Glarentza, spring 1431
The army mustered at Glarentza in the early morning. Six hundred seasoned pikemen stood in their ranks, ninety-six Pyrvelos marksmen checked their firearms, fifty light cavalry sat on restless mounts, and ten light field cannons stood on their carts near the rear. A hundred swordsmen waited beside them with their hands on their hilts. Some nine hundred conscripts with pikes kept glancing at the veterans around them. The conscripts had been issued their pikes four days before. Most of them held them as if the shafts might do something on their own.
A priest moved through the lines with a small leather-bound Psalter, the new Greek one, printed small enough to carry onto the field. He read the blessings for the soldiers' protection, calling on the saints and martyrs, and the men crossed themselves as he passed. His voice carried a little way over the noise of the crowd and grew fainter as he went down the lines. When he reached the cannon crews he hesitated over the carts, and then blessed them too, the way he would have blessed a plough.
Beyond the soldiers, the townspeople had gathered along the narrow cobbled streets to see them off. Families called out blessings and held on to their men a moment longer: mothers with their children against them, wives holding a hand, fathers with a palm on a son's shoulder. Constantine caught the eye of an old woman leaning on her stick. She was watching her grandson, a conscript who could not have been eighteen, find his place in the line, and she did not look away from him to bow.
A group of Venetian traders stood apart from the crowd, watching and not cheering. Their trade depended on the port of Glarentza and the steady flow of printed books, and they had done the same sums as everyone else.
Constantine acknowledged the cheers with a nod and straightened in the saddle. Today they would march to face Turahan Bey.
George rode up on his left. "Are you still set on meeting him in the open?"
"I am," Constantine said. "He may have the numbers. He has never faced field cannon, or the Pyrvelos."
They marched east along the Patras road and then up into the hills, the cannon carts last, with the conscripts between the carts and the regulars so that nobody could see them from the front. The pace was set by the carts. Twice a wheel had to be chocked on a slope and the whole column stood in the sun while the crews heaved it over. Andreas rode up and down the file and said nothing to anyone, which the conscripts took for anger and the veterans knew for attention.
The army reached Chalandritsa on the second evening and halted to regroup. Scouts brought word that Thomas was holding Kalavryta with several hundred men. Turahan had left a few hundred riders to watch the town and brought the rest west: about six thousand Akıncı and Sipahi, advancing toward them. The scouts had seen smoke in three places on the way back.
Andreas said that Turahan had come for tribute, to frighten the Morea into paying, and would not waste his time on walls. Then he would come looking for them, Constantine said, and they could choose the ground. He had already chosen it. A long shallow plain east of the town, open enough that the horse would want to use it, with a rise at the far end where a man could stand and see the whole of it.
Night came down on the camp. Constantine went to his tent and tried to eat alone, but the food was dry in his mouth, his stomach turned, and he pushed the plate aside. He got outside the tent and three paces past it before he vomited in the grass.
George was standing a few steps off with a torch.
"Every commander I've known threw up the night before a battle," he said. "The men are asleep. None of them saw."
Constantine wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "A commander can't be seen like this. If they see me..."
"They'll see you tomorrow on your horse," George said. "That's what they'll remember."
Constantine looked out over the camp where his soldiers slept. Somewhere among the tents a man was praying aloud, slowly, the way the priest had prayed over them that morning.
* * *
Across the plain, Turahan Bey rode at an easy pace behind the haze of his Akıncı, who were already scouring the hills and villages ahead. The smoke of their fires hung in the morning air, as it had the last time he came into the Morea. He expected this campaign to be simple: press the Greeks back into their fortresses and make them pay.
A scout came in with his horse lathered, dismounted, and bowed.
"Bey, we have sighted them. A Greek force, fewer than two thousand, drawn up in the open on the plain to the west."
Turahan frowned. "Their only force? You are certain this is no decoy, with a larger army in the hills?"
"We have combed the hills, my lord. There is nothing. If anything were coming, it could not arrive in time."
Turahan looked round at his commanders. "Fewer than two thousand, and they march into the open to meet us. These Greeks must be desperate." He paused. "Or foolish enough to think they can match us in the field."
One of his older officers narrowed his eyes. "They may believe defending their lands calls for a bold stand, my lord, but they will only hasten their own defeat."
Turahan allowed himself a smile. "Then they have handed us an easy victory. Send the Akıncı forward to probe their line. If it breaks, we go through and ride them down."
The Akıncı went out in their loose groups, and the standard moved forward at a walk behind them. From a low rise Turahan could see the Greek line now: a block of pikes in the center with the sun on their helmets, a thinner and poorer-looking block on the Greek right, and behind the center a row of small carts he took for baggage. A few horsemen sat off to the side, not enough to matter. He had seen Greek lines before. This one stood straighter than most, and he put that down to the pikes, which were longer than he was used to and gave a man something to hold.
The Akıncı rode in, loosed, swung away, rode in again. The pikes in the center tilted and took it. On the far side the poorer block did not tilt, and men in it were already stepping back.
"Their right," said the officer beside him.
"I see it." He gave the order to the Sipahi commander himself. Two thousand, between the pikes and the rabble, and through.
