The Walls of Byzantium (50 page)

‘They have been offered a better price for the cannon they’re building,’ he said. ‘By the Empire.’

‘The Empire? But it’s penniless.’

‘They have found money.’

‘So give them more money.’

Mamonas scratched his chin. There was three days of stubble on it. ‘It’s not so simple. The Venetians have persuaded themselves that this crusade will succeed. They are nervous.’

‘They are fools,’ Suleyman snorted. ‘We will beat this crusade and punish them for their cowardice.’ He paused. ‘So what do we do? I want Constantinople. How do I get my cannon?’

‘You wait, lord. Crush the crusade and then talk again. Meanwhile …’ Mamonas was looking beyond Suleyman to the door to the staircase, checking they were alone. He’d heard that Anna might be with him.

‘Meanwhile?’

He turned to look Suleyman in the eye. ‘Meanwhile, you give them the Magoris boy. They want him.’

‘Why would they want him?’

‘They wouldn’t tell me.’

Suleyman frowned.

Why does everyone want Luke Magoris?

But then why did it matter? The more he considered the idea of handing Luke over to the Venetians, the more he liked it. It would remove him from Anna.

But what about Zoe? What about their agreement?

Suleyman’s mind wandered to his usual picture of Zoe: naked on the bed beside him. No other woman had engendered such hunger in him. He wanted to keep Zoe.

But hadn’t he fulfilled his side of the bargain? She had given him Anna and he had delivered her Luke Magoris. He’d never
promised that she could have him indefinitely. And this was an affair of state. He wondered, briefly, how much of his daughter’s activities the man standing beside him knew.

‘When do they want him?’

‘As soon as possible, lord. It could happen tomorrow or when you go north. There will be Venetians with the Christian army.’

Suleyman considered this. If he handed Luke over tomorrow, there would be difficult questions to answer from Zoe. Better to do it later.

Then Suleyman’s mind moved on to a new idea. Having Luke escape and be taken by the Venetians might prove very useful. Especially if he then took certain information to the enemy.

‘All right.’ He turned towards the door. ‘I will take him north and arrange for him to escape. I will tell you where your Venetians can pick him up.’

PART THREE

NICOPOLIS

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

NICOPOLIS, BULGARIA, 24 SEPTEMBER 1396

The great fortress of Nicopolis stood next to the Danube at a point where the river was nearly a mile wide. On this evening, the standard that flew sluggishly from its tallest tower was the flag of the Prophet, topped with a moon, which meant that its experienced commander, Dogan Beg, had yet to surrender to the two crusader armies encamped to its front.

Watching the armies from the prow of a hill was the heir to the Ottoman throne. Behind him and flanked by Kapikulu cavalry, was Luke.

The armies were as impressive as they were different. That commanded by the Comte de Nevers was the more flamboyant, with a vast green tent at its centre surrounded by sixteen magnificent banners given by his father, the Duke of Burgundy. Each bore the image of the Virgin Mary, patron of crusaders, and beneath it the Count’s motto ‘
Ic houd
’ or ‘I never yield’. Surrounding it were the pavilions of the other French and Burgundian commanders: the Admiral de Vienne and Marshal Boucicaut; the Comte d’Eu and the veteran Sire de Coucy. Further out, a sea of gaudy silk washed across the wasted fields like a quilt and beyond stood a tilting ground with stands and
emblazoned shields and pennants and all the accoutrements of the joust.

Suleyman laughed. ‘This is more Lenten fair than army camp. All that’s missing are the dancing bears! Where are the scouting parties, the sentries? Where are the siege engines?’

Luke rose in his stirrups to see better.

Yes, where are the siege engines?

The camp was positioned out of arrow range of the fortress walls and in front of it were some desultory earthworks but no catapults or battering rams or siege towers. And there were certainly no cannon of any size.

The other camp was better. Here flew the flag of Sigismund, King of Hungary, and alongside it fluttered the standards of Wallachia and Transylvania. The tents there were less colourful and there was no tilting yard, fewer banners and much less silk. It was the nearer of the two and Luke could hear the sound of hammer on anvil and see the smoke of campfires curling into the sky as soldiers prepared their evening meals.

The land around the fortress consisted of blackened fields lined with charred stubble, in one of which stood a scarecrow dressed in Saracen armour, a donkey’s tail attached to its turban. Surrounding these was a landscape of gently rising hills and scattered woods from which clouds of starlings exploded like rain-bursts.

Beyond both armies and the fortress lay the mottled brown of the Danube with its marshy islands and, across it, the plains of Wallachia marching north towards distant mountains. The water looked sullen in the late-afternoon sun and upon it, lying at anchor, were ships flying the flag of Venice.

How many men are there in these armies? Enough to beat the Turks?

Luke heard his neighbour’s stallion snort and its rider’s mail
clink with the movement. The day was still hot and flies gathered on the heads of the animals to be shaken aside. These Kapikulu had been his silent companions on the long ride from Constantinople along with other, more talkative sipahis from Anatolia. Zoe had explained to Luke that the sipahis were akin to the feudal knights of Christendom in that they held a plot of land, or
timar
, directly from the Sultan and were expected to come to war with retainers equipped at their expense. They were magnificently dressed in richly decorated mail and plate armour, with chest medallions and pointed turban helmets, and they carried maces and bows and had large quivers of arrows slung at their sides.

