Clermont Castle, Morea — October 1428
The east hall smelled of candle smoke from the morning's mass and of the oiled leather of men who had ridden in yesterday. Michael reached the doors and stopped. Through the wood he could hear them, seven voices loud and arguing over something already, and his mouth had gone dry in a way it had not done on the rampart or the mole. He pressed his palms once against his thighs, and George, beside him, looked ahead at the doors as though he had noticed nothing.
"Nikolas will speak first if you let the silence sit," George said quietly. "He considers it his office. The one with the grey beard cut square. Sgouros is the tall one, lands up toward the Skorta passes, and he has been telling the others since last night that the passes are the whole question. The two at the far end came over with the dowry. They will not speak unless you speak to them."
"And Markos?"
"Young, dark, will sit closest to the maps. He keeps the treasury tallies." George set his hand on the door. "They are more afraid of you than you know."
The doors opened. The lords stood as he entered. He walked slowly and took the chair at the head of the table before any of them could sit, the way he had told himself to the night before, lying awake with nothing else he could prepare. The maps were laid out as George had promised, Clermont's walls inked large, the scouts' report held flat beside it with a candlestick. Seven faces turned toward him. He put his hands flat on the table.
George remained standing at his right. "My lords, the Despot thanks you for your attendance. The council is sat." He took his seat, and the hall was Michael's.
For one heartbeat nothing came, the words he had built in the night gone from where he had left them, and he covered it by drawing the map an inch toward himself as though that had been the pause's purpose.
"Ehm. Please sit. You are welcome in this hall. Most of you I know only from an oath and a name, and I mean to mend that before you ride. You came two days on bad roads, some of you, and I kept you waiting a day more." He turned the map of Clermont's walls so it faced the table. "You have all seen what is drawn here. Let us begin with the wall."
They sat, Sgouros last, at the pace of a man whose knees negotiated the matter separately. Nikolas spoke first, rising halfway, hands still folded on the table. The outer rampart, he said, had been surveyed twice in the Tocco years and let go twice, and the sums written then would be half the truth now. Stone could be had from the old quarry above the village, but lime was the cost, lime and carts, and the carting would fall on men who were needed in the fields until the olives were in. He sat down without having said whether he was for it. A careful man, Michael thought.
Sgouros did not rise halfway. He stood, and he was as tall as George had said, with a soldier's spread of shoulder gone stiff at the joints.
"Mend the wall, Despot, and you will have a mended wall. I hold Doxa and the two villages past it, two days north. When riders come down the Skorta my people do not run here. Nobody runs two days. They go up to the caves with what a mule can carry, and I have sat in those caves, Despot, as a boy, listening to our own roofs burn. The wall of Clermont was sound that year too. It kept its mortar dry." He put one finger on the map, up in the brown folds where the roads thinned. "Men in the passes. That is where a raid is met. The rest is masonry."
"And if the wall falls, Despot, everyone falls with it." Nikolas said from down the table.
Nikolas was right, and Michael knew it. He looked at the map where the finger had been, and the dryness came back to his mouth. A week ago the hardest thing he had ruled on was whether to reorder a series in paperback, and this man's villages would burn or not burn on what he said next. Under the table his knee had begun to jog.
"How many men do you hold, Sgouros?"
"Sixty of my own, Despot. Forty fit."
"And the garrison here holds fewer than you might hope, Sgouros. Fewer than I hoped." He heard his voice trying for firm and landing near it. "I had the count from sergeant Vlachos, on the north rampart yesterday morning. I thought I had better walk it before I ruled on it." At the far end of the table the two Tocco men looked at each other, and Michael marked it and went on.
"The passes." He looked down at the map and found the brown folds where Sgouros's finger had been. "I will not pretend to know this ground. I am told the passes that matter are three, a day's ride between them, and that if I garrison them properly this castle stands near empty." He looked at Sgouros.
"My villages need protection, Despot. The damned Turk will come again. He always comes again."
"There are not enough men, Sgouros. Not for the wall and the passes both." The words came out flat. The room went still, and for a moment he was sure he had lost them. He made himself keep going.
"And Nikolas has the truth of it. If the wall falls, everyone falls with it, your villages among them. So we will mend the wall, starting this week. For the north, there are not enough men to stop a raid this year. What I can give you is warning. I will write to my brother Thomas in Kalavryta. Watchers, his men and mine, out past the three passes. A raid crosses, your villages have a day to move people and animals into the caves before the riders arrive."
Sgouros stood a moment, jaw working, once, twice. "Watchers." A pause. "A day's warning is not nothing, Despot. I will take it."
Michael let out the breath slowly through his nose, and turned to the treasury before the room could feel him do it.
