Before the sun sorted color from smoke, the camp woke in low voices. Firelines hissed back to life; surgeons unwrapped and wrapped again; harness rang once and went still. Dew strung itself along pike‑heads like thin glass. Under the thorn where the council had sat, the awning sagged, and the words agreed at midnight hardened into orders: count at first light, in sight of all.
Runners went tent to tent. Teams nosed their wagons from the lines, oxen leaning until leather sang. They drew the tallying to the field's far edge where the ground was least full of men. Ropes ran from hub to tent‑peg; a circle was staked. A chalked board leaned on a barrel swollen with damp; its hoops creaked as if still dreaming.
George stepped into the middle as if he were the stake the whole ring had been tied to. His ledger's corners were dark from thumb and weather. Men brought what they had found and what they had tried to keep; the circle held them all.
The Burgundians did not like the circle.
A sergeant with rain‑pale eyes planted his boots and said in his kitchen French that he'd never seen spoils treated like tithes. Men behind him—good steel, tired faces—watched the piles of armor and coin the way dogs watch a butcher's hands. The word Roman passed along their line with the slow scrape of a grindstone.
George didn't look up. He tapped the board with his nail. "Arms and armor to the center," he said. "Counted in sight of all. Anything else will be counted twice."
The sergeant's mouth opened for a reply and closed again because Constantine was already there, hair damp with the morning that had come out of the grass. He didn't need to raise his voice.
"We said we'd count at dawn," he told them. "We do it where all can see." His thumb found the heavy shape in his pouch, Murad's bent ring, and he let the weight remind him what victory could turn into if untended.
"Jean," he said.
De Croÿ pushed through with his helmet under his arm and a grin that never reached his eyes when coin was at issue. "My Duke's men keep tidy books," he said, quick as bright iron. "Two of ours at your board, George. They watch the count, not the pile."
"And two from Hunyadi," Constantine added, "and two from Stefan's tents. Nothing has changed from what we swore at the start. Shares as agreed. We do not forget whose spears held our flanks while we made our noise."
Two of Hunyadi's men with plaited moustaches shouldered in, grave as judges. A Serbian in sheepskin took a place at the board, scratching tallies in a hand that made letters look like fencing. The Burgundian sergeant measured that, spat—deliberately to the side—and nodded. "Two," he said. "Each." The word each carried away some heat. Men behind him eased the set of their shoulders and began lifting what they had brought to hide in their sleeves into the open.
The line moved. Armor first, as arranged.
Mail shirts came off in a glittering rain: links tight as grain heads, some new and some fretted where sweat eats iron. Lamellar cuirasses bumped down, their laces clotted with mud the color of old blood. Helmets. Round shields with their faces painted in eyes and suns and wolves. Coils of bowstring. Bows stacked like ribs. Sabers that had sung and would sing again if a hand let them. Each piece set on the central cloth and named, chalk marks cutting the air into sense.
George's voice ran in a flat cadence that men leaned toward because sums are a language that pays you back for listening. "Mail, two thousand and some. Lamellar, just under a thousand sound, three hundred hurt. Helmets, more than that. Sabers, enough to arm a bad idea. Bows, less than I hoped; the wagons burned there."
He lifted a cloth and the coin showed itself, dim as fish in a deep well. "Gold and silver by the sack, altun, ducats, akçe, reckoned near ninety thousand ducats by Venetian weight, by our scales." He did not smile. Numbers of that size made a different kind of hunger.
"Food?" Constantine asked.
"Barley, biscuit, dried meat, enough for two weeks". A page turned; his nail left a crescent of dirt. "Powder, some casks fused, some blown. A bit left whole. Enough to frighten a town, not a country. What we have we can regrain under linen and sun." He tilted his head toward a row of canvas humps at the far rim of the circle. "Fifteen bombards found undeployed, mouths stuffed with rags to keep the damp. They are as useful to us on the move as monasteries."
Constantine took that in with a slow breath. "We haul them forward with the train," he said. "Set them short of the walls on the Thessaloniki road. If the gates open, we melt them there; if not, the bronze waits and learns our patience."
Jean made a small appreciative noise in his throat, like a man tasting an honest stew after weeks of salt meat. "Bronze pays a second time," he said. "If you are patient."
"Make it so," Constantine said to Andreas, who appeared as he always did, already listening. "We loose no stones to bare our teeth. The bronze will work harder in another shape, when we choose the mould."
George shut the ledger half a finger and looked up at last. "Distribution," he said, and the word turned the ring of men into a room. "First to the men who stood yesterday with bare heads and patched coats. No more heroes with their ribs showing through. Then we mend the front ranks, gear that won't break in their hands. Only after that, shares by oath."
