Clermont castle, Octomber 1428
Theodora slept on beside me, breath small and even, hair spilled across the silk. I eased upright, careful not to wake her. Cold climbed from the stone through my linen and into the seams of my shirt. At home I would have tapped a thermostat and waited for the quiet click; here the fire had fallen to red pits and ash, a faint sweetness of spent beeswax in the air.
Two days since I woke in this body. I had tried every explanation—coma, a mind buckling under stress, some punishment beyond sense—and none held. Years of shelving "what‑if" paperbacks had taught me the usual levers: keep a wall standing one more season, buy ships with dear coin, find a man who can pour bronze true, trade a promise for time. Elegant in print; ruinous in practice. None of it explained why I was here; it only sketched the work. I was Constantine Palaiologos, or I would have to pass for him.
I crossed the chamber and unbarred the shutter. The hinge gave a low groan, and autumn air pressed in, smoke, damp leaf, a thread of brine from distant water. Below, torches stitched a thin seam of light along the inner wall; beyond that, the ground fell to black fields and the long backs of the Morea's hills. Somewhere in the valley a dog barked twice and fell quiet. Two strokes came clean from a far bell, the sound carrying in the cold. A sentry on the inner ward shifted, spear‑butt tapping stone—once, then again—a signal done by habit more than thought.
Clermont castle lay quiet under me, honest work in stone rather than beauty. In another life the word castle belonged to books and tours; here it was draughts down a stairwell, soot that lived in the pores, and a guard with his cloak pulled high because the wind took the gallery at an angle.
The sill's grit caught at skin that was not mine, hard where it should have been smooth, the knuckles mapped with fine white lines. A single scar ran wrist to elbow, tidy as a tailor's work. When I leaned, the shoulders settled into a practiced readiness I'd never learned. The cross came next, the old pattern executed with a soldier's economy, and the Greek followed as if drawn up from the ribs: "Kyrie eleison." Whatever else I had lost, the body had kept the habits.
Fragments rose like fish breaking water and were gone: a ridge road above olives bent like knotted rope; the sharp stink of horse and leather; a boy's laugh on a practice ground; rain on a tent; a council table, the grain worn smooth at the corners, men thinned by years listening for a decision and not letting their eyes show how much they needed one. When I tried to hold any piece of it, it slipped.
How long could I pretend? Not a grand unmasking, no flames and cries of sorcery, but the small seam where a lie catches. A steward's boy would kneel and wait for a blessing; what words did a Despot use for that? A guardsman would announce a child born to his house and expect the proper reply. The liturgy would come out of me by pattern, yes, but a single wrong saint's day on my tongue, a name misplaced in a roster, and it would be talk in the passage, not accusation at first, only a look held a moment too long. Then the colder look from a man like Sphrantzes, George Sphrantzes, the man who kept the books and the truths no one said aloud. Then the wolves.
I bowed my forehead to the stone and let the cold have me; it steadied more than warmth would have. Hiding was not work. The word from the wall, work, kept finding me.
I had kept the other thought at the edge and it came in anyway: the life I had left, the ordinary things I had not believed could be taken. Jason's last call had ended the usual way, I'm swamped, Dad. Soon. Soon never comes. Nick was lamplight by the window on wet evenings, a mug of cocoa leaving a ring I meant to wipe and forgot; two chairs facing the same quiet while rain stitched the glass.
And Ellen, there was a time when her laughter was my favorite sound. She'd throw her head back when something truly delighted her, curls shaking, eyes bright. Lately our conversations had thinned to logistics about the boys and the careful calendar of birthdays and holidays; our last talk closed with the hollow catch up soon we both heard as form. She had a life, work, a circle beyond mine; I had told myself I'd made peace with that. The peace didn't follow me into this room. I had let those days be ordinary. Now they were sealed.
I flexed my left hand and looked for the pale nick I had carried for thirty years from a misjudged cut when Jason and I tried to build a treehouse. It wasn't there. This arm bore a different history: bowstring ridge, an old puncture on the thumb pad, a callus at the base of the ring finger where a sword's grip had sat. My boys existed somewhere I could no longer reach; this body belonged to a life I had not lived. The ache was useless and heavy and still it set its teeth.
If I had any use here, it lay in what I knew, which was less than I wanted and more than anyone around me could imagine. I knew the shape of the tide that would break. Twenty‑five years, perhaps less, before the last wall went under. Knowledge is not power by itself; it is only weight until you set it against a lever. The trick was not to drown under it before I could make it move something.
