General Narses and Paul the Chain and the four hundred soldiers of the Hikanatoi Tagma spent the day resting. Sentries were posted and weapons, shields, and armor were cleaned and checked, but this counted as a day of rest following their exhausting exploits the day before. Narses passed part of that day forcing himself to talk with Paul about Romanía’s military situation. A map was even stored in the baggage, although it was so primitive that (after the slaves set up the map in his tent) Narses could hardly make sense of it. He was able, however, to identify the boot of Italy—“one of Romanía’s wayward western catepanates,” Paul said—all the way on the map’s left side. He could work his way outward from there.
Soon enough, with Paul’s reluctant assistance, Narses figured out that Romanía was little more than a rump state surrounding Konstantinopolis. As Paul explained, her heavy infantry maniples which had once conquered the Mediterranean were hopeless against the steppe’s horse archers, pouring down around the Pontic Sea to the east and west for centuries. These horse archers learned to ride before they could walk, and they would drink the blood of their own mounts galloping beneath them rather than stop for meals.
“Unless reforms are made,” Paul said, “as unthinkable as it may be, there may come a time when Romanía is no more.”
Thinking about his knowledge of the future, Narses chuckled. I wonder if I should tell him.
But the question was: what changes could be made? Rome hired Bulgars in the west to fight the Skythioi in the east, and then hired Skythioi in the east to fight the Bulgars in the west. Regardless of their origins, most mercenaries were unreliable. One hundred men in the Hikanatoi Tagma were light and heavy horsemen, the former serving as scouts, the latter serving as kataphraktoi, which meant a man and a horse covered in chainmail and whatever else you could drape on them—steel if possible, but leather more often than not. Their armor and relative speed were the only counter to steppe horse archers. Since the Battle of Carrhae many centuries ago Roman infantry had been losing one battle after another to these barbarians. She was surrounded on all sides by powerful enemies who looked upon her wealth with envious eyes.
When Narses asked why the Romans didn’t simply recruit their own horse archers, Paul rolled his eyes and replied that to ride a horse and shoot arrows forward, backward, left, and right at full gallop accurately and without falling to your death meant living your whole life on the steppe as a nomad, rather than lounging in towns or cities.
“For the Romans to produce an effective number of horse archers,” Paul said, “we must stop being Romans.”
Victories could be won, territory could be retaken, but the unstoppable tide of centuries was rushing against the great sand castle that was Konstantinopolis. Most Roman generals, commanders, emperors, and priests therefore trusted that God would somehow deliver them from these demons. They prayed to Him every day and rejoiced whenever He answered their prayers with even minor triumphs.
“But one day the barbarians may scale the land walls and raise their banners over the holy city,” Paul said. “The only question is: who will be the last man to die for Rome?”
Back when Narses had been named Boucher, history had been boring. At Pemetic High, he had taken the easy required social studies classes which were taught by gym teachers and filled with the children of lobstermen. Everyone spent these classes cracking jokes, staring at the clock, and doing anything but work on school-provided computers. 1776 and the Civil War had no connection to catching lobsters, throwing footballs, or making money. Yet Narses in his old teenage body had still absorbed a little history. Now, living in the distant past, he noticed that these Romans lacked guns. Guns, he told Paul the Chain, would solve their problems.
Paul was exasperated by this point. “Domestikos, what in God’s name do you mean?”
“You know, a gun,” Narses said. “It’s like a metal tube that shoots bullets. You hold it in your hand.”
“I am sometimes unsure whether you ought to speak with a physician or a priest.”
“Oh, come on,” Narses said. “Maybe back then—back now—it would be like a metal tube that you put gunpowder inside. Then you set it on fire and it explodes, shooting like a little metal ball out of one end. The ball goes out fast enough to kill people.”
“Are you talking about naphtha?”
“I don’t know what that is. I’m talking about guns. You need to get guns. Hell, even my dad has an old .45 that’ll—”
“I warn you, Domestikos, you cannot speak like this in front of the men.” Paul was wagging his finger at Narses. “They will think a demon has possessed you.”
“Hey, you said we’re in an impossible situation. I’m just trying to help. Don’t kill the messenger.”
