Glarentza, Morea — October 1428
The land gate stood open when they came down. The two men posted there had seen the riders coming, and one went in through the wicket at a run while the other held the gate and bowed. By the time Michael rode through, the word was already ahead of him.
Near the gate the houses were low and plain, mud brick and bare wood, some standing empty. Further in they grew taller, two floors with iron on the doors and paint on the shutters, merchant houses built when the harbor paid for them. They rode past a warehouse with its doors chained and grass growing along the sill of the loading bay, and another whose roof had gone at one corner, the beams open to the sky. A merchant's house with Latin arms carved over the lintel had laundry strung across its courtyard and a goat tethered to the mounting block.
Where the street opened toward the harbor a church fronted the square, a big Latin-built hall with a tall west door. Over the door the old carved saints had been left in place, and the cross above them had been changed out for one of the Greek pattern, brighter than the stone around it, the mounting new. Through the open door came the smell of incense and old candle smoke. He looked at it as they rode past and said nothing.
The harbor lay past it. The mole ran out in a long arm of laid stone, berths along it for ten ships, and there were two: a coaster with her sail down and her deck empty, and further out a round-bellied trader flying Venetian colors, men moving on her, water casks going up her side on a whip line. The rest was gulls and grey water slapping stone.
A man came along the quay toward them at a pace between walking and running, pulling his coat straight as he came. He was middle-aged, soft at the belly, a ring of keys swinging at his belt. He arrived out of breath and bowed too deeply.
"Despot. Maurikios, Despot. I have the harbor, the dues, the weighing. If word had come ahead, we would have made ready. No word came ahead of you."
"No word was sent. Walk with me a while, if you can spare the harbor."
Maurikios walked, half a step behind and leaning forward to be half a step ahead. The Venetian ship was taking on water and salt meat, he said, in from Cyprus, bound home, a night's stop only. Most of them were a night's stop only now. In his father's day the Latin hulls came to load, currants and silk thread and kermes, wax, oil, and a ship might sit a week at the mole with the porters going like ants. Now they watered and went. Six ships this season had loaded anything worth the weighing. The rest paid anchorage, drank at Lybistros's tavern, and left with the morning wind.
"Lybistros does well from it," Maurikios said, "though they make a commotion there from time to time, the crews. Nothing the watch cannot settle."
Then the noise started, around the corner of the tavern at the head of the mole. A voice first, big and wine-loose, going up and down in two languages, and then the man himself backing out of the tavern door with his hands up in front of him and a bundle and a long wrapped thing slung across his back. A stout man in an apron came after him into the street, red to the ears, and behind the apron came a girl with a tally slate held up like a writ.
"Paid," the big man was saying. "Paid, pagato, all paid, ask anyone, ask God."
"The slate says a ducat and a half," the stout man shouted. "Three stops your ship has made this year, and every one of them on my slate. My wine, my roast, your dice on my table every night you were ashore. The slate says what it says."
People had already stopped to look, dockhands drifting up the mole, a porter setting down his load. Michael turned his horse toward the noise without deciding to, and the crowd's edge saw him and went quiet. The stout man turned to see what had silenced the argument, and his red face went pale. Lybistros, then. He bowed low. The girl with the slate bowed. The big man was slower, swaying a little as he turned, and Michael watched the understanding climb him: the guards, the horse, the cut of the coat, the bowing street. A soldier's face under the wine, forty and weathered, a white seam of scar through one eyebrow. He took his hat off, which he had not thought to do for the tavern.
And behind his shoulder, riding across his back on a sling of oiled leather: a barrel. Wood-stocked, iron-strapped, longer than a man's arm, the muzzle end capped with a plug of rag. A curved iron lever lay along the stock's side, tied down with cord.
Michael went still in the saddle. Of all the things this world had shown him in three days, this was the first he had not expected to see. He dismounted. The guard who had paid for the bread came down behind him.
"What is the trouble here?"
"Despot, it is nothing." Lybistros bowed again over the words. "A misunderstanding, the house is honored, it is not a thing for your ears."
"A ducat and a half, I heard." He nodded to the guard, and the guard counted it onto the girl's slate in silver, and Lybistros stopped protesting. The big man watched the silver with his hat in his hands and the caution of a man who has been handed luck before and had it turn in his grip.
"You are off the Venetian ship."
Zuan looked at the silver on the slate, then at Michael, then back at the silver. "You paid it," he said. "Despot. Lordo." Whatever he meant to ask next, he swallowed it, and began again. "Her escort, Despot. Zuan. Eleven years at sea and before that the wars in Friuli." His Greek was broken but serviceable, Venetian filling the gaps.
"That piece on your back. Show it to me."
