Burning through the farr, Herakleia soared into the sky and caught Ay?e Khatun before she could bash her life out on the ground. 95/100 farr remained for Herakleia. Ay?e Khatun was crying so mournfully that she hardly even noticed that her suicide attempt had failed. At almost the moment Herakleia set her down in the palace courtyard, Chaka Bey and his retinue of slaves—as well as Selcan and Aykiz—rushed out of the palace. Chaka Bey now wore his demonic face, as well as all his golden armor, which shone almost too brightly to look at. Ibrahim Hummay was bowing beside him and looking smaller than ever, clad in swirling silk and glittering jewels that jingled with his careful footsteps.
“What’s this all about?” Herakleia clutched Ay?e Khatun close. “What’s the meaning of this?”
Before Hummay could translate, Chaka Bey roared at Herakleia, lunging toward her, his right hand trembling as it came close to drawing his damascened scimitar, its hard steel blade sharp as volcanic glass.
Hummay bowed to her. “Forgive me, strategos, but my master Chaka Bey wishes to inform you that he believes this is not your business. These are his words, not mine. He demands that you return his wife to him at once.”
“Not until he can explain why she just tried to kill herself.”
Chaka Bey screamed like a lion, so that even the air around him seemed to tremble with fear. Ay?e Khatun shook in Herakleia’s grip, and Samonas—standing nearby—clutched his head in frustration, at the same time murmuring a prayer.
Hummay, meanwhile, translated Chaka Bey’s words. “My master wishes to inform you that his wife, the illustrious princess Ay?e Khatun, is not acting like herself. This place has filled her mind with ideas that can never be. She has forgotten her duty to her husband as well as to her father and to Great Seljuk. Even to act in this way betrays Trabzon, does it not? For it risks everything—including your very lives.”
“She wants to join us,” Herakleia said. “She told me. I told her she needed to honor her vow to her husband.”
Hummay translated, but these words only further enraged Chaka Bey. His wailing voice rattled the citadel windows.
“My master wishes to inform you that from the moment he arrived here, you have been attempting to turn his wife against him. Every word you uttered was meant to trick and seduce her.”
“That’s not true!”
Chaka Bey’s screaming continued. Hummay, caught between two foes, was tense. He kept his head bowed, and his eyes averted.
“My master Chaka Bey wishes to inform you that you must return his wife to him immediately, or the alliance with Trebizond ends.” Hummay paused. “Great Seljuk will declare war on you, and ally with the Romans and all other powers against you. When this city is taken, every inhabitant—down to the babes in their mothers’ arms—will be put to the sword.”
This is a nightmare. Herakleia looked down at the woman she was clutching to her chest. Ay?e Khatun looked up at her with tears in her reddened eyes. All her makeup was running down her face.
“Please do not send me back,” she whispered.
Herakleia looked at Chaka Bey. “The documents we signed stipulate that anyone who wishes to join us is welcome to do so.”
As soon as Hummay had translated these words, Chaka Bey drew his scimitar and stepped toward Herakleia, his golden armor clanking. The Trapezuntine guards in the courtyard came to her side and drew their own weapons. Chaka Bey stopped, glared at them, and shouted so furiously that he was spitting everywhere, his face red with rage.
“My master wishes to inform you that you cannot possibly believe that he would give up his wife to this place. He states that it is an obvious violation of the prior diplomatic arrangements which Trabzon and Great Seljuk agreed upon in order to hold this embassy here in the first place. Had no such arrangement been made—one respecting the lives and property of both host and guest—he never would have come here at all. It is an outrage. It violates all that is sacred.”
“It’s not my fault your wife wants to leave you.”
Chaka Bey screamed, but Hummay stepped away.
“Ay?e Khatun is not the only one who wishes to leave,” he said.
Herakleia looked at him. Before she could ask what he was talking about, she was shocked to see the rest of the slaves—as well as Selcan and Aykiz—as they stepped away from Chaka Bey and stood behind Herakleia, leaving the Seljuk potentate alone. He glared at them in shock, and shouted and waved his sword as sweat poured down his face.
“You want to join the uprising?” Herakleia said to Hummay.
“Thus it is with all of us, strategos.” He bowed. “We have all spoken. We are all astounded with this place. Who would choose slavery over freedom, when given the chance to have the latter?”
“But you know we have to let him go.” Herakleia nodded to Chaka Bey. “He’ll go back to his brother and declare war on us.”
