Blachernae, early October 1438
From the gallery above the great room, Constantine watched the hall fill.
The room had been eight months in the masons' hands, and tonight was the first time it would be used. The plaster had dried pale and even, the new lamps hung in two long rows, and the floor below was already loud with two hundred voices: officers in from Thessaloniki and Skopje and the Morea, churchmen, the city's nobles, the men of the chancery and the yards. Servants moved along the walls with jugs, filling cups before anyone had sat down.
George came up the stair behind him with a folded letter in his hand.
"It's a pity, a night like this without the old man in it."
"It is." Constantine kept his eyes on the hall. "Of all of them, he is the one I would have wanted here."
"He writes that he is too old now for the sea." George turned the letter over. "He sends twenty graduates instead. A full class. He vouches for twelve of them."
Constantine smiled. "And the other eight?"
"He says we will find out what they are at our own expense, the way he found out at his."
Constantine looked down at the hall. He had wanted Plethon at this table tonight, in a chair near his own, close enough to lean over and tell him before the room heard it. The letter going south carried the news instead, and would find him on his bench under the tamarisk with sand on the page.
"He will hear it from paper," Constantine said.
"And he will write three pages on being told last," George said, "and one line of congratulation at the end."
"The one line will be worth the three pages."
Below them, Theophilus had come in at the far doors, walking the careful walk of a man three days off a ship, telling someone — Laskaris, by the set of the shoulders — about every plank of the voyage in turn, and Laskaris was hearing him out with the patience of a man who had spent half his life at sea. Then Theophilus looked up, found Constantine at the rail as though he had known where to look, and inclined his head once. Constantine returned it, and the older man went back to his planks.
Andreas and Aristos stood near the soldiers' end of the second table, heads together over something that required Aristos to set three cups in a line and move one of them twice. Laskaris drifted over, listened, moved the third cup, and said something that made both of them laugh and Aristos reach for the jug.
Nearer the middle, Niketas of Skopje stood beside his wife. She wore her best, which was good wool dyed dark and a pin that had been polished for the occasion, and she stood very straight with one hand on the table edge as though the floor might pitch. Niketas was telling her something in a low voice, naming men around the room. She nodded at each name and did not take her hand off the table.
Filelfo had no such trouble. He had dressed in a deep red Italian cut with fur at the collar, the only fur in a hall of Roman wool, and he moved through the room like a man visiting his own house. Scholarios, beside him in plain dark cloth, was looking at the sleeves. Chortasmenos was looking at the books painted into the new frieze and naming them to anyone who would listen.
Antonio di Pietro had found the one place in the room from which the new roof trusses could be seen end to end, and stood there with his head back. Taccola, beside him, had been brought from his warehouse in a clean coat that did not fit him; he had already turned his cup upside down on the cloth and was studying the ring of wine it left.
And at the high end of the nobles' table, nearest the dais of anyone not of the blood or the council, sat Loukas Notaras. He was in dark silk, at ease, and the men around him leaned in when he spoke. A fragment came up through the noise as the hall quieted between songs — "...the first two hulls fitted by spring, and the convoy shares paying from the first voyage..." — and the man beside him was nodding at the table like a man counting it.
They came down by the inner stair as the stewards moved to the doors, and the hall found its feet in one long scrape of benches.
Katarina entered with her women behind her, two by two, and the room standing. She wore the deep blue of the house and the small crown, and she came down the length of the hall without haste, the way she did everything now, while two hundred people watched her and she let them. Constantine met her before the dais and gave her his hand up the step. He had argued once, years ago in Glarentza, that a dinner did not need a procession. He had stopped arguing. She had built the court she had been trained for, and tonight the court was being seen by the whole empire at once; he gave her the ceremony the way other men gave jewels, and she wore it better.
They sat. Patriarch Joseph rose, steadied himself on his stick, and blessed the food and the house and the city in a voice that had grown thinner since the spring but carried to the doors. The hall answered him. Then the servants came through in files, and the room filled with the smell of roasted lamb and fish in vine leaves and bread still warm enough to steam when it was torn.
On the wall above the second table, the fresco that had been half a saint in July was whole again, the missing half painted in over the summer so cleanly that only the slightly brighter blue of the new robe betrayed the seam. Catherine, Thomas's wife, was pointing it out to Joseph beside her.
"John of Damascus," she said. "You can see it now in the hand."
"Basil," Katarina said down the table, without turning her head. "The hand proves nothing."
The Patriarch looked from the Princess to the Empress, took up his cup, and found something to study in the wine. Constantine ate, and let the question stand where it had stood since July.
Thomas leaned in from his right. He had been watching Constantine all evening the way a man watches a door he knows will open. "When?" he said, under the noise.
"After the next course."
"You should have done it before the lamb. Half the room will be too drunk to remember it."
"They will remember it."
When the dishes had been cleared and before the sweet wine came round, Constantine looked at Katarina. She gave him the small incline of the head, a finger's breadth, that no one past the second seat could have seen.
He rose, and the hall went quiet.
"Romans, honored guests," he said. "Tonight this house is full for the first time since it was made new, and I had thought that reason enough for the table. It is not the reason." He set his hand on the back of Katarina's chair. "By the spring, God willing, the Empress will give the empire a child."
For one breath the hall held. Then it rose all at once, chairs going back, cups going up, and the old cry rolled down the room from the officers' tables to the doors and back — many years, many years to the Emperor, many years to the Empress — over and over. Katarina had been trained from girlhood to receive acclamation with a level chin, and the chin held; the rest of her did not. She was smiling before the second cry, openly, at the officers' tables and the clergy and the whole roaring length of the room, and when her eyes came back to Constantine they were bright.
