Clermont Castle, October 1428
A breeze came off the gulf through the open window of the tower chamber, carrying salt and, from the north rampart, the faint tap of mallets where the masons had begun taking down the bad courses. Michael sat near the window with a cup of some bitter herb the kitchen swore by. Past the walls the sea showed in a long grey band. The brew was foul and he drank it anyway, because it was hot and because holding something steadied the hands.
Two weeks. He had been two weeks in this world, in this body. Constantine Palaiologos, Despot of the Morea. The first shock had worn down into something quieter and more useful, a kind of hunger. He had spent the two weeks learning the ground under him: a wall that shed stone every winter, a harbor that watered ships and watched them leave, a treasury a man could count in one evening, bread at two coppers the loaf when the flour came at all.
If he let his mind run, it went far. Ships, routes west, lands no chart in this world had a name for. Columbus would not be born for more than twenty years yet. He allowed himself the thought for the length of a breath and put it away. Dreams like that belonged to a realm that could feed itself through a dry year. What he had was the Morea, the Ottomans a season's march to the north, and the certain knowledge of how the story ended if nothing changed. But he knew guns. He knew, roughly, what a printing press did to the world. What he did not know was how a man built either one without a single machined part, and that question had kept the lamp in this room burning late all week.
A knock. "Enter."
George came in and bowed.
"Despot."
"George. Sit. There is a great deal today."
Before George reached the chair, Alexios came in behind him with a letter, road-dusty, the seal pressed crooked into the wax. "From Kalavryta, Despot. The rider came in at first light."
Michael cracked the seal and read it standing. It did not take long. He read it a second time to be sure of the ending, then held it out across the table. "From Thomas."
George read it with no more expression than he had given Theodore's letter, and set it down, and pressed the crease flat with two fingers. "Warmer than your brother Theodore's."
"By a little."
"He does not like it."
"He is not asked to like it." Michael took the letter back and laid it under the cup. "He argues for two pages and yields in four lines. Patras waits. That is all I needed from him."
"A fortnight, you said." George sat. "He has kept it to the day."
"He was never late for an argument." Michael pushed the cup aside. "But that is the old business. I called you for the new. In these two weeks I have been deciding what must be done to hold the Morea. Perhaps more than hold it. You have ridden with me, George. The wall, the village, the mole. You heard the count at council. Half-empty treasury, stores at two-thirds, going into a year that will not be kind. If we sit on that and guard it, it only gets smaller. I mean to spend it on things that grow."
"Land," George said.
"Land, trade, and craft. The harbor first. Six ships loaded cargo at Glarentza this season, and the harbor master keeps the count like a man keeping a deathwatch. I want workshops in the town. Trades the Morea does not have, doing work the Morea does not yet know it needs. We start small. We test each thing, and what fails, fails cheaply."
George was quiet a moment. "The lords rode home content because you gave them a mended wall and clean wells. New ventures will start new talk. Men will ask where the coin comes from. Then they will ask why."
"Let them ask why. The coin I mean to settle today."
Foundations of a Plan
When the door closed, Michael stood at the window a while. Below, a cart of lime was being backed and argued toward the north rampart, and the mallets went on.
He pulled a fresh sheet toward him and dipped the quill. The letter was to Constantinople, to his mother. Selymbria had been a prized holding once, fat land on the Marmara shore, and every year the raiding took a little more of the fat. The pride of holding it now cost more than the holding earned. Sentiment would not save the Morea.
Mother, he wrote, I have decided on a hard thing. I mean to sell our holdings at Selymbria.
The admission stung, and some of the sting was his own and some belonged to the body he wore, and he had stopped trying to sort out which. He set down the case plainly, asked her blessing and the help of her agents, and did not pretend the choice was easy. Then he sealed it, set it at the corner of the table on the papers gathering for George, and watched the wax lose its shine.
Glarentza would be the hub. He had stood on the mole and seen what the harbor was built for and what it had shrunk to, berths for ten ships and two of them filled, warehouses with grass at the sills. It would take less to wake that town than to build a new one. Workshops first, then trades to fill them. Paper the Morea might make for itself in time.
And the press. He meant to build a printing press. He knew the shape of it the way a man knows a house he grew up in and left young. The first tries would be crude, most would fail, and the whole art would have to be taught to men who did not know they were learning it. Scripture and the classics, for the clergy and the noble families. In the world he had left, a goldsmith's son out of Mainz would build the thing in about twenty-five years and change the price of a written word for good. Michael had lived his working life inside that change, and he had pulled ink across a stretched screen with his own hands enough years to know what ink forgave and what it did not.
In its corner the culverin waited on its sling. Ten ducats on the mole, fired once at a hatch board with half the harbor watching, and worth every coin for what it had told him. Three evenings running he had taken it apart on this table, laid the lock and the plug and the ramrod out in a row and put them back, and the sulfur smell had gotten into the wood. A longer barrel, a truer ball, powder milled fine and even: he could see the road from this thing to the guns he knew, and every step of that road needed men whose trade was iron and fire. If George found him armorers, the road could be walked. He let himself see it once, ranks of men with guns at the shoulder standing off a charge, then folded the image away and went back to the list.
The list filled a page and started another. Tools, stock, materials the Morea could not supply. And at the head of it, above all the goods, men. Smiths, founders, carpenters, masons, scribes. Skilled hands, and behind the skilled hands any family willing to follow them south. Constantinople was emptying by degrees; every man in it knew it. With any luck, some of them would follow George back to Glarentza.
On the day George sailed, Michael rode down to Glarentza to see him off. The ship lay at the mole taking on the last of her stores, and they stood apart from the loading, at the foot of the gangway.
Michael handed him the sealed letter and the list. "The letter goes into my mother's own hand. The list you know what to do with. Men before goods, George. Goods we can buy twice."
George ran his eye down the page as he took it, and his brow went up before he reached the bottom. "I will find the men." A pause, and the ghost of a smile. "Whatever it is they are to build."
"Safe travels, my friend."
George went up the gangway. Michael watched from the quay until the sail filled and the ship grew small on the grey water. He was getting better at this: the voice, the stillness, the weight a despot's words were expected to carry. He rode back up to Clermont. In the tower chamber the cup still sat cold on the sill, with Thomas's letter under it. The culverin stood in its corner. His own copy of the list still needed to be made. Glarentza would be the workshop of the realm: presses, forges, trades that had no names yet. Planting the seed was one thing. What the seed needed after was another matter. He picked up the quill and started the next list. The mallets on the rampart kept on, faint through the window.