After landing at the quay, the fugitives and their guides ascended into the walled portion of Trebizond. There were three sections: a Lower Town by the sea walls, an Upper Town in the center, and a citadel at the rear. Each of these three sections was divided from the others by a wall. The Lower Town was crisscrossed by six streets, the Upper Town by only two (one running north-south, the other east-west), but all of these were crowded with walled mansions. In the Upper Town the fugitives passed the Panagia Chrysokephalos, the All Holy Gold-Headed Mother of God, a sturdy brick church of domes and slanting orange tile rooftops, large enough for a few hundred parishioners, and attached to a monastery. Here priests, nuns, and monks were handing out food to children, mothers, grandfathers, and grandmothers. These people packed the city. Those not standing or sitting slept on the ground or in the doorways of the walled mansions. Those who were awake turned to Herakleia and bowed, crossing themselves and murmuring prayers for her long life. The doux ignored them and proceeded onward, but Herakleia returned their bows and was even walking toward the church when the doux pulled her by the wrist to the citadel that loomed over the Upper Town. Herakleia tried to shake her wrist loose, but the doux whispered something, and she surrendered, though she kept looking at the masses of the poor. Some workers asked if she needed help; she told them she was alright. Alexios, Gontran, Diaresso, and the royal retinue followed.
Continuing upward, they reached a double gate which led inside the citadel built into the southern limit of the walls. Here the doux’s attendants brought the four fugitives to the ducal bathhouse attached to the citadel. While they washed their bodies with glorious hot water and soap inside gender-segregated chambers, their dirty clothes were replaced with silk garments embroidered in gold with the usual patterns: crosses, chi-rhos, and double-headed eagles. Once the fugitives had finished changing, Herakleia was taken to a makeup room while her three companions rested in private chambers on soft beds with fur blankets.
This last sight reminded Alexios of his old life. Outside the game he had never encountered anyone gauche enough to purchase real animal fur. But he was so tired that he thought: when in Rome…
He fell into bed, sighed with pleasure, and then rebuked himself for enjoying something so wrong. Though his piety was low, soon he was almost whispering a prayer for the beasts sacrificed to create these blankets. What else could he do but pray? The animals were dead. Thousands more were experiencing the same or worse across the world. People were always praying around him and talking about Jesus or Mary or the saints that it was difficult to avoid their influence. Since arriving in the game, his piety had increased from Initiate to Novice (3/10).
He climbed out of bed, knelt on the floor, and bowed. “Father in heaven, thank you for saving me from the Romans, please save the animals who made up the blankets in these bed coverings, I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”
5 XP added to piety skill, the voice said.
How does the piety skill help me exactly?
Knowing how to deal with religious people can come in handy in a world where they are commonplace, the voice said.
Alexios returned to bed. Had he actually formally prayed? Romanía was still changing him. For days he had barely even thought of himself as Torres. He was becoming Alexios, and didn’t even care anymore—since Alexios was strong, young, handsome, intelligent, unafraid of risking his skin for the common good, almost flawless but for his naïveté, his inexperience, his weakness for a certain woman, and his brashness and occasional overconfidence.
Outside the game, praying like this would have been ridiculous. No one in Maine was religious. Churches there were almost always empty. They were closing all the time, and most people considered them tax scams. As for the faithful, they rarely prayed publicly, doubtless afraid that others would consider them lunatics who babbled in tongues while draping Burmese pythons over their shoulders and writhing on dull gray wall-to-wall carpeting in the aisles between the pews.
The question was—if praying became a habit, would Alexios become Christian? If he married Herakleia, would he insist that she perform her duties as a woman in the home? Would he support God, Church, Emperor?
He shook his head. Jesus had been a radical, but Rome co-opted his violent activism in the name of finding a new way to control the lower classes, agitated as they were by constant invasions and civil wars. Give up on all you desire in the real world, and you’ll have riches in heaven, or something like that—while the ruling classes continue to enjoy heaven on Earth.
