Yet it was a war Walter knew that mankind could not afford to lose. For, with the whole world smashed as England had been over the last two years – with stores depleted, manufacturing capacity gone, governments dissolving – we would not get another chance. The massacre of mankind as an independent species would be completed in this generation. And for the children of the future – like the wretches in the Martians’ cylinders – only a million years of slavery.
Walter concentrated on the immediate situation. The first landings had been scattered, at New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Peking, Bombay – one per midnight band. Now, though, in the last hour – and even as he had listened to wireless reports of the devastation of Peking – the pattern had changed, with no less than three targets at the same longitudinal meridian being selected: St Petersburg in Russia, the Ottoman capital Constantinople, and Durban in South Africa – the latter the first Martian footfall in that continent. And given the operational pattern so far, Walter could predict to the hour when the major assaults on those centres would begin: at six in the morning, local time.
Then, through his window, Walter saw a flash of green light, in the darkened sky. He glanced at a clock. In Berlin, it was midnight.
16
A SHADOW PLAY
‘Ulla! Ulla!…’
In a strange, lonely dawn, Emre heard that eerie cry echo over Constantinople, even drowning out the muezzin calls.
Emre Sahin was, by inclination and training, a soldier, but a decade before, in the wars against the Balkan League, a Greek cannonball had neatly detached his left leg and the lower part of his right. He had been just twenty years old at the time. Now Emre had become an accidental journalist, and he would leave one of the more compelling accounts of the Martians’ action in Constantinople, for the benefit of myself and other historians.
But as it happened, in the days before the Martians came, Emre, anticipating the ending of Ramadan a few days hence, had been preparing a shadow-puppet play.
Emre had always enjoyed the end of Ramadan: the threeday celebration that followed a month of fasting, when family would visit to exchange gifts of sweets and tobacco and perfume and porcelain, and there would be happy gatherings in the coffee houses, and in the open spaces there would be a bayram, a fair with amusements for the children. And Emre, after his injury, had got in the habit of mounting shadow plays: his own adaptations of traditional stories for his nephews and nieces and their neighbourhood friends, and bawdy shows for the adults. His art was simple but his storytelling good, and the work gave him and his family a good deal of pleasure. And it had been a key part of how he had rebuilt his life.
Emre had perforce come to spend much of his time in the home of his parents, deep in the heart of that ramshackle part of Constantinople south of the Golden Horn which foreigners then called by the archaic name Stamboul. Life after the injury was difficult, of course. But there were consolations. Emre was blessed with loyal brothers and one sister, all older than he was, and a rising generation of nieces and nephews. That was how the writing began; as well as making up shadow plays, he assisted the children with their own writing exercises, and wrote out the stories he made up for them. Some of these he placed with a Stamboul newspaper, whose editor encouraged him to do more. His mother, who had survived her husband, probably thought it a foolish endeavour and a waste of time – but then her crippled son, largely bedridden, now had nothing but time, and why not let him waste it?
He could hardly be a roving reporter. But he soon discovered he could journey in time, with the help of books his family bought or borrowed for him. He wrote topical pieces on aspects of the city’s history, and later graduated to better-paid work for guide books for the foreigners who swarmed through Constantinople: thanks to the oil, visitors in recent years so eager to prove themselves friends to the Ottomans and not foes. The Schlieffen War had seemed likely to destabilise the Ottoman empire almost as much as it had the Russian, but it seemed to Emre that in recent years the situation had grown calmer. The Sultan had been restored, to no great enthusiasm. The British insisted on their ‘protectorates’, to ensure access to the Suez canal, and to the oil of Mesopotamia, but otherwise kept themselves to themselves. The Germans, meanwhile, had proven themselves useful allies at least in the short term – fighting to fend off Russia’s ambitions to own Constantinople itself. Allies in the short term: perhaps you could hope for no more than that.
But now, in the middle of this complex swirl of history and ambition, the Martians had landed.
Constantinople was almost unique in the Second War in that the first landing of the Martians’ invasion party fell within the bounds of the city itself, landing in that more modern part of the city north of the Golden Horn known dismissively by the locals as Frengistan – ‘Foreigner Town’. Hotels, business centres and embassies had been flattened indiscriminately, and few of the surviving Turks mourned.
Soon, though, the Martians had been ready to move. They advanced through the districts of Pera and Galata, and then the fighting-machines simply waded through the waters of the Golden Horn north of the new German-built Galata Bridge, and into the old city. Centuries before, the ancient Roman city walls had been no defence against the Turks with their gunpowder weapons; now they proved no obstacle to the Heat-Ray. It is to be wondered if the Martians sensed anything of the antiquity of the quarters into which they probed, the glittering legs of the fighting-machines towering over the dusty houses and bazaars, and the ancient, glittering mosques. But then, I suppose, to a race as antique as the Martians, even Constantinople is as evanescent as a traveller’s pitched tent.
It was unfortunate that Emre was left behind during the flight.
The Martians’ advance into Stamboul was a shock to the inhabitants; communications in much of the empire, even the older parts of the capital, were still primitive in 1922. An alarm had been sounded, the local police running from house to house and ringing bells. One of Emre’s brothers, dragging his children behind him, had come to the door to collect their mother.
And Emre, in his room at the back of the house – a wounded soldier too stubborn and proud to call out – stayed where he was. So it was that when the Martians came to his neighbourhood, Emre was entirely alone.
The first he saw of them was a kind of slim pillar passing his window. He realised later that he had seen the leg of a fighting-machine, picking its way through the dilapidated neighbourhood as an adult might step cautiously across a carpet strewn with toys.
Emre had a vehicle of his own, a kind of low cart made for him by one of his brothers – practical, but hated by Emre, for it was like a beggar’s chariot. Still, now he used his strong arms to lift himself down from his bed and onto the cart, and rolled through the deserted house to the front door.
Something was coming down the street.
Emre saw a thing like a swollen metallic spider, so huge it all but filled the narrow street, side to side, but its five limbs carried it over the cobbles with uncanny grace. As it passed, tentacular limbs probed into the houses to either side, the open doors and windows. And what Emre thought was a sack of leather was riding on its back. This was the controlling Martian. It was thus in some parts of the world, where the Martians sent in their handling-machines to explore densely inhabited neighbourhoods, in advance of destroying them – or perhaps in search of feedstock, a fate that, fifteen years before, had so nearly had befallen Walter Jenkins and the curate in the ruined house in Sheen.