Clermont Castle, February 142
The lamb had gone cold on Theodora's plate. She had cut it once and moved it twice, and she was watching him eat with a faint smile.
"That was delicious," Michael said. "When did we last have a quiet supper, the two of us?"
"I'm glad you enjoyed it, my Despot." She looked down at her plate, and the smile went where her appetite had gone.
He had been watching her for days without letting her see it. The food moved and did not lessen. She had left the morning mass early on Tuesday, and Eudokia had begun carrying dry bread up to the bedchamber without being asked. He knew the shape of it. He had lived beside it once, a long time ago, in another life, watching Ellen push eggs around a plate the month before they knew about Jason.
"Theodora." He kept his voice level. "Are you carrying a child?"
Her fingers went along the rim of the plate. "I believe so," she said. "The signs are there. I wanted to be certain before I said it."
He put his knife down. A child. Constantine's child, by blood, and his by everything that would come after, and there was no way to hold the two thoughts apart, so he stopped trying and reached across the table and took her hand. Her fingers were cold from sitting away from the fire.
"You should rest more. We can have the physician,"
"Do not make a fuss of me." She laughed a little, embarrassed, and squeezed his hand instead of letting it go. "I will be careful. That is all it needs for now."
She had stopped watching him the way she had in the first weeks, or she had gotten better at it. He no longer knew which, and most days he no longer minded. The doors opened and a servant came in for the dishes, and Theodora took her hand back slowly.
Winter had gone into the workshop.
The room off the old treasury held a long table he had ruined with ink, and on the table the press took shape a piece at a time, wooden frame and screw and the flat bed for the forme, most of it built twice because the first build taught him what he had forgotten. His hands were stained black to the wrist most evenings. He mixed ink from lampblack and linseed like a man following a recipe out of his own unreliable head, and pulled smeared proof sheets off crude paper, and pinned the least bad ones to the wall to remind himself the thing could work at all.
By the small forge in the corner, the culverin from Glarentza hung on two pegs, and under it lay his drawings for its children: a longer barrel, a tighter ball, the serpentine lever given a spring. The drawings were as far as it went. The local smiths could hammer what he sketched but not bore a true barrel, and he would not let a badly bored barrel be the first gun anyone here saw burst.
Powder was its own problem, sulfur and saltpeter and questions he could not ask aloud. One thing at a time. George would bring back men who knew metal, or he would not, and the drawings would wait either way.
The rest of it was slower and duller and mattered more. He had sat with the tax rolls and taught the collector double-entry, credit against debit, and watched the man cross himself over the ledger the first week and then, by Epiphany, start correcting Michael's own arithmetic. The treasury told the same story more neatly now, which was the only improvement: it was still draining. Wall, wells, road work, wages. He had sold two of the dowry estates in Arcadia to cover the spring, and had sat a long evening over the deed before sealing it, selling land four months after swearing to hold it. It bought a season. He tried to think of it as buying a season.
Andravida, March 1429
The day was hot for March. In the flat fields east of Andravida the new plough stood in a half-cut furrow with the oxen blowing gently in the traces, and around it a circle of farmers stood at the distance men keep from a thing they have decided not to trust.
"Look here." Michael set his hands to the stilts and drove the share in, and the soil came up and turned over in a clean dark ribbon, deeper than the old scratch ploughs cut. The oxen leaned and took it without laboring. "Deeper cut. The ground breathes, the roots go down, the yield comes up. It pulls harder at first. It pays at harvest."
An old man with a face cured like the hide of his own oxen looked at the furrow and not at him. "We have tilled with the light plough since my grandfather's grandfather, Despot. Who is to say this does not tire the land? Or kill the beasts under it?"
"Nothing says it, except that it has not been tried here." He straightened up from the stilts. "It has been tried on the two plots by the river since January. Kostas worked them." He nodded at a middle-aged farmer in the circle, who looked as though he would have paid money not to be nodded at. "Ask him, not me."
It was early yet, Kostas said. The ground turned easier than he expected, and held together well after rain. The oxen had not suffered for it. Beyond that he said nothing, not with the Despot standing there, and the crowd heard what he did not say as much as what he did. A younger man with his arms crossed spoke up. "Stories of new ways travel easier than sacks of grain, Despot. We have heard promises before."
"Then keep the old ploughs on your own strips and watch mine. If my furrows beat yours at harvest, come and tell me. If they fail, I will hear that too." He took his hands off the plough. "I am not taking the old ploughs away from any man. I am showing you a new one. The harvest can judge between them."
