They walked past the overseers, who only took their eyes off the stevedores to note the arriving merchandise in their wax tablets. Nearby, Roman officials were also checking the ships’ cargo manifests—written on paper and stamped by officials in Chrysopolis or Chalkedon just across the Marmara Sea. A few guards were present, but they paid little attention to the fugitives, who averted their faces.
“Let’s keep our distance,” Gontran murmured. “Without appearing like we want to keep our distance.”
They can’t know exactly what we look like, Alexios thought. But they must be watching for people like us. Four men, five horses. An old monk. A young farmhand. A Frank. An Aethiop.
Deeper inside the City, Alexios found statues and columns everywhere, some staggering in size, many cracked or crumbling from earthquakes which might have taken place centuries ago. Sprawling mansions with marble colonnades and enormous courtyards with gardens and flowers and fountains were built alongside towering tinderbox tenements which leaned over the straight paved roads. These were packed with seas of people whose heads rose and fell like ocean waves. Horses, donkeys, and oxen pulled creaking carriages bound for the markets. Even the occasional sedan chair could be seen flying on the shoulders of slaves. All kinds of other people were in the streets, too. The most common were Greeks in their colorful robes; the richer ones had sown precious stones straight into the golden hems. Alexios spotted one powdered matron covered in emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds; she glimmered like lightning as she fanned herself on her palanquin. At the same time, beggars sat in the streets, keeping their heads low, raising their cupped hands to passersby.
Are those gypsies? Alexios thought. I mean…Roma? That’s what I’m supposed to call them, isn’t it?
Dionysios gave the beggars most of his remaining coins. They thanked him.
“Live and learn.” He met Alexios’s gaze as they walked away. “The dialectic of the individual versus society. The particular versus the universal. Both are bound together and define each other. You can’t just focus on one to the exclusion of the other.”
“You should just let them starve,” Alexios said. “It’ll strengthen the species. Or something like that, I guess.”
Dionysios laughed. “Don’t give me that Nietzschean Social Darwinist eugenicist bullshit.”
Alexios was too overwhelmed by all the different people here to answer. The robes of saffron and Tyrian purple and all the different languages made him feel like a country bumpkin. Many young men here were wearing either green or blue and walking together in fearsome groups and glaring at each other, almost like they were gangs. Greens would occupy the corners of one street while Blues occupied another; the two colors always kept apart. Dionysios explained that these were the City’s demoi—sort of like a combination of political parties, mafiosos, cops, and soccer hooligans. They were always fighting and killing each other, though they were their rowdiest at the Hippodrome, where even from a distance Alexios heard ringing bells, roaring crowds, galloping horses, and thundering chariot wheels.
“Whom do the demoi serve?” Dionysios jarred Alexios from his reverie. “Whom do they protect? The rich and powerful. Property. Their job is basically keeping immigrants, slaves, poor folk, and women and children in line. They also extort as much protection money as possible out of whoever can pay. Then they kick some of that up to the government. Everything’s about patronage here. As political parties, they channel people’s anger away from the ruling class.”
The old monk also pointed out—when their backs were turned—a few Bulgars dressed in traditional red and white Carpathian tunics.
“The demoi love to fuck with the Bulgars,” Dionysios said. “And they hate the Turks, too. Whichever group seems to threaten Romanía the most at any given time—that’s the group that has to worry about pogroms. Some foreigners try to wear Roman clothing and blend in, especially if they’ve been here a few generations—they effectively become Romans—but others who are a little more radical and maybe more connected to their people dress in their own native style because maybe sometimes they want to fight.”
He indicated some nearby Turkish women, who wore tall conical headdresses with flowing red capes. A group of Persians striding nearby wore enormous puffy colorful flowing pants, which Romans considered barbaric. Slavs also wore pants that were a little tighter, and combined these with white tunics and—for the men—blond bowl cuts which looked like they had been chopped off with an ax. Western merchants, called “Latins” here, dressed in tights whose bright patterns clashed with those of their tunics. Religious pilgrims wore practical gray kaftans, their supply packs slung over their backs, with bast shoes, like 19th century Russian peasants. Many Armenians were also present, and Diaresso murmured complaints about them for some reason. Most Jews, in contrast, dressed like Greeks, except some wore a yellow hat which resembled a lampshade.
“Jews have been living here a long ass fucking time, almost longer than anyone,” Dionysios said.
There were Aethiops, too. Diaresso was far from the only Afrikan in the city; several beautiful Aethiopian women nodded to him as he passed.
