It was an unpleasant journey along the old Roman road through the mountain valleys. Out of fear of giving away their position, nobody spoke. Even the children kept silent. The instant the babies cried, the mothers would shove their faces against their bare breasts—now swollen with milk, their nipples white with it—to silence them. But one baby named Hovhannes refused to stop screaming no matter what anyone did. He terrified everyone, and his shrieks echoed across the mountains.
“Oh, the Seljuks will come,” muttered the driver Isma’il al-Saffar. “They will hear this boy from the distance of a thousand farsakhs! Even from Sera, the Seljuks will come, complaining about the noise!”
Having been rested, fed, and cleaned, baby Hovhannes still yelled and cried. He had done so the night before, but everyone had been too tired to care, sleeping through his wailing until he exhausted himself and passed out. Perhaps now he was taking revenge for this neglect. His mother, a young woman named Angela—fitting the name in every way with her beauty, warmth, and patience, in contrast to Hovhannes’s unending rage—sang to him, played with him, and hugged him close, never losing hope that he would calm down. Her energy was admirable, but Hovhannes’s crying had made her thin and haggard, and no one could care for this child forever. Others took turns with him. Elders who missed the days when their own children had been young picked him up, tossed him into the air—safely—sang to him, hugged him, kissed him, and told him they loved him in different languages. Everyone passed him around and tried to cheer him up. Even Sahakanuysh, the mother who had lost her baby, took him and cared for him as though he was her own. This restored her spirits a little, but not his. Hovhannes continued to cry his eyes out. Nothing was good enough for him.
“Are you sure this is your child?” said the amazon Amat al-Aziz to Angela. “I think he may have been switched with the son of a king!”
“All hail Prince Hovhannes!” said her friend, the amazon Nazar al-Sabiyya, while bowing deeply to Hovhannes. He kept crying regardless.
Laughter rose from the four carriages and the hundred refugees walking the broken Roman road, which was turning from dust to mud again as the convoy left the rain shadow of the Pontic alps and wended north to the cooler wetter Euxine region. Here the mountains held back the clouds, which spread either endless mist or rain in early spring.
Herakleia paid little attention to this amusement. She was almost unable to look away from the forested cliffs and foaming waterfalls that hung over their heads to the left and right like tsunamis about to crash down on them. She was so worried about being ambushed that her eyes played tricks on her. Frequently she saw warriors hiding behind the boulders on the mountaintops, watching them, pointing, planning an assault, though on closer inspection these warriors always turned out to be young pine trees lost in the shadows, swaying in the wind, imitating men, transforming from tree to Seljuk and back again—both to terrify her and to amuse themselves. A helmet would glint, and Herakleia would come close to screaming that they were under attack, but the helmet would turn out to be a mountain stream splashing in the sunlight—almost seeming to play—among the rocks.
Yet her worry was not entirely selfless. Herakleia also found it difficult to think about what had happened to Ay?e and Jafer, and wanted to distract herself. Sometimes she felt like yelling at Bob the Silent Seljuk Prisoner, demanding to know where Chaka Bey had taken Ay?e. She also wondered about torturing the information out of him, though she rebuked herself for even considering this idea, since she was a victim of torture, and also knew from personal experience that it was useless. It only emboldened its victims. At best, they would just lie to you. Torturers were so sadistic that they sometimes killed their victims—without getting any useful information out of them. And so Bob the Silent Seljuk Prisoner walked with them, his hands tied behind his back, looking miserable, refusing to open his mouth except to eat or drink. Even then, he accepted little food or water. Herakleia had explained that she would set him free and even give him a horse and supplies if he told them where Chaka Bey had taken Ay?e, but Bob only responded by averting his gaze, as though there was something evil about a woman offering to make deals with him as though they were equals. Suspecting that he only spoke Turkish, Arabic, or Persian, the amazon Umm Musharrafa translated for Herakleia in all three languages. But Bob still said nothing.
The convoy moved through the Death Worm Marsh as quickly as possible. At the marsh’s northern edge, beneath the mountain village of Tzanicha, a pair of Laz youths dragged down a carriage laden with jars of milk and sacks of cheese, which they exchanged for old golden nomismas stamped with the face of Christ on one side and Good Emperor Anastasios on the other. The youths only spoke Laz, a Kartvelian language unknown to anyone in the convoy, and too difficult for Pentarch Kata Surameli (who was Georgian) to understand. At least this was what Herakleia assumed. As the Trapezuntines and refugees rested and shared their goods among themselves, the youths pointed south to the marsh and repeated the phrase “lo-mee-katsis-sakhit.”
