Abydos was built alongside a narrow strait called the Dardanelles which led north to Konstantinopolis and south to the Aegean. In the city was an ancient fortress on a hill, several piers and storehouses, a few churches overlooking the cliffs, and some caravanserais. A handful of landowners also kept miniature palaces here. As you walked along the road away from Abydos’s center and passed through a gate in the walls, buildings became less frequent, until you found yourself standing in the countryside. Then the road wound through hills which were draped in farmland like a vast checkered quilt of alternating green and gold, interspersed with villages which resembled quilting points.
Lee and Diaresso sat on a beach outside the city walls. They had spent the last of their money on fried fish folded inside pita bread with salad and dressing, which they were now munching. Their horses were also nibbling bags of oats tied around their heads. Aside from some clothes, weapons, a prayer rug, and a few bags of supplies, this was all Lee and Diaresso possessed.
Upon arriving at the beach, Diaresso had taken a moment to say one of his five daily prayers—the Dhur prayer, which took place at noon. This began with washing his hands, arms, mouth, nostrils, face, ears, and bare feet three times each with clean water from his canteen. He then knelt on his prayer rug in the direction of Mecca and said his prayers.
“Praise be to Allah,” he said in Arabic. “Lord of all the worlds…”
Once Diaresso had finished and put everything away, he explained—with much patience—that he and Lee had been sneaking eastern contraband into the capital. This was their profession. The collegia (guilds) and the state, working together, set such high prices on Seran silk that you could get rich smuggling as long as you were willing to risk your life by staying off the roads.
Your mercantile skills are Professional (Level 7/10), the voice added.
Other smugglers evading the guild rules only traveled to the frontier, where middlemen fleeced them. But if you continued along the route—past the Persian deserts where fire-worshippers battled the Saracens—and then if you braved the bandit-infested mountains of Baktria, and skirted the cold sandy Taklamakan Wastes among the blue-eyed monks of Tocharistan and their mountains honeycombed with monasteries, then—after a journey of many months—you would enter Sera. At the terminus of the trade routes, in a huge city called Dongjing, wealth was so cheap it would make your eyes bulge.
Reams of silk glimmered like lightning. Then came the spices: pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves, piled in mountains—including a sweet salt called sukkar. Alum was another vital ingredient, without which making dye was impossible, and it could only be found in Sera. Lapis lazuli, spinel, jade, and other rare precious substances came from here, as did advanced technology like the “fire lance” with which Lee’s avatar—an escaped Frankish peasant adventurer named Gontran Koraki—had equipped himself.
In Sera, Diaresso and Lee exchanged gold solidi and nomismas stamped with the faces of caesars and messiahs for sacks of all these goods. Then they exchanged their horses for camels, since for some reason the Seres had trouble raising horses and would pay for good Roman rides. The two merchants bought as much as they could haul back to the Empire of the Greeks. Sometimes their train consisted of dozens of camels: a tempting target for the fearsome Sogdians who had defeated Alexander the Great, more famous in those days for his piety than for his conquests. But the two men had traveled back and forth several times, and their trick—their major innovation—was to move without torches at night, and to hide their mounts during daylight. In the darkness under the canopy of heaven ringing with the eternal music of the spheres, you just needed to stick to the road and keep your camels from bawling too much, and you could make it.
The biggest problem was finding the money to start these journeys in the first place. In the Kingdom of the Franks everyone was so poor that they had stopped using money and just bartered with one another and even paid their rents in kind. Much of the world’s gold was piled in Konstantinopolis: mountains of it hacked from mines by enslaved prisoners of war.
To finance their expedition, Diaresso and Lee borrowed money from an unsavory Abydosian named Demetrios Maleïnos, the doux of Abydos who also dabbled in “a little of this and that.” He was notorious for the punishments he meted out to debtors who had trouble paying their debts. They were encased in a special kind of old Roman cement. Maleïnos had an entire garden decorated with these unfortunate grotesqueries—people pleading for their lives, begging for mercy, praying for aid, now silent and unmoving for years, sometimes decades, surrounded by flowers bobbing in the sea breeze, buzzing with bumblebees. “Praxiteles ain’t got nothing on me,” Maleïnos liked to say. “I’m a real artist, a Phidias to Phidias!”
