The Walls of Byzantium (4 page)

Oh my God
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CHAPTER TWO

THE CITY OF MISTRA, SPRING 1392

The darkness in the hole was complete and heavy, clinging to the little girl like a thing from hell. She felt it all around her, closing in with its searching tentacles, clawing its way into her soul with its foul presence. It stroked her hair and sent shivers up her spine with its reeking breath. It moaned with ghastly insistence, rising to a shrill scream when it felt itself denied.

Never before had she felt such fear.

She was curled into a little ball, her head sheltered beneath her hands in supplication to a God she knew had abandoned her for her disobedience.

I swear by my brother’s life I will never again disobey my mother. Let me see the morning and I will be good. I swear it
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The next morning seemed an impossibility. It felt like hours since that awful crash outside had told her that the storm had brought a branch down at the entrance to her hiding place. At first she’d tried to push it away, using all the weight of her seven-year-old body. But as it had refused to budge, she’d felt the first surges of panic rise up in her, quickening her heartbeat to a tempo that seemed to convulse her whole being.

Help. Help me. Help me. Help me
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But the panic had taken her voice. And the noise of the storm outside, as it ebbed and surged through the roots of the giant tree, drowned any tiny sound she could muster.

Please Father Jesus make Alexis come. I will never be bad again. I swear on his life
.

To swear on her brother’s life was to promise a lot. There was no one more worshipped in Anna’s world than her only brother, three years her senior and idolatrously close to her God. But her brother didn’t know of this hiding place. One of the few secrets she kept from him was this little cave she’d found amidst the roots of the oak that grew in the corner of the Peribleptos Monastery walls. And she hadn’t told him for the very good reason that it provided the perfect hiding place in their games. Not even the monks who taught them knew about it.

Now she wished, with all her heart, that he knew of this place.

What was that noise?

She had heard a scratching noise. She was sure of it. It came from the entrance. It was closer than the storm. It came again.

They are coming for me
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She turned away from the sound and began to tear at the earth, clawing great handfuls from the blackness in front of her to escape whatever was coming. Dirt flew into her hair, her eyes, her mouth, engulfing her as she scrambled to get away.

Father Jesus, Alexis, Mother Mary … help me, help me, help me
.

Then she felt air.

Miraculously, her fingers were free and she felt air on her palms.

Freedom!

She threw every last ounce of effort into widening the hole
she’d created. She brought her other arm up and pulled aside the earth and grass to make the smallest of windows. She hoisted herself up and looked into the night, lifting her nose to breathe in the scent of pine.

Then she screamed.

Two eyes, yellow and beyond evil, were staring into hers.

Anna shivered. The night was warm but the memory of that night was still vivid. She’d managed to block it for so many years and it was only in these days of terrible suspense, as the Ottoman army bore down on her city, that it had risen unbidden from the depths of her unconscious.

Had she kept her promise to God? No, she could not claim that. Had she obeyed her mother without question from that moment onward? Assuredly not.

But then had her crime been so terrible? All she had wanted was to see the Despot and his new Despoena, Bartolomea.

But her mother had forbidden her. She’d taken her hand and led her past the honey cakes, plums and spiced chestnuts, past the partridge and quail in saffron with fried mushrooms, past hares baked in wine and grey mullet from Rhegis, past everything that Bartolomea would eat without her.

Once in bed, she’d determined that she would see the new Despoena, whatever it took, and she’d climbed out of her window and on to the branches of an apple tree.

But just as Bartolomea’s delicate toe emerged from her litter, the branch had snapped and Anna had fallen on to a clothes line from which hung some of her mother’s finest dresses.

So Anna had run away to the one place she knew she would not be found.

Now, eight years on, it was night again and a new fear was
all around her. Anna was standing on the balcony of her house in the city of Mistra, looking out over the Vale of Sparta where the lights of countless campfires studded the darkness like fireflies and the conversation of fifty thousand Turks drifted up the hill in a single whisper.

Around her, filling the streets, squares, balconies and battlements of their small city, stood people looking on in silent vigil.

Anna felt a presence behind her.

Her brother was watching her. ‘Are you frightened?’ he asked quietly.

Anna turned to look at him. She smiled. ‘Do you remember when you found me, all those years past, wandering outside the city walls in my nightdress?’

Alexis nodded.

‘Do you remember I said then that I couldn’t remember what happened to me that night?’

Her brother nodded again.

‘Well, I’ve remembered.’

She turned back to look over the valley, and Alexis moved to stand next to her at the balustrade. Below them, far out on the plain, a deep drum had begun to beat. Then the squeak of heavy wheels could be heard between its thumps, and from among the campfires emerged horsemen holding torches aloft. Behind them rolled the engines of destruction: trebuchets, mangonels and tall, multi-tiered platforms with dripping hides hung from their sides. Anna had never seen such monsters.

‘And this is more terrifying?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘You see, this I understand. The Turks want our empire because it’s the last fortress to defend Christendom. Once they have it, then they can conquer the rest of the world.’

Alexis took his sister in his arms. ‘Anna, all that is left of the Empire is Constantinople and our little despotate. That’s all there is. We just have to hold them off long enough for the armies of Christendom to gather and drive them back.’

Anna shivered. She pressed her cheek against the hard buttons that ran up the front of his tunic. ‘Will I go into the Sultan’s harem?’ she asked.

Alexis laughed. ‘No, the Turks don’t enslave the well born, and our family is the most honourable in the despotate. You’ll be safe, I promise you.’

But eight years ago Anna had made a promise to God and not kept her faith.

‘Will Emperor Manuel in Constantinople not come to our aid?’ she asked.

‘The Emperor has no money,’ Alexis replied. ‘No emperor has had any money since the Franks pillaged Constantinople two hundred years ago.’

