by Neil Oliver
His viziers were still on their feet awaiting his pleasure, and he gestured at them to take their seats. He joined them, on a throne raised on a dais set between their couches, and while sweat coursed from every pore on their bodies they watched as the founders and stokers approached the furnaces.
Clad in thick robes, mask-like head-coverings that concealed all but their eyes, heavy leather gauntlets and slippers, the men tended huge crucibles, one within each furnace. With wooden poles as long as the masts of galleys they stirred the molten metal. The hellish soup of copper and tin – spiked now and then with coins of gold and silver for good luck – swelled and bubbled. Noxious fumes rose from the mixture and the observers strained even to keep their eyes open as they gazed upon the spectacle.
All the while the sultan had hastened back from the Rumelihisari, Orban had overseen the preparation of the metal. It had been three days now – the fires fed by air pumped continuously into the flames by sets of bellows worked ceaselessly by rotating teams of workers. Having cast a practised eye over the brew one more time – and contented himself that the soup glowed with precisely the right shade of cherry red – Orban ordered the commencement of the pouring.
Now was the most dangerous and telling moment of the whole exercise, and Mehmet hunched forward on his throne, shielding as much of his face as possible with gloved hands as he struggled to watch. His eyes felt dry as paper, and stung in protest.
The founders started up a rhythmic chant, calling out to God as they used long poles with metal hooks on the ends to reach into each furnace and tip the crucibles forward until their liquid contents poured into carefully positioned gutters of fired clay leading to the hole in the top of the mould.
While the red rivers flowed, the workers ran up and down alongside the channels using yet more long poles to prod and cajole the liquid, easing out air bubbles that might enter the mould and leave a weakness in the casing of the finished bombard. All was measured, deadly serious activity until the mould was completely filled and the overspill flowed across the earth, hissing and throwing up clouds of smoke and steam.
Orban called a halt and almost at once the plug that had formed on the top of the mould began to change colour, fading in brightness until what had seemed like a flow of dragon’s blood turned dark and strangely lifeless.
Unable to contain himself, Mehmet leapt from his seat and rushed towards the master founder. Sensing and seeing the sultan’s approach, Orban turned from the mould and hurried over – anxious that his master should not come too near to the heat. Mehmet said nothing, but his expression carried the question he dared not ask.
‘I am pleased,’ said Orban, nodding. ‘All is well.’
In the thrill of the moment, Mehmet quite forgot himself and slapped his founder on the shoulder with boyish excitement. He shook his head in honest wonder at all he had just witnessed.
‘God is with us,’ he said. ‘He sees to it that I shall have what I need to complete this task.’
Orban bowed his head. Experience had given him the strength to withstand the heat of the furnace, but the intensity of the sultan’s gaze was altogether too much for him to bear.
If the creature’s conception had been a wonder, a breathtaking union of elements, then its birth out of the earth that had cradled it was a clumsy affair of stumbling men and bellowing beasts of burden. By morning, Orban had judged the metal would have cooled enough to permit the excavation of the mould. Hours of heavy labour followed, as the sun rose ever higher in the sky, until the great seed had been wholly unearthed. Ropes and tethers were fixed around its massive bulk and teams of horses were used to haul it up and out of its pit until it lay on its side on the sand.
The sultan had retired to his palace and his bedchamber soon after the completion of the pouring. Orban sent word to invite him to gaze upon the product of a week’s endeavour only once the clay of the mould had been cracked away and knocked clear of the interior. By the time Mehmet arrived with his retinue, the bronze had been buffed to a golden sheen. Supported upon massively stout wooden trestles, it gleamed with a terrifying lustre. It had the scale and appearance of something made not by men but by the almighty.
Mehmet reached out a hand towards the glow of its surface, but such was the reverence he felt, he stopped short of touching it. He walked the length of the cylinder and found it took him a dozen exaggerated paces to travel from its rounded base to its gaping maw. While he rightly decided it was beneath his dignity to do so, he saw there was room enough inside the barrel for a man of his size to crawl comfortably inside and turn around.
He turned to face the master founder and saw that his face was bathed in golden light reflected from the bronze.
‘A blast from this trumpet would have toppled the walls of Jericho,’ he said.
30
With the memory of the bombard gleaming before his eyes, Mehmet returned to the palace and made for his private quarters. His favourite room had windows on three sides and all were open to allow soft breezes to freshen the air.
He crossed to an eastward-facing window and looked down into the courtyard. There, on a tall pole at the centre, ruffled by a breeze, was an elaborate banner with a braided horsetail as its centrepiece. He remembered when, weeks before, he had ordered it set in place. At the sight of the thing, a great cheer had gone up from those passing nearby, and the sound had spread, carried on a sudden wind and infecting all who heard it, until it echoed from one side of the city to the other.
Mehmet turned his back on the courtyard, walked to the centre of the room and cast himself down gratefully upon the cushions and pillows heaped there. Another breeze, and as welcome, came this time from the westward-facing windows and caressed his skin. He imagined his commands carried upon it like the scent of blood, into the most distant reaches of his realm.