Behind me, the sheets rustled. Theodora murmured and reached into the space where I had been. I turned. In the lamp's low crown of light her face was calm for once, the line between her brows smoothed away. For two days she had done what she could: soft words, room to breathe, no press of questions. I had paid it back with distance that felt like theft.
I went back and stood by the bed until her hand found my wrist. She did not wake fully. "Constantine?" she breathed, not quite a word.
"I'm here," I said, and then, in Greek without choosing it, "Sleep." She turned and the quiet took her again. The warmth of her palm lingered along the thin skin at the inside of my wrist as if the touch had left heat behind.
On the table, a small metal mirror leaned against a folded cloth. I'd caught this face in water and scraped metal since waking; tonight I studied it. Younger than the mind behind it, edges pared by years that had demanded more than they returned. Not mine, but mine to carry into daylight.
A leather strap lay beside the mirror, the end worn smooth where fingers had habitually worked it while thinking. I took it without thinking and found the motion, the thumb turning, the forefinger pressing the ridge, then set it down again as if it might betray me.
Outside, the watch changed; the new man's spear‑butt tapped twice, answer and receipt. The wind found a gap under the door and brought the corridor's chill along the floor. I imagined the day pressing at the edge of dark: a boy with a tray and a bow; the cold of water in the basin; a cross of cloth heavy with thread laid on my shoulders; a corridor where men measured my step and made their thoughts quiet. Sphrantzes would test me without seeming to test me. He would say, as you instructed, and watch my eyes for the flinch.
I opened the chest by the wall and found a narrow book wrapped in linen, psalter or prayer book, the hand neat and dark on vellum. I could sound the lines out from church memory; the mouth knew more than the mind. I read a verse under my breath, slow as if walking a rocky path in the dark. The words steadied not because I believed they would save me but because they demanded breath given in measure.
Enough.
I crossed to the door and lifted the latch quietly. The corridor lay in a wash of moon‑pale. A guardsman at the far end straightened from his post and bowed, spear held close, the metal fittings dull in the low light.
"Despot," he said, low.
I almost spoke, almost set the day in motion before it began, but the iron was cold under my palm and something unstitched behind the eyes. Not deduction: recollection. A map flexed open behind my eyes, edges bright and the centers still dim; pieces slid into place as if they had been waiting for the hand to lift them.
Tar and hemp, the smell of a harbor at night. Glarentza's quay under my boots, oars knocking hulls, a silver ring on Theodora's hand and John's seal heavy on the treaty. With her dowry, the port is yours. West Morea, Elis and Arcadia, to hold and mend. John in the City counting men against coin, weighing church union like a tool in the box if it would buy ships.
Mystras in the mind's eye: Theodore's neat, narrow hand on an order; his voice careful as a ledger, guard the passes, keep Laconia quiet, let the coast be your work. He wanted no talk of union, only walls and prayer and the Hexamilion watched like a live wound. Thomas farther north at Kalavryta, a quick laugh at councils, mountain roads under hooves, men and horses ready to move.
Letters from Constantinople in a younger brother's tight script, Demetrios restless in the palace air, the City's politics under his nails. And Andronikos, pale in a monk's cloth, Thessalonica handed to the winged lion to save it from the crescent, keys traded for time and breath.
Venetians at Modon and Coron, counting barrels as if salvation could be tallied; Nauplio's harbor lights; far off. Their garrisons polite and precise and always for hire, at interest.
From the north, hooves in wet earth and smoke on a noon wind: Ottoman riders cutting down into the valleys, a farm gone to sparks, a chapel door barred too late. Raids like weather. The wall across the Isthmus patched and patched again. Some squares stayed blank, names without faces, faces without loyalties, but the shape was there.
That was the board. My piece sat here at Clermont above the road to Glarentza, wind off the gulf finding the galleries at an angle.
I let the latch fall and set the bar back in its place. There would be time enough at first light to find the man who kept the books and the keys, to ask for rolls and maps and names. Not now.
On the way to the bed I stopped at the hearth and nudged the ash until a buried coal showed a patient red. I fed it two thin sticks and watched the flame take with the small sound of breath catching. The room smelled of smoke and beeswax and the salt in Theodora's hair when I lay down.
She stirred and pressed closer, warm where the air was cold. I kept my hands still and let the weight of the coverlet and the stone beneath the rug tell me where I was. I set one palm to the wall and counted three slow breaths the way I had done behind a counter on bad days, when the register would not balance, a delivery went astray, and someone wanted a book that did not exist. One thing, then the next. Stone. Breath. Light.
Sleep came late and not kindly, fragments that would not hold, a council table without faces, a gate seen from too near, the whisper of a strap turning under a thumb. But under the noise a single clear thought set hard enough to carry: at first light, work.