by Neil Oliver
Constantine strolled towards the torrent unsurprised and unafraid. Among the waste and the bodies of the dead were holy relics – reliquaries and ossuaries, vessels of gold studded with precious stones, all of it borne upon a tide of still-warm piss and shit.
‘When the sacred vases and utensils of unsurpassable art and grace and rare material, and the fine silver, wrought with gold, were to be borne away as booty, mules and saddled horses were led to the very sanctuary of the temple. Some of these, which were unable to keep their footing on the splendid and slippery pavement, were stabbed when they fell, so that the sacred pavement was polluted with blood and filth.’
He was inside the church now, watching soldiers fight among themselves, rolling in all manner of foulness as they wrestled one another for this or that scrap of gold or silver. From the wellspring of the torrent of filth arose an unmistakable figure – Mary, mother of God, clad in soiled and soaking robes that clung to her body and revealed every curve and fold. While she had the look and shape of the Virgin, she was pure no longer. Her pale blue raiment was torn so that her breasts were exposed. Her legs too were clearly to be seen, and, most alarming of all, a wanton smile played upon her too-red lips.
The imagery was vivid and uncompromising, as Constantine had learned it had to be if memory was properly to be stimulated, goaded into recall.
‘Nay more, a certain harlot, a sharer in their guilt, a minister of the furies, a servant of the demons, a worker of incantations and poisonings, insulting Christ, sat in the patriarch’s seat, singing an obscene song and dancing frequently …’
Outside once more, the defiled church behind him, he made his way back home, taking this turn and that at random, sure that he would encounter all he needed to summon the rest of the words of the long-dead scribe.
In a doorway a couple struggled. A man, clad in mail, had the near-naked woman by the throat. His free hand held a cruel blade, the point drawing blood from a spot beneath her ribcage. Her skirts were forced up around her waist and he had forced himself between her legs. His hips were grinding against her and into her and his gaping mouth was at her neck while her tears fell. Elsewhere, wailing fathers were dragged from their wives and children and carried off, or cut down before them. Children begged and wept and howled, and mothers tore at their clothes and hair and fell upon the ground.
‘No one was without a share in the grief. In the alleys, in the streets, in the temples, complaints, weeping, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity, the separation of those most closely united.’
His recitation at an end, he felt the city of his imagination disappear behind him. Ahead of him was his bedroom, always his bedroom. He saw himself upon the bed, his teacher beside him. He closed his eyes.
‘Excellent, my dear Costa,’ said Doukas, turning from the painting and looking into his student’s eyes. ‘Most excellent.’
After a minute or so, the prince opened his eyes and fixed them squarely upon those of his friend.
‘The Turks encamped before the wall – how many?’ he asked.
Doukas looked down at his lap for a moment, and then back into Constantine’s face.
‘The word from our lookouts is that they number perhaps five thousand,’ he said.
Constantine smiled as he considered the frown lines etched deep into his teacher’s brow.
‘But …?’ he said, raising his chin to emphasise the question.
‘But there are many more on their way. Of that there is no doubt.’
Constantine said nothing, just kept his eyes on Doukas’s plump face.
‘Many, many more,’ said the scholar. ‘Mehmet advances from his capital at Edirne with every man available to him. Those of our people who have already faced them say the assembled host is … uncountable.’
Constantine nodded. ‘I am sure that is how it appears,’ he said. ‘I must admit that part of me would relish seeing such a gathering at first hand.’
‘I have no such ambition,’ said Doukas. ‘Unfortunately we will both have the opportunity to gaze upon them in their glory before the week is out.’
‘What keeps them?’ asked Constantine. ‘I’m sure they’re more than keen to get on with it. What do the heathens call our wall … the bone in Allah’s throat?’
‘Indeed, my prince – the bone in Allah’s throat,’ said Doukas. ‘Sad to say, he hasn’t actually choked on it yet.’
‘Now, now, Doukas,’ said Constantine, raising an eyebrow. ‘Are we not all people of the Book? Muslims, Christians, Jews – same father, different name.’
‘Different people,’ said Doukas sadly. ‘I doubt if Allah means us any harm. But Mehmet and his hunting dogs?’ He left the thought floating in the air between them, like a bad smell.
‘Dogs? Dogs? Come, come, Doukas – first you wish harm on our Father in heaven, and now you call his children names.’
‘All his children,’ said Doukas. ‘And therein lies the disgrace of it. There may be as many Christians as heathens marching towards us, under the sultan’s banners. Perhaps it is the end of days, right enough.’
‘Faith, my friend,’ chided Constantine, placing a hand gently on one of Doukas’s chubby thighs. ‘Now is the time for faith. How many sieges has our city faced in a thousand years?’
‘More than a score,’ replied Doukas, without looking up.
‘Twenty-two,’ said Constantine. ‘Allah has been trying to cough up the Wall of Theodosius for a thousand years. I fail to see why you should imagine the twenty-third will end any differently from the others.’
Doukas looked calmly into his student’s face.