Zuan's hand went to the sling strap and stopped there. "This? Despot, she is mine. Bought in Brescia. Not the ship's. Mine."
"Then she is yours to sell. Name your price."
The crowd had thickened and gone very quiet. Zuan looked at the silver still on the slate, and at the man who had paid a stranger's tavern debt without asking a question.
"Ten ducats," Zuan said. Too loud. A price named the way a man throws dice. "With the horn and the lead and the match. Ten."
Somebody in the crowd laughed. The guard leaned in at Michael's shoulder and said, low: "Despot, that is four times its worth at least, and we do not carry such a sum."
Michael looked at the wrapped barrel and not at the guard. "Ride to Clermont. Bring it."
The guard held one breath's worth of stillness, then bowed, mounted, and was gone up the street at a trot that became a canter at the gate. Zuan stood blinking, a man whose absurd number had been neither beaten down nor bargained with, and did not seem to know what to do with that.
"While we wait," Michael said, "load her. I'll see her fired before she's paid for. The plank there." He nodded along the mole, where a broken hatch board leaned against a bollard. "Set it up on the stones. Shoot at that."
It took two boys from the crowd a minute to prop the board on a nest of stones forty paces down the mole. Zuan took longer, because his hands had wine in them and because he did nothing without narrating it to the crowd in two languages. But the order of the work was the order Michael knew. Powder from the horn, poured to a measure guessed by eye. A wad of tow rammed down. The ball, patched in leather, rammed after, the rod ringing in the barrel at each stroke. Fine powder shaken into the pan by the touch-hole, the cover slid over it. Zuan untied the cord and the curved lever swung free, and he clamped a length of match cord into its jaw, struck fire to it with flint and steel, and blew on the end till the coal sat red.
Michael stood with his hands behind his back and watched. He knew the smell that was coming, the sulfur edge of the burnt priming. He knew the weight of the rod's last stroke. For a moment the mole was a wet field and he was fumbling the ramrod in borrowed boots, men in blue wool laughing, his sons laughing hardest, that reenactment weekend they had talked him into. This thing was cruder, and simpler by far. But it was the same animal. Everyone around him saw a pipe that shouts. He watched the lever, the curved iron with its coal. He could work with this.
"Despot." Zuan had the piece up, the butt end braced against his chest and his cheek laid along the stock, the coal wavering over the pan. The crowd had opened away from him on both sides. "Watch."
He pressed the lever. The coal dipped, the pan flashed with a spit of white, and the gun went off.
The sound went flat across the harbor and came back off the town wall a half-beat later, doubled. Every gull on the mole went up at once. The horses screamed and fought their handlers, hooves clattering on stone. Smoke rolled sideways, thick and white and stinking of sulfur, and through it Michael saw the hatch board jump. When the smoke thinned the board still stood, but its left edge was chewed to bright splinters.
The crowd flinched back as one, and for a moment nobody made a sound. Then came the shouting, and a few of the old men crossed themselves.
Maurikios had both hands pressed to his breastbone. The remaining guards were still fighting the horses quiet. He found his voice first, still breathless, trying to be useful: "A crossbow, Despot, strikes truer than that, and twice as often. A crossbow would have split the board at the center."
"It would," Michael said.
He walked forward through the drifting smoke and held out his hands, and Zuan, after a heartbeat, laid the piece across them. It was heavier than it looked and warm as bread from the barrel's heat, the stock nicked and oiled dark by years of hands, the touch-hole rimmed with black. He held it the way a curious man holds another man's property, turned it once, gave it back. His hands did nothing worth watching. Behind his face he was cataloguing: barrel could be longer, ball tighter, the powder milled finer. A crossbow strikes truer. But not for long.
The ship's master came down the mole while the smoke still hung, a thin, dry man with two sailors behind him. Whatever he had come to shout, he saw who was standing with his escort and did not shout it. He bowed, and his Greek was better than Zuan's. He would be honored to wait upon the Despot's business, he said. He could wait an hour.
The money came back, the guard's horse dark with sweat. Eight ducats and a half went into Zuan's hat; the rest, Michael said, had gone to Lybistros's slate. Zuan looked at the hat a moment, then nodded. The horn, the bag of lead balls, and the coiled match went into the guard's saddlebag. He handed Michael the sling, said something about God and fortune, and the master walked him up the gangway.
They rode for Clermont with the light going. Behind them the trader stood out from the mole under sweeps, and Glarentza's noise came up again at their backs. The culverin rode across his saddlebow on its sling, knocking gently at his knee with the horse's walk. His hands still smelled of it, sulfur and oil. Ahead the castle stood black against the last of the sky, and along its northern shoulder he could make out the broken run of parapet he had walked that morning. He kept one hand on the culverin the whole way up.