The Byzantine Wager

Chapter 20 - That Same Morning

Chapter 20

That Same Morning

Pons woke Cyn from his side of the bed before dawn even broke. They had spent the night at an inn near the city and he knew they were in for a busy day. They saddled their horses in the foggy prelight. It was still early morning when they came over a rise in the road and could look down to the sea. The first they could see of the city was the dome of the church of the Holy Apostles, on the top of the highest of the seven hills of this New Rome, there in the far distant background, rising out of the sea mist and looming over the walls.

Madonna. What walls. Twelve meters high and five meters wide running ten kilometers, from the Sea of Marmara in the south to the waters of the Golden Horn in the north, cutting off the peninsula. A tower twenty meters tall rose every one hundred paces of its length. Made of finished limestone blocks - the wall almost gleamed. It ran straight as an arrow, to the north, dipping over the seventh hill before turning to the northeast. In front of the wall was another wall. This one was a mere seven meters tall, and in front of that was a moat eighteen meters wide. Every two kilometers the wall was punctured by a massive gate with a formidable bastion. Cyn was amazed.

"Close your mouth. You look like a yokel." Pons advised. He remembered himself as a young man, younger than Cyn here now, first viewing these same walls and thought that he had also probably looked as dumbfounded. In those days he had been merely a man-at-arms in the retinue of Lord Guilhem, who was accompanying his cousin, the German Kaiser, to the Holy Land.

"Can't be taken." Cyn said succinctly. Throughout the journey, whenever they had traveled near a castle or walled town they would discuss various ways of breaching the defenses. Catapults or undermining the walls? The benefits of an attack with ladders as opposed to using a ram. How long would it take to capture a place by assault? By starving them out? Soldiers talk.

"Can't be done." Cyn said again. "Never in a hundred years. Look at those walls will you. A donkey could kick at them all day, every day, for an entire season and not knock it down." He referred to the onager style catapult which, though easy to construct on campaign, kicked like a mule every time it fired a rock. "And to defend. Christos, those towers. I could hit anything with a crossbow from up there, and they would have bugger all chance of shooting me. Nah. You'd have to take it by sea."

Pons pointed. "Have you noticed the sea wall?"

Riding closer they could see that the walls continued at a height of ten meters running northeast for eight kilometers along the coastline of the Sea of Marmara to the tip of the peninsula, near to where the basilica of Holy Wisdom and Imperial Palace dominated the landscape. There it met up with the northern seawall running along the Golden Horn which continued back to the west before vanishing from their view behind hills covered in buildings, sea mist, and the smoke of ten thousand fires.

Constantinople. The largest city on Earth.

Cyn insisted on seeing the golden milestone, the Milion. Throughout the long journey the milestones had been constant companions. Both men had looked forward to spotting them. Sometimes they were in plain sight, sometimes they were hiding in the grass which their horses would crop to reveal, others were prominently set into bridges. As the numbers counted down their trip Pons and Cyn cheered the loss of each D and C. It wouldn't seem right, to Cyn's way of thinking, not to go all the way to the beginning.

Pons did not mind. He remembered from his previous trips that the Milion was right next to the Basilica of Holy Wisdom, the Imperial Palace, and the Hippodrome. Three of the first places he wanted to go to anyway.

The via Egnatia entered the city at the Porta Aurea, the great Golden Gate, the land wall's largest and most imposing entrance. Made, not of limestone like the rest of the wall, but of white marble and capped with a golden statue of a chariot drawn by elephants. A line of carts trundled in through the main portal bringing everything needed to keep the hundreds of thousands of souls inside alive. Wagons loaded with jars of olives and oil, donkeys piled high with firewood, monks sitting on top of sacks of flour - their cart pulled by a yoke of bullocks. Foot traffic, such as the old women with baskets on their backs stuffed full of clucking chickens, the children leading goats, and farmers pushing barrows full of vegetables, all passed to a second smaller door to the left of the main portal. A third doorway to the right admitted traveling friars, messengers, officials traveling by covered litter, priests, and the like. It was to this gate that they made their way.