As soon as Alexios looked away from this, he stepped around a handful of Seran men in silk gowns with sleeves so wide they drooped to their knees. Arab men favored enormous white robes which covered almost their entire bodies. At that moment, in fact, men standing atop pillars at the Sarakenoi Temple were blasting the sonorous call to prayer in Arabic through speaking trumpets.
“But,” Alexios began, “I thought—”
“Yeah, you thought wrong,” Dionysios said. “This is a city, The City, one of the biggest in the fucking world—if not the biggest. In big cities you find all kinds of cool fucking shit. All kinds of different people live with each other in important places like this—and not just here, but across the whole planet. The Romans are a little more easygoing inside the city walls. It’s just, like, outside the city walls—that’s where they really like to fuck with everyone. And then as soon as people out there start pushing back, the people in here are like: ‘Oh my god, we’re so innocent, how could you possibly do this to us?’”
“It’s hard to think that these are the people who are sending out the soldiers who killed my aunt and uncle,” Alexios said.
“I know what you mean. They can be polite to your face, but real fucking shitheads when you get into their politics. Just remember, though, it’s the ruling class that’s sending out those armies. Regular Romans, for the most part, are just interested in getting through their day and maybe having a little fun, if they can. Mostly they don’t give a fuck about destroying other places or raping and pillaging. Materially they do benefit, however. They get a few crumbs from the table.”
“Damn,” Alexios said. “That sounds familiar.”
“At the same time,” Dionysios continued, “Rome is surrounded by all kinds of dangerous enemies—east, west, north, south, everywhere. The Bulgars, the Turks, the Patzinaks, the Persians, and the Arabs are under all kinds of pressure, too. Sometimes people start stirring up shit way the fuck out there in Skythia, and that sends waves of destruction cascading all the way down to the City’s walls, right here. Sometimes entire nations of people have to get up and move—tens, hundreds of thousands of people. That means the barbarians living around here have to get the fuck out and find new places to live—which means killing whoever gets in their way, since pretty much the whole damn world is already taken.”
“Shit’s fucked,” Alexios said.
Gontran looked at him. “You said it.”
Alexios had barely noticed Gontran. Thanks to his stealth skills, he blended in with the masses. Yet he had been eavesdropping on Alexios’s conversation with Dionysios.
After asking around, the fugitives found their way to the First Hill—just a few minutes’ walking distance from the harbor—where many of the City’s inns were located. These were marked with signs displaying painted carvings of beds. But since the fugitives were almost broke by now, they went to the horse market and sold their extra horse for eleven golden nomismas, an excellent price thanks to Gontran and Diaresso’s haggling skills. This gave them the money they needed to stable their other four horses and to eat and sleep in one of the inns. Diaresso and Gontran took almost all the rest as payment for bringing Alexios and Dionysios here in the first place.
“Do not forget how much you owe us,” Diaresso said.
“Believe me, I know,” Dionysios said. “Just don’t you forget that we still need your help rescuing Herakleia. It’s gonna be quite the operation, and we’re gonna need all hands on deck.”
“Whatever that means,” Diaresso said.
They ate the usual Greek fare in a tavern attached to the inn. It was quiet at this time of day since they had arrived between breakfast and lunch. Their table was more sophisticated than in the countryside. It had a white linen tablecloth with identical napkins, white glazed ceramic plates and bowls decorated with blue geometric patterns, as well as knives, forks, and spoons. The forks, it should be said, were more like carving forks, while the spoon stems were long and elegant, descending into ovular scoops.
After wolfing down their meal and groaning with the joy of hot food, they climbed the wooden stairway—another unusual sight—and staggered into their room. There they found four beautiful beds, one against each wall, all made of wood and covered with blankets. Still clothed and wearing their laced sandals, each man fell into a bed and passed out.
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It was night when Alexios woke up. After taking a moment to recall where he was, he climbed out of bed—feeling sore from riding horses and sleeping in the woods for two days—and staggered to the window overlooking the street. For a few minutes he leaned out and stared at all the different people passing by. Hundreds were still walking back and forth. What time was it? For a moment he was troubled by the fact that he had come from a world where people counted time in units called minutes, seconds, even milliseconds, nanoseconds, and picoseconds, these last few so quick you would never notice them without powerful machines whose inner workings were beyond almost everyone’s understanding. Here in Romanía, however, it was enough to say that several hours had passed since sundown.
