Byzantine Wars 3: The Faraway

They were hunting him. The fire towers along the coast were flashing, each flame flickering like a star. Talking about him. Chatting.

Scramble the fleet, every light said. Alert the legions. The criminals are here. They must not escape.

Soon all Rome would know.

Gontran Koraki, captain of the Paralos, wiped a drop of seawater from his lip, and turned from the fire towers to his crew. They were sailing south along the Bosporos narrows that flowed between Asia and Thrace. Their mission? Reach Venice—a thousand miles away, on the other side of a thousand islands, a thousand fortresses, a thousand ships, and a thousand thousand murderers—to forge an alliance against Rome.

It was a daunting task. Yet for the first time in all his days aboard this unusually fast dromon—a two-master with forty oars—Gontran possessed a full crew of ninety-three men and women. They were here to row the oars, furl the sails, swab the deck, and pump blinding naphtha from the bronze dragon spout at the bow straight into the faces of anyone foolish enough to oppose them. Trebizond’s engineers had even equipped the Paralos with a small cannon called a basilik, as well as a steel battering ram—warning the crew to use the latter only in emergencies, for the shock of two ships coupling like animals could split the ribs of both, dragging their hulls beneath the waves as the crews battled across the decks.

A red flag—the uprising’s standard—whipped aft.

The crew was mostly Khazari: a mix of Jews, Turks, and Varangians who babbled to each other in a Euxine pidgin Gontran would never understand. He was inexperienced in commanding such a large crew, yet in the last few weeks he had gained enough XP to level up to apprentice leader (4/10).

As for the ten amazons aboard, they were Greeks and Saracens, plus one fellow Frank—Clotilda, a serving girl who had escaped Roman captivity to join the Republic of Trebizond, along with her friend, a Syrian named Zaynab. An Arab named Zulaika al-Jariya was also with them. She was a runaway harem slave and survivor of many battles. Their commanding officer—called a dekarch in Greek—was a Kurdish peasant woman named Ra’isa, who was always clad in armor. Fierce and bright, she intimidated Gontran, along with everyone else.

Aside from them, two other crew members remained. Both were—like the rest of the crew—unusual to Gontran. One was the ship’s pilot, a coal-powered automatôn made of bronze named Talia. She possessed the strength of a dozen men, though she was shapely as a Greek statue and just as disdainful of clothing, her sharp metal skin blinding in its luminousness, her eyes flaring blue gas jets, her voice powered by an unearthly pipe organ sequestered in her throat.

The final crew member was Gontran’s second-in-command and long-time business partner, Kambine Diaresso. He hailed from a faraway place called Tomboutou. This lay beyond the Libyan deserts in the Sahel, where the sand sprouted with green grass in the spring rains, and the great river bent its course in the shade of curving acacias as Fulani herders—Earth’s most beautiful people—guided their cattle to pasture. Diaresso was tall and muscular, dressed in white robes which shone in the sun and fluttered in the spring winds. Turning his geometric features to Gontran, Diaresso’s golden scimitar belted at his side glittered and clanged against his long legs.

“I told you we ought to have braved the straits by night,” Diaresso growled. “Now all the uncircumcised dogs in Rûm will be baying for our blood.”

“I was getting bored anyway,” Gontran said. “I’m in the mood for a race.”

“If a race is what you desire, they shall exhaust us in relays. They shall blockade the Dardanelles with a hundred ships—”

“Look, I’ve told you a thousand times: don’t borrow trouble. You’re in charge of the fire crew, so get to work. Keep us alive, Diaresso.”

“By my beard, it shall take a miracle.”

Glaring at Gontran, Diaresso stalked across the deck, shouting orders in Arabic and Greek at a handful of young Khazari idlers who were hiding behind the foremast to play a quick game of dice. Bowing to Diaresso and exclaiming “üzgünüm, effendi!,” they snatched their spotted wooden cubes and scrambled to toss roped buckets overboard, then drew them back again brimming with seawater. These buckets were left all over the deck in order to douse any possible conflagrations.

