A Dowry for the Sultan

by Lance Collins

  The arrogant Roman soldier, he cared less about. Dumrul’s spies had learned the officer’s identity, Bryennius, the commander of only three hundred. Derar mused on what he might do with the Roman after he had rescued his nephew. With both Dumrul and Derar after him, the Roman would get his just desserts. Derar had learned to live uneasily with the fear that Seljuk spies in the city would come to know of him. For the moment, Derar had to trust that the Horse-archer knew his work and would safeguard his identity as a Roman spy in the Sultan’s court.

  Derar removed his iron helmet of the pointed Iranian type, richly inlaid with silver and having a slender nasal and light mail aventail. Running artistic fingers through the sweat damp locks of his wavy hair, he watched Zaibullah lead his horse to where Farisa, veiled against the dust on her black mare, was tending his two baggage camels. The woman looked at him and then at the city. She was even slimmer from the journey, eyes as dark and bright as the desert night sky, at once alive with interest and dull with unspoken concerns. When she smiled, which was often, her full lips parted over strong white teeth. No humour played in her eyes now, as she observed the army moving into place about the fortress from where the last shouts were dying away to leave a brooding silence.

  Did she think, now, of her Greek origins, Derar wondered. From her circle of acquaintances in the bazaars where she bought their needs, or from hearing the gossip of the grooms, farriers, armourers, healers and other followers of the army, she was an invaluable source of information. But would she run if she got the chance? Derar had no reservations about slavery. In the culture, it was as old as history, but in this particular instance he was beginning to have doubts.

  Derar watched furtively as Zaibullah assisted Farisa with unloading the baggage and setting up camp. The Turk had once been a ghazi for the caliphate, where his courage and intelligence had come to notice. Derar’s well-placed friends had told him Zaibullah had done some spying for the Caliphate when he had visited his tribal relatives. The friend of a friend had recommended him for this journey, and thus far, Zaibullah had not been found wanting. Despite his preference for the finer things of the agricultural lands over steppe and desert, Zaibullah had easily re-adopted the dress and ways of the nomads and played his part well as a hired companion. Cheap he was not: the promise of more gold and further employment at the completion of this journey together with decent treatment seemed to hold his loyalty for the moment.

  Derar observed the easy way Zaibullah and Farisa co-operated to establish their black tent and camp, knowing a bond was developing between them: friendship from the woman, more from the man. He would need to be watchful, lest Zaibullah’s feelings for the woman overcame his mercenary loyalty. Farisa took the lead in caring for their stock, drawing water and starting the fire, for they had not eaten since noon the day before.

  Seeming to feel his gaze Farisa glanced up and Derar sensed she felt more than servitude towards him. He smiled with genuine warmth to her, and then looked away to the unfolding scene and sighed. Yes, his gold coins had saved her from an uncertain future, and there had been no end of jealousies and petty demonstrations in his extended household when he had brought her home, but his heart had been touched elsewhere.

  To hide his thoughts, Derar turned on his heel, as if to check the tightness of his girth, and looked over his saddle westward along the river valley. He had planned simply to track down his brother and nephew and talk them into returning. The whole task had become more complex with the death of the former and imprisonment of the other.

  Personal consequences loomed large. Somehow, Derar confronted himself, he had to either prevent the capture of the city, or rescue his nephew before or during the sack, a seemingly impossible task. In the meantime he must blend usefully into Tughrul Bey’s army, maintain access to the Sultan’s inner circle and appear useful at least and indispensable at best to those he betrayed. All this, remain undiscovered and pass his intelligence to the Horse-archer.

  Somehow a plan would come to him, and he would yet escape down the Arsanias with his nephew and companions, hiding out amongst the pockets of Arabs in Mesopotamia. Down the river they would travel away from the Romans, perhaps to Marwanid-Kurdish Amida on the Tigris, then west to the Euphrates, to the white tents of the Arabs of Syria—people careful of horses’ pedigrees and hospitable to strangers. There, Derar reasoned, they could make their way peacefully away from Roman and Seljuk alike, shunning the black tents of the brigand tribes of the desert’s edge. In his mind’s eye he appeared at the home of his brother, with his nephew at his elbow and the eyes of his brother’s widow accepting the mixed news.

