Robert continued. “Ah, but you see, my friend? You think you are the most intelligent person to ever set foot upon the Earth, and yet I can still instruct you in the diplomatic arts. I am not just muscle. I am also mind. We Normans, we are not so barbarous as you wily and perfidious Greeks imagine.”
“Can you sign your own name?” Herakleia blurted.
“What need would I possibly have for something so preposterous? I have monks to handle my documents for me.”
“Everyone needs to know how to read and write in order to enrich a city like this.”
“Ah, but that is dangerous, no? If the rabble learn to read, will they not be confused, and kill you and take your place?”
“Only if we don’t work together to begin with.”
“Then I think we have discovered the explanation for this defeat of yours. It is this chaotic democracy your philosopher Aristotle warned us about, this mob rule you permitted here in defiance of all logic and reason. You should not shake the peasant’s filthy hand—you must whip him into shape! For there is an order to the world, princess, a great chain of being. Nobles rule peasants, men rule women, fathers rule wives and children, humans rule animals, animals rule plants, and plants the inanimate soil. This is a simple, self-evident order—an organization to existence designed by God himself—that you have defied. And look at how it has cost you!”
Herakleia fought hard to keep from rolling her eyes.
“Ah, but it is so very debilitating,” Robert continued, “to seek to regain the lost paradise where all were equal. Holy God expelled our ancestors Adam and Eve from the gates of the Garden, and set an angel with a flaming sword to keep them out. And this, you know, He did for a reason, one not so obscure.”
“Are you saying you are some kind of divine retribution?”
“Why not? In Normandie God saw fit to grant my father but a humble plot of land to cultivate in His name. You yourself have gone against His will by telling peasants that they are actually kings, when we all know full well they are the opposite. They are scum. They are vermin, every last one of them.”
Terrible and Horrible were snarling loudly at each other again. Robert tossed some meat to the other side of the hall in order to distract them.
“You yourself, monsieur le duc, seem not to know much about theology,” Herakleia said. “I have heard that the Latins see things differently, but according to the gospels and the traditions of the church fathers, we Romans believe that humans can become closer to God than Adam and Eve ever were through an unending process of spiritual contemplation called theosis. Heaven and Hell, for us, are merely matters of perspective. The closer to God you are, the greater the joy and love you behold. The farther you are, the greater your misery—”
“Princess, please, this is but a spiritual matter, and I have no need for Greek mysticism. God of course doesn’t have a problem with monks, priests, and the faithful laity worshipping his divine essence. They are His lambs, His children! But you have done something entirely different. Rather than contemplating the glory of God, you have sought to dethrone Him, like Satan himself!”
“If that’s true, why didn’t God just strike me with a lightning bolt?”
Robert stretched his muscular arms wide. “But princess, do you not see this lightning bolt before you now?”
This time Herakleia was unable to keep from rolling her eyes.
Robert bit into a slice of fresh toasted bread that was smeared with strawberry preserves. “Anyway, as I was trying to tell you earlier, how your weapons impressed us. How they vomited fire and thunder like dragons! Many of my men swore that you must have made a deal with the devil himself. This, too, would explain your confusion of the proper order of things.”
“If I’d really sold my soul to the devil, do you think I’d be here right now?”
“Ah, touché, princess, but God is stronger than the devil—and God does not honor the devil’s bargains. We also thought it very extraordinary that you had clothed in armor every last man-at-arms—or should I say woman-at-arms, these femmes fatales of yours. Have you no appetite?” He nodded to her plate of food.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Yes, in other words. But I think I have yet to see you eat so much as a morsel. You are like some of the women I have heard of back in France. They become so obsessed with Jesus and so filled with hatred for the world—and who can even blame them for despising this vale of tears?—that they stop eating entirely, except for the host on Sundays. When they die, their bodies exude a miraculous perfume, and their bones become relics and cure disease and so forth. You do not wish to become these women, do you? It would be a terrible waste.”
Herakleia shook her head. “I’m just not hungry.”
“I should like you to be happy, princess.”
Herakleia was silent.
“Well, suit yourself. I shall have to give your repast to my poor little poochies! After all, they are both very good boys, and they have been very patient!”
