“You can’t tell your husband!” Herakleia shouted, following Ayşe Khatun as she walked quickly back down into the city along the road, which was crowded with carts and workers. “Please wait. Stop!”
Ayşe Khatun kept going as though no one had spoken, though everyone was turning to stare at her.
“All of these people depend on us!” Herakleia shouted. “Children in the city could die if you go through with this!”
Ayşe Khatun stopped and turned.
“You want to join the uprising,” Herakleia said. “Fine. You’re welcome to. Anyone is. We’re happy to have you. But not everyone is meant to be a soldier or a worker. You could help us so much just by continuing to be who you are!”
“The old way of doing things has become quite impossible.” Ayşe Khatun looked at her. “‘Normal’ has become impossible.”
Herakleia watched her, unsure of what to do. Drawing a sword and threatening the princess would only lead to trouble—as would letting her tell Chaka Bey that she was finished with him. The bey would blame the uprisers for twisting Ayşe Khatun’s mind, as though they had consciously desired this, even as it went against all they stood for.
One princess is not worth the entire uprising.
But Chaka Bey could never conceive of the possibility that Ayşe Khatun was a human being with thoughts, feelings, dreams. She was a person impacted by the world, but one who could also impact it.
Although Chaka Bey was unpleasant and frightening, and would—without hesitation—slaughter innocents to preserve his exploitative power, Herakleia also felt sorry for him. He had been impolite, but he had harmed no one, and was obviously infatuated with his wife—even more in love with her after years of marriage. Who could blame him? What was lacking in Ayşe Khatun? Herakleia herself had never felt physically attracted to women—not since arriving in the game, anyway—but the sight of Ayşe Khatun—particularly when she was dressed like a miner—quickened her pulse. Clearly Chaka Bey could not get enough of her. She was his treasure. Losing her to the uprising would devastate him. No army could hope to inflict such a crushing defeat in battle.
But of course, if Ayşe Khatun truly went through with joining the uprising, it would lead to war. Within months, Trebizond would be facing yet another siege—its third in a year. Thousands of soldiers would surround the walls, burn the suburbs, and kill or enslave or wound her comrades—again.
One way or another, Herakleia could not let this happen.
She raced after Ayşe Khatun, even using a little farr to leap over the grass, leaving her with 99/100. Ayşe Khatun had neither changed her clothes nor washed since exiting the mine; her silk dress was still hanging in the changing room, suspended on a gust of coal-laced air. She too was covered in coal, but so was Herakleia.
Herakleia grabbed Ayşe Khatun by the wrist and threw her down into the grass beside the road. Everyone had stopped to stare.
“Get away from me!” Ayşe Khatun gasped as Herakleia pinned her to the grass. “What do you think you are doing?”
“I can’t let you go through with this,” Herakleia said. “I can’t let this happen. You don’t know what’s at stake.”
“I do what I want!”
“Listen to me. You want to join a workers’ uprising, but you’re still acting like a princess. Joining us means that you have to let go—sometimes—of your individual desires in the name of the common good.”
Ayşe Khatun laughed. “Who decides what the common good is? You?”
Herakleia nodded. “They chose me to be their leader! The moment I fuck up, I’m out!”
“Strategos,” a worker said from the road. It was one of the Domari acrobats. What was his name—Jafer El-Hadi, one of Alexios’s friends he had brought here from the Arabian deserts. He had been a dekarch in the Fifth Century, but he had resigned his commission to raise his family. Now he was holding his fat toddler. “Are you in need of—”
“Please leave us alone,” Herakleia said, growling more than she would have liked—taking out her frustration on this random man. “If you want to help, please keep people from bothering us.”
“Daddy, why are the ladies hitting each other?” the toddler said.
“As you wish, strategos,” El-Hadi said, ignoring his toddler, and still speaking more formally than most Trapezuntines. He stepped closer to Herakleia and Ayşe Khatun, turned his back, and then gestured for everyone on the road to continue along their way.
Nothing to see here, Herakleia thought. Just a catfight between two princesses in the grass.
Ayşe Khatun struggled against her, but it was useless. A soft princess could never defeat a battle-hardened warrior. Herakleia’s mêlée combat skills were actually low (Beginner, 2/10), since she had killed only a few people in her time in Byzantium. Nonetheless, she was still much stronger than Ayşe Khatun. Exasperated, Ayşe Khatun spat in Herakleia’s face, but Herakleia deflected the spit with the farr back onto Ayşe Khatun’s forehead.
Ayşe Khatun gasped with shock. “How dare you? My husband will hear about this!”
“Will that be before or after you tell him you want a divorce?”
“Let me go!”
“Only when you swear allegiance to the uprising—which means swearing allegiance to the decisions the uprising makes, even if you disagree, even if these make your life uncomfortable. It’s not all about you. You must look beyond yourself.”
