As evening fell, the three men aboard the Paralos celebrated their escape by drinking wine from the ship’s barrels. At first they tried taking turns at the steering oars while doing this. Each told the others that it was alright, they could get drunk while he—Gontran, Samonas, or Diaresso—kept an eye on the ship. But soon they were all so drunk there was a risk that at least one would fall over the side. Talia was ultimately the only crew member who could take the oars and keep the Paralos from capsizing or running aground. Gontran offered her food and drink, but she explained that anything except coal, water, or air would wreck her inner machinery.
“That’s right,” Gontran slurred. “I almost forgot. You’re a robot.”
“This word is unknown to me,” she said.
“It means ‘automatôn’ where I come from.”
“At your point of origin there are automatônes?”
“Oh yeah. But none of ‘em are as pretty as you. You know, you’re real pretty for a robot. I could almost forget you’re made of metal.” He reached out to touch her, but she batted him away so hard that he fell to the deck.
You have lost 5 health, the game voice said. You now have 55/100 health. Your charisma XP is also declining. You have lost favor with Talia the Automatôn.
“Ow,” Gontran said, lying face-down. “Shoulda known. Happened before.”
Diaresso and Samonas were singing together arm-in-arm on the other side of the ship—they must have discovered a song they both knew—so they failed to notice.
Gontran was still lying where he had fallen. He looked at Talia. “What’d you do that for?”
“I will kill you if you touch me again,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. “Lesson learned. I get drunk, I sexually harass women, then they beat me up. Hang on. I think I gotta puke.”
He climbed to his feet and vomited over the side of the ship.
You have lost 1 health, the game voice said. Your health is at 54/100.
When Gontran had finished, he collapsed to the deck again. Talia asked Diaresso and Samonas to help him. Though the two men were drunk, they were less drunk than Gontran. Diaresso apologized to Talia for Gontran’s behavior, explaining that wine unlocked the infidel’s inner nature, transforming him into one who had little respect for women—“a terrible thing, for women hold up half the sky.”
“I am no woman,” Talia said.
“Nor did Allah set up the firmament without pillars in its stead,” Diaresso murmured to himself. “Nor did He stretch out the Earth even as a bed.”
Samonas spluttered with laughter.
Diaresso brought Gontran a blanket from the hold so that he could sleep in peace on the deck beneath the frigid stars. Samonas had turned away to gaze at the sea, doubtless thinking that it was beneath him to even watch Diaresso at work.
Gontran dreamt of being eaten by snakes the size of rivers, their scales plated with golden armor, their eyes shining red like rubies, mesmerizing him. He dreamt of his friends in Trebizond begging him for help. He dreamt of his family in Metz doing the same.
Always the same old shit.
In the morning, Gontran woke feeling confused, as usual—not knowing where he was. The cold wind of the sea was ruffling his hair, so that was a clue. And for some reason it felt like someone had split his head open with an axe. His arm also hurt, and he had lost a few points of health, bringing him down to 50/100, though his stamina was restored. Squinting in the sun, he climbed to his feet and shivered in the chill air. The Northmen, he recalled, slept inside tents set up on the decks of their dragon-prowed longships. Greeks often slept belowdecks instead. Nobody just slept on the deck under a blanket. And yet it felt good to be out here on the Euxine—that was where he was—on the move.
Despite his headache, he was in a good mood. The sky was clear, the sea extended in every direction, and no other ships were in sight.
For the time being, the Paralos crew was safe. A strange feeling that was. Gontran had spent the last three or four days running or fighting for his life, with hardly a moment to catch his breath, save the party the night before, which he only vaguely remembered. How nice to be at sea again, with the ship’s wooden timbers creaking, the ropes tightening, the sails fluttering as the prow cut through the splashing waves. Not since his arrival in Trebizond all those months ago had he been on the ocean. Only now, when he had a moment to think, did he realize how much he had missed being on the water, and how grumpy being trapped on the land made him feel. Oddly enough, all this water was the best way to relieve the damp, drizzly November in his soul.
November. That had been the month of his birthday back in the old world. He had always hated it in Maine. A cold miserable month, with all the leaves fallen. No snow, just the expectation of months of sky-fallen avalanches looming over you. All the tourists gone, and the business owners and landlords, too, this latter group having fled to Florida for their eight-month vacations.
Walking around town in Maine in November, it's just you and the empty houses, silent and stern like the moai of Easter Island, all monuments to folly erected in the name of dying civilizations.
Gontran shuddered. He was glad, in a way, to be free of that lonely place.
