Polykastro woke in the colorless hour before the sun made claims. South of the outpost, the camp unmade itself with practiced economy: ashes raked thin, embers drowned, tent pegs wrenched free, and canvas folded still smelling of sweat and smoke. Men moved in the half-light with helmets cradled in the crooks of their arms, faces slack with the ache of short sleep. Mules complained as the harness tightened. A priest somewhere finished a prayer, reluctant to let daylight have the last word.
Constantine rode the line once, slow, letting the morning sounds settle: leather creaking, metal touching metal, pike-butts thudding into earth. The Vardar ran to their left, narrow but steady, a brief coolness rising from it before the heat claimed the day.
At the road's edge, the Polykastro commander waited with his spear grounded, eyes bright… Constantine reined in, and the man saluted with a sharpness that read like anger.
"Majesty. Polykastro is honored to see you pass."
Constantine nodded. "You've done your part. The road beyond is ours."
Constantine touched heel to flank and rode on. Behind him, Polykastro's roofs and the little domed bathhouse blurred into the heat-haze, a quiet corner of the empire left behind as the column moved toward harder ground.
The column stretched north, and as the sun climbed, the day hardened quickly. August was a dry fist. Dust rose in a low veil around boots, hooves, and wagon wheels, clinging to sweat. The first hours were simple, flat ground, open sightlines, the river keeping pace. Men spoke in short bursts, saving breath as if it were another ration.
By noon, Constantine called a halt. They took what shade they could, watered the animals, and ate in a good mood with bread, olives, and a few jokes passed along the line.
They moved on in the cooler hours and camped where the valley first hinted at stone. The night was close. Sleep came lightly.
At first light, they set out once more.
Then the valley tightened.
Cliffs drew in, slopes steepened, and the river pressed hard against stone. The Vardar's voice changed, less a murmur, more a steady shove of water against rock.
Constantine signaled, and the march shifted.
Orders moved down the line in murmured relays. Scouts took to both ridges, small figures climbing into scrub and broken limestone. The column compressed; intervals measured; carts pulled tight to the infantry instead of trailing in easy confidence. No songs. No shouted jokes. Even the muleteers quieted, their usual insults sinking to a mutter as if the gorge could hear.
Andreas rode up beside Constantine, shoulders wrapped in heat-dulled iron, beard gray with dust.
"Same ground," he said, nodding to where the rock narrowed again. "Same throat."
"We treat it as if a whole army waited," Constantine said, eyes forward, "even if none does."
Andreas grunted, assent and warning both. "Men get killed when they believe in empty roads."
Ahead, the cliffs closed until the road felt carved through the earth with a blade. The Iron Gate. Demir Kapija. A place that took a wide world and forced it to pass single-file.
The first arrow came without trumpet or cry. It hissed out of the rock above and drove into a horse's neck, so clean it might have been placed by hand. The animal screamed, high and shocked, and collapsed, dragging its rider down in a knot of legs and leather. With that sound, the gorge woke.
More arrows followed, a quick rattle from above. Not volleys but scattered shots, probing, meant to sting and signal. From a broken run of old stone, half wall and half ruin, shapes shifted: azaps in rough cloth and patched gear, crouched behind rocks used like this since before their grandfathers' grandfathers were born. A few mounted men showed and slipped away again, akıncı riders weaving between boulders like wolves that refused to be caught.
The vanguard recoiled a pace, not in panic but on instinct. Shields came up. A few of the mounted skirmishers swung out of their saddles, Pyrvelos muskets sliding off their shoulders.
Thomas was already there with the forward screen where the road narrowed. His horse stamped, restless. He lifted a fist, and the cavalry answered. They did not rush uphill but slid forward in a disciplined push that narrowed the angle and forced the Ottoman skirmishers to break cover to fire. Heads and shoulders flashed above stone, a bowstring's twitch, a shot, then gone again.
A dozen riders swung down to thicken the fire, joining the men already working their muskets. The first gunshot cracked in the gorge like a hammer on iron. Smoke snapped outward and hung low; the sound bounced off both walls and came back warped, as if someone else were firing behind them.