The fire arrows were coming. Gontran shuddered at the memory of those meteors whistling toward him in the storm-tossed darkness, slamming into the masts and wreathing them in flames.

Next, he approached Dekarch Ra’isa. Not only clad in shining mail, she was also veiled in a jade hijab, and waiting for him, her hands clasped behind her back.

“Artillery crew is ready, katapan.” She bowed at his approach. “Basilik is loaded, and naphtha spout, too.”

Keep your shirt on, Gontran wanted to say. He found Ra’isa humorless and uptight, but dependable, to the point where he had trouble recalling the last time he had needed to give her an order. She anticipated his commands. A self-educated peasant warrior and a survivor of the Trebizond sieges, she was rumored to have experienced unspeakable injustices before joining the uprising. Gontran struggled to treat her professionally—to do otherwise endangered the mission—as she was so beautiful it sometimes seemed like the sky, the clouds, the waves in the sea, the rocks and grass and trees and ruins on the land, the floorboards in the deck—all sighed with longing to be with her. It did not help, either, that this Saracen maiden walked with a straight back, spoke with confidence and fearlessness, and had proven that she would knock any man who disrespected her to the ground—once even smashing a hapless Varangian deckhand with the absurd name of Igor Bryachislavich straight through the floorboards and down into the hold beneath.

Ra’isa was also Zhayedan. She could run upon walls, leap across rooftops, and slice speeding arrows in half with her ringing blade.

In other words, she’s high-maintenance.

The Paralos had now reached the Towers of Oblivion. These were two brick prison-fortresses constructed on either side of the Bosporos almost within sight of Konstantinopolis. The thick crenellated towers touched the shore at the narrowest point of the straits, and were meant to strangle this neck of sea flowing from the Euxine to the Aegean and beyond. Already the soldiers inside the towers were blasting trumpets which warned the Paralos to halt for inspection. The Paralos, of course, ignored these warnings, and sliced the blue waves as the wind surged in the sails and the crew oared to the beating drum—played by Joseph ben Solomon, a boy who, like Ra’isa, had also survived the Trebizond sieges. Eager for adventure, he had begged to join the expedition, but the workers’ council had forbidden it, saying he was too young. And he was. Stowing away among the sacks of bread and cheese and the barrels of wine and olive oil and potable water belowdecks, he had revealed himself only when it was too late to turn back. Gontran was furious that the boy was here, and terrified for his safety, but the crew made the best of it, and Joseph had become their unofficial mascot. As he pounded the drum, Gontran rubbed the boy’s orange hair.

“When the fighting starts,” Gontran told Joseph, “go belowdecks and stay there.”

“But you need someone to keep time for the rowers, sir.”

“I’ll find someone else. We were taking turns drumming before—”

“But katapan,” Joseph began.

Gontran raised his finger. “No arguments. And if we don’t make it, if we get captured, either surrender to the Romans or run for your life. Don’t get yourself killed. Live to fight another day.”

Joseph rolled his eyes. “Aye, sir,” he said sarcastically.

Gontran looked to the Towers of Oblivion, thinking the boy liked sailing out here too much. It was going to get him killed. Even if he surrendered, the Romans would enslave him, and do many other unspeakable things besides. Joseph knew. Like so many in the uprising, he was a survivor, he had been through all of this before. Still, he didn’t belong here. He should have been studying in school, not beating a drum in a war zone. Yet taking care of him had increased Gontran’s parenting skill to Initiate (1/10).

As he watched the Towers of Oblivion, two Roman galleys left their piers to pursue the Paralos.

“Steady as she goes,” Gontran told Talia.

“There is no need to say as such,” her voice box hummed. “For I am fully aware of our primary mission objectives.”

“Touchy for a robot,” Gontran said.

