A Place Called Armageddon (55 page)

‘Give me fire,’ commanded Giustiniani, the order passed back in shouts to the looming bastion and beyond. In moments, a huge ball of flame shot over the walls in a high arc. There were a few mangonels, siege slings that had come to seem almost redundant with the bringing of the great guns. And though there was little naphtha left for fuel, most having gone to the Scotsman and his Greek Fire, there was enough for this ball. It passed in flame across the sky, then dropped, to plunge into the advancing black mass. Fire briefly lit the sweeping ranks of armoured men – and, in their midst, one yellow
oriflamme
.

‘The Anatolian division,’ declared Giustiniani grimly. ‘Back to your position, lord. The real battle is about to begin.’

Constantine sighed, saluted, turned and was gone, his guard following at a run. The Commander looked at Gregoras. ‘And to yours, Noseless One. I need your arrows.’ As he turned away, Giustiniani called after him, ‘Did you see that huge fucking Turk that danced atop the stockade?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you kill him?’

‘I tried, master.’

‘Well … try better next time, will you?’ Giustiniani grinned. ‘Kill them by the score!’

There were other men lined up at the knotted rope and Gregoras had to wait his turn to climb. While he did, arrows began to fall thicker over the stockade,
kolibrinas
cracked and their bullets whined off walls. The music drew closer, the
mehter
band of the Anatolians accompanying their men right up to the fosse, the music a ferocious blare. But the Christians had music of their own. Every bell in the city pealed the alarm, recalling its citizens to the fray, beseeching God. Somewhere nearby, a water organ groaned with the approximation of a hymn.

When his turn came, Gregoras climbed swiftly, slid over the battlements, grabbed his bow, slipped the finger ring he’d had fitted into place, notched an arrow. With one eye only showing past the crenel, he watched the stockade jerk and dance as if alive as the enemy poled and hooked it. A ladder drew his eye, the first of scores slapping down. ‘Come on,’ he whispered, and when a helmeted head appeared, he put his first arrow through it.

It was harder to shoot after that. The Anatolians in their black armour, the Genoans in theirs merged into one long, seething, striving mass along the ill-lit rampart, friends and targets near as close as lovers. And in their bastion, he and his bowmen were targets too, for the mass of Turkish archers, slingers and culverin men clustered a bare sixty paces away, just the other side of the fosse. Arrows careened off the crumbling mortar of the crenels; bullets struck, sending splinters of stone near as fast as lead. To lean out, to take that hard shot, was to lean into a death-bearing storm. Yet the bowmen did it, again and again, and many paid death’s price for it, reeling back with a shaft jabbing through a limb, scoring fire across a skull, buried in a chest; with a ball lodged in lungs fast filling with blood, coughed out with a last plea for forgiveness. Gregoras felt death pass him on each side, above, below. Once he felt a sting at his temple like some biting insect, reached up to wetness, rubbed blood between his fingers then off onto his jerkin. And still he leaned out more than any other, defiant, a wild thirst taking him as he sought another victim for the next arrow, one less Turk to stab at his friends, to push his way into his city, to threaten what he loved. He sought, shot, missed, sought, shot, killed, and then his quiver was empty and he was reaching for what belonged to the dead and the dying beside him. When those arrows were gone too, he looked about him, spied a falling crossbowman with a bunch of quarrels, snatched the weapon up even as the man went down. It was big, heavy, did not have a stirrup; but a crannequin leaned against the wall to hook and pull up its string. He placed the metal hooks, wound up the cord, loaded a bolt, stepped forward again, glanced through projectiles to the scene below.

There was enough fire to see by. The Greeks had poured burning pitch down at spaces along the rampart. Ladders, stacked wood and men all burned. The Turks were shooting fire arrows from their lines, and Gregoras watched the flaming arc of one, its exquisite parabola ending as it thumped into a barrel and spread flame over wood. The black mass of men at the line heaved as the disciplined Anatolians threw themselves again and again up the ladders, and many straddled the walls. For the moment there was not a distinguishable target to be had there, so Gregoras looked again to where the enemy archers had to be in the darkness, and when an arrowhead of flame appeared there and started to slowly rise, he aimed two hand spans to its left and squeezed his trigger. The arrow jerked up in its place, then fell to splutter in the mud.

