Pegae, noon
The castle had its feet in the sea, and Hızır had walked the wall often enough since the spring to know which of the old merlons the masons had patched worst. He stopped at the one that rocked under his hand. Past it the water opened out, and the Roman ships stood well off the harbor mouth where they had taken station, the two tall ones and the galleys spaced between with their oars shipped, watching the water and the rock and going nowhere. South of the rock, where the coast road came in over rising ground, the second body of Romans had come up only a few hours since and was already in the dirt. They had their camp lines pegged and the ditch begun, and forward of it the gun-pits started. He watched them throw the dirt up out of the pits and bring the timber forward on the carts.
His brother found him there. Mahmud came along the wall walk with the letter in his hand and put his back to the sea.
"They are siting the guns. Look where the pits are." Mahmud waited, and got nothing.
Hızır kept his eyes on the horizon.
"By tomorrow they will have the platforms laid, and after that we are just meat for their guns to chew," Mahmud said, and turned the letter over in his fingers. "You keep looking East."
"I am not looking for the Bey. I know where the Bey is." Hızır turned from the parapet's edge and put two fingers on the patched merlon, rocking it where the new mortar had not taken to the old stone. "I am looking at the wall. This stretch, where they did the work in spring. It will go first, and it will not go slow."
"First or last, it goes, and you know that better than I do." Mahmud waited until his brother looked at him. "So why are you measuring it like a man choosing where to put his feet?"
A gull came in over the harbor and went out again. Down on the rising ground a Roman officer rode the line of the works with a man pacing behind him, and the sound of the picks came up thin across the water, off the beat, a hundred men keeping no time with one another.
"The terms are clean," Mahmud said. "Lives, the men's property, the fort whole. He does not even make us crawl for it." He waited. "You are quiet."
"I am thinking about our duty."
"To who, Hızır? To the man who rode off and left us the bill?" Mahmud came off the parapet. "I am not dying here so you can keep faith with him. There is no glory here and there is no song. The men who would sing it are riding with him, and they have shat the name of this place out of their heads already." He flicked the letter against his palm. "We are not the army that lost Edessa. We are two brothers and a hundred half-starved men in a fort the Romans built and mean to have back."
"And after we open the gate?" Hızır turned the question over the way he turned everything, slow. "We give up the fort and live. Then what are we? Two Mihaloğlu with no fort, no men, and no Bey to go back to. Yakub will not take us, and he should not. We held nothing." He looked at the harbor. "That is not surrender. It is the end of our house."
"Then we give the Romans a reason to want us. We do what our grandfathers did." Mahmud waited until Hızır looked at him. "The first Mihal did not hand Osman his sword and wait to be fed. He gave him his god and rode at his right hand for thirty years. We are what we are because he counted right. He did not love Osman's god the morning he took it. He loved his house."
"He had somewhere to climb to," Hızır said. "The Turk was rising under him. You are asking me to take their water and unmake the one thing his bargain bought us, and call it the same coin."
"It is the same coin, turned over." Mahmud put out his hand toward the inland hills, gold and empty under the noon, where the Bey's horse had gone. "He went toward Osman because Osman was the one rising. Look out there. There is nothing in that direction now but dust off the Bey's column, running." He brought the hand back, toward the water and the ships sitting on it. "It is all down here now. He counted which way the strength ran and he ran with it. I am counting the same."
Hızır stood with his hand on the patched merlon and the picks coming up off the beat from the south, and he did not say yes, because there was nothing in him that wanted to say it. He murmured a prayer under his breath. He took his hand off the stone.
"Send the cloth down. Open the gate." He looked at the harbor, the ships that had not moved since dawn. "And tell their priest there are men here who will go to his water. Put my name at the top of it." He went down off the wall before his brother could answer, and did not trust his face to the stair behind him.
Pegae, the Roman camp, after dark
Constantine with the first legion came into the camp south of the castle one hour after dark. The lines were lit and quiet. Men sat at their fires with their boots off, and out past the harbor mouth the fleet's lanterns rode at anchor in a long slow string.
Aristos met him at the edge of the camp on foot.
"It surrendered, Majesty. At noon. The castle, the harbor, the stores, a hundred men and change." He could not keep all of it flat. "We never opened a gun. They watched us start the pits and the fleet come up, and they sent the cloth down before we had a platform laid."
Constantine got down stiffly, and the first thing in him was not the fort. "You took no fight on the road? Nothing came down on you from the hills?"
"Nothing, Majesty. The road was empty the whole way up."
"Good." He stood a moment with his hand on the saddle, letting that be true. The march had cost the men a night's legs against a fear that never came down on them, and he would take that over the other thing. Past Aristos the castle stood black on its rock, the harbor under it, the hills behind it dark and giving nothing back.
Inside the tent on the rise the lamps were lit and the others were already there, Andreas with his harness still on, George at the camp table, Thomas with a cup. They had the look of men whose day had gone better than the morning promised.
"Who held it for the Turk?" George asked.
