He shook his head. ‘Not the column of Constantine. I know that particular old wives’ tale. It was the column outside the Holy Apostles, the one Michael Palaiologos erected to celebrate the city’s recapture from the Latins. The bronze statue of the angel is meant to come alive in our hour of need.’
‘But there is no column or statue outside the Apostles,’ said Anna in bewilderment.
‘Not anymore,’ said the megas doux. ‘It came down in an earthquake over a century ago and if this prophecy had any credence, we would have put it swiftly back up.’
Anna’s eyes grew wide. ‘You should check the Apostles,’ she said. ‘They are bound to try the summoning there if they have not already.’
An indulgent smile came upon the megas doux. ‘Dear heart, if there really was a lunatic cult sacrificing to angels in the Apostles, then I think my men would have noticed. We’ve been camped there near two months.’
‘Of course,’ said Anna to herself. ‘That might be the reason they have tried to summon elsewhere.’
‘Well, they will be happy to learn that the reserve is vacating the Apostles as we speak. Giustiniani has given me command of the seawall, but no extra men, so I am shifting your brother and his comrades to guard it.’
Anna fixed him with her most earnest stare. ‘Father, John Grant did not kill Manuel. If you are interested in proof, it can be found written in Hebrew on a lime kiln wall. If you are interested in justice, leave men to watch the Apostles church. In any case, please, for me, let him go.’
The truth was that none of it mattered either way. Whether Iagaris had been killed by a deranged zealot or a foreign mercenary changed absolutely nothing. The city would soon fall. That was the only truth that mattered to the megas doux. Loukas Notaras needed to get his affairs in order before it did, and anything else was an unwanted distraction. He wanted his daughter on that boat west, and it would be easier to achieve that if she was placated on this mess instead of running around, trying to prove her lover’s innocence.
‘Alright my dearest,’ he said at last. ‘I will instruct Jacob to look into these deaths, and I will have John Grant released and returned to duty. But I think it best that you remain in the house. If there are maniacs running loose then it is better not to wander the streets and tempt fate.’
‘Oh, thank you, Father!’ she said, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek.
When she had gone from the room and he had restored his papers, he looked down and saw again the order for the countermining recruits.
He called for Jacob and instructed him to transfer a prisoner named John Grant to the mining detail. Then he pushed the whole angel nonsense from his mind and returned to the pressing business of his affairs, smiling at another loose end tied up.
XXIX.
Two youths, bedecked in mail corselets, ill-fitting helmets and wispy beards, led Grant to the work detail down by the Kaligaria Gate. Men had heard the rasp of shovels striking stone in the night, and already that morning an enemy mine had been located.
The ground around the Kaligaria Gate was studded with half-buried buckets of water and men squatting beside them, carefully watching for disturbances in the surface.
A balding veteran from Chios, Giacomo Tetaldi, oversaw the work. He stood mopping the sweat from his filthy face and chewing on mastic.
Behind him, the dark mouth of the countermine entrance yawned from the yard floor. A tongue of rope emerged from the abyss, along with the faint sounds of the men working away below.
As the boys struck the chains from Grant’s wrists, he saw the rope move and a soil-filled bucket emerge, followed immediately by a familiar face.
No amount of dirt could hide Sambucuccio’s pugnacious features, nor the grin that spread as his eyes fell on Grant.
‘I told them! I said they wouldn’t dare touch a blond hair on your head! Those boy-loving Greeks know they can’t afford to throw away the only decent fighters they’ve got.’
The two escort guards, Greeks both, wisely chose to ignore the barb and swiftly headed for the nearest postern back through the inner wall.
Grant clapped an arm across Sambucuccio’s back. ‘I know why I’ve been condemned below ground, but what are you doing digging to the devil?’
‘Hit an archon, didn’t I. When they dragged you away, I slugged one of those perfumed palace eunuchs. Would have murdered him too, had I known then that the punishment would be the same.’
‘I didn’t murder anyone, just gave him a dunt or two, same as you did. Anyone else dumb enough to do similar on my behalf?’
