A Place Called Armageddon (51 page)

Now, as the very last sung note rose from the thousands of voices there and seemed to echo forever inside the great dome, Sofia reached and touched the cavity, seeking another miracle, one sought by every single person around her, everyone inside and outside the great church, everyone in the city, in that moment. ‘Holy saint. Holy Gregory. Bring us salvation this night. Let your shining light guide us to triumph over our foes. Help us. Bless us. Save us.’

Though so many had reached before this night that the fullest well should have been dry, she still felt a touch of moisture on her fingertips. Perhaps it was only the transferred tears of those who had been there before her, for nearly everyone present wept. But she took it as a sign of grace and brought it to her lips.

The last note clung still, sustained by yearning. Everyone who heard it knew that when it ended, it could – could! – be the last Christian song ever heard in the great cathedral. If their prayers went unanswered. If God had chosen to punish them. If the infidel stormed the city this night, as he had vowed to do.

Then it was gone, and with its going, people began to move, swiftly leaving. God and the saints had been called upon, and now men had to make their earthly dispositions. She let the other women jostle past her. She would have a last moment with her saint and then she would follow, for there was also much she needed to accomplish this night.

‘Wife.’

The familiar voice. She turned. Theon had been kneeling with the emperor, right before the altar screen. He had partaken of the holy mystery, been shriven and blessed. In the flickering light of a thousand candles she thought she still saw the wine upon his lips. ‘Husband,’ she answered.

They looked at each other. There had been a formality in their greeting, as if they were acquaintances. Indeed, she had seen little of him in the recent weeks of the siege. He slept near the emperor, ready for any command. The times he returned to the house, she was often gone. Lately she had led a party of women, daughters of the city like herself, to carry materials to the walls for the stockade that needed constant repair. With her son at her side, she worked as much as she could, slept little, ate less and less.

‘You look tired,’ he said, continuing the formality, echoing her thoughts.

‘As do you,’ she replied.

He did. The armour he was forced to wear had never suited him, and he looked small within it, as if he’d borrowed it from a much bigger man. He saw her stare, and perhaps something of what she felt showed on her face, because he came to her more briskly, took her arm. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I will see you home.’

‘I do not go home.’ She moved with him, as they both headed towards the doors.

‘And where do you go, if not there?’

‘The same place as you. I go to the walls.’

He stopped, stared at her in shock. ‘The walls? Do you not know that the Turks will attack them this very night? Not as before. Again and again and again till they have stormed them or all died trying.’

‘I know this. But until the moment that they do attack, there are stones to lift. It is my duty.’

‘Your duty is to your family.’

She slipped his grip, kept moving, threading her way through the crowds, seeking. ‘Thakos will be with me, for boys work beside the women. Minerva is with Athene, at the house.’

He followed, caught her arm again, halting her. ‘And you must join her there. With our son. You must obey me.’ Anger coloured his voice now. ‘Obey me!’

She stared at him for a long moment. ‘I hear you. At any other time I would seek to please you as I always have,’ she said softly. ‘But there are others I must obey before you now, Theon. The emperor who has ordered that monks, women and boys do the work that soldiers cannot be spared for. The Blessed Virgin, who protects us and urges that we protect ourselves. And …’ she hesitated. ‘Myself. My will.’

‘Your … will?’ He looked incredulous. ‘When have you ever had a will?’

‘Since the Turk first came to take everything that I love,’ she replied, gently pulling her arm from his grasp.

He let her get a few paces, followed, grabbed her yet again. She turned, and there was fury in her eyes. Just like her damned cat, he thought, ever ready with its claws. He thought of striking her. He’d done it before. But they had come to the front of the building, Constantine was close, men who knew him. Wives had to be struck in private. Besides, he did not need her to be humbled here. Time enough for that pleasure later. He only needed her to obey him. ‘Listen to me,’ he said softly, releasing her arm. ‘No, I do not command, as is my right. I ask you to hear of something that, if the worst happens, may save the lives of our children.’ He saw he had her and he continued, emphasising each word hard. ‘If the Turks triumph, they will be thinking only of pillage. Of rape. Then, after both, of enslavement. But certain places, certain people, will be spared. So when you have done your duty at the walls, you must return to our home—’

‘How do you know this?’ she interrupted him, something she would never have done before.

