“Getting back to business,” said an Armenian smith named Vahram Darbynyan, turning to Herakleia. “Does this ‘collectivization’ you speak of mean that my firstborn son cannot inherit my land?”

He doesn’t care about that distant future I talked about, Herakleia thought. Peasants are always so practical. They care about the here and now. All they want is to have their own little plot of land they can farm in peace. But if we don’t work together, there will never be peace. You need to keep an eye on the big picture.

Herakleia nodded to the peasant. “It means that the farmland belongs to all of us, that we all work to improve it together, and gain together from that improvement. You’ll have your own land to feed yourself, but all land in the republic ultimately belongs to the people as a whole.”

Large numbers of people in the audience grumbled.

“So we merely exchange the rule of the Seljuks and Romans for the rule of a peasants’ committee,” said a Kurdish shepherd named Hasan Dasni.

“It’s not perfect, it’s just better,” Herakleia said.

“What of idlers?” said an Arab merchant named Omar bin Ahmad. “Those who steal the fruits of our labor? Must we tolerate them, too?”

“To quote the Bible,” Herakleia said, “‘He who does not work shall not eat.’”

Father Arkadios grumbled something about blasphemy. Sarah raised her fist, and the priest shrank away, wincing. Herakleia almost felt bad for him.

“Will you put this priest to work?” Sarah seized Father Arkadios’s wrists and raised them into the air. “Look at how soft his hands are! He’s never held anything except his own cock in his life!”

The crowd laughed. Arkadios pulled his hands away, muttering about the inappropriateness of her coarse japing.

“And yet,” Herakleia continued, biting back a smile, “not everyone can be working all the time. Differences in intensity of labor are both inevitable and sometimes difficult to measure. Trebizond’s council, to which Paiperte will send its own delegate, sets the quotas, which the people fulfill. We will work hard, but we will not work ourselves to death. Sometimes people will rest. Sometimes they will look like idlers. We cannot make society instantly perfect everywhere. Just don’t forget that until we came along, you already had plenty of idlers—and they were the ones living in palaces, living off the fat of the land, running the show while you worked for them. Under the republic’s laws, idlers will exist, but the difference is that they will no longer be in charge. Do I look like an idler to you?”

For a moment, no comments or questions came from the audience. Herakleia became cognizant of how she had neither bathed nor changed her clothes in at least two days, despite spending most of that time either hiking, riding a horse, or fighting for her life.

“You look like the very devil himself!” Father Arkadios exclaimed. “Come to befog the masses, to trick these helpless fools into working against their own interests!”

At this point the peasant women bound Arkadios’s hands behind his back and gagged his mouth. No one spoke in his defense. Some people even clapped and cheered.

“Listen,” Herakleia said. “I could lie and say that your families will own your land forever, that life here will instantly be paradise for everyone. But that’s not how it works. The republic is fighting for its life. Great powers to the east and west want to destroy us. Our only chance is to make more and better things than our rivals. This sometimes means adopting policies which might seem contradictory or even harmful in the short term. To trade with our enemies might sometimes be necessary, for instance, so that we can build up enough resources to destroy them. We cannot simply isolate ourselves and pretend that all of our troubles are over. That will lead to disaster.”

The peasants listened in a silence that felt skeptical to Herakleia.

“You’ve already done things the old way,” she said. “How did that turn out? You lived in a world where everyone was looking out only for himself and his own family. You could never be sure that your firstborn son would survive to adulthood, so you made too many kids—most of whom couldn’t inherit your land, since within a few generations it would be so subdivided that no one would have more than a few feet for himself. The old way of doing things produced too many surplus people. The landlords and monasteries and tax gatherers used these surplus people in their armies to force you to become tenant farmers. This removed any incentive to produce more than the bare minimum—since you were working for parasites, not yourselves—which itself led to supply problems, which then led to the Seljuk conquest. Is that what you want to go back to? How will the result be any different?”

Silence.

