Parion, late August 1439
The village stood on a low headland with a stone mole that the sea had been working on for longer than the houses behind it, and Nestor brought the boat in under the lee of it with the Pelagios anchored a cable out and the rest of the squadron strung along the coast to the east, hull-down, working toward Pegae. He had his orders from Laskaris in four sentences: go ashore, find who spoke for the place, learn what they knew, come back before the evening watch.
There was a crowd on the mole before the boat touched. A dozen men and as many children and a few women hanging back by the net-poles, and an old priest at the front of them in a faded cassock with a staff he did not seem to need for walking. When the boat's bow ground on the shingle the priest came down to the waterline himself, and Nestor saw that he had a paper pinned to the breast of the cassock, much folded and gone soft at the creases, with a printed eagle on it and a line of letters under the eagle that Nestor could read from six feet away because he had seen the same sheet pasted on walls from Crete to the Horn. Ieros Skopos.
"Welcome," the priest said. "Welcome, and God be praised, who let me live to see this day." He crossed himself, his hand brushing the folded paper on his breast.
"Thank you, Father." Nestor stepped over the gunwale into the shallows and came up the shingle with his boots wet, the way the Emperor had come ashore three days before, though he did not think of it that way until later. "Captain Gregoras, of the Emperor's fleet. Who speaks for Parion?"
"I do, in the things of God. Father Kosmas." He turned and put a hand on the shoulder of a broad old man beside him. "Theodoros keeps the harbor, what the Lord leaves us of it. And Demetrios there the fields, when the Lord sees fit to give us fields worth the name." A dry sound that was almost a laugh. "He has not seen fit this year. We are being tried."
They took him up off the mole and into the shade of a fig tree by the first house, and a woman brought a clay cup of water and then, after a word from the priest, a second cup with a little wine in it. Nestor drank the water and left the wine, and saw the priest note that he had left it, and approve.
"You have had a hard year," Nestor said.
"We have had many hard years, Captain. This last month was the worst of them." Theodoros, the harbor man, lowered himself onto an upturned boat with the care of a man whose knees had opinions. "They came through in the spring, and the spring before, taking the tax. This summer they came and took it twice. And a month past they came a third time and took what was not tax." He spread his hands. "Grain. The salt fish we had put by. Two of the better boats, for the carrying. They left us the nets, God be thanked, because you cannot eat a net but you can fish with one."
"You'll not be stripped again," Nestor said. "The Emperor will protect you."
He let it sit a moment. The priest crossed himself.
"But Pegae is our concern now," Nestor went on. "You're near enough to see its boats. What goes in and out of it?"
"There has been more coming and going than there used to be," the priest said. "Since around the Dormition. Carts on the inland road, more than before. And boats too, though by God's mercy I haven't seen a Turk on the water this last week."
"How many men in the fortress?"
"I don't know, Captain. More than last spring, the Lord help us all."
"And ships? Do they have any warships there?"
"They kept a few, once. We haven't seen them about for months."
"And you?" he said. "No garrison here?"
"We are too small to garrison and too poor to revolt." The priest's mouth bent. "And there is a reason they have never burned us, when they burned Artake and the two villages up the shore in the bad years. The governor's wife was born in this village. Taken north when she was a girl, thirty years gone, and married to a Turk, and she has remembered where she came from. Twice she has turned the worst of it away from us. A Christian woman in a Turk's house, doing what she can." He crossed himself. "God will know how to weigh it."
Nestor looked at the village behind the old men — the dozen houses, the half-empty drying racks, the children who had crept close to look at his sword and his boots and the gold at his collar. He said a little more than he had been sent to say, because the priest had kept the bitterness out of his voice, and that was harder to answer than bitterness would have been.
"The Emperor is on this shore, Father, with his mighty legions. He has crossed, and he means to stay, the towns of this coast under Roman law again." He paused. "There were fishing villages here that paid their tithe to the City and sold their fish in its markets, and were rich enough, in my grandfather's time. The Emperor means them to be so again. I cannot give you back this year's grain, but the men who took it will not be taking it next year."
The priest looked at him for a moment.
"That is a great deal to promise for a fishing village, Captain."
"It is the Emperor's promise, Father, not mine. I only carry it ashore."
Theodoros got to his feet. He crossed himself, slowly, and said, "Ieros Skopos."
Nestor left them what he could spare from the Pelagios's own stores, and went back down to the boat with the children following to the waterline. As the boat pulled out he looked back once. Father Kosmas had not moved. He stood at the head of the mole with the folded eagle on his breast and his staff planted, watching them go, a small dark figure against the pale stone.
The road to Biga
Constantine rode at the head of the column an hour past noon, with Andreas on his left hand and the standard a length behind, and the dust of ten thousand men and their animals going up behind that in a long brown smear.
The road had left the sea two days before. It ran now through low country going gold with the late summer, stubble where the grain had been cut and carried, and a line of willows ahead that the road had been bending toward all morning. By the seventh hour they were on it: a river off to the right of the road, slow and shallow between soft banks, no wider than a good stone's throw, sliding south through the willows toward the sea they had left.
"The Granicus," Constantine said.
Andreas looked at the river without much interest.
Constantine watched it slide along between its willows, unimpressive, a river a man could wade in most places. "Alexander fought his first battle in Asia on this river. The first real one. He crossed it against the whole Persian satrapal army drawn up on the far bank, cavalry on the heights, and they nearly had him in the first rush: a Persian had a sword raised over his bare head and Cleitus took the man's arm off at the shoulder. And then it broke, and after that the whole of Asia was open in front of him." He looked at the water again. "Somewhere along here."
