A Road Away from Rome

The conquest of Constantinople had many consequences. One that I had already seen was the thinning of the population of young princes in the court. Eight of the old sultan’s sons and brothers had died in the assault on the walls and a ninth had been crippled. Two others—a toddler and an infant, proof that the old sultan had been virile until the end—suffered fatal incidents on the grounds of the sultan’s new and unfamiliar palace one night, both allegedly mistaking windows for doors, and both followed by their nursemaids. In both cases, their nursemaids, presumed officially to be the only direct witnesses to their misfortune, followed their charges out the window, were determined to have been likely distraught enough to defenestrate themselves, in one case vigorously enough to reach a horizontal distance of nearly twenty feet before impact.

This left the new sultan with three or four plausible heirs, one being his own infant son (kept well away from windows), a half-brother sent away to war upon Trebizond, and an uncle sent away to manage Rumelia. His crippled half-brother, who was about Radu’s age, was unsuited to military deployment and unable to fall out of a window without overt assistance; however, it was not in any case clear to me or to the court at large that a crippled Osman prince could succeed as a leader, the recent example of Tamerlane in the east notwithstanding.

Sultan Allaedin proclaimed himself the Sultan of Rum—or, in European translation, Emperor of Rome, though more diplomatic translators bearing forth his announcement usually left his title in the Turkish form to avoid immediate offense, as it pressed against titles claimed by the three most powerful European rulers—including the immortal sorcerer-king Koschei ruling the Golden Empire north of the Axine Sea and the infamous Leon the Usurper, whose cruisers were clad in Corsican brass and had no equal anywhere in the open waters of the Mediterranean.

Leon claimed the title of Emperor in Rome by virtue of having ridden into the original western city with a complacent army of musketeers outside and a cooperative Pope within. Koschei’s claim was more complicated. The last Roman Empire had fallen several times, and during one of the previous falls, senators fleeing the sack of Constantinople by Venetians had arrived in Tanais. They brought with them an eligible Greek princess from a recent ruling dynasty and a willingness to declare themselves a proper quorum of the Roman Senate; ever since that time, Emperor Koschei titled himself Emperor of Rome and his capital Rome-upon-Tanais.

As a practical matter, Constantinople was distant from the Golden Empire and across the Axine Sea; the Golden Empire’s fleet was not nearly large enough to challenge Venice’s fleet, and Koschei’s claim was therefore held very loudly on a symbolic basis, primarily serving to glorify his own capital and provide an excuse for claiming insult. Besides, the Venetians (and the Greeks once they reclaimed it) were valuable trade partners.

The Sultanate, however, was not a valued trade partner of the Golden Empire; the Golden Empire’s new railroads connected its three great rivers from west to east, providing an economical connection from the Axine Sea to the Khazarian Sea, a modernized northern alternative to the old Silk Road. At the ordinary speed of trade, it takes three or four weeks for news to travel between the second Rome of Constantinople to Koschei’s claimed third Rome upon the mouth of the Tanais River. The emissary sent by the Golden Emperor arrived at Sultan Allaedin’s court arrived only seven weeks after the city fell. The Undying Emperor had a memory like a steel trap in spite of his age, and the message he bore would change everything.

Those intermediate seven weeks were a pleasant time, however, and I remember them fondly…

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Chapter 6: The Lighthouse

“The moon is quite full tonight,” I said, jerking my head to indicate the shuttered window.

“Already?” Helena’s fork dropped to her plate in a barely controlled motion, clinking loudly.

“Yes—and it really looks quite nice tonight, if you would care to go out for a moonlit walk. The sky is very clear,” I said, gesturing at the door to the stairway. In my opinion, the lovely brunette was overdue for fresh air; she had not descended to the lower levels of the palace beneath the lighthouse tower for a little more than two weeks, much less out of doors.

