For a mile in either direction, hammers ring, axes chop, camels bray, bark, and bleat. He passes camps of arrow makers, camps of harness makers, cobblers and blacksmiths; tailors are fabricating tents inside yet larger tents; boys scurry here and there with baskets of rice; fifty carpenters construct scaling ladders from debarked logs. Ditches have been cut to carry away human and animal waste; drinking water is stored in mountains of barrels; a great portable foundry has been constructed at the rear.
Men approach from every corner of the camp to ogle the cannon where it gleams, immense and bright, on its cart. The oxen, wary of the commotion, stick close together: Moonlight appears to sleep on his feet as he chews, unable to raise his head above his backline, and Tree finds a place beside him and lies on his side, twitching one ear. Omeir rubs a mixture of spit and crushed calendula leaves into his left hind leg, as Grandfather would have done, and worries.
At dusk the men who have brought the cannon from Edirne gather around steaming cauldrons. A captain climbs to a dais to announce that the sultan’s gratitude is immense. As soon as the city is won, he says, they will each be able to choose which house will be theirs, and which garden, and which women will be their wives.
All night Omeir’s sleep is broken by the noise of carpenters building a cradle to hold the cannon and a palisade to conceal it, and all the next day the teamsters and oxen work to hoist it into place. An occasional crossbow bolt comes whistling out from the crenelated parapet atop the city’s outer wall and sticks into a board or into the mud. Maher shakes a fist at the walls. “We have something a little bigger than that to throw back at you,” he calls, and everyone who hears him laughs.
That evening in the pasture where they feed the oxen Maher finds Omeir sitting atop a fallen block of limestone and squats beside him and picks at a scab on his knee. They gaze across the encampment to the moat and the chalk-white towers, striped red with brick. In the setting sun the jumble of rooftops on the far side of the walls seems to burn.
“Do you think by this time tomorrow, all of that will be ours?”
Omeir says nothing. He is ashamed to say that the size of the city terrifies him. How could men have built such a place?
Maher enthuses about the house he’ll choose for himself, how it will have two stories and channels of water running through a garden with pear trees and jasmine, and how he’ll have a dark-eyed wife, and five sons, and at least a dozen three-legged stools—Maher is always talking about three-legged stools. Omeir thinks of the stone cottage in the ravine, his mother making curds, Grandfather toasting pine nuts, and homesickness rolls through him.
Atop a low hill on their left, surrounded by shields, a series of ditches, and a curtain-wall of fabric, the sultan’s compound of tents ruffles in the breeze. There are tents for his bodyguards, tents for his council and treasury, for his holy relics and his falconry, his astrologers and scholars and food-tasters; kitchen tents, toilet tents, contemplation tents. Beside an observation tower ripples the sultan’s personal tent—red, gold, and as large as a grove of trees. Its interior is painted, Omeir has heard, the colors of paradise, and he aches to see it.
“Our prince, in his infinite wisdom,” says Maher, following Omeir’s gaze, “has discovered a weakness. A flaw. Do you see where the river enters the city? Where the walls dip beside that gate? Water has been running there since the days of the Prophet, peace be upon Him, collecting, seeping, chewing away. The foundations there are weak, and the mitering of the stones has begun to fail. It is there that we will smash through.”
Up and down the city walls, sentry fires are being lit. Omeir tries to imagine swimming the moat, clambering over the scarp on the far side, somehow scaling the outer wall, fighting across the battlements, then dropping into a no-man’s-land before the huge bulwark of the inner wall, its towers as tall as twelve men. You would need wings; you would need to be a god.
“Tomorrow night,” says Maher. “Tomorrow night two of those houses will be ours.”
The following morning ablutions are made and prayers recited. Then flagbearers pick their way through the tents to the very front of the lines and raise bright standards in the dawn light. Drums and tambourines and castanets sound throughout the company, a racket meant as much to frighten as to inspire. Omeir and Maher watch the powder makers—many missing fingers, many with burns on their throats and faces—prepare the huge gun. Their expressions are strained from the constant fear of working with unstable explosives and they reek of sulfur and they murmur to one another in their strange dialect like necromancers, and Omeir prays that their eyes will not meet his, that if something goes wrong they will not blame the defect in his face.
Along the almost four miles of land wall, the cannons have been organized into fourteen batteries, none larger than the great bombard Omeir and Maher have helped drag here. More familiar siege weapons—trebuchets, slings, catapults—are loaded too, but all of them seem primitive compared to the burnished guns and the dark horses and carts and powder-stained tunics of the artillerymen. Bright spring clouds cruise above them like vessels sailing to a parallel war, and the sun pushes above the city’s rooftops, momentarily blinding the armies outside the walls, and finally, at some signal from the sultan, hidden by a shimmer of fabric atop his tower, the drums and cymbals go quiet and the flagbearers drop their standards.
At more than sixty cannons, cannoneers set tapers to priming powder. The whole army, from barefoot conscripted shepherds in the vanguard with clubs and scythes to the imams and viziers—from the attendants and grooms and cooks and arrowsmiths to the elite corps of Janissaries in their spotless white headdresses—watches. People inside the city watch too, in sporadic lines along the outer and inner walls: archers, horsemen, counter-sappers, monks, the curious and the incautious. Omeir shuts his eyes and clamps his forearms over his ears and feels the pressure build, feels the huge cannon draw up its abominable energy, and for an instant prays that he is asleep, that when he opens his eyes he’ll find himself at home, resting against the trunk of the half-hollow yew, waking from an immense dream.
One after another the bombards fire, white smoke ejecting forward from their barrels as the guns smash backward with the recoil, rocking the earth, and sixty-plus stone balls fly toward the city faster than eyes can track them.
Up and down the walls clouds of dust and pulverized stone rise. Fragments of brick and limestone rain onto men a quarter mile away, and a roar rolls through the assembled armies.
As the smoke drifts away, Omeir sees that a section of one tower in the outer wall has partially crumbled. Otherwise the walls appear unaffected. The gunners are pouring olive oil over the huge gun to cool it, and an officer prepares his crew to load a second thousand-pound ball, and Maher is blinking in disbelief, and it is a long time before the cheers subside enough for Omeir to hear the screaming.