After dinner, Narses ordered the recruits who had performed poorly that day to keep watch. Everyone else slept in the tent city glowing with torchlight in the Hippodrome’s architectural embrace—the long cement bleachers, the obelisks and statues of the spina, the kathisma’s purple curtains fluttering in the breeze, the starting gates decorated with the four bronze horses, the curved sphendone at the far end.

Narses trusted none of his recruits, however, not even Angelos Makrenos. After locking all the Hippodrome gates, he secretly stayed awake to watch the watchers, burning through farr to prop open his eyelids in the dark. It had been a long day for everyone, the emperor most of all.

The cold night passed. All was silent within and without the Hippodrome save a single hooting owl.

At dawn the next morning, before the cocks were even crowing, Narses woke the recruits with a mercilessly loud trumpet blast. They groaned, swore, and stretched their aching limbs as he screamed at them to get out of bed.

The nightmare isn’t over, Narses felt one man think. I’m still trapped in the nightmare.

Because the recruits were too slow, Narses cracked his whip. This made them leap from bed, rush to their tent entrances, and stand upright with their arms at their sides.

“You have rested enough,” Narses said.

He ordered them to muster beyond the camp for inspection. There he smacked them with his whip whenever he found them standing in a slovenly manner. Soon he was forcing transgressors to do pushups.

Everything needed to be perfect, clean, shiny, in order. Straight. Evenly spaced. Yet the men were filthy.

They will wash today.

The enormous Baths of Zeuxippos adjoined the Hippodrome, but amid all the steam of those vast chambers, the recruits could easily escape and then melt away into the City along a thousand different alleyways. Narses decided to make them wash in the nearby Julian Harbor. It would be much harder to escape that place. He told the Assyrian slave Iwannis to procure soap. The slave—Narses’s chief of slaves—bowed and ran out of the Hippodrome, gesturing for other slaves to follow.

These supply issues were driving Narses insane. In the Iliad, Homeros depicted war as a panoply of battles, duels, and romance, but in reality it mostly consisted of boredom, exhaustion, cowardice, pettiness, incompetent leadership, and supply problems—interspersed with flashes of intense, gruesome violence. Yet people were transfixed by the fighting and the love stories. War was impossible without food, drink, clothing, weapons, armor, soap, and countless other supplies. If men lacked proper latrines, for instance, they would give themselves dysentery and die puking and shitting their brains out. Without guides, they could spend months marching back and forth across terrain none of them knew anything about.

Whichever side could best tolerate these annoyances would triumph. Victory was a question of raw materials, factories, labor, and willpower.

Élan vital, isn’t that what they called it? Narses had heard this term in one of his old world social studies classes which had been taught by his football coach.

Inspection over, Narses announced that the recruits would soon be running ten laps around the Hippodrome. (This was the rough equivalent of ten kilometers.) The first ten recruits to finish would have extra rations of meat, bread, and wine in the evening; the last ten would be on watch duty.

Narses felt how they wanted to groan and complain. Instead, they kept silent and still.

Progress.

The recruits ran. Narses cracked his whip in the stragglers’ ears, ordering them to move. His kentarchs—he now had eighteen, one for each century, each hundred men—helped supervise. Angelos Makrenos did such a good job, Narses thought about giving him a whip of his own.

That one will go far. He is destined to fight by my side.

Yet Narses had been burned before. He remembered Kentarch John. A beautiful man, kind and sharp and true, the traitors had cut his throat outside the walls of Nikomedeia.

That’s what you get when you care for someone. You get burned.

He needed to be cautious—to stop himself from caring for this Angelos Makrenos. Narses would jinx it. Yet Narses’s eyes kept straying to the beautiful youth running and smiling through the winter morning light like one of Phidias’s statues come to life. The boy was an Apollo, a sun who warmed Narses’s heart. Just to be around Makrenos put Narses in a good mood. Sometimes he almost felt himself capable of laughing. What would it have been like to live a normal life with Makrenos? To have a house and a farm together? No more killing or dying, just living with one another in peace for years. To wake up alongside this man every morning. To kiss his full lips.

