A Place Called Armageddon (42 page)

Gregoras leaned to the side, spat some of the foulness from his mouth that bad air and good aqua vitae had made there. He pictured his friend, his fraying saffron cloak flapping, and held his dagger a little tighter.

He listened, to the ragged breathing of his men, to the steady strike of metal on earth, to the praising of Christ the son, Maria the mother, their song getting louder or his hearing getting better in the dark. Other senses more acute too – the smell of sweat, for it was hot in a crowd beneath the ground, and of men’s gases expelled, fouling the air further; the wetness on his palms, the drops running down his back. He heard his men behind him muttering prayers till a harsh whisper from the Scotsman cut them off. And he could not help silently mouthing the words to the hymn the men he was about to slay were singing. Christ in all his glory come, he thought. Lead us from the dark.

It was as if he’d summoned it. The perfect blackness ahead, pierced suddenly by a single shaft of light. The sound of the hymn slightly louder for a moment, then cut off with a harsh cry, part triumph, part fear. Serbian was not a language he spoke, the word hissed the other side of the wall unintelligible. Not so the whispered Turkish reply.

‘Have you found it?’

John Grant did not whisper. ‘Now!’ he shouted, and swung his pickaxe hard into the wall. On the other side, his man did the same. Four blows were enough to shatter it, the cave flooding with torchlight as the wall collapsed. Gregoras was squinting now, till the blurred shapes before him coalesced into three bearded men stripped to the waist, tools held crosswise before their chests. Behind them, a man in a turban, eyes widened by a shock all felt, each enemy staring at the other for one single, endless moment. Broken by the Scotsman’s next scream, the native war cry Gregoras had heard him cry before.

‘Craigelachie!’ Grant yelled, and swung his pickaxe again – into the bare chest before him.

All that was silent transformed to noise, all that was still into movement. Gregoras stumbling forward now, then finding his feet, then running, dipping to dodge a swung shovel, needing to reach the Turk before he cleared his curved dagger from its sheath. He did, one hand grasping the wrist, shoving the blade back down, the other bringing his own weapon up and slashing the steel across the throat just too late to stop the cry erupting from his throat. ‘For the love of Allah, come!’

God’s name was enough. Further down the well-lit mine, wider than the one he’d come from, men were moving. Miners rising from their rest; soldiers turning with weapons in their hands. As Gregoras dropped the dying Turk to the ground, he heard the cries of the miners he’d passed, falling. His men needed no commands, they were already running forward, his young lieutenant at their head. He pressed himself against the wall to save a trampling, and when the last of the twenty had gone past, he followed.

‘Drive them! Drive them back! Further!’ Grant was beside him now, his own miners in a body coming up. Some were holding shovels, pickaxes. Most seemed to be carrying clay pots in both hands, their necks stuffed with rags. As Gregoras ran forward, quite fast now because the miners ahead and the Turks had, to a man, turned and fled, he shouted, ‘What is in those pots?’

‘The product of my labours. At least, it will be. Far enough,’ he bellowed, halting suddenly, his men and Gregoras with him. Grant whistled, pointed at what looked like a large bladder on the ground, with a long stick thrust into it that trailed off into the mine ahead. ‘Look! A pump to cleanse the air. A fine example. I’m having that.’ Bending, he ripped the device from the ground, then looked around. ‘Begin!’ he commanded, and his men put down their pots carefully and began hacking away at every second wooden prop. Grant turned back to Gregoras. ‘Haven’t you business of your own?’ He pointed ahead, then pulled out his silver whistle. ‘But listen for my call, ye ken? It will not be long in coming.’

Gregoras had only paused for a few seconds, and there had been silence ahead. Now, as he again ran along the passage, sounds came, and soon sight – his men, in a crowd, striking with their daggers and axes at Turks who had rallied before them. The tunnel was wide enough for five to fight five, and the front rank grappled as others pressed from behind. There were some cries of fear, of fury, of sudden agony. Some calls to God too, however He was seen. But mostly Gregoras was aware of the lack of noise, as if each side was aware of the fragility of the earth that pressed in upon them and did not want to disturb it with a shout.

