Not long after the Valide Hatun tossed her apple of discord and left, the diwan session broke up and Yakub, avoiding Moses Capsali, joined Radu and Yunus for a drink at a nearby meyhane. The half-drunk crowd there included more than a few janissary from the palace barracks.
The middle of the room was given over to a lithe, boyish köçek dancer, the light running silver down the side of the youth’s face and along the prow of his nose. The meyhane’s semi-darkness was rapacious and secretive and every patron’s eye was directed to the boy who swayed in moaning rapture, his black shadow leaping up the wall behind him, monstrous and gigantic. In Yakub’s mind he saw, as in a witch’s ball, the figure of himself, spellbound. Then he saw the serious face of Moses Capsali and his enjoyment of the talented, long-haired dancer immediately soured. Gentile proclivities.
Sat at the table beside him, Yunus seemed to detect his restlessness, and having heard the tale on the walk there, knew the cause. Throwing an arm out dramatically towards the köçek dancer he raised his voice over the music and called, ‘Oh beauty, you are my king! All I want is to be your slave. I’d sooner be your slave than become Padishah of all the world.’
They were lines from a poem which was familiar to all three of them. The opening from a ghazal written by the Sultan himself. Yunus turned to Hekim Yakub and grinned. ‘Does Capsali suppose the beloveds our Sultan writes poems about are women?’
‘Capsali doesn’t read them,’ said Yakub. ‘He’s quite ignorant of any spirituality outside his own. He can’t understand how a Sufi might see a path to true love of God through the contemplation of a beautiful boy, nor how a man could write poetry about a handsome youth. He can’t see the appreciation of beauty as simply an appreciation of God’s art. To him it must all be sodomy.’
‘Ah, he sounds the sort who keeps no beardless friends and has no taste,’ said Yunus. ‘Doesn’t he know that the learned these days are all enamored of boys. As the poets of Kastamone like to say, the rose is in bloom and the tulip has been smartly shown the door.’
‘Capsali cares very little for the world beyond Blachernae. He’s content to pair Jewish men off with Jewish women and await the messiah. He thinks there’s only another thirty years of pairing to go. Then hallelujah! The kingdom of Judah will be divinely restored to us without effort.’
‘And while he waits, he misses out on all the pleasures of life,’ said Yunus, who was not one to forego anything he considered a pleasure. ‘Sultan Mehmed has a real talent for words. "In the kingdom of the moth I saw a sun-kissed angel. To his dark curls, like hyacinth, sighs of lovers cry out. Seductively dressed in black, was this light cypress, and in the possession of the Franks, his beauty reigns." Did our Sultan write that about you, Radu?’
Radu had been unusually sullen since the diwan. Forced into the conversation he said, ‘No, that one is from before my time as favourite. His sun-kissed angel was a Greek youth taken in the conquest. Mehmed was besotted with him for a while.’
‘And where is he now?’ asked Yunus.
‘Who knows?’
Yakub saw the sadness in Radu’s eyes. Where will you be, when Mehmed moves on from you?
Not for the first time, Yakub wondered about the Sultan’s beloved. Did Radu take any pleasure in it? During those first years he must have. Whatever the views of men like Moses Capsali, there was nothing unusual in a beautiful adolescent drawing the attentions of older men. Indeed, a palace youth would feel great shame if he could garner no admirers from among the court’s upper echelons and his career would certainly suffer for it later. There was no greater laurel for a young man’s excellence than the Sultan’s special regard, and Radu had commanded it for five years.
But boys were supposed to grow into men; to become the desirers rather than remain the object of desire; to give and no longer receive. Whatever Radu’s personal temperament, he remained trapped in a sort of adolescence as long as the Sultan continued to favour him in this manner. Forever a line in someone else’s poem, never the composer of his own poetry. Outwardly honoured, privately pitied.
Yakub turned back to the köçek dancer, whose art lay in blending all three sexes into one, so that the audience saw clear feminine grace, boyish temptation and masculine nobility but could never settle their minds upon which was paramount. He approved of it because he saw in the köçek a metaphor of his hopes for this triple-faithed empire of the Ottomans. Yet he saw too that the dance of the köçek would not work if the dancer attempted to make the feminine aspects tempting, the boyish noble or the masculine graceful. ‘We are what we are,’ he told himself as the dance came to an end and the davul player passed around the hat.
