Blachernae, late April 1440
The leaf had come up from the press house that afternoon, still smelling of ink. Katarina held it to the lamp and read it in a voice that was not her own.
"'The walls of Bursa were raised against the whole world, and the whole world came.'" She let the leaf down to her lap. "Who is this man?"
"It is meant to sound like that."
"Too grand, even for the Kyrix. Filelfo overdid it."
Constantine had a book shut on his knee, and his hand rested on it. "We worked that line together, three or four times, until it stood up on its own. The leaf goes to every garrison and every port. It should sound like an emperor once. After that it can talk plainly."
The brazier between the chairs had been lit at dusk, which in the last days of April it should not have needed, and the charcoal ticked as it settled. Two servants stood at the inner door, hands folded. The balcony doors stood open a hand's width. The air off the Horn smelled of mud, and tar from the boats near the wall.
She went back to the leaf and read the next part in her own voice.
"'What does the Emperor eat, when the choice is his? Lentils, with vinegar and onion, as the tagmata cook them.'"
She looked at him over the top of the sheet. "Lentils."
"I like them."
"You like fish off the coals, salt on it, and a good day's hunting. And you put lentils in print, for every soldier between here and Glarentza."
"Every soldier eats lentils."
"They do. At Smederevo they ate them all winter." She folded the top of the leaf down a finger's width, so the line was hidden. "You are courting the City with a bowl of lentils."
Constantine smiled. "Yes. People like a story about their emperor."
She unfolded the leaf and smoothed the crease with her thumb.
"And now you want the children in it. Zoe's horses. Manuel's teeth. What the Empress wore at Pascha."
"Small things, and that they are well. Nothing more, Katarina. Let the Empire feel it has a family in this house."
She set the leaf on the table between them and squared its edge to the edge of the wood with one finger.
"They may have your lentils," she said. "They may not have my children. When Pisanello comes, they may look at us on a wall. That is as near as they get." She took up her wine. "And you pose for him."
"I will. We settled that."
She drank. "Filelfo says he sailed out of Ancona. If the wind has held he is past Corfu. I have had the north rooms cleared for him. The light is good in them in the morning, Filelfo says, and bad after noon, which is when you would want to pose."
"Then the mornings. Sundays, if he needs more."
She found her place on the leaf again. This time she read it through once without a sound, her lips moving, and then aloud.
"'What do the two words mean, the ones men write on every wall?'" She read the answer slower. "'That the Romans are one people and this is their land, and God did not keep them through a hundred years of the Turk for nothing. The purpose is to gather them back. Every village that still keeps a priest, every man who still calls himself Roman.'"
She put her finger on the last line and left it there.
"The monks will read that one their way," she said. "And the men who pin the eagle on their coats will read it theirs."
Constantine nodded and looked at her finger on the page and then at the brazier. A coal had rolled to the rim, and he took the tongs and put it back into the heat and set the tongs down.
"Read the rest," he said.
"'What did the Emperor feel at the crossing into Asia? Alexander crossed at that place. I had known it since I was a boy, and when the water was at my knees I thought of him, and of the men who went with him. I will say plainly that it moved me.'"
She looked up. "That part I liked." She put her finger under the line. "We had the Romance at Smederevo. My mother's women read it to us in the winters. I knew the griffins before I knew my prayers."
She laughed out loud, and put her hand over her mouth, and took it away again. Then she smoothed the leaf on her knee and went down it with her finger to the last answer, near the foot of the sheet.
"'At Mudanya there is a man who fishes,'" she read, "'who kept his nets and his prayers the day we came and the day after.'" She stopped. "You have never told me about a fisherman."
"I saw him from the road. He was at his nets when the column came past. He was still at them the next day, when we went on to Bursa."
"And he is in the leaf because?"
"Because it is a nice small story. Many men will see themselves in him."
She looked at him a moment longer. Then she folded the leaf in half along its crease, laid it on the book on his knee, and stood, and went to the balcony doors and pushed them the rest of the way open.
The cold came in at once. She went out into it, and after a moment he set the book and the leaf on the table and followed her.
The Horn lay black under the wall. One lamp moved on it, slow, a boat working across toward the far bank. Far down the water, where Galata was, a few lights showed low along the shore. There was no moon. The stars stood hard and close, the Bear straight overhead, a red star high in the west, and the sky between them was black.
"It is clear," she said. "And cold. At Clermont the doors would be open tonight and Zoe would sleep with the sea in the room."
"Yes."
"I miss the weather. Only the weather." She had her arms folded into her sleeves. "Not the house."
"The beach house, you mean."
"Your house."
"I put four rooms on it for you. A dry one for Zoe, out of the wind." He was smiling. "And you never slept a night in them."
"I know." She moved closer against the cold. "It was a kind thing to do. It was still a fisherman's cottage."
"It was a very good fisherman's cottage."
"It was," Katarina said, and smiled, and looked back out at the water. "And here I have a court under my feet, and the court has me, and I am the Empress in the Empress's city. I would not trade it for sand."
"I miss the long evenings there," he said. "Plethon on his bench, and the cook asleep on the step waiting to lock the gate behind me. He would keep me until the lamp went out over one line of Plato, and then argue the line again on the path."
"He writes often."
"It is not the same."
Out on the water the boat's lamp reached the far side and went out, or went behind something. She watched the place where it had been.
"I miss my family a little too," she said. "My mother writes. It is all weather and prayers."
"Then they should come. Your father, your brothers, whoever will make the journey. And when the children are older we go up ourselves. Zoe and Manuel should see Smederevo with their own eyes."
She let it go. "What are you looking at?"
