Once the assembly had voted to join Trebizond, further elections immediately took place. Paiperte needed its own council representing the interests of its various groups, as well as administrators to organize supplies and officers to lead a least one century. Mamikonian was almost unanimously chosen as council head. Afterward, things took on a momentum of their own. Herakleia watched the Paipertians vote to store the city’s grain in the castle, as hundreds of other peasants volunteered to join its first century—with the aggressive peasant woman Sarah elected kentarch—while hundreds more said they would work on equipping that century with weapons, armor, food, clothing, shoes, horses. A team likewise left to construct a signal tower on Lightning Mountain that would hopefully put Paiperte in touch with Trebizond.
People like Father Arkadios and Benjamin the Tanner maintained that such things were impossible, that greed and ignorance prevented exploited classes from organizing themselves—that these classes were exploited specifically because of their greed, laziness, ignorance, sinfulness, and divine disapproval, and not because the Romans or Seljuks held swords at their throats. If these wretched slaves, peasants, workers, and women and children had been graced by God, so the thinking went, and if they had just applied themselves, they would have been just as rich and powerful as Caesar! Never mind that the old system made it almost impossible for anyone from the lower orders to climb the social ladder. Most of the time they revolted by working as little as possible, which made them look like lazy fools to their exploiters.
Yet once the exploiters were driven out of power, the exploited proved them wrong. Long ago, the Romans had disdained their barbarian adversaries in the same way. Romans had never thought the barbarians capable of destroying them. But where was Rome now? Nonetheless, most Romans in Konstantinopolis were so wedded to their dying culture that their views on barbarians were still unchanged, even as the empire barely extended beyond the capital’s walls and a few cities on the Aegean coastline. Most Romans were Konstantinopolitans who had nothing but contempt for the outside world.
The Paipertians seized the city’s few taverns and bakeries and consolidated them in order to feed everyone, thereby freeing up the city’s women to work on more vital projects, like ensuring that everyone was armed at least with a sharpened wooden spear. Then the Paipertians ate dinner in the maidan in the evening, sitting on long expensive carpets taken from the castle. In imperial times these would have only been used for weddings connected to the local satrap, but now they would be used for meals for everyone—three times every day. Dinner consisted of pita bread with rice pilaf and yogurt. Everyone eating in the maidan like this reminded Herakleia of those early cozy days in Trebizond when she had been with her friends Alexios, Diaresso, and Gontran after they had smashed General Narses’s immortal century.
“You cannot make anyone do anything without whipping them,” Father Arkadios said to Benjamin the Tanner as they sucked down their dinners in the maidan. No one else would sit with them. “People do not work unless they are forced.”
“Yes, it is true,” Benjamin the Tanner said.
Herakleia finally had a moment to sit with Ayşe and ask if she was comfortable talking about what had happened with Chaka Bey. Ayşe only responded by shaking her head and then hugging Herakleia.
“Thank you for rescuing me,” Ayşe said. “Sister.”
Herakleia hugged her close.
“One day I hope I can repay you,” Ayşe said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Herakleia said.
Dinner eventually ended. Paiperte’s men then did the traditional women’s work—and put away the leftovers, washed the dishes, and rolled up the carpets.
Some resisted. “It is not the way,” Father Arkadios and Benjamin the Tanner said.
For decades, ever since these peasant men had been born, they had been used to being waited upon by their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, wives, daughters. Men would sit and eat while women cooked, brought in food, and then cleaned up, sometimes being forbidden to sit with them—as if they would want to—sometimes being left only to eat the table scraps. Women existed to serve men, cheer them up, and provide sexual pleasure. At times women even lacked individual names. They would be referred to only in relation to the men in their lives. Even in official records, a woman would be Konstantinos’s Eldest Daughter, Konstantinos’s Mother, Konstantinos’s Grandmother. You addressed an older woman by calling her “auntie” or “grannie,” you addressed a younger one by calling her “girl.” She was the girl you had never seen before, unrelated to you, whom you ordered to smile when you spotted her walking veiled on the street, carrying a heavy wooden bucket sloshing with water from the well. It had shocked Herakleia to see how hard these peasant women worked, how dirty and difficult their labor was. Even slave men sometimes had slave wives to command. These slave women had no servants but their own bodies.
