Byzantine Wars 3: The Faraway

Evening. Sunset reddened the marble sea, gracing the waves with light. The Paralos’s crew had been rowing their long heavy oars since mid afternoon, each man resting only a few minutes per hour by beating the drum to keep time for everyone else. All of them were sad about Joseph, whom Ra’isa had wrapped in a white burial shroud. Sometimes the crew members lacked even the strength to reach the drum, and, stumbling aft, they would fall to the deck and sprawl there, groaning, clutching their arms, pleading for help from the Virgin, from Allah, from Adonai, from Perun. Then the air would split with a basilik roaring from one of the pursuing Greek ships, a deep splash would surge up from the sea close enough to drench the sails, the rowers would row harder, and the man on the deck would crawl to the drum and pound it.

Bum, bum, bum.

Gontran had never felt so weary. Unable to speak, desperate with sadness for the loss of Joseph, barely able to think, he had told himself many times that it was impossible to go on. Then the Greeks would fire, and a second, third, fourth, or fifth wind would rush within him.

Joseph would not have wanted us to stop. He would have told us to keep fighting.

Mercifully, the wind continued to blow southward, but this also meant that the Greek ships continued to pursue.

No torches lit the Paralos’s deck. Soon it would be too dark to see. Then, perhaps, they could rest. But the Greek crews knew this, too, and so the torches on their decks blazed with a demonic intensity, since they could never return home without their quarry—for their incompetence the emperor himself would whip the flesh from their bones. To inaugurate his reign, he had impaled thousands of people on the seashore near Konstantinopolis as a warning to all who would oppose him, their corpses rotting on the wooden stakes, the flesh picked clean by carrion feeders. Some stakes were even surrounded by piles of bleached bones that could be seen from miles away.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Pure sweet blackness ascended from the east, chasing the last tinges of sunlight into the west. Stars and planets coalesced from the night while the white crescent moon rose from the horizon, almost like it was a prop being hoisted in a stageplay. Now the Paralos was adrift. The crew sprawled on their oars like corpses—only Talia’s blue eyes shining like two liquid flames—but the Greeks were still converging on them, their drums pounding like heartbeats, growing louder, the enemy captains calling out to each other in the night, coordinating.

How can we fight them? Gontran thought. I can’t lift my arms!

Indeed, he could hardly even hear as Dekarch Ra’isa whispered for her amazons to prepare to repel boarders. Armed with spears, swords, and shields, they hid below the wales. The ship’s basilik was propped aft again, and aimed down. They would only fire when the enemy ships were too close to miss, targeting the lowest points of their hulls.

Ra’isa withdrew Gontran’s Seran pistol-sword from its sheathe and pulled his powder and ammunition bags from his pockets, though she left his hundred and twenty nomismas. Gontran loved his pistol-sword—it had saved his life many times—but he was too weary to even look at Ra’isa, let alone ask if she knew how to use it. Diaresso, by his side, seemed to have passed out, for he was murmuring to himself about Queen Tamar and the grapes of paradise.

One moment Gontran was ready to surrender to his fate. The next, the basilik was exploding, and Greeks were screaming “for the cross!” A vast hulking mass crashed into the Paralos, which rocked so far to the side that Gontran gripped his oar out of terror that he would plunge into the sea. Boots slammed onto the deck as metal clanged and men fell into the waves, yelling and gurgling. Gontran’s pistol-sword made a crack sound that was loud enough to startle him, and the amazons screamed: “for the uprising!”

More ships slammed into them, soon too many to count. It was a battlefield in the middle of the sea, and the ground beneath the soldiers’ boots and sandals was wood rather than earth or stone. Steel clashed, men grunted and screamed in the dark. Gontran wanted to avenge Joseph, but when he got up to fight, he fell to the deck and was unable to rise again. The game voice told him his stamina was down to single digits, and affecting his health, which had decreased to 90/100.

Though the amazons were great warriors, and even darted about in blurs, ten weary battle maidens could never hold off hundreds of furious marines. The Greeks, however, were unprepared for an automatôn. Gontran sensed somehow, as dreams and reality mixed, that Talia was whirling across the decks, dousing the torches, snatching the enemy’s swords with her metal hands and stabbing their eyes. For most marines, the last thing they ever saw were two blue flames lunging toward them in the dark.

