by Sean Munger
Artabasdos’s features hardened. “That plan is absolutely unacceptable,” he pronounced. “You plan to invite Saracens—heathens, Mohammedans—into the holy city?”
“It’s the only reliable way to introduce the ghouls into their camp,” Theophilus spoke up.
“We respectfully request His Majesty’s coordination with our plan,” said Michael. “This can work, Sir. If Maslama’s sitting still waiting for the Emperor to surrender instead of launching a full-out attack on the walls, that means that Maslama thinks there’s a chance the Emperor will surrender. Maslama believes the Emperor is weak, and from what you’ve said of His Majesty’s activities, it seems that the Emperor has been actively promoting that impression. Maslama hasn’t even used his navy. His ships are just sitting there blockading the harbors. If the Emperor says that he’s ready to discuss terms, Maslama will jump at the chance. I’m sure of it. This plan will be successful. You can assure His Majesty of that.”
“But a peace delegation would be small,” said Artabasdos. “Ten people at most. I’d been under the impression that we were going to create hundreds of ghouls, transformed from the inmates in this prison.”
“We don’t need hundreds,” I replied. “Ten is enough. And far less dangerous to our own people than packing dungeons with legions of ravenous ghouls.”
“What if this attack fails, young monk? Your plan requires the Emperor to commit an act of treachery that will enrage the entire Mohammedan world beyond all measure. Your plan requires the Emperor to sue for peace and then slaughter a delegation of envoys, personal representatives of the Caliph, acting in good faith under a flag of truce. Suppose the Saracens quickly slaughter your ten ghouls, as you yourselves did at St. Stoudios. We’ll be left with a powerful enemy who will be morally outraged at the Emperor’s duplicity and even more determined to reduce Constantinople to ruins than they were before. At that point, all negotiation would be impossible regardless of circumstances. You would have the Emperor throw away any chance of a negotiated settlement on this speculative scheme.”
“With all due respect, Kouropalates,” said Michael Camytzes, “I don’t believe the Emperor ever intends to negotiate. This war will end with one of two outcomes—either the Saracens are defeated and humiliated, or Constantinople falls and the entire Byzantine civilization is destroyed. He will never settle for any other result. I’ve met His Majesty but twice, and yet I know this. I’m surprised, Sir, that you do not.”
Artabasdos seemed taken aback by this criticism. I thought the man fulsome and vague, and it baffled me why the Emperor would give his own fair daughter in marriage to him; but then again I wasn’t one to understand the vagaries of politics.
Artabasdos finally responded by pointing a fat finger at Michael’s face. “The Emperor is not one to leave such large questions open to resolution by mere underlings,” he sneered. “I’m going to speak to His Majesty about your plan. I promise you I’ll present it honestly, but I predict the Emperor will be no less enthusiastic about it than I am. And when he rejects it, you’d better have another plan. A practical one. Is that understood, Captain Camytzes?”
“Yes, Sir. Clearly understood.”
The kouropalates grabbed the parchment from my hands. “Good evening, then,” he said bitterly, and left.
When the door closed, Theophilus rolled his eyes. “Will you two ever learn how to speak to persons of authority properly?” he moaned.
Camytzes walked over to the table to refill his flagon of wine. “Anyone want to lay odds whether our plan will even get to the Emperor?” he said casually.
“Gambling is a vice, and therefore sin,” I replied. “But if I were a gambling man, I’d probably bet the same way you would.”
We were all pessimistic, both that Artabasdos would keep his word to propose the plan fairly to the Emperor, and that Leo would even honor us with a reply. Therefore it was with some surprise that, two days later, we received at the Praetorium an official messenger from the palace bearing a scroll in a wooden tube decorated with gold leaf. Theophilus broke the seal, unrolled the note and laid it on the table. All three of us leaned over it with both curiosity and dread. The Emperor’s handwriting was very poor, and the edges of the parchment were stained with smudged green fingerprints—from pistachio nuts, no doubt. The note read—
To Captain Camytzes and Brothers Stephen and Theophilus, c/o the Praetorium, Constantinople:
The kouropalates has told me your plan for employing the so-called ‘ghouls’ in the fight against the heathen Saracens. I must say I was quite pleasantly surprised by both your ingenuity and your duplicity! Such is a maneuver worthy of a Byzantine. You will do us much honor on the field of battle.
