Through the trees, they could hear whooping cries and a stifled scream from down towards the Gate of Eugenios. Eager to join in the looting, some of the Turkish boat crews had deserted the water and forced their way through the abandoned seawall.
From a thicket at the base of the slope, Anna and Grant watched a pack of men, mad eyed with greed and excitement, hare off up the path towards the city.
Once they were out of sight, it was easy enough to emerge from the foliage, try not to look too closely at the body in the archway, and pass through the sundered iron postern and out onto the shingle shore at the water’s edge.
Pera lay across the narrow straight of water, the Promised Land, and stretching towards it, low over the waves, hung the enormous iron links of the chain.
The Turk sailors had come ashore in a small rowing launch. Anna found it pulled up in the reeds. Together they hauled it to the water and gingerly pushed it back into the brimming Horn.
With all he had left he marshalled himself into the small boat’s Rhodian colossus, hands taking hold of the chain, legs set athwart the line of the keel. He kept his back to the water, the better to look at Anna sat on the rear crossbench and hide from his sight the distance he must somehow drag them across.
A red liquid serpent had not stopped slithering down his arm from the reopened shoulder wound, but the pain from that cut was bearable and far less concerning than the other side, where he had started to lose feeling altogether.
He looked at the gently rocking face in the stern, at the dark eyes that seemed to hold the colour-shifting brume of the macrocosm about their black center and felt surer in his belief than ever in his life before.
The timeless countenance of necessity had spun its wheel, the immortal hand had reached out; he had always been set on the pre-destined path to this moment, this golden watery channel, this chance to pluck a single mortal vessel from the cataclysmic fire. For encapsulated within her was the knowledge, the grace, the heritage, the grandeur and pride, the steel and fortitude, the glory of Byzantium; in her was the spark and the soul of a human flame that had kindled around this inlet centuries before and was, this day, dampening down into ash. She was a perfect cinder that might leap across the void of destruction and nestle into the dry kindling of reborn civilisation. Troy to Rome to Byzantium and on, the spindle came around again.
Driven by this conviction, he reached out and began hauling the boat into the choppy, white-capped waters, one painful, muscle-bursting, wound-tearing pull after another.
It was hard enough work just to keep the boat under him, as the wind and water contrived to tug the craft away and set him dangling from the chain like a body from a gibbet.
The seven hundred pace distance seemed like seven hundred miles, and each pull felt as if it would pop his arm from its socket. He lifted his gaze away to the distance, where amid the whorl and hoop of rising smoke columns, the domes and towers of the great city remained.
Every bell had been stilled. The only noise now was the beating of the wind at his ears, and after a time even that fell away to an unnatural silence. He noticed it and the swimming of the distant skyline, just as his hands came away from the chain and his buckling legs dropped him into the bilge.
A scream of horror split the silence. The reeling blur of blue slowed its whirl and coalesced into sky, cloven in two by the black line of the chain, which, somehow, still hovered over the boat.
He craned his neck and saw Anna had grabbed the iron link as it drifted away and was wrestling, arms about the boom, feet wedged beneath the thwart, to hold on against the pull of the water.
He hauled himself upright and grasped the chain once more, but he could not summon the effort to pull the boat to the next link. Half-dead, he hung like a soused scarecrow, the boat bobbing and turning under his feet.
Seeing his exhaustion, Anna carefully moved to form a starboard reflection of him across the mirror of the chain; palm to palm, face to face, her hot breath sweeping, soft as duck down, across his cheek. Blue eyes fixed to hazel and drew strength from the stubborn resolve they found lying within that regard.
‘Come on, you can make it,’ she cooed, but there was nothing left in him. ‘Come on!’ she said, her voice growing sterner. ‘Are you not my varangian? My angel? My love? Prove it! Just over there lies our future together. Take us there! Come on! Make it!’
He dug into himself one last time. With the sweet smell of her, blown by the breeze across his face, he could almost forget the pains of his body, forget the horrors of the previous hours, previous weeks, previous years. He reached out his arm to the next chain and pulled.
Lightning shot through his shoulder, he felt something inside tear, but he bit through the pain, shut it out and crossed his other arm over to the next.
Hand over hand, link by link, inch by inch they crawled towards the far shore. All he could see was the faintly freckled features of Anna’s face pressed close to his own, urging him on. His vision, his whole consciousness, seemed to grow dark at the edges and contract until she was all that remained.
She promised the world if he could get them across. She told him of the house they would have in Venice and all the wicked things she would do with him in its soft, snow-white, feather bed. She threatened to throw herself out of the boat, give herself up to the tide if he could not take the next iron ring with his numbing arm. She lied about Turk galleys gliding across to enslave them, or Genoese coming to their rescue, anything to keep him dragging on that chain, shortening the distance to salvation link by link.
