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  “I will stay and fight your guns for you, as long as you wish me to.”

  “Well said. Can you doubt I will ever choose otherwise?”

  Hawkwood rose and bowed. “If my lord speaks for his people,” he said, “I am content.”

  2

  The Byzantine

  John VIII died before the end of the year, and Constantine succeeded as Emperor. Immediately all Constantinople became aware of the surge of new energy and optimism emanating from the throne. Some laughed, more grumbled…a few responded.

  News from the Turks indicated that the Emir Murad was concentrating all his energies on defeating the Albanian patriot, George Castriota, known as Scanderbeg. Thus the city was left in peace.

  The Byzantines cared nothing for what might be happening in Albania, or for the steadily spreading Turkish envelopment of south-eastern Europe. Life was there to be lived: they drank and they ate, they traded and grew rich, they quarrelled, and from time to time they rioted at some real or imagined distress.

  But most of all they played.

  *

  “The Green!” screamed Catherine Hawkwood. “The Green!”

  “The Blue,” screamed a nearby throng. “The Blue!”

  But others in the crowd also cheered for the green colours, as the chariots tore round the hippodrome, four-horse teams panting and spitting, drivers straining over the reins, dust flying from hooves and churning wheels.

  All Constantinople ceased work on circus days, and when there was a cause for celebration, as now, the entire population seemed to gather inside the walls of old Byzantium to enjoy the sport — and the rivalry, which too often degenerated into angry strife.

  On days such as this, the hippodrome became more than a circus; it became the heartbeat of a nation.

  From long before dawn men had toiled at sweeping the sand of the track smooth, making sure there were no impediments for the galloping horses; others swabbed and mopped the tiers of white stone seats that entirely surrounded the arena. These were hard to sit upon for any length of time; the wise and the wealthy would bring their own cushions…which could be used as missiles should their side lose.

  The pie-sellers and the vendors of sweetmeats were early in place, followed closely by the dispensers of the favours, green or blue, that would denote one’s allegiance on this day.

  By mid-morning the flags and banners had climbed to the tops of their poles, and were surely visible on the far side of the Bosphorus, a swirling forest of colour to denote that the Byzantines were en fête. By now, too, the teams and the chariots had arrived, for inspection by their owners and trainers, and their drivers, famous men whose talents were disputed in the taverns. They wore leather caps and leather shields at knee, elbow and shoulder, leather codpieces to protect their genitals and leather masks for their faces. When a chariot went down in a flurry of breaking wood and thundering hooves, a man would count himself fortunate to survive with just bruises.

  And then came the crowds. Most wanted to get to the circus early in order to secure their favourite seats. They jostled and bantered, in good humour, when they arrived; the extremes of exultation or anger would come later. And the throng stood to cheer the Emperor as he entered the royal box through its special corridor, clad all in purple and accompanied by his retinue. Bowing and smiling to the populace, he first had the owners and drivers presented to him, before giving the signal which had the trumpets blaring to announce the beginning of the games.

  John Hawkwood hated the hippodrome and attended it as little as possible. But not to have come today would have aroused anger in his neighbours, and during the two and a half years he had spent in Constantinople he had learned to behave like a proper citizen of the greatest city in the world, even if he could never really become one.

  For two days previously news had arrived of the death of the Emir Murad II, lord of the Ottomans. Constantinople had immediately been thrown into a frenzy of vicious joy. The devil was dead. As had previously happened on nearly every occasion when an emir died, there would surely be fratricidal strife amongst Murad’s sons, perhaps years of civil war during which the Byzantines could continue to enjoy themselves.

  The Emperor had proclaimed a holiday. In this, Constantine XI was doing nothing more than was expected; his people preferred holidays to workdays. And Constantine was all too aware that he was not as popular as his late brother — for one very simple reason: he had wooed the West. Worse still, he had been received in audience by the Pope, in his anxiety to obtain additional troops to man his walls. To most of the Byzantines, this seemed worse than if he had crawled on his knees before the Turkish Emir.

