‘Of course you do not know,’ said the cardinal acerbically. ‘You are Dracul. Your people will not even leave their dead in God’s hands, and you condone it.’
He grabbed the cardinal’s collar. ‘I condone nothing. You cannot change a people overnight. It takes time, thought, learning. Someone needs to give me that time. You, for instance. And there is something else, since we are on the subject of accusations; if my son is killed in this battle, I will hold you personally responsible.’
The cardinal shook him off and backed into the table. A jug smashed down. ‘What do you expect?’ he spat. ‘An army of Catholics to cover the backs of the Greeks?’
‘No, My Lord Cardinal, an army of Christians to cover the backs of their brothers.’ He seized his cap and cloak. ‘I will not waste my strength over senseless argument. As far as I am concerned, I intend to find a chapel and pray.’ He nodded at Hunyadi. ‘Any chapel will do.’
‘Then we shall not have the honour of seeing you on the battlefield?’
He galloped through the gate. Hunyadi’s talent was to make a weapon from a word, and nobody did it better. It had been years since he had personally led his men into battle. It was not that he could not fight. Even Cazan could not rival him with a sword. As for bare-handed combat, he could manage it well enough. He could, if he chose to, take out almost any man in the blink of an eye. Nor was it a matter of courage. Courage was easy when death was uncomplicated. No, when the time came for him to die, he knew he must be ready for it. To die on a battlefield without the rites was unthinkable. He simply could not take the risk. When the time came for him to go, he would leave nothing to chance. He reined his horse back to a slower pace, struck by the speed at which he had thrown Popescu’s warning to the wind, and exhausted not only by the ride but because he had had the kind of sleepless night that even he was not accustomed to. He had spent the best part of it standing, rosary in hand, certain of disaster. The sooner he warned Mircea of the meagre support that surrounded their soldiers, the better. He picked up the pace again, cloak flying.
Chapter 43
Halil Pasha sank back from the shuttered window of the corridor that overlooked the second courtyard and pressed his back against the wall. Egrigoz’s most notorious hostage was only the throw of a stone away from him. He pictured the prince of darkness belted, sworded and receiving his commission as a janissary, one of the Sultan’s private guard, and blinked. It would be like swallowing a knife in a piece of bread. In all honesty, he would rather see the boy sent back home. At least they would have the Bulgars between them. And then there was that meddling woman, Azize Hatun. If the Sultan’s third wife had been banished, she no doubt deserved it. As for her comments about Mehmet having caused the death of Aladdin, the Sultan’s first son — well, that had to be absurd. But the more he thought about it, the less absurd it seemed. Mehmet was certainly capable of it; that he did not doubt. And if it were true? If Mehmet had murdered his brother in order to take his place as heir? He sank his head back and bit his lip.
Ruminating on this, Halil Pasha made his way along the corridor to where it joined the first courtyard, and gained entry through the gate. Hearing raised voices, he wandered towards the source of the commotion. It looked as if a bazaar of some kind had been set up at the gate. One of the imperial guards, robed in perfect red, was in heavy dispute with a dervish over a pouch of snuff. Eventually, the dervish produced what must have been coinage. He handed it over to the gatekeeper then set off back into the bowels of the palace with his goods. The gatekeeper appeared at a loss. He looked after the ragged figure and scratched his head, no doubt wondering, as he was, how such a dervish had gained the favour of the Sultan. Murad was not known for his patronage of those who loitered on the fringes of the clergy. It was hard enough at times dealing with the demands of the ulema itself without having to accommodate its renegades. Still, at least he did not have the look of Barak of Tokat, whose loin-clothed presence and hashish-induced hysteria had caused such a rumpus in Damascus. He frowned. Azize Hatun had mentioned something about a soothsayer that the Imperial Chamberlain had brought back from Manisa. That would mean that the Sultan had commanded it himself, which was unusual. Murad had always treated prophecy in the same way that he treated the Timekeeper’s predictions; they were either dismissed or deliberately disregarded, as though by doing so Murad could prove himself unbound by the ligatures of fate.