He didn't wait for the argument. He cut it off by calling names. Boys stepped forward, ears red with the listening of their friends. A young recruit with a leather jerkin too thin for winter took a mail shirt; he put it on like a penitent and flinched at the weight until his back accepted it. A Serbian with a cracked kettle‑helm traded it for a proper cap of iron and couldn't keep from grinning, which made him look twelve until you saw his hands.
"You'll take complaints," Jean murmured to Constantine, eyes on the pile.
"I'll take men who don't die for lack of collars," Constantine said. He did not say that a man in good iron stood straighter and shot truer and ran less. He did not need to.
A runner ducked the rope and breathed into George's ear. He tipped his chin toward the shade where a few men sat, hands wrapped in linen, more mark than fetter, their coats clean, faces closed. Their signet rings were strung on cords and wax-sealed for the ledger. One sat with the kind of stillness soldiers notice.
"Ottoman officers," George said. "Two sanjak-beys, four timariot sipahis. They yielded to Hunyadi's men and were brought in under guard."
"The norm," Constantine said. "Held for ransom, treated as men who may be useful to the living. Bread, water, decent shade. Let them see our order and not our appetite. When we speak in Thessaloniki, I want bargaining chips that can speak back."
The Burgundian serjeant heard that and snorted. "If you feed wolves," he said, "they remember your hand."
"If we starve them," Constantine answered, "they remember our throat." He let that sit. The serjeant's face worked and then settled into a thin smile that admitted, if not agreement, then the presence of a larger game.
From the bombards' canvas the smell of old oil and damp iron lifted, thick as a thought you couldn't swallow. Men with pry‑bars went to work, the first wheels turning, the weight revealing itself with a grunt that ran up the line like a cold.
He walked the circle once more, boots blacking with the morning's thin mud. Men straightened without noticing they had done it. On the cloth a single akçe winked in the sun, tarnish catching light like an eye opening. He set his thumb on it, pressed, and felt the give of metal under skin, the small, particular truth of it. Then he let it lie.
By noon the field had been given back some of its names. Chaplains moved along the trenches, Greek and Latin and Slavonic, hands black with earth, lips working the same mercy in different words. Helmets were set on mounds where heads would never rise again; a splintered pike became a cross; a strip of cloak stood in for a shroud. Constantine took one spade from one trench and said nothing. The men saw it and went on.
What dead they could not claim were laid decent in a common pit, the sign of the cross traced over it and a stone rolled into place. The crows waited in the thorn and did not argue.
The living shouldered straps. Coin rattled in purses that had been empty yesterday; the light it made in faces was small and practical. George sealed his ledger, snapped the thong, and sent the pay‑chest under guard to the center of the column. The first wagons lurched, then found their gait. Oxen leaned into the traces until the leather sang.
Thomas's riders ghosted out before the dust rose, counting fords and bad ground, marking where the carts would break if left to habit. Andreas set the files in order: guns, victuals, wounded, then the long tail of kit and hope, and the march pulled itself together like a man standing after prayer.
On the fourth day the wind learned salt. The road tipped toward the sea; the scrub grew sparse and wiry, and gulls stitched white into the sky like careless mending. The sprung gun‑carriage creaked in a voice the men were beginning to like.
Thomas came back at a hard trot with the scouts clinging his wake, mud salted up their boots. He swung down before Constantine had time to ask.
"The garrison's gone!" he said, breath white in the morning. "Surrendered the town to the Venetians, formally; the Lion flies on the harbor fort. They say the city is 'kept for Christendom.'"
More trickled in, details like nails picked from a barrel. Several galleys moored crosswise at the harbor mouth, oars shipped, their hulls sitting like door‑bolts on water. A tidy guard posted in the citadel, banners neat as a ledger. Clerks with clean hands installed in the customs house and granaries; a notary reading words on the steps of St. Demetrios, restitutio per ius postliminii, and a parchment in which the phrase custodia temporaria appeared like a refrain.
Thomas swore softly. "Venice steals with gloves on."
"Venice writes what it wants first," George said. "Then makes the world rhyme with it."
Constantine let the news settle in him, heavy and simple as a coin. He could feel how easily a single wrong word would turn this into a quarrel.
"Then they kept the lamp lit," he said. "We don't quarrel with that."
George's stylus hovered. "They have written."
"Then we write next," Constantine answered. "In Latin and Greek. We come to receive, not dispute. We thank them for custody honestly kept and say, plain, that custody ends when the keeper arrives." He glanced seaward, as if measuring the wind. "Let their notary read what he likes; we will answer where all can hear. Thessaloniki will be ours, by ink if they are prudent; by iron if they force it."