‘Do you know where you are?’ Prince Francesco asked.
‘Asia?’ I asked.
I glanced at Nerio, who had the best education among my friends. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Somewhere with cats,’ he said.
Fiore shook his head.
Peter Albin looked around as if he was in Heaven. ‘It is an ancient temple,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ the prince replied, ‘but whose temple?’
His son stood there, insufferably smug as all young men can be.
Nerio guessed, ‘Apollo.’
Fiore crossed his arms. ‘Zeus?’ he muttered. ‘Jupiter?’
Prince Francesco shook his head.
‘Mars?’ Peter Albin asked. ‘Ares?’
Young Francesco laughed. ‘Even the Greeks seldom built temples to the god of war,’ he said. ‘Who worships war?
Prince Francesco looked at us all triumphantly. ‘This was the tomb and hero-place of Achilles,’ he said. ‘Achilles and his lover-mentor, Patrokles.’
‘Jesu!’ Peter Albin said. ‘We’re at Troy, then!’
We all smiled at his enthusiasm, which was infectious. Prince Francesco nodded. ‘You landed on the beach where the Greeks beached their ships, and the local Greek bishop told me that this was the tomb of Achilles, and that mound there, just at the edge of sight, is the remains of Priam’s Troy.’
The dozen of us spent the day climbing over the ruins. I still have a gold bead that I plucked from the ground. Marc-Antonio found a bronze arrow point, and then everyone wanted one and the hunt was on. I thought Peter Albin might knock Marc-Antonio down for his find, but he found a small bronze lion instead, something that we all agreed might have been a shield decoration.
We ate our food on the wind-blown beach, and handed our ponies back to the locals, who ate with us, and proved to be the local bishop and some of his people. He spoke, in Greek, about the siege of Troy. He recited a piece of poetry, and Sir Giannis translated.
‘This is Homer,’ Giannis said at one point.
I had heard of Homer – indeed, Dante mentions him, and Abelard – but I had never read any. It was odd and beautiful to sit on a beach with my friends as the sun set over Europe, hearing the words of a bard from over a thousand years before our Saviour walked in the Holy Land – an event that seems ancient enough to most of us – and yet the story that Giannis translated was as modern, as good, as the very best chivalric chansons of my youth.
When the bishop left us, we made a fire and camped on the open beach, drinking wine.
‘What did you think of my bishop?’ the prince asked.
‘I liked him very much,’ Giannis said. ‘He was an honourable man. And very educated.’
Peter Albin’s eyes were wide and shining like a boy’s, for all that he was my age or a year older. ‘I want to find a copy of Homer,’ he said.
Sir Giannis nodded as the fire crackled. ‘I could perhaps find you a copy. Or you could pay to have one made in Constantinople.’
‘What did you think of the story?’ Prince Francesco asked me.
I think that I shrugged. ‘The arrogant, greedy commander? The great warrior who does not feel he is receiving his due from his lord?’
‘I think that you just claimed to be Achilles,’ Nerio said.
‘Nay. If I said the story was the same … then Agamemnon would suddenly turn warm and give Achilles everything he wants.’ I was laughing, but Prince Francesco was not.
Albin leaned forward. ‘Your Grace,’ he asked, ‘do you think that it really happened?’
The prince stared into the fire awhile. ‘Something happened,’ he said carefully. ‘And it happened here. Isn’t that … odd? Here we sit; we’ve just fought a campaign of our own in these waters, and Troy looks on us as we sail by, and Achilles, perhaps, judges us. Is it all a fable?’ He shrugged. ‘I grew up on tales of Troy, but in many of them, Hector and Achilles are cowards and other men like Diomedes are the great ones. But Homer …’ He shrugged again.
Sir Giannis smiled with a little tinge of bitterness. ‘To us, Homer is like a fifth gospel,’ he said.
