Alexios and Dionysios gathered the bodies around the burned village of Leandros. Though Alexios told himself that this was just a game, and that his aunt and uncle were just NPCs, they had felt as real as anyone in the real world. From the moment he arrived here, they had done nothing but help him. Now they were dead.
He stopped, balled his hands to fists, and glared at the sky.
“They deserved better,” he whispered.
A passionate urge for revenge combined with guilt as he got back to work. Maybe if he'd just given the manual to the legionaries, everyone in Leandros would still be alive. On top of that, Alexios had also escaped their fate by chance alone. If he’d remained here with Eugenios instead of adventuring to Mount Ida, he would have been slaughtered alongside everyone in Leandros.
Alexios deserved his misery. He was guilty of the crime of surviving.
Both he and Dionysios worked in silence, using tattered clothes wrapped around their hands to keep from directly touching the dead. Since Leandros was so small, it took little time to bury the bodies in a single mound. After finishing, Dionysios used two sticks wrapped together with string to erect a small wooden cross nearby. Alexios asked if he was Christian.
Dionysios shook his head. “Despite being a monk, I have zero piety. But it’s probably what most of these people would have wanted. A Christian burial.” He made the sign of the cross over the mound, and commended the dead to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Then he bowed his head and turned his hands up at the sky to pray.
“No one delivered their last rights,” Dionysios said a moment later, looking at Alexios. “So technically, their souls are all in hell, at least if you buy into that. But I did what I could to free them.”
“I barely knew them.” Alexios’s voice was trembling. “But they were so nice to me. I never cared about people dying in video games.”
Dionysios hugged Alexios.
“They were closer than you thought.” Dionysios stepped away. “Sometimes we don’t know how much people matter to us until we lose them.”
“I’m ready to join you.” Alexios’s eyes were red with tears. “I want to join the uprising. This place was all I had. Whoever did this needs to pay.”
“Well, I’m happy to teach you how to kick their asses. You can learn how to become a Zhayedan. One of the immortals. We can destroy the system that did this together.”
Alexios nodded. “Alright.”
“If we’re going to rescue Princess Herakleia and join the uprising,” Dionysios said, “the first thing we need is horses. And I know just where to find some.”
New quest: help Dionysios find horses, said the voice.
Dionysios began walking along a dirt road which led westward. Alexios looked at the mound one last time, then caught up with him.
“Where are we going?” he said.
“Abydos.” Dionysios jutted his chin to the horizon. “It’s a small city on the coast. The crossing point for the Dardanelles. A pretty important strategic location. There’ll be plenty of horses there. We might even find the bastards who killed your family.”
“Do you even have any money?”
“Nah, I’m a monk. Except for a little silver, I’m all cleaned out. We don’t really use money where I live.”
“So how are you planning to get us some horses?”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Dionysios wrapped his arm around Alexios’s shoulder, and together they walked along the road. The dirt was undisturbed. Little more than the usual foot traffic had come here. If the Roman army had passed this way, they would have left all kinds of markings. A few thousand marching feet, trotting horses, and rolling carriages would have torn a road like this apart. The murderers of his aunt and uncle must have gone elsewhere.
After walking several hours, Dionysios and Alexios stopped at a hill overlooking Abydos in the distance. Unlike the towns that lay behind them, the city was intact, and beyond its clustered buildings the sea was covered with sailboats leaning into the wind, gliding over the gleaming whitecap waves. When Alexios had first teleported inside the game, the wind had been puffing those sails, the galley oars rising and falling like wings. It was long ago. Yet here they were again—dozens of these serene boats sailing over the blue sea between two green shores.
“I’ve never been fond of Abydos,” Dionysios said. “Ports like this attract all kinds of shitheads involved in unsavory shit, mostly slavery, sexual and otherwise. Honestly it’s too bad the legionaries didn’t burn this place to the ground. Nobody would miss it. Nobody decent, anyway.”
“But it looks so nice,” Alexios said. “And if it’s so awful, what are we doing here? Shouldn’t we go somewhere else?”
“This is the closest city,” Dionysios said. “We’ll never find the uprising if we don’t grab some horses.”
“Are you planning to steal them?”
Dionysios winked. Alexios rolled his eyes.
