The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “Bingo.” The crew chief grinned at Jack. “You were right again.”

  “Couldn’t have happened without your hard work.”

  It was a great gun, a gleaming bronze cannon at least two metres long, its upper surface washed clean of the accumulated grime of centuries and shining like gold. Jack could immediately see it was an early type, its ornate cylindrical breech tapering to an octagonal fore end. He had seen similar guns, dating from the sixteenth century, from King Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose in Portsmouth and from shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada. But this one looked older, much older. After the crane had slowly swung its load over the railing and deposited it on the foredeck, Jack strode over for a closer look, the crew crowding eagerly behind. He ignored the spatter of mud from the cleaning hose as he crouched down and stretched his hand reverently towards the gun.

  “The Lion of St. Mark’s,” he said. “It’s Venetian all right.”

  He pointed to a raised casting near the breech end of the gun. The image was unmistakable, a winged, forward-facing lion wreathed in a leafy garland, one of the most potent symbols of medieval Europe. He traced his fingers over the emblem and trailed them towards the rear of the breech. Suddenly he raised his other hand to order the crewman holding the hose to avert the flow.

  “There’s a foundry mark,” he said excitedly. “In front of the touch hole.”

  “It’s a date.” The crew chief leaned over Jack, shielding his eyes from the glare. “Anno domini. Then Roman numerals. I can barely make it out. M, C, D…”

  “Fourteen fifty-three,” one of the others exclaimed.

  “My God,” Jack said quietly. “The Great Siege.” He had no need to explain that date; its significance had been drummed into the crew during his many briefing lectures. 1453. The year of the greatest-ever showdown between East and West, a clash of titans at this crossroads between Europe and Asia. The year of the last dying gasp of the Roman Empire, its domain shrunk to this one defiant promontory from its heyday fifteen hundred years before, when Rome had ruled the greater part of the known world. For a moment Jack felt a frisson of energy as he pressed his hand against the cold metal of the gun. He glanced along the line of the barrel towards the city of Istanbul, its minarets and domes rising like a studded jewel from a mirage. He was touching history itself, drawn into the past with an immediacy no textbook could ever convey.

  After a moment he stood and arched his back, his tall, lean frame towering over most of the crew. “It’s a field piece, a siege gun, much bigger than the antipersonnel breech-loaders carried on ships of this period. My guess is we’re looking at one of the guns used by Sultan Mehmet II and the Ottoman Turks to pound the city defences.” He gestured towards the shoreline where the fractured remains of the Byzantine sea walls were just visible, their impressive stature further reduced by earthquake and modern development. “The Ottomans would have used any gun they could lay their hands on. This one was cast in Venice earlier that year, then maybe captured in battle or by pirates, then used against the massed forces of Byzantium behind those walls, including the Venetians themselves. The Turkish media are going to love this.”

  As the crew dispersed back to their jobs, Jack looked again at that emblem on the gun. Like his own forebears in England, sea captains and explorers who had touched the farthest reaches of the globe, the Venetians were maritime adventurers who had spread their tentacles across the Mediterranean world, even installing a colony of merchants here in Constantinople. Theirs was a world of trade and profiteering, not imperialism and conquest. Yet they had been responsible for one of the greatest crimes in the history of civilisation, a crime which had drawn Jack to this spot and which he was determined to fathom before the expedition was out.

  Back on the bridge, Jack resumed his seat behind the chart table and rolled up his sleeves. It had been a cool early summer morning but the sun was beginning to bear down as the sea mist burnt off. He looked over at Tom York, IMU’s senior captain, a neatly attired, white-haired man who was conferring over the main radar screen with the ship’s second officer, a newly appointed Estonian who had come with impeccable credentials from the Russian merchant marine academy. York glanced keenly at Jack and inclined his head towards the window from which he had been watching the scene on the foredeck below.

