Lopadion, early September 1439
The river had dropped a hand's width in the days they had been camped on it, low with the end of the dry season. Yakub could see the new mark on the stone piers of the bridge, the wet line dark below and the stone drying pale above, and the mud cracking where the reeds had stood in water when they first came up. A string of pack mules went over the old Roman span and raised no spray at all. Below the camp the Rhyndacus ran shallow and brown between its soft banks, slow enough to wade in most places.
Turgut came up the slope from the horse lines with his coat over one arm. He waited until the two grooms working a lame mule had moved off down the bank.
"Miletopolis," he said. "The garrison walked out. Two days ago, the whole post, scattered."
Yakub stopped with the cup half-turned in his hand. "Romans? Down there?" The road south ran through his head, the empty country, the days of it. "How is this possible?"
"No." Turgut looked off down the bank a moment before he said the rest. "They deserted, my Bey." His jaw worked. "Dogs that ate the Sultan's salt and ran. Oath-breakers, every one."
Yakub set the cup down on the stone. Further down, at the horse lines, a voice rose, then another over it, the words lost but the shape of it plain, and a third man telling them both to shut their mouths. Somewhere in it Yakub caught "home" before it died down. Men quarreling about who got to the water first, or men quarreling about going home.
"No enemy near them," he said. "And they ran anyway."
"Days from the nearest Roman and they couldn't hold the place." Turgut shook his head, once. "After the brothers at Pegae, now this. It runs one way, Bey." He set a boot on the chest. "A man with a timar has a roof waiting. He's starting to think he'd rather be under it than in these reeds."
A fly settled on the rim of the cup at Yakub's feet and he left it. East of the camp the road ran off past the lake toward Apollonia, and beyond it, two days on under its hill, Bursa.
"Send riders after them," Yakub said. "Bring them back and hang —"
He stopped. Twenty men scattered to twenty villages, two days gone, and every horse he sent to chase them was a horse off the line and a man who might keep riding once he was over the hill.
"Leave it," he said.
Turgut crouched and pulled a stalk of dry grass. "The beys feel it. The men feel it. A post like Miletopolis walks off, then another, and then the rest start reckoning their own roads. Another week sitting here and you'll hear the same talk in your own tent." He turned the stalk in his fingers. "We have to do something and do it fast."
"We can't meet him in the field," Yakub said, looking down the road. "Not with what we have."
"So we don't," Turgut said. "We take the boy and the household and we go east, to Kutahya, while the road's still open. Then further south. Winter will come, earn us some time." He stopped for a second, hesitating. "We contact Karaman."
Yakub looked at him and said nothing.
"I know what I'm asking." Turgut turned the stalk in his fingers. "Better to owe Konya than to hand Osman's grandson to the Romans."
"Karaman." Yakub said the word and let it sit. "You want me to bring Osman's grandson to their gate with a treasury on a cart and ask for a roof. To Ibrahim, who was burning our villages two years ago." He looked down at the river. "He would take the treasury, keep the boy, and we would never ride out again. I will not go into Konya a beggar with Osman's heir held out for charity. That is not saving the House. That is selling what is left of it for a winter indoors."
The grass stalk snapped in Turgut's fingers. He dropped the two halves and stood.
"Then Amasya. They said when the raiding was done they would talk about a common front against the Romans. We send to them now."
"And what do they send when the raiding is done." Yakub picked the cup back up, looked at the warm water in it, and tipped it out onto the stone. "Three thousand. Maybe four. And only if they come at all, and only when it suits them." He shook the last drops from the cup. "We cannot count on men who are robbing Trebizond while we watch the Romans."
Turgut said nothing to that. Down at the lines a horse went up screaming over some small thing and was quieted, and the ordinary noise of the camp came back, the ring of a smith somewhere, a man calling for water.
"Then what do we do, my Bey," Turgut said it flat, not as a challenge. "Every road from here tastes of ash."
Yakub looked at the sky over the western hills. The sun was past the high point and coming on toward the noon call.
"It is the hour," he said. "I will pray, and I will think on it, and we will talk again after."
Turgut went down the slope toward the lines. Yakub stood a moment longer at the edge of the water, then turned back into the camp.
