The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8)

by William Dietrich

  “Not in my French convent school, Astiza. But here in Topkapi? Ghosts haunt the harem; everyone has seen them. Servants have mysteriously vanished. Jinns dance away the darkest nights, and anyone who dares peek soon dies of terrible illness or accident.” She shivered. “The world is a battleground between darkness and light.”

  “All things are dual.”

  “Then we must be friends. You must carry my regards to Ambassador Sebastiani and bring back news that I can use to reinforce Selim and Mahmud. There’s no time to waste. Since the death of Selim’s mother the Janissaries sense weakness and are plotting to roll back reform. The English and Russians encourage our backwardness. Only France promises progress.”

  “I’m instructed to tell you that the English and Russian ships are assembling in the Aegean Sea,” I said. “They may try to force the Dardanelles and Bosporus. Russian armies are marching on your borders. Some trained artillerymen are being assembled in France to advise you, but until they arrive we have only two emergency experts to improve Ottoman defenses.”

  “And who would they be?”

  “My husband and his brother. Ethan fought against Bonaparte at Acre with Pasha Djezzar, and has also fought alongside Napoleon. He’s learned from many masters. It gives him an inventive frame of mind.”

  “And do you bring new powers from the past to help us, Astiza?”

  “Sometimes the key is recognizing the powers you already have.”

  CHAPTER 30

  “You’re a lunatic, Gage. A medieval madman.”

  “Necessity requires invention,” I argued to Sebastiani. “It took Napoleon three years to build his Grand Armée that crushed the Coalition at Austerlitz. We’ll be lucky to have three weeks before the English navy comes.”

  “It’s an antique! Hours to load. Almost impossible to move.”

  “A single hit could turn a battle.”

  My debate with the French ambassador was good-natured. Sebastiani had fought in Italy and Austerlitz and had far more military training than me, but he respected practical experience from my own nasty scrapes. We both knew the forts at the Dardanelles Strait that protected the Ottoman capital were woefully weak, despite Sultan Selim’s fledgling New Army. Our puzzle was how to strengthen them.

  The iron artifact we were debating was one of the Great Turkish Bombards, iron cannon more than three hundred and fifty years old. They were antique, but bigger than anything in current use. This particular one had a barrel seventeen feet long and weighed seventeen tons. Its granite cannonballs were two-and-a-half-feet in diameter and weighed seven hundred pounds. Simply shaping such spheres was the work of Sisyphus, or rather of Turkish slaves. There were several of these monster gun-barrels left in the Ottoman forts, none of them mounted on the ramparts or a wheeled carriage. To a modern artillerymen, these relics of Ottoman greatness should have been melted down eons ago. But since they hadn’t, I thought they were the best hope we had. “The predecessor to this gun was the one that the Turks used to breach the walls of Constantinople in 1453,” I reasoned.

  “Yes,” said Sebastiani, “but it was so slow to load and cool that the Ottomans got off only three shots a day. The Turkish commander tells me that a single shot from these antiques consumes nine hundred pounds of gunpowder. None have been fired for decades, and then only for ceremony.”

  “I’m sure I could get the rate up to four a day, with a little practice and a lot of powder. Selim has a modern gunpowder works.”

  “The biggest French field piece fires a twenty-four-pound ball, weighs less than a sixth of this behemoth, and can get off a shot every three minutes.”

  “But the bombard has two dozen times the punch.”

  “Moving and firing these guns took sixty oxen and four hundred men.”

  “And conquered the world’s most storied city. Besides, all we have to do is mount them, not move them. It’s the ships that come sailing by.”

  “The powder required would supply an entire battery of guns!”

  “A battery that Selim doesn’t have, and won’t until more French metallurgists, chemists, and gunners arrive.” I’m not always so determined, but I had a hunch the coming showdown would turn on morale as much as might. These noisy monsters might bolster the Turks and confound the British. “Ambassador, I’m a Franklin man, an electrician, and a confidant of the American inventor Robert Fulton. I’d much prefer something new-fangled. If Fulton were here he’d make us a steamboat or a submarine, and Franklin would conjure balloons. But there’s only me. I can’t employ an electric fence as I did at Acre, since the Dardanelles is two miles wide. I can’t redeploy the death-ray mirror of Archimedes, since we had to destroy it in Tripoli. Which means that this relic is our only chance. The English fleet is gathering at Tenedos Island, just miles from here. Should Britain finally dare try to force the straits, we need a gantlet of fire to discourage them.”

