The Walls of Byzantium tmc-1

by James Heneage

  Barbi laughed. ‘I am to visit the Hospitallers at Smyrna and teach them about Greek fire. We go there next.’

  ‘You’ve perfected it?’

  Barbi nodded. ‘Better than that. I’ve developed a hand-held siphon.’

  The Hospitallers at the fortress of Smyrna were the last Christian stronghold in Anatolia. Bayezid had tried twice to take it and would try again now. Greek fire would be useful there.

  Then Luke remembered that he was not alone. ‘Omar, these are my friends Dimitri and Benedo Barbi from Chios. Dimitri sells mastic.’

  ‘So I see,’ said the old man happily. ‘It seems to work.’

  Dimitri grinned and shook his hand, ignoring the woman who was now being led away by the crowd. He turned to Luke. ‘Can you talk? We have things to tell you.’ He glanced at Omar. ‘Forgive me, sir, but this is unexpected.’

  Omar nodded and walked over to the stall. He picked up a lump and examined it carefully. ‘So this is the cure for the Sultan’s toothache. We have much to thank you for, Dimitri. You go and talk and I will keep your stall. But don’t be long, I’m a poor haggler.’

  Dimitri and Barbi led Luke back through the arch and into a cavernous warehouse full of kneeling camels being unloaded. The air was thick with the smell of dung and spices and dust rose from the straw on which the animals lay. The November grey entered through windows high in the wall and struggled to make headway through the gloom. It was a place to talk and not be heard.

  Dimitri sat down on a bale of cotton. He unbuckled a flask from his belt and offered it to his friend. ‘So what happened?’ he asked. ‘The last I heard you were on a ship bound for Venice.’

  Luke drank the water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘The captain of the ship was Venetian.’

  ‘So you were given to the Turks?’ asked Barbi, who’d sat down as well.

  Luke nodded. ‘Then taken to Nicopolis as their captive. To watch.’

  Dimitri took the flask and seemed engrossed in it. When he spoke again, his voice was low. ‘I hear it was a massacre. And worse. I heard that Bayezid murdered thousands of knights who might have been ransomed, that he got old men to do it.’ He looked up at Luke. ‘Is it true?’

  Luke nodded again. ‘What else did you hear?’ he asked softly.

  Dimitri and Barbi exchanged glances. News of Luke’s treachery had reached Chios already.

  Luke leant forward and took Dimitri’s arm. ‘Dimitri, what you’ve heard about me isn’t true. You know me. I’m no traitor.’

  The two men looked at each other for some time and then Dimitri smiled. ‘Marchese will be relieved. It was the only thing clouding his happiness.’

  ‘His happiness?’

  ‘Of course, you don’t know. Why should you? Fiorenza is with child.’

  Luke stared at him. ‘With child?’

  ‘Yes. After all these years, their prayers have been answered. The whole island rejoices.’

  Luke felt weak. Fiorenza with child? With his child? Of course it was his child. Marchese was incapable.

  Dimitri frowned. ‘You’ve gone white, Luke. Is the news so bad?’

  Luke forced himself to smile. ‘No, of course not. It was a surprise, that’s all. I thought …’

  ‘You thought Marchese too old? We all did.’ He was looking at Luke quizzically. ‘It would seem a miracle, no?’

  ‘A miracle, yes. Please tell them how happy I am.’ He changed the subject. ‘How did the alum and mastic fare in Venice?’ he asked. ‘Did we get a good price?’

  ‘The very best.’ Dimitri said. ‘With no alum yet through from Trebizond, we got what we asked for. And the Venetian fleet took pounds of mastic to dress the crusaders’ wounds.’

  ‘And does it fix dye?’

  Dimitri shook his head. ‘Alas no. The Florentine chemists saw to that. But it didn’t matter. We sold it before the markets heard the news. The price was astronomical. Do you know how rich you are, Luke?’

  Luke didn’t answer. Dimitri didn’t know that every penny of that profit had gone to Plethon, to the Empire.

  But Luke wasn’t really considering that. He was thinking of the vines of Sklavia and the orchards of the Kambos and of a child that would grow up there thinking another man his father.