"A star that is not up yet." He pointed low, toward the west. "The one you see from the nursery before dawn. When Manuel wakes early."
"Danica."
"Yes, Danica. The old Greeks gave it two names. One star before the sun, one star after it, as if they were two. They were one star, close to the sun. Ahead of it for months, then behind it." He pointed past the roofs, toward the land walls. "By winter's end it stands there after supper. The same star."
"One star."
"One."
She looked west, where there was nothing yet. "The women at Smederevo would call you a liar."
"The old men at Athens said it first. I only read and trust them."
He glanced back through the open doors. The two servants had not moved from the inner door, the lamp on the table stood between them and the balcony, and the distance was the length of the room. He put his hands back on the stone.
"The book on my knee," he said. "I pressed Filelfo for it, more than once, before he sent for it. A Latin poem, near fifteen hundred years old. A man named Poggio dug it out of a German monastery twenty years ago, and there are a dozen copies in Italy now. Filelfo will not keep one in his own house. He thinks little of it, and less of Poggio. He found me one anyway, because I would not let it go."
"What does it say?"
"That nothing under heaven was made only once." He said it evenly, in the voice he kept for dispatches. "That every star may be a fire like the sun, so far off that the distance fails. And that around some of them there may be other earths. Other harvests. Other cities."
She crossed herself. Then she crossed herself again, slower, and her hand stayed at her breast.
"Does the Church know what you read at night?"
"Filelfo knows."
"Filelfo is a Latin. You mean to bring the Pope's bishops into this City to argue the Creed under Justinian's roof, and you stand on your own balcony and tell me there are cities in the sky."
"The poem tells you. I do not hold with the poet. Neither does Plethon; he has no patience for Epicurus, and his letters are all tables and the length of the year." He looked up at the Bear. "But the old men knew the sky better than the schools let on, and I mean to have it back. There will be a hall for it. The heavens, beside law and physic. Antonio can draw one more."
"Antonio can draw it in the morning." She took her hand from her breast and put it through his arm. "If there are other cities up there, their empresses are cold too, I expect. Come inside."
They came in, and she pulled the doors to behind them, and one of the servants came from the inner door to see to the brazier. Constantine picked the book back up, the folded leaf still on it. The inner door opened again, and the steward stood there, a candle in his hand and his cap off.
"Majesty. Empress. Master George is in the passage. He asks to be received."
Katarina looked at Constantine. It was past the second hour of the night.
"Bring him up."
George came in with his cloak still on and his hat in his hand. He bowed to them both.
"Majesty. Empress. The Patriarch is dead."
Nobody moved for a moment. The servant at the brazier had the tongs in his hand and stayed as he was.
"When?"
"This evening, after Compline. He went to his bed as he always does, and the monk who sits up for him went in with the lamp at the turn of the hour and found him. He died in his sleep, Majesty. There was nothing on his face."
"Was anyone with him?"
"The monk, across the door. He heard nothing."
Constantine crossed himself. Katarina crossed herself beside him and said, low, "God rest him," and then she took the candle from the steward's hand.
"I will wake the women," she said. "The doors will want cloth by morning." She went out past George, and the steward after her, and the inner door closed behind them, and the light in the room was the lamp and the brazier.
Constantine put the book down on the table. The folded leaf slid off it, and he set it square again.
"He censed the doors of the hospital in March with his hand shaking," he said. "Two deacons to bring him down the steps."
"Yes, Majesty."
"We have work."
George set his hat on the chair Katarina had left.
"Isidore should have been here for this," Constantine said.
George's face did not change. "He will hear of it in Florence about the time the sittings end. They write that the fathers run on into the summer."
"And Joseph could not give us until summer."
"He could not." George turned his hat once on the chair and let it be. "There is no hurry, Majesty. The throne has stood empty a year and more before now, and the City stood."
"A year."
"If it needs a year." He waited a moment. "Thessaloniki does well. Metrophanes. A man of trust. He has the eagle on every church door in his see, and he put it there before we asked. If it has to be settled before the fathers are home, he would serve."
"I know what he is." Constantine looked at the shut balcony doors. "We wait."
George said nothing.
"Write to Isidore tonight, and to Mark, and a line to Bessarion under it. It goes by the first ship west, and Rome hears it from us before it hears it from Venice." He came to the table. "And the Kyrix. The next leaf carries it, and the words will be mine."
"Majesty." George put his hat back on and went for the door.
"Read them to me before they go. All three."
"I will." George was already through it.
Constantine crossed to the balcony doors and opened one of them.
It came in with the cold: the semantron at the Chora, close, wood struck fast and then slow. Under it, far off toward the ridge, a bell began, one stroke and a long wait and one stroke. Then a second bell, nearer.
On the water the boat's lamp had come back and stopped. Across the Horn a light showed once in the Galata tower and went out.
Author's note:
In OTL patriarch Joseph II died in Florence in June 1439, right in the middle of the council, a month before the union got signed. He's buried in Santa Maria Novella, the tomb is still there. Here there was no trip to Italy for him, the plan was to bring the council to him, so he got another year at home and died in his own bed in the City. Small change, big consequences for the next chapters.
Metrophanes is real too. in OTL he was metropolitan of Cyzicus and got elected patriarch in May 1440, almost exactly when this chapter is set, as the union candidate. the anti union side refused to even say his name in the liturgy. in this timeline he's holding Thessaloniki instead.
And yes, C running a press office in 1440. the interview, the lentils, the fisherman. nobody in that room has a word for what he's doing yet, Katarina def doesn't see the whole picture. She will though. Give it a few years and the imperial family is the most popular household in the Mediterranean, and it starts with a bowl of lentils!