As Herakleia fell asleep, Gontran Koraki was, at that time, having breakfast—which consisted of a little bread, cheese, and wine—and doing his best to forget last night’s dreams. They were always the same. His mother, father, sisters, and brothers were all pushing ploughs over the muddy fields and through the cold mist that overhung the troughs and the lumps of manure in Metz, in France, Gontran’s homeland. By now his family was so hungry they’d eaten their horse—a spavined nag named Rollo—after the harvest failed. In desperation the women and children hunted for acorns in the forest, and made soup from leaves and grass, if only to fill their bellies with something. In this recurring nightmare Sigibert the Bailiff was laughing behind them and whipping wounds into their flesh, while Lord Chlotar himself held a cup to their bleeding welts, slurping their blood, and wiping the gore from his lips and teeth, as his castle soared up behind them, growing taller and more magnificent with every drop of blood he drank, complete with drawbridges and crenellations and churches, their steeples topped with crosses and scintillating silk pennants blazing like fire in the wind.
Gontran shuddered.
He was still in his guest room in Trebizond’s citadel, where he’d been living since summer. The room was sparsely furnished thanks to the uprising selling or melting down everything of value for merchants of Venetia or Varangian Rus. The Alanian tapestries, Tabriz carpets, bejeweled shrines, gilded codices, chests full of Seran silk, gold and silver plates, and mink cloaks were all gone, leaving each guest room with a bed, a pillow, some blankets, a table, a chair, a washstand, and a single oil lamp. It was like a prison. The stone walls, floor, and ceiling were cold as ice in the winter, but the palace’s basement furnace piped in just enough heat to keep you from freezing to death.
Still, Gontran was free to come and go as he pleased, and the uprising charged no rent. He’d needed to go all the way to the council to ask for a safe to hide the sack of coins he’d earned from rescuing Princess Herakleia, but the council always gave him the same answer. When the city was secure, when every belly was full, then they could focus on building things of secondary importance—like safes. Necessities, however, came first.
“A safe is a necessity to me,” Gontran had said.
“But not to us,” they answered. “Not to society.”
“Bunch of tyrants,” he muttered as he left the council session.
And so he hid his sack of coins under his bed. There was nowhere else to put them, even for a Master Thief (8/10) like Gontran. Using his Journeyman Charisma (6/10) skills and a single precious golden nomisma stamped with the face of Good Emperor Anastasios, Gontran had also bribed one of Trebizond’s apprentice blacksmiths to put a lock on his door. Gontran counted his money every morning when he woke up and whenever he returned to his room. He always had thirty-six nomismas, about enough to buy four decent horses, or maybe one good slave.
The situation in France was different, however. As valuable as Gontran’s coin would be in such a famished place, you couldn’t buy individual serfs or even families of serfs for any amount of money. You needed to buy the land they lived on, and then even when you did, the serfs were bound to the land and would be mutilated if they were caught leaving without permission. He could never use the money to help his family, no matter how much they haunted him in his dreams. Lords rarely sold their ancestral land; you needed to fight them for it.
Gontran himself needed to return to Metz and somehow convince his family to either flee, or to overthrow Lord Chlotar. Both choices had problems. If his family fled, where would they go? How would they get there? What would they do when they arrived? And if they overthrew Lord Chlotar, how would they fight the other knights who would attack them from every direction as threats to the divine order? The knights were powerful, too. They spent their lives either training for wars or fighting them. They were coated in steel, rode magnificent horses, and could fling well-equipped armies at rebellious peasants long before risking their own skins. A few untrained, unarmed, and exhausted farmers could never defeat the knights. They had ruled France for almost a thousand years—so long no one could conceive of doing things any other way. People forgot that the Romans had built the ruined aqueducts of France, and assumed they’d been constructed by giants.
Still, action was better than death. Gontran had seen the world. Maybe he could change his family’s minds if he told them about warm sunny Palermo, or Konstantinopolis’s basilicas, or even Trebizond’s factories, to say nothing of all the other wonders he’d seen.
