A Place Called Armageddon (15 page)

More cries of ‘God is great!’ came then, from more voices. He could feel a shift in the room. Not enough, yet. Soon perhaps. After other persuasions.

He took a breath. ‘Isolated, alone, weakened? Yes. But if we leave Constantinople now – now when we are so strong, when stars and man align – who knows if some other power will not come and make it strong again? Our enemies the Venetians, who held it once. Our enemies the Hungarians, always seeking to hurt us. As long as its gates are closed to us, they could be opened to an enemy who could do what these Greeks can no longer do – use the best-placed harbour in the world, the city that cuts our lands of Anatolia and Rumelia in half, to stab us in the back.’

Another murmur came, more uncertainty in it. Mehmet pressed on. ‘Now, as never before, we have a chance to end that threat for ever.’

He could feel the change under the canvas. Men beginning to make up their minds. Yet he sensed that too many still balanced on the dagger’s edge.

It was his time. The moment he and Hamza had discussed. The moment of hazard. He turned to the one man who could yet tip it either way. ‘What do
you
say, my grand vizier, most esteemed of all my father’s and my advisers? Doubt still rests upon that venerable brow. Speak it. We would be honoured to hear your wisdom.’

Candarli Halil Pasha blinked. All knew that the young sultan could move no enterprise without his help. So to consult in open council was to invite him to sway the waverers back. It was a challenge, there was danger in it, and he chose his response with care. ‘Asylum of the world, guide of all nations, I hear you. Your words are wise, your preparations clear, your courage and skills undoubted. Yet you have talked already about the great warriors – your own unparalleled grandfather and father were two of them and I stood beside them both – who came to this place and failed.’

He paused, so Mehmet’s words were not exactly an interruption. ‘And why did they fail so, old warrior?’

‘There are men here perhaps more qualified than I to speak of this. But I believe two things have always thwarted the sons of Isaac whatsoever their numbers and faith. Two – water and stone.’ He looked around, licked still gritty lips. ‘The seas that lap the city on two sides and the triple walls that seal off the land.’

Assenting murmurs came. It was the moment Mehmet and Hamza had foreseen; the time for two strokes, swift as sword thrusts. One in words. One in … something else.

‘I thank you, uncle, for your wisdom. They are both questions I have long pondered, as many have pondered before me. Water and stone indeed.’ He looked behind him. Hamza had returned to the tent. He nodded and Mehmet turned back. ‘We are
gazis
and prefer to feel God’s good earth under our hooves than shifting planks beneath our feet, do we not? Yet, as you have stated, a city surrounded by water needs command of that water to be taken. I will take command of it.’

He opened a hand. Hamza placed a roll of parchment in it. Mehmet began to read. ‘Know that in boatyards up and down my empire, men have been hard at work, building, repairing. The day we march on Constantinople is the day our fleet will sail from Gallipoli. A fleet of one hundred and twenty vessels.’ There were gasps at that. ‘There will be twelve –
twelve!
– full war triremes. Eighty
fustae
each armed with cannon. Thirty fighting transport ships. Even if renegades of Venice and Genoa sail against us, how many will they muster? Twelve? Twenty? The seas, Candarli Halil, will be ours.’

The grand vizier was not the only man who looked shocked as Mehmet rolled up the paper and tapped it against his breastplate. ‘Now … what else was it that has always thwarted us, uncle?’

‘The walls,’ the old man stuttered. ‘The walls that … that …’

‘The walls that defeated every army that camped before them, including my father’s? Including Eyoub, the Prophet’s banner-bearer, whose grave I would seek beneath them and raise a temple over it?’ Mehmet nodded. ‘But neither of them had what I have,’ he added.

‘And what is that, lord?’

It was time. ‘Something to take away stone as easily … as easily as I can take away canvas.’

He did not look back. Simply lifted his hand, held it high, let it fall. Hamza, holding the fold of the entrance, looked outside and did the same.

The pavilion was not the largest. Indeed, it had been chosen for the purpose it was put to now. Four big men rushed to the centre to grasp the thick pole there. As soon as they had a firm grip, Hamza beckoned again – and the canvas walls vanished, drawn up fast and away by a system of pulleys, men and horses.