No one reacted to this comment. This was because no one here knew the word robot, which originated in a place called “the old world.” Gontran and his friends Alexios and Herakleia came from this “old world,” though it actually lay a thousand years in the future on the planet’s far side. While rotting in a classroom in that place, they had played a magical board game which had transported them here last summer, giving them new bodies and identities. Herakleia had also learned, during Trebizond’s second siege, that the Roman general Narses the Town Destroyer—the butcher of Anatolia, the mass murderer, war criminal, rapist, and slave driver—hailed from the same place. This monster was now rumored to be emperor of Rome thanks to a recent coup d’état. He had been a jock and a lobsterman’s son back in the old world.

This is what happens when you take someone like that and put them in charge of an army, Gontran thought. You get a slave empire.

As the crew oared away from its two pursuers, Dekarch Ra’isa ordered her amazon artillery crew to position the ship’s basilik at the stern. They acknowledged her command. The artillery crew of four had been training back in Trebizond for months. They stuffed black powder into the metal tube, loaded the ball, and took aim beneath the red flag which was whipping in the wind.

“Prepare to fire!” Ra’isa shouted.

Gontran plugged his ears. Everyone turned away.

“Fire!”

One amazon touched a burning fuse to the firing hole. The basilik exploded and lunged back on its creaking wooden wheels as the crew leaped out of the way from the acrid smoke laced with sparks. With his eyes Gontran followed the black ball as it swooped across the sea and burst into the closest Roman ship, splintering its hull, setting it aflame, and letting the gushing saltwater inside its hold. Before long, the ship was sinking into bubbling foam, and its crew was leaping into the waves.

Everyone aboard the Paralos cheered.

“Nice shot!” Gontran shouted.

Ra’isa and her amazons were too busy taking aim at the second ship, which was now turning away to retreat, the enemy captain waving his arms and yelling commands. But turning his ship to the side like this made his vessel a wide target, one even easier to strike. Although the basilik was hot enough to melt the skin from your bones, Dekarch Ra’isa’s artillery crew loaded and fired again within sixty seconds. Dry smoke puffed from the basilik. Gontran tasted it on his lips as the blast rang in his ears and shook his bones, and a pillar of fire leaped into the sky from the enemy ship’s deck, blackening the sails. The Roman crew members clasped their hands as if in prayer and dove into the sea. Their ship went down fast.

Another cheer rose from the Paralos crew. “Amazons,” they chanted. “Amazons!”

“Amazing,” Gontran said to Ra’isa. “Good work, dekarch.”

She bowed. “Thank you, katapan, but we work hard for this day. And without uprising, we are on family farms, our husbands or parents are beating us, or we are dying in childbirth.”

“Really makes you wonder.” Gontran wanted to change the subject, since he disliked politics. He eyed the countryside, noticing the ruined state of the buildings dotting the coast, the broken white marble temples to Apollo, the fortifications that Xerxes might have built.

“You know,” he added. “One ship with a basilik can do a lot of damage when there aren’t any other basiliks to stop it.”

“That is not mission, katapan.” Ra’isa’s excited tone had grown more stern. “Workers’ council order us to—”

“You aren’t in the mood for a little raid?” Gontran said. “Romans are always messing with people in other countries. Maybe it’s time people from other countries started messing with Rome, right in their capital? What do you think?”

“Then mission is at risk. Even if we destroy some buildings, we gain only risk. We cannot destroy Rome alone. ‘Think, act, speak only to advance the uprising.’ Plus, we only have thirty-five shots.”

Gontran laughed. “Only thirty-five shots. Who knows? The way you and your amazons shoot, you might be able to take off Narses’s head.”

“Some other rapist will replace him,” Ra’isa said.

Diaresso approached them and said something in Arabic to Ra’isa. She didn’t speak Arabic, yet knew many quotations from the Koran, and even answered Diaresso with a quote of her own, which made him nod and smile knowingly. It was unusual to see him in a good mood these days. Back in Trebizond, he had broken up with his old flame, the beautiful Queen Tamar, who had barely survived the Latin occupation. Now it seemed that little tied Diaresso to the uprising save his business partnership with Gontran.

