by Sean Munger
Camytzes patted my shoulder and then started toward the dusty stone steps leading to the interior of the tower. His mute resignation spoke volumes. Our situation was now unchangeable. We were, all of us in Constantinople, in the same boat.
Chapter Seven
Tinkering with Death
For me the next six weeks were a strange mixture of gloom, exhilaration, dread and curiosity. Almost immediately the kouropalates Artabasdos sent word to Michael Camytzes that he was reserving several rooms of the Praetorium of the Eparch for use as our laboratory and headquarters. It wasn’t an especially fun place to work. The Praetorium was Constantinople’s largest prison, its gloomy stone cells crammed with murderers, thieves, child molesters and sodomites. That we found ourselves there was partially Michael’s doing. He insisted to Artabasdos that no experiments involving the ghouls could be conducted with any modicum of safety unless the subjects—that’s what he began to call them—could be kept pent-up behind impenetrable walls, separated from us and from their guards. The Emperor happily obliged. I also gained an insight into Leo’s perverse and macabre sense of humor when I learned that he’d told the prisoners of the Praetorium, through their warden Bringas, that many of them were “about to perform a service for the Empire that, if successful, will result in the total repayment of your debts to society”. Naturally he and Bringas neglected to mention that this service would involve their deaths. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered much if they had said so; many of the prisoners were condemned to death, and those who weren’t couldn’t expect to live long anyway due to the bad food and terrible conditions of the prison.
Theophilus and I still lived at St. Stoudios. As grim as our task was, I have to admit that at least I was relieved to be absolved of working in the tannery. My skin, clothes and hair didn’t reek like moldering intestines and day-old urine when I retired to the straw-covered pallet in my cell every night. I also found that my new job as a special servant of the Emperor offered me a certain amount of status at the monastery. No one knew precisely what we were doing, but word had spread among the monks that Theophilus and I enjoyed the favor of the Emperor and were tasked to carry out some special project for him. As a result, Rhetorios offered us permanent seats at the head of the table and we were constantly greeted in the hallways and courtyards, as no other monks were, with kind bows of the head and greetings such as, “Good morning, Brother Stephen.” This may have been due as much to our new status as to gratitude at having slain the ghouls that had rampaged through the infirmary, which was still closed and sealed off indefinitely. Either way, it wasn’t bad.
Our status came with one very good fringe benefit—privacy. Unlike most other monks I was not obliged to join prayers at specific hours and my time—what little there was of it when not in conference with Theophilus and Michael Camytzes at the Praetorium—was my own. Consequently, I began to make significant headway on the Empress’s icon. By the end of September the diptych was fully constructed and I had prepared its surface for painting. At night, working by candlelight, I sketched the figures of the Virgin, the Saracens and the city of Constantinople. I even managed to secure a few paints and some brushes lifted from the art studio, which was still shuttered and idle. As hesitant and uneasy as I was about the project involving the ghouls, at least I could satisfy myself that I was spending an hour or two a day doing what I should have been doing all along in the service of God—even if no one but the Empress herself would ever know.
“If we’re going to do this,” said Michael Camytzes, “we need a definite plan. The Emperor is deluded if he thinks it’s going to be as simple as simply creating a couple of ghouls and then sending them out to wreak havoc through the Saracens’ lines. We have not only the safety of our own people to consider, but also we must determine how to make these ghouls an effective weapon against our enemies. This requires much thought and planning.”
Camytzes uttered these words on our first day at the Praetorium. Michael, Theophilus and myself enjoyed an expansive office—formerly the chamber of the warden Bringas, who had relocated to a smaller room—fitted out with elegantly carved chairs, several large tables, candelabra and a fireplace. In the corner of the room was a colossal wooden trunk bound with bands of steel and held shut with a giant unbreakable padlock. Inside this chest, which had been built at Michael’s direction by the prison carpenter, was the jar that contained the severed ghoul’s head. I avoided that corner of the room. It wasn’t because I was afraid the head might get loose, but if you listened closely, you could faintly hear the sound of the head snapping and thrashing in its preservative fluid, still fighting after many days to taste human flesh. The whole business made me shudder.
