Chapter 53: Before the Crossroads

They rested in a town whose name Remy did not bother to retain.

It was small enough that names felt excessive. A clearing had been offered to them at the edge of the settlement, granted with the cautious generosity of people who understood that armed travelers were better accommodated than refused. The company spread across it without ceremony, unpacking what needed to be unpacked, tending to the horses before themselves, as they had learned to do over the long weeks of travel.

Remy had ridden ahead with Sir Gaston to speak with the headman.

The gifts were accepted without difficulty. That was how it usually went. A man of modest means who received more than he expected rarely questioned the source of his fortune. Gratitude, when it came, came quickly and without conditions.

They rode back toward camp at an easy pace, the late afternoon light flattening against the dry ground. Sir Gaston rode with the loose confidence of a man accustomed to long hours in the saddle.

"You would be out of coin," he said, "with how much you spend."

Remy kept his gaze forward. "Not likely."

"You say that with some confidence."

"I did not begin this pilgrimage without thought," Remy replied. "It was planned. Every stretch of it."

Sir Gaston made a sound that was neither agreement nor skepticism. He shifted in the saddle, adjusting his reins. "A brilliant arrangement, then. I say even an old king would have found himself in debt on a journey like this. The dry road is as unforgiving as the sea."

"It is a pilgrimage," Remy said.

There was no elaboration in it. He did not intend one. Sir Gaston accepted the answer with his usual equanimity, and the conversation settled into silence as the camp came into view.

The company had arranged itself with reasonable order. Fires had been started. The smell of cooking had already begun to drift across the clearing, thin but present. A few voices carried on the wind, easy and unguarded. The kind of ease that only came after sufficient exhaustion had been endured and sufficient comfort had been found on the other side of it.

Remy dismounted and handed Morgan's reins to one of the stable hands without instruction. The horse tolerated it only because he recognized the routine.

He entered his tent and closed it behind him.

Inside, the light was dimmer, filtered through canvas, cooler than the air beyond. He set his gloves aside and unrolled the map he kept closest to his person, spreading it across the flat surface of the travel chest he used for such purposes. The route ahead required little revision. He had studied it enough that revising it was more habit than necessity.

Still, he studied it.

Outside, the sounds of the camp reached him without effort. Cups struck together. Someone laughed at something. A song began, unsteady at first, then finding its footing as more voices joined. The money he had distributed, the supplies he had arranged, the gifts that had secured the clearing, all of it had purchased this.

He did not begrudge them the comfort.

But he was aware of it.

The thought arrived, as it occasionally did, without invitation. He could ride out in the night. Quietly. Morgan would not protest, and no one would hear them leave. By morning, the company would wake to find him gone, and what remained would be enough to carry them forward, if they chose wisely. The gold was distributed along the route in measures he had arranged months in advance. They would not starve. They would not be left without recourse.

They would manage.

He held the thought for a moment, examining it without affection.

It was not the first time it had come. He recognized it for what it was, not a plan, not a true intention, but a pressure valve. A way the mind accommodated the weight of what it did not choose and could not set down. The company had accumulated around him without his full consent, and it had not diminished. It had grown. Fifty people now moved in his shadow, dependent on decisions he made without being consulted first, grateful for things he had not offered, trusting him with a certainty he had not invited.

He rolled the map closed.

The funds were sufficient. He had ensured that before departing. Pouches of gold, sealed and marked, lay buried in locations he carried only in his own memory, spaced at intervals along the route they traveled. It was not charity. It was logistics. The same calculated preparation that had governed every other aspect of how he moved through this era. He was not generous by sentiment. He was efficient by habit.

Yet the distinction felt thinner some evenings than others.

He sat without lighting a lamp.

The singing outside continued, growing less precise and more earnest as the night settled in. Men who had marched across plains and through mountain passes now sat beside fires and sang badly and did not care.

Remy listened without meaning to.

The years ahead pressed at the edges of his thoughts, as they often did in the quiet. He knew what waited in them. Not in detail, not in the particulars of his own path through it, but in the broader shape of what history had already determined would occur. It sat in him like a weight that did not increase and did not lessen, that simply existed alongside everything else.

He had lived long enough to understand that dread was a luxury.

He could not afford it.

He did not remain in the tent long.

The walls of canvas offered no particular comfort, and stillness, when it arrived uninvited, had a way of turning the mind toward things better left unexamined. He pulled his cloak over his shoulders and stepped outside.

The camp had settled into its evening rhythm. Fires burned at measured intervals. Men sat in loose clusters, their conversations quieter now, the song from before having dissolved into something more private. A few looked up as he passed. None spoke to him directly. He had a way of moving through spaces that discouraged casual address, not through coldness exactly, but through the simple suggestion that he was already occupied.

