Clermont Castle, Morea — October 1428
The horses were waiting in the yard, four guards already mounted, one of the animals stamping and being gentled.
The grey had not lifted. The clouds hung low, holding whatever rain they had, and the dust in the yard rose at every hoof and settled slow. Michael took the reins, and the body swung him up before he could think about how it was done. He sat a moment with his weight settling into the saddle and let his hands find their place.
They rode out through the gate and along the foot of the outer wall, where the ground dropped away toward the village and, past it, the roofs of Glarentza gone soft with distance, and beyond them the flat grey line of the gulf.
A man was waiting for them where the rampart bent north. He stood with his helmet under his arm and his cloak pinned high against the wind, and he bowed as much as a stiff back allowed.
"Despot. You wish to see the rampart."
The name arrived a breath after the face did, the way it did now. Nikolo Vlachos, who held the wall, and had held it for the Tocco lord before him, and been kept on with the castle when the castle changed hands. Sixty if he was a day, grey stubble, a face cured brown and creased like old harness leather, and pale eyes that did not quite match the rest of him. Something Italian in the jaw and in the set of the mouth.
"I do. Walk it with me, if you would."
"As you wish, Despot."
Vlachos led him up the inner stair. The steps were sound near the bottom and worn hollow higher up, each one dished in the middle like a spoon, and Michael kept a hand near the cold stone of the wall without quite touching it. At the top the wind came in from the gulf and pulled at their cloaks.
The walkway ran wide enough for two men. For the first fifty paces it was good stone under good mortar, and Vlachos let it speak for itself. Then it stopped being good. The parapet dropped to waist height where the upper courses had come down, and the fallen stone lay below on the slope in a long grey scatter among the scrub. What mortar remained crumbled at a touch, and caper bushes had rooted in the open joints and split them wider. Further on, a stretch of wooden hoarding sagged out over the drop, its planks gone soft and dark, and someone had run a rope across the walkway at hip height and tied it off to an iron ring.
"How long has it been like this?"
"The hoarding, six years. The parapet, longer. It comes down a little every winter." Vlachos put a hand flat on the low stone. "The Tocco lord put his coin in other business. The wall had to wait."
Michael leaned on the parapet to look down at the scatter of fallen stone, and the block under his palms tilted. It moved the width of a finger, no more, grinding on its neighbor, and Vlachos's hand was on his arm before the sound had finished. Not gripping. Just there.
"Not that one, Despot."
He stepped back from the edge and looked at the block. It had settled again into its bed of bad mortar as if nothing had passed. He put his hands behind him.
"Is this the worst of it?"
"No, Despot." Vlachos took him along the northern run, past the roped hoarding by a plank path the garrison used, and named things as they went. The facing had spalled off one long stretch and left the rubble core open to the rain. Further on he pointed out a failed drain, two winters of water let down inside the wall, the stain running dark a man's height on the stone. Near the tower the walkway itself was sound but the parapet would not stop a thrown stone. He gave each thing its place and moved on.
At the north tower they stopped, and Michael looked out the way an enemy would come. The road from the passes ran down through brown hills and thin olive groves toward the village at the castle's foot, and past the village the land fell away to Glarentza and its harbor, close enough to count the masts at the mole.
"If a raid came down that road," Michael said, "what happens?"
"The village comes up here. Glarentza shuts its own gates and trusts its own wall, but the villages have nothing. They come here with what they can drive." Vlachos looked along the broken parapet. "The last time was eleven years ago, Despot. Turks off the passes, two days of smoke. This wall was better then, and it was enough. The villages lost the harvest that was still in the ground. Everything else got inside in time."
"And now? It would not hold. Anyone could see that."
"You have it right, Despot. We hold the towers and the gate, and we pray nobody thinks to look hard at the north face."
Michael walked a few paces and set his hand on the parapet, testing it first. His cloak moved in the wind.
Down in the village a dog was barking, and stopped, and started again.
"There is talk of sending men to the passes," he said. "Patrols, to stop a raid before it comes down. What do you think of that?"
Vlachos was quiet a moment longer than the question needed.
"We have forty-one men fit to stand a watch," Vlachos said at last. "The passes that matter are three, a day's ride between them. Put ten men in each and we hold this castle with eleven. And ten men do not stop a raid. They see it coming. That is all ten men do." He rubbed at the grey stubble along his jaw.
"I have stood on a mended wall while it held, Despot. I have never once been saved by a patrol."
Michael nodded and looked down the long broken run of it once more, the caper bushes shivering in the joints. Numbers, he thought. Men, paces, winters, carts of stone. Ten men to a pass, a day's ride between, eleven left to hold a castle. Vlachos had them all in his head and had waited to be asked. He looked at his own hands on the parapet stone.
"Thank you, Nikolo."
Vlachos bowed his stiff bow, a half-beat late. He saw them back to the stair, and at the bottom he took his leave and turned back to his wall.
Michael and the guards walked the horses down. The small village began where the castle's shadow ended, one lane of stone and mud houses along the slope with the church low and whitewashed at the far end. A mallet somewhere, unhurried. Chickens. Two men were up on a roof relaying thatch, and they stopped with the bundles in their hands when the horses came into the lane, and stayed stopped.
It went that way down the whole lane. Work stopped as he rode past, and started again once he was gone. A woman drawing water stood with the rope in both hands until the horses had passed. Three children ran along the churchyard wall to keep pace and were called back sharply by someone unseen. A man salting hides in a doorway straightened up and stood with his hands hanging. Nobody spoke to him. Nobody expected him to stop.
Out past the last houses a shepherd stood off the lane with a dozen goats around him in the scrub, watching the road the way he had before the horses came.
By the well at the widening of the lane, an old woman had a cloth spread on the ground with her goods set out on it. Two small wheels of cheese, a clay jar stopped with wax, one loaf. She was arranging them as though the arranging mattered, and when the horses stopped in front of her she came up off her knees slowly and bowed and fixed her eyes on the cloth.
Michael dismounted. The nearest guard came off his horse a half-second behind him.
"What do you have there?"
"Cheese, Despot. Honey from my son's hives. Bread." Her hands had taken hold of each other. "There was more bread yesterday, Despot, there was, I only, the flour's dear this year. I bake what I can get."
"Your son keeps the hives?"
"He did, Despot. He is in Glarentza now, there is wage work at the harbor. The hives are mine to mind till he is back." She said it plainly, a fact among facts, and touched the wax seal of the jar and let it alone.
Michael looked at the loaf. It was a good loaf, dense and dark, the top scored in a cross.
"I'll take the bread."
She wrapped it in a square of sacking with quick hands, and held it out to him. He had no purse. Despots did not carry them. The loaf hung between them a moment and her eyes came up as far as his collar, and then the guard at his shoulder stepped in and put coins on the cloth, and she took them with a bow and did not count them.
"There's honey too, Despot, if the house wants it. I don't mean to trouble you." She bowed low as she said it, deeper than before.
"I'll see that they know."
She stayed low a moment longer before she knelt back to her cloth and her arranging. He stood a moment with the loaf warm in his hand, and then passed it to the nearest guard. They rode out past the well. Behind them he heard the bucket go down, and the rope ran on and on before the water sounded, a long way below the stone lip.
Past the shepherd and his goats the lane bent and became the Glarentza road, rutted and dry, the town plain ahead of them now, roofs and the walls of the harbor mole and a few masts thin as pen strokes against the grey water.
"What did the bread cost?" he asked the guard who had paid.
"Two copper coins, Despot. I gave her three."
Three coins. He set the number away where he could find it again, the first number he owned in this country, and turned his horse onto the road.