Gontran and Diaresso escaped Trebizond on the Paralos. The wind blew them north into the vast Euxine Sea, but they were only two men, and both needed to work the steering oars with their frostbitten hands, beating the foam from the churning winter waves. As if that wasn’t enough, three Venetian galleys had been chasing them for an entire day through the gray overcast gloom, and now they were close enough to loose fire arrows. Most of these splashed into the water and faded into the deep, but the wind carried one onto the deck. Clattering on the wood, its seeds of sparks burst forth into a flower of flame.
“Diaresso!” Gontran shouted.
“What?” Diaresso shouted back. “What is it that you wish me to do now? Go on, order me about like a dog! Why must I always be the one to solve all those intractable problems for which you alone are responsible?”
“Guess you’re still a little testy,” Gontran said. “Maybe because we left Tamar behind…”
“Never let her name fall from your foul lips again, infidel, or I swear by my beard it shall be the last sound you ever make!”
“Alright, I’ll take care of the fire,” Gontran said. “Can you take my steering oar? Please?”
“It is far too much work for one man, and we have been fighting and sailing without a wink of sleep almost since the siege began! I cannot even remember when last I was able to rest—”
“Look, do you want the ship to go up in smoke or not?”
Diaresso glared at him, then stepped between the two steering oars so that he could hold both at the same time.
“Got it?” Gontran said.
Diaresso nodded silently, though he trembled with the effort of holding both oars.
Taking a deep breath, Gontran ran forward to douse the flames with a bucket of seawater which was tied to the mainmast. As Diaresso groaned and swore, the Paralos swung to the starboard and slowed, allowing the Venetian ships to gain on them. Their drums pounded faster, and the rowers oared harder, groaning with the effort.
Venetians, Gontran thought. I hate these guys. Just hope there aren’t any Normans with them—
“Get back here at once, giaour! I am not strong enough to do the work of two!”
“First time you’ve ever admitted to any kind of imperfection.” Gontran stumbled back to his steering oar and grabbed it.
He and Diaresso fought the currents with the last of their strength, swinging the ship straight into the waves, grunting and swearing, the one in French, the other in a language from Tomboutou called Djula. Gontran was unsure if they were still heading north, as the sunlight was fading, but for the moment moving away from the Venetians was all that mattered. If he and Diaresso could just hold on a little longer, maybe they could disappear into the night.
Gontran had been in a situation like this last summer when the Romans had chased them across the Paphlagonian coast during their flight to Trebizond, but back then Alexios and Herakleia had also been onboard to help them. A crew of four was also insufficient for a ship like the Paralos, but it was twice as good as a crew of two.
More fire arrows shot down, carried by the frigid wind blowing at Gontran’s back. Two struck the deck this time. Gontran was about to tell Diaresso that it was his turn to douse the fire, but when he looked to the side he saw that the Venetians were close enough now to pull around the Paralos. They were no longer behind it; they were surrounding it.
If either Diaresso or Gontran released their steering oars, they’d be finished. But if they let the flames consume the ship, they’d freeze to death in the icy waves.
What are we supposed to do? Gontran thought.
He looked ahead to the two little flames fluttering on the deck, and willed the wind to extinguish them, and even tried to blow them out himself, but just then he spotted—in the dusk—someone climbing up from the hold. Who was he? A tall thin man wearing a plain white turban. Gontran recognized him but forgot his name, at least for the moment. The man was one of the citadel eunuchs who had defected to the uprising. An Arab, not a Greek, but a Christian, which was confusing for a Latin like Gontran. This Arab Christian eunuch had been designing and constructing all sorts of machines inside the city for months, but he was a typical absent-minded philosopher, one with a useful head but useless hands. He also had some kind of mild but permanent leg injury and walked like a grandmother. Somehow he had hidden aboard the Paralos. Maybe he’d fallen asleep in the hold after the siege—
“Samonas, help us, would you?” Diaresso yelled. “In the name of Allah!”
Samonas—that was his name—looked at Diaresso as though waking from a dream. Gontran lifted one of his hands from his own steering oar—which made his entire body tremble with the effort of holding the oar with his other hand—and pointed to the flames.
“Hey, Samonas!” Gontran shouted. “Put out that fire or we’re all dead!”
“Oh my,” Samonas said. “It would appear I’ve gotten myself into a great deal of trouble this time. And all I wished to do was take a nap in an undisturbed place, free of harassment from all those disgusting barbarians—”
“Shut your irreligious mouth and douse these unholy flames!” Diaresso cried.