Plan approved. I will make the necessary overtures to Maslama and keep you informed of our progress. However, I cannot say that I’m entirely ready to stake the future of our civilization on such a small number of ghouls. If your plan fails, we’ll need a new plan. Consequently, I suggest that we develop a contingency in case our aims are frustrated.
Please begin breeding ghouls at the earliest convenience. I expect the full spate of negotiations with Maslama to take a fortnight. I hereby direct you to have five hundred (500) ghouls transformed and ready to deploy by that time. Hopefully they will not be needed. But, it’s always best to be prepared!
God be with you!
Basileus Imperator of Rome and Constantinople,
God’s Vice-Regent on Earth, His Majesty Leo III.
Chapter Eight
The Attack
The morning after we received the Emperor’s note we began the grim process of transforming ghouls in the Praetorium dungeon. “God will provide,” said Theophilus, standing back as Camytzes began to unlock the thick heavy padlock on the iron-banded chest in our office containing the severed ghoul’s head. “Whatever happens, His will shall be done.”
Camytzes, being the military man who had on occasion been required to carry out the dreadful duty of killing innocent people, thankfully spared Theophilus and me the horrors of having to create our first ghoul. He requested of Bringas that the most notorious murderer in the Praetorium be brought to a heavily fortified cell and chained, in a supine position, to a board with his hands and feet securely fastened. The man Bringas chose was a foul stinking brute of a man barely capable of speech, and who was said to have buggered children and murdered them. Nonetheless I crossed myself and whispered a little prayer when Michael told me that he tossed the severed ghoul’s head into the cell—it landed on the wailing murderer’s loins, right in his lap—and that the prisoner, helpless to defend himself, was bitten several times in the course of a few minutes. Camytzes said he returned to the cell an hour later and looked through the bars. The murderer was stone dead. The severed head had managed, even without a body, to tear open the man’s abdomen and was happily munching on his oozing entrails. Having been preserved in the jar of brine for over two months had done the head no harm at all. The murderer’s body was released from its bindings, while a guard stood with his boot on the severed head, still chewing and moaning.
Because our plan depended upon the introduction of ghouls into the Saracens’ camp while the victims were still dead but before reanimation, it was very crucial to know how much time elapsed on average between the death of the infected person and their reanimation as a ghoul. Theophilus and I had a rough estimate of this time period, which we called the “Dead Zone”, from our experiences at St. Stoudios, but this was an opportunity to measure it precisely. Camytzes posted a guard by the murderer’s cell with instructions to tick off the hours (as measured on a sundial, whose results were shouted down in the dungeon by a messenger) until the murderer rose again. In his case it was slightly over six hours. After the word came to our offices that the transformation was complete, Theophilus, Michael Camytzes and myself, accompanied by the warden Bringas, descended into the torch-lit darkness of the dungeon to view our grim handiwork. I shuddered as I heard the insensate moaning coming from the murderer�
�s cell. Camytzes, his sword drawn, held us back at a safe distance. Visible in the flickering torch light we could see a burly bald man—or what was left of him—dressed in filthy rags. His eyes were blank, his mouth hanging slackly open. His skin was ashen. A huge chunk had been taken out of his stomach and his entrails were shredded. As soon as the ghoul saw us he launched himself against the iron latticework of the cell door, stretching out with a blindly clawing hand. Even the severed head was attracted to us, inching along the dirty stone floor by opening and closing its jaw until it too was pressed up against the bars, moaning incoherently.
“Monstrous!” whispered Bringas, as we stared transfixed at the ghouls.