His tent stood on the dry ground above the bridge, the flaps tied open against the heat. The mat had been laid out for him on the bare earth inside, the regent's chain coiled on the chest where he had left it that morning, the working leather of a man in the field on his shoulders instead. He took off his boots at the edge of the mat. A servant brought the basin and he made the washing, the water cool over his wrists and the backs of his hands, the dust of the camp coming off grey into the bowl. He could hear the men forming for the prayer behind him, the shuffle of them, a cough, the murmur as they made their lines.
He faced the qibla and began.
The words came of themselves, the way they had since he was a boy, his body knowing the standing and the bending without his mind in it, and that left the mind free, which was the trouble with praying when a thing was eating at you. He pressed his forehead to the mat. The earth under the cloth was warm from the day. He asked, in the plain way he had always asked, for a path. He turned the two roads over against the dark behind his eyes, Konya and the wall, the beggar's gate and the siege, and found them both shut where they had been shut on the riverbank, and no third road opening in their place. What came instead, slow, under the familiar words, was not a way out. It was the quiet that came when a man stopped looking for one. He had buried Orhan with a prince's rites and hanged the men who killed him. He had stood between this boy and Karaman and Cairo for a few years. He could not save the state. He could choose where it stood when it ended, and how. He held the last prostration longer than the form asked.
When he rose and turned, Turgut was waiting at the open flap with the rider behind him, and the rider had the grey look of a man who had come hard and not eaten.
"Bey." The rider bowed. "The Romans have moved from Cyzicus. The whole army, off the coast and inland, on the Bursa road. We counted the columns from the ridge above the road two days running. Twenty thousand, near enough, with the train."
"Their fleet?"
"Left Cyzicus, to the east, when we left, Bey, the tall ships and the galleys both."
Yakub sat down on the chest beside the coiled chain. He worked his feet back into the boots while he thought it through, and the leather was stiff and he had to force the second one.
"Mudanya," he said. "The ships go into the gulf and they take Mudanya, and once the port is his they land him bread and powder there while he marches the men and the guns up the road to us."
"A few days at most," Turgut said. "Lopadion is the crossing. The road from the coast comes to the river, and the river is the only thing on it that is not flat."
"And look at the river." Yakub stood and went to the open flap and put his hand on the pole. Below them the Rhyndacus ran its low brown line between the drying mud, the bridge standing clear above it, a man walking his horse across the ford a hundred paces down where the water came no higher than the beast's knees. "A few months ago I could have made him fight for that water. Now a child could wade it carrying the powder dry on his head. There is no ground here. The country is open and the rivers are down and I have ten thousand and shrinking against twenty and their guns. I could put every man I have in those reeds and he would walk over us by the second day and not slow the carts."
Turgut came to stand by him at the flap. The rider had drawn back, waiting, turning his reins in his hands.
"There is nothing here to hold." Yakub looked down the road the Romans would come up, then east, where the road climbed away from the river toward the high ground and the orchards and, two long days beyond them, the wall. "We pull off the river. We do not leave him a fight he wants on ground that suits him. We go back to Bursa and we put the army inside the work the masons finished, behind the new courses on the north face, with the boy, and the tombs of Osman and Murad, and the looms and the foundry. All of it. The whole of what we are, behind one wall."
"Yes, my Bey."
"Send to Amasya and Karaman. It costs a courier and a sheet of paper and it is owed to the men to try." He took his hand off the pole. "But I am not holding the wall because I think the Türkmen will come. I am holding it because it is ours, and it is the last of it, and a man does not walk away from the last of it to die better-fed somewhere east. We lost Edirne. We do not lose this and keep calling ourselves a House."
He bent and took the signet ring out of the small pouch at his belt, Orhan's ring, the seal of Osman cut deep and worn pale at the edges, and he turned it once in the light from the open flap and closed his hand on it.
"We hold Bursa," he said. "To the end."
Turgut looked at him, and at the closed hand, and did not argue it. Whatever was in his face he kept there.
"Yes, Bey."
"Strike the camp before dark. I want the carts on the Bursa road by first light and the horse covering the rear." Yakub put the ring back in the pouch and drew the flap-cord through his fingers. "And get this man fed before he falls over."
Turgut turned the rider down toward the cook fires and went after him into the noise of the camp, calling for the officers. Behind the tent the men were breaking from the prayer lines and going back to the work of the day, and below the bridge the river ran on low and brown toward the sea, dropping another hand's width into the dry of the year.