Constantinople, Tuesday, May 29, 1453 — St. Romanos Gate
First the rumor, then the word with a blade in it: Open.
Men pass it down the battlements east to west until a captain makes it plain, St. Romanos is broken. One hinge torn, the inner leaf jammed wide, janissaries inside the city and coming fast.
It is still the early hour, the sky not yet made up its mind. Small bells answer somewhere, too quick for prayer. Last week the moon was eaten. Last night men swore they saw the light slip off the great dome and vanish into the dark. Constantine files the omens with the other things he cannot mend.
Leather drinks the oil rubbed in at midnight. A thread of myrtle rides the strap's seam, green and out of place where the air tastes of tallow smoke and iron filings.
He reaches for the brooch at his shoulder. Enamel under thumb. The pin fights, then yields. The purple sloughs off and puddles with a weight beyond cloth. He wears no crown on a wall; he has already laid aside each thing that says Emperor and kept the only thing that still matters: work.
A guard stares as if a statue had stepped down.
"To me," Constantine says. Not loud. He doesn't need loud. Duty draws some men, choice draws the others; the cords braid. He counts without numbers. Enough.
They run for the stair that falls toward the valley of the Lycus and the torn gate. In the angle where stone meets street, a charcoal cross is half‑rubbed away by palms. A short length of chain lies scabbed with rust, forgotten after some hurried mend. He lifts it. Weight speaks in the palm, things you hold, things that hold you. He sets it where an ankle might catch and live.
Below, the portcullis is jammed high. The inner leaf hangs crooked, teeth ripped from the jamb. The lane beyond is a throat and from that throat the city coughs up its last. Standards ripple like fire in a wind that is only men moving.
"Hold the wall," he has said all morning, as if words could be stones. There is no wall now. Only the work left to the hands.
They go down into the light.
Edge from the shoulder; weight on the left. The first rank coming up is young and fearless; the second less so; the third hardens because there is no other way through. Steel thinks of bone and finds it. Breath is coin; he spends it, buys a yard, then another. For a heartbeat the wedge holds and the street's current changes its mind.
A spear glances off his hip. A mace kisses the helm and makes the world thin at the edges; he does not go down. Leather creaks. The myrtle breathes at his shoulder, garden following a man into a broken city.
It is Tuesday, unlucky day, his mother Helena's name like a stitch in the mind—Constantine, son of Helena, as the old mouths muttered, the city founded by another Constantine, son of Helena. Let prophecy take its pleasure. He has work.
"Now," he says.
They push. Space opens like wood under a clean cut. He hears himself laugh once, short, exact, the sound a nail driven true.
The answer comes from the flank, hard and fast. The wedge collapses; the press turns to whirlpool. A ring of his own men is there and then not there. Faces crowd close, teeth bared, eyes wide. He sees a boy he bound at dawn; the linen is already red.
In the crush, the thought arrives cold and simple: No capture. He turns, searching for a hand he trusts. "Is there no Christian here to take my head from me?" The words leave him without drama, workman‑plain. No blade rises. Not cowardice, only the failure of time.
"Then forward," he says, and goes.
A bright edge slides under the rim of the cuirass and angles up; the body understands before the mind does. He leans into the wound as into wind and spends what breath remains buying room for others to live a little. The lane sways though the stone is still.
At his ankle the eagles stamped on the greaves catch the light like wet wings. He has the absurd thought that this is what will be remembered.
The counter‑surge bears him back one step, two. Close work now: the smell of men, wet leather, old iron. A hand hooks his elbow and is gone. He takes one more cut from the shoulder, hears the clean strike, and in the same instant a blade lifts, bright and personal, from the right.
There is a cold along the neck like water poured at the spine. The world tilts and opens. He thinks, not to God, not to history, but to the work, not yet. One more breath. He tries to take it.
He cannot.
The rest is brightness. Then nothing.
Chapter 01: Awakening
Clermont castle October 1428
A hard sound split the dark and dragged me up from sleep. Pain throbbed behind my eyes—dull, nailed in place—as if someone had set iron there. I groaned and kept my eyes shut a moment longer, willing the ache to loosen. Something was wrong.
Cold, dense air lay against my skin and raised a slow shiver along the spine. Where was the hum of the air conditioner? The faint sweetness of last night's chamomile? The bed was too firm; the sheets were rough, scratching like sackcloth. I opened my eyes.
Dark wooden beams crossed the ceiling, smoked and gleaming with old oil, not the smooth plaster of my bedroom. Stone walls closed around me, the kind you see in a fortress. Panic rose as I pushed myself upright, muscles answering in ways that felt learned and not my own. I looked down at the hands in my lap.
These were not my hands.
Mine were a little wrinkled, soft from years of shelves and pages. A pale nick sat on my left index finger from a misjudged cut when Jason and I tried to build a treehouse; we laughed until the plank slipped and the saw kissed skin. The memory pricked sharp. What would my boys, Jason and Nick, say if they saw me now?
