After lunch, Ay?e Khatun asked Herakleia for a tour of Trebizond, and what could the strategos do but oblige? “The princess takes what she likes,” Ay?e Khatun explained, waving an ornate paper fan. As they walked, and worked off the banquet they had devoured, they met practically everyone in the city, and saw all the sights. Ay?e Khatun abandoned the tiny polite Seran princess steps she had used earlier and—adapting to circumstance—instead took the same broad strides as Herakleia.
“I used to be a princess too,” Herakleia said.
“Is that so?” Ay?e Khatun said. “Can one ever stop being a princess?”
“Seems like it.”
“What a pity.”
Herakleia observed how Ay?e Khatun needed to lift her glimmering silk robe above the dirt and muck on the paved road.
“We can find some pants for you, if you want,” Herakleia said.
Ay?e Khatun bowed. “I appreciate the thought, but I can only take things so far before I anger my husband. To be out here alone with you and unguarded is already quite extreme.”
“You aren’t unguarded. I’m with you, and the people of Trebizond know you’re our guest. They won’t let you get hurt.”
Indeed, almost everyone they passed greeted them, to the extent that it was a little difficult to keep their conversation going. Ay?e Khatun asked Herakleia to talk about her adventures, and she was happy to describe her trip to Sera, her capture by the Romans, and how her friends Gontran, Alexios, and Diaresso had risked everything to free her.
“I would be so delighted if I could meet these friends of yours,” Ay?e Khatun said. “They sound like such adventurous people—like people in novels!”
“I’m sorry you missed them. They left before you arrived.”
“Next time,” Ay?e Khatun said. “I will have to wait for next time. I used to tell myself that I could always do the things I wanted to do in my next life, but lately I have begun to suspect that there is no next life. Perhaps this is the only life we have.”
Herakleia kept silent. She was already worrying about how this place was changing her guest. Ay?e Khatun had become the key to the alliance. Small compromises needed to be made in the name of the greater good. This was Herakleia thinking like a politician with a broad constituency.
“Please tell me more stories,” Ay?e Khatun said as they continued walking. “I know you must have more adventure stories.”
Shrugging, Herakleia talked about how she had once been eaten by a gigantic sea monster called a ketos, and how she had defended Trebizond in two sieges—fighting in the first on a sailboat, then in the second in a resistance movement that had expelled the Latin occupation within weeks.
Ay?e Khatun’s eyes widened. “However did you manage to accomplish such a thing? For some people, it must take years, decades, if not centuries to achieve such feats.”
Memory of fucking Duke Robert to death—his flushed, sweaty face, his blue eyes rolling with pleasure—flashed in Herakleia’s mind.
“We got lucky,” she said.
“Oh, do not be so falsely modest with me.” She slapped Herakleia gently with her fan. “I suspect that luck had nothing to do with it.”
They met the blacksmith Jamshied al-Tabrizi, who was then teaching his students how to forge hand cannons. Ay?e Khatun called them “fire lances,” but remarked that they were more advanced than what she recalled in Sera.
“The soldiers of Great Song must hold these weapons using their hands and feet,” she said. “They are too dangerous to hold with hands alone.”
Jamshied bowed to her. “These weapons are also dangerous, my lady, but we’ve reduced the number of times they explode in our hands. They’re more accurate and dependable now.”
“It’s easier to aim when you aren’t worried about blowing yourself up,” Herakleia said.
“Even if they do not explode, the fire lances of Great Song are far too hot to hold,” Ay?e Khatun said. “They will burn your hands away.”
“That is no longer much of an issue,” Jamshied said.
“It’s all so very impressive,” Ay?e Khatun said as they walked outside Jamshied’s shop and into the sunshine. Soon they were back in the citadel courtyard watching some amazon trainees run upon walls. “These must be the women soldiers I have heard about, doing their amazing feats of acrobatics.”
“Most of our army consists of women,” Herakleia said. “The men are too busy building and mining. Without women, we’d have almost no one in our army at all.”
Ay?e Khatun laughed. “These women of yours—these amazons—they more than hold their own against the fighting men of this world, do they not?”
“We’ve taught them the fighting techniques from Tiger Mountain, as I mentioned, and as you can see.”