‘I look at the sea and I watch the waves,’ he said. ‘I watch the waves and how they never stop moving. I look at our sea walls and see how they are locked in place. These Ottoman Turks are the sons and daughters of a restless people. They do not love cities as we do – rather they despise them, I think. Just as the sea rolls endlessly, without a moment’s rest, so these Turks remain always on the move. Their hearts are happiest not in palaces or on city streets, but on the journey. We are only in their way. Our walls are an offence to everything they believe, everything they are. The waves must roll and walls must fall.’
‘So why do they tarry on the journey to Constantinople?’ asked the prince. ‘If our presence here is so abhorrent, why don’t they come at a gallop?’
Doukas stood from the bed and walked over to the windows. He looked out for a few moments, his attention caught by a long line of hand-wringing citizens walking in procession, heads down and mumbling, behind a party of priests carrying a life-size statue of the Virgin.
‘They are burdened with great … machines,’ he said, still watching the desperation of the faithful as they begged ceaselessly, day and night, for divine intervention.
‘Machines?’ said Constantine. ‘Of what sort? Catapults, battering rams? All have been arrayed against the wall and always they have failed. The bone in Allah’s throat can neither be coughed up nor swallowed down.’
‘I lack the words to describe these latest creations,’ said Doukas. ‘Our people in the villages beyond the walls – those who have already been defiled by the passing of the Turks – send word of great bombards.’
‘Bombards?’ asked Constantine, frowning. ‘But we have those.’
‘Not so, Costa,’ said Doukas. ‘Those who have seen them and lived to tell the tale describe machines longer than a house is tall, big enough for a man to stand inside.’
Constantine waited for his teacher to continue.
‘The largest of them launches a stone as big as a hay wagon for a distance of a mile and more,’ he said. ‘I have heard them called “city-takers”, and so cumbersome are they it takes a hundred men and as many beasts to haul the things a mile or two a day.’
‘City-takers,’ said Constantine. His tone was all at once dark, like clouds gathered for a sudden storm. ‘Perhaps Allah’s fingers are finally long enough to reach down and pluck the bo
ne out once and for all.’
35
All the while Mehmet and his force are advancing upon the city, a lammergeier soars high above.
Reflected upon the sheen of his golden eyes, the Great City beneath appears a tattered patchwork. The encircling walls still seem immutable as a mountain range, yet even these have been ground down by years, like an old lady’s teeth. Built more than a thousand years before, they defy every attacker that seeks to challenge them. Behind the walls, hunkered in their shadows or exposed to the light of day, the citizens live their lives amid a web of streets and alleyways and ancient buildings. Some structures are grand enough, the churches and shrines especially, but the city now is made as much of empty spaces as anything upstanding. Constantinople is in the process of forgetting herself.
She has never truly recovered, after all, from violation at the hands of Christian men, soldiers of the cross who came by sea in 1204. That rape, and by her own brothers, was more than she could bear, and the hurt inflicted then has never healed. Now, too, the dementia of ages is at work, like a rising tide of darkness and absence.
Where once there were homes and businesses, streets and lanes crowded with workshops and market stalls, places of industry and endeavour, now there are swathes of scrubby heath – grasses, bushes and even trees reclaiming and smothering the work of men. Saddest of all is the mighty hippodrome – once the home of charioteers and baying crowds. What was then a wonder is now in precarious decline. Empty plinths lament the absence of the great bronze horses sculpted for Alexander the Great, trophies of a distant war but looted two and a half centuries before.
Mehmet and his Turkmen might covet the place like no other, but the once perfect picture is growing smudged and indistinct, blind spots fogging and blurring the image, piece by piece. The Great City is like a book left open in the rain, and now half the words are washed away. Some of the loss is the product of neglect, but much is just the merciless erosion of old age, the inevitable failing of one who has lived long enough, or too long.
A city is a dream shared by its inhabitants, and now the blissful sleep of Byzantium is past and cruel awakening morning approaches. In sleep she dreams she is young and lovely, as she was and thought she always would be. But when she looks at herself in the mirror, in the first light of day, she will see that time has caught her.
Where once the dream made perfect sense, now many scenes seem meaningless and vague, doomed to the oblivion of forgetfulness. All around the place are statues and memorials whose very names the people have forgotten. Above their sorry heads, on walls and sculpted porticos held aloft by fluted columns, are fine inscriptions, but the origins and meanings of those thoughts and words are mostly lost as well.
The dream, the original, essential truth that bound it all together, as mortar binds bricks, is turning to powder and blowing away on the wind. Since the inhabitants no longer remember, or even care, what stories once explained their city, those have been replaced by superstitions and rumours and by folk myths and tales to frighten children.
This siege by the Ottoman Turks is in many ways the lesser of two evils, for Constantinople is already busy dying from the inside out.
Just visible on the outer edge of the bird’s vision are the incoming tides of two Ottoman armies. It was no accident that set Mehmet out from Edirne on a Friday. Rather, he chose the holiest day of the Muslim week so his soldiers might not fail to grasp the sacred nature of their quest. He rode out from his capital accompanied by his holy men, his sheiks and his viziers, on the crest of a wave of soldiers and animals that seemed, to all who witnessed its passing, to reach from horizon to horizon. Horns blared and men howled and cheered as they poured away from their city and out across the landscape.