Within minutes of the raising of the banner, messengers and heralds had been dispatched far and wide, taking with them the news that their sultan had finally set his eyes upon the greatest prize of all – the Great City.
They would be close to him now. From Edirne he would lead them – professional soldiers and impassioned volunteers alike – to Constantinople.
Soon now, within the hour, he would set himself to the task once more and not rest this time until it was done. The great bombard and city-taker was ready, the final piece in the complex puzzle he had been assembling for many weeks. When he rose again and rejoined his throng, he would be at the centre of a whirlwind of his own creation – shaping and directing it, feeding it like a living thing and coaxing more power from it. There would be no end to his efforts until either the goal was reached or life itself was taken from him. For now, for a few final moments, he was alone with his thoughts. Muhammad himself had foretold that the city raised by Constantine would, in the end, become home to the people of the Faith. He trembled, and wondered whether it was the chill of the breeze that stirred him, or the will and pleasure of God.
There would have been no need of force, he knew, to bring the masses to him from every corner of Anatolia – to have them form his armies and fight for him. Rather they would come like guests to a wedding. The only injustice would be that felt by those left behind, those deemed too crippled, too old or too young. Even they would make the march to the mustering points – as many boys as could shake off the grasping hands of their mothers, as many old men as could drive their old bones over the intervening miles, as many of the halt and the lame as could drag themselves across the unforgiving earth.
They would be lured not only by his command but also by the prospect of glory. For the city of Constantinople – just five days’ ride to the east of his palace at Edirne – dangled in the faces of the faithful like the reddest apple, the sweetest fruit of all. Those blessed with the chance to reach out for it would either taste its flesh or, harvested themselves by the cruel blades of the infidel, rise to the paradise promised only to martyrs.
Mehmet’s breathing had grown shallow and fast with the thrill of
it all.
‘They shall be as numerous as the stars,’ he murmured. ‘My armies will flow towards the walls of Constantinople like a river of steel.’
He lay back upon the pillows, luxuriating in the softness and the cool. Once he embarked upon the campaign, comforts would be few and far between. He would spend the necessary weeks and months – however long it took – at the centre of his forces. Young as he was, he had passed enough time among besieging armies to know they made for foul and pestilent company. They would stew in their own juices, basted by misery and hardship, until the Wall of Theodosius itself was finally brought low. Only then, when his river of steel had burst its banks and flowed into the streets of the Great City, would he savour any freshness.
Slowly he became aware of a new sound, building like a thought. He ignored it at first, dismissing it as nothing more than the hubbub of the palace and of the city beyond. But the noise grew steadily in volume and intensity so that it elbowed its way to the forefront of his consciousness. It had something of the ebb and flow of waves upon a shore, a great booming, rhythmical roar that rose and fell with a life of its own. He sat up slowly, realisation dawning. Suddenly flooded with understanding, he leapt to his feet and crossed to the open windows once more. Looking out, beyond the palace walls, he saw men – hundreds, thousands of men, and countless animals besides. His army, his people, had arrived at his city walls at last. In ordered ranks they advanced upon Edirne, banners flying and horns blaring.
‘It is begun,’ he said, and he brought his hands together beneath his bearded chin and raised his eyes to heaven.
31
Constantinople, April 1453
Prince Constantine flew high above the city, beyond its walls and out over the sparkling waters of the Sea of Marmara. A chill breeze swept over him, through him, ruffling his clothes and hair and filling his lungs. He was free, and filled with the joy of it and the endless possibilities. Far beneath him, formations of oared galleys practised their moves upon the blue. Lithe and fast as sea serpents, they cut with predatory purpose between the portly merchant ships plying back and forth, every which way – sharks among dugongs.
The waters around Constantinople were always busy, yet another means of approach to the centre of the world. The pull of the Great City attracted a ceaseless flow: pilgrims and merchants; makers of war and preachers of peace; madmen and malcontents; paupers and princes, and all else in between. They came on foot, on horses and on wagons and carts; on the broad shoulders of elephants and upon the cross-draped backs of donkeys; in boats and ships of every size and shape and in every condition imaginable. The prince’s city was irresistible and he marvelled anew at the colour of it all, and the energy.
He was dreaming, of course. The flying dream was his favourite – lived to the full for as long as it lasted and bitterly mourned when it ended. Sometimes he drifted gently back to consciousness, landing among his bedclothes as lightly as a leaf parted from a tree on a windless day; often the return to the waking world was presaged by a sudden, sickening fall, a headlong, flailing dive towards rooftops, desert sands or cresting waves. Soft landing or hard – each return to earth near broke his heart.
At other times he dreamed he was weightless in water, sweeping across an undersea world in the manner of a dolphin, or a seal – or better than either, able to breathe there, to suck down lungful after lungful of energy-giving oxygen without the need to return to the shackles wrought by gravity for the world above. But just as with the dream of flight, the thrill of the deep never lasted – or not long enough.
Always there was the sudden loss of ability followed by a terrifying plummet. In the dream of the sea it was a plunge, stone-like, into deeper water. Blue turned black and then his crushed lungs would blaze in his chest until he awoke gasping into the captivity of reality, weighed down by the anvils of his crippled legs.
