Since the night attack had begun, there had barely been a moment for Herakleia to think. But now, as she followed Simonis to Paiperte with Euphrosyne and Umm Musharrafa close behind, she realized that it might have been wiser to capture Chaka Bey alive. They had defeated a great foe, but Great Seljuk was greater, a slave empire so vast that only its eunuch administrators knew just how far east it extended—perhaps all the way to the fortresses the Seres built in the yellow deserts to monitor the comings and goings of merchants on the silk routes.
Chaka Bey’s brother Malik-Shah was also the sultan. Honor would compel him to seek vengeance.
We could have ransomed Chaka Bey, Herakleia thought. Could have had a peace deal. But Simonis was so angry she killed him. It’s my fault…we never talked about what to do if we actually beat him. We weren’t even sure he was here. We thought he was in Erzurum! And part of me never thought we would pull it off. Even as we win and make progress, I’m still stuck in the past, still convinced we’ll fail no matter how hard to we try to make it.
Though it was the middle of the night, word had already spread through Paiperte that its Seljuk garrison was no more. The city itself was the usual multicultural mix found in these ancient regions where people had been living in cities for thousands of years—where people had actually started living in cities in the first place—and so there was the Roman quarter, the Armenian quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Turkish quarter, the Kurdish quarter, as well as small numbers of Lazikans and Assyrians and even some Persians and Afrikans. All of these people had more or less lived in peace under the Seljuks (for the last few years) and then the Romans (for centuries). But now that the Seljuks were gone, anomie reigned. Donkeys were braying, fires were rising, and all the different ethnic groups in the city had united to set fire to the Turkish quarter and burn down the mosque, a square brick structure beside a large rectangular minaret, even as the city’s church bells rang for the first time since the Seljuks had taken over. The mob was screaming in at least five different languages as they dragged Turkish families out of their homes before tossing burning torches inside.
Herakleia, once again, was not prepared. They had come here to rescue Ayşe, not to liberate a city or deal with the ethnic tensions of the Seljuk occupation. When she saw the crowd’s size—it was hundreds of people, most of them screaming and pumping their fists—she paused on the dirt street lit by orange flames, as did Umm Musharrafa and Euphrosyne, who had caught up to her. The farr worked when one united with the exploited to defeat their exploiters, but this crowd was almost a lynch mob, wasn’t it? The people of Paiperte had united to attack a culture, not a class—a reactionary action—though the Turks themselves were a class of their own, weren’t they? That was how colonization worked. Class and race blurred together and contradicted. Even the lowliest worker colonizer was still a step above the richest and most successful colonized business owner.
The contradictions of colonialism make its destruction seem complicated, at least to the colonizer, Herakleia thought. But for the colonized, decolonization isn’t complicated at all.
Umm Musharrafa and Euphrosyne had drawn their swords and were shouting in as many languages as they knew for everyone to stop, but either no one heard them or no one cared. Herakleia asked her amazons to be quiet and sheathe their swords. Simonis was among the crowd, but she was lost in the middle, packed in tight with raging Paipertians, ignored and unable to contribute to the carnage, much as she might have liked to. By then the mosque was in flames, as were the Turkish shops, while all the Turks in Paiperte—at least those the crowd could find—men, women, children, eunuchs—were brought to the maidan in the city center. Herakleia, Umm Musharrafa, Euphrosyne, and Simonis—who rejoined her fellow amazons—could only watch. The crowd was too dense to get through.
“They’re going to blame us for all of this.” Herakleia gestured to the burning mosque, which no one was putting out, though the fire could spread across the city. She covered her face with her hand and groaned at the sight of the Turkish families huddled together in terror in the maidan.
“Whom do you mean, strategos?” Umm Musharrafa said.
“Historians in the future,” Herakleia said. “They’ll say we burned this mosque down, or told the people of Paiperte to do it.”
“It doesn’t matter what we do,” Euphrosyne said. “The Seljuks and Romans tell their people that we Trapezuntines murder babies and drink their blood for fun—and the richer Seljuks and Romans believe them. They say that we herd everyone we meet into prison, that we burn every church to the ground, that we make every woman a prostitute. One would think that the Roman Empire, of all nations, would hesitate before criticizing others, but then one would be a fool, for they did not enslave half the world by being kind, honorable, or truthful. There is no lie, no matter how outrageous, that our enemies won’t tell or believe about us.”