‘But surely Mistra has money?’ asked Anna.

‘Yes,’ said Alexis, ‘we’re rich. But not rich enough.’

‘What about Monemvasia?’ pursued Anna. ‘You’re always telling me that the Mamonases are one of the richest families in the world. Surely the Archon will come to our aid?’

Alexis turned to look up the hill, to the very top where the citadel’s bulk was silhouetted by a giant beacon blazing from its tallest tower.

‘That beacon was lit a week ago,’ he said. ‘It’s fifty miles to Monemvasia and there are beacons on every hill between. They’ll have seen the signal for days now but still we’ve had no word.’

Brother and sister were silent for a long while. The siege engines had stopped in front of the campfires and, if anything,
seemed more menacing in silhouette. Great boulders would be hurled from the trebuchets tomorrow, boulders that would make short work of the city’s walls.

But did the Turks have cannon? Anna’s father, Simon Laskaris, was Protostrator of Mistra, second only in rank to the Despot. He had been urging Theodore for years now to invest in these new machines that used some form of igniting powder to hurl a stone. Indeed, a Hungarian had presented himself at the court only three years past, ready to sell this new technology. But the Despot had merely laughed and waved the man away. He’d rather use the money for new churches.

Anna said, ‘So Bayezid means to conquer the world?’

Her brother nodded. ‘This Sultan is far more warlike than his father. He has boasted that he will water his horse at the altar of St Peter’s in Rome.’

Anna shuddered at the thought of such desecration. Rome might be the seat of a Catholic Pope but he was still a Christian.

Just then a light gust of wind lifted the cooking of a thousand campfires.

‘Come, Anna,’ Alexis said. ‘We’re in God’s hands now. Let’s go inside and see what our mother has for us to eat.’

Anna did sleep that night. So quiet and well disciplined was the Ottoman host that only the neighs of their horses and the sound of mallet on tent peg disturbed the rest of those citizens of Mistra that lay abed.

When dawn came, it was as if a city of tents had risen from the ground in the night. The people of Mistra, emerging sleepily from their bedrooms, wondered at the sight before them. Even the cats were silent.

This was order indeed. For as far as the eye could see there
were row upon row of tents, with streets and squares laid out between them and corrals for the horses on the banks of the Evrotas River. At their centre stood a gigantic pavilion, made up of silks of every colour imaginable. It had gardens around it with rows of fruit trees in tubs and caged birds suspended from their branches and neat lawns on either side with borders of tulips gently swaying in the dawn breeze.

Ten minutes later, the Protostrator Simon Laskaris and his daughter were hurrying up the streets on their way to the citadel. The streets were full of jostling crowds anxious for news or simply there to fill amphorae with the water they’d need for the siege. Simon was pleased to see that the praetors, whom he’d ordered be armed the night before, were keeping some sort of order in the queues for the wellheads. The city’s population was already swelled to triple its normal size by the influx of refugees from the countryside.

When she’d heard that her father wanted her to accompany him to meet the Despot, Anna had guessed that he wanted her with him to amuse the Despoena while the men talked. In fact he’d been so impressed by her calm at dinner on the previous evening that he wanted her with him as an example to the city.

And it seemed to be working. People stopped to bow to the Protostrator and stare at the girl striding behind him. They were used to seeing Anna chasing her brother through the streets with a catapult. They knew her as a tomboy, with mud on her knees, the women secretly worrying for the day they knew she would be forced to make some illustrious marriage.

But here she was dressed as a woman.

Anna Laskaris had Norman blood in her veins and it showed
in the cascade of hair, soft and red as fox fur, that fell to her waist and in the two malachite eyes that stared out on the world from a face traced with the lightest patina of freckles. Dressed in a chemise of the finest white lawn and with the plaits of her hair braided with flowers, she radiated calm.

They arrived at the citadel to find the Despot already dressed in armour, his breastplate burnished to a perfect sheen. With him was the Despoena Bartolomea, who hurried over to greet them. ‘Anna, you look ravishing! How many soldiers did you distract from their important work on your way up? Come, let’s go and feed my marmoset and you can tell me how things are. That man’ – she nodded in the direction of her husband – ‘tells me nothing.’

The Despot, however, was not to be cheered by the sight of Anna. When the women left, he was still arguing with a Frankish knight over a scroll that lay on the table between them. Eventually, the Despot ripped it in two, handing one half to the knight who bowed stiffly and left.

‘Normans!’ said Theodore. ‘They can’t write and they won’t do anything unless you pay them.’ He looked down. ‘Get up, Simon. I can’t talk to you down there.’

Laskaris rose from his knee.

‘It’s their way of sealing a contract,’ said the Despot, pulling a chair to the table. ‘You put your mark on the paper and then tear it in two. They claim their money when we join the two bits later. Ingenious. Wine?’

The Protostator took the goblet.

‘Sweet wine from Mount Ganos.’ The Despot raised his glass and drained it in a gulp. He wiped his beard and looked suddenly at his friend. ‘Do we still have Mount Ganos, Simon?’ he asked.

‘I fear not, Majesty. Most of Thrace belongs to Bayezid now.’

The Despot sighed. ‘Well at least we’ll still have the Malvasia, assuming those Mamonas pirates haven’t sold the last barrel to the Sultan. Did you know they sell it to the Sultan?’

‘I had heard something,’ murmured the Protostrator, sipping his wine.

‘Horses too, I gather,’ went on the Despot. ‘Since the Turk took Adrianopolis for his capital and renamed it Edirne, they’ve been doing regular business there. The Sultan wants to build up his cavalry and Mamonas has access to Outremer stock. Apparently they’re fast and fierce. Destriers that bite their way into battle.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, we can’t afford them any more than we can cannon. Let’s go outside and see what’s going on.’