Camytzes turned toward him. “Warden, station a heavily armed guard down here at all times. Have your men begin bringing the prisoners down one by one and placing them in this cell. The process of opening the cell door and forcing them inside may be extremely hazardous, particularly when the ghouls begin to multiply in larger numbers. Instruct your men that they need not worry about killing ghouls—if they feel threatened enough that they must destroy one to prevent being bitten, that’s perfectly acceptable. Any man who is bitten by a ghoul must himself be incarcerated in the cell, regardless of their protests. Is this clearly understood?”
Bringas, a man who had spent a lifetime guarding the most foul and dangerous men in society, looked as though this was almost too much even for him. He swallowed hard and nodded to Camytzes, but offered no protest.
“You should go,” said Michael to Theophilus and myself. “Await word from the palace regarding the negotiations with Maslama.”
We needed no prodding. Raising our cowls against the eerie wails of the ghouls, Theophilus and I ascended the stone steps back to the main level of the Praetorium. Distantly I could hear from other cells the clanging of chains and the defiant shouts of the prisoners. I shuddered to think that within the space of a few days all of those men would themselves be ghouls, and the Praetorium would be a charnel house of Satan’s evil, right in the center of the Empire’s capital city.
Three days later—by which time the ghoul population of the Praetorium had increased to approximately fifty—the Saracens launched a major attack against the walls. It began at daybreak with the wheeling of twenty new siege towers up to the Fifth Military Gate, where the River Lycus flowed under the Land Walls into the city. It was unseasonably warm for early November and the fighting raged furiously for many hours, with our men trading flaming arrows and projectiles with the Saracens until well into the late afternoon. Wounded men flooded the infirmaries of Constantinople’s hospitals and a pall of smoke hung over the central part of the city.
At the Praetorium we were hushed and dejected. Camytzes had assumed that the Saracens’ offensive meant that the Emperor’s attempt to negotiate with Maslama had failed. “If they don’t buy that the Emperor wants to surrender,” he remarked, “there’s no way Maslama will send a delegation into the city. Our plan will be useless.” Above all things we dreaded having to use the ghouls who were now multiplying in the Praetorium’s dungeons. No one was quite sure how they would be deployed into the Saracens’ lines, and all of us feared that the result would be the infestation of Constantinople itself.
The fighting slackened at dusk but did not end, and the night the offensive began I returned to my cell at St. Stoudios, deeply troubled. I took a meal of gruel and watered-down wine and worked furtively on the secret icon until the candles burned almost to nothing. All night I heard the distant shouting and clanging from the battle out my window. I was just beginning the process of putting away the painting supplies when there was a knock at my cell door. “Brother Stephen!” It was Thomas, my old companion from the tannery. “Someone is here to visit you. He says his business is urgent.”
“All right. Just a moment.” I draped a cloth over the icon and stashed the paints in the wooden chest by my bed. I went to the door. As I opened it, a crack of orange light from the candle in the hallway illuminated my visitor. It was a monk I had never seen before. He was obese and wore a new cassock, bound at the waist with a straining rope, and a heavy hooded cloak. His hands were clasped together inside his sleeves. A long gray beard was the only part of the stranger’s face protruding from his hood. My only thought was that this may have been some sort of official business from the Emperor, but it seemed strange he would have sent a monk to deliver a message.
“Can I help you?” I said.
“This monk has taken a vow of silence,” said Thomas, who stood behind the visitor. “He presented these at the door.” He handed me three notes scrawled on parchment. The first one read—
I am from the Monastery of the Christ Pantocrator.
The second—
I must see Brother Stephen Diabetenos immediately. It is most urgent.
The third—
I have taken a vow of silence, so I must communicate only through writing. I seek the Lord’s forgiveness for the inconvenience.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, handing the notes back to the monk. “If you’ve taken a vow of silence, how exactly are you supposed to tell me what it is you want?”
At this the fat monk immediately unclasped his hands and withdrew them from his sleeves. In one hand he held a quill pen; in the other, a roll of parchment.
“Oh. I see.” I stood back from the door. “Well, you’d better come inside. Thank you, Brother Thomas.”
The strange monk stepped inside and I closed the door to my cell. I stepped over to the candle on my desk. “Well, I guess I’ll have to light a fresh candle, if you’re going to be writing,” I said, lifting the lid of the desk. “This one’s almost out.”