It also bothered Gontran to see his crew speaking foreign languages—it always made him suspect they were plotting against him—but he couldn’t force them to speak Greek. Only a handful knew it. And besides, the uprising insisted on democratizing everything, even the military, which meant that Gontran served at his crew’s pleasure. If he displeased them, they would replace him.

A few enemy scouts rode galloping horses along either coastline, doing their best to keep up with the Paralos. No more vessels pursued the dromon, but the sea was growing crowded with Varangian longships, Arab dhows, Italian galleys, Greek barges, and even the occasional Hanseatic cog. Straight ahead, just above the blue waves, rose the striped walls of Konstantinopolis, the domes and towers swelling from the Earth. Even the statue of Konstantinos Magnos was visible from this distance. He bestrode a marble pillar that towered above all the jumbled rooftops of red and orange tile, clutching Neptune’s golden staff in one hand, his head crowned with the sun’s rays.

Gontran shook his head at the sight. He hadn’t been here in almost a year. Since then, the dickheads that ran Rome had tried to kill him more times than he could count.

“Still,” Gontran said to Ra’isa. “Still feel like we should give them a volley or two.”

Her expression asked if he was serious.

“We’ll be passing the Great Palace,” Gontran said. “It’s right on the coast. It’s huge. You can’t miss it.”

She watched him for a moment. “One shot. As we move.”

“Infinitely better than nothing.”

He instructed Talia to pilot the ship toward the palace precinct, which—as they neared the Marmara Sea—appeared to occupy most of the City, taking the form of grass lawns, forests of cypress and pine, and white marble churches, apartments, fountains, and offices beyond counting. The gardens were still gray in the spring, but they would be glorious in the summer. That was when the City smelled like nectar, though you could always catch the deep musty scent of incense pouring out of the churches and monasteries, rattling as ever with their eerie wooden semantrons, a mesmerizing sound Gontran never got used to. Only the Italian churches in Galata tolled bronze bells.

“Keep us out of bowshot,” Gontran said to Talia. “We’ll be alright.”

Talia nodded. “I acknowledge your command.”

“You tempt fate, giaour,” Diaresso whispered to Gontran. “What need have we for such dangerous hijinks as these? What is it that you seek to prove?”

“Girls just want to have fun,” Gontran sang. “Oh yeah, girls just want to have…fun!”

Diaresso shook his head as if to say that Gontran was so disappointing, it went beyond words.

Ra’isa’s artillery crew, meanwhile, had wheeled the basilik forward, propping it—awkwardly—atop the naphtha spout. With the cool wind billowing everyone’s clothes, the artillery crew loaded the basilik and took aim as Talia worked the steering oars, swinging the ship toward the towering masses of domes.

Where’s the emperor hiding? Which window in the palace is it?

It was so exciting, Gontran almost wanted to whip out the Seran pistol-sword belted at his side and fire it into all that architecture, the mountains of pillars and arches, though he knew it was pointless. The wind was so strong, the bullet was bound to plop into the sea, there to be gulped down by some wandering mullet, and found in its stomach ten years later by an astounded fisherman.

But the Paralos was so close! Even the great church of Hagia Sophia was in sight, seeming to bask in the clouds above the sea walls, its blue dome topped with an enormous gilded cross, its white walls glimmering in the sunlight reflected from the waves.

Guards on the thick massive sea walls aimed their bows between the battlements and loosed arrows. These splashed the sea.

Gontran pouted. “Oh, too bad! Try again!”

Dekarch Ra’isa aimed the basilik herself this time, and (while wearing mitts to protect her hands from the scalding metal) lifted it as high as it would go. It looked like she was aiming at the cross that topped Hagia Sophia. Before Gontran could ask her to avoid committing a war crime—Christians were also aboard the Paralos—she fired, and the ball hurtled above the City, pulling behind it a tail of smoke and fire, an ominous comet zooming into the distance out of sight. He worried that it would land in a school or a house, that it would decapitate a child, but he told himself that, in all likelihood, the ball had buried itself in a field somewhere beyond the walls. A farmer would stop his plough horse, stare at the crater, cross himself, and mutter a Hail Mary to the sky.