‘Only me!’ Sambucuccio said, grinning proudly.
‘Well, I’m grateful,’ said Grant. ‘So now they’ve us shovelling earth from under our own walls. Maybe we should keep digging until we reach Liguria.’
‘Those Turks are busy little bees, I tell you, John. We found their first tunnel soon enough. Too shallow. Burst in through their ceiling we did, right on top of those devils. The look on their faces! Tetaldi knows his stuff. They’ve started another tunnel around here, but this time we’re not going to come in from above like they expect us to. Oh no, this time we’re going under, then we shall spring our tunnel with fire and collapse their’s downwards. Undermine the underminers; it’s poetic!’
‘Leave the poetry to Beccadelli and get back down that hole,’ Tetaldi called out. ‘And show your friend where to swing his axe.’
It was lung-bursting, muscle-straining work. Each man in the group took a turn at the rock face, carving out another few feet, while the others carted away the rubble or secured the deepening hole with timbers and props. Work would pause from time to time and Tetaldi would descend the rope to put his discerning ear to the stone and gauge where they were in relation to the enemy tunnel. And with each ringing axe-swing, there was the ever-present fear that the Ottoman miners would do similar, locate the works beneath them and come bursting in from above.
The ground beneath the wall was almost entirely solid rock, which was harder and far noisier to cut through than softer clay might have been. That improved the chances of Tetaldi locating the enemy tunnel, and in the mid-afternoon, with the nod of a master satisfied at his pupils striving, he declared them to be in position.
Barrels of black powder were rolled down the tunnel and lit by a long fuse from the surface. Then, with a crump, the fruit of their hard labour was collapsed.
Sweat-soaked and filthy, Sambucuccio and Grant watched as a plume of dirty smoke coughed from the mine entrance, and a long wait began for a dozen pairs of eyes fixed on the water buckets.
‘Do you regret having come to Constantinople yet, John?’ asked Sambucuccio as they waited for a sign of new subterranean activity.
Grant thought of Anna, of a feather bed in the Rose Palace and the crisp rustle of grass among the ruins. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I suppose that makes me mad.’
‘That makes us both mad,’ said the Corsican with a grin. ‘But I tell you this: a peasant in his quiet field could live a hundred years and not taste as much life as we do here in a single day. Do you feel it pumping in your veins when you fight? It’s a narcotic – like the most powerful booze you ever drank. Virgin mother, what a feeling when the bastards miss you with their cannon or their crossbow!’
It was late in the day. The water surface had given up no more secrets, and many eyes turned towards the heavens as the moon began to rise.
The latest prophecy to sweep Constantinople foretold it would not fall under a waxing moon. There seemed no basis for this proclamation, but there hardly needed to be, such was the fear-addled collective state of mind.
That night’s full moon would afford the populace a last glimpse of their lunar protector at its full power before, the next night, it would begin to wane and leave Constantinople once again vulnerable.
Exhausted from the day’s hard labour, Grant hardly noticed dusk’s doubtful light fade and the bright tapestry of constellations unfurl. The air was clear and unclouded, pure as crystal a
fter the dust-choked atmosphere of the mine.
Sambucuccio was snoring, his arms wrapping a water bucket in a tight embrace. Slowly, Grant became aware of a babbling murmur trickling down the line of towers; the sort of febrile unease that a soldier sometimes senses intuitively among his camp comrades.
He stood up and craned his neck to see what had gotten the men on edge. Seeing faces turned skywards, he followed their gaze and took in the moon for the first time.
What should have been a great white disc was instead a thin, sickle-like crescent. The moon appeared not full, but three days old. The talisman of the city had transformed itself, against all laws of nature, into the very same symbol that fluttered on the green banners of the Moslem host beyond the walls.
It was a sight to chill blood to ice in the veins. Even the planets were against them now.
From beyond the wall the sound of shouts and joyous prayers came across the clear night air. The Turks had seen the moon too and were celebrating such an auspicious portent.
