The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible (5 page)
Nicholas could not believe it was so simple to step ashore into the heart of this great enemy Mohammedan empire – yet merchants, travellers and ambassadors did it all the time. He gazed around in awe upon the dusty, crowded, deafeningly noisy quayside of the most populous city on earth. Above rose the great towers and minarets like giant candle-snuffers, banners in the breeze, and above them all, the green banner of Islam.
They were accosted immediately by a multitude of helpful voices offering guidance, tobacco, coffee, girls and boys.
‘Inglisz!’ they soon surmised. ‘Inglisz always welcome! You do not worship idols like the filthy Greeks,’ spit, ‘you are Protestants, yeas, you are brothers of Islam, People of the Book, Inglisz brothers!’
It was one point of view.
‘You want a boy? I know a sweet boy, behind like a peach.’
Crowds began to gather and stare, without hostility but with inexhaustible curiosity. Smith was already feeling uncomfortable. ‘I’ve no interest in your peachy-arsed catamites,’ he growled, ‘we’re making for the English embassy in Pera.’
‘Yeas please, come, Sir Inglisz, come, I take.’
Smith knew his way round the ancient city of the enemy all too well, but Stanley had given him firm orders to feign ignorance. ‘And be courteous, Brother John, and docile, though I know it makes your guts writhe within you. And for the love of God, no mention of Malta now.’
Two quayside guards with long pikes were already coming over. They busied themselves with paying the captain, and making their farewells. The captain bellowed for porters, gangplanks slammed down, wooden barrows appeared and unlading began. The four travellers agreed to one small man in ballooning red pantaloons guiding them, and made their way into the crowd. The guards watched them go with narrowed eyes.
At the gates into the city everything was searched.
‘Gifts,’ said Stanley at his sternest. ‘From the Queen of England to the Sultan himself. First they must be lodged at the English embassy.’
They were immediately provided with an additional escort of six armed soldiers.
Word spread fast. The crowd made way, staring, entranced. ‘Inglisz merchants! Come for the Sultan himself with Inglisz gold and jewels!’
Even with armed escort, progress through the Grand Bazaar was a battle. The soldiers struck out left and right with heavy wooden pikes, but the recipients of the blows took it all without complaint. Nicholas had never imagined such a scene. The Grand Bazaar of Constantinople had eighteen gates and sixty-seven main streets. London’s Cheapside seemed like a toy market in comparison.
‘And four thousand shops,’ said their guide. ‘Many, many. Here you can buy anything you desire. It is the Bazaar of the World.’
The mingled odours were indescribable: drains and camel dung and fresh red camel-meat hanging from butchers’ hooks, and frankincense, rose-petal jam, huge steaming cauldrons of tripe soup reeking of garlic, reckoned the perfect cure for a hangover. For the Turks, though Mohammedans, were still great lovers of wine.
‘I feel sick,’ said Hodge, already dreaming of damp woods and green fields.
More sickly perfumes: attar of roses from Adrianople, essence of hyacinth, almond and cypress oil, then the streets of the tailors, caftans of heavily brocaded Bursa velvet, then the coppersmiths, the ceaseless tink of their delicate hammers, the charcoal fires fanned by negro slaves with goose wings, a sheep being butchered with cleavers in the middle of the street. Brains gathered in a bowl for soup.
‘A fine gentlemanly thing it is,’ said Nicholas, ‘to travel the world and see other men and manners.’
Hodge regarded him sourly.
They passed through a huge dusty square, surrounded by a wooden portico. The slave market. Negresses black as night and stark naked, standing on a raised stage as if for hanging. Prospective buyers examining their long ebony limbs, pulling open their mouths with rough fingers, examining their perfect white teeth as you would a horse. Even Smith muttered, ‘Poor heathen bitches.’
On other platforms, diaphanously draped, the most expensive Georgian and Circassian slave girls, famed for their beauty, bound for the harems of only the wealthiest merchants of all, if not taken by the Sultan’s own buyers for the Imperial harem itself. Nicholas could not help but look.
‘Forget it, lad,’ said Stanley. ‘You couldn’t afford one of them for your whole estate in Shropshire.’
‘I am looking with pity, not lust,’ said Nicholas.
