Joseph.
The stolen horse nuzzled Gontran awake. He bolted upright. It was evening, the birds and insects were screaming as though trying to deafen one another, and he was still somehow alive. His head pounded, and his bladder felt like it was about to burst. Standing and staggering a few steps from the little secluded glade he had found with István—who was snoring in the grass—Gontran unleashed a gushing flood of piss, one so profound it threatened to drown the world like a second biblical deluge. Both Lemuel Gulliver and Noah himself would have exchanged looks, had they seen this thundering urine—far more powerful than any firehose or opened floodgate, the jet strong enough to cut steel.
Having emptied his bladder, Gontran next realized that he also needed to relieve his bowels. The resulting mountain of dung shocked him. Even a fully grown diplodocus plodding by would have stopped and stared. A first-time mother—having just given birth to healthy cherubic octuplets—would have told Gontran that his achievement was greater. An entire acre of farmland could have been fertilized with this load of shit—fertilized so thoroughly that nearby seeds as yet unplanted would have burst into green life at the mere thought of being scattered into such voluminous, nutrient-laden night soil. He could have fed the world like a living Ceres with his horn of overflowing plenty, a living god of shit.
Damn, I had to go.
His health and stamina ticked upward as a result.
The road was impossible to see from the glade. Gontran and István could have been in the middle of the woods, a thousand miles from the nearest hut. This was why no one had found them.
Gontran ate dinner with the satisfaction of a free man, fed the horse with a bag of oats he’d stolen from the stables—the satisfaction of a thief—then shook István awake. Soon they were off. And before long, the Roman road was passing increasingly busy peasant hamlets. Forests had been cleared and marshes drained, and now farmland stretched for miles, all of it plowed and sown with crops. The houses, too, were changing, the mud walls turning to wood or stone, the thatch roofs becoming tile. These houses looked cozier than the wretched, smoke-filled hovel Gontran had known in Metz. Something was waking this place. A dark age still reigned in Monselice, but here people were already moving toward the light of the Renaissance.
“It is weather,” István said, when Gontran asked about all the activity here. “Every year good. Even the grandparents say it never so good when they are child. Every season perfect. Right amount of rain and sun, cold and heat. Every season mild. So for once, farming easy. Even the peasants do well. They have time and strength to build homes. And they have children, many children. Now everyone always hungry for land, always looking, always clearing.”
“That’s funny,” Gontran said. “Where I come from, the weather’s crazy. Huge storms wipe out entire cities every few months. Half the people can’t get enough water, half the people have too much. But here I guess it’s nice and stable.”
“Better than you think. Italiaország, it land of passion. Women here are beautiful, and they love you like they want a chain for you and them, and then they throw away key. And their brothers and fathers—they kill you. If you look at pretty daughter, pretty sister, then brothers and fathers draw the swords.”
“‘We work hard and we play hard,’” Gontran said.
“What?”
Gontran shook his head. “Sorry, just some of the nonsense I had to deal with where I come from.”
“In Franciaország, you mean?”
“No. Someplace else.”
István asked more, but Gontran refused to elaborate. He was getting tired of explaining the old world. They always asked the same questions and reacted the same way. It had been interesting, when he had first arrived in the game, to explain something like an airplane to people who believed that you needed to flap your arms like a bird in order to fly, but the novelty had worn off, especially since so many of them refused to believe him. He was frustrated, too, because he knew that in the old world, people would react the same way. They would look at him like he was insane if he even mentioned that he had once ridden a horse to medieval Verona. The effect of all this old world skepticism—perfectly reasonable from their point of view—would be so powerful, continuous, and omnipresent that he, too, would suspect that he had lost his mind, even though all his senses told him that at this very moment, he was riding a horse to medieval Verona.
Gontran and István came to the city from the south. Built on the curving River Adige, its sturdy Roman walls hugged a jumble of rectangular gray towers and brown-red campaniles. Dozens of these rose above the rooftops, and the bells from some of the old square churches were clanging so loudly that nothing else could be heard.
