Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  ‘Nice spot,’ said Constantine. ‘Lovely views.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Doukas. He was as plump as a pot-bellied pig and Constantine smiled at the sight of him, his rotund silhouette like a child’s spinning top.

  ‘This sultan of the Ottomans fears nothing and no one,’ said Doukas. ‘He does as he pleases while your father, the emperor …’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘Does nothing, Doukas?’ asked Constantine. ‘Is that what you were about to say?’

  The teacher pretended he had not heard the question.

  ‘Do not forget that Constantinople has shrugged aside the shadow of the Muslim scimitar for century after century,’ said Constantine. ‘Why should my father doubt the strength of the city’s defences now, after all this time?’

  Doukas did not answer and instead began listing the statistics of the new fortress.

  ‘Walls as wide across their tops as three men laid head to toe,’ he said. ‘And as tall as eight men standing on each other’s shoulders. The towers are greater still. Truly it is a marvel.’

  ‘I hear talk of magic in the mix as well,’ said Constantine. Doukas turned to look at him, saw that the prince’s eyes were wide, his teeth glinting.

  ‘I wonder about you sometimes,’ said the teacher, resuming his survey and squinting into the sunlight. ‘Where you find pleasure.’

  Constantine warmed to his theme. ‘They say the mortar was mixed with ram’s blood, for strength and good fortune.’

  ‘There’s hardly anything magical in that,’ said Doukas. ‘Heathen superstition – no more and no less. Damn them all.’

  ‘What about the layout of those walls you’re so impressed by, then?’ asked Constantine. ‘I have heard their lines trace the shape of two names intertwined – the sultan’s and the Prophet he serves …’

  ‘For one who spends so much time in a darkened room, you don’t miss out on idle gossip,’ said Doukas.

  ‘God forbid my father’s subjects should keep me in ignorance,’ said Constantine.

  Doukas clambered down from his perch at the window and crossed to the bed.

  ‘Never mind the prattle of hoi polloi,’ he said, taking a seat by the prince. ‘The facts are more sinister than any fancy. Sultan Mehmet has built his own castle within sight of our walls – and no more than six miles from the Golden Horn. He even calls his abomination Rumelihisari – the fortress on the land of the Romans!

  ‘No captain dares pass the Ottoman fort without first allowing his ship to be boarded, the cargo checked and taxed.

  ‘The walls are festooned with guns – big enough, they say, to hurl stones from one side of the channel to the other. No ship is safe.’

  Now that his eyes had properly adjusted to the near darkness, Doukas noticed that the prince was considering a sheet of parchment pinned to a board. On the parchment was a sketch plan of the new fortress and the territory around it.

  ‘You have to admire the gall of the man,’ said Constantine, tapping his finger on the outline of Rumelihisari. ‘Right where the channel is narrowest – at the Sacred Mouth.’

  ‘Have you heard what the people have taken to calling the thing?’ asked Doukas.

  Constantine looked up from the plan and shook his head.

  ‘Bogaz Kesen,’ said his teacher. ‘The throat-cutter.’

  ‘Oh, I like that,’ said Constantine. ‘Has a ring to it.’

  Doukas shook his head, exasperated.

  ‘I call it a tumour,’ he said. ‘A tumour in the Sacred Mouth.’

  28

  Within the view framed by Constantine’s windows, but much too small to be noticed from six miles away, a figure mounted on a fine white mare surveyed the latest symbol of his intent.

  He was Mehmet, hero of the world, son of Murat, Sultan, son of the Sultan of the Gazis, frontier lord of the horizons. His age was twenty-one years and he had been sultan for nine of them. His mare, Hayed (which meant movement), was on heat and would not settle beneath him. She turned this way and that, even rearing on to her hind legs.

  ‘Calm yourself now, Hayed,’ he said firmly. He was strong, and a masterful horseman, and the challenge to his authority only made him smile as he used his knees and heels to enforce his commands. She came to a standstill and he stroked her neck, feeling the long, coarse hairs of her mane between his fingers, smelling her sweat.

