Bursa, the tenth night
They mustered in the narrow yard behind the south magazine, in the dark under the wall, fifty men of the guard and near as many of the household, and no lamp among them. A sergeant went down the line with a sack of raw wool, wrapping buckles and sword fittings so nothing would ring. The women held the children against their shoulders with cloaks pulled over their heads. Below in the ward the garrison was forming at the breaches, a few thousand men trying to be quiet, and the sound of it carried up through the stone as a long low shuffle.
Yakub found the boy at the head of the household, in a plain wool coat with a soldier's cap on him. Under the cap Ali held his face the way the men around him held theirs. He had grown that spring and the coat was short at the wrists.
"I can stand at a wall." Ali's voice came low and level, the way he had been taught. "Murad's son does not go out the back of a fortress at night."
"Murad's son does what keeps the House alive. Tonight that is walking." Yakub took the pouch from his belt and worked the ring out of it, the old ring, Osman's seal cut deep in the flat of it and worn pale at the edges by six hands before the boy's. Orhan had carried it off when he ran, and it had come back to Yakub with the body, and since that day the leather of the pouch had gone soft with handling. He took the boy's hand and pressed the ring into it.
"Your forefather's seal. It does not go into the ground here." He closed the boy's fingers over it. "Kutahya first. After that, Turgut decides, and you listen to him as you would to me. Walk fast, and keep your cap down."
The boy's jaw worked once. He nodded. "My Sultan," Yakub said, and bowed low. Then he straightened and turned him toward the line with a hand between his shoulders. A serving woman drew him in beside her and put a bundle in his arms so that he would have the shape of a boy carrying baggage and not a boy being guarded.
Turgut stood at the postern with his helmet under his arm. He had picked the fifty himself through the afternoon, sworn men of his own and of Yakub's house, most of them, and a handful from the eastern valleys who knew the tracks over the shoulder of the mountain, and they waited along the wall in single file with cord run hand to hand between them for the dark.
"Hasan can lead them over the mountain as well as I can," Turgut said. "My place is behind you."
"Hasan can get him over the mountain. He cannot keep him alive after it. He cannot make the beys hold their tongues. That work is yours." Yakub looked at him. "I put it on you as an order, Turgut. The last one I have that matters."
Turgut stood a moment with his thumb moving on the rim of the helmet. Then he put the helmet on and bent his head, and there was nothing more said between them. He turned to the postern and gave a low word, and the file began to go through, one man and then the next, out into the dark under the mountain, and the household folded in among them, and somewhere in the middle of it went a boy with a bundle in his arms. Yakub watched until the last man was through and the postern was barred again behind them. Then he went down to the wall above the east breach, where his men were waiting, and took his place at the parapet, and gave the order.
The garrison went out at the third hour after midnight, the foot through the two eastern breaches and down the rubble slopes, the rest through the east gate, out into the dead ground. They covered perhaps two hundred paces. Then a picket fired, one shot, high, and the drums began in the Roman camps before the echo had come back off the mountain.
Yakub stood at the parapet and watched it go. The night was clouded and moonless, and he followed the fight by its fire. The first Roman shots were thin, scattered along one stretch of the forward trench, and they fell away as the garrison's front went into the ditch and up the far side. The sound of that work came across the flat, iron and voices together, and there was nothing to see with it. Then torches came up out of the camps in swarms, and firing began again behind the bank, ragged at first, single pieces and short strings of them. It did not stay ragged long. The drums kept their beat under it, and the fire steadied into volleys, one stretch of the line and then the next, until whole ranks were firing together and the flashes came in rows.
The Romans had dug facing the citadel as well as the field, ditch and bank and stakes, and behind the first line a second, and the garrison had to fight through each of them under fire from the next. Even so they came on. A stretch of the forward bank went under, the flashes there stopping and starting again pointed the other way, and his men set fire to a store of fascines among the Roman works, a tall flame that lit that quarter of the field.
At the parapet beside Yakub a man counted low under his breath, the way gunners count. Yakub had his own count running. A half hour, he had told Turgut. Give me a half hour of their eyes.
The Roman horn calls were moving now, from the center camp toward the flanks, unhurried. Companies were coming up out of the reserve lines in blocks, their order visible even by torchlight, and swinging in against the shoulders of the fight. They had been sleeping in their boots. He had known they would be. The storm was set for the morning, and a week of burned villages had kept their camps standing to arms half of every night besides.
Then, from the south, from the mountain quarter high behind him, a single shot.
Yakub's count stopped. Two of the men at the parapet turned their heads. Far up on the shoulder of the mountain there was nothing to see. A dog began somewhere up there, then a second, thin with distance, and under them something that might have been a cry and might have been a bird, and then the guns along the east covered everything.
