ALEXIOS

  Back in the winter, when the Trapezuntines were rebuilding Trebizond, Alexios Leandros started having visions. At first he thought they were just nightmares. Tossing and turning in his bed in the citadel at night, he saw the Roman legions return to the city, burn it to the ground, and lock all his friends in chains, cracking whips to make these new slaves march across the mountains and valleys of Anatolia.

  Back to Konstantinopolis. To the slave market in the Valley of Lamentations.

  That was only the beginning of these visions. Sleeping beside Alexios in bed, the blue-eyed Princess Isato of Zagwe—heir to the Aethiopian throne—was hung from a tree, her nude body swaying on the creaking rope, left as a feast for birds. In his dream, Alexios saw that it was the crusaders who had hung her, men dressed in white robes marked with red crosses over their armor and chainmail, a crowd of them standing with a few officials who had filled out the paperwork to legitimize everything. The healer and debtera Za-Ilmaknun joined Isato on that tree, his mequamia and backpack and even his clothes cast aside, the audience nodding and cheering and clapping as he kicked and struggled, hauled into the air on that rope.

  “The papers were all in order,” an official explained to Alexios. “These were dangerous, impulsive criminals, tried in Roman courts, defended by Roman lawyers, and now suffering the force of the same Roman law to which all of us must adhere. It may not have been pretty, but it was the right thing to do, and—moreover—it was perfectly legal. When we came to Trebizond, we had no intention of harming anyone. We simply wished to liberate the city from the criminal regime which oppressed it…”

  Alexios bolted upright in the dark, gasping, sweating.

  It took time to realize that it had just been a dream, that he was safe in bed with Isato. He hugged her close, telling her to never leave him.

  “I will leave you if you do not let me sleep, commoner,” she groaned in response.

  Alexios released her, apologized, and moved away. Soon she trembled with sleep, and was snoring again. He kept awake, however, afraid that the awful dreams would return. It was dark and quiet, and he was exhausted from rebuilding Trebizond and the Workers’ Army.

  Either the dreams returned first, or sleep did. Now he saw his adopted children, Basil and Kassia. In Alexios’s visions, the Romans and Latins took them to Konstantinopolis along with the other slaves—beating, whipping, or killing anyone who even mentioned the uprising.

  Thus did they walk for weeks through the valley of the shadow of death. Any who were too weak to go on—old women complaining that it was impossible to take another step—were left to die. Once the slave column rounded a hill or a cliff, a soldier would go back to dispatch the stragglers, returning a moment later as casually as though the problem had just been a broken axle or a splintered carriage wheel. Sometimes he would even walk with a spring to his step.

  These visions made Alexios shiver with fright. Evil was not always necessarily some gruesome demon screaming in your face. It could also be a young, handsome officer in the military annoyed that when he cut your throat, you splashed blood on his armor.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Herakleia said, jarring Alexios from his vision.

  They were standing by the red roses blossoming along the city walls. It was spring in Trebizond. They had been walking together, to Alexios’s surprise. How much time had passed? He felt as though he had been asleep only a moment ago…

  “Alexios,” Herakleia said.

  “Nothing,” Alexios said. “Sorry.”

  “So you aren’t going to answer my question,” Herakleia said.

  “What question?”

  “What do you think about the council’s proposal to send Gontran aboard the Paralos to Venice? You didn’t—”

  “It won’t work,” Alexios said.

  Herakleia narrowed her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t explain. Sorry.”

  He left before she could respond, though he had no idea where he was going. None of it mattered. Reality was turning into a dream, dreams into reality.

  Alexios kept walking, working, eating—it was evening, now, and he was laughing at a banquet in the Community Hall with other workers—but he was no more present than before. Soon enough, he woke from the real world into visions, just where he had left off.

  His adopted son Basil was literate. This meant that he fetched a good price at the market in Konstantinopolis’s Valley of the Lamentations. He became a palace slave, which was an easy life compared to most. But after many years of being surrounded by palace officials, Basil found the past too painful to remember. Nobody mentioned the uprising except, occasionally, to misrepresent or denigrate it. They knew nothing about it, except that it was bad. A handful of moldering history books in the imperial library dismissed it in a few sentences. Otherwise it was as though the uprising had never happened. The empire kept marching on.

