The Towers of Samarcand

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A party of five stood on the hill of Kosmidion overlooking the city of Constantinople: the Sultan Bayezid, his three sons and the Grand Vizier, all cloaked and furred against the winter wind that swept in from the Bosporus. They held cloths to their faces.

The rain had stopped at last and a sudden shaft of sunlight ignited the spearheads on the city walls. There were pitifully few these days. Constantinople, the last gem in the empty crown of Byzantium, was a place of fields and orchards and churches whose domes no longer wore the gold to ignite.

A few of the city’s garrison had emerged in sortie the night before and now stood behind, spread-eagled in crucifixion as their saviour had been, the stench of their decay all around. Bayezid spoke through his mask.

‘We need cannon.’

The Ottoman Sultan had been known as Yildirim in his youth: ‘Thunderbolt’. He was fourth in the line of Osman and had astonished the world by the speed of his campaigns to quell the gazi tribes of Anatolia and stretch his empire to the banks of the Danube. Now he was a man addicted to wine and sugar whose size of turban mirrored the size of his belly. His heir, Suleyman, stood on one side and his second son, Mehmed, on the other. They were as different as their mothers: Suleyman tall and pointed of nose and beard, Mehmed smaller, his gazi roots there in a face as flat as the steppe. Bayezid’s third son, Musa, stood a little behind and was yet to be bearded. The brothers hated each other.

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