Bursa, the third day after
The last of the psalm carried down the slope while Constantine was still walking away from it. Behind him the priests were moving along the second row with the censer, and the burial parties stood off to the side with their mattocks grounded, waiting to close the earth. A clerk of the second division followed the rows with the book open on his forearm, taking each name off the wooden tags and reading it back to the sergeant beside him before he wrote. The morning was warm already. It would be hot by the middle of the day, and the digging had gone on since before light to be done ahead of it.
Farther out, beyond a fold of the ground toward the east road, two carts stood at the lip of a long trench with men unloading them. They had been at that work for three days now, and there were more carts on the road behind them, coming down from the city with the wheels loud on the stones, carrying the dead of the garrison and of the Turks of the town who had fled up into the citadel.
Constantine looked at it for the time it took to walk twenty paces, and then the fold of the ground closed it off, and the camp came up ahead of him with the standards hanging slack in the still air.
Andreas met him inside the line of tents and fell in beside him. They passed the farrier's rows, where horses stood waiting to be shod, and the smell of burnt hoof hung between the tents. At the headquarters tent the guard pulled the flap, and Thomas was already inside with a cup, standing over the map weighted at its corners with shot.
A rider came in before the flap had fallen. The duty officer put his head in first, then brought the man through. He was one of Thomas's scout officers, dust to the thigh.
"Majesty." He bowed to the depth his stiffness allowed. "From the parties in the hills. We had a trail out of the high ground south of the city. We followed the sign east, making for the tracks over the shoulder of the mountain. Two days into the hills."
"And," Thomas said.
"Lost it, my Prince. The ground goes to bare rock along the ridgelines, and there are goat tracks off it in every direction." He turned one hand over, empty. "Southeast, as far as we held it."
"How many?" Andreas asked.
"Under a hundred by the sign, General. On foot, all of it, as far as the rock held it."
Constantine had the treasury inventory on the map table, three sheets in a clerk's hand, and he drew it toward him while the officer spoke. He had read it twice the day before. He read the second sheet again now, the coined gold by weight, the plate by count, the regalia item by item with a line to each.
"Feed your men and let the horses stand down," he said. "You did what the ground allowed."
The officer bowed and went out. The flap fell, and the light in the tent went back to canvas-yellow. Outside, a farrier's hammer started up again, two strikes and a pause.
"So they are into the hills, must be Ali," Thomas said. He came around the table and set his cup on the corner of the map.
"It must be," Constantine said. He turned the inventory sheet around and pushed it across the map so that it faced them. "Read the entries."
Andreas ran his finger down the column. He read it, and stopped where Constantine had stopped.
"The seal."
"The swords are there. Murad's standard is there." Constantine put his finger on the blank line where the clerks had entered nothing. "The seal is not there. It is not on any of the dead we have searched, and the chamberlain we took swears on his own neck that it never left the Sultan's room in his time. A seal is the one thing in that room a man can carry over a mountain in his cheek."
"So the boy is out," Thomas said.
"Probably he is alive. Probably he is in those hills, going east ahead of our scouts, with the ring."
The hammer outside stopped. A horse went past at a walk, and a man somewhere down the row was calling a count for a working party, the numbers coming muffled through the canvas.
"In every case, if the house of Osman rises again, it rises at Kütahya. Boy or no boy, regent or no regent. Take that off the board and the answers stop mattering," Andreas said.
"You think? He could run south too," Constantine said. "The coast has more towns for him to raise money and men than the interior does."
"The coast towns will not have him." Thomas shook his head. "They will not help a running prince with no army."
"Thomas is right." Andreas laid his hand flat on the map, inland, where the roads drew together in the high country. "Kütahya is the only door still open for him. Some interior timars still have their horse, whatever is left of it, and the beys of the high country have not seen a Roman soldier in their lives. Whoever walks in there with Osman's seal in his hand stops being a fugitive the day the gates close behind him, and every man who ran from this campaign has somewhere to run to."
"With what under him," Constantine said. "He cannot raise more than a few thousand at most."
