Mountains of steaming food rose above gold and silver platters. Wine flowed in rivers, hundreds of guests roared with conversation, torches and candles and chandeliers glowed, the City’s best professional musicians played lutes and sang, and even a masked show—similar to commedia dell’arte—took place. This was the Great Banquet in the Great Hall of the Great Palace. Yet later on, Narses would forget it all. He was so hungry and thirsty that he ate like a starving man, and even drank wine. To him wine still tasted like cough syrup. He had never liked alcohol. But he forced himself to drink for this special occasion. After sucking down what might have been an entire barrel of wine, he slurred some excuse to no one in particular, and got up from the table just as the world was beginning to spin. The roaring conversation died down (as did the music) as he stumbled past all the gathered lords and ladies of Byzantium.
Paul stood to address the staring crowd, and laughed nervously. “His Majesty is tired from a, em, a rather exceedingly long day. He was in prison in the Tower of Galata just this morning, you know.”
“But Fortuna has smiled upon His Majesty!” Goudeles cried. He had supplied the evening’s wine and was happily telling everyone about his tavern.
Goudeles supplied the wine, Narses thought, growing more dizzy by the second. It’s Goudeles’s wine…that’s why…I can’t believe I drank that man’s wine…
It would have taken the rest of the night to bid everyone farewell, so Narses stumbled out of the Great Hall without speaking to anyone—except his guards Sulayman and Axouch.
“You’re the only ones I trust,” Narses said. “I have no one else. I’m all alone. This place is a snake pit…I’m surrounded by snakes…”
Glancing at each other, they held Narses’s arms to keep him from falling, then brought him to his old apartment—the domestikos’s apartment—beneath the gaze of the porphyry tetrarchs. There Axouch and Sulayman promised to sleep outside in the hallway to keep Narses safe. He locked the door behind him, but found the apartment dark and unoccupied. Where were Konstantinos and Oromazdes? His slaves must have moved to the emperor’s quarters.
God knows what they’re doing there.
He was so drunk, he forgot his fear of the dark. Having no desire to waste his time struggling to light a torch or a candle, Narses felt his way to his bedroom. He smelled the bed before falling into it: the linens, mattress, and pillows all seemed fresh and clean. Yet when he lay down, he felt uncomfortable. It was too soft. For the past year, he’d been on campaign, sleeping either on collapsible beds or on his cloak on the ground.
Hard to adjust.
Taking his blankets and pillows, he lay on the floor and fell asleep.
Narses’s first official day as emperor started in midafternoon with a hangover. His mouth tasted disgusting, and he felt like he had been poisoned.
Never again, Narses thought. Not another drop of alcohol. Not another bite of meat.
Paul somehow got inside his apartment, rapped at his bedroom door, and said that it was past the sixth hour. Narses groaned in response.
“There is a great deal of business to attend to, o despota mou,” Paul said. “We have to plan your predecessor’s funeral. Then there is the matter of confirming officials to their various offices. And trouble in Galata, which I repeatedly warned you about. And—”
During this speech, Narses had been searching with his hand (and with his eyes shut to the blazing, head-splitting daylight) for something to throw. He finally found a candelabrum atop a nearby table, and flung it at the door. The loud bang! interrupted Paul.
“Majesty?” Paul said hesitantly. “Are you alright?”
“Go away!” Narses groaned.
“Em, yes, very good, majesty,” Paul said. “But what am I supposed to do about all of this—”
“You’re the vizier, you handle it!” Narses shouted. “Now leave me alone! No more visitors, no more guests!”
“Majesty, I think that would be unwise—”
“Do you want to lose your eyes, Paul? Do you want to get your nose slit?”
“No, majesty—”
“Get out of here! And don’t come back! I’ll find you when I need you!”
After a moment: “Very well, majesty.”
Paul left. Narses turned over and fell asleep. Then he opened his eyes to the dark. His headache was gone, and he felt better. Standing, he stumbled toward his bedroom doors, tripped over the candelabrum he had thrown, swore, and then staggered across his apartment to his bathroom. There he drank some water and washed out his mouth.
He sat on a couch in the triklinion and stared into space, unsure of what to do. His apartment was dark. It was also dark outside. Everything everywhere was dark.
Presumably guards were at his apartment doors, but if he asked them to find Oromazdes and Konstantinos, everyone would know that he was in a bad way. Gossip and scheming was an olympic sport in the Great Palace. Only the greatest practitioners ever made it inside the walls to begin with.
