The meadows on the Kacha, north of Avlita, late July 1440
"Second rank. Fire."
The volley went off down the line. The smoke stood in front of them. Through it Arethas saw horses go down at the edge of the burning camp, three, four, a rider thrown clear and up again and running. The rest wheeled off into the smoke of the felt tents. The sound of the volley came back off the trees.
"First rank. Load."
The corporals took up the count behind him. The men loaded the way they had loaded at Glarentza and on the Mudanya road: match clear, pan, charge, ball, the wad rammed twice. The first rank had their pieces up before the horsemen finished turning at the far end of the meadow.
They had come into the camp an hour before light, up the river side, pikes in front and the Company's men on the left. For a while it went as planned. Then a party of Tatars came at them from nowhere. The camp burned behind the line now. The meadow in front of it was full of loose horses and mounted men, two hundred, perhaps three, riding a long circle at the edge of the smoke. They swept in along it in strings of ten and twenty, loosed, turned away. The arrows fell at an angle out of a clean sky. A man in the second rank sat down with one through the thigh. He was dragged back by his collar. His piece was handed forward to a carrier who had never fired one.
"Hold." The line wavered toward the nearest string as it came. "Hold until you can see the horse's teeth."
They came in closer the third time, because the smoke let them.
"Second rank. Fire."
That volley emptied saddles. The string came apart. The rest pulled back and held at the far end of the meadow, horses blowing. The sun was behind them now. The line saw shapes, not faces.
Sergeant Lekas came down the front rank counting. "Seven, Captain. Three dead. Two that won't walk."
"The Company?"
"On the left. They stood."
Stavrakios had them in two ranks at the edge of the burned horse lines, fifty muskets and the rest with spears, and the fifty had fired when the tagma fired, near enough. Stavrakios himself was walking behind them with his sword out and his hat gone, saying something to each man's back as he passed.
The Company's riders came down the meadow from the north at a gallop.
They rode in strung out, twenty less a few, the horses lathered. One man led a horse with an empty saddle. They pulled up at the burned lines. The leader, a Thracian with a split lip, stayed mounted. He looked for Stavrakios and found Arethas first.
"There's more, Captain."
"Where."
"Across the river. On the flat between it and the next." He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "We rode to the rise to count the lines like Stavrakios said, and there's a camp past that one that doesn't end. Horses to the hills."
"How many."
"Didn't stop to count, Captain. That's no raiding band. A camp laid out proper, and horse on the flat as far as I could see."
Stavrakios came up behind him, breathing hard, and heard the last of it. He looked at Arethas. Arethas looked at the meadow. Forty or fifty loose horses, good ones, milled at the edge of the smoke with cut lines trailing.
"Form the square," Arethas said. "Wounded and carriers in the middle. Pikes on the corners." He turned to Lekas. "And the dead men's pieces and powder."
"The horses," Stavrakios said. "We paid for those horses in men."
"What you can catch while the square forms. The rest stay."
"Fifty head, Captain. The Tatar has lifted our carriers' mules off that road every week since spring, and there they stand."
"Then go and catch them," Arethas said, and went to see the square made.
It was fifteen kilometers back to the bay, and they had walked it in the dark going out with the pikes in front and their mouths shut. Now the sun was up and the whole plain could see them.
The square walked. A hundred pikes at the corners and along the faces, the muskets in two ranks behind them, the carriers and the mules and the men who could not walk in the center. It went south at the pace of the slowest carrier. Small Tatar groups rode its edges. They did not close. They came in to loose, and went away again. The first string that tried it close lost two men to the muskets and did not try it that close again. After that they kept their distance, riding just out of range. One of them rode the whole length of the eastern face with his bow down, showing them his back. Of the camp beyond the river there was no sign yet.
By the second hour the plain was white with heat, the cuirasses too hot to touch. The Company's men on the west face walked with their heads down. The small Tatar groups had drawn off. Arethas mounted once to see where, and his rib told him what it always told him on horseback. They were gone. In their place, far back, on a rise stood a long line of horse. That was what the Thracian had seen. It moved when they moved. It kept pace across the whole plain and never closed. When he looked again an hour on, it was gone into the heat, and he did not see it again.
