by Neil Oliver
‘For all the good it did him,’ said Constantine. ‘I mean … by the sounds of it.’
She smiled at him, enjoying the fact that he evidently understood the irony of her grandfather’s actions.
‘My father was among the bodyguards – soldiers sent along to keep the delegates from harm. My mother told me he was the single most beautiful man she had ever laid eyes on.’ Yaminah relished the thought and rocked back in her seat and closed her eyes.
‘Would I be right in supposing he laid more than his eyes on your mother?’ asked Constantine. She opened her eyes wide and stared at him, mock horror on her face.
‘How dare you?’ she said, but she smiled again. It felt like they were taking sides – she and Costa conspiring against the memory of her grandfather – and she was surprised by the pleasure of it. The thrill came from a secret sealed away long ago, but it tasted sweet just the same.
‘She said she noticed him as soon as she stepped aboard the ship,’ she said. ‘He told her later that he had spotted her waiting by her father’s side on the dock – that it had pleased him to know the first sight was his alone.’
‘What did he look like?’ asked Constantine.
She glanced down at her hands once more.
‘I only wish I knew,’ she said.
‘I know that. Of course I know that,’ he said. ‘But how did your mother describe him?’
‘He was dark,’ said Yaminah. ‘Darker than her, anyway. She said the tone of my skin was from him, and my hair too, I suppose.’
‘What else?’
‘Well, he was quite the grand physical specimen, apparently,’ she said. She blushed at the thought of her father the giant, and while she had no such memory, she allowed herself to picture him picking her mother up off the ground and spinning her around like a toy.
‘And you such a little thing,’ said Constantine.
She scowled at him again.
‘That is all the picture I have of him,’ she said. ‘My mother spent more time telling me how gentle he was, and kind … how he would look into her eyes and tell her he could hardly believe she was real.’
‘And so they became lovers,’ he said.
‘And so they became lovers. My grandfather and the rest of the delegates were kept busier than any of them had imagined, I think. They were in Rome for weeks and my grandfather had no option but to leave my mother to her own devices. He attended meeting after meeting after meeting. My mother and father stole some time alone together and … and I was the result.’
She held her hands out to her sides, palms upwards, as though inviting him to consider her existence for the first time.
‘I am delighted to hear it,’ he said. ‘And she kept you a secret?’
‘From him, at least. She said as soon as she realised she was going to have me, it was like awakening from a dream. She knew at once what it all must mean, the consequences …’
‘And so what happened?’
‘She left him,’ she said. ‘Left my father. The delegates were due to depart for home – and since the bodyguards were not regarded as necessary for the return, they had been paid off. She waited until the last possible moment and then left him behind.’
‘And that was the last she saw of him?’
‘Until five years later, yes – when she gave in to the need to tell him about me,’ she said. ‘She got a message to him somehow … somewhere. And he came to her.’
Constantine began moving his hands once more, and when Yaminah looked up at the ceiling, she saw the figure of a man transported across the sky by giant birds. She caught his meaning and smiled in the dark.
‘He found his way to her somehow,’ she repeated, still watching the show. ‘She was married by then, of course, long married. My grandfather had seen to that, and Notaras had been happy to oblige. My mother was … she was lovely.
‘She was alone, except for her servants. I think my father must have kept watch until he was sure it was safe. My mother said I was out with my nurse and that my father seized the moment and … and he came to her.
‘She said she found scars upon his back and on his legs, and when she asked about them, he told her men had come on the day she left him. They had barred his door and set the house on fire. He only escaped because his friend rescued him.’
‘A friend indeed,’ said the prince.
‘His best,’ said Yaminah. ‘Anyway, they talked and talked and … and they were together when my … when her husband returned.’
‘So what happened?’
‘There was a fight. My mother did not tell me exactly what happened. There was a fight and my father killed Martin Notaras. My mother said my father begged her to leave with him – to find me and for us both to leave with him.’
‘And why not?’ asked Constantine.
Yaminah shrugged, hopelessly.
‘Where could they … we … have gone?’ she asked, not expecting an answer. ‘She made him leave us behind. And he … and so he did.’
They sat quietly for a few moments. Finally Constantine reached out for her and held her hand, as she had wanted him to all along.
‘My mother said his last words to her were some kind of an apology.’
Constantine kept silent, just stroked the back of her hand with his thumb.
‘He told her he was all the trouble in the world,’ she said.
‘Do you know his name?’ he asked.
‘Of course I do,’ she said, looking up at his face. ‘My father was Badr Khassan.’
PART FOUR
Wedding
44
The days of siege passed in the Great City like a malady endured. Through it all – every moment, it seemed – the emperor was with his soldiers on the battlements or among his frightened and fearful people. Where they prayed, he prayed – in the Church of St Sophia and in a score of other holy places besides. When they processed through the streets carrying their most revered and trusted icon – the Hodegetria depicting the Virgin and her child – he was always to the fore, head bowed like the rest beneath the weight they shouldered.