“Better to fight for freedom and die, than to bow to slavery and live,” Hummay said. “To kill or imprison him here likewise means war.”
Herakleia laughed. “So all this careful diplomacy was for nothing.”
“We could have had an alliance with a great empire,” Samonas said.
“No empire has ever been great,” Herakleia said.
Samonas continued. “We could have had hundreds of thousands of Turkmen warriors riding down our foes—none of whom are capable of fielding an army that comes anything close to that size. Instead, we now have one runaway princess, and twenty runaway slaves.”
With Ibrahim Hummay translating, Herakleia explained to Chaka Bey that he was free to leave the city. In response, he shrieked that he would never go anywhere without his beloved wife. Tears were in his eyes, now, as he dropped his sword, fell to his knees, and begged her to come back. But she refused to even look at him.
“Was it all a farce, my darling?” he asked. “Did you ever truly love me, as I love you?”
Ay?e Khatun was still clutching Herakleia and too terrified to look away, as though she expected at any moment to be returned to slavery. Ibrahim Hummay’s words, meanwhile, continued to echo in Herakleia’s mind.
Who would choose slavery over freedom?
“I will be your slave!” Chaka Bey lay flat on his face and stretched out his arms, palm-down, to Ay?e Khatun. “I will do anything you ask, if only you come back to me! There is no one else in all the world like you!”
“Never.” Ay?e Khatun looked at Herakleia, then stepped away. “All my life I have done nothing but what other people have asked. This is the first time I do something for myself.”
Chaka Bey rolled onto his side, writhing and crying. After he had exhausted himself—with everyone in the courtyard looking at each other, afraid to approach, yet unsure of what to do—he seized his sword, stood, and pointed the tip toward his belly. He was shutting his eyes, murmuring a prayer, and about to drive the blade inside himself, but Herakleia stretched out her hand, and with the farr yanked the blade away. 99/100 farr remained.
Chaka Bey’s eyes widened. He tried to hold the weapon, gritting his teeth and growling and shoving the sharp tip toward himself with his fingers whitened and all his muscles trembling, but Herakleia’s farr was too strong. The sword flew from his hands—pulling him back onto the ground—and swooped through the air, turning end over end, whistling, ringing, gleaming in the morning sun, until Herakleia caught it, whirled it around, and tucked the damascened steel into her belt.
“What is this sorcerous place?” Chaka Bey gasped, looking back and forth at everyone in the courtyard. “What djinni enchants it? What have you done to my wife and slaves?”
Now that he was disarmed, all the Trapezuntine guards rushed upon him. At Herakleia’s command, they placed him on his horse, and shouted for him to ride home. He was soon galloping out of the city, crying, covering his face with his arm whenever anyone looked at him. The Trapezuntine workers were too surprised by his appearance to do anything except get out of his way and stare when he passed.
When he was crossing the Mill River bridge, he turned back to Trebizond and bellowed that he would have revenge. His voice echoed across the mountains and valleys, and even seemed to sing across the sea, pushing aside the wind-swollen sails of Arabian dhows.
“I swear I will have revenge!” he cried in deafening Seljuk which every person for miles in every direction heard. His voice was so strong that even if you covered your ears, it still pulsed through and shook your ear drums. For days afterward, people would complain of ringing in their ears, even when they were too far away to have even seen Chaka Bey.
“I curse this place in the name of Allah!” he continued. “I swear I shall soon return to take revenge upon every last one of you, slaughtering you all, and burning this place to the ground until not a brick remains! For the rest of time, until the breaking of the world, no one shall speak the name of this place without shuddering in fear! You shall all pay for what you have done to me—I, who came here as a friend! I, who was ready to help you achieve all you wished to accomplish! I, who was ready to spill the blood of my brothers to aid you! This is how you repaid me—by seducing my wife, for whom I would have given the world, and stealing my slaves! May every last one of you burn in eternal hellfire!”
Exasperated and out of breath, he vanished along the Satala Way, trailed by dust.
Everyone in the citadel courtyard was silent for a moment.
“Well.” Samonas raised his eyebrows. “Who’s ready for breakfast?”
Nobody—except Samonas himself—laughed at his joke. His mood, as a result, soured again. Kentarch Fatima Al-Din had joined them in the courtyard by then. She asked Herakleia what they were supposed to do now.
Herakleia looked at Ay?e Khatun and the twenty slaves. “There’s nothing we can do—nothing except welcome these new friends to Trebizond, and find them all a place to stay.”
