The broken parapet on the Anemas side was a strip of stone slick with dust, blood, and powdered lime. Serbs and Roman infantry kept reaching it and dying there. Men could climb it, even hold the crest for a few breaths, but the breach was still too narrow to hold more than a few men.
From the rise opposite, Constantine watched another ladder go up into the smoke. It caught for a moment beneath the cracked lip of the parapet, and three men climbed at once. One vanished over the top. The second took an arrow through the mouth and pitched backward into the men below. The third got one hand onto the broken stone before a hooked pole caught him under the arm and tore him sideways off the ladder.
Below the wall, the ground had been churned into earth, chalk, snapped shafts, and bodies, with pavises leaning askew and one mantlet burned down to a black frame. From behind the shields, pyrveloi fired upward in short bursts, chipping stone and buying only moments of cover.
Grgur Branković was still too far forward, easy to pick out even through the dust in sweat-dark mail with his sword bare. He kept driving men up the same ruined stretch as though sheer will could force it wider.
A Serbian standard-bearer climbed higher than the rest, heading for the broken crown of the tower where the coping had fallen away. For a moment he stood above the parapet. He planted the banner staff in a split in the shattered stone and hauled it upright, the red cloth and dark eagle showing clear to both armies. Then two arrows hit him, one under the arm and one in the throat. He fell backward. The banner came down with him and caught against the broken tower.
Andreas stood beside Constantine with his hands behind his back. "We are losing too many men on that strip," he said. "They reach the top and die there."
Constantine kept his eyes on the wall. Another ladder went up into the smoke. "Hold the pressure." His gaze shifted to the broken tower crown. "We have to keep at it. If there is a way through, it may be there."
Another ladder went up and slid away. A man beneath it screamed once, thin and high, when the side rail came down across his leg.
Aristos was in the forward press again, dragging a pavise by one handle to clear a lane for the next firing team. He shoved it into place with his shoulder, knelt behind it, fired upward, then stood and sent another reserve file forward into the smoke.
Constantine saw too many familiar helmets vanish at the foot of the wall and not come back up. The dead were no longer just from the first failed rush; they were piling under every ladder.
At Petrion, the fight had already changed shape. The first sea-wall towers taken by the Romans were now firing inward, their parapets lined with men bracing pyrveloi on the stone and shooting along the wall-walk and down into the courts below. The Ottomans still held stretches between them and still answered from the next towers over, but the line was no longer theirs alone.
Laskaris stood on Katarina's deck, watching everything at once: the tower-ships against the wall, the supporting galleys astern, Kyreneia off the gate sector, the black current in the Horn, and men drifting out of place under the pressure of the fight.
A picked party had already gone over from the boats: around sixty men, Roman marines and Gattilusio men together, shields on their backs, axes and picks slung. They moved in the shadow of the wall along a strip of beach so narrow that the wash licked their boots on one side while damp stone pressed close above them on the other.
At first, they went in single file, bent low, with one hand on the wall where the footing was poor. Farther on, they found what Laskaris had been told to look for: a bricked service postern, long sealed, its face cracked by cannon fire. They went at it with axes first, then picks, until chips began to spit outward and the mortar gave way. When the opening was finally large enough, the men hesitated over who would go in first.
The first Roman through died almost at once, speared in the belly. The man behind him stumbled over the body and took a sword cut across the face before the passage clogged shoulder to shoulder with men trying to get through.
The fight closed to arm's length. The Ottomans came hard on them, trying to seal the passage again before the Romans could break through. Men fought half turned in the narrow space, shields jamming, blades striking too close to swing cleanly.
Then fire came in from above. Romans on the captured wall sections had gotten close enough to shoot into the fight, and when the Ottoman defenders crowded in to crush the breakthrough, that fire hit them from the flank. The pressure at the opening eased, and the assault party forced its way through.
A horn sounded from within the wall. Laskaris heard it from the deck and knew at once what it meant.
"Forward," he said.
More men came in from the ships, and within an hour the Roman banner rose over the gate-fort. Laskaris checked once to be sure it was really theirs, let out a breath he had been holding, and said, "Send the report."
Blachernae Palace
Halil saw the fight on the broken parapet still raging when the runner found him. He had gone up to a terrace from which the damaged stretch at Blachernae could still be seen through the smoke. The wall there looked less like a wall now than a broken tooth, but it still held because every man who reached it could be met from two directions at once.
The runner was mud to the knee and out of breath before he reached the end of the passage.
"My lord—Petrion."
Halil turned. "What of it?"
"The gate-fort, my lord. Lost. The Romans are inside. They have the gate, the sea wall there—" The man swallowed hard. "More are coming in by water."