And yet he’d already tried to convince his family to come with him once, before he left Metz. Some made excuses, others told him to be silent. A few—like his father, Hugh—screamed in Gontran’s face, spitting and swearing, accusing him of secretly working for Lord Chlotar and trying to undermine the family. Hugh had even thrown their one good chair against the wall. Only when Gontran’s mother Agnes separated them and told them both to shut up—explaining that she was afraid that father’s heart would burst—did the fight end. Gontran left soon after. Now he was in Romanía, thinking of returning to free them.
Who am I kidding? he thought. It’s like arguing with a brick wall.
He knew what Hugh would say. “If the rest of the world is so great, why’d you come back?”
Gontran had already left Trebizond once, and had gotten as far as Niksar before circumstances forced him to return. Now he thought constantly of leaving again. From the moment he woke to the same cold dim chamber, the same window view of gray hills and dark sea and dull rooftops, the same standard breakfast of bread and cheese and wine and anchovies which even the leaders were supposedly tiring of, the same conversations about the workers this, the peasants that, women’s health this, children’s education that, the same worries about the next Roman attack—from the moment he woke, he felt the urge to leave.
Yet Herakleia and Alexios kept asking him to stay. They said they needed every good person they could get. Diaresso, on the other hand, was too busy frolicking with Queen Tamar to care about anything else. And so Gontran was left alone. The urge to leave tormented him each day, while the nightmares did the same at night. He grew unpleasant to be around. People tried to cheer him up, remarking that weeks had passed since they’d even seen him smile at anything other than his own misery.
“Every moment I stay here I betray my family,” he told them. “If you were doing the same, how would you feel?”
But his family would never listen. They would go to their graves worshipping the lord who drank their blood. Sometimes Gontran could change their minds, but then the next day when they spoke again it was like the prior conversation had never taken place.
With breakfast finished, Gontran approached his washstand, cracked the thin layer of ice in the basin with his fingers, then splashed his face with water so cold it chilled his eyeballs to their roots. Scrubbing his face with the same towel he’d been using for the last week, he left his room, locked it, checked that the rickety lock had worked, and then dropped the key into his right pants pocket. He wore a mix of French and Roman clothing: pants, tunic, boots, with several cloaks to keep warm, as well as a belt with his Seran pistol-sword tucked in its scabbard.
He strode along dark hallways and down dim stairwells. These had seemed labyrinthine when he’d first arrived in Trebizond, but now they were as familiar as the Metz of his nightmares. All the doors to the various chambers were open; everyone had already left for work. Soon the cleaners would come for the laundry.
Gontran was amazed that anyone worked here at all. He believed what Michele Cassio the Venetian merchant had said at that first dinner in Trebizond months ago: “Every beast is driven to pasture with blows.” But there were no blows here. Everyone in Trebizond worked because they wanted to. Such a utopian vision could never last. Herakleia claimed that it was more efficient and less sexist for teams of workers to do everyone’s housework instead of forcing individual housewives to do it all on their own.
But Gontran trusted none of these workers. They were lazy and incompetent, and he had demanded that they keep out of his room, since everything needed to be, as the French phrase went, comme il faut, just so. He kept it tidy himself. Besides, the housecleaners made no effort to please him, never greeted him or smiled at him unless he did so first, and—because of the uprising’s heavy-handed anti-sexism policies—were often aging men who had an annoying predilection for singing the same few folk songs continuously. One in particular sang an infuriating tune about April days and hope. Sometimes women volunteered for these jobs, but even if any of them were attractive, they seemed like they’d beat him if he even looked at them the wrong way. Plus, they were bound to steal his money at the first opportunity.
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When he came outside the citadel and strode into the courtyard, snow was everywhere. A blizzard must have come the night before. He’d slept through it. Now everyone was shoveling paths in the streets and digging out doorways. Here Gontran realized that he had no idea what to do with himself. Why had he even come outside? At the same time, he didn’t want to spend his day freezing his ass off shoveling snow. And yet he felt guilty for being among all these busy people when he had nothing to do. Even the children and elders were helping, regardless of the fact that none of these gigs paid.