Once, his gaze left her — along the high table, past Thomas and Catherine, to the seat where his mother would have sat. She had heard the news already, in the monastery parlor a week ago, with Zoe on the bench beside her; she had said little, and had kept the children an hour past the time set. At least she had seen them. And she would want to see the new one, Constantine thought. He took his eye back from the empty place.
Joseph was on his feet, stick and all, and the hall quieted for him. He blessed the child unborn and the mother carrying it, asked God's mercy on the house of Palaiologos, and sat down heavily to a roar that owed something to the wine. Thomas reached Constantine before the roar had finished, took him by both forearms, and pulled him in; he had known for a week and embraced him as though he had learned it that moment, which was its own kind of brotherhood.
Then Notaras rose, cup in hand, and the nobles' table rose with him.
"Majesty. Majesty." He bowed to each of them, unhurried. "The City has her walls again, her churches again, and her Emperor again. Now God grants her what no mason and no army can build. A child of this house born within these walls. To the child, and to the years it will see, which will be better years than ours." He let a small smile travel along the table. "We who lend to the empire have never been so sure of the return."
The hall laughed and drank, and the laughter let the evening loosen.
After that it was music, and the sweet wine, and the long loose end of a dinner going well. Aristos was made to tell the story of the Mesembria raiders twice. Niketas's wife laughed at last, at something Catherine said, and took her hand off the table. Taccola escaped to the courtyard and was retrieved by Filelfo. Joseph was helped to the door by two deacons and blessed everyone within reach on the way.
It was late when the servants began clearing in earnest, and the hall had thinned to knots of men talking over cold cups. George came to Constantine's shoulder with a flat leaf of paper in his hand, fresh enough from the press that the ink still smelled of it.
"As you asked," he said. "The first copies came up this evening."
Constantine took it. At the head, under the eagle, in clean capitals: THE ANNUAL COUNCIL OF THE EMPIRE — YEAR 1438. Below, in three blocks, the three days: the sessions, the rooms, the hours, and under each session the names of the men who would sit it, set in even type like the lines of a psalter.
"The second hour," George said.
Constantine read down the first column, folded the leaf once along the line the press had already creased into it, and set it on the cloth beside his cup, square to the table's edge.
In the morning Constantine rode down to the university quarter with Theophilus, George, and Filelfo, through streets still wet from the night's washing. The meeting had been set in the law school, in the long hall where the benches had gone in for the September students; the room still smelled of fresh plaster and chalk, and the men of the chancery and the themes were already in it when he came — clerks of the Logarion with their cases, Scholarios with a folded opinion under his arm, Notaras among the city men near the windows. At the head of the room a great black board ran the width of the wall; a clerk stood beside it with chalk and a wet cloth, writing up each figure as it was read and wiping the last away.
Every man had been given the same printed booklet at the door, a thin sewn thing of a dozen leaves — the year in summary, the order of the sessions, the headings of what would be said. They held them open on their knees and turned the pages together.
Theophilus chaired, as the room had learned the night before he would. The reports went through the morning in order. The treasury first: the year had ended in a good surplus, and most of the surplus had come from the presses, which earned more than the mines and the customs together, with Siderokausia second and rising. The chalk went up and was wiped and went up again. Then the census, phase one complete: the empire counted for the first time in centuries and the count leaner than hope.
Then the themes: the new structure read out, small enough to ride in a week, two years and out, the pen and the sword in different hands. Scholarios spoke briefly to the courts they would need and the judges he did not yet have. The twenty graduates from Glarentza were parceled out by name — themes, chancery, the Logarion — along with the new clerks recruited in the city, and Filelfo reported on the university itself: the law school teaching, the library shelved in two bays of three, the first foreign masters due in the spring, the Κῆρυξ printing five thousand a month. Of the works he said only that Antonio's drawings were done and the ground would open before the frost.
Constantine spoke perhaps six times in four hours, and four of those were questions.
In the evening he went to the city barracks. A tagma of the legion stood formed in the drill yard in the last light, muskets at rest and armour blacked, and he walked the front rank slowly with Andreas a pace behind, stopping at one man in four. At the end of the line he called Captain Arethas forward, said what the rolls and the drill reports had said of him all year, and gave him the medallion and the purse before his own men. The tagma was dismissed into a noise that followed them all the way to the officers' building.
Inside, the lamps were lit and the table crowded: George, Andreas, Thomas, Aristos, Laskaris, Niketas and several senior officers. The reports went round once more, soldiers' length this time. The first legion ready to march. A second possible by next autumn — if the officers could be found, and only by stripping veterans from the north; Aristos named the coast roads that would thin, one by one. The garrisons held. Powder production steady at Skopje and the new mills keeping pace. The six great siege pieces were out of the cast-shop and proofed, and Niketas had the figures for what they ate in charcoal and what they weighed on a road, which were the kind of figures that bent every march around them. The fleet stood at two great ships and sixteen galleys, seven new hulls in service since the summer, though Laskaris would not call a gun crew trained until it had fired in weather.
In the yard afterward, where the officers lingered by the gate with the last of the wine, the talk was looser. There were rumors of a campaign in the spring. Every man had them from a different cousin and swore his version was the sound one, and whichever way the telling ran, one name was on every lip. Anatolia.