“The immortals,” Paul said, shooting his bright blue eyes back and forth, and speaking yet again in his ironic tone. “Have you forgotten about them?”
Narses forced himself to laugh. He had no idea what Paul meant.
“Of course not,” Narses said.
“They await us in the imperial palace,” Paul said. “They are training now. They will soon be ready for their first test in battle. Perhaps we should join them. There are other projects, too, which His Majesty the Emperor is undertaking—a new method of bombardment which sounds oddly similar to what you have mentioned here.”
“Right, of course.” Narses said nodded along, feigning knowledge.
“But these are unprecedented times, as you must be aware, Domestikos. Nothing is unusual, after all, about a general or a disinherited prince leading a rebellion. But for the provincials to rise en masse all at once—that is most unprecedented. And unprecedented disasters require unprecedented means of amelioration.”
“Totally,” Narses said.
“We must return to the City,” Paul said. “We have been fighting mere villagers here in Troas. Even now the criminals lurk elsewhere in Romanía, and if we do not hurry they will make common cause with our enemies and destroy us.”
“But we were having such a good time,” Narses said. “I was hoping we could keep going tomorrow…”
“We cannot, Domestikos,” Paul said. “We have work to do.”
Because Narses still felt a little unsure of himself in this place, he took Paul’s advice. Following breakfast the next morning, Narses ordered the herald to assemble the tagma. After three trumpet blasts, the four hundred Hikanatoi rose from around their campfires and stood at attention just outside the camp ditch to listen to their general, who began by saluting them.
Then, while pacing in front of his horsemen and heavy infantry, gesturing and shouting like a second Demosthenes, Narses—to his surprise—felt at home. The words flowed from his mouth without any preparation, all at the right speed and with the correct tone as well as all the proper questions and strategic pauses. He was a Professional Charismatic, after all. Even as he met his men’s eyes, he remembered their names and ranks as well as details about their personal lives—the families they had left behind in their homelands, their specific strengths and weaknesses and successes and failures. The soldiers, their officers, and Narses himself had been living, fighting, and dying together for months, ever since the emperor had ordered Princess Herakleia’s capture after hearing from his spy network that she was back in Romanía.
Speechmaking came to Narses naturally. His love for his men was like a father for his children. At the same time, nothing could be more glorious than dying in battle for the emperor. Nothing would make him prouder than to see each of his boys dying a beautiful death.
Narses declared their mission in Troas accomplished, and announced that the Hikanatoi Tagma would be returning to the City. The men cheered.
“We have taught the traitors a lesson they shall never forget!” Narses shouted as he walked among his assembled men. “That is to say—they would never forget, if any of them were still alive!”
His men threw their heads back and roared with laughter.
“Make no mistake,” Narses continued, paraphrasing much of what Paul the Chain had told him before. “Rome is in danger. Pagans to the east and west threaten our borders—and what is a strong nation without strong borders? Within our borders, too, many criminals are making common cause with outside powers and betraying us. The time has come to regroup with our brothers-in-arms in the capital, to march out at the head of a glorious army such as the world has not seen in ages upon ages, and take back what belongs to us! Only together can we make Rome as magnificent as she once was! We must secure the existence of our people and a future for our children unto the thousandth generation! All this chaos and law-breaking must end! We must return to normalcy—the normalcy of empire!”
The men cheered. Their eyes were wide. They were waving their swords or beating them against their shields. Narses fed off their energy, shouting so loudly his throat hurt.
“We’ll drive the Bulgar shit-eaters back to that cold northern shithole they came from!” Narses cried. “We’ll force the Skythian blood-drinkers back to the steppe! We’ll send the Sarakenoi fleeing to their wretched desert wastelands with their circumcised dicks between their legs! The Germans—the Franks—the Longobards—we’ll drive every last one of them into hell! All the world shall be brought under the reign of one church, one emperor, one empire—as our Lord Jesus Christ always meant it to be! Rome is back, my brothers! We must restore Romanía’s greatness, and make the world strong—cultured—civilized—and Roman—now, and always!”
The men were shouting so wildly that they would have jumped off a cliff if he’d ordered them. Their duties for the day were more prosaic, however. Narses instructed his senior officers to break camp. Tribune Michael Rhangabe relayed Narses’s commands to the four kentarchs, each of whom commanded the four centuries which made up the tagma.