Aristos gave the names. "Two brothers. Mihaloğlu. Hızır is the elder and held the command. The family is an old raiding name out of Rumelia, gone down in the world. They were at Edessa, I am told, and lost what they had there." He set a captured roll on the table. Constantine drew it toward him. It was a stores tally in a Turkish hand he could not read, the figures down one margin he could, short numbers, a fort that had not been holding much.
"The two brothers and their men want to take service with us," Aristos said. "Some of my captains want them hanged by morning. Some of the men in the ranks lost people to that name. I have them under guard, apart from each other, until you decide."
"Good," Constantine said. "That was the right call."
"They also want to be baptised," Aristos said.
George looked up from his leaf. Thomas had the cup at his mouth, and he choked on the wine and set it down with a knock that slopped some over his hand.
"The surrender was sense," Andreas said. "That much I will take, and even the baptism with it. Enlisted is another matter, and I would not put weight on it yet."
"Baptised, enlisted, whatever keeps them fed," Thomas said. He laughed, short, not pleasantly. "Of course they asked. They will say anything and swear to anything to keep their necks. Believe it if you want. I do not."
"I do not need to believe a word of it." Constantine had not moved from the captured roll. He turned it a quarter so the figures sat square to him. "Whether the man means it is a question for his priest. What it is worth to me is a different question, and I can answer that one."
"It is worth a turncoat and the trouble he brings," Thomas said.
"It is worth a page." Constantine looked up. "Mihaloğlu. An old raiding name, men on both sides of the water know it. And it comes to be baptised of its own accord, at the first Roman fort to fall in Asia, with no gun fired to make it. Filelfo will have that in the next sheet before the ink on the surrender is dry, and it will be heard even in Bursa and in every garrison town in Anatolia." He let it sit. "I have spent two years telling the people under the Turk there is something to come back to. Here is a Muslim house I do not even have to persuade. I am not going to hang it off a mole to please the men who lost cousins to it."
"Those men will not love you for it, and they will have every right," Thomas said. "They will do it because you say so. They will not thank you."
"They will not." Constantine straightened off the table. "And they will see the name they have feared their whole lives standing in the water with its head bowed, taking what we give it, in front of everyone."
"If you mean it to be seen, do it in daylight where the camp can see it. Not a corner at dusk with a priest and four witnesses," Andreas said.
"Yes. Daylight." Constantine turned to Aristos. "Tomorrow, mid-morning, when the light is up. The standards out, the priest and the monks at the water, the brothers and any of their men who will go. In the open, by the river, where the camp can watch if it wants to." A breath. "The river, not the harbor. I want them in running water, and I want it remembered."
"So this is going to be another of your shows," Thomas said. He turned the cup once on the table, slow. "Good. Let them see it. This is what Ieros Skopos was for."
"Yes exactly." Constantine looked at him, and something in it was almost easy.
"There is another report, Majesty." Aristos's voice changed under it. "The first scout reports came in at dusk. The horse that worried you at Biga. It went east, in good order, baggage and all. Ten thousand at the least, on the sea road toward the interior."
"That is why we met nothing on the road tonight. There was nothing to meet." Constantine looked at the dark beyond the tent flap, toward the horizon where the army he had marched hastily to fight had walked off whole. "He was never coming for Aristos. He was never coming for me."
Andreas had not moved. "Scorched earth, it seems," he said, and did not look pleased to have called it. "No point, really, when we have the fleet so close to support us."
The mouth of the Granicus, next morning
The river came down through its willows and ran out shallow over a gravel bar where it met the sea. Constantine watched from the low rise with Thomas beside him and the command a little back. Word had gone round the camp, and the men had come down to the bank on their own, a long loose crowd of them strung above the gravel with their breakfast still in their hands. A priest and two monks of the campaign stood at the edge of the water, their stoles bright against the gray of it.
The men went into the river in their shirts. There were near forty of them, the two brothers first and the rest of the garrison behind, walking down the bar into water that came up cold around their knees and then their waists. The priest spoke the words and they did not carry far.
One of them balked. A young one, near the end of the line, stood to his chest in the water with his arms wrapped round himself and would not go down, until the elder brother, already wet to the hair, put a hand on his shoulder and said something low in Turkish, and the boy let himself be taken under. He came up gasping and crossing himself the wrong way and then the right way, watching the others to learn it. The willows hung over the far bank. The far bank was empty.
"I would have had their heads on the mole," Thomas said. He watched the men come up out of the river one by one and stand dripping on the bar in the sun. "I can see the sense of it. Does not mean it sits well to watch."
"It is not meant to sit well." Constantine kept his eyes on the water. "If it sat well we would only be taking our revenge, and revenge is cheap and it stays bought for about a season. I am trying to buy something that holds." He looked once more at the river going by, the same river a man could wade in most places, the one he had told Andreas they would have no need to fight on. There was no satrapal army drawn up on the far bank. There were willows and gravel and forty wet men taking a new god to keep an old name, and the water ran out past them to the sea the fleet was sitting in. Somewhere east of all of it, the army he had not caught was a day further inland than it had been at dawn, and getting further while he stood here watching men be washed.
He turned his horse for the camp and the work of the guns. "Bursa," he said, to no one in particular, and rode down off the rise.