You have lost 5 piety XP, the voice said. 5 XP have been added to your education skill (3/10).
Alexios snorted.
So what would happen was, upon becoming a Christian, Alexios would tell himself he could still be faithful while helping the poor liberate themselves, even if—in reality—he would be making the world worse, inflicting further punishment on the most vulnerable.
It was tempting to believe that things only got worse, this was just the way the world was, people were predisposed to cruelty. But the rich wanted him to think this.
Make them think there’s no point in fighting, that they’ve lost before they’ve even begun.
It was his hunger and exhaustion talking. Changing his clothes and bathing had restored some of his stamina, but he still wondered about dinner. Had they forgotten him? Or had that duke or doux, what was his name, Bagrationi—bah-guh-lah-tee-on-ee—Bag of Rats Tony—was he alone with Herakleia? If so, what could Alexios do? This citadel was the man’s castle. Bagrationi was also taking a risk helping them. The man was a Roman official. One wrong move, and the doux might change his mind.
Alexios lay back on the soft silk pillows and recalled his adventures, still unable to believe he was even here. Any second he might wake up in detention again.
He lifted himself so he could gaze through the window at the walled city descending into the blue waves, still covered with rowboats as well as a few galleys—some sailing west to Konstantinopolis, others sailing east to Alania, a mountainous country set between the Pontic and Caspian seas.
Outside Trebizond’s walls, refugees were returning to their tents, dragging their children, having learned that the Roman warship was piloted by friends rather than foes. The poverty here was one of the first things that had struck Alexios. How could people live like this? But industry, too, was concentrated here. Trees were turning into ships and buildings, but also fueling the smithies smelting ore that men covered in dust were hacking and carting out of the Pontic Mountains. Trebizond was the most developed place he had found in Romanía. Smoke rose from holes in the workshop roofs, and inside were looms and textile manufacturers and other machinery. This must have been ahistorical, but so were sea monsters and giant ants. A little candle of power had somehow been set alight here. The question was: would the Roman army snuff it out?
Trebizond’s citadel was much smaller than the Great Palace in Konstantinopolis, but Alexios discovered—as he was led along various hallways hung with colorful silk tapestries toward the main dining room—that the doux and his servants made the best of it. Much space was given to desks and chairs where scribes scrawled on Seran papers, counted money, issued orders, went over plans for new buildings, new machines, new schemes. The shelves were packed with codices. Some were ancient manuscripts; others were much newer. It was almost more like an office building than a palace or a military installation. Alexios had seen little of Konstantinopolis’s Great Palace—he had been too busy trying to free Herakleia—but the citadel in Trebizond belonged to a world centuries ahead of Byzantium. The doux himself might have been another outsider, one who was modernizing this place.
At dinner, Alexios was seated at the ducal table’s far end, along with Diaresso and Gontran. At the head was Bagrationi, while Herakleia sat at his right. One of the Venetian Latins—named Michele Cassio—sat at his left, while a big-bearded priest in a black cowl named Sophronios the Metropolitan was next to Herakleia. To Cassio’s left was a matronly Alanian dowager named Tamar who was Bagrationi’s mother and the unofficial Queen of Trebizond. Her face was soft, dark, and more beautiful for her age, her hair black and flowing as it spilled over her glimmering silk dress. Though she seemed kind and wise, she kept glancing at the three male newcomers, conversing with them and releasing rich, easy laughter at their unimpressive jokes. This may have been because—thanks to their time in the bathhouse and their change of clothes—Diaresso, Gontran, and Alexios looked more handsome than ever.
When the guests had arrived and the famous black wine of Trebizond was poured into sardonyx goblets—all of which, in Alexios’s opinion, belonged in a museum—Bagrationi stood and raised his cup into the air.
“To the uprising,” he said.
“To the uprising,” his guests repeated, nodding and sipping their drinks.