  Derar turned back to his tent. He had chosen a black one in Tabriz both for its campaign utility and to blend in with the army. Neither of his companions knew his full design. The agony of deceit he withheld from them. Derar trusted Farisa. Zaibullah had already unwittingly passed one message, disguised as a boastful threat, when he had ridden to the fortress weeks ago to ascertain the whereabouts of Zobeir. Derar did not know how Zaibullah would react to his double game if he found out.

  In the late afternoon, with the Seljuk army still moving into place, Derar saddled his black mare, Zanab, and rode with Bughra Dumrul and his escort to parley with the garrison. Horsetail standards and kettledrums announced their intention. Quieting his restive horse, Derar scanned the battlements but could not recognise a familiar face among the helmet shadows looking down. While they waited Derar furtively marked the tower against which he had been instructed to shoot his message arrows. This would be difficult on a dark night.

  They waited, motionless except for the nod and toss of horses’ heads and the breeze playing with the standards, their shadows long on the ground before them. Derar took the opportunity to examine the formidable defences.

  To a blare of trumpets, the city gates swung open. A high-ranking officer, accompanied by a standard-bearer, rode out. Derar looked with keen, professional interest at the good horses, the mail and the fine weapons. The officer, an impressive, bearded man, rode boldly up to them and halted silently without ceremony, the standard-bearer to his left. It was not Bryennius.

  The silence was oppressive.

  Dumrul’s interpreter initiated a formal greeting. “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, our Sultan Tughrul Bey, Client of the Commander of the Faithful, Lawful King and Asylum of the Muslims, commands you to surrender the city.”

  The Roman, the low sun golden on his face and armour, made no reply. Derar admired his nerve and show of absolute confidence.

  Dumrul tried again. “Berkri resisted and was shown no mercy. Archēsh surrendered and was spared the worst. Surrender now, and when our Sultan occupies Manzikert, he will take the most beautiful girl among you as his bride, but the city will be spared the excesses of an unregulated sack. The terms will not grow more generous, Roman. Nor will they be repeated.”

  Derar saw in a clear image the Roman horsemen and walls, the line of horses’ heads and horsetail banners in the barest breeze. He had come looking for his nephew, but now found himself in a cruel war where even the horses were terrible, with their ears and manes and eyes. Derar swallowed.

  The Roman allowed a long pause, then spoke, his voice ringing clearly in the Persian tongue. “Go tell the Sultan, return to his own lands. There is nothing to discuss.” With that the two watchful Christians backed their horses a dozen steps away from the danger of close quarters and swinging them on their haunches, galloped for the gates.

  Isma’il watched them go and uttered an oath. “Then take this for your supper, Dogs.” He heaved his chestnut stallion around in a half-rear and galloped to the lines of waiting men. “Attack!” he screamed. “Attack! Attack!”

  * * *

  60Ghazi—an Islamic cross-border raider.

  61Crenelle—on battlements, a space between two high merlons for the defenders to shoot through.

  62Ghu
lam—a (usually Turkic) professional cavalryman of the Seljuk state and Abbasid Caliphate: something equivalent to the troopers of Byzantium’s tagmata.

  Chapter Eleven

  Comes the Shepherd King

  The Walls of Manzikert,

  Evening, 21st August 1054

  Guy watched from the battlements as Count Daniel Branas parleyed with the Seljuk officers, amongst whom he was almost certain he could make out Derar al-Adin on his black mare slyly scanning the battlements, but the light was deceptive, the low sun sending an orange glare against his eyes.

  As Branas withdrew, Guy knew his dismal expectations had been met. “Here they come, men. Make ready! Remember, shoot only two-thirds the range.” Guy walked along his stretch of wall, repeating the firm orders that had been passed through Balazun from Count Doukas. “Mind our men at the scarp breastworks behind the ditch.”