  “I’d say mid-fifteenth century, from a distance.” York had begun a distinguished career in the Royal Navy as a gunnery officer and since then had developed an expertise in early naval ordnance which had proved indispensable on IMU projects. “I can’t wait to take a closer look. Right at the dawn of naval gunnery. But too late for us.”

  Jack nodded. “Fourteen fifty-three, to be precise. Almost two hundred and fifty years too late. We’re looking for something way before guns were used at sea. It’s a terrific find and I didn’t want to deflate the crew, but we’ve got a long way to go before we reach the Crusades.”

  Jack gazed pensively towards the shore, his view momentarily obscured by an overcrowded ferry that passed perilously close to the excavation. In the shimmer of phosphoresence left in the boat’s wake the city seemed to be floating on a cloud, like a heavenly apparition. It was one of the supreme images of history, a palimpsest of the greatest civilisations the world had ever known. To Jack’s eye it was like a cross-section through an archaeological site, only instead of layer built upon layer, here everything was jumbled, the threads of history all interwoven and nothing clear-cut. At the lowest level were the cracked and fissured remnants of the walls of Constantinople, first planned by the emperor Constantine the Great when he moved his capital here in the fourth century AD and abandoned Rome to decline and ruin. Above the walls rose the slopes of the much older Greek acropolis of Byzantium, a name which survived as the term for the Christian empire of the Middle Ages which was based in Constantinople and traced its roots back to Rome. Above that rose the sprawling splendour of the Topkapi Palace, hub of the city the Ottoman Turks renamed Istanbul after they defeated the Byzantines in 1453 and shining heart of the most powerful state in the medieval world. Higher still, above the few remaining wooden houses of old Istanbul, rose the minarets and cascading domes of Hagia Sofia, once the greatest of all Christian cathedrals in the East but after 1453 a holy site of Islam. And somewhere, Jack knew, it was possible, just possible, that the sprawling mass of the city concealed evidence of a migration at the very dawn of history, of settlers from a precocious civilisation who had fled their citadel of Atlantis as it was inundated by floodwaters far to the east in the Black Sea.

  He could hardly believe it was six months since he and Katya had lost themselves in the labyrinthine back ways of the city. It had been a time of supreme exhilaration, basking in the discovery of a lifetime, but a time also of emptiness and loss. For Katya it had been the devastating truth about her father’s evil empire, a revelation which weighed heavily on her despite all Jack’s efforts and led her to return to Russia to spearhead a renewed effort against the illegal antiquities trade. For Jack the sense of personal loss had been more acute, and he still felt it now. He had been with Katya when the search for Peter Howe had finally been called off. Howe had been a friend since boyhood and Jack was reminded of him every time he saw Tom York, his limp a legacy of the same gun battle. Jack had insisted on staying with Sea Venture over Atlantis until the search had finally been called off. For many days afterwards he felt that his ambitions had become entombed in the Black Sea with the wreck of Seaquest, that he had no right to risk the lives of others in his search for adventure. It was Katya who had nursed back his confidence as they became absorbed in the history of Byzantium during their long days together exploring Istanbul. She had persuaded him to reawaken a schoolboy dream he had cherished with Peter Howe, a dream of a fabulous lost treasure which had become all-consuming after Jack and Katya had parted ways at the airport, a dream which had led Jack back to where he was now.

  “I’ve done it!”

  Jack snapped out of his trance and hurried over to the source of the noise
in the navigation room behind the bridge. In the darkened interior he could see where the radar and position-fixing consoles had been stacked on either side to make way for a complex array of electronic gadgetry surrounding an outsize computer screen. In the midst of it all, oblivious to his presence, sat a swarthy, dark-haired man with a rugby player’s physique, his eyes glued to the screen and his head clamped in earphones festooned with antennae.

  “Good thing you finally lost some weight,” Jack said. “Otherwise we’d be excavating you out of this.”

  “What?” Costas Kazantzakis shot him an impatient glance and reverted to the screen. Jack shouted the words at him again.