Stanley grunted sceptically.
The owner of the slave farm out in Anatolia was saying as they passed by, ‘Now a melon may take only one summer to grow from seed, whereas one of these beauties takes fourteen, fifteen summers. But then the reward, the reward!’
A strange thing, thought Nicholas, to farm human beings. Yet other lands, other customs. Then again, was he not in some sense a helpless slave to his Queen, taking orders he could not disobey? He suppressed the thought for his peace of mind.
At last they came to Pera and the cool English Embassy with its enclosed and shady garden, and were made welcome. And a message had already come for them. They would be expected to dine at the Palace tonight.
‘It seems,’ said the consul, ‘that there is already considerable curiosity about the English visitors.’
‘Excellent,’ said Stanley, ‘excellent.’
A seneschal received them at the palace gate, and conducted them with elaborate commentary past the Gate of Felicity leading into the extensive gardens and many pavilions and villas beyond, where lived in luxurious captivity the Sultan’s numberless wives and concubines. The passageway between the male and female quarters was called the Golden Road, he explained, and guarded by Nubian eunuchs more strictly than any other in the Sultan’s vast domain.
They waited on low divans in a sweet-scented chamber of gilt and velvet, and were brought coffee and sweet sherbet.
‘I need an ale,’ said Hodge.
Next they were admitted into a greater chamber lined with a dozen or more palace guards, and there, to their great surprise, in this country where women were kept virtually invisible, they were greeted by a woman: a strikingly beautiful dark-eyed girl in her twenties, eyes heavily outlined with kohl like an ancient Egyptian.
She introduced herself as one Esperanza Malachi. ‘And as you may be wondering,’ she said, ‘I am not Muslim but a Jewess, hence my being allowed to go unveiled about the palace, as well as … other freedoms.’ Her eyes rested on Nicholas as she said this, and her voice was gently lilting, faintly mocking. He felt they were being seduced already. Careful now.
She explained that as
kira
to the Sultana, she was her closest adviser and financial agent. ‘The Sultana is Venetian by birth, as you know,’ she said. ‘A great lover of fine dresses, but very extravagant.’
Her freedom was surprising, but charming. Stanley said he would be delighted to make the Sultana’s acquaintance.
They passed on into a still grander chamber, where they finally met the celebrated Venetian Sultana Safiye herself, formerly Sophia Bellicui Baffo. Rather than receiving them stiffly on a throne, she came towards them with the light, dancing steps of a young girl. Tall, fair-haired, slender, a young mother in her mid-twenties with laughing eyes, consort of Sultan Murad III, and one of the most powerful women in the world.
Esperanza Malachi curtsied very low with head bowed, pretty neck as graceful as a swan’s beneath her dark ringlets, and then introduced the Sultana. ‘Our beloved guests, I give you the Sultana Devletlu İsmetlu Malika Safiyā Valida Aliyyetü’ş-şân Hazretleri.’
All vainglorious heads of State loved long titles and numerous names, but the Sultana smiled ironically at her own. Despite her fairness and Esperanza’s dark-eyed beauty, thought Nicholas, they were almost like two sisters in their teasing manner. Their audience with the Sultan would have a little more formality. This was like some unexpected enclave of Venetian femininity and flirtation in a palace otherwise ruled by the strictest, most masculine Ottoman hierarchy.
‘You may address me simply as the Sultana Safiye,’ she said. ‘My Esperanza is teasing you with too much … information.’ She fixed Stanley’s eye. ‘One cannot take in too much information at once, can one?’
Her manner was captivating, yet …
Stanley bowed his head and said nothing.
‘How was your voyage?’
‘A fair one, Your Majesty.’
‘You came by way of, let me think, Cadiz, and Sicily?’
‘Cadiz, the Balearics, Malta, and north of Crete,’ he replied rapidly.
‘Malta?’
‘Aye.’
She smiled, then took Smith’s hands in hers. ‘My,’ she said, ‘what mighty hands you have for an ambassador of court. You could bend a horseshoe, Brother. And these scars!’
Brother? Why was she calling him Brother? She certainly knew how to discompose John Smith. He huffed and tried to answer, but she interrupted, ‘Yet could you undo a pretty lady’s pearl necklace, do you think?’