  Then he remembered something and turned to the engineer. ‘Benedo. How is the building? How are the villages?’

  ‘The villages are good. They’re coming up fast and the mastic is reaching its markets. The blockade is no more.’

  ‘No more?’

  ‘There was a storm. The Turkish ships were scattered, many sunk. And then the Empire’s fleet appeared and sank what was left.’

  Chios delivered.

  In a world that had deprived him of Anna, of his freedom, of his good name, of his child, this was a rare bit of good news. Perhaps one day, when he had done whatever he had to do, he could bring Anna there.

  One day.

  ‘I should go back to Omar.’

  Dimitri asked, ‘Why not come with us?’

  ‘Escape? No, they have Anna and my friends. Anyway, where would I go? Christendom thinks me a traitor.’

  Back in the courtyard, Omar was haggling for his life. It wasn’t so much the price as the sheer number of people desperate to buy the aphrodisiac now that word had got round of its effects. Luke wondered if the brothels of Bursa would be able to cope.

  Beneath an arch on the other side of the square, a dark man in darker clothes was watching the scene, his hand on a short sword at his side.

  Luke didn’t see him; nor did Omar or Dimitri.

  But Benedo Barbi saw him and he frowned. He’d seen him somewhere before.

  It took no time at all for Anna and her escort to reach the walls of the city.

  The only creatures abroad at that early hour were dogs and cats and bakers stoking the ovens that would make the city’s bread. Their hooves echoed against the walls of sleeping houses and through the narrow streets that led out of the city. They met a line of donkeys plodding moodily along, their heads sunk low and their backs piled high with the stuff for building. A turbaned man walked in front and stopped to bow deeply as their little calvacade passed.

  Then they were out on the plain and around them was all the melancholy of a spent summer. The fields were bare, scraped clean of their harvest and black with the stumps of blasted crops. They passed vineyards shorn of their bounty, with row upon row of stiff yellow leaves that only waited for a passing wind to lay them to rest.

  Anna rode with all the energy of uncloistered joy. She swept off her cap and allowed her hair to cascade behind her. She felt the sun on her cheeks and lifted her palms to wipe the tears from her eyes. She felt the thrill of horse between her thighs and the smell of leather filling her nostrils. With every perfect stride stretched out beneath her, the memory of the harem grew fainter.

  Whatever the future, for today I am free.

  By mid-morning they had reached a small town where a market was in progress. Soon they were passing between stalls of hung game and trussed fowl, between copper utensils and carpets of herbs. There were baskets of over-ripe fruit and vegetables bursting from their skins. They passed forges and entered streets thick with the sawdust of wood carvers and lined with the kiln-fires of potters. The air was heavy with yeast and cow dung and carob and blood.

  At midday, they were riding through a landscape of lakes and marshes. There were flamingos and black storks and pelicans strung out along the shores and a blizzard of cormorants taking wing. Anna stopped her horse and watched the sunlight dance across the water and listened to the talk of a million birds.

  An hour later they had reached the valley of the Mariza River and its sides were thick with forest. The road they travelled was lined with trees aflame and the floor beneath them was hoof-deep in leaves crisp as parchment. She slowed her horse to a walk and the leader of the sipahis caught up with her.

  ‘Lady,’ he said as he came to her side, ‘from here we turn south.’


  A track ahead branched off to the left and they took it, rising with the hill towards a forest of oak. Soon they were among gnarled, arthritic branches twisted with age and a silence broken only by the soft fall of hoof. As they crested the hill, Anna drew her horse to a standstill and stared at the beauty before her. The path ahead broadened into an avenue carpeted in gold. The trees on either side were beech and their tall trunks rose to form a vaulted roof above. She was in a cathedral through which heaven shone its individual eye.

  The sipahi knight rode up to her and coughed politely; she nodded and gently kicked her horse. It was late in the day and the shafts of sunlight shone low through the branches, turning the carpet to a weave of richer reds. Then they were entering the hills where the air was milder and the sound of water could be heard all around. Through the trees they could see the glint of waterfall and the velvet of washed, mossy rocks. They saw deer between tree trunks and once they saw a single boar that stared at them, legs astride, on the path ahead. Anna raised her hand to stop a sipahi arrow and it cocked its heavy head, turned and trotted away.

