Emperor's Winding Sheet (21 page)

“No,” said the Emperor to that. And not a man of his council advised saying yes. But Notaras spoke up, declaring he was speaking for many of them, and urged the Emperor to leave the City. “If you fall, my Lord, perhaps to some stray arrow, the City and the Empire both are lost forever; if you are in safety, the loss of the City itself will not be the end. Surely your presence in their midst will rouse the Westerners as nothing else can? Perhaps the Hungarians will support you, perhaps the Serbs. Your presence in his rear may make the Sultan lift the siege at once.”

“No,” said the Emperor.

“My Lord, this advice is the advice of us all,” said Phrantzes.

“Theophilus?” said the Emperor, looking round for him. “What do you say, dear cousin?”

“The same as all the rest,” said Theophilus, quietly, fixing his unsmiling eyes on the Emperor.

“Justiniani?” said the Emperor, as though he would appeal to him.

“I will make ready one of my ships to take you safely hence, Lord Emperor,” said Justiniani.

The Emperor bowed his head. Then he said, “No. Do not ask it of me. Ask me rather to remain with you. I am ready to die with you.”

“My Lord, prudence bids you …” Theophilus began.

“Prudence?” said the Emperor, looking up at him. “Pru dence? You tell me to leave the City, the churches, the people, the monks and nuns, the holy icons … I can see that what you advise would be for my safety, but what would the world say of me? Prudence? I would rather follow the example of the Good Shepherd, who laid down His life for His sheep.”

Then Phrantzes and Theophilus were weeping openly, and Notaras looked at his master with a fleeting softness on his proud face.

“My Lord, if you will not go,” said Justiniani in a while, “will you not at least remove your lodgings to a better place? You are too close within the walls here, too near the battered part. If they break through …”

“I must be near the walls,” said the Emperor. “I am already wearied out with riding, and I cannot give myself yet more miles to cover.”

“Nearby you must indeed be,” said Justiniani. “But need
you be just where they might break through? Suppose they got in at night? You are so near they would be upon you before there was time for warning, and if they found you sleeping, they would take you alive … I pray you, for your servants' peace of mind, take your rest farther off.”

“Very well,” said the Emperor. “I will return to Blachernae. But I will have a tent pitched just within the St. Romanus Gate. If I am as near as that there will be time for warning.”

 

SO THE NEXT DAY VRETHIKI AND STEPHANOS WERE BUSY
again. a small contingent of Justiniani's men was dispatched to help them pitch the tent, and carry things, so the hard work was swiftly accomplished with laughter and Italian voices, chatting and chaffing in their tantalizing babel, that Vrethiki with his now well practiced Latin could nearly—so it seemed to him—but not quite understand. It was a tall wide tent of purple linen they had found. Outside, it had fringes and banners, all scarlet and gold. It seemed made for ceremonies, for a king going to a tournament in a green field, rather than for the dry verge of a roadway just within the wall of a doomed, dusty City. Stephanos curtained off a portion of it for the Emperor's bed, and he found a screen behind which to unroll his bedding and Vrethiki's, out of sight of the grand men who would doubtless be coming in and out. They kept only what was needed for the barest comfort; everything else went back to Blachernae.

It was while they were still disposing things neatly in the tent that there came suddenly a thunderclap of sound. Vrethiki saw the tent walls bulge inward, like sails catching the wind, felt a moment later the blast like a gust of wind, pressing on him, hurting his ears. He and Stephanos both rushed out of the tent. They could hear cries a little distance
off, toward the Lycus valley. They scrambled hastily up the long flight of steps that climbed the back of the inner wall to the catwalk, and having reached the battlements looked anxiously down the slope to the valley bottom. A great pinkish cloud of dust hung over the wall. Through veils of thinning smoke they could see the great gun with a dribble of smoke still floating from its muzzle. It stood with its back embedded in timber balks and mud to hold its tremendous recoil. A Turkish soldier poured water on it that went up in a hiss of white steam, rolling off the hot metal.

“So they've mended it,” said Stephanos gloomily. A cannonade of balls from the smaller cannon that were drawn up in endless rows rumbled toward them. They could see the shot arching toward the walls, and hear the crack of their impact. “Come on,” said Stephanos. “Who wants to watch this dismal sight? We have work to do.”

