugged off the pack of ants. The carracks were free.
Hovering beside the boom, two Venetian boats saw their chance and shot forward, loudly sounding trumpets. There was enough pantomime in this gesture to make the broken line of Turk galleys abandon thoughts of pursuit. The battered carracks limped to the safety of the Horn, leaving behind a watery battlefield littered with splintered wood and floating corpses.
The hillside, by now teeming with onlookers, seemed to give a collective sigh. The palpable delight of the spectators crackled in the air like a lightning storm. People hugged and cheered and forgot their earlier dashed hopes of a full fleet’s arrival.
Anna closed her eyes and felt the intoxicating emotion of new-found hope. ‘You see,’ she said to Plethon. ‘We might win. And then what? We must plan for tomorrow, even if tomorrow never comes.’
On the far side of the straight, the sultan had come down to the shore to watch his expensive new armada put into action. Anna could see the many-coloured banners streaming in that divine southern wind, but she could not make out if Mara Brankovic was in his contingent, nor the look on the sultan’s face as he took in the failure of his precious fleet.
XXI.
F or days the guns had kept up their pounding at the walls. The defenders could do little but huddle in the lee of the stone curtain and pray the next shot did not bring it down upon their heads.
There had been casualties – mostly minor wounds from flying chips of stone – but the men were not the target of the Ottoman gunners. Little by little, the wall, the city’s masonic shield, was beginning to crack under the methodical barrage.
The men sat about the yard in fast-established cliques – there were too many fault lines among the mongrel company for it not to happen. The Latin mercenaries kept to themselves with the unspoken, sneering disdain of professionals lowered into partnership with amateurs.
‘I’m afraid,’ Boccanegra admitted to Fieschi as the two sat in the parapet’s long, crenelated shadow and made ready for the night’s work. ‘I know we’re not supposed to admit such things, but I can’t stop thinking what it would feel like to have a sword chop into my arm. I keep imagining it and my bowels begin to swim each time.’
Fieschi shook his head. ‘Never let your thoughts go in that direction. Never think about your own death. It will come, so there’s no use dwelling upon it.’
Boccanegra stuffed a wad of mastic into his mouth and began to chew. ‘Do you think it possible to see the future? Perhaps this obsession my mind has with a sword cutting my arm off is because a sword really is going to cut my arm off. Maybe that is destiny or God’s choice for me. Maybe the next time...’
‘Stop it, Leo.’ Fieschi snapped. ‘Your mind doesn’t know the future. You’re not going to get your arm cut off. We are all going to see this siege through and sail home safe and happy. That’s the future my mind sees. That’s the only future you need to think about.’
‘God willing, but that future seems a long way off,’ said Boccanegra. ‘What about the near future, what about tonight? Why did John have to volunteer us to raid their lines?
He was not the only one of the men under Grant’s command to ask that question.
The frightening swiftness of the wall’s decimation from the basilica gun, especially in comparison to the damage inflicted by the other cannons, had led Giustiniani into risking a body of men on a night raid to try and spike the gun.
Grant had volunteered his company for the task. It was the act, Fieschi feared, of a man who had set himself on death and sought now only to make a good end of things. It was a fear the veteran kept to himself.
Fieschi clapped a hand on Boccanegra’s shoulder. ‘Well, at least we’ll get to do something instead of just sitting here waiting for the cannon ball with our name on it.’
He scrambled up onto his knees and peered over the lip of the crenelation across the short no-man’s-land to the Turk camp. In the gathering gloom, he could make out the activity of the gunners around the single cannon aimed towards their tower.
The next shot, the Maghrib prayer, was almost due. In a strange way, the time leading up to the blast was worse than the shot itself, and once the dust cleared, every man experienced a tremendous surge of energy, a mixture of excitement and relief set loose by the blast.
That would linger like a narcotic in their veins for a time. Their faces would wear smiles, and men would tell jokes and horse around like children until, as time lengthened, the anticipation of the next shot began to flood their nerves with fear once more. The undulating strain was enough to make a man seasick.
‘What’s it like for them, do you think?’ Fieschi said, nodding in the direction of the Turks.