Gontran and István entered Verona through a tall white Roman gate of arches, pillars, and triangles just before it was closed for the night; the tired guards leaning on their halberds barely glanced at them before waving them inside. The paved streets were lain out in a regular Roman grid, and crowded with the medley of people that could always be found in more important medieval cities. Old world films would have depicted the people here as painfully white—so as not to upset the more sensitive viewers—but Gontran quickly found many Arab merchants, Jews, and even Africans. This latter group was a sign that your city mattered: only backwaters were monocultural. Some Africans were slaves sweating under sacks of heavy merchandise—slave masters in this time period did not discriminate: they were equal-opportunity enslavers who believed firmly in inclusion, and would therefore manacle and abuse anyone they could find regardless of skin color, usually prisoners of war fleeing lost battles, mostly women and children snatched up in sacked cities, who themselves worked out of sight of the streets as domestic servants and sex slaves. Other Africans were freemen. These went about their business like regular Italians, dressed in the same plain clothes, shouting the same boisterous language, and gesturing in the same ridiculous manner. Gontran could almost hear them saying: “Ey, come on, whaddya gonna do?” For whatever reason, old world movies depicted Italians or Romans as British or American, but when you went back in time and saw them in action, they tended to remind you of Italians. A few Africans were pilgrims from Aethiopia or merchants or ambassadors dressed in diamonds and saffron. One was even being carried through the city in a palanquin chair held by four white slaves, their muscles bulging from the strain, the sweat pouring from their matted hair, for their master was fat. Gontran wondered how long it had been since he had seen a fat person. In the medieval world, fatness was a sign of wealth; in the old world, it was a sign of poverty.
Chuckling, Gontran also imagined the ghosts of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X smiling down with approval from the sky on the Black master with white slaves. Though in reality, Talia and Herakleia and the uprising also did not discriminate, and would destroy slavery wherever they found it, regardless of skin color.
Then Gontran and István passed the usual medieval sights and smelled the usual medieval smells. Butchers whacked hunks of red meat with axes while flies buzzed animal corpses dangling on black iron hooks greased with blood and fat. Children were playing everywhere unsupervised.
All day, every day, for ten years or so, Gontran thought. Rolling around in the dirt with animals, some children wearing no more than a cloth shirt, truly free range kids. The school of hard knocks.
An enormous red brick church with a more ornate style was surrounded by wooden scaffolds, although the construction workers had already left for the day. Most shops were closed or closing—they advertised their wares with carvings and paintings rather than written words—but the taverns were open and shining with torchlight, roaring with conversation and song and laughter, and reeking of ale, wine, piss, and vomit.
Good old medieval city life, Gontran thought.
István stabled the horse, telling the sleepy stableboy they’d pay in the morning.
“With what money?” Gontran whispered to István as they walked away.
“Do not worry,” István said, limping beside him and wincing from the pain of his wounded ankle. “I take care of everything. You free me from slavery, Gontran, and so now I free you from slavery of hunger, slavery of need.”
Gontran asked István what he was talking about, but got no answer.
Next, István guided him to a tavern marked with a large wooden sign depicting what he could have sworn was a death worm—the gigantic monster which had nearly devoured him back in Trebizond, an experience he had been struggling to forget ever since. Gontran shuddered. Although the image was quaint, it was disturbing enough to make him hesitate, but István urged him to continue.
“What is matter?” István said.
Gontran shook his head. “Nothing.”
Inside the Death Worm Tavern were roaring drunkards, men and women clutching each other, and everyone—save the grumpy barmaids—having a good time. István pulled Gontran straight over to a dark table in the corner where three skinny white men were sitting. The instant these spotted István, they threw themselves onto the floor—covered with fish and chicken bones gnawed clean amid wads of phlegm—and bowed repeatedly, repeating the word uram, crawling toward him, seizing his hand, and kissing it.
Bunch of weirdos, Gontran thought.
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As it turned out, István was the scion of a Hungarian nobleman. Captured in battle by the Venetians and subsequently enslaved and forced to work as a glassmaker, his father—Lord Emeric of Esztergom—had sent men to scour the Veneto for his poor son. István himself had been told, in the event of his capture, to make his way to Verona, then to the Death Worm Tavern—“you can’t miss it!”—and then to a specific table in the back, where some of his father’s servants would always be waiting.
They bound up István’s wound, and found him some clean clothes, as well as clean clothes for Gontran. They drank. They partied. Gontran lost himself. He had stopped caring. Life was short and could end in an instant for the most laughable reason, the equivalent of an anvil dropping on your head from the sky, so what did anything matter?
Just enjoy yourself as best you can. Don’t think.
The wine flowed in rivers—in fuming fiumi—and he devoured the usual medieval fare—pies stuffed with meat and cheese. Without tomatoes, Italian cuisine was difficult to distinguish from that belonging to France, Germany, Spain, or England. It was all the same shit wherever you went. Pork pies, pigeon pies, fish pies.
Pies, pies, pies, you want ‘em, we got ‘em.