This was too much for Smith and he snatched his hands away. She laughed lightly; Nicholas was beginning to think this was the most dangerous interrogation they had ever faced. Like an evening at the Court of Paris with King Francis and his gaily dancing whores. But very, very dangerous.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘The Sultan awaits us.’
They were specially robed for the occasion in a side chamber, valets fussing about tying them into garments of cloth of gold. Smith growled throughout.
‘Patience, dear John,’ said Stanley. ‘Count yourself lucky. Many a visitor before the Sultan has his arms pinioned behind his back throughout the audience, for fear of assassination.’
‘You could still kill a man with arms pinioned,’ objected Smith. ‘Butt him to the ground and a sharp stomp to the windpipe.’
Stanley gave him a warning look and Smith fell silent.
The Sultan Murad sat on a golden throne surrounded by a green satin carpet sewn with silver and pearls. A man of medium height but slim build, with a henna-red beard and mild, scholarly features. They said he was fond of opium, wine and women, painting and clock-making, and for an Ottoman Sultan, shockingly uninterested in waging war on Christendom. Bookish and eccentric, he preferred to pore over his exquisite collection of Persian miniatures, plundered from the Palace of the Seven Heavens at Tabriz by his grandfather, Sultan Selim the Grim. And one night he wandered in the bazaar in disguise and heard a cook named Ferhat holding forth about the mismanagement of State finances. Murad promptly gave him a top job in government.
Nicholas could see at once that this was no Suleiman the Magnificent. So why this sense of threat? What was to be the next move in the eternal war between Islam and Christendom?
Each of them kissed his gently proffered hand, and then the gifts of the great English Queen were brought forth. Twelve pieces of gilt plate, thirty-six garments of fine cloth, ten of satin, and six pieces of finest Holland. There was also an exchange of elaborately sealed letters. Then they dined, the Sultan still high upon his lonely throne, conversing with none, while the rest sat cross-legged below him on long carpets, eating from exquisite porcelain bowls set before them.
After days and weeks of ship’s fare, it was truly a feast: saffron rice with raisins, roasted kid, candied apricots, cherries, a sallet of almonds, grated apple and wild greens, roast quail, partridge, baby camel in camel’s milk … though sadly no wine. The Sultan was delicate enough only to drink in private. Throughout it all was low, polite, empty conversation. Nicholas felt intensely that there was more to come, more going on behind the scenes. The entire Sublime Porte worked in that way, politics and plots busily conducted behind this serene and jewelled façade.
After they had dined they stood and filed out of the chamber, while the black slaves scrambled over the carpets for the scraps.
‘Look at them blackamoors,’ said Hodge. ‘Like animals.’
‘Perhaps because they are treated like animals,’ said Nicholas.
Hodge harrumphed.
Unrobing again, Stanley had calculated that no valet spoke English, and he said softly to them all, ‘Trust no one. They are trying to sow division amongst us.’ They looked questioningly at him, but he simply repeated, ‘Trust no one.’
They were just on the point of departing to sleep again at the English Embassy, when they were stopped by a richly dressed vizier, glittering eyes and sharp forked beard.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘the night is advanced and the streets are dark. We insist that you sleep in our guest quarters. There is wine in your rooms and the beds are of the softest.’
Stanley said, ‘I, we, really need to return—’
‘Please,’ repeated the Vizier. Guards moved a little behind him, and his gaze was fixed and unblinking. ‘We insist.’
Stanley hesitated, knowing they were not being offered a choice. ‘But of course. We are flattered at your kindness.’
The Vizier smiled.
Nicholas could almost have laughed at the unreality of it all. They were not only in Constantinople, but now passing the night in the Sultan’s Palace, under his very roof! They who had fought at Malta and Lepanto! If only it was known. Then he sobered. Someone did know. So much more was known than spoken. He felt it in his bones.
His chamber had high ceilings for coolness in summer, damask hangings, elaborately carved wooden screens, and a huge white bed with sheets that might have been white silk. Probably the only time in his life. His hand slithered over them. Preferred linen.
