PART 4: HERAKLEIAD

Herakleia felt numb. Lying in her bed in the Trebizond citadel, she was so lost in thought that she failed to notice the sunrise shining through the thick glass window. For minutes or hours she had forgotten where she was, still stunned by the Latin victory over the Workers’ Army two days before, itself the greatest defeat of her life. What made everything harder to deal with was the relative decency of the conquerors, at least so far. This was a stark contrast to the usurper, who had nearly tortured her to death after imprisoning her in the imperial palace the previous summer, and whose legionaries had threatened to impale every last person in Trebizond if they captured it. In comparison, Duke Robert and his fellow mercenaries had adopted a more businesslike attitude toward the city’s destruction.

There’s nothing personal about it, all their actions said. If you accept that you are beneath us, you might survive, after a fashion. But if you resist, we will kill everyone you love in front of you.

They had locked Herakleia in her chamber and kept her from her friends. She was now the responsibility of Lady Sikelgaita of Salerno, who had ordered her into a blue satin dress at axe point before bringing her to that dinner where Herakleia almost killed Narses the Town Destroyer. None of these insults compared to Robert forcing Herakleia to be a puppet of his colonial occupation, however. He claimed he only did this because the Trapezuntines still listened to her.

“The Duchy of Trabzon will run so much more smoothly,” he explained, “if one of the former leaders of the people makes them accept their defeat that they may move on with their lives. To tell you the perfectly honest truth, I desire that your supporters join us in making this place better than ever before. All of us—Norman and Greek, lord and peasant—should join together to bring about prosperity, as God intended. If the nobility succeeds, everyone does.”

Herakleia told herself that she would resist; only on the outside would she seem to accede. Perhaps that was the reason the people had still listened when she walked through the city and asked them to stand down, even as the streets swarmed with barons, marquises, counts, petty knights, and priests—many of whom had brought along their wives, children, servants, and bodyguards. These vultures had come to feed upon the uprising’s corpse, itself already bloated with death fumes. The new arrivals also insisted that all the “Greeks” and other disreputable characters dwell outside Trebizond’s walls. She remembered the crier’s words.

“Henceforth,” he shouted into his speaking trumpet, “only servants will be allowed inside Trabzon during the day, and before entering the city all Greeks, Saracens, Armenians, Jews, etcetera will be searched for weapons at the gates!”

Instantly the Daphnous suburbs became an overcrowded shantytown, one deprived of fuel and food, since most of the city’s resources went to the Latins, whose homes were always warm, and whose bellies were always full of good things. From the cold empty half-finished houses in the outskirts the Trapezuntines watched the city torchlights illuminate the clouds.

The Latin nobles, too, were just as haughty as their titles suggested. Each was the Something of So-And-So, Cousin to His Majesty the Thing, Lord of Some Place You Have Never Heard Of, Defender of Some Virtue Or Other. And when all these Somethings of So-And-So dismounted from their magnificent horses—which were caparisoned in silk that glimmered like lightning—these Somethings pranced about with straight backs, and kept their chins held so high that they couldn’t look at anything without turning their eyes down. They always wrinkled their noses if any Trapezuntines came too close. Their golden spurs clanked against the streets and their swords clanged against their legs.

But Herakleia’s hatred for the Latinokratía—the Roman term for the Latin domination of Trebizond—was based on more than just aesthetics or even the fact that they had defeated her. Nor was it even due to their treatment of her comrades—which could have been worse. After working for so hard and so long in so many different ways—whether as a soldier, an organizer, a miner, a midwife, a blacksmith—she was bothered by how the Latins did as little labor as possible. Indeed, they seemed to think the concept of labor beneath them. Roman aristocrats could behave like this, but Latin landlords took laziness to a whole new level. Herakleia had spotted servants feeding knights—who were grown men—by hand, dressing them, and putting shoes onto their feet. The knights were great fighters, yes, but otherwise their abilities seemed limited to basic bodily functions, and Herakleia wondered if they were even capable of completing these without assistance.