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as it were.” Samonas rubbed his head. “Apropos of nothing at all.”
“Samonas, we are going to die!” Gontran yelled.
“Becoming a eunuch was supposed to mean a life free of manual labor.” Samonas contemplated the flames which were spreading across the deck. “So few people have respect for thinkers like me.”
Gontran was ready to draw his pistol-sword and shoot him, but no ammunition remained.
“By my beard, squelch the inferno before it consumes us!” Diaresso roared. “Can you not see that Gontran and I must continue to labor upon these here steering oars?”
“Neither of you comprehends the meaning of this.” Samonas raised his hands into the air. “It marks a sort of divergence for me, you know.”
Gontran and Diaresso looked at each other, unable to believe that this was happening.
“I step from one realm I’ve inhabited all my life,” Samonas continued, “and enter another. I stray from the world of stylus and papyrus to the world of whips and calloused hands.”
“Would you save these philosophical banalities for another time?” Diaresso screamed.
“As one draws nearer in contemplation to God,” Samonas said, tossing the empty bucket over the side and then pulling it back again with its cold wet rope, “one beholds the choir of angels singing to the music of the crystalline spheres, the six-winged seraphs flapping in the heavens. Simultaneously one beholds the flames of the eternal inferno descending inside the cavernous Earth and fading.”
With the bucket of seawater, Samonas put out the fires. As Diaresso and Gontran gasped with relief, Samonas clutched the bucket and stared at the smoke rising from the two blackened arrows. His buskins were soaked with seawater. Gontran nonetheless found himself attempting to appraise their price.
Samonas smiled at Gontran and Diaresso and said: “Well, then—”
A hook attached to a rope clanged onto the deck and caught on the side of the ship.
Cheers rose from the nearest Venetian vessel. The crew was now close enough to see. Gontran’s shoulders fell when he noticed that the warriors aboard were gigantic in stature and towered over the diminutive rowers.
Normans, he thought. Even worse than Venetians. They might speak French and take the eucharist, but they aren’t much different from their pagan Northmen grandparents.
Dim evening light glinted on the Normans’ armor as they jumped with excitement, slapped each other’s backs, shook hands, hugged, took swigs from wine flasks, or gripped the side of their ship—all in preparation for leaping aboard the Paralos. There must have been dozens of Norman knights in addition to just as many Venetian sailors and rowers on that craft. As far as Gontran could tell, neither group paid attention to the other. He was distracted by Samonas, who had been staring for some time at the hook. Now he was talking to himself again.
“What a fine problem this is.” Samonas placed his hand on his chin. “A real aporia, yes, that is the term, an impossible impassability, a logical contradiction that cannot be overcome. Zeno tells us that all movement is impossible, that Achilles can never catch the turtle in the great race. And yet this hook before me now has reached its destination, thereby overcoming this contradiction—at least seemingly. For if we consider the well of the thought of Demokritos—”
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“Samonas!” Gontran yelled. “Get rid of the hook or they’ll come aboard and cut our throats!”
“But how can one experience one’s own death?” Samonas said. “When one is dead, one cannot experience anything. It is quite intractable—”
“You shall certainly experience it this day, should you fail to dislodge that hook!” Diaresso cried.
Samonas looked to the two men heaving the Paralos’s steering oars. Then he turned back to the hook, pried it from the ship’s side, and tossed it overboard. The Normans on the approaching vessel groaned. They were so close Gontran saw their eyes shining in the dark.
“Have you no weapons?” Diaresso yelled at Samonas. “You should have cut the rope with a scimitar, thereby depriving our foes of their precious hook, for they have but a limited supply!”
“Forgive me, my dear Diaresso, I came here unarmed,” Samonas said. “I have never been particularly partial to weapons or violence.”
“I hate pacifists,” Gontran said. “Violent people will at least admit they want to screw you. But pacifists pretend they’re above the fray.”
“Of course, one is then prompted to ask,” Samonas said. “What, really, is violence? What, really, is the meaning of the word is?”
Gontran and Diaresso groaned.
In the old world this guy would have a long comfortable academic career, Gontran thought. He would have been the darling of the corporate press. Instead, he’s trapped with us on the Paralos in the middle of a storm.
The hook clanged on the ship again, this time catching the mainmast, and the Normans whooped as they yanked their vessel closer. Samonas stared at the hook once more, and opened his mouth to begin another monologue.
