Constantinople, March 1440
The hall emptied slowly. The chamberlain left last, and the braziers went out with him. Constantine waited at the western window, shutters open. A few lamps moved on the water below. At the sea stairs, a boat knocked twice against the stone.
George crossed the floor with one man behind him. The stranger had been searched at the gate, and it showed in the way his coat hung open at the collar. He walked steady, and a half step quicker than George. A man who had waited all day and was done waiting.
Constantine nodded toward a door.
They went into the small room off the hall where the secretaries kept the day's paper. Shelves of rolled correspondence, a copying table, shears, sand, one lamp. George shut the door. In the close light the sea was still on the stranger's coat, salt dried grey along the seams. Constantine stood by the copying table and looked at him.
"Your name."
"Hugo Podocataro, Majesty. Of Nicosia. My family has served the kings of Cyprus three generations. I am sent by King John."
His Greek was clean, almost a notary's, but it had a lilt, and a doubled consonant here and there.
"You are welcome in this city, Master Podocataro. Though kings do not usually send their men in secrecy. Speak your errand."
Podocataro drew a letter from inside his coat, under a small privy seal. Constantine broke the wax and read. At the head, in Greek: John, by the grace of God King of Jerusalem, of Cyprus and of Armenia.
"Jerusalem and Armenia," George said, reading past his shoulder. "Your king is rich in kingdoms he has never seen."
"The titles came to his house with much else that is gone, my lord."
"They were also Roman lands once," Constantine said, and read on.
The letter itself was short. It accredited the bearer, asked that faith be given to what he would say, and offered the king's friendship. It closed with a prayer for the good success of the talks in Italy, for the union of the churches and not much more. He set it down.
"Your king writes a careful letter. Friendship, faith, and prayers. It asks for nothing."
"Yes, Majesty. What it does not say is why I am here."
Constantine studied him for a moment. "Your king is to marry soon, I hear, a distant kinswoman of ours, the..." He searched for it.
"The Montferrat house, Majesty," George said. "Marquises in Lombardy."
"That one."
"You are well informed, Majesty. The king sends ships to Italy to bring his queen home as we speak. I sailed with them as far as Rhodes and left them there, under the king's private word."
Of the Montferrat kin Constantine knew little. A branch gone west and gone Latin a century and more past. They had sent one letter of congratulation after the City was retaken, in Latin. He had answered it in two lines, sent a Bible with the answer, and forgotten them.
"So," he said. "What does the King of Cyprus want with me?"
"Your friendship, Majesty. He marries into the Emperor's house, as he counts it. He wishes a door. Nothing written, nothing sworn. Only the knowledge that if his fortunes turned, the Emperor of the Romans would not be a stranger to him."
"And what does he need?"
Podocataro hesitated for a moment. "May I speak plainly?"
"You came a long way not to."
"My king is twenty-one years old. He is pleasant and gentle with servants and generous when he remembers to be. He is also idle, and easily led, and he has never in his life held one purpose through a whole winter. The kingdom is governed by whoever spoke to him last. For some years now, the one who speaks to him last is a mistress. A Greek, of Patras. She has given him a son."
"Then the king's only son is a half-Greek bastard," George said.
No one answered him.
"Famagusta has been Genoa's for near seventy years," Podocataro went on. "It is the most profitable harbor in the island. What trade remains goes through Salines and Limassol, and those the king holds, in name now. Since the autumn the sultan's war galleys ride at Salines. His officers sit at the customs table and count what lands, so that the tribute may be assessed with accuracy. The harbors thin. A master who can choose his port chooses one without galleys in it."
"The galleys," Constantine said. "How many, and why."
"Fourteen when I sailed. There is a rumour about Rhodes, this summer. The sultan is done suffering the Catalan sails that nest there and prey on his ships."
"Does Rhodes know about this?" George asked.
"They see what every deck-hand sees. The ships are not hidden. What the Order expects of it, I cannot say. The Order does not confide in Cypriots."
"You have told us your king's wants and your king's weakness in one breath," George said. "That is a strange loyalty. Who else sent you, Master Podocataro?"
Podocataro hesitated again. The lamp fluttered once in the draught under the door and steadied.
"The king sent me, my lord. That is true, and the letter is true. But I carry more than the letter."
Constantine drew the stool from the copying table and set it in front of him. "Sit."
He sat slowly.
"The Latin lords despise the king," Podocataro said. "They despise the lady of Patras more, and the child most of all. Among themselves they talk of correction. The kingdom better managed and themselves managing it. That is the whole of their horizon." He paused. "Ours is different."
"Yours?" George said.
"There are four Greek noble houses in Cyprus, my lord. Podocataro. Singlitico. Sozomenos. Kontostefanos. The old Frankish lords are dying out, and we hold the offices they left. My kinsman Jacomo has been judge, auditor, chamberlain. Today he keeps the kingdom's seals."
He drew a folded paper from his breast, worn soft along the folds, and opened it on the table.
Constantine recognised the letterforms before the sheet lay flat. An Ieros Skopos poster, two years old or near it, by the style of it.
George tilted it to the lamp. "So you are a believer in the cause."
"Yes, my lord. There are circles now that meet. In Nicosia, in monasteries behind closed doors."