They came down to the Belbek in the third hour. The river ran knee deep that month, gravel and slow brown water between two low banks. The square could not cross as a square. It went over as a column. The small Tatar groups came back for the crossing. They rode close for the first time, into the pikes and the files in the water, firing from the saddle and turning away. The near-bank pikes held. Four went down holding it. The muskets on the far bank fired across the water into the strings as they turned. A carrier lost his grip on a bridle. The horse went over in the current with the wounded man on it, and the man behind went in after them. They got the horse up. The man was gone. Three more lay in the shallows, the water running through their coats, the blood thinning out downstream.
"Leave them," Arethas said to the men who had stopped.
"Move."
On the far bank the square formed again. The Tatars followed. They came at the tail twice more in the next hour, small rushes, a dozen riders loosing and turning. A man went down with an arrow in the calf and was got onto a horse. The Thracian took one through the meat of the forearm bringing his men back into line after the second rush, snapped the shaft off himself, and kept walking. After that the rushes stopped. The riders hung on the flanks a while, out of range, then fewer, then none. The plain was empty behind them and the heat lay on it.
In the sixth hour the ground began to fall toward the sea. The bay showed first as a grey line, then the harbor town, then the palisade running up the slope to the fort.
The palisade gate stood open and men were coming out of it. Captain Markos had sent a company down the slope. They met the square short of the wall with water skins and took the wounded off the horses, two men to each. The light Drakos in the gate stood loaded, their crews watching the plain. Nothing was on it. The square came apart at the gate and went through as a crowd.
Arethas stood inside the gate with his hand on the timber. The wood was warm from the sun. Up the slope, at the far end of the palisade, on the tower of the Kalamita fort Alexios's men had walked out of in May, the eagle stood out in the wind off the bay. Markos was already at the gate. He had come down from the fort when the tower sighted them. He looked at the square coming apart in the yard, at the wounded being carried in, before he looked at Arethas.
"Mother of God. What happened."
"We got ambushed." Arethas wiped his face with his sleeve. "There's an army across the river. It watched us the whole way back."
"Losses."
"Forty-six. Eight I could not find."
Stavrakios came through the gate at the tail. He stopped while his men went past to the warehouse, then said his number without being asked.
"Fifty on their feet. Twelve to the warehouse. Eighteen I left out there."
Avlita, the same night
Arethas stood at the window of Markos's office in the fort. Down the slope in the dark the Roman galley lay at the mole with a lantern at her stern, and the Company's two round-ships beyond her, loaded, waiting on a wind. Behind him the door opened and Athanarichos came in with the company's ledger under his arm and took the last chair. Arethas turned back to the table. The lamp lit the roll sheet, the tablet with the powder count, the Alexios seal ring on Sigerichos's hand.
"Fifty," Stavrakios said. "Eighty went up that meadow this morning on the Company's wages. Fifty came back."
"The count was your count, Stavrakios," Markos said.
"The count was right. Three hundred horses at most, no more all summer, and my riders counted them a dozen times. What was past the rise, nobody told me to count."
"Nobody told anyone."
"The camp was three hundred," Arethas said. "The rest was across the river."
"And tomorrow those thousands will come to visit us." Stavrakios put his hand flat on the roll sheet. "Your three months are up on Sunday, Captain. A siege would change that, or I guess we can just take the ships and go."
"The ships are full, and they sail tomorrow," Athanarichos said. He was a small man with a Goth's name and a clerk's hands, the Company's factor at Avlita. "Give up the wharf and the charter is worth the lead on its seal. The directors will say so, and the Genoese will have the Euxine to themselves again by spring."
"The order," Markos said, "was written for a wharf, our watch on it until the Company's own could stand, and a Tatar who comes down the valley at night and goes back up it." He nodded at the window, at the dark where the plain was. "It was not written for a war."
"Whatever it was written for, we may have a siege by tomorrow," Arethas said, and read off the tablet. "The six Drakos here have fifty charges apiece. The two on the gate have thirty."
"The town comes inside the walls tonight," Markos said. "Then the grain." He looked at Sigerichos for the first time.