It’s impossible. No sense thinking about what cannot be.

Narses forced himself to return to the task at hand. Nearly two thousand men charging around the Hippodrome was quite a sight. They ran, stomped, and gasped like a flock of gazelles—a flock of humans. Though the sand was damp and cool thanks to Konstantinopolis’s rainy snowy winters, they still kicked dust clouds into the air. Aside from that snowstorm two months ago that had almost buried Narses alive when he had been carrying Romanos on his back near the Kerasos Signal Tower, it had been an unusually dry winter.

Yet some of these skinny, scrawny city boys—all destined, until yesterday, to become monks, priests, poets, scribes, tutors, bakers, beggars—were so weak they could barely move faster than a brisk walk, much less finish their ten-kilometer race. They fell into the dust, crying and trembling as Narses cracked his whip in the air again and again. Slaves carried the truly exhausted ones to the Hippodrome hospital. Narses heard some recruits thinking that they envied the slaves.

The slaves mostly don’t have to run, thought a recruit named Manuel Sergopoulos. The slaves don’t have to fight. I would give anything to leave. Maybe if I show him that I’m no good for this, he’ll let me go. I can go home, and be with Eirene…

Narses had no idea who this Eirene was, but he sensed the memory of her soft body in her coarse tunic of Aegyptian cotton.

Must be a serving wench at one of the thermopolia, Narses thought. As cheap and easy as the food, and just as dissatisfying. Disgusting. Real men waste no time thinking about whores.

By first hour’s end, the recruits were finished running. Narses congratulated the victors, and a logothete on duty carved their names into a wax tablet. The original four Armenian kentarchs were among the winners, plus Makrenos, of course.

“Have the men take a few minutes to drink water and rest,” he told the kentarchs.

Minutes after saying this, just as he sensed the recruits beginning to relax, he cracked his whip as loud as he could, and shouted: “Attentio!” This was an old Latin term which the Roman military still used.

The men jumped from their benches and held still, staring forward with their arms at their sides. He ordered them to assemble in the mustering ground.

“All of you must know something.” Narses paced before the ranks. “Some of you wish to leave. Some of you think that I will discharge you if you prove that you are too weak for the army—that you can escape through there.” He pointed his whip at the locked sphendone gate. “The truth is that there is only one way out.”

He nodded to a squad of slaves who were waiting by the Hippodrome hospital entrance. These bowed to him, dashed inside the hospital, and returned a moment later carrying a small wooden coffin. At his command, they opened the lid. Inside was Grigorios, looking pale and asleep.

“A waste of life.” Narses looked up at his men. “Death is the only escape.”

At his command, the slaves carried the coffin in front of the recruits, all of whom at least glanced at it. Some stared in horror.

“This is the fate that awaits Rome if we fail.” Narses pointed at the coffin with his whip. “This is what the Sarakenoi will do to all of us. You must fear me more than you fear them.”

Some recruits had fallen to their knees and were dry-heaving.

“All of you are mine forever, now,” Narses said. “You will do your duty. Or you will die.”

He nodded to the slaves. These replaced the lid on the coffin, then returned Grigorios to the Hippodrome hospital. Narses had ordered them to tie heavy stones to the corpse, then to dump it in the Propontis later that night when no one would see. No one would care about the death of a homeless boy.

Next, the recruits began combat training with wooden swords and shields. With these, they only attacked wooden posts at first, being taught to stab rather than slash.

“Stabbing increases the chance of a fatal hit.” Narses was walking among his men, his hands clasped behind his back. “It leaves you less exposed, and reduces the chance of accidentally striking your buddies.”

Recruits lunged forward, stabbed the wooden posts, and then leaped back to cover themselves with their shields, chanting old camp Latin together: “Oppugna! Recedera!”

