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Porphyry and Ash

Page 31

by Peter Sandham


  ‘Send your men to the Holy Apostles,’ Grant said. ‘You’ll find in the crypt the bodies of two of these madmen. The priest got away.’

  ‘It seems I owe you an apology and a debt of gratitude,’ said Notaras, meeting Grant’s eye. Anna had fallen back into a swoon, and her father laid her head back onto a pillow and glanced to where the doctor was coming in with Jacob.

  ‘I’ll take the apology,’ Grant said with a nod. ‘As for the debt, see that her wounds are properly cleaned and keep her safe. That’ll set things even.’ He made to take his leave.

  ‘They are coming tonight,’ Notaras said suddenly. ‘The Turks. An all-out assault. By dawn the city will be theirs.’

  Grant showed no surprise. Once, he had thought it treasonous that the megas doux should seek to negotiate a surrender without a fight. Now, thinking of the girl and the almost equally delicate beauty of Hagia Sophia, he began to see things differently. Perhaps, he considered, the bravest man of all is the one who sacrifices his honour for what its loss might preserve.

  ‘Keep her safe,’ he said again and moved to the doorway.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the megas doux said in surprise. ‘Not to the walls, surely, you will find only death there.’

  ‘Purpose,’ said Grant. ‘I’ll find purpose there, after many years of searching.’

  XXXII.

  Some weeks before, Anna Notaras had wished that the candle of worship within Hagia Sophia might flame up one last time. Although she was herself absent that evening, the sound of voices raised in song came to her ear through the window of her room in the Rose Palace. She lay on her front, listening, silently weeping in joy and despair, while Zenobia gently rubbed balm into her wounded back. For the first time since its Latin desecration, the people had converged on the great church. Greek and Latin, Venetian and Genoese, side by side; united in a last solemn ceremony, a final plea to God.

  Stood among beggars and lords in the dark, lamp-lit basilica, John Grant watched with a quiet calm as no ritual was spared, no relic left unparaded. All had come. All, in their finest robes, to the mother church one final time. Ranks of soldiers, merchants and millers, fishermen and sailors, all joining their voices to rise and fall in the harmony of rhythmic chanting. The sound re-echoed from the walls and rose with the incense vapour, up, up, into the curving embrace of the dome.

  The gaunt emperor led a solemn procession beneath a banner of the two-headed eagle, joined by the Latin cardinal Isidore and all the local churchmen, absent Gennadios. It seemed at last that here the two halves of the faith were united; the great schism forgotten.

  The relic of the true cross was paraded, and soldiers kissed its silver casing, that it might instil divine strength to them for the hours ahead.

  Then, having taken the sacraments, the emperor fell to the floor and begged God to forgive all their transgressions. He bowed in all directions and took his leave, followed by Grant and the rest of the army, leaving behind a vigil that would continue through to dawn.

  In the crisp night air, under a lurid moon, Grant made his way towards the front line, enjoying the still calm before the storm of cannon fire returned. The stockade was crowded with the pick of the defenders, almost a thousand men in heavy plate, ready to face everything the sultan had to throw at them. They would lock the postern gates behind them and stand their ground for the very last time.

  Fieschi nodded to Grant as they performed a final check of the straps on one another’s armour.

  ‘This time tomorrow we’ll all be immortal, one way or another,’ said Fieschi. ‘Fifty-two days we’ve held them off. Fifty-two days in hell. Not bad for so few facing so many.’ He waved his hand out towards the killing zone between the fosse and the outer wall. ‘How many thousands of them have died out there I wonder?’

  ‘And still they come,’ said Grant. He placed a hand on Fieschi’s shoulder. ‘We’ve done our part. Nobody could ask more of any us, I think.’

  ‘Go easy,’ said Fieschi with a knowing smile. ‘We’ll drink a round with Maruffo and the others, and it’ll taste divine.’

  ‘Maybe in heaven his jokes will be better,’ said Grant. He had put on Maruffo’s old harness of plate; only the dog-faced bascinet, tucked under one arm, remained to be seated over his head.

