It would have been a kindness to have finished him off, but mercy by now was nothing more than a vague memory, so Grant simply left him to bleed out and stepped towards the next threat.
The number of defenders atop the rampart was thinning, while the press of conical helms seemed to grow. He was rarely only fighting one man at a time now.
Two more lances snapped as their heads were driven against the tight leather and oak of Grant’s shield.
In their rush, the Turks crashed forward into him, pushing him back. Grant’s feet churned for purchase on the gore-besmirched parapet, but the momentum and collective weight of the two sipahi sent all three of them sprawling onto the ground in a tangled pile.
It was a cardinal sin for a man in plate to lose his footing. You were never more vulnerable. He knew he had seconds before someone would throw their weight upon him, pinning him in place, and then the visor would be opened and a knife driven through the eyeballs. Grant had killed enough knights in his day to know the procedure all too well.
He kicked one sipahi away and scrambled to climb astride the other man first. Then, gripping both gauntlets about the aventail-covered throat, he dropped his weight through his shoulders and crushed the Turk’s windpipe.
He felt a pain in his flank as the other man drove the broken lance into his side, screaming for his god like a banshee.
The stab was aimed at the join of two plates. The needle point penetrated but could not break the riveted mail undershirt beneath. Only the tip slipped through the hole of the ring to leave a shallow puncture wound.
The lance was snared by it, the sipahi lost precious moments shaking it free and by then Grant was on him.
His sword was gone but his shield remained strapped across his arm. He used both hands to smash the rim into the the Turk’s head with such force that it knocked the sipahi out cold.
Grant picked up his sword and with two hands drove it downward into the mouth and out the back of his unconscious foe’s throat.
For a moment he was alone, caught in the eye of the battlefield storm while the fighting whirled around him like a tempest.
The noise was deafening: a cacophony of clashing steel, prayers and curses, the cheers of small victories and screams of final defeats.
There were lower sounds mixed in with the voices: axe-heads meeting flesh, polearms pounding against armour, lances shivering themselves to splinters, and above it all, the unceasing, otherworldly, piercing wail of the enemy horns.
The smell was there too – an awful mixture of sweat, cordite and the vile, sickly stench of exposed human offal. His throat had no time to gag.
His veins pumped acid, his chest heaved like foundry bellows. He had never felt so weary, and yet the will to live, the fierce urgency of each moment had his whole being sharpened to a point, to the single purpose of survival. He needed to kill, for Anna. Every Turk dead was one less to threaten her.
In the pre-dawn darkness, the compound glowed with the flickering light cast by flares and the smouldering arrows that pincushioned the ground.
He looked around and saw his next target, but just as he was striding across the wall-walk towards him, the stockade wall exploded to his right in a spray of earth, wooden planks and human limbs. A cannon strike had found a weak point, blowing open a breach.
Through it the sipahi came pouring, six abreast.
From the rampart, Grant watched the wave of missiourka helmets crash into the first Genoese men-at-arms, who tried desperately to form a line and contain the incursion.
He saw Giustiniani, in the forerank, stumble onto one knee under the blow of a Turk balta.
The momentum of the Anatolians looked as if it would carry them right over the bodies of the Genoese wall, and if it did, the protostrator would be crushed, stabbed or suffocated in his armour.
A surge of feeling came upon Grant from deep within – a mix of anger and energy, an almost euphoric sensation flooding loose about his veins.
With a wild shout, he launched himself from the rubble pile, down onto the press of men. He crashed into the man standing over Giustiniani, lopping the Turk’s arm off at the elbow.
The upper arm and shoulder continued to claw forward, the stump now spraying bright blood, the man so lost in the battle rage that his body was slow in registering the fatal wound.
The nearest Turks reeled back in shock, and the Genoese close by were able to force their line forward, making their weight and momentum count.
They rolled right over the top of Giustiniani and Grant until the pair were clear to the rear of the line and could stand, both somewhat surprised to be alive.
