The Walls of Byzantium tmc-1

by James Heneage

  ‘Why would they want him?’

  ‘They wouldn’t tell me.’

  Suleyman frowned.

  Why does everyone want Luke Magoris?

  But then why did it matter? The more he considered the idea of handing Luke over to the Venetians, the more he liked it. It would remove him from Anna.

  But what about Zoe? What about their agreement?

  Suleyman’s mind wandered to his usual picture of Zoe: naked on the bed beside him. No other woman had engendered such hunger in him. He wanted to keep Zoe.

  But hadn’t he fulfilled his side of the bargain? She had given him Anna and he had delivered her Luke Magoris. He’d never promised that she could have him indefinitely. And this was an affair of state. He wondered, briefly, how much of his daughter’s activities the man standing beside him knew.

  ‘When do they want him?’

  ‘As soon as possible, lord. It could happen tomorrow or when you go north. There will be Venetians with the Christian army.’

  Suleyman considered this. If he handed Luke over tomorrow, there would be difficult questions to answer from Zoe. Better to do it later.

  Then Suleyman’s mind moved on to a new idea. Having Luke escape and be taken by the Venetians might prove very useful. Especially if he then took certain information to the enemy.

  ‘All right.’ He turned towards the door. ‘I will take him north and arrange for him to escape. I will tell you where your Venetians can pick him up.’

  PART THREE

  NICOPOLIS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NICOPOLIS, BULGARIA, 24 SEPTEMBER 1396

  The great fortress of Nicopolis stood next to the Danube at a point where the river was nearly a mile wide. On this evening, the standard that flew sluggishly from its tallest tower was the flag of the Prophet, topped with a moon, which meant that its experienced commander, Dogan Beg, had yet to surrender to the two crusader armies encamped to its front.

  Watching the armies from the prow of a hill was the heir to the Ottoman throne. Behind him and flanked by Kapikulu cavalry, was Luke.

  The armies were as impressive as they were different. That commanded by the Comte de Nevers was the more flamboyant, with a vast green tent at its centre surrounded by sixteen magnificent banners given by his father, the Duke of Burgundy. Each bore the image of the Virgin Mary, patron of crusaders, and beneath it the Count’s motto ‘Ic houd’ or ‘I never yield’. Surrounding it were the pavilions of the other French and Burgundian commanders: the Admiral de Vienne and Marshal Boucicaut; the Comte d’Eu and the veteran Sire de Coucy. Further out, a sea of gaudy silk washed across the wasted fields like a quilt and beyond stood a tilting ground with stands and emblazoned shields and pennants and all the accoutrements of the joust.

  Suleyman laughed. ‘This is more Lenten fair than army camp. All that’s missing are the dancing bears! Where are the scouting parties, the sentries? Where are the siege engines?’

  Luke rose in his stirrups to see better.

  Yes, where are the siege engines?

  The camp was positioned out of arrow range of the fortress walls and in front of it were some desultory earthworks but no catapults or battering rams or siege towers. And there were certainly no cannon of any size.

  The other camp was better. Here flew the flag of Sigismund, King of Hungary, and alongside it fluttered the standards of Wallachia and Transylvania. The tents there were less colourful and there was no tilting yard, fewer banners and much less silk. It was the nearer of the two and Luke could hear the sound of hammer on anvil and see the smoke of campfires curling into the sky as soldiers prepared their evening meals.

  The land around the fortress consisted of blackened fields lined with charred stubble, in one of which stood a scarecrow dressed in Saracen armour, a donkey’s tail attached to its turban. Surrounding these was a landscape of gently rising hills and scattered woods from which clouds of starlings exploded like rain-bursts.

  Beyond both armies and the fortress lay the mottled brown of the Danube with its marshy islands and, across it, the plains of Wallachia marching north towards distant mountains. The water looked sullen in the late-afternoon sun and upon it, lying at anchor, were ships flying the flag of Venice.

  How many men are there in these armies? Enough to beat the Turks?