Do their servants wipe their asses for them? she wondered.

And yet even these lowly Latin servants rarely hesitated to snatch bread from Trapezuntine hands and mouths. The invaders barged into Trapezuntine homes and either threw out the residents or forced them to act as hosts. All the Latins were armed, some heavily so, and almost every knight wore the cross over his chainmail and breastplate. This sight was particularly sickening for Herakleia. It conjured some old world memory she had trouble putting her finger on, a historical horror signifying only that the word ‘monster’ mocked the true reality of men who wore such symbols.

How could we let them defeat us?

These knights bristled with razor-sharp points the way porcupines bristled with quills. The Trapezuntines, in contrast, were disarmed and exposed. Every one of their weapons and armor pieces was accounted for and locked in the citadel vaults.

This enabled the Latins to seize anything of value in the city. Many times Herakleia had watched them abuse her comrades. As a woman, you could count yourself lucky if all they did was catcall. She had heard a story about one amazon trainee named Clotilda, a Latin slave from the imperial palace in Konstantinopolis who had escaped Narses’s death march and joined the uprising. A Latin cornered her, shoved her against a wall, and reached under her dress, saying something about how he knew she liked him. She pushed him back with her farr; he called for help. Two of his mates came to his assistance. Together they brought her to the city sawmill. They were going to saw her in half, but by using the last of her farr, she managed to escape and go into hiding. The Latins had ransacked Trebizond, searching for her for days without result.

“Everything is backward with these Trapezuntines!” the Latins said. “The men do the working, and the women do the fighting! A dark mass of Asiatic scum, lazy and effeminate fools. But not to worry, we’ll teach these ogres their proper place.”

This shit cannot stand. Herakleia clutched her fists and gritted her teeth beneath her lips. But what could Trebizond do?

On top of all the Latins’ depredations, they had dissolved the unions, expelled the union leaders, and outlawed labor organizing, throwing the city’s economy into chaos. Such was the new ruling class’s incompetence that just this morning they had already sent a ship back to Konstantinopolis to request supplies. (Normally Romans would use Anatolia's signal tower network to communicate with the capital within hours rather than weeks, but one of the links along the Paphlygonian coast had broken for reasons unexplained, cutting off Trebizond from Konstantinopolis. None of the invaders had thought to bring messenger pigeons, either.)

Chaldía’s alternately hilly or mountainous geography and cloudy, wet weather made it a poor place for agriculture, but the feudal nobility knew of no way to live except by robbing peasants and then sanctifying this robbery with laws and priests. The knights were incapable of creation. They could only steal.

Already the nobles were dividing up the surrounding farmland based on their absurd ranks and genealogies. Herakleia had attended meetings in which these leeches—a term which was an insult to actual leeches, who never drank more blood than they needed—pulled out parchment rolls to show off vast family trees, though these people were so inbred that few were more than two or three cousins from any of the others.

It was a nightmare. The worst people on Earth had defeated her.

All but the poorest of these nobles—the old Don Quixotes with their spavined Rocinantes—had brought bailiffs and overseers across the world from the Latin West to ensure that the occupation’s laws were followed. None spoke Greek, but such people were unafraid to bridge the language gap with whips. Herakleia had already seen them slowly riding horses back and forth across the little farmland Trebizond possessed, their lashes cracking in the air, their eyes fixed on the native Trapezuntines laboring beneath them, ready to carve welts into their flesh.

Make them work so hard they can’t think.

Thus were the workers, miners, engineers, scholars, artists, and warriors of Trebizond driven into the fields. Thus was their culture destroyed; thus were they reduced to a state worse than animals. It was winter, and too early in the season for planting, but they would clear the snow and prepare the frozen soil nonetheless. On the face of it, this made little sense, but the point was to re-acclimate the Trapezuntines to domination. When the lord said “jump,” you jumped, or he whipped you.

