A Scotsman under the city

In Master of Shadows by Neil Oliver, a man navigates the darkness beneath a besieged Constantinople and an orphan falls to earth

For more than eleven hundred years the Byzantine Empire controlled much of Europe, as well as that part of Asia known once as Anatolia. Its capital city was Constantinople, founded by and named after the Roman Emperor Constantine in AD 330. In the centuries that followed it became a centre of Christian learning, art and theology as well as an architectural wonder – a manmade heaven on earth.

During its long life Constantinople was besieged more than twenty times – by Arabs and Avars; Bulgarians and Persians; Slavs and Vikings and more besides. In 1204 the city fell to the Christian soldiers of the Fourth Crusade. The city was raped, sacked and torn to pieces – left in tatters until 1261, when the Byzantines took it back.

Then in 1453 the twenty-oneyear-old Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II brought a truly massive army before the ancient walls of the place they called the Great City.

Standing in defiance of the young sultan’s ambitions was Emperor Constantine XI. He was more than twice the age of the sultan and had inherited an empire that was unravelling and failing before his eyes.

In the years and months before the siege began, he had asked for help from throughout Christendom. But the four-centuries-old Great Schism – between the Catholic Church of Rome and the Orthodox Church of Constantinople – meant that even the Pope turned his back on the Christians of the East, and they were left alone, to stand or fall.

When the Ottomans arrived outside his gates, Emperor Constantine had no more than eight thousand soldiers at his command, ranged against a force of perhaps a quarter of a million men.

Among the city’s defenders was a man cloaked in shadow. He is mentioned in accounts of the siege, but only in a few lines here and there.

He clutched a knife, its blade curved like a tiger’s claw

Some writers described him as a German, but in fact he was a Scot, and his name was John Grant.

Like a loved one, the darkness took him in her arms. The ghost of the torch flame, extinguished moments before, drifted in front of him, fading to yellow and then blue. He waited until there was nothing before his eyes but steady blackness.

It was the silence that sometimes felt overwhelming underground. He held his breath, straining with the effort of listening. The silence pressed against him from all sides and leaned down from above. He was a threat to its dominion – likely to make a sound and tear apart the quiet. Only the darkness held him safe.

He reached out to the side with his right hand until his fingertips brushed against the cool wall of the tunnel. Crouching, bent over like a half-shut knife, he took a step forward into the cramped space, then another and another, and then stopped.

Instead of rock, his fingers felt empty space. He had reached a corner – a twist away towards the right. He moved sideways again until his fingers regained contact with the wall and began inching silently forward once more. Sometimes his hair brushed the roughly hewn roof of the tunnel and he flinched from it like a child ducking a blow.

In his left hand, his good hand, he clutched a knife, its blade curved like a tiger’s claw. Experience had taught him that a sword was unwieldy in the tunnels, an encumbrance. He made no noise as he drifted into the darkness, all but floating over the ground as he felt for each step. His breath trailed noiselessly from his open mouth. With his eyes closed he summoned his consciousness and sent it out ahead of him, further into the void.

He had covered a dozen yards beyond the corner when, on an impulse, he stopped. He trusted his impulses, however slight. The texture of the darkness had altered. Where before it had been smooth and still, now it was disturbed, ruffled. Ripples, like waves from a pebble dropped into water, pulsed against his face and chest. Beats from an anxious heart.

There was someone else there, someone else trying to be silent but disturbing the peace just the same by being alive. He smiled. With his knife held low he reached out swiftly with his right hand, straight in front. He touched a man’s face, felt stubble on the chin, and cold sweat. A gasp