Glarentza, September 1437
The officer's room at the barracks in Glarentza had a window that took the full afternoon sun. Constantine was at the long pine table when Andreas came in. Down in the yard a sergeant was running fifty raw recruits through pike drill, and his count came up through the boards in a slow, thudding cadence.
Andreas pushed the door wide with his shoulder. He had a sealed packet under one arm and his cloak folded over the other.
"Majesty."
"Welcome, Andreas. Sit." Constantine pointed to the bench across from him.
A servant came in behind Andreas with a tray. He set the cups down, poured water and wine into each, and stood with the jug still in his hand.
"Leave us," Constantine said. "And no one is to come in."
"Majesty." The man set the jug on the side table, bowed, and pulled the door shut behind him. The latch caught with a small wooden click.
Andreas took the cup, drank half of it in one go, and put it down. He set the packet at his elbow without opening it.
"You look thinner," Constantine said.
Andreas pressed at his belt with his thumb where it had taken in by a notch. "Sea travel does not suit me. The deck pitches and my stomach goes with it. Between Gallipoli and Thessaloniki I was over the rail more often than I was on my feet. The weather did not help. Three days of it, and nothing I ate stayed down."
Andreas reached up and rubbed at the salt on his collar. A thin grey line came away on his thumb, and he wiped it on the side of his trousers. "And you—you look more rested than the last time I saw you."
"Family time."
"It shows."
"Zoe is growing. She walks now. She talks at the maid for whole stretches when she thinks no one is listening, in some private dialect of her own that no one else has been admitted to."
Andreas almost smiled. "And the Empress?"
"Well. She has settled in. The house answers to her now."
He inclined his head, took another swallow, and let the silence sit a moment. Outside the sergeant called butts, and there was the dry clatter of pike-shafts being grounded. A pause. Then the count began again.
"How do you find Glarentza?" Constantine asked. "It has been a year."
"Missed it. Missed the barracks here too." Andreas looked toward the window. "Looks bigger. There is a new quarter past the forge that was a goat field when I left."
"That is the Albanian quarter. The city is growing faster than we can put streets under it. Theophilus says fourteen thousand now."
Andreas nodded. "I saw your new ship at the dock too. The sister to the Katarina. I went past her twice on the way up."
"Diogo and Afonso did good work. She is nearly ready for her first voyage, a couple of weeks more. There is a small galley nearly finished beside her too, and Diogo will have three more on the slips by spring."
"Good." Andreas drank again. "Looking forward to seeing the new cannons too."
"You will see them this evening. We meet with Luca and Elias after vespers. There is a four-pounder I want your hands on. Drakos pattern, scaled down. One horse on the trail. They have cast ten already and will have thirty by the new year."
"For the mountain work."
"For the mountain work, and the streets."
Andreas took that without comment, the way he took most things. He watched the corner of his cup for a moment.
"We need more ships, Majesty."
"I know."
"From the moment Laskaris came back to Gallipoli he was complaining," Andreas said. " He says he cannot patrol the islands and the strait and the Marmara coast on the hulls he has, and he said it more sharply every evening."
"He has been writing to me too, through every courier who comes south," Constantine said. "The same complaint. He does not enjoy depending on the Gattilusios."
"He does not enjoy depending on anyone whose flag is not ours. The Podestà least of all. He says he would rather sail short-handed in our own bottoms than have a Genoese galley as his right arm."
Constantine set his cup down. "He is not wrong."
"No."
Constantine reached for his cup and turned it in his hand. "The Gattilusios have been loyal where it counted. That is something." He set the cup down. "But we cannot live on borrowed hulls forever. The yard runs for that reason. Soon Laskaris will have more ships."
"He will be glad of them. He will still complain. But he will be glad of them."
A burst of shouting came up from the yard, and a pike-shaft cracked sharply on stone—someone had grounded one too hard. The sergeant's voice rose, then dropped. Constantine waited for it to settle before he went on.
"What of the recruiting? Your last letter said you would have numbers when you came."
Andreas reached for the packet at his elbow and untied the cord with two fingers. He pulled out a sheaf of folded sheets and a smaller bound book. He did not push them across yet.
