The rest of the day was spent fixing the damage the Paralos had sustained during last night’s storm. Planks had been dislodged, nails were loose, and parts of the sails were torn, but thankfully plenty of tools and replacements were stored in the hold. Gontran and Diaresso were no strangers to undertaking repairs away from a safe harbor, but to their surprise, Samonas not only helped—and kept an eye out for komodo dragons—but also badgered his two companions with questions. For the issue of sea worms burrowing through the hull, for instance, he asked why the hull wasn’t plated with metal—like copper, perhaps. Would that keep those dastardly devourers at bay? Gontran and Diaresso looked at each other and nodded, saying that it might, at least if not for the expense.
“I thought you weren’t interested in actually doing things,” Gontran later said to Samonas while they were hammering nails into the ship with Diaresso.
Warning, the game voice said. You are about to begin a philosophical-biographical discussion.
Oh, shut up, Gontran thought.
I thought you didn’t like politics.
I don’t.
Well, I was just warning you.
“Oh yes, well, certainly that was true before the uprising,” Samonas said. “In those days I was alienated from my own labor, and I therefore lost myself in the most idle speculations. I was fascinated with Aristoteles and Plotinos and Pythagoras and all the others, which meant, you know, disdaining the material world, and constructing a fantasy realm which was designed specifically to be as abstruse and incomprehensible as possible in order to keep out the philistines. If something is easy to understand, so the thinking goes, it must be worthless—therefore when we speak and write we ought to be as ornate and complicated as possible. ‘All you can see and feel is but a shadow of the truth,’ and that truth must be esoteric. Often I still catch myself thinking and talking that way, replacing God with ideas like ‘the One’ and thinking myself so much better than uneducated and superstitious believers.”
“Like during the storm.” Gontran shook his head. “You wouldn’t stop talking about that stuff.”
“He is one of the People of the Book,” Diaresso said. “He is entitled to such thoughts, ignorant as they may be.”
“Ah, yes,” Samonas said. “I was a little out of it, as it were. I was lucky even to have my own skin. I had lost everything else!”
“I still cannot comprehend how men themselves cannot believe in Allah,” Diaresso said. “The incomprehensible beauty of the universe is proof enough that only the Lord of the Three Worlds could have made it.”
“It only seems beautiful from a certain point of view,” Samonas continued. “When a mode of production first becomes dominant—now I am speaking to you like the strategos—the poets who reap the material benefits and serve the ruling class will fall over themselves searching for new and beautiful ways to praise society, which looks beautiful to them.”
“Do you then claim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Diaresso said, “rather than a creation of Allah, who is unique, and utterly beyond man’s comprehension?”
“The answer to any yes or no question is always yes and no at the same time,” Samonas said.
“What do you mean?” Merely for Gontran to ask this question and listen to the answer added XP to his intelligence skill, which was at Journeyman level (6/10).
“Beauty is a social construct,” Samonas said. “Certainly the material world exists, but to claim that one aspect of it is beautiful while another is ugly is absurd. It is a subjectivity taking place within an objective world—subjectivity and objectivity, yes and no, at the same time.”
“These are mere muddle-headed abstractions,” Diaresso said.
“Then allow me to ground these abstractions in an example,” Samonas said. “To the Latins, it is a beautiful thing, to enslave Trebizond. They are teaching us our proper place—teaching us to work, and to be productive. Yet for us, such enslavement is a horror beyond all reckoning. Who is correct? It is absurd to say that anyone is. And yet it is a greater absurdity to say that everything is subjective. If that is what you believe, then you should give me all you possess, since its very existence is apparently up for debate.”
Gontran had to stop himself from checking the money in his pockets.
“This is what some Christians and even the ancient Greek philosophers think,” Samonas continued. “In their minds, the material world is but a shadow of the truth—God for Christians, or the Good for Plotinos. Yet by some strange coincidence, everyone who believes this nonsense happens to be wealthy…”
“Alright, we got it.” Gontran only tolerated this discussion because it took his mind off the dullness inherent to fixing the ship.