The Sipahi formed below the rise. They took their time about it, as they always did, the lances coming up in rows and the horses walking out onto the flat and settling into a trot, and Turahan watched the Greek line while they did it. It did not move. The pikes stood. On the right the rabble were still shrinking back and someone over there was shouting at them, and the gap between the two blocks was a hundred paces wide and getting wider. The Sipahi commander saw it too and bent his line toward it.
The trot became a canter and the canter opened out, and the drum of it came back up the rise and he felt it in the saddle. The lances came down. He watched the gap in the Greek line widen as the rabble shrank from the horse, and then he watched the pikes in the center do a thing he had not seen pikes do. They opened. Lanes appeared in the block from front to back. The carts stood in the lanes, with men crouched beside them who had not been there before.
"What are they..."
* * *
Constantine sat his horse behind the center, among the carts, with George on his left. Akıncı arrows stood in the ground between the wheels, and one had gone through the canvas over a powder keg and stuck there. Below the far rise the Sipahi were forming in rows.
On the right the conscripts had given ground under the arrows. Andreas had got down from his horse and was shoving men back into the files and shouting at them, but the gap between them and the center kept opening. When the Sipahi came out onto the flat at a trot, they angled toward it.
"They're going for the gap," George said.
Constantine raised his arm, and the gun crews turned to watch it. The ground began to shake under him as the Sipahi broke into a canter. His horse felt it before he did and tried to turn, and he wanted to let it. He held the reins short and kept his arm up.
"Open the lanes!"
The sergeants took it up along the center. The files of pikemen stepped apart from front to back, the way they had drilled it all winter, and the crews ran the carts forward into the lanes and crouched by the wheels. He counted the Sipahi in, a hundred paces, then eighty, then sixty, close enough now to see the horses' chests.
He dropped his arm. "Fire!"
The carts went off together and jumped back on their wheels. White smoke rolled out of the lanes and hid everything in front of them. On the far side of it the drumming of the charge broke up, and the screaming began.
His eyes went to the carts first. All ten were whole, and the loaders were already at the muzzles with the swabs. When the canvas bags were rammed home he shouted again, and the second round went off into the smoke. Off to the right the Pyrvelos had started, one crack after another, and the Akıncı who had come back for the gap were turning away from it.
Nothing came out of the smoke toward the lanes.
* * *
On the rise, Turahan heard it after he saw it, a flat row of white and then the sound. Bombards? He'd heard bombards at a wall: one great blow, then a long wait while the crew loaded again. This was shorter, ten or a dozen of them together. The front of the charge did not slow and did not swerve. It fell, horses and men together, the whole front of it at once, and the horses behind went into the fallen ones at the gallop. He saw one rider go straight over his horse's head with the lance still in his hand. Then the smoke came across and he could not see the lanes any more, only hear the second row go off inside the smoke, and after that the sound horses make.
Nobody on the rise spoke. The Sipahi who could still ride were coming back out of the smoke in ones and twos, without order, some of them without lances, and behind them the smoke rolled slowly over the place where the charge had been. On the Greek right the rabble had stopped running away, because the Akıncı had stopped coming, because something along the Greek line was cracking at them one shot at a time, too fast and too many for crossbows. He could see Akıncı down on the grass out there, and loose horses.
"Cannon," the older officer said. "In the field. On carts."
"Impossible," Turahan muttered.
"Order a retreat," he said.
The horns went. His Akıncı broke off at once, as they were made to. The Sipahi came back slower. Turahan sat his horse and counted the standards that came back with them, and stopped counting when he understood what the number would be. The Greeks did not follow. He had expected them to, and had half wanted it, because a line that leaves its ground can be ridden down. The line stayed where it was. The smoke thinned over it, and he could see the carts again and men running between them with buckets.
"Bey," the older officer said. "Kalavryta."
"Leave them. Pull the watch off the town and bring them to us on the road." He turned his horse. "The Sultan will want to hear this from me, and not from a Venetian."
* * *
On the Greek line the smoke took a long time to go. When it thinned the Sipahi were a litter of horses and men out to sixty paces, and beyond them the field was empty to the hills. On the right, some of the conscripts were throwing up in the grass. Constantine couldn't blame them. He'd done the same the night before, and nobody had even been blown to pieces by the cannons yet. Somewhere in the ranks a man shouted "Constantine!" The men around him took it up, and soon the veterans were chanting it and striking their pike butts on the ground in time.
He raised his hand to them for a moment and the chant grew louder. Then he turned his horse.
"Andreas. Two of the light horse on every road east. I want to know where Turahan sleeps tonight and what he burns tomorrow. He has most of his army still mounted and a long way to the Isthmus."
"Despot."
"George. A rider to Thomas, now, before the Bey's own riders tell him we won. And find me whoever counts our dead."
George went. The nearest cannon crew had begun to swab out. The sergeant was shouting at a boy to stop staring at the field and bring water, and the boy did not move until the sergeant hit him. Out past the lanes, among the horses, something was still trying to get up.
The chant had spread to the conscripts, who had the most reason not to sing. Constantine let it run, since there was no stopping it, and sat with his back to it and watched the hills for dust.