Book III / Chapter 06: Bursa in Disorder (Patreon)

June 1437

By the time the road bent north and Bursa showed on the hillside, Yakub Bey’s right thumb was raw from the reins, and the men behind him rode in broken files. Above the mulberry gardens, the wall of the Hisar caught the late light; lower down, the domes of the Ulu Cami sat in smoke. They smelled the city before they reached the gate: horse dung, dye vats, and boiled silk.

Turgut came up on his right. “No rider,” he said. “We should have seen one an hour ago.” He wiped his nose on the back of his glove. “If the Janissaries hold the gate and the boy is kept behind doors, do we get to him at all? And Halil—”

Yakub kept his eyes on the road. By the last milestone he had expected a chamberlain to meet them. If Halil still lived, someone would already have come out beyond the mulberry groves with questions, orders, and a place marked out for the men. “The agha has served the house for years,” he said. He shifted in the saddle where the leather bit at his thigh. “Halil did the same, and it does not help him now.”

Turgut glanced toward the hill. Behind them a cart wheel shrieked where one of the baggage carts struck a rut. “If they keep you from the Sultan, I’ll know what to think,” he said.

Yakub raised a hand and signaled the column to close up. “You will know after I have seen the place myself,” he said. “And if Halil were alive, we would have been met outside the walls.”

At the lower road he halted the files and sent the baggage and the wounded toward a strip of ground beyond the orchards, where a stream ran down from the hill, shallow but clean enough if the horses were watered by turn. He gave the rest of the orders quickly: no drums, no shouting, no fires until full dark. When Turgut asked whether the whole force should come inside, Yakub shook his head.

“The city has enough mouths,” he said. “We go up with twenty men and no more.”

If the court meant to keep him waiting, it would have Yakub Bey in its hands, not the last few hundred men he had brought out of Ankara. He watched the carts begin to spread along the bank, then turned his horse uphill toward the fortress road.

The climb to the Bey Sarayı took him through lanes where silk was reeled in open workshops and women threw wash-water into the gutter. A mule train loaded with dyed thread pressed to the wall to let him pass. Janissaries stood at two turnings below the fortress gate, their coats dusty, match cords tucked up against the breeze. Their officer saluted without warmth and sent a boy ahead through the gate.

Inside the Hisar the ground leveled. The palace lay in low buildings and covered walks over older stone. One chamberlain took Yakub’s sword. Another asked his name, though the whole gate knew it already. A third offered sherbet and did not return.

He was shown into an outer room with blue tiles along the lower wall. Servants crossed the doorway with trays, papers, folded cloth, and a basin of water gone grey at the rim. His Majesty was at prayer. His Majesty would receive him later. Someone would come presently. No one said when. Yakub sat once, then stood again and watched the inner door, where an older Janissary held his place without shifting. The boy was somewhere behind it, and no closer for that.

The Janissary agha came soon after. He embraced Yakub with one arm, then held him back long enough to look over the dust on his sleeves.

“You came in thin,” the agha said.

“We all did.” Yakub glanced at the door through which the agha had come. “I was told the Sultan is at prayer.”

“He is,” the agha said. “He is young, and every man here wants to pull him a different way. Sit.”

The agha sent the servants out, shut the lattice himself, and poured the forgotten sherbet from the sweating jug on the tray. His hand shook once as he set down the cup. Yakub noticed it, and the hollows under the man’s eyes, and left his own cup untouched beside the lamp.

“Your loyalty stands as it did under Murad?” the agha asked.

“We stood with Murad. We stand with his son.”

A knock came at once, two quick taps and a pause. The agha opened the door a hand’s breadth, took a folded strip of paper from the chamberlain outside, and read it without comment. Then he said, “His Majesty asks what news you bring from Ankara.”

Yakub looked at the paper in his hand, then past him into the dark of the inner passage. “Tell His Majesty that Ankara is lost,” he said. 

The agha folded the strip smaller and set it under the lamp base. His face did not change, but he let out a slow breath. “Speak it plain.”

“They came in strength. Fifteen thousand at least, twenty if the later counts were right. Karaman men, Türkmen, Amasyans, many carts behind them, and horse enough to sweep the ground ahead of them. I was too weak to hold them out and too short on fodder to wait for a siege.” Yakub took the cup and drank. “Another week and they would have cut the road behind me. No relief was coming. I brought out the men who could still fight.”

The agha nodded once. “You did well to save them.”

