Things were going poorly for Herakleia. After that first day in the palace with the sympathetic Frankish slave girl Clotilda, the emperor had stormed into the apartment and demanded to know—again—where the “mob” was hiding and what kind of strength they possessed and where the manual was. Herakleia repeated that she knew nothing. Emperor Nikephoros then reiterated his earlier offer: her son, if she gave birth to one, would inherit the throne. But when Herakleia repeated that she was incapable of answering the emperor’s questions, his smile vanished. He removed a golden ring around her finger—its embossed chi-rho signified her royal status—and then gestured to his guards. They chained her wrists and ankles and brought her down several flights of stairs into a dripping, lightless dungeon beneath the palace foundations. There, one last time, the emperor spoke with her.
“We don’t have time for this,” Nikephoros growled. “Tell us where—”
“I would tell you if I knew!” Herakleia screamed. “I swear to God I have no idea!”
With a grimace, Nikephoros stepped away from the locked door. Together, he and his two Varangian guards walked back up the stairs, bringing their torches. After a door clanged shut, Herakleia was plunged into darkness. It was also hard to sit because the floor was wet and uneven and reeked of filth.
Herakleia stayed there for who could even say how long. Exhaustion forced her to lie on the bricks poking out of the muck on the floor. Hunger pangs came, drove her wild, faded, and then returned. Rats squealed in the darkness. When they crept near her body, she screamed and kicked them away. Then, after they had left her alone, she groaned from the misery of this place, and sometimes cried. What had she done to deserve this? At some point they would put out her eyes with a burning sword. The voice warned that her health was failing.
Sometimes sounds from above the palace foundations shook the bricks. Sandals skittered along floors and voices murmured. The entire world outside her prison was continuing without her.
So much time passed that Herakleia feared she would forget who she was. Already it was hard to recall the world before the game. Had her name been Jackson? Darius Jackson. He had been one of three Black kids going to a Maine high school.
I don’t even belong here, he thought. There’s only two skin colors in games: white, and political. Just like there’s only two genders: male, and political. And two sexual orientations: cis, and political. People get addicted to imaginary fantasies because the real material world is encroaching upon them. When they’re inside these fantasies, they don’t like to wake up.
His parents were Jamaican, and they ran a small restaurant in Eden Harbor called Everyday Bob’s. They did all the work, but they didn’t own it. The owner was a white lady on semi-permanent vacation in Pensacola. Bobbi—that was her name—only came to Maine in the summer when Florida got too hot. Except for checking the books to make sure that her workers weren’t stealing from her, Bobbi stayed out of the way, which was the best you could hope for with business owners, but she was still living off his parents. It sucked, but they said there was nothing they could do.
Jackson wanted to go back and help them. He had been gone for days. What if he was actually still back in that classroom, staring at the game board in a trance or something? His parents, the teachers, doctors, half the school could be in the classroom right now, begging him to come home. But he was trapped in this place. Imprisoned within a prison within a prison—inside the game, the palace, and then the dungeon.
As for Herakleia, she was a blank. Her memories sometimes tumbled inside Jackson’s mind like clothes in a dryer. He remembered a woman—Herakleia’s mother Prokopia—weighed down by a robe that was so studded with emeralds and rubies that it was almost like body armor. She wore these clothes once a year. In Herakleia’s memory this woman was marching through a massive gold and black marble church where hundreds of priests and monks—dressed in glimmering silk robes covered with pearls and embroidered with Greek letters and images of Jesus—chanted sacred hymns, and where the incense was so thick you could barely see anything but the shadows of the people in attendance. Walls covered with mosaics rose upward, arcing into darkness pierced by bars of sun which stabbed down from windows in the great domes. Bells were clanging and wood was rattling and young Herakleia was coughing and crying and covering her ears and having trouble breathing from all the myrrh and frankincense choking the air. Because she was ruining the procession, Prokopia ordered a servant to take her outside. After recovering, she was allowed to play in the gardens while the interior of the colossal edifice ululated with Byzantine chants.
Jackson also remembered Herakleia’s education in the palace gynaeceum at the hands of interchangeable black-bearded priests. Aside from rhetoric and geometry, they taught her to memorize the catechism and caned her if she forgot even a syllable. Though Jackson had never been to church, he could recite the catechism from Herakleia’s memory: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages. Light of light; true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father…”
It sounded just like the Pledge of Allegiance. Those religious weirdoes back in the 1950s forced kids to recite the catechism, just with “the flag” instead of “God.”
Herakleia shook her head, laughing at how ridiculous it was. Romanía might have been a hard place to live in, but at least people admitted that they were talking about God and religion when they were talking about God and religion. Back in the old world, few people would admit they were doing the same when they said the pledge. He always refused to stand for it, which drove his teachers crazy.