  Suddenly an explosion tore apart the peace of the morning and Hayed reared up once more, so that Mehmet had to rise in the stirrups and lean forward over her neck to retain his balance. When she settled back down on to all four hooves, he turned his head in the direction of the sound. It was the report from one of his heavy guns newly installed along the seaward-facing walls of the fort. A thin veil of dark smoke rose into the sky, betraying its source.

  Glancing upstream to his left, he saw why his gunners had sprung into action. A galley, small and slight as a water beetle when viewed from so high above the strait, was travelling downstream from the Black Sea as fast as its oars would propel it. Mehmet counted three sails on the craft as well, all filled with a wind that favoured its line of flight down the channel and on towards the Great City.

  Still the little ship came on, and now there were shouted threats as Mehmet’s soldiers warned the crew of the consequences of attempting to evade inspection and the payment of tolls. A second shot rang out, and clearly the time for warnings had passed. A stone cannonball weighing almost half a ton missed the galley’s bow by no more than the length of a man.

  Moments later, a second ball, as big as the first and moving slowly enough that its passage just above the white tops of the waves could easily be tracked by Mehmet’s sharp eyes, blasted into the galley. The hull cracked like an eggshell and seawater gushed into the void.

  The sultan watched impassively as the shattered vessel began to turn turtle. The tiny figures of men scrambled over the sides and into the water – striking out desperately for the shore or clinging to floating wreckage. Less than a minute later, the galley was gone and only a clutter of men and flotsam remained to show it had ever existed.

  Hayed seemed strangely mollified by the display, as though she had watched it as well and found that the outcome suited her mood, and Mehmet had to dig his booted heels into her flanks to get her moving – down the slope and towards an entrance to the fortress.

  Armed guards at their posts lowered their heads as he passed, careful to avoid his eyes, but Mehmet kept riding hard, through an elegantly arched gateway in the shadow of the north-western tower, and on down a cobbled thoroughfare. Rumelihisari had been built with all possible speed, but his masons had been under orders to create something beautiful, worthy of God.

  He glanced beyond the battlements and glimpsed, shining in the sun on the far side of the strait, Anadoluhisari, the fortress put in place by his great-grandfather, the Sultan Bayezit, half a century before. Now his own work completed the set, a pair of stone hands poised to wring the infidel’s neck.

  He spared a thought for Bayezit, whose own siege of the Great City had failed, along with so much else in the end. He thought of him brought to battle by the Mongol Timur the Lame and defeated and kept for the rest of his days in a cage pulled behind the victor’s dogs. Mehmet spat the memory of the khan from his mouth and spurred Hayed all the harder.

  By the time he had reached the sea wall, craft crewed by his own men were already fishing bedraggled survivors from the water. Scores of soldiers and robed officials looked on from the battlements, clapping and jeering, and it was some moments before anyone noticed the sultan’s arrival. At once there was a clamour as men ran forward from all directions to help him dismount.

  Mehmet shook his head at their approach and Hayed, still skittish and ill-tempered, shied backwards, away from the press.

  ‘Leave me be,’ he said, jumping easily down and straightening his clothing. ‘Let us see who has been first to challenge our authority.’

  He received the prisoners in the guardroom on the ground floor of the massive
twelve-sided tower that loomed over the waterfront above the middle portion of the sea wall. He was seated on a tall wooden stool, the hem of his sky-blue robe skimming the flagstone floor beneath his feet, so that he had the look of a bird on a perch, with folded wings. His face was long and thin, the profile aquiline. The avian appearance was intensified by a nose hooked like a beak.

  Those closest to him might fear him, but they found much to admire as well. For all that he was headstrong and impulsive, he was clever too, and learned. A keen student from childhood onwards, he was a master of languages, a poet and a great reader of books. The exploits of Alexander the Great he had learned by heart, and he knew history and geography, science and engineering.

  He was accompanied by a dozen armed guards but his confident air suggested he felt no need of their protection. All was silent, and then the sound of iron shackles dragging on stone announced the arrival of the prisoners. Mehmet was distracted, gazing at the light from a window high in one wall, but turned his hazel eyes to the door as they entered, preceded by two heavily muscled guards armed with scimitars unsheathed.