“What we do here matters,” Herakleia said. “The truth matters.”
“We are not precisely innocent, here, strategos,” Umm Musharrafa said. “These historians you speak of will not be mistaken to blame us, for the chaos here began with our arrival.”
“But we didn’t intend for any of this to happen!”
“To Shaitan with your Christian obsession with intentions!” Umm Musharrafa said. “Intention does not matter, for who can see inside any man’s soul?”
“There’s a difference between murder and manslaughter,” Herakleia said.
“Perhaps,” Umm Musharrafa said. “But one man is still dead, and another man has still killed him. What does it matter what lay inside the killer’s soul? Souls are mysteries even to their owners! What matters is action—what matters is results! We worked like slaves under whips to rescue poor Ayşe, dedicating everything to her, caring nothing for the consequences, and this is the result! We did not care, we did not know how strong we were, and now the people here are ready to massacre the Turks!”
“What were we supposed to do?” Herakleia said. “Just let Chaka Bey kidnap his wife?”
“One must sometimes sacrifice for the greater good,” Umm Musharrafa said. “Is that not the prime commandment of every faith? Is that not the unofficial motto of the uprising?”
“I don’t see why you’re all so upset,” Simonis said.
“The only reason we’re down here is because of you,” Herakleia snapped at Simonis. “You disobeyed a direct order—”
“You would have had to come down here anyway,” Simonis said. “What’s happening here is justice. We’re avenging the injustice of the invaders. It might be messy, but no one forced them to come to this place.”
“They were driven out of their homelands by even fiercer warriors on the steppe,” Herakleia said. “That’s why they came here. There was nowhere else to go. And what about the women and children?”
Simonis shrugged. “Too bad for them. The Seljuks killed women and children, too. Why do you think the people of Paiperte are so angry? What do you think the Seljuks did when they first took over this city?”
“There’s room for everyone here,” Herakleia said. “Land for everyone. Food for everyone. Prosperity for everyone. We don’t need to kill each other—”
“Someone should have told the Seljuks,” Simonis said. “When they burned Ani to the ground and murdered or enslaved the survivors, someone should have told them.”
“But that’s just the way of the world,” Umm Musharrafa said. “People have been fighting for generations—”
“Did Armenia ever do the same to them?” Simonis said. “What have my people done except seek to live in peace with our neighbors? When did Armenia launch an attack on the Turkish homeland in the steppe?”
“Armenia was too weak to conquer, so it was conquered,” Umm Musharrafa said.
“Really?” Simonis said. “So you believe in nothing except ‘might makes right.’ Does that mean that if I killed you now, you wouldn’t complain?”
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Herakleia stepped between them. “Simonis—”
“I will not defend the actions of the Seljuks,” Umm Musharrafa said. “If I believed in what they have done in these regions, I would not have joined the uprising. I was a harem slave, do you not recall? What investment did I have in their empire? Such is the past for many amazons in the workers’ army. I was but a moving decoration in the sultan’s garden of earthly delights, like an automatōn of flesh and blood, one forced to run naked across his paradise while he chased me, thrashing through pools and fountains, fleeing across cypress avenues and parks full of docile deer and cages where leopards with glowing eyes growled and purred. He was always faster than us. He always caught us, monster that he was, and took us, thrusting into us in the prickly grass, though none of the children we bore him would ever inherit the throne. All were destined instead to inhabit forever the weird netherworld of the harem, walled as it was away from the rest of humanity, its only entrance guarded at every moment by sword-armed eunuchs. For all our long dreary days there what did we do except pass the time by gossiping and plotting against one another in the steaming hamam, avoiding the leers of the eunuch guards, waiting for the sultan to recall our existence so that we would then have the privilege of working at the point of a sword to excite his flaccid member? One day he would perish, doubtless while carousing at one of his banquets or amid the pleasures of his bed. His heart would burst, and then his heir would order his army to invade the harem and slaughter our babies. All our children would be put to the sword. There is no excuse for this. There must be justice if there is to be peace.” She nodded to Simonis. “And what we experienced inside the harem was little compared to the depredations perpetrated by the Seljuks beyond its walls. We might have been bored, we might have been the victims of rape, but least we had food, shelter, and relative comfort. What did the people driven from their homes have? Many lost their lives, many lacked even clothes on their backs, many were reduced to eating dirt, grass, or tree bark to relieve the voids in their stomachs, driven like Adam and Eve from the Garden by the Seljuks’ flaming sword.”