  “True.” Sebastiani looked across the Dardanelles to the Asian shore, lowered his voice, and leaned close so Ottoman officers couldn’t hear. “These Turks have the loudest bands and most colorful uniforms on earth, but I’m not sure they can wield these guns as their ancestors did.”

  “On the contrary, they’re the very devils in a fight—I saw them in Egypt and the Holy Land. They have too much reckless courage, not too little.”

  “And do you, American? This antique might blow up.”

  “Then I’ll let the reckless Turks light the vent.”

  He shook his head. We’d won Selim to our side, thanks to Aimée’s help, but we’d been struggling for the past half-year to help our new allies. Summer had become fall and then winter, and Selim’s strategic position had grown steadily worse. His generals seemed hapless. His soldiers milled like a herd.

  “These Ottomans have the worst discipline of any army on earth,” Sebastiani said. “Each commander goes his own way, soldiers dash about on the battlefield like Pamplona bulls, half disappear in winter, and most of the rest were absent during Ramadan. I know they can fight. Can they work?”

  “Ramadan ended in December and the English threat has not. I agree, the Janissaries refuse to adopt disciplined firepower. But like the Russians, the Turks don’t like subtlety. This is just the kind of weapon to inspire them.”

  Sebastiani contemplated the bombard and finally shrugged. “You’re right, what alternative do we have? We’ve persuaded them to resist the bullying English and Russians. Now we have to help them any way we can. Any way they can.”

  We were talking strategy in one of the world’s most strategic places, the Hellespont of the Dardanelles. Here Persian tyrant Xerxes crossed on a bridge of boats to assault the ancient Greeks, and lashed the waves with whips when the wind kicked too high. Here Leander swam nightly to lie with Princess Hero. On the Asian shore nearby was Çanakkale, reputed to be the site of legendary Troy. And here was the southern chokepoint of the straits between Europe and Asia, the Black Sea to the north and the Mediterranean to the south.

  We were standing on a rampart in the Turkish fort of Sestos. Two miles across the channel was its companion fort, Abydos. Both were out of date, ill repaired, and undermanned.

  I shivered, from both the cold and the odds. It was February of 1807, and almost a year had passed since that reception at Catherine’s cavernous palace outside St. Petersburg. It was winter again, the straits swept by chill steppe winds, the water gray and the hills brown. Despite the seasonal temperature, power politics in Constantinople was coming to a boil.

  Napoleon had once more triumphed in Europe. His brother Louis had become King of Holland, and brother Joseph the King of Naples. The Holy Roman Empire had been officially declared dead and Napoleon had created a new Confederation of the Rhine to reorganize his German allies. Most importantly, he’d marched on Prussia as Lothar Von Bonin had feared and within a month had smashed the Prussian army and occupied Berlin. Nor had Bonaparte stopped there. As Cza
rtoryski had hoped, the French emperor had advanced to Warsaw and revived Polish hopes of independence at the urging of a certain Polish beauty named Marie Walewska. By all reports, she was serving her country in bed just as Izabela Czartoryski once had. The newly recovered Grunwald swords had inflamed Polish patriotism.

  Meanwhile the Russians had threatened Turkey’s Ottoman provinces to support rebellious Serbia. This had pushed Selim into declaring war on Russia at the end of December, and breaking relations with Russia’s English ally when he did so. British ambassador Charles Arbuthnot, once the sultan’s favorite diplomat, had fled the city to the safety of the English fleet.

  Now the ill-prepared Turks were desperately preparing to stave off two enemies at once, Russia and England. Selim was relying on Sebastiani’s experts, including me.

  There had also been a whirlwind of personal news. I’d wondered if I might once more meet Prince Peter Dolgoruki across a battlefield, me on the Turkish side and he on the Russian. But word had come that his illness had persisted after our encounter with Cezar Dalca and that Dolgoruki had died in St. Petersburg while raving about dark subterranean chambers and implacable evil. He’d been buried, Adam Czartoryski had written, with “appropriate precautions,” meaning stakes, garlic, and a stone in the mouth.