  But because the uprising was absent everywhere, it was also present everywhere, like a specter haunting the world. Rich ladies would scowl at the slightest hint that the slaves serving their food, cleaning their houses, caring for their children, or working on their plantations had once fought back. Romans worked hard to talk or think about anything else. Feverishly they wanted a return to normalcy.

  Basil forgot it, even repudiated it. In his mind, the year he had spent in Trebizond was either a blank, or a source of shame.

  “Hey Basil,” said another palace slave. They were sitting with their friends at a busy tavern near the palace. “Weren’t you in Trebizond when that little revolt happened? What was that even like?”

  “He was a criminal for a little while,” another friend said, laughing. “He just wet his whistle a little.”

  “I can’t imagine what it was like,” the first friend said.

  Basil seized this man by his tunic. The tavern went silent. Everyone stared.

  “Don’t talk about that,” Basil said.

  “Alright, alright,” the other slave said. “I didn’t know you were so sensitive about this.”

  Basil released him, got up, left his friends, went home. He could barely hold it together, walking Konstantinopolis’s crowded streets. Only back in his apartment, when the door was closed, did he throw himself into bed.

  “I’m sorry, Alexios,” he cried. “I’m sorry, Kassia.”

  Basil could only live this way for so long. One either listens to a guilty conscience, or murders it. With the passing years, the advancement of his own career, and the exposure to so many people who felt that Rome—for all its flaws—was an overall force for good in the world, Basil changed his mind. He also had no comrades, no reinforcement, no discipline, no place to vent his frustrations, no way to read about or discuss the struggles of other oppressed peoples, no hope for meaningful change.

  Rome was eternal. If Rome ended, it meant that the world itself had also ended, that Jesus had returned.

  Soon Basil came to believe that the uprising had abused him and twisted his mind.

  Was it even his fault for thinking this way? How else could anyone survive in the Great Palace, surrounded by people whom the Roman Empire benefited so much? Even the slaves in the palace lived a honeyed life compared to the peasants in the fields. One could only spend so many nights crying about so many friends and family members who had either died terrible deaths, or suffered even harsher fates. Was death not easier than being transformed into a monster?

  Basil joined the palace officials with all his soul. He worked for the empire and fought for it, helping the legions crush slave revolts, expand territory, preserve honor, rewrite history. Though Basil was a slave, as a social climber and opportunist he soon possessed slaves of his own, and walked the marble halls of power, slept in beds with silk sheets, advised emperors, owned countryside estates with views of the Bosporos, the Marmara, the Golden Horn. He retired there each summer to relax during the heat and disease outbreaks, sipping wine from his own vinery in his sunny flower gardens with his children and grandchildren, whose freedom he had purchased, who were even truer believers in Rome than he was. What reason did they have to question the empire, when they lived in paradise? For them, Rome was something warm, friendly, and comfortable—something that kept them safe, well-fed, entertained, and happy. They played with wooden dolls that were Roman soldiers; they played a game called “Romans versus barbarians.” They had never known anything else. No one ever told them that another world was possible. Had anyone even hinted that it was wrong to whip the slaves in the fields of Basil’s plantation estates, his descendants would have reacted angrily—would have rationalized slavery or deflected blame elsewhere.

  One such estate in Hebdomon was where Basil’s own biological parents Anna and Germanos had worked back when they were enslaved, before they had fled for their lives to Trebizond. Basil even purchased this plantation from the House of Komnenos—this was the family of Emperor Nikephoros, who had owned Basil’s parents—without any hint of ill will, watching with approval as his own enslaved men and women worked the land, bending over it, sunburned and drenched in sweat, breaking their backs to make him money—

  “I’m out of here,” said Gontran’s voice from somewhere in the darkness.

  The vision faded. Alexios was standing at Hadrian’s Harbor in Trebizond. It was afternoon. Gontran and his crew were getting the Paralos ready for departure. The ship’s complement of amazons—including Dekarch Ra’isa—was saying goodbye to their friends. Much of the city had come to wish the Paralos well on its voyage.

  “Good luck.” Alexios shook Gontran’s hand. “I’ll see you when you get back.”

  “And you,” Gontran said.

  Alexios also hugged Diaresso goodbye, though the man from Tomboutou was distracted by his farewells to Trebizond’s head teacher, Queen Tamar of Alania. They were in the middle of breaking up, long-distance relationships being difficult to maintain even under the best of circumstances. And these were medieval circumstances.