Out on the flat the shape of the fight had changed; the flashes that had pointed outward were pointing in again, and the ripple of the volleys had steadied into the slow regular breathing of men firing by ranks who were no longer worried. Away on the far right, where the ground ran toward the broken Balabanbay tower, there was a brief boil of noise and movement and then hoofbeats, a great many, going east, fading. The horse had found the seam between two camps and gone through it. Two hundred, perhaps, riding into the dark with their reins loose, and no one behind them but the dead.
The rest of the garrison began to come back. The wounded came first, dragging themselves out of the dark below the wall and up the rubble on their hands, and the men at the breaches went down to haul them in.
Then the mass of them came, in no order, back across the dead ground and up the rubble into the breaches, dropping swords to climb with both hands, and the Roman fire followed them the whole way. Behind them the torches came on in blocks, keeping their order, pausing at the ditch only long enough to bridge the places where the garrison had filled it with fascines and with themselves. The storm columns set for morning would not wait for morning now.
He went down from the wall. On the stair his knees told him his age at every step. At the bottom two men went past him carrying a wounded man on a pavise taken off a dead Roman, the man on it holding the lip of it with both fists and saying nothing, and behind them a boy of the household ran the other way with pikes in his arms, three of them, too many for him.
His room was as he had left it. The lamp burned low on its shelf and the chest stood at the foot of the bed. He took the regent's chain from his shoulders and coiled it on the chest, ring on ring, and laid the clasp on top of the coil. From the pile by the door he took a plain steel cap, some dead man's cap brought in for the metal, and worked the strap to his chin. His sword he kept; it was a plain sword. He ran his thumb once down the sheepskin of the scabbard, and the words of prayer came up in him of themselves, the way they always had. He let them run while he pinched out the lamp.
At the east breach the last of the garrison was coming in over the rubble with the Romans not far behind them, and his officers were doing what officers do at the end, pulling men out of the flood by their collars and turning them around and making a line of them.
It was not much of a line. Six hundred, seven, in the ward inside the main breach, some of them bleeding, mixed in among his own few dozen, and more still coming over the rubble in twos and threes with shot smacking the stones around them. A granary roof in the lower court had caught fire, and the light of it came and went across the broken wall, so that the breach showed and sank back into the dark, over and over.
Yakub walked out in front of them so they could see him. He did not raise his voice much. Voices carry in a stone ward at night.
"The wall is open and the day is coming, and I have sent no herald down to their camp. I will send none." He looked along them, the burned faces. "You ate the House's bread, and the bread is spent. What is left to give is how we are found. Whoever falls on this stone tonight falls a martyr, and God does not lose count of His own."
A man near the end of the line was sick, quietly, and straightened up again. Nobody moved out of the line. The firing on the rubble slope beyond the breach had stopped, which meant the shields were coming.
Yakub drew, and said the takbir. The first time it was his voice alone in the ward. The second time it came back at him from seven hundred throats, and the third time it was a single sound with no separate voices in it at all, and under it he could hear his own heart, and boots on rubble.
The first shields came over the crest of the breach with the burning ward behind Yakub throwing his shadow up the slope at them, long and thin, so that his shadow reached the Romans before he did. He went up the rubble at a run with his house around him and the line roaring at his back, up toward the grey saddle of the breach and the shields coming down it, and the two met a little below the crest, in the loose stone, where the footing was worst.
Bursa, dawn
Constantine came up the rubble of the main breach on foot a little after first light, Andreas a pace ahead of him and the guard strung out below. His boots found stone where stone showed between the bodies, Roman and Turk together in the loose scree, thickest just below the crest where the first push had met the sortie's survivors coming back.
Inside, the ward still smoked. The granary block had burned to its stone and gone out on its own, and two chains of soldiers were working buckets on the roofs beyond it, where the fire had jumped once and been caught. Smoke stood straight up off the whole rock in the windless morning, one grey column that they had watched from the camp since before light.
Somewhere off toward the west gate the men started chanting his name. It came through the smoke in pulses, one company taking it up from another, ragged, hoarse, dying away and starting again nearer. In the street below the ward the dead had been dragged out of the houses and laid along the wall in a row, and the row ran all the way to the corner.
Andreas came back to him from a knot of officers at the wellhead, wiping at the dried blood on the back of one hand, not his own.
"No one of rank among the dead. We've turned every body at the breach and along the wall. No chain, no seal, nothing. If the regent is here he is lying in a common coat." He paused. "And the boy is not here either. Not among the dead. We took few prisoners, and he is not among them. A party went over the south face in the night, it seems. The pickets above the Cilimboz heard something around the third hour, fired once, lost it. Thomas has three parties on the mountain tracks and riders gone east to watch the Kutahya road."
The smoke went up off the roofs behind him and the buckets swung. Bursa was the last of it, and the House of Osman had come down to a boy on a mountain with few men. A hundred and fifty years, ended on this rock in one night. Except that a boy on a mountain was not an ending, and he had been alive too long to mistake a burned capital for a grave.
"Good," he said. "Get the fires out and the dead in the ground, theirs and ours. And the boy is the first work now. I want him found, alive or dead."