Book III / Chapter 39: Hunting News
Outside the Theodosian Walls, December 1439
They went out through the Gate of Charisius before light, hooves loud under the arch, and the cold met them on the far side like a wall of its own. Four riders, two falconers with the hooded birds on the cadge, a huntsman with the dogs, three servants with the sumpter mule and the food, and a dozen of the household guard who kept to the road and stayed out of the hunting. The frost had come down hard in the night and held; the stars were still out over Thrace, and the breath of the horses went up white and hung.
The Philopation lay along the slope north of the road, the old imperial hunting park, partly cleared now, the cut brush stacked in windrows pale under the frost. Good ground for hare, and partridge along the old orchard edges once the light came.
Thomas rode up beside Izaoul and was already talking, about the mare Izaoul had left in his stable for five months and what she had cost him in oats and temper, about the state of the coverts, about a goshawk that had died in August of nothing at all, the way goshawks did. Izaoul answered him easily. He sat his horse without waste, and five months of roads had thinned his face and left the rest of him as it had been.
At the first ride the chief falconer brought the birds up, and Constantine looked at the cadge a moment and nodded at the second peregrine, and the falconer took her to Izaoul and held up his arm for the transfer without a word. Izaoul took the bird onto his fist. He looked at her, and then at Constantine, and inclined his head. To be handed a bird from the Emperor's own mews was a favor, and he received it like one, quietly.
Light came up yellow along the frost. They worked the first field edge and the dogs put up a covey almost at once, and the morning began.
It was good flying. The air was hard and still, good air for a bird to climb, and Thomas shot well besides, which surprised no one. He carried the short bow he favored and took a hare from the saddle at thirty paces while it ran, and a second an hour later at more, and each time he looked around to see that it had been seen. George, who rode a quiet gelding and hunted attentively and without appetite, said the second shot had been luck, and Thomas said that a man could be lucky twice a day for twenty years and Andreas would still call it luck, and they let the old joke run its length.
Between the casts, while they walked the horses, Izaoul gave his account, in pieces, in his own order, and Constantine did not press him.
He had gone up in July, by the inland roads, near a month in the going. Buda he knew from the old days, from four years at Sigismund's court as a boy, and enough of it remembered him for doors to open. King Albert had received him twice in the first fortnight, and more often after that.
"He received me with courtesy and no warmth," Izaoul said. "But that was the first time. The second time, some warmth. By the third audience he had questions faster than I could answer them, and all of them were about the war."
He took the letter from his saddlebag then, wrapped in oilcloth, the seal heavy on it, and brought his horse alongside to hand it over. Constantine broke the seal and read it in the saddle while the dogs worked a windrow. Congratulations, in good chancery Latin, on the victories God had granted his brother of Constantinople;and in the third paragraph, buried in the courtesies, the Serbian matter, agreed as it had been proposed. A man who did not know to look for it would have read past it. He read it twice and handed it across to George, who read it once and put it away inside his coat.
"So, the terms stand," George said.
"The terms stand," Izaoul said. "He took his time over it, and enjoyed the taking, it seemed to me. A king stuck in Bohemia does not often get something easy to say yes to. The Despot will be told it was hard won."
"My father-in-law will call it a poor bargain and keep it. I will send him the right letter," Constantine said, and that was all the Serbian matter got, on a cold morning five hundred miles from Smederevo.
The hawks went up twice more. Izaoul's peregrine took a partridge in a stoop out of the bright air, and the falconer made her in and fed her on the fist, and Thomas said that the bird was wasted on a diplomat, and Izaoul said that so was he, and Thomas laughed and the ride went on.
Of the army, Izaoul said, Albert had asked above everything. The numbers, the guns, how infantry stood against horse, how the volleys were timed, whether it was true the files fired by rank on a word of command. "I told him what all the world knows and no more," Izaoul said. "I have never stood in a battle in my life, not Edessa, and I said so. He liked me better for it." He had heard the rest from his voivode in Transylvania, who had seen the Roman way of it at Edessa years before. "The king told me," Izaoul said, "that the voivode had told him the account was worth hearing twice. From a man who praises no one, he said, twice is a great number."
Constantine watched the dogs. "He asks the right questions. The mark of a man who can rule."