“An utter mastery of qi.” Ay?e Khatun watched with amazement as two trainees raced each other along the walls. “Here you have exceeded all but the greatest fighting monks also. This Trebizond, it is a special place.” She turned to face Herakleia. “Many powers would wish to steal its secrets.”
“Two have already tried. They both regretted it.”
“You sometimes call yourselves immortals, do you not? And yet you are not truly immortal, but only made of flesh and blood, heart and soul. Silver coins can fell your people just as silver arrows can. I have also heard legends from these lands of yours.” Ay?e Khatun looked to the sunlit mountains that seemed to rise above Trebizond like tidal waves. “In Great Song, we call this place Fulin. You have a legend of a man who flew too close to the sun, do you not? His feathers melted, for they were glued together with honey, and he plunged to his death in the sea.”
“Ikaros. Everyone knows it.”
“I like this legend,” Ay?e Khatun said. “I like so much about the cultures in these lands. We consider all those outside Zhongguo barbarians, but I have found that we can learn much from one another. In the past, I would have been frightened to walk outside the palace without armed guards, but here I am only with you. I have learned much from my husband, perhaps too much.”
“You seem to keep him under control.”
Ay?e Khatun smiled white teeth from her red lips, and her kohl-lined eyes squinted with amusement. “He is my dog. But even a dog will tolerate only so much from his master before he fights back.”
“Story of my life,” Herakleia said.
Ay?e Khatun laughed.
They made their way out of the Northeast Gate, through the Daphnous Suburbs, around Mount Minthrion—which had more buildings every day now—and toward Kárbouno Mountain, where the poisonous smell of coal laced the air. Ay?e Khatun had asked to see the mines, and Herakleia had obliged her. In the last few months, thanks to the combined genius of Jamshied and Samonas—as well as the vague memories of the old world lurking in the minds of Herakleia, Gontran, and Alexios—the workers had constructed an actual elevator, one powered at first by people and animals and later by steam, and which even included a safety mechanism designed to engage if the rope supporting the elevator snapped. This not only made it easier to move workers in and out of the mine, but it greatly increased the rate at which coal was extracted, to the extent that now a large steam-powered water pump was also necessary to keep the groundwater in the depths of the earth at bay. The miners had burrowed so deeply that their tunnels and chambers would have collapsed long ago otherwise. They also lost more time now by “timbering”—hammering wood into place to hold up the tunnels—but safety, not profit, always came first.
Ay?e Khatun inevitably asked for a tour of the mine. Herakleia was expecting this, and likewise expected the princess to persist even after being warned that going underground was dangerous. They found spare heavy iron helmets in the storage depot. It looked so incongruous to see the beautiful Seran princess dressed in silk with an iron helmet on her head, and Herakleia warned Ay?e Khatun that her clothes would be ruined if she wore them into the mine. Excusing herself into the locker room, she exchanged her silk dress for a miner’s pants and tunic, and was once more transformed. All that remained of her Seran-ness was the white powder on her face, the kohl lining her eyes, and the rouge on her lips. Combined with the silk, the makeup made her look beautiful, but now Herakleia thought she looked like a clown, and she even advised Ay?e Khatun to wash the makeup off, since she was bound to be covered in coal anyway. The princess followed her advice. Without the makeup, she looked even more beautiful, as if that was even possible.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
<i>I have to take it easy with this woman</i>, Herakleia thought. <i>I’m starting to have too much of a crush on her.</i>
Ghiyath al-Din, having lost a leg to the Latin invaders, now manned the elevator controls, spending much of his time here studying reading and mathematics textbooks printed by the city’s press. Herakleia greeted him, and remarked upon the amazing progress he had made. When he had first arrived in Trebizond as a refugee from Syria—along with his wife Fatima, who was now Kentarch of the Workers’ Legions—he had been unable to write his own name. It had been a struggle to get him to memorize the first few letters of the Greek alphabet, especially because his first language was Arabic. But he had kept at it, attending classes alongside children and other illiterate adults—of which there were many—in the Gabras School. At this point it seemed like the man would soon be writing books of his own. After all, the library here was limited—Trebizond was always looking for more books, and forcing ships which carried books to have them copied and printed here before the ships were allowed to depart—which meant that there was much that needed to be written, particularly primers on history and dialectical materialism, not to mention medicine, chemistry, engineering, and psychology. These fields impacted workers the most, and such disciplines were in their infancy even in the most advanced parts of the world. And even when history books existed, for instance, they were produced by servants of the feudal or slaveowning ruling class, and therefore rarely concerned themselves with the overwhelming majority of humanity, disdaining it as filth, only focusing on the triumphs and follies of the great men in history—nobles, knights, priests, emperors. This meant that having the time, resources, and know-how needed to conduct scientific experiments and interpret the results could lead to almost superhuman progress. In his spare time away from Kárbouno Mountain Ghiyath al-Din was already interviewing people and taking notes in preparation for a history of Trebizond, one which extended back even beyond the days when the Ten Thousand arrived here with Xenophon, escaping the death of Cyrus, Persian Shahanshah, to the days of Mithridatic and then Roman domination, and finally the coup of Nikephoros and the subsequent uprising.