What Murad desired was the very thing he would not get: a civilised peace. He would not get it because he did not know how to bring it about, and Halil Pasha as Grand Vizier did not have the power to enforce it. As for the Christian armies, they simply did not have the strength for it. Peace needed politics, not battles. It needed diplomacy, but Murad was not diplomatic. He liked to think he was, with his parables and his poems, but he always wanted to own the poem, rather than learn from it. The same was true of peace. When you forced a pledge of peace from your enemy, the enemy would soon make it a matter of vengeance, and the sword would be drawn again. War-making was in the blood of the Osmani. When you had to fight your way to the top, battle stuck to you like shit in a desert. Try and scrape that off your feet, and you would have a hard job of it. The letter he was now trying to compose to the Palaiologos brothers required a good deal of scraping.
On his return to his chambers and his desk he dipped his quill in ink and set himself to the task. How to explain to a man such as Constantine Palaiologos, a learned scholar, that the stripping and butchering of Cardinal Cesarini, a member of the Catholic clergy, on the battlefields of Varna was not the work of a bunch of Saracen barbarians but the outcome of the breaking of a treaty? No matter what the depth of discord had been between the church of the Catholics and the church of the Greeks, they were still Christians, and Christians liked to imagine that their rules of engagement on the battlefield were somehow cleaner, as though a long sword made death more civilised than a kilij.
How to convince the Greeks that the Venetians and the Genoese, the so-called friends and allies of Constantinople and Rome who should have been supporting them, had abandoned him and his good brother John? And that the leaders of Christendom, its kings, dukes, cardinals and princes, should realise from the events of Varna that to attack the borders of the Ottoman realm was a folly that would bring nothing but death and destruction. Christendom was falling apart at the seams. Even Janos Hunyadi could not hold it all together. Constantinople would fall into their hands like a plum, and the Palaiologos brothers should give up the fight before it became too late and widespread slaughter was inevitable. And that, Halil Pasha did not like; he did not like it one bit.
How it would be when Constantinople was taken, he dared not think. What explanations would he need to find then? Assuming, of course, that the Emperor would be alive to hear them, and that he doubted very much. If Constantine looked up, he would see the sword of Damocles in the hand of Mehmet. If he looked down, he would see the shifting sands of the Church of Rome, which sooner or later would pull him under.
It was not that he wanted especially to save the Greeks, but he did not want a bloodbath. More precisely, he did not want Mehmet to provoke one. Over the past few months he had spent long hours in the company of the Sultan’s heir and equally long hours afterwards wondering how Murad had been so ready to promote Mehmet to the rank of heir. The only answer he could find was this one: Murad did not know him. Even Mehmet’s act of unjustifiable cruelty to the Brankovic boys had not alerted Murad to what his son was capable of. Then he remembered Azize’s accusation about the murder of Aladdin and felt the ground he was standing on slip beneath his feet. How well the two incidents matched up, and how well they had been carried through. Most of the palace staff still thought that Murad had been behind the order for the blinding of the Serbian brothers, which anyone close to Murad knew to be impossible right from the start. But Mehmet did possess a particular talent for concealing his own intentions. He had very effectively concealed the incident with V
lad Dracula; the guards had been forbidden to discuss it on pain of execution. It was a relief that Dracula was under heavy guard and off his plate, but still the fact remained that, for the time being, he was all they had. There was nobody else that could stand the test of Mehmet. Seizure or no seizure, Vlad Dracula was almost becoming a solution to a problem.
He sealed his letter to Constantine on the marbled paper he used for correspondence. He had warned John once already to no avail; perhaps his brother Constantine would have the sense to listen. But even as he tied the letter, he knew it would not be enough. What were the words Vlad Dracula had used? God’s gamble. Astonishing how he should have chosen words so well suited to the case. It was almost as if he knew Mehmet to the core. Perhaps when you placed your hands around the neck of another, you felt the substance of his life, the evil and the good. He brooded on this a few moments more then he stood up, delivered the letter into the hands of the gatekeeper, and made his decision.