  But today he was acclaimed. He sat in splendour in the purple-swathed imperial box with his wife, Magdalena Tocco, and surrounded by his children, his sisters, and his younger brothers, Theodore and Andronicus, Demetrius and Thomas, his nieces and nephews…and also by those who regarded themselves as the true upholders of the Byzantine tradition, men like Lukas Notaras and the Patriarch Gennadius, men to whom Turk and Roman were equally obnoxious.

  John Hawkwood marked them well, as he had learned to on many occasions during the past two and a half years. If his dislike of them had been fuelled by theirs of him, by the many insults to which he had had to bow his head in subjection, it had a sound and justifiable basis. The walls of Constantinople were undoubtedly enormously strong, but the city could never be impregnable until every able-bodied man made its defence his common purpose. Yet the faction that threatened irretrievable ruin had been allowed to smoulder through the weakness of the emperors, and every so often, as today, was fanned into flame by the games. For if the Emperor cheered for the Blue, Notaras shouted for the Green, and the populace shrieked in their support for one or the other. These were not really games, Hawkwood thought; they were political gatherings of the deepest and most sinister importance.

  Did he now regret his decision to leave England and seek his fortune in a foreign land? Sometimes, indeed, when he looked at his children. He hated to see Catherine wearing a Byzantine robe which flopped away from her shoulder to reveal her breasts or swirled away from her hips to expose a sliver of white leg; he hated to see her parted lips and flailing hair as she became as carried away as any Greek, her cheeks mottled red and white, teeth gleaming and seething with false passion. Catherine was now twenty-one, and a woman of striking loveliness. Had he remained in England and she not yet been married, he would have been disturbed, but in Constantinople he counted every day she remained a virgin a blessing.

  Was he condemning his only daughter to spinster-hood? He could not be sure. There were suitors enough. Or were they suitors? Loose-lipped and seductive-eyed young men who came calling, hands sliding over each other’s robes, arms round each other’s waists, often to be found hand in hand, discussing poetry. Many possessed sound financial credentials, and parents apparently anxious to marry their sons to the daughter of a man who might be a heretic but enjoyed the favour of the Emperor himself. But marry his Catherine to one of those? Have her sucked into the Orthodox Church, and made the plaything of a Greek catamite?

  Yet he was aware that the decision was hardly his. Catherine was a woman of character. Since coming to Constantinople that character seemed to have degenerated, and now she appeared determined to be more Byzantine than any Greek. Should she decide to wed, it would take a more brutal man than himself to forbid it. He could only pray that she would choose wisely when the time came, and that, until that day arrived, she would act wisely as well… He disapproved of most of her current friends, especially the Notaras family.

  His close guardianship of his daughter had done nothing to aid his popularity. But he worried hardly less about his sons — or Anthony, at least. William, he reflected with satisfaction, was a worthy Hawkwood. He was already an accomplished soldier and gunner, and was giving every evidence of developing into a sober, sensible man. He cheered for neither Blue nor Green, disliking the hippodrome as much as did his parents.

  Perhap
s Anthony, too, would develop satisfactorily. Perhaps nineteen was too young an age on which to form judgements, just as sixteen may have been too young an age to uproot the boy and carry him so far from his home. Now he looked quite as excited as Catherine did, screaming himself hoarse as the horses swept round the final bend…and always glancing over to the royal box to smile and wave at that Notaras girl, Anna.

  That was a more serious cause for concern, for both Catherine and Anthony had struck up friendships with the sons and daughter of the Grand Duke. Socially the Hawkwoods were in an anomalous position. As regards religion, for instance, since Mary flatly refused to worship in St Sophia, nor would she allow her children to attend, so every Sunday they took the ferry across to Galata to attend the Genoan church. And though in receipt of imperial favour, they were not of noble birth, while the Byzantine nobility was perhaps the most stiff-necked in the world. Yet John Hawkwood had come here as a master gunner, and the Emperor had placed him in command of all the Byzantine artillery, with the rank of general. Therefore he had stepped into the best circles, and carried his family with him. Since young Basil Notaras aspired to be a gunner himself, it was natural that the boy should have come into contact with the young Hawkwoods — and fallen entirely under the spell of Catherine’s red-haired beauty.

