Mehmed stood outside his tent, watching the artillery flash in the pre-dawn light as he did each morning. He saw a cannonball strike the base of a tower along the Mesoteichion. The tower shook, then toppled forward, and Mehmed smiled. He had been to look at the walls the previous day, and the amount of damage was even greater than he had hoped. The outer wall along the Mesoteichion had been almost entirely reduced to rubble. The time to strike had come.
'Your Excellency seems pleased,' Halil remarked, stifling a yawn as he joined Mehmed. 'Is it good news, then, that you wish to discuss with me at this ungodly hour?'
'Very good news, Halil. Tomorrow night, under the cover of darkness, we will attack. You will distribute ladders and torches and make sure that the men have everything they need.'
'Do you think an attack wise, Your Excellency? Perhaps another week of bombardment, as we had agreed, would make success more certain. Patience is, after all, the principal virtue in siege warfare.'
'Patience will not feed my men, Halil,' Mehmed said. 'You know better than anyone how difficult it is to keep an army of this size in the field. I had thought that you would be happy to finish the siege early. It will mean an end to your ceaseless search for supplies.'
'I would be only too happy, your Excellency. But the walls of Constantinople, even weakened, will not be easy to take. We must be patient and allow your other plans to bear fruit. After all, think of what a defeat now might do to the morale of the army.'
'There will be no defeat,' Mehmed said curtly. 'I am not a fool or a child who you need lecture, Halil. The walls of Constantinople are only lightly manned at night. We will strike quickly, sending the bazibozouks north and south to distract the defence while the janissaries focus their attack near the Lycus, where the walls are weakest. They will overrun the defenders before they are able to rally more troops, and Constantinople will be ours.'
'I was here when your father besieged the city. The walls of Constantinople will not fall so easily, I fear,' Halil said. Then, after a long pause, he bowed and added: 'But may it be as you say, great Sultan. I defer to your greater wisdom.'
Mehmed frowned. He did not like Halil's tone, nor did he understand why his grand vizier was so eager to delay the attack.
'Excuse me, Sultan,' Ulu said as he appeared at Mehmed's side. 'Zaganos has come from the mines.'
'Very good, Ulu. Bring him to me.' Zaganos was Mehmed's chief miner. He appeared a few seconds later, his face and clothes black with dirt.
'We found something, Sultan,' Zaganos said. 'A tunnel near the gate of Caligaria, where you directed us to focus our efforts. It leads towards the walls, but it hits a dead end before it reaches them. It appears to have been filled in.'
'Take me to it,' Mehmed ordered. 'I shall see for myself.'
He followed Zaganos towards the rear of camp. Mehmed had ordered the tunnels to be started here, far out of sight of the walls of Constantinople. It had meant a long, laborious dig, but the tunnels were finally nearing the moat beyond the Blachernae walls. Still passing underneath the moat and walls would take several more weeks. It would be much easier if they could find one of the passages that Mehmed had read about in the Russian's description of Constantinople.
They reached the tunnel's entrance — a hole some five feet high, braced with wood and dug into a hillside. 'Are you sure you want to enter?' Zaganos asked. 'The mines aren't entirely stable.'
'I want to see,' Mehmed insisted.
'Very well. Mind your head, Sultan,' Zaganos said as he led the way into the tunnel. The passage was narrow, only slightly broader than Mehmed's shoulders. Frequent wooden braces held up the ceiling, and lamps hanging from some of the braces offered a weak, flickering light. The ceiling was black dirt, as were the walls halfway down. Below that, the rest of the walls and the floor were made of fine grey clay. As they walked, the ceiling grew lower until Mehmed had to walk bent at the waist. Zaganos, a powerfully built but short man, only had to duck his head.