A silver ewer full of dark red wine stood by his bedside and … two olivewood cups. He poured a cup and drained half of it – decent enough – and was stripped down to the waist when there came the softest tap at his door. He went over and unlatched it, opened it wide, expecting Hodge or one of the knights. Before he could even react, a slim figure in a face veil had slipped into the room behind him. He closed the door. So they had sent him a concubine. True hospitality.
He turned and she had already drawn off her veil.
‘You,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you wore a veil.’
‘Depends,’ she said.
‘And if you’re the only woman roving about on her own, everyone will know who you are anyway.’
Esperanza Malachi smiled her infuriating, teasing smile and tossed the scrap of muslin onto the bed. ‘Pour me a cup of that wine, and let us give thanks that we are Christian and Jew, and our God heartily approves of such things. This is new red from Greece, apparently.’
‘Is it?’ He sounded testy, even to himself.
‘From the Peloponnese. Overlooking the sea where that great battle of the galleys was fought three years ago. Lepanto.’
He didn’t react, poured her wine. ‘How would you know that so precisely?’
She laughed again. He already knew this one would never answer a single direct question. He observed quietly that Islam and Christendom were now at peace, weren’t they? Handed her the cup. She sipped it, looking over the rim at him like – he swallowed – like the most skilled courtesan. Why were huge dark eyes so attractive anyway? What was the point of that?
She said, ‘Let us drink to peace, you and I. Sir Nicholas Ingoldsby and the Jewess.’ They knocked cups. ‘Though some are friendlier towards the West than others. Some of the imams hold that no unbeliever should be allowed in Constantinople at all. Others, even within the palace, believe in much closer connections. My, look at your scars!’ She touched his elbow. ‘This looks like a musket ball.’
‘Tough being a court ambassador,’ he said. ‘Always in the wars.’
‘And this,’ she said, touching his chest with feathersoft fingertips.
He stepped back and reached for his shirt and pulled it back on. ‘Yes, all very manly I’m sure.’
She sat on the side of his bed and stretched out her legs, baring slim brown feet, thin sandals decorated with mother-of-pearl.
He drank more slowly. ‘The Sultan does not seem such a man of war.’
‘He is not,’ she agreed. ‘He prefers the company of artists, musicians, dancing girls … Do you know the ritual of how he chooses a girl for the night?’
He sighed. ‘I do not. I am sure it is all very alluring and will inflame my helpless, lust-driven masculine flesh so much that I cannot resist your charms. And then we will lie together, and then in helpless thrall to you, I will tell you all the most important State secrets of England. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?’
She drained her cup and kissed her pretty mouth to the back of her hand, red wine and lipstick kiss. ‘The Sultan first has to process along the Golden Road to the women’s quarters and bow low to
his Mother and request entrance. Then the girls are paraded before him, and he signals his choice for the night. Then there are many hours of preparation as the girl is scrubbed and bathed by virgins, painted and perfumed, dusted with henna … Can you imagine how it must vex a man of hot blood and impatience?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘At last she is brought to his room by two of the older ladies and he takes her hand and draws her inside. The rest we can perhaps imagine. She must submit to his every wish. And in the morning, any money that is left in the chamber is hers by right.’
‘So she is a whore?’
‘Is she? Or a kept wife? After that night, the girl may never see the Sultan again. He may be the only man she ever lies with. The date is carefully registered, in case she falls pregnant. If not, she may merely grow old in the prison of the women’s quarters, and eventually be exiled to the Palace of Tears.’ She was becoming too melancholy. ‘Sit beside me,’ she said.
‘I prefer to stand.’
‘Do you think, if you were Sultan, you would choose a girl like me?’
‘I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever be Sultan.’
‘Are all Englishmen so reserved as you?’
‘We try.’
‘If you were Italian you’d be on top of me by now.’
‘I prefer to be English, thank you.’
She regarded this lean, handsome, mysterious, drily humorous emissary of the Queen Elizabeth with curiosity. It was time to be more plain-spoken then. They said that was the English way. ‘Have no fear. You are in no danger here.’
He looked puzzled. ‘I didn’t think we were especially – though there is much I am uneasy about.’
‘Then know this. The Sultana, but no one else, knows that your companions are Knights of St John, and that you all fought at Malta and Lepanto.’