  He shuffled to the back of the compound, where an armoury of weapons had been laid out. They had their choice of axes, polearms, swords and maces, shields bearing the double eagle and whitewashed pavises daubed with the red cross of Genoa. There were barrels, some thick with arrows, others of blackpowder and more yet of water to slacken thirst or fire.

  His choice was a tall ghiavarina, a heavy spear with a wickedly sharp, tapering blade of almost a foot in length. From the base of the double-edged blade, two sharpened lugs gave the weapon the look of an enlarged boar-hunting spear. With enough force in his arm, Grant could punch this weapon through a full plate harness and gut a knight. Against the felt jackets and leather of the irregular Turk skirmishers it would be remorseless.

  He settled down and waited.

  In the darkest hour of the night, the soft ululation of the Isha prayer was replaced by the harsh bray of a herd of horns and pipes.

  A cymbal crashed and the drums began, hidden at first by a last crescendo of fire from the cannons. The Turk was coming. They had been warned.

  ‘Stand to!’ Giustiniani called out.

  Men began to shuffle onto the rampart in their heavy harnesses, fanning along it in a paper-thin line of bodies stiffened by their armour shells to appear something more than ordinary men half-delirious with terror.

  Torches were lit and flung from the wall, lighting the terrace before the fosse with flickering shadows that danced like pagans across the churned-up ground.

  The air stank of their nerves, betraying the unconvincing masks of bravery each man wore. The danger would almost come as a relief after the dripping torture of anticipation; that was the worst of it – the interminable dread.

  Grant set the bascinet on top of his head but left the visor raised. He would drop it only at the last. He barked out advice, all the while trying to remember what his old commanders had said at times like this and wondering how they had made the task of leading men seem so easy.

  He raised his ghiavarina into the air. ‘Once they start climbing, there’s nothing to it,’ he called. ‘Take your lance and put all your hate behind the blow. The steel tip’ll do the work and rip through the metal and leather and dreams of any Turk you catch upon it. Speed them to hell and make ready for the next one, we could be in for a long night.’

  A crossbowman took up position behind him, hoping the big, plate-covered body would offer protection while he reloaded.

  Out beyond the fosse, shapes began to move in the darkness. The pulse of the drums grew to match the racing of their hearts, and then, with a howl, the first wave of red caps came swarming, like angry ants, across the muddy ground towards the earth causeway that spanned the fosse.

  The crossbowman beside Grant set the stock of his bow to his shoulder and waited for the first runners to reach the glow of the flares.

  ‘Nothing to it, lads,’ Grant called out once more in encouragement. ‘Kill anything that tries to scale our wall. If you die, ask God to send us reinforcements.’

  A drumfire of shots rattled a greeting of iron from the rampart, and the front rank of bodies dropped to the earth.

  The roar from the Turks was like nothing Grant had ever heard. It rose in a wave of sound that never broke, building in volume as those first brave men came dashing at the fosse and into the teeth of withering crossbow fire.

  These were not the elite janissary, nor even the well-bred sipahi cavalrymen, these red-turbaned azaps were little more than volunteer peasantry, with no armour beyond simple leather corslets. What they lacked in protection they made up for in courage and dropped like flies for it on the lip of the ditch.

  A second volley of bolts from the walls shredded more men like blossom in a tempest, but the sh
eer numbers could not be checked. Even as one man fell, the next Turk would be hurdling the dying body and charging across the mound of earth.

  It took no bow skill to slay them; it required no aim to pick out a victim among the seething mass. The causeway funnelled them so tightly that a lucky shot might send two or three men over the edge in a tangle, and once down in the ditch, even the unwounded would struggle to climb free from the hellish pit of flesh as more bodies tumbled in upon them.

  More cautious men, seeing the deathtrap on the causeway, sought to ford the fosse elsewhere. They scrambled up the steep inner face using their own dead comrades for purchase.

  The toll was terrible, but little by little, men and ladders were reaching the foot of the stockade and the rain of bolts and bodkins had to slacken as archers switched weapon to the lance in readiness.

