Constantine rode out alone but for two of the household guard, and those he left at the gate. The track from Clermont castle ran along the dunes, then turned where the sea opened through a gap in the pines. The wind came off the water with a little weight in it, enough to push the mane of his horse forward over the neck. Sand had been blown across the last stretch of the track in long, curved tongues, and the hooves moved through it without sound.
He dismounted short of the house and walked the horse the last hundred paces himself, the reins slack in his hand. His own place stood empty half a mile further down, the shutters closed and a padlock on the seaward gate.
Plethon's house showed between two tamarisks, whitewashed and low, with the sea at its back. A reed awning ran out over a flagged court. A fishing skiff had been dragged up on rollers above the tide-line to the south, and a string of gourds hung drying from a hook in the lintel. The door stood open. From inside came the dry, steady tap of a knife on a board, and a woman's voice low.
Plethon was on the bench under the nearer tamarisk with a book on his knee. He looked up when the horse's shadow crossed him, marked the place with his thumb, and rose. The rising took him a beat longer than it had two years ago. He steadied himself against the bench edge as he came to his full height, and then the stoop left his shoulders.
"Majesty."
"Master." Constantine gave the reins to a boy who had come from the side of the house without being called. "I should have sent word."
"I would have told the boy to set out cups all the same. Come in from the light."
He led Constantine in under the reed awning. The court was swept clean to the flags, but the wind kept depositing its small gifts: a frond of dried seagrass, a single black feather caught against the leg of the bench. Plethon kicked the feather aside.
"You have kept the place plainer than I expected," Constantine said.
"I have kept it as you gave it to me."
A low table stood in the shade of the wall, with four stools around it and a stack of wax tablets at one end. Two of the tablets still had morning work on them, half-erased — a line of a verse, a diagram of angles, a margin of numbers. Plethon saw him looking at them.
"The students were here this morning," he said. "Three of them. I send them back before the midday heat."
"You teach here?"
"Two mornings in the week now, sometimes three. The ride from town is not long, and they are young enough to take it as a holiday from the halls."
He set the book down on the tablets, aligning the corners. "I had meant it for my own quiet. It has not turned out that way. I do not complain."
Constantine sat on the stool at the end of the table. The boy came back with a jar and two shallow cups, poured water cut with a little wine into each, and withdrew.
"I heard you keep more of your time here these days."
"I do. The sea is easier on the knee than the stairs at the academy, and the wind takes the dust out of a man's head." Plethon lowered himself back to his bench with one hand on the armrest. "I read better here. I argue worse, which turns out to suit the teaching."
"Mine stands empty." Constantine nodded south along the beach. "Katarina will not sleep in it."
"Will she not say why?"
"She does not call it a house. She calls it a shed on the sand. She has asked twice, without pressing, whether I mean to build something proper on the same ground: walls, a gate, a second floor, a chapel in the court. I said no. She stopped asking." He turned the cup once on the table. "And in her own time, she has made Clermont into what she wants. Her rooms, her garden, the wall that was moved for Zoe, the chapel with the icons she brought from Smederevo. She has built the life she means to live, and she has built it there. The beach house has no part in it."
"A young empress wants a court under her feet. It is not an unreasonable want."
"It is not."
"You will not bring her round to this place. Leave it where it is. Go between the two houses as your own life needs. She has the one she wanted." Plethon lifted his cup, then did not drink from it. "And I assume you mean to take up the running again?"
"I mean to."
"Good. And while you are passing this way, stop in. Sit for an hour with the students if the morning allows it. I should like you to meet two or three of them, nothing formal, only a cup and a conversation. It does a young man good to have put a face to the emperor before he is set to work for him."
"I will make the time."
"Good."
"And the academy?" Constantine said. "I hear it goes well, but I should like to hear it from you."
"Nikolaos runs it better than I did," Plethon said it without ornament. "He has patience for the dullest of them, which I never had. He keeps the hours, keeps the ledgers, and has managed to carve out a second writing-room without asking Theophilus for funds. I usually send him a letter once a week, and he ignores the parts of it he should ignore."
Constantine smiled and asked, "And you?"
"Four or five of the older ones. I take them here when the weather is good. It is easier on them than watching me breathe." He lifted the cup, held it a moment, and set it down again without drinking. "I am seventy-seven this winter, Constantine. I teach what I can still teach standing up."
"You will teach longer than that."
"I will teach until I do not. It is the same with all work." He passed the back of his hand across his forehead, more habit than need. "And you. How is it at Clermont?"
"Busy."
"I did not ask about the ledgers."
Constantine turned the cup in his fingers. Outside the awning, the light on the sand was very white, and a wave struck a rock offshore with a sound like a door shutting somewhere inside a large empty hall. He watched the water for a moment.