  When the Paralos sailed away, it blasted its basiliks, and the onshore basiliks answered, belching smoke, thunder, and flame onto the flat pane of the Euxine Sea. Everyone cheered as wind filled the dromon’s sails, its red flag fluttering, its prow cutting the waves on its way west.

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  Soon Alexios returned to his visions. He was back inside Basil’s mind—Basil, as a retired grandfather doing his best to justify an unjustifiable life. In his opinion, slavery was just a fact of existence. These people were simply unlucky, lazy, and foolish. He was also good to his slaves, only punishing them if they stepped out of line. The more tyrannical slave owners could really get out of control and give everyone else a bad name, but he was one of the good ones. And there were all kinds of laws, now, to prevent these abuses of power. Besides, if the slaves freed themselves, they would just end up enslaving other people. The enslavement of some was necessary for others to be free. Slavery was a necessary evil, one sanctioned by the Bible.

  To Basil’s last breath—as an old man on his death bed, surrounded by his family, all of whom were waiting to fight over the inheritance—he believed that what he had done was right. A dozen black-clad priests blessed him, sang for the salvation of his soul, raising gilded crosses and candles and Bibles into the air.

  Then he was gone.

  Alexios was asleep, but tears were pouring from his closed eyes. A world without Basil is not a world I want to live in.

  As for Kassia, she, too, forgot everything. She could read and write just as well as Basil, but a literate slave woman was a danger to the status quo. She kept her power secret. They sold her for twenty nomismas—about three years’ salary for the average City worker—to an old man. She became his body servant, cooking and cleaning for him, tending to his sexual and emotional needs. He impregnated her, and she bore him children, all of whom were sold off as soon as they were old enough. Families needed to be kept separate. That way, they were easier to control. Such sales also helped her master profit off his investment, both when he purchased her off that stage, and when he inseminated her womb.

  Kassia’s life was shorter than Basil’s. He lived to his eighties; she died in childbirth before she had reached thirty, screaming on a blanket, drenched in sweat, covered in blood, her infant stillborn.

  Once the Romans had recaptured Kassia and Basil from Trebizond, neither could escape the prison that was any society in which slavery existed.

  Waking to the real world, Alexios went to the reconstructed Gabras school at Trebizond’s heart, just across from the People’s Hospital. There he found Basil and Kassia studying alongside their teachers and friends. It was such a relief for him to see his kids, but at first he only observed them from out of sight, having no desire to interrupt their studies.

  The class was voting on what they wanted to do next. Some students wished to play in the courtyard; others wanted to read or study science or arithmetic. The teachers separated them according to their desires, then helped with their interests. Younger children often just wanted to play, while the older students were more serious about their studies, thinking about the skills they needed to help the uprising—which paid higher wages for in-demand professions like doctors, nurses, engineers, or soldiers. These youths were also joined by adults, mostly peasant women who had never been formally educated. They were studying the heliocentric model of the solar system, which went against everything almost everyone on Earth at that time believed. It also seemed irrelevant to their immediate lives—what difference did it make to them if the sun went around the Earth or vice-versa?—but as their teacher Queen Tamar explained, it was relevant in that it showed how the world was not always as it seemed at first glance, and dialectical materialist science was necessary to understand it.

  Alexios was impressed with how these youths and peasant women approached this subject. It took him away from his troubles. As the students learned about how Earth was just one planet out of many, how the sun was just one star out of many—how the stars were other suns which lived and died and sometimes even turned into infinite points in spacetime called black holes—he saw no resistance or even boredom from the students. They asked questions, explained things to each other, nodded as they struggled to wrap their minds around the vastness and complexity of the cosmos. There was nothing stupid about them. These students had simply never known about these things. Nobody had ever told them; there had never been time to ask; how were they supposed to find out? But now they knew, and Alexios believed, for a moment at least, that the wonder they showed here would change the world. These people would become scientists and engineers who knew from experience that with the right theory and the right resources, no problem was unsolvable. They would overcome the dreams that had seized hold of Alexios’s consciousness.