Halil did not answer at once. He looked back toward Blachernae, where the broken parapet was still being fought over in strips of smoke and shouting.
"Move Sultan Ali," he said.
Karaca Bey hesitated. "My lord?"
"Now. Through the inner court. Janissaries only. Have the boats on Marmara ready. Do you understand me?"
The man bowed and went.
Halil turned back to the runner. "Find Ali Beg. Petrion is to be taken back at once. Tell him to strip the lower reserve: two orta from the palace, and every spare man he can pull from the Theodosian line."
Northern Roman Camp
A small galley came in from the Horn, and not long after, a runner came up from the shore, half falling on the last slope, helm gone, one hand still black with powder.
"Majesty," he said. "Petrion gate-fort is ours. Men are going in."
George had been standing two paces behind Constantine. At the words he drew a hard breath through his nose and looked south, though the Horn itself could not be seen from where they stood.
Constantine did not hesitate. "George, two tagmata to Petrion at once. Send powder with them."
George was already turning before the sentence ended, shouting for a clerk and then a signal officer in the same breath.
Constantine turned back to the runner. "Tell Laskaris to use every ship he can spare to move men."
Then he looked to Andreas.
"Another wave," he said. "Tell them Petrion is open. And tell them there is more gold for the men who take that damned tower and hold it."
Andreas gave one short nod. "At once."
Orders ran downhill. Fresh ladder files came up through the churned ground. Men who had been lying flat behind mantlets stood and lifted again. Pyrveloi were pushed forward closer than before, the pavises almost under the wall.
The new wave went at the wall with a different momentum. Word had already spread that Petrion was open, and men climbed harder than before.
Aristos took the right-hand ladder file and Grgur the left. They went for the tower crown together, where the Serbian standard-bearer had fallen earlier. A Roman got over first and disappeared into the broken top of the tower. Another followed, then a third. For a few moments the fighting went out of sight, down stair and into stone, all boots, iron, and bodies meeting too close to swing cleanly.
Then Roman voices rose from inside. Few, but enough. A shield showed over the broken crown, then a helmet, then Grgur himself, climbing the last stretch with one hand on the stone and the other bloody to the wrist.
"Hold it!" Andreas shouted, though no one up there could have heard him through the guns.
This time they did. Once the tower was theirs, the wall stopped being a ledge and became a position.
Pyrveloi went up into the tower almost at once, hauled by slings and hands. From the arrow slits and the broken crown they began firing left and right along the adjoining parapet, almost level with the defenders who had spent the whole morning shooting down at the climbers. That alone changed the fight. Men on the broken parapet could finally stand and answer back.
A ladder on the left bit and held, then another on the right. The defenders on the adjoining walk had to turn toward the tower or die where they stood, and they could no longer sweep the breach clean at will. Roman infantry and Serbs began getting over faster than they were thrown back. The broken strip widened by ten paces, then fifteen.
A knot of Ottomans tried to rush it from the inner side, but tower fire caught them as they hit the men already on the wall. They broke apart in the press and fell back toward the gate-stair.
"More men!" Grgur shouted from the crown. "More men!"
Below, fresh men came up. By the time the next ladder shattered under a dropped stone, it mattered less. Enough were already on top.
They cleared the adjoining parapet a little at a time, fighting now for the wall-walk itself rather than the broken crest alone. A Roman officer got a team to the tower stair and sent men down into the gatehouse from above. There was shouting from inside, then hammering, then a splintered crack that carried even over the gunfire.
By noon, the Romans had secured the Blachernae gate, and troops were entering the quarter in numbers. Constantine went in behind the first formed files with George close beside him, while more infantry came through the gate. The streets were narrow, damp, and already loud with the noise of a city being taken: doors slamming, boots on stone, shots too close to place.
The defense broke unevenly. Reports came in heaps. At Petrion the Romans were already pushing inland. The Palace of Porphyrogenitus still held with janissaries in its courts. A large body of Ottoman cavalry had burst out through the Golden Gate in the confusion, ridden hard through the Serbian camp outside the southern line, taken what it could from wagons and loose stores, then been bloodied off the main camp and driven west under smoke.
Some men were throwing down their arms. Others were still firing from towers that did not yet know the city behind them was being lost.
"They're breaking," George said.
Constantine heard the Porphyrogenitus report twice more before he answered it.
"Take it," he said. "No pause."
By evening, the fighting there had gone from hard to spent. Smoke and plaster dust still hung in the palace rooms and galleries that had changed hands all afternoon. Men were still dragging bodies out when Constantine and George entered by a side hall, its tiles blackened at the edges by fire.