Everyone disassembled the tents and placed them in mule-drawn carts. Most of their possessions the men would have to carry on their own shoulders, however. Roman infantrymen were still nicknamed “donkeys” because they hauled so much. Each man had to bring a cape, armor, sword, shield, three throwing spears, a shovel, an axe, bags of food (ham, cheese, bread), a frying pan, a water canteen, sandals, a helmet, and undergarments. With all this equipment on his back, the typical Roman legionary would spend most days walking twenty miles at a brisk pace without stopping. They moved so quickly the baggage train and camp followers often had problems keeping up. Several hours before sunset they would halt, cut down the nearest trees to erect palisades—preferably on a hill surrounded by a field, or in an open space. If no trees were available, they would use their spears. Then they would dig a ditch around the palisades, set up their tents, and choose the night watch. For these reasons, Roman soldiers weren’t just soldiers—they were also construction workers, and would even build stone bridges and paved roads during peacetime.
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When the march began, Narses found that he loved every minute of it. He loved singing with the men—galloping back and forth along their ranks, urging them on, and even dismounting so he could walk alongside and talk with them beneath the golden eagles and the ringing standards. One older song they still sang in Latin, though almost everyone in Romanía spoke Greek now:
Eternal legion victorious!
Roma, O Roma!
Her strength is Anatolian, our duty to God!
Eternal legion victorious!
Roma, O Roma!
Flies the eagle of the legions above the land!
Eternal legion victorious!
Roma, O Roma!
Flies the eagle of the legions above the land!
They sang while the trumpets blasted and the drums pounded. Some men howled “Roma, O Roma!” in the background, while others called and responded “Eternal legion victorious!”
Narses couldn’t get enough of this song. It went perfectly with marching—with stomping the road. His heart soared; he felt unstoppable. All the world would bow to these men.
Seeds of the Dragon.
While Narses was absorbed in marching and singing and even encouraging the barbarian mercenaries to join the Romans, Paul the Chain took him aside and murmured that he was getting too intimate with the lower orders.
“Discipline will break down if you fail to maintain a proper distance,” Paul whispered. “Narcissistic Narses! Remember that you aren’t just in command of this tagma—you’re also the Supreme Commander of the entire army.”
Reluctantly Narses acquiesced to his advisor and climbed back on his horse. Nonetheless, the sight of such a disciplined column marching and singing on the road winding through farmland brought tears to his eyes. These men were his brothers. They were his tribe. That old cliché—that he would go to hell and back with his boys—proved true. Many also had wives and children waiting at home. They had been apart from their families since last winter’s furloughs. Their lives were in Narses’s hands. Again and again he told himself to fight for them, be true to them, and—paraphrasing Paul—maintain discipline. Romanía was nothing without it.
Quartering parties from the tagma’s Fourth Cavalry Company checked the road several stadia ahead, riding back and forth to their kentarch to spot potential ambushes, while the tetrarch in the rear guard kept an eye out for surprise attacks from enemy horsemen. Here the concern wasn’t the revolt so much as Skythioi, who had been penetrating so far into Romanía lately that they were sometimes spotted scouting the City itself from the Bosporos’s eastern shores.
As the tagma drew nearer to home, the road—now a paved two-lane highway crowded with horse-drawn carriages and mules—took them near larger cities. Each was more or less the same from a distance: clusters of red rooftops were supported by fluted pillars inside rectangular networks of streets, all bound by walls. Often domes and crosses topped the largest buildings; their gonging bells echoed across horizons and made chirping swifts storm the rooftops. Outside the city gates, mounds of refuse buzzed with flies, and tombs lined the nearby roads. Beyond lay endless rolling oceans of farmland.
At last they came to Chrysopolis—the Golden City—which faced the Bosporos. Despite its name, this place was run down. Its walls were broken and burnt, and many buildings inside were crumbling, with few under construction. Paul explained that Chrysopolis was difficult to defend and had been sacked several times in the last hundred years.
With a glint in his eye, Paul then looked at him as they rode together alongside the tagma. “Chrysopolis is not so fortunate as the holy city. Every now and then, all Skythia descends upon this place, kills or enslaves everyone, destroys everything. If it weren’t for the sea, Konstantinopolis would have been lost long ago, and you and me would be mining gold for a barbarian chief.”