  He heard the iron gates slam shut behind Branas and the roar as the waiting nomads gave a great shout and hurled themselves forward in a dismounted, thickly massed crescent. The Seljuks carried their personal weapons and scaling ladders, their dancing standards held aloft by the boldest as their drums, fifes and trumpets screamed a deafening cacophony. Guy, shading his eyes with his hand, saw the leaders pass the furthest ballistae range sticks, then rush by the two furlong markers. Archers posted along the scarp breastworks were already engaging with disciplined arrow showers. Seljuks were falling.

  Guy heard men near him utter the soldier’s prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us, Amen.”

  “Ballistae!” he yelled hoarsely over the tumult. Men manning the bolt-shooting engines hunkered down in their protective galleries and peered out through the arrow slits searching for targets. “When you have a knot of them, shoot at will.”

  Charles, Jacques and Aram Gasparian were moving calmly up and down the wall directing and encouraging the men.

  Guy watched the enemy come within easy range. “Archers!” The bowmen gave their weapons a last check and fitted arrows. “Make ready.” Judging the closing distance, he knew the longer infantry bows on the wall outranged the weapons of the Seljuk horsemen, but as soon as these came into range, the defenders themselves would be showered with incoming arrows.

  “At the enemy to your front, two furlongs—shoot!” sounded repeatedly from the commanders along the ramparts. With an ominous swish, hundreds of arrows leapt in a great arc from the walls. Then hundreds more in a second torrent, after which the discharge became an irregular hail as the attackers came within range of the engines and archers on the main wall.

  The infantry supports on the concourse between the walls, sheltered against the fore-wall under their mantelets63 of interwoven light branches. They were tasked to guard the sally-ports as the archers from the scarp-breastworks retired through them, and relieve any threatened point.

  The hellish scene burned into some part of Guy’s soul like a glimpse of the underworld. The sky was darkening and smoke was everywhere. Squinting into the setting sun, the men on the walls could only make out in the dimmest, fear-filled abstract, the multitude of their attackers. The main wall behind them glowed orange in the sunset while the battlements cast skirmishing shadows over the men. These, sweating and cursing, heaved on the screaming sinews of the ballistae, their sun-gilded helmets bobbing forward again as they placed the heavy bolts in the grooves. Archers nocked arrows and drew their bows, peering quickly through the crenelles into the darkness that rose from the river, seeking a mark for their missiles. Spearmen crouched against the stones, waiting for the moment when they would have to expose themselves to Turkish arrows, to push away a ladder or spit the men on it. Engines on platforms built into the gallery walls and atop the towers lobbed rocks or clay pots of Greek Fire into the attackers, the liquid from the bursting containers being set alight by fire-arrows.

  The noise was deafening; the screaming of the wounded and fearful, the hoarse, bellowed commands of the leaders ever more urgent. Mangonels groaned as soldiers swung back on the ropes to launch another rock or fire-pot. Ballistae cracked ferociously, speeding the lethal darts on their way as Seljuk arrowheads sparked on the stone and clattered around the defenders. Every man, senses sundered, wore the look of earthly concentration as they subjected their mortal selves to this now their work.

  A red glow in the west bid farewell to the sun, though the fierce day was far from over. It struck Guy how much time had passed. Several of the men under his charge had been maimed by arrows and crawled down the steps from the wall. Four lay dead and he was ashamed that he could not name them. Glancing at the main wall, he was relieved that his own men would now be invisible to the Seljuks below them.

  “They’re in the ditch. Our archers are retiring from the scarp breastworks,” Charles yelled, directing their men to cover the city’s soldiers as they withdrew behind the fore-wall.

  “We lost too many men trying to defend the scarp,” Guy muttered to Jacques as the defenders of the breastworks fell back under their shields fifty feet to scramble through the sally-ports to safety.

  “The infidels lost a great many more,” Jacques replied. ‘Nor have we finished using the ditch and breastwork to torment them.”

  From below and behind them the sally-port guard parties reported all was well. “Number One sally-port secure. Number Two sally-port secure.” Those from the scarp breastworks sank to the ground gasping for breath. Some wept. Others cursed the heathen and looked for a place on the crowded fore-wall until the decarchs ordered them back into line. The shout went up for medical orderlies while some of the wounded in their distress cried for their mothers.

