The Katarina came in under shortened sail, with a light galley off her port quarter. Glarentza opened ahead in noise and work, cranes standing over the water. Rope teams hauled at the slipways while hammers sounded from shed to shed and pitch smoked by the yard wall. Tar reached Constantine first, then wet hemp, then the dry dust of paper bales stacked under canvas near the customs sheds. In the yard beside the harbor, a sister hull to the Katarina stood nearly ready, her ribs black with tar, her gunports cut through the planking, men moving over the sterncastle with adzes and mallets.
More masts stood inside the mole than he had ever seen there before, with others waiting beyond for their turn to dock. Warehouse doors stood open onto sacks, coils, and crates, and two-wheeled carts moved back and forth under shouted tallies. People had gathered along the quay to greet them, some leaving their work to call out and raise their hands as the flagship drew near.
By the time the gangplank struck, Theophilus Dragas was standing at the head of the quay with the metropolitan, several household attendants, the harbor master, and a detachment from one of the new tagmata. Constantine let the gospel touch his brow, kissed the cross, answered the blessing, and embraced Theophilus once, hard and brief. Theophilus held him by the forearm a moment longer than ceremony required.
"It is good to have you back, Majesty."
Then his eyes dropped to the packet under his arm. "The town has been waiting since dawn. Men from the yard, the harbor, the presses. I put them off till evening."
"Tomorrow." Constantine looked past him toward the inner gate. "Tonight I hear only you. Where are my wife and daughter?"
Theophilus nodded once. "At Clermont. Her Majesty has been waiting with the child."
They went through the harbor with tagma men clearing a path through the crowd. New warehouses crowded the road by the water, their doors open on cotton bales, barrels of oil, and wrapped bundles from the presses, and farther on a carpenter's yard had been fenced off for spars and mast hoops. By the second gate the shouting had begun to thin, and the sound of the sea came back between the buildings. Theophilus, riding a little behind, said that the lower garden wall had been moved on the Empress's order after Zoe twice got at the open channel. A stone curb had been laid there now, and a fig tree had been dug up and set three paces farther in, the earth around its roots still dark.
The noise fell away once he entered Clermont's inner court. Water ran under the covered channel, and a pigeon burst from the eaves and crossed the light. On the loggia sill someone had left a shallow bowl of mint in water to keep the flies off, and he caught the smell of it before the maid drew back the hanging.
Katarina stood in the strip of garden beyond the loggia, with a nurse some paces back and her hands folded before her. She wore a plain dark blue dress, with a narrow chain at her throat and her hair uncovered. He stopped at the step. The nurse looked to Katarina before moving, and so did the maid holding his gloves. Her face was a little leaner than he remembered, her shoulders more settled. The house answered to her now.
She came to him without haste. When she reached him, she put one hand to his cheek and left it there for a moment, her thumb brushing the roughened skin where salt and sun had worked on him.
"You look thinner."
He looked at her hand, then at the hollows under her eyes.
"You look stronger."
That brought the beginning of a smile, gone as fast as it had come. She touched the front of his cloak, the salt dried into the cloth, and said, "You should wash before you sit down. You smell of ship."
He laughed once under his breath. When he put his arms around her, she held him hard through the chest and then eased back to look again. On the low table behind her stood a child's cup no bigger than his fist.
The nurse brought Zoe in when Katarina called to her over her shoulder. The child came across the loggia on uncertain feet, then stopped when she saw him and caught at her mother's skirt with one hand. She had more hair than he had expected, dark and fine, and a guarded face. Her eyes went from his boots to the marks on his sword belt, then to his beard and the hollows in his face. After that she pressed her cheek against Katarina's leg and stayed there.
Constantine went down onto one knee. Standing over her only made it worse. He pulled off his other glove and held out his empty hand.
"Zoe."
She looked at him, but did no more.
Katarina rested a hand on the child's shoulder. "This is your father."
Zoe stayed where she was. She shifted one foot on the flagstones and kept hold of Katarina's skirt.
He could still hear the harbor, faint through the walls, and now and then a hammer from the yard between the sounds of the fountain. He sat back on his heel and opened his satchel. At the bottom, wrapped in an old scrap of linen, was the last of the dried mint Katarina had hidden there before he rode north. He took it out. The leaves had crumbled along the folds, but when he opened his hand the smell still rose from it.