But where were the others? Diaresso and Samonas must have been sleeping belowdecks. As Gontran turned, he saw Talia still holding the two steering oars, standing rigid as a statue.
“Morning,” Gontran murmured. He clutched his head and groaned; merely to speak made the pain worse.
Talia turned her blue eye flames toward him—her segments clinking, the engine inside her grumbling—but said nothing.
“You been at that all night?” Gontran found a water flask and washed his mouth without touching the nozzle to his lips. “You want a break?”
“It makes no difference to me,” she said with her voice like a pipe organ. “Better that I should care for this vessel than you three creatures of crude flesh and blood.”
“You don’t need sleep?”
She shook her head. “What is sleep but frailty?”
“Well, Leonardo da Vinci, it’s convenient.” Gontran leaned over the side of the ship. “Luxuriant. But also kind of horrifying. A taste of the death to come. Nothing’s worse than death to someone like me. It means no more eating, drinking, buying, selling. That’s probably what happens when we die. But some people believe in heaven and hell. Heaven’s a place where all of us can be as rich as kings, and do all those things as much as we want. Hell is where we can’t consume at all. Instead, we are consumed.”
“What do the words ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ mean to a machine like me?” Talia said. “For one who has no soul?”
“You seem to have a soul, if you ask me. Some people believe that everything has a soul. Maybe even souls themselves have souls, as do their souls, and on and on.” He widened his eyes and spoke with a crazed, mystical tone. “As the Great Einstein said, everything is made of energy!”
Talia’s blue fire eyes darted back and forth as she struggled to understand what Gontran was talking about, an effect of his intelligence skill recently leveling up to Journeyman (6/10).
“This counts as no relief from my labors,” she said. “It merely adds to the burden.”
“Sorry. How long’s that fuel of yours going to last if you keep working like this?”
“You said there was a great deal of fuel at your point of origin.”
“Yeah, but first we have to get that fuel, and the problem is right now, there’s a lot of really bad people in the way. I was hoping, uh, that you could help us out with that, since you seem kind of unstoppable.” He squinted at the sun, which was to starboard, then groaned again. “It’s morning, right? We sailing north?”
Talia nodded.
“Well, Trebizond’s south, if that’s where you want to go. Must be about two or three days from here—with a fair wind at our backs, of course.”
“How many ‘really bad people’ guard this place you have spoken of?” Talia said.
“Thousands at least. More are probably on their way. Nice as it can be, Trebizond’s really like an asshole magnet. All the assholes in the world are converging there.”
“Do you expect me to fight thousands of ‘assholes’ by myself?”
Gontran shrugged. “I don’t know. You were pretty good at beating the shit out of us…”
“That is not saying very much. What are you but a glorified wineskin filled with blood, one which can walk and talk?”
“Ouch,” Gontran said.
“That is what you said the previous night.”
“Excuse me?”
“You mean you cannot remember?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You said I was pretty and tried to touch me.”
“Oh. Maybe that explains this.” He raised his arm, which had a huge bruise. “Sorry about that. I tend to be kind of belligerent when I’m drunk.”
“Imperfect. Flawed. Already I have forgotten the reason for my coming here.” She peered over the side of the ship. “I would sink forever, and my inner fires would be extinguished, if I fell.”
Gontran raised his eyebrows. “Seriously? All it takes to stop you is a little water?”
“I may be strong, but I am not immortal. I cannot fight your battles for you. Your thousands of enemies would attack me like a swarm. Sooner or later they would succeed in overpowering me.”
“Too bad. I thought I’d found our golden ticket out of here. We have a bunch of friends back there who are really counting on us…”
“You must find another way. Recall that I am not here to assist you in your troubles. I left my home to procure fuel for my brothers and sisters, the Children of Hephaistos.”
“Right, right,” Gontran said. “You wouldn’t know of anywhere else we could go, by any chance? Maybe where we could find like a whole army of people like you?”
“Given the positions of the stars last night, I suspect I have been asleep for over a millennium. When last I left the Island of Creation, the city of Athens was the beating heart of the world. This ‘Trebizond’ you mention, I have never heard of.”
“I think Athens is just a village now.”
“It is therefore safe to assume that much of my knowledge is outdated.”
“So there aren’t any bronze armies hiding anywhere?”
“All automatônes dwelled in the Island of Creation,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“To protect them from slavery.”
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“I don’t understand why you keep talking about that—”
“The Hellenes are famous for their craftiness,” Talia said. “A few even built simple contrivances whose parts were animated by steam. But they could never match the creations of Hephaistos.”
“Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Wasn’t that inventor’s name Hero of Alexandria or something? He built a steam engine, but nobody ever used it. Except I hear the emperor has, like, a steam-powered chair or something—”
“For all their craftiness, the Hellenes relied on human labor to power their society,” Talia said. “They relied on human slaves using the simplest tools to grind value from the Earth. To increase value, they needed more slaves or land, which they often acquired in war. But the tools remained the same, or only very slowly changed. To have replaced slave labor with machines would have undermined the Hellenic ruling class, which made its money through war and enslavement, not by improving the productive forces.”
Gontran sighed. “Everyone’s talking like Herakleia these days.”
“If they ever realized that they could unleash forces beyond their imagination by deploying more advanced tools—steam-powered beings like myself, for instance—we automatônes would be finished.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry. The Greeks never figured it out. Far as I can tell, they’re still pretty much up to the same shenanigans as always. I mean, don’t get me wrong, a few things have changed. They call themselves Romans now, not Greeks—they get a little touchy when you call them Greeks—and they all love this guy named Jesus and think he’s their personal lord and savior. Plus, Konstantinopolis is the capital of the world, now, not Athens.”
“This place, too, I have never heard of. Konstantinos’s City. Who is Konstantinos? Even his name is strange to me. It sounds barbaric, almost Italik or Pelasgian, like the natives of Megálē Hellas—”
“But other than that,” Gontran continued, not hearing her, “it’s still slaves, like you said, using the most backward tools you could ask for. I just talked about this with Diaresso—he isn’t even interested in better tools. Sometimes these people don’t even have iron—they’re using wooden ploughs instead. I bet there’s some people still using stone tools out there in the hinterland. Trebizond’s the only place that’s different. They’ve got real potential there. The only problem is that they’re a little too wishy-washy.”
Talia looked at him more intently, her segments shifting.
“It’s only different because of people like me,” Gontran continued. “Because of people with a lot of strange new ideas.”
“Oh, I am certain of it,” she said with a sarcastic tone.
“If it weren’t for us, the uprising probably would have been crushed a long time ago. It’s on life support now as it is. I don’t know how Alexios or Herakleia are doing—if they’re even alive. But you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“In this Trebizond, there are contrivances like me?”
Gontran shook his head. “No, nothing like you. We barely had time to build, like, a children’s science kit version of a steam engine. But people like what’s his name, the new blacksmith from Persia—Jamshied, Jamshied al-Tabrizi—he managed to cook up a few things, and even their few minor improvements made a huge difference. That’s actually half the reason we’re out here now. Apparently we started mining so much that we wrecked the economy on the other side of the world. The people who lived there got pissed and decided to mess with us. So here we are. With nowhere to go, and nothing to do. Just kind of waiting to get captured or killed…”
“You must find allies to take back your home, since you are too weak to do this yourself.”
Gontran nodded. “I’m with you, sister.”
“I am not your sister. And I cannot help you.”
“Yeah, I understand. Although you’ve been a huge help so far…”
“This conversation is over.”
Gontran raised his hands. “Alright, alright.”
He turned away from Talia and tried to think of somewhere safe where they could hide or find allies. Since fleeing Trebizond, even thinking about this had been impossible. First the Romans had chased them, then there had been the maelstrom and the island of misfit toys. Where were they supposed to go now? This entire region was unknown to him. Most of his traveling had either been on land or in the Middle Sea. Pontos and Skythia were blanks. Nobody came here because there was nothing but pirates and steppe raiders, and nothing to trade—nothing except fish, grass, honey, wax, furs, and slaves. Of course there were the Khazars up north, but they’d been having so many problems with the Varangians and the Turks lately, people rarely heard much about them. Were the Khazars Turks? He couldn’t remember.
Gontran needed a map. But nobody ever had maps in the Middle Ages. If people here needed to travel long distances, they just used guides, or asked for directions along the way. And there were few destinations to begin with. Some roads—just dirt paths, really—stretched for hundreds of miles without a single fork, passing peasant villages which didn’t even have names, where nothing had happened in hundreds of years. People there were born, they farmed, they made more kids, they paid their rents and tithes, they went to church, and then they died. If you wanted to go east, you just kept moving, and made sure the rising sun was in front of you each morning. To go west, you did the opposite. And so on.