An azap screamed and dropped out of sight. Two more shots followed, quick and steady. An arrow caught one of the vanguard men in the shoulder. He staggered, teeth bared, and stayed upright until someone hauled him down behind a rock and clamped a hand over the wound. Another arrow struck a man in the thigh; he went down hard, cursing the rocks instead of the Turks, as if anger could be thrown somewhere safer than fear.
One man did not curse at all. He fell with an odd softness, eyes wide, hands opening and closing on nothing. Blood darkened his collar where a shaft had found the throat gap under his chin. He tried once to breathe. The gorge took the sound.
Further back along the column, where the road had not yet pinched to rock, Constantine heard the echo of shots from the Gate. The sound came thin and mislaid by stone, but his body knew it before his mind named it. First blood. A campaign always took a first life, even if the dead man's name never travelled farther than his own friends' mouths.
In the throat of the pass, Thomas saw the fall. One of his men went down with his hands clawing at his collar, blood darkening the cloth at the throat. For a heartbeat, he felt the old pull in his legs and gut, the urge to drive his horse straight at the rocks and chase the enemy uphill. He did not move.
Instead, he pushed his screen forward only as far as he had to, step by step, until the Ottoman skirmishers began to give ground. The azaps pulled back in small knots, slipping uphill and northward, using the old wall and the broken ground to vanish.
One mounted akıncı tried to cover them. He showed himself for an instant with a short spear lifted, then wheeled away as a Pyrvelos shot clipped his horse's flank. The horse screamed and stumbled, and the rider went down in a hard tumble among stones.
Thomas's men surged toward the fallen rider, blades ready, then checked as Thomas dropped his hand, palm down. They closed in at a walk. When they reached him, he lay twisted, one leg pinned under his horse, face smeared with dust and blood, eyes bright with the stunned hatred of a man who had expected to die cleaner. A trooper dragged him free. He tried to spit and managed only a cough.
"Don't let him choke on his own pride," Thomas muttered as he rode up, and one of the men rolled the captive onto his side.
The man spoke Turkish first—defiance, threats. When that earned him only silence, he tried rough Greek, enough to be understood. His bravado thinned with each question asked in the same tone, as if the answers were already known.
"How many here?" Thomas asked.
The captive hesitated. Thomas leaned down, set the flat of his sword lightly against the man's wounded leg, and let the weight of the steel settle. "Say it."
"Not many. Watchers." His eyes flicked to the cliffs. "A hundred… maybe. We were to send word."
"To Skopje," Thomas said.
A muscle jumped in the man's jaw. "Yes. To Skopje."
"And Skopje itself?"
The captive hesitated, breath stalling. Thomas shifted the flat of his sword from the man's thigh to the deeper gash below the knee and pressed. The wound answered before the man did; he screamed, sharp and raw, hands clawing at the dust.
"Skopje," Thomas repeated, voice low.
The answer came out grudgingly, forced past pain. "The Kale has men. Two… three hundred. Not more."
They buried the dead quickly. There was nowhere proper for it in the throat of a gorge—just a shallow scrape of earth where the road widened enough for a few men to work. A priest murmured a few lines, his voice taken by the river. Someone marked the spot with stones that the next winter flood would scatter.
Then Constantine signaled, and the army threaded into the Iron Gate.
The gorge took them in file by file. Wagons creaked, axles complaining as wheels found their way over rock and dust. The Vardar roared, close enough for a man to imagine falling into it not as a hero but as excess weight. Cliff faces leaned inward, pale and scarred. Wind funneled through in hard gusts that snapped at the banners. One standard tilted, and its bearer steadied it with both hands, jaw clenched as if wrestling an unseen pull.
When the valley finally widened, it felt like a hand opening.
Light spilled in. The river's roar softened into something more ordinary. The air moved freely again. Men exhaled without realizing they'd been holding breath.
And then the ground itself began to speak.
Not in monuments, but in small betrayals: a bank that didn't match the rise, an old cut of earth half-collapsed. A piece of iron half-buried near a scrub bush, too shaped for stone. A broken ring that might once have held a stirrup. Dark splinters of wood worked up by rain.
The column quieted without an order. Men felt it. Some places carried memory the way a body carried scars.