‘So, will you accept the Hakham Bashi’s help and take a wife?’
‘I might have to.’
‘Or you could convert,’ suggested Yunus, ‘and lower your taxes at the same time.’
The physician’s face stiffened. His eyes, turning upon Yunus, had lost all the mellowness which the wine and sway of the dancer had aroused in them.
‘I’m a Jew. I may not always be a good one, but I will never turn my back on who I am.’
The disgust which Hekim Yakub felt in that moment towards Yunus for the insincerity of his conversion was overpowering. He shocked himself with the strength of it. The Valide Hatun was right to mock the hollow character of a man who so glibly arbitraged kin and creed. Yakub stood up, his hands shaking at his side and left the meyhane without another word. Making his way immediately to Blachernae, he knocked at the Hakham Bashi’s door and was married before the first buds of spring had appeared. By that time, Yunus was feeding the crows in Wallachia.
11.
Hungary, May 1462
For George Sphrantzes and the Black Sheep, it had been a cold, uncomfortable night spent under the stars on the boat deck. The fireworks had sparkled above the Smederevo battlements and Sphrantzes had correctly guessed their significance. He was not surprised when Mara Brankovic appeared on the jetty the next morning, nor that she failed to recognise him. He was a very different man to the one who brought her an Emperor’s marriage offer all those years before.
As the barge neared the Hungarian riverbank, Nikolaos said, ‘I don’t understand. Why are they just letting us go like this - and with fresh horses into the bargain?’
‘I suspect we have the Ambassador to thank for it,’ said Sphrantzes. ‘The Turks must have realised abducting a Venetian diplomat from Hungarian soil like that risked sparking war on two fronts. Someone overreached. The horses are an apology.’
Reaching the shore, those gift-horses were swiftly unloaded, but it would take time for the stratioti to muster and load all the weapons, tenting, rugs and provisions. While this was being seen to, the Captain called a conference to discuss the day’s route. ‘If we follow the riverbank, we should reach Belgrade tomorrow.’
‘Belgrade? That’s in entirely the wrong direction!’
The Captain rubbed his jaw. ‘We can’t make it to Wallachia now, Basilissa. Even if we could, you said yourself the Turks are reportedly invading it. We need to turn back while we still can.’
‘He’s right,’ said Sphrantzes. ‘We’ve been given a reprieve. Let’s not waste it.’
‘We can still reach Poenari,’ said the Ambassador. ‘If we ride north, across the puzsta and then through the highlands. We’d approach from a different direction to any Turk advance from the Danube. It would be a race, but we might get to Poenari and out in time.’
The Captain shook his head. ‘It’s too dangerous, Ambassador.’
‘You have a contract, Captain,’ Anna Notaras said. Her voice, strong and hard edged, rang with a resolve Sphrantzes had not expected. ‘You gave your word to take me to Wallachia.’
The Captain raised his palms. ‘Basilissa, the situation has changed.’
‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘I am continuing. Even if it’s only with the Ambassador, my niece, Nikolaos, and Lueger.’
Erasmus Lueger’s face twitched in alarm. ‘Me?’
&n
bsp; ‘You’re still my prisoner,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘Be reasonable!’
To Sphrantzes’s gimlet eye she did not appear in the mood for reason. He began to wonder what had taken place inside Smederevo’s walls.
‘We shall make for the mountain route, as the Ambassador suggested,’ she said. ‘Captain, I am appealing to you, as a man of honour, not to abandon us.’
The Captain looked wounded by the suggestion of dishonour. ‘Basilissa, please, listen to reason.’
It was all too much for one member of the party. Although she appeared unharmed by the ordeal of the Turkish fortress, Eudokia had remained silent during the Danube crossing. She had sat on the flat surface of a rock at the edge of the meeting, her bent head cradled in her hands, but now she jumped to her feet and yelled, ‘She’s not the Basilissa!’
Every head in the ring around the Captain turned her way in surprise.
‘Be quiet!’ snapped Nikolaos.