But Maleïnos was the only one who would loan Diaresso and Lee any money, so what could they do? The Bible’s strictures on usury made doing business so difficult that sometimes you couldn’t find anyone to loan you anything at all!
Then, after setting off eastward with little except food, water, horses, and gold, Diaresso and Lee had run into trouble. To avoid the Roman customs inspectors along the coast, they had slipped into the interior, which was ruled by people called Turks or Skythioi. These were the world’s great riders: only a few years ago they had smashed an entire Roman army and even captured emperor Diogenes IV himself. These days they were becoming more commonplace, and some were even settling in towns and cities—which meant that they had attacked Lee and Diaresso. In terror the merchants dropped their sacks of gold in order to escape with their throats uncut, and now they were back in Abydos and owed Maleïnos a debt they could never repay. Diaresso had insisted on staying away from that murderer and getting out of town, but Gontran had said that he could talk the bastard into financing one more trip, one more big score that would free them from dragging their asses across Asia and instead set them up as rich merchants in the capital, where they could enjoy the world’s best courtesans every day.
Lee grimaced with disgust. “I said that?”
Diaresso nodded. “It was your idea. For me, all I desire is to return to Tomboutou.” He sang in a bluesy style: “Take me back to Tomboutou…”
“That’s your home, right? What’s stopping you from going?”
“I was a farmer there,” Diaresso said. “I had my wife Mariam, my sons Ali and Afel, and land. We worked it together until my brother Tamaga stole it from under my nose. He sold my family and me into slavery, scattering us to the four winds like so many grains of sand. Now I search the world for them, biding my time that I might one day return home and take vengeance.”
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These revelations left Lee feeling dizzy. She feared she would pass out again, but she kept herself under control—especially since falling asleep here was dangerous. At any moment men waving swords could run out of nowhere shouting for their money. At first that experience in the caravanserai had left her feeling numb, but now she believed she was traumatized. In her mind she kept seeing the man she had killed. Again and again the primitive gun exploded in her hand and his face splashed outward like a popped water balloon. He was dead, but he lived on inside her.
Lee had also gathered that she was in a game. Those annoying losers in detention—where she didn’t even belong—had somehow sucked her inside a magic board game, one with a voice which sometimes spoke to her out of nowhere. It was unbelievable, but also far from the first impossible thing she had experienced in her life.
On top of that, it was too real. Nothing was fun about this place. Games had never interested her—they were a waste of time, and all the killing grossed her out even when it was so pixellated that you could barely see anything. But even the goriest games didn't come close to what she had seen here.
She shook her head. Those guys in detention had been annoying enough when they were just distracting her from calculus. Now she wanted to kill them. They had possibly wasted the lifetime she had spent studying to get into the Ivy Leagues. You knew a place like this game was hell because there were no Ivy Leagues. Were any schools here at all? Diaresso kept calling it Romanía or Rome, but it was nothing like Ancient Rome. She hadn’t seen a single muscular, red-caped centurion. Everyone spoke Greek, churches filled with golden mosaics were all over the place, as were bearded monks in black robes and hats, while everyone else wore colorful dresses or tunics. All of it was unknown to her. As soon as she could think, her mood swung back and forth, and she even trembled with fear, asking herself how she was supposed to get home. Then that mysterious voice had said that “defeating the emperor” was the only way.
Gontran, this man whose body she now devil-like possessed, was also still inside her somewhere, and always trying to take back control. She felt unfamiliar urges, and worried that he would overwhelm her—that he would possess her. Despite the fact that she had killed one of Maleïnos’s henchmen a few hours ago, she kept thinking of heading to the tax collector’s lair and trying to work things out. Lee thought this a terrible idea, but Gontran kept insisting on it.
Memories of a faraway town called Metz also filled her mind. Those vineyards and orchards were always foggy until the morning sun burned the moisture away. A family waited for her in a farmhouse, ploughing the dark soil with their half-starved workhorse, laboring always for Lord Chlotar in his manor, for the priests and monks lounging in their hilltop churches.