Gradually, the moon climbed higher in the sky and began to thicken and return to its natural form, but the hammer blow to morale had already fallen.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, the noise from the enemy camp vanished. The shouting, the chanting, the clashing of cymbals all died away seemingly at a stroke.
The deep silence that took its place was somehow more unsettling; every man at the wall was rattled by it. Soldiers began hurrying to take up stations along the wall in expectation of an attack.
From the rampart, Grant and the other defenders saw a single beacon flare into life out in the middle of an otherwise darkened plane.
Another beacon, close by the first, burst alight, then another and another. A chain of fire began to spread across the plane. Some of those watching from the wall caught mad hope that the Turk camp was burning, but the pattern was too ordered.
The chain of light became a coiling spiral of torches, spreading steadily out until lights could be seen dancing everywhere, from the foothills of the distant slopes, around the narrow end of the Horn and beyond Pera in an enormous sweep that held the city within its compass.
Grant began to count the fires, but they were too numerous and their abundance too frightful to consider.
An attack never came that night, but few Greeks slept, all the same.
The morning brought fresh signs of activity beneath their feet. Another tunnel was located and intercepted. This time Tetaldi’s men entered the shaft behind the diggers and dragged two to the surface for interrogation.
They were Serbians, not Turks; silver miners lured south by the chance of carving a fortune from the rock beneath Constantinople’s walls.
They must have been handsomely paid, to judge by the obduracy with which they had stuck at the task, but once captured, they did not need much persuasion to talk, and they confirmed what Tetaldi had already suspected: the miners had first hollowed a chamber under the earth somewhere close to the fosse. When the counterminers brought down a tunnel, the Serbs could swiftly replace it because they were digging from a shorter distance away and not the entire length from their camp.
‘We’ve been lucky thus far,’ Tetaldi told them grimly at a hastily convened meeting of his men. ‘But we need to continue to be lucky every time. They only need to be lucky once. A single tunnel, properly placed and sprung, could drop a whole section of the defences. So, before that happens, we must vanquish them once and for all, and that chamber is their weak point. If we bring it down, they shall have to start digging from scratch. That would take weeks, and we all know this whole affair will be settled one way or another by then.’
He spat the chewed-up mastic into the dust and scratched out a rough pattern of intersecting lines with a stick. ‘So, here’s the plan. We shall dig out the last tunnel that we intercepted, re-prop it and head back up it. Then we rush the chamber, fire the props there and bring the whole thing down.’
‘Sounds suicidal,’ one man said.
‘Well, you didn’t join this detail to keep safe,’ said Tetaldi. ‘We’ll have surprise on our side for a time. With luck, the chamber will be empty, or the miners will scatter. The rest, as always, will be in the hands of God and the man setting the fuses.’
‘I cannot speak for God,’ a familiar voice sang out behind Grant, ‘but if you want to fire pit props in a hurry, this might be of assistance.’
The gaggle of heads turned to find Plethon grinning at them, his white hair billowing wildly in the stiff breeze.
Beside him, his two sons, red cheeked from the effort, manhandled between them a strange metal contraption. Grant was reminded of the musical toy boat, but this looked an altogether more practical device.
Plethon’s hand held a four-foot hollow lance with a brass hose running from one end into the sealed copper cauldron, which his sons were happily setting down. A handle sprouted from the cauldron’s top and a set of foot bellows from its base.
‘Our attempt at a cheirosiphon,’ Plethon said and then performed a gleeful demonstration of how to operate the machine.
One man pumped the handle up and down, creating pressure in the liquid fire cauldron, while the foot bellows stoked a shallow brazier pan of burning flax at its base. A second man pointed the lance and by opening a valve, sent the pressurised liquid leaping in a jet from the mouth. A wick ignited the flammable liquid as it shot out, transforming it from thick, black tar into a deadly spray of boiling fire. In the narrow confines of the tunnels it would be deadly.