So he sat and stared into space, hoping someone would knock on his doors and do everything for him. But nobody did.
After some time, he made himself stand, unlock the apartment entrance doors, and poke his head outside. The cold marble palace corridor was lit with flickering torches set in regular sconces. Two Varangian guards flanked his doors, staring straight ahead. Narses recognized neither of them. The moment they noticed him, they bowed on their knees.
“Send for my personal slaves,” Narses said.
Both Varangians stood, bowed their heads, and said in unison: “As you command, o autokratōr!” Then the lower-ranked soldier—the one standing on the left—rushed off to do Narses’s bidding.
“Where are Axouch and Sulayman?” Narses said to the remaining guard.
“They needed rest, o despota mou.” The Varangian spoke Roman with a heavy barbarian accent. “Their shifts ended some time ago.”
“Shifts, they have shifts, how convenient.” Narses shook his head and shut the doors. “I’m the only one on duty all day, every day. I never get a break.”
After a long time, Konstantinos and Oromazdes entered Narses’s apartment, bowing hesitantly and stepping forward. Narses made them wash him, change his clothes, and prepare a vegetarian meal. He drank no wine, only water.
After Narses had eaten his fill, he dismissed the two slaves, locked the doors behind them, closed the curtains around his windows, and returned to sleeping on his bedroom floor. He dreamed of Romanos, the youth from Nikomedeia. In the dream, Romanos stole Narses’s Almaqah blade, and shoved him off the Kerasos cliffs. Then Narses plunged past the seagulls and smashed into the icy foaming sea, his bones tearing holes in his flesh, his organs spilling out.
Narses gasped, bolted upright, and drew his rhomphaia, which was still sheathed at his side. The ringing metal mixed with the ringing in his ears.
A cloudy winter morning glowed around the window curtains.
I’m alive, he thought. I’m not dead. Well, not yet.
Romanos was the reason he refused to teach anyone the farr. Narses trusted no one with such power. The youth had used the energy against him. Emperor Nikephoros had also nearly killed Narses with the farr. He himself was the only one who could be trusted to wield it. So many so-called immortals had also used it in the first Trebizond siege, but they had been too weak and incompetent, and had all perished. Reliance on such a crutch spelt doom. He needed to be more realistic.
Narses sheathed his blade. Soon, with his slaves’ help, he dressed in clean clothes. Axouch and Sulayman had returned to their posts outside his door; they showed him along the chilly marble corridors to his offices. These were nearby, and consisted of an entrance with guards and a secretary; an inner waiting room with couches, classical statues, windows overlooking the city, and even some light reading material on a table—a sort of newsletter concerning the goings-on about town. Written by hand several days ago, only a few dozen copies existed, and all were outdated. The newsletter began by mentioning His Majesty the Emperor Nikephoros’s official visit to the best tavern in town—the Swan, in the Fifth Region—owned and operated for generations, thanks be to God, by the talented Goudeles family.
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
Goudeles, Narses thought. I can’t escape Goudeles. No matter where I go, he’s always there. In the mirror. In my cup of water. In this newsletter. In my dreams.
Past another door with another pair of guards was the emperor’s office. Narses had forgotten how shabby and cluttered this place was. Regardless of how often the slaves aired out this place or burned incense, it always reeked of old papyrus, paper, and even vellum. Shelves were packed with important documents, military treatises, and the sixty bound tomes of Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis (as well as a condensed version in just six handy volumes). Narses had once looked at the first page. It said something about how anyone who questioned the Holy Trinity was demented and insane.
There was also a bible, of course, and many dusty volumes of canon law.
These full shelves lined the walls. They were interrupted by a gigantic roaring fireplace and enormous windows with spectacular views of the City, the Golden Horn, the Straits of St. George, the Bosporos, the Marmara, and the forest of sailing ships and rowed galleys flitting over the waters. Surrounded by cold blue sea and the dull green land were the white marble walls and red rooftops of the lesser cities of Chalkēdon, Chryosopolis, and half-burned Galata, with its chain and Great Tower, where Narses had just been imprisoned.
