By now Narses was delegating more authority to his kentarchs. They had been reading the old military manuals of Vegetius and Maurikios and applying the lessons inside. The best soldiers in the two tagmata were likewise beginning to train on horseback. Like dogs, the men knew that if they followed orders, they would be rewarded. With the exception of Domestikos Makrenos, whom Narses guarded jealously, the best soldiers were even given passes to visit the City brothels—packed with cheap beautiful refugees. The men went with the understanding that if they caused trouble, returned late, or fled, they would be whipped.
“I warn you.” Narses pointed at them with his whip. “Don’t make me send my Turks and Varangians to find you.”
The men nodded. “Sir!”
Harsh but fair.
And besides, was army life really so bad? The camaraderie in the ranks was growing. They lived together all the time. No one was allowed to be alone. Their earlier, earthly concerns about putting food on the table, educating themselves for their careers, finding a suitable virgin for marriage, or a thousand other annoyances no longer mattered.
Now there were only their buddies in the army. There was only Rome. The fatherland would provide everything its sons needed. All were united in a common cause, working hard to see it through.
By the first month’s end, all eighteen hundred men were ready to take their oaths.
“I swear that I shall faithfully execute all that the emperor commands,” they said, their unified voices thundering. They had placed their right hands over their hearts. “I shall never desert the service, nor shall I seek to avoid death for the Roman Republic!”
From the kathisma Narses watched his men take their oaths. He nodded and saluted.
“Now you are truly my brothers.” Narses lowered his hand. “You are truly reborn. More training must be undertaken, but we near our goal. Ave Roma, my brothers.”
“Ave Roma!” they shouted in unison.
Training continued. The men threw javelins, slung rocks, and shot arrows. Some even learned archery on horseback—shooting arrows forward, to the left and right, and also backwards while riding at full gallop.
They were training themselves, now, and growing beyond Narses’s control.
Confident that his officers would care for his men, he returned to the palace. He had not set foot here in the last month, having neglected every problem in the empire save the army. Paul had been ordered to start basilik production and to send merchants to acquire brimstone from the volcanic isle of Melos in the southernmost Kyklades isles. Without this rare and expensive material, no black powder could be made and no basilik would fire. The precise mixture of materials needed to produce an effective black powder was still unknown, although Orban had left the recipe in the palace library. There was only one problem: the recipe was written in Seran, which no one in the City knew how to read.
On top of that, none of the blacksmiths in Konstantinopolis understood how the engineer Orban’s basilik functioned. Paul was forced to design the weapon from memory, doing his best to instruct local blacksmiths. This task alone would have kept anyone busy, but Narses had also ordered Paul to construct at least three dromons to fight the Venetian fleet guarding Galata. When Paul protested that this was impossible—yet again, there were neither workers, nor supplies, nor money—Narses responded in the usual way.
“Impress any workers you need from the City,” he said. “Pay the costs using church gold. Make it happen. And that reminds me…have the fire towers along the Hellespont keep a sharp lookout for the Venetian armada. We know it’s out there. We know it’s coming.”
Paul bowed. “Majesty.”
Narses turned to leave his office, since there was so much to do—he couldn’t stay here, he needed to supervise everyone and everything or it would all fall apart—but Paul stopped him.
“There is something else, majesty,” the parakoimomenos said. “It’s a, em, rather sensitive matter. The matter of, a, em, your—”
“Speak, eunuch!”
“Your wedding, majesty,” Paul said. “At some point in the near future you need to marry Her Highness Erythro Komnenē in order to legitimize your accession to the throne.”
“I am already emperor, eunuch. What’s the point?”
“You agreed to do this earlier in order to, em, allay the concerns of the many noble families to which she is related.”
Erythro, Narses thought.
Something twisted inside him like a knife in his gut. Frailty. Did he care about this woman? His half-sister. But she had no idea they were related. Nikephoros had told Narses months ago in the labyrinth of memory. Narses had never understood why Erythro had liked him. Actually, she had stopped talking to him after her father had died, and had even moved—along with her family, slaves, and ladies-in-waiting—across the City to Blachernae Palace, which was situated on the northwest corner of the Land Walls. It was there that they had quietly buried Nikephoros’s body.
Erythro had always frightened Narses. If you even looked at the emperor’s daughter the wrong way, you risked getting your eyes burned out with a white-hot fire poker. Yet now her father was dead, and it was necessary to sire progeny. Narses would use her to propagate his dynasty. The House of Narses. He had no surname, since he was officially an orphan—though secretly he was a bastard from the House of Komnenos.
Regardless, the empire would be strengthened. That would be the end of it.