“We need to work together,” she said. “We need to sacrifice for the common good. And every person will have a say in what that means. You may not believe this, but you are not the first peasants and workers to seize power. There is a science to this—to understanding and changing society itself—called Mazdakism. There is history. There is theory. So long as we test theories by gathering evidence in the material world, so long as we are mindful of history written by and for workers and peasants like ourselves—so long as our leaders are trained revolutionaries who have learned from our mistakes—we cannot fail. But that doesn’t mean we will instantly succeed, either. There will be setbacks—sometimes severe ones that might last many years. The Latins burned Trebizond to the ground only months ago. Yet we came back stronger than ever. Slave and peasant revolts are the inevitable result of slavery and feudalism because these systems only favor a tiny minority at the expense of a vast majority. Sooner or later, one of those revolts was bound to get organized, to stop with its utopian thinking and focus on what actually works in the material world.”

No one argued or asked questions. Uneducated, illiterate people were often full of questions, and better at asking them than educated people—most of whom were only educated in the art of jumping through hoops placed there by the ruling class, passing ridiculously difficult tests, obeying arbitrary commands, making excuses for disaster, saying or doing whatever their teachers (and then bosses) wanted. But after Herakleia had spent so long fighting in the countryside, she had some experience speaking with peasants, a rare ability among purpleborn. At this point she could sometimes answer their concerns before they even asked.

“What the republic offers is imperfect,” she said. “But it’s an improvement over your current situation. And besides, you’ve already tried everything else. Centuries of rule by Roman, Armenian, and Seljuk dynasties has led to the precipice this city now faces. Going back to the old ways means either death or slavery.”

“You speak harshly,” said Abraham ben Moses, an old Jewish dyer with a long white beard and mane of hair. “But it is the truth. I have survived rule by the Seljuks, Romans, and Armenians. None ever bothered to speak with us as you have, nor to listen to our complaints—aside from the Romans. You were always welcome to challenge their authority, so long as you had the money to hire a lawyer and wait years for the courts to get back to you. Now that’s justice!”

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Laughter from the audience.

Ben Moses continued. “But what you propose here is totally different. That in itself is a sign of change.”

Mamikonian crossed himself and looked to the sky. “May it be a true sign.”

“Yet she is a princess, is she not?” blurted a Turkish woman named Sayyeda. “She is not a peasant, nor a worker. How can she be trusted?”

Some in the audience grumbled for Turks to be silent. “We spent enough time listening to them!” an Armenian man shouted.

“I can’t be trusted,” Herakleia said. “No one can be. In the republic, any government official can be voted out at any time.”

“We shall see,” Sayyeda said.

Despite this skepticism, Herakleia felt that the meeting was going well. The only people who would really oppose these policies were the landlords, the tax gatherers, and the bureaucrats—this last group often consisting of soft city slaves, scribes who lived better than the richest peasants. Like almost anyone who had done well in Paiperte in the last few years, they had all collaborated with the Seljuk rulers, living among them and imitating their ways, which meant that the people’s tribunal here had already deprived them of their right to speak in public assemblies. This meant that when it came to land reform and other changes, few people complained.

“Still, there are contradictions you should be aware of,” Herakleia said. “Men stand to lose power as women gain the right to lead their own lives if they so desire. When all material necessities are guaranteed, women won’t need to marry rich men if they don’t want to. Actually, they don’t need to marry at all.”

“Blasphemy,” said Father Arkadios, having managed to spit out his gag. Sarah replaced it and then tightened it until his eyes bulged.

Yet it was actually convenient for this man to be so oblivious to how much Paipertians of all kinds disliked him. Herakleia might as well have been paying him. People were taking out their frustrations on a foolish priest rather than on her.

“Men will have to work harder to be nicer and more attractive to women,” Herakleia said. “They won’t be able to rely on arranged marriages to grant them their own personal body servant and sex slave.”

“Merciful God!” shouted Benjamin the Tanner from the crowd’s edge. “How can she be permitted to speak in this way? Does she have no respect for wives, mothers, daughters?”

“Maybe she knows what it really means to be a wife and a mother,” said Anna, the Armenian matron from the banquet back in the castle. “She doesn’t idealize it the way you do.”

“Women are full citizens in the republic and equals to men,” Herakleia continued, “not merely baby-making machines, in law and in fact, as proved by my existence here, talking to you. Any job men can do, women can also do, and vice-versa. Women will be leaders with power to enforce our liberation. We will not hobble ourselves by restricting the activities of half our society in order to protect the fragile egos of a few insecure men. Divorce, birth control, and sex education will be commonplace. Abortion will be performed on demand at no cost and with no questions asked. Women will no longer need to fear dying in childbirth.”