  “Okay, okay.” Costas lifted off the headset and leaned back in what little space he had. “Yeah, well, it was scraping my way through that underwater tunnel that did it. I’ve still got the scars. If anything good came out of that project it was the gods of Atlantis warning me to pull back on the calories.”

  Costas craned his neck around and took in Jack’s mud-spattered sweater. “Been playing again?”

  “Siege gun. Venetian. Fourteen fifty-three.”

  Costas grunted then suddenly snapped the headset back on as the screen erupted in a kaleidoscope of colours. Jack looked on fondly as his friend became absorbed again in his task. Costas was a brilliantly inventive engineer, with a PhD in submersibles technology from MIT, and had accompanied Jack on many of his adventures since the foundation of IMU over a decade ago. His hard science was a perfect foil to Jack’s archaeology. Not for Costas the complex interwoven threads of history and the uncertainties of interpretation. For him the only significant problems were those that could be solved by science, and the only complexity was when things failed to work.

  “What’s going on?”

  Maurice Hiebermeyer squeezed through the doorway beside Jack. His frame was definitely on the bulky side; Hiebermeyer seemed to be in a permanent sheen of sweat, despite his baggy shorts and open shirt.

  Jack nodded in greeting. “I think Costas has finally got this thing to work.”

  Jack knew what was coming next. Hiebermeyer had flown in by helicopter the night before from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria, like a bird of prey pouncing on its target, hoping that Jack would be looking ahead to the next project, having found the problems of excavating in Istanbul’s harbour insurmountable. They had last spoken on the deck of Sea Venture six months ago when Hiebermeyer had mentioned another extraordinary find of ancient writing from the necropolis of mummies that had produced the Atlantis papyrus, and since then he had been bombarding IMU with phone messages and emails.

  He fumbled with a folder he was carrying. “Jack, we need to…”

  “It will have to wait.” Jack flashed a good-natured smile at the portly Egyptologist. “We’re on a knife-edge here and I have to concentrate. Sorry, Maurice. Just hang on till this is over.” He turned back to the screen and Hiebermeyer went silent.

  “Yes!”

  The screen rippled with colour, and the two men moved up behind Costas for a better view. They were looking at a video image, a floodlit grey mass with a mechanical pincer arm extending into the middle.

  “We’re now almost fifty feet below the sea floor, one hundred and sixty-eight feet absolute depth from our present position.” Costas removed the headset and leaned back as he spoke. “In a few seconds the imaging will automatically revert to sonar and the ferret should be back on line.”

  “Ferret?”

  Costas glanced apologetically at Hiebermeyer and handed over a plastic model he had been holding like a talisman, an odd cylindrical shape that bore a passing resemblance to the remote-operated vehicle they had used to explore the Neolithic village in the Black Sea. “A combination remote-operated vehicle, underwater vacuum cleaner and sub-bottom sonar,” he enthused. “It’s controlled from here via an umbilical and can burrow through sediment with pinpoint precision, sending back images as crisp as an MRI scan. At the moment it’s digging through terragenous sediment, land runoff, tons of it. We’re at the edge of the channel swept by the Bosporus, but even so there’s vast quantities of sediment, several metres per century. We need to go deep if we’re to stand any chance of finding what we want. The weight of that chain is going to bury it further still.”

  “Ah, the chain,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “Remind me.”

  Jack shifted over to a yellow Admiralty Chart of the Istanbul approaches pinned to the wall beside Costas. Their position was clearly marked at the outer edge of the estuary that cut through the city, its sinuous scimitar shape defining the promontory of Byzantium and forming one of the greatest natural harbours in the world. To the ancient Greeks this was Chrysoceras, the Golden Horn, as if a giant mythical bull had embedded itself in the Bosporus as it strained towards the Black Sea, a significance not lost on the three men with the bull imagery of Atlantis still fresh in their minds.

