The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [261]
She said, “We can do nothing else meantime. My son has the Black Sheep on his other side. He cannot fight both.”
Nicholas said, “Agree to whatever he asks of you, Khatun. You are right. Another day, the chance may occur. And meantime, Trebizond will come to no harm. It has never been so strongly defended. Soon, the weather will change, and there will be nothing more for this army to eat, with strong hillmen waiting in shelter to pounce on them. He will not blame you for that.”
She said, “I thought you would blame me. You see what I have to do. I may have to do worse. But I see this orderly camp; these well-trained Spahis; the marked and varied abilities of such as Tursun Beg, the Vizier Mahmud and most excellent of all, the Sultan himself. I look at them, and I see that my own son, though greater by far, is not yet ready to govern as they are. In eight years, this man Mehmet has begun to learn what the Emperor David has begun to forget. You will see the Sultan. He and his army will come within the next day and night. And meantime, the Grand Vizier has already sent an envoy to Trebizond.” She paused. “You had not heard?”
“No,” said the man Nicholas.
“He has sent in the name of the Sultan to call on the Emperor to surrender. A formality, to be sure. But it opens an exchange, and worlds await the result. He has used as spokesman his Greek secretary Thomas Katabolenu, as he used him once to urge the despot Thomas out of Mistra in the Morea. We should have the answer tomorrow. We are only three miles to the south of the Citadel. You will have realised that. It is a little marsh called Skylolimne, Dog Lake. When you wish to return to the Citadel, it will be easy.”
“I should like to see the Sultan,” said Nicholas.
They didn’t stay longer. Later, lying stiff-limbed in darkness, wishing for the great copper cauldrons and scented water of home, Sara Khatun thought of the Sultan, and what she herself had said to him at the start of this journey. “Why tire yourself, my son, for nothing better than Trebizond?”
And he had made the reply that was proper. “Mother: in my hand is the sword of Islam. Without this hardship. I should not deserve the name of Ghazi, and today and tomorrow I should have to cover my face in shame before Allah.”
The answer from Trebizond was a rebuff. Tobie, snoring under his sun cloth, awoke in fright as a shadow fell over him, and then found, to his relief, that his lips were shut, and the cause of the shadow was Nicholas, his squirrel tail fluttering and his eyes bright under the brim of his hat. Nicholas addressed him in Turcoman. “You lazy fool: you will be late for the Vizier. How can you snore, while the army suffers an insult? One has returned bearing the words of this little Greek king, who says he will never surrender.”
“Maybe he will attack us instead,” said someone in the next company, softly jeering.
“I have heard of such an Emperor going to war,” said another. “He took his chandeliers and his candles, his dinner tents and his bathing tents and his sleeping tents, his table linen and his writing parchment and his sacred altar and his oils and his wines and his caviare and his sheep and cows and goats for the killing. They carried water-beakers for the chickens on horseback, so it is said.”
“When our lord leaves the Sublime Porte, he carries his baggage upon a hundred camels and twice that number of mules and of horses,” said another. “He takes his sherbet from a pitcher of silver, and made a gift to an emir last year of a skinned sheep painted red and white with silver rings in its nose and ears. He is a greater man.”
“Did I say he was not?” said the first. Tobie rose, and dressed, and filled a canvas bag and took it, alone, to Tursun Beg, who had not recognised the dyed beard of Nicholas and even in daylight would hardly remember, he was sure, one of the many captives on the Ciaretti. That the plague symptoms had been his