Hearing Robert’s tone change, Terrible and Horrible—who had been fighting loudly on the other side of the banqueting hall—approached him, wagging their tails. He pet them both, then hurled yet more meat to the other side of the room. They raced after it and resumed their eternal battle. Herakleia shuddered.
“Now, as I was telling you, about the armor,” Robert said. “In Normandie, you know, the peasants who fight for us are quite responsible for their own armaments. It is cheaper for us that way, you understand. Often they show up for battle with no more than a big stick. Even their clothes are tattered. But bodies are all we really need, and often our foe has nothing better than that which we ourselves possess. Battle is not unlike a game of chess, really. You deploy your peons—your pawns—and fix the enemy in the center. Then you use your knights to swing around and strike him from the sides. Not unlike our conquest of Trabzon, wouldn’t you agree?”
Herakleia said nothing. Alexios and Qutalmish used to talk about chess and shatranj all the time. Great people who were gone.
“But was it not expensive to clad these amazons of yours in armor?” Robert said. “To ensure every knight and horse in your army has armor, it would bankrupt the Emperor of Constantinople himself! I think even Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great never went so far as that.”
“We wanted to protect every soldier.”
“There it is again! I don’t even know what to call it—this universality of yours. That is even unusual for the Greeks, is it not? The warriors of the Empire of the Greeks, rare as they are, they are responsible for their own upkeep, are they not? Does not each knight draw upon the produce levied from a single village? This is how they feed their war horses, pack mules, squires, yes?”
“That’s a new policy of the usurper’s,” Herakleia said. “The politeía can’t afford to field the cavalry we need to fight off the barbarians, so he’s shifting the burden onto the free peasants.”
“Free peasants? Is that not a, how do you call it, a redundancy, or an absurdity, an oxymoron? But peasants are always free—free to work for us!” Robert laughed, and looked to Chlotar de Metz, who laughed with him.
“Long ago, in the days of Julius Caesar, the free peasants’ ancestors were slaves,” Herakleia said. “Back then, Romanía’s economy—”
“I do not know this word you are now using, oikonomia. Oikos I know, that means house. And nemein means to divide. And so you are dividing the house of Rome?”
“Romanía’s society,” Herakleia said. “It was based on slavery. But after a few hundred years, Romanía ran out of places to conquer. There were no slaves left to steal from other lands. Its economy—its society—began to falter. Thus you had the famous Roman decadence, at first created by immense riches. There was nowhere to put them, except in displays of luxury. But because of the economic—the societal—stagnation, decadence eventually became the mysticism of the stoics and the Mithraists, and then turned to Christianity—a supposed systematized indifference to worldly pleasure.”
“The One True Faith is so much more than that, princess. I am afraid I cannot permit you to bring this unholy disbelief to my table, for then God will chastise us both—quite justly.”
Herakleia continued speaking along her previous train of thought as though Robert had said nothing. She was carried away by the possibility of summarizing Roman history in only a few minutes.
“So it became harder for rich Romans to prosper,” she said. “With nothing to inherit and no lands to conquer, their children became monks, nuns, priests, and martyrs. Roman generals turned against each other and plunged the empire into a century of civil war. The barbarians, too, saw that Rome was both weak and rich, and invaded.”
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“Really you cannot blame them for taking that which you neglected. Almost no Greek soldiers were present when my brothers and I first arrived in Italía with little more than the clothes upon our backs. The mercenaries your emperors were hiring turned and ran the moment they saw our battle formations charging down those golden hills of grain like the hand of God Himself.”
“And now the Turks have taken almost all Asia, with their satraps in Ikonion and Erzurum. The state cannot supply rich Romans with more slaves, nor can it afford to lose revenue to landlords. And so the peasants are free to cultivate their own lands; they owe some surplus only to the tax collector. That is why they are free.”
“What savages.” Robert was petting Terrible and Horrible, who had returned to him from their brawl. “Nothing is more unendurable than the tax collector. Were I ever to see such a man, I would slay him on sight. I would sic these two most excellent boys on them!” He kissed his dogs’ mouths.
“The corruption of tax collectors has always been a problem.”
“There is no such thing as a good tax collector, princess.”
“Yes, you’re happy to steal from peasants using your bailiffs, but not so happy when the state steals from you using tax collectors.”
“Nonsense,” Robert said. “And you have men of means in the Empire of the Greeks, do you not? How do they become rich without peasants?”