"Cold," he said. "She is cold. Not angry. She does not raise her voice. She will sit with me in the garden and speak to me about Zoe and about the kitchens and about a cousin in Smederevo who has broken her ankle, and she will not once ask me about the campaign. She does not ask, and she does not tell me what she has been carrying for the year I was away." He set the cup down.
"Zoe does not know me. She will come to me if I hold out the mint. She goes back to her mother before I have counted ten."
"A year is a long time in a small life," Plethon said. "And in a young marriage."
"That's true."
"She is well-raised. Her mother saw to that, and her grandmother before. She will thaw. It will not be on your timetable, and you will want to remember that." He paused. "But do not wait on it to do the other thing."
"What other thing?"
"More children, Constantine." Plethon's voice stayed even. "One daughter is a gift, but she is not a strong succession. You spent a year on the campaign, and if a single arrow had found you, the empire would rest on a girl who cannot yet say her father's name. Do not wait on courtesy to go to your wife."
Constantine did not answer at once. Down the beach, the child shouted again, and the dog went silent.
"I know," he said.
"Good."
Plethon reached behind him and shifted the book a finger's breadth along the bench.
"The students," Constantine said. "How many of them could I use?"
Plethon's eyebrows lifted a hair. "Use how?"
"As clerks, as scribes to a strategos, as men who can write a clean letter in two languages and keep a tally. Thessaloniki has half the administration it needs and few of the clerks. The City has fewer, and most of the ones there served under Demetrios, which is another problem. In the towns, it is priests. In the villages, it is the eldest man who can count past thirty. I cannot run a recovered empire through a hundred captains and a thousand village deacons."
"No."
"So, how many?"
Plethon took a moment with it. "Six," he said at last. "Seven at most, and of the seven, perhaps three are ready for a proper place in the administration. The others are still young enough that you would be putting them in rooms larger than they know how to cross. Theophilus has already taken nine from me."
"I had heard."
"He takes the best of them before I know they are ready. He has an eye for it. I do not begrudge him, but I will not have much left for you this year." Plethon held up a hand before Constantine could answer. "You will have more next year. Nikolaos has thirty-odd now at various stages, and a dozen of them are beginning to show shape. Give me two years and I will give you a class you can place."
"Two years is a long time when a strategos in Macedonia is trying to collect a wheat tax through a half-literate priest."
"I am aware."
"I will take the seven."
"You will take the three I tell you are ready and the four that are almost so, and you will accept that two of the four will likely disappoint you. They always do, at that age."
"Understood." Constantine leaned back against the wall. The plaster was warm between his shoulders. "It is a start."
"It is a start."
For a moment, the only sound was the wind in the tamarisk above them, and a gull somewhere out over the water. Plethon drank from his cup and set it down.
"You have something larger on your mind."
"The themes."
"Ah."
"I have been thinking them through the whole way home. The old lines do not work. I want to draw new ones. I want your thinking first."
Plethon took his time. He set his palms flat on his knees. A fly that had come in under the awning settled on the rim of his cup and was brushed away.
"A strong centre," he said. "Themes run by governors under a short commission. A year, perhaps two. Long enough to learn the district. Not long enough to put down a root into it."
"I had been thinking along that line. Two years, with a formal review at the end of the first."
"Two is serviceable. One is barely a posting — the man is gone before he knows the district. Two lets him do the work and get out before the work learns his name." Plethon considered the cup. "And the governor does not hold the army."
"Go on."
"If the theme has a tagma in garrison, the tagma answers to its own officer, not to the governor. The governor collects, judges, administers. The officer drills, musters, marches. A diarchy of sorts. Each needs the other to do his work. Neither can do the other's work alone. It is an ugly word for a sound arrangement."
"That was my thought as well." Constantine turned the cup a quarter-turn. "I had the same argument with George and Andreas in the City before I came down. The conclusion was the same: the governor cannot hold the sword in the district he is governing. The other thing we kept coming back to was size. I have been inclined toward smaller themata."
"Yes, break them down." Plethon's voice sharpened a fraction. "Do not restore the old great themata. A theme the size of the old Anatolikon is a kingdom waiting for its king, and you have had enough of those in the last hundred years. Keep them at a size a governor can ride across in a week and a courier can cross in a few days."
Constantine nodded, and Plethon went on, the cup still untouched in front of him.
"The rest you know where I stand. A taxpaying class exempt from service in arms. Land held publicly, a third of what it produces going to the state fund. Incentives for the virgin ground, for the fields the Ottomans burned and let go to thorn. State mills where the wind is right. The new plough, which turns your ground twice as fast as the old one, and which your farmers on the plain here have stopped calling a novelty. A monarchy advised by a body of educated men drawn from the middle, whose bond is to the state and to Ieros Skopos and to nothing a cousin's marriage can take from them. I have said all of it before. The measure has not changed."