A rider pushed forward from the Tagmata, reins taut as if the ground had pulled him. On his breast, beneath dust, the imperial mark showed faintly. His Greek carried the rough edge of the border.
Lieutenant Nikola Vuković.
He raised a hand, and his voice came out hoarse, more statement than drama. "Here," he said. "This is where it broke."
Constantine rode up to him. "You were here."
Nikola's eyes did not leave the basin. "I was," he said. "We ran south, thinking we'd meet you." His throat moved. "We met stone and Turks instead."
The word spread without shouting, Sigismund's ground. The place where the old emperor had ridden into a gap and died without even a sword stroke, where the crusade had broken like pottery on rock.
Constantine signaled a controlled halt.
Sentries moved out in quick, practiced arcs, securing the basin before the officers gathered. A priest arrived, icon under his arm. Thomas rode in, face tight, eyes raking the basin. Andreas came last, heavy as an ox, his gaze blunt and, for once, almost gentle.
George dismounted beside Constantine, his boots marking the powdery soil. He looked around with the cold eye of a man who knew empires were made and broken in places like this.
Constantine looked at the ground once more, the half-buried iron, the scarred banks, the world's indifference to human want, and gave a simple order.
"Raise a cross."
No one asked why. Two soldiers went to a wagon and levered off a spare beam, rough pine meant for repairs. Another pulled a length of tar-stiff rope from a bundle. Knives flashed. They worked quickly; a campaign halt could not become a performance. In minutes the cross lay on the ground, crude and honest, smelling of sap and sweat. They hauled it upright and packed stones around its base until it held.
The priest stepped forward. He did not sing or linger. He lifted the icon, made the sign of the cross, and murmured a prayer that sounded like breath shaped into words. A few drops of water, blessed, spattered the wood. Constantine crossed himself once, slowly, and felt the motion settle into him like armor he rarely admitted to wearing.
For a moment, the basin held a silence thick enough to hear insects in the scrub.
George spoke first, "Kingdoms wobble when an emperor falls in the field. God keep us from following him too soon."
Thomas's eyes stayed on the cross. "He died as an emperor should," he said, voice rough with something like respect. "Facing the enemy."
Andreas gave a short nod, as if agreeing with both and neither. "Bravery doesn't make the ground kinder," he said. "But it earns respect."
Constantine let those words stand. Then he turned toward the waiting files, men who had never seen Sigismund but had heard the story until it became warning, until it became almost superstition.
His voice carried without shouting. It did not need to be loud in a place like this.
"Emperor Sigismund and his men did their part," he said. "They bled here so others would learn what this road costs."
He paused, letting the wind move around them. "Their fall did not end the war. It did not end our hope."
"We struck back at Edessa. We took what the Turks thought was theirs."
Then, the vow, short and hard: "We will break the Ottomans. Once and for all."
The cheer began small, then thickened as pike-butts struck earth and shields thudded against shafts.
Constantine lifted his chin toward the cross.
"IEROS SKOPOS."
Thomas answered at once, sharper from the saddle: "IEROS SKOPOS!"
For a moment, the basin trembled with it, the sound of an army remembering its purpose. Then Constantine raised his hand, and the chant ebbed in disciplined waves, leaving only the wind and the wood of the new cross behind them.
North of the basin the Vardar ran calmer, as if the gorge had wrung the wildness out of it. The valley broadened. Villages showed at a distance, clusters of roofs and smoke, fields cut into squares, thin lines of people standing at their edges like posts, watching the Roman host with the stillness of those who had survived too many banners.
No Ottomans appeared, only the sense of eyes on the ridges and the certainty that word was already racing ahead faster than any army could march.
Days later the road lifted, and the scouts returned with the look men wear when what they've seen will shape the next hours.
Constantine rode up the low ridge with Andreas and Thomas beside him, George a half-length behind. Heat lay over the land in a shimmering veil. Cicadas drilled the air.
And then Skopje appeared.
Author note:
On Patreon, the campaign is already in full swing, and the last chapter kicked off a huge wave of strategy and logistics discussion. If you enjoy watching this unfold and talking through the decisions, Patreon is 15 chapters ahead.