The road had been climbing through the hill country for ten days, forest close on both sides of it more often than not, and for the first of them Paraskeuas had waited for it to go wrong. It was good ground for an ambush, and he knew it. But nothing came; whatever was left of the Turk after Bursa was not in these woods, or was not fool enough to try the legion. Now the trees were thinning at last, the ridges opening out, and beyond them the ground fell away toward a broad valley, the fields there still standing. Kütahya was down there somewhere, a day off, less.
"They'll make us fight for this one," Paraskeuas said. "They won't just open the gate."
"Maybe," Christodoulos said. His bad leg had been at him since morning. He walked it off and kept up.
"Well I hope they fight." Paraskeuas shifted the strap where it had worn a groove in his shoulder. "Bursa fought, and Bursa paid for it. Half the men who stormed it died there." He spat into the stubble at the road's edge. "Makarios with them, and half my file besides. Let their towns pay for it, every one from here to wherever the boy's hiding."
Christodoulos did not answer for a while. They had been going to take a lot together in Thrace, he and Makarios, two of the legion allotments side by side where the land was good, and put in vines, and be old men who had once been soldiers. He had the paper for his still, folded away. He did not have Makarios.
"If the Emperor says burn it, we burn it," he said. "If he says leave it, we leave it. What you and me want was never in it." His eyes stayed on the dust rising from the column ahead.
Paraskeuas said nothing more. They walked. After a time he said, in a lighter voice, "Next Kyrix that comes up from the City, it'll have Bursa in it."
"Likely."
"A victory like that, they'll have printed it big." He almost smiled. "I want to hear if they name our tagma, first up the breach. My mother can have it read to her. Her son, in the paper out of the City."
Up the line a horn went, and then the file-closers were shouting them back into their ranks, and there was no more talking after that, only the road.
By the time the horn had brought Constantine up to the vanguard, Kütahya was in sight: a town on a rock across the valley, smaller than he had let himself expect. Riders came out from it while the legion was still on the march, four of them under a white cloth on a lance, and Andreas sent men to bring them in and take their weapons before they reached the column. They were let up to Constantine on the road itself, and the eldest of them, a grey man in good cloth, got down and went to his knees in the dust without waiting to be told.
"Majesty. My lord Mesud sends me. The gates are open and the garrison is stood down. He asks no fight and offers none." He kept his eyes on the ground. "He asks to be heard, and to keep his people, and he lays the town in your hand."
"Whose town is it to lay," Constantine said.
"His, Majesty, by his blood. He is sister-son to the last bey of Germiyan, whose house held this country before the house of Osman took it from them. He asks only what was his grandfather's, and to hold it under you, and to serve." The old man looked up for the first time. "He has proof of his service ready. He begs you come and see it."
Andreas had brought his horse up alongside. He said nothing, but he was watching the town the way he watched everything, counting the walls and the gate and the men on it, and there were few men on it. Constantine let the envoy kneel a moment longer.
"Tell your lord his surrender is accepted, and his people are under my peace from this hour," he said. "I am coming in to take his oath and see this proof he speaks of. Ride ahead and tell him so."
Two tagmata went in first and put men on the gate and the walls above it. Only when they sent back that the town was quiet did Constantine ride in, the rest of the legion coming behind him in column. The streets were empty the way streets are when the people have been told to stay off them, shutters closed, a face pulled back from an upper window here and there. It would have been a hard, costly place to take. Mesud had spared him all of it. That was the first thing to hold against the rest, that the man had handed over a fortnight's fighting and a thousand casualties for nothing but his oath. A man did not give that much for nothing.
He was waiting in the open ground below the citadel, a man of perhaps forty in a robe too fine for the morning, and he came forward too fast when Constantine dismounted, and bowed too low, and began before he had been asked.
"Majesty. You have come, and this house has its country back at last. I am Mesud. My mother was sister to the last bey, and when he died with no son he did not leave this land to his own blood. He left it to Murad. He gave Germiyan to the Ottoman like a coin passed across a table, and my family has stood outside its own gates for twenty years." The words came out fast and a little high. "When Bursa fell I took back what was ours. And I did not wait to be asked to prove whose man I am. I did the thing already, before you came. Come. Come and see what I have done for you."
"You are eager to show me something," Constantine said.
"I am eager to be believed, Majesty."
