Constantinople, early March 1440
The Kontoskalion harbor was loud already when Constantine came down to the water. Grain was coming ashore under the crane, sack after sack out of an open hold, and a gang was rolling pitch barrels down the inner mole past the Company's four round-ships, crews aloft bending the sails on and the last of the water going aboard. At the seaward berth, Agios Phokas, the sister ship to the Katarina, was the tallest ship in the harbor.
Nestor was at the foot of the gangway with his hat under his arm, and beside him Matteo. The deck watch stood along the rail above.
"Welcome, Majesty. The ship is ready. The wind is fair from the northeast, and my sailing master gives me his word it will hold."
"Good." Constantine looked at him a moment. "You have grown a beard since I saw you last, Nestor."
"I have, Majesty. The sea air agrees with it more than my razor does."
"It suits you." He turned to the man beside him.
"Captain Matteo, Majesty," Nestor said. "Of the Pelagios, my old ship. He takes the windward station today. The Nikaia takes the other."
"Captain."
"Majesty." Matteo bowed. "Forgive the look of me. We had a last matter with the water casks and I came straight across."
"A captain who counts his own casks is a captain I trust."
Constantine had stopped listening to himself. His eye had gone to the man's legs and stayed there. The breeches were a heavy twilled cloth, blue gone pale at the knee and along every seam, stiffer than wool. He looked at it longer than it was worth.
"What is that cloth?"
Matteo, surprised, glanced down at his own legs. "This, Majesty? Fustian. Genoa cloth. In Genoa every crew wears it. It outlasts wool at sea, three seasons to one, and it dries between watches." He turned his leg slightly, the way a man shows a horse. "It costs less too, which is why it looks like this."
"The blue."
"Woad, Majesty. It goes pale where you kneel. There is no help for it."
"No," Constantine said. "I suppose there is not." He looked away from it, out at the water. "Three seasons to one at sea. Cloth like that would serve my own crews well. When we are at Gallipoli, you will tell me where it is woven and what a bolt costs."
"Whenever it pleases you, Majesty," Matteo said.
They went up the gangway. George stopped at the mainmast to settle some details, and Constantine went aft alone, up to the high deck at the stern. The lines came off, the Pelagios's oars flashed once on the water, and the Agios Phokas pulled away from the city as the sails filled.
Thomas was at the after rail. He had been there for a while, watching the harbor work, and he was in plain grey wool, short-coated, with sea boots gone white with salt at the seams.
"Brother," Constantine said, coming up beside him.
"Brother. Ready for Gallipoli? Finally, something to do."
"We are going to look at a wall, Thomas. Reports and a walk. But I am glad you are coming." He looked him over. "And where is the Italian coat? Filelfo praised it to half the hall. Men turned to look."
"Men turned because Filelfo was shouting." Thomas glanced sideways at him. "I am dressed... what is it you call this? Ah, yes. Laconian." He plucked at the sleeve without looking at it. "You favor it yourself. I like it for the field, mostly." Thomas went on. "Aurelius would approve. Every hour, he says, do the thing in front of you, as a Roman, plainly, with justice, and let the rest go." Thomas said it fast, like a thing rehearsed. "You were right to insist I read it. I thank you for it."
Constantine looked at him a moment longer than he needed to. Then he put his forearms on the rail. Behind them the City was losing its detail, the domes going flat in the light.
"I expected a dull book," Thomas said. "An emperor telling me how to be an emperor. I have had enough of that from you."
"I told you. He was a soldier at heart."
"Yes, it is a camp notebook. Lists. He tells himself to get out of bed. He tells himself not to complain of the cold. He counts what he owes his tutors like a quartermaster counting boots." Thomas shrugged. "That is why I finished it in two days, and started it again."
"He wrote it at war. On the Danube, in the plague years. There was no one left to perform for."
Thomas gave a short nod and let it stand.
The shores stood far off on either hand, Asia low to port, Thrace clearer to starboard. The wind was steady and cold, and the ship creaked with each swell.
"As a Roman, you said." Constantine nodded at the shore to port. "There is a man at Mudanya who fishes for a living and prays toward Mecca off the stern of his boat, five times a day. When he does the task in front of him, plainly, what is he?"
"A Turk who fishes."
"That is his trade. I asked what he is."
"You asked what you want him to be." Thomas turned from the rail and looked at him. "I know this road, brother. You have been building it since Bursa. Wading ashore with your sword up, in the steps of Alexander, in the Kēryx for every man to read. Filelfo sold it in ten cities. You staged it well."
"I did. Men need the picture of their victorious emperor," Constantine said. "I also meant it. Both can be true." He let the wake run a moment. "You know your Alexander better than Filelfo's captions do. When the fighting in Persia was over, what did he do with it?"
Thomas's jaw moved. He did not want to say it.
"He put on their robes. He married his officers to their women at Susa, a hundred at a table. He took thirty thousand of their boys and drilled them the Macedonian way." Thomas set his hand flat on the rail. "And at Opis his own veterans, men who had walked to the end of the world for him, mutinied on a riverbank rather than swallow it. His own men, brother. What makes you think Romans will?"
