Byzantine Wars 3: The Faraway

Someone was grunting. When Gontran opened his eyes, all was dark save the fire flickering in the braziers beneath the stern's red tent. Every Venetian was asleep except for Annibale, who had mounted Ra’isa beneath the red canvass fluttering in the firelight. She lay on the blankets on her back, her face turned away.

Now Gontran felt only disgust. Before he knew what he was doing, he stood to his feet and lunged toward her, his chains ringing. Annibale stopped humping Ra’isa and looked toward Gontran, but what could he see from the bright stern except darkness? In an instant, Ra’isa whirled around, wrapped her strong legs around Annibale, and wrestled him to the deck. There, before he could make a sound, she strangled him with the manacles chained to her wrists. He stuck out his tongue, and his eyes bulged.

Gontran wanted to cheer, but he restrained himself. His heart throbbed in his chest as he glanced back and forth into the darkness, wondering if anyone else was seeing this. Adrenaline surged in his veins, and his muscles and bones forgot their exhaustion, especially since sleep had restored some of his stamina.

It was finally happening. They were finally breaking free. They had only been enslaved a day, but that had been long enough.

Ra’isa whispered into Annibale’s ears, loosening her grip so he could breathe. He reached into his pocket, withdrew a keychain, and unlocked her manacles, though she kept them tight around his neck. Once freed, she pulled the whip from his belt and tossed it over the side—it splashed gently into the sea—then drew Annibale’s sword and held it to his throat as he locked himself in her manacles. He unlocked the other amazons sleeping nearby, fastening their manacles to his three friends' wrists. The four Venetians were then chained to the mainmast. All but Annibale were so drunk that they remained asleep. Ra’isa flung their whips into the sea and gave their swords to her waking comrades. Then she whispered for Zulaika al-Jariya to unlock the galley slaves. Gontran was the only one among these who was awake. When he was free, he thanked Zulaika, and stepped quietly to Ra’isa, kneeling before her in gratitude—something he had sworn he would never do for anyone. Then he bowed, touching his forehead to the deck and whispering his thanks.

“It is my job,” she whispered.

Gontran stood and looked at her, wondering in all seriousness if she was human, or divine. Then his eyes fell on Annibale, sitting with his back to the mainmast, a wrathful expression on his face. He spat toward Gontran.

Gontran lunged toward Annibale and raised his fist to punch him. Before he could strike, Ra’isa pulled him back. She was shockingly strong.

“We still need them,” she said. “We still have mission.”

“What mission?" Gontran said. “Who cares about the mission? You still want to go to Venice, a place crawling with these guys, this filth?”

“You should know of filth, Capitano Cane,” Annibale said. “It’s your element, is it not?”

This time Ra’isa was unable to restrain Gontran—or she let him go—and he punched Annibale as hard as he could, knocking the Venetian to the deck. Gontran’s fist hurt, and he even lost one health—he was only an Apprentice Brawler (3/10)—but that didn't stop him. He kicked Annibale’s belly, forcing the wind from the Venetian’s lungs so that he gaped on the wooden floorboards like a fish plucked from the sea. Then Gontran dragged Annibale to the nearest pile of shit on the deck, shoved his face in it, and even grabbed it and stuffed it into his mouth.

“You like that?” Gontran growled. “You want some more?”

Ra’isa pulled him back. “Enough,” she said. “You cannot treat prisoner like this. Even prisoner you hate.”

“We’ll make him row in the morning,” Gontran said. “We’ll whip him hard the instant he slows down. We’ll see how he likes it.”

Annibale spat out the shit in his mouth. “Do whatever pleases you, Capitano Cane. I will always be a bright Hyperion, and you a dark satyr—”

“I think he’s talked enough for one day,” Gontran said to Ra’isa. He picked up a Venetian cutlass lying on the deck and, before anyone could stop him, cut a strip of cloth from Annibale’s fine black velvet doublet. Then he tied this strip around Annibale’s mouth. For a moment the Venetian glared at him and spoke more, but his voice was too muffled to understand.

“Big improvement,” Gontran said to Ra’isa, tucking the cutlass into his belt. “Make shitheads shut the fuck up forever.”

She smiled, and in response he felt something flicker within him, a sweetness he had forgotten. He wondered again: how could he have never noticed her?