  ‘How many are they?’ he asked, as the line of bedraggled figures trooped slowly into the room.

  They were chained at wrists and ankles and still soaking wet. One looked to be a boy of perhaps ten or twelve years. While they lined up in front of the sultan, water ran from their clothes, darkening the guardroom floor. The flagstones were red and the spreading dampness had the look of freshly spilled wine, or blood.

  Mehmet considered the faces before him. All were dark, save the boy, who was fair, and he detected family resemblances among the group – as though brothers had found places aboard for brothers, fathers for sons.

  ‘A crew of twenty-five, your majesty,’ said a clerk who had brought up the rear of the line and now stood as close to the sultan as he dared. ‘Plus their captain.’

  At the mention of the rank, a prisoner in the centre of the line raised his bearded chin. Mehmet noticed the movement and addressed the man himself.

  ‘Your name?’ he said.

  The bearded man looked the sultan in the eye before responding.

  ‘I am Captain Antonio Rizzo, your majesty,’ he said. ‘Our home port is Venice and we pass this way many times each year.’

  The man looked to be around thirty years old. His dark hair was curly, unruly and just beginning to show grey by the ears. The face was not handsome, but open and pleasant. He had a bangle of silver metal on one wrist. Around his neck he wore a silver locket and on his left hand a silver ring. Taken together, Mehmet thought, the assemblage suggested a loved one, if not a wife.

  ‘Kneel down,’ said the sultan.

  Rizzo looked left and right at his men, and they at him. Mehmet saw trust in the looks they gave him, even affection. They certainly intended to take their cue from him.

  ‘KNEEL!’ bellowed one of the guards, and all of them dropped, the captain included, as though poleaxed.

  There was silence then, broken only by the sound of water dripping from clothes and the ends of noses and unwashed hair.

  ‘You know it is against our wishes for any ship to pass through these waters without payment of a toll,’ said the sultan. There was no note of a question and he delivered the information as a simple fact.

  ‘Yes, your majesty,’ said Rizzo.

  ‘So you knowingly and openly defy us?’

  ‘We were a week overdue, your majesty,’ said the captain. ‘With a cargo of beef that had already begun to spoil. It was my intention to settle our debt on the return leg of our journey.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the sultan. ‘Well the meat is well salted now.’

  He turned his attention to the clerk.

  ‘We have no time for debts,’ he said. ‘They will settle their account immediately. Keep the boy.’

  The clerk took a thin wooden board from under his arm and made a swift note on a sheet of parchment fastened to it. Mehmet wondered what it said, but not enough to ask.

  ‘And put the good captain where everyone may see him,’ he said. He stood up from his stool and walked out of the door, followed by his guards.

  Within the hour, all of the Venetians were dead – all save the boy, whose youth and appearance had pleased the sultan. He was Rizzo’s son, and the fair hair was the gift of his mother. He was placed within the harem. Each of the other crewmen was swiftly dispatched with the sword. Rizzo was impaled, however. Before any of the beheadings were carried out, and while all looked on, two strong men held the captain face down on the courtyard in front of the tower, his arms manacled behind his back and his legs spread wide by a length of wood tethered between his ankles. A third man, less heavily built than the other two but with specific skills, then thrust the sharpened end of a long wooden pole as thick as his arm into Rizzo’s anus. He used a heavy mallet next, to drive the point onwards, like a tent peg, into the abdomen. Rizzo was still alive, and bleating like an abandoned calf, when the pole was raised vertically and the tail end slotted into a waiting socket between two flagstones by the battlements. From a distance it might have looked like a toy for a child – one of those on which the arms and legs of a jointed figure jerk up and down when a string is pulled.