Jackson read all the time, but he’d been a poor student—acting out, being forced into meetings with Vice Principal Ross. At these meetings his mom begged him to do what the school wanted, and he agreed that he would—only for her. He got in a lot of trouble once—the white administrators threatened to call the police on a Black kid—when he said he wanted to burn it all down. He didn’t mean it literally. They hadn’t believed that he’d gone to high school in Jamaica—maybe they thought Jamaica didn’t even have high schools—and they’d given his mom trouble about transferring his credits. When she offered to give Vice Principal Ross his Jamaican high school’s phone number, Ross asked if they could even communicate. She punctuated their entire conversation with the question: “Do you understand?”
Another time he’d gotten in trouble for lying on the floor of his classroom and refusing to get up. They wanted him to obey, to jump through their million hoops, and they were even hinting that he should take medication for depression, but he refused.
Zoning out in his classes, he dreamt all the time of raising his right fist, punching through the ceiling, and shooting into the sky like Superman. More than anything he wanted to escape Hellworld. That was why he gravitated toward the big beards. All his life, he’d wanted to join a revolution. Now he was here, alone with his thoughts in an oubliette, a word he never thought he’d use, much less experience, dwelling on how God was a dude but also God, and how this dude-God had sacrificed himself to himself in order to redeem humanity—or something. Then came a third part, the Holy Spirit, and who knew what that guy—if it or he was a guy—did. But people around here took religion seriously. They thought differently from modern people, probably because they earned their bread differently. In Maine, you got your food at the supermarket. In Byzantium, you mostly grew it yourself. That made a different kind of person.
The catechism also reminded her of Romanía’s constant religious infighting. Along with the other educated classes, Herakleia lived and breathed these obscure disputes, but Jackson would have fallen asleep if anyone had tried to explain that these arguments mattered. (“The three persons are united in one Godhead, you foolish girl!” one teacher had said in the palace gynaeceum, as though it was obvious that three different entities could also be one.) These disputes were one reason they had lost half of Rome to the Sarakenoi, who insisted that God is One.
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Since time out of mind Egypt had been a hotbed of religious fanaticism, philosophy, and science. For centuries Alexandria’s Great Library had been attracting people who thought too much for their own good, pouring over the papyrus scrolls stuffed in its alcoves. The primitive science of alchemy itself was said to have been created there by Thoth, the writing god—a man with an ibis head—known to mystical weirdoes and experimenters as Hermes Trismegistos. Way back when, a Greek Egyptian named Eratosthenes had calculated the Earth’s size using simple geometry. A Greek Egyptian engineer named Hero had designed a steam engine. A Greek Egyptian astronomer named Ptolemy had determined that the Earth was the center of the universe—which made sense in a world without telescopes.
Herakleia thought all about this because she was an Educated Master. It was hard to stop herself from thinking in a place like a dungeon where this was her only escape. Sometimes she thought so much that taking action was difficult. Everyone called her an idealist, like her father. They said she was out of touch and too extreme.
Applying the Ancient Greek obsession with science and logic to religion is where the problems started in Egypt. After Emperor Theodosios the Great had made Christianity the state religion for all Rome, people had been arguing about the nature of Christ nonstop, and doing so especially hard in places like Egypt. People would scream at each other for hours over religious differences, quoting endless Biblical passages from memory to justify their positions, though all of these arguments—just like arguments from Jackson’s world—were window dressing for economic contradictions.
The Patriarch at Konstantinopolis was extracting too much money and exerting too much control over faraway churches in Egypt and Mesopotamia—threatening their leaders with death, torture, civil war, and excommunication if they failed to follow along. So when the Sarakenoi stormed out of Arabia—right after the cataclysmic war between the Romans and the Persians—and told people they could believe whatever they wanted as long as they paid a special tax—one much lower than what the Romans wanted—a lot of people went for it.
Half of Romanía was lost in a historical instant. The grain ships from Egypt stopped coming to Konstantinopolis, and this doubled, tripled, quadrupled the price of bread, all while wages stagnated. Then the Sarakenoi armies overwhelmed Rome’s exhausted legions and marched on Konstantinopolis. Their heathen armada besieged it, and was only driven back by blazing Greek fire—naphtha—what Jackson recognized as something like napalm. Roman war galleys spewed blinding liquid flames from wooden spouts which had been carved to resemble dragons, and the flames whirled atop the sea like a curtain of death that enwrapped dozens of ships and cooked countless shrieking sailors alive. Charred corpses were washing up on the shores of the Propontis for months. Everyone said they had seen angels fighting alongside the legionaries.