A few men grumbled about this. Some women contained their excitement, others were skeptical, while some even cheered. This in itself intimidated into silence the less-excited men nearby.

“Parents also need to respect children as equals, love them, and refrain from abuse,” Herakleia said. “Children will also be free to live their own lives, even if that means contradicting their parents’ wishes. They will be raised collectively. Child marriage will also be over. The age of consent shall be raised to eighteen.”

“This is absurd!” Benjamin shouted. “You mean to destroy the very family itself!”

“Family, as you know, it is a product of society,” Herakleia said. “As societies change, so do their ideas about family. In the future, all of us will consider one another family members—because that’s what we actually are. Isn’t it true that we’re all cousins, all descended from Adam and Eve? Is Jesus’s family itself not an example of a nontraditional relationship?”

“Blasphemy,” said Arkadios.

“How does he keep getting free?” Sarah gagged him a third time. “Aside from annoying everyone, it’s the only talent he has!”

“I should be allowed to speak.” Arkadios escaped his gag once more. “Everyone should be free to voice their opinion.”

“Not if that opinion means making me a slave!”

“But don’t you see?” Arkadios said. “You are making me your slave because you won’t let me speak!”

“Ah, yes.” Sarah slapped his face and gagged him again. “Slavery is when you stop people from enslaving other people.”

Herakleia turned to the burned-out ruins of the Seljuk mosque. “This may be the hardest contradiction to overcome. The republic is also based on mutual respect for everyone, regardless of background. Islam came here with a sword, but so did the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and even the Hittites.”

“Who are the Hittites?” Sarah said.

“Exactly,” Herakleia said. “If anyone is indigenous to these lands, it is the Kurds, Armenians, and Laz people—though these people taken together are also a minority now in their own country. There are also Jews, Turks, Persians, Afrikans, and Assyrians. Romans themselves have lived here for a thousand years. In such a diverse place, it is essential that we all work together and respect anyone who follows the rules, regardless of background, though this does not mean allowing exploiters to go back to living on stolen land or wealth. The Roman and Seljuk empires will make alliances with anyone—even each other—so long as they have a common goal. The republic is no different. If we’re working toward the same goal, we’re comrades, that’s all that matters.”

She had wanted to say something about sexual minorities also, but she had found that people here were unfamiliar with this concept. Ancient Greeks, Romans, and even medieval Turks had no concept of homosexuality—though this didn’t mean that it didn’t exist. Far from it, homosexuality was actually commonplace! Slave and feudal societies expected people to have monogamous relationships that produced children, but what did it matter if they slept sometimes with members of their own gender? Aggressive homophobia and transphobia and the nuclear family were all bizarre products of the old world.

These kinds of meetings could go on for hours, but things moved more quickly since there was nowhere to sit, and the situation was more desperate than it looked. At any moment, a dust cloud could be spotted rising above the Tabriz Road, and ten thousand Turkmen raiders would be upon them. According to Hummay, Sultan Malik-Shah himself had trouble controlling these Turkmen. They were a wild double-edged sword, roaming the steppe from the lands of the Rus to the borders of Sera, with just the thinnest veneer of Islam coating their pagan ways. Their salary consisted only of what they could steal, and they sometimes even attacked the Turks who wished to live in peace in the cities. These raiders were so good at conquering that they even conquered the conquerors. Hummay added that Paiperte might even be a convenient distraction for Malik-Shah. Rather than harrying his possessions, the raiders would gather from across his lands, burn the city to ash, and so fatten themselves on plunder that an entire season would pass before they could climb back onto their horses.

When Herakleia and Hummay finished speaking, and when the Paipertians stopped asking questions, she announced that a vote would be taken by hand, as to whether the city should join the republic. If the result was overwhelmingly clear, the hands would not be counted. If the results were close, they would have to line up and drop pebbles in jars, one person at a time.

“Oh my, that will take all day at least,” Hummay whispered.

“This is a democracy of fools!” Benjamin the Tanner shouted.

“God will judge!” cried Arkadios.

Herakleia asked Mamikonian to do the honors.

“Whoever desires that the city of Paiperte join the Republic of Trebizond, raise your hand!” he shouted.

Almost every hand went up—except, of course, for the hands of Arkadios and Benjamin.

Herakleia, Mamikonian, and Hummay looked at each other.

“Motion carries,” Herakleia announced to the crowd. “Welcome to the Republic of Trebizond!”