Chrysopolis’s main gate was open, and the tagma marched through singing while its musicians played drums, pipes, and horns. The motley inhabitants either ignored them or stared. Few welcomed the soldiers.
“They don’t seem happy to see us,” Narses said to Paul.
“Taxes,” Paul whispered back. “The people are not overly fond of them. The army is rather expensive.”
“They should be proud to support us!” Narses said. “Don’t we keep them safe? How can the merchant trade or the scholar write without the soldier to guard him? Aren’t we all on the same team?”
Paul chuckled. “I suspect they see things rather differently, Domestikos.”
“If God didn’t want the emperor in Konstantinopolis, then he wouldn’t be in Konstantinopolis,” Narses said. “These people should be proud to pay taxes. Taxes help protect our—what do you call it—our sphere of influence!”
Paul kept quiet for once. Narses recalled how much everyone hated taxes in Maine. Yet now that taxes provided for his livelihood, his perspective had changed.
At the harbor the men embarked on an enormous galley called a dromon, which oared across the surging blue-green tides to Konstantinopolis as the wind puffed in the ship’s two vast triangular sails. Separate vessels brought the baggage and the horses, though Xanthos and the officers’ horses came aboard Narses’s ship.
It took half an hour of heaving and hoeing and drumming and singing for the rowers to get them across. Narses would have assumed that the sailors were slaves or convicts, but no one was whipping or beating them, they weren’t chained up, and they seemed healthy and content. Some even had knives or short swords strapped to their sides. He asked Paul if they were slaves, and Paul looked at him strangely, as if wondering why Narses was full of so many childish questions.
“It’s an honorable profession, Domestikos, rowing ships like this, particularly those in the imperial navy. It pays well, and the men know what they’re doing. It would be foolish to entrust lowly slaves with martial matters.”
“Then why did I think they were slaves?”
“I cannot tell you, Domestikos, I am not a mind-reader or an atsinganou fortune-teller. But slaves are disloyal and lazy, and do not work for God like good Romans. To tell you the truth, slavery is a complex institution. It’s human nature, sanctioned by God’s Word. And to oppose human nature is unbelief. Humans are imperfect beings. We always manage to mess things up sooner or later, so there is little point in trying to change anything.”
Narses nodded. “Alright.”
“Still, these days you mostly only encounter slaves in cities, in the homes of rich men, and in mines. Everyone else is a worker, a peasant, or someone making money directly from the state. Though I myself am a slave and belong to the emperor, I have money and slaves of my own, and enjoy far more privileges than many freemen…”
Narses nodded, though he was already getting bored and tuned out Paul the Chain’s droning lecture. Instead Narses watched the quicksilver seawater run along the flying oars, dripping into the Bosporos’s dark whirlpools. His eyes rose to the green shore, which in every direction was studded with white marble palaces and churches and red brick monasteries. All kinds of boats were plying the waves alongside the dromon, which Paul told him was named the Paralos, in honor of an ancient Athenian ship which had fought in the Peloponnesian War, whatever that was.
“It’s an unusually fast, well-made ship,” Paul added. “Though it has a large crew now, supposedly only a few men are needed to pilot it. As you can see, a number of horses can also come aboard, which is somewhat unique.”
The sight of the sea also reminded Narses of his past in Maine. Boucher had intended to get into lobstering as soon as he could drop out of high school—just like his fathers and grandfathers going back two hundred years. There was even Indian blood somewhere in his ancestry—that’s where he got his high cheekbones—so it was okay that they’d taken the land. Everybody said that ten or twenty years remained before climate change drove the lobsters north into Canada. He had good genes, so he could do anything. But if he could just get a lobster license, he could make mountains of money and pump it all into land, hotels, rentals, or stocks. It was hard to get that license—thousands of people were trying at the same time—but if you bought land on an outer unbridged island where almost nobody lived, you could jump to the head of the line. The state government had mandated this policy years ago to encourage people to live on those islands, but the policy ensured that anyone with the money to buy that land could become a licensed lobsterman with his own boat and crew. Most outer island landowners didn’t live on the outer islands, which meant that the price of that land increased while the population declined. Boucher’s family had the money; his parents and relatives lived in big roomy houses with all the amenities, including snowmobiles, ATVs, even miniature bulldozers. His dad only paid attention to him when they were hunting deer or watching sports. He didn’t attend Boucher’s football games, but once said: “don’t come home if you lose.” As for his mom, who only left the house to go on walks or check the post office, she had coddled him as a child, but after he started school she nagged him so much he did his best to avoid her.