That day the bombardment was particularly heavy. The blasts of noise rolled ceaselessly over them like the waves beating one after another on the shore. The newly recast gun was fired five times. And the fleet in the Golden Horn was maneuvering too. Little skiffs bustled round it bringing supplies; it seemed they were making ready for battle. In the afternoon the Emperor was summoned by Lukas Notaras to see what was happening at the boom; there, too, a cannonade was being fired. The Turks had set up guns behind the walls of Pera, and were firing very high into the air right over the colony, so that the balls plummeted downward onto the ships at the boom. They were not, of course, accurately aimed, but they had sunk one vessel that day, and they were enough to threaten and alarm the sailors.

“An assault is coming,” said the Emperor. “We must do all we can to be ready for it.”

On the land walls the bombardment did not cease even with darkness. The enemy fired blindly all night, hoping no doubt to prevent Justiniani's repair gangs from making the damage good. But Justiniani made a stockade farther back, across the line of the smashed and fallen inner wall, instead of at the outer wall, and he mustered troops on the terrace between the walls on either side of the gap to take the attackers in the flank. When dawn came, therefore, there was no way open into the City but the same obstacle course as before—the partly filled-up fosse, full of loose rubble, treacherous footing, then earth walls, and the stockade, grimly defended. The Turks kept up the bombardment for another day. Then, in the middle of the night, the attack came.

Thirty thousand of them rushed the breach in the walls in the Lycus valley. The Emperor, who was sleeping in his tent, was woken at once by the noise, and Vrethiki and Stephanos helped him on with his armor by lamplight. Chain corselet, great golden breastplate—Vrethiki fumbling with the straps, all fingers and thumbs in his haste—then the purple surcoat, with the double eagle woven on it, and last the sword. Hastily they prepared him, and he went out into the night.

He was gone for some three hours, and Vrethiki, who had been left behind—Stephanos would not let him go after the Emperor in the dark, but took up the cup and flask and went himself—sat trembling alone in the tent, listening to the fearful din of battle, expecting every moment to see Turks bursting into the tent. He remembered that if he were not at the Emperor's side, the City might fall, and he felt that might even be true, and he ought to disobey Stephanos and go and find the Emperor. But the blackness of the night and the noise defeated him, and he stayed where he was. Never had three hours seemed longer!

At last the Emperor returned, escorted by a handful of his Varangians, and Vrethiki jumped up, and came to help him off with his burdensome armor. The noise in the distance was gradually dying away, receding through rise and fall like an ebbing tide. But the Emperor was weeping. Silent tears ran down the hollows in his ravaged face, and he said not a word. Vrethiki brought him warm wine from a pan upon the stove, but he would not have it, and went, still weeping, straight to his bed.

“What has happened?” said Vrethiki fearfully. He al most thought the City might have been taken, and that, after all, the Turks would come rushing in and slaughter them all.

“Rhangabe has been killed,” whispered Stephanos, “an old friend of the Emperor's, who fought with him often, and saved his life, they say, at the battle of the Hexamilion. He cut the Sultan's standard-bearer in two, but then they surrounded him and killed him. The Emperor is grieved for him.”

“Did they get through the wall?” Vrethiki asked hoarsely.

“No, they were driven back. God knows how. Sleep now; we must wake him at dawn.”

It seemed to Vrethiki he had been sleeping only a moment or two when Stephanos shook him awake, and asked him to light a lamp and warm some wine. He could not keep his eyes open or raise his head from the pillow till Stephanos came again and pulled the covers off him to let the chill air of morning do the job.

“No dreams and waking last night, then?” said Stephanos, who was laying out clean linen for the Emperor.

“No,” said Vrethiki. “It's strange. I haven't had any bad dreams for quite a while. Not since the Emperor let me go, and I chose to stay. And yet in a way I'm more afraid than ever.”

“Real Turks are bad enough, you mean, but better than
nightmare ones?” said Stephanos, with his quizzical smile.

“They were real before—those pirate Turks,” said Vrethiki. “I can remember now all about it, though I'd rather not—I try to turn my mind away from it.”