When Gontran woke, the warm sun was overhead. He was surprised—as ever—to be alive. Lying under his bench, his body ached so that when he turned his head to look around, it was all he could do to keep from shrieking in agony. Every muscle was strained, every bone ready to snap. Some of his stamina was restored, but he had lost a lot of health. His pistol-sword was in his hand; Ra’isa must have given it back.

Memory of yesterday’s battle returned. Gontran recalled Joseph’s fate, and he slumped with sadness.

Talia stood nearby like a statue, every inch of her bronze skin drenched in blood save her flaming blue eyes. Drip, drip, drip, the blood pooled beneath her fingertips. Greek ships had rammed the Paralos from every side, and their decks were piled with red corpses. Talia had slaughtered them all.

“Do you still believe,” Diaresso whispered in Gontran’s ear, “that it is a good idea, a safe idea and a worthwhile one, to fire our unholy basilik upon that great monster of a city?”

Gontran was too downcast to answer.

Talia turned her head, then her body, to face them. “I have dispatched the slave masters.”

“Mashallah,” Diaresso said. “For I am glad that you fight by our side, Artifice of the Artificer, and not that of the enemy.”

“Only so long as you fight for universal liberation,” she said with her pipe organ voice. “Turn against that ideal, and I shall turn against you.”

“As you have so often said.” Diaresso turned to Gontran, and whispered: “She was the miracle I spoke of—a miracle of golden handiwork. Without her, we would all be dead, or worse.”

“Not everyone made it,” Gontran said.

“Yes, the boy was martyred.” Diaresso eyed Joseph’s body, still wrapped in a white shroud by the wale. “Yet only fools think that war is like unto a banquet in the countryside. Even when fought for a just cause, as our war is, much needless suffering is incurred. I shall pray for Joseph—for all the days that remain to me.”

As the Paralos’s crew revived, they took turns thanking the automatôn. Ra’isa offered to wash the blood from Talia’s metal skin—it being inappropriate for the men aboard to do so, though technically Talia’s gender was an open question. She accepted Ra’isa’s offer.

“Only, with the water, proceed sparingly,” Talia added. “Too much will extinguish both my inner and outer lights.”

“Bad for us, then,” Ra’isa said.

Gontran, meanwhile, got to work counting the dead. Of their original crew of ninety-three, they had lost Joseph, plus four sailors and one amazon. This left eighty-seven. Every survivor save Talia was wounded, three grievously so. The ship’s doctor, Abu Ubayd—a man with a black turban and a forked beard who had trained in Isfahan—was forced to amputate. One by one, rags were stuffed in the mouths of these three unfortunates. One was Varangian, named Dmitri Anatolyevich, another was a Turk named Ibn Ismail, while the third was a Trapezuntine named Athanasios. Crowds of men held them down, and Doctor Abu Ubayd sawed off their wounded limbs, tossing them into the sea—where they splashed and floated, a free meal for sharks—his arms red with blood as his patients shrieked like madmen.

Two men with one leg each, Gontran thought. One man with a single arm.

Next, Gontran examined the ship’s damage with Diaresso, assigning the rest of the crew to search the enemy vessels for useful supplies. The Paralos needed to move quickly. Already merchant ships from how many different nations were sailing past, all of them keeping their distance from this mid-oceanic battlefield of tangled ropes and interlocked spars. Word of the Greeks’ defeat would soon reach Konstantinopolis.

On the deck, in the hold, even dangling over the side with ropes tied to their waists, Gontran and Diaresso hammered with wooden mallets every plank the ship was made of. All held firm. Not a nail was loose.

“The second miracle of the day,” Gontran said to Diaresso, after both were convinced of the Paralos’s seaworthiness.

“There shall not be another,” Diaresso said. “Though you may thank Allah if you wish, for He is all-wise, all-merciful.”

Gontran held his hands palm-up to the sky, closed his eyes, and bowed his head. “Thank you, Allah.” He opened one eye and looked at Diaresso. "How do you say 'thank god' in Arabic? Is it 'alhamdullilah?'"

“Do not tempt Him with your irreverence.”

Gontran opened both eyes and lowered his hands. “I was serious!”

“If you were truly serious, you would recite the Shahada, submit to Allah, and join the community of the faithful.”

