Candia, December 1439
The workshop door stood open to the lane. Symeonakis went in. The place smelled of hot glue and chalk, and under that, sour egg. Panels stood in racks along the wall, some bare white, some laid with red bole, two already gilded.
At the long bench by the window the apprentice was working a soot bag over a pricked drawing, pinned face down on a fresh panel, tapping his way along the lines. He saw him and straightened.
"Father Symeonakis."
"Andreas, you have grown," Symeonakis said. "I would have passed you in the street. But the face is your father's, there is no missing it."
"So everyone says, Father."
"Greet him from me." He let the boy take his cloak.
Akotantos was already crossing from the back of the shop, wiping his hands on a cloth that had given up being any color at all.
"Two years," the painter said. "Maybe even more. You have not been up this lane in two years."
"You exaggerate, it is merely eighteen months." They clasped hands.
"You have spread, Angele. The shop, I mean. Half of this was a wool store."
"The wool man died and his sons quarreled, God rest him, and I got the wall knocked through for the price of settling the quarrel." He said it easily, pleased, and threw the cloth over his shoulder. "Sit. The boy will bring wine. You did not climb up here to admire my racks."
"Partly I did." Symeonakis took the stool by the bench, where the boy had gone back to his tapping. "Partly the services. The second night wants your right choir at Saint Titus after the reading, not before. The Latins have moved their own office an hour and I would rather our sound did not arrive in the middle of theirs."
"Wiser for everyone." Akotantos took the other stool. "Done. What else."
"A commission. A Baptism, for my church. And it must stand by Theophany, which I am aware is three weeks off, and I am aware of the face you are about to make."
The face arrived anyway, and his eyes were already moving along the racks. "I've a panel sized from the summer. Cypress, dry as a bone. It'll take gold by Sunday if the boy keeps the fire even." He looked back. "It can be done. But it will not be large."
"It does not need to be large. It needs to be there when the water is blessed."
"Then it will be there." Akotantos stretched his legs out and laughed once at himself. "A Baptism in three weeks. And the winter already full. I'm doing a panel for the new Duca as well, for his chapel. A Dandolo, come out from Venice in the autumn."
"I know him. He received the clergy when he landed."
The painter slid a sized panel a hand's width along the rack, squaring it with its neighbors, and said nothing.
"Which saint does he want?"
"He has not chosen one. His steward came twice and settled the frame and the gold and everything except the saint." A shrug. "The gold they always settle first."
The wine came, and for a while the talk was small. The price of lapis. A church in Sitia that wanted a whole screen and would not pay for half of one. The boy's progress, praised in the third person while the boy pretended to hear none of it. Then, while Akotantos was refilling the cups, Symeonakis's eye went along the litter of the long table and found, under a sheaf of sketches, the corner of a printed leaf, soft and grey at the fold.
"I did not know you read the Kyrix."
Akotantos slid a sketch across, without hurry, and the corner went under.
"Occasionally," he said. "I keep it for the drawing, mostly. The little marks they print by the notices." And then, having covered it, he seemed to hear himself, and he drew the sheet back out from under the sketches and opened it on the table between them, at the second side, below the fold. "There. Look at the soldier."
Symeonakis looked. A man cut in black, few strokes, the spear on the shoulder, above the terms of the legion's oath.
"Six strokes," Akotantos said. "Spear, shoulder, and the line of the back, and whoever cut him knew that a seventh would have spoiled him." He tapped the margin, not the figure, craftsman's care even here. "The boy is doing the same work at that bench. He pricks a Virgin through and pounces her, and she comes out the same fifty times over, in Sitia and in Pediada and wherever the panel goes. A mark made to repeat. The man who cut this soldier does the same work, only with a knife and a block of wood."
"I read it too," Symeonakis said. "Bursa was a good month's reading. God has been kind to the Romans this year."
"So it was," the painter said. He folded the leaf along its old crease and laid it back on the table, and laid the sketches over it, this time without haste. "Kind, yes."
Symeonakis drank. Down the lane a mule went by under charcoal, the driver's stick tapping slow on the stones.
"Andrea," Akotantos said. "Go down for the eggs before the market shuts. Take the basket, and do not run with them this time." The boy went, and left the door open behind him, and the cold came up the lane into the room.
"They write from Italy," Symeonakis said, "that the fathers sit in Florence. Whatever they agree there will be read out in this town from two pulpits."
Akotantos looked at the panel racks for a moment. When he spoke it was slowly, and there was no shortening in his speech at all now.
"Your Baptism panel, Father. How do you want it painted. The old way, or the new way the Latins like."
Symeonakis held his eyes. "The old way."