Ay?e Khatun, Ibrahim Hummay, and all the other slaves got down on their hands and knees and bowed their heads in the dust, gasping their thanks. Herakleia told them to stand. When they refused, she helped them up.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“That’s the last time you bow like that to anyone,” she said. “You aren’t slaves any longer. You’re free.” She looked to the former slaves. “You’re men. You’re women. No longer property.”
“If that is so,” Ibrahim Hummay said, standing to his feet, “then you will permit me to tell you that I was already aware of this fact.”
“Be silent,” said an ex-slave named Dogan. “How can you argue with her only a moment after she has risked everything to free us?”
Hummay ignored him. “I wished only to thank you for your help,” he said to Herakleia. “And to test this newfound freedom of ours.”
“No need to thank someone who’s just doing their job,” Herakleia said. “Here we say what we like, so long as it doesn’t hurt people.”
She spent the rest of the day helping Ay?e Khatun and the freedmen find new homes. Samonas trailed after her the whole time, babbling that she couldn’t do this, it would ruin them, they needed to send a rider after Chaka Bey to beg his forgiveness.
“What’s done is done,” Herakleia told Samonas—several times.
Although he was annoying, she was unable to dismiss him. A moving, full-scale model of the whole city—with all its people coming and going, all the workers doing their different jobs, all the people staying in different homes, all the commodities changing hands and being stored or being exported—somehow lived inside his mind. Not only did Samonas know where to house these new Trapezuntines, but he also reluctantly asked each of them what they wished to do with themselves. Ibrahim would have to tell Kentarch Al-Din everything he knew about Great Seljuk’s military—where the empire’s armies were located, how many men it could field, the state of its supplies, the morale of the cities nearest to Trebizond, and so on. Ay?e Khatun, meanwhile, expressed her desire to join the amazons.
“You’ve already done so much damage in one day, I guess it doesn’t matter,” Herakleia said.
Ay?e Khatun said nothing, only hugging her in response.
All the freedmen were told that they could leave whenever they wished. If they stayed, however, they needed to work. In exchange, they could expect housing, medicine, food, water, education, community, entertainment, and power, plus retirement at sixty. Everything would be cheap or free, and always of the highest quality.
“We focus on heavy industry first,” Herakleia explained as they walked through the city together to their new homes—which they needed to share with many other people, as overcrowding was becoming an issue despite the relentless pace of construction. “We build up our defenses and our industrial strength, trading grain and iron and textiles for money, and exchanging money for machines we cannot build ourselves. The plan is simple. Once we have built up our productive capacity, and have the ability to defend ourselves, we can diversify, working on light industry to produce consumer items. Perhaps, as our strength grows, we can even permit foreign investment, at least so long as those investors follow certain rules and are kept under control.”
“I’ve heard that the Venetians, Genoans, and Pisans have become such a problem in Konstantinopolis,” Samonas said. “They’ve practically taken over the city.”
“They provide excellent services,” Herakleia said. “Yet money alone is never the only thing they’re after. Always they’re looking for control. Opportunity. Land. Slaves.”
It turned out to be easy to find homes for the freedmen, but less easy to find them jobs. They were all house slaves, and had grown used to tending to the needs—and maneuvering around the moods—of Chaka Bey. Most of the time, their job was only to make the bey look more imposing. A man with twenty well-dressed slaves must have been important, after all. This meant that their jobs were, in fact, bullshit. But there were no bullshit jobs in Trebizond. Everyone worked hard at some vital task six days a week. This was exhausting, but rewarding. No one doubted their purpose and no one was insecure about their own value. Each could see with their own eyes how their actions made a difference.
Yet it turned out to be too much for some of the house slaves. Not everyone was cut out to be a miner, farmer, fisherman, soldier, weaver, teacher, scribe, caregiver, construction worker, chef, entertainer, or blacksmith. These were all real jobs which required real dedication, and each was harder than being on a team of twenty yes-men who were tasked with tending to the bodily needs of one person. Thus, within days, two freedmen left to follow Chaka Bey. Samonas protested this, since he was rightfully worried that they would exchange their updated knowledge of Trebizond for forgiveness, but Herakleia thought that their long-lost master already knew too much.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s seen everything already.”