Ay?e Khatun found all of this fascinating. “In Zhongguo,” she said as they entered the elevator, “only the priests and eunuchs are permitted to read and write. There are some scribes, too, musicians, poets, and entertainers, but it is looked upon as a dangerous thing for ordinary people to know these secrets. The poets themselves are often branded as traitors and meet terrible ends.”
“But do they actually betray the emperor?” Herakleia said. “The Son of Heaven?”
Ay?e Khatun blushed. “They are often made the playthings of rival conspirators at court.”
“They don’t fight for the people?”
“It is unthinkable. Why would they? If anything, the poets view the toilers of the fields and the merchants of the marketplaces and the soldiers of the marching armies with even more contempt than do the eunuchs and the Son of Heaven himself. Indeed, the laborers are actually beneath their contempt—in their minds, they are merely dull obstacles if they exist at all. To the intellectuals, manual laborers are no different from draft animals.”
“Intellectuals can be a problem if they aren’t disciplined by the working class,” Herakleia said. “It’s the same with anyone. If you aren’t explicitly on the workers’ side—regardless of the demands they make upon you—then you are aiding slavery and reaction. What we aim to do here involves making workers into intellectuals, and intellectuals into workers.”
“I can see you are already progressing.”
Herakleia smiled. She had expected skepticism from Ay?e Khatun, and was unused to outsiders—particularly outsiders with royal pedigrees—agreeing with her so easily. Was this a trick? What did Ay?e Khatun want with her?
Ghiyath activated the lever, and the elevator swung down into darkness. Ay?e Khatun gasped and hugged Herakleia in fear, then laughed nervously and stepped away. Almost nothing could be seen save for the light glowing from the chemical lamps in their helmets. Herakleia showed Ay?e Khatun how to adjust hers. Even at its maximum setting, the lamp gave off only a dim glow, one barely brighter than a candle. But it lasted for hours, and was safe around pockets of gas—some of which could be ignited by a spark from a pickaxe striking bedrock—so it was the best Trebizond could do for the time being.
The elevator descended, and the air whooshed in the darkness, but it still took time to get to the bottom, passing many abandoned tunnels along the way. Sometimes the helmet lamp light would glint against the emergency escape ladder—welded to the rock—as it blurred past. With a shudder Herakleia remembered the days, not so long ago, when workers needed to climb down here using rickety wooden ladders that would creak, groan, snap, splinter, and sometimes step back and forth like stilts at the edges of cliffs that overlooked endless chasms.
After an eternity, the elevator reached the bottom. Herakleia and Ay?e Khatun stepped out into the darkness, meeting coal-blackened miners who nodded to Herakleia and said “strategos” before shoving tubs of coal into the elevator and stepping back—allowing the two passengers only a moment to get out of the way. After tugging a string attached to a bell at the top of the shaft, the elevator vanished.
“I’m almost afraid to ask.” Ay?e Khatun’s voice echoed in the darkness. “But how deep are we?”
“Thousands of feet,” Herakleia said.
At the bottom of the mine, there was little to see. Miners hacked at the walls with pickaxes, shoveled the coal into tubs, and then shoved the tubs along iron tracks to the elevator, always doing their best to keep an eye on cracks in the walls or ceilings or problems with the timber. Water was dripping everywhere. Herakleia explained to Ay?e Khatun that they were planning on building even larger machines to mine this place, even though the price of coal had fallen so low—as a result of their hard work—that it was almost worthless.
“Why then do you mine it?” Ay?e Khatun asked.
