Slipping the sabre from the haft with a turn of the wrists, he brought the axe head cutting around in a mandritto fendente, putting all his remaining strength behind it.
The razored edge bit into the janissary’s forehead, under the rim of his arming cap and split the skull open like a melon. The left arm still clutched the green banner as the body toppled back over the rampart.
There was no time to savour the kill. Even as the giant was staggering from the mortal blow, his comrade beside him slashed at Grant’s unprotected face. He saw red across his vision. The cut stitched him across the brow, opening the muscle there to sheet his face in blood. The metallic tang of it filled his mouth.
He swung the axe up backhanded in a roverso sottano and caught the second janissary under the armpit, almost cutting him in two.
The poleaxe-wielding defender stepped past and slammed the pedale hammerhead down to finish off another janissary, and the small section of rampart was clear of invaders once more.
Grant saw through the blood that it was Giustiniani stood beside him. ‘Hold on,’ said the Genoese condottiero. ‘One more blow and they’ll break.’
The first rays of red dawn were still casting themselves across the clouds like a reopening wound, illuminating the carnage below.
The light traced its brilliance across the metal surface of two tall armoured bodies on the rampart. Neither was a target a janissary marksman would miss. With a flat crack, several handguns fired at once, and both Grant and Giustiniani staggered.
The pain in his side might have been the cracked ribs; Grant thought the cuirass had deflected the ball.
Beside him, Giustiniani was bent over, a gauntlet clutched under his armpit. When he brought the hand back, the fingers were wet with blood.
The visor flipped up, and Grant could hear the gutteral suck and bubbling of his laboured breathing. Already his sternum must be pooling with blood.
Instantly, anxious Genoese bodies were lifting a screen of pavise shields around them, although no one cast Grant so much as a glance. All eyes were fixed on Giustiniani, already whey faced. Bloody bubbles flecked the corners of his mouth. He gasped to his aide, Dalmata, ‘Get me to the boat.’
Dalmata nodded and undid the clasp of Giustiniani’s helmet to lift it away and retrieve the postern key, which hung down beneath the plackart.
An agitation descended across the Genoese and caught the attention of the emperor. Under the cover of the screen of pavise, the party of Chiot mercenaries were moving steadily backwards to the rear of the compound, leaving Grant and the remaining defenders to continue to hold back the janissary onslaught.
The emperor moved across to where the stricken protostrator was being slid onto an improvised stretcher.
‘Where are you going?’ said Constantine, alarmed by the sight of the postern key in Dalmata’s hand.
‘Where God himself will soon lead these Turks,’ Giustiniani said weakly and coughed up a wad of thick blood.
Dalmata moved towards the postern.
‘Don’t go!’ cried the emperor. ‘They are almost spent.’ He could have been speaking of either side.
More and more Genoese were glancing rearwards or even shuffling back towards where their captain lay. They sensed what was happening, and the janissary did too.
‘Don’t do it,’ Constantine said, this time directly to Dalmata as the key was placed in the postern lock.
‘God be with you,’ Dalmata replied, his eyes fixed by his shame to the ground.
‘God has damned us, and so too now have you.’ said Constantine.
The emperor spat into the dirt beside the stretcher and turned from the opening postern. As he did so, his eyes fell upon a Turk banner cresting a tower, down the line above the Kerkoporta. By then Dalmata was already through the gate, leading the dying Giustiniani from the compound.
The sight of the open iron door and the abandonment of their leader was too much for the exhausted Genoese. A surge of men seeking to follow became a stampede as others saw the crescent banner atop the tower down the line.
The rampart, contested and held so fiercely through the night, was abandoned as resistance collapsed back towards the narrow, unlocked gate.
Exhausted legs stumbled as men succumbed to temptation and raced for the portal to safety. Bodies crashed into one another and a great mound of panicked men blocked up the gateway, choking off the retreat. The crush began to claim victims.
‘The city is taken!’ the first voice rang out, once in Greek and then, more enthusiastically, in Osmanli.