“How do we propose to introduce the ghouls into the Saracens’ army?” I asked. “And how do we do it in a way that doesn’t put our own troops at risk?”
“That’s a very good question,” Michael replied. He reached for a parchment and an inkpot. “We should brainstorm some ideas. The kouropalates told me the Emperor has taken a personal interest in this project, and we need to provide him with some evidence that we’re at least doing something.”
“How about catapults?” Theophilus suggested.
“Yes, that’s good,” I replied. “Once we have a suitable number of ghouls, we’ll behead them and fire the heads as catapult projectiles over the wall into the Saracens’ lines.”
Michael scratched this idea on the parchment but I could tell he wasn’t especially taken with it. “What of the risk to the men loading the catapults?” he said. “If so much as one of them is bitten by one of the heads, the pestilence will be loose in our lines.”
“Put the heads in glass jars,” I suggested. “They can be loaded safely by the artillerymen, and the jars will shatter on impact and let the heads loose.”
“There’s still the problem of the safety of those loading the heads into the jars in the first place. And what if one or two are broken in the process of loading the catapults, as surely they will be? We’ll have hungry ghoul heads rolling around on top of the towers and inside the walls, hiding in dark recesses ready to bite some unsuspecting archer or infantryman. Additionally, we can’t be sure of how many of the heads will survive the landing. Do you know the force that a catapult projectile packs when it lands on something? The act of firing them may crush the heads like eggshells, rendering them useless.”
“Plus, we have no idea how many of the heads will actually succeed in biting Saracen troops,” said Theophilus. “A disembodied head can’t move. It could be easily crushed underfoot, even without weapons. We couldn’t expect more than one in a hundred heads to actually be effective.”
“One is enough,” I pointed out.
“Not necessarily,” said Camytzes. “In Domelium we slaughtered seventy-seven ghouls in an afternoon, and at St. Stoudios eleven. Yes, it was desperate and dangerous, and in each case the outbreak must have begun from a single ghoul, but we did succeed in smiting them. We can credit the Saracens with no less martial capabilities than our own. How could we be sure the ghoul weapon will be more than a temporary annoyance to the enemy?”
Such were the questions we dealt with in those first days. It was maddening because nearly every idea we hatched brought with it one or more complications that made it impractical or dangerous. For instance, to solve Theophilus’s objection involving the limited usefulness of severed ghoul heads, we considered the notion of not beheading the ghouls but simply launching them whole over the walls. This would have been done by encasing each ghoul in a terra-cotta sphere, which would shatter upon impact. Of course this raised the very large question of how a thousand potters were supposed to craft human-sized spheres around their deadly cargoes and somehow avoid being bitten or torn to pieces by them. Plus this scheme would have required thousands of tons of raw clay, an army of potters and the use of precious cords of wood to fuel the furnaces needed to bake the pots—something rather impractical in the middle of a siege where firewood was at a premium for the comi
ng winter. Nearly every permutation of catapult-fired ghouls had complications of this type, and so, a week or so into our deliberations, we abandoned the catapult idea and focused on other methods.
“How about sapping?” Michael Camytzes sighed one afternoon. He was pacing; I was doodling aimless forms on a parchment with a quill, and Theophilus was asleep in a chair. “We tunnel under the walls and introduce ghouls directly into the Saracens’ camp. At the appropriate moment, they pop out and wreak havoc.”
“Ghouls can’t dig,” I shrugged. “You’d need a living man with a shovel at the end of the tunnel to dig through the last break of earth at the right moment. We couldn’t trust a slave or a convict to do that, and even if we could get a soldier to volunteer for a suicide mission, how could we make sure the ghouls don’t simply tear him apart before he manages to finish the tunnel?”