Impressive though it is, driving before it a flotsam of terrifying rumour that is itself enough to engulf and sweep away all save those who follow the Prophet, still it is only half the sultan’s army. For every soldier or cavalryman that departed Edirne in the west, the same again flocked to a second mustering station, at Bursa in Anatolia, and those too are on their way to the Great City, from the east. Constantinople is a solitary white rock in the path of an encircling torrent surging towards it from all sides.
Ready for them – as ready as he can be at least – is the Christian emperor Constantine. He is more than twice the age of Mehmet. He has had his chancellor’s office seek out every man within the walls who is fit to fight, and now the task is complete and there are fewer than eight thousand names on the list.
The emperor is a stag at bay, horns lowered towards the snapping jaws of many foes. But he has fought before, and often, and must put his faith in the wall, and in God.
To add to the citizens’ woes, there are Christians by the thousand among the advancing force. At the core of the army are the sultan’s janissaries – professional soldiers, cavalrymen and gunners. Born under the cross, they were captured as boys and turned to Islam under the shadow of the scimitar. There are Christian mercenaries too, soldiers of fortune ready to side with the Muslims or anyone else in return for gold and silver.
Like the emperor, his subjects also put their faith in the wall, and in God. Constantinople is a city built as a heaven on earth, with the emperor as God’s anointed and appointed champion. Prayer and ritual are everywhere. Bells ring and wooden gongs boom and the holiest of holy icons are ceaselessly on the move through the streets, giving hope to the faithful. Here is a stone from Christ’s tomb, his crown of thorns, the nails from his cross. Here too the bones of his apostles and the head of John the Baptist.
While the market squares and taverns of other cities might ring to different talk, in Constantinople every man speaks of religion. Every man knows God’s will better than his neighbour. They bicker among themselves and dismiss as heretic and apostate any whose opinion differs from their own by word or deed. In this way they make enemies of all – especially their fellow Christians in the West. Even as they damn their neighbours, so they are damned themselves.
They look up to heaven, but only the birds look back.
Closest to the city, almost in the shadow of the wall now (having departed weeks before the guns), are the crews tasked with transporting Orban’s bombards. The Great Gun alone requires a team of hundreds of men and scores of draught animals. It takes up the length of three wagons, chained together to support the barrel, its early lustre dulled now to a malevolent glimmer. Oxen moan and haul and their handlers struggle beside them, yard by yard.
Yet more teams of men – labourers, carpenters and craftsmen of every sort – busy themselves further ahead again, levelling a path and building bridges to ease the passage of the Great Gun and the rest of the artillery train.
Also on the move, almost insignificant but important nonetheless, are other figures, with other plans. Chief among these, moving like water beetles upon the surface of the Sea of Marmara, is a flotilla of three ships. As they alter course to make for the entrance to the Golden Horn and the imperial harbour within, the lammergeier’s attention is briefly fixed upon them.
Just within reach of his sight, like dots before his wondrous eyes, are the figures moving upon the deck of the foremost vessel.
36
Prince Constantine was hardly alone in mourning all that had been lost to the Crusaders in 1204. The Byzantine heart had broken then, and while it kept on beating, its ancient rhythm was lost for all time.
Aboard the ship leading the little flotilla towards the royal harbour of Constantinople, Lẽna’s mind too was filled with the city’s plight. As a student of war she had been taught the sad tale by her father, so that she knew it by rote; as a willing soldier of Christ, she felt the pain of the city’s wounding like a knife in her own gut.
She breathed deeply, relishing the clean, fresh taste of the salt air and letting it cleanse her thoughts of all the horror that had unfolded in the city in the name of Christ.
She felt as though life itself was re-entering her body with each new breath. It was the fir
st day since their sea voyage had begun weeks before that she had felt anything like well. For almost all of that time she had been beyond miserable, racked by a seasickness that swelled to fill every corner of her being. For more than two weeks, the fat-bellied carrack had wallowed and rolled in the ceaseless swell. Truth be told, her incapacity had served its purpose by keeping her below deck and out of sight. Despite her pleasure and relief in the open air, she took care to keep a scarf loosely draped around the lower half of her face.
She gazed towards a thin white line etched across the landscape in the distance – part, she assumed, of Constantinople’s sea wall. The feature was barely visible through mist and haze, and all the while she peered ahead, she massaged the aching and tender muscles of her stomach.
When John Grant had first informed her that he had secured passage for them both, all the way to the city, her delight had matched his own. The bloodstained angel on the tor had reminded her who she was, after all. While the lightning flashed and the thunder roared, she had seen the path she must follow. Her death postponed – a martyr’s death – had been a near-unbearable burden. She had escaped the flames but had allowed herself to be carried into hell just the same. Her guilt had lain upon her life with all the crushing weight of a gravestone, until everything good had been squeezed out of her like juice from an apple, leaving only a husk.
But the angel had come back for her, had revealed herself and given her the strength and the reason to remember who she was and what she was for. She had been given back her child, the son upon whom she had turned her back, and now she would follow him to the end. He was bound for Constantinople in hope of saving a girl. Lẽna would go there too, and the soul she might save was her own.