It was evening, but the city was crowded. Alexios and Dionysios passed plenty of horses and carriages, in addition to fearsome-looking men who glared at them from the shadows. Groaning donkeys and camels laden with merchandise were being led to enormous galleys and cogs docked at the pier. On these ships were slaves of every age, gender, culture, skin color, eye color, hair color—and hair style. Chained or tied together, they were led to a covered market by the town’s church, where semantrons were rattling, and priests were singing out the doorways. Near the city center, an acrobat was spitting flames like a dragon, and legionaries with Armenian accents were pulling screaming people out of their homes and ransacking them—shouting about a book. Dionysios tucked the manual deeper into his black robes; both he and Alexios gripped their sword hilts.
“You don’t have enough farr to fight them,” Dionysios said. “Not yet.”
“But the game voice isn’t saying anything about how much farr I even have,” Alexios said.
“You need to do a stat check. You would also feel it, if it was there. But it doesn’t even really matter right now because you don’t even know how to use this shit. Any of these people here could be divine warriors fighting to free the poor from the rich. But most of them are too ensnared in the world. They’re caught up in all this nonsense like flies in a spider web. They think it’s good and natural for everyone to always be poor, and for the world to be constantly falling apart. Or they’re just too busy trying to stay alive to think about it, to connect the dots into a dialectical materialist whole. They can see individual problems, but they have trouble putting it all together. Our job is to liberate them from both their ideological and physical chains, to help them find their own way. This might seem daunting, but great things have small beginnings. Once upon a time, Rome was just a few mud huts alongside the Tiber River. The name ‘Roma’ itself probably means ‘titties,’ since that’s what the seven hills looked like to the people living there back then. The Great Titties Empire. The Republic of Titties. If you told those people that one day they’d rule the whole fucking world—that people thousands of miles and thousands of years away would call themselves Romans—they never would have believed you. Anything is possible so long as we plan, work, and learn from our mistakes. The workers also have a thing or two to teach us. And hey, here we are.”
They had arrived at a tavern that was so seedy, Alexios smelled the wine, sweat, and urine from the street. Several men had collapsed in puddles of their own vomit by the entrance. A dozen horses were tied up out front. Alexios thought that Dionysios was going to steal some, and even checked to make sure no one was looking, but the monk stepped over the unconscious men, moved them into the recovery position, and then walked inside.
“What are you doing?” Alexios said, jogging after him.
“I may seem strong to you.” Dionysios eyed the darkness in the tavern. “But I can’t fight this entire uprising myself. We need help.”
Dionysios brought Alexios to a table, where they sat on hard wooden stools and ordered two cups of wine from a serving woman. A band was playing folk music using instruments Alexios lacked the words to describe, and the tavern was full of men who seemed to come from every corner of the planet. Alexios stared at them and their strange clothes—a mix of hats, robes, sashes, belts, capes, armor, and pants. Their shoes were pointed upward at their tips. Where were these people from? What languages were they speaking?
“Maybe we can find a ship to bring us to Konstantinopolis,” Dionysios said. “It’d be the fastest way.”
“But you said you didn’t have any money…”
Dionysios glared at Alexios. “Keep your voice down. We can promise whoever helps us some kind of reward from Herakleia. She must have shitloads of money in that palace of hers.”
“We’re going to rescue Herakleia, now?”
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“One step at a time,” Dionysios said. “If we get her on our side, the uprising might help us fight the Romans who destroyed your home.”
“Look,” Alexios said. “I don’t mean to criticize. But aren’t you assuming a lot, here? How are you even sure she’s in her palace in the first place? She might be in prison, or even dead for all we know. And who can even say if she can give us any money? She might not even have any!”
“She’ll probably be pretty grateful if we bust her out of that place. Plus, she’s a princess! She’s gotta have some money hidden somewhere! But like I said, let’s just take this one step at a time.”
“Famous last words,” Alexios said.
After getting his drink, Dionysios moved away from Alexios and started talking with people in the tavern, one after the other—finding out if they had a ship and meant to leave for the City any time soon.
Looking around, Alexios examined the people in the tavern. Although he would have assumed that such characters were forbidden in a place where Christianity was the state religion, he spotted Muslim merchants wearing white turbans as well as tall Afrikans with golden scimitars belted at their sides. Muscular white Germanic men with long braided golden hair smiled and spoke with them, and a pair were even arm-wrestling in front of the band, which consisted of Indians singing and playing traditional music—complete with a twanging sitar, tabla drums, an ululating flute, and a woman with long black hair belting out rhymes in a foreign language. She wasn't the only woman in the tavern, either. Some were medieval serving wenches, but a few were armed and sitting at the tables, drinking, daring anyone who stared at them to fight—
An ugly man shoved Alexios away from his table and growled at him in a language he didn’t understand.
You have taken 1 damage, the voice said.
Alexios picked himself up and scowled.