But radicalization was sweeping these lands as various age-old empires were destroying each other and collapsing, as famine, disease, war, and uprising wiped out even the ruling class. The women were furious, and they were armed. When a few men like Father Arkadios and Benjamin the Tanner complained about washing the whole city’s dishes, the women reached for the knives tucked in their belts. Kentarch Sarah reached for her sword. They repeated a Trapezuntine catchphrase: “to liberate one we must liberate all.”
The peasant commune and workers’ republic continued to develop. Despite the annoying and nonsensical cynicism of Benjamin the Tanner and Father Arkadios, people volunteered for the watches to keep an eye on the different approaches to Paiperte until sunrise. All the city’s torches and candles were doused. It was a cloudy, starless, moonless night, so the Seljuks would have a hard time mounting a surprise attack.
Just as Herakleia was back on the castle wall lying down by the battlements and wrapping herself in her cloak to sleep, a horse clopped up the path to the gate. Kata Surameli, on watch, challenged the darkness, and the darkness responded: “It’s Nazar al-Sabiyya, walking in this black night like a blind woman!”
Of course it is, Herakleia thought. I’ll never be able to sleep.
She got up and went down into the dark courtyard. By then the amazon women were chattering together, lit only by a single dim oil lamp they huddled around. Someone had already taken Nazar al-Sabiyya’s horse; another had locked the gate behind her.
“I spoke with Trebizond via signal tower,” Nazar al-Sabiyya told Herakleia. “Reinforcements are coming. They have decided to send the entire army.”
“But that would leave Trebizond defenseless,” Herakleia said.
“They feel the danger is here, strategos, not there,” Nazar al-Sabiyya said. “If Paiperte falls, Trebizond is next.”
“Well, alright, good job, welcome back,” Herakleia said, her stinging eyelids fluttering, the game voice warning about her low stamina. She was too tired to argue. “I’ve barely slept in two days. I’m going to bed. I’ll deal with this later.”
She climbed back up the steps to the battlements, lay down on the walkway, and wrapped herself in her cloak once more, hearing and seeing nothing, caring about nothing, as her thoughts faded and flew apart inside her consciousness.
Finally, I can sleep.
But then another horse was clopping up the path to the castle. Herakleia opened her eyes and gritted her teeth.
Will it never end?
Maybe the castle had a crypt or an underground storage vault where she could sleep. She had heard that there was a garden behind the castle, but she had been too busy to look for it.
“Who’s there?” Kata Surameli challenged from above the gate.
“Amat al-Aziz,” said a woman’s voice from the darkness. “Back from Erzurum.”
Herakleia tensed up. She rose once more and joined the other amazons in the courtyard. Amat al-Aziz was grinning in the lamplight.
“If they aren’t going to attack, that’s all I need to know,” Herakleia said, swaying on her feet. “I’m ready to pass out.”
“The Seljuks have fled Erzurum,” said Al-Aziz. “The peasants have taken over and set up People’s Committees, and they want to join the uprising, too.”
Herakleia’s eyes widened. She was awake again. “Are you serious?”
“I am never not serious, strategos.” Al-Aziz shrugged in a charming way. “Just ask anyone.”
“It’s true,” said Al-Sabiyya.
“Maybe the domino effect isn’t nonsense after all. The tide is with us for once.” Herakleia looked to Al-Aziz and Al-Sabiyya. “Good work. Everyone except Kata Surameli—get some rest. We’ll have to set out for Erzurum at dawn.”
Herakleia trudged back up to her spot on the walkway, praying that she would be allowed to sleep. No more visitors. No more interruptions.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
She rolled herself up in her cloak on the hard stone walkway and vanished almost instantly into unconsciousness.