"The land is the larger matter." Constantine set his elbow on the table. "The Constantinople nobles came to me with their lists of titles. Old grants, one or two from before my grandfather. They asked to be confirmed."
Plethon's face did not change, but something in the way he set down the cup suggested pleasure being kept on a short rein. "And you told them?"
"That the lands seized in the course of war had passed under imperial control, and that the titles they held were now to be read against the registers of the state, not against a memory of what their grandfather once held at Thrace."
"That will have been a sight."
"One of them wept. Notaras sat it out, as Notaras does."
"You did not send them away with nothing."
"I offered them the bonds."
"Ah." Plethon sat back. "The paper again."
"They are not paper."
"They are paper. You will forgive an old man his vocabulary. Paper anchored to revenues and stores, paper I have come round to, paper I would still not hold for my own account. It will work, you tell me, and I believe you half the way."
"It will work."
"You say that about the bonds the way you say it about the books, and the army, and the plough on the Elis plain. You speak of them, Constantine, as though you have already seen them work."
Constantine did not answer at once. The cup was still warm under his hand where the light had caught it through the awning. He set it aside, a fraction too carefully.
"If I let myself talk about them as though they might fail," he said, "they will."
Plethon watched him a breath longer than the answer required. Then he glanced toward the beach.
"And the lands," he said. "What will you do with them."
"A census first. Citizens and lands both. Then redistribution, in stages, where the registers and the courts allow. I want to know what the empire actually contains before I start making promises about it. I want a clerk in every district who can tell me how many ploughs are working and how many households are on the tax roll. Not a guess. A figure."
"A colossal task."
"Yes..."
"You will wake every grandfather sleeping in every village. Half of them will come at you with a deed their own father could not read. Some of the deeds will even be genuine."
"I know."
"The emperor is the ultimate legislator and judge. But the emperor is not in Thessaloniki at the hour a widow is turned out of her house by a nephew with a paper. You need men under you who can enforce the law and inspect it, and not only the army officers you have borrowed into the work for want of anyone else."
"Most of the districts have church courts now. Clerics, monks, marriage, inheritance, dowries. They work."
"Within their competence. That is not the whole law." Plethon leaned forward a hand's-breadth. "You should reestablish the provincial courts, Constantine. At least the provincial courts. Glarentza does not have a proper one, and Glarentza is your own city. Above them, the higher offices — the katholikai kritai, the dikaiodotes, the offices as they stood before we shrank them down to their titles. I know you have not the men yet to fill all those chairs. I know. But the frame must exist before the men do. Otherwise the men will be trained to fill nothing."
"There are a few jurists in Constantinople."
"There will be."
"There are. Three or four men Sphrantzes has named to me. They read Harmenopoulos as other men read their psalter. But I am not ready to trust any of them yet with a theme, or with a judge's seat."
"Still. I would sooner trust a lawyer I am unsure of than a priest who has grown fond of collecting his rent."
Constantine laughed once, short.
"It is observed. Which brings me to a thing I did mean to say to you." Plethon's voice lowered a shade, though no one was within earshot. "Ieros Skopos."
"Yes."
"It has gone where I wanted it to go, and it has begun to drift where I did not. The further it travels, the more it is being folded into Orthodoxy alone. The Roman root, the Greek root, these are being quietly shaved off in some places by men who find the phrase useful for other ends. I have it from Crete most clearly. Abbots there have bound it up with their own rents and their own quarrels, and it would not surprise me to hear the same from Macedonia by the end of the year."
"I do not want funny ideas in Crete. We cannot afford a war with Venice. Not this year, and not next."
"I do not think Venice will move unless you move first. Arm no abbots, send no letters that could be read aloud in a bad room, and the thing stays an irritation."
"Good. Send agents and keep me informed. I mean that."
"I will. An abbot in Crete writes five letters for every one he receives. It will not be hard to know what he is thinking before he knows it himself." He turned his head toward the sea. "And while we watch him, watch the rest. This is the time to build. Italy is busy tearing at itself, Hungary cannot decide what to make of Albert, and the Ottomans are spending what strength they have left fighting each other. None of that will hold. Use it while it does."
"I know what worries me most."
"Anatolia."
"Yes, Anatolia. There are still many Romans there. And the infighting between the emirs and what is left of the Ottoman house, it will open something. A door somewhere. The trouble is that going through the door means governing chaos on the other side of it, and I do not have the men."