They laughed, drank, talked, told stories. In Hungarian, István explained Gontran to his servants, who subsequently bowed, thanked and congratulated him in broken Italian, and then procured anything he desired. Gontran was supposed to be disgusted with this kind of feudal behavior, but he no longer cared.
I gave everything to the uprising, and what did it get me? Chains around my ankles on a salt farm. Whips on my back on the deck of my own ship. I’m done with all this idealistic bullshit.
When it was almost morning, Gontran and his new friends—István, Benedek, Gabor, and Csaba—staggered along the dark streets, pissing and vomiting everywhere, singing Hungarian battle tunes, dancing drunkenly before a folk band that was playing in the torchlight before a fountain in the city’s old Roman forum. Someone dressed in clashing colors was juggling what looked to Gontran’s eyes like bowling pins.
Somehow he found himself hugging a sex worker or a sex slave—someone whom poverty forced to tolerate his clumsy advances and his breath which reeked of wine, at least so long as he paid. Gontran buried his head between her soft beautiful breasts, and annoyed her by crying—in his profound drunkenness—for Dekarch Ra’isa. The sex worker—a pale Greek beauty dolled up in lead rouge, black eye shadow, and white powder, her black curly ringlets pouring all the way down to her thighs like a waterfall of hair—jerked his penis to give him an erection and get it over with, all in vain. He was flaccid. His life—his very existence—was flaccid. Living like this led only to death, misery, destruction, but it was easier than sticking your neck out, just for someone to cut it off.
“We’re only human,” he babbled.
She nodded, pretending to understand.
“Can’t we get a break sometimes?”
Gontran collapsed in bed beside her and puked on the floor. That was all he remembered.
Gontran woke up in a bed that was in a room somewhere, feeling as though he had been poisoned. It wasn’t just the predictable headache that seemed to ax his skull in half like it was a watermelon the instant he made the mistake of opening his eyes to the golden afternoon gleaming outside his window and the medley of bells ding-dang-donging from the ornate campaniles rising into the spring clouds as if to warn him of the second death that awaited him in the fires of the Hell of the Damned for his betrayal of the uprising and all it stood for. No. It was the way a rotten essence permeated his flesh, muscle, and blood. His mouth tasted disgusting. He stank of vomit, piss, and alcohol, and was drenched in sweat.
For some time he was unable to even think. All he could do was lie in bed—in an inn or brothel, who knew?—and stew in misery as the world went by outside his window. At some point he climbed out of bed, splashed his face, rinsed his mouth using water someone had poured for him in a ceramic bowl, and even took advantage of the mint leaves left in a little wooden box on the bedside table. Someone had even cleaned his vomit from the floor. It might have been Maria, the woman he had failed to sleep with last night.
Maria. Everyone’s named Maria. And why wouldn’t they be? She was Jesus’s mom. A woman so hot, God himself couldn’t resist her.
Gontran looked out the window to get his bearings, but he had never been to Verona, and so the sight before him—crowds milling and donkeys braying beneath stone and wood buildings lost in the shadows of towers—was meaningless. As he was looking around like a miserable fool, someone knocked on his door. He opened it to one of István’s servants—this one was named Benedek—who bowed and guided him downstairs to the Death Worm Tavern. Gontran never got tired of this place. He never got tired of being reminded of that one time a giant tentacle monster almost ate him.
István, Gabor, and Csaba were gathered at the same table as before. When Gontran and Benedek arrived—István and his cronies had been polite enough to wait—they had dinner. This time Gontran, however, was unable to drink anything but water, and unable to eat anything but a few mouthfuls of bread. The Hungarians, in contrast, were eating and drinking as though they had just crawled out of a desert.
István slapped Gontran gently across the chest. “Hey, you listen. We go to the Magyarorság soon. Maybe tomorrow morning. You should come with us.”
“Me?” Gontran said. “You want me to come with you?”
“So I say!” István looked at Benedek, Gabor, and Csaba, who were politely watching. “I am son of a lord. Many years ago my ancestors ride in and kill some people and take some land. Ever since, we live in comfort. You should come. We live as kings.”
“Peasants do all the work though,” Gontran said.
Gabor, Csaba, and Benedek exchanged looks.
István frowned. “They always lazy and stupid. But we never see them, except for servants in father’s castle, so it’s no problem. And peasants in castle behave. It not easy in there, but it better than field work.”
“You were just a slave for how long?” Gontran said. “And you’re telling me you’re looking forward to living off a bunch of peasants?”
“We have many thousands on our land. So we live like the kings. Even if they lazy, we live well. We eat, sleep, drink, fight, fuck. That’s how we live. It good life!”