“There’s just no winning with you.”

“Truly.”

“Alright, Diaresso, but if I convert to Islam, will you at least be a little nicer to me?”

“To merely do one's duty merits no reward. To declare that there is only one God, and He is God—that is its own sweetness, its own reward.”

Next, the question was whether to bring any of the abandoned Greek vessels with the Paralos to Venice. Even one more ship would make a difference, but the problem was the lack of manpower. To take one Greek vessel and divide the Paralos crew meant that the next time there was a battle, both ships would be operating at only half strength.

And so the Paralos’s crew burned the enemy ships. Having taken spare arms and armor, a great deal of money, many iron balls and much powder, they pushed the Paralos away with their oars. Then it was Ra’isa, running about the enemy decks with a torch, who set them aflame. Once she had finished, she dove into the sea, swam to the Paralos, and was pulled onto the deck with a rope around her waist, like a mermaid drenched in ocean. The reflections of the liquid flames seemed to oil the sea, flashing in the waves and troughs, acting as a funeral pyre for the Greek dead. This they would have hated, since it would prevent their bodily resurrection on Judgement Day.

The final task before departure was the sea burial of the Paralos’s dead. For those who had perished, some were popular, others less so, but the entire crew was distraught over Joseph's death. Only Talia’s eyes were dry as different crew members, acting as priests for their respective faiths, bid the fallen farewell. Joseph’s Jewish comrades had a minyan and said a kaddish, while Diaresso begged God to forgive the deceased Muslims, doing his best to face Mecca. The remainder of the dead sailors were Christians, including Clotilda, the Frankish amazon. One of the deceased sailors was a devotee of Perun, whose body was lowered onto a plank, which was then set aflame. The others were dumped into the ocean. Joseph’s little body was the last that fell into the sea.

Gontran cried. He was shocked by how emotional he was, and in his embarrassment wanted to hide himself from his crew. But where could he go on a ship like this?

I always liked Joseph…I can’t believe he’s gone. If I hadn’t seen his body, I wouldn’t have believed it. My life was an adventure until someone close to me got killed.

A southward wind kicked up. Soon they were on their way, the Greek armada burning behind them, the flames fluttering against the sky like curtains of searing light. Gontran threw himself into his work to avoid thinking of Joseph. Everyone else did the same, laboring without conversation or laughter, even focusing on unimportant tasks. Gontran gave no orders that day; the ship ran itself. In the evening, when all the crew save Talia was sleeping in blankets or hammocks, he cried again for Joseph.

Any of us can die like that. None of us is safe. At least it was quick. He probably didn’t even know what happened. ‘Didn’t even know what hit him’—stupid saying. Poor Joseph. I’m sorry I didn’t keep you safe. The uprisers, these fucking nuts, all they ever say is that when you commit yourself to the uprising, you’re already dead. You’re already a marked man. And that, ironically, the only way you live forever is by giving your life to the uprising. What did Herakleia say? “To make excuses for the status quo is a living death. By dying for the uprising, we live in glory forever.” Fucking cultists. I can’t tell myself that for Joseph. He’s gone. That’s it. And his death was meaningless. He should have lived a long life, should have had a spouse and kids if he’d wanted. He escaped the carnage in Nikaia, and even survived being turned into a child soldier and marched across Anatolia like a slave. Then he survived two sieges—at least two battles, probably more. Only to have his head taken off by a basilik. It makes no sense. There’s no purpose to it, none at all. If the uprising fails, he'll have died for nothing.

In Gontran’s half-dreams, a comet streaked through the night, sparkling in the void.

He'll flash like that forever.

The Paralos exited the Marmara and plunged into the Straits of the Dardanelles, this being the narrow passage to the Aegean. “If the Bosporos is the Marmara’s throat,” a sailor said, “then the Dardanelles is the ass.”

Here Leander swam the sea for love of the priestess Hero, drowning on the way; here for ten years the Greeks besieged the ringing plains of windy Troy. Ruins were scattered everywhere on the two coastlines, the broken marble shining white against the earthen fields like the bleached knucklebones a barbarian shamaness tosses to consult the fates. These days the Dardanians were mostly farmers, fishermen, and merchants who counted on the mountains to shield them from the Turks to the east and west. Rome had little presence here save its signal towers, always flickering.

