Strait of Dardanelles, late August 1439
The shore came up slow, and Constantine watched it come. A long pale beach under low hills, the morning sun not yet over them, the water between the boat and the sand flat and bright and almost without a wave to it. Two tagmata stood formed up already on the strand, the ones that had gone over at dawn to make the beach safe, and behind them the hills were empty. No horse on the ridgelines. No smoke.
The standard-bearer held it upright in the bow, the pole socketed against his boot, the two-headed eagle hanging black and gold and dead still in the windless air. He was young, and he had gripped the pole the whole crossing as though it might be taken from him, and he had not said a word.
"You'll want it dry above the line," George said beside him, watching the beach. "The sand near the water won't hold it."
"I know where it goes."
"I know you do." A pause. "Filelfo's cut is already carved. The eagle and the shore. In the steps of Alexander the Great." George let that sit a moment with a smile. "He only needs the details of the day, and I'll send him the day."
"So the eagle's ashore whether I am or not." Constantine smiled back. "He'd have carved it whether I planted anything or stood on the deck and waved."
The boat grounded with a long grinding push. Constantine took the standard from the young man's hands and went over the side before the keel had fully bitten.
The water took him to the knees, cold under the warm air, and the bottom was firm sand that did not pull. He waded out of it with the pole in both hands and came up onto the beach with his boots full and the eagle riding over his shoulder, and that was the moment, he knew, that Filelfo's block was carved for and the City would read about in a fortnight: the Emperor coming up out of the sea onto the Asian shore. He felt the theater of it and did not mind it. A man could mean a thing and stage it both at once.
He walked up past the tide line to where the sand went dry and packed, and set the spike of the standard against it, and drove it down.
It did not take. The point skidded and the pole jarred in his hands. He lifted it and set it again, harder, both arms behind it this time, and felt it bite and go in and hold. He worked it once to be sure, and let go, and the standard stood on its own with the eagle hanging over it.
"Ieros Skopos," he said loudly.
The nearest rank replied first, and the rank behind took it, and then the whole of the two tagmata had it, and the word went down the beach and rolled back, and the muskets came up off their shoulders and the spear-points with them, the steel catching the sun that had just cleared the hills so that the whole line flashed at once. He stood by the standard and let it run.
Andreas came down the sand while it was still going on, unhurried. He stopped before the standard, looked at it set in the ground, and gave Constantine the short nod he usually gave.
"Beach is ours," he said. "Has been since the fourth hour. The scouts are out — three parties, west along the water and two inland to the first ridges. Nothing on the roads yet but a goatherd who ran." A dry flick at the corner of his mouth. "We let him run. He'll tell it better than we could."
"No one came down to meet us."
"No one will, on this stretch." Andreas turned and looked up the empty beach, north and east, the way the campaign would go. "Eighty years since a Roman army stood on this side of the water with the standard up and meant to keep it there. Eighty years." He said it flat, and then stopped looking at the beach and looked at the standard instead. "They had it from us a piece at a time. We'll have it back the same way. Starting here."
He did not wait for an answer and went back up the sand to where his officers were waiting with the questions that did not need the Emperor in them.
Constantine stayed by the standard a moment longer. Out on the bright water the fleet was still coming: the round-ships heavy and low with the rest of the army, the galleys working between them and the shore, boats already pulling in with the next wave, oars catching and throwing the light. They would be landing men until dark and into tomorrow. The eagle hung still above his head, and behind him the shouting had fallen off into the ordinary noise of an army getting itself ashore.
The tent had been pitched on the rise above the beach where the ground was dry, and by noon the sun had made it close inside despite the open flaps. A trestle held the map weighted at its corners with whatever had come to hand: a dagger, two stones off the strand, a cup that Andreas kept moving when he wanted to point at what was under it.
Constantine stood over it with the three of them. Biga, two and a half days up the coast road, slow with the guns; the road itself drawn as a thin line that hugged the water and then bent inland where the hills came down. Beyond Biga the country opened toward the gulf and, further still, Bursa — ten days off at the least, with Biga to reduce before it and, somewhere between, the open battle the Ottomans would give them if Yakub chose to come out and meet them in the field. No one had put a finger on Bursa yet. There was no use pointing at a thing that far down a road not yet walked.
"The road holds the coast as far as here." Aristos set his thumb where the line bent away from the sea. "After that it climbs. Not badly — carts will take it — but it leaves the water, and the fleet can't follow us past the turn."
"Past that we're on our own," Andreas said. "No guns from the sea, no stores over the side. What's in the wagons is what we have, and what's in the wagons is what I packed for, so that's no surprise to me." He moved the cup off the bend. "It's a short road to Biga. If the thing drags and we want more up from the coast, we hold the road back to the water and run wagons along it. A day's march. I've held longer roads than that with less."