Checked on the left, the bulging mass of men was spreading on the right side of the breach like a malignant wart.
The feet of the men-at-arms slithered on the bloody cobbles as both sides pressed against one another, shield on shield, blades stabbing, hooking and slashing at whatever they could reach. A spume of spitted curses hung over the scrum like the spray off a cataract.
The breach was choked with the seriously wounded and dying. One man, helmet torn away, lay face down with a triangular flap hanging from his skull. Another sat emitting short, high-pitched screams with a look of fascination at the vibrant guts slithering between his cupped hands. The Bocchiardi brothers were in the thick of it, laying about with mad alacrity.
Inch by inch, the barrier of steel was forcing the sipahi back towards the gap. Grant picked up a lance from beside its dead owner and joined the press. He drove the lance over the shoulder of the rank in front, bellowing out all his life’s grievances.
Again and again he rammed the lance home, into faces and shoulders and throats. Around him, the air was thick with bolts and screams. It was nearly impossible to tell friend from foe – every man had become nothing more than a wailing force of blood and iron.
Little by little, the defenders hacked the incursion to pieces. The yard became empty of Turks, save for fixed-grin bodies strewn about it. Broken, the sipahi fled back across the fosse, and the Chora bells rang out in celebration.
XXXIII.
There was no way to sleep when any moment the street might fill with howling packs of invading Turks. There was no way to find rest with a mind full of terrors and a heart breaking and re-breaking at the thought of John dead and the misery to come. Anna did not even feel the wounds on her back, she was numb to all outward sensation.
She haunted the halls of the Rose Palace like a ghostly apparition, lost in her thoughts and fears and despair. She was aware, after a time, of Zenobia sitting in the nook of a window seat. The handmaiden’s face wore the same blank stare.
They sat together in silence, for how long it was impossible to say. They heard the distant crump of cannon fire as the first assault began and waited, hardly breathing, for the sound of bells.
The ringing alone of the Chora’s carillon would mean the attack was beaten off, the clamour of many bell towers would be the signal that the defences had broken, and the city was lost.
No bell had yet tolled when Theodosia appeared from her chapel. After days of near constant vigil, Anna had almost forgotten her mother was even in the house.
‘Good, you are awake,’ Theodosia said when she saw them both.
‘Of course I’m awake!’ Anna felt like screaming. ‘Only the dead could sleep now!’ Instead, she bit her tongue and wrung her hands.
‘We’ve a busy day ahead and much to prepare,’ said Theodosia. ‘There are baskets set out in the triclinium. Come, help me carry them to the church.’
‘Now?’ said Anna in disbelief. ‘Have you lost all sense? Everything, everything hangs by a thread!’
Her mother looked at Anna as if she were a simpleton. ‘It is the twenty-ninth. The feast of St Theodosia. My saint’s day. In a few hours the emperor shall hear the terce kontakion read at the Hagia Theodosia, and before then we must prepare it.’
‘In a few hours the emperor shall be dead,’ said Anna. ‘If he is not already.’
‘Have
faith,’ said her mother, ‘have faith. Come, Zenobia.’
It was clear Theodosia was deaf to all argument. Not wanting to be left alone in the house, Anna reluctantly put on a cloak and took up one of the heavy baskets of rose garlands. Then she dutifully trailed her elders to church one more time.
The small, solid bastion of ochre bricks and low scallop domes lay a mile closer to the wall, at the foot of Petrion’s hill, overlooking the shores of the Horn. Her older, married sisters, Theodora and Maria, were stood waiting for them outside, anxiety for the fate of their own husbands carved deep into their faces.
As together they crossed the little apron of cobbles outside its doors, the moon’s reflection quavered in the surface of the waters beyond. Anna could see the pinpricks of brands where the Turks were busying themselves on the far shoreline. A pontoon reached out towards the seawall near the Kynegos Gate, and several Turk galleys were gliding along, parallel to the city, raking the walls with gunfire, but it was so distant and unreal that to Anna it seemed closer to a water firework pageant than a serious threat.