  Then, quite suddenly, they were there.

  At the top of the slope, the wood ended and below lay a meadow halved by a tumbling brook. Stretching into the distance were fold upon fold of wooded hills with all their reds and yellows glowing like a pathway of embers towards the setting sun.

  And there, pitched next to a little waterfall, was the tent that Suleyman had given her at her wedding. It was open on three sides.

  She dismounted and walked slowly towards it and a delicate music came over the meadow to meet her. With it came servants who carried jugs of sweet wine and sherbet.

  Anna entered the tent, sat on the cushions and watched the sun complete its progress to the west and she listened to the zither and thought of Mistra.

  She thought of the Evrotas River twisting its way through the valley beneath the city walls. She thought of Mount Taygetos behind, always topped with snow. She thought of autumn in Mistra, of the St Adrian’s Day market where roasted chestnuts would be tossed from hand to hand as they cooled. She thought of grumpy praetors lighting the evening lamps along the narrow streets. She thought of her mother hanging tapestries on the walls of the triclinium against the winter cold. She thought of a little city on a hill that would, quite soon, fall to the Turks.

  You can do a lot of good as wife of the Sultan.

  The sun was almost set now behind the hills. It was a dazzling display of beauty put on by whoever’s God was up there, and its finale was an explosion of oranges and reds and yellows witnessed by an audience of tiny clouds basking in its brilliance.

  Then all was violet and people with lamps appeared from nowhere to unroll the sides of her tent and to cast rose petals over her bed. A servant appeared at her side and refilled her glass with wine and another offered a plate of quail’s eggs and the roe of sturgeon. She ate and drank and wondered, with mild interest, when the Prince would arrive.

  And then she thought of Luke.

  Where are you? Where are you now?

  He was as good as dead. She would never see him again. She closed her eyes and let the fatigue steal over her limbs. The questions came and went with images in their wake. Then they slowed and finally stopped on one single image that filled her mind as it had done every night for so very long.

  Like this, she drifted into sleep, soothed by the lullaby of a zither.

  She awoke suddenly. It was morning and she was in the bed and clothed in a gown of finest lawn. Someone had done this. A servant, she hoped.

  She was aware that a voice had awoken her and it was a voice she knew.

  Then she heard the voice of her future husband. He was talking to somebody close to the tent. But she knew it wasn’t his voice that had woken her.

  There was a dressing gown hanging over a chair beside the bed and she quickly rose and put it on. She would not greet him from her bed. Her head was still heavy from the wine and the deep, deep sleep that had followed it and she found a little basin and splashed water over her face, blinking open her eyes.

  Whose voice woke me?

  Anna left the tent to find Suleyman outside but not the answer. The Prince was sitting at a table admiring the view. The horse from which he’d just dismounted was being led away by a groom and behind it followed a larger creature, stepping out elegantly. At its rein was a tall sipahi knight with gold mail and a gyrfalcon held high on his wrist.

  Whoever had woken her was no longer there.

  Anna walked over to the table and sat down. On it were bowls of fruit and dahl and honey and rose petals strewn between them and a small vase of lilies whose milky filaments bowed under orange stamens. For a while, neither of them spoke and the only sound was the gurgling stream and the music of morning birds.

  Eventually Suleyman said, ‘I have brought a poet with me.’

  ‘A poet? For me?’

  ‘For us both. He will recite to us as we take our ease.’

  ‘But I want to ride. You’ve brought a gyrfalcon. We can hunt.’

  Suleyman looked up from the peach he was quartering.

  ‘I told you,’ she continued calmly. ‘that I want to ride.’

  Suleyman smiled and lifted the peach to his mouth. ‘And I want to listen to poetry. We disagree so soon?’

  It was Anna’s turn to smile. ‘So let’s take the poet with us. Does he ride?’

  At that, Suleyman laughed. ‘All right, we will ride. When would you like to go?’

  Anna rose. ‘Now,’ she said.