“You know where I came from,” Gontran said. “You know my friends are against all that.”
“In Franciaország?”
“No, I mean in Trebizond. Have you heard of the uprising?”
István shook his head.
“It’s a slave revolt,” Gontran said. “They’re the ones who own that ship I was commanding.”
István looked at his servants. “It not go well I think.”
“No,” Gontran said. “Not exactly…”
“You see?” István spread his long arms wide, then lowered them. “It way of world. It cannot change. And you know this city—the Verona—its nickname is ‘Little Rome.’ There is little coliseum here—actually it very big, it is just small compare with coliseum in Rome—and did death fights there. Many buildings here built using slaves. Things always bad, ever since Adam and Eve fall out of garden.”
Gontran had argued like this many times with Alexios and Herakleia. Somehow it grossed him out to hear the same thoughts from a nobleman, because Gontran hated noblemen. He had only tolerated István out of ignorance of his status. Now that Gontran knew the truth, if he’d possessed his pistol-sword, he might have drawn it right now under the table and blown István away.
“If you try to change the things,” István continued, “you just make the things worse. Like Spartacus, you know? He and all his friends die. Many thousands. Maybe it better if he just bow to Rome. Then everyone live.”
“He couldn’t,” Gontran blurted.
István, Csaba, Gabor, and Benedek looked at him.
“What you mean?” István said.
“You think they had much of a choice? You think they didn’t try everything they possibly could to avoid bloodshed?” Gontran shook his head. “That’s not how it works. The moment you throw your lot in with an uprising, it’s victory or death. And a lot of people only get to that point by kicking or screaming. They know what fighting back means. Endless work, misery, bloodshed, boredom, all for an uncertain future. They know there’s no going back. That they’ll probably never live to see the world they want to build. But it’s better than the prison they live in. The uncertain future is better than the certain present, one where they have to watch everyone they know suffer and die needlessly. They start to think that maybe things don’t need to be the way they are. They start asking questions nobody can answer. And you know how the authorities answer?”
His Hungarian friends shook their heads. Gontran was getting worked up. He had been living around idealists for too long. He had reached the point of quoting the Bible, a book he hated.
“‘They say what is right is wrong and what is wrong is right,’” Gontran said. “‘That black is white and white is black; bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter.”
István said something in Hungarian to Csaba, Benedek, and Gabor. They laughed.
“Listen,” István said to Gontran. “Forget history, ideas, society. Just think about you. Back in Velence, you lucky. You like Bible? Well, guess what? God bless you. You go free in days because of the drunken Boscolo.”
“One day working out there was enough for me,” Gontran said.
“Many other slaves,” István continued, “they work years, decades, if they live. They never escape. Le saline are tombs. Salt tastes like blood for a reason. I am there for months, you know? Boscolo, he not always drunken. That day, he drinks a lot. He celebrating because you good expensive slave. He think maybe he can retire. Now he dead. He make one mistake, and he dead. And think about this. We still in Verona. Velence not far. One or two days on horse. Maybe Venetians find you. Maybe they take you to le saline again. This time, they give you special chains with no lock. You need blacksmith to get them off. And then you never escape. For years you think about me. You think about beautiful Magyarország, beautiful Magyar ladies. You think about the life you maybe have there. It like a sword in your brain.”
Gontran covered his face with his hands. He isn’t completely wrong.
István rubbed his shoulder for a moment. “You are fun in party. You are good man. You help me find friends and family, and you ask nothing in return.”
“Believe me, that’s not the way it usually is,” Gontran said.
“But you free right person, Gontran. I am not regular person. I am like a god that is testing you. Well, you pass the test. I repay you a thousand times. For your entire life, you can live in Magyarország. You never worry about anything again. It is safe place. Our warriors are fearsome. All Christendom fears them. My father, he grateful for your help. Maybe he even knight you. Then you get peasants, plus you get a lady for a wife, title to lands that last forever. And so? Nothing to worry about the rest of your life. Your only trouble is boredom. Is asking: what do I do today? Hunt? Read? Drink? Sleep?” He laughed, and his servants laughed with him.
Gontran snorted. It’s tempting. I’m tired of the uprising. Tired of losing, of running for my life and losing good people. Joseph’s gone, and for what? Diaresso, Ra’isa, Alexios, and Herakleia are all still out there, but they can get along fine without me. I did my part. I tried my best. It didn’t work out.
“So?” István said. “What you think?”
“You make a good case,” Gontran said.
“Good!” István exclaimed. “Then you come with us?”
Gontran nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”