Janissary gunners, surging onto the emptying rampart could have their pick of targets in the scrummage of bodies by the gate. New corpses fell to the earth with every shot, tangling up more legs as they fell. The fighting in the stockade was fast becoming a massacre.
Beside the emperor, Andronikos Kantakouzenos spat blood into the dirt. ‘Let’s make a proper end of this,’ he said to his old friend. They were a knot of thirty bodyguards, an island of resistance amid the janissary flood.
Constantine slipped the purple cloak from his armour and nodded to his companions. ‘We tried,’ he said. ‘By God, we tried.’
Away to the left of the slaughter at the open postern, another small island of resistance took the form of a Scotsman.
The cut in his left shoulder from the razored spaulder was deepening each time he moved, and his right side ached about the rib cage. Wounded but defiant, Grant saw the emperor throw himself into the maw of the janissary ranks and knew it was time to get out if he could.
Under his breath he muttered, ‘Dead. Dead. All gone, all dead,’ as he scanned the rear wall for an exit. The city was falling, the emperor was slain, but his own purpose remained. Somewhere back behind the wall, Anna would be waiting, still in need of protection from the screaming, blood-crazed devils, already scrambling to scale the inner wall around him.
The postern that Giustiniani had left through was a death trap of tangled corpses, and the other gates remained locked. The far one of these looked his best hope, but he would need a means to blow it open. That was when he spotted the cauldron.
The copper pot sat discarded on its side, the black resin dribbling from the lance. He dragged it across the blood-spattered cobbles towards the nearest iron door and set it upright a few yards short of his target, then he pressed his foot on the bellows and pumped the handle.
Behind him, the rampart was fast being subsumed beneath a white comber of borks. A group of janissaries came screaming towards him, blades raised in triumph.
Grant turned, slipped the lock and felt the surge in the tubing as the black liquid welled past the gate. A curtain of fire swung out like a golden arm, slapping itself across the onrushing bodies and turning their war cry into a horribly shrill scream.
He released the lock and pumped at the cauldron handle once more, wincing as the metal cut into his shoulder.
The gruesome spectacle of the charred bodies and the hanging whiff of roasted flesh bought him a bubble of time. With victory at hand, other Turks thought it wiser to look for easier meat along the compound wall than seek fiery martyrdom.
He had chosen this postern in part because of the barrels stacked along the wall beside it. He dropped the fire lance and hurriedly rolled one and then another of the powder kegs into place beside the hinges of the postern.
As he splintered the barrel with his axe to let a little of the black powder spill out, he thought of Plethon and his experiments and then wondered how near it was wise to stand. ‘Only one way to find out,’ he thought, taking up the lance. He slipped the lock, gave a final silent prayer and brought the arm of fire across to lick the barrels.
A thunderclap. A shrill ringing in his ears. He was on his back. A dark underbelly of cloud spread before him, rippled by a gleam of light.
He managed to lever himself up onto the couter plate of one elbow and look across to the thick black pall where the postern had been.
As the smoke thinned, he could make out the iron
door was buckled, its hinges torn from the brickwork. He got to his knees, then his feet and stumbled through the archway and out of the death pit. He began to shuffle, as fast as his exhausted body could take him, away from the slaughter.
He found a low wall and crouched behind it while he pulled off his sabatons and unclasped the rest of his harness.
In the distance, the sun’s rays sparkled off the dome of Hagia Sophia. He fixed his eyes on it and cried out in pain as the broken spaulder came out of his flesh.
His arming cote was soaked in sweat and blood, and his throat rasped. He was beyond exhaustion, but he knew he had to put distance between himself and the Turks as they came through the wall, so he struck out, across the field, as fast as his broken body would manage.
At the first wooded copse he allowed himself to fall into the cool shade of a plane tree. Propped against its bole he looked back across the fields towards the smoking walls and saw the green pennants flying from almost every tower.