What’s left of the army usually does its soldiering on horseback these days, Narses thought. Since our opponents do the same. But in all likelihood it will be infantry rather than cavalry assaulting Galata, thanks as always to supply issues. For now, we lack horses, fodder, horseshoes, and trainers, in addition to the special ships required for deploying cavalry in amphibious assaults.

Following lunch, the recruits practiced marching. They synchronized their steps, the kentarchs shouting “sin, dex, sin, dex!”—Latin for left, right, left, right! The kentarchs also ensured that the men were properly spaced, each with three feet free on every side. “Tighten up!” “Loosen out!”

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Then, with the slaves’ help, they learned to dig ditches and construct palisades. At this point the recruits’ tunics smelled disgusting, so they also needed to change into new clothes and then wash and dry the old ones. But it was not yet time. A few grumbled that this was slave’s work, woman’s work.

“You are all my women,” Narses said. “All my slaves.”

No one talked back this time. No one even looked at him. Even their minds were quiet. By now they had learned to stand straight at attention and face forward whenever he spoke.

Easier to accept your fate than to resist, Narses thought. Even in your mind, where no one can hear you but yourself.

That night, Narses allowed himself to sleep. He woke the recruits with the trumpet the next morning. It took them less time to stand at attention outside their tents. Inspection went faster.

They ran around the Hippodrome, did pushups and situps. Then they learned to cook using fires. This would have been easy for country boys, but city boys relied on their mothers or wives or fast food vendors to cook for them.

“One day you will be hundreds, thousands of miles from here,” Narses told them, as they learned to bake bread using the army’s old mobile bakeries, which were mounted on carriages. “You will have no food with you except what you can carry. You will have no one to rely on but yourselves. In the middle of the forest, the desert, the mountains, the steppe, it will be just you and the enemy.”

The recruits ate. Then they did more combat training. Those who did well—lunging forward, stabbing a post with their heavy wooden sword, then lunging back behind their heavy wooden shield—were paired up and told to fight using the same movements. Angelos Makrenos defeated all the other kentarchs, one by one. The men cheered.

Narses watched with approval as Makrenos fought. The emperor considered promoting him from kentarch to the next highest rank: domestikos. This would mean commanding the reconstituted Hikanatoi tagma—“Able Battalion”—Narses’s old job. But such high positions usually only went to older and more experienced officers.

No matter.

Narses stopped the training and announced that he was appointing Makrenos to domestikos of the Hikanatoi tagma. The young man would have command over four centuries, plus their four respective kentarchs.

The men cheered this promotion. Domestikos Makrenos beamed like the angel he was.

Two more domestikoi were needed for the reconstituted Athanatoi and Exkoubitoi tagmata. Narses picked Poghos to lead the Athanatoi, while an able Roman named Euthymios took the Exkoubitoi. Each tagma was supposed to consist of about four hundred men, with four centuries of a hundred men each, but in practice Narses had decided to divide his roughly eighteen hundred men among these three tagmata.

That’s enough organizing for now.

Next, the men played tug-of-war. Narses announced that the winning centuries would bathe first. Since they were still wearing their old disgusting tunics that the slaves had given them days ago, the men pulled hard, groaning, gritting their teeth, shouting encouragement to one another.

When they finished, Narses and his kentarchs marched them to the Julian Harbor. The recruits were disappointed that they needed to wash here like slaves, soaping their nude bodies in sight of the crews of passing ships, since anyone in the City with an obol to his name would spend it on the baths. Narses also brought his Turks and Varangians, placing them at strategic positions around the harbor to stop any men from running away. Morale was already fragile enough, and even one escapee would ruin it.

The recruits washed their clothes in the waters, too. The amount of work that needed to be done to build even a few tagmata was amazing. Yet it was already hardening the men.

I will be the forge that tempers their steel.

Dinner was in the Hippodrome. The food and drink came on time. Narses permitted the men to converse, and he even left them for his own tent. Listening through the canvas, he heard them chatting. Some even cracked jokes and laughed.