  Equally it was natural that the young man should have introduced the girl to his half-brother and his younger sister, and that Anthony should have gone along as chaperon. John Hawkwood didn’t know if Anna Notaras had fallen equally for his red-haired giant of a boy, but no-one looking at Anthony could doubt that he was in love with her. They were very young, but John did not care to imagine the Grand Duke’s reaction should their relationship become more serious — Anna Notaras was undoubtedly destined for the bed of some Byzantine grandee. At the moment, his concerns were more with Catherine, who had clearly fallen for Basil Notaras. And although Basil might be only the bastard son of the Grand Duke, Hawkwood could never see him being allowed to marry a foreigner and an apostate. And the Notaras family needed no favours from the Emperor. John had attempted to convey a warning to the girl, and been impaled upon that imperious stare of hers, so could do nothing more than pray that she would retain the good sense and propriety to which she had been educated.

  There were pitfalls to either side of the path he had chosen, but there were pitfalls enough in England. And in Constantinople he had at least been able to introduce his family to a luxury they had never previously known, his yearly salary as general-in-command of the artillery being more than he had earned in his entire life. Long discarded were the short tunic and jerkin of an honest English yeoman; the tunic he wore today all but brushed the ground, and was of gold and black brocade. His chaperon and liripipe were black, while his dark green undertunic was velvet, and allowed to show at neck and sleeve. His long pointed shoes were also black.

  Mary was no less transformed in her patterned houppeland, her jewelled girdle and her heart-shaped headdress with its jewelled caul. But she was transformed in more than merely her appearance: the timorous, unhappy woman who had sailed up the Bosphorus had become submerged in the confident wife of a successful man. No doubt she was well aware how unpopular they were, as Catholics, but her house was filled with fine things and her husband was the friend of the Emperor. No doubt she, too, observed the dangers that surrounded her children — but she seemed confident they would overcome them. Indeed, confidence surrounded her like an aura; she had never believed her husband could achieve so much.

  Even the meanest Byzantine enjoyed a luxury unknown to the average English lord. When John remembered the effort needed back home to fill a tub to bathe in — a single tub in which each member of the family must take his turn… Here in Constantinople one merely turned on a tap; and in the better class houses one could have hot or cold water as one chose, supplied from the immense reservoirs that extended beneath the city.

  Equally he could compare the tough and stringy English meat, so tasteless one could have been eating shoe leather, with the delicious Byzantine lamb dressed with spices he had only ever heard of before; or the rough English ale in contrast with the delicate red and white wines served here with every meal. Or, indeed, the rain of an English spring and the chill of an English winter against the perpetual summer of the Byzantine year. When the north wind blew off the Black Sea, and the locals shivered and grumbled, he felt tempted to suggest they should thank God they had never experienced a north-easterly gale coming off the North Sea on a January day in Suffolk.

  Most important of all, he could contrast his humble standing in England with the eminence that had been thrust on him in Constantinople. He had an interview with the Emperor perhaps every week. That a man who ruled hardly more than a city should be so titled might seem a joke to many, but Constantine XI was heir to an imperial tradition which stretched back to the Caesars. And he had the character to support such a burden; more often melancholy than smiling, as he looked around himself at the immensity of the task he had inherited, he never doubted for a moment that the city could stand against the worst the Turks could do, or that he would personally conduct its defence.

  The task was indeed immense. As the Emperor had once explained to Hawkwood, the people of Constantinople had lost the martial vigour which had characterised their ancestors. It was not, John supposed, that they were cowardly; it was simply that they could not conceive of any force on earth interrupting their carefree existence. And if Constantinople had fallen to an assault once before, that was all but two and a half centuries ago. And if the week-long orgy of rape and pillage that had scarred the city forever was still remembered, it was also remembered that the hated Franks had been admitted by treachery; they had not stormed the city walls.