“No matter,” said the monk softly, pulling back his cowl. “I’m sorry to have deceived you. I employed the ruse of the vow of silence so my voice wouldn’t arouse suspicion.”
If I had been surprised when the Empress came to see me before, you could have knocked me over with a feather this time. There she stood, dressed in a monk’s cassock, untying the false beard from her chin. She’d added a pillow around her stomach to make herself look fat, thus disguising her ample bosom. Her sea-green eyes looked even more ravishing in the dying light of my candle. Instinctively I bowed. “Your Majesty,” I breathed softly.
“I told you last time, forget all that ostentation.” Maria immediately made for the shape of the easel underneath the cloth. “Is this the icon?”
“Yes, but please don’t look at it! It’s not even close to fin—”
The Empress had already whipped the cover off the diptych and was examining it. There was not much to see. I had sketched the outlines of all the images, but only the background color and a few buildings in Constantinople had yet been painted. I always hated having my work viewed by its patrons before it’s finished. Invariably they suggest changes. If it’s already done and you’re on their doorstep demanding payment, it’s much harder for them to insist that this or that be done differently.
“I don’t care what shape it’s in,” said the Empress. “I had to come see it. This is the only place I know of where I can even find an icon. There are no icons at the palace, as you know, and my husband doesn’t like for me to go to church without him—and there are never icons in his presence. When the attack started today, I became apprehensive. I felt I had to give my prayers to the Virgin for the strength of our men’s arms in repelling this ghastly attack.” With that, the Empress dropped to her knees and crossed herself. She lowered her head, but then looked up at me, her hands still clasped together. “Well,” she said expectantly, “aren’t you going to join me?”
“The icon’s not finished yet,” I said. “Praying with it before it’s blessed wouldn’t be—appropriate.”
“Brother Stephen, our entire way of life is hanging in the balance. I think the Virgin will forgive us just this once.”
It took a few moments for me to remind myself that it was the Empress of Byzantium—and not just a devastatingly pretty woman—who had asked me to pray with
her. I said nothing more. I came and knelt on the stone floor next to her. I crossed myself. We bowed our heads and we both prayed, whispering, her in Greek and myself in Latin, beseeching the Virgin Mary to once more come to the aid of our beleaguered city. We both said “Amen” at almost the same time. The Empress did not rise from her knees at once.
She was looking at me, and smiling.
“You don’t smell like entrails this time,” she observed.
“No, Your Majesty. Thankfully I haven’t been employed in the tannery for some time.”
“You needn’t call me ‘Your Majesty’. I have a name.” She got up off her knees and began to untie the rope around her waist. “This disguise is dreadfully uncomfortable. I can’t bear the thought of shuffling back through the streets toward the palace wearing it again so soon. You don’t mind if I remain a few minutes, I hope?” The cassock fell to the floor of my cell. Underneath it the Empress Maria was wearing a ravishing dress, deep royal blue, its sleeves decorated with thin brocade. She wore a gold necklace with lapis inlays. The showy display of her wealth alone would have dazzled me, but the fact that her dress was considerably lower cut than any I’d seen her in before was enough to take my breath away. The Empress was endowed. Seeing that girl bathe in the stream three years ago had nothing on what I was seeing now.
“Um—of course not, Empress—er, I mean—Maria.” My eyes were fixated on her bosom, but my mind reeled at the tortures her husband would inflict upon me if he knew she was here and that I’d allowed her to be so familiar with me. Yet I was very, very far from asking her to leave.
“So, this is how our monks live these days, is it?” said Maria, looking around the empty room. “Not very much comfort, is there? Look at that bed. You’ll be hunched over with a twisted spine by the age of thirty, sleeping on that thing.” She sighed. “I have a wonderful bed. It’s six feet across. Rosewood imported from Egypt—before Egypt fell to the Saracens, that is. My husband doesn’t share it. He says it hurts his back. When we have to ‘do our patriotic duty’, as he calls it, I of course have to go to his room. That’s the price of living in the luxury of the purple chamber.”