“Lo-mee-katsis-sakhit,” Herakleia repeated back to them. “What the hell does that mean? Are you talking about Seljuks? Seljuki? Turki?”
“Ara!” the youths said. “Lo-mee-katsis-sakhit!”
“I’m sorry,” Herakleia said. “I don’t understand you.”
“Lo-mee-katsis-sakhit!”
Herakleia turned to Za-Ilmaknun. “Seems we''ve got a problem with something called a ‘lo-mee-katsis-sakhit.’”
“Would I only knew what such a thing was,” he said.
“Could it be the death worm?” Herakleia said.
“This creature you have spoken of has not troubled anyone in many months,” Za-Ilmaknun said. “It seems likely these two anxious young men speak of something else.”
The youths gestured southward to the marsh, then northward to Trebizond, repeating the phrase “lo-mee-katsis-sakhit.” Herakleia wished she could tell the youths to imitate what they were talking about, but she had tried to get over language barriers with this technique before. Even if it had been possible to communicate her desire to interact like this, their language of bodily movements was probably just as confusing to her as their spoken language. Most people had little practice miming or performing. These games of charades, when they took place, often ended up frustrating everyone even more than before.
Regardless, it seemed the youths wanted the convoy to keep going. Although everyone was tired and hoping to rest, they agreed to continue moving for a few hours more. They were feeling a little better thanks to the break and the fresh food, and baby Hovhannes had screamed himself to sleep again, this time after almost everyone in the convoy (even the old monks) had cared for him. And so the convoy thanked the Laz youths, bid them farewell, and were soon off. The youths were still anxious at this departure, but what could the Trapezuntines do? Herakleia wondered if these were some of the Haldi people Diaresso and Gontran had met in that cave along the Satala Way. These people had attempted to warn Herakleia’s friends about the death worm, but their language had been too difficult to understand.
The caravan traveled along the meandering road, bones and muscles aching. The carriages stopped at the little rushing waterfalls to splash their faces and refill their water skins.
Herakleia longed to see the first fire tower in Trapezuntine territory. It must be close. The sight would mean that she was safe. More than anything, she wanted to be behind the city’s massive walls, ensconced in her room in the citadel after washing the last few days’ accumulated crud from her flesh at the Roman bath—the underground furnace blazing bright and red, the tiled mosaics inside choked with scalding steam. She would rest in her bed sipping cha, and multiple walls of thick stone would lie between her and the outside world. Even if the Seljuks attacked, they would need weeks or months to get through. She would have at least one night of shelter and safety when she could lose herself in sleep.
Since the night before, a feeling of dread had been growing inside her. It was difficult to explain, but at this point it had eclipsed all her other emotions, even the regret she felt at El-Hadi’s amputation and the loss of Ay?e. The two youths from Tzanicha had been warning them about a real danger. The convoy needed to get to safety, but at the slow pace of the carts and the walking refugees Trebizond was at least another day or two away.
In these parts of Chaldía, the Satala Road was a band of dirt and broken pavement that wound between cliffs. These sometimes drew so close that, when Herakleia had first come here, she had worried that the convoy would need to leave the carriages behind and proceed on foot, shifting their supplies to their backs. The road widened now and then, and sometimes the caravan crossed old stone bridges that were built in the days of Mithridates Eupator or even Xenophon and his Ten Thousand. Sometimes the trail would go up, and vertical drops stretching a thousand feet would lie over the side. Herakleia tossed a boulder down just to see what would happen, and watched as it seemed to hover in space as it flipped over itself, shrinking slowly until it shattered in the faraway darkness. Boulders sometimes fell from the mountains onto the road, and the caravan stopped sometimes so that people could clear them out of the way. But thankfully these heights were rare. Soon the caravan descended.
The road rarely allowed travelers space to rest. Hours before sundown, when it was time to find a campsite, set up the tents, cook dinner, and appoint a watch, there was still nowhere for the convoy to stop, except the road itself. No one else was using it, but sleeping here would leave them exposed.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Herakleia also knew, from her years of reading whatever she could get her hands on in the Great Palace library at Konstantinopolis—in this case, a military manual written by the Emperor Leo some centuries ago—that more than one imperial column had been ambushed in defiles like this. It was too easy, too tempting to push boulders down at one end, then another, trapping everyone inside so that you could pick them off with rocks, arrows, and whatever else you could hurl down on their heads.