Theodosia pressed a rose garland into her hands. ‘Stop gawping and make yourself useful,’ she told her troublesome daughter. ‘The doorway shall grow so pretty with all these petals arranged about it.’
It was difficult to thread flowers while the hand trembled and the ear stretched its attention to the distance. The sound of the fight at the wall echoed as a dim, constant hum.
Every now and then the sky to the west would shimmer from the flash of a cannon fusillade, and, once, she thought she saw the clouds threaded briefly with orange and guessed the men at the stockade were using Greek fire to burn the heathen from the wall.
Then, just as she thought the night’s darkness had begun to wane, the sound of Chora’s bell came drifting across the hills. It was the second time she had heard it.
‘They have beaten off another attack,’ Anna said to Zenobia. ‘Is that victory, do you think? How much more can the sultan have left to throw at them?’
The answer came a few minutes later. The whole sky seemed to shake with the sound of gunfire.
After months of training, her ear could discern a cannon clap from smaller shot. That noise had not been the solo voice of a cannon, but a choir of a thousand arquebusiers, loosing in chorus together.
At last her mother seemed to register the danger. ‘Sweet Theotokos, what was that?’ said Theodosia, briefly pausing from her flower arrangement.
‘Janissaries,’ said Anna. ‘The last trumpet.’
All the while they had been dressing the doorway, a trickle of women had come to the church to pray or give help in its festive preparation. The sound of the third assault brought a sudden rush of bodies into the church; people were taking their place in whichever sanctuary or bolthole they judged best.
Anna saw others heading towards the nearby dry garden, where several half-forgotten portals gave passage into an abandoned underground cistern.
The sky had started to brighten, and the sound from the walls seemed to increase in unison with the light. Anna dropped a rose and could not contain her trembling enough to pick it back up.
Watching her, Zenobia said suddenly, ‘The myrrh! I’m so foolish, I have left it behind. Despoina, would you be kind enough to fetch it?’
She placed a hand each side of Anna’s quivering palms and leaned her head close to her mistress’s ear. ‘Go!’ she whispered. ‘Make for Hagia Sophia. It may be even the Turks are shamed into mercy at the sight of it. It will surely prove a better shelter than this holy rose garden.’
Anna’s eyes widened in shock. Zenobia, her rock, her steadfast voice of confidence, was trying to say goodbye.
‘Go!’ Zenobia whispered again. ‘There cannot be much time left.’
‘Come with me,’ said Anna.
Zenobia’s smile squeezed the moisture from the corners of her eyes. ‘I’ve watched over you near twenty years, girl. I know better than anyone you’ll come through this somehow. Your mother... your mother needs watching now. Goodbye, my sweet child.’
She clung a moment to her old nurse, then staggered away east, down the seawall road that would take her to Hagia Sophia.
Ahead, the fine line of dawn rent open the horizon’s black garment, but it seemed to her to be the all-consuming light of oblivion that approached. Behind, distantly, there came the ringing sound of a multitude of bells.
XXXIV.
When the Anatolians broke, the exhausted defenders could not even summon a cheer. More than a few, like Grant, remembered the sultan still had another card to play – his best troops. His janissary.
Grant moved to the rear of the smouldering compound to throw a ladle of water down his burning throat.
His sword hand ached, his whole body ached and not without reason. The once-polished metal of his armour was dimpled and scratched from bascinet peak to sabaton. The leap from the rampart had cracked the hinge of his visor, forcing him to tear it completely away. He looked a lot better than he felt.
The few yards’ walk back from the stockade wall was over a carpet of bleeding, broken flesh. Drunk with fatigue, he had only a vague impression of the horrors that surrounded him; backs and bellies pointing skyward, bristling with the fletched spines of bodkins; rivulets of blood draining down a cannonball’s gouge in the dirt like an abattoir gutter; an archipelago of corrupt human fragments where another stone shot had found its mark.