Despite the objections, the sapping option received much consideration over the next few days. Theophilus had the idea of digging the tunnels ahead of time, ending in a large cavern just under the surface on the Saracens’ side and protected from our side by a heavy door. The roof of the cavern would be supported by a wooden pillar that could be pulled down by means of a system of ropes. At the proper moment the pillar would be yanked away, causing the cavern to collapse into a sinkhole which the Saracens would naturally try to investigate; then the ghouls would be released in the tunnel and the door shut behind them. We liked this option and Camytzes was on the verge of writing down an official proposal to the Emperor in this regard, but he consulted one of the professional sappers working for the army who told him that it wouldn’t work. Supporting the sinkhole cavern would not take one pillar, but an entire system of pillars and support structures which would consume vast amounts of lumber and ropes, not to mention the hundreds of men that would have to labor for months underground to dig the tunnels. This was how our deliberations went—when an option was logical, it turned out not to be practical; when an option was practical, it turned out that the limitations on materiel due to the siege made it impossible. We were stymied at every turn.
One evening in October I gave voice to our frustrations. The candles were burning down to nothing and as the faint clicking and thrashing from the as-yet unused ghoul head in the chest mocked our lack of progress. It was late and Theophilus had already gone to bed. “Catapults won’t work,” I said. “Tunnels won’t work. Simply dumping the ghouls over the walls in wheel barrows won’t work. Why won’t they work? They’re either too dangerous to our own troops, or we can’t be sure the ghouls won’t be more than a momentary annoyance to the enemy. The instant the ghouls get over the wall—however they do—the Saracens will slash them to pieces with their swords, just as they would if they were Byzantine troops instead of ghouls.”
“The Emperor,” sighed Camytzes, “is convinced the ghouls are a super-weapon. He doesn’t understand the practical difficulties.”
“All the methods we’ve been discussing aren’t that much different than the methods any military commander would use to try to gain an advantage against the enemy. I mean, catapults, sapping, throwing stuff over the walls—you’d do that normally, right? Those are methods you’d try even if we weren’t talking about using ghouls?”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that we can’t use a method that the Saracens are already expecting. We can’t introduce the ghouls into their lines by force. In order for this to work the Saracens are going to have to want to let them in. If they voluntarily let the ghouls into their lines, maybe without realizing what they are or how dangerous they are, we’ve succeeded.”
“Let me guess–we have the Emperor trick Maslama into thinking he wants to make peace, and instead of a peace delegation we send a bunch of ghouls dressed like soldiers?”
“It’s worth a try.”
Michael shook his head. “They’d know it was a trick the moment the ghouls appear. A bunch of wailing, shambling men scattering mindlessly, tearing their own clothes off aren’t likely to be mistaken for a surrender party. The Saracens would cut them down like grass in seconds.”
“Yes, but we only need a very short window of time. Once they’re in, they’re in.”
“The Saracens will be on their guard. Leo is the most treacherous man ever to sit on the throne of Byzantium. You don’t think that even if he sent a cadre to Maslama under a white flag that the Saracens wouldn’t have phalanxes of guards surrounding the cadre and watching their every move just in case it happened to be a trick? Maslama would be an idiot not to do that. The Saracen commander is many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.”
“If we could keep the ghouls in line for a few minutes, though—maybe we can use ropes or chains or something, maybe lash them together in formation, if we conceal it from the Saracens so at first glance it looks like—”
“That’s way too complicated. The more complex a scheme is, the more can go wrong.”
I grunted in protest, but I knew he was right. I sat back in my chair, staring at a map of the Theodosian walls that was draped over the edge of the table.
My eyes lingered on this image. The shape of the parchment in that position—the curl of the edge of the map over the wooden surface of the table—gave me an idea.
“What would the Emperor do,” I asked Camytzes, “if the army happened to capture a few Saracens? Maybe some high-ranking ones, officers or something?”
“He’d torture them mercilessly and try to get all the information out of them that he could about their plans,” Michael replied, turning away from the window. He walked back to the table and reached for a flagon of wine sitting on it.
