The days passed, and Alexios grew so concerned about Rakhsh's food that he dismounted and walked alongside the horse as often as he could. This was difficult in the snow, but thankfully they had traveled so far south that the weather was growing milder, and only the mountaintops were coated in white. Everything else was brown and rocky, however. The children remained in the saddle for the most part, and Alexios only got back on when he started worrying that his shoes would fall apart or that his feet would blister.

At the ruins of a nameless city which looked as though it had been burned into nonexistence years ago, the road branched south again. For the last few days they had been moving southwest; now they were moving south-southeast. Here a destroyed bridge crossed the Halys River, but thankfully the water was shallow enough to ford at this time of year. The nameless burned city was surrounded by a wide valley which extended almost to the horizon on all sides. A great deal of farmland and many little villages had once been here, but now they were all overgrown with weeds.

What am I even doing in this place? Alexios thought. This is a waste of time.

There was no one to help him—no one but Basil, Kassia, and Rakhsh. He was pursuing a mirage. There was no Hermes Trismegistos, nor were there any Sabians. Dionysios’s command to travel south was just a dream.

Yet what could Alexios do? Desolation extended for hundreds of miles in every direction. He might as well continue and hope for the best.

Something will turn up.

Less snow meant drier feet, which was a relief. Following the broken Roman road was also easier, since it was built alongside a stream whose banks were lined with bare brown bushes and trees. Alexios found a milestone which stated that the city behind them had once been called Sebasteía.

“Lots of people must have lived here,” Alexios said to the children as he walked alongside Rakhsh. “But there was a battle, and now they’re all gone.”

“Thanks for stating the obvious, Alexios,” Basil said.

Alexios frowned. “It doesn’t matter what I say, you just attack me regardless of—”

Suddenly the biggest dog Alexios had ever seen charged from the roadside, barking so that its lips foamed with saliva. The creature was more like a lion, with its brownish yellow-white coat, and it towered over Alexios and obscured the sun as it reared up on its hind legs to strike him. Rakhsh screamed, and Alexios drew Gedara and slashed the creature's belly, but it still knocked him down, subtracting five health, leaving Alexios at 83/100. Just as the dog was about to sink its foaming teeth into his flesh, a brick struck its head. It howled and fell from Alexios, limping back to the roadside and disappearing among the ruins and trees.

Kassia and Basil—who had dismounted—kept throwing bricks and rocks in its direction and shouting for it to leave them alone. Only a trail of blood and saliva was left behind.

Gasping with relief, Alexios climbed to his feet, wiped off Gedara, sheathed it, and brushed himself off. The children were still clutching the biggest rocks their little hands could hold, ready to throw them if the beast returned. Their chests rose and fell with deep breaths, and their wide eyes were shining.

“Thanks,” Alexios said.

“Are you alright?” Kassia said.

Alexios nodded. “You both just saved my life.”

“See?” Basil said. “We aren’t completely useless, Alexios.”

“We aren’t just slowing you down,” Kassia said.

“Did I ever say that you were?”

“No,” Kassia said. “But you were thinking it.”

“Then it seems like I’m not only going to be your teacher or protector,” Alexios said. “You’re also going to teach and protect me.”

Within Alexios, he felt the farr stirring for the first time in days. He turned to the side and narrowed his eyebrows.

Can it be that the kids are also exploited? Alexios thought. But of course they are!

It was so obvious, how could he have missed it? Romanía—or what remained of it—was an agrarian society, one where parents birthed as many children as possible in order to increase the number of farmhands working their land. The concept of childhood was almost nonexistent here. Most farms had paltry surpluses, which meant that kids were made to do backbreaking work almost as soon as they could walk. Grinding more calories out of the ground than you put in (with no more than a few wooden or iron tools and some people and livestock) meant laboring from sunup to sundown six days out of seven from spring to fall every year. Children—and, more often than not, women—had little choice in these matters. The men, the husbands, the fathers and grandfathers (who were physically stronger) made most decisions—unless the exploited united against them.

To free children from abusive, exploitative, or neglectful parents is praxis, Alexios thought. As is the realization that children are partners in the struggle.

While these ideas flew through his mind, his farr grew to 5/100.

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Kassia and Basil got back on Rakhsh, and soon they were walking the road once more, their eyes fixed on the spot where the gigantic dog had disappeared.

“We can be more democratic if you want,” Alexios said.

“Huh?” Basil said.

“We can decide everything we do together,” Alexios said. “I can stop forcing both of you to do things you don’t want to do.”

The children looked at each other.

“Do you really mean it?” Kassia said.

Alexios nodded. “Yes. Do you both still want to continue to Melitené?”

“Now you ask us,” Basil said. “What other choices do we have? We can either keep going, or turn back—even though there’s nothing behind us for at least a week. And in every other direction, there’s probably nothing for months.”

“It’s true, there aren’t really any other places to go,” Alexios said. “We’re a long way from pretty much everywhere—which was half the reason I decided to take us out here to begin with.”