Perhaps it was because we had been to Jerusalem, where the past seems to walk with the present, but the bishop and his tale made it all real to me, and I slept fitfully. Mayhap it was just cold sand and the wrong cloak, but I woke often, and I felt as if a host of shades marched past me in the night, and charged with a shout. It was an unseelie night, as if the Trojans still walked their ruined walls, and the Greeks licked their wounds on the windswept beach. I would not willingly return to Troy. But from that night on, we all spoke more of the distant past; we were in Outremer, where Jesus and Alexander and Achilles and the Apostles and the legions all walked or marched, and the past was palpable there.
The next morning we rose early, ate lobster for breakfast grilled on a fire right there on that beach, and sailed back to Lemnos.
‘I wanted you to see Troy,’ Prince Francesco said, with his arm around my shoulder. ‘I know that you and Nerio will leave me soon. I will miss you. And I am not Agamemnon.’
It is good to be loved.
Two days later, our little fleet of eight galleys beached at the port of Trajanopolis, or so Peter Albin called it. The Greeks called the port Ainos, but many of them called the whole area Trajanopolis, or Traianopolis. Albin told us all about the Emperor Trajan, who sounded like a good knight and a good king – a veritable paladin, in fact. There are baths there as ancient as any I have ever seen, and we all worked the stiffness out of our wounds there while the prince collected taxes.
The next day, I rode with Marc-Antonio and young Albin all the way to the fortress of Avantas, which towers over the plain, and Peristera, ‘the pigeon’. A few years before, a handful of archers had held the place against a Turkish army, and when I heard the tale, I thought it exaggerated. But when I met one of the archers, a tall, thin man with the pointed beard and thin face of a Greek icon, and when I climbed the track to the castle and saw the plain at my feet, I believed. The archer, with a mad grin, pulled a Turkish horn bow to his ear and loosed a shaft into the fields four hundred feet below us. The shaft seemed to travel forever, and I had a notion, then, of how a handful of men might dominate an army.
Sir Giannis told me that the man was now almost a beggar, having lost his farm to the Turks.
‘Sign him up,’ I said to John the Kipchak.
John watched the man shoot, and gave him a gold florin. His name was Christos Lascaris, and you’ll hear more of him.
It was a beautiful area, very different from the Greek islands like Lesvos and Chios, which resembled the Holy Land. Thrace was more like the north of England; even in high summer, the leaves were green and the valleys rich and well-watered. It was fine, fertile land, with good farms, and it was here that the Kantakouzenoi had made their main effort to rebuild the Byzantine heartland; there were new fortresses and towers and churches all through the hills. And if the politics of Outremer bores you, you’ve come to the wrong table; the Kantakouzenoi were the scions of a powerful family like the Percys or the Mortimers in England. John Kantakouzenos had declared himself Emperor and had, despite everything, been a good one. His sons were very powerful within the empire, and ruled most of the Morea that was not ruled by Frankish princes like the Florentine Acciaioli and the Venetians at Negroponte and the old French families in the north. But despite their efforts, or because of their recent civil war, the Turks were everywhere past Avantas; we couldn’t even find a bishop.
All of this made for some interesting diplomacy as we rode abroad with an Imperial banner. Thrace was virtually a Turkish despotate, and with the Turks holding Adrianopolis (which they called Edirne) and having recently taken Didymoteichon, you might have expected the Byzantines to unite in the face of the threat to Constantinople, which was less than a hundred miles away on the Via Egnatia.
Or maybe not. If you know the Sco
ttish Borders, you know that not everyone unites in the face of an external threat, eh? Both sides tended to call on the Turks to win disputes. Prince Francesco and his son explained all of this to me as we rode through the brilliant sunshine from the new fortress at Avantas, away from the sea and up into the hills. We had perhaps two hundred men-at-arms and forty archers. The priest at Avantas declined to provide guides, because Prince Francesco was representing the Emperor and they claimed on some legal quibble that he had no legal right to go armed in Thrace.
Sir Giannis was sombre. ‘This is bad,’ he admitted. ‘Very bad. It should not be like this.’
The garrison at Avantas was mostly imperial troops from Constantinople, and as such had been delighted to see us, but as we went north, we were met with grim hostility from Greek peasants.
A day later and we’d intercepted a Kantakouzenoi raiding party. We were in no-man’s-land, between the Turks and the Greeks, and our Kipchaks had caught the Kantakouzenoi on the move and followed them to their camp on the heights.