To Giustiniani he had entrusted the care and defence of the walls, and this had been among his best decisions, for the Genoan brought not only a lifetime of experience of warfare, but also instinctive tactical genius. As soon as he was able, he set about the work of assessing the walls – all twelve miles of them. Battered and bruised they most assuredly were, but still strong, still good.
‘But they are failing,’ Minotto had informed him, as soon as the Genoan had arrived at the palace. ‘These torments of the heathen are too strong. We are lost before we have even begun to fight!’
Giustiniani said nothing, but shook his head. He had looked around him then and from among his men selected a twenty-strong party to ride out with him and survey the worst of the damage. Almost as an afterthought, it had seemed, he pointed at John Grant.
‘At such a time, we need all the luck we can get,’ he said. He had smiled, and John Grant found himself smiling back. Feeling an inexplicable need, and surrendering to it, he looked for Lẽna. Their eyes met for a moment and she nodded, as though her approval was required, as though it mattered to him.
‘Let us see if your eagles come along,’ said the Genoan.
Embarrassed, John Grant looked again for Lẽna, but she was gone. He looked around the battlements and down towards the interior; there was no trace of his mother.
The little group crossed to the outer wall, where great holes had already been punched, ragged and raw. Only the fosse – simplest of the defences, yet priceless now – stood wholly intact in the attackers’ way. Giustiniani was the most agitated John Grant had yet seen him, first riding back and forth behind the tumble of rubble lying heaped in the gap, and then dismounting and climbing upon the blocks until he could look out over the fosse and into the no-man’s-land beyond.
‘They have made this a war of stone upon stone,’ he said. ‘And have found the results to their liking.’
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p; ‘What can we do?’ asked Minotto. His words were measured and delivered quietly, but John Grant sensed the tension beneath.
Giustiniani squatted to the ground and picked up a fragment of masonry the size of a man’s fist. The damp spring had kept the ground soft, puddled in places with thick mud and ooze. He straightened and tossed the stone, and all of them watched as it landed in a patch of mire with a wet plop.
‘See there?’ he said. ‘See how the softness catches and holds the stone?’
John Grant understood at once, but held his tongue, unwilling to place himself in the spotlight again.
‘It is all we have time for anyway,’ said the Genoan.
‘And so?’ asked Minotto.
‘And so we will plug these gaps with soil, and anything else that comes readily to hand. It is muck we have and time that we lack. We cannot be about rebuilding these walls with blocks and mortar while the Turks are firing upon us. But we can surely heap soil and sand and anything else that can be piled in barrows and pushed into cavities like this one.’
‘That we can,’ Minotto had said.
He had been slower than John Grant to understand the beautiful simplicity of the proposed stopgap, but once he grasped it, he clung to it. ‘And it requires no skill – no masons or other craftsmen. The good folk of Constantinople – women and children too – can bend their backs to this and be a part of the fight.’
Orders were issued and quickly circulated. Within hours, the citizens had begun pouring from the city. First in their hundreds and then in their thousands – just as their ancestors had done a thousand years before, when the earthquake levelled the walls. This time it was a different threat, but the response had been the same. Like white blood cells rushing to the site of a wound, the people rushed to minister to their own hurt.
Under Giustiniani’s directions, his soldiers erected a rough frame of wooden stakes, planting the ends of the shafts within the topmost level of the rubble. Into and on to this scaffold teams of workers piled earth, sand and stones. Vegetation was harvested too, and brush, bushes, branches and even domestic rubbish added to the mix. Since men would have to stand and fight there, barrels were filled with yet more sand and soil and these were placed in ranks, three and four deep, along the levelled top of the spoil to create crenellations behind which soldiers might stand to, or simply take cover.
From dusk of the first day the citizens had worked, on through the night that followed, until by the dawn their efforts were nearing completion. Blinded by darkness though they had been, still the Turkish gunners kept up their fire through that night, and for those labouring among the rubble there were hellish seconds to be endured until the sounds of impact elsewhere told them they had been spared.
When the light of day allowed the Turks to survey the walls, they found to their dismay that all the inroads made by their blessed guns had been swallowed up, so that it appeared they had never been. Now some of the teeth in the grimace they beheld were black, or brown, but they were teeth just the same.
In furious anger the gunners turned their fire upon the ad hoc repairs, but when their missiles found their marks, the result was like a conjuror’s trick. Where before there had been great explosions and thrilling sounds of destruction, now there was silence. The stones, even the greatest of them, simply vanished into the softly heaped soil and became, as they did so, further reinforcements to the structure.
John Grant had laboured among the rest, never shirking a moment of the toil. He had watched women and children sweat beside him and had seen the grief upon their faces and felt their fear – and so understood as never before that he had done right by coming here. Around and above him it had seemed a darkness thicker than the night was forming. At times he had reeled upon the roiling sea of sensations, and he had struggled to reach through the fog of it in search of understanding.