The numbers came from Nikolas first: Elis and Arcadia together, sixty to eighty thousand souls, hard to fix closer, with families drifting between villages after the failed rains. Grain stores at two-thirds of what a prudent year wanted. Then Markos took up the tally book and read the rest without slowing. Perhaps fifteen thousand silver stavrata after the garrisons were paid through winter.
In gold, something above two thousand ducats in reserve. He said "ducats" with his eyes on nothing in particular, and not one man at the table looked at Michael. He kept his face still and his hands flat and let the moment pass. That was how Michael knew every one of them had heard about yesterday.
He set the figures beside the ones he already carried, the price of a loaf, the price of lime and carts. Two-thirds of what a prudent year wanted, and the year was not going to be prudent. The failed rains ran under every number Nikolas had read: the drifting families, the thin stores, the dear flour the old woman at the well had spoken of before any lord did.
"The rains, then," he said. "If the sky will not give water, what can we do to help the fields? Wells, cisterns, who can tell me the state of them?"
The lords glanced at one another in surprise. A stout steward in a brown mantle spoke up hesitantly. "We… pray, Despot. Processions are ordered, and fasting. Beyond that?" He offered a helpless shrug. "If God withholds the rains, there is little mere men can do."
"God helps those who help themselves," Michael said and leaned forward, hands on the table.
"Many of our wells have silted shallow over the years, we can start by digging them deeper. In the worst-hit villages, send men to dredge the cisterns and irrigation canals. Perhaps we can even construct simple aqueducts or channels from nearby streams to fields that need it most."
At that, a few eyes widened, and uncertain looks went along the table. Michael wondered anxiously if he might be pushing too fast.
Nikolas cleared his throat. "Ambitious measures, Despot. Worthy ones, no doubt. But costly, and laborious, and we have neither the coin nor idle men to dig half the countryside."
"Perhaps in stages, then," George said, in a tactful tone. "The channels are a work of seasons, that is true. But clearing existing wells and repairing neglected cisterns can show results within weeks. Quick relief will reassure the people that their lord acts decisively."
Michael glanced at George and took the rope. "Yes. The wells and cisterns first. Nikolas, the worst-struck villages, a list, and teams sent. The channels we will speak of in spring, when the well work has taught us what the ground is."
The faces along the table eased into something workable. Nikolas nodded slowly, one finger drumming. "And the roads, Despot, while coin is being spoken for. The Glarentza merchants petition every quarter, wagons breaking axles on the neglected stretches. Spend what little there is on village wells, and the merchants will say you favored peasants over trade."
"And spend it on roads," Markos said, a half-smile on him, "and the villagers will say the merchants fattened while they went thirsty. Someone will be unhappy either way, Despot. It is the one promise this table can keep."
"Then we balance it as best we can. The most desperate need first: water, for those who lack it. A man can walk on a bad road, but he cannot drink from a dry well. Then the roads. Markos, the route from here to Glarentza, the worst stretch first, its cost alone, before the month is out. The rest waits for spring and the well accounts."
It went on another hour, smaller matters, a boundary suit, a priest's complaint, the tithe schedule, and Michael ruled where the ruling was obvious and deferred where it was not, and twice asked a question so plain that he saw a lord blink at being asked, and both times the answer taught him something the maps had not. When there was nothing left on the table but the maps themselves, he stood, and they stood with him.
They bowed, some deeply, some to the degree their pride allowed, and filed out. The two Tocco men bowed exactly correctly, together, like a drill. Markos went out last with the tally book under his arm and a look back at the maps that might have been approval.
The doors closed, and Michael slumped back in the chair and let out a breath that had been waiting an hour, and rolled his neck until it cracked. His first council. Nobody had called him a fraud. Nobody had stood up and walked out. Seven lords had ridden in to take the measure of their new Despot, and they were riding home with rulings in their saddlebags, and it was almost hard to believe that the man who had given them was him.
George remained behind, stepping close with a quiet smile. "You handled them well," he said. "Decisive but open to counsel, that will earn goodwill. Sgouros will hold the north for you. You gave him a straight answer, and he has not had one from this castle in years."
"I nearly lost the room at the wells."
George's smile went a little wider. "The room was never lost. You opened three doors at once and it can only walk through one." He gathered his papers, and his voice came down to the register he kept for the two of them. "It was well done. But every ruling today has a bill behind it, coin or favor or worse, and the bills come in their own time. We will meet them as they arrive."
Michael let that be. Below the window the yard had filled with the sound of horses being brought up, the lords' parties making ready to ride. He sat a while longer with the drawn walls of Clermont in front of him, the north rampart a clean inked line that was nothing like the truth. Then he rolled the map, set the candlestick back on its shelf, and went to find where they had put the culverin.