“You sound to me, Samonas, like unto an infidel, not a Christian,” Diaresso said. “An unbeliever of unbelievers. A dahri, one who believes that only time destroys, rather than God.”
“Not in the slightest,” Samonas said. “Certainly I believe. Now, if only you’ll allow me to continue along my previous train of thought.” Samonas shook his pointer finger at them. “No interrupting! Now we were discussing poetry during the aggressive expansionist phase of modes of production. As the same contradictions which caused the expansion of these societies in turn cause their downfall, the ruling class’s poets either fall silent, or simply plagiarize their past betters. The ruling class’s philosophers, meanwhile, cease to take an interest in the material world and instead obsess themselves with invisible cities of thought. It is something the strategos taught me—a feedback loop of alienation.”
“Is this then the way you claim to have been before the revolt in Trebizond?” Diaresso said.
“Indeed,” Samonas said. “The so-called ‘real’ world appeared rather dull to me. And from the point of view of the ruling class—or one of its puppets, which I was—why would it appear interesting? It never changed, at least not in a positive direction. All we Romans ever did was lose battles and territory to the Skythioi, while the merchants of Venetia kept edging out our own merchants in our own cities! Wherever I looked, we were losing. What could one gain by focusing on this gradual but very noticeable trend of failure? And who could be responsible for that failure except us, and all we believe, and our very society?”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Gontran said. “If we just replace the bad emperors with good ones like Herakleia, everything will work itself out. The problem isn’t systemic. It’s corruption.”
Samonas stopped hammering and looked at him. “Are you serious? What sophistry. You presume that the ruling class is knowingly evil—as though they are all laughing maniacally as they plan to steal everything that exists. I have worked around such people, and let me tell you, that isn’t the case at all. They all view themselves as heroes. Whatever they do, it makes sense to them. It is right to them. ‘If you let the poor have money, or the government have money, they will just waste it,’ and all that. There is always an excuse for whatever mistakes they make, while there is never an excuse for us.”
“Hey, listen, I’m on your side,” Gontran said. “And I’ve got no love for the Romans. I’m just not sure what you guys are doing with Trebizond is going to work out. I mean, just look where we are. Look what happened to us.”
“We are like unto cubs driven from our sweet mother lioness into the wilderness,” Diaresso said.
“You must trust me, whatever your name is,” Samonas said.
“The wretch is so absent-minded he still does not know our names,” Diaresso said.
“For this current situation,” Samonas continued, “as challenging as it may be, could be much worse. At least we are aware that there is a problem. When I was but a mere scribe in the Trebizond palace laboring for Doux Bagrationi, I refused to face the reality of societal decline. My way of avoiding thinking about it involved losing myself in old books. I, too, thought corruption was a problem, but did not understand that it was part of a pattern, a virtually omnipresent one created by the system, and dialectically moving toward its inevitable conclusion.”
Don’t forget the issue of your parents, Gontran thought. Who forced you to become something you might not have wanted to be. Why would you want to think about a world where something like that happened to you?
“Then the uprising happened,” Samonas said. “Many of my colleagues sided with the usurper, a wholly ignoble fellow, uncouth like the worst elements of the soldiery, an incomprehensibly poor public speaker, a whoremonger, a warmonger, a slaveowner, and a money-grubber to boot.”
“Do you not merely describe all the Qaisars of the Empire of Rûm?” Diaresso said.
“Indeed,” Samonas said. “All emperors are bastards, most assuredly, though in the prison of our reality, some prison guards are friendlier than others, wouldn’t you say? In the subsequent uprising I saw new possibilities. When Herakleia came to Trebizond, and her friend Dionysios—you knew him, didn’t you?—they told me that everything could change, that change is in fact the only constant in the universe. They taught me about a new philosophy they called Mazdakism, a kind of dialectical materialism, a sort of combination of the ideas of Demokritos and Herakleitos, only far more developed. I listened because—I suppose—a part of me had always understood that the world was working against me. And here I am.” He spread his arms wide.