A sharper, higher-pitched trumpet cry in the night. The indistinguishable line at the stockade separated into two, the Anatolians stumbling away, the Greeks hurling insults and a few last stones at the black-armoured backs. Gregoras didn’t even look for another quarrel, to take a last man as he fled. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to draw his string up, crannequin or no.

The music had stopped with that one clarion call, all the noise was being made on his side of the rampart, the arrows and metal ball had ceased to fly his way and Gregoras could look down safely and for longer at the men below, many on their knees from exhaustion, many weeping. He looked for his close comrades – and found them together, Enzo helping to lift the Commander’s great helmet off. The Sicilian looked for him too and he put a thumb up. Both men returned the gesture and then Gregoras sank back, reaching to the stone jug beside him, drinking deep of the water it contained. He looked at the dead and the exhausted around him. More alive than dead he was glad to see, and the wounded already being helped.

He raised the jug again … then stopped without pouring. Put it down, struggled up, leaned again into a gap in the front crenels to stare out into a darkness that moved beyond the rampart. ‘What is wrong, brother?’ A voice came from beside him and he lifted a hand to silence it, kept peering out, trying to hear beyond the noise of his own soldiers into the silence of the enemy.

Something
was
wrong. The Anatolians, the heart of the enemy, proud warriors with a legacy of triumph and a belief in Allah, had drawn off quickly or been allowed to withdraw, far faster than the wild, undisciplined troops who had preceded them. It did not make sense. Unless one of their main commanders had been killed. Or unless …

He did not want to think of another reason. Tried to avoid thinking of it with unaccustomed prayers. He only prayed in battle, when everyone else did.

‘Holy Maria, bless us. Protect us, your servants. Shield us with your light. Hold us …’

He ceased murmuring, to strain his ears for what he did not want to hear … and did. The roll of something heavy, like a stone down a metal slope. The squeak of too much cloth pushed into a space too narrow for it. The sudden splash of water, a bucket thrown.

And then in the darkness close to where he’d sent his last bolt, he saw flame. Not a fire arrow raised and shot, a light that rose steadily as if someone was climbing with it. It halted, hovered.

He was at a side gap in an instant. ‘Commander!’ he screamed, trying to be heard above the drone of prayer, the moaning, the bells. ‘Enzo! It’s …’

He saw Enzo hear him, raise his hands in question, his shoulders a shrug. And Gregoras shouted the word, but it was lost in the action of the word he screamed.

‘Cannon!’

He turned to the roar, saw the giant flash of flame spat out from a huge, round mouth. Not even a second passed before what the great gunshot smashed into the stockade, sweeping away a huge section of it, and the men behind it, vanishing them, a dozen or more, just gone. Gregoras saw the gap, the gaping hugeness of it, a moment before a vast bank of thick black smoke rolled over it, swallowing sight.

There was silence then, for a long moment, before the screaming began, of agony, of terror. Then of something else, as thousands of voices gave out the same deep-throated cry.

‘
Allahu akbar
!’

The Anatolians were coming again.

From the cloud the great gun had created, into the gap it had made, over the destruction it had caused, Turks were charging, twenty abreast, infinitely deep. All the defenders who had stood at that point of the stockade were gone, as if snatched away by God’s own hand. There was no one there to stop the rush, and those survivors nearby were deafened, blinded, stunned. Gregoras could see that the first Turks over the wall were already spreading out, widening their front, allowing more and more of their own to join them.

And then he heard another trumpet, one he recognised: Constantine’s. He peered beyond the spreading Turks, but smoke and darkness obscured all. Yet another trumpet he knew answered – Giustiniani’s. Emperor and Commander called to him. His city. His comrades. Swiftly, Gregoras strode to the rear wall, pulling off the thick quilted jerkin of the archer. Beneath, he had already put on his arming doublet against this eventuality. He bent to his armour. ‘You!’ he called to a young archer nearby. ‘Help me.’