Servants brought food. Sophronios blessed it in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
“Amen.” Everyone (except Diaresso) bowed.
I guess the uprising’s ideals don’t exactly apply to the doux. Alexios eyed the servants.
He felt jealousy and suspicion toward Bagrationi, but he drank wine out of respect for Herakleia, who had barely looked at him since their arrival.
Is it over? Alexios wondered.
Herakleia herself appeared radiant. Covered in makeup and jewels, she was almost unrecognizable, and shone like a galaxy. The doux’s servants had transformed her from an adventurer into a princess, and she even started acting the part, moving slowly and regally, speaking only when spoken to with a higher-pitched, less dominant tone. Was she the same person? Had she been using Alexios? Was she using them all?
We must give everything to the uprising, she had said. Or something like that.
At one point, Bagrationi knocked his cup off the table—apparently by accident—but Herakleia caught it—not only before it struck the floor, but before a drop of wine was spilt.
The doux eyed her for a moment. “You succeeded in learning the divine farr in Sera.”
She lowered her head. “As the peasants and workers requested.”
“You must make a demonstration of your abilities tomorrow.” Bagrationi looked at his dinner guests. “Princess Herakleia will become a second Kadmos, scattering dragon’s teeth into the soil and growing a fresh crop of warriors for our Thebes.”
Herakleia eyed Alexios. “He has also learned the divine farr.”
Bagrationi raised his cup. “The more, the merrier.”
Alexios nodded to the doux, but otherwise could think of nothing to say. This awkward inaction added no XP to his charisma.
As dinner progressed, Alexios found himself drinking one cup of wine after another and devouring his food without tasting it. His anger grew as the guests laughed over the fugitives’ adventures. To Alexios, hardened by almost two weeks of fighting, Bagrationi, Tamar, Cassio, and Sophronios were as soft as their silk clothes, pillows, blankets, and beds. Among the Paralos crew, Diaresso was the most comfortable here, eating his own bodyweight in food, while Gontran was almost as rigid as Alexios. The Frankish merchant must have been thinking about his reward. Had he even noticed the industry in this place? To invest here would bring big dividends, assuming it was possible for private investors to do so. But Gontran was a different kind of businessman, one almost closer to a self-employed long-haul trucker, making money from transporting goods over long distances—buying cheap and selling dear. It was difficult to build up wealth using his methods since he was always moving and at risk of losing everything to bandits, tax collectors, floods, wolves, plagues, earthquakes, and God knew what else. But Doux Bagrationi had found a new way to get rich. Alexios forced himself to ask about this, mentioning the town’s industry. The doux told him that, following the advice of the monk Dionysios—
“Dionysios,” Alexios said. “Is that—”
“Yes,” Herakleia said. “Your Dionysios.”
Alexios’s head fell. Gontran—surprisingly—put his hand on his back and asked if he was alright.
“Is something the matter?” Bagrationi said.
“The monk Dionysios gave his life to rescue me,” Herakleia said.
Bagrationi dropped his fork to his plate. “Why didn’t you tell me? This is a terrible loss. Without Dionysios…”
Father Sophronios turned to Alexios. “I shall pray for your deceased friend.”
Alexios thanked him.
“So will I,” said Cassio the Venetian. “The great Dionysios was a man with many impressive ideas. The Serenissima has become quite interested in their proper implementation. And yet we have encountered trouble. The curious thing is that it is not quite enough to merely transport workers and equipment. Wage labor appears to be the key. And if the workers have other options, if they aren’t interested in working, then…”
“Forgive me,” Father Sophronios said. “I know I just mentioned that I would pray for Dionysios, may he rest in peace. But I must remind everyone that he himself neglected his prayers. He was an itinerant monk who spent no time in any monastery I know of.”
Tamar locked eyes with Alexios. “You have my condolences,” she said.