It was hard to see anything distinct in the flicker of torches and blades. Then Gregoras did, as two of his men fell at the same time, including his young lieutenant, face smashed with a mace. The man wielding it was a huge Turk, who should not have been there, making the space look small, and Gregoras could sense that point in battle fast coming when one side quailed and the other drove them back. Yet no whistle called him and he knew that the Greeks must stand. ‘For the emperor and for ‘Christ Risen,’ he cried, and moved between his men. They had begun to turn away, were a moment from flight, so he passed through easily enough, crouching low, shifting left to dodge the falling mace, brought down with a force that would have stoved his brain. He did not try to take the blow on his buckler; his arm would have been snapped. Instead he let it fall, felt the wind of its passing even as he lunged up and punched the dagger into the flesh beneath the Turk’s bearded chin.

The man fell away, landing with a thump that shook the ground. It was enough to rally Gregoras’s troops, for the enemy to quail in his turn. Gregoras stepped back, as his men, with a cry of ‘Christ Risen!’, pushed past him, driving the Turks back. He heard a moan, looked down, saw the young lieutenant’s smashed lips move in plea. ‘Help me,’ he whispered. Gregoras hesitated … and then they came, clear, shrill. Three blasts of a silver whistle.

‘Come,’ said Gregoras, dragging the fallen officer up. His men knew the signal too. As a body they turned and charged towards their safety. ‘Here!’ he yelled, and one of the soldiers slipped his shoulder under the arm of the young lieutenant that Gregoras held out. Together, with the young man’s toes scraping the ground, they ran.

The Turks had turned back under the ferocity of the last assault. But fresh men, who had been kept always in readiness, had arrived and were now running down a passage they knew led straight into the city they had struggled so hard to take. It was a foot race, Gregoras and his helper just winning it. There was a slight bend to the Serb tunnel; they rounded it …

‘Down!’ came a guttural Scottish cry. Gregoras obeyed, bearing himself and his burden swiftly to the ground, sliding along mud that blood had made slick. He twisted as he fell, ready to leap up again on command. So he saw Grant above him lean back, then hurl his arm forward. Saw the flame that flew like a comet’s tail through a night sky. Gregoras was rising to his knees as he saw the projectile smash – one of the clay pots shattering on the ground before the charging Turks. There was a moment when liquid splashed over mud and onto trailing clothes. Then, with a sharp fizz, the burning fuse ignited the liquid and the tunnel went up in flame.

‘Come,’ Grant cried, bending to help Gregoras rise, the Greek in turn aiding his moaning lieutenant. Together the three stumbled back, away from the screaming Turks, those who burned, those who sought to pass the flames and charge on. But more of Grant’s men were against the tunnel’s walls, and as they passed, each miner lifted a clay pot and threw it – not at the Turks, some of whom had come through the fire, but straight at the base of the wooden props that held up the roof.

Grant had a grin greater than ever before. Passing his burden to two soldiers who reached out their hands, Gregoras turned to the Scot as they ran. ‘Won’t they put out the flames?’

‘Nay. Greek Fire cannot be stamped out and it’s the devil’s job to smother, because it just spreads and burns anything. Same with water, it’ll burn atop it. About the only thing that would work is piss.’ He laughed. ‘And have you ever tried pissing when a roof’s about to fall in?’

‘Greek Fire?’

‘Aye,’ Grant nodded. ‘Seems that I have rediscovered its secret after all.’

They’d reached the entrance to their tunnel, the last men back. There was a little bunching there as the soldiers pushed through, so Gregoras turned, hands before him, weaponless but ready to leap for the throat of a pursuer. None came through the smoke and the dancing light, but as he watched, what did come was sound, a deep rumble, a dozen screams suddenly choked off. A wall of dust hurtled towards him.

‘Come now,’ said Grant, seizing his collar, dragging him through the stone lintel of the archway, slamming the door shut, shooting its bolt. They both fell up the steps, lay there staring at the wood. Something hard hit it on the other side, but the lock and the solid oak held; while as they watched, through the edges of the doorframe a fine burst of dust blew out, like a man’s last sigh.

–
TWENTY-SEVEN
–

The Tower

17 May: forty-first day of the siege

‘Will I live?’

Behind her veil, Leilah rolled her eyes. If she had a ducat for every time she’d been asked that question recently, she could forget the fortune Geber’s manuscript would bring her and retire for life. It came with setting up her tent in a war camp. Soldiers had few other concerns.