“Let me ask you a question,” Gontran said. “There’s something I’ve been wondering.”
“Please, ask away. I love all questions, I love a rigorous criticism of all that exists. And I suspect I know precisely what you’re about to ask.”
“So you’re aware that where I come from, there aren’t any eunuchs,” Gontran said.
“I know virtually nothing about where you come from,” Samonas said.
“I come from France, what Romans call Gallía.”
“Ah, yes, a lost province of the empire, one every Roman emperor in his typical presumption hopes he will soon reclaim. But other than that, what do barbarian lands matter to Rome?”
“Thus does their lack of curiosity lead to their downfall,” Diaresso said. “For while you may take no interest in the barbarians, they take a great deal of interest in you.”
“Well, listen, this is how it is in France,” Gontran said. “Men are men, and women are women. There aren’t any eunuchs. So I have to ask—”
“You wish to know if it was my choice to be mutilated like this, as it were.”
Gontran nodded. “Yes.”
“In many ways Romanía is freer than the rest of the world,” Samonas said. “There are people here, born as men, who are desperate to become closer to their true natures. Some monasteries will castrate them as a public service, if these people so desire it. And I cannot deny that there may be an economic dimension here, since eunuchs, as you know, tend to rise to the top in the imperial administration, and not just because of our famous wittiness, but really because we cannot sire children. This means that the emperors tend to think us more trustworthy than rivals who have families to feed. The politeía is therefore our child, and we serve it with all our body and soul.”
“And yet you must know,” Diaresso said, “how the Frangistani swine-eaters believe eunuchs to be a flagrant display of eastern despotism, decadence, and decline.”
“Is it not a sign of strength to permit people to be themselves?” Samonas said. “Who is stronger, the one who is obsessed with the genitals of others, or the one who does not give a damn?”
“For me it is a matter of no consequence,” Diaresso said. “Those who are neither men nor women have always dwelled in Tomboutou and across the Dar al-Islam. Some are harem guards or servants of royal families. In a way, they remind me of the storytellers and musicians whom we call djeli.”
Here we go, Gontran thought.
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“For days at a time,” Diaresso continued, “the djeli can play in mighty symphonies. You have no idea how I miss such things, how I long to return to the celebrations of my homeland. I would retire to Tomboutou, farm, raise my family, and play the music of the djinn every day if I could. It’s true that this place here is but a shadow of the truth—the truth being Home.”
“It’s not just those born as men,” Samonas said. “I have long suspected that there must be people born as women, too, who successfully become closer to their true nature as men, for they likewise have economic reasons of their own to do such things. Who can fault some women, at least, for having no interest in becoming the slaves of their husbands, fathers, or sons? I believe such people gravitate toward larger cities like Konstantinopolis, where they can be safe with those who care for them, though I do believe that these women who become men must conceal their transformation from either everyone or almost everyone. As for the rest of the city, the people are so busy that they are indifferent to genitalia, so long as you keep yours out of the way. It is the country bumpkins who obsess over the boring question of whether the genitals match the clothing.”
“It was something else,” Gontran said. “So many women in Constantinople are street vendors and shopkeepers. That would never happen in France. Only men can work in the markets there, since buying and selling means traveling long distances along dangerous roads…although they don’t even qualify as roads, not in the Roman sense. They’re nothing like the paved imperial highways you find here. They’re more like dirt paths in the woods.”
“You see?” Samonas said. “The environment of Konstantinopolis produces results which are different from those of your homeland.”
“But you aren’t answering my question,” Gontran said. “Did you choose to become a eunuch?”
“Ah, the question of free will, does it ever get old?” Samonas said.
“I’m serious.”