In a thousand ways the Latins forced the Trapezuntines to acquiesce. Some surrendered; a few thrived; others fought back. But for now, resistance was hidden and disorganized. It could take the form of refusing to smile and bow when ordered about like a dog, or it could mean “forgetting” to use polite forms of address in the Latins’ language. Monsieur le comte was supposed to be used for counts, madame le comtesse for their wives, for instance, while unmarried women were called mademoiselle. At the moment, forgetting these titles or using the Roman words instead—dominus or domina, kyríos or kyría—was one of the few ways to fight back. One often needed to use methods almost too subtle to notice. Or so Herakleia told herself.

On top of the knights, the Trapezuntines also needed to fear the Latin priests. A man who called himself Bishop Herluin of Bayeux had also come to sanction the crusade, as had monks and clergy beyond counting, all shaved and dressed in white or brown cassocks as opposed to the beards and black robes favored by Romanía’s clergy, some of whom remained in the workers’ city. Bishop Herluin himself had donned weapons and armor to fight in the siege, cutting the throats of prisoners or absolving those Latins who did the same, though at the battle’s conclusion he traded his helmet for a mitre, his hauberk for a chasuble, his sword for a crozier, and his shield for a jeweled Bible. Now, rather than screaming at the sergeants-at-arms to advance—rather than blessing Roman infants before Latin soldiers tossed them to the flames—he was intoning sacred hymns on the subject of driving the serpent of evil from the garden. Herakleia was struck by the man’s handsomeness. Indeed, the Latins tended to look beautiful, clean, young, and strong, while the Trapezuntines were weak, dirty, old, and bent under the shame of defeat.

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The Latin priests’ first priority was seizing the People’s Hospital, dumping the sick and wounded outside the city walls, and reconsecrating the building as Notre-Dame de Trabzon. As soon as they finished throwing out the patients, beds, tables, and medical supplies, they invited the Latin leadership inside, as well as the surviving Trapezuntine notables, including Herakleia. There, using bowls and plates and crosses and even the hand bells they had brought from Gallía, they held mass. Peculiarly, Bishop Herluin’s sermon was so quiet no one could hear it, though this was apparently how things were done in Latin lands. Herakleia somehow came to understand that he was blessing all of the Latin warriors who had died in the siege, ensuring their safe passage to paradise. He said no prayers for the Trapezuntines who had fallen in the same battle.

“To tell you the perfectly honest truth,” Robert whispered, standing beside her in the church as the chorus sang, “I do not really care what it is that you Greeks believe, so long as you continue to labor for us. And yet the priests say that we must convert these troublesome schismatics, whom they claim are worse than Saracens. What can I do? This expedition never would have happened without the support of the priests. And to lose that support, ah, that would be a terrible thing indeed!”

Herakleia kept silent. Bishop Herluin was preaching again, and for a moment she heard him whispering in Latin. She thought it so strange that he used this language. It was incomprehensible to everyone inside the building—perhaps even the priests themselves. Before and even during the uprising, Romanía’s native priests had preached in everyday Roman, the language in which the New Testament itself was written. But for whatever reason, the Latins preferred their religious rites to be undertaken in ancient gobbledygook. Though they were called Latins, they were unable to understand the Latin language, speaking vulgar dialects of Latin instead.

How anyone is supposed to follow this is beyond me, she thought, as Bishop Herluin continued to murmur unintelligibly. It’s almost as if they want to be misunderstood. People can project any meaning on these sounds, while it’s easier for the priests to guard their comfortable status. If anyone questions them, they can just say something like: ‘it’s not nonsense, you just don’t understand because you aren’t educated experts like us.’

As if the Latin nobles and priests and their numerous yes-men and hangers-on were not despicable enough, the last group feasting on Trebizond’s corpse consisted of the Venetian merchants, who had supplied the vessels and sailors necessary for the crusade’s success. They were represented by the leader of their republic, who had joined the crusade in person, a man who called himself a “doge.” Herakleia found this word funny for some reason, though she couldn’t recall why.