  The Varangians in the right flanking tower pumped a jet of Greek Fire along the front of Guy’s section of wall. He heard howls and shrieks below and braved a quick look. The very ground was afire and immolated men ran crazily, screaming and beating at the inextinguishable burning. Noting a huddled group of fifty or so in the firelight who were forcing a ladder up the fortress wall, Guy motioned four men to grab the handles of the cauldron of boiling water. They staggered under the weight of it as he guided them the few paces to where to tip it. They made ready with the unwieldy cauldron as Guy prayed none would be hit or lose their footing, spilling the scalding liquid amongst their comrades. “Now,” he wheezed. The torrent sprayed with a hiss, through the purpose-designed sluice in the stonework, forward of the wall to the accompaniment of screams and oaths from below. Several bags—made of paper or other flimsy material—containing quicklime were thrown down after the boiling water, in order to cause burns and noxious vapours.

  “Here!” Guy indicated a crenelle. “You and you. Here,” he ordered in his basic Armenian. “Keep them away from the base of the wall, men, so they can’t start knocking out the facing stones to undermine it.”

  A ladder searched upwards. An Armenian fisherman tried to push it away with a pitchfork, but in an instant the weight of nomads on the ladder pinned it to the wall. Encouraged, the Seljuks threw up more ladders. Tribesmen in loose trousers and horn lamellar armour stepped up, holding their silk-bound, spiral cane shields over them. A Seljuk appeared in the crenelle next to Guy where a blacksmith spitted him with a pitchfork, toppling the man backwards off the wall. From the dark a javelin transfixed the blacksmith, who with a cry collapsed onto the rampart. A Seljuk berserker entered the gap and slashed at Guy who parried with his shield and thrust with his spear but could not penetrate the man’s defence, as the attacker could not strike him. A second Turk appeared on the other side of the merlon, then a third. Guy was terrified of being overwhelmed in the din and flickering firelight. Suddenly, all was black as the flames died down. The darkness was full of stabbing, screaming shadows, the clash of weapons, showers of sparks as steel struck stone and the dull thuds as shields took the impact of blows.

  Guy heard the strategos’ great voice above the clash of arms when a Turk facing him went down, cloven to the chin as another sheet of flame
lit the scene for a moment. “Well done, d’Agiles. Carry on!” Basil Apocapes roared as he went, exalting his god and exhorting his soldiers.

  “Step aside left,” Jacques shouted and discharged his crossbow full into the chest of Guy’s immediate antagonist.

  A knot of heavily armed and armoured cataphracts loomed in the blue starlight and the few Seljuks that had gained the battlements were banished from it.

  “Good. Good, men. Well done,” Guy heard Jacques shout as he glanced over the wall. “But it’s no use trying to push the ladders straight out with that much weight on them.” The groom took a grappling hook on a rope and leaned out through a crenelle while another held the back of his belt. Jacques swung the rope and let fly the hook so it caught across a ladder, then hauled back quickly before the Turks could unfix it. “Heave! Heave!” he grunted as he pulled the flesh-laden ladder sideways. Others grasped the rope and with a whoop the defenders felt the ladder topple sideways. Jacques moved forward to shake the hook free and retrieve it before the Turks recovered. “The damned thing’s snagged. Pull! Wait. Pull now!” They heaved away and were rewarded by the empty ladder appearing. Hands reached out and seized it as it fouled on the merlons.

  “This is one they won’t use again,” a townsman exclaimed in triumph.

  “You’ve the hang of it now. Good fellow.” Jacques slapped the man on the back and moved on.

  Suddenly, the attackers melted into the night. There was momentary jubilation on the wall, the leaders looking over the side, urging caution that the hasty attack had been beaten off, but the battle was far from over. Men waited at their posts, staring into the ink before them. The groans and cries from the littered space between the ditch and fore-wall covered any possibility of hearing a silent attack. Tense, exhausted, the smell of naphtha64 and burnt flesh in their nostrils, the defenders waited. After what seemed like an eternity, the word came from Balazun and was whispered man to man through the dark along the wall, “Half stand-to.”