Early that same morning, Herakleia was in the palace of Trebizond helping a mother give birth. While the blizzard howled against the walls and windows, hurling snowflakes against glass and stone, the mother—named Fatima—was groaning, crying, and writhing in her bed. Three other midwives were present here, and they had been training Herakleia for months—bringing her Midwife Skill up to Apprentice (4/10)—but this was the first birth which she had assisted, rather than observed. She remembered seeing such events in things called movies back in the old reality she had come from, but since arriving in Romanía she had witnessed actual births, and now believed that nothing was more exciting. Even the Siege of Trebizond, with all its fighting and explosions, was incomparable to the act of bringing life into the world.
The techniques the midwives used here were also new to Herakleia, and she still needed to adjust. Fatima was a young mother, only a teenager, and this was her first birth, which meant that she had been in labor since before sunrise; it was now long after sunset. The other midwives had made her smoke an opium pipe to dull the pain—a medieval solution to the problem—and helped her squat over a birthing stone for hours without any result. First births were often the hardest.
Now the mother was lying in bed, a birthing position more familiar to Herakleia. The midwives did something unfamiliar, however. One by one they climbed onto Fatima and pushed down on her belly to force the baby out. Wiping the sweat from the mother was Herakleia’s job, but she was also responsible for cleaning the unbelievable amount of blood pouring out of Fatima. A large bucket was needed to hold it, and the sickening metallic odor of blood filled the air.
Earlier the midwives had asked Fatima the question they always asked mothers before they went into labor: “If the birth becomes dangerous, whose life should we choose: yours, or the baby’s?” Fatima was a traditional girl, always attending Friday prayers at Trebizond’s mosque. She was full of quotations from the Koran and the Hadith, and the second wife of an old Arab migrant to the city who had come all the way from Aleppo to work in the mines.
Yet Fatima was also full of contradictions. She had volunteered—with her husband’s permission—to join the Workers’ Army, and was training with first century’s artillery squad (against the midwives’ advice). She had even learned the unofficial saying of the Zhayedan—“Don’t let the farr fade!” Nonetheless, she had told the midwives to choose the baby’s life over her own. This meant that Artemia, the lead midwife, had brought surgical knives, which now gleamed on a nearby table. If the birth killed the mother, the midwives would cut the baby free. This was a task usually performed by surgeons and barbers rather than midwives, but Artemia was the most experienced healer in the city when it came to the caesarean section, and it was rumored that she was even able to do this while saving the mother’s life.
Now the midwives were shouting that they could see the head. The moment had come. Artemia—the old wise experienced witch—reached inside Fatima, who was screaming wildly, and withdrew the infant. Herakleia, standing beside her, was almost more shocked by the slop which poured from Fatima straight into the bucket rather than the baby, who was drenched in bluish mucus and silent.
Dead? Herakleia thought.
Artemia, holding the baby in the air by the ankles, whacked its back hard. The baby puked a mouthful of phlegm onto Fatima’s belly, and then bawled. Everyone else in the room gasped with relief. Herakleia wiped up the mess on Fatima’s belly, building up her midwifery XP. Others, meanwhile, cut the umbilical cord and handed the baby to Fatima, who somehow looked more beautiful than ever despite all she had been through. The baby had now stopped crying, and was staring at everyone and blinking huge black filmy eyes as if to say: “Who are all of you?”
Artemia, meanwhile, had washed her hands and arms with soap. Herakleia had taught the Trapezuntines this technique, though Diaressso had remarked that this was a commonplace for healers across Afrika. “Only the swine-eaters of the Dar al-Harb know nothing of washing their hands!” he had exclaimed.
Artemia fell into a nearby couch and wiped the sweat from her forehead.
“That was a good one,” she said.
“Thank you,” Fatima said. She was already trying to get the baby to suckle her breast. Another midwife, an Alanian named Rusudan, was helping.
“So, strategos,” Artemia said to Herakleia. (Strategos was her elected position: it was the Roman word for general.) “Do you think you’ll be staying with us? Or will you be going back to making compromises with our old enemies on the workers’ councils?”
Herakleia was busy scrubbing the mess on the floor. “It’s definitely exciting here.”
“True, very true,” Artemia said. “And it never stops being exciting—or rewarding. That’s why I’m still doing it.”
They had talked like this at the conclusion of several births. The elderly Artemia could be repetitive and forgetful; yet at the same time no one in the city knew more about midwifery. Her long life of helping women, many of whom were doubly enslaved—by society, first, and their husbands and families, second—had radicalized her long ago. When she had heard about the Republic of Trebizond, she had traveled there from her old home—the hill fortress town overlooking the ruins of Ephesos—across Anatolia, joining the workers to help them.
Once Herakleia had finished scrubbing the blood and other bodily fluids from the floor and washed herself, Artemia groaned, stood from the couch, and took her away from the midwives, the mother, and the baby. Closing the door of the bedroom—which had once been the prison cell for an old landlord named Gabras as well as a wrecker named Bryennios—they stepped into the marble hallway.