Ay?e Khatun, too, was unused to living without her two ladies-in-waiting. After a lifetime of service, she was shocked to see them abandon her, just as she had abandoned her own husband. Selcan and Aykiz both wanted to become teachers. They both already knew how to read, which meant that the scribes’ union accepted their applications and put them to work. The entire city was full of people who were desperate to become literate, while literate people themselves were hard to find. It also took years to train people in reading and writing before they were ready to even teach the basics to others. Many adults had lived for decades without being able to write their own names.
The Roman ruling class believes it is as pointless to teach the poor to read as it is to teach animals to read, Herakleia thought.
Ay?e Khatun threw herself into her new work as a trainee so thoroughly that it was sometimes difficult to remember that she was both the Seran king’s daughter and the ex-wife of the Seljuk sultan’s brother. She had made her choice and now she would stick to it. Because the newest class of recruits had already started training a month ago, she was forced to hit the ground running. Kentarch Al-Din had nearly refused to allow her to do this, claiming that Ay?e Khatun could never catch up to the other recruits, but the princess gave it everything she had. She was free, now, for the first time in her life, and she would do whatever she could to preserve that freedom. She even told people to stop calling her Ay?e Khatun—she was just Ay?e, now. The word “khatun” meant princess or lady in Seljuk. But now she was only Recruit Ay?e, Strateioteia Ay?e.
The other recruits resented her at first, thinking her lazy and ignorant. They were also angry that she had skipped a month of boot camp. But Ay?e struggled to endear herself to them. The woman who had never lived a day without one servant to dress her, another servant to do her makeup, a third to cook her food, a fourth to clean up her messes, a fifth and a sixth to keep her company and entertain her—this woman instead became their servant. On top of all the training and exercise Ay?e was forced to do—always lagging behind everyone else as they jogged outside the city, did push-ups, scaled ladders, learned to swim, practiced with swords and shields and bows and miniature basiliks in full battle dress—Ay?e would cook and clean for her fellow recruits and tend to their personal items, always getting up before them and going to sleep after them, listening to their stories, laughing at even their worst jokes, struggling to adapt her refined language to their coarse and near constant swearing.
More than anything, Ay?e wanted to be accepted. But these were rough women, nearly all of them from peasant backgrounds, having come from the most desperate poverty, the kind pitied even by starving draft animals. Make no mistake: these peasants had been poor. One came from a family which had only one tunic to share among five people: one person would wear it while working outside. Another came from a family which starved one winter because they needed to save the last of the grain in their shack for planting in the next season. A third had been sold into slavery as a young child to pay off her family’s debts, a common story among amazons. A fourth had been rendered a homeless refugee by war, her home village burned to the ground, her family and friends wiped out. They all spoke of satisfying their ravening bellies by drinking bark soup or by shoveling handfuls of dirt down their gullets. They also spoke difficult dialects of Roman, Seljuk, Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Persian, or even Hebrew. None was literate, and they appreciated when Ay?e tried to teach them to write their names. (The princess was literate in Roman, Seljuk, and Seran.) Having suffered all their lives from malnutrition, many lacked teeth, and all were smaller than Ay?e—who herself was not tall. None could be called pretty, either, at least in the traditional sense. To be rich sometimes meant marrying the most beautiful people in your country—to be beautiful meant that you were the key to inheriting property. After centuries of marrying in the name of property, the ruling class sometimes seemed to belong to entirely different species from the ruled. They could not necessarily be called more beautiful—since they were usually forced to marry someone their father chose for financial or political reasons, often a first cousin who would give birth to inbred monstrosities. But to live a life of ease indoors, to sleep in a warm bed every night with a full belly, to have education and entertainment whenever one desired, to fear nothing, to be guarded by loyal, well-paid, heavily armed knights night and day—this made a difference as years turned to decades, and decades to lifetimes. The rich seemed eternally young. Peasants, in contrast, married whoever they could; as divorce was impossible, peasant women often avoided marrying entirely. Looks were almost never a consideration, and everyone was in terrible health. On top of that, you could see from looking at these new recruits that they had all lived hard lives. They looked old, though they might have been young, and none could even say precisely when they had been born. And while Trebizond was an improvement over their old lives, it was still no picnic. As the cliché went, these were hard times which demanded hard people. Everyone worked together, and the Trapezuntines had all made a great deal of progress—having chased away the parasites in order to share the surplus as fairly as possible—but they still had much to do. Although some complained about how they were overworked, none would consider going home. Half the reason they had come here in the first place was the fact that they had no home. Landlords had taken everything, and the soldiers and tax farmers had destroyed the rest, killing or enslaving entire villages, cities, extended families. These amazons had all seen unspeakable things. Piles of bodies covered in blood had once been people whom they had known and loved. For the amazons, everything was gone. Trebizond was all that remained.
