wild skirling of the Anatolian pipes, the fitful light of flares, and the sudden thundering crash of the Hungarian’s gigantic cannon.
All the bells of the city were tolling. As the smoke cleared from the breach in the walls where the invading troops lay dying; as the defenders rushed to reconstitute the rubble; as the moon struggled clear of a ribbon of black and flying cloud, Mehmed himself advanced at the head of his crack infantry, the Janissaries. He led them to the moat, and from there they advanced, not in a wild battering frenzy like the irregulars and Turks who had been flung against the walls all through the night but, in the hour before dawn, in steady and unwavering file.
“They fought on the walls, hand to hand, for an hour or more,” the old lady said. “Believing the Turks were failing. Even those Janissaries losing their momentum. It…it wasn’t so.”
Yashim had watched her lips working against her toothless gums. Dry eyed, she said:
“There was a little gate, you see, at the angle where the great old walls of Theodosius met the lesser walls behind the Palace of the Caesars. It had been blocked up, goodness knows how many years before. So little, that gate. I don’t think two men could pass through it abreast, but there—God’s will is infinite in its mystery. It was opened at the start of the siege, for sallies. A party had just returned from a sortie, and—would you believe it—the last man back forgot to bar the gate behind him.”
It was the discovery of the little gate rocking on its hinges—a tiny gap in the whole eight miles of massive wall and inner wall, a momentary lapse of attention in a story that had run for a thousand years—that turned the course of the siege. Some fifty Janissaries shoved through and found themselves between the double walls. But their position was desperately exposed, and they might still have been driven back or killed by the defenders had one of the heroes of the defence, a Genoese sea-captain, not been seriously wounded by a close shot at that very moment. His crewmen bore him from the walls; the Byzantines sensed that he had abandoned them, and gave a shout of despair. The Ottomans made a rush for the inner walls and a giant called Hasan surged over the stockade at the head of his Janissary company.
In ten minutes the Turkish flags were flying from the tower that stood above the Kerkoporta.
All this was four hundred years ago.
But now, rising behind the great cypress in the square, the tower of the Kerkoporta still stood, red and white and empty against the wintry blue sky.
The exact spot where fifteen hundred years of Roman history reached its bloody climax, as the last emperor of Byzantium tore off his imperial insignia and, sword in hand, vanished into the melee, never to be seen again.
The exact place where Constantinople, the Red Apple, the navel of the world, was won by the Janissaries for Islam and the sultan.
Old Palmuk had been right after all.
There
The fourth tekke.
Shaking his head at the memories he had summoned, Yashim walked forward into the winter sunlight.
[ 87 ]
The stone flight of steps which led up to the inner parapet of the first wall was invisible from the alley. To reach it, Yashim groped his way down an unmarked passage between two wooden houses built against the base of the wall. Reaching the top, he turned back and followed the parapet walk to the Kerkoporta Tower.
At parapet level there was a wooden door set in the masonry. It stood ajar, its hinges rusted, fastened to the jamb with a length of flaking iron chain which almost crumbled at Yashim’s touch. He pushed. The door trembled slightly. He put his shoulder to the planks and heaved, until the hinges screamed and the door swung inwards into the dark.
The floor was littered with dust, fallen mortar, and dried droppings. Lifting his sandalled feet with care, Yashim advanced by the slanting sunlight into the centre of the chamber, and looked around. The ceiling was lost in the shadows. The walls showed signs of having been plastered once, but now revealed layers of Roman brickwork interspersed with courses of stone, while in the farthest corner of the chamber a stone staircase spiralled up from the floor below and disappeared upwards.
He crossed to the staircase and peered down. A slight breeze seemed to be coming up towards him, suggesting that the room below had air and maybe light; it carried odours of damp masonry and straw. He felt for the step and began to descend into darkness, his left hand trailing cobwebs from the rough outer wall of the spiral.
For several steps he was in total darkness, and when he thought of the sun on the square, and the tradesmen sitting outside their shops only a few yards away, he knew that this was as lonely and silent a spot as anywhere in the whole of Istanbul.
Another winding turn of the spiral brought a slight change in the quality of the darkness, and as Yashim went on