Though the Sarakenoi were pushed back, their armies marched beyond the boundaries of the known world. In the west they surged across the Exarchate of Afrika all the way to the Pyrenees at Gallía’s edge. To the east they overran Persian fire-worshippers and Indian gymnosophists, even battling the Seres in a faraway country of green hills and mountains called Ferghana. Some said the Sarakenoi capitals of Baghdad and Cordoba were finer than Konstantinopolis; others maintained that the Sarakenoi were mindless automatōns who did whatever their lying leaders told them, that all their ideas were just bastardizations of the One True Faith, and that their supposed wealth was built on the slavery of good Christians. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Sarakenoi were conquering the world while Rome was left behind, just as Herakleia was left behind in this dungeon. Rome had displeased God, as had Herakleia.
So far as she was aware, only Nikephoros and a few servants knew she was imprisoned. Was the serving girl Clotilda a spy? No one in the palace could be trusted. The stakes of endless intrigue were high, but people also schemed out of boredom. You could only pray, gorge yourself at banquets, and engage in orgies so much.
A door clanged open somewhere, startling her. A torch floated down in the darkness. Hands seized her and carried her upstairs and along bright hallways until she was thrown onto a hard cool smooth floor and half-blinded by sunlight. As her eyes adjusted, she made out a mosaic beneath her; it was Hercules battling the Hydra. Her entire body was covered in greenish filth. Trembling, she tried to look at the vague shapes surrounding her. She could see the mosaic, but not these people. Was she losing her sight?
“Give us the manual!” a familiar voice growled. “Tell us where the criminals are!”
All I ever tell him is the truth, Herakleia thought. Maybe I should just lie. But I don’t even know the names of any of the places here!
“Bithynia,” she blurted. It was the first place name which came to her. “They’re in Bithynia.”
The men around her laughed.
“Across the Bosporos?” Nikephoros exclaimed. “Do you take us for fools? Back to the dungeon!”
“No!” she screamed. “Please, I swear I don’t know!”
The men’s hands hauled her along the hallway, down the stairs, and into the hole. When they left her in the darkness, she began to cry again.
Some time later Herakleia opened her eyes. She was tied to a table in a different room. It was walled with stone, dark, windowless, and lit by torches set in the walls. The floor was wooden and sprinkled with sand. She gasped with fright.
“Hello,” a strange voice said.
A head was hovering above her. It was that pale, hairless creep from the legionary tent all the way back in the countryside. Another table beside him was covered with knives, surgical instruments, jars, and whips.
“Do you remember me?” the man said, his eyes darting about. “My name is Paul Katena, if you've forgotten. We've actually met a number of times, your highness, though you never expressed the slightest interest in me. Who can say why? I’m an interesting man, am I not?”
Herakleia looked away.
“It seems that the emperor,” Paul continued, “in his magnanimousness, believed that it was enough to lock you up in your apartments, and then in the dungeon—in order to help you. But this has not proven to be the case. Now, we have so much to do, and so little time. History moves with or without us. Because of your loyalty to the traitors—which is commendable in its own way—you have refused to divulge the information we need to bring the revolt to a swift conclusion and save as many lives as possible—”
“I told you,” Herakleia said. “I—”
“Yes, yes, we know, we've heard you deny our accusations often enough. Sadly, the time for mercy has passed, your highness.”
“I would tell you if I knew,” she said. “Please let me go.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Whether you choose to tell us the truth or not, you are to be corrected for betraying all that is good and noble in the world. Should you survive these procedures, the emperor, in his infinite wisdom—for the man is halfway to God, after all, and is backed by the Senate and People of Rome—he has declared that you are to spend the rest of your life spinning wool in the Monastery of Stoudios. With a little effort there, you might be able to atone for your sins.”
“My sins?” Herakleia said.
“We’re all sinners, every one of us. Only God can judge. But He is merciful.”
Paul picked up a knife from the table and held the blade inside the flames of one of the torches. Then he pressed the blade to her bare shoulder. The flesh sizzled, and she screamed and writhed in a vain effort to push him away and protect herself. Paul withdrew the blade as the voice warned that her health was low.
“You have lost your mind,” Paul said. “We don’t know how else to help you. You won’t listen to reason. You’re really so stubborn, your highness. All we want is for you to be happy and well-adjusted again.”
He waited for a moment, since the wait itself—the expectation—was unbearable. Then he pressed the blade to her other shoulder for much longer this time. She screamed so much that the voice seemed to belong to someone else. Her own flesh was cooking.
He withdrew the blade. Then, smiling at her, he rubbed her hair with his hand, like she was his pet.
Health is down to 15/100, the voice said.
Only a few more minutes, she thought. Only have to hang on a little longer.
“You’re doing so well, your highness,” he said. “You’re doing really quite well.”