“I would be only too happy to answer,” Samonas said. “We were just making conversation. Now, there are two kinds of eunuchs. The first is castrated in infancy; the second before the onset of puberty, though a small number do so even later—like Saint Origen the Scholar. Those castrated at infancy tend to possess a rather unique and otherworldly voice which is cherished in our church choirs. They are something of a rarity, however, since such operations endanger the infant’s life, which is already quite fragile to begin with, as I’m sure you understand. As for those castrated later, they tend to be indistinguishable from men. Some operations can remove the entire scrotum and penis, while others merely slice the vas deferens to render the male sterile. There is not a vast difference between such ‘cut’ men and so-called ‘normal’ men.”
“You sound like a man to me,” Gontran said.
“And yet one who knows a great deal of womanly matters,” Diaresso said.
“Had I not desired to become what I am,” Samonas said, “do you think I would have allowed myself to be castrated? By the time puberty begins, the child has become a youth, and the youth can run like any adult. Those of us truly uninterested in becoming eunuchs would simply flee.”
“But not all have such a choice,” Diaresso said.
“I did,” Samonas said.
Gontran raised an eyebrow. “Never thought of it like that.”
“You focus too much on the individual aspect of the contradiction between the individual and the world,” Samonas said. “How can one choose to do anything when we are products of our environment?”
“Do you then believe individuality to be like unto a desert mirage?” Diaresso said.
“An illusion, you mean,” Gontran said.
Diaresso nodded. “Yes.”
“Not in the slightest degree,” Samonas said. “You don’t need to choose one or the other. We are individuals and we are products of our environment at the same time. It’s yes and no at once. The individual is a product of his specific environment and experiences. Subject and object are bound together in an endless cycle, the one ceaselessly changing the other. Plus, as I learned from Dionysios, God is also a compulsive gambler, and a dice-roll is involved in every action which takes place in the universe. Much of who we are is therefore a product of chance.”
“What laughable blasphemy is this?” Diaresso scoffed. “The Prophet, may peace be upon him, forbids gambling. Why would he do this if Allah is, as you blasphemously claim, a wretched gambling addict?”
“I shan’t claim to speak for Allah,” Samonas said. “Perhaps He loves gambling, but doesn’t wish humans to join him in his addictions. Regardless, you must remember randomness and subjectivity if you are to have any hope of making sense of the objective world.”
If only you knew, Gontran thought, recalling for a moment that he was trapped inside a board game.
“How different would the world be today,” Samonas added, “if everything always went as planned?”
“In His Wisdom Allah draws the universe toward the Day of Resurrection,” Diaresso said. “Mere men cannot understand.”
“That’s where I disagree,” Samonas said. “The entire world can be understood—every part of it.”
“Then there is no longer any point in continuing this frivolous discussion,” Diaresso said.
“Amen,” Gontran said, though he had gained so much XP from conversing with Diaresso and Samonas that he had nearly leveled his Intelligence up to Journeyman (6/10). The game seemed to be biased in favor of Gontran’s two companions.
“Very well,” Samonas said. “I live to serve, as you know.”
The Paralos was a new, sturdy, and well-built ship, so its ‘crew,’ if they could be called that, finished their repairs in time for dinner, which Diaresso cooked, being the best chef among them. There was little he could do with the ingredients at hand, however: hard tack was usually broken up, mixed with water, and cooked into a kind of pancake. While doing this he begged Allah to keep the maggots and weevils away. He refused to eat the salt pork, however, which was left to the two infidels, though he had no problem with drinking wine.
“Isn’t that haram?” Gontran said.
“After all of our many tragic years together, you have finally learned one word of the language of the Prophet, may peace be upon him,” Diaresso said. “Yet you have never commented upon my preference for wine, particularly the black variety from Tarabizun.”
“Never really cared about it until now.”
“It turns to water the moment it touches my lips.” Diaresso sipped from a tin cup. “So there is nothing to fear for one who fears god. I am on the right path, and shall one day return to Allah.”
Gontran laughed. “How does that work, exactly? Doing a reverse Jesus, I mean—turning wine into water?”
“Have you not heard of al-kīmiyā?”
“Alchemy, you mean. Why not just drink water? Why waste the wine?”