  Suleyman watched her for a moment; then he shrugged and rose and walked with her up the meadow, the long grass brushing their ankles. There was a little waterfall near the trees at the top and he knelt to fill his water bottle.

  Then she heard it again. The voice that had woken her. It was within the trees.

  She turned and walked up to the wood, leaving Suleyman at the stream. She entered the trees and peered into the sudden gloom and saw that he was standing there alone, his two eyes separated by a band of silver metal.

  Eskalon.

  He was the captain of the guard’s horse, the one she’d seen led away. His long nose was protected by a shaffron studded with jewels and at his haunches hung embroidered cloth of gold.

  Eskalon.

  She breathed his name and stepped forward as the great head came down to meet her. She lifted his chin and rested hers on the bridge of his nose so that they stared at each other, eye to eye.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she whispered, but she knew it was the wrong question.

  His eyes were near to hers and they had tiny pools of light at their centre.

  ‘Where is he, Eskalon?’ she whispered.

  The two pools moved a fraction as if the door to another world was opening. She looked into them and the trees grew still around her, the canopy above closing out the sun and birdsong. Then she was looking around a landscape of swirling gasses and there was someone coming out of the mist towards her, someone she knew, someone she still loved and who still loved her.

  Luke.

  The shape of him was vague but unmistakable. In a moment the face would appear and she was dizzy with longing. He drew closer and she lifted her arms to him.

  ‘Anna.’

  It was Suleyman’s voice.

  Anna turned to him.

  He said, ‘You are pale.’

  She took a deep breath, feeling the warmth of Eskalon’s breath on her neck. ‘Prince Suleyman, I want to offer you a wager.’

  ‘A wager? It is forbidden for me to accept wagers.’

  ‘And it is forbidden for you to drink wine and for your father to fornicate with boys from Trebizond but it happens. Call it a challenge.’

  ‘And it is what?’

  ‘A race. On horseback. You and me, back to the gates of Edirne,’ she said.

  ‘And the prize?’

  ‘If I win, this horse — which, by the way, I will ride.’

  ‘And if I win?’

  She loo
ked at him and her hand came up to touch the lily at her ear.

  ‘You win me,’ she said. ‘I will marry you without divorce. I will turn to your faith. You can have your red-haired heir within a year.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  EDIRNE, OCTOBER 1396

  In the Year of Our Lord 1354, an Islamic God had stamped his sandalled foot and the walls of Gallipoli fell like a camel sinking to its knees in the sand. A passing Ottoman war band then skipped into the fortress and so began the stream of Turkish men, women, children, sheep and saints that, ever since, had poured across the Dardanelles up into the fecund valleys of Thrace. Their ferries had been Venetian.

  In that year, too, a philosopher called Plethon had been born in a city not far to the north. Adrianopolis, city of Hadrian. Now Edirne, city of Bayezid.

  In that city, on the day following her race with Suleyman, Anna sat on a stone bench in a little courtyard made by Murad for his wife, the Byzantine Princess Gülçiçek Khatun, and stared at a pillar.

  The courtyard was colonnaded with Roman columns resurrected from the earthquake and each one was different. A single tree stood at its centre, planted to mark the birth of the Princess’s first-born, Yildirim.

  So absorbed was Anna that she did not hear the soft tread of the philosopher until he was next to her and had spoken the word of the Prophet.

  ‘“Cursed be the man who injures a fruit-bearing tree.”’

  Anna swung around. ‘Plethon!’ she cried, jumping up from the bench and hugging the togaed midriff of the man before her. The sunshine glanced from his balding head and two cats tiptoed away to sleep in the trimmed borders that ringed the square. ‘Are you really here?’

  ‘In person,’ said the sage, performing a little bow. ‘It is, after all, my home. Or was.’

  Anna smiled. She was dressed, from head to toe, in the whitest gown and her hair tumbled to her shoulders in waves of copper. Her face had thinned and there was shadow where once there’d been curve. Her eyes held something distant in them as if her mind was elsewhere.

  Plethon took her hands and gazed at her, watching the colour creep slowly into her cheeks. ‘Anna,’ he said at last, ‘are you very unhappy?’