Alexios sputtered out a “thank you,” and nodded, but inside the darkness in his heart, a light was kindled. For a moment, he forgot about Dionysios—who never would have wanted him to waste his life mourning. Alexios also forgot about Herakleia. Instead, his eyes rested on Tamar. She smiled at him, and he blushed, then sipped so much wine he almost coughed.
“Dionysios, may he rest in peace, told me that modernization is an almost miraculous process,” the doux said. “It cannot happen without wage labor, commodification, and the relentless competitive reinvestment of surplus into greater efficiency, all in the name of further reinvestment and production. He said that all of these different concepts were interconnected, and that for as long as humans have existed, modernity, as he called it, has never been created.”
“How then did this man know of such things?” Diaresso said.
“He was like us,” Alexios murmured. “He came from the same world.”
“Ah, I remember,” Diaresso said. “He was another djinni.”
Gontran shook his head at Diaresso.
Bagrationi continued. “The process is akin to boiling a pot of water.”
This guy just loves to hear himself talk, Alexios thought.
“As the quantity of heat increases,” Bagrationi said, “the water appears placid, until after a very long while it suddenly bursts into bubbling steam—effecting a total qualitative transformation. This is how the Roman Empire in the West, for instance, was lost to the barbarians. Over the course of centuries, many different factors—perhaps hundreds—all contributed to the Western Roman Empire’s sudden and complete transformation into a feudal backwater.”
“Have you been there?” Gontran said. “You seem familiar with it.”
“We tell him many stories,” Cassio said. “He is curious about the outside world.”
“If I understood Dionysios correctly,” Bagrationi said, “he taught that we could achieve a similar kind of transformation here. This process is apparently accompanied by much bloodshed, the mass enslavement of heathen people as well as women and children, the violent expropriation of commonly held land, war and conquest on an unimaginable scale, the mechanical dissection of the natural world and the reduction of the human body to the status of a machine, the invention of dependable timekeeping devices such as water clocks, the introduction of Indian numerals, double-entry bookkeeping, improved sailing technology, gunpowder, paper and paper money, the compass, catastrophic plagues sweeping the old world away, banking, the metamorphosis of peasants into wage laborers, market imperatives ramping up the productivity of farmland, reinvesting the capital gained from slave trading on a mass scale into industrialization—and on, and on. All of this must come together in roughly the same time and place in order to make the qualitative leap from what Dionysios called the ‘slave mode of production’—the Roman economy, in other words—to modernity. Only from there can we progress to a different mode of production, one in which, as the Mazdakist saying goes, ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.’”
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“It sounds akin to the Garden of Eden to me,” said Sophronios. “Before our parents Adam and Eve were tempted by the devil, they lived a life of ease.”
Bagrationi nodded. “Dionysios claimed that humans actually lived like that long ago, before the advent of farming, and that the story of Adam and Eve is an echo of that experience.”
“It’s a true story, in other words,” Alexios said.
“Of course it’s true,” Sophronios said. “Are you a second Julian, come to annihilate Orthodoxy?”
Alexios cleared his throat. “Right, it’s true. That’s what I meant.”
“After Dionysios left, we ran into all kinds of problems,” Bagrationi said. “The people of Trebizond, the refugees, they have a very different way of thinking. It took a lot of work on Dionysios’s part to change my mind, but I suppose that’s one of the powers of the farr—you can actually change people’s minds. That in itself seems like a miracle to me, since no one ever seems to change their mind about anything. People are very set in their ways. But it proved much harder for me to change the minds of the Roman citizens here, both my fellow Trapezuntines as well as the dispossessed refugees.”
Alexios crossed his arms. “How so?”
“They conceive of time and space completely differently, for one. To effect Dionysios’s transformation, workers need to show up to work at the right time and place six days a week. They can’t be late. This also requires us to divide the land, to say what goes exactly where, to break everything down—every idea, every physical object—into its simplest and smallest pieces in order to understand it. Dionysios called this ‘mechanism,’ and said it came from a Frankish philosopher I have never heard of with the peculiar name of Day-kart.”