He swallowed his anger. Sphrantzes was beckoning him and he did not have time for it. ‘I know. I know how they will do it, too – with the marks of important men placed upon doors. With flags. You will find one such flag under our mattress. If the Turks break through …’ He bent, to catch once more the gaze that left him at his words. ‘Yes, I say “if”. I will try to come. But if I do not – or cannot – do you hang this flag from the upper windows. And then do you lock our doors, shutter our windows, and seal yourself and our children with you on the roof.’

She looked at him for a long moment. ‘What have you done, Theon,’ she whispered, ‘to earn such a favour from our enemies?’

He felt the itch come again, his rising hands moving into fists. He breathed, let them fall. ‘I have done only what a father should do. A husband. I have prepared for the worst that may come.’

She stared at him a moment and then was moving again, darting between horses that prevented him following. By the time he could, she’d reached a cart, two asses in the traces. Other women were crammed on it, two helping her up, all as haggard and determined as she. He pressed up to the edge, as one of the women took the reins. ‘Did you hear all I said, wife?’

She looked down at him. At the restrained fury in his eyes. But for all his politician’s guile, he was also a husband. A father. Trying to care for his own. And though she had prayed, though she believed in miracles given by saints, though she would do all she could of her duty, she was a mother and there was a part of her that needed some other hope too. Some plan if God and man failed. Perhaps a flag beneath a mattress, however it had got there.

‘I did. And I will … obey,’ she said, as the woman at the reins shouted, ‘Huh!’ and the cart lurched off. Standing, she looked back at him, suddenly wondering if she would ever see him again. ‘I will. Go with God, husband. May the Virgin and all the saints protect you this night.’

Ignoring the calling of his name, which had become more insistent, he watched the cart recede into the crowd. His hands were still balled in fists and he lifted them, looked at them. That was how we parted, he thought, my last touch of her an angry grip upon her arm. Was there not a kiss for me, Sofia? I would have preferred that a thousand times more to Christ’s blood upon my lips.

Then another thought came, and he looked sharply up. But the cart was lost in the swirl of men and women scattering about their tasks, the city’s, their own. As he turned away to the insistent call, he wondered this: if the kiss she’d spared him was saved for another. A man whose armour fitted him well. And whether it was
duty
that took her to the walls at all.

Gregoras had tried to keep Thakos close, and his head down. Though it was night, enemy archers still had an eye for a target, and arrows constantly fell to harass those who were ceaselessly filling and repairing the gaps in the stockade. But the boy was ever curious and would rise up to look at the Turkish lines and the wonders there.

‘Why are they burning so many fires, Uncle?’

‘Two reasons. They feast – can you not smell that succulent lamb?’ Gregoras’s mouth flooded with saliva at the thought. ‘Because they have fasted this day to prepare their souls for the assault and now need to feed their bodies for it. And they do it to show us their numbers, to make us afraid.’

‘But we are not afraid, are we, Uncle?’ Thakos said, looking frightened.

‘We are. We should be. Only the lunatic is not afraid. But a man controls his fear, uses it.’

‘I see.’ The boy nodded. ‘And do they play that music to fright us too?’

Gregoras listened. The drums, the trumpets, the
ney
and
sevre
and all manner of stringed and piped instruments had been sounding the day long so that he had almost forgotten them, a constant clamour against every thought. ‘They do. And to fill themselves with courage.’

‘We have trumpets too. I can play one. I wish I had brought mine and not …’ He lifted the slingshot from the ground beside him. ‘Is it time to practise again, Uncle?’ he asked, a quaver in his voice.

And in his hands. He had never truly mastered the weapon, despite his desire. He was not a warrior; Gregoras could tell that it was not his nature. That he was too gentle. And he was only seven years old. Gregoras shook his head. A city that needed seven-year-olds to fight for it was a place in its last agony. ‘No. Save your stones for later.’

The boy swallowed. ‘When will they attack?’

