Page 34

"We had rain, so we didn't see any eclipse while at sea. Do we currently have a Constantine on the throne right now?" Phaidros asked, scratching at his head.

Arslan nodded sadly. "We do. Constantine XI Palaiologos, and his mother is Helena Dragaš."

"Fuck," Alexis said and buried his face in his hands.

The prophecy would have spread faster than Greek fire. There was no way Con wouldn't have heard it by now. Alexis's one chance to convince him to leave had just gone up in smoke.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The wall walk above the Saint Romanus Gate was crowded, even at the second hour after noon. Men in armor, priests' habits, and nothing more than padded jerkins moved along the parapet with water and weapons.

Alexis came up the steps of the inner gate-tower with Arslan's token in one hand. The Greek captain at the top of the steps looked at the token and stepped aside.

“The last I saw him, the Strategos was on the bastion," the captain said. "If you find him, tell him that we collapsed another tunnel."

Alexis nodded and followed where the captain had pointed. To the east, beyond the moat and the outer wall, across the great, cleared kill-ground that ran the length of the Theodosian line, the Ottoman camps were thick with tents, smoke from cook-fires, and timber being shifted into earthworks at the edge of the Lycus valley.

Mio Dio. They will start those damns cannons again soon.

Alexis hadn't been there a day, and their booming had already jangled his nerves. It was no wonder that wherever he went in the city, all the people looked exhausted and hollow.

Closer to him on the parapet was the scent of blood, mud, men, and a particular bread the Greeks of the city had always made from chestnut flour when grain was short. He drew the hood of his plain gray cloak further down over his face and squeezed around groups of soldiers and civilians doing their best with their horrible odds.

He came round the bend at the great bastion and spotted Constantine. He stood with his back to Alexis, hands clasped behind him, listening to the men around him talk. He wore a working plate of blackened steel over leather, scarred on the pauldron from a glancing blow. His hair, longer than Alexis had ever seen him wear it, was tied back with a strip of plain cord.

Around him were captains, sergeants, two of the Genoese in the colors of Giustiniani's house, and an old monk with a sword belt buckled crooked over his cassock. Con said something, and they all laughed.

His back straightened as he sensed someone behind him, and he turned his head a fraction. His eyes found Alexis, and the laugh on Con's face went still before relief flooded it. That made Alexis feel like the worst of bastards.

"Salve, magister," Con said in Latin, moving away from his men to greet him.

"Salve, Caesar," Alexis replied, inclining his head slightly.

"This," Con said to the captains in Greek, "is the friend I told you would come. He might look tall and scrawny, but he's a devil with a sword, just you wait and see."

"Vaffanculo," Alexis whispered, but played along and bowed to the captains.

One of the Genoese, a broad man with a scar that ran from his lip into the gray of his beard, grinned and saluted Alexis with his cup. The old monk, who had a face like a walnut and eyes far too bright for the rest of him, made the sign of the cross over Alexis without seeming to notice he had done it.

Con clapped a captain on the shoulder, murmured something, and moved back toward Alexis.

"Walk with me, Alecto," he said. "There is a space we can talk.”

"Lead on, Strategos," Alexis replied with a touch of sarcasm.

Con only winked at him, and they went off the wall together. Behind them, the men resumed their work and their laughter.

The chamber in the tower had once been a chapel, but it had been pressed into service as something between an officer's quarters and a war room. A trestle table sat in the center, weighted at one end with rolled charts and at the other with a wine jug. Two cots lined the walls, and a small triptych of the Pantocrator sat beside a recently lit candle. The window in the eastern wall looked out across the Lycus valley and onto the Ottoman lines.

Con closed the door behind them and shot the bolt. For a moment, neither of them said anything. Con's face was a little older and harder, but his dear friend all the same.

Con crushed him in a hard embrace and held on for a long moment. "I'm so glad you came, Alecto."

"I had to see things for myself," he replied and let him go. He knocked his knuckles on Con's breastplate. "Old thing still fits, I see."

"And still keeps me in one piece." Con turned away to the wine-jug and poured two cups. "Drink. The wine is bad, I'm afraid. The good wine has been sent to Galata, where the Genoese won’t fight without it. Ad fundum."

"Ad fundum, fratello."