The Towers of Samarcand

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CONSTANTINOPLE, SUMMER 1402

In the great library in the Blachernae Palace in Constantinople, Plethon was rubbing his eyes. He was seated at a long table on which were the bibles, testaments, uncials and codices that he’d been reading and rereading through the night, checking yet again that the casket held what he thought it held. In front of him was a flattened scroll and in his hand a goose-quill. He was stroking his beard and thinking.

It was, he supposed, nearing dawn and still the drum beat out its dismal tempo as it had since nightfall. He wondered why the Turks hadn’t yet attacked. For weeks, they’d been massing their army for the final assault. Listening to the drum, Plethon supposed that this was the night they’d chosen to do it.

Earlier that evening, he’d looked out from the walls across the Lycus Valley, his white toga patched with sweat. Stretched out before him was the Ottoman army, bigger than it had ever been. To his right, it rolled past the Gate of Charisius, past the Blachernae Palace to the banks of the Golden Horn. To his left, it wound its way down to the Sea of Marmara, in whose waters Bayezid’s larger bath toys sat at anchor. Great fires were being lit the length of the Turkish lines and battering rams, ballistas, mangonels and scaling platforms hauled forward, their sodden hides slimy as snakeskin. Giant drums beat out a rhythm that went deep into the earth and travelled through the empty mines to rise up the spine of every man who stood on the city walls.

Plethon’s eyes had travelled to the top of the Maltepe Hill where he could just see the Sultan’s vast tent, a regiment of janissaries standing guard around it.

A voice said: ‘That’s where he’ll watch from.’

A soldier had come to stand beside him. He was a man well into his fifties who, in normal times, would be beyond military service. ‘Bloodthirsty bugger.’

‘You’ve seen this before?’ asked Plethon, turning to him.

The man nodded. ‘Adrianopolis, thirty years ago. His father Murad took the city. As mad a bugger as this one.’

Adrianopolis, now called Edirne. Plethon had been ten when the city had fallen. His father had hidden him in a cellar. ‘So what will they do?’

The man grinned, a single tooth pressed against his bottom lip. He’d removed his helmet and streaks of sweat coursed down the deep lines of his face. ‘First will come the bashibozouks,’ he said. ‘They’re mad, howling buggers too.’ He paused and slapped a fly on his neck. ‘Then, when their bodies are piled up against the walls, the janissaries will climb up them to get over the walls and finish us off.’ His hand slid horizontally across his neck. ‘They’ll cut our heads off, that’s what they’ll do.’ He turned and walked on along the ramparts, chuckling to himself.

Now Plethon was seated in the palace library with a letter he’d written on the table before him. The library was a circular room with bookcases spreading out to its perimeter and a long table at its centre. On every shelf was a jewel. The illiterate crusaders had been uninterested in learning when they’d come two centuries earlier and much had survived their onslaught. Now the manuscripts were all gathered in a place deemed safer than most. Here were treasures from Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad and many cities besides, probably the greatest amalgamation of human writing outside Cairo. It was to this room that Plethon had welcomed scholars from Florence, Sienna and Ferrara these past years, men of curiosity who’d come to Byzantium to find ancient reason to underpin new thinking.

Plethon was humming quietly to himself and scratching his ear with the end of the goose feather. He stared at the letter. It was written to the only other person in the world who knew what was in the casket at Mistra. He rolled up the vellum, sealed it and looked up at a window, seeing that there was now some light in the sky. Dawn. Surely the Turks must attack now?

The candle flame rose as a draught entered the room and he heard the sound of a door closing and heavy footsteps approaching. The Emperor was standing in front of him wearing armour. He was pale and his eyes were ringed with shadow. He looked exhausted. ‘I think you’d better come to the walls,’ he said.

Plethon had been expecting this. He’d stated his intention to die defending the city and now he was being summoned to do so. He nodded and rose, placing the scroll in his sleeve. He wondered what he was expected to fight with.

The two men walked in silence from the library and through the halls and corridors of the empty palace, the only sounds the squeak of the marble beneath their feet. There were braziers lit beneath pillars, each creating an island of shifting flame, and Plethon thought of the fire that would soon consume the city. Would the library survive again? He thought not.

They came to a tower and a spiral staircase that would take them up to the walls. The Emperor stood to one side to let him pass and by the time he’d reached the top and walked out on to the battlements, Plethon was out of breath.

How can I hope to fight the Turks?

Dawn was breaking in the east and the world was strangely silent. He straightened up to look over the walls.

Bayezid’s army had vanished. Where yesterday there were men manning the trenches and palisades, now there were none. The siege engines, battering rams, ballistas: all had gone. In the uncertain light of a new day, Plethon could see that the only thing still standing was a solitary tent on the hill of Maltepe and beside it a drum, abandoned.

Plethon looked along the battlements. They were slowly filling with people: soldiers holding their helmets, mothers holding children, priests holding relics that had done their work at last. There was no sound beyond the rustle of the dawn breeze on clothing, a sound that passed through the silent watchers like a sigh.

Then a thousand faces turned from the empty plain and were raised to greet a new sun that was rising behind them; rising over a sea on which no Ottoman galleys floated; rising far in the east where an old man, cured from illness, was at last marching to fight Bayezid.

And with the sun came joy. First one, then ten, then a thousand bells began to peal from the towers of the city’s churches, close and far, spreading the news and scattering the silence and causing the people on the walls to blink, then smile, then embrace each other in joy and relief.

Plethon let out a long sigh. He reached into his sleeve and brought out the scroll. He broke the seal, unrolled the paper and read what he’d written. Then he tore it into little pieces which he let drift, like cinders, to the ground below the Christian walls of Constantinople.