"Then it will be ready by the eve of the feast." Akotantos rose and took the sized cypress panel out of the rack and stood it on the bench in the light, and looked at it the way he would look at any day's work.
Symeonakis rose too, and took his cloak from the peg himself. At the door he paused with the latch under his hand.
"Walk me to the corner. There is a small matter."
Akotantos took his own cloak down. They stepped out together, and the lane ran down toward the harbor, the water showing bright at the end of it.
The rehearsal was called for the third hour of the night, at the metochion of Saint Catherine, and they came as they had agreed to come, one at a time, not close together.
Symeonakis was there before any of them, and had the candles lit and the benches in order when the first knock came. Savios, with the books. Kakos and Mylaios together from the school, which could not be helped, since they walked home together every night of their lives and anything else would have been noticed. Neophytos came up from the Amari road with the mud still on his hem, blessed the room in a voice that filled it, and took the seat at the head of the table. No one had said the table had a head.
Akotantos came last. He had his psalter under his arm and he had come, and that was his answer, and Symeonakis, watching him take the bench by the wall, asked him nothing.
The serving brother brought the wine and the small loaves, set them down, and drew the door shut behind him. The brazier ticked in the corner. One shutter stood a hand's breadth open on the harbor side for the smoke, and the cold came through it in a thin blade that the candles bent away from.
Neophytos looked down the table at the new man.
"I know your hand," he said. "The Michael icon over our south door. The abbot crosses himself at it every morning."
Akotantos inclined his head, and after a moment they let him be.
It was Kakos who began first. "If the emperor can take the coast in one summer, Smyrna to the straits, when we were told our whole lives it could not be done, then why not this island."
"The island is ready," Mylaios said. "Men come to my door that I have not seen at a service in ten years, asking if the news is true. Ieros Skopos is in every mouth."
"The Amari houses are full on Sundays," Neophytos said, "as they have not been full in my lifetime. Men stand in the yard who cannot get inside the church. That is not my doing. I did not fill them. Bursa filled them."
"Then the question stands where it stood," Kakos said. "Do we speak, or do we sit under strangers another two hundred years and light candles about it. I say a man goes with the first sailing. To Glarentza, to master Plethon. He has the emperor's ear."
"To Plethon..." Neophytos set his cup down. "We know what Glarentza answers. Prepare, and wait. We have prepared. How long is a man to wait once he is ready. Romans may ask their emperor for a hearing. That is all it is. A delegation, to the City, in the spring. Letters are read by secretaries. Faces are read by emperors."
"And faces are seen by others besides the emperor," Savios said. He had not raised his voice all evening. "The Serenissima keeps ears in the City. A delegation cannot be kept quiet, and whatever it asks, Venice will hear the asking. Wait until the council at Florence rises. Then we will at least know which world we are asking in."
"The council." Neophytos said the word the way a man sets down something sour. "The council is Greeks going to Italy to be instructed. What we are speaking of is going to the Roman emperor, in the Roman city, to say that this island is full of Romans. If that sentence must wait upon Latin bishops, then nothing we say in this room will ever be said anywhere else."
Symeonakis had said nothing yet. He had an instruction of his own, two years old, and every man at this table would have known the hand at a glance. It said to watch, to keep the island quiet, and to write to the master what he saw. That was not for this table. What he had instead was the calendar.
"The sea is closed," he said.
The table turned to him.
"Nothing can sail before March, my friends. Not to the City, not to Glarentza. We can decide this again at Candlemas, with two more months of news in hand."
No one answered. Neophytos pushed his cup away from him and let it stand. Symeonakis looked at the shutter.
"Now let us rehearse."
The books went round. Candles were moved. For a moment the room was only men finding their pages, and then Akotantos, who had not spoken one word the whole evening, stood, and gave the tone, and it went out of him round and sure as a bell, and the room found it together on the second breath.
Christ is born; glorify Him.
They took the katavasia through twice, and the second time the parts sat into their places, and the sound went up through the beams and out through the shutter, over the roofs.
In the quiet after it, Neophytos crossed himself. "Ieros Skopos," he said, low. Around the table they answered him, low as well.
They went down afterward one at a time, as they had come, with the space of a psalm between them, and Symeonakis went last, and stood at the gate in the cold with the town dropping away black below him. At the foot of it the harbor lay still inside the mole, the masts bare, the water flat and shut, and nothing on it would move before March.
Author note:
Symeonakis was the actual protopapas (chief priest Venice allowed the Greeks) of Candia in this period, a scholar with serious manuscript connections, and in our timeline, the main link of Plethon's network on the island. Angelos Akotantos is probably the most important Greek icon painter of the 15th century, working in Candia right now, for both Greek and Latin patrons. The kid is Andreas Ritzos, his real apprentice, who grows up to be a master himself.