Part 5: What Survived

Constantinople, Year of Our Lord 1453. Chapter 5.

The glass merchant Andronikos Palaiologos had survived three emperors and two plagues by the simple method of being useful to whoever held power and invisible to whoever did not. It was a philosophy that had served him well for fifty-seven years. He did not expect it to fail him now, at the end of everything, with the Ottoman guns sounding their endless arithmetic against the Theodosian walls.

His warehouse stood three streets from the Golden Horn, in the quarter where the Venetian traders had their counting houses. He had thirty-seven crates of Venetian glass, packed in straw, labeled in a cipher only he could read, loaded onto a boat that was leaving with the tide—or leaving as soon as the captain could be persuaded that the tide was an argument against waiting for the price to improve. Andronikos had spent the morning persuading him.

In the afternoon, he climbed to the roof and looked at the walls.

They had held for eleven hundred years. He could see the sections where the guns had opened new mouths…