Prince Francesco chose his son as an ambassador and sent me to watch over him – and Nerio to watch me, I suppose. We rode over stony fields to the base of a long ridge, and then we were blindfolded and taken to their camp. There were two Kantakouzenoi, both older men: Matthew Asen, who I later learned had been Emperor briefly, and Thomas. They were plainly dressed in good wool, and they had recently worn maille over it; their hair was matted from helmets. Their horses were as good as mine and both had bow cases on their belts like our Kipchaks carried: open at the top, flat, wider at the bottom, for holding arrows flight-side down like the Mongols. They wore curving swords like Kipchaks and their saddles were like Kipchak saddles. Thomas was as blond as my sister and Matthew was dark and heavy. Matthew wore a high hat, like but unlike a Mongol hat.
Young Francesco dismounted immediately when we were close. Marc-Antonio took all our horses, and we walked forward. The Kantakouzenoi remained on horseback. There were at least a dozen soldiers present: the stradiote or pronoi cavalry that is too light to stand a charge of knights, but otherwise almost the equal of Mongols. I looked them over carefully; they looked hard, and completely capable. Above us on the slopes stood the stones of an ancient wall, and it was lined with men, and the sounds of horses – maybe four hundred. Enough to give us trouble.
Young Francesco addressed Matthew, the Despote, from one knee. He was respectful and cautious, and it was an excellent performance. The young man had, in the last year, shown himself a capable soldier, and now he showed himself capable of thought and lordship. I applauded inwardly.
‘… And Sir Guglielmo D’Oro, Spatharios, and Sir Renerio Acciaioli, also Spatharios of the Emperor John V …’ I heard go by in the Italo-Greek of the conversation.
‘Lord of Morain,’ I muttered. ‘Baron of Methymna.’
‘Duke of Nothing,’ muttered Nerio. ‘Count of Empty.’
The Despote of Thrace raised a hand and blessed us. ‘I am always pleased to meet messengers from our cousin the Emperor,’ he said. He didn’t smile, but neither did he frown. ‘Your father is with you, I think?’ he asked.
‘Your Grace, my father sent me merely to ascertain who might have come down the pass, and would be delighted to receive you,’ Young Francesco said.
The despote nodded, looking down the pass at the olive groves below, among which the rest of our men were waiting. ‘I do not believe that my guards would be happy with me if I rode into your little army,’ he said. ‘Let us have our discussion right here.’ He glanced at me. ‘I have heard of you. You did my people a favour. In Athens.’
I smiled. ‘Perhaps, my lord,’ I said. ‘We co-operated long enough to defeat the Turks.’
The Despote Matthew managed a very Greek smile: thin lips, half his face. ‘When the Emperor’s galleys and mine combine with the Knights of St. John and the Venetians,’ he said, ‘Hell might not actually have been said to have frozen over, but I imagine it was quite cold for a bit.’
Giannis, who was translating, let loose a bark of laughter before he revived enough to pass on the despote’s comment.
We all laughed, and the atmosphere lightened. The sun was dropping and it was becoming cooler. We had brought wine with us, and Marc-Antonio and Achille bustled about, sharing it. I watched a pair of the stradiotes; their hands came away from their sword hilts, and when one bent to take wine, his eyes met mine and he twitched an eyebrow, as if to say, ‘Eh, we’re just posturing, leave me alone.’
Francesco’s Greek was very good, and he bore the brunt of the conversation. The first part was very stilted, or so it seemed from the translation. After one joke, the despote retreated behind an ancient court ceremonial practice, and the prince’s son was forced to roll the despote’s titles off his tongue fluently at each address, so that the simplest sentence had to be preceded with a full list of honorifics. After a quarter of an hour, the despote raised his hand and encouraged Francesco to address him as ‘your grace’, which shortened the proceedings enormously.
In short, the despote denied that anyone had authorised our coming, despite an ornate purple vellum document bearing the Imperial seal, and said that we would make trouble with the Ottomanids at Didymoteichon.
In vain, the young prince explained our invitation and the reasons for our numbers.