“The father’s a real bastard,” Artemia whispered to Herakleia as they sat together on a wooden bench. “He didn’t even come for the birth. He’s back at home sleeping.”
“I don’t blame him,” Herakleia said. “He works in the mines. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
Herakleia spoke with authority on this subject. A week ago she had worked there, hiking up the path into the mountains before dawn and then into that hungry gaping maw propped open with wooden supports—like yellow fangs—which led down into a long throat of darkness. One line of clean workers with gray eyes trudged in; another line with red eyes whose clothes were covered in soot trudged out.
Yet no one forced either group to move. Elected overseers were present and the workers’ councils set quotas, but the mood was positive, and people greeted each another and cracked jokes. The workers worked, yes, but they were united in a common purpose: to make Trebizond a fortress, and then to destroy the enemy before the enemy destroyed them.
All the workers knew that the emperor would invade their new home, sooner or later.
It’s hard to believe that people would volunteer to work in the mines for the common good, Herakleia thought. Yet for most of humanity’s time on Earth, no one forced us to do anything but ourselves. A master whipping his lazy slaves into shape is a new development compared to the hundreds of thousands of years we spent running through the forests with no boss save our families, our friends, our bellies, our minds, our hearts.
Kárbouno Mountain was different in other ways from most mines in the eleventh century. Since the conclusion of the siege, Trebizond’s workers had freed themselves from their masters’ limited imaginations. Before even Julius Caesar’s time, the Roman ruling class’s wealth had been based on conquering foreign lands in order to enslave more people so they would do more labor. There was little incentive to improve technology when slaves were so plentiful.
Liberated slaves, workers, and peasants, however, had a different perspective. They desired to produce as many necessities for themselves while doing as little work as possible—and without enslaving anyone else. With Herakleia’s vague old world memories—as well as the engineering aptitude which some laborers had revealed thanks to the uprising’s education programs—Trebizond’s workers had constructed mining equipment which almost belonged more properly to the nineteenth rather than the eleventh century. This meant that iron rails, tubs, and new tools like pickaxes had been built, especially after the arrival to the city of the talented new blacksmith from Persia, Jamshied al-Tabrizi, who was training apprentices as quickly as possible.
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Now Trebizond possessed more iron and coal than the workers knew what to do with. Michele Cassio, a Venetian merchant transporting the workers’ commodities abroad, had told them during his last visit some weeks ago that they were driving other mines across Romanía and even Gallía into penury—and within only a few months of starting production. The economy of Romanía as well as Sarakenou and Latin lands was so underdeveloped that one small industrializing city in Pontos was now supplying enough iron and coal to make prices collapse.
This made it difficult for Trebizond to exchange coal for hard currency, and likewise decreased that currency's value. Typically the Roman government dealt with money issues by minting more coins and debasing the metals inside, though this only exacerbated the problem. The real answer was for Trebizond to issue its own gold currency and to likewise focus on manufactures which everyone always needed—textiles, for instance—rather than raw materials which were more subject to price fluctuations. This would allow workers to reinvest profits in the Trapezuntine economy while destabilizing places as faraway as Paris, London, Tomboutou, Baghdad, and even Sera and al-Hind and Axum and lands even farther east about which nothing was known save their names: Cauli, Cipangu, Taprobana.
That was Herakleia’s plan, anyway. The workers had approved.
One issue, however, was that the market dominated in none of these places. Across the planet, nearly everyone could produce what they needed without resorting to exchange. If the price of coal rose, for instance, feudal lords could have their servants cut down firewood instead. If clothing grew too expensive, peasants could make their own. Trade therefore centered on luxuries like silk or spice or slaves, the feudal ruling class being the only one with the money to purchase commodities they did not make themselves. This lack of market dependency was holding back a great deal of misery—the misery of working for a wage, and being forced to exchange it for necessities—but it was also threatening Trebizond’s development. Regardless, Herakleia and her friends would find a way around this problem.
And since Herakleia wished to understand how every aspect of Trebizond functioned—and knew the danger workers' delegates faced, of becoming bureaucrats isolated from Trebizond's toiling masses—she had asked the miners if she could labor alongside them despite her lack of training. They had granted her request.
Donning heavy metal helmets which had been pried months ago from the bodies of slain Roman legionaries, the workers entering the mine needed to watch their heads. Stalactites stabbed down from the ceiling, and even a gentle bump could crack your skull or tear a hole in your scalp. Within moments of setting foot inside the mine, the darkness became so absolute that one longed for cloudy moonless nights in the wilds far from civilization. Absent the fluttering torches, it was impossible to see your own hands, and you needed to feel ahead into the darkness, using an old rope tied along the wall.
The workers were still trying to figure out how to construct the first electric lights, though this technology depended on the vague recollections Herakleia, Alexios, and their friend Gontran possessed of the old world. Even when they had lived there, none had bothered to understand how something as basic as an electric lightbulb or even a battery functioned—since none had ever believed that they would be teleported a thousand years into the past where they would desperately need such knowledge. All they could remember was that electric lighting had something to do with copper and a filament, whatever that was. Gontran himself—the rogue Gallic merchant—had taken difficult classes in physics, but these had taught him little more than obscure mathematical formulas which he needed to memorize for tests that were supposed to grant him entry into a good college so he could spend his life helping the ruling class squeeze workers.
