They came to the Hippodrome from the palace side, not by the long northern approach where emperors had once shown themselves to the city. Along the broken flank of the Great Palace, men were already at work with bars and sledges, prying dressed blocks from fallen walls and stacking salvaged brick in red heaps beside the road. In places the marble facing had split and peeled back, exposing the older cores beneath. A half-vault still stood over a dark room that smelled of damp mortar and mouse filth.
George went a few paces ahead, touching the stone as he passed. He knocked one ashlar with his knuckle, stooped to inspect a cracked brick course, then jerked his chin toward the half-vault.
"Good stone there. That brick can be cleaned and used. Leave that vault. It may come down."
He raised a hand without looking back, and one of the clerks trailing the party came forward with a wax tablet against his forearm. George nodded him at the sound course, then at the vault. "Measure that. Mark the vault to come down before anything's stacked near it." The clerk crouched at the brick, stylus moving, and George straightened and rubbed the white grit from his thumb.
"It'll come up as rubble fill. Cheaper than quarrying, if it's pulled down in order."
A few steps later the ground opened before them. The Hippodrome lay in its long basin, scarred and uneven, with the monuments still standing down the middle. The Obelisk of Theodosius rose over the broken ground. The Serpent Column stood lower and darker, green at the bends. Farther off, the Walled Obelisk stood over patched earth and cart tracks. Smoke from cookfires drifted across the open stretch. Goats nosed among broken brick. Children ran between lean-tos built against the old substructures, and near the southern curve a cart stood tilted on one wheel.
Past the sheds, the cook smoke, and the animals, the space itself still held. It ran broad and long through the heart of the city, with the monuments fixed along its middle line. On the eastern side, old arches and broken wall lines still marked the edge. Men had built stalls and sleeping places beneath some of them. Laundry hung between columns.
George took the ground section by section. The monuments would remain. The open middle could be cleared further, though not all at once. Some of the vaults under the old seating were still usable if they were sound and properly cleared. The rough sheds and newer walls along the edge could be moved. The people who had been living there for years would be harder to displace. As he spoke, he pointed with two fingers: the line to keep, the line to cut back, the arcade bays that might be shored and used, the arches that ought to come down before one of them killed a man in his sleep.
They walked along the palace side, where the old imperial quarter had once pressed close against the arena. A pot seller had taken one of the deeper vaults for a shop and sleeping place. Her shelves were only planks laid on brick, but the bowls were stacked neatly, mostly red ware with a few grey jars, and soot climbed the back wall where she cooked over a broken brazier. In the next bay a family had built a lean-to under the old stonework. A child sat on an upturned basket, scraping the inside of a pot with two fingers while beans and onions still steamed in it. The woman rose when she saw the guards and pulled her veil straight with a wet hand.
Constantine stopped. Behind the woman, old brick showed through plaster the color of dirty wax. The timbers of the lean-to had been cut from fresh wood and still bled sap at one end. George came up beside him and lowered his voice. There would be more like this all along the eastern side, he said.
Constantine looked back across the Hippodrome. Behind them, hammers still rang from the palace ruins, and somewhere beyond the western houses a bell marked the hour.
He said he wanted an open square there, one the court could use for entries, proclamations, and regulated market days, with the library and schools along the old palace side. He bent, picked up a fragment of worked marble with his soot-blackened thumb, then let it fall again.
George glanced toward the old palace quarter. "So you want the presses here as well?"
"No. West of Kontoskalion, with the rest. Here I want the library, the law school, rooms for reckoning and astronomy, spaces for copying and archives, workshops for instruments and devices, and a court where men can live and work under one rule."
George brought it back to what could actually be built. One court, he said. Use the old foundation lines only after they had been opened and tested. Raise the library first, and the two halls after it, or at the same time if the stone proved sound. Leave room to expand. Constantine agreed. The work would have to be gradual. Before a course of brick was laid, he wanted Theophilus's full reckoning from Glarentza and the city's ledgers brought into order. Captured gold could vanish quickly if they spent it as though there would always be more.
They came upon a rope seller in the next arcade bay, an old man with hemp laid out in coils and two nephews twisting new line from damp fibre. Tar had soaked into the floorboards beneath him. Beyond him, under another patched roof, a woman was washing a child's shirt in a bowl of brown water and hanging it on a cord fixed to stone. Constantine asked how many people they were speaking of if the whole edge was to be cleared. George did not answer at once. He looked instead at the woman wringing out the cloth and at the rope seller's nephews, who had stopped twisting and were watching the soldiers' boots.
George said that moving them decently would cost money. They could clear the edge faster by force and let the people find room elsewhere, but if they did it that way the whole quarter would turn against them. Constantine said nothing, and they walked on while George set out the remedy in the same order he would have used for a wall or a storehouse. Survey first: names, households, trades, and how long they had been there. Mark the monuments and the old fabric no one was to touch. Clear refuse and the dangerous places first, before some fool died under a falling arch and called it imperial justice. Forbid new building into the substructures. Find another controlled market edge and move the traders by rule, not by shouting. Then open the center ground in strips, while surveyors and masons tested the palace side for salvage and sound footings. Constantine repeated the phases back to him until both of them had them in the same order.
The rider found them near the southern curve, where the old wall bent and the ground fell away. He slid down too quickly, caught the rein before the animal could shy, and bowed. "Majesty. From the harbor. The fleet is in from Caffa. Grain is on the quay, and Admiral Laskaris asks audience."