And then she did not have to lie. She could promise him that the ship was real, that he was not imagining the dark hull of the carrack kedging from Pera’s harbour up to the chain.
But her voice was so distant now, growing smaller all the time, and the darkness that had begun to bloom at the corners of his vision burgeoned with every laboured breath.
He saw her reach up, saw the rope ladder dangling from the rail of the ship and the hands that helped her up towards its deck.
She was safe now. He knew that much as he let go of the chain and fell back into the gently rocking boat.
She was safe.
Above, a red cross of Genoa billowed across the white sail. A woman’s face looked down. The lips, moving, seemed to whisper, ‘Ananke,’ but there was not enough breath to form a sound.
Author’s note
“Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.”
Dorothy Dunnett
That quote from the queen of historical fiction has been a mantra I have tried to maintain in this and subsequent books in the Porphyry series. Almost every name you come across was a real person with a partially documented life waiting to be fleshed out.
In the case of the siege of 1453 there was a veritable landslide of factual soil to work with, and often it was a case of sifting and choosing what to omit to avoid the complete burial of the plot.
To that end I have occasionally contracted time for dramatic effect – such as in the case of the conflict below ground: in reality John Grant and his comrades had to deal with at least six enemy mines in the space of nine days.
Similarly, several events I depict as happening on the final day of the siege – the procession of the Hogetaria, the thick fog and St Elmo’s fire burning atop the dome of Hagia Sophia – really took place over the prior four days. In that regard I have a poetic licence and I’m not afraid to use it.
Of all the real people whose lives I researched, I found Anna Notaras to be the most fascinating. The fall of her city and civilisation was just the start of a long life’s tale. She witnessed an age of incredible global change, from a childhood among Roman Emperors to the discovery of a new world’s shores across the Atlantic and a cataclysmic war across the Levant in between.
She was doubly lucky in 1453. Firstly, in avoiding the fate that befell most of her fellow Constantinopolitans (she never wrote down the exact details of when and how she escaped the city, but the ge
neral assumption by some historians that she had moved years before to Italy are provably false).
Secondly, when she eventually resurfaced in Italy there was a family fortune waiting to be claimed. Her grandfather, Nicholas Notaras, had been a very successful merchant and salted away an enormous sum of money in the Bank of St George in Genoa (the equivalent to many millions of dollars today). When the city fell, the question of to whom this money belonged became a matter of international diplomatic concern. It is from this correspondence and the years of legal ranglings that some of the Notaras family history has come down to us. I don’t wish to give away too much that will appear in subsequent stories of this series, but how Anna got her money and what she did with it marks her out as a significant figure of this era, and it is all the more striking that she accomplished this at a time when the odds were so heavily stacked against her both as a woman and as a refugee.
It was the discovery that a single, mysterious Scotsman, John Grant, had played a role in the siege that sparked my initial interest in the subject. I wanted to know what he was doing there and what became of him. In the end he proved to be just a writer’s rabbit hole to tumble down. Grant is mentioned in several primary sources, mostly praising his involvement in the countermining effort, but details of his life prior to the siege and his fate in the final assault are unrecorded. Those gaps just begged for the last resort of imagination to fill them in.
Although the monk Gennadios was certainly the most outspoken critic of the emperor’s unionism and did incite rioters into the burning of the Venetian quarter during the weeks leading up to the siege, the quasi-ritual deaths in this story are entirely fictitious.
However, there is a little factual soil binding that plot strand together. The prophecy of Archangel Michael’s intervention should the walls be breached was a popular legend of the time and more than a few Constantinopolitans must have been horribly disappointed at his no-show. Among the diaries of the siege, more than one speaks of an atmosphere of doom and desperation among the citizens and strange religious practices (granted much of that can be dismissed as Latin prejudice).
The fall of Constantinople was the tragic end of the Roman Empire, but it marks the start of many other things (some fortunate, others even more tragic). The ramifications heavily impacted trade, technology, military strategy, royal marriage, maritime exploration, population migration, European religious and philosophical consciousness and cultural identity for at least the subsequent fifty years (and indirectly one might argue are still having an impact to this day). Of course, the most immediate ramification was the turbo-boost given to the nascent Ottoman empire and its young bellicose sultan.
It is these ramifications that underpin the rest of the Porphyry series, and they will take us on a thirty-year journey right across the Levantine map: from the Crimean steppe to the lagoon of Venice, from the mountains of Transylvania to the harem of Topkapi by way of Anatolian plains and Aegean islands. I hope you will join me for it and thank you for taking the time to read Porphyry and Ash.
If you would like to learn more about this or the history behind the stories, I try to share footnotes on my blog : porphyryand.blogspot.com and my twitter feed: @HKSandham.
Peter Sandham, 2019
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