It was no secret. The Turks had been proclaiming the hour in their camp all the long day. ‘Soon after midnight,’ he replied.

‘And where?’

He looked down the length of the valley, along the long line of flame. ‘Everywhere,’ he murmured.

Somewhere this side of that line was his emperor. Constantine, on his return from mass at the Hagia Sophia, had ridden out immediately to visit each bastion, to inspire his troops, to show that he was undaunted and so should they be by the enemy’s fire and noise. But he would return here ere long, for all knew that even if the attack was to be general and encompass all the walls of both land and sea, it would, as ever, be most concentrated here. It was why the imperial tent was pitched right there, just behind the walls – a long bowshot from Mehmet’s tent, set up on the brow of the hill opposite, above his great guns. Here, at the Fifth Military gate, known by most as the St Romanus for the civil gate of that name it was near, where the Turks had destroyed the outer wall and where the Greeks had built a stockade to replace it. Here, where the great Giustiniani stood with his Genoans. Here would be the crisis, all knew. So Constantine would return here, and soon.

The only order he’d given before he departed was that the Commander must cease his unending supervision of the defence and rest. Giustiniani had reluctantly agreed to sleep for a couple of hours, but only if his two deputies – Enzo the Sicilian and Gregoras, formerly Zoran Rhinometus – saw that all that could be done was. And it had been. Enzo was down at the
stauroma
still, shoving last barrows of mud between the timber and the stones. But Gregoras had retired to the inner wall, to the crumbling bastion where he had placed his armour and from which he would shoot his great bow.

The music directly opposite them slackened, so that a single voice could be heard above it, crying out. ‘Another call to prayers, Uncle?’ Thakos asked.

Gregoras listened, shook his head. ‘Another reminder of what their sultan has promised them. A swift journey to a martyr’s paradise or three days of pillage once the city falls.’

‘What’s pillage?’

Gregoras opened his mouth to answer, only to close it again. What could he say to a boy about the horrors he’d witnessed? That he’d taken part in, for Christian nations pillaged cities of the Turk and of other Christian nations too. It was what a mercenary lived for, the opportunity for booty. He’d looted enough to buy that piece of land in Ragusa. And if he had not taken part in other aspects of pillage … well, he still knew what would befall Constantinople’s people if that fragile stockade was toppled. Slaughter for the men who resisted, rape for their women, enslavement for all. The boy might be seeing it all too soon. He did not need to see it in Gregoras’s words now.

He thought of him as ‘the boy’. He found it hard to call him his son, despite what Sofia had revealed. Yet they were soon to part – despite his fear, his gentleness, Thakos was determined to fight, and Gregoras was equally determined to get him away from the battle. Should they leave one another, and Thakos never truly know the man he called uncle and who, more than likely, had died in the final battle for the city? Should Gregoras not be remembered as something more than a noseless curiosity?

‘Why are you looking at me like that, Uncle?’

‘Thakos—’ Gregoras began.

And then the boy interrupted him by leaping up. ‘Look! It’s Mother. Mother!’ he called.

Gregoras pulled the youth down, as an arrow flew over. Then he peered between the crenels, to the outer wall. A party of women were just dropping earth and timber onto it. One was looking up, bucket in hand.

Sofia.

Gregoras leaned into the gap. ‘Behind this bastion,’ he called. Then, stooping to pick up his bow and quiver, he dragged Thakos to the archway, crouching low.

She met them at the bottom of the stair. ‘My son,’ she cried, and he rushed into her arms, stayed there, until he remembered he was meant to be a soldier and a man and pulled away.

‘Here,’ Gregoras said, holding out the slingshot he’d also picked up, ‘take this and find some more good stones. Practise. I need to speak to your mother.’

Thakos nodded, snatched the rope weapon, ran off. ‘Not far,’ they both called, and laughed when they realised they had. A silence came then, as each looked at the other.

Sofia broke it. ‘I have not … not seen you,’ she said at last.

‘No. I have been … busy.’

‘As have I.’

Silence again, more awkward than the first. Then both spoke at once.

‘I was looking for—’

‘I found him wandering—’