Without camaraderie, we are doomed.

Night. Sleep. Morning. The trumpet. Running. Marching. Lunch. Maneuvers.

“You are nothing without discipline!” Narses shouted at the recruits. “You are nothing without commands! You are nothing without each other! Follow your officers, follow your training, and you will come back alive!”

More stabbing posts and each other with wooden swords. More washing in the Julian Harbor under the gaze of Turkish and Varangian guards.

Dinner. Conversation. Sleep.

Repeat. Repeat. Day after day, night after night.

After one week, Narses rarely punished any of the men. There was no need. Often they anticipated his commands, obeying before he even thought of issuing an order. When the time came, when the moment of truth arrived—the moment they saw their chance to stab an enemy soldier in his chest—they would not hesitate. Even an instant of doubt meant death.

Now they could march four hours a day without complaint. Slaves brought them supply chests for their clothes, soap, and other belongings. One day these would follow the men in the baggage trains when they were on campaign. Each squad would have a dekarch, three soldiers, a slave, and a mule.

Narses recalled how he had trained with Nikephoros’s Athanatoi here in the City. It was a year ago, before the march to Trebizond. Afterward, while traveling across Anatolia, he had trained the youths liberated from Nikomedeia and Nikaia. But ultimately that entire army had proven itself unworthy of Narses.

These men will be different.

After two weeks, the best troops were given steel armor and sharpened swords.

“The sword is your woman,” Narses told them, holding his imperial rhomphaia aloft. “She is your only true love, and will keep you safe, so long as you keep her strong and sharp. Sleep with her as you would a woman, caress her, bathe her, never set her aside. Let her stay wedded to you like a woman. Let her be soaked in blood like a woman. Hold her in battle, kill any man who touches her. Show her love, and she will be truer to you than any woman. Like your own mother, she will grant you life.”

All his men were soon clad in many styles of metal. Armor suits captured in wars against Persians, Latins, Turks, Varangians, even the criminals—all was worn here. Some segments were rusted or dented. Iwannis, who had turned out to be a most dependable slave, informed Narses that the City’s armories were now empty.

The time has come.

That morning, when everyone was suited up, he ordered Axouch, Sulayman, Sigurdsson, and Ironside to open the West Gate. Then he marched all eighteen hundred men, century by century, out to the Mese Ordos. Walking behind their kentarchs and standard-bearers, Narses’s recruits sang old Roman marching songs—“Roma, O Roma, legions eternal and victorious!”—in time to their stamping feet, and the two cornu horns Iwannis had dug up in some dusty, cobweb-strewn basement in the Great Palace. These huge, curved horns made primeval sounds which only the player’s lips and throat could modulate; there were no buttons or holes. Nonetheless, Narses had found decent musicians among his men, and these blasted their cornus, now, scattering the doves and magpies from the cypresses as eighteen hundred soldiers stomped down the crowded sunny thoroughfare, all the way out through the Golden Gate and into the countryside, and then back again, singing the whole time with smiles on their faces.

Everyone in the City stopped and stared. Some families recognized their sons, brothers, cousins, and cried out for them, and even tried to embrace them, but Narses’s men knew better than to react. Emotions were for the weak; reason was for the strong. Some children got too close and were knocked onto the cobblestones, making the women cover their mouths, gasp, and struggle to pick them up. Oblivious to this, Narses’s men marched forward like living statues, the regular rhythm of their tramping sandals echoing across the City.

How long since Byzantion has sounded like this? How long since so many soldiers have marched in good order along these streets?

Yet on the way he noticed that there were no flags, pennants, or banners to greet them. Had all the people in the City forgotten their fatherland? Without the red-yellow standards his men carried, no one would have known who they were at all!

“Take a note, boy,” he told Iwannis, walking beside him. “We need more flags. And a symbol to unite the people.”