“Because…”
“Yes?” Gontran said.
“There is a moment.” Diaresso smelled the wine. “If only a brief one, in which I seem to taste it. And besides, every cup I drink is my last. It makes the taste of the water so much sweeter. I swear with earnestness every time I drink, that I shall not drink again. And Allah is all-wise and all-merciful. An old prostitute once, after a long life of sin, gave a thirsty dog a drink of water, and for that, Allah wiped all her sins away, according to the Hadith. Even minor good deeds can change the universe. Thus, it is for the abstruse purposes of Allah that I swear with all my heart and soul I shall never drink, and then drink again.”
“Once you change it into water, can you spit it out so I can see?” Gontran said.
“Enough of this nonsensical discussion!” Diaresso gave him his pancake. “Here! Now eat your repast, thou foul giaour, thou!”
Munching on the hard tack pancake, Gontran heated up the salt pork, which he shared with Samonas, to Diaresso’s disgust. Gontran was the only one who refused to drink the wine that often went with meals, since he had volunteered to take the night watch—remembering how Diaresso had fallen asleep during his watches, while also doubting that Samonas could keep his eyes open through so many hours of darkness.
“It is often talked about in Trebizond.” Samonas primly ate small amounts of his food with his unusually clean and delicate hands using only the fingertips to touch the utensils. “How most sailors are often so drunk they can scarcely take a step without stumbling to the floor.”
“You mean the deck.” Gontran burped out the last word of this sentence. Diaresso chuckled.
Samonas, however, wrinkled his face in disgust. “But if everyone at sea is like that, the effect cancels itself out, does it not, in true dialectical fashion? Here, however, those creatures in the darkness which watch us with envious eyes might very well not be drunk, which means that one amongst us must go without the divine nectar of the gods in order to guard our lives.”
“You’re talking about me,” Gontran said.
Samonas nodded.
“What creatures do you speak of?” Diaresso said. “Apart from those nameless reptilian titans we beheld earlier this day.”
“There may be others we don’t know about,” Samonas said. “We haven't ventured out of sight of the Paralos. Much of this place—what else to call it?—we have yet to explore.”
“I’ll stay up on the deck,” Gontran said. “You two can sleep down in the hold. We’ll be fine. As far as I know, those things—they’re called komodo dragons, by the way—they can’t climb the hull. They don’t seem too interested in us, either.”
“You don’t understand,” Samonas said. “You must be vigilant, my good sir. We know nothing of this place. There must be a reason why it doesn’t appear on any of our maps, though it lays not terribly far from a busy port city like Trebizond.”
“Those navigators who discovered this unholy isle must have perished without a trace,” Diaresso said. “Perhaps others thought them lost to storms”
“When in reality they were taken by the inhabitants,” Samonas said.
“Thanks, that’s really encouraging,” Gontran said. “You know, you two are just trying to scare each other. Not every island is inhabited.”
“You utter these pseudo-profanities like one whose life is boring and uneventful,” Samonas said. “Yet if I’m not mistaken, you and your partner both lead rather interesting lives, do you not?”
“Not by choice,” Gontran said.
Samonas took a small bite from his hard tac pancake. “Yes indeed. Well, allow me to just say that it would be rather surprising if this ‘unholy isle,’ as this one calls it, turned out to be uninhabited.”
“His name’s Diaresso,” Gontran said. “Kambine Diaresso. And I’m Gontran Koraki.”
“Why bother?” Samonas said. “I’m terrible with names. Plus, we’ll all probably be dead within a matter of hours. It’s a miracle we’ve survived at all.”
On that ominous note, they soon finished eating. Diaresso and Samonas descended to the hold and threw themselves in the canvas hammocks slung on nails sticking out from the rafters. Gontran stood on the deck to watch the orange light of sunset glow through the volcanic glass sky and spear the forest of palm fronds basking in the steam. For a few minutes, Diaresso twanged the strings of a lute he must have found—the tune sounded Spanish to Gontran’s old world ears—but he broke a string and swore. Soon fatigue overcame him, as he lapsed into silence, and his string music was replaced by natural symphonies of wind instruments, voices, and percussion—the whistling birds, howling monkeys, and rattling insects.