Halil lay on the floor of an antechamber beneath a hanging split by a sword cut. He had not died in the fighting; that was plain enough. There was no armor on him and no broad wound from a rush, only knife work under the ribs and once at the throat, one slipper half off, blood dried in a dark fan across the tiles and into the grout.
The officer waiting there bowed low. "Halil is dead, Majesty," he said. "His own men, by the look of it. The Sultan's rooms are empty. No sign of Ali."
George looked at the body a moment longer than Constantine did. "His own men," he said again, quieter.
Constantine looked at the slipper, half off the foot, and at the dark fan in the grout. "Find his chamberlain. And whoever commanded the janissary guard in the palace. I want them alive."
By full dark the Romans controlled most of the city, though fighting still lingered in the lower quarter and in a few towers. A force of Ottomans trapped near the lower quarter sent out a white cloth and offered surrender for safe passage, provided their arms were stacked and counted rather than taken with them. Constantine granted it. He needed fewer pockets of resistance, not more heroics in alleys already slick with dead.
The terms were still being shouted through interpreters when another officer came in.
"Majesty. Prince Thomas has been found alive."
He swallowed once. "The Empress Helena is with him."
Constantine did not answer at once. He only gave a short nod, then said, "Take me to them."
The Petrion gate-fort was quieter than the rest of the city, though not by much. The passage still smelled of burst mortar, damp stone and lamp smoke. Men slept against the walls with spears in hand. Others sat where they had dropped after the fighting and stared at nothing. A surgeon worked under a low lamp in one corner, his sleeves rolled and his hands already red again after wiping them.
An officer brought Constantine to a heavy door at the back of the fort and stepped aside. Constantine stopped outside it, drew one breath, and went in.
Helena was nearest the wall, wrapped in a dark cloak on a low chair, the lamplight catching the silver in her hair. Thomas sat farther back on a bench with his bad shoulder bound again, his face hollowed by smoke and lack of sleep. A monk stood near the window slit and lowered his eyes when Constantine entered.
Helena tried to rise, but Constantine crossed the room in two steps and laid a hand lightly on her shoulder. "No."
She looked up at his face for a long moment without speaking. Then her hand went to his cheek and stayed there. He felt how cold her fingers were.
"My son." She did not say anything else for a moment. "Let me look at you."
He bent and touched his forehead briefly to hers. "Mother," he said. "I thought I had lost you."
Then he turned to Thomas. His brother looked thinner than he should have; his mouth tried for one of the old expressions and did not quite find it.
"You kept her," Constantine said.
Thomas answered rough and flat. "I said I would."
Helena looked from one son to the other. "Sit," she said. "Both of you."
So they did. For a little while no one spoke. Outside, the city still muttered with wounded men, distant orders, and doors opening and closing in the dark. Inside, the lamp guttered once and steadied.
Dawn came thin over Constantinople. Smoke still rose in places, dark from a burned knot of houses near Porphyrogenitus, pale from damp timber at Petrion, thinner strands elsewhere where fires beaten down in the night were only now giving up the last of themselves. The air smelled of wet ash, lime dust, sea salt, and the old city smell beneath it all: drains, tallow, bread, damp stone.
Roman troops stood on the walls and at the gates with the look of men who had aged years in a day. At Petrion, men were already clearing wreckage from the fort mouth so traffic could pass. At Blachernae, the broken gate stood in Roman hands, ugly and splintered, one leaf shattered and the threshold still dark with yesterday.
Doors began to open by degrees. A woman stepped into a lane with a jar and looked both ways before moving toward the cistern. Two boys came out carrying a broom between them and began pushing plaster chips and splintered wood into a heap. An old priest emerged beneath a torn awning with a censer and crossed himself toward the palace.
Constantine came out of the Blachernae Palace with George and Andreas. The court behind them still bore the marks of the day before: a broken standard pole, blood thinned by the night damp, a fallen shutter, abandoned shields stacked under an arcade.
Then a bell rang somewhere below, struck too hard by a shaking hand. Another answered it, then another farther off, until the sound began to spread across the walls and lower streets, uneven at first and then gathering, as if the city itself were remembering how to speak. Soldiers at the gate turned when they saw Constantine. The first shout came raw from a throat that had almost nothing left.
"Constantine!"
A voice answered from the wall above. "Ieros Skopos!" Others took it up. The cry ran along the broken stone of Blachernae, over the shattered gate, down toward the Horn, and inward through the smoke-hung streets, until for a moment it seemed that all Constantinople was answering: bloodied, smoke-stained, and Roman again.