Half of the Crusaders just fled because they were unarmed, or because they were servants whose pay grade didn’t include armed combat. They scattered immediately into the woods beyond the camp. Meanwhile there are hundreds of thousands of citizens of Constantinople sitting on the walls of the city, watching this from across the Golden Horn like it’s reality TV. Most of them don’t actually care who wins because they understand it’s just about who sits on the throne, they know the Crusaders aren’t here to try to actually harm the city itself. All the potential emperors are assholes, and they’re all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So the citizens are literally picnicking and placing bets on who wins the day.
Finally the Crusader knights were mounted, and their foot soldiers got their heads together enough to finish armoring and grab their weapons, and we finally had full engagement. We still had the advantage of topography, because we were coming from the top of the hill and they were down the slope. Two Greek soldiers ran right up to the Crusader army, grabbed a lord, slashed him across the face, and began to drag him back toward the tower, but one of his knights went after him and hacked the heads off both of the Greeks, and brought the lord back to the safety of the crusading army. The whole thing happened in about thirty seconds.
That shifted everything—suddenly the Crusaders rose to the occasion, cheering and catcalling, and Christ, talk about a counterattack. None of our men had horses, and most of them were conscripted—they didn’t want to be there, they had essentially no military training. So as soon as things got really heated, they deserted their stations. Some of them ran down to the harbor chain to try to pull themselves across the Golden Horn on it—it could take the weight, those links were nearly as big as I am—but the Crusader archers picked them off easily. Remember, there’s a quarter of a million people watching this for their morning entertainment. It was surreal.
Abruptly, there’s only a couple hundred of us left, and we start to realize (of course, I knew this all along) that we better close the gates of the tower before the Crusaders come charging in.
To be more precise, they have to close the gates; I have to get my butt out the gates and away from there. As much as it insults my military instinct, I can only meet my KCW if I get away from the tower, because all the Varangians in that tower are going down. So—just like the three times before—I push my way out during that moment of confusion, when the Varangians and Greeks are trying to close the gates while the Crusaders are trying to force them to stay open. I’m wearing Varangian lamellar armor, relatively lightweight, so I have more mobility than the Crusaders whose ranks I have to break through. I jab at a couple of armpits and groins to encourage bodies to get out of my way, but my goal isn’t to terminate anyone, it’s just to get out of there. I know how it ends. My job is not to stick around for it. It’s hard because I know some of those men pretty well now and leaving them to their doom while I slip away to find a witch to Send me home . . . we should consider getting counselors to help soldiers deal with that, it could fester into PTSD.
The only other Varangian I see fleeing the tower is Magnus. He follows me out of the place. He’s got his eye on me. I think he’s expecting me to grab a boat oar and single-handedly mow down a few hundred armed knights or something. But in all of the confusion it’s easy enough for me to elude him.
So I get out, away from the tower, and I watch. I watch the Crusaders barely manage to pry the gates back open, and I watch them stream into the tower, and I hear the carnage inside, and I know what it means.
That’s when it happened.
I knew what was supposed to happen next. The Crusaders were supposed to go down and open up the casing for the chain mechanism, release the chain, and sail into the harbor, to the astonished horror of their quarter million spectators. Then they send across the Bosporus for the rest of their camp—especially the women and the cooks. There’s a KCW in the Crusader army, and she’s supposed to Send me back here. Meanwhile the Jews of Pera are frantically packing their bags and hightailing it out of town to start the well-documented Byzantine Diaspora. All of that is what happened three Strands in a row.
But this time something happens that has never happened before: there is a massive flash of light and an explosion on the harbor side of the hill, right exactly where Pera is. The entire hillside—all of Pera, which was built of stone—is flaming. This has never happened before, I have no idea why it’s happening, obviously at the time I didn’t know that Rachel had come back to 1203 and meddled by telling people what was coming. I realized from the 1601 London DTAP that this has got to be Diachronic Shear and I knew I had to get as far away as possible. So I run toward the woods and wait to see what happens when all the fire and explosions die down. That happens very fast, actually—just like in London.
I come back toward the tower for reconnaissance, and I see at once that two things are different from how they’ve always been. First, because of the explosion and fire and all that hell that broke loose, there’s no way to release the chain mechanism. It’s fused. That thing is never going to open. Ever. And just as I’m thinking about what a massive fuck-up that is—because without the chain being lowered, the ships cannot get into the safety of the harbor, and then literally, history cannot move forward—and then the second thing I notice is that . . . Pera is gone. Gone. Not even any foundation stones. It’s obliterated—a black charred spot, acres of it—on the hillside, as if there was never anything there. And that awful smell I remember from the Albigensian DTAP, that noisome smell of charred bones after an execution. The whole area, which had been walled and locked, went up so fast that nobody there had time to escape. Horrible.
A quarter hour later, while half the army is still walking around in a daze, something incredible happened: the Eagle, the largest and heaviest iron-prowed Venetian ship, rammed into the harbor chain and broke it. They broke the harbor chain of Constantinople! That’s not how it was supposed to happen. Invaders tried for five hundred years to break the chains guarding the Golden Horn. Every generation of that chain was unbreakable. Something about the Diachronic Shear must have had a molecular effect on the metal and weakened the chain. I think the multiverse required the Crusaders to get into the harbor and so made sure it happened, even if they couldn’t do it the way they did on every other Strand.
Anyhow—neither side lost many men to the Shear, but it freaked the hell out of everyone. Even being aware of the Shear, I’m already feeling confused about what happened, so I’m sure all kinds of crazy things will end up getting said about it. I’m willing to bet everyone will say that Pera must have been made of wood to go up in flames like that, and the flames must have come from the fire-arrows—something like that, even though I know Pera was made of stone and tile, and I also know the angle the fire-arrows came from would never have landed in Pera anyhow. So lots of weird crap is going to get said.
In conclusion, it appears Rachel was reunited with her family and warned them. This changed everything.
Clearly Rachel’s information moved quickly out of the Jewish settlement. There is no way we will ever know what Rachel said, or to whom, or what that person attempted to do with the information. We know only that the multiverse could not bear such a change of course, and eliminated its possibility.