  Unlike most of the older students, Kassia and Basil were both in a group that was reading and discussing Homer’s Iliad. This was an ancient text, and one difficult for children to understand—written in Mycenaean as opposed to Koine or Byzantine Greek, different from even the Ancient Greek used by Herodotos or Platon or Byzantine scholars. Still, all cultured Romans knew Homer and could at least recite some passages by heart. The teacher here was an educated slave named Nikolaos who had fled his master’s villa, and who was capable of explaining the difficult grammar and vocabulary in each stanza. Using a new book printed by the People’s Press, the class worked through the text one sentence at a time, then went back and put them together, chanting the rhythms and rhymes as the teacher strummed a small harp called a psalterion. It was moving to experience this. The music and poetry was second-to-none, of course, but the sight of the poorest people on Earth gaining an education—which was often restricted to only the very richest—almost made Alexios cry. He was emotional these days.

  This is what we’re fighting for. The uprising doesn’t just want its people properly fed or housed. Its people must be the most literate, cultured, and knowledgeable on Earth. People who can’t read—or who don’t want to read—will never break free from their masters’ shackles, whether physical or ideological.

  The class discussed Homer’s literary techniques, his metaphors and punning, the way he spent line after line building up random mooks only so that a hero could bring them down. Little happened in the text, it was just a meaningless slaughter without beginning or end, yet it was also a beautiful achievement, the work of many bards who had honed each syllable for centuries.

  When the class had finished, Alexios thanked the teacher for letting him observe—adding that his knowledge and skill were both impressive—then hugged Basil and Kassia. They went out together for lunch. It was warm and beautiful outside, now—the amazingly cold and wet winter was over—and the Maidan was crowded with long tables and benches, where workers brought out food made in the People’s Canteen, ate together, then brought their empty plates and bowls back. Carriages loaded with food and other merchandise were rumbling across the square, the dung left by the horses and mules picked up for fertilizer or fuel by those workers whose turn it was to perform these unpleasant tasks. At the wharf, other workers were loading or unloading goods from merchant vessels, another unpleasant job which everyone took turns doing, save those who were disabled or too old or young. Even educated workers sometimes needed to perform difficult manual labor, but the council had voted for this to ensure that all Trapezuntines stayed connected. In the short term, it might have seemed like a waste of resources, but in the long run it helped smooth over the contradiction between educated and uneducated workers, the alienation that was inherent to class society. Educated administrators, after all, would be less likely to waste or abuse uneducated workers if they knew and liked each other, while uneducated workers would be less likely to revolt or sabotage production if they were personally connected with the city’s elected administrators. Everyone needed to be working together if the uprising was going to have any chance of success.

  Alexios sat with his kids, and they watched the sailboats and galleys flit across the water. He asked about how things were going, and they answered and then asked him the same.

  To Alexios at that time, Trebizond seemed like paradise. Everything anyone could want was here. Necessities for all. Friendship. Purpose. All were united in one common goal. This was a real community. That word, community, abused so often in the old world, was barely even mentioned here because the concept itself was both alive and omnipresent. Alexios had begun to realize that people in the old world talked about community so often because it was something they desperately needed and lacked, and which their society was incapable of providing—was indeed actively destroying.

  Alexios, Kassia, and Basil took their dishes back to the dishwashers who were on duty that day. Then the kids returned to school, and Alexios went back to his own duties, training and educating kentarchs and dekarchs so that they could in turn train more soldiers. So many resources were needed to protect the uprising. Twenty percent of the city budget went to either training or supplying soldiers or paying their pensions. It was a militant society, one constantly under attack, and this had deformed its ideals somewhat, necessitating a compromise with the existence of class relations, since defending the uprising was impossible without organization. Utopia would have to wait until the uprising was safe. Yet Alexios felt that even the high amount of money spent on the military was insufficient. He was a soldier, so of course he wanted more soldiers and officers, plus better supplies and education, but his nightmarish visions were making him believe that no amount of focus or dedication would avert their fate. Some battles you just could not win. The time was not right. The forces of reaction were too strong. The productive forces were insufficiently developed, the material circumstances were unfavorable, the workers and their vanguard were unprepared…

  In the evening, Alexios’s family got back together. They had dinner on the Maidan, even joined in the village dances the peasants had brought here from the countryside, where everyone held hands and jumped in a big circle to instruments which were Bulgar bagpipes called kaba gaida, and made from animal skin. The city’s Muslims had a sufi variation of this dance called dhikr, which involved running and jumping and clapping together, mostly while chanting: “Allahu Akbar!” Under normal circumstances, women and infidels were forbidden to participate, but the rule in Trebizond was that religion must be inclusive for all, and that everyone was free to believe whatever they wished so long as it harmed no one else. This caused some tension with new arrivals—all major faiths in these lands were segregated by gender—but anyone who ignored the rules was forbidden to live in Trebizond.