Regardless, unlike the nobles or priests, Doge Enrico Ziani and his sailors were fascinated with Trebizond’s industrial methods and pleaded with the Norman nobles to preserve and even expand them—just with the merchants and landlords in charge instead of the workers. Ziani was merely one of four members of the Latinokratia’s ruling council; the other three consisted of Duke Robert, Bishop Herluin, and Paul the Chain, who had departed with General Narses to apprehend some escaped bandits. Herluin predictably defied Ziani’s request, arguing that nothing but devilry could be learned from schismatics and that they belonged in the fields where through hard labor they might atone for their sins. Robert, however, recognized that something fascinating had taken place in Trebizond and agreed to spare the machinery and some workers for study. Now the Venetian merchants were examining Trebizond’s workshops and mines and even interviewing former labor leaders and workers as quickly as possible, clearly with the intention of bringing the city’s techniques (and technology) to the Serenissima.

We can’t let them, Herakleia thought. Whatever the merchants learn they’ll use against workers around the world.

So much to do, so many people to fight. This was why she lay on her bed, paralyzed with indecision in the light of the winter dawn.

We’ve lost the battle, but not the war.

This was her new mantra. Most workers, peasants, and slaves in Trebizond were probably repeating similar phrases to themselves. And yet only two nights before, all Herakleia’s suppressed rage from the defeat had exploded when she had nearly killed General Narses at dinner, an action that surprised everyone in the banqueting hall at the time, including herself. Duke Robert had later warned that he would execute her if she betrayed his hospitality again. He was a man of honor, but he cared nothing for the fact that Narses had admitted to murdering Herakleia’s sister.

Regardless of what Herakleia did, they stopped her. No matter where she turned, they stopped her. Suicide was therefore never distant from her thoughts.

Better to die on your feet, she thought. But I’d make it count. I’d take a few of them with me.

But how could she fight back like this, fearing even to lift a finger, and all alone? Another mistake could lead to how many deaths, how much more misery, hunger, destruction?

Someone else should take charge, she thought. A hero should rise from the masses. I’ve failed them. I don’t deserve them. How could I even begin to aid an insurgency? No one is allowed to speak to me. I’m watched at all times. They took all our weapons.

“Ah, princess, I am very sorry,” Duke Robert said. “If you please, you must explain this subject to me.”

Herakleia started. They were sitting in the banqueting hall. Somehow she had been brought there without even realizing it. She was still wearing the same blue satin dress into which Sikelgaita had forced her—and still feeling uncomfortable in it.

Bread, olives, and cheese had been lain out before her, along with a cup of steaming cha, though there were no knives or cutlery on the table this time. Robert sat at the head of the table; she sat by his side. An armed Latin guard, old and grizzled—his name was Chlotar de Metz, wasn’t it?—stood just behind him, his hand resting on the hilt of his sheathed sword. The Latins were learning how to deal with Zhayedan.

We in turn must learn to fight them, Herakleia thought. Even as they learn to fight us.

A serving girl also stood by the door, her head bowed, her hands clasped. Herakleia noticed that the serving girl’s hands were thick from manual labor, but also tattooed in the Kurdish manner. As Herakleia examined her, she soon realized that the serving girl was none other than Dekarch Ra’isa!

And so yet another great warrior in the workers’ army is now reduced to servitude.

The barbarians had not only forced her to remove her hijab, but had also dressed her in one of their low-cut bodices, exposing her cleavage.

How the wheel of fate turns.

Yet Herakleia knew Ra’isa would never surrender. She must have been working as a serving girl for the invaders in order to bide her time and gather her strength.

But how had Ra’isa gotten inside the citadel to begin with? She knew the farr, and could have dispatched Robert and his guard before they even had a chance to draw their swords. What restrained her?

Herakleia’s own farr had been fading lately. Only 5/100 remained. That was what happened if you failed to help workers—if your actions were indistinguishable from those of parasites. Perhaps it was the same for Ra’isa.