“May we stop, strategos?” Katranide asked, walking wearily beside Herakleia.
“We have to keep going as long as possible,” Herakleia said. “We need to find a more defensible position.”
Katranide nodded and looked away. Herakleia wished that she could let the poor woman rest on one of the carriages, but every available space was occupied—mostly by sleeping babushkas and old monks, still exhausted from the last few days. They were in such bad shape that Za-Ilmaknun was checking them constantly; he had told Herakleia that they would collapse if they walked even a little on their own. Once the convoy reached Trebizond, they would have to be carried to the hospital, where they would need days if not weeks to recover.
They came close to death.
With baby Hovhannes asleep, conversation in the convoy ceased. Wooden wheels and axles groaned, horse hooves clopped, ragged shoes and slippers and bare feet shuffled, and many people could be heard breathing. In their minds they kept telling themselves to put one foot in front of the other, they were almost there, they only needed to walk a little more and then they could rest. Sometimes they would look up to see if the road had widened, if their surroundings had become more amenable to a campsite for over a hundred people. But the narrow road kept winding between cliffs.
Only when it was getting dark and Herakleia was thinking that, exposure or no exposure, they needed to rest, did the mountains fall away, revealing a valley of pines.
“Thank God,” she and many others said in several languages. Many also crossed themselves.
Pulling off to the side, they set up their tents and unhitched their horses close to the cliffs. Few people spoke. Many rolled themselves up in blankets and went to sleep without waiting for dinner. Angela and baby Hovhannes were among them.
Katranide clucked her tongue. “Those sleepyheads will be starving in a few hours when they wake. Prince Hovhannes will be especially cross.”
By then the amazons, drivers, and refugees who still possessed a little energy had gathered wood, ignited fires, and began cooking whatever they could find in the convoy’s dwindling supplies. Mostly this took the form of more hard tack pancakes: ground up, mixed with water, and then fried in iron pans with fruit, meat, mushrooms, and vegetables. After gobbling down these pancakes with their hands, dessert consisted of yogurt drizzled with honey. The food was plain, but it might have even been considered cozy, given the convoy’s growing camaraderie. Everyone ate quickly, and drank only water. They were too frightened for wine. All eyes were on the deepening dark encroaching on the camp. Herakleia was far from the only one who felt the dread mounting around them.
Not Seljuks. Something else. The lo-mee-katsis-sakhit.
No one but the babies and elders had slept that day, which meant that everyone of fighting age was ready to pass out. Herakleia herself felt so tired that she worried her skin would melt from her bones. She was afraid to look at her own reflection, and thankful that mirrors were rare here. Most of the time, if you wanted to see what you looked like, you either checked a puddle of water or a polished metal surface. The shadows and lines she would find on her face would belong to someone two or three times her age. People would guess that she was in her thirties or forties, not that she was nineteen. Strain would transform her into an old woman before she knew it.
As dinner was dying down, everyone fell into silence—they had barely said anything to begin with—and looked at each other. Someone needed to keep watch that night, but no one wanted to.
“I’ll do it,” Herakleia said.
“Strategos,” said the Kipchak amazon Jiajak Jaqeli, her blue eyes and red hair flashing in the firelight. “You cannot. You have already done this how many times on this journey?”
“Believe me, it’s not as much of a problem as you think,” Herakleia said. “I’m not sure I’m going to sleep anyway.” That feeling of dread is going to keep me awake.
“Please, strategos,” said the old wizardly Zoroastrian driver Hurmuzdyar bin Wandarin Bawand. “Let us—”
“If I start nodding off, I’ll wake you,” Herakleia said. “So you’d all better get to sleep as soon as possible.”
The amazons and drivers looked at each other. They were ready to accept Herakleia’s pronouncement when Miriai—who had been talking with El-Hadi, who was still lying in his carriage—interrupted.
“It’s alright, dear.” She patted Herakleia’s back. “I napped most of the day. I can take care of it.”
“Are you sure?” Herakleia said.
“Ach, nobody doubts a young person, everyone doubts an old person,” Miriai said.
Herakleia sighed. “That’s not what—”
“Older people can have a hard time sleeping,” Miriai said. “We have to get up and pee twenty times each night no matter how much we drink the day before. Even if we’re dying of thirst in a blazing desert, even if we’ve been cooked on the sands for weeks without a drop of water, we still have to pee twenty times a night. No more, no less. So it’s no problem. I’ll sit beside you, I’ll wake you if I hear anything. And besides.” She gently elbowed Herakleia. “We have to watch out for that daiwi. The lo-mee-katsis-sakhit.”
