Constantinople, late November 1439
The frost had gone off the tables by morning but the benches still held it, and Eirene had sent the boy out with cushions before anyone was allowed to sit. The yard was full. Three households shared the yard and all three were out, and half of Arsakios the dyer's people from the next lane besides. The tables were pushed together under the bare mulberry, bread and oil set out, and a pot of something hot that Eirene and the dyer's wife kept the children's hands away from.
The whole city had the day. The foundry had banked its fires the night before, which Sabbatios had overseen himself.
Loukas the notary's clerk had the Κῆρυξ, and it was not the month's ordinary leaf but a special one struck for the day, the ink still sharp on it. He stood at the head of the table and gave them the whole campaign in one draught: the fall of Bursa back in September, the surrender of Kütahya after it, the bey of Germiyan sworn to the Emperor. The seal of the Ottoman chancery taken, the house of Osman ended in Anatolia, and now, freshest of all, the coast from Nicomedia down to Mylasa under Roman law.
"Read the part about the guns again," said Arsakios.
"You have heard the part about the guns twice."
"I like it. Read it again."
Loukas read the part about the guns again. It was Filelfo's best manner, the walls of Bursa coming down in sentences that were built like triumphal arches, and Sabbatios drank his warmed wine and listened to the facts and forgave the prose the way he did every month. The Italian had never burned his hands on anything in his life. But the guns in the piece were real guns, and some part of some of them had gone through his own yard on the Lycus, and a man could sit under a mulberry tree on a cold morning and know that, and say nothing.
"Smyrna," said old Kyriakos, who had sailed once, forty years ago, and never let anyone forget it. "My grandfather had a house there. We ran when the city fell to the Turk, came here with nothing, and never went back."
"It's Roman again," said Arsakios.
"What I want to know is what happens next." Loukas had put the leaf down and was eating standing up. "We've got the coast. But Anatolia is big, and it says right there at the bottom, the Amasyans are pushing into the east of it already. While we're counting our cities, they're counting villages."
"Then the Emperor will deal with Amasya," said Arsakios, "when it is time to deal with Amasya."
"I didn't say he won't. I said it's the question."
"You talk like the empire reports to you," said the dyer's wife, going past with the pot.
"It's my empire," Loukas said. Sabbatios found himself nodding.
"Ieros Skopos," Kyriakos said, and raised his cup.
"Ieros Skopos," the table said, and drank.
"They should push on," said Kyriakos. "While the iron is hot. That's all I'm saying. My grandfather—"
"Had a house in Smyrna," said the whole table.
Then the bell of the church at the end of the lane began. It stopped, and began again. Under it, farther off, a deeper bell answered, then another, until every bell in the city was going at once. Away toward the land walls, horns sounded too.
The yard came up off its benches like one body. Children were caught and coated. The pot was carried indoors by the dyer's wife. Sabbatios put the small one up on his shoulders, and Eirene took his arm. The three households went out of the yard gate into a lane already crowded, everyone moving the same way, down toward the Mese and the sound.
They got a place at the second cross-street by arriving rudely and holding it. The small one had his hands in Sabbatios's hair. The noise came up the great street ahead of the procession itself, a sound with no edges, and then the head of the column came through and the sound found them and went over them and Sabbatios stopped being able to hear his own household.
The pyrvelos companies came first. Pieces shouldered, walking in step, rank on rank of them, and the crowd threw winter flowers, dried things, ribbons, whatever it had. Then the standards of the tagmata, and then trophies borne on poles and cushions: banners with the horsetails, a great chest carried open, and on a cushion under guard a small dark thing that the man beside Sabbatios said was the seal of the sultans, the very seal, and the man's neighbor said it was a copy and the real one was in the palace, and both of them cheered it equally.
Then the Emperor.
He rode alone in the space made for him, on a grey horse, slowly, in armor with the eagle over it, bareheaded. He raised his hand to one side and then the other, the whole way, and the roar where he passed moved down the street with him.
"Michael VIII came in on his feet," Kyriakos was shouting, somewhere close. "When we took the City off the Latins. On his feet behind the icon, my grandfather saw it—"
"Your grandfather wasn't born—"
"Behind the icon, on his feet, I am telling you—"
"That was two hundred years ago, you old fool, nobody saw it—"
The Emperor went by above the argument, slow and unhurried. Sabbatios watched him go and did not cheer, because his hands were full of his son's ankles, and stood there a long moment while the roar moved on down the Mese toward the heart of the City. Iron doesn't lie, he thought, and today he did not mind the noise.