"Mm." Andreas considered the river with the eye of a man pricing a thing he had no intention of buying. "Bad ground for it. The bank's soft and the bottom's worse. I'd not want to put horse across it under fire." He turned his head and looked at the empty far bank, the willows, the gold stubble running up to a line of low hills, nothing on them. "Well. We'll not have a Granicus of our own to fight. There's no satrap drawn up over there waiting for us."
Constantine let it go a little way down the road before he spoke again.
"You are easy about Aristos at Pegae."
"I am. Should I not be?"
"I find I am less easy about it than I was over the map." Constantine kept his eyes on the road. "It seemed a clean thing in the tent, the two of them apart, each to his own work. Out here, with the second legion a day's march off where I cannot see it, I keep turning it over."
"He is not alone. He is a day's hard march from us, and we are a day's hard march from him, which was the whole of the arrangement." Andreas turned in the saddle to look at him. "Two fists that can each stand a day alone and come to the other inside one. You were sure enough of it over the map."
"Over the map." Constantine kept his eyes on the road ahead. "It is a different thing seeing the country open up around you and your two halves a day apart in it, and not knowing what is in the part you cannot see."
"It is always a different thing on the ground than on the map. That is why you bring men who have stood on the ground." Andreas turned his head and spat into the stubble at the roadside. "The plan is sound. Both places fall faster for our being apart. Pull the legions back together every time your stomach turns over and you'll take twice as long at everything and the men will learn the Emperor jumps at shadows. Hold to it. It is a good plan. I have worked with worse."
Biga, afternoon
Biga was not a fortress and had not pretended to be one. It sat in the elbow of the river where the inland road met the road up to the coast, an open market town of mud-brick and timber with a wooden palisade thrown around the heart of it that would not have held a determined goat, much less a legion, and the gates of that palisade stood open because there was no one left in the town to shut them. The administration had gone. The richer houses were shuttered. A few of the poorer people had stayed, there was woodsmoke from somewhere near the river, but the town had emptied itself ahead of the army the way water goes out of a cracked jar.
"An open town and a river and the road junction," Andreas said, and looked at the sorry palisade with something close to approval. "Say what you like about the Turk, he does not waste stone on walls. Same as the northern campaign." He was already turning to the work of it, his eye going over the ground east of the town where it rose a little and the river covered one flank. "Camp on the rise. River on the right, the town at our backs for the stores. Get the ditch started before dark on the open faces. I want—"
He gave it out in the short flat phrases of a man who had laid out a hundred camps, and the order went back down the column, and the first legion began to come off the march and turn into the thing it became when it stopped being a column: parties told off for the ditch, the wagons swinging into the town to unload in the empty houses, an officer riding the line of the rise with a sergeant pacing the frontage behind him, the standards going up where the cohorts would form. The dust began to settle. Men got their helmets off and their tools out. Someone, somewhere down the line, started the particular cheerful obscene complaining that meant soldiers had been told to dig.
Constantine had got down off his horse and was standing at the top of the rise with a cup of the river water gone warm in his hand, watching the camp draw itself out of the disorder of arrival, when the scouts came in from the northeast.
"Majesty. Horse. A great body of horse, northeast, beyond the second line of hills." He pulled air. "Coming down toward the Pegae road. Thousands. We could not count them true, they kept the ridges, but thousands, Majesty, not a raiding party. Turkish horse, moving with a baggage, moving like men with somewhere to be."
"Which road," he said. "Toward us, or toward the coast."
"Between, Majesty. They could come down on this road, or hold north and strike the coast road behind the second legion. From where they sit they could take either. We could not tell which, and I did not wait to learn it."
"You did well." Constantine looked northeast, where somewhere past the hills thousands of horse were choosing a road.
"It is most likely a screen," Andreas said. "A strong one, to make us do just this — pull in, abandon the junction and the river and a half-built camp, all on the word of one patrol that lost them in the hills. If they are not on the Pegae road at all, we have thrown the position away for nothing, and taught them they can move us about the country whenever they show us a dust cloud." He set his jaw. "Send the horse back out. Confirm it before we tear down a camp we have half-built."
It was good sense. It was the plan, the same plan, the sound one he had drawn on the map and held to all the long gold afternoon down the road. Two fists, each able to stand a day alone. Send and learn. Do not flinch at the first open feeling in the stomach.
Constantine stood with the warm cup set down on its stone and the half-dug ditch behind him and the unseen horse on the hills in front. Everything he had argued for in the tent was in the balance — the two legions, the parallel roads, the sieges done faster, the whole of how he meant Rome to fight from now on. Against it stood one old certainty he could not argue down: an army with its fists apart, in front of a strength it could not see, had already given something away.
"No," he said. "Strike it."
Andreas went still. "Majesty—"
"Strike the camp. We march now, while the light holds." Constantine turned and looked at him. "Pegae is a few hours' march north, less if we push it. We will be under its walls by the time the second legion has its fires lit." He let that sit. "Two tagmata stay here with the siege guns. Let them hold the town and the junction and finish the ditch you wanted. The rest of us go light, and we go now."
"Majesty, if it is a screen—"
"If it is a screen, I will have marched the men for nothing and looked the fool, and I will wear that. But I will not stand here digging on a river while a force I cannot count chooses which of my legions to strike first."
Author note:
When Murad I took the coastal Biga (the old Pegae/Karabiga) in 1365, he settled Turks there and turned its churches into mosques. Soon after the conquest a night raid burned and devastated the town so completely that the survivors relocated inland, and that ruined coastal site is the origin of the name Pegae- Karabiga, "Dark Biga." The inland town that grew up from those survivors became the new Biga, which the Ottomans used as the regional administrative center.
The inland town had no real fortifications. The strong walls and the seaward castle stayed where they had always been, out on the coast at Pegae.
So the seat of government is the open town down the river, and the prize with the walls is by the sea.
Parion was a real Greek fishing village of the period.