Zoe let go of Katarina's skirt. She took two small steps forward and stopped again. Her hand opened and closed once in the air before she took the bundle from his palm. At once she crushed it in her fist and looked down at the flakes stuck to her skin. He did not move. She rubbed thumb against forefinger, lifted them to her nose, and then reached out and pressed the same fingers into his beard.
Mint caught there in little green scraps. Zoe stared, then made a small sound, almost a laugh. When he lifted her, she stiffened for a breath and looked back at Katarina, unsettled, then settled against him. After a moment she twisted for her mother again, and he gave her back.
They ate in the garden in the late shade. Bread, cold eels from the kitchen, white cheese, olives, and watered wine were set out between them. Zoe sat first on Katarina's lap, then on the bench between them, slapping a crust against the board until crumbs stuck to her wrist. Constantine watched her and said little. Katarina tore bread into smaller pieces and told him about the year as it had come: the winter fever that lasted three nights and broke at dawn on the fourth, the first tooth and then the second, the way Zoe would sleep only if the nurse hummed and eat pear only if it was mashed with goat's milk, and her habit of pulling off one shoe and hiding it under the nearest chair.
"She says three things with certainty," Katarina said, putting a piece of bread down near Zoe's hand. "Water. Dog. Me."
Constantine looked at Zoe's bent head. "She'll take time to learn mine."
Katarina looked at him over the rim of the cup. "She will. Give her a week of your face at breakfast."
He kept his hand on the cup while Zoe banged the crust twice more against the board, then held out the wet end to him.
The garden wall kept out the road noise but not all of it. Hooves went by once beyond the outer court. Somewhere inside a servant dropped a pot lid and apologized too loudly. Constantine could have sat there through the evening and into dark. Katarina never asked about the treasury, the Patriarch, Galata, or the walls. She stayed with Zoe.
"She walks better on grass than on stone," she said. "She dislikes broth. She likes the dogs. She bites anyone who tries to wash her hair."
Zoe chose that moment to lean across him for the bowl of figs, planting one hand on his sleeve. He set his free hand against her back without thinking. The cloth at her shoulder was still warm from the day. Katarina drew the bowl nearer.
The servant who came to the garden gate did not step over the threshold. He bowed, waited until Katarina looked at him, and said that Theophilus asked pardon for the hour, though not for the business. He had the yearly books from Glarentza, and the city accounts.
Theophilus came in with ledgers under his arm, a roll of loose accounts tied with cord, and a few sealed letters tucked into his belt. He bowed less deeply here in the garden than he had on the quay, then set the ledgers at the empty end of the table.
After a few words for courtesy, he came to the matter.
"I will keep to one point," he said. "Everything was easier to balance before we put Constantinople in the books."
"I expected no different," Constantine said.
Theophilus gave a brief smile and set his finger halfway down a column. "Constantinople takes gold every day and gives almost nothing back yet worth naming. The works you want there will cost heavily. So will the new garrisons. The gold taken from the Ottomans helped, but only for a while."
"What of the mines?" Constantine asked. "And the paper and book sales? Your letters gave better numbers."
"The mines at Siderokausia are yielding more than before, yes, but they will need more investment before they do what we need of them. Paper and books have sold steadily as well. That is not the trouble. The trouble is the scale of the expense. We cannot do everything at once."
He touched the second ledger. "You took the city. You took the cost of keeping it too."
Constantine drew the nearer book toward him. The figures were close and neat, each line pressed tight against the next. On one side stood the gold taken in the conquest, the proceeds from book sales and the treasury's other revenues. On the other were bread, wages, timber, and the steady drain of coin for building works, ships, and powder. Theophilus had marked the worst points in red.
"For now?" Constantine asked.
"For now, we carry it," Theophilus said. "If the harvest is sound, if the presses keep moving, and if no one forces us into another great campaign before the winter books close. After that, you must choose. We cannot rebuild in Constantinople, raise more troops, and build every ship you want all at once. Even the Tachis Ippos network is a drain on the treasury."
Outside the garden wall, one cart went by with an axle that needed grease, crying at each turn. Zoe had gone quiet at the change in the adults' faces and was working a fig seed loose from her palm with her thumbnail.
Katarina lifted the child to her shoulder and rose in one motion, without hurry, and Zoe laid her head down at once, spent from the long day.
"You are here now," Katarina said, looking at the ledgers rather than at him. "There will be time enough for the rest."
She shifted Zoe higher and went inside before he could answer. Her sandals made almost no sound on the stone. At the doorway she told the nurse to bring warm water, then disappeared into the darker room beyond the curtain.