Simonis shoved past Herakleia and hugged and kissed Umm Musharrafa for this speech.
“Not all Turks,” Simonis said.
“What does it even mean to be a Turk?” Umm Musharrafa said. “When one no longer speaks Turkish or practices Islam or wears the turban, can one still be a Turk?”
“What does it mean to be anything?” Simonis said. “Am I an Armenian? Am I a Roman?”
“You’re a worker,” Herakleia said. “A woman. An amazon.”
The crowd, meanwhile, brought Paiperte’s Turks to the wooden stage used for selling slaves in the maidan. (Every city had these save Trebizond, since the workers there had removed theirs.) One by one, Turks stood on the stage before an Armenian Robespierre—bearded, balding, plain-clothed, in his thirties, named Gagik Mamikonian. Said to be descended from a glorious ancient dynasty, he was a textile merchant, his branch of the clan having fallen on hard times, a stolen Seljuk scimitar strapped to his side. He tried the Turkish men, having declared an amnesty for all the women and children, though women with multiple accusers would be tried. Simonis translated the proceedings—undertaken mostly in Armenian—as best she could for the amazons.
The first among the accused was a man named Nasir ibn Mahmud. Dressed in torn clothing, but young, handsome, well-fed, and strong, he fell to his knees and begged for mercy, pleading though his wrists were bound. If not for his turban and language, he would have been indistinguishable from the men in the crowd, many natives of these regions having converted to Islam and learned Turkish to benefit from the Seljuk imperial colonial project, particularly people who came from Rome’s lower orders.
Herakleia felt sorry for Ibn Mahmud as he made his case on his hands and knees with tears in his eyes, apologizing for everything, promising to do better in the future, to abide by Paiperte’s decrees. After he had spoken for a few minutes, growing numbers of people in the crowd yelled for him to be silent. By then, according to Umm Musharrafa, he was repeating himself in Turkish. Yet he refused to stop talking, and so he was gagged.
At this point, Mamikonian called for witnesses. A long line formed. Men, women, and children stepped onto the stage, one by one, and accused Ibn Mahmud. To Herakleia it soon seemed like Ibn Mahmud had somehow found copies of Justinian’s Codices and Digests as well as the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunna—and, hey, why not?—the Torah and the Talmud in order to break each and every law enumerated in these texts. Was there anything this handsome, charming man hadn’t done? Crying and moaning, overcome with rage, older veiled women described how Ibn Mahmud had ruined their families’ reputations, leaving them with bastard children who were social outcasts, unable to start families of their own, destined only for slavery in the mines or in the army among the Turkmen raiders, who continued the cycle of injustice. Even some of these children spoke, with no one forcing them or having had the time to coach them, as they described how Ibn Mahmud had joked about them when he was drunk with his friends. “Just doing my part to help the Sultan fill his recruitment quotas” was his favorite joke, the one he had repeated many times, though even his drinking buddies had stopped laughing at it long ago. Ibn Mahmud did not discriminate, either. Every ethnos was represented among his victims. He loved women of every background, so long as he could get them with child, though he hated all the men who were beneath him, bowing only to Paiperte’s Seljuk rulers, disdaining as fools those who bowed to God. The men who spoke against him talked about how he had seized their businesses, targeting a Jewish tannery, a Jewish dyer, and an Armenian apothecary, among the city’s more profitable establishments. Ruin followed Ibn Mahmud like a shadow. He had embarrassed even his fellow Seljuks. Many times they had prevented him from committing even greater crimes, for these would have incited the whole city to riot against them. “Ah,” he had said. “If you can’t have a little fun, what’s the point? Let them riot—we’ll take care of the wolves, then go back to enjoying the sheep.”