This time he experienced the least familiar option, and the one he found most troubling of all. Having spent many happy minutes soaring and swinging in the sunlight, he became aware of heaviness in his legs. Instead of trailing straight out behind him, they began to pull earthwards of their own accord, as though his feet were suddenly encased in lead. His forward motion faltered and then failed completely. He was falling now, feet first towards the water, faster and faster, looking now not at the waves but into the empty vastness of the clear blue sky above. After too many desperate moments, tensed for impact but with no way of knowing when it would arrive, he awoke instead, with a jolt, sweating and panting among a chaos of sheets.
While he waited for his breathing to return to normal, he focused on the circular ceiling of his room. At his own request it had been painted like the sky – azure blue and flecked with white clouds. There were birds here and there, doves, starlings and sparrows and a single white gyrfalcon. Most of it, though, was empty blue and at the centre of it all the noonday sun, golden and with wisps and tendrils of fire coiling away from the rim. It was the sky he loved and flight he longed for – the chance to shake off the bonds of earth and rise up, weightless and untrammelled.
‘Costa?’
He heard her soft voice as though from far away. After a few moments, it came again. ‘Costa? It’s me, are you awake?’
It was Yaminah. Even now she sought his permission before coming into his room.
‘Yes … yes – come in, come in,’ he said, his gaze still fixed upon the ceiling.
She opened the door no more than a few inches and slipped inside. The heavy fabric of her dress made a shushing sound as she turned to close the door before stepping quickly over to his bedside. An observer might have thought her an intruder, someone who did not belong, and yet Yaminah had lived in the palace of Prince Constantine’s parents for six years. It was the only home she had and she was made welcome, but still she moved through its rooms and corridors as though in mortal fear of discovery by the guards.
She knelt down and took his right hand in both of her own. She stroked the slim, elegant fingers as she talked.
‘They’re here,’ she said.
‘I know,’ said Constantine softly. He looked down at the top of her head, bowed as if in prayer. She remained focused upon his hand rather than his face. ‘They certainly like their drums.’
‘And their horns,’ she added, and sniffed drily. ‘I suppose it’s safe to assume they would have us be in no doubt about their presence. Or their intentions.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ he said, and he smiled. The vulnerability of the pale skin of her scalp, revealed by the neat parting of her long brown hair, made him think of the child she had been when he first saw her, perched like a bird of paradise on a balustrade inside the Church of St Sophia all those years before. All those years before his old life had ended and a new one began. He reached for her face with his free hand, caressed her cheek as softly as a wish. He felt her expression change beneath his fingers as she too began to smile.
His touch, the reassurance of it, seemed finally to give her the peace of mind she needed, even if it would not last. She looked up into his face for the first time since she had entered. There was always shyness in her manner towards him, though she knew it pleased him every time she walked into a room. She had made his world smaller than before but she filled the space entirely.
Even from where she knelt on the tiled floor by his bed she could see that his legs were awkwardly arranged – out of line with his top half – and that he was, as always, unaware of it. He looked broken, a sapling toppled by a storm. He was broken, and she wished with all her heart that she might fix him – or at least straighten him, as she would have smoothed the sheets upon which he lay. But even to attempt to do so would wound what remained of his male pride, she knew, and she let him be.
He lay there like her own private Christ: come to save her and her alone, and paying an awful price for his good deed.
‘Do you still want to go through with it?’ he asked. ‘Now that all these uninvited guests have shown up? I mean, heaven alone kn
ows what we’re going to feed them.’
Despite the seeming lightness of his question, the hearing of it made Yaminah’s smile vanish like day turned to night.
‘How dare you ask me that?’ she said, two hot tears pricking in her eyes. He might as well have struck her. Her gaze was fierce, an outright challenge, her chin raised towards his face. ‘And why say it like that – I’m not about to go through with anything. I want it even more now.’ Her voice sounded brittle. ‘Don’t you? Don’t you?’
The speed of Yaminah’s emotions – their arrivals and departures – was a fascination to the young prince and sometimes made him want to laugh out loud, but this time her sudden momentary seriousness, and the accompanying hurt, banished his own smile as well.
‘Me too,’ he said, nodding, and he cupped her heart-shaped face with both his hands. With his thumbs he caught her tears, then lightly traced the lines of her cheekbones, as though opening a book to a favourite page. ‘Me too.’
When he had asked her to marry him, weeks before, he had known she would say yes. In truth he had felt he owed her, although sometimes in his heart he wondered if the gift he had to give was a blessing or a curse. She loved him – he knew that – but was it fair to bind her to him for a lifetime?
His father’s hearty approval of the betrothal had surprised him most of all. Since his accident, the prince had remained out of sight of most. His absence from court life had seemed to meet with the emperor’s approval, and so when Constantine had broken the news of his plans to marry Yaminah, he had expected a sharp intake of breath at the very least.
A wedding would place the prince centre stage after all – bringing him back to the forefront of everyone’s attention. He had thought therefore that there might be a note of caution from his majesty, if not outright disapproval – and yet the emperor had sounded only surprised at first, and then sincerely enthusiastic about the whole idea.