How the tables turn, he thought. I am marked out for destiny…protected by the divine…all those who seek my destruction have been themselves destroyed…
It was easy to get lost in history and memory staring out those windows. Beyond the jumbled cities, suburbs, and farmland was the Turkokratía, what Duke Robert had called Turkdom, in the peculiar Frankish Greek he had picked up in Italía. Narses had gone on so many adventures out there. Something told him he would be back. Vast hordes of dark, satanic monsters lurked in those lands, and lusted feverishly to seize Konstantinopolis, rape its women, throw down its golden crosses.
Always the Turks gather and conspire to destroy us, Narses thought. I must take the fight to them. I must raise my Defense Force. What am I even doing in this place?
At the office’s center were three desks: two for scribes, one for him. No chairs were available for guests, since Nikephoros had liked to keep meetings moving quickly. There was a chalkboard—a recent innovation imported from Serindia—as well as wax tablets for note-taking, in addition to multiple abacuses. Reed pens, inkwells, sealing wax, and loose stacks of blank paper were also included. An enormous map of the world decorated one wall, but Narses could barely read it. The only identifiable geographical feature was the boot of Italía. Everything else was too cramped, jumbled, and misshapen, not that he had been interested in geography to begin with. Cities and regions were also labeled in a minuscule, difficult-to-read cursive scrawl. The map supposedly extended to Muziris in Serindia, and even beyond to Taprobana, the Golden Chersonesos, and the Empire of the Seres, but good luck finding them.
All of these supplies and decorations were interspersed with classical statues of the usual suspects: glorious Octavian beside Old Uncle Cla-Cla-Claudius, clutching one of his precious scrolls and looking as though he was ready to limp behind a curtain to hide from destiny. A face of grinning Dionysos crowned with green leaves and purple grapes leered from a wall. In an interesting visual pun, a statue of the muscular mythological figure of Herakles throwing a discus lay beside a bust of the grim emperor Herakleios, terror of the Persians and Arabs, Savior of Rome. There was, of course, baby Romulus and Remus happily suckling milk from the grinning she-wolf Lupa’s swollen teats. Near the room’s entrance, a young, beardless Christ as the Good Shepherd carried a lamb on his back. The symbolism was unmistakable.
My calling, Narses thought.
He surprised even himself by diving into his work here. It absorbed him for hours. There was so much to do before he could build his Defense Force. No one was standing in his way—finally—and no one was telling him that this or that was impossible, for to deny the emperor meant risking a beating, at the very least. When He told you to do something, to move heaven and earth, you made it happen.
Sitting at his desk, Narses bent down into his papers, and scrawled all day, periodically holding up a document and asking for scribes to copy it, or to pass it to the courier to deliver it to some other office. Paul soon joined him, bringing various government officials, many of whom had been present at his coronation. Some had been unable to attend, however; these brought sacks bulging with golden nomismas as recompense. Paul took these once the officials had departed, however. The second time he did this, Narses demanded to see the government’s accounts, suspecting the parakoimomenos of pilfering Roman taxpayer money.
Paul bowed. “As your majesty commands.”
He left the office, then returned some minutes later hauling a book that was almost too massive for him to carry alone. Yet he refused to trust it to slaves. Paul’s muscles trembled as he gently placed the tome on the emperor’s desk. Gasping with relief, he then licked his fingers and—
“Don’t do that,” Narses said.
Paul bowed. “Apologies, majesty.”
Wiping his hand on his silk tunic, he opened the book to its most recently used page. The text was written, however, in cursive Latin, and used the famed double-entry bookkeeping, a foreign concept Narses had never learned. The numerals were also Sarakenou rather than Greek.
“So this is how the barbarians do their numbers,” Narses said. “This is how the Latins swindle us. It is Jewish nonsense, is it not?”
“Like many things, like even the Three Wise Men, it comes from the east, majesty.”
“You must teach me this, logothete. I will understand the finances of my empire. We will use the barbarians’ own cabalistic mysticism to destroy them.”
Paul bowed. “These are recent innovations from the Venetians, complex and difficult to comprehend. Why not let your faithful ministers perform these burdensome tasks for you, majesty? After all, you have an empire to run—”
“I don’t trust them,” Narses said. “I don’t trust anyone—except myself.”
“A wise choice, Most Christian of Emperors. When shall our lessons begin?” Paul eyed the windows, which were orange with sunset.
“Now.” Narses looked to a slave who was standing by the doors. “Boy. Have our dinners brought here. We’ll be working late.”
The slave bowed and departed.