Alexios chuckled. Everyone outside knows about Cartesian coordinates, but in this game Descartes hasn’t even been born yet. We’re putting Descartes before the horse.
“Peasants, you know, a lot of them work on common land when it’s convenient for them,” Bagrationi said. “They only produce or take what they need and just kind of relax a lot of the time.”
“It is sinful to take more than one needs,” Sophronios said. “To lend money at interest, and generate money from thin air and without one’s own labor, that is another sin for which one must do heavy penance.”
“I agree,” Diaresso said.
“But we need the peasants working as much as possible in a specific time and place if we’re going to have enough of a surplus to reinvest in better tools and equipment,” Dionysios said. “A man with his bare hands alone cannot produce nearly as many textiles as a man with a loom, for instance.”
“The forces of production,” Herakleia said.
Bagrationi nodded. “On top of that, there’s issues with local beliefs in magic, which is basically the idea that the stars or demons are responsible for our problems, rather than individuals, and that you can get things done without doing actual human labor. Prophecies, magic charms, lucky and unlucky days, the belief that people or objects can be in two places at once, mystical adoration of the oneness of the natural world, vagabondage, laziness, and many other beliefs besides have slowed us down.”
“That sounds like the farr,” Alexios said.
“There are many beliefs, many ideas, and who can say which is real or not? Dionysios warned about this and explained that in his time, the ruling class dealt with intransigent workers by imprisoning, torturing, and executing them en masse, or simply throwing them out of their homes and allowing them to die as a result of a lack of medicine or food or some other necessity. He said this was called ‘the white terror’ and that it had been ongoing for centuries in his world. It is hard to change people’s habits peacefully, but Dionysios said that in a workers’ state, the workers must be in charge. They must have all the power and must likewise be the sole beneficiaries of society. I try to explain this to the Trapezuntines and refugees, that we can only defeat the Romans if we change our economics, but they do not listen. This word, ‘economics,’ they’ve never even heard it. And so we have achieved only limited success. We were forced—for our survival—to adopt disciplinary measures.”
“Every beast is driven to pasture with blows,” Cassio said. “To make peasants into workers, we must discipline and punish.”
“Repeat troublemakers we exile,” Bagrationi said. “And thus have we begun to enrich Trebizond.”
“Meaning you,” Alexios blurted.
Herakleia scowled at him.
“It’s a fair criticism,” Bagrationi said. “There is much work to be done, especially when it comes to equitable distribution. Certain people, myself included, have gotten too used to living in luxury.” He glanced at his mother. “More refugees came to Trebizond than we could possibly accommodate, which is why we’re cutting down so much of the forest—we don’t have enough room! Some of the land is given over to growing wheat, but a great deal is also there for grazing sheep. Dionysios told me that if we could mass-produce clothing, if we could flood the Anatolian marketplaces with cheap food and textiles and manufactured goods, we would earn more coin than we would know what to do with. We could train a professional army with infantry, cavalry, archers, you name it—powerful enough to take on Nikephoros. A real army, too, made of people who live here and care about this place—not mercenaries.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it made,” Alexios said.
“I’ve been blessed, it’s true.” Bagrationi glanced at Herakleia. “There’s only one thing missing in my life.”
Herakleia looked away. This angered Alexios, but instead of fighting the doux, he kept drinking wine—while the servants, who were little more than ghostly arms carrying glass jugs in the darkness—moving so quickly their faces were blurs—kept pouring refills. This black Trapezuntine wine was good, and loosened Alexios’s tongue. He bragged about his exploits and told raunchy jokes, to Sophronios’s chagrin, the priest clucking as he brushed food from his enormous bushy black beard. When Diaresso, bard that he was, got up to play a few folk tunes from Tomboutou on his lute, Alexios took his seat at the table, leaned back, and even put his arm around Tamar, checking Herakleia and the doux for their reactions. But they were too busy going over sanitation plans.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “We’ll get to all of that as soon as we—”
“You’ll get to it now!” she shouted.