It was just a different kind of slavery in Trebizond. In Konstantinopolis, there was a huge slave market in a place called the Valley of Lamentations where you could buy young women to clean your house, muscular men to work your fields, or educated scribes to handle your account books. Every coin in those sacks back in his room had been produced by prisoners of war, often Slavs who were caught in the Balkans these days. After nobody ransomed them, they were enslaved—en-Slav’d—and then forced to live out their lives hacking gold from the insides of mountains.
Still, slaves of any kind usually did a poor job. They hated work, stole whenever their master’s back was turned, and ran off the instant they got the chance. Their bodies were trapped, but their minds were free.
In France, in contrast, serfs like his family worked just as hard as any slave, but they went to church now and then and believed that everything they did was part of God’s plan. Gontran had told them that this was just a trick to make them work harder, that the lords were living in heaven right this second while the serfs toiled in the real-life Hell of the Damned, and that it was impossible to know what happened after death, though it was probably the same as what happened before life.
Nothing.
His family didn’t care. And so they were enslaved, body and soul.
Here in Trebizond, meanwhile, the people were free to leave whenever they pleased, and few attended services at the city’s remaining churches and mosques, its one synagogue, its one Zoroastrian fire temple. There was even an old ruined mithraeum up on Mount Minthrion, hence the place’s name. But without religion and without whips Herakleia and the uprising’s other leaders had somehow convinced the Trapezuntines to work for no pay. She told them they were working for each other, and they believed her. Thanks to their idealism, stupidity, desperation, and brainwashing, they all worked harder than any slave or peasant, from sunup to sundown every day, and with hardly any complaints. Mind, body, and soul they were enslaved here. It was a cult. They lived and breathed this ideology so thoroughly the different genders could have showered together in the bathhouse without even noticing one another.
Worse than any slave’s fate as far as I’m concerned, Gontran thought. Worse than the fate of any peasant toiling in the cold manure in Metz. A bunch of fools the Trapezuntines are. Herakleia found a way to make slaves love their shackles. She’s going to be rich beyond her wildest dreams.
Although—now that he thought about it—whenever Gontran saw her, she was either working in the mines or training to become a doula or a blacksmith. She was everywhere. Her room was no different from Gontran’s, her clothing was as simple as anyone’s—though more masculine than most women—and she adorned herself with no jewels. Most mornings she was arguing in the community hall with the council members and workers. They had a strange way of fighting each other. For hours, they debated abstruse points based on Mazdakist texts Gontran couldn’t follow, but then when everyone had said their piece, they would vote, and everyone present would respect the majority’s will. If any delegates refused—or if they spoke out against the councils themselves—the workers voted them out. It was strange for Gontran to witness people argue so vehemently, then drop the subject the moment they were told. They were like robots sometimes.
The last item he had seen them arguing over was the city’s decolonization efforts. These were relatively superficial at the moment, taking the form of mandating Turkish, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, and Laz as officially recognized languages—in addition to Greek—to be taught in school and used in government offices and in Trebizond’s growing signage. Some council members stated that this was too burdensome, that the people should be unified by speaking Greek, which had been spoken here since before the days of Xenophon over a thousand years ago, but Herakleia herself had said that embracing different cultures and “intensifying their contradictions”—whatever that meant—was a strength of the uprising, not a weakness. Laz amazons in the army, for instance, would fight harder for Trebizond if they knew their children would grow up speaking their ancestors’ language. The opposing council members had acquiesced.
Gontran had never seen such fanaticism. Romanía’s Christian priests were notorious for arguing about ideas no one understood, and when the more dangerous heretical bishops were captured and burned in the Hippodrome they would still be screaming, as the flames licked at their bare feet, that they were right and everyone else was wrong and one day soon God would repay. And so to see these Trapezuntines argue with the same vehemence, but then drop the matter the instant they were told—it was madness.