“I can’t go back.” Ayşe Khatun was crying, now. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Tears might work on men, but they won’t work on me. One way or the other, you’re going to do your duty. You’re going back to your husband. You’re going to keep him on our side.”
“You want me to whore myself out to him. You’re no different from my father.”
Herakleia paused. These words stung.
“We all need to make sacrifices,” she said. “We’ve all left things behind.”
“Did you whore yourself out, too? Or is this just a duty you force on others?”
Herakleia saw Duke Robert’s flushed face as his neck cracked in her grip.
“I can’t even talk about it,” she said. “It’s too hard to think about. But if you think you’re the only one around here who’s suffered from sexual violence, you’ve got another thing coming. Building a new world costs blood. It costs pain. Look past yourself and see what you’re going to do. Think about the consequences of your actions.”
“It’s all I’ve been allowed to think about my entire life. All I’ve ever been told is to think about others, never about myself.”
It felt, in some ways, like Herakleia was talking with a younger version of herself—the girl trapped in the Imperial Palace who had yet to discover the forbidden Mazdakist texts.
“You can have your midlife crisis later when all of this is over,” she said.
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“When all of what is over? When will it ever be over? Even if you and my husband conquer Rome, who will the next enemy be? You will still need Great Seljuk as an ally—and still need me in my husband’s bed, with my legs spread wide!”
“If that’s what it takes to free humanity.”
“Would you put yourself in my place?”
“I already have. More times than you could imagine.”
“Shall I bear my husband’s children, too? Shall I raise vipers in my nest?”
“They won’t be vipers. They can join us. In time, maybe even your husband will come around.”
“Never. You know nothing about him. You’ve met him for only a few hours, and now you think you know him as I do? Perhaps this uprising of yours is doomed after all, if its leaders think in such ways.”
“I want to let you go. Will you promise to do as I say? Go back to Chaka Bey as his wife, or go back as a comrade of ours. Either way, you’re going back.”
Tears were spattering the coal on Ayşe Khatun’s face. But she pursed her lips, and nodded.
Herakleia climbed off Ayşe Khatun, helped her up, and even brushed her off. Then Herakleia thanked Jafer El-Hadi, who bowed to her and said it was nothing. His toddler stared at them. Wasn’t the boy named Ibrahim?
Soon enough, the two princesses were back on the road. Workers greeted them. Some asked Herakleia if she had gone back to work in the mines.
“Just for the day!” she told them, eyeing Ayşe Khatun. “I had to work off some stress!”
The workers nodded. Few envied her. She was the one who, together with the council, made the decisions that were too hard for anyone else to figure out—and she was also the one who took the blame when things went wrong. Many times she had volunteered to step down, since her record was far from perfect, but the workers had begged her to stay.
As she returned to the city with Ayşe Khatun and snuck her into the citadel bathhouse to wash up—keeping an eye out for Chaka Bey or any members of his retinue—Herakleia noted that the city seemed to have grown larger even during her time down in the mines. The workers were free to build and direct themselves, which meant that improvement could be seen everywhere.
It was almost dinner time. Chaka Bey would soon be wondering what had happened to his wife. After Ayşe Khatun had scrubbed herself raw in the baths, Selcan and Aykiz brought her inside the palace. Before long, she was covered in silk and makeup, and sitting in the banqueting hall beside Chaka Bey with Herakleia and Samonas and her two ladies-in-waiting (Aykiz had retrieved the silk dress from the mine’s locker room), all while Ibrahim Hummay stood beside his master, translating.
Nothing on the outside had changed; everything on the inside had changed.
Chaka Bey asked about Ayşe Khatun’s day. Herakleia explained everything—except, of course, his wife’s radicalization.
“Actually, I think she enjoyed working in the coal mine a little too much,” Herakleia said, as Ibrahim Hummay murmured her translated words into Chaka Bey’s ear. “Most people don’t enjoy it. We rotate everyone out all the time. You need to be careful, Chaka Bey. Your wife is going to turn into a worker and join us before you know it.”
Chaka Bey laughed deeply and heartily, then said something, watching Ayşe Khatun. He drank deeply from his cup of wine. Ayşe Khatun, however, was silent, and even seemed depressed.
“My master wishes to thank you for being such an excellent host to his wife,” Hummay translated. “Indeed, he says, she is a hard worker, and a wonderful and excellent woman, the most any man could hope for.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Herakleia said.
Samonas was watching Herakleia, his expression saying: what the hell are you doing? But Herakleia ignored him and sipped her wine. Ayşe Khatun forced a politic smile. Few would have suspected that only a couple of hours ago she had been writhing in the grass, covered in coal, dressed like a miner, screaming with tears in her eyes to be allowed to abandon her husband.
It’ll make a good story to tell Samonas later, Herakleia thought. If it doesn’t freak him out too much. She smiled at her old confidant. But he usually freaks out too much.