The doors of Hagia Sophia stood open, and the singing came out of them into the cold. Constantine dismounted in the square and went up the steps on foot, and the noise of the City fell away behind him at the threshold. Inside was candlelight and incense and the packed warmth of thousands, and he walked up the length of the nave through the standing crowd with his helmet under his arm, his footsteps lost in the singing.
Patriarch Joseph waited for him before the sanctuary in the full vestments, gold and white. When he began the thanksgiving his voice was thin, it had thinned again over the autumn, and the great church did what the quay at the sailing had done: it went quiet to hear him, thousands of people finding a deeper quiet so that one old man's voice could reach the back of the largest room in the world. The deacons carried the responses. The choir took the weight. But the prayers themselves were Joseph's, offered up in that worn thread of a voice under the enormous gold, thanks for the victory, thanks for the armies preserved, thanks for the Empire, prayers for the dead of the campaign.
The gallery was to his right. He did not look up at it often. But he looked once. Katarina stood at the rail with Manuel against her shoulder, asleep or close to it, and Zoe beside her being restrained by a nurse from waving, and Catherine with Helena's hand in hers and the little one toddling at her skirts. Katarina was looking at him. He looked back to the altar and the incense went up through the light in slow ropes, and the choir lifted, and under all of it he let himself, for the length of one breath, stand in the building itself: the impossible ceiling, the gold going soft in the candle-smoke, the room he had first walked through in another life with a camera in his hand and ropes keeping him off the floor he now stood on in armor. Then Joseph's voice came thin down the nave again, and he turned his eyes back to the altar.
At the end the Emperor spoke from the steps of the sanctuary, briefly, thanks to God and to the men who had fought, and closed with the two words the whole church was waiting for, and got them back from thousands of throats at once. Then they sang the polychronion, many years to the Emperor, and Joseph raised his hand at the last of it and blessed him, and Constantine bowed his head under the old man's blessing, and it was done.
By evening Blachernae had gone quiet, or as quiet as it went. The feasting was elsewhere in the palace and would run for hours yet without him; he had stood the necessary time in it, said the necessary things, and left it to Thomas, who was better at it and enjoyed it honestly.
The private chamber was small and warm and smelled of the supper they had nearly finished. The nurse had brought Manuel in and been sent away again, and Zoe had lasted through the sweet course and half a story before sleep took her mid-sentence on the couch, one shoe off, and neither of them had moved her.
Constantine sat on the floor.
He had the baby on the carpet in front of him, propped up in a rolled blanket, and was letting him win a tug-of-war over a wooden horse. Zoe had outgrown it years ago, and somewhere the household had found it again and brought it out. Manuel had the horse by the leg and was working at it with his whole body, with a concentration Constantine recognized from siege engineers, and when it finally came free of his father's hand he made a sound of such complete triumph that Constantine laughed out loud.
"He has your stubbornness," Katarina said, from the couch. "God help that horse."
"He has excellent instincts. He wanted the horse, he took the horse."
"He is going to put the horse in his mouth."
"He has earned the horse. He may do as he likes with it." The horse went in the mouth. Constantine lay propped on one elbow and watched his son gnaw a toy that had teethed his daughter. Outside, faint through the shutters, the city was still at it, singing somewhere down the hill, a horn now and then, a bonfire's light shivering against the winter dark.
"Three months," Katarina said.
He looked up at her.
"You said autumn, and you are here." She was smiling into the cup when she turned it. "I have had Antonio up twice while you were away. The whole range along the sea wall, the old apartments, nobody has lived in them since your grandfather's time and the roof is going. I want to take it down to the arches and do it properly. There are drawings. You will be shown the drawings. Filelfo has seen them and says the range will be spoken of in Italy."
"Filelfo says that about his own laundry lists."
"He does. But Antonio believes him, and a builder who thinks Italy is watching works better."
"Am I to be consulted, or informed?"
"Informed. You may choose the chapel ceiling, I have not decided it."
He laughed, and Manuel startled at the sound and then decided it was good, and banged the horse on the carpet.
"With God's help there is no war for a while," Constantine said. He was looking at the baby when he said it. "There is a great deal to do, but it is the kind that is done here. Roads, the new lands, the ledgers, the church business in the spring. Work a man can do and still be home for supper."
"Then be home for supper," Katarina said.
Zoe slept on. The fire ticked. Down the hill the singing went on into the dark, and no one in the room was listening to it.
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Ieros Skopos!