“Is that all you’ve got?” Gontran said to Konstantinopolis. “A couple of ships, and a few arrows?”

Talia turned the Paralos southward again, and they sailed away from Konstantinopolis and into the Marmara, the cities of Chrysopolis and Chalkedon falling behind them on their left, the Italian churches in Galata back to their right ringing their warning bells. All the hundreds of merchant vessels which crowded the sea were sailing or rowing away from them now. The Greeks deployed no more warships to stop the Paralos.

Maybe the emperor really does have no clothes. Maybe this whole thing will be easier than I expected.

As the artillery crew secured the basilik, and as the rowers pulled the oars from the waves and stored them under their benches—stretching their muscles, groaning, laughing—Ra’isa approached Gontran.

“Now they know we are here,” she said. “Everyone in Konstantinopolis will hear basilik. They will taste our fear.”

“See?” Gontran said. “One shot didn’t hurt anyone. If anything, it felt pretty good!” He turned to Diaresso, who had crossed his long muscular arms. “I told you it would work.”

“The cat possesses but nine lives,” Diaresso said.

“We showed them,” Joseph said. He had stopped drumming. “We took a little revenge for what they did to my family.”

Gontran drew in a deep breath. It was shocking that one so young had already experienced such terrible things. Narses himself had enslaved the boy back in Nikaia, turned him into a child soldier, and murdered his family. Gontran hugged Joseph close.

“We should have dropped you off at a fishing village or something,” Gontran said. “Somewhere sympathetic to the uprising. You could have found your way back to Trebizond.”

“But I want to stay with you,” Joseph said.

Am I going soft for this kid? Gontran wondered as he looked at Joseph’s orange hair and his warm eyes.

“We got lucky,” Gontran said. For a moment, he was horrified that he had attacked the capital of the Roman Empire with a child aboard his ship.

We should have dropped him off. But there’s nowhere to put him! Everywhere’s too dangerous!

“You keep trying to get rid of me,” Joseph said. “But I’m here to stay.”

What happened next occurred almost too quickly for Gontran to understand. For an instant, he heard a deep swooping sound above him, and when he looked up, a hole had been torn in the foresail. Then came a roaring crack from behind. He turned to look, and a pillar of gray smoke was rising above the City’s sea walls. This was followed by a nearby red flash, then another smoke pillar.

And another.

And another.

“Get down!” Gontran dove to the deck with Joseph. “Everybody down!”

I’ll keep him safe, he thought, covering Joseph with his own body.

As the City’s walls lit up with flames—belching smoke, vomiting heat and light—iron balls darted around the Paralos, swooping, whistling, screaming. To port, starboard, fore, and aft, blue columns of foaming water surged into the air higher than the two masts, which shook as the projectiles hurtled around them.

With the volley over, the rowers rushed back to work—Gontran and Diaresso joined them—but an iron ball smashed through their oars, sending splinters into their eyes. They shut them, cursing in different languages, and Joseph beat his drums faster as the rowers dropped their wrecked oars into the sea and pulled up their only spares from under their benches.

“Get belowdecks!” Gontran yelled at Joseph. “This is no place for a kid!”

“The rowers will never keep time without me!” Joseph yelled back.

Gontran turned around and stood up to climb off his rowing bench. He was about to carry Joseph belowdecks, but then the drumming stopped. He felt something wet on his back. Gontran turned, and saw Joseph’s little body lying headless on the deck, red blood gushing from his neck stump.

Gontran felt sick. The groan of anguish he released from his throat sounded like it had come from an animal rather than a person. But now the sailors were rowing for their lives, and he needed to help them. Though he was afraid to look back, when he did, he saw that several enemy ships were leaving the huge harbors on the City’s southern flank, their sails taut with wind, their banks of oars rising high into the air and plunging back down into the sea. As his eyes narrowed, he discerned basiliks at their bowsprits, their artillery crews loading them and aiming at the Paralos.