  Luke heard his neighbour’s stallion snort and its rider’s mail clink with the movement. The day was still hot and flies gathered on the heads of the animals to be shaken aside. These Kapikulu had been his silent companions on the long ride from Constantinople along with other, more talkative sipahis from Anatolia. Zoe had explained to Luke that the sipahis were akin to the feudal knights of Christendom in that they held a plot of land, or timar, directly from the Sultan and were expected to come to war with retainers equipped at their expense. They were magnificently dressed in richly decorated mail and plate armour, with chest medallions and pointed turban helmets, and they carried maces and bows and had large quivers of arrows slung at their sides.

  Suleyman had chosen to take just Anna with him to the crusade. But Zoe was unpeturbed. She didn’t enjoy life on the march and staying behind gave her the opportunity to further investigate Siward’s tomb before Luke’s letter arrived with Plethon.

  Throughout the journey, Anna had remained hidden from view inside a carriage at the rear of the column. If the thought of Anna so close had raised Luke’s spirits, the country they’d travelled through, the woeful evidence of an empire in its final days, had lowered them again.

  To begin with, they’d ridden across Thrace, a land where birds had taken the place of people. It was a flat, open country, crossed by rivers and mirrored by lakes, which had once been rich in corn and wheat and where the peasants had lived in prosperous villages with fat churches and fatter oxen in their fields. Now it was desolate and the fields were choked with weeds and the villages abandoned, their churches open to the sky.

  As they rode further west, there appeared the first signs of change. People of darker skin were rebuilding the villages and pointed minarets were replacing domes. With them were groups of black-coated Bektashi dervishes who would provide the religious nucleus of their new communities.

  One night they stayed at a zaviye, or hospice for travellers or settlers from Anatolia. Luke had usually slept with the horses, often with no dinner inside him. But that night, a sipahi knight had taken pity on him and had brought him roasted bird with a sauce of saffron and mushrooms and unsmoked honey and Luke had slept deeply and dreamt of Anna.

  The next day they came to villages being built by people of lighter skin who didn’t seem to want a church or mosque, people who dressed in simple robes and wore no crucifixes or other ornamentation and barely looked up as they rode past.

  ‘Bogomils.’ It was the sipahi knight who’d given him the food. He spat.

  ‘What are they?’ asked Luke, wondering if the man spoke Greek. ‘They don’t look as if they’ve come from your homeland.’

  ‘They haven’t. They’re from around here. They’re heretics to your church but suitable to us for repopulating these lands. They’re insolent but they understand the country and work hard.’

  ‘Why are they heretics?’

  ‘Because of what they believe. They think that God had two sons, one bad and one good. The bad one created the world, so all material things are evil. They don’t like priests or popes or churches or any form of authority. So they were persecuted by their Christian lords. But we leave them alone as long as they pay their taxes. And they don’t believe in fighting.’ He spat again.

  ‘They won’t fight for their beliefs?’ asked Luke.

  ‘Not here. But in France they did. They were called Cathars there and your pope launched a crusade against them two centuries ago. He razed whole cities to exterminate them in the name of your God.’

  The sipahi knight had turned in his saddle to look at Luke, his dark eyes bright beneath the shadow of his helmet.

  ‘Do you know what this crusade has done
so far to win the hearts of the people they are liberating from us? Since crossing the river at Orşova, they have harassed and murdered the local peasantry. They massacred most of the citizens of Rahova even after they promised to spare them. Is this your God of love?’

  Luke looked to the sky as if He might defend himself.

  But all he saw were birds. So many that it seemed that heaven had sent a plague. There’d been herons, cormorants, ibis and white-bellied geese. Kites and falcons had ridden the currents while swifts and warblers darted and screamed their way low across the fields and lakes around them. Many of the birds were on their way south ahead of winter. Others had chosen to stay in this land devastated by war.

  An empire of birds.