Suleyman had chosen to take just Anna with him to the crusade. But Zoe was unpeturbed. She didn’t enjoy life on the march and staying behind gave her the opportunity to further investigate Siward’s tomb before Luke’s letter arrived with Plethon.

Throughout the journey, Anna had remained hidden from view inside a carriage at the rear of the column. If the thought of Anna so close had raised Luke’s spirits, the country they’d travelled through, the woeful evidence of an empire in its final days, had lowered them again.

To begin with, they’d ridden across Thrace, a land where birds had taken the place of people. It was a flat, open country, crossed by rivers and mirrored by lakes, which had once been rich in corn and wheat and where the peasants had lived in prosperous villages with fat churches and fatter oxen in their fields. Now it was desolate and the fields were choked with weeds and the villages abandoned, their churches open to the sky.

As they rode further west, there appeared the first signs of change. People of darker skin were rebuilding the villages and
pointed minarets were replacing domes. With them were groups of black-coated Bektashi dervishes who would provide the religious nucleus of their new communities.

One night they stayed at a
zaviye
, or hospice for travellers or settlers from Anatolia. Luke had usually slept with the horses, often with no dinner inside him. But that night, a sipahi knight had taken pity on him and had brought him roasted bird with a sauce of saffron and mushrooms and unsmoked honey and Luke had slept deeply and dreamt of Anna.

The next day they came to villages being built by people of lighter skin who didn’t seem to want a church or mosque, people who dressed in simple robes and wore no crucifixes or other ornamentation and barely looked up as they rode past.

‘Bogomils.’ It was the sipahi knight who’d given him the food. He spat.

‘What are they?’ asked Luke, wondering if the man spoke Greek. ‘They don’t look as if they’ve come from your homeland.’

‘They haven’t. They’re from around here. They’re heretics to your church but suitable to us for repopulating these lands. They’re insolent but they understand the country and work hard.’

‘Why are they heretics?’

‘Because of what they believe. They think that God had two sons, one bad and one good. The bad one created the world, so all material things are evil. They don’t like priests or popes or churches or any form of authority. So they were persecuted by their Christian lords. But we leave them alone as long as they pay their taxes. And they don’t believe in fighting.’ He spat again.

‘They won’t fight for their beliefs?’ asked Luke.

‘Not here. But in France they did. They were called Cathars there and your pope launched a crusade against them two centuries ago. He razed whole cities to exterminate them in the name of your God.’

The sipahi knight had turned in his saddle to look at Luke, his dark eyes bright beneath the shadow of his helmet.

‘Do you know what this crusade has done so far to win the hearts of the people they are liberating from us? Since crossing the river at Orşova, they have harassed and murdered the local peasantry. They massacred most of the citizens of Rahova even after they promised to spare them. Is this your God of love?’

Luke looked to the sky as if He might defend himself.

But all he saw were birds. So many that it seemed that heaven had sent a plague. There’d been herons, cormorants, ibis and white-bellied geese. Kites and falcons had ridden the currents while swifts and warblers darted and screamed their way low across the fields and lakes around them. Many of the birds were on their way south ahead of winter. Others had chosen to stay in this land devastated by war.

An empire of birds
.

That evening, north of Kazanlak, they’d reached the foothills of the mountains and the guards had donned their cloaks and wrapped them tight against a chilling wind, their heads sunk deep into cowls and their eyes searching the landscape for bandits. The mountains here rose through pine-forested sides to snow-capped peaks where eagles circled on their giant wings spread out in benediction.

They had ridden down into Tarnovo as the sun fled west, turning the meandering Yantra river below into spilt honey. This city had once been the ‘Third Rome’, the capital of the Bulgarian Tsars that, three years ago, had held out for four
brave months against the Turkish onslaught. Now it was the meeting point of armies.

The road was narrow, allowing only pairs, and Luke found himself again riding beside the sipahi knight who seemed to have attached himself since giving Luke food. In front of them rode Suleyman and he was talking to his companion loudly enough for Luke to overhear.

He was talking about the Christian commanders. The ones he claimed to respect were, on the French and Burgundian side, the Admiral Jean de Vienne and Sire de Coucy and, on the Hungarian side, King Sigismund himself and the Voivode of Wallachia, Mircea, whose army had defeated the Turks at Rovine a year beforehand. He also admired the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Philibert de Naillac, who had sailed there from their fortress in Rhodes with a detachment of monk-knights.

‘If they have any sense,’ Suleyman had said, ‘they will listen to these men. But they won’t. De Nevers is vain and stupid and thinks only of Burgundian glory and he has the right of what they call the
avant-garde
. His knights will charge and our Serbian knights will stop them. You’ll see.’

And Luke had listened and remembered what he’d heard.

He was thinking about it now as he stared down at the two Christian armies outside Nicopolis.

The Serbians will be in their front line
.

He didn’t know why, but he felt that this information would be of importance to the crusaders. He looked over to the tents of Burgundy. Somewhere in there would be men like de Vienne and de Coucy who would know what to do with it.

But how could he get it to them?

Luke didn’t sleep at all that night. It wasn’t just that he had not been given a tent, being tied instead to a wagon wheel where the camp dogs fed on the scraps from janissary cauldrons and howled and fought their way through the night. It wasn’t that a gentle drizzle had begun shortly after nightfall and continued ever since, soaking him to the bone. Luke had not slept because he kept turning over in his mind what he now knew of the battle to come..