  Czartoryski had also noted with some satisfaction that Alexis Okhotnikov, his successor as the Tsarina Elizabeth’s lover, had met an “accident” and was dead.

  “I wish I’d bet on that one,” Caleb had remarked.

  Meanwhile, the Russian Admiral Dmitry Senyavin, whom I’d encountered at that winter reception at St. Petersburg, was patrolling the Adriatic and might add his ships to those of the British.

  Newspapers also reported the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the slave general in St. Domingue who’d pressed me into service years before. The Haitian slaves had won both independence and chaos.

  I’m ever reminded that life is sweet because it’s so precarious.

  Despite our own military peril, the grand strategic scheme of Napoleon was within reach. Bonaparte would march on Russia from Poland in the spring, while the Ottomans would strike from the south.

  “Persia is also being courted,” Sebastiani told me. “A diplomat named Pierre-Amédée Jaubert negotiated with the Persians in Tehran last year. No doubt he could have used the savant Ethan Gage and his bewitching wife Astiza for his embassy.”

  “Persia sounds very far away.”

  “Not to a new diplomat named Claude-Mathieu de Gardane, who volunteered to replace Jaubert when the latter fell ill. At first men wondered at Gardane’s eagerness for such a far-flung assignment, but then came rumors that this eager aide-de-camp had a grandfather, Ange de Gardane, who was a representative to the Persian court during the reign of Louis the XIV.”

  “He wanted to continue the family service?”

  “In the crassest way. The elder Gardane reportedly assembled a treasure during his years in Persia, and then hurriedly buried it during an uprising. His grandson wants to find it and dig it up.”

  “A treasure?” I react to the word as I do to a pretty woman or a gambling den. “Of what kind?”

  “Old, the story goes. Speculation ranges from the hoard of Genghis Kahn to the lost loot of Nadir Shah, who sacked the Mughal treasuries of Delhi.”

  “Intriguing.” It was more than that, and I filed the rumor away. “I’d still like to tour the treasury in this country. Yet to get an invitation.”

  “Do you need one? Rumor holds that you somehow penetrated the Peter and Paul Fortress and its royal vault.”

  “I’m behaving myself here.” Astiza and I had uncovered not a hint of the Trojan palladium and were relieved not to worry about it. My job as military advisor had given me regular work, predictable hours, and no need to trapeze from towers. “I’m the most trustworthy of men.”

  “Perhaps. But even Selim has the sense not to let Ethan Gage anywhere near his Ottoman treasury.”

  Nor would his Janissary generals let me near their proud but ineffectual troops. The Aga Abdulla Gelib and Vizier Hilmi were so opposed to military reform in the capital that I’d come here to Sestos and Abydos in hopes of accomplishing something with its New Army garrison. Meanwhile, Astiza worked as harem go-between.

  Our job was made more difficult because Ottoman disunity was leaving defenses undermanned as the Turks waited to see whether it would be the reformers or the reactionaries who triumphed.

  Nor was manpower our only problem. The Turkish forts were built to withstand arrows and catapults, not modern naval artillery. Ferns, vines, and small trees grew in the cracks of walls that would topple at the first broadside. Needed was an earth embankment to deflect cannon fire, a moat to discourage British or Russian marines, an abatis of pointed logs to slow an infantry attack, supporting batteries, trenches, and observation towers.

  This would take money, men, and time. We had little of any.

  “World events conspire in our favor, while local jealousies intrigue against us,” Sebastiani summed up. Out on the water, a Turkish frigate tacked back and forth in symbolic patrol, but the Ottoman fleet Caleb was advising was like the Ottoman army, awkwardly suspended between antique pride and clumsy reform, and wracked with internal rivalry. Caleb was as consumed at sea as I was on land, and we’d seen little of each other.

  “So we must turn to the tools we have,” I persisted. “If we can send just one of these half-ton granite marbles rattling around the decks of the British flagship, it will give the English pause. So I have a simple idea for mounting these great guns.”

  “Which is?”