“I was glad when you chose to stay,” said Stephanos, without a flicker of emotion on his impassive face. “Selfish perhaps, but mostly I was glad for your sake. What you run away from is always just behind you.”

“I had to stay,” said Vrethiki. “And I expect you're right. Though I'm not sure what good can come of turning to face things when you can't hope to conquer.”

“We can conquer ourselves,” said Stephanos, lifting the curtain and going to wake the Emperor.

The Emperor rose and dressed. He sipped a little mulled wine and ate a round of bread while Stephanos and Vrethiki strapped on his armor. At the tent door Don Francisco and Theophilus awaited him, and his groom with his horse. Stephanos and Vrethiki were still eating their bread when they mounted to go with him.

They went first to the sea wall along the Golden Horn. But in spite of all the maneuvering there had been no attack. However, the cannon fire from beyond Pera had driven the ships from the boom; they had taken shelter in the lee of the Genoese walls, and in the little harbor below the Acropolis. Things were getting very difficult. The Emperor turned back, and rode round the Blachernae walls, looking at the increasing number of guns mounted on the Turkish pontoon bridge with a grim stare. Then up the slope, toward St. Romanus, and along the land walls. The battle of the night before had left the fosse thickly strewn with corpses. In the still, gray air of dawn a smell of blood tainted the air breathed by the defenders. Behind the stockade men sat or leaned
in attitudes of the utmost weariness; beyond it, creeping cautiously among the dead, Turkish soldiers were recovering their fellows for burial, and dragging them away. One of the bodies shrieked as it was pulled, and the Emperor looked up. “Should we allow that?” he asked the nearest captain. The captain seemed to make an effort to answer. “They're unhealthy when they rot, Sire,” he said. “They stink bad.” The Emperor nodded. “I am watching them, to make sure what they're up to, Sire,” said the captain. His voice was sluggish and low-pitched with fatigue.

The Emperor rode on. And along that middle stretch of wall he found half the sentries sleeping at their posts. Some of them were literally asleep on their feet, leaning forward through the battlements, or slumped on their cannon, where cannon there was, on the towers of the outer wall.

“Shall I dismount, and wake them, Sire?” asked Don Francisco, when they found the first few sleeping men.

The Emperor looked at his soldiers with a certain weary tenderness in his eyes. It happened that the sentry they were standing over had a gash in his cheek, and blood crusted his hand, where it lay flung out beside him, fingers lightly curled round the grasp of his bow. “They sleep the sleep that will not be denied,” said the Emperor. “If you woke him, he would sleep again before we had ridden as far as the next tower. Leave him be.”

And, indeed, a slowness and weariness seemed to hang over the tents of the enemy also; there was no stir or bustle over there, only, in a little while, the melancholy howling of the call to morning prayer.

 

THAT WHOLE DAY WAS QUIET. THE VENETIANS CAME TO THE
Emperor, saying they thought it was no longer safe to keep
powder and arms in their ships on the Golden Horn. For some reason the Turks had not yet attacked the boom from the Bosporus and at the same time from the Golden Horn, but if they did … It would be better to shift the Venetian armaments to the Emperor's arsenal at Blachernae, and their ships into the harbor called Neorion; they would bring the crews to help the defense of the walls. The Emperor thanked them. Every man was needed. He asked them to go to the section of wall that was being pounded by the guns on the pontoon bridge.

Days passed. The Venetian captains had trouble persuading their men to move—they were used to sea fighting, and preferred to remain afloat. Besides, hardly a day went by without some sort of demonstration from the great fleet in the Bosporus. The infidel ships would sail out bravely toward the boom, trumpets and drums sounding; the weary Christian sailors would muster, at the alert, and then without so much as a shot fired, the Turks would with draw. This ludicrous performance was yet enough to fray men's nerves, especially since everyone was hungry—however fairly shared out, the rations were small—and tired, and suffering from a special kind of irritability and weariness. Vrethiki, who felt it himself, understood it well enough. It came from being always tensed up to meet a crisis—to face disaster—and then finding that the crisis had passed, and the same readiness must be kept up another day, another night, another day. It made everyone heart sick. It was like watching at his father's sickbed, and coming slowly, and guiltily, almost to wish for what one feared—the end.