Constantinople, late September 1438
The bell from the church two streets over woke him, the way it did every morning now, and Sabbatios lay a while listening to the house come awake under it: Eirene at the lamp downstairs, the boards taking her weight, one of the children already up and complaining.
There was bread and a little oil set out by the time he came down, and the small one was already at the table with her face in a bowl, and two of the others were fighting quietly over a belt by the door in the way children fight when they have been told once already. The house was a good one, two floors and a yard behind, better than anything he had held in Glarentza. There was a servant boy now too, waiting in the corner to be useful, which still sat oddly on Sabbatios even after six months of it.
Sabbatios tore the bread. "The Κῆρυξ should be out today." He half rose to go himself before he remembered, and Eirene was already turning to the corner. "Send the boy," she said. "That's what he's for." She told the boy to fetch it from the man at the corner, and to say it was for Sabbatios of the Lycus works, the coin at the month's end.
The boy went. Eirene wiped the small one's chin and said her sister had asked them again for a supper. It had been weeks, and now that they were all in the same city there was no excuse, no three weeks' sailing to hide behind. Sabbatios made a small noise in his throat and said they would go Sunday, after. She knew what after meant and did not press it.
He liked it here less than she did and they both knew that too, and neither of them made a quarrel out of it. She had her sister and the church she had been baptized in and the streets she had grown up in before the bad years. He had a foundry that smelled of someone else's river. Iron doesn't lie, he thought, which was the thing he said about most things, and he was not sure this morning what the iron was telling him, only that the bread was good and the work was waiting.
The boy came back quick, pleased with himself, and laid the sheet down by the oil with both hands flat on it as if it might blow away in the closed room.
He took up the sheet. He liked the thing well enough. It was the man who made it he had no use for. Filelfo, the Italian, he had seen a few times outside the Hagia Sophia on a feast day, dressed past his station and talking like he was being written down, and Sabbatios had taken against him the way a foundry man takes against anyone who never burned his hands.
He ran his eye down it: court news at the top, the notices under, a column of how things stood abroad, the news out of the larger towns, and at the foot his favourite part, the small space where readers wrote in to argue about books and what the ancients had really meant.
Two of the notices were not news. One was a call to put money into the crown's chartered ventures: the new yards, the trade fleet that would carry grain and paper and metal under armed convoy, repayment promised through the Logarion under the eagle seal. Sabbatios read it the way he read all such things, with the half-interest of a man who had a little put by and no intention of handing it to anyone who printed the word repayment in a newspaper. The other notice took up more of the leaf and had a heavier border, and the words at its head were larger than the rest: The Empire Needs You. Below it, the terms of taking the legion's oath, the pay, the bounty, the land at the end of the years for a man who served them out.
He folded the leaf along its crease. The Emperor was building a new army to a new shape, everyone knew that, and the Emperor would want more men for it than he had, because that was the one thing Sabbatios had decided about the man in the years of working under his coin: he always wanted more. More guns, more hulls, more men, more of whatever it was this week. A good fault in a ruler, his father would have said, when set against the other kind.
He put the sheet inside his coat and went out into the grey.
The works lay down toward the Lycus, where the little river came in stone-lined along the south side of the yard and turned a wheel at its lower end. You smelled it before you saw it, charcoal and hot iron and the thin sour edge of flux, the same smell the Glarentza yard had carried, so that walking into it each morning was the one moment of the day that did not care which city he was in. Petros had the foundry going already. Carts of charcoal stood drawn up at the back, and a gang was wrestling a green casting out of its pit, and a man Sabbatios knew lifted a hand to him through the smoke without stopping what he was doing.
His own work these past months was not the foundry. It was the warehouse a few hundred paces south, the dry one Petros had cleared when the Italian came, given over now to the engineer and his devices and the men set to help him build them. The Italian had asked for a skilled metalworker, and someone had put Sabbatios forward, and that had been that.
Young Kosmas was already there, sweeping where there was no need to sweep, which was what the boy did when a thing in the room frightened him and he did not want to stand near it idle.
"It's cold," Kosmas said. "I didn't light it. I wanted you here when it was lit."
"You wanted not to be alone with it." Sabbatios hung his coat on the peg. "Light the brazier under it. It won't bite you while it's cold and it won't bite you while it's hot either, it only spins. Go on."
The thing stood in the middle of the floor on its iron frame, and even cold and still it made Kosmas walk the long way round it. A hollow sphere of bronze, the better part of two armspans across, mounted on pivots so it could turn, fed by a pipe from a sealed copper vessel set over the brazier below. Two bent arms came off it at the sides, their mouths turned opposite ways. Drive the water to steam and the steam climbed the pipe, found its only road out through the arms, and the force of it leaving spun the sphere on its pivots, faster and faster, hissing, until the bronze was a blur and the sound filled the room. The old Greeks had made small ones, Taccola said — a man called Heron, a thousand years gone, a toy to frighten the pious at a temple door. Taccola had built one the size of a wine-tun to see what a large one did.
What a large one did was frighten Kosmas.
"My uncle says it's not right," the boy said, lighting the brazier with his face turned half away. "A thing that moves with no hand on it and no beast and no water turning a wheel. He says only two kinds of things move themselves. The living, and the other kind."