  29

  The sultan did not stay to witness the executions. Instead he departed for his capital at Edirne, three days’ ride to the west of Constantinople. As he turned his back on the Throat Cutter, and while his retinue fussed around him on the road, he smiled as he remembered the flight of the colossal stone ball that had doomed the Venetians and their ship. He had seen the store of ammunition at first hand, like gaming pieces for a giant, and for all that each missile was as fat and big around as the greatest wild boar, the bombard had tossed it across the strait like a pebble. His hand clenched involuntarily into a fist as he considered the power. Just as the hulls of ships would splinter in the face of such weapons, so too would the ancient walls of the city that had defied his forebears, his own father, Murad, Bayezit, and all the rest.

  It was late afternoon on the third day of the journey when they reached Edirne, and with the sun hanging low in the sky like a copper coin, he saw the earthbound infernos of Orban’s furnaces. Without a thought of going first to the palace, he hastened towards the crowd of men labouring ceaselessly to add to his steadily growing collection of city-takers.

  One of the foremen caught sight of Mehmet’s approach, accompanied by his attendants, and shouted out to the assembled founders, masters and labourers. All turned towards the sultan and as one they stopped what they were doing and dropped to their knees, heads bowed. Nearby were two long, low couches on which the sultan’s most trusted advisers had been seated to observe the massive labours. They too had risen at word of Mehmet’s approach but he waved everyone away – insistent that his arrival should do nothing to interfere with the job at hand.

  ‘Continue! Continue!’ he shouted, as he reached the casting pit in a specially prepared site outside the city walls and jumped down from Hayed’s back. All leapt to their feet once more and he strode excitedly to towards the commanding figure of Orban, the master founder. Fully a head taller than the sultan, though not as powerfully built, he took care to stoop uncomfortably low.

  Mehmet was hungrier for a progress report than any show of deference.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, eyes wide.

  ‘You have timed your arrival perfectly, majesty,’ said Orban, straightening and leading the sultan on a quick walk around the perimeter of the pit.

  It was itself a colossal creation, as deep as five tall men, and the width of four. Rising from the centre, to ground level, was the rounded top of a huge cylinder of clay that had been mixed with grass and shredded linen to form a robust mould. In fact the mould was in two parts – one inside the other like a sword inside a sheath.

  What was visible to Mehmet was the outer shell of clay that had been painstakingly shaped and then lowered into position over the slightly smaller inner mould, leaving a void all around – like the a
ir gap around a finger in a loose-fitting glove. Into this space, several inches wide, would be poured the torrent of molten copper and tin that would form the bombard itself. Packed tightly around the mould was a framework of huge logs and iron rods, which had in turn been surrounded with a fill of earth and stones so that the weight of the bronze might be supported while it cooled in its cavity.

  ‘We are about to pour a slurry of wet sand down and around the outside of the mould,’ said Orban. ‘It will absorb some of the metal’s heat and prevent the mould from cracking.’

  Mehmet nodded. His was no casual interest. Rather he had immersed himself in the lore of metal casting – indeed ever since Orban had offered his services. The founder had told him he had learned his art in Hungary, the land of his birth. He had impressed the sultan with his frankness then, admitting that he had tried first to ply his trade in the Great City. The emperor had been keen enough but lacked the funds to suitably reward his endeavours – and so he had sought out the sultan of the Ottomans instead.

  Mehmet had spotted Orban’s value at once and had thrown down a challenge:

  ‘These weapons you say you can make – will they bring down the walls of the Christians’ city?’ he asked.

  Orban had nodded.

  ‘I am certain of it, sire,’ he said.

  Since then the Hungarian had made the guns mounted on the walls of the Throat Cutter – one of which had utterly destroyed the ship of the Venetians. Now he was poised to create his masterwork, the greatest bombard the world had yet seen.

  While Mehmet and Orban watched, the labourers piled yet more earth and sand over the top of the pit until only a small hole remained leading into the cavity inside the mould itself.

  Content that all was as it should be, Orban had the men turn their attentions then to two huge furnaces built of clay bricks. They had been alight for days, fed continuously with charcoal so that each interior blazed like the sun and roared like the mouth of hell. Orban bade the sultan keep back, but Mehmet needed no instructions to stay many yards from the scorching heat.