He took them around the base of the citadel to a yard that had been a stable. Men of his stood along the far wall, guarding a row of something laid out under sailcloth, and the smell reached them before Mesud had his hand on the cloth. He drew it back with both hands and watched Constantine's face while he did it.
They had been dead some days. There were a dozen of them and more, laid in a row, and they had been beheaded, and the heads set each above the shoulders of its body so the count could be read at a glance, and the days and the heat had done what they do.
Grown men, most of them, guardsmen by what was left of their dress, and among them a few boys.
"Turgut, Yakub's dog, who brought the boy over the mountain," Mesud said, moving down the row, naming them, his voice going quick and bright now that the cloth was off and the worst not shown on Constantine's face. "His men. And the boy, Majesty. Alaeddin Ali, the last of them. They came thinking Kütahya was still a door for the house of Osman. I gave them the shelter a loyal man gives the enemies of his overlord. I took them, and I ended them, for you, so that no man could raise that name against you again. It is finished. I finished it."
Andreas came up on the other side of the row and looked down at it, hands behind him. None of it moved him.
"So this is the boy," Andreas said. He looked down the row at the two smaller ones and then back at Mesud. One of Mesud's men brought up a chest and opened it, and there was the folded standard, and a sword, and in a cloth by itself a ring. "The seal is here, Constantine." He did not touch it. "That is the thing that mattered, and it is in the chest and not on a boy riding east. Whoever is in that row, the ring is off the board. The house cannot be raised without the name or crowned without the seal, and the seal is ours." He said it flatly, for Constantine and not for Mesud. "It changes little whose faces those are. Take the town and be done."
It was a sound argument and Constantine heard it as one. The ring was the thing he had feared, and the ring was in the chest. He could take Andreas's logic and accept the row without looking closer, and never be sure, and it would not matter to the war. But he wanted to be sure.
"Bring up the scribe," he said. They had taken him in Bursa out of the palace, a chancery man of the house of Osman. He was brought into the yard not knowing why, and then he saw the row, and understood before anyone spoke, and his legs went and a soldier held him up.
"Look at them," Constantine said. "You served in that house. Tell me who these are."
The scribe went along the row, and he was weeping before he was halfway, the ugly helpless weeping of a man with no defense against what he was seeing. At the big guardsman he stopped and put his hand over his mouth. "Turgut Bey," he said through it. "That is Turgut. I would know him anywhere." He could barely get it out. And then Mesud's man moved him down to the smaller two, and the scribe looked, and made a sound that was not a word, and went down on his knees in the muck of the yard.
"That is the şehzade," he said. "That is Ali. That is my Sultan." And then he could not say anything, only knelt there with his hands at his face and his shoulders going, and no one in the yard needed him to say more.
So it was true. Constantine stood over the row and made himself look at the boy for a while, the ruined head and the thin shoulders and the good coat he had died in, and there was no triumph anywhere in him, only the flat sick knowledge that this was the thing he had put an army on the road to make happen, and that it had happened, and that it looked like this. He had wanted the house of Osman finished. Here it was, finished, in a stable, done by a frightened distant cousin who had cut the throats of children to have something to sell. Constantine had bought it. He would pay for it in the coin the man wanted, and ride away, and the boy would still be dead in the same way whatever he felt about it.
"Cover them," he said. "They are to be washed and buried by their own rites, all of them, the boy with honor. Not thrown in a pit. See to it yourself."
Mesud could not wait for him to speak. "You see now, Majesty. You see what I am. My house restored, that is all I ask, the beylik of Germiyan under your hand, and I am yours. Against Karaman, against any of them, yours." The words were coming too fast again. "I did the thing no one else would do. I have earned it. Majesty. Have I not earned it?"
Constantine looked at him and did not answer for long enough that the man's smile began to come apart.
"You have Kütahya," he said at last. "You will hold it as my vassal, and the land your grandfather held. You will pay what my clerks set you. You will keep only the men they let you keep, and you will open your gates to my soldiers whenever they come to them." He looked at the man and not at the row. "Bey of Germiyan, under the Emperor of the Romans. That is what you have earned."
"Majesty..." the man began, glowing.
"I have not finished." Constantine let him hear what was under the level voice. "You did this before I came so I would find it done and have to keep you. I understand you well enough. You are useful, and so you keep your head and your town. Do not take that for my thinking well of you. A man who kills a boy in a stable to buy a crown will do worse to keep it, and I will remember that about you every year you pay me." He turned away. " Now bring the paper."