“We don’t like heretics,” the man’s hairy, dirty friend said. “That’s what he’s telling you.”
Both men were human pigs, and could have been twins. Alexios sensed that they were English—that the one who had shoved him was speaking Old English, although it sounded so much like Dutch or German that it was incomprehensible. Their breath reeked of bacon and eggs.
“Heretics?” Alexios said. “What are you—”
“Don’t play with us, you whoreson knave,” the hairy pig said. “This godforsaken hellhole is rotten. ‘Empire of the Greeks!’ Ha! You Greeks—you’re out of communion with the pope in Rome. No one gives a damn what the pope in Micklegarth thinks.”
Alexios tried to back away, but the human pigs followed.
“You’re all heretics,” the human pig said. “Saracens the lot of you, and if you don’t bake the host with yeast, then you’re all headed straight to the Hell of the—”
“Hate to break it to you,” Alexios said. “If you guys have a problem with Greeks, hanging around the ‘Empire of the Greeks’ probably isn’t the best idea.”
The human pig widened his eyes. “We hunt your kind for sport, heretic. In ten cities across the world they’ll put us to death because of all the heretics whose sins we purged with fire. We’re heretic hunters, we are. I swear by God’s wounds and God’s bones.”
“Gentlemen, is something wrong?” Dionysios said, suddenly standing behind Alexios. “It’s nothing a little wine couldn’t smooth over, I’m sure.” He gestured to a serving woman, who had been watching them in silence.
The human pig screamed, shoved Alexios aside to get at Dionysios, and drew a knife. Falling to the floor and taking another point of damage, Alexios saw green liquid drip off the knife’s tip.
Poison!
Just as the human pig was about to stab Dionysios, the old man drew his sword and gouged a deep gash into the pig’s face—tearing an eyeball from its socket. The bloody eyeball tumbled in the air before dropping onto the floor with a squish. Screaming and clutching his bleeding face, the human pig dropped his knife as his friend pulled him away—snatching the eyeball by its red stalk before he left.
Dionysios sheathed his ringing sword. Everyone in the tavern was staring at him. The music had stopped.
“It’s a touchy subject,” Dionysios said to the crowd. “Theological differences between the pope in Rome and the patriarch in Konstantinopolis. You all understand.”
Everyone looked away. The music resumed. Dionysios helped Alexios to his feet, then flipped the serving woman a silver coin.
“Sorry about that,” Dionysios said.
“Those two have been coming in here looking for trouble for days,” the serving woman said. “Seems to me they’ve learned their lesson, at least when it comes to monks.”
Dionysios smiled. “The laity really ought to know better than to debate obscure theological shit with doctors of the church. ‘No investigation, no right to speak.’”
The pig had knocked over Alexios’s drink, but the serving woman—who told them her name was Eirene—said she would clean up the mess. Dionysios brought Alexios to a different table in the darkness at the back of the tavern where a young handsome Frank was sitting with a muscular, towering Sarakenou. The first man had some kind of strange sword sheathed at his side, while the latter wore a large crossbow over his back as well as a golden scimitar in his belt.
“This is Gontran Koraki,” Dionysios said, sitting at the table with Alexios and gesturing to the Frank. “And this is Kambine Diaresso. They’re merchants and adventurers, both with plenty of experience in this area by land or sea. They tell me they’ve got fast horses which can get us to the capital in a few days. They’re game to rescue Herakleia for some reward money, too. What was the sum we agreed on?”
“Ten golden nomismas to bring you to Konstantinopolis,” Gontran said. “Then a lot more for rescuing this princess, whatever her name is.”
Dionysios laughed. “Damn, that’s a lot of money. Ten’s enough to buy a decent horse of our own, isn’t it?”
“We have to charge extra,” Gontran said. “Since you can’t pay now.”
“There’s another thing,” Dionysios said. “Show him, Gontran.”
The Frank held out his forearm and pulled back the sleeve. A B-shaped scar was scratched there.
“What the hell?” Alexios said.
“Meeting people who remember they’re from the outside is rare,” Dionysios said. “But it looks like we got pretty lucky.”
“Are you also from beyond the game?” Gontran said to Alexios.
“Yeah.” Alexios showed his scar.
“What is the meaning of this?” the man named Diaresso said.
“It’s simple,” Dionysios said. “The three of us—we aren’t exactly from here. And I mean we really aren’t from here. Like, we come from a different dimension entirely, if you know what I mean.”
“I do not,” Diaresso said.
“Were either of you in detention a few days ago?” Gontran eyed Dionysios and Alexios. “Back at Pemetic High?”