If only I could speak with her in private, Herakleia thought.

Robert tossed a chicken leg at his two enormous mastiffs, Percival and Louis, though Herakleia secretly called them Terrible and Horrible. They snarled, growled, and barked at each other as they fought over the meat just three paces away. Herakleia tensed up.

“It is très amusant,” Robert said, turning toward her from his favorite hunting dogs. “You force me, princess, to remind you once again of my munificence.”

Herakleia looked at him, and took a deep breath to steel herself for the next battle in this conflict: a meal with her captor.

“Sorry,” Herakleia said. “I was thinking of something else. What were you asking me? How does what work?”

“This, your magnificent city. It has the most peculiar type of riches I have ever encountered in all my days upon this Earth. You know, you left us precious little treasure, princess. Looting was oh so difficult when there was nothing to loot in the first place! But the Venetians were very much impressed with the, how do I say in Greek, the quarters of the workers. The poorest types in Trabzon live in a comfort much greater than some of the scions of the nobility I know. I have already sent for many of my cousins to join us and make their fortunes here.”

Herakleia winced at the thought of even one more noble coming to Trebizond.

“The city itself is the treasure,” she managed to say.

Terrible and Horrible, meanwhile, had torn the chicken leg in half and were both chewing their pieces nearby, cracking the bones and licking them. Each mastiff was easily as large as Chlotar of Metz, who was standing nearby with his hand on his sword hilt. He himself was a muscular man, his armored legs like tree trunks. His name seemed somehow familiar, but Herakleia was unable to place it.

“Ah yes, really, that is very true,” Robert said. “But there is something here which is simply extraordinary. I do not even know how to call it; you seem to breathe it in the very air. Most of my fellow knights think ill of such things. For you must understand, we are a very simple sort. We care only to ride our destriers into noble battle, to romance the hearts of ladies who are as fine as silk, to recite the poetry of troubadours at banquets, and to beg forgiveness of the Almighty for our sins.”

I can’t take much more of this.

“You must understand,” Robert continued, “technology, tools, counting money, these are the concerns of the merchants. It is no secret—though circumstance forces us to work side by side—we view them quite contemptuously.”

“The Venetians?”

“Oh yes, the Venetians, but of course, and all merchants. For what do they do with their lives except squeeze coins from the very rocks like wretched little goblins? Yet you have somehow utilized their techniques to make this place richer than all the pearls of Araby.”

“At least we agree that we hate merchants,” Herakleia said.

Robert laughed, and then pointed at her while holding his cup of cha. “I think I have never met a lady quite so amusing as you. I pray you speak more often in the future.”

“If you let us go,” Herakleia said. “If you join us to fight the usurper.”

Now Robert was sipping his cha. He almost spat it out. “More of this witty repartee! Ah, princess, what a fountain of amusement you are. It may be a good thing after all that you seem very ignorant of the most basic modesty and proper deportment. You are so very unladylike!”

“I’m serious, Robert—”

“Remember that you are the only Greek I allow to address me in that ignoble fashion, daughter of an emperor that you are.” His smile had vanished.

“You could have killed the Trapezuntine people or sold us into slavery, but you let us stay together. Why not join us?”

Probably a waste of time, she thought. I’m only an intermediate charismatic. But it’s all I’ve got.

“And yet I do not think you would make the best emissary,” Robert said. “Your generalship skills, too, are very lacking, I am sorry to tell you. What reason have we to change sides when we are triumphant? Why then did my men lay down their lives and die upon the battlefield outside these very walls?”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

Robert laughed and shook his head. “Keep this up, we shall have to make you our court jester. Tell me, princess—draw some watery knowledge up from that profound well of savviness you possess in the depths of your heart—when has any conqueror simply changed his mind when the conquered have politely asked him?”

Herakleia was silent. Terrible had finished his chicken leg, in the mean time, and was now growling as he approached Horrible, clearly intent on stealing whatever remaining meat the latter possessed.