"I will not put on anyone's robes, brother. They come to us. We do not go to them," Constantine said. "And count the other roads for me. I can put the sword to every Turk village in Anatolia, and spend ten years and both legions doing it. I can drive them east and make Karaman a gift of every man who can carry a grievance. Or I can do what was done to us. The Turk held Christian land for a hundred years. He counted us, taxed us, left us our priests, and grew strong on our backs. So the fisherman keeps his prayers. He pays his jizya. He knows the word."
"And the men who will count them?" Thomas said. "Walk any market from Mystras to the Horn. The sheet on the church door, the printed eagle, the two words under it. Ieros Skopos. Your presses run it and priests pin it over their hearts. Those men did not march to put Turks on a tax roll. Holy purpose, brother. God's land coming back to God. That is what they carried up the wall. Now go and tell them the purpose has room in it for Mecca. Tell them, and then read the sheet they print next year."
"We took the land back, brother, did we not? At least most of it. And they will bear the rest. Romans have before. There was an emperor who made every free man in the empire a Roman with one stroke of a pen. Gaul, African, Syrian, all of them, citizens by morning. The taxes came in. The legions marched. The sky did not fall."
"The emperor who signed that," Thomas said, "killed his brother in their mother's lap."
The wind held steady. Out to windward the Pelagios rose and fell on the swell, her sail the one bright thing on the water. Neither of them looked at the other. The wake ran out behind, white, then grey, then gone, and the gulls that had followed from the harbor peeled away one by one back toward the land.
"We have had enough of brothers killing brothers," Constantine said, and crossed himself.
When Thomas spoke again the edge had gone out of his voice and what was under the edge was worse. "I dug at Bursa. Three days. You saw the rows. Wooden tags, and the names cut in with knives because there was no time to paint them, and by the third day no one was saying anything at all, we just dug." He was looking at the water. "It is not simple to let it go. That is all I am telling you, brother. It is not simple."
The book had a sentence for this too. That in a little while the wronged and those who wronged them lie in one earth, and none of it holds. It came up in Constantine whole, the shape of it ready in his mouth. He did not say it. Not over those rows.
The ship creaked through three swells before he spoke.
"A branch cut from its bough is cut from the whole tree," he said. "It dries where it falls. A man cut off from other men is the same. But a cut branch can be bound back to the wood. It takes. It grows with the tree again, and it is never wholly of one mind with the tree after. The join stays. The scar sits in the grain as long as the tree stands." He turned his hands over on the rail, palms up, palms down. "I do not ask anyone to forget the axe. I ask for the graft."
Thomas was quiet. Then, flatly: "That is from the book."
"Everything is from some book," Constantine said.
Something in Thomas's shoulders came down half a finger's width. He made a short sound through his nose, not quite a laugh, and looked away down the deck, and the argument stayed where it had fallen, on the boards between them.
The master came aft with his cap off and reported the wind holding and the ship dry at the well, and asked leave to shake out the topsail, and got it. Forward, a boy was sent up, and the canvas cracked and drew. Land was called from the masthead past midday, the peninsula fine on the starboard bow, and through the afternoon the two shores that had stood all day apart began to draw slowly together ahead.
Thomas stayed at the rail. He watched the strait open, and when he spoke he spoke sideways, to the water.
"There is a passage near the front. He gives thanks to the gods for a brother. A brother whose character made him mind his own, he says, and whose affection gladdened him." A pause. "He also gives thanks, mind, that a tutor kept him from breeding fighting quails. So the company is mixed. Do not stand too tall."
Constantine put his hand on the rail beside his brother's, not touching, the two hands side by side on the worn wood.
"I am glad you read it," he said.
Gallipoli opened ahead of them in the last full light. The point came out, then the three towers above it, squat and new-pointed at the tops where the masons had been, then the mole, and behind the mole a forest of bare masts, ten galleys in two ranks. In the middle of them, high out of the water, black-hulled, rode the Katarina, at anchor in the same water she had fought in. Thomas's right hand came up and found his left shoulder and rested there, and he said nothing, and Constantine did not look at him doing it.
Boots on the ladder. George came aft with his cloak snapping, one hand up against the spray.
"The tower has answered, Majesty. They are manning the mole, and there is a boat putting out. Laskaris does not mean to be met last on his own quay."
"Then let us not keep the Admiral from his ceremony."
Nestor's voice ran forward along the deck, and the courses came rattling in, and the Agios Phokas stood in toward the guns and the towers under her topsail alone, slowing, the way a ship comes into a friend's harbor.
Author note:
So yes, Constantine just found jeans! The word "jeans" literally comes from Genoa. Genoese sailors wore a tough cotton twill for centuries, cheap, hard-wearing, dyed with woad, and it faded exactly the way your jeans fade today. The French called the cloth "bleu de Gênes," blue of Genoa, and that's the origin of blue jeans. (Denim is the cousin, "de Nîmes," from the French town.) And you all know Constantine. Cheap, lasts three seasons at sea, half the world wears it in our timeline... he is definitely not asking about bolt prices for fun.
Also Thomas read the Meditations. It will surely help him! Haha.
And we get our first look at the question of the new lands: what happens to all the Muslims now living under the eagle. C's answer is basically the Ottoman system flipped on its head. A reverse jizya of sorts. Whether the men with the printed eagle pinned over their hearts will accept that... well. Thomas said his piece.
Off to Gallipoli for inspection!
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