The castellan sat at the end of the table with the ring on his hand and his hands folded, a grey man in a decent coat, who had walked down out of his own fort in May at the head of eleven men and had walked back up it every morning since to sit in the room they had left him. He said what he had been asked.
"Twenty days for the two tagmata and the watch. Less with the town inside the wall."
"Water."
"The cistern in the rock is full. The river is under the guns."
They went on through the stores a while longer, question and number. Then Arethas set the tablet down.
"That bandit camp in the north has been a nuisance since spring. This is different. I thought the clans were fighting each other. A force that size says otherwise."
"The lord Alexios paid at Solkhat at Easter, as he pays. He had no answer. The collectors came down the valley in June as if he had not paid. There is no khan's word on the peninsula this year, not from Sarai, not from the west. The local beys collect for themselves." Sigerichos said it to the table.
"Caffa and Cembalo pay Solkhat too," Athanarichos said. "The consul's own clerk told me so in May, over wine, as a thing a Roman ought to know. He said the clans mean to rule themselves now. No more Sarai. They mean to make one of their own at Solkhat, and they have sent north for a man of the blood to sit in it. Some prince living among the Lithuanians."
Markos stood up.
"Whatever it is, we prepare for a siege. The galley goes to the City tonight, straight, with the news." He went to the door and opened it and spoke to the man outside. "Ring the bells. Everyone in the town comes up inside the fort. Everyone."
Author note:
Oh boy, Crimea in 1440...
The Golden Horde was coming apart. Ulugh Muhammad had been driven off the Volga by Küçük Muhammad around 1437 and had gone north to make himself khan at Kazan; Sayyid Ahmad held the steppe west of the Dnieper and claimed the whole Horde too. Two khans, three if you count Kazan, none of them with a hand on the peninsula.
In Crimea the real power was the karachi beys, the heads of the four great clans, the Shirin first among them under Tegene Bey, with the Barın, Arghın and Qıpçaq. They had made and unmade khans for twenty years from Solkhat (Eski Qırım, the old Tatar seat inland from Caffa). By 1440 they had stopped pretending to serve anyone at Sarai and were collecting the peninsula's dues for themselves: the Genoese at Caffa and Cembalo paid Solkhat, and so did Alexios of Theodoro, for protection nobody delivered.
What the beys wanted was a khan of their own, a man of Genghisid blood who would owe them everything. They found him in Lithuania: Haci Giray, a Tuqa-Timurid whose family had lived in exile there for years. The embassy to Grand Duke Casimir, who had only taken Lithuania that June, went north in 1440. Haci Giray came the following year, minted his first coins at Solkhat in 1441, and by the end of the decade the Crimean Khanate was a state. It outlived the Golden Horde by three hundred years.
This time the Romans had set foot in the region too!
Character index:
Captain Arethas: Book II Ch 40 (a young conscript at the new war academy in Heptapyrgion, Thessaloniki, laying stone with Stylianos, talking about the officer school), Book II Ch 68 (holding the small fort above the Vardar at Aetos, George's war academy pupil, got a cracked rib), Book III Ch 10 (drilling recruits at Glarentza,),Book III Ch 23 (the 1438 review, medallion and purse before his men), Book III Ch 30 (Bursa, under George on the Mudanya road with four tagmata off the second legion). Captain of the tagma that went out.
Captain Markos: Book II Ch 78 and 79 (Adata: spots the Ottoman horse on the ridge with Kallistos, leads the first rope raft at dawn, takes the shoulder cut), Book III Ch 4, "Orders for the Living" (the honors ceremony in the City, takes the steps with visible effort).
Stavrakios: Book III Ch 37 (named as captain of the Company's warehouse watch, "formerly of the First Legion,"
Athanarichos: Book III Ch 37 (the Company's factor at Avlita).
Alexios of Theodoro: Book III Ch 7 (a man of his comes to Laskaris in private at Cembalo; Constantine sends a courteous letter, friendship answered in kind, Roman protection not), Ch 37 (doubles the port dues, his protection "does not exist," a few hundred ill-found men across all his holds), Ch 43 (Theodoro "collapsing, the lord barely holds his own town").