“Perhaps I will.” Helena picked up her fork, pushing a half-eaten piece of fish around her plate. “I am not hungry. Still…”

Helena’s eyes flickered to the makeup case sitting on the side table. I knew that, having established her reputation for having an ugly aspect at the cost of Pasha Mustafa’s reputation for refined taste in women, she did not wish to either remind Pasha Mustafa of his embarrassment either by showing in her ugly guise or endangering her aforementioned reputation by appearing as comely as she did naturally. She did not wish to draw any eyes other than mine.

And I did not doubt that she did wish to draw mine, as she had remained affectionate. I was a strong young man in good health; she was a young woman with a comely figure, and no chaperones resided in the lighthouse to prevent behavior that our shared religion deemed sinful—indeed, servants rarely ventured up the stairs other than by my explicit request. We therefore thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company in the shared solitude of the lighthouse. In the process, she improved my Greek, and I sometimes taught her rudiments of the Osman dialect, though she had limited enthusiasm for learning the language. Speaking the Osman dialect in her presence would inevitably sour her mood, so I did it but rarely.

Tonight, though, her hand did not stretch out over the table to brush against mine, and her foot did not slide against either of my legs. Instead, the silence hung heavily on us as I vigorously ate and she pushed food sullenly around her plate. I had been training at archery with the prince who had been lamed in the assault, who was now eager to find some sort of exercise that did not require the use of his ruined and still-painful legs. Shooting might have been more practical as a form of military training, but little muscular activity is involved in tripping home a little hammer against a phoenix stone set at one end of a metal tube, and the work of reloading in between shots is at best a dirty affair and becomes awkward if one is required to remain seated throughout.

Abruptly Helena stood, turning without a word and walking over to the stairwell, closing the door behind her even as I stood to follow. She had not adjusted her makeup, nor had she grabbed a cloak from the rack next to the door—had she forgotten? I opened the door, calling out her name down the stairs.

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“Helena!”

As I waited for a reply that did not come, I heard her footsteps above me—she was going up, rather than down. I followed, taking two steps at a time, passing a disused supply room and a study before reaching the top floor and the door into the lamp room. It was shut, barred against me; I knocked.

“Helena, is something the matter? Are you unwell?” My stomach churned as I considered what a ruined princess might decide to do that required ascending to the very top floor of a tower.

“Go away—I am trying to pray,” Helena told me, her voice muffled by the door. “Leave me be.”

My heart fell all the way back down to our quarters, and I slunk slowly down the stairs after it, taking each step slowly as if I might find the missing organ lying there waiting to be further stepped upon. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, my stomach growled; I helped myself to seconds and finished my meal, chewing automatically without really tasting the edible matter passing through my mouth and into the sunken pit of my stomach.

I read quietly for several hours, then went to bed alone. In the morning, I found that Helena had cleared away the remnants of her meal and, finding the door to the study locked, presumed that she was within and disinterested in my company.

The next two evenings, I returned from court to find the bedroom door latched and its occupant vocally disinterested in my company. I slept instead on the couch. On the third evening after the night of the full moon, Helena greeted me quietly, ate her dinner quickly and quietly, then wrapped herself in a blanket on the couch, falling asleep. I was not convinced she wanted my company on the couch, so I retreated to the bedroom, respecting her recent desire for solitude. I could not fault her for having had a sudden impulse to pray at length. We were not married. As she had no priest to confess to in our private sanctuary, her need for prayer was greater than mine to begin with, and she had not spent so long among Turks as to begin to forget the regular religious habits of her own people.

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The next day, after discreetly unburdening myself to a priest—discretion being the better part of diplomacy as a foreign hostage prince who had not converted to the religion held dear by the Osman—I went to arms practice. The lamed prince was taking a break from archery practice, and pells had been set up for the sultan’s guards to drill on in that part of the courtyard instead. I was resting after a sparring match when Pasha Mustafa’s astrologer came up to me.

“Did your brother lose very much at dice playing against Pasha Halil?”