The Paralos passed several cities. Among them was the small run-down port of Abydos, where Gontran and Diaresso had first met Alexios and his teacher, the wild old wizard Dionysios.

“Thus the deep misfortune of my fate.” Diaresso slumped on the wale before the passing quays and storehouses, themselves slumping toward the sea.

Gontran was afraid to speak, and almost wanted to hide belowdecks. In Abydos lurked Demetrios Maleïnos, the unsavory doux who had lent him and Diaresso hundreds of nomismas—Gontran wanted to forget the specific amount—to finance a trading expedition to the Seres. That project, like many others, had come to nothing. Akinji raiders had attacked Gontran and Diaresso while they were departing the Greek Empire. Dropping their sacks of coin—along with almost everything they carried save their weapons, clothes, and skins—they had kicked their spurs deep into their horses, whose sides were soaked with blood as their galloping legs thundered against the blurring land, gasping as foam bubbled around their lips, their black eyes wide with fright, their muscles rippling and gleaming in the alternating light and darkness of day and night. Diaresso and Gontran returned to Abydos, there to beg Maleïnos for one more chance, since the crime lord had agents everywhere, even as far as the burning city of Bakuya in Shirvan, the orderly Seran capital of Dongjing, the Cholla capital of Tanjore.

In Abydos, Gontran and Diaresso had run into Alexios and Dionysios in a tavern before their planned meeting at Maleïnos’s palace. Even now, Gontran was tired of always having to watch his back. He felt tempted to abandon the uprising and abase himself before Maleïnos, paying all the money he possessed—a hundred and twenty nomismas, sequestered at all times in his pants pockets—to show that he meant business.

And that I don’t deserve to be turned into a statue, Gontran thought.

This was a reference to Maleïnos’s favorite way to punish failure—encasing people in Roman cement. He had an entire garden of these grotesque statues outside his palace.

Abydos lay on the left side of the Dardanelles. On the right was Sestos, an old town with a silted up harbor surrounding a fortress whose cobblestone highway led north into Thrace, the Bulgar Khanate, the Kingdom of Diokleia, and lands beyond. With enough time, money, and luck, those roads could even bring you to Metz, Gontran’s home in northern France, where his peasant family still labored beneath the cracking whip of Lord Chlotar. Gontran had sworn that he would return one day to free them, but this goal—and every other— he had set aside for the uprising.

Sometimes I can’t even justify these actions to myself, he thought.

Past the Dardanelles rose the isle of Tenedos. Here the warrior Philoctetes was abandoned for ten years during the Trojan War for a poison snake wound which refused to heal, instead festering and stinking enough to drive his Greek comrades away, coughing, covering their noses, waving their hands, exclaiming that Troy was bad, but this was something else. Gontran wanted to stop there; these days the isle was famous for its opium, women, and wine.

Preferably taken together, he thought.

Many such isles were spread before them in the Aegean. Each was known for some commodity which would fetch a handsome price the farther one hauled it. Gontran’s merchant’s eyes saw all these isles and their fragrant storehouses stuffed with sacks, barrels, crates, skins, and amphorae of goodly merchandise. Oddly enough, he found himself longing, too, for the annoying scribe Samonas, whose lifelong walking problems had granted him an addiction to knowledge—mostly useless philosophies, though he was also a living navigational chart.

With Samonas by my side, we'd make a lot of money.

But the Paralos could stop nowhere. Greek, Italian, and Arab cutters prowled these seas like slavering sharks, the Etesian winds swelling their sails in warm spring months. Thus, Gontran and his crew threaded the needle with regard to the archipelago that reposed upon the gleaming waves, the ship’s course plunging south between the sporadic Sporades on the right and Mytilene on the left, the former famous for its dainty horses, the latter for its poets, its exiled kings and queens, its monasteries. Just south of Mytilene lay Chios, notorious for medicinal gum that was spiced like molten lead, and weeped in tears from its trees like drops of rain from eaves of reeds. In Paris a handful of such mastika could be exchanged for a handful of gold coin.

Standing on the Paralos’s deck, watching out for pirates, Gontran ground his teeth in frustration as though chewing that medicinal mastika.