It was as the dawn came on that he finally succeeded in seeing through the welter of chaff to the grain he had known was there within. With the task of plugging the gaps all but completed, the workers began to slow their efforts and to lean upon picks and shovels. There were a few moments for quiet conversation, the swapping of stories of the night’s adventures and misadventures, and as the sun rose milky behind a thin blanket of cloud, John Grant reached all the way down and felt the push.
He had suspected it was there, swamped and all but overwhelmed by the clutter of anxiety around him. In the respite and calm he had had the time to listen and to feel and he had known, all in an instant, why it had been so hard to pinpoint. While he had stood in the cool of early morning, his skin damp and cold with the residue of the night’s efforts, he had felt a pressure rising through his body from his boots. The soles of his feet, soaked by the dew, were tingling. In fact, when he moved, it was almost as though he was walking upon the rounded ends of broom handles.
It was the push, all right – and it was coming from under the ground. The realisation had washed through him like warm relief, like the sensation of finally summoning a lost name from within the muddled depths of memory. At first he had hardly known what to do with the knowledge. He had understood at once that it mattered and that he could not and would not keep it to himself. But how best to ensure it was turned to the advantage of all?
He had heard Giustiniani’s voice then, and turned to watch him moving between groups of weary soldiers and civilians. The certainty that this man would at least listen appeared in his heart unbidden, and he had immediately run to the commander’s side.
Sensing his approach, the Genoan had turned to face him, hands on hips.
‘The birdman,’ he said. ‘And all in a flap.’
John Grant blushed, and slowed his approach.
‘What is it?’ asked Giustiniani.
Aware as always that the push gave notice, but only so much, he had resolved to express his instincts in as straightforward a way as possible.
‘I believe the enemy is digging beneath the walls,’ he said.
45
Fog like wet linen hung loosely draped about the night. The light of the moon did its best, struggled to penetrate the murk but seemed content in the end only to cast a dark, grey gloom that felt like forgetting. Lẽna had been drawn by it, into it. There was something dreamlike about her progress towards the Ottoman lines, she thought, coupled with the faintest sense of watching herself from afar. The more she thought about it and allowed the sensations to wash over her, the more she realised the city itself had seemed like the setting for a dream.
More than that and besides that was the unmistakable notion that every moment she had experienced since their arrival in the harbour had happened before. She had no words to describe the feeling, but the longer it lasted the more she felt a tingle of excitement that was almost indecent; sacred and profane. If she had a destiny then it was close enough here, it seemed, beyond the city walls, that she might reach out into the gloom ahead and touch the hem of its garment as it led the way.
Constantinople was a city besieged, huddled in the shadow of war and worse, and yet its citizens had about them the air of a people enchanted or otherwise befuddled. She had known it was a city of superstition and rumour, its folk given to trusting portents and signs more than the action of their own hearts and hands. The people here had long since learned to accept fate and to see everything as the will of God. But their plaintive beseechings for help from elsewhere fairly set her teeth on edge.
Lẽna loved her God, even if he must be silent, but always before she had been, and even now she was, imbued with the certainty that some part of her fate was her own responsibility. While she sought to find and follow her own path wherever it might lead, those citizens of the Great City had the look and feel of the herd. They were scared, that much was obvious and understandable. They feared their God was disappointed – or worse, that he was angry with them and vengeful as a result.
But for all that they might cast their gaze to the sky and to heaven in search of more signs, more portents, there was someth
ing in their dull and impotent acceptance that struck Lẽna as … bovine. Their necks were stretched ready for the butcher’s blade, their eyes wide and imploring and their mouths agape. She had come to help them – more specifically to give all of herself in service of the greater need – but found to her dismay she almost hated them as well.
The city had defied a score of sieges after all. The sights and sounds of an enemy baying for their blood were nothing new. Perhaps the experience of being besieged, of being put upon by one lustful foe after another, was the destiny of Constantinople.
Only by an act of collective will could they deny the unworthy claimants to their place on earth. Was she judging them too harshly? She shook her head as she advanced into the swirling djinns of fog. Let them be, she thought. Let them face what they must, and how they must. Tired of deep thoughts, she turned her attention to the job at hand. She had come to pay what she owed.
She had found it easy to leave the city, to pass beyond the walls and into the no-man’s-land that separated the foes one from another. Men paid most attention to other men in times of war, and while the great gates were heavily barred against the threat of soldiers and men-at-arms, the lesser posterns were more porous to those who seemed to pose no threat. It was via one of those that she had left the city behind, beyond the palace and at a point where there was no fosse to negotiate. If any guard had noticed her passing, she had evidently mattered not at all.
Warrior though she was, she had given little thought to any plan. It had seemed enough merely to put herself in danger. She was close to God there – closest of all – and in the valley of the shadow she feared no evil.
She thought about the girl who had burned at the stake in her place, and about all the years she had gained while the innocent’s blackened bones had turned to dust. From that day to this, all the intervening heartbeats and breaths had amassed somewhere as a terrible debt, and she was ready to settle her account.