  That evening, north of Kazanlak, they’d reached the foothills of the mountains and the guards had donned their cloaks and wrapped them tight against a chilling wind, their heads sunk deep into cowls and their eyes searching the landscape for bandits. The mountains here rose through pine-forested sides to snow-capped peaks where eagles circled on their giant wings spread out in benediction.

  They had ridden down into Tarnovo as the sun fled west, turning the meandering Yantra river below into spilt honey. This city had once been the ‘Third Rome’, the capital of the Bulgarian Tsars that, three years ago, had held out for four brave months against the Turkish onslaught. Now it was the meeting point of armies.

  The road was narrow, allowing only pairs, and Luke found himself again riding beside the sipahi knight who seemed to have attached himself since giving Luke food. In front of them rode Suleyman and he was talking to his companion loudly enough for Luke to overhear.

  He was talking about the Christian commanders. The ones he claimed to respect were, on the French and Burgundian side, the Admiral Jean de Vienne and Sire de Coucy and, on the Hungarian side, King Sigismund himself and the Voivode of Wallachia, Mircea, whose army had defeated the Turks at Rovine a year beforehand. He also admired the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Philibert de Naillac, who had sailed there from their fortress in Rhodes with a detachment of monk-knights.

  ‘If they have any sense,’ Suleyman had said, ‘they will listen to these men. But they won’t. De Nevers is vain and stupid and thinks only of Burgundian glory and he has the right of what they call the avant-garde. His knights will charge and our Serbian knights will stop them. You’ll see.’

  And Luke had listened and remembered what he’d heard.

  He was thinking about it now as he stared down at the two Christian armies outside Nicopolis.

  The Serbians will be in their front line.

  He didn’t know why, but he felt that this information would be of importance to the crusaders. He looked over to the tents of Burgundy. Somewhere in there would be men like de Vienne and de Coucy who would know what to do with it.

  But how could he get it to them?

  Luke didn’t sleep at all that night. It wasn’t just that he had not been given a tent, being tied instead to a wagon wheel where the camp dogs fed on the scraps from janissary cauldrons and howled and fought their way through the night. It wasn’t that a gentle drizzle had begun shortly after nightfall and continued ever since, soaking him to the bone. Luke had not slept because he kept turning over in his mind what he now knew of the battle to come..

  The Serbian knights will be in their front line.

  Luke shivered and drew the sodden folds of his cloak around his shoulders. He thought about the French knights of his age who’d be lying in their tents listening to the rain. How many, like him, would be facing their first battle tomorrow? How many, like him, would be thinking of the long training that had brought them to this point? How many were worrying whether it would be enough not just to survive the battle but also to uphold the honour of their calling?

  He looked down at the plate next to him where his untouched food sat like an island in a sea of brown water. Around him, the campfires of the army had long succumbed to the rain and the dawn was still some way off. He could just make out a shape moving slowly, hesitantly in the dark before him. He closed his eyes and then opened them, wiping aside the rain and straining to see what was out there. He heard a sniff, and then a growl.

  It was a dog. A large dog was coming towards him. Had it smelt the food?

  Luke was seated on the ground next to the wagon wheel and his hands were bound either side of its axle, the chains reaching through its wooden spokes. He edged closer to the hub and felt the manacles around each wrist. They were immovable. He tried to shift himself sideways, to get to the other side of the wheel, but the chain was too tight. He turned back to the dog and could now see its size and hear the rasp of its breathing. The animal had stopped and its head was just above the ground It was watching him with yellow eyes that flickered through the rain.

  It wanted the food and Luke was in the way.

  Luke tensed himself, readying his legs to intercept the creature in its leap, to somehow kick it away. He thought of dodging the impact but the chain made movement to either side impossible. But if he could move forward, if the chain would slide …

  The dog sprang. With a growl, it leapt through the air and Luke flung the top of his body forward, joining his fists and pushing them out so that the chain scraped up to the hub. The dog smashed into the wheel rim above him, its jaw scraping his knuckles, its hot breath on the back of his neck. He heard a crack, a crack not of bone but of wood. The dog had missed him and he could see its black shape rolling away on the ground. He flung out his legs and his boots hit something hard: a head. He kicked again and this time the crack was of bone.