She was just a warrior, he thought. A brutal peasant woman. Too manly for my tastes. One of the cultists who gave her life to the uprising, who would have done anything for Herakleia. I didn’t personally like her, but I respected her. And now…

Gontran recalled that he was still covered in filth. Though it was night, and sharks were prowling the sea, their serrated jaws gaping wide into the sloshing brine, he needed to wash himself, and he knew how to swim thanks to learning back in the old world. At once he left Ra’isa, went belowdecks, and found soap, a towel, a flask of fresh water, and a change of clothes. Back on deck, he explained what he was up to, and apologized to the amazons, who were the only ones awake. They turned away as he stripped off his disgusting clothes and tossed them over the side. Then, dangling a rope into the sea, he lowered himself into the freezing brine for just a moment, and scrubbed his flesh hard, worried that a shark would lunge from the deep and bite his feet off.

Pulling himself back on deck, he sudsed his skin with soap, rinsed off the saltwater with some fresh water, toweled himself dry, and pulled on his new clothes, conscious of his nudity, afraid to see if the amazons were watching. This improved his health by one point, leaving him at 75/100. Shivering, he wrapped himself in the blankets beneath the red tenda di comando, where the amazons were already waiting. The rest of the crew was still asleep, unaware of their freedom.

“Should we wake them?” Gontran said.

“Let them rest,” Ra’isa said. “They need strength tomorrow.”

He remembered that there was another Venetian ship prowling nearby, the Liona. Forgetting the cold, he bolted out of the blankets and looked into the distant darkness for the candle flame he had seen earlier. It was still in the same spot. His shoulders fell, and he sighed with relief.

“Jesus,” he whispered, falling back into the blankets.

“We come to Venice in morning,” Ra’isa said. “Maybe afternoon.”

“How’s that possible?” Gontran said. “We sailed halfway up the Adriatic in just one day?”

“We work hard, make good time,” Ra’isa said. “Annibale tells me.”

“What are we going to do?” Gontran said.

“You are katapan. You decide—Capitano Cane.” Ra’isa laughed, as did the other amazons.

“Captain Dog,” Gontran said. “Very funny. Still.” He looked at Annibale, who was sitting slumped against the mast in the darkness, his head turned away. “Still, getting enslaved for one day was enough. I’m not getting enslaved again.”

“Now we take hostages,” Ra’isa said. “Annibale and his friends—Giovanni, Marco, Agustin—they are important. They are, how do you say in Yewnanî? Big shots. We return them to Venice in exchange.”

“In exchange for what?” Gontran said. “You think the city’s going to ally with us if we threaten their little golden boys?”

“In exchange for respect,” Ra’isa said. “The chance to speak.”

Gontran shook his head. “No. I’m not going there. They’ll kill us, enslave us, steal the ship and drown us. There’s no reason to go. We’ve seen what they’re like. They’re just as bad as when they came to Trebizond. Nothing has changed. The words that’ll change their minds don’t exist, Ra’isa. They don’t care about words—they just care about money.”

“Sounds familiar.” She smiled at her friends.

“No—not like me,” Gontran said. “They can’t be trusted. There are other cities. We can try the Normans in Sicily. There’s—”

“We vote in morning.” Ra’isa looked at her fellow amazons, all of whom were falling asleep. “When crew wakes.”

Gontran clutched his head. “Right, let the crew decide.” He thought, but did not say: let the morons decide.

“You think we want to die?” Ra’isa said. “You think we like the living death of slavery?”

The image of Annibale on top of Ra’isa flashed in Gontran’s mind. “No.”

“I have given more to uprising than you know. We have duty, all of us. We must all sacrifice.”

“Right.” Gontran watched her, remembering how intimidating she could be, afraid of telling her that it was simplistic to divide the world into us versus them. “Still, it’s strange. Evil never seems like it has to work that hard. But good always has to do so much.”

Ra’isa shrugged. “For Venetians, it’s easy. They have money—lots of money. They pay soldiers. And those soldiers have choice. They can be bad, and get money now. Or they can be good, and maybe get money later. Many choose money now. It’s easy. Simple. As for us, what do we have? Only people. Many people. And to have many people, it is hard to organize. Money tempts us. Tempts us to betray. For us, everything is harder. But there is difference: we are right.”

Gontran thought that they sounded like cult members when they talked like this, splitting the world into black and white, good and evil.

Yet this is what science teaches, Ra’isa said in his thoughts. Some things in nature are true, others false. Gravity is not up for argument.

“Where did you learn about gravity?” Gontran said.

“At uprising school. Strategos taught me.”

“Alright, but look. Human societies aren’t as simple as nature.”

