At first, the sound of the horns barely registered. I groaned and rolled over, trying to find a spot of warmth to curl up in. But more horns joined the first one, and the sound swelled and rose into a shriek the ripped away the last wisps of sleep. Reluctantly I rose from the bed, staggering over to where my equipment lay in a heap below a worn wooden cross. I thought of getting something to eat on the way, but a quick scan of the hut confirmed what I knew already: the last hardtack and jerky had been consumed weeks ago. I grabbed the rest of my equipment, planning to put it on as I went, and hustled towards the door.
“Manuel?”
Anastasia sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes.
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever it is, it’s serious.”
“How serious?”
I didn’t have an answer. Her face searched mine. What she saw evidently didn’t reassure her, because she leaned over and shook Helena awake.
“Say goodbye to your father, dear,” she said.
Helena looked up at me. She was a bright girl. Even though she wasn’t yet seven, she often tagged along with Anastasia to the market to admire the stalls. That was back before the siege, when there was food and laughter and light.
“Daddy,” she said, her face drawn tight with fear at the sound of the alarms, “are we going to be ok?”
I froze. Their eyes drilled into me.
“Of course, dear. I wouldn’t ever let anything happen to you.”
I didn’t let my face fall until I was out into the chilly night.

    I didn’t feel any fear as I passed the ruins of the outer city, tracing a familiar route through overgrown streets under a tapestry of stars. All I felt was the fuzziness of interrupted sleep and the constant, gnawing hunger that had been with all of us for months now. Here and there I saw a refugee or two from the hinterland around the city lying in the street, their ribs showing and their faces desperate. They were always very old or very young; anyone capable of assisting in the defense had been drafted long ago. Even though they had stretched our food supply past the breaking point, I felt a profound empathy with those weary faces staring up at me with crazy hope. We were, all of us, simply victims of the last act of a cataclysmic struggle. I jolted myself away from that dark thought. The Turks had tried and failed to breach the walls twice before, sustaining enormous casualties in the process. Who said this time wouldn’t be any different?
    As my platoon gathered at the base of one of the towers, the thunder of hoofbeats alerted us to the approach of our commander. The horse looked much like the rest of us: exhausted, hungry, its eyes sunken deep into their sockets. The officer looked like he had just returned from a feast. We eyed him resentfully as he spoke.
“We’ve been ordered to hold this sector to the last man,” he intoned. “If we lose the walls, we lose the city, and I don’t need to remind you of the horrors that heathens inflict on the faithful.”
He paused. Realizing that his speech wasn’t having the desired effect, he added, “If we can hang on long enough, our allies will have time to prepare a relief army. The Empire might be on the back foot, but it’s not dead yet!”
Easy for you to say.  We stood where we were for a long second after his speech, staring him down until he muttered something and wheeled his horse away, and we shouldered our weapons and trudged into the tower. The staircases were old, in bad repair, overgrown. Water dripped from a leak in the ceiling. We kept moving.
    Looking back from the top of the walls, it was painfully clear how far Constantinople had fallen. This city had been the greatest in Christendom for a millenium. When the Empire was young and vigorous it had been the crossroads of continents, the “City of World’s Desire”. When the Turks had come out of the east for the first time, it had served as a hub for crusaders from all over Europe marching into the wastes of Anatolia to drive them back. Victories had been won, and the priests from their high towers proclaimed that God was still with us, that we were strong yet. But the Turks kept coming. The Empire lost its most valuable lands to the invaders, and its most valuable friends to squabbles within Europe. Isolated and left to face a vastly superior enemy, it had fought on. But defeat after defeat, treaty after treaty, had meant that all that was left of Rome today could be seen from our walls. Constantinople had decayed with its empire; its population, a shadow of what it had been, was isolated into small villages, separated by partially cleared fields and ruins where the refugees now slept. Further afield, the Emperor’s District stood as a last reminder of the city that was. Behind whitewashed walls, the glowing spires of its palaces and churches pierced the sky. It looked beautiful, but we couldn’t know for sure. None of us had even been inside.
    “What do you think they’re up to?” another soldier asked me, his voice ringing out against the cold stone. I looked out at the villages again.
    “I’m hoping they’re finding places to hide.” I didn’t want to think about the chaos below. Concentrate. Do your job, and there won't be a problem. I looked back up. He shifted from foot to foot in the cold breeze, the hobnails on his worn soles scraping on the aged stone. He looked small and pale and very, very scared.
    “My sister’s down there,” he said after a minute of silence. “I told her we would be fine.” Didn’t we all. “I’m gonna miss her.”
