by Neil Oliver
So his question, when it reached her, was like a hand thrust down into the depths to save a drowning soul, and she reached for it gladly. Worse than knowing was Constantine not knowing, and while it might break her heart to tell him what she now knew, if she kept it secret she felt it would choke her to death as surely as a swallowed peach pit.
She took a deep breath, like the first breath of a head suddenly above water after much too long submerged.
‘I heard something today, Costa,’ she said …
We begin to rise above them, the girl and the broken boy, and towards the shadows of the ceiling.
‘While some of this must be true, and some of it might not be,’ she says, ‘it is all I know …’
Higher still and we can no longer hear her words. They are both small now, and getting smaller. The height and the distance make them seem like children, fragile without the protection of adults. While she talks, the girl keeps pushing the contraption of wheels and chains and the broken boy’s legs keep rising and falling, so that he looks like part of a toy.
40
As Giustiniani’s ships drew closer to the city, they were spotted first by the members of a welcoming party. Men and women dressed in expensive gowns and robes lined the water’s edge. At the centre of the gathering was a tall and elegant figure, more simply dressed than the rest – in the manner of a soldier of Byzantium, in fact – but noticeable as a result. His hair was light brown and hung to his shoulders in long, loose curls that might have seemed feminine. He was handsome, however, with a broad chin and wide cheekbones. His mouth was wide, the lips thin but well shaped, his eyes a blue so dark they were almost purple. Suddenly catching sight of the flotilla’s commander aboard the foremost of the vessels, he raised one arm in greeting.
‘Giustiniani!’ he shouted. ‘Not a moment too soon! The sight of you pleases me more than could any other!’
The Genoan leapt up on to the gunwale of the ship, grabbed hold of one rung of a rope ladder leading to the rigging as he did so, and leaned as far out over the water as he could without tipping into the drink.
‘Where else would I be at such a time, your majesty?’ he replied. ‘I have brought every man I could. I only wish they were ten times as many.’
‘Or a hundred times, old friend,’ replied Emperor Constantine. ‘Or a thousand.’
When Giustiniani’s vessel finally came alongside the wall, men aboard and on land sprang into action – tossing and securing ropes, positioning gangplanks. The desire to get off the always rolling deck and on to firm ground, after so long at sea, was overpowering for most, and individual commanders had to bellow orders as they strove to maintain control and ensure the disembarkation was carried out as smoothly as possible.
John Grant and Lẽna hung back from the press of those men most eager to leave the ship, hoping their own sudden and unwanted notoriety might be lost in the excitement of arrival. He was grateful for the moment of quiet for another reason too. Having learned long ago to keep his own counsel, he revealed nothing of what he felt. In truth, he was close to breathless with anticipation and his heart was beating so hard in his chest he feared it might be heard by anyone standing close.
He had approached the strife of war many times and Badr had prepared him well. He knew to expect and to accept a rush of excitement. He knew also that such a feeling was not to be trusted – that it could be his undoing. He had seen enough of killing and dying on the battlefield to know what happened to those who gave in to the thrill and let it carry them away, heedless of danger.
What he experienced now, however, as the city of white and gold loomed larger by the moment, was altogether different. All his life he had been aware of the movement of the world he stood upon. He sensed both its rotation and its forward flight. But a lifetime of awareness of it had given him the balance to cope, as well as the strength to accept it. Truth be told, he simply ignored the sensations for the most part, and gave in to them only when he had time to revel in the pleasure they brought.
Up till now he might as well have been standing on a log tossed by a river’s rapids – but his body made unconscious adjustments born of instinct and experience that countered the momentum so that he felt only smooth and level flight.
What was happening now, however, had never happened before. Here beneath the sea walls of the Great City he could have sworn he felt the world slowing down. In the moments that remained to him, he gave himself over to the fall … and found it all but gone. It was as though the white water of a lifetime was behind him, and what lay ahead was glassy calm.
He was almost giddy, felt the need to make his ears pop, but those feelings were overpowered by another – that he was finally, after so many years, approaching the hub of the wheel.
‘Come on.’
It was Lẽna, and she was pulling him by one arm, making for the gangplank. He shook his head to clear it and followed her.
Giustiniani had been first to go ashore, and John Grant watched as he strode forward into the waiting arms of the emperor. Some gasped at the intimacy, the apparent breach of etiquette, but the two men paid no heed.
It was then that he noticed the girl standing by the emperor’s side and also watching the embrace. All other thoughts, all the overwhelming emotions of before, were brushed aside. He felt raw, like something newborn, and his skin tingled as though his nerve endings were exposed to the elements for the first time. His knees weakened and he breathed deeply of the cool air, clinging to it as though it was a rope.
Just the sight of her had filled him, all in an instant, with sadness. Her face was a perfect heart, her lips darkly red, eyes as black as a bird’s. While he stared, she opened her mouth slightly, as though to speak, but said nothing. More than anything, he wanted to hear her voice – to know what she was thinking right there and in that moment. A wind was blowing onshore and the fabric of her dress was held tight against every curve, but it was no base desire that he felt. In place of the familiar need and want, he experienced for the first time something akin to panic … as though time might be running out.