Everyone looked at her. Diaresso stopped playing his lute.
“I left here over a year ago,” Herakleia said. “You’ve put the people to work and made a lot of money for yourself, but it’s a miracle the refugees haven’t all died of dysentery!”
Bagrationi shrugged. “Some did. We’ve had riots, too. The refugees aren’t passive by any stretch of the imagination. They’ve been quiet lately only because we’ve managed to keep them busy. Many times they’ve dealt with sanitation issues on their own. We’ve just been too busy to let them—”
“We need to dig latrines,” Herakleia said. “We need proper housing and running water, everyone needs food—”
“All of these things cost money, my dear.” Bagrationi looked to the other guests for sympathy.
“So does this meal.” Herakleia glared at Bagrationi, Cassio, Sophronios, and Tamar. “You all want me to marry him. That way you can legitimize this little breakaway empire of yours. I’m telling you now, it’s not going to happen. The agreement between us was that the peasants and workers would be in charge. But all I have to do is look outside to see that you don’t give a damn about them. All you care about is stealing their labor and turning it into more—”
“Your highness—”
“Don’t speak to me until you’ve democratized the economy.” Herakleia stood from the table. “You know what? You’re right. This entire place needs to be transformed.”
Before anyone could speak, Herakleia left.
The dining room was silent.
“It must be that time of the month.” Bagrationi drained the last drops of wine from his cup. “I have heard of barbarian tribes who force their women to live separately during menstruation.”
“A most admirable practice.” Sophronios sipped from his wine cup. “Imagine the calamities we might avoid were we to do the same.”
Tamar rolled her eyes. No one spoke.
“Ought we to call it a night?” Cassio said.
“There’s no reason to let her little tantrum ruin the pleasant time I’m having with all of you,” Bagrationi said. “Since the child is gone, the adults can properly deal with the situation. Please, Mr. Diaresso—I was enjoying that music you were playing. What was it about?”
“It was but a folk tale,” Diaresso said. “The story of Sinamory, when his nurse warned him, as a child, not to drink the poison his evil stepmother wished to use upon him.”
“That sounds much like our stories. Please, continue.” Bagrationi turned to Cassio. “I suppose we should discuss another loan from the Serenissima, since it appears we’ll be building more housing.” He looked to one of his servants. “Inform the eunuchs that we’ll be having a late evening.”
The servant bowed and left the dining room.
“You know how un-Christian these reforms of yours are.” Sophronios was slurring his speech a little. “There is a certain way things work in the world. It is sinful to conjure lucre, as it were, from thin air. Greed is a cardinal sin, and there can be no excuse for it…”
“Is this your opinion on the matter, Father Sophronios?” Bagrationi said.
“I’m of two minds,” Sophronios said. “On the one hand, you must ‘render unto Caesar,’ etcetera, etcetera. On the other hand, it won’t be easy for me to save souls if the Romans burn me at the stake. Such is to be my fate if I stop your reforms.”
Tamar gasped and covered her mouth. “Would Nikephoros do such a thing?”
“His men burned down almost every town and city in Troas,” Alexios said. “That’s where I’m from.”
Tamar pouted. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
He forced a smile. “I don’t mean to bring down the mood. I came here to fight back.”
“Thus do I cast my lot with criminals,” Sophronios continued.
“Are you calling me a criminal?” Bagrationi said.
Sophronios nodded, and his eyelids fluttered. “From the perspective of Nikephoros, you’re a criminal, my lord doux, if you’ll permit me to say so. Or you will be when he finds out you’re in charge of the uprising. But from the perspective of God…”
“I want your perspective.”
Sophronios looked at everyone, then raised his cup. “To criminals!”
The others echoed his toast.