The man’s question struck me oddly, and I paused for a long moment before answering. “In truth, I do not know how much he lost and won,” I said. “It has been my practice to try to limit his participation in the vice of gambling when we are together, but I do know that two nights before he left for Trebizond, he lost a slave woman and a fine horse trying to win back the sword that Pasha Mustafa had bestowed upon him.” I paused. “Though he did say that Prince Mehmed cleaned out Pasha Halil’s whole table stake. He cannot be too lucky.”

“Hm, but that means nothing,” the astrologer said. “The prince carried divine favor with him off the battlefield, and the dice can be expected to respond to that from time to time. But the vizier—from the signs of his birth, I would expect him to hold extraordinarily poor luck this year. He has been winning quite often, and it is no poor luck to lose to a prince. And have you never diced with him yourself? I have been seeking to measure his excess luck via mathematics, as I think his fortune portends some kind of anomaly.”

“No—my prizes have been few, and I prefer to conserve them rather than to get greedy,” I told him—though for a moment, the lustful mind of youth whispered to me that if Helena’s shoulder was turning cold in my direction, I might find another woman warm and welcoming. I pushed the thought aside. It was bad enough that I had ruined Helena’s virtue and reduced her to the status of the concubine of a captive prince fighting for a foul fiend; I should not wallow in sin like my hosts, nor did I like the idea of risking Helena’s loss.

Rightfully or not, she was mine—a treasure hoard of delight from fine silken sable hair to delicate pearly toes. And I could not bear to have any of my treasures robbed from me by a bandit bearing dice. I swayed on my feet as fire built up for a moment in my chest, my wrists suddenly heavy as possessive jealousy surged along with the heat.

“Are you well?” The astrologer was gripping my shoulder. “You were acting as if you might faint, and I thought I felt the heat of a fever upon you.”

“I am—I will be fine,” I said. “Helena has been in a mood.”

“It is that time of month for her, then?” The astrologer nodded sagely. “She is your first, is she not? In time, you will get used to womanly cycles and moods. She will be available again after a few days, perhaps a week at the longest.” He lowered his voice, leaning in. “In truth, she will want it as much as you do—perhaps even more while she is unclean, which is why the law says to keep away and not approach them.”

I nodded as if understanding, though at that time I had little understanding of womanly ways—I knew that women had monthly courses, though not precisely what they entailed, and knew that women were accounted inconstant in mood, though not in what ways those two things might be related to one another.

“If you need distraction—perhaps we could play at dice this evening,” the astrologer said smoothly, continuing when I opened my mouth to object. “If you are not one to wish to risk your own purse, I could stake you a handful of akcheh to bet with—”

I interrupted. “—and wish only my winnings in return?” I raised my eyebrows. “Do you think tonight is an auspicious night for me, astrologer?”

“I think it is a particularly ill-fated night for someone else,” the astrologer said. “If you return all your winnings to me, it would be my luck you tested from the start. So, I will ask only half your winnings beyond what I lend you and will forgive your debt if you lose it all.”

“I will consider it,” I said, looking back at the guards. “If I do, I will find you this evening.”

I picked up my wooden practice blade, seeking another sparring partner, and soon found one. My arms still felt weak, and so I struggled. Every parry had to be placed just so to avoid a painful bruise; anything short of perfect technique would see me overpowered by my unhindered sparring partner. Once I had found my rhythm, though, my thoughts turned inevitably back to the astrologer’s invitation, the clatter of wooden blades a sort of percussive music.

In truth, what did I have to lose? Gambling was a vice, but I could not see any way for me to lose the astrologer’s game, and Helena had spoken to me barely thrice in the last three days. If she wanted my absence, she could have a little more of it tonight, I thought, then let my thoughts greedily drift over the possibility that I could earn a little free pocket change if I had the luck that the astrologer forecast for me.

In my youth and naivete, I did not consider that a handful of silver akcheh could be considered a cheap payment to be able to use a prince as a pawn in a deeper game...