The youth came up, his mouth working, no sounds emerging. Still, his fumbling fingers did the work Gregoras directed him to. He got the breastplate around him, ordered the youth to tie the front plate to the back while he slipped the twin vambrace over his upper and lower arms. Judging from the screams and steel clatter coming from below, there was time for little else. His legs, shoulders, neck would have to be exposed. He bent for his metalled gloves, thrust them on. ‘Helmet,’ he commanded, and the young man lifted it, and pushed it on. Unlike the borrowed helm he’d worn in the sea fight, this was a barbuta, open at the face. In a night fight, he was happy to trade the protection of a visor for keener sight.

He considered what was left, reluctantly disdained his shield in favour of two weapons – a fluted mace and the falchion he’d acquired to replace the one he’d lost at sea. Shoving each into loops at his side, just as the youth tied his last knot, Gregoras flung the rope over the battlements.

He took a breath, bent to his study. It showed him a fight that had progressed. Not a rout, for the Anatolians had only spread a little further, their front perhaps a hundred men across, all that could force themselves into the gap their cannon and their initial rush had made. But Gregoras could see that they were slowly pushing forward against the still rallying Genoans and Greeks, allowing more of their men in, with still more forming behind.

He bit his lip. What little could he do? Then he heard again, from the far side of the melee, that distinct cry of the emperor’s bugle. And this time he glimpsed something flying there in the torch flare: the double-headed eagle of Constantinople. Saw the part of the enemy’s line it soared above bulge inwards.

He looked to the base of his tower. On the fringe of the fight, men milled. Directly below him was an open patch of ground. Climbing onto the rope, he slid down to it, faster than he had the previous time, the heavier for the metal on his back.

He landed in a group of about ten men, of his country he could tell by their longer beards and ragtag armour; pushed to the fringes of the fight by the heavily armed, better-trained Genoans. They turned to him, startled at his sudden appearance, several lifting their swords. ‘I am Greek!’ he yelled, then pointed with the mace he drew to where the bugle sounded again. ‘And that’s our emperor coming.’ Now he drew his falchion, raised both weapons high and crying, ‘For Christ and country!’ ran into the fight.

He aimed at an angle, just behind the enemy’s rough front line. He could not heed if he’d been obeyed, if men followed. Not when his trumpets called him. Could only strike at the Turk half turned away from him, turning back to raise his shield too late to stop the falling mace. Gregoras did not have time to prise the weapon from the crushed turban helmet before another Anatolian had turned on him, more prepared, striking before he was struck, sweeping his scimitar in a great arc over his raised shield, down, aiming for Gregoras’s unarmoured shoulder. The Greek had no time to lament his own missing shield, could only twist round, jerking his mace free, lifting his falchion as if punching its pommel up, reversed across his head and angled down. The weapon’s wide blade was short but strong, the scimitar smashed against it and slid down with a steel scream. It pulled the Turk into a slight stumble forward, lowering his shield, let Gregoras jab the blunt end of his freed mace into the face revealed, knocking the head up. Not a blow to kill, only to shock, which it did, enough for death to follow, the falchion pulled back, turned, swept forward, pitted blade slashed deep into the exposed throat.

Men
had
followed him into the small gap he’d opened. One lost his sword hand to a scimitar’s cut, but a second drove his spear point through a shield and pinned the man behind it. This Greek was huge, not all the giants were on the other side, and finding he could not jerk free his spear, he just bent, grunted, lifted, charged. The wailing Turk was a human battering ram, men were buffeted aside, the side rank of the enemy driven in.

‘On!’ Gregoras yelled, and followed. The big man was roaring, swinging his awful, living burden from side to side. Finally, a spear thrust in from the side, slicing across his leg behind the knee. He stumbled, still roaring, but his own spear lowered before him and blades swung over it. Gregoras had gained enough ground to knock two aside, one with each weapon he held. But another spear snapped the man’s head back and he disappeared from Gregoras’s vision, full now with enemies of his own.

He saw a man, an officer by the elaborate
kalafat
of peacock feathers on his helm, trying to close the gap the huge Greek’s charge had opened. Gregoras ran straight at him, smashing his mace into the shield that rose, dropping to his knees and scything parallel to the ground with his falchion. The officer’s boots were armoured but the blade was heavy and smashed the metal in. The man staggered, yelping in sudden pain, and Gregoras was up, driving his shoulder hard into the man’s huge square shield, sheltering behind it as he pushed the officer into his men.