Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [233]
Nicholas remembered the man — Cristoforo? — who had interviewed him: youngish, easily angered; and wondered if he had laid the foundations of his statutory tower before the Turkish cannon were trained on it. Most of the tall, three-walled bulwarks were shattered, their bracing-timbers awry in the starlight. They were made of juniper wood, which hardened with age. He knew the groves it had been cut from, and the quarry where the dull yellow stone had been hewn. He walked to the tower where Ochoa had died, but couldn’t see whether the plaque was still there, unread, bearing the name of Adorne.
They had smashed the Armenian church. The mosque looked whole, but he knew it was not, and could not bring himself to go in, and look again at the mihrab, and the painted Genoese coats of arms. He turned downhill and back, past the empty warehouses and food stores, until he reached the Christian church.
The girl at the brothel, telling him about it, had said that the Governor had been quite right to do what he did. The attackers, angered by the long resistance, had broken loose from their officers and had swept killing, burning, pillaging through the town. It had been wise to leave the broken castle and take cover; to allow the Turkish soldiery to indulge in their passions below, and to wait until Gedik Ahmed Pasha or someone with sufficient authority brought an official troop up the hill to meet the Governor, and receive his formal surrender.
‘And?’ Nicholas had said.
‘And so the Governor marshalled all his men, many hundreds of them, in the church of St Mary’s. Without arms, to show they offered no resistance. They expected, of course, to be taken to Constantinople. They did not expect to be freed.’
He had asked, then, about the imam Ibrahiim, and the girl had pulled a face. ‘The Governor would not let him join them in the church. He was an infidel, like the Turk, and the Turk would deal with him, they said. If he chose to serve the wrong sultan, it was not the Governor’s fault.’
And so Gedik Ahmed Pasha’s men had climbed to the citadel, and had found the imam Ibrahiim praying in the mosque, and had killed him, but not before attempting to extract from him, by torture, anything he might have to say about Cairo. Later, his pupils took him to Caffa for burial.
And the Governor and his garrison?
The Governor was here, where Nicholas also was standing, high above the sea on a hot August night, with the flies and the cicadas buzzing. Here by these blackened buildings where, despite the hot summer sun, the stink of burning, the stench of carnage persisted. The Turks had sealed the windows and doors of the church, and set fire to it, killing the hundreds within it. Their remains were still there.
May we not also mourn the loss to others?
We may feel sorrow, of course. But even the anguish of personal loss is relieved by the passage of time. If it does not diminish, then it has not been confronted.
The imam had counselled him before death. His friend Umar had not. Umar had left, saying nothing, to go to face a terrible end. Perhaps he believed Nicholas self-sufficient, requiring no admonitions, no comfort. Gelis had thought so.
Or perhaps, all the time they were together, Umar had been conveying something, and he had not understood. The imam had said the same. I am wasting my breath. His own friends had given up, too.
As the imam said, it deserved thought. There would never be a better time for it.
BAÇI SARAY WAS EMPTY. The broad plain was dust, which once held the summer pavilions of the Khan, surrounded by the wagons, the herds, the