Yakub rubbed two fingers over the cup rim, gritty where old glaze had chipped away. “There was talk in the villages that they might press for Kutahya after Ankara. I do not know if that was fear talking or scouts ahead of them, but I heard it more than once.”

The agha set down his cup too hard and spilled sherbet onto his fingers. He wiped them on his sleeve without looking down. “That cursed dog Ibrahim,” he said. “We needed Ankara one month more.”

For a moment the agha’s face tightened, as if he might say something more. Instead he turned and called through the door for fresh maps of the eastern roads. When he sat again, he said, “How far behind them were you when you broke off?”

“Close enough to hear their mules at night if the wind lay right.”

The agha nodded and moved at once to numbers, roads, and grain: how many men Yakub had brought back, which bridges on the Ankara road still stood, whether the Amasya horse rode with their own baggage or off Karaman carts, whether their mounts were worn enough to slow them after a week. Yakub answered in counts and distances, and the agha took it all in without interrupting.

Only when that was done did Yakub lay his hand on the table. “Now tell me how Halil died.”

The agha looked at  the court outside. “My charge, when the city broke, was the Sultan,” he said. “When the Romans forced Petrion and word came from Blachernae, I took the boy through the inner court and down toward the Marmara. I had Janissaries on the passage, boats waiting under the wall, and men running where they should have held.”

“Who was with Halil?”

“He would not leave.”

“Who was with him?”

The agha reached for the cup and did not drink. “Men from the palace. Men from the reserve. I did not stop to count names while the Romans where inside the city.”

Yakub said nothing.

The agha was tired, and Yakub believed him about the boy. But he had named gates, passages, boats, and the road to the water. On Halil he named no one.

A second knock came. The chamberlain handed in another strip and withdrew. The agha read it and left the paper open in his hand. “His Majesty asks how many fit men remain with you.”

“Just over eight hundred under my own eye,” Yakub said. “More stragglers may still come in.”

Without looking up, the agha said, “There is another trouble. Orhan’s name has been heard near Mylasa. We have it from two coast traders and a judge’s clerk who came north by sea. He is said to be gathering men there.”

“Rumor?” Yakub asked.

“If it were only tavern breath, I would not waste the hour on it.”

That told Yakub more than the loss of Ankara had. He had expected fear, perhaps anger, perhaps a lie to cover Halil’s death. Instead the agha was trying to answer Ankara, Orhan, Halil, and the Sultan at once, and none of it joined cleanly.

“How many have you here?” Yakub asked.

The agha met his eyes. “Less than fifteen thousand fit for the field. More will come if the western sanjaks still answer their letters.” He folded the strip once between his fingers. “If the rest arrive in time, I go first against Orhan, before he gathers more men. But if Ibrahim moves on Kutahya, I must turn to him first. That is the order of it.”

Yakub bowed his head once. When he rose, the agha rose with him and embraced him again, more briefly than before. Outside the shutter a muezzin had begun the call, and the voice drifted up the hill thin through the evening air.

“Keep your men close tonight,” the agha said. “I will send for you when the Sultan receives.”

Yakub gave the proper answer and left with the taste of  sherbet still on his tongue.

When he came back down to camp, dark had settled under the mulberries. Fires burned low behind carts and saddles. A groom was rubbing down a lame horse with straw, and farther off a man coughed twice and spat into the grass. Turgut was waiting by a cloth spread over two chests, with a bowl of lentils gone cold and a lamp set low.

-Yakub ate standing, three mouthfuls and no more. The lentils had skinned over and tasted of smoke. Turgut watched him, then said, "Well?"

"Halil's death stinks." Yakub set the bowl down. "The agha would not name who was with him."

"And the boy?"

"Behind a door. I was kept from him with prayer and chamberlains."

Turgut waited.

"Less than fifteen thousand fit to march," Yakub said. "And in the southwest Orhan's name is being spoken near Mylasa. The agha calls it rumor, but not the kind he can laugh at."

His second spat into the dust while Yakub watched the groom work the straw in circles over the horse's flank.

"Then we are under the walls of a desperate court," Turgut said. "On the losing side."

"I know where we are."

Yakub straightened. His thighs had stiffened from the ride and from sitting too long in the palace room. "I do not abandon the House of Murad."-

Then he reached for the clerk’s board and began to give orders. Turgut took the first list and went at once to the horse lines with the lamp, while the clerk knelt in the dirt, cut a reed pen, and set the wax by the coals. Down by the stream, under the dark mulberry branches, the first tent pegs were already coming out of the ground.