His mind filled with things to tell her, and only her – thoughts she alone inspired so that they appeared spontaneously, fully formed. Now that he had seen her, it mattered a great deal to him, more than anything in fact, that no more moments should pass before he made her understand the importance and the urgency of it all.
Lẽna had felt the intensity of his attention, his distraction, and following his line of sight, she spotted the girl as well.
‘What is wrong with you?’ she asked.
Even though he had been caught out, his mouth open like a freshly caught fish lying stunned on a riverbank, for a few moments more he kept his eyes fixed on the vision. Then he turned to Lẽna.
‘Hmm?’ he said.
‘See something you like?’ she asked. ‘The little lovely standing in the emperor’s shadow, though clearly not eclipsed by him?’
John Grant said nothing, just turned to seek her out again.
To his dismay, she had moved further back into the crowd of onlookers and all but out of his sight. He glimpsed only the top of her head, the long chestnut-brown hair in a centre parting.
Pulling himself together, he tried to pay attention to whatever Giustiniani might be saying.
‘Interesting times,’ said the Genoan, leaning back from the embrace with the emperor so that he might gauge his friend’s expression.
‘Indeed,’ said the emperor, and John Grant saw him smile a hard smile.
‘I expected a hotter welcome from your Turkmen,’ said Giustiniani. ‘Where is the fleet you warned me about?’
Emperor Constantine placed an arm around the other’s shoulders and began guiding him away from the ship and towards a gateway leading into the city.
‘They have vessels by the score,’ he said. ‘But they are galleys – powered by oars and low in the water. For all that they have the numbers and the speed, they would not dare confront high-sided ships like yours in open
battle.’
‘So they do not yet hold all the advantages,’ said Giustiniani.
‘Not quite,’ said the emperor. ‘Or at least, not yet.’
‘Have you sealed the city?’ asked the Genoan.
‘Even as we speak,’ said the emperor. ‘We are an island now.’
He picked up the pace and gestured towards the land walls.
‘We have horses nearby,’ he said. ‘Quickly now – their first attack may come at any moment.’
Most of the men aboard the first ship had followed their commander ashore, and now the other carracks slid in behind. John Grant stepped on to the harbour wall, followed by Lẽna, and they began following the rest of the party into the city. He looked ahead, straining for a glimpse of the girl – and spotted her by the emperor’s side.
‘My, my,’ said Lẽna. ‘Quite the first impression.’
High above, impassive and imperious, a lammergeier flew, riding columns of warm air and surveying the movements of the tiny figures trapped upon the world below. Above and beyond the prattle of shouted greetings and commands, he listened instead to the collisions of the currents of air that kept him aloft and aloof, while he scanned the landscape for whatever he might want.
He had watched the ships, like insects scuttling on the surface of a pond. They were still now, he noticed, and lines of men poured away from them burdened with loads that bent their backs and slowed their progress. Longer and longer grew the procession, passing in single file through gaps in high white walls and winding along cobbled paths that led upwards, away from the water and towards a wide square of gleaming white flagstones. It might as well have been the progress of ants, or termites.
All at once the bird’s senses were assailed by something new.
An array of dots was fixed always in his view – the product of proteins in his eyes conspiring with the light of day to set free clouds of electrons that helplessly aligned themselves upon earth’s own magnetic field. Like twinned souls travelling together for eternity, each one of the pair sensed the rightness of its other; unbreakable bonds keeping them connected, regardless of distance between them. The infinitesimal crumbs were entangled, united by an invisible stickiness that came from the heart of the universe itself, and for the bird the consequence of that union was an unfailing sense of direction. For all the apparent magic, he experienced only the unmoving pattern, permanently in his vision and always showing him the way north.
But it was away from north that he turned now, and towards the east, where his peerless vision had detected food. Downwards he spiralled, closing on his target – the body of a man. It was that of Rizzo, the luckless Venetian ship’s captain, still mounted upon a tall pole above the battlements of Rumelihisari, a warning to all. The elegant processes of decomposition were well under way, but still his body was whole. His arms and legs moved gently in the breeze, an obscene mimicry of life.
Down flew the lammergeier until it could alight on the battlements below the corpse. The bird was a large and baleful presence and his sudden arrival scattered the crows and other, smaller winged scavengers that had been busying themselves upon what little remained of the exposed flesh of the captain’s head, hands and feet, so that for a few moments he had the feast to himself.
Having looked left and right, and contented himself that there were no people or other dangers close at hand, he hopped forward on to the corpse, burying his talons in one bloated thigh. With his powerful beak he tore at the flesh and connective tissue there, flapping his great wings to add purchase and force to his efforts. With a wet, tearing sound, the leg detached itself from the whole and fell heavily to the ground. The lammergeier followed the limb and continued the work of tearing away at the mess of it. Unlike most scavenging birds, he had no interest in the flesh, and deliberately eschewed the darkening, putrid meat. He was only satisfied when his efforts had freed one of Rizzo’s femurs, a long thigh bone. He rose into the sky once more, bearing the livid, glistening trophy grasped tight in his talons.