A sudden flare of light from the enemy encampment caught our eye. It was a torch. It was passed along a line of other torches, and gradually the entirety of the enemy force came into view. It hit us like a blow to the chest. We could feel a collective exhalation, like the hope we had been clinging to was finally escaping to the stars. It was the largest group of people I had ever seen, arrayed in ranks that reminded me of toys instead of real people. From our distance they all looked exactly the same, pikes glinting in the torchlight, green uniforms arranged precisely. I glanced at my comrades along the wall. Uniforms were a distant fantasy. Most of us clutched farm implements instead of weapons. Discipline, once a point of pride, had died years ago. Looking at their orderly ranks and our listless militia it finally hit me that we, just like the walls we stood on and the empire we fought for, were decrepit and utterly obsolete, part of the past already. I saw some men weep silently as reality set in.
    The night was eerily silent. The Turkish army was merely standing in formation. We were quiet, too. The crushing weight of the situation had stripped us of the ability to do anything but stand and wait. A cold breeze pried at my cloak. Then, the enemy lines stirred. A magnificent figure on horseback emerged. This, I realised, was likely the Sultan himself. I imagined the look of triumph on his face as he stood before the prize his ancestors had coveted for centuries. He swung his horse around and disappeared back into his army. A minute later, a shrill whistle came and the army started forward, marching in perfect formation across the blasted ground.
    The first thing to hit us was the cannon salvo. A line of blinding bright flashes of light appeared on a hill behind enemy lines, followed a few seconds later by ear-splitting roars. There was a momentary lull, then the volley slammed into the walls or shrieked over our heads. The ancient stones trembled, throwing loose a shower of pebbles and making us sway on our feet. Then silence again, save the rhythmic tramp of the Turkish boots. They halted not a hundred yards from us, stretching into the distance in either direction as far as the eye could see, not making a sound. Surely they can see us, I thought. Surely they can see our rags, our scythes and pitchforks. Surely they feel some pity for us, the remains of Rome. But if they felt anything, they didn’t show it. Then, as a body, they turned left and began to march. Where-
“Follow me! Cannon breach! Main gates! They’re in!” Our officer, wild-eyed and disheveled, hurtled out of the tower and skidded to a stop in front of us, wheezing. I didn’t register it at first. The other men had a stunned, stupid look on their faces. I suppose I did as well. I glanced at the army below. Our officer opened his mouth to speak again but the next moment there was a soft thwip and he crumpled to the ground. Whatever spell had been holding us in place broke and we sprinted for the tower, taking the stairs two at a time.
    Despite the breach I had never felt safer than I did at the base of the wall, with feet of solid rock between me and the machine grinding along outside. The rest of my platoon stopped to catch their breath and then instinctively looked at our officer’s horse, who threw us a hollow-eyed glance and went back to rooting for something to eat. We pulled ourselves together, got into something approaching formation.
“Main gate’s that way”, a skinny boy holding a torch said, gesturing somewhere to the left. He started jogging off into the maze of ruined streets. We followed.
    We turned corner after corner, cutting through empty fields, ducking through the skeletons of buildings where the refugees huddled. Old women, tears running down their paper-thin faces, whispered blessings to us. Children too young to understand what was going on sat and cried, their sobs echoing off the stone. Old men sat hunched in ruined entryways, dreaming of a better past. Then, the clash of metal on metal, the screams and shouts and the crack of muskets faded in. We began to see a flickering, unholy light and turned a corner, ending up right in the inferno.
The roar was deafening. The Turks were pouring in from the great entryway and piling up together, forming a great mass of men that pushed against a thin line of defenders. The thatched huts that lined the avenue were all ablaze, throwing off sparks that rained down on the heads of the soldiers. Horses whinnied and stampeded through the crowd, throwing men aside. The Turks seemed almost like one beast, straining against us with all their might. I saw the boy that had been leading us drop the the ground and roll around, his hands pressed to his ears. The rest of us screamed, unable to hear our own voices, and rushed in.
    I don’t know how long the melee lasted. It could’ve been ten seconds or ten years. It was all a blur of fire and heat and fear and noise. I remember a few moments with vivid clarity: a Turk bearing down on me with his eyes burning with hatred, a wounded horse rearing up before collapsing to the ground, a blazing beam from a hut falling and showering me with sparks. Beyond that, it was all a timeless, terrifying smear, until I looked behind me. I was dazed with heat and fear and exhaustion and hunger, but looking back on the villages, it almost seemed like their comforting lights were even brighter--
Fire.
My stomach lurched and dropped, landing with a wet smack on the slick cobble of the avenue.