  Thus, out of a population of some hundred thousand souls, less than five thousand were prepared to don armour in their own defence. This was far too few to adequately protect such an enormous circuit of walls. And Constantine’s dream of an army of Western soldiers of fortune coming to his aid had long dwindled. There had been constant promises, but few volunteers had as yet followed John Hawkwood to the East.

  So the city’s defence rested on those five thousand — and it also rested with the artillery. But the artillery itself was not of the best. The iron pieces had been cast at least a generation before, and Hawkwood was not at all sure how they would stand up to continuous firing. He was not even allowed to practise with them often, because the citizens complained at the noise they made, and the Emperor worried that the walls would crumble under their vibration. So John had had to content himself with re-siting the cannon in what he considered were the most vital positions; a task accomplished with much grumbling by the soldiers required to drag the huge pieces of metal, and observed with an equal amount of contempt by those like the Grand Duke Notaras who felt that all Constantine’s defensive efforts were bound to be futile, in view of the enormous strength commanded by the Ottomans, and that their only hope was to come to an accommodation with them — to pay them tribute and be left in peace.

  “They want us here,” the Grand Duke would insist. “We are their window on the world. Why should they seek to destroy us?”

  John Hawkwood had no time for such defeatist talk. Constantinople could be held, even by the handful of men at their disposal. The Ottomans were no seamen, therefore the three miles of wall that stretched from the Golden Gate in the south to the Acropolis in the northeast, fronting throughout that distance the Sea of Marmara, needed no more than regular patrols. Since there was no way the few galleys possessed by the Turks could hope to break the boom guarding the Golden Horn, as long as the Genoese held Galata on its north bank there was no possibility of attack from that direction either. This left the land wall of Theodosius, a long three miles, but, with the ditch and the double wall in front of them, four thousand resolute men supported by artillery could hold five thousand yards. Not even the Turks had the men to assault the entire wall at once.

  “Constantinople will hold, Your G
race,” he had assured the Emperor after his latest tour of inspection.

  And now perhaps, he thought, as the steaming horses were brought to rest, and the winning Blues cheered themselves hoarse while the defeated Greens relapsed into sullen silence, these walls will not even be assaulted — at least for the foreseeable future. He wished he could catch just a glimpse of what was going on across the Bosphorus, in the seraglio of the dead Emir.

  *

  The crowd erupted from the hippodrome to make their way back into the city. It was early evening, and few people intended to sleep much that night. They thronged together in their factions, seeking the wine-shops. And the more cautious householders began shuttering their windows; though it was a chill February night, no one could doubt there would be several violent riots before dawn, as the Blues and the Greens exchanged points of view.

  “I believe our driver was bribed,” Basil Notaras complained, white silk robe billowing as he strode in front of his half-brother and half-sister, his eyes searching the crowd. “The fellow should be whipped.”

  “He should be whipped in any event,” Alexius agreed. “Look, there is your quarry, brother.”

  In front of them, Catherine Hawkwood’s glowing head rose above the hurrying throng; she wore the fashionable hennin, the conical tall hat which added as much as two feet to a woman’s height, and she stood out like a beacon.

  “Damnation, her parents are with her,” Basil muttered.

  “Then we must coax her away,” Alexius said. He was well aware of his brother’s passion, and of Basil’s determination to consummate it — this very night if possible. It was an occasion when normal guards would be lowered.

  Basil increased speed, gripping his sister Anna by the hand as he forced his way through the throng without the slightest regard for whom he was pushing to left and right. People cursed, and more than once hands reached for daggers, but the weapons were always hastily released, for the people of Constantinople feared the anger of the Grand Duke far more than that of the Emperor — his arrogant sons had to be endured.