Death's End

Later, when she was older, she had found out the truth. The basic frame of the story was true: Her ancestor had indeed been a member of the Children’s Crusade. It was right after the plague had swept through the villages, and he had joined in the hope of filling his belly. When the man had gotten off the boat, he found himself in Egypt, where he and more than ten thousand other children were sold as slaves. After many years of bondage, he escaped and drifted to Constantinople, where he did indeed meet a woman warrior, a holy knight. However, her fate wasn’t much better than his. The Byzantine Empire had been hoping for the elite troops of Christendom to fight off the infidels. Instead, they received an army of frail women as poor as beggars. The Byzantine court refused to supply these “holy warriors,” and the women knights became prostitutes.

For more than a hundred years, Helena’s “glorious” family had barely eked out a living. By her father’s time, the family’s poverty had grown even more acute. A hungry Helena picked up the trade practiced by her own illustrious ancestor, but when her father found out, he had beaten her, telling her that he would kill her if he ever caught her again… unless she took her clients back home so that he could negotiate a better price and keep the money “for her.”

Helena left home and began to live and ply her trade on her own. She had been to Jerusalem and Trabzon, and even visited Venice. She was no longer hungry, and she dressed in beautiful clothes. But she knew that she was no different from a blade of grass growing in the mud by the road: indistinguishable from the muck, as travelers trampled over her.

And then, God granted Helena a miracle.

Even then, she didn’t model herself after Joan of Arc, another woman who had been divinely inspired. What had the Maid of Orléans received from God? Only a sword. But God had given Helena something that would make her into the holiest woman besides Mary….

“Look, that’s the camp of el-Fātiḥ, the Conqueror.” Phrantzes pointed away from the Gate of St. Romanus.

Helena glanced over and nodded.

Phrantzes handed her another sheepskin bag. “Inside are three portraits of him from different angles and in different clothing. I’ve also given you a knife—you’ll need it. We need his entire head, not just the brain. It’s best if you wait until after nightfall. He won’t be in his tent during the day.”

Helena accepted the bag. “You remember my warning.”

“Of course.”

Don’t follow me. Don’t enter the place where I must go. Otherwise the magic will stop working, forever.

The spy who had followed her last time, in the guise of a friar, had told Phrantzes that Helena had been very careful, turning and looping back on her own path multiple times until she arrived in the Blachernae quarter, the part of the city where bombardment from the Turkish cannons was heaviest.

The spy had watched as Helena entered the ruins of a minaret that had once been part of a mosque. When Constantine had given the order to destroy the mosques in the city, this particular tower had been left alone because, during the last plague, a few diseased men had run inside and died, and no one wanted to get too close. After the siege began, a stray cannonball had blown away the top half of the minaret.

Following Phrantzes’s admonition, the spy had not entered the minaret. But he had questioned two soldiers who had entered it before it had been struck by the stray missile. They told the spy that they had intended to set up a watch station on top of the structure but gave up after realizing it wasn’t tall enough. They told the spy that there was nothing inside except a few bodies that had rotted until they were practically skeletons.

This time, Phrantzes didn’t send anyone to follow Helena. He watched as she made her way through the soldiers thronging the top of the walls. Among the dirt-and-blood-encrusted armor of the soldiers, her bright cloak stood out. But the exhausted soldiers paid her no attention. She descended from the walls, and, without making an obvious effort to throw off anyone who might be following her, headed for the Blachernae quarter.

Night fell.

—————

Constantine stared at the drying water stain on the floor, a metaphor for his vanishing hope.

The stain had been left by a dozen spies. Last Monday, dressed in the uniforms and turbans of the Ottoman forces, they had sneaked through the blockade in a tiny sailboat to welcome the European fleet that was supposed to be on its way to relieve the siege of Constantinople. But all they saw was the empty Aegean Sea, without even a shadow of the rumored fleet. The disappointed spies had carried out their duty and made their way back through the blockade to bring the emperor the terrible news.