Gontran raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
After Sophronios sipped from his cup again, he turned to Bagrationi. “I’ve held my tongue as long as I could, my lord doux, but I can wait no longer. You know the resources of the church here dwindle—”
“I thought this was supposed to be a dinner among friends,” Bagrationi said. “But it seems everyone came here to get a few gold pieces out of me.”
“Speaking of which,” Gontran said. “We’d been promised a reward for rescuing Herakleia. My friend Diaresso and I came to collect.”
Bagrationi frowned. “I thought it was Mr. Alexios here whom we have to thank for—”
“It was a team effort,” Gontran said.
“But how could I have promised a reward when I wasn’t aware that Princess Herakleia had been kidnapped to begin with?”
“Well, she was, and we rescued her and brought her here, safe and sound,” Gontran said. “Now it’s time to pay up.”
“What sort of compensation were you expecting?” Bagrationi said.
“Two good horses and as much gold as they can carry. One hundred nomismas ought to do it. We also need supplies for a long journey.”
Cassio coughed. “A princess’s ransom.”
Gontran sipped more wine. “That’s the idea.”
Alexios was barely listening to their conversation, as Tamar had placed her hand on his leg.
“I’m going through with Princess Herakleia’s plans,” Bagrationi said. “I think the truth is clear to everyone. I do want to marry her. And I don’t want to just make her my wife—I want her to be empress. It’s her birthright, after all. And as I’m sure you’re aware, the princess doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to. I must fulfill her wishes, and that means spending quite a bit of money. There are thousands of people sleeping out there in tents right now, and she told me to build housing and plumbing for every single one.”
Gontran frowned. “What are you saying? Herakleia is worth all this money to build all these homes and everything, but the guys who risked their necks rescuing her—they aren’t worth anything?”
Bagrationi was growing more tense. “That isn’t what I—”
“Gentlemen, if I may,” Cassio said. “I wanted to comment earlier that I was quite impressed that you, Signore Gontran, and your crew managed to sail that ship of yours, what was it called—”
“The Paralos,” Gontran said.
“The perilous Paralos,” Cassio said. “A curiously adventurous name for a curiously adventurous ship. Fast, well built, and already endowed with an excellent crew. Here is my proposal. What if the three of you were to fly a Venetian flag from the mast? You would be in command, you would have a crew, and we could work in a percentage of the profits for your pay. We would have you transporting freight from Trapesunta to Venesia and back again.”
Gontran looked at him, unsure of what to say. Diaresso had stopped playing his music.
Cassio continued. “They’re producing so much clothing and iron here these days, we can’t find enough ships and men to move it.”
“Look,” Gontran said. “I can’t deny I’m tempted—”
“Gontran,” Diaresso said.
The Frank looked at him. “He hasn’t even said how much he’d pay! There isn’t a contract—”
“I’ll have one drawn up,” Cassio said.
Gontran shook his head. “We’ve got other plans.”
“Speak for yourself, you fool,” Diaresso said. “This is a regular job!”
“Not everybody’s interested in regular jobs,” Gontran said. “I’ve got family back in Metz. And don’t you have family in Tomboutou? Or did you already forget?”
“Do not speak to me of family,” Diaresso said. “If it weren’t for you, I would have returned home long ago—”
“Gentlemen, please!” Cassio said. “There’s no need to get angry.”
Sophronios was crossing himself and praying to the ceiling.
“Listen.” Bagrationi looked at Gontran, Diaresso, and Alexios. “You’ve all done well. I owe you a debt of gratitude no amount of money can ever fully repay. Yet I believe one hundred nomismas is a little high. That’s several days of profits—and several days we cannot afford to lose, since we reinvest those profits in better machines and infrastructure. Why don’t we instead say fifty nomismas?”
“No problem,” Gontran said. “We’ll just take half the princess with us. Her lower half—since that’s the only part you want.”
“Gontran.” Alexios jutted his chin at the merchant’s wine cup. “Maybe you’ve had enough.”