“The ruling class’s wealth comes from access to state coffers, not directly from peasants, although some rich Romans still have latifundia worked by slaves won in battle—prisoners of war. These days, as I was saying, the usurper has been squeezing the free peasants harder and harder. That’s one of many reasons why everyone’s so angry at him. They’re already squeezed enough as it is.”
“Ah, true, very true, but I do not blame His Majesty. The good man is doing his best. What else can he do?”
“He could make Romanía like Trebizond,” Herakleia said.
“Yes, what a brilliant idea, we see how well that has worked out for you. Your little fanatics lost to us in a matter of hours—I wonder how they would fare against more notorious savages, like the Saracens? I suppose you are better workers than fighters. And that reminds me. You know, it has become very difficult to earn an honest living these days. Part of the reason, even in Normandie, was this very city! You should have seen the chaos you caused with the shipments of your trade goods arriving there. Really, princess, you view us as invaders, but you began this conflict, even if you yourself refuse to admit it. We are only defending our homes.”
“We never meant to destabilize your homeland,” Herakleia said.
At least not yet, she thought.
“Thoughts and words matter little,” Robert said. “Intention matters little. What matters is action. It may have been an accident, this destabilization, as you call it, but you still must face the consequences.”
That’s for sure, she thought. While Robert looked down to munch his toast, Herakleia glanced at Ra’isa.
“And so is it your machinery?” Robert suddenly interjected. “Is that the reason for Trabzon’s grand riches? You have many new mining tools and techniques, I have noticed. Your people even use coal to heat their buildings as well as the bellows of your blacksmiths. A very offensive and infernal odor it makes. Not quite so wholesome as burning firewood.”
“It’s not the technology that made this place rich,” Herakleia said. “That’s a common misunderstanding. We even have a word for what you’re talking about: technology fetishism or technological determinism. Where I come from, some people worship machines like gods.”
“In Constantinople?”
“It’s a long story. I can’t explain now. But I can explain technology fetishism. Machines require people to build, maintain, and work them. This is the case for every machine without exception. Machines cannot build, maintain, or work themselves. Even if you could construct an automatōn who might imitate the existence of a human being, someone, sooner or later, would still have to build that machine in the first place.”
“You discuss so many ideas I have never considered in all my life. I cannot see the point.”
“Technology doesn’t matter if people won’t use it the right way,” Herakleia said.
“We can force them to use it for us.”
“It’s not that simple. What if the people refuse? What if they run away, or unite against you? How can you control them, Robert? Will your soldiers watch every last person at every moment of every day? A few peasants can overpower a knight.”
“We will do what we must. And one knight is worth a hundred peasants.” He turned to his dogs, who were still watching him, and spoke to them as if they were his babies. “We know that’s true, don’t we? Yes we do, yes we do!” He turned back to Herakleia. “They do not yet speak Roman. They only know French. But what difference does it make?”
“It’s so much simpler if we work together,” Herakleia said. “If we use machines to increase the surplus, and then share it among all the people who produced it. Then there’s almost no need to force anyone to do anything.”
“But people are by their very nature lazy.”
“Speak for yourself. Don’t project yourself upon the entire universe and say: this is how it is. I assure you, the universe is more complex than you could ever imagine. Its depths go on forever.”
“Très amusant.” Robert sipped his cha, then looked at it. “We need to bring this beverage back to Normandie, should we ever return with our skins intact. It is so pleasant to drink in the morning with breakfast, particularly in winter, amidst all this cold damp air, so very similar to Cotentin, my place of birth. This cha of yours also has a strange—how to call it—excitement to it, I think. I feel quite excited when I drink it.”
I can’t take much more of this, Herakleia thought.
As Robert droned on about the wonders of cha, and as the two dogs resumed fighting nearby, Herakleia wanted to look again at Ra’isa, but she was afraid to give herself away. Could they even communicate? She had only learned a little about the farr, and was unsure if telepathy counted as one of her abilities. Regardless, Herakleia wanted to try.
For a moment she concentrated as hard as she could, screaming in her thoughts so loudly the sound could have smashed the windows and turned the citadel to rubble if it had escaped her mind. All her mental strength she directed at Ra’isa.
Hey, Dekarch Ra’isa! Can you hear me?
No answer.