"Then the empire will wait a year, Constantine, or two. Anatolia will still be there. It has been Roman and it has been Turkish and it will be one of them again, but not this spring." A small smile, the first of the afternoon. "Take the door without a household behind you and you have only found a longer way to fall."
Constantine set his hands flat on the table and looked at them. The afternoon had moved round by a hand's-breadth. The reed awning cast its bars across his wrist and across the wax tablet's edge.
They sat a while after that with less between them. Plethon asked after Sphrantzes and heard the answer. Constantine asked after a student who had been at the launch of the Katarina and had since gone to Mistras; he was well, Plethon said, and writing home too often for a boy supposed to be working. A woman came out from the inner door with a small plate of olives and salt cheese and bread, set it between them, and went back in. Constantine ate two olives. Plethon ate one, and kept the pit in his fingers while he talked.
"And Bessarion?"
"Rising fast." Plethon was unsurprised by the question. "Faster than any Greek has risen in that court in a hundred years. He is useful to Eugene, and he has the sense not to look eager about it. And do not forget he is the man who made the Pope richer through your presses — they will not forget it. Rome counts in ledgers even when it pretends to count in souls."
"He is ours, still?"
"He is ours. At the end of it, yes. He was ours when he went, and he will be ours when he comes back, whether the red hat stays on his head or not. I have said before and I will say again that I would not be astonished if he wore white one day."
"Pope?"
"In time."
"I do not think that is possible. Not without a union, at least. He will always be a Greek to them — something to lift with when it suits them, and set down again after."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. There have been stranger things. He speaks their Latin better than most of the men already in the Curia, and he has the one quality they prize beyond blood, which is patience."
"We shall see."
"We shall."
Plethon flicked the olive pit out past the edge of the awning, where it struck the flag and rolled a short way into the sand. He watched it come to rest before he spoke again.
"While I have you. At the dinner, you spoke again of the union. Of sending men to sit with them over it."
"I did."
"I am less sure than I was, Constantine, that you still need it."
Constantine turned his head. "Say it out."
"The empire stands. It stands better than it has in three generations. Constantinople is yours, Thessaloniki is yours, the Morea is safe, the fleet is growing, the presses are feeding half of Italy and all of Central Europe. You do not need Rome's blessing to hold a throne you already hold. And a union, Constantine — a real one, signed and proclaimed — will alienate the Orthodox majority. Why take on a fight the situation no longer forces on you?"
"You have a point."
"I know I have a point. I would like to know what you will do with it."
Constantine took his time. Down the beach the child had gone quiet.
"There is a point," he said. "But we made promises in Rome. They helped us with the crusade, in their way: money, ships, names on letters we could hold up in the West when it mattered. I will not shred that lightly. And their cities are our largest market for the books. The presses run on Italian gold before they run on any other. I am not going to pull that thread out of the loom to spite a theological position."
"You could slow the talks to a walk."
"I will slow them to whatever pace the theologians walk at. Let them argue. Let them send letters and hold synods and write treatises that three men will read. It will not be settled in a year, and it will not be settled in five. We have time, Plethon. We have all the time in the world, so long as we do not let an accident force our hand."
"As you wish."
"You disagree?"
"I wish you to be careful of the promise you are keeping and of the one you are postponing. That is all."
"Noted."
Plethon looked out past the awning at the line of the water. The wind had dropped a little, and the sea beyond the skiff had gone from chop to the long slow breathing of an afternoon turning toward evening. He spoke without looking back.
"It will not matter in the end. Muhammad and Christ, Constantine, they are the same confusion in different robes. Given time enough, both will fall, and the true truth will shine through every region of the world."
Constantine did not answer at once. He set the cup down with care.
"I am not sure about that, Master."
Author note: This one ran long! Constantine and Plethon had a lot to work through, and I didn't want to split it. Reform of the themes, the courts, the students, Ieros Skopos, Crete, Anatolia, the union question, Bessarion. It all needed to be on the table in one sitting.
A word on Plethon himself: his ideas in OTL were genuinely unique and, for his time, mostly heretical. The land-holding reforms, the professional army supported by a taxpaying class, the middle-class advisory body, all of it comes straight from his actual pamphlets to Manuel II and Theodore Palaiologos. And that last line, about Muhammad and Christ being the same confusion and both eventually falling to "the true truth" that's not me. He actually said it. It's preserved in George of Trebizond's account of Florence, and it shocked his contemporaries enough that George says he feared him "like a poisonous viper" ever after.
He's a fascinating man. Neoplatonist, proto-humanist, possible secret pagan, teacher to half the Italian Renaissance through Cosimo de' Medici's Florentine Academy. Worth a look if you haven't checked him so far!