"How many are you?" Constantine said.
"Few, Majesty. But more by the month, and the houses stand behind it."
Constantine looked at the sheet a moment longer, then slid it back across the table. Podocataro folded it with care and returned it to his coat.
"So, Podocataro, what do the four houses want?" Constantine said.
"The island home, Majesty. Under the empire, as it was before the Franks and the Muslims. Ieros Skopos." He crossed himself.
"And the four houses would hold what they delivered," George said.
"Someone must, my lord."
"Ieros Skopos," Constantine said, and crossed himself.
"Now. You serve a king, and you have sold him to me in an hour. Tell me why I should trust a man who does that."
"I serve the cause first, Majesty. I will not stand in this room and pretend otherwise. But I have sold nothing. Everything the king asked, I have asked. Everything the king offered, I have offered. What I carry beyond his brief breaks no word of his. I am an Orthodox Greek who has watched the island be eaten for years, by Genoa from the west, by Cairo from the south, by our own court from within. The law I studied at Padua holds that a king who cannot keep his ports, his coin, or his coasts has broken the compact he was crowned under. That is my answer in law. The rest is faith, and the faith you have already seen. It is folded in my coat."
Constantine was quiet a moment.
"I understand what you are asking, and I understand why. And I will be honest with you, because you have earned that much by coming. I hold a peace in the east. It buys me the years I need, and I will not spend them on Cyprus. Not now. What your houses hope for cannot come from me today, and I will not pretend otherwise and send you home with false comfort."
Podocataro inclined his head. "We have waited two hundred years under the Franks, Majesty. We can wait for you."
"Why wait on us at all?" George said. "Depose him yourselves. Your kinsman keeps the seals. You would know the way of it."
"We could take the palace, my lord. We could not hold the island. The morning after, Cairo comes for its tribute, Genoa comes for its debts, and the Latin lords come for our heads. And who would we crown? No bishop would set a crown on a Podocataro, nor should he. We need a sovereign. A name men will kneel to."
He paused.
"There are those among us who say they would kneel soonest to a queen of the Emperor's blood."
Constantine straightened, and Podocataro came up off the stool.
"Hear what you will carry home. To your king: the Emperor thanks him for his friendship, wishes him joy of his marriage to our kinswoman, and keeps a door open to his men. Nothing in writing. To the houses: today the answer is no, and I have told you why. Keep them patient, and keep them quiet. No risings, no oaths, no names on paper. If the day changes, you will hear of it."
A silence sat between them. Podocataro bowed his head and said nothing more.
George took a coin from his purse and the shears from the table. He set the coin on the table's edge and cut it in two. He passed one half across.
"Your houses trade into this city," he said. "Letters travel with cargo. Any man who comes to us from you carries that half. Any man who comes to you from us carries this one." He closed his hand over it.
Podocataro turned the cut silver once in his fingers and put it away.
"One thing for myself, Majesty. If this goes badly, my wife and my children will need a roof in this city. Not an office. Not a pension. Just a door that opens."
"They will have it," Constantine said.
Podocataro bowed lower for it than he had bowed for anything else.
George took him out through the dark hall, and the sound of the sea door came up the stair a while after.
When he came back, the lamp had burned down a finger. The letter lay squared on the table, and beside it, out of Constantine's sleeve, the four seeds, dull as gravel in the light.
"Well. That was more than a letter," Constantine said. "Do you trust him?"
George thought about it. "A year ago, maybe. Not now. He is not the first man to look to us from under Latin lords, and he will not be the last. Did he tell us the truth tonight? I think so. That does not mean I trust him." He straightened the letter's corner. "The Cypriot does not worry me. Fourteen galleys at Salines does. Do we send word to Rhodes?"
"Not yet. The Order sees the same sea we do."
Constantine looked at the shuttered window as if the water were still visible through it.
"I thought the sea would grow quieter when the Ottomans were done," he said. "There are storms making on every side of it now. We took one head off the beast, and the water keeps growing new ones."
George said nothing to that. He gathered the king's letter and squared its corners once more.
"One more thing," Constantine said. "The Montferrat letter. Find it. I want to read it again."
George looked up.
"It seems I was too quick with my two lines. Their name is worth something after all."
Author's Note:
Everyone is starting to knock on C's door lately!
Hugo Podocataro is real. The Podocataro were one of the four noble families in Lusignan Cyprus that were Greek (the Singlitico, Sozomenos, and Kontostefanos being the others). They rose exactly as Hugo describes: the old Frankish nobility was dying out and Greek families climbed through the offices. His kinsman Jacomo really was judge, auditor, chamberlain, and chancellor by 1436. And the real Hugo was at sea in 1440 with the mission bringing John's bride home from Italy, then went ambassador to Genoa, Rome, and half of Italy after. This time makes a detour to Constantinople...
John II is pretty much as advertised: twenty-one, pleasant and weak. Marietta of Patras was real, Greek, and at his side since before 1438, and their son was born in 1439.
And John really was marrying a Palaiologina, sort of. The Montferrat marquises were a cadet branch of the imperial house, gone west and Catholic a century earlier. Palaiologos in surname, Lombard in everything else. Whether that old letter gets a more interesting reply this time... well. He did ask George to find it.