‘I will not! We’re only here because of her lie. She’s not the Basilissa. She never married Constantine. She made it all up to look important.’
The words seemed to echo around the surrounding tree canopy and out across the water. Sphrantzes watched the faces around him intently and saw the Ambassador’s stiffen with alarm. The colour had risen on the neck of Anna Notaras, but her lips remained firmly closed. It’s over. Her ruse is collapsing about her ears. Sphrantzes found himself conflicted at the prospect. Certainly, he had wanted to be the one to pull the walls down upon her, but strangely, it was not just disappointment at stolen thunder he was experiencing in the moment of her downfall.
‘You’ve been made a fool of,’ Eudokia sneered at Nikolaos. ‘You’ve been duped by fine manners and a bit of money.’
The eyes of the servant had narrowed down to bodkin points. ‘Theotokos! What would you know, you silly child? She’s not my Empress because of someone she may or may not have wed.’
At last the false Basilissa chose to speak. ‘That’s kind of you to say so, Nikolaos, but Eudokia is right. I didn’t marry Constantine. And regardless of my intentions, I should not have claimed otherwise. Captain, it was also wrong of me to appeal to your honour while at the same time misleading you about my status.’
Before the Captain could reply, she stepped up onto the same rock Eudokia had vacated and raised her voice to address all the stratioti who had been busy packing saddlebags and pretending not to listen in. ‘Just as Eudokia said, we are here because of a lie. But it is not only my lie. It is Venice’s lie and Bessarion’s lie. It may be your lie too. It is the lie that our empire did not die with Constantine. It is the lie that Byzantium has continued and that we may even restore all that has fallen. We must go to Wallachia to sustain that lie. We must go there because the Ambassador’s mission, my mission, promises to be the first step in turning that lie into truth. Kyr Sphrantzes once told me that Greeks need Greece. He was correct. Whomsoever makes that homeland a reality will be our rightful Basileus or Basilissa. To that end, I’m for continuing to Wallachia. Who’s with me?’
The Captain’s brow furrowed. Sphrantzes saw him turn to the Ambassador and say, ‘That can’t be right.’ But his words were almost drowned by the cheering of his own men. There was no question in which direction the Black Sheep would ride now.
‘It’s like something out of the third century,’ Sphrantzes muttered to Nikolaos as they gathered the last of their things and prepared to ride out. ‘Troops proclaiming their new Emperor in the field.’ The boy was beaming and probably ignorant of all history, so Sphrantzes added, ‘That’s not a good sign, Nikolaos.’
Stepping down from her rock, Anna Notaras approached her fair-haired Austrian captive. ‘Kyr Lueger, I release you from your oath. You are no longer my prisoner and now free to make your own way home.’ But as the column of horses began to move across the floodplain of the Danube, Erasmus Lueger was still riding among them.
‘What’s he hanging around for,’ Nikolaos grumbled.
‘I fear he might have fallen under the same spell you have,’ Sphrantzes replied.
For days they rode northeast into the strange grass sea of the Hungarian puszta, the limitless yarn of the land unwinding itself across the middle distance. One moment the plain ahead would lie empty as far as the eye could see, and the next they would find themselves riding among fields of golden wheat, sheep and cattle herds, or horses left to graze among hayricks. The smell of lucerne and clover hung in every purr of wind. The air was occasionally musical with the adagio of sweep-well timbers; the long, weighted pole dipping like a heron, to draw up water. War felt as distant as Cathay.
On the third day, they saw two stick-thin men in rags, chained together and labouring to replace the forked fulcrum pole of another sweep.
‘Turk captives,’ the Captain told Sphrantzes as the wild-eyed men stopped their digging to watch the riders pass. ‘They say Vlad Dracula used Turk prisoners to dig him a well at Castle Poenari. Two years they were at it and when they finished, he cut the rope ladder so they couldn’t get out. They carved a message into the walls before they died, “You have water, but no soul.” These are only a little more fortunate to have been taken by Hungarians.’
The land grew lonely once more; flat and empty for many miles, save for the gallows-profile of sweep-wells. Each evening the clouds, untethered by the flatness of the land, displayed their potential for sculpture in black vesper’s pageants sailing overhead: soaring domes and towers cannoned to tatters by the wind; the upturned prow of a sinking galley; a woman’s profile arching backwards in delight. The inner mind led the eye to behold many things.