Diaresso had said that Gontran was an escaped serf. Generations ago—who could even say how long—Gontran’s ancestors had sold themselves into serfdom to escape debts, taxes, barbarians, and disease. At least that’s what Lee thought. Nobody knew for certain. Everyone seemed to think that nothing had ever changed anywhere—that people had always lived just as they lived now, and always would.
But Gontran was different from his ancestors. He had always been different. His name meant “Raven” in a language called Frankish, and the surname he had given himself—Koraki—meant the same in Greek.
My name’s Raven. Raven Raven.
And so, tricky raven that he was, Gontran had fled the lord’s manor as soon as he could outrun Sigibert the Bailiff—resolving even as a teenager that he would never pay any landlord. The other serfs had refused to join him, since they were terrified of the knights on their thundering war horses. His parents, siblings, and cousins all begged him to stay and accept his lot. But it was impossible. Suppressed for centuries, the urge to leave was now breaking free, and it had engraved itself in his bones.
He spent years wandering Christendom, stealing, fighting, working, building up his skills, and making his way to where the money was: the Kingdoms in the Sun along the coast of the Middle Sea, the Empire of the Greeks, and even lands beyond the imagination of anyone in sleepy misty Metz. In France, a big thinker was someone who believed it was a good idea to conquer another fief so that more rent could be extracted from more serfs. To imagine any other way of making money was insane in their minds.
The Empire of the Greeks, in contrast, was always trying to crush the barbarian hordes in the west whose leaders called themselves kings and emperors; and to smash, likewise, the caliphates and sultanates in the east—to go farther than anyone had ever gone, to bring one world under the control of one emperor and one god.
Make no mistake, the Romans were bastards, but at least they were ambitious. Here philosophers filled libraries with books, while in Metz the priests mumbled and coughed through the Latin rosary, fooling no one but themselves. Their signatures were indistinguishable from scribbles.
Gontran still lay inside this body somewhere. In contrast to Lee—who needed to get back to studying in Maine—the adventurer wanted money, wine, and women, with this last desire taking precedence over all the others. Her thoughts veered toward visiting Abydos’s whorehouses. During the walk to the beach his eyes had examined everyone passing who had even resembled a woman. Almost regardless of their attractiveness he had tried to think of things to say that would get them into bed.
Was this how all men thought? Then they really were pigs! Lee herself had always been too busy to start a relationship. Since she was twelve, catcallers had been telling her she had slit eyes or a horizontal vagina or that they wanted to eat her pu pu platter. A lot of the time they shouted at her when they were driving by in their big boy pickup trucks. But sometimes the educated students or the good teachers in her classes would glance at her while talking about China. Then they would reassure her that they hated the government and not the people. She needed to remind them multiple times that she was Korean, not Chinese.
So many Asians had been murdered by lunatics melting their brains on corporate media that Lee started carrying mace. She avoided going out alone, and had little desire to do more than the basics for her appearance. The prettier she was, the more people would notice.
Always she wanted to make a difference, but she had never gotten the chance. She had dreamed of studying hard to become a prosecutor so she could stop anti-Asian hate crimes. Later she could win elections and change the world.
Now it took all her effort to keep from catcalling the women around her. Yet men and women met her eyes, smiled at her, raised their eyebrows, and even spoke to her. Was Gontran Koraki an attractive man? It excited her and made her feel confident and cocky to the extent that she even began to swagger. She wanted to ask women where they were going, how they were doing, and what they might be up to in the evening. Most would ignore her or tell her to fuck off—though not all.
Their breakfast finished, Lee and Diaresso had to figure out what to do next. Regardless of what happened, they needed money. None could be found outside the city, and it would take five days to ride to Konstantinopolis to find a job—five days without food or fodder. This was why Gontran, speaking through Lee, once again told Diaresso that they should head back to Maleïnos’s palace, apologize for killing his goon, and offer to make it up to him. They just needed one more chance. And because Diaresso was out of ideas, he agreed.