“It keeps us warm in the winter. It’s also useful for building high-powered machinery. We have plans for machines that the world has never seen before—heavy lumbering titans which can’t move except by the power contained in these stones.” Herakleia held up a chunk of gleaming coal into the lamp light. Ay?e Khatun’s shining face—now smudged with coal—was only barely visible in the darkness.
“How beautiful to see,” Ay?e Khatun said.
She entertained herself by joining the miners and slamming a pickaxe against the rock walls, explaining once again that “the princess takes what she likes.” Herakleia thought that Ay?e Khatun would only do this a few times, giggle like a schoolgirl, and then satisfy her curiosity—“what’s it like to have a real job?”—for the rest of her life. But she was full of surprises. She kept at it, hacking at the mountain heart until the sweat running down her face was black with coal. Again and again she pounded the seam, switching from one arm to the other, grunting swears in a language no one else understood, until even the other miners had stopped to watch. Minutes passed. Soon these turned to a quarter of an hour, then half an hour. Out of boredom, Herakleia joined Ay?e Khatun, unsure of when she would be satisfied, doing her best to gratify her guest, especially since it seemed that Ay?e Khatun controlled Chaka Bey—and perhaps also inadvertently controlled Great Seljuk, or at least had some influence over the family of the Exalted Sultan. Herakleia soon realized that the princess was taking out all her frustrations on the mountain, to the extent that even the mountain itself was almost cowering and begging her to stop. Finally, after one hour, then two, Ay?e Khatun declared that she’d had enough. She was so exhausted that she almost needed to be carried away. Herakleia and a few other miners—including Masud, the big Turkish miner who had survived the Latin occupation—helped her back to the elevator.
“I have not seen my family in years,” Ay?e Khatun explained as she and Herakleia rode back up to the sky. “It took a year to travel from the capital to Erzurum. But my family abandoned me. They practically sold me to Chaka Bey. I understand why they did it, and all my life I had known that it was coming. Yet I did not know that it was possible to live differently, not until I heard about this place, not until I came here.”
These words should have excited Herakleia, but they actually frightened her. Now she was unsure of what to say. Was Trebizond radicalizing the princess?
“Why should women always bow down to men?” Ay?e Khatun said, partly to herself. “Why can we not determine our own destinies? Why must we merely serve as their sows, breeding their children for them that they may profit and pass on their property to their descendants? Are we not more than mere cows? The word in Seran for ‘slave,’ it is not so different from the word for ‘woman.’”
“Of course we’re more than that,” Herakleia said. “But some of us still have duties, responsibilities. Some of us can help more in certain ways than others—”
“Perhaps I should never have come here,” Ay?e Khatun said. “I might have been happier, had I remained ignorant of this place. It will change me forever. I have tasted something I may have never known otherwise. I knew it almost from the moment I first looked down upon the city from the mountains. When I saw how vast it was, how busy and sprawling, how black acrid smoke rose from the buildings, and how the sea was full of all kinds of ships…I knew this place was unique. I had never seen anything like it. But I did not know that it would change me so quickly. How could I have? And now tell me, strategos, how can I return to my old life, having tasted of the freedom of this place? Shall I simply live out the rest of my days as a decoration for my husband, giving him children until I die in childbirth, while you adventure across the world?”
“They’re called adventures for a reason,” Herakleia said. “They’re dangerous and full of misery. There’s nothing fun about hunger, cold, heat, or watching the people you love get killed. Good people lose their lives if they’re unlucky—their limbs if they’re lucky. The loss is often meaningless. I know what you’re thinking, princess, and if you mean to join us, it would mean giving up all the comforts of your court. Your beautiful clothing, your servants—”
“What are they except the adornments of a golden cage?” Ay?e Khatun said.
“But there’s another problem.” Herakleia squinted as their elevator neared the light. “If you join us, your husband will never forgive Trebizond. He will declare war against it.”
“What does that matter? Great Seljuk cannot stand up to the might of this place.”
“It’s a vast empire, almost undefeated in battle. We don’t even know how far its borders extend…”
“I cannot go back.” The elevator stopped, and Ay?e Khatun walked outside into the light on her own. “No one will convince me. You let me work in the mine as a man—you let me work as a free person. I cannot return to slavery. Consequences be damned, I wish to join your uprising, and you cannot stop me. For the princess, as you know, takes what she likes.”