They would take their time now, he thought. Men would grow cautious with victory at hand, and there were churches and Blachernae Palace to ransack.
He stripped off the padded arming cote and rested for as long as he dared – just a few juddering heartbeats – to catch his breath and press a cool, fat leaf into the running wounds in his shoulder and side.
Grant felt almost overcome with anguish for the dead in the stockade – Fieschi, Constantine and thousands more. They had almost held. They had come so close to turning the last assault back, but instead their deaths had been for nothing. He had hoped, perhaps against all reason, that Constantinople could be saved, but it had not been God’s will.
It was clear now that God’s plan for him had never been to save the city, but to save just one girl. Anna. If he could get her out, if he could get her to safety, then whatever else, he would be at peace.
He opened his dry mouth and shook the dew from the low branches onto his swollen tongue. Then, with a last nervous glance back at those banners, he set off through the trees and did not stop, even when he reached the Mese.
He was back past the Holy Apostles, a mile from the front, when he met the horsemen on the road. It was Loukas Notaras and a dozen of his reserve. Their eyes all betrayed the horror of his appearance; arms and legs bruised and lacerated, glistening with mud, sweat and blood. Overcome with the swelter, the sunflower locks had doured to brass, but the lapis gaze remained cool and pitiless and unchanged. One man slid from his mount and pressed a leather canteen into Grant’s grateful hand.
‘You look as though you crawled out of hell’s deepest pit,’ the megas doux said. For the first time, Grant heard awe in his tone. ‘I passed Giustiniani being carried to his grave, are there any of my countrymen still alive up this way?’
Grant shook his head. He took another swig of the water and said, ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘What Constantine should have done long ago,’ said Notaras. ‘Limit the damage. I shall ride up this road and attempt to surrender the city.’
‘God protect you in that endeavour,’ said Grant. ‘They’ve a fierce taste for blood at present.’
The megas doux gave a nod. ‘And worse besides, no doubt. My daughter claims you are an angel. Seeing you now, still living after that night of butchery, I am inclined to believe it may be true. She is sheltering at Hagia Sophia. Go to her, kyr Grant, get her away if you can. Please.’ He turned to the men of his party, ‘Somebody give this man a horse!’
XXXV.
The sun had risen on the last day of the Romans. It shone with a brilliance, dazzling from the stones of the forums, making the columns glow liked bleached bones as Grant galloped through each in turn.
The frantic cadence of his mount’s hoof beats matched the desperate clamour of church bells in the air around him; echoing their alarm impotently up to the heavens, then falling silent, one by one, as successive districts were overwhelmed.
Over his shoulder, the dark smoke cloud of the first fires loomed like a towering desert djinn. The thousand-year-old empire was sinking into oblivion like a hull-shattered galley slipping beneath the waves.
To his right, where the slope of the land fell away to the abandoned Marmara seawall, he could make out the dark tide of Turk sailors sloshing over the battlement lip. They would climb the hill in no time and Hagia Sophia would be one of their first objectives.
He clattered into the Augustaion square and fell off his mount. People were still flocking towards the great church in hope of sanctuary, and a woman, supposing him a Turk, screamed at the sight of him.
He forced his way through the throng and inside the basilica’s nave, calling out for Anna with every step.
To the right of the ambo, a mane of dark auburn turned at the sound of his voice. She bit her lip at the sight of him wading towards her through the press of bodies.
The floor beneath her slippers was a circle of lucent marble, a broad disc of a single sea-green stone, made vivid by the shafts of citrine that streaked in from above in an arrow-storm of light.
He might have known she would choose this spot: the rota at her feet was part of a larger opus sectile, a central globe around which dozens of smaller granite spheres and marble moons orbited. The Greeks called it omphalion, the navel of the earth, the center of the universe, and it was the very spot where imperial heads first received their crown. When the Turks burst through the doors to claim Constantinople’s soul, they would find Anna Notaras planted over it, contesting the ground.
‘Are you a ghost?’ she whispered as she flung her arms about his neck.