"He lost many on the citadel and the house spent itself on Karaman and Orhan before we ever put a keel in the water," Andreas said, and moved his hand east along the map roads as he spoke. "What is left is small garrisons, the horse that got off the Mudanya road fight, whatever the timars can still mount. No real army. Enough to hold walls. Enough to raid the coast we take, every summer, for as long as there is a sultan to raid in the name of."
"Then we finish it," Thomas said. He set the cup down, on the map again. "Now, while there is nothing between here and there that can meet us. Boys grow, Constantine. He is fourteen. In two years he is a man leading the revenge himself, and the revenge comes every year until one of us is dead of it."
Constantine let it sit. He took the weight off the southern edge of the map himself and rolled the lower sheet up to bring the coast road into the light, the towns marked down it in George's small hand from the winter planning, Pergamon, Phokaia, Smyrna.
"The plan we wrote in the spring is that road," he said. "Coast and fleet, the towns that will open, wintering in Smyrna. It is the plan the supply is laid for. We take the coast clean, and the interior starves inside a line we hold, and the boy can sit in Kütahya ruling goats." He looked up from the map. "You are asking me to tear up a working plan and march a legion two hundred kilometers from the sea. In the spring, Andreas, you told me the inland road was the one mistake on the table. I agreed with you."
"That is true, Constantine, and it was true then. I said no inland while there was a field army to catch us on the road. There is no field army to face. The Turk was weaker than even we reckoned," Andreas said flatly, and went straight on.
"The plan was built on a condition and the condition is gone. What has not changed is the season. The high road is dry another month, five weeks with luck. We go now and we are under Kütahya inside ten days. We burn what makes it a capital and we are back on this ground before the rains close the road behind us, and if the boy is behind those walls when we come, it ends there." He straightened off the map. "Or we take your coast, and it is a good coast, and next spring the interior has a settled sultan, and we do this march anyway, against a year of his preparing, with Karaman deciding whether to make it two wars."
"Karaman." Constantine said the name and left it a moment. He set the map weight back on the coast road, over Smyrna. "You both understand what a Roman legion burning Kütahya says in Konya. That is the border of their world. I am not saying it as an objection. I am saying it so nobody in this tent claims afterward that we were surprised. If we do this, we are choosing the coalition against us, a year early, with our own hands."
"They stand up either way," Thomas said. "You think Konya sleeps better if we stop at the coast? The only question they are asking is when, same as us."
Andreas picked the scout officer's report up off the table and put it down again in the same place. "Finish the house, Constantine. Whatever else comes, it should come with this finished."
Constantine stood over the map with his hands on the frame. The farrier's hammer had started again somewhere down the lines, and under it, further off, the carts on the east road, the sound carrying now that the tent had gone quiet. He looked at the coast road with George's towns written down it, and then at the empty high country where the roads drew together, no Roman ink on it at all past the first hills.
"All right," he said. "We finish it. Kütahya stops existing as a place a sultan can be made." Constantine kept his finger on the roads while he said it, on the junction where they met. "The citadel, the arsenal, the stores, the walls, all of it burned or thrown down. What the men take, they take. If the boy is inside, or a regent, we end it there. If they have gone past it, then he runs to Karaman with nothing behind him, and Konya can decide what such a guest is worth."
He pulled the inventory sheets off the map to clear it and began giving it out in order, and Andreas came around the table with the dividers before the second sentence.
"Inform George. Write it tonight. The second legion moves on Nicomedia as planned, Aristos under George, the fleet in support. Nicomedia first, Nicaea after, both before the rains."
"He will ask about the siege guns," Andreas said.
"The guns stay with us. If Nicomedia shuts its gates against him, George sends word and waits."
The muster took the two days. On the morning of the third the first legion formed on the flat ground east of the camp in the dark before light, by torches, the tagmata coming up one behind another off their streets and the mule train standing loaded on the road itself behind the gun teams, breath showing in the first cold of the autumn. Constantine came out to the head of it as the sky was going grey over the mountain. Behind him the city stood on its rock with smoke rising thin from the morning fires, ordinary smoke now, cookfires and forges. The column stepped off while the torches were still lit, and the road took it east.