The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [258]
Nicholas said, “Yes. It is impregnable. But no one has given the Emperor the armour from the Doria.” And he brought his eyes back from the courtyard. Neither moved. Then Nicholas laughed and, lifting one hand, spread its fingers. He said, “I told Astorre, when he saw that, to take me off to a brothel.”
“But you came instead to a priest. I am glad,” Godscalc said. “I know what you are saying, and we are going to sit, and drink a full glass of wine, and discuss it. And you will not bear the brunt of all this alone. I promise you that. Whatever blame there is, it will fall on me, too.”
Pouring the wine, he kept his back to the boy so that he should not see that the priest’s hands, also, were shaking.
A week later, it became known that this young character, the head of the Charetty company, had been taken ill with the fever again, and that the doctor had given up everything else to look after him. Without his cheerful face, the tedium of the siege became a little more obvious, and the edge of fear now lurking below it. But luckily, there was the reassurance of Captain Astorre’s constant presence: in the town, on the ramparts, in the Palace, putting good heart into everybody. There had been time to train others, and set a good routine; and even Pagano Doria found it convenient to slacken his childish vendetta, having other things of more note on his mind. Nor did he object when, having no chaplain, his officers asked leave to make use of the Charetty priest Godscalc. July moved towards August, and the City steamed in the heat.
In the mountains behind, it was cooler; and women were better off than men, although it did not stop Sara Khatun’s servingwomen from complaining. On the last stretch of the journey, even the light two-wheeled covered carriage the Sultan had given her had proved impossible, and she had resorted to the cane palanquin, hand-carried, that she had brought from Erzerum, leaving the women to ride. They were among the few with that privilege, of those who travelled with the Ottoman army. Without tents, without guns, without any scrap of baggage that would hinder them, the combined armies of the Sultan Mehmet and his Grand Vizier Mahmud had forcemarched in a sweep to the east after the governor of Little Rum, whom hell receive, had taken her son’s mountain castle at Koyulhisar. The border fortress they had thought would resist him. And since then, the Janissaries had overrun most of the main posts and passes, although some, she observed, they circumvented. Lightly armed, lightly provisioned, with almost none of their cavalry, the Sultan and his army had chosen to make speed their chief weapon: speed and surprise.
The Ottomans were not going to hold this country unless they made peace with her son. They would be lucky to hold Koyulhisar through the winter. Through the winter, her son Uzum Hasan and his forces would retreat into the mountains of Armenia and the plains beyond the river Euphrates, to emerge and attack when it suited them. The Sultan didn’t want that. But equally, the Sultan knew her son’s weaknesses. The White Sheep were nomads, with the wilfulness that nomads displayed; unlike the drilled, silent efficiency of the Ottomans. And their dashing cavalry skills were no use in this great range of mountains. The mountains the Sultan had to traverse if he wished to reach and challenge Trebizond. As it was now clear he did.
Sara Khatun had been with the Sultan’s army now for several weeks, and he had treated her and her entourage of Kurdish and Turcoman nobles with exemplary respect as she had never doubted he would; even to naming her Mother. If she had been, she would have reduced his drinking by half. The prince of twenty-three who had taken Constantinople and (fortunately for her sake) saw himself as a second Alexander conquering a second Darius of Persia, was now a beak-nosed and inflated 31-year-old. A man who spoke Arabic, Persian and Greek and liked gardens, mathematicians, catamites, military strategy and making up excellent poetry. She was less enamoured of his Grand