  Alexios, Basil, and Kassia participated in these dances. They were another way to bring the city’s people together. Yet when Alexios and his kids went home to their new apartment outside Trebizond’s walls in the Daphnous suburbs, Alexios fell into silence. Part of him felt almost like a prophet newly-inspired, one whose duty it was to walk among these happy masses and tell them to repent, for the day at judgment was at hand. Another part kept repeating what Hermes Trismegistos had told him back in Sumatar: “It is nothing.” A vision of Alexios’s old teacher Dionysios had guided him to that observatory in the desert. Now new visions were guiding Alexios elsewhere.

  ‘It is nothing.’ It doesn’t matter. All will be consigned to the flames. I thought I’d escaped Hermes’s influence, his comfortable armchair philosophizing, his idea that nothing matters, but it’s so hard to break free from that. Maybe the cliché about breaking eggs to make an omelette is true. All these visions I’m having are some sort of expression of that forbidden knowledge, that the ones who seek to justify slavery are not entirely wrong. But maybe I was wrong to turn Hermes down. Maybe I could have averted Trebizond’s destruction if I’d just been brave enough to sacrifice myself. Power is not always necessarily bad.

  Kassia and Basil noticed that Alexios had gotten quiet. They asked if anything was the matter. Not wanting to trouble them, he said not to worry about it, even as they stood before him in chains.

  I’m my own worst enemy. None of the Romans or Latins knows as much about these philosophical problems as I do. Their criticisms are always so simplistic, so easy to bat away. The real criticisms come from those who read the theory and do the praxis. The theory is written on their flesh in the form of the welts and scars and marks inflicted on them by their masters.

  Visions continued to trouble Alexios. He thought that something had to give, that it was impossible to go on like this. Yet the visions followed him through his waking life. As he trained amazons, he saw them lying in puddles of their own blood, eyes and mouths gaping like fish on the chopping block. When he hammered scaffolding into place, he saw it burning, even as he held it in his hands. One dream flame singed his palm; he dropped the wood and gasped. Though the fire had disappeared, a mark was left on his flesh. Another time, while passing bricks to workers, Alexios saw the buildings they were constructing in ruins, or owned by landlords.

  He worked as hard as he could, trying to exhaust or distract himself, but there was no way out.

  Gontran Koraki, dead.

  Kambine Diaresso, dead.

  Herakleia, dead. Killed. Murdered.

  The same for Basil and Kassia.

  All of them dead or enslaved. Their legacy erased. Everything they cared about either destroyed or turned against them.

  Alexios spent more time alone in his room, thinking he could escape his visions that way, but they still flashed in his mind. He saw through the walls, even through his shut eyelids, as the imperial banners rose over Trebizond and the world beyond—this time for good. The survivors of the final cataclysm bowed on their hands and knees to the marching Roman legions, and kissed the golden eagles shoved in their faces.

  “Roma, O Roma!” sang the triumphant legionaries, stomping as they marched through central Trebizond.

  Wherever Alexios went, whatever he did, the visions followed. Even if he hid in bed under his blankets and covered his head with his pillow, they played before his eyes, blared in his ears, seized hold of his bones.

  What am I supposed to do? Am I losing my mind?

  Isato was the first to notice that something was wrong. She slept beside him every night, and was annoyed by how he kept waking up, gasping and screaming. At last she brought him to Za-Ilmaknun, who asked about his troubles. Alexios was afraid to tell him—afraid to sound like he was against the uprising. To publicly doubt that it would prevail was no different from attacking it. But he spoke to Za-Ilmaknun alone and in private, and the debtera listened, and also prescribed a solution.

  “It is spirit sickness,” Za-Ilmaknun said. “I have seen it many times. A spirit has taken hold of you, my son. We must draw it out into the light—must see what it is, and what it wants.”