“After that. They’d certainly be killed, wouldn’t they?”
“Obviously.”
“Then what would he do with them? Their bodies, I mean.”
Michael looked at me in a way that suggested he was catching on. “Most likely he’d behead them and throw their carcasses into the Bosporus to deny them a proper Mohammedan burial.”
My finger traced the curve of the map lying over the edge of the table. “Might he hang their bodies on ropes over the walls to insult Maslama? I’ve heard of that being done during sieges.”
“Yes, he might do that.”
“And these soldiers who died heroically—the Saracens would be obligated to cut them down and bury them as heroes, right?”
“Yes.”
I smiled. “The Saracens would have nothing to fear from dead men, would they? I mean, possibly Maslama himself would grieve over them.”
Michael smiled back. He seemed to understand. “And then get a hell of a surprise.”
It was fortunate that we came up with this idea when we did. The Emperor was growing very impatient. Artabasdos frequently inquired of Camytzes about what plans were afoot, how many convicts we had turned into ghouls, and when the weapon would be ready for deployment; Michael kissed him off with vague responses, but we had no illusions that this would work for long. In retrospect, I think we deliberately stretched out the planning process because we were understandably reluctant to begin the actual ugly work of creating demons, and the more ideas we hashed over, the more we postponed that inevitable future. But at the end of October the kouropalates paid our office in the Praetorium a visit. We found him in a foul mood, which grew worse when he pressed us again about how many ghouls were currently ready for combat and how many we could expect to have ready in a fortnight’s time.
“None?” he roared. “You three have been sitting around for two months, gorging yourselves on chicken, wine, bread and olives at the Emperor’s expense, and you haven’t transformed a single ghoul?”
“Sir, you must understand this is a complicated matter!” Michael protested. “We must have very careful and precise plans, or this weapon will be useless—or worse, will backfire on us.”
“The Emperor has bent over backwards for you!” Artabasdos blasted. “He’s been dithering with Maslama since the fleet arrived. He’s been mollifying him with false clai
ms that he’s negotiating with the Patriarch and the army for authority to surrender the city. The Emperor has been doing this precisely to buy time for you to create your army of ghouls with which to destroy the Saracens. Do you understand what will happen to you when I go back to the palace and tell him that there is no army—just a head in a jar and couple of sheets of parchment?”
I was tired of being dressed down by the Emperor and his minions, and I was finally ready to speak out. “We can’t transform the ghouls yet,” I said sharply. “In fact, we can’t do it until literally hours before we strike. The plan we’re working on involves delivering the ghouls to the Saracens while the men are still dead, during the period of dormancy before they reanimate. That has to be timed precisely.”
For once Artabasdos held his tongue. He looked at Michael, at me and at Theophilus—who, characteristically, had been totally silent during the exchange—and finally the kouropalates snatched up one of the papers on the table. It was a drawing, done by me, of five bundled bodies hanging on ropes over the walls, with the Saracen army below.
“So, this is how you plan to introduce the ghouls into their lines?” he said. “Lowering them via ropes? That’s something, at least. How many are you planning on deploying? Five hundred? A thousand?”
“It will depend,” said Camytzes.
“On what?”
“On how many Saracens we can lure into the city and capture alive.”
Artabasdos’s eyes grew wide. “What?” he gasped.
“It’s very simple,” I replied, snatching the paper from the kouropalates’s hands. “Maslama sends a delegation of envoys into the gates of Constantinople under a flag of truce. We immediately take them prisoner. To taunt Maslama, the Emperor gives back the bodies of his friends by hanging them over the walls. Unbeknownst to the Saracens, however, we will have allowed the envoys to be bitten by ghouls, whereupon they’ll be swiftly put to death. The bodies will be bundled up in sacks while still dead. The Saracens cut them down and prepare to give them heroes’ funerals in full view of our troops. Then the ghouls reanimate and infect the Saracen army.”