The battle faded, the senseless roar dimming as I forced myself to focus my vision on the column of light that was my village. It flickered and jumped. I imagined fire leaping from building to building. I imagined them sleeping--I clutched my spear and took off running.
    I was exhausted from the battle. My arms and legs felt hollow and heavy. My stomach ached. My head was screaming, blurring my vision, making me dizzy. My side burned, and I could feel a sickening wetness soaking through my cloak. Don't look. I didn’t notice the hoofbeats until they were almost on me. I flung myself to the side, barely missing a sword and a shout of “coward!” As I picked myself up, I saw that their leader was wearing a cloak of purple. Only one person in Constantinople could wear purple. It’s really come to this, then. Focus. The riders thundered away, heading towards the battle. I ducked into a side street, tripped on stone, fell on my face, lay there. Get up. Get moving. I don’t want to. You have to. I saw green-clad shapes enter the street behind me, heard shouts and a crack, saw a stone near my head splinter, picked myself up and ran.
    I careened through the decayed streets, making my way towards the village. It was joined by other columns of light now. It was hard to focus. How did they get in? My head hurt. I focused, kept moving. They were burning the fields, not that there was food in them. Not that it mattered anymore.  Focus. Keep moving. Almost there. I clambered up a hillside, saw Turks, threw myself down. What’s going on? The emperor is certainly dead. Doesn’t that stop it? Isn't it over? Focus. Keep moving. My head hurt. My vision was dislocating, shapes and lights and swirls dissolving and reforming. I must’ve hit my head. Village. Right. Past the pond where I skipped stones as a boy, past the wooden bridge over the stream, ablaze now, towards the village. I looked up at the Emperor’s District. The churches were ablaze, casting the whole city in a flickering, unearthly glow. I turned a corner, saw a familiar road, broke into a dead sprint. I smelled burning wood and something...worse. Keep. Moving. The huts came into view. I tripped and fell, tasted iron. I looked up. Fire. All fire. Turkish soldiers running to and fro, running down screaming shapes. I didn’t think, didn’t feel. I was stripped of all exhaustion, all pain. All that was left was a child, trapped inside, raging, it isn’t fair it isn’t fair it isn’t fair! It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair I was born to a cross instead of a crescent, that my people were at the end while theirs were at the beginning, that they would march home to their wives and daughters while mine lay where they fell. I was dizzy, even though I was laying down. My vision was dissolving. I tried to get up, to run, to scream, to cry, to fight, but I tripped and fell and lay, facing in towards the spires, the heart of Rome. The stars were fading, winking out one by one. And, on the horizon, dwarfing the blazing relics of the Empire, the sun was rising, bright and brilliant and beautiful.

It was market day again. The newly paved streets bustled with vendors hawking wares from across the Orient and with shoppers, reveling in the brightly colored mobs and the tumultuous shouting. People were everywhere, pushing, swarming, bustling, enjoying life in the greatest city in the Muslim world. The ruins had been torn down and replaced and the fields paved and built over. The ancient walls had been so thoroughly repaired that little remained of the original. At the heart of the city, the Sultan’s District presided over the metropolis like a serene father, the spires of its palaces and mosques glinting in the bright sunlight. The harbor thronged with ships, bringing goods and tribute to satisfy the appetites of the great city.
    Europe had responded to the Turkish threat with too little, and far too late. The Sultan, from his new capital at Istanbul, had swept through the Balkans, bringing it all under Turkish control. Now a kindly old man, he spent most of his time with his harem and his wine, enjoying the fruits of a life of conquest. His successors would take the Turkish banner yet further, into the Crimea in the north, Persia in the east, and the gates of Vienna in the west. The Turks had their best days ahead of them.
    But for now, on this bright Saturday, with the imams preparing to sound the call to prayer from the parapets of what had once been Christian churches, a single figure, dressed in rags, stood in quiet, nondescript public square. Street urchins, watching him, whispered amongst themselves that he must be a prophet, for he had come to this exact spot at the same time every single year, since the beginning of time itself. Others said he was a ghost, coming to mourn a long-past tragedy. All they knew was that he came to this corner of the city and stood where he had fallen all those years ago, staring at the buildings that concealed the spot where the village had been. Then he turned and walked away, letting memory turn the twisted byways into ruined buildings and fields, the tangled crowd into green-clad soldiers, the bright day into the twilight of his people. He made his way down the hill towards the gate, marking where the columns of flame had been, now pulsing with their own exuberant light. He made it to the gate, to the spot where the last emperor of Rome had fallen in battle, and pushed his way through, back to wherever it is ghosts come from.