The Walls of Byzantium (58 page)

Bayezid’s party came back through Thrace and the birds had seemed to travel with them, or at least those that had not already gone south for the winter, and they were fat, black creatures that had perhaps gorged themselves on the flesh of two thousand Christian martyrs.

Luke knew that the memory of that slaughter would stay with him forever, that his worst nightmares would be of men kneeling silently on blood-soaked ground, of exhausted executioners turning their old eyes to their sultan for some small measure of mercy and finding none within those cold, bloodshot eyes.

Approaching the town of Stenia, they’d seen the walls of Constantinople in the distance, defiant above the mist of an autumn morn. Here they’d crossed the Bosporus and ridden down its banks to the new castle of Anadolu Hisar, built four years past to stop help coming from the Black Sea.

Now it was a prison.

As they rode up to its gates, men were being paraded along
the cliffs overlooking the channel and many were familiar to Luke. De Nevers, Boucicaut and d’Eu were standing in chains and all had days of dirty beard on their faces. Their once-splendid hauberks hung from gaunt bodies stripped of armour and they were wrapped in filthy bandages still black with their blood.

Their guards pushed them into line and the Sultan drew aside his curtains and laughed at their misery and drank toasts to the ransoms they’d fetch. And these men who’d once commanded armies turned their heads to look at the tall Greek who rode with Bayezid in clean clothes and no chains and their hearts were filled with hate.

The Sultan had come here for a purpose. Helped from his litter, he walked over to where he could see the waters below. Then he clapped his hands, toothache forgotten. ‘Is that him?’

A long line of ships was making its slow way down the channel.

‘Yes, lord. In the front boat.’

Bayezid clapped his hands again and turned to the line of chained men. ‘De Nevers!’ he shouted in French. ‘See! Hungary still comes to your rescue!’

The Turks roared at that; even the grave imams raised a smile. The guards slapped each other on the back and yelled insults and challenges to the boats below, and in the first of the galleys, the King of Hungary clutched the foredeck rail and looked up at his former allies through a film of tears.

Luke could do nothing except look as well but he’d have given his fortune to be somewhere else. He saw Sigismund below, his long cloak wrapped around his hunched frame, and he saw de Naillac by his side: two men sailing home to tell of the catastrophe that was Nicopolis.

A voice came from the line of prisoners behind him. ‘Traitor! May you rot in hell!’

Luke turned and saw Boucicaut staring at him.

Then de Nevers spoke. ‘We will get home one day, Greek. And when we do, you will pay for what you have done. This I swear.’

In Edirne, Anna was sitting in misery with Suleyman’s grandmother.

The Valide Sultan Gülçiçek, now seventy, was a woman smelt but seldom seen. Among the many scents of the harem, among its shifting essences of food and flowers and mastic, hers was a very specific smell of decay.

It was autumn when the Valide Sultan became most tetchy, being prone, at this time of year, to confront the issue of her age and, in confronting it, to banish the younger women from her presence.

It was also the time of year that the Chief Black Eunuch, the Kislar Agasi, spent most time planning how best to distract his mistress by way of entertainment. In a month’s time, winter furnishings would be introduced to the harem, soft velvets hung in place of sullen linens and the calm of milder weather would descend like manna upon the rooms, pools, courtyards and lawns of his little kingdom.

Until then, he needed to extemporise.

On this particular evening, he’d invited a travelling bard-poet and his apprentice to give of their best. First, the
ozan
had told amusing stories to the strum of his disciple’s
baglama
. Then he’d dared suggest a musical rhyming contest between the quartet of wives allotted to Bayezid by the Koran. Each
kadin
had embellished the game further by suggesting forfeits for
those unable to find a suitable quatrain for the rhyme. There was little love between them.

The mother of Bayezid, unquestioned ruler of the harem and much beyond, was sitting on a low couch in the shadows of a little alcove before a tall window covered by an intricate wooden grille. Behind her, the evening light was caught in coloured glass and horn so that it arrived around her as tiny shards that exploded among the beads and sequins of the cushions.

She was, as she liked to be, almost invisible.

The room outside the alcove was blue and gold. Tiles from Iznik rose in patterns on all four sides to a height where gold mosaic took over. Above the mosaic, on a frieze beneath the dome, the calligraphy of earnest Koranic injunction swirled. In the centre was a small pool, strewn with the flowering of late roses and, drinking from it, a child sambar, its spindly legs mirrored in the water. Around the marble floor were bowls of apples and almonds and clear mastic sweets. A single cushion was propped against the pool’s wall and on it rested a zither, a tambourine and a little drum. Carpets were hung on the walls and before them knelt bare-breasted servant girls who stared at the ground. They were young and had gold bands on their upper arms and had, it seemed, escaped the Valide Sultana’s injunction on youth.

Anna had no idea why she’d been summoned to this room. She sat in uncomfortable silence next to the alcove listening to the ozan’s game and smelling the smell of Bayezid’s dying mother.

Then there was a cough and quiet fell upon the women.

Gülçiçek spoke. ‘You do not like this game, Anna Mamonas?’ The voice was muffled by its journey through the veil but no
softness had attached to it. It was low and there was malice in every word.

‘I am sorry, highness, my mind was elsewhere,’ she said into the stillness.

A pause. Only the sambar dared lift its head, its tiny horns hooped in question.

‘I think you were thinking of a Greek. Am I right? One who betrayed his kind at the field of Nicopolis?’

There was stifled laughter from within the alcove. It belonged to Nefise, the Sultan’s aunt and Gülçiçek’s constant companion.

Anna didn’t reply. She had heard Suleyman for herself. She didn’t believe it.

The ozan and his apprentice were quietly gathering up their instruments and preparing to depart. Gülçiçek addressed them.