  Jack picked up a pencil and traced a faint line over the entrance to the estuary. “During the Byzantine period the Golden Horn was closed off in times of emergency by a giant boom almost a kilometre long, huge links of roughly forged iron held up on pylons and barges. It was attached here, on a tower near the extremity of the city walls where the estuary meets the Bosporus, and here, about three hundred metres away from us on the Galata shore. The chain is first recorded in the eighth century AD and had a famous role in the Great Siege of 1453, but we know of only two occasions when it may have been breached. The first was in the eleventh century, when a gang of Viking mercenaries supposedly got their longships over it. The second is more definite, in 1204, when Venetian galleys broke it with a ram. The chain was rebuilt, but a severed section may have been lost on the seabed. If we can find it, then we’ve hit the layer with the loot and we’re in business.”

  “The first link in our story.” Costas’ pun scarcely concealed his anxiety, his fingers quietly drumming the desk and his eyes flitting over the screen. The image had gone dark and the only indication that the ferret was operational was the depth gauge in the corner, cycling with agonising slowness through one-inch increments.

  “So how can you be so certain about the location?” Hiebermeyer had put his own quest on hold and was becoming absorbed in the project.

  “It’s always been contentious, but a fifteenth-century manuscript unearthed in the Topkapi archive last year gives an exact position fix between known monuments on the shoreline.”

  “I don’t like it.” Costas glanced at the wall clock and shifted uneasily in his seat. “If that gun was from 1453, then we’ve got at least five metres of compacted sediment to dig through before we’re anywhere near the target layer. And we’ve only got twenty minutes before Sea Venture has to shift position.”

  Jack pursed his lips in shared concern. This project was like no other they had worked on, a constant game of cat and mouse in one of the most overcrowded waterways on the planet. They had a six-hour window each day authorised by the port authorities, but even so they had to shift repeatedly to let a ferry or cargo vessel past, some with draughts so deep their screws churned up the bottom sediment. Jack had every confidence in Tom York’s ability to troubleshoot the navigation, and Sea Venture’s dynamic positioning system meant that she could reacquire precise co-ordinates with ease. But there was no protection for the excavation on the seabed, nor, more important for Costas, any guarantee that his prize creation would not become enmired forever with all the other detritus of history.

  Hiebermeyer sensed the tension and persisted with Jack. “So what’s this childhood dream of yours?”

  Jack took a deep breath, nodded and beckoned Hiebermeyer over to a computer console on the far side of the room. It was a story he had told a hundred times before, to the crew, to the press, in his repeated attempts to gain backing for the project from the IMU board of directors and the Turkish authorities, but it never failed to send a shiver of excitement up his spine.

  “The Great Siege of 1453 was one of the defining moments in history,” Jack began. “The de
ath knell of the biggest empire the world had ever seen, the event that gave Islam a permanent foothold in Europe. But for the city of Constantinople a far more calamitous event took place two and a half centuries earlier. Desecration and rape on a colossal scale, a horrendous atrocity even by medieval standards. And the perpetrators were not infidels but Christians, Crusaders of the Holy Cross, no less.”

  “The Crusades,” Hiebermeyer said. “Of course.”

  “The time they didn’t quite make it to the Holy Land.”

  “Remember what Professor Dillen drummed into us at Cambridge,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “That the greatest crimes against Christendom have always been caused by Christians themselves.” The two men had been contemporaries as undergraduates, and when Jack had returned to complete his doctorate after a stint in the Royal Navy they had studied early Christian and Jewish history together under their famous mentor.

  “The date was 1204,” Jack continued. “Pope Innocent III had called for a fourth Crusade, yet another doomed expedition to free Jerusalem from the infidel. How the noble knights of the Crusade came to be diverted from their cause to sack the greatest treasure-house of Eastern Christianity is one of the most appalling sagas in history.”

  The small screen in front of them suddenly flashed up an image recognisable the world over, four splendidly wrought horses in gilded copper standing together in front of an ornate architectural backdrop.