“Humans are part of nature,” Ra’isa said. “You cannot separate them when it is convenient for you. And do you not speak of ‘human nature’—this simple human nature that is always greedy, that is always cruel—only when we speak of destroying slavery, feudalism, wage labor? Does this not excuse injustice? If human nature is always same, why do we not live in caves or forests, like first men, first women? We are on ship in middle of sea!”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Gontran said. He was feeling angry, frustrated, confused. Despite the fact that, as a rogue, his intelligence was at Journeyman level (6/10), this happened whenever he argued with Mazdakists. You could never change their minds. They always had an answer for everything.

“Of course not, katapan,” Ra’isa said.

Gontran had the sense that she was toying with him. Yet her eyelids were trembling, and she was struggling to keep them open. She must have been exhausted. Unlike Gontran, she had never gotten a break since their capture. Yet she was still strong enough to smoke him in an improvised debate—in her second language.

“You can sleep,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on our prisoners and make sure the Liona doesn’t sneak up on us.”

“Thank you,” Ra’isa said. “Wake us at dawn. The Liona will be watching.”

“Right. Then we’ll have to argue about our next moves in a committee.”

“Democracy makes us stronger, even if it seems inconvenient.” Ra’isa shut her eyes, lay back in the blankets, and stretched out her limbs like a cozy cat. Gontran wanted to keep arguing with her, but she was snoring before he could think of a rebuttal.

He chuckled. It was funny that she had fallen asleep so fast.

Such a true believer, she passes out in the middle of lecturing me about democracy.

Gontran had no problem with voting every year or two for representatives in the government. But to make everyone vote everywhere all the time? It was so chaotic, obeying an emperor almost would have made more sense! Still, he had already talked about this with Mazdakists. What had Herakleia told him? “The way you think about worker democracy is the way feudal lords and slave masters think about liberal democracy.”

He scoffed. Might work in theory, but not in practice.

Yet he could even hear Herakleia’s response. “If something is good in theory, it’ll also be good in practice. Nobody says the theory of relativity, for instance, is good in theory, but not in practice.”

But this was an effective way to stay awake—just keep thinking about politics. Gontran could argue with his memories like a madman all night. The best thing about this was that, unlike in real life, he always won. His rhetorical abilities always rendered his mental opponents speechless.

His eyes fell on Annibale, barely visible in the brazier light. The Venetian’s eyes were closed, and his head was tilted to the side, the black velvet rag still tied around his mouth, his face smeared with shit. Gontran had never in his life thought he could stuff shit in a person’s mouth. But these Venetians made him so angry, they pushed him to new extremes.

I thought I knew who I was. ‘Know thyself’—it’s such a basic concept. But I had barely scratched the surface.

Being here had taught him about his own nature. It was always changing. It changed depending on circumstance. For instance, at this point he could hardly remember his name in the old world. Back there, a thousand years in the future, across what the Arab navigators called the Green Sea of Darkness—the Atlantic—Gontran was a girl named Helena Lee. She was a Sere. That’s what people here might call her. A lonely, mousy girl dedicated to her studies in a strange place where everyone spent many years in school. That was there. When he had been transported here—somehow—he had changed. Bit by bit, he had stopped being Helena Lee, and had transformed into Gontran Koraki, the rogue Frankish merchant and runaway peasant who had gotten caught up in a slave revolt in Romanía. It was like that story from the old world—the one about going to the planet Mars. (People in that place told each other these kinds of fanciful tales.) These characters went to Mars, and then slowly transformed into Martians, to the point where they became unrecognizable both in their appearances as well as their thinking. That story had terrified him when he had read it, but the same thing was happening to him here.

This place is changing me.

Dawn lightened the darkness. This, as usual, presented problems. What was the Paralos crew supposed to do about the Liona? The latter ship would sail for Venice the instant the blinding forehead of the sun peaked above the horizon. Even now, the sun was tinging the night with the deepest shades of blue, and the stars were beginning to fade. If the Paralos followed the Liona, they would need to keep up their brutal pace, and spend another day oaring like—well, like galley slaves. But if the Paralos showed the slightest sign of trouble, the Liona would attack, forcing the Paralos to fight or flee.

What do I do?