Herakleia woke to the dawn light, and felt tired, but excited and happy. All her life she had been waiting for a chance like this. The stagnation had broken. Things were finally getting better—and she was a part of it. After breakfast she would spend another day riding with her comrades across the rocky Armenian plateau, where the streams and rivers gushing from the ice-capped mountains watered farmland, orchards, gardens, all green with life, all red with swelling fruit, the peasants leading donkeys along the dusty road, laboring in the fields as sparrows chirped in the trees and bushes.
The amazons decided that Al-Aziz and Al-Sabiyya would stay in Paiperte to act as advisors. Everyone else in Herakleia’s squad would help Erzurum—another city with a name that sounded odd to Herakleia’s ears—organize for power. Hummay, Ayşe, Miriai, Za-Ilmaknun, Simonas, Euphrosyne, Umm Musharrafa, Kata Surameli, Jiajak Jaqeli, and Herakleia shook hands with Paiperte’s new leaders, Mamikonian and Sarah, and wished them well. The whole city turned out to see them off, cheering, clapping, thanking them, as the church semantrons rattled. Even Father Arkadios and Benjamin the Tanner were present, still muttering about how this entire project was doomed. Herakleia wondered if they would ever change their minds, or if they would make their peace with the fact that they had been wrong all their lives. Maybe she would return here one day and find them claiming that they had always supported the uprising.
How many more cities lie before us? Herakleia wondered, as she left Paiperte on the sunny Tabriz Road with her friends. How many cities behind?
She lost herself in memory and speculation. A map would have been helpful, but cartography was almost nonexistent in 1082, at least the way old world people knew it. If you were traveling a long distance as a merchant or an army, most of the time it was enough to follow the sun and ask directions. The fact that there were few roads made things simpler.
Stick to the muddy highways where you sink in up to your shoulders, stay away from the forest paths.
She lacked a paper map, but she possessed a mental map of memory and knowledge. There was Erzurum ahead, and Erzincan back the other way, somewhere near the Satala ruins. A lifetime ago she had taken this route east with her bodyguard George Vatatzes, now long gone, shot in the back with an arrow by a Roman horseman in a forest near the fading port city of Abydos. If Homer had written about Vatatzes’s death, he would have said something like: “Vatatzes had trained all his life to shoot and ride, only to be shot and ridden over. All your days, Vatatzes, from the moment your parents conceived you, from the moment your mother brought you into the world, the moment you first spoke, first walked, all of it led to that arrow spinning through the air and into your back.”
Herakleia wiped a tear from her eye. So many good people lost. Honor them by fighting the way they would have if they were still here. They wouldn’t want you to be sad forever.
Abydos. That was where Alexios was from. He had been living in a nearby village. In Troas, where the Iliad had taken place thousands of years ago. One period in Herakleia’s life had ended and another had begun. One friend lost, another gained.
Other cities lay in Anatolia. To the west lay the breakaway Seljuk Sultanate of Rūm in Ikonion, city of painted icons. They were called beyliks, weren’t they, these little breakaway kingdoms where a cousin of the sultan had stopped kicking up his dough to his boss. Near Ikonion, you found the once-great, now-dwindling Roman cities of Nikaia and Nikomedeia, not more than a few days’ journey from Konstantinopolis, sites of important ecumenical councils where hordes of bishops had brawled, punched each other, and screamed about eternal Christological questions.
So much for the west. A week or so south of Paiperte was Melitené, city of honey. Alexios had told her that it was thriving under the Seljuks, who were only really a problem if they decided to destroy you. Otherwise, if they were running your city, you could do worse, especially if there was no uprising.
They’re only a problem if they’re a problem.
