Sample
In 1453, Sultan Mehmed Khan is only 20 years old, but he is the master of the Ottoman Empire and has the greatest of all dreams: he wants to conquer Constantinoples, the capital of the Ceasars of the East, the Red Apple. Deaf to the doubts of his ministers, to reason and even to the interest of his empire, driven by visions of glory and greatness, he lays the siege and begins a mortal struggle with the doomed old city. But he will have to learn that pursuing dreams may be a very bitter task...
The Red Apple
Halil Pasha was lying awake when the messenger came to his door, escorted by the janissaries. Like many old men he slept very little, thought more than he slept and his night thoughts were never cheerful.
The Sultan’s summons came like a thunderbolt, with torches light and heavy treads in the quiet inner courts. Just as a thunderbolt, there was neither questioning nor helping it.
The old Vizier stood praying softly, while his servants arranged a fur cloak over his green vizier’s robe and twisted the turban around his bald head. Meanwhile, his Nubian eunuch took from a casket handfuls of gold Venetian ducats and piled them on a silver plate.
Halil Pasha felt thankful that the night was so cold that no one could say he was trembling with fear. But perhaps he had grown too old to serve such an unpredictable sovereign. What could he do against that mind so strong and that wild obstinacy, when he could command nothing more than empty forms of respect?
That very morning he had rejoiced in silencing young Mehmed about the war, and there he was, scared into bartering a plate of gold for his life!
Never had the way seemed so long, nor the slaves so slow in taking the fur cloak.
The Sultan received the Grand Vizier sitting on the edge of his bed. In the flickering light of the newly lit candles, Halil dared nothing more than a glance at his sovereign‘s features, and the sparkling dark eyes struck him as an ill omen.
Sighing inwardly, he knelt at the Sultan’s feet, where the eunuch had laid the precious plate.
“Allah’s will be done, the great and merciful, and let the office, not the life, be the price.”
Mehmed waited for the eunuch to withdraw before he interrupted the Vizier’s customary salutations.
“What is this, master?” he inquired, touching the plate with his boot, so that a ducat rolled out with a clink.
Halil Pasha clenched his fists to stifle an instinct to pick up the coin. Had there been menace in the young cold voice or only an echo of the old man’s own fears?
“ Customs prescribe, my Sultan.” faltered the minister “A gift. Customs forbid that the serf summoned in the midst of the night should come empty-handed .”
“ Gold!” growled Mehmed, springing to his feet with such vehemence as made the Vizier recoil. “ Gold, when there’s but one thing I want. Give me Qostantiniya!”
Squatting on the floor, Halil Pasha moistened his lips again and again. There was the man whom, it was said, the Greeks paid lavishly, year after year, for their safety.
Frozen in the act of raising his hands, the Vizier looked infinitely old. His flabby cheeks had the colour of parchment, and his turban had slipped sideways.
There was no benevolence in the Sultan’s gaze, no respect, no compassion.
After this, Mehmed turned his back to the old man and hit the wooden gong, and two pages appeared. They began to undress their master, while the dismissed Vizier slowly rose to his feet and withdrew, overcome with shame at having betrayed his fear.
Mehmed soon found he could not bear the silent bustling of the pages, and ordered them away. Once alone, he threw himself half-dressed on the bed, sure that no sleep would come to him that night. Yet, he longed for the morning, when the Sultan s decree would be read before the Divan, repeated in the mosques and spread through the whole empire. The decree to lay siege to Qostantiniya.
His heart’s throb sounded to him like the beating of his soldiers drums, and of the shipyard men’s hammers, and of the horses hoofs along every road in Anatolia. Messengers horses, and captains , and recruiters and couriers. And one, a horseman, a spy riding eastwards at full gallop, towards Qostantiniya to let the haughty Greeks and their Basileus born in the purple know, that Padishah Mehmed Khan, Sultan and Sultan’s son, lay his hand on the Red Apple.
Dozens of half-naked slaves, with shining arms and blackened faces, worked under the casters. The forge fire crackled and howled and roared, all but overwhelming the din of the smiths hammers.
White-hot iron bubbled in a melting pot, nearly ready for the mould.
The Sultan stood on a wooden scaffold, watching the scene and lending a keen ear to Urban’s talk. The huge, red-bearded Hungarian spread his drawings in succession and, in his coarse half-Turkish half-German tongue, explained with identical earnestness the gauge of the cannon’s barrel or the minutest detail of ornament, stopping now and then to yell orders to the men at the bellows.
From the liquid iron came a glare that caught the eye. It was pleasant to look at, and Mehmed liked to gaze until he saw nothing but light.
“ Don’t stare at the iron, my Sultan.” Urban had been instructed how to address the sovereign, but his uncouth Turkish betrayed him now and then into forbidden imperatives. “ It is beautiful, but it makes you blind.”
Mehmed winked just once, and lowered his gaze on a drawing of the gun’s breech. Urban had been right, as was to be expected from a man of his calling: after staring at the white-hot iron, the brown lines of the drawing seemed to blur. Lest the Hungarian, the dragoman and the officers of the retinue should notice, Mehmed shoved the drawing off the table, and it fell to the ground in a roll.
“What I want to know is whether this gun of yours will pull down the walls of Qostantiniya.” he said. And he suppressed a smile thinking how far the pretextuous question was from being either idle or false.
Urban thoughtfully drew the back of his hand across a hairy cheek, where the scar of an old burn ran from chin to ear.
“You must not expect, my Sultan, they will go down at once.” he slowly explained “ This one,” and he nodded towards the huge empty cast, “ is fit to crush the very walls of Babylon, but it will take its time. This is no culverin, you can shoot three, may be four times each day and no more; maybe the Greeks will repair the breaks between a shot and the next. And then, on the land side, the walls are old stuff, but sturdy”
“ What is the place like?” cut in Mehmed, hoping that both the question’s urgency and his voice’s trembling would be lost in the din. He had suddenly realised that the man had been in Qostantiniya, once at least, to offer his skills to an Emperor too poor to buy them. Urban had seen the city. The Sultan had known it all the time and never thought of questioning him!
The Hungarian had stopped short, wondering at the half understood question and made uneasy by the flash in the Sultan s eyes.
“What does Qostantiniya look like?” repeated Mehmed in a steadier voice and lowering his gaze, so that the caster felt reassured.
“ To tell the truth, my Sultan, it’s poor stuff enough.” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “ It comes to little more than the name and the walls, when you see them from a distance. Still good, the walls are, but not everywhere, and grown with grass. But I guess they’ll be repairing them, by now.”
“ And what inside? Poor stuff, then?”
It would have taken either a Turkish or a very trained ear to sense the danger in Mehmed’s voice, and indeed the dragoman raised his eyes in alarm. And Urban thought he saw what was expected from him!
“ Inside it’s nearly all in ruins.” he went blindly on “ There’s a harbour, a road and a market place, and the Emperor’s palace near the walls. And a few churches, too. But for the rest , he shrugged his shoulders again in contempt “You wouldn’t even call it a town. It’s rather like villages scattered through the countryside. To go from place to place there are only pathways across the fields, and with hedges, too. And at every step you come across ruined palaces and abandoned gardens. And flowers, too. So many of them, at the right time. Wild roses everywhere .”
Then a caster shouted from below that the iron was ready and Urban, forgetting the wild roses in Qostantiniya, hurried away to see to his work.