“It also means no one to play with,” Kassia said. “And no food.”

“What, you mean you’re getting tired of stale, rock-hard bread for every meal?” Basil said.

“I’m sorry, I’m doing my best,” Alexios said. “Just let me know if you want to do things differently. We’re a democracy, now. We decide things by majority vote.”

“I wish Rakhsh could vote, too.” Kassia patted the horse.

“If he wants to, he’s welcome,” Alexios said.

Unbelievably, the horse neighed in response, almost as though he understood.

“Rakhsh is a very good horse.” Alexios patted him with Kassia. “Strong and fast, with limitless endurance. He also seems sharper than most people.”

“Seems?” Kassia said.

“That isn’t saying much,” Basil said. “Most people are fools.”

“I don’t think so,” Alexios said. “People are products of their environment.”

“Then should I blame the environment for my mother’s death?” Basil said. “Should I stab the earth instead of the man who killed her?”

“Way to kill the mood,” Alexios said. “But to answer your question, this goes back to the individual-versus-society contradiction. That’s what Herakleia taught me, anyway, in Mazdakism. It’s not an either/or dichotomy. It’s both at the same time. It was a Roman general named Narses who killed your mother. Thankfully my friend Gontran shot him, but we never found his body.”

“Do you think he’s still alive?” Basil’s eyes were fixed on Alexios.

“If you don’t see the body, then they’re alive,” Alexios said. “At least in stories. Not so much in real life.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” Alexios said. “It was Narses who killed your mother, and Narses should pay for that, but we can’t ignore the fact that Romanía creates men like Narses every day. Romanía is full of people who are just like him. To focus on the individual alone is just as absurd as focusing on the society alone. Both must change in order to rectify your mother’s death. We have to tear up the problem by its roots.”

“I’m glad there’s a philosopher here to explain the greatest tragedy of my life to me,” Basil said. “It makes everything so much easier.”

“Isn’t it better to know than to not know?” Alexios said. “Acting without understanding means acting like Narses. Our goal is to make the unconscious conscious.”

“I can't talk about this anymore.” Basil wiped a tear from his eye.

Alexios wanted to comfort him somehow, but earlier Basil had ordered Alexios to keep his hands away.

“Just remember you can always talk to me about anything,” Alexios said. “I won't judge. I’m always there for both of you.”

“And when you get attacked by a giant dog,” Kassia said, “we’re there for you.”

—

Day after day they continued south, enduring the barren cold, the silence broken only by the occasional moan of wind or their own footsteps. Conversation grew sparse as their energy dwindled. Basil and Kassia focused on staying in the saddle while Alexios thought of little except putting one foot in front of the other. It was hard to keep their heads and eyes up. Most of the time, they slumped and watched the slow passage of the road beneath them.

At some point the image of Herakleia flashed in Alexios’s mind. This startled him from his torpor. He remembered how much he loved and missed her, how much he wanted her, and how worried he was for her. There was a sense, too, that something was wrong. Someone was doing something terrible to her. She was in the kind of pain that drove people to suicide, her spirit screaming across space and time, like a beacon of agony, so loud it deafened him, so bright it blinded him. That was the reason he felt it.

Alexios almost turned Rakhsh around, intent on returning to Trebizond to help her, but he forced himself to continue south. That was what she had asked him to do.

Find allies, she had said. Come back and free us. You have to come back here with armies. I’m ready to do my duty. Are you ready to do yours?

He returned to crossing the wastes, determined only to continue.

Sometimes they passed bleached bones picked clean by carrion feeders—skeletons of men and horses near rusted shields and helmets. Arrows with their fletches intact still pierced the eye sockets of skulls wearing the onion-shaped helmets of the Sarakenoi, or the conical helmets with the tassels on top favored by the Romans.

Forgotten battles, Alexios thought. Battles which were never important enough to be given names in history books.

It was an ocean of brown rock that no longer moved. Such was their loneliness—of a man without his love, of children without their parents, of people with neither land nor country—that Alexios began to wonder if Kassia was right. Maybe they were the last people on Earth.

Not another soul relieved the expanse.

At the instant they forgot how many days had passed since their flight from Trebizond—at the instant they ceased to feel any hope for reaching their destination—they sighted the city on the horizon. A mass of walled domes, towers, tenements, and minarets was surrounded by a wide valley of fallow farmland.

“Is it Melitené?” Kassia said.

Alexios nodded. “I think so.”

“Then we’re finally here!”

Alexios and Kassia whooped and cheered for a moment—even surly Basil smiled, while Rakhsh snorted—but they settled down when they realized that they still had some distance to cover before they reached the city gates. Several hours remained in their journey, as streams and irrigation ditches with little stone bridges and isolated villages lay everywhere. Alexios had likewise never seen so many windmills.

“We’ve crossed into Tourkía,” he said to the children. “The lands of the Sarakenoi. We aren’t in Romanía anymore. We’ve come to Melitené—the city of honey.”