An absolute lunatic, Herakleia thought. Though at the same time she knew, as did any child, that criminals were not solely responsible for their crimes. Sick societies created sick people, and vice-versa. In a better world, Ibn Mahmud would have been as gentle as a lamb.
It took two hours, in the middle of the night, just to hear the witnesses speak against this man. (None spoke in his defense.) Most of the crowd had been awakened from sleep when the ambush on the mountain began, but everyone was rapt, and even the amazons—tired from their long day of hiking and fighting that had begun at sunrise—could hardly blink, so exciting were the proceedings. Herakleia admitted to herself that it was one of the best shows she had ever seen, more interesting than helping women give birth or fighting in multiple desperate battles. Many members of the crowd were crying, wiping their tears with their sleeves, comforting one another, or shaking their heads and muttering curses to an entire pantheon of gods.
Finally, the last witness finished speaking. Mamikonian asked if anyone else wished to speak. No one stepped forward. Next, he asked for the crowd’s verdict. “Guilty!” was the unanimous cry—shouted loud enough to scatter frightened swallows from their nests in the trees just beyond the city outskirts.
“What is to be Ibn Mahmud’s punishment?” Mamikonian said. “Are we to do the Christian thing, and release him with admonishments, for he has asked our forgiveness—”
“No!” the crowd interrupted. “No, no, no!”
“Are we to exile him, so he can continue his cruelties elsewhere, so he can continue wreaking misery upon the innocent, so he can come back with the Seljuk army?”
“Never!”
“Shall we enslave him, and give him an entire lifetime to find an opportunity to escape?”
“No!”
“Shall we send a message to the enemies of the uprising?” Mamikonian gestured to Herakleia and the amazons, standing in their armor at the back of the crowd. “Shall we let the Seljuk invaders know that justice is coming? That the conquerors are soon to be conquered?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Is the verdict death?”
“Death!”
“So be it!” Mamikonian cried.
Herakleia was shouting that they couldn’t do this, that when the Seljuks in other cities heard about this they would execute Christians in retribution, but no one heard her. It was a nightmare. Yet it was hard to believe that Ibn Mahmud deserved anything less. The witnesses had been convincing, one after the other, on and on, a remarkable catalogue of complaints, one to stretch the imagination. No one had spoken in his favor, true, but this might have been due to fear rather than a desire to let the truth be known.
They dragged Ibn Mahmud to a wooden block on the stage and held him down as he screamed for mercy and struggled to escape. Mamikonian himself drew the scimitar from his side and raised it with both hands as high into the air as possible, the sharp blade gleaming in the torchlight. Herakleia knew from experience that beheading a person wasn’t as simple as it looked. It often took multiple blows to sever someone’s head, an unpleasant experience for everyone involved.
Could really use a guillotine right now, she thought. Find myself thinking this same thought at least once a day.
The crowd was screaming for Mamikonian to kill Ibn Mahmud. And Mamikonian swung the blade back into the air so far that its curved tip nearly sliced his own back. Then he swung it down through the swooping air, but stopped just as the metal touched Ibn Mahmud’s neck.
The crowd was silent. Mamikonian’s shoulders slumped, and he sheathed his scimitar. Ibn Mahmud was crying beneath him.
“The cycle of violence must end,” Mamikonian said to the silent crowd.
Oh my god, Herakleia thought. He needs to be careful. The crowd will kill him as a collaborator if he goes too easy on these people. And if Ibn Mahmud ever goes free and gets his hands on Mamikonian, he won’t hesitate. He’ll kill him.
“Let him always be in chains,” Mamikonian continued. “Let him spend the rest of his days working off the debt to his victims. When they are all satisfied that he has done so, and they feel that he is finished harming the world, he will be released.”
Ibn Mahmud was pulled off the stage and replaced with another Seljuk, just as handsome and charming as the last. And so the next trial began. The crowd’s attention did not flag, but the amazons made their way back to the castle so they could rest.
That’s enough for one day, Herakleia thought.