'The tunnel we discovered was beneath where we have been digging,' Zaganos explained as they walked. 'That is why we didn't find it earlier.' He pointed to a side tunnel as they passed. 'We've run side tunnels like this out to either side of the main tunnel, but we were digging too high. It was only luck that led us to the tunnel. One of our diggers was pushing a cart full of clay through one of these side tunnels when he fell through the floor, and into another tunnel below.' Zaganos stopped before a dark side passage. 'This is it.'
Zaganos took a lamp from the wall and led them into the side tunnel. After about fifteen feet there was an irregular hole in the floor, with a ladder leading down. 'I'll go first to light the way, Your Excellency,' Zaganos said. He clambered down the ladder, and Mehmed followed. When he reached the bottom, Mehmed found that he could stand up straight. The tunnel was at least seven feet tall. The walls were of stone, leading up to an arched ceiling, also of stone. The floor was dirt. The tunnel that the Russian had described was made entirely of stone — ceiling, walls and floor. This must be a different tunnel.
'This way towards the walls,' Zaganos said. They followed the tunnel for some thirty feet before it ended suddenly in a pile of rubble.
'Perhaps this is just a cave-in,' Mehmed suggested. 'Have you tried to dig around it?'
'We have, Your Excellency,' Zaganos said. 'There's no way through. The tunnel has been collapsed for as far as we can see.'
'And what about the other direction? Where does it lead?'
'The tunnel is collapsed in that direction, too. My guess is that somebody used charges to bring the tunnel down. Somehow, the section that we're standing in escaped the destruction.'
'Well then, let us take advantage of our good fortune,' Mehmed said. 'There are other tunnels here, and we are going to find them. You will have as many men as you need, Zaganos. I want you to dig side passages off this tunnel, stretching the length of the walls if need be, until you find something.'
'I understand, Sultan.'
'Good. Start digging.' Sofia held an old, tattered book in one hand and a candle in the other as she descended the steps from the palace kitchen to the storerooms below. She had come straight from the library after she had come across a book, written hundreds of years ago by a Russian named Alexandre. He wrote of tunnels beneath the walls, built when the new wall surrounding the Blachernae quarter had been put up in the seventh century. Even more intriguing, the Russian insisted that he himself had passed through one. He said that during the Latin conquest, the emperor had used a tunnel to escape from the city. For a small price, a cook who had served in the Imperial Palace during the conquest had shown the Russian the tunnel. The entrance, Alexandre wrote, was beneath the imperial palace itself.
At the rear of the storerooms she found a stairway leading down into the palace dungeons. She descended the steps, her candle shedding a feeble light in the subterranean gloom. The staircase opened into a large underground room. The floor glistened with what looked like guano. Sofia thought that she could hear the titter of bats overhead, but the light of her candle did not reach to the ceiling. Other than the bats, the dungeon was silent. No prisoners had been kept here for centuries.
Three passages led from the room, and after consulting the book, she took the one on the furthest right. It led through a series of low rooms, and then to a staircase, which led down to a lower level of the dungeon. At the bottom, the stairs opened on to a long hallway. The air was colder here and the walls glistened with moisture. A large rat, startled by the sudden light, scurried away from beneath Sofia's feet, and she inhaled sharply. As she exhaled, she could see her breath in the cold, heavy air.
She pulled her robe more closely around her and walked down the hallway. To her left and right were a series of old prison cells, their doors open. Sofia peered into them as she passed. Manacles hung from the walls, and in one cell she saw an old skeleton. Other than that, the rooms were empty. At the end of the hallway, past the cells, was a large door.
Sofia consulted the book again and then pushed the door open. It swung slowly inward, groaning on rusty hinges, and she stepped into a room cluttered with various instruments of torture, all covered with a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. Set in the wall to her right was a fire pit, and next to it hung branding irons and pincers. On her left was a rack, a device for slowly pulling victims apart until they would confess to anything. Other implements were scattered about: restraints, spikes and wicked-looking knives. She shuddered.
A large tapestry depicting the fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1203 hung on the far wall. Various scenes from the siege ran around the edges of the tapestry, framing a larger image that depicted the Latin knights breaking