He shook the crew awake, one by one, bringing them bread, cheese, and watery wine. It was amazing to see their reactions as he told them they were free. Each had been too tired to wake when their manacles had been unlocked; they had slept on the benches piled atop each other. Now it was the sweetest thing for them to learn that they were no longer enslaved. Some men sprang up, shouted, pumped their fists, grabbed each other’s hands, and danced in circles, improvising entire songs, startling the others. All were exhausted, but their fatigue vanished when they realized that they were now working for themselves rather than for their masters. Quickly they cleaned the deck and returned to their usual tasks, though most took a moment to spit on the four chained Venetians and curse them. The fifth man, the drummer who seemed to be a slave—he had been chained up since his arrival onboard, his skin filthy and clothed in rags—bowed to Gontran on one knee and swore him allegiance. Gontran rolled his eyes, helped him up, and asked his name.

“Drosaik, my lord,” he said, looking to the four Venetians chained to the mast. “Do not mistake me for one of those kurac. I am from Lastova. They captured and enslaved me many months ago. They burned my village, and anyone they did not enslave they killed—”

“That was a pirate’s nest,” Annibale said, having woken up and struggled free from the cloth gagging his mouth. “Lastova, the last refuge of the Narentani. We only gave you and your bastard friends what they deserved, Narentano. I would do it again, a thousand times I would. Pagan scum Sclaveni like you are fit only to be slaves, or to be impaled upon my rapier like chunks of meat roasting over an open flame—”

Drosaik walked past Gontran, seized Annibale’s black velvet collar with one hand, and punched him hard with the other, splashing the air with blood. He was winding up for another punch when Gontran pulled him back.

“What are you doing?” Drosaik cried. “Take your hand away!”

“Sorry.” Gontran eyed Ra’isa, who was watching him while sipping water from a flask. “She stopped me from killing this guy last night. But we need to keep him fresh.”

“Fresh? Fresh for what?”

“That’s the question.” Gontran let Drosaik go. The Narentine pirate glared down at Annibale as if about to spit on him again.

“No,” Drosaik said. “You are not good enough for my spit.”

Annibale the witty poet could think of no response. He just turned away.

Gontran looked over the side of the ship to the Liona—still visible in the distant murk of early morning.

He turned back to the crew. “Everyone, we need to make up our minds. Do we continue onward to Venice, or should we go someplace else?”

“To Venecija?” Drosaik said. “Why would you go to such a place? What will they do except put you in irons once more?”

“It’s only what you deserve,” Annibale said.

Gontran told him to shut up, then replaced the gag around his mouth, and tightened it.

“The council want us to go to Venice,” Ra’isa said. “To Venice, then, we should go.”

Much of the crew nodded their assent, though some were speaking with one another. Diaresso was leaning over the side, looking to the west, almost as though he wanted to dive into the sea and swim all the way back to the Libyan shore, to the orchards along the Maghreb coast. He had been silent and sullen since regaining his freedom.

“Well?” Gontran said to him. “What do you think?”

These words startled Diaresso. He glared at Gontran, then looked back to the sea. “Each adventure you drag me into is worst than the last. I have been thinking for some time of going my own way.”

Gontran shrugged. “I know this trip hasn’t been easy for you. But you can’t go it alone. Nobody survives out here by themselves.”

“And yet to be with you is worse than being alone. I swore I would never be enslaved again—and look at what happened to me! What if the Venetians had slain the warrior women? Then where would we be?”

“We’re lucky they didn’t.”

Diaresso scoffed. “Luck is all you have, not skill, not intelligence. And luck, as they say, has a habit of changing.” He looked to the crew. “They seek to travel to Venice. That is their folly. I shall not join them. I shall not risk a third enslavement. Once was a horror, twice a tragedy. The third time shall kill me, and doom my family to unspeakable torment for the rest of their days upon this Earth. Days? Ha! They shall not be days. Even with the sun blazing in their faces, they shall know only night for the rest of their lives, if such an existence can even be called life.”

“Diaresso—”

“Do not speak to me again. I am not yours to command. Should we sight land to the west, all I ask of you is that you let me go ashore. By the grace of Allah, I shall find my way home.”

Gontran looked at him, almost too sad to speak. “If that’s what you want.”

“I know not wants, only needs, giaour. I need to survive. And here…” He looked down to the waves swirling in the darkness beneath the ship. “There is no chance of that. This expedition is doomed. It was folly from the very first.”

“Katapan!” shouted David Halevi—rebellious son of a rabbi, and now a Kitezhi sailor—pointing to the bow. “Look!”

All the bustle on the Paralos stopped, and everyone turned toward the direction Halevi was indicating. It was the Liona. Her crew must have noticed that something was amiss with her prize. Now the Venetian ship was rowing toward the Paralos.