Farther south cycled the Cyclades, a yellow spatter of paint floating on the silver sea, each isle close enough to be seen from the others, their signal towers flickering. From these the Paralos could not hide. Yet as days passed, no Aegean monks, fishermen, or merchants stopped them. Gontran eyed the harbors full of fishing boats, the rolling peaks and valleys running with sheep, the farmland scattered with farmers who were themselves scattering seeds into the rich dark furrows, the monasteries rattling with wooden semantrons, and the mountain chora towns clustered like white lambs around brick castles which were only the size of guard towers on Konstantinopolis’s Land Walls.

If only I could pick up some silk on Andros! he thought. Some marble on Naxos or Paros!

The quarries here were titanic, and from their living rock one could carve glittering white statues whose tops would breach the clouds. To the south lay the cheese and wine of Crete, where the azan could still be heard from the old days of the emirate, and then past Crete were the slave markets of Egypt. Gontran, as a former peasant, had never traded slaves, and never would. But few merchants saw any difference between trading unlucky animals versus trading unlucky people. The only difference merchants really saw was that the latter option usually made more money.

As for Gontran, every minute he spent here, he lost money. On the uprising's altar he had sacrificed his possible future as lord of a knightly realm—safe behind thick walls, warmed by fires roaring beneath the flue, entertained by the songs of wandering troubadours, enriched by thousands of peasants laboring in town upon town, all of it secured by a stamped and signed vellum parchment testifying to his enfeoffment of these lands in the name of the king.

Instead of resting, I work, Gontran thought. Instead of winning, I lose.

Yet he had no regrets. He did not buy entirely into the uprising’s ideals. But he would never live off the stolen labor of others. He had never made his peace with feudalism or slavery, as so many ostensibly good people did. Instead, he had decided that the path to women, wealth, and wine—all that he desired—led through the uprising.

Following the ship’s portolan map, the Paralos turned west. It darted between Andros and Chalkis along the narrow Kafireas Strait, both isles lowing with snow white heifers of the sun. Here were busy shipping lanes. Every vessel was armed not only for defense, but also to take advantage of opportunities, since everyone was either a potential pirate or victim of piracy. The most common barques were Venetian, distinguished by their striking flag: on a red background, a winged lion of gold rested its paw upon an open book. But other flags were also present. Here was the Greek chi-rho, there the rearing knight on his steed for Ancona, alternating blue and red stripes for the young and semi-independent republic of Ragusa, a blue background with a diagonal slash checkered red and white for Sicily, and crosses for Pisa and Genova. Occasional Saracen ships sported black or white flags scrawled with Arabic. All of these flags were defensive, in a way, since to attack a ship flying the Ancona flag (for example) meant attacking the whole city and armada of Ancona. Yet Venice was the only flag the entire sea feared. No one wished to incur the wrath of the Serenissima, a growing power, and therefore the most aggressive.

But Trebizond’s red flag was unknown. Sometimes passing sailors would ask, in Mediterranean pidgin—a non-inflected mix of Romance, Greek, Arabic, and Touareg—who they were.

“Trebizond and Kitezh!” the Paralos’s crew would respond.

Kitezh the other sailors knew—it was the northern power of the steppe, swallowed up long ago by Varangians and Turks.

“But Trebizond,” the other sailors asked, “is independent?”

“Yes, independent!” the Paralos’s sailors cried. “We got rid of our bosses, so watch out!”

Here always the captains of the passing vessels would swallow nervously, mop the sweat from their brows with a shirtsleeve, dart their eyes back and forth, and chuckle awkwardly as their crews looked at them. “We’re all friends, aren’t we, boys?” the captains’ actions said. “Aren’t we?”

Yet the red flag’s obscurity didn’t just invite curiosity. It also invited violence. The Paralos was a fast ship, big, strong, and sturdy, which meant that single passing vessels refrained from aggression. Gontran also possessed a Seran luopan, a small wooden geomantic device scrawled with obscure symbols which always pointed south, thereby enabling safe travel per peleggio—i.e., in open seas, and not along the coasts, as most safer captains preferred.

But two weeks after the Marmara battle, the Paralos encountered something that was not safe. When they swung north toward the Adriatic and passed through the narrow Strait of Otranto, they encountered a trio of two-masted Venetian war galleys guarding this body of water. The Venetians surrounded the Paralos, blew their horns, and shouted—in Venetian, not pidgin—to surrender.