Triumphantly he flew, up and up into the burning blue of the sky. It was only by chance that his flight took him back towards the west, over the city that had preoccupied him minutes before.
It was calculated intent, however, that had a second of his kind spy him and his prize and set itself the task of stealing it. The first bird had sought only to place himself high above a hard surface of the sort that would shatter a fallen bone and expose the marrow within – the favoured foodstuff of all his kind. In his stomach was an acid so strong it would dissolve even the bone itself.
His casual flight put him above the same square of white flagstones he had observed minutes before. The line of men was filing across it now, carrying weapons and other possessions in readiness for a fight. Satisfied with his position, he released his prize and, moments later, set himself in a spiralling descent behind it.
It was then that the second bird – a female of the species and slightly larger – made her move. She had waited, tens of yards above, until the other lammergeier let go of the bone. Sensing her moment, she adopted a yet steeper dive and plunged downwards in a tight, corkscrewing flight while the prize tumbled end over end.
Far below them, John Grant (blessed or cursed with the power to detect the approach of foes unseen) sensed movement in the air above his head and, without any conscious thought, reached up and out with his good left hand and caught the falling thigh bone even before he saw it.
There was a gasp from somewhere in the line – followed by cries of fear and surprise. The noise rippled through the men, and all turned to investigate the cause. Emperor Constantine, along with every last one of them, was looking in the right direction in time to see the birds. So too was the girl.
While John Grant held the stinking bone up high, both lammergeiers, talons extended, alighted upon it. For a moment, as each struggled to win the prize from the other, they seemed fused as one. The emperor stood tall, frozen in the moment. By his side, Giustiniani cried out at the sight and dropped to one knee.
Men turned from John Grant, and from the huge birds mantling upon the bone he held above his head. Those soldiers saw their commander kneeling, with his face upraised to the spectacle, and beside him, the Emperor of Byzantium. As though for the first time, they paid heed to the imperial emblem on his chest – the double-headed eagle of the house of Palaiologos.
Turning back to John Grant, they watched in silence as he let go of the thigh bone, slippery with gore, and the birds, still grasping it between them, still fighting for supremacy, rose together into the sky. One had its head turned to the east, the other to the west.
There was a heavy moment of quiet then, interrupted only by the beating of wings, and then a great roar of approval. John Grant, with Lẽna by his side, turned from the sight of the birds rising higher and further away, to find a thousand men cheering, their faces shining.
He looked from one to another and then found, by chance, the face of the emperor. He saw too the image of the two-headed bird on the tabard, and the hairs on his arms and neck rose in excitement. The emperor held out one hand, beckoning him. John Grant turned his attention instead to the girl by Constantine’s side, and their eyes met for just an instant before a thunderous explosion of noise seemed to split the world in two.
All flinched and dropped and turned instinctively in the direction of the source of the din, and as they did so, a whole section of the city wall – an edifice that had been in place for longer than memory – collapsed in a heap, a gigantic plume of mortar dust rising from it like the ghost of a lost loved one.
This could not be, and men cried out at the wrongness of it. Not since an earthquake a thousand years before had any harm come to the Wall of Theodosius. The quake then had utterly levelled the wall and the whole population had rallied, working tirelessly and unstintingly to rebuild it. Since then, it had defied everyone and everything. It was a fixed point in an uncertain universe. And now part of it was gone, punched through as though by the wrath of G
od.
Moments later a second blast, that near deafened all that heard it and dropped every man to his knees in fear and disbelief, rolled across the world. This time a tower that had kept watch over the landward approach to the city for century after century fell crashing to the ground as though crushed from above by an invisible fist.
While men knelt and cried, a third blast rang out, and this time a ball the size of a bull soared over the top of the wall and crashed into the bell tower of a church on one side of the square. For a few moments, a perfectly round hole gaped high in one wall, before the entire structure crumpled earthwards and another ghostly cloud of dust and dirt rose against the sky.
‘To me!’ shouted Emperor Constantine. ‘To me!’
He turned then, away from John Grant and the miracle of the birds, and began running towards the ruptures in the city’s defences, and all ran with him, baying for the blood of the infidel.
41
A mile from the emperor (and from John Grant and the lammergeiers) and a few hundred metres beyond the wall, Mehmet stood open-mouthed and awestruck alongside his chief smith. A wreath of smoke coiled around them like a serpent.
The preparations for this first firing of his guns had taken weeks. The teams tasked with their transport had advanced across the landscape between Edirne and Constantinople at a speed of no more than a mile or two each day – slow as lava from an erupting volcano, but as unstoppable. Mehmet had ridden alongside them at times, cajoling and cursing by turns. Men and beasts had groaned and strained with the effort of hauling the huge cylinders of bronze and brass, and the sultan’s calls had mixed into the din, or even rose above it, as he urged them forward with threats and promises.