Focus on me, Herakleia thought. Scream as loudly as you can in your mind.
Strategos! Ra’isa thought. Do you speak to me?
You have leveled up to Initiate Telepath (1/10), the game voice said, adding that she was burning through the last of her farr (4/100).
Yes! Herakleia thought. Can you hear me?
I can, strategos!
Herakleia almost leapt with joy. This was the first time she had communicated with a comrade in days.
“Delightful,” Robert said. He was still eating, drinking, and petting his dogs. “Nothing tastes better than free food. I never knew how much I appreciated these eastern lands of wealth and luxury and corruption, not until I left my home. To think, I could have stayed back in Normandie all my life without ever knowing anything about this place! And the women of Trabzon, too, they are even more beautiful than the rumor mongers say. Who would have thought that such beauties could have ever walked the Earth? Do you not agree, Lord Chlotar?”
“I do, monsieur le duc,” Chlotar said, eyeing Ra’isa. Evidently he spoke a little Roman.
“Lord Chlotar is a real Frenchman, you know,” Robert said. “Even his distant ancestors were never so barbarous or heathenish as my grandparents.”
Are you in touch with the workers? Herakleia thought.
Yes, strategos, Ra’isa answered. But to do anything is hard. Latins are everywhere. They say they cut off people’s hands, if three or more Trapezuntines meet together, even out on street.
“And here I am, sitting in silence once more,” Robert said. “I speak only with myself, my poor little poochies, and Lord Chlotar of Metz. I thought you were a princess, Herakleia, but you act as uncouth as any common villein.”
Herakleia looked at him. “What?”
“Sometimes you are pleasant, at other times it is very difficult to say why I dine in your company. You are voluble one moment and silent the next. Why should I bother? I think there’s just something about you. In French, we say: je ne sais quoi, princess.” He reached forward and rested his hand on hers. “You know, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in all my days upon this Earth.”
Herakleia resisted the surge to seize Chlotar’s sword and stab Robert’s face.
Help! she thought.
I’m sorry, strategos, Ra’isa answered. I cannot.
“I want to hear you speak French to me someday,” Robert said. “I will have one of Sikelgaita’s ladies-in-waiting teach you. It is the most beautiful language, but it would sound more beautiful, pouring from those ruby red lips of yours. Ah yes, that reminds me. I have contained this secret for much time. His Majesty paid us more than we could have imagined to venture to Trabzon. But even that was not enough to sweeten the arrangement. He also promised his daughter Erythro in matrimony to my son.”
“Your son?” Herakleia said. “You mean Bohemund?”
“Oh yes,” Robert said. By now he had pet Terrible and Horrible so much that he smelled like them. “The House of Hauteville would then become an imperial house—soon united by both marriage and blood to the Emperor of the Greeks! And yet even that was not enough. He also permitted me to—how shall I put it? Take you under my wing. For even as far as Normandie, we have heard of the legendary beauty of the ladies of Trabzon. It is a constant theme of this place, you might say.”
As Robert chuckled at his joke, Herakleia slumped.
Not this again, she thought. I’m so tired of men trying to get under my dress.
We must organize, strategos, Ra’isa thought.
Of course, Herakleia answered. I just don’t know what we can do.
We must wait for the Latin scum to be weak and lazy, Ra’isa thought. Then we drive out the invaders and take back our land. We can begin to organize safe houses, gather weapons—
Robert seized Herakleia’s hand and tried to kiss it, but she jerked it away before he could.
“Very well.” Robert raised his hand and pointed to her with his finger.
Chlotar of Metz stepped forward and clasped Herakleia’s wrists in iron manacles almost before she could react. Then he tried to make her stand, but she rose of her own accord, grateful that breakfast had finally ended
“Tell me when you have changed your mind on this matter,” Robert said. “I will grant you much if you join me—more than mere freedom. Who knows? Perhaps I shall even make you duchess of this place, and leave you to your own devices. You can play your little games in Trabzon, so long as you render tribute to us, and pay your taxes to the emperor. What do you think of this proposal, princess? Is it not generous?”
Herakleia was silent.
“Give it a bit of time,” Robert said. “But until you agree, you will remain in your chamber.”
With the guard following, she walked out of the dining room. In terror of confinement Herakleia looked to Ra’isa as she passed, but the dekarch kept her eyes down.