  The dog lay still.

  The wheel was at an angle. The animal’s charge had broken the axle at the hub. He pulled the chain towards him and heard another crack. He pulled again and the wheel came away and the wagon crashed to the ground, narrowly missing him. He was still chained but he was free.

  Luke waited in the darkness to hear if the sound had alerted anyone.

  There was nothing. Just the sound of rain.

  He could feel his heart beating against his chest and his breathing was uneven. He began to crawl away from the wagon towards where he’d heard the sounds of horses earlier. He got to his feet and began to run slowly in a crouch, the chains dragging between his legs. He heard the whinny of a horse.

  He reached a rail and saw movement beyond. He ducked beneath it and held the chain still as he whistled softly into the dark, turning his head to left and right. Then he heard the pad of hooves on wet earth and a horse trotted out of the night, its head held high with uncertainty. Luke lowered himself to his haunches and offered his chains and the horse’s head stretched out to sniff and inspect. Then, slowly, Luke took the long nose in his hands and stroked it and his mouth came close to the horse’s ear and he whispered into it and the horse nodded and Luke knew he was trusted.

  Luke led the horse by the mane, feeling his way along the rail until he came to a gate. Only then did he mount the animal, talking to it as he did so. He listened for a while, judging the direction, then kicked its sides. It had stopped raining and the first light of day would soon outline the hills to the east.

  But he had been heard.

  He saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Riders taking shape in the darkness. Riders coming towards him. Silent riders who knew what they were following.

  Luke dug his heels in, grabbing the horse’s mane with both hands to keep himself on. He leant forward and whispered again into its ear and it started forward down the faint outline of a road at a trot. He looked over his shoulder and saw that his pursuers were following but making no attempt to catch up with him. Who were they and what was he to do? Any thought of going back to find Anna would have to be abandoned. He’d have to try and make it to the crusader lines.

  Before him rose a darker mass. A wood and a chance, possibly, to hide. He slowed as the first trees loomed up around him, weaving his way between their trunks and ducking to avoid branches. He heard the soft crack of twig beneath his
hooves and then the same noise behind him as the riders entered the wood. They were closer now. Was this another of Suleyman’s games? Was he watching it all from somewhere with his cat-eyes, his night-eyes?

  Who are you behind me?

  The wood was dark inside and got darker as he went further in. His horse seemed to have picked out some path between the trees and Luke lay low, breathing in the comforting smell. He glanced awkwardly up at the stars, now visible through the branches, and the parting clouds. He thought he saw the North Star ahead, which meant that they were going towards the crusader camp. But the Christian army was three miles away and his pursuers just behind.

  The warm, earthy scent of early autumn was all around him, a smell of pine essence released. All he could hear was the horse breathing and the steady drip, drip of rain.

  Then his world exploded.

  Something living landed on his back and his horse reared and he was thrown to the ground with his assailant on top of him. The air was punched out of him and he was pinned to the earth with a knife to his throat.

  ‘If you want to live, don’t move,’ hissed the man through the cloth that masked his face. The language was Greek. ‘Don’t move at all.’

  Luke lay rigid, feeling the cold of the blade against his neck. His cheek was against the ground and he could see other men emerging from the trees around, men with bows. He heard the sound of arrows being released and shouts in Italian and a scream where an arrow found its mark. The riders that had been following him were wheeling their horses, trying to escape, black shapes buffeted by panic.

  ‘Venetians!’ hissed the man on top of him. He was wearing the padded, buff leather of the gazi and he smelt strongly of horse.

  They lay there together for a while, both breathing hard, as the riders fled and the archers returned, forming a circle around them. One of them lit a torch. The man got up and put his dagger into his waistband. He took a sword from one of his companions, broke Luke’s chains, then walked over to one of the horses and found a thick pelt, which he threw at him.