One moment his council had been standing sheltered in a tent. The next they were in the open air, shading their eyes against bright winter sunlight, blinking at what they had not seen before – that the tent they’d entered from the city gate behind them had been set atop a hill; that from its summit, a valley dropped and rose gently to another summit perhaps a mile away. That the distance between the two was lined by thousands upon thousands of soldiers in two huge bodies, a wide avenue between them. Finally that they shared their hilltop with the largest cannon any man there had ever seen.

Cradled by wooden blocks, settled into the ground like a huge black worm, it wasn’t just large. It was monstrous. Five tall men lying toe to fingertip could not have equalled its length. Its vast girth tapered to a narrower end that no man would be able to wrap his arms around.

It was the drawing of Mehmet’s sword that drew their eyes back to him. He had donned his helmet again, and once more his armour shimmered in light. He raised the weapon high into the sunlight, brought it scything down, crying out one word: ‘Now!’ As a man who seemed all soot thrust a glowing taper into the breech, Mehmet sheathed his sword, raised the forefinger on each hand and spoke again. ‘You may wish to do this,’ he called. And he put a finger in each ear.

Some did, most were too stunned, too slow, and so were destined to hear the cannon’s roar for weeks afterwards. To some it was as if hell itself had gaped, exploded forth flames and the screams of all who had ever died. To others, to Jew, Christian or Muslim gathered near, it was as if Armageddon had finally come.

Sound was one thing. Sight another. From monstrous flames a comet shot, trailing fire and smoke, soaring the length of the valley between the massed ranks of men to finally, with a sound more of animal than of man, bury itself in those slopes a mile away.

The cheering from the army went on for a while, funnelled up to them by the valley’s contours.

Mehmet stepped to the edge of the pit. The smoke that filled it slowly cleared, and once more the monster could be seen. Men swarmed around it, using soaked bales of cloth to cool it down. In their midst was the man as black as his creation, though his colour came from gunpowder and not brass. ‘So, Urban Bey?’ Mehmet called to him. ‘Are you happy at your child’s first cough?’

The black-clad man spat before he spoke, in heavily accented Osmanlica. ‘I am, lord,’ replied Urban the Transylvanian. ‘But I would see the afterbirth.’

‘Then let us go and see it.’ Mehmet turned to Hamza, standing a little back from the crowd on the emplacement’s slope. At his master’s nod, he beckoned other waiting men forward.

‘Lords,’ Hamza called. ‘Will you ride?’

There were horses for all, and even the most venerable, like the grand vizier, mounted. If a Turk could still walk, he could still sit on a saddle.

Mehmet led them sweeping down the valley, a bolt of mounted light that passed from him onto the steel ranks that lined his path, and back again. His tens of thousands of soldiers cheered, ululating their loyalty in shrill extended cries.

They galloped the whole way, all freed of the confines of the tent and most from their doubts. Reaching a small cluster of men, Mehmet reined in, dismounted. The mob opened to him, admitting him to what they were grouped around – a rough-edged tunnel, about half as wide as a man is tall, dug straight into the earth. Perhaps straight through to hell itself, for smoke rose in wisps from the jagged entrance.

When the rest of the horsemen had gathered around him, Mehmet signalled to one of the men, prostrate before his sultan. ‘Brother, you look the tallest here. Slide in and tell me how deep it is buried.’

The man bowed, swallowed and then slid feet first into the earth. He disappeared – and then the wiggling tips of fingers were thrust out.

Mehmet could not check the murmuring, did not want to. ‘Content, Urban Bey?’ he said. The begrimed gunner’s black face showed white in his smile. Mehmet turned away from him, back to his council. He looked straight at Candarli Halil Pasha. ‘Your last question, Uncle, was how I would do what my father and grandfather and eight hundred years of the Prophet’s followers have failed to do.’ He pointed into the hole. ‘The stone down there is granite. I will fire stones like it, every day, every hour. Until the walls collapse. And then I will lead the heroes of Anatolia and Rumelia, the Kurds of the mountains, the Arabs of the deserts, the janissaries of my heart …’ he turned and smiled at their commander, ‘over those walls. And I will take my war standard and the Holy Qur’an and pluck out the core of the Red Apple.’