“Samonas!” Gontran yelled. “Do you see the sword at my side? Take it and cut the rope!”
“Very well, whoever you are, whatever your name is.” Samonas shuffled over to Gontran and pulled the pistol-sword from his sheathe. “I will submit to your commands, if only for the benefit of the greater good, itself a muddled reflection of the Platonic ideal of—”
“Be silent and sever the rope, thou utter nincompoop!” Diaresso wailed.
“Don’t drop my sword over the side!” Gontran added. “It was very expensive, although I got a great price for it. I brought it all the way back from Sera. If you’re interested, I can—”
“Why in the name of Allah would he be interested?” Diaresso said. “He just told us he abhors violence, seeking instead to leech off the violence of others, like unto a great toad which swells itself to bursting from guzzling all the rivers, oceans, and lakes in the world.”
“I was just saying, if he wanted a good deal—”
“You would seek to profit from a sale even at the cusp of death!” Diaresso growled. “May Allah cast all merchants into the fires of hell!”
“There’s nothing wrong with buying and selling,” Gontran said. “It’s normal.”
“Whenever you swine-eating polytheists utter the word ‘normal,’ I reach for my scimitar.” Diaresso nodded to Samonas. “His philosophizing has infected you like unto a plague of the spirit. Thankfully I am far stronger than you and can more easily resist.”
The Venetian galley slammed into the Paralos, and the Norman warriors were about to jump aboard when Samonas finally sliced the taut rope from the hook. As the Norman ship lurched away, two men in full armor fell into the swirling depths. This slowed the pursuing armada for the time being.
“Never should have come to Trebizond,” Gontran said.
“Who?” Diaresso said. “You, or these Christians who thirst like jackals for our blood?”
“Both,” Gontran said.
“It’s a question of free will, is it not?” Samonas shuffled back from the mast to Diaresso and Gontran. “It bridges the contradiction between the individual and the world. Do men choose to do what they do, or are they compelled by circumstance?”
“Kill me now,” Gontran said.
Samonas raised the pistol-sword. “Are you serious?”
“Was your mom serious?”
Samonas stumbled backward in shock and lowered the pistol-sword. When Gontran ordered him to give it back, Samonas slipped it into its sheathe.
“It is always amazing to me,” Diaresso said to Gontran, “that you still dwell among the living, speaking of other men’s mothers in this foul manner.”
“It was all we talked about back where I’m from,” Gontran said.
“In the Land of the Men Who Frequently Insult One Another’s Mothers,” Diaresso said.
“Yeah, that’s a catchy name for it,” Gontran said.
“We eunuchs rarely know much about our mothers,” Samonas said. “It’s been many years since I’ve seen my family. They sent me from my birthplace, in El-Kûfe, you know, to Konstantinopolis to receive my education when I was only a boy, and—”
“Believe me, Samonas, your education is just getting started,” Gontran said.
“Look you.” Diaresso nodded to the bow. “What is that? Are those isles lying in yonder darkness?”
Samonas and Gontran peered ahead. Large black masses obscured the silver sea.
“In the middle of the Euxine?” Gontran said. “No, I don’t think there’s a single island out here, at least so far from Taurica—”
“According to all the charts I have ever seen, you are correct,” Samonas said.
“What is it then that I now behold with these mine rolling eyes?” Diaresso said. “Are we about to be assaulted by another ketos, or—may Allah forfend!—an entire pack of those foul monsters?”
“I thought the ketos was just an old wives’ tale,” Samonas said.
Imagine a eunuch using misogynistic language, Gontran thought, though it was really his previous self from the old world thinking this—the young unmarried student Helena Lee.
“I only wish the ketos were but a fairytale,” Diaresso said. “Just a few months prior, one of those leviathans nearly devoured this entire vessel in a single gulp. The Paralos could have fit inside its very nostril!”
“We never would have recovered from an investment loss like that,” Gontran said.
“What I would give to return to my desk in the citadel,” Samonas said. “To be with my books again, and a nice cup of Seran cha by the fire.”
“Hate to break it to you, but those days are gone, and probably for good,” Gontran said.
Diaresso narrowed his eyes. “To me it seems that whatever it is that we are bearing down upon, whether islands or monsters, they are motionless utterly. They must be either uncharted islands, or sleeping giants.”
“We are still close to Trebizond,” Samonas said. “How then could those masses on the horizon be islands? Having eliminated the impossible, they must therefore be monsters, though I scarcely believe it.”