He had never left Maine in his life. Now he was somewhere deep in the past, thousands of miles away on a Roman galley. It was his first time out of the country. Nobody he knew had ever gone to a place like this. They went on Caribbean cruises or they visited Canada, but they never went to Europe, Asia, or Africa. Shit was too weird over there. Everyone was either Muslim, gay, or Chinese. Only America-haters went to those kinds of places.
Something about the salt smell of the sea, the laughing gulls, the rushing waves and the wind whipping the sails, the way the men crossed themselves and wore solemn facial expressions whenever they spotted a church or a monastery—it stirred a longing in Narses’s bones, reminding him of Maine.
He belonged here. It was strange. Back in Maine, whenever anyone complained about anything, he would say things like: “Why don’t you move back to New York?” Only locals belonged in Maine. And yet he was now in Byzantium, a place he had never heard of.
Approaching the peninsula from the southwest, the striped walls encircling Konstantinopolis seemed to belong to an endless castle, complete with toothy battlements, huge thick towers, and even a lighthouse. Behind the walls were mountains of domes, arches, pillars, red tile rooftops, and golden statues gleaming so brightly in the sun his eyes watered. Green gardens were lined with cypresses chirping with swifts, and the gongs and bells grew so loud that the sound waves trembled in the water flowing past the dromon. It was evening, and the yellow and red and orange light from the setting sun was pouring over the thrashing waves as a nearby pod of gleaming dolphins tore through the surf. Then the chanting of thousands of monks transported him away, though at the same time his spirit was bound to the domes of the churches which were like no churches he had ever seen, the obelisks carved with hieroglyphics, the vast statues of emperors standing on pillars and gesturing to the sky. In Maine he had not been religious, but here his piety was at a Professional level (7/10).
They arrived at a place called an “arsenal”—the Kontoskalion—where more dromons in varying states of construction were lying in their berths, their ribs displayed like those of decaying whale carcasses. The sky was now a purple backdrop for a theater, the clouds were red curtains, and the workers were actors hammering planks into place, sawing wood, and talking together when the sailors of the Paralos brought the ship inside the harbor walls and moored it to one of the piers. Narses and Paul disembarked with the men, then bid them farewell and watched them light their torches and march along the main paved thoroughfare—called the Mese—to the distant land walls, their legs stomping to the beat of the drums. It would take half an hour to walk to the Golden Gate. Then they would continue along the Via Egnatia to the imperial garrison in the Hebdomon suburbs just a few stadia away, past one country mansion after another.
As for Narses and Paul, a squad of elite guards called excubitores guided them (and their slaves, horses, and baggage) through the mongrelized hordes in the city streets to the Great Palace, which was minutes away. Adjoining the Hippodrome, the Great Palace consisted of walls, gates, stairways, courtyards, and gardens, all decorated with statues of rearing lions, the vast complex sloping downward along gentle grass hills to a private harbor on the Sea of Marmara. Deeper inside the palace—or palaces, rather—were administrative offices, and farther still were the private apartments of the emperor, his family, and his closest supporters.
The excubitores handed Narses and Paul off to palace servants, who brought them to their separate suites. Other servants brought their horses to the imperial stables. Once Narses was inside his own set of rooms, his servants pulled off his armor and clothing, left to retrieve food, and filled the bathtub in the bathroom with steaming hot water. Strange booms sounded in the distance. The evening was cloudless, but Narses paid little attention to the sound. Somewhere in the palace precincts, a pet lion roared, and a peacock cried.
I was wrong to want to stay out there.
He relaxed after his long day of marching. A pair of slave girls—whose names, he had learned, were Euphrosyne and Simonis—massaged his back.
You were right, Paul, and I was wrong.