Constantinople, Spring of 1439
The gun had come down from the foundry on a sledge the night before, and now it would not go into the boat.
Eustratios had the lever again. He was past forty and the small of his back had opinions about it, but he had worked the City's wharves since before they were worth working, in the lean years when the trade that mattered crossed the Horn to the Genoese at Galata and a Roman loader took what was left. That had turned. The Emperor had rebuilt the Kontoskalion, the mole and the piers all new ashlar where there had been ruin and scaffolding a year ago, and now many of the ships came to the imperial harbor first. A man could load from dawn to dusk now and sleep sure of the same tomorrow. He had hauled more in the last two years than in the ten before them, and he knew a thing the young ones did not: that you did not fight the weight, you waited for it to decide to move and then you were ready.
"On three," the foreman said, for the third time.
They walked it a hand's breadth and stopped to breathe.
"For Trebizond," Gelasios said, when they had straightened. "All six of them, and the muskets going with the soldiers there." He nodded down the wharf, where a knot of men in the coats of a tagma stood by their kit, waiting to board the same round-ship, looking at the loading with the patience of men who would not be asked to lift anything. "Help for the Komnenos against the Muslim raiders out east. Our people down there, the paper says. It was in the paper."
"It is always in the paper with you."
"So? I like to hear what's going on. Nothing wrong with that." Whenever a fresh sheet came off the press his sister's boy, who set type there, would find him and take him through it line by line, the way he had since the paper first started coming. Gelasios could not read a word of it himself, and would have given an eye to, but he had the pictures at least, the little carved cuts at the head of each story, blocky black things stamped into the page that a man could puzzle out on his own. "The boy read me the latest. The legation sails today, for Italy, for the council with the Latins. Bishops and a notary and the Emperor's own men, to talk about joining the churches."
"Union." Eustratios spat, neatly, to the side. "No good ever came to us over that water. My grandfather said it, and his. They smile, and then one day they're inside the walls and the city's burning."
"That was a long time ago."
"Fire doesn't forget."
"Ah, leave off. The Emperor knows what he's doing," Gelasios said. "He took the City back, didn't he? Built all this. He's not going to hand us to the Latins now. If he's sending men to talk, there's a reason."
"Maybe." Eustratios let it go, because Gelasios had a point even if he wouldn't say so out loud. His own son had eaten better this year than he had at the same age, and was drilling now with the new legion they were standing up, and stood straighter than his father ever had. Whatever else the Emperor was, he had made that happen. A man could grant all of it and still not trust a Latin. "Doesn't mean I have to like their bishops."
Then the sound came down the wharf from the east, the long brass note that meant the Emperor was on the water steps, and every head on the quay turned toward it, and the foreman swore and called them back to the lines, because the gun did not care who had arrived.
Three berths down, Constantine stood at the head of the quay with the legation drawn up before him and the harbor at his back, and let the ceremony be as short as it could decently be.
There were ten of them sailing. Isidore at their head, broad and certain, a man who was eager for this council and could not quite keep the wanting off his face. Mark of Ephesus beside him, harder to read, a man going to see what could be had on level terms and to say no plainly if the terms were not level. George Scholarios, younger, skeptical in the way of a man who trusts only what he has argued down himself. Two monks and three more churchmen of lesser rank, a bilingual notary out of Plethon's first class of clerks with his case of blank books, and a quiet man of the chancery, one of George's men, whose task no one had announced and everyone understood: to watch, and to write to the Emperor directly, and to belong to no faction in the room.
Patriarch Joseph blessed them. His voice had thinned over the winter and did not carry as it once had, so the quay went very quiet to hear him, which was its own kind of honor. He asked God to keep them on the water and steady in the council and Roman in their hearts, and he made the cross over the lot of them with a hand that shook a little, and they bowed their heads.
"You will not be among strangers," Constantine said, when the blessing was done. "Bessarion is in Rome before you, and he is our friend in those halls, whatever robe he wears now. Weigh his counsel; he knows the ground better than any of us, and he wishes us well." He looked along the line of them. "And you will be received as what you are. This council does not summon you. It receives you, as equals, as the half of the Church that kept the faith while the other half argued. Carry yourselves so."