"Your uncle is a fool who has never seen a millrace." Sabbatios crouched and checked the brazier was catching clean. "There's no third kind. There's only kinds we've made and kinds we haven't yet. The Italian heats water, the water turns to breath, the breath wants out, and a thing that wants out hard enough will push. That's all it is. It's not the devil. The devil would do something useful."
The sphere ticked once on its pivot as the metal warmed, a small dead sound, and Kosmas crossed himself before he knew he had done it.
"They said a man was hurt with it. At the start."
"A man scalded his arm because he put it where steam was coming out, which is where you do not put your arm." Sabbatios stood. "Listen. When they first cast cannon at Glarentza, before they had the trick of it, barrels split. Men were hurt by those too, and worse than scalded. Nobody stood in the yard and said the cannon was the devil. They said the bronze was wrong, or the bore was wrong, or the man who loaded it was a fool, and they fixed the bronze and the bore and they hanged the fool, more or less, and now the cannon don't split and they broke the Sultan with them." He nodded at the sphere. "It's the same. Iron doesn't lie. It does exactly what its making tells it to. The trouble is always in the making, or in the man."
The water had begun to talk in the vessel below, and the sphere stirred, and the stir became a spin. "There," Sabbatios said over the rising noise, because the boy's face wanted something said. "That's all it is. Now we watch — does it run true today, or does it shake? Pray it doesn't, because the Emperor comes this afternoon at the Italian's own invitation, and neither of them likes to be shown a thing that shakes."
"I've seen him ride past," Kosmas said. "I've never stood in a room with him."
"Then keep your hands at your sides and your mouth shut, and let me and the Italian do the talking." Sabbatios watched the bronze turn and turn. "If he looks at you, you bow and you say nothing clever. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
They watched the sphere through its run, and it ran true, no shake in the frame, and Sabbatios let it spin down on its own and made Kosmas note where the pivots had heated, and the morning went the way a working morning goes, in small adjustments and waiting. Near midday, banking the brazier to a low fire so the vessel would be hot but not running when the Emperor came, Sabbatios remembered the other thing.
Sabbatios watched him a moment, the boy who crossed himself at a kettle on a frame. "What do you do Sundays?" he said. "After the liturgy."
Kosmas looked up, wary of the change. "Home. My uncle's—"
"Come with me instead. Some of us meet — at Theodoulos's, the cooper, two streets back of the harbor. A man reads out and the rest of us talk it over. What the Empire was. What it's to be, now it's ours again." He let it sit a beat. "The sacred purpose, if you want the high words. We don't use the high words much at Theodoulos's. Mostly we just talk."
"My uncle expects me."
"Your uncle thinks that" — Sabbatios nodded at the sphere — "is the devil. And he's got you crossing yourself at it. Leave your uncle home." He wiped his hands. "Come once. Listen. If it's not for you, don't come again, no harm. But you live in this city, lad, and your fathers let it fall asleep — kept their heads down, paid whoever held the gate, and called it wisdom. Somebody woke it. A young man ought to know who, and why, and what it'll cost to keep it awake." He hung his rag on the peg. "Or don't. The floor's clean. Come Sunday."
Constantine came down to the Lycus works in the early afternoon, George at his side, the guard behind. The third time this month he had come this way.
"You'll want to see the foundry first," George said. "Petros has the new pieces poured. He'll be wounded if you go to the Italian before him."
"Then we go to Petros first." Constantine glanced at him. George had come down from Thessaloniki only the week before, for the great council that was coming, and was no less curious than the Emperor to see what the yard had made.
The new bronze stood clean and red in the foundry yard, and bigger than the last lot, the great siege pieces he had asked for, longer in the barrel and heavier in the wall than anything they had cast at Glarentza. Constantine gave them the time they were owed, the bore and the cooling, praise where praise was earned, and where he wanted the next ones changed. Petros stood through it pleased and grave. Then he went south, two hundred paces, to the warehouse.
He smelled the charcoal before he reached the door, and under it the hot-bronze smell, and then he was inside and the thing was there in the middle of the floor on its frame, dull and still over its banked brazier, and Taccola was beside it with a rag in his hand and the look on his face he got when he had a thing to show and no patience for the greeting that came before it.
He made the greeting anyway. A half bow, the right words in his careful spare Latin, the formality he was capable of when he remembered to be. Then he forgot it almost at once.
"Maestà. It runs. This morning it ran, the men tell me, true, no shake." He was already at the brazier, raking the charcoal up. "You will see. Give it the time to find its heat."
"I have the time." Constantine came and stood where the heat of the coming fire would not reach him and watched the Italian work. Behind him George took up a place by the wall, and further back, near the door, the metalworker and a younger man stood with their hands at their sides; Constantine knew the older one, Sabbatios, Elias's man, one of the first he had given to Taccola, but he did not turn and name him, because Taccola wanted the room now and it was his to have. The guard waited outside. A few of the foundry men had drifted to the door to watch the Emperor watch the sphere.