He walked to the edge of the clearing and beyond it, into the outer reaches of the town.

It was not a large place. A single road ran through its center, flanked by structures that had been built for function rather than permanence. A well stood near the middle, dry-stacked stone that had been repaired more than once. Lanterns burned in a few doorways. The air smelled of woodsmoke and something fried in oil, sharp and faintly sweet.

He was not looking for anything in particular.

He rarely was, in these hours. He moved and he listened, and information found him the way water found the lowest ground.

It was near the edge of the road that he first noticed the merchant.

The man sat apart from the others who had gathered at the base of the inn, his back against the outer wall, a cup resting untouched beside him. He was not old, but he looked worn in the way that men looked when they had been moving too long and was tired of the road. His clothes were of reasonable quality, though road-stained and poorly tended. A cart stood nearby, its load covered with cloth that had not been properly secured.

He was from the east. Remy read it in the cut of the coat, in the style of the boots, in the way the man's eyes moved across the town with the detached wariness of someone who had stopped trusting familiar places.

Remy settled beside him without a preamble. The man glanced at him. Took in the cloak. The bearing. Said nothing.

Remy waited.

"You are heading west," he said at last, in Greek.

The merchant looked at him more carefully. "You speak it well."

"Well enough," Remy replied. "Where from?"

The man picked up his cup, considered it, and set it down again without drinking. "Constantinople," he said. "Two weeks back. Perhaps a little more."

Remy said nothing, which was its own kind of invitation.

The merchant accepted it.

"I had a stall in the covered market," he said. "Linen. Good linen, not the coastal sort. I did well enough." He paused. "There is no point in remaining now."

"Why?"

The man looked at him as though the question were almost offensive in its innocence, then seemed to decide that Remy genuinely wanted an answer.

"The walls," he said. "You have seen the walls?"

"I have."

"Then you know they are old." He turned the cup slowly in his hands. "Old and patched and patched again. The inner wall holds better than the outer, but the sections near the Blachernae are in a state that would embarrass a village fort. There are gaps where the mortar has gone entirely. Sections where the stones have shifted and no one has had the funds to reset them." He shook his head once, the gesture carrying the exhaustion of a man who had explained this too many times and convinced no one who mattered. "The Emperor has petitioned for aid. He has petitioned for years. What comes back are promises and delegations and letters sealed with wax that mean nothing when it rains."

Remy listened without comment.

"The Turk knows," the merchant continued. "He has always known. He does not need spies to tell him what any traveler can see from outside the gates. The walls speak for themselves." He finally drank from his cup, a short sip, as though he had forgotten why he had poured it. "It is not a question of whether. It is a question of when his father dies and the son decides the time has come."

"And the garrison?"

The merchant gave a short sound that was not quite a laugh. "Capable men. Not enough of them. The city relies on the reputation of those walls more than on the men who stand behind them. And reputation does not hold when the reputation is a lie."

The night had deepened around them. A dog moved through the far end of the road, then disappeared between buildings. Somewhere behind them, a fire crackled as someone added wood to it.

"The Genoese and Venetians?" Remy asked.

"The Genoese hold Galata and will hold it as long as it profits them to do so. The Venetians send envoys and count ships. Neither will march unless they calculate a return." He set the cup aside. "And neither will march in time."

The certainty in his voice was not dramatic. It was the certainty of a man who had done the arithmetic and accepted the result.

Remy studied the road ahead, the darkness where it bent out of sight.

He had known this. He had always known it. The fall of Constantinople was not a mystery to him. It was a date. A name. A set of circumstances he had read and studied and carried through decades of another life. It lived in him the way all foreknowledge lived in him, present but untouchable, accurate and entirely useless.

"You were right to leave," Remy said.

The merchant looked at him sideways. "You think so."

"I think the city will endure longer than you fear," Remy replied. "But not indefinitely."

The man considered that for a moment, then nodded slowly, as though the half-consolation was still more than he had expected.

They sat without speaking for a time. The town settled around them. Above, the stars had sharpened, the sky clear and indifferent as it always was.

At last, Remy rose.

"Safe roads to you," he said.

The merchant looked up at him. "And to you." He paused. "Where are you going?"

Remy adjusted his cloak.

"South," he said. “I wish to look at it before it falls.”

He walked back toward the camp and did not look back.

The fires were lower when he returned. Most of the company had found their rest. A single guard sat at the edge of the clearing, half-watching the dark. He nodded as Remy passed.

Remy entered his tent and lay down without removing his boots.

He stared at the canvas above him and said nothing to the silence.

Twenty years, he thought. Give or take.

Then he closed his eyes.