  “That we don’t. We elevate the barrels on earth ramps just enough to lob the cannonballs to mid-channel, secure them to rope and pulley like carronades on a warship, and use the time needed to cool these massive barrels to winch them back into position. They’ll lie so low on the rampart that enemy cannonballs will fly overhead. The granite projectiles can be pushed to the muzzle from a ramp on one side. Water to swab and powder to fill won’t have to be lifted so far. Our manpower will be just enough.”

  “And the British will linger while we reload?”

  “One good hit is all we need. The English are brave, but they don’t want to lose ships to a strategic sideshow. Napoleon told me once that the goal in war is to frighten the enemy more than you are frightened. These bombards would frighten the devil himself.”

  Sebastiani shook his head. “Well, their age frightens me. But have at it, Monsieur Gage. The tools at hand, as you say.”

  My scheme was easier said than done. It took four days to organize skeptical soldiers, drag and prop a gun to an optimum position, build a ramp to load it, and get the Turks started on reinforcing the walls. Then a day to assemble the powder and roll a cannonball into readiness, and then two more days for officers and potentates to arrive from Constantinople to witness the test-fire. One was Aga Gelib, who clearly hoped the gun would burst in my face.

  Even after I drilled the artillerymen it took two hours to load and tamp the powder. The rock ball rumbled down the barrel with a growl. Despite my quip to let the Turks fire it, the Turkish aga refused to allow any of his soldiers near the bombard, meaning I had to light my own eccentric idea.

  Well, the gun looked sturdy enough. So I fit a match into the touchhole, lit it, hurriedly backed away, squatted, and covered my ears. Spectators took my cue and crouched, turned, or winced.

  The blast was like the bugle of Armageddon. The old gun gave a tremendous roar, bucking so hard against its lines that the ground quaked. Flame flashed, smoke billowed like a thunderhead, we followed a gray streak against the sky, and then the granite struck the middle of the Dardanelles channel with a tremendous splash. It was as if a meteor had fallen from heaven.

  There was a long, uncertain silence. Then the garrison began to whoop with excitement. The bombard had worked, and Gelib’s dark scowl at my
success couldn’t change that. The general stalked away as spent smoke streamed from the cannon mouth and the old iron threw off heat like a stove. To avoid cracking the barrel we waited half an hour before swabbing the bore with water, and then followed that with olive oil to protect the metal and lubricate the next shot.

  “That frightened even me,” admitted Sebastiani, who’d accompanied the aga for the demonstration. “And it may hearten the soldiers enough to bring some back into service. Congratulations, Gage. You’ve given Selim and his reformers military hope.”

  “Now all I have to do is ready the rest of the guns.”

  “Exactly. Except a Turkish officer must complete that task, I’m afraid.”

  “You mean I get to return to my family in Constantinople?” Astiza, Harry, and I found this new city even more agreeable than St. Petersburg. The weather was better, the people warmer, and the sights varied. We roamed the Grand Bazaar, attended receptions at different embassies, boated on the Bosporus, shopped at the Spice Market, and made excursions to the surrounding farmlands. The heat of summer had given way to the delicious warmth of a long, calm autumn, and even in winter snow was rare. Spring would come early.

  “No, you can’t have a reunion yet. Word has come that British Admiral John Duckworth’s squadron has been reinforced at Tenedos Island by rear admiral Sir Sidney Smith, a combination which gives the English enough firepower to risk fighting their way to the capital.”

  “Smith! We’ve known each other for years. Not the easiest man to work for, but then I’m not the easiest employee. We’ve had a tumultuous relationship but I respect his energy and ability.”

  “Good, because you may shortly find yourself either fighting him or negotiating with him. You’ve done wonders with this antique bombard, but before we risk using it I want you to go talk to Smith and Duckworth.”

  “Talk?”

  “Parley. Negotiate. Delay. Your brother Caleb suggested the idea to give us more time to ready the Turkish fleet. It will also give us more time on land. We need to mount more guns and assemble more men, and you’ve pointed the way. Now you have another task. Given your command of English and your background dealing with the British, the sultan has ordered you to sail a ship of truce to the anchored British flotilla, meet with Duckworth and Smith, and persuade them not to attack Constantinople at all.”