"We will not fail you, Majesty, nor the faith," Isidore said. He turned it slightly toward the others as he said it, the eager and the doubtful both. "We go to open the door, not to walk through it. Nothing in haste, and nothing without the whole council behind it."
"I know it. I have faith in every man on that ship." Constantine looked along the line of them once more. "Send word often, and plainly, the good with the bad. I will want full reports, not comfort."
They went up the plank, the ten of them, the notary clutching his case against the breeze, and the lines came off, and the galley stood out into the Horn under oars with the crowd on the mole calling after it. Constantine watched until it had the wind and did not need watching, and three berths down a gun went into a round-ship at last with a great groan of timber and a ragged cheer from the men who had put it there.
He was turning to go when the officer reached him, a young man of the palace guard, out of breath from the climb up from the water and trying not to show it. He put his mouth close to the Emperor's ear and said six words.
Constantine's face did not change, because there were a thousand people on the mole and every one of them could see him. He gave the officer a small nod, said a word to George at his shoulder, and walked to his horse at the pace of a man with nowhere urgent to be, and only once he was through the gate and into the street did he put his heels to it.
It went on all afternoon and into the dark.
The men waited in the long room with the cold hearth, the one that looked out over the gardens, because the other rooms were full of women going back and forth with cloths and basins and low voices, and a man in the way was worse than a man absent. Thomas wore a track in the floor. George had brought a book, and turned the same three pages of it for four hours without reading a line. Princess Catherine went in and came out and went in again, and each time she came out Thomas stopped and looked at her, and each time she shook her head, not bad, not yet.
"Zoe took a day and a night," Constantine said once, to no one, to all of them. "The first is always the longest. They told me that the first time and I did not believe them either."
"Sit down, brother, before you wear through the floor," Thomas said. "She is strong. You said so yourself, an hour ago, and again the hour before that."
It was full dark, and the lamps had been lit and were burning low, when there was a stir at the outer door, and a servant came in ahead of someone with his face caught between announcement and astonishment, and Helena came into the room.
She had come down from the monastery. No one had thought she would. Katarina had asked that she be sent for the moment the pains began, before Constantine had even reached the palace.
Constantine rose, and for a moment the waiting went out of him. "You came." He crossed to her and took her hands. "I am glad of it, more than I can say."
"Constantine. How is she," Helena said.
"Close, they tell me. It has been close for an hour." He kept hold of her hands a moment longer. "She is strong. She has been strong all day. Come and sit, you should not have rushed across the city at your age, but I am glad you did."
Helena nodded, and looked at him a moment longer than the words needed, and whatever was in the look she did not say, and he did not ask. Then she turned to Thomas, who had stopped his pacing and stood very still by the cold hearth, and the room seemed to hold itself.
"Thomas." She crossed to him slowly. For a long moment she only looked at him, and what was in her face was not forgiveness exactly, but it was not the gate either. Then she put her hand to his cheek, the way she had when he was small. "My son."
Thomas said nothing at all, which from Thomas said everything.
"The girls are well?" she asked.
"They are well, Mother. They ask after you."
"Next time they come to me, come with them." Her hand came down to his arm and stayed there a moment. Then she let him go, and took the chair nearest the lamp, and folded her hands, and waited with them.
The night wore down. Somewhere past the third hour the sounds beyond the inner door changed, sharpened, and then there was a long stretch of nothing that was worse than any noise, and Thomas stopped pacing and George set his pages down at last and even Helena lifted her head.
And then, through the wall, thin and furious and entirely new, a sound none of them had heard before in that room.
The door opened. One of Katarina's women stood in it, and behind her Brother Damianos, the physician they had brought up from the Glarentza hospital, wiping his hands and looking more tired and more pleased than a man had a right to look at once.
"A son, Majesty," the woman said. "A son, and the Empress is well. Tired, but well. She is asking for you."
Constantine went in.
Katarina lay against the pillows, spent and damp and lit from within in a way he had no word for, and in the crook of her arm was a small furious red thing wrapped in white, fists going, complaint already practiced. She looked up at him, and there was the old level look in her even now, even here, the one that had crossed the hall at a hundred dinners, but under it tonight was something she did not bother to govern.
"A boy," she said. "Born in the City. In the purple." She looked down at him, the small one, and back up. "Manuel. For your father. Unless you would have it otherwise."
"Manuel," Constantine said.