And so for now, in the mines, people had nothing but torches and oil lamps. Proceeding inside the tunnel clutching these flickering torches, which often went out and needed to be relit, they came upon a vertical shaft leading into black depths. Since the workers had yet to develop an elevator—there had been no time to figure it out—they descended that endless pure inky abyss using a series of wobbling wooden ladders which felt as though they could break at any moment. Herakleia needed to keep moving, too; workers were both above and below, and everyone was anxious to get to the bottom as soon as possible. A nearby rope was constantly lifting huge buckets of coal to the top of the mine; striking one of these buckets could have killed her, and the creaking ropes would sometimes snap, or friction from the pulleys would make them burst into flames.
The darkness surrounded her and made her feel dizzy. It was a miracle she kept her balance. She thought of ikons she had seen in her old life in the Great Palace of Konstantinopolis, of souls climbing the ladder of divine ascent to paradise, with the haloed angels praying for them in the sky, and demons shooting them with arrows or pulling them down with hooks into Satan’s yawning maw. Her heart pounded in her chest with each step she took as the ladder groaned and swayed. What would it have been like to fall into that black air, to have no idea of how distant the bottom lay? If not for the occasional torches clutched by workers who were brave enough to climb with only one hand, Herakleia would have had no idea of how much farther she needed to go. The final step onto the ground would have caught her by surprise.
Most of the time, during that descent into the void, she thought only of gripping the rickety ladder, which creaked as workers lowered themselves, everyone too terrified to speak. During rare moments of lucidity she wondered what she was even doing there. Different people had different skills. Maybe she wasn’t meant for this. But how could anyone have been meant for this?
In a way, her position on the ladder was similar to her position as leader of the uprising. How had she, of all people, been placed here?
After a journey which felt as though it had lasted hours, Herakleia’s guide—an educated Armenian youth named Hagop, one of the radical Tondrakians, a Zoroastrian Defender of the Dispossessed—brought her to a passage so narrow they needed to crawl through on all fours. Inside that black tunnel, which was held up by a few wooden posts, and dripping endlessly with groundwater, it felt like the entire mountain was pressing down on her. If a cave-in had occurred, she would have died before she could scream. The whole world was ready to crush her, and the wooden posts in the tunnel walls were trembling with the effort of holding it off, ready to burst into splinters at any moment.
Little Atlases, each with the world on their shoulders.
She also had trouble keeping up with Hagop, who was nimble and thin, and tucked himself through the tight passages as easily as if he was navigating Trebizond’s streets.
They arrived at the coal seam. There, within a few paces of other workers laboring in dim lamplight, drenched in sweat and grime, Herakleia hacked at the coal with a heavy pickaxe someone gave her, spraying her face with shards. Every breath drew stale powder into her lungs. It felt poisonous. The game voice told her she was leveling up her mining skills from Initiate to Beginner as she wiped the coal slivers from her eyes, spitting them from her lips, coughing them from her lungs as her muscle burned with the effort and her bones ached.
Everyone doubts me, she thought, slamming the pickaxe into the mountain. Nobody should.
A big Turkish miner named Masud laughed, clapped her back, and asked with his heavy accent: “How is taste?”
“Awful,” she answered.
“That is money taste,” he said. “Power taste.”
Hagop said later: “What do you make of our little commune down here, strategos? Our little community of ants?”
“It’s so difficult.” She mopped the black sweat from her brow. “I knew it was hard, but I had no idea it was this hard.”
“Yet you feel as though you’re making a difference, don’t you?” Hagop said.
“Forgive me for asking,” Herakleia said, “but did you choose to come down here? It sounds like you could have been a teacher back in the city…”
“Oh, I find I get plenty of teaching done in this place,” Hagop said. “When I joined the uprising I found myself gravitating more toward this kind of work.”
“And he is skinny,” Masud said, regarding Hagop. “Good for mining.”
“All my life I’d spent with books and writing,” Hagop continued, “feeling so lonely, living practically all my days indoors, listening to the world go by outside—everyone talking and laughing out there. I got tired of always being alone all the time. I wanted to be with people. I thought I was meant for writing, I dedicated my life to it, but I soon found that I preferred this kind of work—that there’s nothing wrong with hard manual labor like this, and that it can even be nice as long as you’re contributing to the greater good. That’s what I originally disliked about it—mining just made the lords richer while destroying the bodies of the slaves in the mines—and that’s why I first gravitated toward writing. It was an escape from all the world’s troubles. But now that we’re free, we can work for each other however we prefer…”
Herakleia smirked in the dark, thinking that some people believed in the city a little too much, the intellectuals most of all.
“I know it sounds fatuous,” Hagop continued. “But that’s how I feel. Here I have a real chance to teach and to learn. Just to help these people learn to read and write—it makes such a difference.”
“Teach monkey to talk,” Masud said in the darkness, “is bad idea. But teach monkey to write—that is worse.”