  At the same time, the rattle of arrows and shot against the stone ramparts began to grow as more and more of the azaps crossed and could return fire at the wall’s defences.

  A wooden frame clattered against the parapet. The cry of ‘Ladder!’ rang out.

  They had prepared. Along the wall-walk, large stones sat ready – thanks to the cannons these were in rich supply.

  It was a sinew-straining effort to deadlift, in armour, a rock the size of a sheepdog. When a ladder banged into place to Grant’s right, a Greek man-at-arms dropped his lance and squatted to pick up a boulder.

  ‘Let’s give them a warm Roman greeting shall we!’ he said with a grin as he lifted the rock up onto the lip of the wall. Some of the men had spent the morning painting crosses or messages onto the boulders. Grant could see this one just had the laconic instruction ‘catch’ scrawled across it.

  The Greek had the boulder up in the crenelation gap when his face exploded in a cloud that splattered across Grant’s visor and turned his world briefly crimson.

  The azaps, bowmen at heart, were disciplined enough to have archers covering the ladders and the man-at-arms had worn an open-faced barbute for its better vision. The arrow had struck at an upward angle, under the cheekbone and straight into the brain. He was dead before his body had folded itself limply over the boulder. Grant never even knew his name.

  The shock sent adrenaline surging through the Scotsman’s veins, jolting his muscles into action even before his mind caught up.

  He lurched forward, shoving both body and boulder over the edge of the wall and down onto the red caps as they swarmed up the ladder.

  Another arrow clanged off the top of his helmet, sending him stumbling back, but the rock did its job, snapping the ladder and sending the men on it tumbling to the ground below.

  For what seemed an eternity, the azaps tried in vain to scale the walls or tear away the barrel crenelations from the low rampart with hooked staves.

  The horns continued to low like cattle across the plain, but increasingly the sound struggled to compete with the shrieks and cries of the dying beneath the wall, the hoarse yells and curses of the defenders above, and the lower thuds of missiles clattering down like hailstone.

  Ladders continued to strike against the parapet. Grant braced himself against a barrel and drove his eight-foot ghiavarina down into the chest of the first man climbing it.

  He didn’t know what province the sultan got these troops from, but it bred men of suicidal courage. They continued rushing over the mounding bodies of comrades, helmetless and in little more than boiled leather. They scrambled at the stockade wall but could not scale it and died in such numbers that after a time they abandoned attempts to set ladders altogether and began instead to climb the pile of corpses up towards the rampart.

  He lost count of how many he slew; his arms were exhausted from the effort. Again and again he drove the ghiavarina down into them and each time another man would reel away, clinging to a punctured chest or gored face.

  He cut one man across the belly, opening him up like a wineskin, dousing those below in a rush of appalling gore.

  Thrust-and-draw, thrust-and-draw, thrust-and-draw.

  Some tried to grab and claw at the lance, braving the vicious lugs in hope of toppling him down onto them, but the crossbowmen around Grant picked them off; two bolts loosed every minute and a kill with every shot.

  The assault was in chaos. Even had they been disciplined troops the clamour and din made any command impossible to discern. The shove of bodies from behind and tangle of corpses all around prohibited any manoeuvre beyond a steady pressing in a single direction.

  Green-clad chavushes paced beyond the fosse, brandishing clubs and whips to deter any who wavered and turned back. The only choice left for the azaps was which side of the ditch to die on.

  It was an arm-wrestle for the wall, one side with the numbers, the other with the armour, and for an age the match hovered in the balance.

  There appeared no end to the slaughter – it must have drained the sultan of a thousand men – but it hardly mattered. In Mehmed’s plan, the role of the azaps had never been to breach the wall, merely to exhaust the defenders.

  And then suddenly it was over. The horns blew the call for retreat and there were no more ladders to topple, no more hands to slash or heads to cleave.

  The hailstorm of arrows died as swiftly as a summer storm, and the noise – the clamour of gunfire, bells and bawled shouts – became a rippling cheer from the walls as men risked a glance and saw the bloodied Turkish survivors slinking back into the night.