“Majesty?”
Narses looked at Paul. “Set a date for the wedding.”
“Very good, majesty. But would you not like to speak with your future wife at some point, or at least spend some—”
“I have no time. I will wed her and she will produce an heir, thereby satisfying every party involved.”
“Except you may forget, majesty, that Erythro is not a mechanical contrivance. If I may, she has feelings, desires, and thoughts of her own. She has an immortal soul.”
“And?”
“I am trying to tell you, majesty, that Turks and Venetians are not the only threat to your reign. If you neglect the nobility, if you treat them the same way you treat the mob—the scum of the street—there will be problems, to say the least.”
“I have not appropriated any of their belongings to pay for the empire’s reconstruction.”
“That is not enough, majesty. Each of the noble families is competing with the others—the Komnenoi against the Doukades, the Phokades against the Angeloi and Dalessenoi, and so on. Some, at least—a majority—must feel that their possessions are growing, that they are gaining something from your reign. Otherwise they will conspire against you.”
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Narses waved his hand. “I would sooner put them all to death. The aristocrats are like the church—just a weight on the empire’s shoulders. What value do they add?”
Paul widened his eyes, then forced himself to speak. “Every person has a mind and a body, majesty, and a role to play in our society. It is the mind’s part to command while it is the body’s part to obey. To put it another way, some must lead while others follow. The world does not revolt against God, let us say—for the angels once tried that, and were punished with eternal damnation.”
“Your point?”
“The nobility is a natural outgrowth of a society such as ours, majesty, though every society—since our parents’ Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden—has had leaders and followers, greed and corruption, blood and sweat. Were you to, ah, em, remove the nobility from power, they would simply be replaced by other people, other families, sooner or later—people who behaved in the same fashion. As talented as you are, you cannot run the entire empire alone.”
“That is where you come in.”
Paul nodded. “Yes, you have worked me to the bone, if I may say so, majesty, and I have appropriated many logothetes from the fisc to assist me in carrying out your orders. My own office has grown greatly in size. But when your reconquest proceeds, when our lands in Asia are returned to us, it will be the nobility—not court eunuchs like myself—who will run the show there, as it were.”
“I have no desire to let that happen,” Narses said. “Aristocrats ruled those lands for generations, and lost them to the Turks. We must organize differently when we regain what was taken from us.”
“What do you mean, majesty?”
“We will settle the people—and not the nobles—in our reclaimed lands, Paul. The people will all be granted enough land for their own maintenance and upkeep. They will pay taxes directly to us, and pay no rent to landlords, as it was in the old days.”
“Yet the tax farmers have often been even less popular than the nobility…”
“The people’s first sons will inherit their lands,” Narses continued. “This will stop the problem of land being divided up too much among families. All other sons will join us here in the capital as either workers or soldiers.”
“I see, majesty. And the nobility does not fit into this vision of the future?”
“Like the church, they do nothing but hold us back. And like the church, I will only tolerate their presence until I am strong enough to sweep them aside.”
Paul swallowed nervously. “It is difficult to imagine Rome without the church, majesty. Even in the days before the church, there were numerous Hellenic temples and religious leaders. These forces in our society will not go peacefully, should you choose to usher them off the stage of history, as it were.”
“Of course not. No one ever wants to get offstage when their time has come. Now leave me, eunuch. I have work to do.”
Paul bowed. “Majesty.”
Narses rested only at night, and ate his vegetarian, alcohol-free meals as quickly as possible. In the mornings, he helped Axouch, Sulayman, Sigurdsson, Ironside, and various logothetes pry gold from churches and monasteries in the City’s outskirts. Priests and monks protested, blocked him, begged him on their hands and knees to stop, kissed his feet, prayed, even raised their hands and fists against him, but he and his men always knocked them aside and took what they needed.
Only fools count on the mercy of their enemies.
Soon the smaller poorer outer churches—the ones few people cared about—were empty. Narses and his men found themselves raiding consecrated Houses of God which were halfway from the Land Walls to the Great Palace, at the Third Hill’s western edge. These churches were larger and more splendid, their foundations dating back to the Edict of Toleration. The priests in those days had started purchasing land and laying bricks in the muck the instant Megas Konstantinos signed that historical document. Unlike in the outer churches and monasteries, congregations actually existed here, while the priests were a far cry from the retiring dotards who had been granted dwellings in or near the chapels and hermitages beyond the Land Walls as an act of charity. In contrast, these younger priests were sharper, and by now they knew that Narses was coming. Soon he and his men found the churches already denuded of treasure. They were as plain and unadorned as in the halcyon days of iconoclasm—doubtless making the corpse of Leo III the Isaurian smile in his porphyry tomb. Perfume would issue from his rotten flesh, and if anyone in the capital had still cared about his nonsensical ideas, they would have roamed the streets with wild looks in their eyes, ratting their semantrons, shouting that a miracle was afoot.