Before things became even worse than they were already, he must take a gamble of his own. Mehmet must be stripped of his title of regent and heir, even if it cost him his position at the palace. If Mehmet became Sultan the power he would wield would be even greater without the restraint of his father. Murad may not be perfect but he was at least a man who strove for something more than conquest. Perhaps it was his fondness for parables that made him the man he was. A parable may not be particularly scholarly; it did not provide an explanation for everything, but at least it made you look for one.
Chapter 44
Battle-weary and worn from travel, Murad shut himself in his apartments with instructions not to let anyone in for the rest of the day. He bathed, and then he ate. Both alone. The efforts required at Varna to repair the negligence of the past few months had cost him life-blood. His army had won the day because he had made certain that it would. He had spared no quarter. Now, his strength drained, he sat himself down in his chair and tried to pick up his life where he had left it before his return from Manisa had ruined it.
He had hardly sat at his desk since then. Entering his study was like entering the chamber of the deceased and finding everything just as it was before the occupant passed over. His book was open at the same page; his candle was snuffed half way down the wick and his blotting paper still bore the marks of old words. He turned over the parchment and tried to read backwards. He cast it aside and tapped his fingers on the table. He had a thousand things to do but no desire to do even one of them. He rubbed his hands over his face and swept them over his beard. He knew what he needed, but he did not have it, or at least, not the way he would have liked it.
In spite of Varna, from whichever angle he inspected his life there was something wrong with it. It was true that the Hungarians had now been pushed back to the right side of the Danube; Mehmet had received his lesson; and he, Murad, had surrounded himself with beauty. Two new odalisques had arrived during his absence. Both sublime. He had ordered a new series of miniatures based on feast-day celebrations of his reign. Aladdin’s day was one of them. He had decided to record it in small detail on his wall, with the vague idea that what was on the wall was not in the head, but he knew, in the kernel of his heart, that it was wrong, all of it.
Nor had he, in reality, secured the land to the north in the way he would have liked. Because of Dracul, Constantinople still had a way out. Varna was a good battle won, but it was only one battle. Wallachia continued to support the Greeks and keep open the door to the Catholics. At any moment a reconciliation between the two Churches could be achieved. Christendom could be whole again. That would make Constantinople practically unconquerable.
And Mehmet? He did not want to think about Mehmet. Not even for a moment. Not for the rest of the day at least. Brankovic was raging about the blinding of his sons, and Murad could find no excuses that would conceivably justify it. Two eyes of two sons was beyond the pale. He did not even want to think about how Brankovic’s daughter would feel about the incident. He had considered simply telling her that Mehmet had gone against him and ordered it out of spite, but that would be tantamount to an avowal of incompetence, and incompetence was not the word he was looking for. He knew, of course, what that word was, but since the woman seemed incapable of either pronouncing it or showing it, he had decided that love was redundant. In essence, it did not exist. It belonged perhaps in a miniature on a wall somewhere. Perhaps he would have it painted.
On the road back from Varna he had ruminated on the Brankovic homeland. Serbia barred the road to Vienna, with the Kosovo fields at its heart. And when Constantinople was conquered, an expansion to the north would be even more straightforward. The only thing that barred the way, as ever, was Dracul. To secure the south of Serbia they needed Wallachia firmly behind them. How many concessions could he force from the old devil this time? With Varna under his belt he could certainly press for more. Dracul’s oldest son had made a heroic stand at the fortress; if Mircea Dracula had not managed to save Cardinal Cesarini’s life, he had almost certainly saved Hunyadi’s. The old wolf Dracul had taken a risk with the one son he had left. And yet, he wondered about the wisdom of further conquests. When Durad Brankovic had given him his daughter, he had thought he was making a pact, but it was more of a burden than a pact. All it had brought him was uncertainty.
The Imperial Chamberlain poked his face into the room. He had endeavoured, he said, to explain that His Highness was not to be disturbed, but Mehmet was having none of it.