George wasted no words on surprise. He said only that they would go at once and turned back toward the palace road. Constantine looked once over his shoulder before following. The obelisk still rose over the open ground. Smoke drifted low across it, and beyond, along the palace edge, he could still make out the strip where the first court might rise. Then he turned and went down through the broken quarter toward the port.
The chamber they used for reports was small enough that the sea could still be heard from the loggia beyond. Lime had been patched into two cracks in the wall and not yet painted over. On the table stood three wax tablets, two price sheets, a rough chart of the Black Sea held down by a knife, and an opened sack of grain with its mouth folded back. George bent over the figures as Constantine entered.
Laskaris stood as Constantine came in. He was tired, salt dried white in the creases of his face and his eyes reddened from the wind, but he stood easily enough. "The voyage was clean, Majesty," he said, and something eased at the corner of his mouth, close to a smile. "We brought grain back in weight, and we lost no hull worth naming."
The tightness Constantine had carried in his jaw eased a little. Only then did he sit. George did not. He asked how much there was, what quality it was, and how much had already been lost to freight, fees, and commitments made at the loading places. Laskaris answered in the same order. The holds were full enough to ease the city for a time, but not enough to make bread cheap. The grain was mostly hard wheat, dry and sound, with some barley mixed into the lesser sacks. Nothing had spoiled beyond what any voyage would lose. What was already owed in freight and handling was written on the tablets under George's hand.
George read one line, then another, and his mouth tightened. "Those Genoese will dry us out with one hand and bless us with the other."
Laskaris gave the smallest lift of one shoulder. Prices at Caffa had been high from the first hour. The factors knew why Roman ships had come and how quickly they needed to leave again. There were port fees, brokerage, priority at the loading quays, and charges for labor that should have been covered by the first fee and were not. Constantine reached into the open grain sack, let a few kernels run across his palm, and dropped them back. They clicked thinly against the rest. "We will build our own chain when we can," he said. "Ships, factors, and warehouse men of our own."
George pushed the price sheets aside and looked at the chart. "You saw more than Caffa?"
"Yes," Laskaris said. "And I heard the same complaint elsewhere before we turned west." He put a finger lower on the chart, at a point southeast of Caffa. "At Cembalo, a man came to me in private. He said he served Alexios of Theodoro."
The room was quiet. Outside, a gull cried once and was lost in the wash against the stone below the loggia. Laskaris said they had touched at Cembalo on the return for water, pitch, and a look at the harbor. The approach there had been discreet. The man had not come in livery, only with one servant, and he spoke good Greek. He asked first about Roman ships at the strait and whether the Emperor truly held Constantinople. Only then did he speak plainly. Alexios wanted help against the Genoese. If help came, friendship now and dependence later could be discussed.
After that Laskaris kept it short. A few years earlier, Alexios had sided with Venice, taken Cembalo and other posts from Genoa, and lost them again the next year. Since then Theodoro had been pushed away from the best of the coast. The man said Genoese hands were at every harbor worth having. He said Alexios would rather hold his ports under Roman protection than keep losing them to Genoa one harbor at a time.
Constantine asked about Caffa, and Laskaris answered without ornament. Caffa was rich, dirty, and crowded. Counting houses stood beside brothels. Contraband moved through the streets at night under armed guard. There were more hired blades on the quays than men keeping order, and the trade ran because the right people were paid to let it run. Cembalo was smaller but useful: a good harbor, a height above it, a short wall line, and not many men. It could threaten the coast, or be threatened from it.
George asked the next question before Constantine could turn the chart any farther. "And the Tatars?"
Laskaris rubbed salt from the back of his wrist with his thumb, leaving a white streak on the skin.
"Divided. That is how it looked, and how men spoke of it. No single hand over the whole Horde. One khan in Sarai, another in Kazan, another pressing his claim elsewhere, and the emirs changing sides when profit or fear told them to."
Constantine took another pinch of grain and let it fall back into the sack. The walls, the Hippodrome, the Black Sea harbors, the piers at Gallipoli, the new lands to be administered—every one of them wanted men and money, and there was only so much of either. Theodoro might be worth something. Genoa would stay expensive, and the steppe behind the ports was too broken up to lean on. There was opportunity in all of it, but none of it changed the need to count carefully before moving.
"The timing is good," he said. "That does not mean we are ready."
Laskaris waited. George did not argue. Constantine flattened the chart with both hands and gave the answer he wanted sent east. Alexios would receive a courteous letter. His goodwill would be acknowledged. If he meant friendship alone, that could be answered in kind. If he meant Roman protection, he would have to say so plainly and say what he offered with it: ports, ships, intelligence, tribute, hostages, and obedience in writing. No promise of ships would go out before that. George said they would draft the letter carefully and send it back the same way, through men who knew the coast and could be trusted with the seal.
Then Constantine pushed the tablets aside and put a hand to the admiral's shoulder, briefly. "You brought bread back into the city," he said. "Worth more than any speech I could make about it."
He told him to count what needed repair, scrape what needed scraping, and let the crews rest a little. Laskaris took it with a nod and a breath out through his nose. "They'll be glad of it, Majesty," he said, and his shoulders came down from where the voyage had set them.
Constantine gave him the next order. "Next week we sail for Gallipoli."
Laskaris looked at him at once. "Andreas took it?" Constantine said he had. The fort was in Roman hands, and Andreas was already measuring piers and storehouses. Constantine added that from Gallipoli they would go on to Thessaloniki, and after that west again to Glarentza. George rolled the chart while Laskaris stood with salt still on his cloak, and outside the chamber the sea kept striking the wall below the loggia.