***
The mine tunnel, cold and dark as midnight, was uncomfortably tight; the ceiling low enough to force each of them into an awkward stoop. The rock it was hewn through ran in a permanent cold sweat, which pooled on the floor and got into the knee joints as the line of bodies slithered uncomfortably along. It felt like they were sneaking down a passage straight to hell.
Fourth in the line of men, Grant inched along just ahead of Tetaldi and Sambucuccio. At the very front, one of the Greeks, Theodoros Laskaris, brandished in one hand a smouldering torch to light the way and in the other a lance, thrust forward as if he were attacking the dark itself.
Between Grant and Laskaris came the two men with the cheirosiphon, the first ready with the fire lance, the second struggling with the heavy cauldron; the noise of it scraping against the floor set the teeth of the whole party on edge.
In total sixteen men crawled down the Cimmerian cloister towards the chamber, each silently fearful that he had seen daylight for the last time. Inch by inch, they forced themselves along the tiny passageway, through stale air and palls of dust.
All the while the dank penetrated to their core, where the deepest fears of every man were set loose by the eerie sounds echoing beyond the torches’ reach.
Three times they halted when Laskaris thought he had seen movement, but each time it proved to be nothing. Finally, Laskaris gestured that they were nearing the main chamber.
‘This is it,’ Tetaldi whispered to those close enough to hear. ‘You know what must be done.’
They nodded and began to creep forward again, but just as they did so, a shape loomed from the darkness into the light of the lead man’s torch.
The Serbian’s eyes grew wide as he took in the face beyond the torch and realised it was not a friend. They widened further as he made out the shapes reflected beyond. He was a miner, not a warrior, and in that moment of realisation he froze.
But only for a moment.
The bearded mouth fell open and began to bellow a warning cry.
Laskaris plunged forward. The light in the tunnel flickered as the lance crashed home and penetrated leather, matted chest hair, sweating skin and finally the shrieking bagpipe lungs.
Serbian hands clung to the lance shaft as the stricken miner stumbled backwards, sank to the floor, and thrashed about, half-blocking the tunnel.
It was all going terribly wrong so quickly, but there was no turning back.
Weaponless, save for a torch, Laskaris charged past hi
s still-kicking victim. Grant tried to follow, but the pair with the cheirosiphon were struggling to move it beyond the dying miner.
When Grant did burst into the chamber, he found Laskaris, isolated, desperately flailing his dying torch at the enraged miners he had found there.
Having crawled down the tight, claustrophobic tunnel, the chamber seemed as big as a castle great hall. Cressets hammered into the grey stone walls gave it a low illumination, casting shadows about the barrel stacks of gunpowder. As Tetaldi had guessed, they were using it as a store room, ready to take the explosives forward once the tunnelling was done and then detonate them beneath the feet of the wall’s defenders.
Nine miners had been at rest there when Laskaris burst from the darkness, and not one of them turned tail down the rear tunnel. Instead, each grabbed a pick or axe and came hurrying across the cavern towards the troglodyte intruders.
‘Take the entrances!’ Tetaldi was shouting as he followed Grant inside.
Looking about, Grant counted five other tunnels leading from the chamber. Several would lead only to the collapsed shafts they had destroyed in the days before, but others could be filled with men at work and one, to the rear of the chamber, must lead up into the Turk camp.
A miner came rushing at him, swinging a large pick wildly about. Grant jumped back, avoiding the hooked point as it cut the air with a low whistle.
He wished he had a shield or heavy armour at that moment, but either would have been a burden in the tunnel. For the same reason, he had also forsaken his longsword in favour of the shorter Turkish sabre he had taken on the night raid of the cannons.
The miner tried to catch him on the back swing of his earlier effort, but again Grant was too nimble.
He stepped away from the blow then brought the kilij blade singing through the air with a backhand cut.
A smear of crimson-tinted splendour painted itself like an oriental carpet where the severed head skidded across the chamber floor.
The rock walls glowed with a sudden, brilliant light as the hell of the fire lance was turned loose; a theatre of shadow puppets danced across the smooth cavern stones.
Porphyry and Ash Page 28