‘Hot meals and no one firing stones at your head? Paradise. They probably even have a tent to sleep in.’
Fieschi grinned. ‘Sounds boring.’
***
The first creak of cart wheels set the hairs of Grant’s neck on end. ‘This is it!’ he thought and felt the familiar precipitous drop of his stomach, followed by an almost out-of-body numbness flowing through his muscles. ‘Just let those carters come a little closer.’
He heaved himself up onto his elbows and peered out from the long, damp grass that fringed the lip of the fosse.
The slope behind him was dappled with the crouching bodies of men, more sensed than seen in the darkness. There were fifty in all, a mixture of Genoese and the bolder among the Greeks.
He felt all their eyes upon him, waiting for his signal to move.
Ahead, the night lay like a dark ocean, stretching away until the picket fires of the Turkish camp marked its distant, glowing shore.
He had a strong sense of the enemy sentries staring back across the darkened hinterland to the cliff of the wall. Watchful or indolent, he wondered, it might make all the difference.
He made out the square shadow of the cart as it was driven towards the fosse. Giustiniani’s prediction that the Turks would add an escort to the carters had proven wrong. It seemed they placed as little value on the men dragging the wagons to the ditch as the carts themselves, but instead of a steady line of wagons they now sent them one by one, testing the waters for ambush, Grant supposed.
There had been no Greeks waiting in the fosse the previous two nights; he hoped that made them less vigilant tonight.
It had been perhaps an hour of waiting, pressed flat in the grass, although lying in the dark, exposed outside the wall, time lost all proportion.
They had formed their ambush a short way to the right of the growing causeway mound and let the first cart of the evening come and go unmolested to further lull the enemy.
Now the second cart was rolling its way forward and Grant was rising from the grass to strike.
The plates of his half-armour clacked like a cicada, a horribly loud sound in the still air, and then it was as if a whole swarm had taken wing at his heels.
With a yelp of alarm, the carters abandoned the traces of their wagon and turned to flee. Grant, racing like a loosened mastiff, heard the heavy pad of feet, saw the dark shape of a head silhouetted by the far camp light and sprang.
The man’s fear escaped in a cry of anguish as they crashed to the earth together in a flounder of limbs. Grant registered the reek of sweat as he swa
m like a wrestler on top of his prone victim.
A soil-muddied palm flailed and slapped across his face. Grant pushed it away with his own left hand, even as his right began to pump the short-bladed baselard into the torso beneath him.
A howl began to escape and became muffled as Grant’s strong palm closed over the other man’s jaw. His right had not stopped thrusting. One, two, three, four, the blade oiled by the blood that now caked it to the guard.
The clack of the insect swarm was fading as the three Bocchiardi brothers led the main body in a wordless charge towards the camp gate from which the cart had departed.
Then the baselard found its target and the rigid muscles struggling against him slackened. The point had pierced the carter’s heart.
Grant rolled clear. Around him similar pairs of bodies heaved and grunted in the darkness until, one by one, the set-upon carters twitched and lay still. Wasting no time, Grant pulled the baselard free and rushed to join the raiding party.
Watchful or not, the Turk picket would expect eight frightened carters to come sprinting back out of the night. By the time they could discern the difference, the men charging at them from the dark would already have loosed death from their bows.
The trench of the gun pits ran away to both left and right of the camp entrance, hemmed in by palisade walls on each side. Grant jumped down into the soft earth of the ditch and almost immediately stumbled over a corpse.
Ahead, he could make out the sound of the Bocchiardi hacking at the slumbering bodies they encountered by the nearest gun.
There was an unnerving absence of the manufactured aggression of war cries. The drowsy gun crews were set upon and butchered with banal efficiency and in total silence, so that for a few brief moments, the only sounds carried to Grant’s ear by the night air were the suck of blades cleaving into flesh and the half-cough of stricken men.
He had to move some way along the trench before he even saw a living Turk. A bizarre fear briefly gripped him that he would not get a chance to do his part in the killing. It was a laughable thought on the edge of a hostile camp of thousands.
Porphyry and Ash Page 20