Above the rooftops shone a million stars. No one here knew they were suns. What did people in this time think they were? Candles? Holes in the glass of the final heavenly sphere, through which the empyrean blazed? Maybe they didn’t think about the stars. But how could they miss them, shining like this in the night? They astounded Alexios. Even in Maine they never shone like this. Too much pollution came from all the cruise ships, tourist cars, and creepy biomedical labs run by eugenicist pharmaceutical investors.
The wide street below was dimly lit by olive oil lamps hung in front of most doorways. The lamp light rendered into shadows the people and horses walking by.
History weighed upon this place. The City was old. For centuries, maybe even millennia, countless people had lived here, calling it different names as it took new forms, expanding and contracting, altering its character so radically that it repeatedly became unrecognizable. He was sure that someone from his past life with the odd name of Jackson could have told him more thanks to his unusual habit of locking himself out of something distracting called the internet and reading other distracting things called books, but now Alexios had no idea where this Jackson was.
These disturbing thoughts struggled into Alexios’s consciousness and were then forced back down into the great, gaping void they had come from.
The shadows walking beneath the window were almost the ghosts of all those millions who had come here before. A sort of slumber seemed to be trying to pull the buildings down. Even the straight geometric churches—with the huge golden mosaics of Christ glowing above the doors—wanted to collapse so they could sleep forever inside the Earth. Invisible flames from the future covered everything.
It left Alexios feeling confused. The City looked permanent—the Land and Sea Walls were centuries old and had never been breached—but it was all tumbling into a distant abyss.
Everything would change.
“Konstantinopolis,” he whispered. “Eis ten Polin. ‘In The City.’”
“Nice, ain’t it?” Dionysios leaned in beside him. “Let’s get some grub. It’s way past dinner time. Then we can get drunk, go back to sleep, rescue Herakleia early in the morning maybe, get the fuck out of here, find the uprising, and stir shit up in the countryside.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Dionysios kicked Gontran and Diaresso and told them to wake up. Alexios tried to stop him, but Dionysios whispered that he needed the mercenaries so they could pay for the meal. Swearing at Dionysios, the two partners rose and stumbled through the door and down the stairs and to one of the tables, half-asleep until dinner arrived. This consisted of a mountain of crisp steaming bread straight from the oven, the usual salad of feta cheese and olives and onions and cabbage drenched in vinegar, an entire stuffed goose covered in vibrant spices, and a river of Kretan wine.
“Bismillah,” Diaresso said, just before he started eating.
“Did I order this?” Gontran said.
Nobody answered. The other three fugitives were too busy slicing off pieces of goose and piling them onto their plates. After gobbling down a few bites each, they filled their goblets with wine from a clay amphora, then clinked them together.
Dionysios said: “To Konstantinopolis.” The others echoed his toast.
“May she never fall,” he added.
“May God forgive me for imbibing that which is haram,” Diaresso said, drinking his wine.
“That reminds me,” Alexios said. “It’s hard to explain. Just a minute ago I was feeling like in the future, this place will be different. All of this will be gone. I mean, of course things will change, but they won't even speak Greek here anymore. They'll speak something else. A different language.”
“Already many different kinds of Turks dwell in this metropolis,” Diaresso said. “There are Bulgars and Seljuks. The Greeks call them Skythioi, Turkoi, Persioi, or Sarakenoi. Often they cannot tell the one from the other.”
“No,” Alexios said. “I mean, like, almost everyone here will speak that language—Turkish, is it called? Almost all the Greeks will be gone.”
“Oh,” Diaresso said. “That is quite different.”
“She’s got a little while left before the Crusaders get here and burn the whole fucking place to the ground,” Dionysios said. “Whatever doesn’t burn they’ll steal and bring back west. The Ottomans will finally take it a few hundred years later. Then it’ll just grow and grow way beyond the walls…”
“What is this nonsense you speak of?” Diaresso said. “How can you know such things? Are you a prophet?”
Dionysios’s cheeks had already turned red, though he’d only sipped one cup of wine. He turned to Alexios. “Oh yeah—I almost forgot. If you don’t keep reminding yourself of where you came from, you’re going to forget. You’ll become Alexios, and you’ll stop remembering the future. You’ll stop remembering who you were before.”
“Before what?” Alexios said.
Dionysios rolled his eyes. “Jesus, before you got here!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t remember the high school? The year 2022? You told me all about that shit only a few days ago, back at my place!”
Alexios narrowed his eyes. “Dimly. It feels like a dream. There’s just a few blurry images. I feel like I was hardly even a full person, you know? I was just a shadow of who I am now. I was just a regular guy…but now it’s like I’m the hero of this whole epic adventure…”
“He’s just an old man talking nonsense.” Gontran indicated Dionysios. “Pay him no mind.”