The chest I looked down at was flat and corded where mine had been comfortably padded. Breath shortened. I swung my legs over the bed and caught on the heavy weave of a rug thrown over cold stone.
"Does something trouble you, Despota mou?" a soft voice said behind me.
I stilled. Despot. The word carried Greek in it, familiar from my Yaya and stray summers of church, yet it reached me whole, not as translation but as something native. Not my title. Not my life. I turned.
She lay half‑propped, dark hair spilling to her shoulders, features gentle, eyes intent with concern. She knew me; I did not know her.
The chest tightened. Who was she? More pressing, who was I?
Then memories surged, arriving too fast, too heavy, faces under crested helms, fields torn to mud, the clang and push of shield to shield, and banners with crescents and long black script snapping in a salt wind. The weight of command, metal and otherwise, settled like a familiar cloak I had never worn.
"No," I muttered, palms to my skull, fingers digging for purchase. "No."
I made myself look again at the hands, young, scarred, the knuckles thickened, a faint bowstring ridge where my soft life had none. The room tilted, then steadied when my right hand moved without asking: forehead, belly, shoulder, shoulder. The old way. I went still.
I tried to speak. The voice that came was deep and steady and not mine. "I… I'm fine," I said, and even to my ears it sounded borrowed.
Her face eased. "You were restless in your sleep," she said, voice low.
Restless wasn't the word. Images pressed closer: Constantinople's walls rising like a held breath; long councils with men drawn thin by years; the weight not of a crown in the moment, but of what it meant to carry one. The name climbed from somewhere below thought and found its seat.
Constantine
The certainty landed with a cold, exact edge. Constantine Palaiologos. I was Michael Jameston, fifty‑five, American, keeper of a bookshop. I sold novels and prints and dusted shelves on Tuesdays. I did not bear an empire's last weight.
Yet the hands, the voice, the small instinct of the body to set weight to the left leg when I stood, these belonged to him. To me.
The woman watched me with quiet concern. Her name floated at the edges of my memory: Theodora. Yes. I almost flinched at the familiarity that name stirred.
"Are you certain you're well?" Theodora asked softly, stepping toward me. Her silken gown whispered over the floor as she moved. In the lamplight, I could see genuine worry on her face, her brow delicately furrowed.
I pushed up, palm on stone, and breathed until the world narrowed and cleared. "I'm only… overtired," I managed.
Her gown whispered as she rose, concern softening to care. "You've taken on so much," she said. "The duties in the Morea, your brothers' affairs. It is no wonder you feel the weight."
I nodded, grateful for anything that could be named. "Yes. The weight of it."
She reached to touch my forearm, warm and light, and for a moment the strangeness steadied. "Fresh air may clear your head," she said. "Or a ride."
"Later," I said, shaping a smile that felt practiced on another face. "A moment will do."
"I'll have breakfast sent up." She moved to the door, looked back once, then left.
When she was gone, I sat on the stool and pressed my palm to the rough lime of the wall. Think. The last thing I remembered as Michael: closing the shop at night, the wet ticking of rain at the windows, the paper smell of the place I had made my life in. The headache, sudden and unlike any I'd known. Then dark.
And now a fortress room. A body that remembered things my mind did not.
I crossed to the window and pulled the heavy drape aside. Hills rolled to the horizon, studded with olive and vine. Far mountains caught a lean slice of sun and turned it gold. A breath of air carried smoke and the clean bitterness of crushed leaves. Real does not announce itself; it weighs. I felt the weight.
My hand went to my jaw. Stubble rasped under my fingers. On the table, a small mirror of beaten metal caught the light and gave back a face I would have passed on any street and then turned to watch, young, angular, eyes pared down by responsibility. I did not know him. I knew him.
If I stood in Constantine's life, what did that mean, for me, for the line I knew history would draw? The fall would come; I had read it, taught it to customers who wanted a tragedy with dates. Did that make me witness, or debtor? Could this be altered? Should it?
A knock at the door cut across the thought. "Enter," I said, the word falling right in a mouth that had said it often.
A boy no older than my Jason at sixteen came in with a tray: bread, cheese, fruit. He bowed without spilling a thing. "Your breakfast, Despot."
"Thank you," I said. He set the tray down and turned to go. "Wait."
He paused, eyes respectful and curious.
"What is your name?"
"Alexios, Despot."
"How long have you served here, Alexios?"
"All my life. My father was a steward before me."
I nodded. The simple exchange steadied more than food would. "Thank you. That will be all."
He bowed and withdrew.
I sat and looked at the bread without tasting it. Possibilities and fears crowded close. If I carried this knowledge, if I knew the tide that would break, could I use it to change anything? Or would motion in one place ruin ten others? Beneath that, deeper and uglier, another question chewed: could I ever go back? Was this a dream from which a sound would wake me, or had I been taken clean from my life and set down here?
Breath shortened again. I set both feet on the stone and felt the solidity of it through the rug. I counted three slow breaths the way I'd done behind the counter on bad days.
One thing, then the next.