What happened if you went farther south? Taking the Aleppo road alongside the Arabian desert, you came to the Promised Land, then Fustat of the pyramids, followed by Nubia of the water wheels and folk songs, Aethiopia of the elephants and subterranean churches, Mogadishu of cinnamon, then the Cape of Soffala, where junks and dhows sailed between the green lands and shadows back and forth to the Islands of Men and Women, the pagan rebellious Zanj, the Black Lords, drinkers of date palm wine, eaters of calves and fish.
That was south. Back in Anatolia, east of Erzurum across cold green snowy steppe, there lay ruined Armenian Ani, whose cathedral was almost as vast as the one in Konstantinopolis. Herakleia had once walked inside and almost fallen onto her back trying to see all the way to the top of its broken conical dome. How its builders expected to defend such a place from horsemen wheeling about these lands escaped her. Konstantinopolis had the sea on three sides and a moat and triple walls facing the land, but what did Ani have? Land on four sides. Easy pickings.
Afterward came Tabriz, the weavers’ bazaar in Media of the warlike Daylamites. Then was Isfahan, city of doctors, philosophers, and scholars, the great luminary Avicenna’s home. North lay the kingdom of Shirvan, the land of fire. Farther east lay a thousand miles of mountains. Most traders in the world only moved a few cities in one direction or the other; the few who traveled longer distances took the sea, riding the monsoon winds across the Arabian Ocean to Muziris in Sindh and Hind, the dhow sails straining against the masts, puffing with fissures of breeze blowing through the gaps torn in the patches, the blue-green bathwater rushing around the prow.
But Herakleia and Vatatzes had a mission. Dionysios had sent them to learn the farr and bring the knowledge back. They had taken the road from Ani’s ruins to Neyshabur, with its bright domes swelling like turquoise sunrises in the darkness. Then they had gone to the libraries and madrasas and the great textile market of Merv, the eastern capital of the Great Seljuk Sultanate, where even beggars dressed in flowing glimmering silk. This was the prime meeting place of eastern and western merchants, lying roughly halfway between Sera and Rome, where Herakleia saw bald monks in thick red cowls bowing inside a temple smoking sweetly with incense to a golden idol so bright she needed to squint. Veiled mobads sang the Avestas to the eternal flame leaping beside the purling fountain in their fire temple, and Nestorians could be found worshipping the divine-inspired (rather than the divine-made) Christ. There were also Manichees, whose vegetarian priests wore tall white hats which reminded Herakleia of French chefs.
For a week, as she and Vatatzes traveled near Samarkand, the green land around the winding river Sogd was covered in gardens and fortresses. This was Transoxiana, north of Baktria, where the people stopped Iskandar Two-Horned from finding the Fountain of Youth, its green valleys well-watered with streams and rivers of melting mountain snow, its sheep-herding nomads dressed in thick felt, living in warm cozy yurts, their masked shamans beating sheepskin drums.
Through the Heavenly Mountain passes of Farghana along the River Jaxartes they went to dry, dusty Kashgar, where green vines crept along walls of mud brick, and jade cupolas rose above the minarets. In the market, unveiled women sitting on carpets strummed lutes with necks longer than they were tall as the muezzin ululated the call to prayer like an opera singer.
Kashgar lay at the entrance to the utterly barren Taklamakan Desert, Gedrosia of Gedrosias, the enemy of water, the great sand sea, the ocean waves of dunes, the place of no return, in which men were executed merely by banishment. Drive them out, and don’t let them come back. There were no animals, not even vultures, not even insects, to devour their desiccated corpses, some of which had been lying in the sand for millennia, and still wearing prehistoric clothes which vexed the local Kashgarese. To climb into a blazing oven after experiencing the heat in this place would feel like a relief.
Herakleia and Vatatzes circled round this wilderness south to the Khotan Kingdom, keeping the Kunlun Mountains on their right, across which lay the land of Bod of the yak herders and the slave-owning priests who drank the blood of serfs and were reborn in endless immortal lives. Then the pair wended through Dunhuang of the singing dunes and thousand Buddha caves to the Empire of Great Song, and finally to orderly Dongjing, capital of the east, most populous city on Earth, where rivers and bridges and artificial lakes abutted the Grand Canal, along whose waters glided merchandise-laden riverboats with sails like segmented fans.