Herakleia, the amazons, and the drivers looked at each other.
“You trusted yourselves the night before to a couple of children,” Miriai said. “Now you’re afraid to trust yourselves to an old lady?”
“No,” Herakleia said, “it’s just—”
“I spent many months with your Alexios—and we even ascended to your home when Hermes Trismegistos brought us there. I saw the matarta toll houses with my own eyes on the soul’s ascent to the World of Light. I saw where you come from.”
“Konstantinopolis?” Simonis said.
“No, you fool,” Euphrosyne said. “She’s talking about the old world.”
“What’s that?” Simonis said.
“It’s hard to explain,” Euphrosyne said. “Kentarch Leandros and the strategos sometimes talk about how they come from some sort of other place that’s a thousand years in the future.”
“Oh.” Simonis nodded. “Christ hasn’t returned by then?”
Euphrosyne shook her head. “I suppose not.”
“What’s he waiting for?” Simonis said.
“His ways are not our ways,” Euphrosyne said.
“I’m tired of that explanation,” Simonis said. “I need something better!”
“Does an ant say the same when a man stomps on his anthill?” Euphrosyne said. “Now shut up and listen!”
“I managed a caravanserai by myself for many years in Pirin after my sweet husband Zaidun passed away,” Miriai was saying to Herakleia. “I’m tougher than I look. I had to be, in order to survive this long. And you know, more than a few people have regretted messing with me.” Miriai winked. “The Great Celestial Father is with me. I can take care of things, little missie.”
“You’ll wake me up if you feel tired,” Herakleia said.
“Don’t worry about a thing!” Miriai said. “Now all of you young ones need to get to sleep. There’s a big day ahead!”
Everyone looked at each other. No one trusted Miriai. Yet their exhaustion was more pressing. Soon they had rolled themselves up in their blankets, getting as close to the fire as possible before plunging into sleep.
Only Herakleia remained awake. For as long as she could—which was only minutes—she lay in her blanket, watching Miriai pace about the camp. The old woman was dressed in white clothing that needed a wash. She had a beauty, a charm, and perhaps what could even be called a sexiness all her own.
Grannie’s got back. Grannies looking for hookups in your area!
Alexios had said that Miriai had done incredible things, that she was much more than she seemed. Whatever was causing the dread everyone felt, Miriai could handle it.
At least I hope she can. Herakleia turned over and fell asleep.
But she was unsure if she slept at all. She kept opening her eyes, checking the flames of the last campfire whirling against the darkness, and the figure of Miriai pacing about the camp with her hands behind her back, moving in and out of the shadows, oddly content.
Herakleia sensed that something was out there. But what if it was nothing? It could have been an expression of her own anxieties—something to focus on. More refugees were coming to Trebizond. More cities wished to join the Republic. The time could be drawing near when enemies like the Romans and the Seljuks no longer troubled them. The uprising would take so much land, so many towns and cities and people—a huge portion of the Earth—that the real enemy would become itself. It would need to deliver on its promise to enrich everyone, to uplift everyone beyond the heavens they prayed for and painted on the walls of the chapels that studded these lands. If the uprising failed, its enemies would have no trouble bringing back slavery and feudalism.
When workers take power, Dionysios had said, you gotta go all the way. With one hand, you gotta drive the reactionaries into the sea. Don’t give ‘em any time to regroup—any time to think. Chase ‘em until there aren’t any left, the same way they’d chase you—the same way they will chase you if you ever take a breath. That’s what you do with one hand. With the other, you build paradise on Earth. You make sure everyone has everything they need. You use machines to eliminate as much labor as possible, starting with the most miserable labor first. You get everyone living in cities. You either make the Earth a garden, or you let it do its own thing. You do national self-determination. You do anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-slavery, anti-genocide…
Two blue eyes were glowing in the darkness, two bright blue electrified sapphires. Herakleia opened her own eyes. The campfire burned in its pit, shining against the tents where refugees, drivers, and amazons slumbered and snored. Black mountains reached up to a sky that was finally clear of clouds, and full instead of stars, so many stars that no darkness lay between.
Two blue eyes hovered in the darkness near the camp. Miriai was facing them, her hands clutched to fists. The eyes faded in and out of existence, two galaxies, two infinities, and they were focused on Herakleia.