He was already on his feet. ‘How the devil—’ They were in greatest danger here, as good as dead. The Turks regarded the Knights of St John as their bitterest, most implacable enemies. At
Lepanto, had they not made straight for the Flagship of the Order, specifically to destroy it at any cost?
Esperanza Malachi soothed him. ‘The Sultana loves to tease and to taunt, but you are in no danger. It was she who arranged for you to be kept here tonight. The Sultana knows much, and some of what she knows, I know – but she is very discreet. And my mistress’ – she bit her lip – ‘she would not be displeased, she would take no action – if word were to come to you and your companions that there is a secret pact between the Ottoman throne and the Tatar nations of the Asian steppes.’
Now he sat beside her, so that she might speak as quietly as possible. They could both die for this. ‘Go on.’
‘Sultan Murad himself wants peace. He dislikes war, not least the expense of it. But others in the Divan require it – perpetual jihad against the Cross – so an alliance with the Tatars suits all. It is a kind of a balance. And the Tatars, not the Turks, can do the fighting. Yet my mistress feels this might be more widely known. She has distaste at the idea of the Tatar nations riding against any Christian power, as in the days of Ghenghiz Khan. Her Catholic birth, her Venetian loyalties—’
‘Yes yes,’ he cut in. ‘Where are they riding, and when?’
‘The Tatars are riding against Moscow.’
He nodded slowly, thinking fast. ‘So much was guessed. Is that all?’
‘But all the Tatar nations. The Crimea Tatars led by their great warlord Devlet Giray, the Nogai Tatars, the Kuban under his banner too, perhaps those from further east as well.’
‘They have raided before. The Russians and Tatars have always fought. The nomads of the steppes raided north the same summer as Lepanto. It is no surprise they will again.’
‘This time it is no mere raid. It is a full-scale invasion, a war of extermination.’
It was a terrible phrase. ‘How many?’
‘Perhaps one hundred thousand.’
The Black Sea is flowing north, through summer meadows.
The Knights had been right in their guesswork.
She said, ‘You must know that they will cross the Oka river at the ford, close by the Russian defensive line, by night. And they have been gifted with many of the finest Ottoman muskets, given military and siege advice. It may even be that some companies of Janizaries ride with them.’
‘No field guns?’
She shook her head. ‘I do not know.’
‘They have no siegecraft.’
Again she shook her head. ‘They are the finest, most ferocious horsemen in the world.’
Now Nicholas understood. This upstart Christian power of Muscovy to the Ottoman north was to be snuffed out like a candle. No mere nomad cattle raid, taking what animals you could round up and then disappearing away south over those measureless Scythian plains … The Tatar armies, with Ottoman support, meant to raze Moscow to the ground. And then perhaps establish a new Tatar khanate in the Kremlin – was that possible? All the Russias had been under the foreign yoke before, for many hundreds of years. A powerful new Mohammedan Tatar empire, loyal to the Ottomans, with a hundred thousand mounted warriors under arms, on the very borders of Europe …
‘When?’
She shrugged. ‘This summer.’
‘Then we are already too late.’ His voice rose. ‘Why are we even being told this? What can we do about it now?’
‘My mistress has only recently learned of it herself. You too are going to Moscow. And an army so large rides slowly. You may yet arrive first. And you are English. Allies of Czar Ivan.’
‘I’m not sure if we’re allies exactly …’
‘You might send urgent word back to your Queen. She might send English reinforcements for Moscow via the north, over the White Sea.’
‘Very unlikely.’ He shook his head. ‘Queen Elizabeth knows well how expensive foreign wars are. And this Sultana plays a dangerous game.’
‘I, too, am in danger, telling you this. I know it.’
He took her hand.
‘You cannot depart tonight,’ she said. ‘You cannot even get past the guard.’
‘You’d be surprised what my companions can do.’
All her flirtation was gone now. She saw visions of war, ransacked cities, burning and desolation.
He saw her sadness and kissed her. She pulled him towards her. ‘Lie with me.’
‘It will still avail you nothing. Politically, I mean. I’ll be telling you no pillow secrets afterwards.’
‘Just lie with me,’ she said, thinking of the girls in the harem who slept with the Sultan only once in a lifetime, draping slim arms around his neck and pulling him close.