Alexios’s heart leapt in his chest. “I was.”
“Which one were you?”
Alexios was surprised that it took a moment to remember his old name.
“Torres,” he blurted. “Julian Torres.”
“I remember,” Gontran said. “We take physics together.”
Alexios narrowed his eyes. “Helena?”
Gontran nodded. “So it seems.”
“But,” Alexios began. “You’re a guy. And you’re—you’re—”
“White?” Gontran said.
“What does that make you?” Alexios said to Diaresso. “Are you some white guy?”
“I do not understand,” Diaresso said.
“Nobody cares about that shit here,” Dionysios explained. “Ask any of these people if they’re white or black. They won’t know what you’re talking about. All that racial shit gets invented during the Age of So-Called Discovery. That’s hundreds of years in the future. Way back now in the year six thousand, five hundred and eighty-nine—according to the Roman calendar, which begins with the Biblical creation of the world—people just care about what you do—what you believe. Except for women or children or poor folk, I guess. The first slavery was the slavery of women.” He watched Eirene the serving woman as she glided through the dark tavern, cleaning messes, taking orders, bringing food and drink.
Dionysios continued. “Are you a Christian, or aren’t you? That’s what matters. And even then, you need to be the right kind of Christian. Do you believe Jesus is totally divine, totally human, or a mix of both?”
“No idea,” Alexios said. “Doesn’t seem like he’s totally human, though.”
“We Muslims do not trouble ourselves about the controversies of the polytheists,” Diaresso said. “The swine-eaters believe in three gods who are also one god. It is absurd.”
“It’s important,” Dionysios said. “These religious controversies can mean the difference between life or death here, when it comes to the nature of Christ or even to holy ikons. Whenever the City gets besieged, the patriarch will always bring out their oldest ikons—these religious paintings with frames studded with jewels, supposedly made by the hand of God himself.”
“Whoa,” Alexios said.
Dionysios nodded. “Whoa indeed. They have like a divine energy that blesses the walls and protects the people inside. But the farther you get from the capital, the closer you get to the Muslim umma, the more likely people are to support Monophysitism. Those people tend to have less money and to be iconoclasts, especially since they get a lot of exposure to some interesting ideas radiating out of places like Baghdad. Their worldview is determined by their economic position in society, plus subjective factors. The whole theoretical concept comes from Mazdakism—it’s called base and superstructure. If you’re rich, you tend to favor the status quo, legalism, peaceful protest, that sort of thing. If not—”
“Thanks for the history lesson, grandpa,” Gontran said. “Things have always been like this. The strong have always oppressed the weak.”
Alexios stared at Gontran for a moment, thinking that Helena never would have spoken so impolitely. She was always quiet, while Gontran was the opposite.
The game must be changing her, too, Alexios thought. Just like it’s changing me.
This didn’t horrify Alexios as much as he might have expected. What had he been before plunging into Byzantium, anyway? A gamer. A high schooler trapped in Maine, that intellectual and cultural vacuum, so unlike the thriving mix of people and ideas he found here. And how interesting was Torres? Not very. He was just a regular guy. Alexios was more likable, a beautiful naive youth training with an old master, a potential hero surrounded by millions of people, the star of his own universe. What, in contrast, did Torres have going for him? Long dreary days at school. Then would come college and an office job wearing a suit, pushing paper, checking his phone whenever he wasn’t busy, spending his whole life waiting for something that never happened—if he was lucky.
“I am confused,” Diaresso said.
(Everyone had continued speaking while Alexios zoned out.)
“Diaresso, my friend,” Dionysios said, “and—I sense—my future partner, the three of us, Gontran and Alexios and me, we’re kind of like demons. Only we’ve been sucked away from our demon world somehow and trapped here inside bodies which don’t belong to us.”
Diaresso looked at Gontran. “That would explain his behavior. We should see a witch doctor. That’s how we deal with djinn in Tomboutou, my homeland.”
“That might be some help to us in the future,” Dionysios said. “Who knows? It might be nice to go back where we came from. But for the moment, the only way out is beating the emperor—and his whole fucking empire.”
Diaresso shook his head. “We came here merely to procure money. Now I find myself sitting with a trio of djinn—though you look unlike any djinn I have heard of. You are supposed to be creatures of smokeless fire.”
“Make no mistake, Diaresso,” Dionysios said. “We’re absolutely creatures of fire. But all that shit’s burning on the inside.”
Dionysios glanced at the doorway as a new group of people entered, and his eyes flashed with flames.