Men worked to clear the rampart of bodies and keep a clear fighting platform. Turk corpses were tossed over the battlement, Christian ones were treated with only a little more care.
Others moving rearward from the breach punched their lances downward into any foe they found still drawing even the meagrest breath, propelling themselves across the grisly floor as the ferrymen poled their skiffs across the Horn.
A bell tolled back in the city. It was the call to orthros; they had been fighting unceasingly for almost five hours.
He found Fieschi close to the wall where the Anatolians had broken in. All four of his limbs lay misshapen and crooked, smashed by the blows from a ram’s-head mace.
The corpse that had wielded it still clutched the weapon, sprawled in the mud beside the Genoese veteran, the broken shaft of Fieschi’s lance jutting from the dead Turk’s breast.
It had been a blade, not a mace, that finished off Fieschi. The cut had severed right through the brand mark on his forehead. His eyes had rolled up in that direction at the last, and the rictus on his face looked almost ironic.
Grant bent down and gently closed the lids. ‘Go easy,’ he whispered. ‘Drink well.’
The janissaries had already begun to mass on the plain beyond the fosse. Inspected from the saddle by the sultan himself, there would be no need for chavushes and whips – they were eager to perform. He was sending all four thousand, every man he had. If they failed, so did he.
Grant gulped a last refreshing ladle of water and moved once more towards the rampart. Looking around, it was hard to judge how many of the stockade’s defenders remained standing, but it could not have been much above three hundred.
He picked up a two-handed war axe from the arsenal and had a sudden, vivid memory of Anna calling him the last varangian. ‘Still no ruby,’ he said, touching his ear with a smile.
There were no shouts when the janissaries approached. There was no rush or charge. The sipahi had come at the defenders with steel, the janissaries brought fire.
With the uniform discipline of automatons, the formation marched to the lip of the fosse and presented three ranks of primed hand cannons. There was barely time to register and take cover before the air sang with the hornet-stings of small shot peppering the rampart.
Before the defenders could retake their positions, the first rank of janissaries was already flying across the fosse and clambering up the pile of corpses to meet them.
The rampart, slick with blood and urine, became dotted once more with rag piles of steel and cloth that had once been warriors.
Death had already plunged a busy hand into their midst, and Grant could feel its bony fingers scrambling towards him. His head rang with the clatter of weapons, the crackle of handguns, the shouts and grunts of the struggle around him. When dawn came it seemed nothing more than another bloody smear.
A type of courage had overtaken him that was not courage at all but despair. He had moved beyond hope, beyond fear, beyond pain into an almost euphoric state.
His armour was starting to fail him. As well as the discarded visor, one of the lames in his spaulder was so badly warped that its edge cut into his left shoulder with every movement. Two ribs felt cracked where a polearm had clapped him, and his right foot’s sabaton was loose from a broken strap.
When the first green banner appeared atop the rampart, Grant forced his way along the parapet to try and drive it back over. He could see the enormous seven-foot brute who waved it; he might have climbed straight down from a beanstalk.
Other defenders were hastening to repel the standard. One man-at-arms flung his lance from just a few paces away, skewering the huge janissary in the jaw. It barely slowed the Turk down. Plucking the weapon from where it had gashed open his cheek, the ogre hacked his kilij sabre into the defender’s neck. The steel split as if it were tin.
Two other janissaries were bashed aside by Grant’s battleaxe, and then he was face to sundered face with the giant standard bearer.
The janissary wasted no time and with a marrow-chilling shout, carved the sabre down at Grant, who caught it on the haft of his axe using the guard of the window.
The giant tried to force the guard down, pushing with such force that Grant’s shoulders burned with the effort of keeping the axe shaft in place.
The monster howled, belching a cloud of stale, bloody breath in Grant’s face. The Turk was fresher and starting to get the upper hand when a polearm’s spike drove past, onto the thigh of the janissary.
The armour turned the blow aside, but it was enough to cause him to stagger. Lizard-quick, Grant seized his chance.
Porphyry and Ash Page 32
