Mehmed put a hand on Radu’s shoulder. It felt cold. “You turned the tide. You saw exactly what was needed, and you did it. As you always have, my dearest, my truest friend.”
Several men climbed onto the roof behind them, bringing lanterns that cast sharp shadows.
“Where are the heirs?” Mehmed asked, standing and offering Radu a hand.
Radu did not take it. “What will you do with them?”
“Get them off this roof, to start with. It is no place for children.”
Radu looked up at Mehmed, raising an eyebrow. “And down there is?”
Uncertainty turned Mehmed’s expression angry. “Where are they, Radu?”
Radu stood on his own, then crossed the roof to where the boys still slept. Mehmed gestured, and one of the men handed him a bag. He reached in and, to Radu’s immediate relief, pulled out a loaf of bread and a leather canteen. Mehmed knelt in front of the boys, who were now sitting up, blinking against the lantern light.
“Hello.” Mehmed’s voice was gentle as he held out the food. He spoke Greek. “You must be very hungry and thirsty after being up here all day. That was clever and good of you to stay out of the way. You are very smart boys.”
Manuel looked up, finding Radu, his eyebrows drawn tight in concern. John, too, searched Radu’s face. Radu put everything he had left into giving the boys a smile of reas surance. He had no idea whether or not the smile was the most damning lie he had ever told.
John reached out and took the bread, then handed it to Manuel. “Thank you,” he said.
Mehmed sat across from the boys, passing the canteen after taking a small drink himself. “John, is it? And Manuel?”
The boys nodded, still wary.
“I am so glad I have found you. I sent my friend Radu to keep you safe.” Mehmed smiled up at Radu. Radu looked off into the night, unable to play along. “You see, our city is hurting. I need your help. I want to rebuild Constantinople, to make it into the city it was always meant to be. To honor its past and bring it into its glorious future. Will you help me do that?”
John and Manuel looked at each other; then John nodded. Manuel followed his example, his head bobbing with enthusiasm. Mehmed clapped his hands. “Oh, thank you! I am so glad to have you on my side.” He stood, holding out a hand to help them stand. Each boy took his hand in turn, smiling up at their new savior.
Radu knew precisely how they felt. He knew how much they must worship Mehmed now, for coming in the darkness and saving them from it. Radu had been them, many years before. He wished he could accept Mehmed’s hand with the same warm relief again.
Mehmed gave the boys into the care of his guards, promising he would see them again when they had gotten some rest, safe and sound in a real bed. Radu went back to the edge of the roof. Already dawn was approaching. The hours here moved all wrong—some crawling by and lasting days, others slipping like water through his fingers.
Mehmed joined him again.
“Will they really be safe?” Radu asked.
“Why would you ask me that?” Mehmed replied, his tone troubled.
“That was not an answer.”
“Of course they will be safe. I will make them part of my household. They will be given the finest tutors and raised to be part of my empire. This is my city now, and they are part of my city. I never wanted to destroy Constantinople, or anything in it.”
“We cannot always get what we want.”
Side by side but further from Mehmed than he had ever been, Radu watched as the sun rose on the broken city. He shifted to look at Mehmed. Rather than pride, a slow expression of despair crept across Mehmed’s beloved features. What he had sought for so long as the jewel of his empire was finally laid out before him in all its crumbling, dying glory. Even without the looting, the city was devastated, and had been for generations.
Perhaps, looking out over it, Mehmed saw what the beginning of his legacy would eventually lead to. Whatever Mehmed did, whatever he built, the greatest city in the world was irrefutable evidence that all things died.
“I thought this would feel different,” Mehmed said, melancholy shaping his words like a song. He leaned against Radu, finally giving him the contact he had craved for so long.
“So did I,” Radu whispered.
After a single day of looting, rather than the traditional three, Mehmed declared an end. He kicked all the soldiers out of the city, banishing them to the camp to go over their spoils and leave what remained of the city unmolested. The camp itself swelled to accommodate the nearly forty thousand citizens taken captive to be ransomed or sold as slaves.
Most of the churches had been protected by the guards Mehmed sent in, and all the fires that had been set were already extinguished. Mehmed himself had killed a soldier found tearing up the marble tiles of the Hagia Sophia. Then he had brought in his own holy men, and the jewel of the Orthodox religion was gently and respectfully converted into a mosque.
Orhan had died fighting in his tower, as had all the men who attempted to hold out. One other tower had fought so long and so determinedly, though, that Mehmed visited and granted the soldiers there safe passage out of the city.
Two communities within Constantinople survived without harm. One was a fortified city within the city that had negotiated its own terms of surrender; the other, the tiny Jewish sector. Mehmed met with the leaders there and asked them to write to their relatives in Spain and invite all the Jewish refugees to relocate and settle their own quarter of the city. He even offered to help them build new synagogues.
Once the soldiers were back at the camp, word was sent throughout the city that anyone who had not been captured had full amnesty. Whether driven out by hope or starvation or simply exhaustion, slowly the survivors appeared.
Mehmed vowed to build something better, and Radu knew that he would.
He simply could not shake the cost of what it had taken to get there.
In the days that followed, Radu wandered the streets in a daze, listening to Turkish in the place of Greek and finding he missed the latter. Over and over he returned to Cyprian’s house, but he could never bring himself to go inside. It would not be the same. He would never see Cyprian again, and Cyprian certainly would never want to see him again. Not now, not after what he had done.
In a city filled with the dead, where tens of thousands now suffered horrible fates outside its walls, Radu knew it was horrendous to mourn the loss of his relationship with Cyprian. And yet he could not stop.
Kumal found him sitting outside the Hagia Sophia. His old friend ran up to him, embracing him and crying for joy. Then he looked around. “Where is my sister?”
Radu felt dead inside as he answered. “I do not know.”
Kumal sat heavily next to Radu. “Is she …?”
“I sent her from the city on a boat with a trusted friend. But whether they got out, and where they went if they did, I do not know.” He had inquired after the boat and received no concrete word of its fate. His only hope was that once news traveled that Constantinople was open to Christian refugees and Ottoman citizens alike, Nazira would return.
“God will protect her.” Kumal took Radu’s hand and squeezed it. “We have fulfilled the words of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Her work in helping us will not be forgotten, nor go unrewarded by God.”
“How can you say that? How can you be so sure of the rightness of this? Did you not see what it cost? Were you not at the same battles I was?”