He winced. ‘We must go,’ he said. ‘We must hurry. It may already be too late, but there are still ships in the Horn.’ He took her arm and began to draw her from the tapestry of bodies towards the church doors.
‘Mother and Zenobia,’ she said as he bustled people aside and crossed the narthex. ‘They are at Hagia Theodosia, towards Phanarion.’
‘Then they’re gone,’ said Grant to the space before them and continued to tug her along in his wake.
A bright portal swallowed them, plunging them from the muffling stone of the church, into the palpable day. Immediately, she saw how he could be so certain. The sky ahead of them, livid and clear in its heights, was turbid about the rooftops with palls of curdling smoke. The air reverberated with the noise of an empire’s bloody sunset. From shoreline to shoreline a horseshoe of pillaging was underway, and the horror of it stopped Anna dead in her tracks.
Grant yanked at her arm. ‘We’re for leaving,’ he said. He glanced about the Augustaion, but his horse had long since gone. ‘We’re for leaving, or you’d best be learning Turkish.’
He began to move with some purpose across the cobbles, dragging in his wake a flesh caryatid, whose fixed stare remained trained towards Phanarion.
They had hardly turned down the first narrow alleyway before screams were at their heels; the first Turks had reached the end of the Mese.
They ducked left down another passageway, and right as Grant saw the street there descend sharply downhill. He wanted to find a way to the harbour through the warren of the old town.
The air held the sound of shouting now, in foreign tongues, perhaps a street away, perhaps two, but his drunk-tired head and the ricochet of sound from the buildings made it desperately hard to judge.
The road passed between the ruined stumps of the original citadel wall then curved and descended in a straight line towards the harbour.
He could see at a distance the gates had been locked. A desperate crowd clotted against them, some trying to scale the tall iron railings. Between that melee and where he stood, Grant could see the red cherries of Turkish turbans sugaring the flat of the Strategion marketplace.
‘We won’t make it that way,’ he said, his voice grown hoarse and robbed of all vibrancy.
The caryatid on his arm sprang back to life. ‘The acropolis!’ said Anna and began to pull him along the road in the opposite direction.
The streets we
re growing less empty. The next passage had bodies lying bloody in the gutter and the busy noise of looters beyond a sundered door.
It was payday for the surviving Turk irregulars, to be extracted in kind from the vanquished. The ancient law of conquest was grimly playing itself out: the winner gets the spoils; the loser gets despoiled.
They scurried through the maze of streets, trying hard not to listen to the sounds that came, on occasion, from beyond the walls about their heads. Then the houses petered out around them and they were climbing through the long grass of the city’s original hill, up towards the lonely Column of the Goths.
Anna surged up the grass bank between a stand of tall trees and felt the burden of his weight on her arm. The effort of the night was catching up, she supposed; he could hardly run on forever. There was a moderate incline to the slope, but while fear made her feet dance like a hound-harried stag across the hard earth, his own seemed to treat it like quagmire.
Cresting the ridge, they fled across the windblown promontory and looked down on Mangana, where a tall plume of smoke rose from Plethon’s library.
There, through the trees, on the roof of the ochre monastery, conical helmets were moving gingerly across the tiles towards a figure dressed in white. Anna stopped for a moment and watched as the figure stepped purposefully out, into the air, and fell from sight.
The pains from the knife furrows and scourge welts, which had rippled across her back with every twist of her body, were suddenly dull compared to the agony that twinged at her heart, but she could not mourn for him now. She could not mourn for any of them yet. She must bottle it up and press on, tear her eyes from the empty gable, force her feet to resume their path. She must drag them both down the gentle slop at the promontory tip, through the bower of cedars where a dear departed tutor had once groomed a bright girlish mind. She must lead them down to the seawall, to the shore and the place where the great chain was anchored.
That was Anna’s plan; that would be their means of escape, but Grant was flagging beside her and twice his knees buckled, and she had to steady him.
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