The water knocked in the vessel; the first steam went up; the sphere stirred, turned, spun, the bent arms throwing their jets and then gone into the blur, the hiss climbing to its roar. Taccola stood back with his arms folded, not watching the Emperor for approval but watching the thing the way a man watches what he has made and still half disbelieves. Constantine liked him better for it than for any bow.
"A thousand years," Taccola said over the noise, in Latin, the language they had settled on between them because both had it and neither had the other's. "A thousand years and more, this has been in the book of Heron, and men read it and made little ones to turn an altar door or whistle in a temple, and nobody asked the question." He turned to Constantine. "You see how fast? You feel the wind it makes? That is force, Maestà. Real force, coming off nothing but water and fire. The Greeks held it in their hand for a thousand years and called it a toy."
"And you don't think it's a toy."
"I think it is the most powerful thing in this city and it does nothing." Taccola laughed, short, frustrated, delighted. "That is the joke God plays. All that force, and it only turns itself. I make it bigger, it turns itself faster. I have thought a month how to make it turn something else, a wheel, a stone, a hammer. And the moment I take hold of the spin to do work with it, I slow it, I fight it, the force goes into my hand and not into the wheel. It will spin forever and lift nothing." He spread the rag-hand at the blurring bronze. "A horse that will only run in a circle and pull no cart."
Constantine watched the sphere turn, and thought Taccola was admiring the wrong part of his own machine. Not the spinning. The spinning was the temple toy, the horse in its circle. It was the steam before it, wanting out so hard it threw the bronze round faster than the eye could hold. Not the wheel. The push.
He said it carefully, knowing he was reaching past what he could hold. "Then perhaps the spinning is not the thing. The force is in the steam wanting out, you said so yourself. Suppose you did not let it out into arms that spin. Suppose you trapped it, and set it against something that moved in a straight line. A weight. A plate. Push, not turn." He stopped; the road ran out under him there. "I cannot tell you how. I only think the wheel is the wrong question."
Taccola had gone still, his head tipped the other way now, and for a moment Constantine thought he had said something foolish in front of a man too courteous to say so. Then the Italian shook his head slowly, not in refusal, but like a man turning a difficulty over and finding the same hard face on every side of it.
"Trap it." He said it flatly. "Maestà, I have trapped it. By accident, the first month, before I cut the arms wide. I sealed the sphere to test the joints, lit the fire, and went to my supper." He held up the rag-hand, two fingers apart. "The seam opened like a mouth. The bronze tore. A vessel of cold water you may seal and it sits all day. A vessel of steam, sealed, the fire still climbing under it — it does not push your plate, Maestà. It bursts." He looked back at the sphere, almost fond. "That is why the wheel. The coward's bargain. I let the force go and take what little I can catch as it runs away. But the floor is not on fire, and my men are not in the river."
"So the trick is not the trapping," Constantine said. "It's the vessel."
"The trick is a vessel that holds what would tear any vessel I can cast." Taccola lifted one shoulder. "When you find me that, Maestà, I will give you your plate that pushes. Until then I will take the little I can off the wheel and be grateful the bronze only tore once." He turned back to the sphere and let it run, and the two of them stood and watched it spin and lift nothing, the question hanging in the hot air between them, unanswered, the way Constantine had half known it would hang.
By the wall, George had followed little of the Latin and less of the machine. He could not see what the Emperor wanted with a bronze ball that spun and did nothing, and had stopped expecting to. He had been wrong too often, standing just where he stood now, about things that later came good. He watched the Emperor's face instead, which told him more than the sphere ever would.
Near the door Sabbatios had followed every word. He had his Latin, what a foundry needed and a little past it. He stood with his hands at his sides as he had told the boy to. He could not wait for Sunday, to tell the men at Theodoulos's what the Emperor had said to the foreign engineer in a hot warehouse. Beside him Kosmas watched the bronze blur and said nothing clever, and was, for once, no more afraid of it than a sensible man should be.
The sphere slowed and stilled, the roar falling to the knock of the cooling vessel and then to nothing. Constantine turned from it. There was always something waiting on the other side of a wonder.
"The mines," he said. "Siderokausia. Theophilus wants the silver flowing better before the winter books close, and the deep galleries are flooding faster than the men can lift the water out. I want your eyes on it. The pumps, the wheels, whatever they have and whatever it should be. When can you go?"
Taccola did not turn from his bench at once. The mines were not his sphere; Constantine could see him weighing the loss of the weeks against the asking. "The pumps at a silver mine," he said, in the tone of a man being asked to leave a good book to go mend a fence. "Any millwright could tell you what they have, Maestà."
"I don't want any millwright. I want the man who built me a thing that spins on steam." Constantine let that sit. "Go and see the galleries, and come back and tell me how to get the water out for good. That's the task."
Author note:
Ngl, I really enjoyed writing this one! It's nice to drop down to ground level for a chapter and see things through a man like Sabbatios. One thing I want to be clear on: there's no steam engine coming out of thin air here. They've built the ancient toy, made it spin, and run straight into the wall: the moment you try to trap the force, the vessel tears itself open. Constantine has a vague idea that the push matters more than the spin, but he can't tell Taccola how, because he doesn't know how.