Читать онлайн «The Abyssinian Proof»

Jenny White

The Abyssinian Proof

1

Constantinople, May 28, 1453

Isaak Metochites and his family set off through the unlit streets. His son, Michael, pulled the cart with their belongings, its wheels greased and padded to make no sound. His wife and seven-year-old daughter, cloaked in dark veils, followed behind. Constantinople lay about them in a black stupor, as close to sleep as death is to the afterlife.

The silence worried Isaak. For weeks, the Turks had kept up a fierce bombardment, along with a constant barrage of noise from trumpets and castanets, presumably to weaken the nerves of the city’s defenders. Only seven thousand armed men remained to defend the city, he thought, but they were not so easily rattled. It was rumored that the Turks planned a great attack the following day and the sudden silence seemed like a great ingathering of breath by the barbarian god of war.

The night smelled of wet charcoal and decay. Isaak thought he heard the Turkish army stirring on the other side of the city walls. He shook his head sadly at the thought that all that remained of the thousand-year-old civilization of Byzantium was this despairing city, the flat of the Muslim hand against its back, ready to tip it into oblivion. Over generations, the Turks had swallowed the outlying cities and provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, the high plains, pastures, ports, and olive groves of Byzantium, until only the capital city remained, the city Constantine had named after himself in the year 330 and anointed the capital of Christendom. A triangle of precious civilization girded by its great walls and flanked on two sides by water.

In the spring of 1453, Sultan Mehmet II, the ambitious leader of the Turks, barely out of his teens, had built a fortress on the Bosphorus strait at its narrowest point, cutting off provisions to the city from the north. It was rumored that the young sultan, whose favorite stories were the biographies of Alexander and Caesar, had piled stone upon stone alongside his men.

Now the Turks were camped outside the city, preparing their final attack. From the land wall he had seen them pitch their elaborate tents amid a sea of soldiers in red turbans and glinting helmets. An enormous iron chain sealed the entrance to the harbor, the Golden Horn, but a month ago the Turks had shocked the population by transporting seventy-two ships by land, rolling them on greased logs over the hill of Pera into the harbor, trapping the Byzantine fleet. Then they flung a bridge of barrels across the Golden Horn and began to mine the city walls. The Venetians had promised to send their fleet to protect the city, but it had not appeared and soon it would be too late. Another Turkish fleet was approaching that would block the Sea of Marmara to the south.

Sprawled along the harbor, Constantinople had become a dark and lawless place. All who could had fled south before the blockade. The day before, Isaak had passed a man roasting a rodent on a small fire beneath the lower walls. Of rats there seemed these days to be an unlimited number. They stopped even in daylight in the middle of a lane, as if to remind the remaining humans that they would soon be evicted. The night before, Isaak had dreamed of his wife lying naked on a sandy shore, the tide coming in. Jolted awake, he had reached for Achmet’s Dream Key and read that if a man dreamed of his wife naked, he would see her grave.