Days passed like this. New people adjusted to new homes. Kentarch Al-Din sent out patrols and work teams to construct signal towers at even greater distances from Trebizond. Drills were undertaken. How quickly could the suburban population get within the walls to safety, once the alarm was sounded? Everyone practiced, again and again, despite the economic disruption. Soon enough, the entire suburban population could hide inside the walls within hours, all while carrying supplies and walking, as Herakleia found herself saying, “in a calm and orderly fashion.”
Supplies were gathered and traded for. Rainwater cisterns—made of iron, not lead—were constructed on every rooftop. (At first glance, iron and lead looked similar, but if you scratched lead, you would leave a shiny silver color behind, and its melting point was so low you could cook it in bread ovens—unlike iron, which was impossible to melt without a powerful furnace with a bellows and plenty of fuel.) Word went out among the merchants visiting the city that the Trapezuntines would exchange sacks of ringing golden nomismas for even paltry amounts of grain. Food, medicine, and bandages were prime concerns. Trebizond’s walls and defenders had already proven themselves in battle, but in a siege lasting months or years, organization would determine victory. Half the reason Trebizond had survived so long in the first place was due to its isolation, as Chaka Bey had said. Mountains sheltered one side of the city, the sea the other. Any besieger would need to maintain supply lines across hundreds of miles of difficult terrain or rough stormy sea. Trebizond just needed to hold out, and it could win.
At the earliest, the Seljuks would attack the city within weeks. Yet no scouts had been spotted. Herakleia would scan the mountainsides using a spyglass produced by the new glass grinders’ union, searching for any sign of white turbans or glimmering steel floating above distant mountaintops. She would ride out along the Satala Way, volunteering for guard duty—always despite Samonas’s misgivings—to search for spies. But none were found, nor was there any evidence of their existence.
Where are they?
Trebizond was tense, but focused. No one needed to be reminded of the consequences of failure. The usurper Narses, for instance, was famous for impaling people, and some bands of Seljuk marauders had begun to copy his techniques. As impalement became normalized, Narses in turn searched for new ways to terrorize people: rumor had it that decapitation contests were growing popular in the Hippodrome in Konstantinopolis.
Thus, from sunrise to sunset, each person in Trebizond moved like a machine. They all told themselves they needed to work together in order to survive—“work together” was indeed one of their mantras, and people shouted these words across the city. “Work together! Work together! Work together!” They got up, washed, dressed, ate, labored, slept, six days a week, seven if they volunteered for more, since it was difficult to relax with such threats looming over their heads.
Conversation and laughter was minimal. The city was crowded and busy as an anthill, but quiet—save the neighing horses, the creaking carriages, the blacksmiths’ clanging hammers, and the soldiery tramping, calling out and responding to orders, executing maneuvers, firing basiliks, urging their destriers to gallop. Even children worked in silence. And, difficult as it was to believe, the majority lost interest in alcohol. This was because everyone had a distinct, vital, and positive role to play in the city, and such a fact meant death for alcoholism. For the disabled, the very young or old, there was always work, always purpose. Everyone knew that they could relax and celebrate when the Seljuks were defeated. Until then, the Trapezuntines worked. They were all workers, after all, the protagonists and underdogs of history, and they were preparing to make history here once again.
Thanks to all of this dedication, Herakleia suspected that the city would soon be impregnable. They would have enough supplies stored in the granaries behind the walls to last six months. In Konstantinopolis, she knew, every resident was commanded to store enough food to last a year. Once Trebizond reached that point, they could send out raiding parties, and scouts could explore surrounding lands for weeks at a time rather than days. For once, the workers could go on the offensive. Plus, the Seljuks were still unfamiliar with gunpowder weapons. The city’s basiliks would terrify them, at least in the beginning, and the Workers’ Army was now more skilled at using these weapons. During the Latin siege, Trebizond had only possessed a few basiliks, each with only a little ammunition. Now the workers had dozens of these weapons, and the new forges were churning out hundreds of heavy iron balls, while the alchemists’ union produced mountains of black crystalline powder.
A week after Chaka Bey’s departure, Herakleia was feeling more confident and secure with Trebizond than she had in months. That was when the influx of refugees began.