Emperor's Winding Sheet by Jill Paton Walsh

man wanted more than he could pay him.”
    â€œWhy, dammit,” cried John in fury, “if he couldn’t be kept by fair means, he should have been kept by foul … he should have been thrown into a dungeon, or even waylaid on his way out of the City by someone with a long-blade knife; anything to stop him reaching the Sultan!” The soldiers all looked grave. They murmured grimly to each other, assessing the impact of that gun. John said bitterly, “When I said we could do with a little incompetence, I meant it on their side, rather than on ours.”
    But Vrethiki, for all that he was ready enough to think ill of the Emperor, and his heart took a familiar downturn at any bad news for the City, could still see that John was wishing his master had stooped to murder. He sighed. Even the Englishmen in this strange place seemed hard to understand. Though doubtless the ugly little gunsmith was a less tender victim than Joan the Maid.

Chapter 8
    W hat use is it to keep arguing over hearsay?” cried the Emperor, sweeping a pile of rough maps, none agreeing with another, off the table in front of him. “We must go and see it for ourselves.”
    â€œBut it’s not safe, Sire. Not for you. We could send someone.” That was Phrantzes.
    â€œI need to see for myself,” said the Emperor.
    Very early in the morning, therefore, in the gray light before dawn, they embarked on a little galley that lay waiting for them in the Golden Horn. John Dalmata came, and another captain called Cantacuzenos, and Theophilus Palaeologos, and the Emperor with Vrethiki. The galley was rowed by forty oarsmen and had no need to wait upon the wind. She plashed gently through the smooth waters of that great harbor, moving along the north shore of the City, while the City itself lay as a long purple shadow against the rising sun. At first the water was fiery with the blaze of dawn; as the sun rose, and the galley rounded the point under the walls of Genoese Galata, and slipped out of the Horn, the sheen on the water thinned to silver in the brightening day, and the City lay far behind, fading to rose and lilac. They moved steadily up the winding waters of the Bosporus, with look-outsfore and aft. They were flying no flag, and the Emperor wore a huge black shabby cloak over his purple garments.
    They had been moving up the Bosporus some half hour when they saw it. They came to a place where a high ridge juts into the narrows, and the Bosporus takes a zigzag round it. On the receding shore, at the mouth of a little stream, the Turks had long ago built a castle; now as the tall ridge on the Roman shore came into view, they could see it topped with towers. One huge tower crowned the slope, another stood far below on the waterline. They were linked with a massive battlemented wall, climbing down the line of the ridge between them.
    â€œThere, Sire,” said the galley captain.
    â€œDraw nearer,” said the Emperor, staring ahead. The rowers dipped their oars, and the galley nosed cautiously forward. As it did so, more massive towers came into view. Along the waterline stood a line of four towers, the outer two massive beyond belief, and a curtain wall, nearly completed, was rising between them. Behind the shore, the castle straggled and sprawled irregularly up the rugged land, widening out to encircle enough steeply sloping space for a small town. At every turn of the walls a tower was rising. The watchers from the boat could see the encampment of the builders—a patchwork of tents and shacks within the castle. Silently they took it in. Nobody builds such a vast structure as that to serve a small purpose, nor does a man build so vastly at such incredible speed—for these walls were nearly at their tops, these towers were all but finished already—unless he is in haste. Vrethiki shivered.
    That creamy new masonry, standing among the steep woods of the shore in the wispy mists of the morning, had been