Those who doubted could doubt no more. Those who still opposed could not be seen to be doing so. All the men of the Council could do, from the grand vizier down, was cheer. The cry spread back again into the valley and the soldiers drawn up there, whose ranks melded into a mob that rushed now to the base of the slope, held back by the household guards, triple-ranked. The cry filled the valley, doubling, if possible, when Mehmet leapt onto his horse, drew his father’s sword and once again gave the war cry of the Faithful.

‘
Allahu akbar
!’

From the walls of Edirne, through the slits of her veil, Leilah watched. She knew she could have dressed as a boy and moved closer. Or even donned the apparel of the Bektashi she’d once been, the janissary’s girl, and gone with her hair unbound, braving men’s stares. But that would have required her to pay elsewhere the attention that she only wanted to focus forward. To the man at the valley’s far end, the destiny he was shaping.

His. Hers. God’s.

She did not truly watch with her eyes; though she kept them open, all was a blur at that great distance. Her sight was better close to – and best of all when looking in. There all was clear. Her two men of destiny – one was on that far hill, no doubt raising his father’s sword as he started the shout that thundered down the valley and swept them up in its noise, even the huddle of women, who’d come from the town to watch their men, caught up in it, shouting it.

God
is
great, she thought as she turned away. And though everything was His will, she had helped shape it as only she could. Only Allah could assure victory – but man could be aided by stars and portents. By those gifted like her to read them.

She headed to the house of her father’s sister’s daughter. Her disguises were there; her weapons too. She would shed the concealment of the woman, don that of a youth, strap her breasts down beneath a tunic, cover her slim legs beneath billowing
shalvari
, push her long hair up inside a turban, mask herself. The dagger at her waist and the crossbow on her back deterred most. She could pass unchallenged. Even into the city she would set out for this day. Constantinople had a Turkish population still, for trade continued even as all prepared for war. One more young man come to see a merchant relative would not receive too much scrutiny, even now.

As Leilah hurried down the twisting alleys of Edirne, she was excited that one task was complete, another beginning. It was not without its dangers. But the man she sought now, her other man of destiny, was more blurred to her than Mehmet had been at the valley’s far end. It was for that reason she had to go. She had to find him again.

Gregoras.

There was a time for people. Each important man in her life, the janissary and the Jew, had come when she needed them and they, in some way, needed her. It was vital now to find him again, one more time, before all that was to come. Place guards around him to keep him safe.

To be certain he is mine and not another’s.

The thought halted her before her cousin’s door. She leaned on it, did not push it in.

This … other. Leilah had seen her in the chart she’d drawn up after her return from Korcula. In whispers before dawn, in the drowsiness that followed lovemaking, she had got the information she needed to map him. And she had found
her
, in his conjunction of Venus and Neptune, a certain place for the entanglements of love.

She is why I must find him, she thought. I would bind him to me one more time.

She was surprised at how her legs gave slightly at the thought, how the ache came between them. Smiling, she took a breath, and pushed open the door.

–
TEN
–
City of Ghosts

Sofia watched him through the shutter, through skeins of rain. They had deluged the city for a week, dissolving even the short distance between their house and the one opposite, making sight and stone insubstantial. It was a ruin, and when she’d first glimpsed the figure within its tumbled timbers, she’d thought it a ghost from the family who’d lived there, parents and three sons lost to plague five years before. She’d crossed herself, gone to pray before the house altar, returned … and the figure still stood there, shrouded head tilted up, the face within lost to rain and shadow. Despite the ceaseless storm, he was there an hour later, a steadfastness most un-ghost-like, for she had encountered spirits before – of her mother once, of a dead brother – and they flitted, came, stared, went if spoken to. They did not stand for hours staring up.

She knew who he was. When she’d named her ghosts he had made the tally. And that was the most disturbing thing of all: the realisation that he whom she’d assumed was dead wasn’t. That he who was banished from the city for ever had returned despite the threatened instant death. That the man she’d loved and forsaken was standing ten paces from her.