The flap moved and an officer came in, dust to the knees, and waited the half-breath of a man deciding whether his news was worth interrupting for and deciding it was.
"From the south, Majesty. Lampsacus is taken." He had the report half by memory. "The Prince's tagma took the port. There was no fight in it, the garrison was a dozen men and a customs house, and they ran. Admiral Laskaris has the harbor. The Prince sends word the mole will take the heavy ships by tomorrow, and he'll start the cannon ashore as soon as they're alongside."
Constantine kept his face still, but something in him eased that he had not let himself feel tighten. The large guns were crucial to the campaign. A field army he could land on any beach with a spring of fresh water; the new large siege pieces needed a stone quay under them or they stayed in the holds, and there was no stone quay on an open strand. Lampsacus was a poor little port and they had taken it for its mole and nothing else.
"So, no fight at all?" he said.
"None worth the name, Majesty. The Prince's words were that it was hardly worth the rowing."
"That sounds like him." George was already turning it into the next thing. "If the guns are ashore tomorrow and brought up the coast by the day after, we lose nothing. We are where we said we would be, on the day we said it." He looked up from the map. "We're on schedule."
"We're on schedule," Constantine agreed. He let it sit a moment, because it was worth a moment — the first army over the water in eighty years, and not a man lost to anything but the heat. Then he put it down, because a schedule kept was a thing to use, not to admire.
"And the sea behind us?"
Andreas turned a hand over. "Quiet, as far as we can see it ourselves. But we don't see far. The strait is ours while the fleet sits in it. South is the question, and south is the Gattilusios' to answer." He glanced at George. "We've had nothing from Mytilene yet."
"We wouldn't, this soon," George said. "I'd expect their report in one or two days, not before. Until it comes we treat the Aegean as we have, and Laskaris keeps the strait locked."
"He does." Constantine had wanted the report in hand before he was easy about the southern water, and he was not going to get it today, and there was no sense pretending the army would sit on a beach until a Genoese galley caught up with it. "We don't wait on it to move up the coast. We wait on it before the fleet commits anywhere south of the strait. Make that the order to Laskaris — he holds the strait and the crossing, and he sends nothing into the Aegean until Mytilene has told him what's in it."
George wrote it down.
Constantine looked at the map a last time, the coast road, the bend where it left the water. "Then this is the day. We camp here tonight and let the rest of the army come ashore. The guns land at Lampsacus and come up the coast. Tomorrow the fleet works north along the shore as we march, and we keep the water on our left hand the whole way to Biga." He set the cup back over the bend in the road, where the turn inland was. "We decide the rest of it there, when we can see the country and the fleet can tell us what it found. One thing at a time, and the first thing is to get off this beach as one army."
"And when do we split the legions?" Aristos asked, too quickly, and knew it, because Andreas's mouth did something at the corner.
"Not on the coast road. There's one road and the fleet beside it." Constantine moved the cup up past the bend. "Past the turn, when we're inland and the country opens, the roads open with it. Then we split — and each of you carries everything you need to stand a day alone if it comes to it. If they offer us battle in the field, we join again."
"I doubt they will." Andreas said it without looking up from the map.
Aristos nodded slowly, looking at the map, fitting his green legion into it.
After that it turned to the smaller things, which were not small. How much powder was ashore and how much still in the holds, and what the damp of the crossing might have done to it; how many rounds each gun would have at Biga; the order the wagons would take on a road that allowed two abreast and no more. George filled a second leaf with it. It went on past the heat of the afternoon, the way such talk did, until there was nothing left that could be settled standing over a map.
Then it broke up. Aristos went to his counting, George to put the orders into clean copy for the couriers, Andreas to inspect the lines for the night's camp.
Constantine ducked out under the flap into the long gold light. The heat had gone off the day and the wind had come up the way it did toward evening, and below him the beach was still working. The fleet stood off the shore as it had at noon, and the boats still came, full of men, pulling in and grounding and pulling out empty, the next tagma forming up on the sand as the last marched off it. The eagle stood where he had set it that morning, the standard small at this distance against all that movement, and the army came ashore under it through the failing light and would go on coming after the light was gone.
Author note:
The Anatolian campaign has started! A few will ask why the army crosses from Gallipoli instead of just rowing over from Constantinople. Two reasons, one in-world and one mine.
In-world: Gallipoli is where the fleet's main base is and was historically the crossing point, so it's a natural place to concentrate and launch, you stage a major crossing at your best naval base.
My reason: it's the Hellespont. It's where Alexander crossed! I wasn't going to pass that up.
The complete campaign is up on Patreon: fifteen chapters ahead, with detailed campaign maps. If you've been waiting for the right moment to jump in, this is the one. The entire arc is waiting, aftermath and all.