Narses and his men found what they were looking for in strange places. The golden and bejeweled ikons, chalices, candelabra, censers, and crosses were locked in ancient crypts, or hidden behind mouldering skeletons or inside the marble tombs of long-forgotten generals, emperors, and eunuchs. In even grander churches located at the Second Hill’s western edge, the priests hid the treasures in the homes of their most fervent believers—often widowed babushkas living alone in apartments the size of closets.
Narses found it distasteful to search the City like this. Soon he and his men were bursting into one home after another, terrifying families at dinner, reassuring them—even as he shoved them out of the way, or held them against their own walls—that there was nothing to fear, he was here to help. Sometimes Narses stared in awe at the wretched plainness of these dwellings, wondering how anyone could live like this. The homes often consisted of only a few rooms adjoining a small courtyard which multiple families used for cooking. Their cramped apartments—possessing little more than a chest of clothes that doubled as a table, maybe a few wooden chairs and couches, plus some iron pots and pans and spoons, with one plain ikon of the Virgin—reminded Narses of the peasant houses he had burned in Troas. Sometimes these places even had dirt floors.
Thus went Narses’s mornings.
After a quick lunch back in the palace with Domestikos Angelos Makrenos—with whom it was too easy to lose oneself in conversation—Narses spent his afternoons hunting in the brothels and taverns for carpenters to work in the City’s reconstituted drydocks. He would have preferred to seize the ships he needed from traveling merchants, but no vessel that visited Konstantinopolis could defeat those three Venetian galleys. They were fast and strong, light and sturdy, having already proven themselves in combat. Fire ships were also out of the question, since rain, snow, sleet, or hail fell almost daily in the gray Konstantinopolitan winter. A swarm of smaller craft might have done the job, but Narses worried that food shipments to Konstantinopolis would end if he requisitioned every dhow, cog, and longship that visited the City.
The only choice was to rebuild the Roman armada. This meant, among many other things, sending men into the countryside to cut down the tallest trees they could find before hauling them back to the City on oxcarts. It was too dangerous to float the lumber down the Golden Horn, where the wily Venetians would seize it.
Canvas, rope, and iron nails were also required, as well as men who knew how to put everything together. Everything needed to be paid for using nomismas forged from church gold. Konstantinopolis was supposed to be the world’s richest City, but Narses had begun to wonder what it actually produced. Wealth came from trade, but what did Konstantinopolis export?
He laughed. Soldiers. Empire. Weapons.
Aside from silk, which had been decreasing in price for decades—since everyone and his uncle now owned their own silkworms and mulberry trees—most of the City’s money came either from plunder, pilgrims, or excise taxes. Almost everything used in the City had been purchased or stolen from somewhere else; the trade deficit here seemed almost infinite.
Narses took more time to study the City’s finances. Konstantinopolis, he learned, was a city of middlemen. It consisted largely of glorified administrators and scribes who did little work, yet considered themselves saints. And the instant anyone even raised an eyebrow in their direction, they would play the victim, groaning with their eyes rolling upward to heaven like Christ dragging the cross through Golgotha. This was why it was so hard to raise, equip, and feed even three tagmata consisting of eighteen hundred souls, coming from a total municipal population of almost half a million. Nearly all actual work was done outside the walls; inside the walls, the only people who really produced any value were women, children, and slaves. In reality, the city economy was based on financial sleights of hand rather than useful or profitable production, with each parasitic capo at each level getting his cut. For instance, by the time a family in the City bought a loaf of bread, it cost a dollar (say), while the original producers who had raised, harvested, winnowed, and baked the wheat—barely got a penny in total for their troubles. They got a penny for a loaf of bread they had produced virtually from scratch, while the family purchasing that loaf paid a dollar. Middlemen took the difference, investing it in land and real estate—since that was the only thing that turned a profit anymore—but which made it difficult for anyone to afford a home.
The high cost of low prices.
Ridiculously high excise taxes and inflated prices allowed the City to pretend that it was rich, even if in reality it was the world’s biggest house of cards. Strong as it might appear, a breath of wind would knock it down.
But before that happened, Narses would save it. He could hardly explain why, but he loved this place. Even if the City was corrupt, he loved the land. He loved his country. The huge buildings, the wide open spaces, all of it was a monument to Rome’s greatness. He would see its glory restored.