Murad wondered, fleetingly, how his son would respond if he, the father, swept into his chamber while he was riding that pony of his on the divan. He relegated the thought to the wall, and looked up.
‘You have been avoiding me, Father.’
Mehmet was wearing a purple silk tunic with a broad belt and hose in the Old Roman style. Purple for victory, thought Murad, amused. Over his short-cropped hair he wore a skullcap that looked almost Byzantine. He was bearded, but the beard was cut close to the chin, either because it would not grow or because his son did not want it to. His eyes were close-set and light brown, like his mother’s.
‘You could at least have kept me informed rather than obliging me to wait for news, like some sort of vizier. As it happens, I know anyway.’ Mehmet sat facing him, his eyes shining. ‘The charge was decisive, was it not? But I will say that I would not have let Hunyadi get away. Couldn’t they have circled from the rear? I think that…’
Murad cut him short. ‘The Hungarian army knew the terrain, the Rumani also. They were not exposed. There were plenty of places to run to,’ he found himself saying. He slammed shut his book and moved over to the divan. Mehmet followed.
‘All the same, a running army is a rout. They must be incompetent. I mean, who mounts a charge with the numbers of a hunting party? If I was so outnumbered, I would have re-formed somewhere else.’
The preferred son and heir stared squarely at him. ‘You thought you could make a fool of me, didn’t you? But you haven’t. And you won’t do it again either. If you think you can put Halil Pasha, or the privy-chamber servants or any other spy on my back, then you are wrong. I can get the better of people like Halil Pasha anytime I choose. And the same is true of anyone.’
Murad supposed that meant him. Choking silently, he shifted on the divan, looked at his son and wondered what God’s purpose had been when he had chosen this particular seed over the others. Was it a punishment or a favour? Had he underestimated the boy? His balls might not be working the right way, but they were there.
‘Perhaps you can explain to me,’ he said, ‘why I would need to spy on my own son? Or should I do that for you? Brankovic’s boys, perhaps? Behaving like a savage so that our name is dragged in the dirt by the Greeks?’
Mehmet reddened. ‘What’s the matter, Father? Did I spoil your amusement in Manisa?’ He turned his fingers back to front and cracked them. ‘Mother is sick, but she isn’t dead, you know. When she recovers, she will have a nasty sh
ock waiting for her when she sees what you have done in the seraglio with that bitch of a Serb.’
Murad jumped up. ‘Enough,’ he boomed. Mehmet stared back at him, willing him to lose his temper. He would not. He sat down and took a piece of fruit from a bowl. He pulled an apricot apart and removed the stone. His hands shook slightly. Mehmet noticed, and looked away.
‘If there are any hostages that require punishment for their family’s transgressions it is not the sons of Brankovic,’ he said, smoothly. ‘It is the Draculesti.’ His eyes flicked over Mehmet. ‘My spies, as you call them, inform me that you keep the younger one with you in your quarters. Perhaps I should have him removed and blinded. Then at least he would not have to look at you while you are sodomising him, or while he is sodomising you, or whichever way around you deport yourself.’
He chewed on the apricot but could not swallow it. He folded his arms and sat back. ‘In the meantime, perhaps you should learn a few lessons from the older one. I hear he is good with a sword. Although I doubt you will find him acquiescent on the divan.’
Mehmet glared, his jaw set. ‘Pity then that he cannot conquer the Golden City. Then I would not have to risk my own life taking it for you.’
He looked at Mehmet in frozen disbelief. The lessons of Egrigoz were wasted on the wind. ‘Your brother Aladdin knew the meaning of respect; you, regrettably, do not. If he were here you would not be this way,’ he murmured. But Mehmet had already backed away from him. Murad watched him take his leave at the doors of his apartments, his head light with horror.
The Imperial Chamberlain stood before him, waiting for an instruction. No doubt, Murad thought, the man had listened to every word they had said. That was how a monarch was brought down: by his own blood.
‘Where is Mara Brankovic?’ he said, tapping his fingers.
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer Page 24