Dinner ended when Ayşe Khatun excused herself, saying she was tired from a long day’s work. After she and her ladies-in-waiting Selcan and Aykiz left the ducal chamber, Herakleia, Samonas, Chaka Bey, and Ibrahim Hummay hammered out the terms of the alliance. Great Seljuk and Trebizond would gather their forces in the summer, rendezvous at the Satala ruins to the south of the city, then march west, taking any cities that were still holding out for the Romans until the combined army reached Konstantinopolis. All captured territory would go to Great Seljuk; in exchange, those who wished to join the Army of Trebizond would be free to do so. Once Konstantinopolis was in Seljuk hands, Trebizond’s independence would be respected.
“But are we not merely exchanging one great terrifying empire for another?” Samonas whispered. He and Herakleia were discussing the agreement away from Chaka Bey and Ibrahim Hummay.
“The Seljuks have promised to respect our independence,” Herakleia said. “The Romans have never made any such promise.”
“How do you know the Seljuks won’t turn on us once the Romans are out of the way?”
“You’re asking me this now? They almost certainly will. But I have someone working on the inside.”
“Why not simply let the Romans and the Seljuks fight each other?”
“They could ally against us. We have to stop that before it happens. We can’t fight Rome and Great Seljuk at the same time. When one is destroyed, we can worry about the other. For now, we need to play them off each other. Take advantage of contradictions in order to split them.”
“But wouldn’t it be better if we got some territory and cities out of this agreement? Nearby lands and towns, for instance?”
“No point in taking them if we can’t hold them.”
“I don’t like this agreement.”
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Herakleia winced as she said this. People back in the old world had spoken this way to excuse their inaction—which was the most generous word one could use to describe their policies.
“Besides,” Herakleia added. “We put in the clause about people joining the uprising. It could mean that we gain a lot of new followers.”
“We need to add in a clause for towns and cities allowing them to join us if they wish. We need to prepare for what happens after the war against Rome is concluded.”
“I don’t know if Chaka Bey will accept that.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Herakleia asked Chaka Bey and Ibrahim Hummay, and to her surprise, they agreed. She did her best to contain her excitement, then returned to confer with Samonas.
“They scarcely consider us a threat,” Samonas said. “That’s why they grant us so much. They underestimate us. What will they say if all their armies and lands choose to join us?”
“They won’t be able to say anything,” Herakleia said. “Because they’ll be history.”
When the four negotiators returned to the table, Samonas and Ibrahim Hummay wrote their agreement in Roman and Turkish, each checking the other’s text to ensure that everything matched. When the advisors told their superiors that the duplicate documents were ready to sign, Herakleia and Chaka Bey scrawled their signatures and applied their respective seals. Then they shook hands. At this point the evening was late, and everyone was exhausted. After one last toast with wine, they were off to bed, with the two secretaries rolling up their respective documents for storage.
In the morning, at the assembly in one of Trebizond’s Community Halls, Herakleia announced to the Workers’ Council—and to the gathered workers’ themselves—that she had allied the city to Great Seljuk, and that their combined armies would soon march on Konstantinopolis.
“Rome has sent two armies to annihilate us in less than a year!” she shouted to the workers, who were all sitting at the long tables and benches and watching her. “While we may have our differences with Great Seljuk, we have never fought one another. This alliance will keep Trebizond safe!”
She was ready to finish her speech with a rousing reference to victory and glory, but hands began to rise in the Community Hall. People had questions. As it turned out, many had the same concerns as Samonas. But much of this had already been discussed with the Workers’ Council and among the workers themselves. The alliance was imperfect, but it was the best they could do under the circumstances. To follow one’s ideals in this situation would mean antagonizing both powers, rather than just one. And if Rome and Great Seljuk did indeed go to war without Trebizond’s participation, the victor would look poorly on the city when the dust had settled.
People despise their opponents, of course, but nobody is more despised than the one who sits on the fence and refuses to do anything.
Some workers grumbled—it was impossible to please everyone—but the majority ultimately agreed with Herakleia’s actions. They had appointed her to deal with this problem, and she had dealt with it while keeping their interests in mind. Now all that remained to be done was to bid Chaka Bey farewell and prepare the army for war. Trebizond had never gone on the offensive before, and new tactics and strategies would be needed: a scientific approach to conquest. They would relentlessly scout every city before they took it. They would know when the city watches changed, when the city watches took their bathroom breaks, when the city watches picked their noses. The Trapezuntine soldiers would practice taking cities again and again, so that it would become second nature. Those soldiers who did well would be elected officers by their comrades; those officers who did poorly would lose their commissions and return to the ranks.
Herakleia went back to the citadel, expecting only a brief ceremony before the embassy of Great Seljuk departed for home. She felt good; her act of solidarity with the workers at the council had restored her farr to 100/100. But when she walked into the citadel courtyard, she heard a woman shouting in Seljuk from a high-up window, and saw all the guards and workers and even Samonas staring up at Ayşe Khatun, who was standing at her window ledge and crying. Almost before Herakleia could even react, Ayşe Khatun jumped.