"It is going well. Better than well. We have a pleasant problem out of a bad one."
"Out of?"
"The Macedonian villages. The Thracian ones. The country between Sofia and Edirne where the Ottomans burned everything they could not carry off. Whole families with no roof and no field. The young men have nowhere to go that pays in bread, and they come to us. They walk in sometimes in twos and threes from villages I have never heard of, with a brother already on the rolls and a name to ask after."
Constantine's hand tightened on his cup. He felt the rim against his palm and let go.
"Numbers?"
Andreas slid the top sheet across. "Seven thousand and some in training between Constantinople and Thessaloniki. The breakdown is on the second page, by depot. Aristos has another nine hundred and fifty in Mesembria, which he is working on harder than he says. We will reach twenty tagmata by spring if the pyrvelos supply holds."
Constantine drew the page toward him and turned it under the slant of light. The columns were neat. Arms, boots, pikes-ready, musket-ready, men assigned to officer training, men still in the second class. Andreas's clerks kept a tighter hand than his manner suggested.
"The pyrvelos will not be a problem," Constantine said without looking up. "Luca is already drawing for a new furnace. We will start a second line in Constantinople in spring. There is brick and water enough at the old armouries by the Lycus, and Elias will move there soon."
"Good."
He turned to the third sheet. The garrison numbers came in below the training depot count. Mesembria, Sozopolis, Philippopolis, Skopje, the Hexamilion, the Morea fortresses, the new line on the Bosporus. He ran his finger down the column and stopped at the total.
"Twenty thousand."
"With garrisons. Yes. That is on the third sheet."
"They are rising fast."
"They would rise faster if Theophilus would let them. With more silver we could turn away half of what is coming, instead of all of it."
Constantine looked up. The corner of his mouth moved. "We keep him out of his temper by not asking for more men until the books close on this year. He is less patient with my soldiers than he used to be."
"How is he?"
"Old—or he says he is. The leg gives him trouble in the damp. He asks me once a week if he can stop walking down to the yard with me. I tell him he can stop the day he stops keeping the books, and he does not like that answer."
Andreas's mouth did finally twitch. "He has not been to Constantinople yet?"
"He has not. He asks after my mother when he writes to her, but he will not get on a ship for the trip. Aside from her, the city does not pull on him. He prefers his ledgers in this room, in this light, with the same clerks at the same desks." He set the cup down. "But he will come this time. I think he goes north with you when you sail."
"With me?"
"Yes. He has city accounts to settle that no one else can sign for, and he means to see Helena while he is there."
Andreas put his head back and let out a short laugh through his nose. "Theophilus on a ship for two weeks. He will hate every plank under his feet."
"He will," Constantine said. "And you will hear it the whole way."
"I will hear it the whole way." Andreas shook his head, still smiling. "He will be over the rail. I will be over the rail. We will keep each other company."
Constantine almost laughed. "Then I pity the captain."
For a moment they sat. The sergeant's count came up through the boards again, and beyond it, faint from below, a horse went down the lane on the cobbles with shoes loud and even.
Constantine turned the wax tablet under his hand and reached for his cup once more. "Tell me about Leon. Are the Philippopolis raids still going?"
Andreas tilted his head from side to side. "Fewer. Aristos sent a tagma in over the summer when the worst of it was on the western road. They cleared two valleys, hanged a few men whom the villagers had named, and left a garrison at the crossing above Philippopolis that had not been manned since the long campaign. Leon writes that the road to Sofia is open again, and the markets in town are calmer." He paused. "What is left is on the western edge, near the Albanian line. It is sporadic. Small. Nothing that keeps me awake."
Constantine drank. "And Anatolia? Anything new?"
"Nothing you do not already have through your letters."
He drank, set the cup down, and did not raise his eyes from it for a moment. Constantine waited.
"I know your reasoning, Majesty," Andreas said. "A year without a campaign. The army needs to settle. The treasury needs to breathe. Constantinople needs its bread routes and its walls. I do not argue with it. It is the right call for this year."
"But."