Still, Samonas had said that the Paralos was meant for diplomacy and trade in the Pontic region. A map was unnecessary for a journey like this so long as your ship hugged the coast. But who knew? Maybe there was a map aboard. If the ship were blown off course, or if they sailed up one of the rivers that flowed into the Euxine, a map would be useful.
Gontran left Talia. Climbing into the hold, he rummaged through the chests that were stored there, oblivious to Diaresso and Samonas sleeping nearby in their canvas hammocks. He found plenty of food, supplies, and trade goods—including a few reams of Tabriz silk which were worth their weight in gold—but no maps. Yet he remembered that they had a living map—Samonas himself. Gontran went to his hammock and shook him awake.
“What the devil?” he groaned. “Get your hands off of me, you scoundrel, you demented—”
“Samonas,” Gontran said. “Where should we go?”
“What?”
“We need somewhere to go. Somewhere safe. Maybe where we can find some mercenaries or something.”
“Mercenaries? How are you going to pay for them? And with whose money? You haven’t got a blasted nomisma to your name!”
“Actually, that’s not completely true.”
“If anything, you owe us! Trebizond has been giving you free room and board for months, and how have you shown your gratitude? By fleeing at the first sign of trouble and denigrating us every chance you—”
“Shut up and listen, alright? This ship has some valuable trade goods. They might be worth enough to exchange for—”
Samonas laughed. “Hilarious! As if the valuables aboard this ship are even yours to trade! They all belong to the workers of Trebizond!”
“Yeah, well last time I checked the workers of Trebizond were a little preoccupied.”
Diaresso smacked his lips, said something about Tamar in his own language, and turned over in his canvas hammock.
“On top of that,” Samonas continued, “you obviously don’t know the first thing about hiring mercenaries, nor even how reliable they tend to be when fighting well-disciplined and well-supplied seasoned opponents like the barbarians who just drove us out of our own homes!”
“Samonas—”
“You couldn’t pay any mercenaries to fight men like that! There isn’t enough money in the world! We are the only ones who would stand up to them, and they already handily defeated us!”
“Well, we need to do something because right now we’re just floating in the middle of the ocean…”
“Now is that really so terrible? There’s plenty of food and wine, the barbarians have no idea where we are or if we’re even alive, and the weather seems calm enough, thank god. Frankly I think we’ve earned a bit of a respite from our troubles—”
“You don’t even know what’s going on back in Trebizond, Samonas. The Normans—they’ll cut off your hand if you even look at them the wrong way…”
“Sounds familiar.”
Gontran crossed his arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Didn’t you grow up there?”
“Oh, so now you finally remember something about me. Can you also tell me my name, which I think I’ve told you now about fifty times?”
Samonas ignored him. “And don’t you speak their language?”
“I’m different.”
“How so?”
Gontran sighed. “I’m a Latin, Samonas. The guys who took Trebizond are mostly Normans. They’re descended from Northmen and were pagans only a couple generations ago.”
“Forgive me, but at times it’s hard to tell the difference, particularly when you’re waking a decent fellow like myself from his well-earned, well-deserved hangover nap—and for highly specious reasons, to boot!”
Gontran frowned. “Samonas, just tell me there’s a city out there somewhere. Tell me which direction to point the ship.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Why would I be here if I knew? Do you think I enjoy talking with you?”
“Everyone should talk with me. Everyone should be enlightened by my conversation, my profundities—”
Gontran grabbed him by his shirt. “Samonas, give me a name and a direction. Now.”
“Is this how they do things in Gallía? Grunting out your coarse dialect while beating and killing one another? I don’t even support the empire, but I have to say, the western provinces have been lost to Rome for far too long—”
“Samonas. Think.”
“Promise you’ll leave me alone. And let go of my shirt.”
Gontran did as Samonas asked. “I promise.”
“You see? It is indeed possible to civilize the occasional barbarian—with the superficial rudiments of culture, in any event. Like teaching a parrot to utter a few amusing phrases.”
“Name. Direction. Now.”
“There’s nothing out here. Everything has been in decline for at least a hundred years. You’ll find nothing but burned-out ruins. Everyone is fighting everyone else. It’s that old contradiction, you understand? Between the wilds and the cities, the countryside and civilization, only these days the wilds have quite the advantage, what with their mastery of horseback riding.”
Gontran rolled his eyes.