“We often use the cross, sir,” Iwannis said. “Yet I have heard that the double-headed eagle is ever growing more popular.”

Narses shook his head. “We need something stronger, simpler. And tell me: what does the cross symbolize except the weakness of compassion? It is the symbol monks and priests hide behind. Christ refused to use his divine power to fight—and so he died a miserable, humiliating death on the cross, nude and bleeding for all to see. No, I’m not interested in martyrs, I prefer men who win, and die asleep in their beds, or in glorious battle. And a double-headed eagle is absurd. Who has ever seen such a thing? You say it’s growing more popular—perhaps among the barbarians—but it already seems antiquated to me.”

“I will think on it, sir.”

“All of us must,” Narses said.

“Sir, that reminds me.” Iwannis looked down to the notes scratched into his wax tablet. “Paul the Parakoimomenos wishes to inform you that issues with the fisc have become critical.”

“Not now,” Narses growled, though he was smiling and waving to the City people watching them march. “Am I not allowed to enjoy anything?”

Iwannis was bold enough to continue. “You must find a way to pay for the army, sir, else the parakoimomenos says he cannot feed your men.”

Narses thought of how they had already passed so many gigantic golden churches on their march through the City. Golden domes, golden ikons resting on the lintels beneath the domes, golden ikons glowing inside the torchlit incense clouds, golden ikonostases and ciboria, gold everywhere. Wealth surrounded them, they were just forbidden to use it, blinded by its power, confused by the priests’ incantations. As always, the church had taken something useful—and for what purpose? What need did the creator of the universe have for gold?

“Tell Paul to remove golden items from the smaller and more isolated churches on the City outskirts and in the Thracian countryside,” Narses said. “Any neglected churches or monasteries. Turn over their gold to the mint for new coins. Keep the official value the same, but mix the minimum of gold into each coin. Have the usual logothetes and Varangians take care of this.” Narses eyed Axouch, Sulayman, Sigurdsson, and Ironside, who were marching with him.

“There will be trouble, sir,” Iwannis said.

“Do not speak to me of trouble. I would melt down every grain of gold in the City to save Rome. I would sell every woman, every grandmother, every baby and little girl into slavery if it meant we could raise another army. I would feed you to the anthropophagi if it increased the chance of victory.”

“Sir.”

Narses directed his four tagmata to march to the Prosphorion Harbor on the Golden Horn. There he unsheathed his rhompaia and pointed it at Galata, which was still guarded by two Venetian ships. Columns of colorful Venetian soldiers armed with long steel pikes were marching back and forth by the piers, their red and gold pennants flickering in the wind.

Magnificent infantry, Narses thought. Magnificent navy. How could we let ourselves fall so far behind?

He turned to his men. “That is your goal. Galata. That is where the road to glory begins. We must take back what is ours.”

The men of the tagmata gazed there with steely eyes, as did Axouch, Sulayman, Sigurdsson, and Ironside.

“I have not told you what the Latins have done to us,” Narses added. “Nor have I told you what they plan to do. They have crippled the state with debt. They intend to capture this City and sell everything inside to the highest bidder—including your sisters and mothers and any woman who has ever hardened your dick. The Latins intend to sell them to the Sarakenoi. All of them.”

Silence from the men.

“Is that what you want?” Narses asked.

“No!” they shouted.

“Let the Latins hear you,” Narses said. “Will you let them reduce our great City to the Whore of Babylon?”

“No!”

“Will you hold up your hands, and let them clasp your wrists in chains?”

“No!”

“Will you work in the mines to make them rich?”

“Never!”

“Will your descendants all grow up bowing to Mecca?”

“No!”

“Then train hard, men! The day draws near when we attack Galata, and teach these slavers who their masters really are!”

They cheered him—really, truly cheered him for the first time. It had been so long since Narses had heard anything like this.

The people in this City have never liked me, he thought. They have never been worthy of liking me. But I will make them worthy. Soon.