"And the queen?" George said.
"Present at the second audience. She said little. She asked after the Empress by name." Izaoul paused a moment. "She spoke of Count Ulrich once, the Empress's first husband, her own kinsman, and said God had taken the same man from both their houses. Then she spoke of other things."
"And Bohemia," Constantine said, before the queen could become a topic. "You said the summer settled nothing."
"Nothing good for Albert," Izaoul said. "And in the autumn there were riots in the royal towns, Prague and Kutná Hora both, put down inside a week."
A Florentine factor who had been in Kutná Hora for the mint had told him the garrison stove in the doors of the tax office and found the collectors already gone out a window, and that the crowd had burned the toll books in the square with a kind of festival patience, feeding them in a few at a time to make the burning last.
"So Albert's garrisons put it down," Constantine said. "Paid with what? I would not expect Hungarian lords to pay for another Bohemian war."
"Then you know them already," Izaoul said. "They do not pay. It is Austrian silver, Albert's own family lands. The Hungarian lords vote money late and vote it small, so the war runs on the king's inheritance, and the Hungarians know it and do not mind it, which tells you how they love the war."
"Three crowns," Constantine said, "and each one watches the other two pay." He looked at the frost on the windrow a while, and then he asked the falconer whether the light would hold past noon, and the falconer said it would, and the party crossed into the next ride.
There, unhurried, Izaoul came to the voivode. The Transylvanian drilled companies of Czech mercenaries now, men taken on from both sides of the Bohemian war, and he drilled them with handguns, in ranks, firing together on command. In Buda they called it the Roman fashion, without embarrassment, as a man names the school he sends his son to. Izaoul gave it plainly and did not decorate it, and having given it he attended to his glove.
"How many companies," Constantine said.
"Three that are spoken of. The speaking may be generous."
"Who drills them?" Thomas said.
"Men of Hunyadi who were at Edessa, it is said."
Constantine nodded once, and asked George whether the second peregrine should fly again or be saved, and George said saved, and the huntsman loosed the dogs along the field edge instead, and Thomas took a third hare, and the sun stood as high as it was going to stand.
They ate at midday with their backs to a windrow, bread and cold pork and wine that had gone half to slush in the skins, and the talk loosened with the food.
"One more thing from Buda," Izaoul said, "that you will want before the wine is gone. The king has a printing press. Bought through Florentine hands, shipped whole, no license of yours anywhere in it. And there is a bookseller's shop open by the castle hill now, a Florentine house, selling print from Venice and Florence and their own new work besides."
George stopped chewing for a moment. "We sold Florence presses three years ago," he said. "Florence sells what sells."
"It was always going to travel, George," Constantine said. He said it mildly, and tore the bread. George looked as if he wished to say more, and kept it for the chancery.
"The king wants to buy from us as well," Izaoul said. "He asked it almost directly, at the last audience. Guns, for the Bohemian work. He means to end that war with one great season, next year or the year after, and he is buying for it now."
George was smiling faintly. "And the grand crusade? Has the Holy Father's vision reached Buda? Is Albert on fire for the cross?"
Izaoul took his time answering. "The crusade. It was named twice while I was there, both times by churchmen, neither time by the king first. I heard him answer the archbishop myself." He set the words out carefully, a man laying coins in a row. "He said: gladly, and with a whole heart, when God has quieted Bohemia. That was the whole of it. Warm words, and later. He has said it before and will say it again, and the men around him repeat it like a psalm. But his stores, his hirings, his questions, everything the man does points north. If the cross goes east in the next two years, it goes without Hungary, whatever Hungary says at the taking of it."
"So the Pope holds Albert's crown back," George said, "and waits. We heard a rumor of this in the autumn. Thin, nothing to build on. From Buda it comes back with bones in it. And our own people in Italy have not written much about it, which I find interesting, since they sit at the man's table."
"The sea has been shut since October," Constantine said. "Spring will tell us which it is, slow news or kept news."
"Kept, with that one," George said, and let it lie.
Thomas had been quiet. "Let the Pope be serious," he said. "I hope he is. Sew the cross on every coat from here to Flanders and let them come. You saw Anatolia. The whole of it came apart in half a season, and half our work was walking. If that is what the infidel is now, then they are fruit on the ground, and the first army through the Levant picks it up. We could do it alone if we cared to."