“It wasn’t like that back when Ioulios Kaisaras was conquering half the world,” Samonas said. “Your Gallic ancestors wouldn’t even ride horses into battle. They would ride in, dismount, and then fight. Preposterous! They had no chance against Roman infantry. But now Roman infantry has no chance against barbarian cavalry. It probably all started back when Krassos invaded Parthia. The Battle of Carrhae, that’s what it was called—near a place called Harran, now, if I’m not mistaken. A horde of steppe archers, you know, it’s just simply unstoppable. They never attack, they just keep loosing arrows that black out the sky like an eclipse—”
“I didn’t ask for a history lesson, Samonas. I asked for a place to go.”
“Very well. All the cities along the Pontic coast have been destroyed save for two or three—and those are still in Roman hands. There’s virtually nothing else except for the occasional fishing village. If you build up any more wealth than that, you’ll have ten thousand horse archers up your rear end before you can even say ‘Jesus Christ.’ They’ll burn down your home, cut your throat, violate the honor of your wives and mothers and daughters, and force your children into slavery. Nobody knows how to stop them—not without walls so massive only the Roman Empire can occasionally pay for their construction, to say nothing of their proper upkeep, which is nearly as expensive. Sound good?”
“So there’s nothing? Really nothing?”
Samonas waved his hand. “Well, perhaps there is one place.”
“What?”
“Kitezh.”
“What’s that? The land of kitties?”
“The Khazars, you know, some of them got tired of praying for deliverance from their foes—the Varangians to the north, the Alani of the Kaukasos to the east, the Romans to the south, the Patzinaks and Bulgars to the west. Its history—”
“Wait a minute, I’ve heard of the Khazars, but I don’t know much about them.”
Samonas smiled. “Jews of the steppe. Jewish Turks. Turkish Jews. Jews with swords.”
“Great,” Gontran said. “Just what we need.”
“Kitezh’s history is a bit similar to the foundation of Venetia, really. The Venetians—weren’t they fleeing the Goths or the Huns or some other horde of savages? I can’t remember. I think they found that lagoon of theirs and built an entire city—the future heart of their thalassocracy—with just a few boats and wooden boards.”
“So?”
“So the Khazars raised themselves to an even higher level. There are no lagoons in the Euxine. The water is sometimes shallow—particularly in the Kimmerian Bosporos—but not shallow enough. If the Khazars wished to construct a second Venetia, it would need to be mobile.”
“So you’re saying…”
“Kitezh is a floating city. It’s rather closer to a city-ship. I suppose you could call it that, although our language, divine as it may be, lacks the proper descriptors—”
“How is that possible? How come I’ve never heard of this?”
“You’re an ignorant rascal, a rascally ignoramus, that’s how.”
“Thanks. But you know, I learn more every day just from talking with you.”
As Gontran said this, XP was added to Journeyman intelligence skill (6/10)—which would make it easier to spar with Samonas, among many other things. XP was also added to his empathy skill, empathy and intelligence being linked. His empathy, however, was somewhat lower than his intelligence, being only at the level of Beginner (2/10).
At this point, the game voice said, you can only increase your intelligence by increasing your empathy.
“Oh really?” Samonas said, jarring Gontran from his thoughts. “Is that so? You find my talk helpful?”
“I was just kidding.”
Samonas seemed deflated. “Oh.”
“So how do we find this place, this Kitezh?”
“They have to put in every now and then to take on supplies—particularly in the winter, since they need fuel to keep warm—but they never stay near the coast long enough for the Skythians to find them.”
“So…”
“They often stick to the northern coast of the Euxine, since that keeps them relatively safe from us Romans. If we were to sail to the east coast, and then make for the Kimmerian Bosporos—north of here—we could perhaps locate them.”
“What do we do once we find them?”
“You were the one who asked for a destination, my good sir, not me. I have no idea if they will even allow us aboard. They do their best to keep their distance from foreign entanglements. All they wish is to live in peace.”
“That’s what everyone says. But alright. I guess that’s all we have.”
“I would still prefer to lounge about.” Samonas stretched, yawned, and shut his eyes. “That’s where my vote goes.”
“Spending a few minutes working those oars really took it out of you, huh?”
“All of us have worked hard enough. We deserve a break from our labors.”
“Not while others are still working. Not while our friends’ lives are at risk.”
“You see? We’ll make a believer out of you yet.” Samonas pointed at him and winked.
I hate when people wink at me, Gontran thought. I can wink at them. They can’t wink at me.
Without answering Samonas, Gontran climbed onto the deck and told Talia to turn east until they hit the coast. He then added that they were looking for some kind of huge ship—a city-ship—called Kitezh.
“I do not know what that means,” she said.
“Yeah,” Gontran said. “That makes two of us.”