Chapter 37: A City of Dead Kings, Very Much Alive

Four extra riders hardly slowed them, and the night was giving up by inches, losing its darkness without quite having the decency to become morning.

Vito reined in at the top of a low rise and waited there alone for a moment, one hand still curled around the leather reins, before the others finally came up behind him.

Knossos lay below in the gray light, a heap of old stone half-eaten by scrub. The Minoan foundations sat beside actual Roman ruins, and somebody had built a perfectly respectable little township out of both, because apparently people will build houses out of anything if the stone is already lying there.

The doorways had been cut from old column drums and garden walls were stacked from blocks that had once belonged to buildings far grander than any present here. About two thousand years of dreams about palaces, and here was the real thing, worn down, gray, and stubbornly real in a way no book had ever managed.

"Makryteichos. That’s what they call it here, long wall."

He rolled the word around once, half to himself. "Cazzo, I’ve spent my whole life calling this place Knossos, and not one man who’s actually lived here would know what the hell I meant if I said it to his face."

Momolo brought his horse alongside him before he had quite finished staring.

"Momolo has seen ruins finer than these!"

He declared to everybody within hearing, sweeping one hand toward the stones below. "In Constantinople, Ser Barozzi, there stood a column so tall a man could waste an entire afternoon looking up at it. Momolo once recited the whole fall of Troy at its base to eleven people."

"And I take it they didn’t ask for an encore, or you wouldn’t be here."

Momolo spread both hands, scandalized that this required explaining. "The performance was a triumph! An old woman came to me afterward, tears in her eyes, and pressed three figs into my hand. Three! I have never been so moved by a woman who wasn’t asking me to marry her."

Vito shot him a sideways look. "Then why come away at all? With three figs and a crowd like that, I’d have thought you’d stay and make a career of it."

His hands dropped to the reins. "Ah, that was an unfortunate business. Talent, as it turns out, is only one of the things required to prosper in the theatre."

Orso’s horse pushed in on Vito’s other side, apparently having had enough of this already. "Can we finish this and sleep like Christian men before the sun gets all the way up? I don’t care which dead king built which wall."

Vito let out a long, wounded sigh. "Work, Orso. Cazzo, work is a jealous mistress. A man can’t admire one old pile of stones for five minutes before she’s dragging him toward the next disaster."

He tapped his horse a nudge downhill.

"Fine, fine, to it."

They rode into the township, the iron horseshoes clicking different sounds beneath them as the road changed. In one place it was packed dirt, then an old pillar had been laid flat into the street and worn smooth by carts, sandals, and generations of people who had never stopped to wonder what sort of fool had once needed a stone that large.

Farther on, a doorway had been made entirely from marble, stolen from some grander building and put to better use, at least by the standards of the people living there.

Ordinary families went about their lives on the bones of an empire whose name most of them had probably never cared to learn. The ancient stones showed through beneath it all, rough and heavy, laid by hands that had vanished a thousand years before the Romans came along and decided they ought to build there too.

Then the cathedral appeared ahead of them, and every man in the company suddenly discovered that silence was an excellent idea.

The whole formation pulled up hard.

The cathedral of the Panagia stood at the end of a modest square, its walls made from the mixture of scavenged old stone and newer work as the rest of the town. There was nothing particularly grand about it except the cross above the door.

The bishop stood beneath that cross now, thick through the chest and shoulders, and his robes were doing a poor job of hiding it.

And he had brought company.

At least fifty men stood with him, perhaps closer to eighty. Farmers, craftsmen, old men who ought to have been asleep, and youngsters who ought to have known better, every one of them carrying some farm tool capable of cracking a skull if applied with sufficient enthusiasm.

Scythes, hoes, pitchforks. One genuine old sword that had probably last been used against pirates when its owner still had a full head of hair.

Vito clicked his tongue under his breath.

"Word travels faster than we do, apparently."

He had no idea how. Somebody might have slipped past St. Titus before the guards were properly posted, or perhaps the whole business had started when Candia’s cathedral went silent.

Either way, he disliked the part where the enemy knew more than it should. It made the business feel unnecessarily personal.

The Bishop slammed his staff against the stone hard enough to make it seem to crack with it.

<anno data-annotation-id="b2e72080-655b-d202-f238-99a85b40c613" data-title=""Οι εχθροί μας ήρθαν! Πάρτε τα όπλα σας!"">"Οι εχθροί μας ήρθαν! Πάρτε τα όπλα σας!"¹</anno>

Then pitchforks and torches came up together, and suddenly the whole square had enough light to look considerably more serious than it had a moment before.

"He calls you an enemy, Ser Barozzi!" Momolo shouted.

The company reached for their weapons on instinct.

The blades whispered an inch from their scabbards all down the front ranks before Vito’s voice cracked across them.

"Keep your swords sheathed."

His hand caught the nearest half-drawn sword and shoved it firmly back into place.

Vito’s voice was flat enough to carry. "Nobody will die tonight. Not them, and not us if I have anything to say about it. Knock skulls if you must, break an arm if you have to, but the first man who puts a blade through one of these farmers comes to me afterward, and believe me, amico, that conversation will be worse than anything waiting for you in that square."

The soldier spat to one side, disgust written all over his face "Porca puttana, I wasn’t hired for the pleasure of getting my teeth kicked in by a farmer with a broom."

"Come now, amico, some broom isn’t going to break you."

Vito clicked his tongue into a grin. "Chins up, shoulders back. Look like you belong on a battlefield and not in a bakery, and half of them will probably run before you have to touch anyone."

The command was followed.

The soldiers grumbled about it, cursed it, but they obeyed.

The bishop faced his own people. Whatever came next was not meant for the Latins.

<anno data-annotation-id="e49707ef-7721-7bf3-776b-f70284e0333c" data-title=""Αυτοί οι Λατίνοι ήρθαν να κλέψουν τη γη μας και την πίστη μας! Θα υπερασπιστούμε την εκκλησία του Θεού μέχρι θανάτου!"">"Αυτοί οι Λατίνοι ήρθαν να κλέψουν τη γη μας και την πίστη μας! Θα υπερασπιστούμε την εκκλησία του Θεού μέχρι θανάτου!"¹</anno>

There was no need for a translation this time. Their intent was quite clear even without the words.

Whatever doubt the crowd had disappeared.

Vito raised his sheathed sword.

He did it slowly, without flourish, and that made the point better than a flourish would have.

"Form a wedge! Two ranks, close order! Horses forward!"

His voice went hard across the square.

"Ruggiero, get the prisoners and their horses out of the way!"

The man dragged the prisoners’ horses through the gap between the ranks and brought them away of the coming fight, taking the priest and his three companions with them.

The prisoners could do little except stare. Their hands were bound, their eyes wide, with no useful say in the matter.

The formation formed across the entrance of the square.

Shoulder to shoulder, facing a crowd that outnumbered them four to one.

On one side there was mail, horses, and soldiers. On the other stood farm tools, anger, and enough stubborn old men.

Between them was a strip of empty ground.

Around the spectacle, a shutter cracked open

A woman’s pale face appeared in it, watched the soldiers and the villagers for one quick moment, then vanished. The shutter clicked shut.

More faces appeared in doorways around the square. They belonged to the people who had not joined either side, either because they were too old, too young, or simply too sensible to pick up a farm tool and join a fight before breakfast.

Nobody moved.

The whole square was there, twenty soldiers on one side and an angry crowd on the other, on the single breath before somebody, anybody, decided what happened next.

<annotations style="display: none;">“Our enemies have come! Take up your weapons!”“These Latins have come to steal our land and our faith! We will defend the church of God to the death!”</annotations>