‘You haven’t finished,’ she said sharply. ‘The lady wishes to play our game. Give her a rhyme.’

The older of the men looked at Anna and then round at the kadins. No one spoke or moved. The apprentice carefully lifted his instrument.

‘Give her a rhyme about the Prince Suleyman since he is to be her husband. What could be more fitting?’

The ozan sat and gazed at the floor. Then he lifted his head and cleared his throat as his apprentice began to strum the strings of the bağlama.

He sang:

‘
The prince before the city walls

Calls out to those that guard

This gilded shadow of ancient Rome
 …’

There was silence. The rhyme was deliberately easy. Three lines were all that Anna had to give, three lines of poetry that would deny what was left of her empire.

Three lines she could not say.

The silence rose into the dome and stayed, pregnant, above them. Anna felt her anger rising.

‘A forfeit, I think,’ came the voice from within, soft with satisfaction. ‘Now, what would be appropriate?’

There was a rustle in the dark and a whisper met by a wheezing laugh.

‘Yes!’ came the voice. ‘That’s it! A question that demands the truth.’ She paused. ‘Are you a virgin, Anna Mamonas?’

Anna recoiled.

‘The marriage to the Mamonas boy,’ continued the Sultana. ‘An unconsummated pleasure, he tells us. So the answer must be yes, surely?’

Anna still could not speak.

‘It seems simple enough,’ came the voice from the darkness, soft and full of hatred. ‘Will my grandson have a virgin for his queen, as he believes he will? Or will he have a whore?’

‘Highness,’ Anna whispered, looking into the darkness, ‘what do you want of me?’

But the answer came from someone else.

‘Enough!’

It was Suleyman and he was striding into the room. He wore a riding coat that billowed behind him and high boots mottled with dust.

‘Enough, Grandmother,’ he said more softly, turning to kneel before her.

‘Enough?’ asked the woman from the shades. ‘Would you not like to hear the answer to that question?’

The heir to the Ottoman Empire bowed low. He was breathing deeply. ‘It is, I think, a question better put to her by the man she will marry,’ he said calmly. ‘I will take her to a place where we may speak with greater ease.’

There was a snort of displeasure from the darkness and Suleyman rose. He bowed again, then turned to Anna and stretched out his hand. ‘Will you come with me into the garden?’

She rose and went before him from the room, not bowing as she left.

They stepped into a scene of moonlit geometry. Low hedges of yew enclosed beds of flowers that had been coaxed to the challenge of providing autumnal scent by expert gardeners. Around them were lawns and a perimeter of fruit trees that almost succeeded in masking the high wall that was the limit of the harem’s world.

The lawn was scattered with the shadows of sleeping animals and, between the trees, the domes of smoking leaves. A sudden breeze carried their rich smell to Anna and she shivered.

In between the hedged borders were four terraced walks that converged at a tiny lake where stood an island with a chiosk enclosed by a lattice interwoven with jasmine and honeysuckle. Around it, the waters were strewn with lily pads and leaves and an arched bridge connected the island to the garden.

Suleyman was leading her towards it and soon they had crossed the bridge and were sitting on a stone bench within. The smell of burning leaves was fainter but still with them and Anna closed her eyes and filled her lungs with its unpainted goodness.

Suleyman said, ‘An oasis, I should imagine.’

Anna opened her eyes. ‘This island? Yes, lord.’ She was trying
to keep her voice steady. ‘An oasis within the desert that is your father’s harem.’

‘A desert?’ he asked. ‘Is it not a place of beauty?’

‘No,’ replied Anna. ‘It is a dry place of scheming old women and it is strewn with the carcasses of those they do not like.’

‘I suspect she just was trying to frighten you.’

Anna looked out through a gap in the vines to the lawns. She saw the trees beyond and she heard something faint within them. ‘Did you know that there are caged birds in those trees?’ She laughed softly. ‘You have your walls and you almost manage to disguise them with trees. But then what do you do? You put caged birds in their branches!’

Anna looked over at Suleyman and saw his profile against the fading sky. She saw that he was without fight that night.

They were both quiet for a long while, thinking of what had nearly happened on a bloody piece of ground.

‘Would you have done it?’ Suleyman asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You love him that much?’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet he betrayed an army.’

‘Did he? You let him escape. It seems careless.’

Suleyman didn’t answer. Luke Magoris was removed, Anna had submitted to him and Constantinople would fall. Nothing else mattered. It was victory, so why did it not feel like victory?

‘You can do a lot of good as the wife of the Sultan … Save whole populations from the sword. Constantinople’s, for instance.’

Anna flinched.

Damn you, Suleyman
.

The Prince sighed. ‘I merely tell you what is true.’

‘So tell me something more. Did he betray the army?’

Suleyman rose. ‘I said what I said to keep him here. Surely that should please you?’

‘You said what you said because Zoe wants him here. It is your agreement.’

The harem had given her much time to think. He shrugged.

‘Well, whatever the past, you submitted to me and I lowered the sword.’ He looked out again over the garden. A sambar stirred and called out in its sleep. ‘How long will it take for you to come willingly?’

Anna breathed deeply. The smell of the leaves was fainter.

You can do a lot of good as wife of the Sultan
.

She looked back at him. ‘Willingly?’

‘Willingly.’

‘Six months,’ she said. ‘It will take me six months. Then I will come willingly. But tomorrow I want to ride as far from this place as I can. And I don’t want to come back inside these walls. Ever.’

Suleyman waited.

‘There’s more. I will not marry you until my marriage to Damian is annulled. It must be set aside in the eyes of the Church.
My
church.’

Suleyman seemed to be lost in thought, but then he laughed. ‘Well, it’s not the language of poets,’ he said, ‘but I dare say I can agree to these things. Where would you like to ride to?’