It was not agreement, but it was not the wall of a moment ago. The old man walked the furrow's length, bent, broke a clod between his fingers, and said nothing, which from the look of him was a form of speech.
Hooves came up the field road, one rider, pushing. He reined in short of the circle in his own dust. "Despot. George Sphrantzes has returned. He waits at Clermont."
Michael looked at the half-cut furrow, and at the farmers, who were watching him the way the whole country watched him, to see what he would do next. "We will finish this another day," he said, and swung up, and left the plough standing in the field where they could walk around it and argue with it all afternoon.
He came down to Clermont with the light going long and gold, and the castle gate was a market. Carts stood loaded in the yard, chests and sacks and a crate of hens, families sitting on their bundles, a mule being argued with in two dialects. And in the middle of it George, road-dusty, straighter than a man off a month of bad ships had a right to be, talking with a lean man in a scholar's robe that had been good cloth before the journey.
"Despot." George's smile was tired and real. "Your timing is kind. We are barely an hour in."
Michael dismounted and tossed the reins to a stable hand. He crossed to George and gripped his arm. "It is good to have you back safely." His eyes went past him to the yard, the carts, the crowd, more people than he had let himself hope for. "And who is this you've brought?"
"Theophilus Dragas. Kin to you through your mother's house. He carries her letters."
The man bowed, unhurried, exact. Fifty or near it, grey coming in at the temples, and eyes that had finished measuring Michael before the bow was done, without hostility, the way a builder measures a wall. "Despot. Your lady mother sends her blessing, and these." He held out a sealed packet with both hands. "I have also brought texts and manuscripts from the remnants of the imperial library."
The name came up out of Constantine's memory a half-beat late, as the names still did: Dragas, his mother's blood, a man spoken of at her table. Michael took the packet. Behind Theophilus the yard was full of the rest of it, and he ran his eye along the carts: tools in straw, an anvil roped to a cart bed, a bell mold, chests that were the wrong weight for clothes.
"Twenty-two craftsmen," George said, following the look. "Smiths, two founders, carpenters, a master mason, a bell maker, Elias there, who cast for the Pantokrator." A stout man with burn-scarred forearms bowed over folded hands. "And something over two hundred besides. Families, a few lesser names, clerks, men with strong backs and no prospects at home. The City empties a little more every year, Despot. I only stood at the gate and offered them somewhere for the road to go."
"You did more than that."
"I spent more than that," George said, dry. "We will speak of the accounts tomorrow. Some of what your mother's friends promised became smaller when it came time to put it in a chest. And the passage cost double. There are pirates working the Cyclades lanes so openly they have a tariff."
"Tomorrow, then. All of it." Michael raised his voice over the yard. "You are welcome here. All of you. There is land, there is work, and there is a wall that needs more hands than I have. Tonight you eat under a roof."
The yard did not cheer. They were too tired for it, and too far from home to trust an easy welcome. But the bundles started moving toward the hall.
The evening settled in around fires in the courtyard, meat smoke and strange dialects and somebody's baby complaining at the noise, and Michael stood at the gallery rail above it with the packet of his mother's letters unopened in his hand.
Theodora came along the gallery and put her arm through his. They stood and watched a boy chase another boy between the fires until a woman collared both.
"So many," she said. "George has outdone himself."
"He has. And it will cost us a granary by spring, and be worth it." He looked at her sideways. "You should be sitting."
"I have been sitting all day. You may ask Eudokia, who put me there." She was quiet a moment, and her arm tightened slightly on his. "A letter came for me as well. From Carlo."
"Carlo? What news does he bring?"
" Half of it asking after my health, which is not like him." She hesitated briefly. "Epirus is being pressed. Tensions with neighbouring lords and whispers of Ottoman movements. He... also inquires about the prospects of an alliance."
Michael watched the fires. An alliance with Epirus was a rope tied to a sinking neighbor, and a refusal was an insult to his wife's house.
"I will not answer him quickly," he said. "Quick answers are how a man ends up owning promises."
"That is roughly what I hoped you would say." She leaned her head against his shoulder, and they stood there while the courtyard sorted itself into sleep, fire by fire. Below, someone had begun teaching a Clermont kitchen boy a Thessalonian song, badly, to laughter. Theodora's hand rested on his arm, and her other hand, he noticed, lay flat and light on her own belly, and he put the letters inside his coat and kept both of them company a while longer in the cold.