She tried again to seek his answer in the cards spread before her. Yet again, as it had been for days now, their symbols revealed nothing save her own confusion. She glanced up from them to the youth squatting on the other side of the kilim. Not yet twenty, she suspected by his wisp of beard, by his accent, a Vlach from beyond the Danube. Though she’d heard that Christians only formed one-quarter of the sultan’s army, they were three-quarters of her clientele, those of the true faith more content to leave their destiny in Allah’s hands.

‘
Inshallah
,’ she murmured, and bent over again. Still she saw nothing. She was not as gifted in the cards’ use as she was with palms and mirrors. Her lover, the Kabbalist Isaac, had only just begun her instruction in his people’s ancient technique when he’d … died. But the pretty pictures pleased her clients.

She frowned. Truly what did the querent need? Not for her to wrench up her soul. He only needed hope. That she’d always been able to fake.

She reached for a card’s blank back, hesitated. For she needed hope too. Her vision had grown cloudy, her certainty compromised. Near seven weeks of siege, a never-ending bombardment, ceaseless assaults, a fleet in the Horn – and still the city stood. She knew from the women of this outer camp, mainly whores whose cooking fires she shared, and from some of the men who sat before her carpet begging for a sign, that doubt had overtaken most minds. The Red Apple had never fallen. Why should it now? Only yesterday, one of their greatest hopes had been crushed. The Greeks had discovered the tunnel that would have brought a great bastion crashing down and allowed the faithful to storm in. They had destroyed it, massacred the men who’d dug it, while those few who had escaped had been horribly burned, their death screams filling the camp.

Her hand hovered. The youth leaned in, transfixed. Still she did not reach.

She was thinking of Mehmet. She had not seen him, except from afar, since that night in Edirne when she’d prophesied his great victory. Should she go to him now? He was as prey to doubts as great as any of his soldiers’. Greater, as were his ambitions. Should she soothe him with portents? Rouse him with prophesies? Hope could be faked for sultans as well as soldiers.

A voice jolted her out of her trance. ‘You do see something,’ the young man whispered. ‘What is it?’

Leilah looked up into blue eyes wide with apprehension, then down again to her hand suspended over the deck. Now she let it fall, touched the card, turned it … crying out as her vision cleared fast, like a veil ripped back.

‘What?’ the youth gasped. ‘What do you see?’

She’d been concentrating, but not on his question. On her own. And the answer was clear.

Ayin. So it was called in the Hebrew. To some it was the temple of God in Jerusalem, long destroyed. To others a stone pyramid. To others … a tower.

Lightning struck the structure, the first spark in its destruction.

She turned it back over swiftly, melding it in with the other cards, rising as soon as it was lost among them. The youth did not move. ‘What did you see?’ he repeated, his voice becoming shrill. ‘Am I to die?’

She looked down at him. What had cleared her vision kept it clear. Death was stamped on his unwrinkled brow. His fate, and there was nothing she could do about it. ‘You are in God’s hands, as are we all,’ she said, stooping for his coin, throwing it back between his knees. ‘
Inshallah
.’

Carelessly and swiftly, she stuffed the cards into her satchel. Grabbed her cloak, looked back. The youth had not moved. ‘Take back your money. Come another day.’

Still he did not bend for his silver coin. ‘You did see, didn’t you?’ he mumbled.

‘Go!’ She bent, snatched up the coin, shoved it into the same hand she jerked him up with. She pushed him through the tent flaps and he stumbled off. Leilah went the opposite way.

Sometimes the meaning of a card was obscure and she had to go deep within herself to find it. Sometimes it was as unambiguous as the symbol itself. That was true of this young man, marked for death. And unless she reached Mehmet, perhaps it meant something else too – the death of her dream.

‘Ayin. The tower,’ she muttered as she ran, weaving between the cooking fires. ‘It must not fall.’

‘The tower,’ the sultan shrieked. ‘It must attack. Not in a week. Not tomorrow. Now! Now! Now!’

Hamza stood at the back of the group of men that Mehmet was screaming at. He had not yet been seen and for that he was grateful. The sultan’s fury was a wild fire that could switch direction in a moment. When he was first summoned, Hamza had thought that Mehmet wanted to chastise his new admiral for yet another failure to capture the boom across the Horn and unite the two Turkish fleets. Like the unfortunate Baltaoglu, he feared he would soon be feeling the strokes of the
bastinado
across his back. But he’d been met at the entrance to the sultan’s
otak
by Zaganos Pasha, who revealed that
he
was the one who’d sent for him.