The words went out over the frost and nobody picked them up. George drank. Constantine looked at his brother a moment, at the open pleased face still warm from the morning's shooting, and thought of dispatch riders. "The Pope has a vision," he said. "So far as I can see, that is all he has. Let him dream it." Thomas shrugged, and reached for the pork, and the talk went elsewhere.
The light began to go flat early, the way it did in late November, and they turned the horses for the city with the bag heavy on the mule: partridge in a row by the feet, three hare, one woodcock the second falcon had taken at the day's edge. On the way Constantine asked why the road home had taken a month longer than the road out, and Izaoul said he had gone down into Serbia, his mother's people, a burial owed, and a girl. Thomas said it was clearly the girl, and the laughter carried them a hundred paces, and the horses walked on.
They were in sight of the walls, the towers going grey-gold in the last of the light and the smoke of the city standing up straight in the still air, when Izaoul spoke again.
"One more thing. At the tables in Buda they laugh at a story out of the mountain country, beyond the Carpathians. Preaching in the villages, they say. That there should be no lords and no dues, and no man owning another, and that Christian and Muslim will sit at one table when it comes. The Hungarians think it is very funny. A world with no dues, in Wallachia." He shook his head slightly, a man reporting other men's laughter without joining it.
Thomas snorted and said something about how the priests beyond the mountains had clearly found strong wine. Constantine glanced at George, and then said, "Tell me more of this."
"Peasant business, Majesty. The villages rise, now and then, and are put down. The voivode himself left Bohemia for it, the year before last, a rising in his own Transylvania, farmers with scythes burning rent rolls until he came home and hanged the worst of them. Mad men, if you ask me. A farmer with a scythe against the voivode." He shrugged. "But the preaching goes on, they say, and moves, and no one has caught the preacher. That is truly all I have of it."
The gate of Charisius took the party in under the arch, out of the last of the light, with the frost already coming down again behind them onto the empty rides of the Philopation.
Author's Note:
A heavy-lifting chapter: diplomacy and world news!
Falconry was the imperial pastime: the Philopation was the actual hunting park outside the Theodosian Walls, and being handed a bird from the emperor's own mews was a legible mark of favor.
Albert of Habsburg really did wear three crowns: Hungary, Bohemia, and elected King of the Romans( Germany basically), never crowned Emperor by the Pope. And he really was stuck in a Bohemian mess his Hungarian lords hated paying for, so the war ran mostly on his own Austrian inheritance.
The peasant rising at the end has a real ancestor too: the Bobâlna revolt in Transylvania (1437) was crushed by exactly the man mentioned. But in this timeline the risings of the period carry an extra layer: a world without lords or dues, Christians and Muslims at one table. You know whose teaching that is. Iskander has been quiet since Book II. He has not been idle.
ALTimeline notes:
- 1434: Sigismund and Ulrich of Celje die at Demir Kapija. Hunyadi saves the remnant, co-victor later at Edessa. Albert of Habsburg takes Hungary through his wife Elizabeth, Sigismund's only child and heir, elected by the estates, with Elizabeth crowned beside him as carrier of the royal right.
- 1435: Albert is elected King, but not crowned HREmperor by the Pope. Frederick confirmed in Inner Austria. Bohemia inherited unsettled, no Compacts in this TL. Hunyadi fights in Bohemia with handgunners inspired by Edessa.
- 1436–37: Hunyadi's Bohemian victories win him the Transylvanian voivodeship earlier. Iskander's Dobrujan rising betrayed by Fruzhin at Silistre; survivors flee north.
- 1437–38: Bobâlna revolt; Hunyadi recalled, pacifies Transylvania. Eugene's axis (Venice + Sforza) beats Milan; Sforza holds Naples. Fruzhin crowned Roman client king of Bulgaria.
- 1439: Albert strong but stuck, fresh riots in royal-held Bohemian towns (Prague Old Town, Kutná Hora), suppressed; diet pays late and small; Austrian purse carries the war. Iskander movement resurfaces in Wallachia/Moldova. Summer: Izaoul's Buda mission. Late Nov: he returns. The hunt.