Diaresso shrugged. “Cowardly hypocrite navigators always hug the coasts and shirk from penetrating the deeper seas, do they not?”
“It isn’t cowardly, they just don’t want to lose their investments, that’s all!” Gontran said.
“Now you are the testy one,” Diaresso said. “In all the thousands of years they have dwelled along these shores, the unbelievers never sailed into the sea beyond sight of land. Thus may uncharted islands here exist!”
“Silence would be prudent at the present juncture,” Samonas said. “I discern an oddity with my untrustworthy subjective ears.”
“You mean you hear something,” Gontran said.
“Hearken to him!” Diaresso said. “I hear it, too!”
Gontran listened. Amid the blowing wind, the surging surf, and the three different rhythms of drums pounding on the Venetian ships, a vague sloshing noise grew steadily louder. He narrowed his eyes, though it was so dark now he could hardly see.
“What is that?” Gontran said.
“Be silent!” Diaresso said.
The wind suddenly died down, leaving them becalmed. Before Gontran could panic over the approaching Venetian galleys—which would soon row alongside them—a low moaning arose from the distant darkness, then faded.
The drums of the approaching galleys had stopped. It seemed the enemy sailors were listening to the horrifying noise.
“No ketos ever made a sound like that,” Gontran said.
“Neither of you understands fluid dynamics,” Samonas said. “You think me bookish and useless, trundling about the world like an old grandmother, yet you ignore the fact that I am far more than a mere theologian or philosopher, I am a natural philosopher.”
“And?” Gontran said.
Samonas looked at him like he was a fool. “The Euxine is a famously calm sea, one so tideless it often has no waves at all—not without a good wind, in any event. But this calmness belies a great force of watery currents, one which could perhaps be channeled by large islands in deeper waters, and under just the right weather conditions.”
The world had grown brighter, in the mean time, and Gontran noticed that his companions were visible again. In a gap in the clouds directly above the Paralos, a million stars shone like a cave full of gemstones.
“I know this,” Gontran said. “In the old world, there are storms like this…at the very center they’re calm, but for hundreds of miles around the center they’re so violent they can destroy entire cities. What were they called? Hurricanes.”
“Yet again you fill my ears with this inane barbarous blubbering,” Diaresso said.
“A hurricane out here,” Gontran said. “That’s a new one.”
Slowly the gap in the stars drifted away, and the wind returned, though soon it was blowing so fiercely that even when Gontran screamed as loud as he could, neither Diaresso nor Samonas heard him. Gontran pointed to the mainmast and the foremast and tried to tell Samonas to reef the sails. Finally Gontran pulled in his steering oar and gestured for Diaresso to do the same.
It’s in god’s hands, he thought. Or somebody’s hands. Not mine.
Free of this struggle against the tides, he was tempted, in his exhaustion, to hide belowdecks, but there was more work to be done. While Diaresso took in the mainsail, Gontran closed the hatch to the hold. Just before the darkness returned, he was able to reef the foresail. At this point he made the mistake of looking beyond the bowsprit—the ship’s lurching made him do so—and he saw that the Paralos was racing up a mountain of ink-black water. The vessel moved so quickly he thought for a moment they might pierce the clouds, and ride the ocean so high they would crash through the moon’s celestial sphere, shattering the crystal which encased the sublunary realm.
As the last light faded, Gontran realized that the whole mountain of water was going to crash over them before they could scale the wave crest. He looked around in vain for something to grasp—he needed a rope lashed to the ship. Diaresso had returned to the steering oars and tied his wrist to a rope that was itself tied to the mainmast. Samonas, meanwhile, was limping around the deck, gesturing like a philosopher, talking to himself.
Screaming into the wind, Diaresso gestured for Gontran to join him. As Gontran ran back to the stern, the ship rose so high it was almost vertical. He fell and slipped down the deck, and just as he was about to plunge over the side Diaresso caught him and wrapped the rope around his wrist. They were now standing on the wale at the stern by the oarlocks for the steering oars, and the Paralos was perpendicular to the horizon.
Gontran nodded his thanks in the whirling rain, but Diaresso shook his head and shouted something. Though Gontran was unable to hear, Diaresso’s lips formed the words “ya lahwi!”
When Gontran looked up into the gloom, he was unable to see Samonas anywhere. The Paralos rose up so high it was now tipping over backwards, and an avalanche of white surf was rushing down the distant wave crest.