“Majesty,” Paul said. “It is unheard of to—”
“When the empire is reconquered, from Babylon to Lusitania, we may rest. When the inheritance of my predecessors is reclaimed—”
“You cannot work us to death,” Paul said. “We’re in the Great Palace, not in some iron mine.”
But Narses was thinking of doing things like in the old world, where people did indeed regularly work themselves to death.
“The same will go for everyone,” he said. “Those who do not work shall not eat. And they must work hard, or lose their jobs. A hundred men would jump to take your place if I asked them, Paul.”
“But there are traditions, majesty. Prescribed break times and meal times. Fasting. Festivals. The church insists that everyone—even the lowliest slaves and prisoners—have time for meals and rest—”
Narses waved his hand. “What has the church done for us? Clearly God is against it. Why else would so many lands have fallen to the Sarakenoi? Why else would so many good Roman citizens have bowed before their idols?”
Paul opened his mouth to argue with Narses, but Narses spoke first.
“Do your job,” he said. “Or I will find someone else.”
Paul blinked, then bowed. “Majesty.”
It took hours for Paul to explain double-entry bookkeeping. Torches and tapers were lit as darkness descended outside the windows. Narses also needed to learn cursive Latin and Arabic numerals. His knowledge of basic mathematics was lacking, since even double-digit multiplication was cumbersome and confusing with Greek numerals. Yet Archimedes himself would have had trouble learning the entire science of accounting in one evening, so Narses sent for a pair of collapsible camp beds, telling the weary Paul that it would be just like old times in the Anatolikon theme, on the march to Trebizond.
Paul shuddered. “A period in my life I would like more than anything to forget.”
“What was that?” Narses said.
“Nothing, majesty. I was merely talking to myself.”
“A bad habit.”
“Indeed, majesty.”
They fell asleep in their beds as a slave was throwing more logs onto the fire in the fireplace, the two muscular Varangians flanking the doorway standing rigid, their eyes wide and glinting without any hint of fatigue.
Narses rose at dawn. He was lying on the floor, having gotten out of bed at some point to sleep there instead. Soon he woke Paul, telling him that all work in his office would stop until he himself understood the empire’s finances. Seran cha was brought, as was a light breakfast of bread, olives, and cheese. Paul asked for some ham, and while he was eating Narses told him that his food resembled human flesh.
“An astute observation, majesty.” Paul gulped down his food with difficulty.
They worked all day. Narses, with his Journeyman education level (6/10), only began to understand by evening. At that point, he saw that the Roman Empire owed the Republic of Venetia in excess of four hundred thousand solidi. (The old-fashioned Latin term solidi was used instead of the Greek nomismata when dealing with government finances.) The Serenissima had little confidence in the empire’s ability to pay, and had therefore only extended credit at the usurious rate of twenty-eight percent per annum. They also weighed every coin to check for debasement.
Narses clutched his head. We can never repay this.
Thanks to the Turks, tax revenue from the eastern themes had all but dried up. The western themes were still providing some revenue, but most of this went into maintaining the thematic garrisons there as well as the roads, the post, walls, plumbing, and granaries in major cities like Thessaloniki. Konstantinopolis paid for its own upkeep thanks to excise taxes on the shipping that passed along the Bosporos, but every year the debt to Venetia grew by over a hundred thousand golden pounds.
Narses sat back, unable to believe the pages in front of him. “This book is death.”
Paul—who had been standing beside him for two days—sighed. “I told you it was better not to know. They have been demanding restructuring. They want a Venetian committee in control of the empire’s finances. They want to raise taxes on everyone—including yourself—until the loans are repaid. And they want to demobilize what remains of the army, sell off the fleet, grant further tax-free concessions, develop ports and factories under Venetian auspices—”
“Send for the doge,” Narses said.
“He won’t come here. You don’t even know what happened in Galata during your coronation. There was a battle.”
“And? Did we win?”
“Galata has been lost to us, majesty. The Venetians have sent the Rosa for aid. The other two ships in the Venetian fleet are currently guarding Galata from us. And because we cannot raise the chain across the Golden Horn, the City is now vulnerable to attack.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“Because His Majesty did not ask.”
Narses stood and walked to the doorway, where the two Varangian guards stiffened. “Must I do everything myself?” he asked.
Paul followed him. “Where are you going, majesty?”
“To destroy the Venetians, Paul.”