We were at a deadlock. No one had spoken of using force; the tone of discussion was urbane, even courtly, and we might have been at Blachernae. Down in the valley below us, pavilions had sprouted like mushrooms on a damp night in the woods, and firelight winked among the olive trees.
‘I repeat, you have too many men,’ the despote said. ‘Send them back.’
Nerio glanced at me. I nodded, and the two of us walked forward cautiously, so as not to startle any of the armed men. Let me note here that we were in full harness and had our war swords on; we were not without resource. But the formality of the proceedings was a thin veneer. We were in the desert, and in the desert there are lions, and there are hyenas.
I bowed. ‘I am Sir Guglielmo,’ I said. I waited while Giannis translated. ‘This is my company of lances – almost half of the men you see. We have our own invitation to visit Didymoteichon, and we travel with Prince Francesco from friendship. My men have served the Emperor all year, in Bulgaria and elsewhere.’
Nerio bowed: a full reverentia. ‘Your Grace,’ he said. ‘I am now one of the Frankish lords of Achaea. When we have visited the Turk, I plan to take Sir Guglielmo’s company across Thrace, by the Hot Gates, and into Boeotia to retake what is rightfully mine. We will not, strictly speaking, be neighbours, but I promise you that I can be a good friend.’
The despote, five feet above us on his horse, looked annoyed. He spoke briefly in Greek, to Francesco.
‘He asks the young prince why his father claimed that they were all his men? And he wonders aloud if his hand is so light that a Frankish lord plans to cross his whole realm in arms without asking his leave?’
Nerio raised an eyebrow. ‘Tell him that I am asking his leave. Now. I have been busy heretofore, fighting the Infidel, as is the duty of all Christian knights.’
Giannis, who knew Nerio all too well, raised a dark eyebrow. But he translated fluently, and the despote’s face cleared.
‘Indeed,’ the despote said, ‘if all Frankish knights did as much, instead of murdering Greeks and harming our Church, we might be better friends.’ He spoke on, and grew heated.
Giannis flushed. ‘He says, as to your being a Prince of Achaea, no man of his blood would ever admit that a single finger’s breadth of Boeotia belongs to any Frank. It is a typical piece of Frankish arrogance to tell a prince of the Imperial House of your aspirations to steal his land and call this theft “friendship”. Nonetheless, he recognises your famous name and he says that your father was an honourable enemy. And that you should be very cautious, as you are perhaps the most valuable ransom in all Outremer, Sir Renerio. Ba
ndits and thieves might form armies to take you.’
Nerio grinned as if this was a compliment. ‘I always take care, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘As to thieving, I beg leave to remind Your Grace that if the Franks took Achaea from the Greeks, so they, in turn, took Thrace from the Thracians and Dalmatia from the Slavs. It is the way of the world, despote, and I can make no apologies.’
The despote frowned as Nerio’s sally was translated. ‘There is a difference between the will of God and the will of Satan,’ he spat.
Nerio opened his mouth, his nasty, sneering smile ready for combat. I loved him like a brother, but I knew where this was going.
‘No, Nerio,’ I said. ‘Or I will call you Fiore.’
Nerio looked at me.
‘Your Grace, I am a simple soldier, and I wish to fight in a deed of arms at Didymoteichon. I have a contract to support my lord Renerio.’ I smiled and tried to look like a bluff, simple soldier, if such exists. ‘It would be financially ruinous for us to turn back to the ships that brought us, which may already have sailed. May we pay a tax – perhaps to support the cost of watching us? I well know the dangers of soldiers loose in rich lands.’
Princes love money, because they never have any. It must have cost Despote Matthew a pretty penny to keep a little army in the field, and for me, it seemed that he couldn’t want a fight any more than Prince Francesco. Especially as there were Turks everywhere.
But he shook his head. ‘Out of the question,’ he said. ‘I will not appear weak. I will allow ten men to go to Didymoteichon, and then only under guard and without arms.’
Again I spoke, because Francesco was angry and Nerio was indignant. I glanced at both, and in one look knew they would follow my lead.
‘Well, we’ll see if you feel differently in the morning,’ I said.
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