The plain seemed to roll on forever, but at last a wall of mountains began to clamber over the horizon. A wood spread itself out before them as the wolf-light of evening closed in once more. It was no more sinister than the forests they had ridden through near Gradec, but after the long ride across the open steppe, the senses grew more fearful of the tangled undergrowth, the dark holloways, the eerie stag head of a dead tree’s boughs glowing with the foxfire of the fungus that had killed it. Out of the dusk’s silence, a cuckoo began calling and made all their spines shiver.
Then ahead, the glisk of a bonfire between the tree-trunks threw spokes of light across the shapes of men and horses. There were gold works in these parts, hugging the tributaries and rivulets which came trickling down from the high peaks. The washing out of gold-dust was the preserve of gypsies and here was a troop settled down for the night.
The gypsies watched warily from their tents as the stratioti came riding into the grove. It was a suitable space for a campsite and the Captain was loathed to move on with the light already poor. They hobbled the horses on the far side of the copse from the gypsies, under the branches of an oak, and set two men to guard them.
While Sphrantzes helped Nikolaos unpack their tenting, he watched the activity among the canvas shelters of the neighbouring camp. Tawny women bedraggled in shawls stared back at him with fulgent eyes, while their hands busied themselves pleaching reeds and withies into creels. Oxen, newly unyoked from their wagons, calmly ruminated, while dogs bickered and snarled between their hooves. The low branches of a tree had been repurposed to hang pots and pans at a convenient height and across the whole campsite, a multitude of children strutted and pecked at one another like chickens about the dust.
‘You find more and more of them venturing further north than they ever used to,’ Rallis told Sphrantzes. ‘They say it was a gypsy smith that forged the nails for the crucifixion.’
The Captain called Paolo Barbo across and sent him to the gypsies with a bottle of fruit liquor. They returned the gesture, sending back a small lute as a gift of their own, which Lueger surprisingly commandeered, and before long the chary looks had melted into broad smiles as the gentle sound of his lute playing, accompanied by cymbals and voices, drifted up towards the great white lamp of the moon.
Later, as they bedded down in their shared tent, Sphrantzes said to Nikolaos, ‘I
still wonder what really went on inside that fortress.’ He was recalling the cold night spent huddled on the moored boat at Smederevo. They had not been harmed, but there had been no friendship in the eyes of the Turks watching over them. ‘We’ve changed the whole course of our journey on the say-so of our enemy.’
Nikolaos had heard Sphrantzes repeat this complaint across the whole steppe. ‘What choice did we have? Basilissa Anna was told the river had been taken.’
‘Told by whom though Nikolaos? Don’t you understand? The woman on the jetty was the Turkish Empress!’
Nikolaos shrugged, ‘If Basilissa Anna trusts her then so do I.’
Sphrantzes rolled his eyes. The blind devotion of the young Cretan servant towards his mistress was galling. Sphrantzes had known nothing like it, except perhaps his own youthful zeal for a young prince named Constantine.
‘She might have sold us out to the Turks, just like her father tried to do,’ Sphrantzes muttered.
Nikolaos shook his head. ‘You’re a bitter old man sometimes.’
‘And you’re a young fool who can’t see past a pretty face!’
Nikolaos slapped his palm down on the ground. ‘What would you know about me - or her for that matter? That I met her in a prison cell? That I’d be there still - or dead, more likely - if not for her kindness? It’s her pretty heart I can’t see past.’
‘Prison cell?’ said Sphrantzes in disbelief.
‘It was the fault of my cousin, Syphis Vlasto,’ said Nikolaos. ‘Godless rogue! He plotted a revolt against Venetian rule on Crete. Of course, he was too careless to get anywhere. He blabbered the plan to the wrong priest who promptly reported him. So Syphis was arrested and began shouting out the names of co-conspirators before they’d even strapped him to the rack. He must have denounced half of Candia because the Venetian governor flew into a panic, as if the small plot was a full-scale Greek uprising. They arrested me in Venice on the strength of my name.’
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