Darkness descended. Gontran paced the deck, wondering how he was supposed to keep himself awake until sunrise. He longed to be sleeping in one of those canvas hammocks belowdecks, snoring peacefully in sweet nothingness. Almost immediately he understood how Diaresso had passed out while he was on watch.
To distract himself, Gontran stared at the birds soaring from tree to tree. Had he ever seen so many in one place? And all of them were so colorful, they seemed more exotic than what you would find in this part of the world. They were not just macaws—there were others, though their names were beyond his knowledge. Were they birds of paradise? Regardless, none belonged in the Black Sea. In the old world, that was what people called the Euxine, the Pontic Ocean.
He could have sworn that one of the birds looked almost mechanical, like it was made of bronze segments rather than feathers. Its bright ruby eyes watched him. And then, after singing the most dreamlike song he had ever heard, the bird swooped back into the leaves, which exploded behind it.
This encounter was so brief that Gontran soon doubted that it had happened at all.
So tired I’m seeing things, he thought, blinking his eyes. And hearing things…
The game voice was indeed warning him that his low stamina was about to affect his health. Gontran paced back and forth along the deck to stay awake. No stars emerged in the crystal sky—clouds must have swept in after sunset—and there were no fireflies here, nor was there glowing algae. Soon the darkness was profound. He was forced to feel along the edge of the deck in order to find his way.
This is ridiculous, he thought. How’s anyone supposed to find us when I can’t even see anything?
Yet if Samonas was right, and people were hiding here, they could light torches to find the Paralos, and then set it aflame. Gontran was so tired that he might sleep through any attack.
Though he forced himself to jump at every unusual sound which arose from the chorus of nightsong, he was soon unable to continue walking. First he leaned against the wale, then he slumped to the deck, sitting with his back to the mainmast, thinking that he needed to wake Diaresso.
I can’t go on, he thought. We’re in so much danger. I don’t know how anyone stays up all night after going through what we’ve been through. We need to take turns.
Most sailors dozed during the day at the first opportunity—whenever there was no work to be done—while marching soldiers threw themselves into the backs of supply carriages and took naps if they were due to keep watch the following night. But Gontran could do none of these things. Almost continuously he had been working for day after day, knowing only exhaustion.
Yet unlike Diaresso, Gontran kept his eyes open and stayed awake, or at least he believed he did. So much time passed that light returned to the darkness, and the sun rose on the other side of the enormous cave, like the world was just a mechanical clock, and every gear was turning according to its purpose.
Gontran was almost there. Gaining a kind of second wind at the thought of how close he was, he picked himself up and leaped over the deck and onto the black sand, which felt so rich against his bare feet. He wanted to go for a short walk to celebrate the fact that he was finally about to rest. Soon he would sleep so deeply that he would have dreams within dreams within dreams, falling backward into one after the other. All he needed to do was keep an eye open for those komodo dragons—
Something was moving toward him through the jungle—something big. It thrashed through the underbrush, and seemed low to the ground, as it forced the trees apart at their bases rather than at their tops. Then, almost before Gontran could react, a gigantic snake emerged from the jungle and slithered onto the black sand beach. It was the size of an old world train—a locomotive with all its carriages—and also some kind of machine, one plated with metal segments that shone like polished gold in the morning sunlight. Its eyes were glowing rubies the size of apples. Steam poured off its body, which wavered with heat, as though it was frightening the very air.
I just can’t catch a break, Gontran thought.
He turned and ran back to the ship, but in spite of his high speed skill (7/10), he knew he had no chance. He could never reach it in time. Too much work and fatigue meant that he heard the metal plates roaring against the sand behind him—and the rapid explosions of its thundering engines—until the sound was almost deafening. Before he could scream for Diaresso and Samonas to help, the snake opened its mouth and swallowed him.