“So you don’t remember either?” Dionysios said to Gontran. “Is the game absorbing you, too? It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen it happen. There’s a lot of other people around here who don’t remember where they came from. Some of them might even be in this tavern with us right now. This place, you know, it pulls you right in. The mind tries to get used to it. Nobody wants to be reminded of the outside world. It’s how you cope. People forget they’re in a game, and they stop hearing the game voice.”
“About that,” Alexios said. “What is the game voice?”
“Hell if I know,” Dionysios said. “Far as I can tell, it just wants to keep the action moving. Sometimes when I chill out a little too much it tells me I need to start doing stuff again. You can’t ever satisfy it, either. It’s always there nagging you, and then sometimes it even makes fun of you when you can’t achieve the impossible goals it sets out. But sometimes people forget so hard they stop hearing it. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s too painful to remember that anything was ever different. So you sort of become who you are, if that makes sense. Knowing about the farr helps. It makes you see deeper into things.”
“The farr,” Gontran said. “Not to be confused with the close.”
Everyone stared at him.
“Or the distant,” Gontran said. “The not-so-far-away. The just-over-that-hill-over-there.”
The staring continued.
“The nearby,” Gontran said. “The around-the-corner—”
“Enough!” Dionysios said.
“Alright, not funny,” Gontran said. “Can someone explain what the farr is?”
“Magical fucking shit,” Dionysios said. “It lets you do all kinds of cool things, like backflips, flying, deflecting arrows with your sword, you name it.”
“So basically acrobatics?” Gontran said.
“It goes way beyond that,” Dionysios said. “You can also read people’s minds, see the future or the past—”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Gontran said. “That’s why you’re so rich, right? You can see into the future?”
“Did you ever think maybe that knowing all this shit means that I don’t give a fuck about being rich?” Dionysios said.
“Everybody cares about being rich,” Gontran said.
“Stop projecting,” Dionysios said. “Not everyone here is a bourgeois piece of shit.”
“What are you even talking about?” Gontran said. “Bourgeois? You mean like someone who lives in a town? I come from the countryside!”
“Yeah, but your heart’s in making money, and to do that, you gotta live in town, at least in this day and age,” Dionysios said. “Nobody makes money alone. You need to get a lot of people to make it for you.”
“None of this makes sense to my ears,” Diaresso said. “Perhaps we should discuss our next moves.”
“Always the one with his feet on the ground.” Dionysios was slurring now as he drank his next cup of wine. “I respect that. But to answer your question, my good mister Diaresso. It’s simple. Break into the palace. Rescue Herakleia. Escape the city. Fucking easy ass shit.”
“Keep your voice down.” Gontran eyed the other people eating in the tavern. Travelers from all over the world were here—including several Latins in tights and multicolored patchwork tunics speaking nasally Venetian. They could have been spies.
“This is what we’ll do.” Dionysios was speaking at almost the same volume as before. “Alexios and I will go inside and find her. We’ll handle the guards. It’ll be a good learning experience for this kid.” He rubbed Alexios’s hair. “Maybe we’ll sneak in or something. I don’t know. Once we find her, we’ll bring her out. You two will have the horses ready. We’ll all get on the horses and ride out of the city.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have sold that last horse,” Alexios said.
“It was necessary to pay us, you forget,” Diaresso said. He turned to Dionysios. “Now tell us, grandfather, where will we go after this rescue?”
“The uprisings are mostly in Anatolia, aren’t they?” Alexios said.
Dionysios nodded. “That’s where most of the people are. It’s too dangerous in Thrace, you know, to the west, outside the land walls. And even in the east it’s getting pretty dicey nowadays.”
“Tell me about it,” Gontran said.
“That’s why it’s so crowded here,” Dionysios continued. “This is like, the one city on Earth that’s never fallen in a siege. All the people fleeing the Turks in the east and the Bulgars in the west are coming to live here.”
“Can you even fight, boy?” Diaresso said to Alexios. “Will all of us die for your youthful incompetence?”
“I’ll teach him a little before we go.” Dionysios hugged Alexios close. “Don’t even fucking worry about it.”
“Who’s worried?” Gontran said.
“We should already charge you extra for all the danger you’ve put us in,” Diaresso said. “When we met, you never mentioned that the Romans were looking for you.”
“I only suspected it at the time,” Dionysios said. “They’ve gotten a lot better organized lately. It must be the new guy at the top, the new Emperor—he means business. But you live and learn.”
“For now,” Diaresso said.