“Stay out of this,” Gontran said. “What do you even care? You weren’t planning to come with us. You were going to abandon us for this suicidal uprising.”
“Suicidal?” Bagrationi said.
Gontran nodded. “This place doesn’t stand a chance. If the Romans don’t get you, the Turks will. It’s too small. There aren’t enough men. I saw the people out there. It’s almost all women and children. This place is doomed—and the sooner we get out of here, the better. So I’d appreciate our payment. We’d like to go. We’ve had a nice time, but there’s plenty of business waiting back where we came from. Debts to pay.”
“We’ll take care of them,” Cassio said. “Whatever they are.”
“You don’t understand,” Gontran said. “It’s not like that—”
“He has family,” Alexios said to Cassio. “They’re serfs. The lord in France works them to the bone, won’t let them escape, that sort of thing. Gontran wants to free them.”
“It isn’t just that,” Gontran said. “We owe a lot of money. There’s people out there who want to kill us.”
“You’re obviously a man of many talents,” Cassio said. “In both senses of the word. As I said, whatever the price, the Signoria will pay. You’ve seen how few men live here. Manpower is almost as much of an issue where I come from. We have so much trouble finding workers—”
“Thanks, but I just work for one person: me.” Gontran looked at Bagrationi. “Pay up.”
“I have to think it over,” Bagrationi said.
“If you want to marry Herakleia,” Gontran said, “you’ve got to pay up.”
“She isn’t your slave,” Bagrationi said. “And I don’t recall her making that a condition of our agreement—”
“I don’t care what you recall. It’s a condition. Pay us.”
Bagrationi looked at Cassio. “It seems we’re going to need one hundred additional nomismas.”
Cassio nodded. “We have all that is required.”
“I’m confused,” Gontran said. “Don’t you have to check with your bosses—”
“I am their podesta for Trapesunta,” Cassio said. “They trust me with this responsibility, especially since it would take months to get a response, if we were to ask my superiors in Venesia. But I would ask you once more, Mr. Gontran, to reconsider. If you worked for us—”
“No thanks.” Gontran stood. “I want the money and the horses tomorrow morning. Then we’ll get the hell out of here, and you’ll never see us again.”
He left. Bagrationi sighed.
“We have worked without pay for many months,” Diaresso said. “You also owe us for our ship.”
“You aren’t the ship’s only owners,” Alexios said.
“Then we deserve our share of the ship’s worth,” Diaresso said.
Cassio nodded. “I understand, sir. I can see that you’re the kind of person it’s easy to do business with. I hope that we can work things out for our mutual benefit—”
Diaresso left before Cassio’s speech ended.
Tamar had been rubbing Alexios’s leg during this entire discussion. Bagrationi glared at her.
“Thank you for your help, by the way,” he said. “I’m glad you were busy—”
“Now you’re blaming me?” Tamar said. “Unbelievable.”
She stood and left. Alexios was unsure of what to do.
“The good lord instructs us to honor our mothers,” Sophronios said to the doux. “What profit a man who gains the world, but loses his own soul?”
“Quiet,” Bagrationi said. “Those merchants know too much. I’m not even sure we should allow them to leave the city.”
Tamar returned to the dining room and glared at Alexios. “What are you waiting for?”
Alexios stood, apologized for leaving, and followed Tamar. While complaining about her son, she took Alexios’s hand and walked quickly through the palace, climbing several flights of stairs. Along the way, Alexios was unable to keep his eyes from her figure swaying inside her silk dress as the luminescence from passing candles fell across her.
Thankfully it took little time to reach her apartment. Inside, servants lit oil lamps and boiled Seran cha, but she ordered them out as soon as the kettle was placed over the orange tongues of flame.
Locking the door, she pushed Alexios onto her bed and pulled off her dress. Then she climbed on top of him and forced her tongue into his mouth. Alexios kissed her as she pulled off his clothes.
“So you’re into younger guys?” he said.
“I like handsome men,” she said. “I find they go well with dessert.”