  Grant lent against a barrel crenelation, flicked up his visor and sucked in lungfuls of air. They had only moments, he was sure, before the next wave came at them.

  His eyes wandered over the inner wall and took in the red cross of a Genoese banner hanging limply from a tower. Maruffo had been right. It felt no different to kill a man for God than it had for money.

  And yet, he thought with a smile, Maruffo had also been wrong. There was a purpose to this fight far beyond any he had undertaken before. He was not fighting here for God, he was not even trying to save Constantinople, he was fighting to keep Anna safe, and that gave him a purpose and an inner strength more powerful than any he had felt before.

  The kettle drums began once more to pound peals of thunder. He took another breath and dropped his visor.

  The second wave was flying across the ground towards the fosse and these were proper troops – Anatolian sipahi, clad in mail and crowned with conical missiourka helmets.

  Had they been capable, the empty-eyed azap corpses strewn in the lee of the wall might have noted with satisfaction the thinner curtain of missiles that met the charge of their comrades. Some of the sting had been drawn from the defences by that first, long, bloody assault.

  Equally, the sipahi were cavalrymen – the charge was their lifeblood, even if this one was made on foot. Their armour, though light, was significantly tougher than the azap sheepskins, and so their numbers were not so badly thinned as they rushed across the causeway and up the pyramid of bodies. In no time at all, the fighting was hand-to-hand atop the rampart.

  The first man to crest Grant’s section of wall had his neck cleaved open before his second foot touched the ground.

  As soon as he had seen the charge begin, Grant had abandoned the ghiavarina, drawn his arming sword and slung his left arm through the enarmes straps of a heater shield.

  Another sipahi appeared and Grant met him with his shield as a weapon, swinging it edge-on like an axe, clubbing him back over the lip of the wall.

  Before the Anatolian had hit the ground, Grant was driving the point of his sword down into the face of the next man on the ladder just as he gripped the top of the parapet.

  Conical helmets were climbing over in too many places; the narrow wall-walk had become the field of battle, and the defenders were falling in numbers. A bodkin snatched away the life of the crossbowman beside Grant in a hot jet of purple from his thigh.

  Grant had to step into the slippery puddle of blood to take the cut of a tirpan polearm across his shield. He thrust his sword inside the reach of
the staff, into the chest of his attacker.

  The metal rings of this Turk’s hauberk were designed to stop a slash or thrust from the strongest of swords, but that presupposed they were in good condition. Rusted from exposure to the rain, damaged from past combat or just poorly made, there would be more than one that failed their wearer when called upon that night.

  This time, the riveted mail checked the blade, bowing it and saving the Turk beneath from serious harm.

  Grant snarled and made to thrust again but instead danced back. The sipahi swung his tirpan, missed and slipped in the bowman’s blood.

  Quick as a viper, Grant buried his swordpoint full into the Anatolian’s face. It penetrated just above the warrior’s impressive moustache and kept on going deep into the skull.

  Grant felt the hot, wet rush of his victim’s blood as he pulled himself clear and turned to the next opponent, his sword clotted with the congealing humours of the last.

  The Antaolians fought like devils, but they were cavalry; their stock-in-trade was the bow not the polearm, their battleground was the open field not a tight-packed melee. Close-quarters combat against heavy armour was hell for them, and the stockade wall soon grew cluttered with corpses.

  Bodies were underfoot everywhere, the dying mixed with the dead, friend tangled up with foe.

  Grant took in little of the wider battle. He lived in the six-inch space before his eyes and slaughtered anything that came into view.

  Turks could now cross the fosse unmolested and pick their targets from below as the defenders struggled to clear the parapet of invaders.

  The palisade wall was aflame, blazing with hundreds of enemy fire-arrows. They fizzed through the sky like insects, biting unprotected bodies where they could, and made little distinction between friend and foe.

  One arrow shaft ripped out the throat of a Turk just as he came at Grant. One moment he had been thrusting a tirpan blade forward, the next he sank to his knees, blood spewing from between his teeth.

 

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