"But next year is not this year. This Yakub Bey seems capable. He has held a force together where the others have not, and he has the Karamanids back on their heels. If he closes on Orhan before the spring, he gathers what is left of the Ottomans under Ali's banner. He has a state again, even if a smaller one." He turned the cup once between his fingers. "If we move in spring, with the army you will have by then, we crush him before he is whole. Orhan is no friend, but a vassal that owes us his throne is better than nothing on that shore. Help him, set him up, and let him keep a piece of the Anatolia for us."
Constantine listened without interrupting. When Andreas had finished, he turned the wax tablet face up and put one finger on the corner of it.
"I have thought about it. Thomas has been saying the same thing in his letters since before the gates of Constantinople were cold. He sees a weak Ottoman state and he wants to put a sword in it before it can stand up."
"He is not wrong on that part."
"He is not. But Orhan is a lost cause if we are honest. We cannot make him a king without putting our own men around him to keep him on his throne, and the moment we do that we are paying for an army on the Anatolian shore in addition to ours. And we will not face only the Ottomans there. The Karamanids are not waiting in Konya for us to come and embrace them. They will fight us, and we will be a long way from our supplies, and the Black Sea is not yet a Roman lake."
He paused, drank, set the cup down.
"You are right that it is coming. The Anatolian campaign is coming. Only the year is in question. And we will be readier the year after spring than we will be in the spring itself."
"So the year after."
"So the year after, perhaps. We will see what Yakub does with his winter."
Andreas nodded. He did not press it further.
Constantine reached under the wax tablet and drew out a thicker bundle of papers, tied with a single red cord. He pulled the knot loose, lifted the top sheet, and turned it so that it faced Andreas across the table.
"While we wait, we put the time to use," he said. "The winter campaign gave me too much to think about not to act on it. We reform the army. The tagma stays, but it is no longer the unit of decision. It folds into something larger."
Andreas set down his cup.
"A new unit?"
"A legion."
For a moment Andreas only looked at him. Then he reached across and slid the top sheet toward himself, set both forearms on the table, and bent his head to read.
"A legion," he said again, half to himself.
"Eight thousand men. Kept together year round. Built so that it can act on its own in the field—march, fight, supply itself, treat its wounded—or as a piece of a larger force. We start with one in spring. By next year I want a second on its way to standing up."
He moved the second sheet across, then the third. Andreas read in silence. His finger traveled down the columns the way it had over the recruit lists, but slower now.
A high command at the head, with its own treasury. An intelligence company under it. A company of artists for maps and surveys and, Constantine had written in his own hand at the margin, "for record." An engineer company. A printing-press company. Three infantry divisions, each with its own headquarters and four tagmata. A cavalry squadron, with horse support and four ippeis companies. A field artillery division, headquarters and four batteries. A support division at the back: headquarters, supply and distribution, field maintenance, medical.
Andreas turned the page over. The next sheet was the tagma itself, redrawn. Pure infantry now. Four hundred musketeers in each, screened by pikes, no horse and guns at the tagma level—the guns had moved up to the artillery division, where they could be massed.
He read it through twice. He took up his cup, found it empty, and reached for the jug himself.
"You came up with this from the campaign?" Andreas said.
"I had time to think when I came back to Glarentza. Things were calmer here, family time helped." Constantine paused. "Most of it we already do. What is new is putting it on paper as a standing structure, with a proper hierarchy, so it does not depend on the men in the room at the moment."
"I see." Andreas turned the page once more. "Has anyone else seen this?"
"George has been over it. Luca looked at the artillery side. You and I have had pieces of this conversation before, in tents and on roads. I put it together into a plan and brought you here to finish it."
Andreas almost smiled. He set the cup down and turned the page back to the head of the structure.
"Eight thousand," he said. He shook his head, but it was not refusal. "The empire has too much border and too few good commanders for the old shape to hold."
"We have the men for one. Think of it as the new shape of any campaign army from now on. The legion is the unit we march with. The tagmata serve inside it. The next campaign we run, in Anatolia or anywhere else, runs through this structure." Constantine set his hand flat on the page. "This is the future of it."