Gontran found himself on the section of wall overlooking Hadrian’s Harbor. His body had carried him here without his knowing. He’d been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he’d barely noticed how far he’d walked. What was he doing? His beloved Paralos—the ship that had brought him and his friends to Trebizond from Konstantinopolis—was moored here and used now for training sailors and marines in the Trapezuntine navy. In the summer when the weather was more favorable for sailing, Venetian galleys, Varangian longships, and even Saracen dhows could be found here loading or unloading merchandise, soaring across the dim tide with the wind bellying their sails. When their crews returned to their homelands, they would gossip about Trebizond’s riches, and how the city was populated entirely by wide-eyed fools. One day soon the whole world would swoop in and separate Trebizond’s wealth from its people. This city was doomed. It might have defeated the Romans once—thanks to Gontran’s help—but it couldn’t survive forever. There was no point in doing anything. The feudalism of France was terrible, and so was the slavery of Romanía, but Gontran failed to see how Trebizond was better.
He needed to talk with someone, either Diaresso or Alexios. The former was probably shoveling snow or teaching his students to play music; the latter was obsessed, now, with becoming a better soldier alongside his little army of amazons—yet another group of unattractive women. No one else cared to hear Gontran complain about this place, and even Diaresso and Alexios could barely tolerate him, saying that women were under no compulsion to be sexually attractive. He was jealous, however, of Diaresso’s relationship with Queen Tamar the Beauty, the mother who had abandoned her own son—the former doux Bagrationi, who had fled Trebizond months ago. Now Bagrationi must have been conspiring with the Romans to reclaim his lordship. Alexios, in contrast, was still single after his girlfriend—what was her name, Anna—had died in the siege. He’d had his little fling with Herakleia, but that seemed to be over.
Gontran set out to find Alexios, the game voice announcing that this was a side-quest. He walked back to the citadel and searched the courtyard and stables. Not only was Alexios gone, but no one had seen him. Next, Gontran checked Alexios’s room in the palace: empty. Where was he? Trebizond was a small city, and everyone more or less knew everyone else, so Gontran walked the streets and asked around. No one had seen Alexios. Growing more concerned, Gontran found the city quartermaster, the eunuch Samonas, who said that Alexios had left to patrol the Satala Road the evening before.
“He hasn’t returned?” Gontran said.
“He must have been caught in the storm,” Samonas said. “But not to worry. Kentarch Leandros is a resourceful lad. He doubtless found shelter, and is surely working his way back even as we speak.”
Gontran left Samonas without saying anything else. Returning to the stables, he was in the middle of saddling a horse in its stall when the old stableboy Leon stopped him, saying the snow was too deep for horses.
“But my friend’s out there,” Gontran said. “How’s he supposed to get back to the city? He might freeze to death!”
“Beg pardon,” Leon said, “but it’ll be the same for anyone else. You’ll get yourself killed, not to mention a good horse. We don’t have too many of those.”
“If I die and lose this horse, I can pay for it,” Gontran said. “The money’s in my room. You’ll even make a profit, since that’s all you seem to care about.”
Leon crossed his hairy, brawny arms. “You know I don’t give a damn about that. We’ll never survive the next siege if we don’t have enough horses. You can’t take any. Not unless you get permission from the what do you call ‘em, the higher-ups.”
Your attempt to convince Leon the Stableboy has failed, the game voice said.
Thanks, I know, Gontran thought.
He left Leon in disgust.
Jogging about the freezing city, he tried to find Herakleia. The council had already met in the community hall, but none of the delegates had seen Herakleia, either. Had everyone Gontran known just disappeared?
Back in the citadel, he pounded on her door, then opened it when no one answered. She was sleeping deeply in her bed, looking serene in the snowy light shining through her window.
No guards. No locks. An assassin could come here anytime.
Looking back and forth, then checking the corridor to ensure they were alone, Gontran whispered: “Herakleia.”
She didn’t stir.
He repeated himself more loudly.
“What?” she groaned. She had narrowed her eyebrows, but her eyes remained closed.
“It’s Alexios,” Gontran said. “He must have got caught in the storm last night while he was patrolling the Satala Road. No one’s seen him.”
She sat up and opened her bleary eyes.
“I need a horse,” Gontran said. “I want to go look for him, but Leon the Stableboy won’t—”
“Tell him you can take a horse.” She fell back into her bed. “Bring enough supplies. Diaresso should go with you. Don’t die out there, Gontran.”
“I won’t.”