The old man offered me his hand. ‘Iannis,’ he said. ‘I am Navarch aboard this ship.’ He pointed at one of the long Greek ships.
I bowed. ‘Sir William Gold,’ I said.
The ceremony passed without further incident, and evening found us filling a street of waterfront tavernas that allowed us to have several hundred men all sitting at what seemed like on long table.
John Kantakouzenos sat opposite me. ‘Fighting the Turks is a waste of time,’ he announced. ‘They are good soldiers, and the empire needs soldiers.’
Angelus grunted. ‘They will take the empire and break it up among themselves,’ he said.
Kantakouzenos shook his head. ‘No, it is we who will break them up. Look at the Patzinaks and the Cumans and all the other nomadic peoples – they come to us and we make them Romans! We used the Huns to break the Goths, and the Patzinaks to break the Bulgars. Perhaps with the Turks we will rid ourselves of the Latins. Yes?’ He laughed.
‘You seemed willing enough to fight yesterday,’ I said.
The old man shrugged and drank. ‘My brother says fight. I fought. The despot has an agreement with your knights, the Duke of Athens, the Emperor, and Venice.’ He smiled with half his mouth. ‘It will only last as long as it is convenient for you Latins, and then you will stab us or sell us. As always.’
Father Pierre had maintained that the Greeks would be strong allies of the crusade once they saw that we were serious and friendly. An evening drinking wine with Syr Iannis made my head spin. He had a different story for everything I knew, not least, of course, that we were the heretics and he was the practitioner of the true religion. He reminded us of the perfidy of the Venetians in attacking the empire a hundred and fifty years before, and he referred to the Latin lords of the Morea as pirates and brigands. It was an eye-opening conversation.
And when Giorgos Angelus accused him of treason again, he just smiled. ‘My brother was the best hope the empire had,’ he said. ‘We need to be done with gentle men who know the ceremonial and love to debate in church. We need soldiers and statesmen and even merchants.’ He shrugged. ‘The empire has no tradition of primogeniture like you Latins and your barbaric ways. Here, if a man takes the empire, it is his. It is nothing but the will of God.’
‘Your brother is a friend of the Turks!’ Angelus spat.
‘Better than Turks than the Franks,’ Kantakouzenos said. ‘The Turks are honest and decent. The Venetians would sell their mothers as whores for a few ducats.’
Nerio might have been expected to take part, given his father’s record in Greece, but he had found a girl, a beautiful girl. Juan was befriended by a Greek priest and they had a conversation about theology and Juan followed him to his little Athenian church to see his icons. Fiore spent two hours debating the Roman origins of our martial tradition with Giannis and one of Kantakouzenos’s officers. Miles basked in the admiration of twenty knights and sat with the two Hospitallers, drinking in their praise.
I listened to Syr Iannis Kantakouzenos, and I worried.
Carlo Zeno never explained what he had been doing at the Tower of Winds. But he never mocked me again – well, any more than Nerio or Juan. Despite that, for one evening, Greeks and Venetians and Hospitallers were all on the same side.
And later we danced. Nerio had become the centre of attention: his name had got out among the men-at-arms, and his father was a famous figure among the Latins of Greece. People came out of their houses to see him, and the atmosphere became less constrained.
I had no idea how famous our little victory was. It was my first sea fight, and if I’ve told it well, that owes as much to hearing the old admiral tell me what had happened as anything I remember. I know that the wind changed at some point and that seemed of great moment to the sailors; of course I understand better now. And I know that the Greeks and Latins shared this – they were starved for victory. The Turks, the Serbs and the Bulgarians had beaten them over and over for twenty years, not by skill in arms but by sheer numbers. And why? For the most part, as far as I could see and by the relation of Giannis, Giorgos, Nerio and Lord Contarini, the lords of Achaea and the Morea were beaten because they were divided among themselves. I have heard it said many times that the knights of Romania, as we called it, were the best in the world, and par dieu, gentlemen, those I met were hardy, cruel men of preux and cunning, , but they had not the gift of loyalty, and so they were easily bested by lesser men.