Herakleia and Vatatzes rested there a few days. Then they traveled to nearby Tiger Mountain, where the monks taught them the farr, called in their language the Way. They knew of Mazdak’s ideas concerning the dialectical materialist nature of the universe, which many people around the world had discovered independently due to its incredible obviousness. Even the ancient philosopher Herakleitos had known it, though the Christians suppressed this knowledge, seeking to empower priests and emperors at the people’s expense.
Taking the Zhayedan Fighting Manual, Herakleia and Vatatzes traveled to the coast, and faced the great dark sea, the Mare Oceanis that never ended in the minds of all who then lived in what would later be called Afro-Eurasia. Some hunters perhaps in the northern lands of white bears and the midnight sun and midday night knew that terra incognita lay beyond the moonlit mountainous isles of snow erupting with lava that glowed red on winter eves. Kamchatka. There, sealskin-swathed men oared kayaks to spear whales, but there was no inkling of Atlantis, of great Turtle Island where the pyramid-builders of Tula and Maya dwelled, the eaters of maize and squash and builders of mounds at Cahokia rising alongside the big muddy Mississippi that slithered like a kingsnake into the Caribbean Sea, the mountaineers of the Andes, the runners through endless forests and prairies that went on forever, thundering with bison herds that shook the land from horizon to horizon for weeks, the sun eclipsed for weeks by wheeling hurricanes of migrating passenger pigeons, the ocean swarming with salmon and bubbling with shellfish thanks to a myriad millennia of indigenous husbandry.
Instead, Herakleia and Vatatzes sailed south. This took them away from Gaoli, where the men wore black top hats and white robes and opened their mouths only to eat rice or pickled cabbage or to quote the good Master Kong. The travelers passed the archipelago of Cipangu oppressed by murderous samurai, around the rising temples of Champa and Kambujadesa, between the Golden Chersonesos and the spice isles of Srivijaya, between Hind and Taprobana, and then to Sindh, around Arabia Felix reeking of frankincense and past the pilgrims of the Hajj to pyramidal Fustat once more, and then to Romanía through Abydos. There their journey together ended.
Vatatzes took one journey, Herakleia another. Now she and her new friends, without whom she had trouble imagining herself, were camping halfway to Erzurum, and so high up after climbing the inclining road all day that they had begun to notice cooler temperatures. The last warmth of the Euxine region was departing; the cold of the Armenian plateau was arriving. Winters here were supposedly worse than in Ultima Thoúlē. People said if you boiled a pot of water, and tossed the water into the air, the droplets would freeze into steaming crystals before they struck the ground. Flesh would become frostbitten within minutes of exposure. The cold would feel like burning. Mountains of snow would fall from the sky, so that you needed to dig tunnels in order to get from place to place.
That night, everyone shivered around the fire. Their fuel was animal dung, trees having grown sparse. They talked about Erzurum, which they would reach the next day. This place was called by the Romans Theodosiopolis, by the Armenians and Iberians Karno K’aghak’, by the Arabs Kālīkalā, though its present name probably came from another nearby city named Artze, which the Seljuks had sacked decades ago. The survivors of that sacking had fled here and renamed this city of many names after their old home, Artze, calling this one Artze of Rome. This soon became Erzurum. Which the Seljuks had also sacked, right? Herakleia was unsure.
Seljuks do a lot of sacking! Although Herakleia shuddered as she recalled the mosque that the mob had burned down in Paiperte. We’ll rebuild it.
In the morning, Herakleia and her companions went to Erzurum. There they discovered that the city was besieged by a hundred thousand Turkmen raiders, who had heeded the call of Sultan Malik-Shah the Sublime, and finally arrived to destroy the uprising.