For two days the Sparhawk passed fortresses and fishing villages along the Euxine coast’s mountainous forests. These settlements and ruins had names like Riza, Ateni, Vitse, and Batumi, but they were so small—often consisting of a few dozen wattle-and-daub dwellings, their rooftops thatched with straw—they might as well have been nameless. What did the inhabitants call them, after all, except “town” or “home”? There was, however, an old fortress built by Justinian, called Petra, but it had been abandoned centuries ago.

  The climate was mild, sunny, pleasant. Palm trees grew among the pines, though ice capped the mountains. Cool sea breezes blew through sunlight. In more stable times, this place would have been covered with vineyards. Green vines would have been twisting along rows of stakes, peasants washing their feet before being lifted into wooden barrels to hold up their tunics and stomp juice from piles of purple grapes.

  The wind pushed the Sparhawk east. The oarsmen passed the time by chatting or gambling. One had brought a lute, another had a drum, and they sang stories to entertain the rest, though the language they spoke was unknown to Alexios and his companions, even if they could still appreciate the rhymes and rhythms. Sedko explained that the musical fables which the ashik—or troubadours—sang were all about forbidden love: between rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, or the children of families who had despised each other for generations.

  “Forbidden fruit.” Sedko munched an apricot. “You know it tastes all the sweeter.”

  “Isn’t it the reason for all our misfortunes?” Alexios eyed Isato, who was watching the passing shoreline with Basil, Kassia, and Vasilissa. “If Adam hadn’t eaten Eve’s fruit, we’d all still be back in the garden.”

  “None of us would even be here.” Sedko tossed the apricot’s heart overboard.

  “But would that be such a bad thing?”

  “You and your annoying questions.”

  “No, really,” Alexios said. “There’s some quote I read about this somewhere. It went something like: ‘What’s best of all is not to be, to be nothing. But the next best thing—is to die soon.’”

  “Alright.” Sedko nodded to the sea. “Get in.”

  Alexios laughed. “I didn’t say I agreed with it.”

  “It’s still pretty dark, even to say out loud.”

  “Not sure I agree with using the word ‘dark’ in that way.” Alexios looked at Isato. Then he turned back to Sedko. “Don’t you remember the Song of Songs? ‘I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.’ A black starry night is beautiful. Black soil is beautiful. Black women are beautiful.”

  Sedko turned his head to the side. “That one certainly is.” He cleared his throat. “I mean—you made a fine choice, is what I meant. But regardless, you may get your chance, if what you want is to not exist anymore.”

  Here we go, Alexios thought.

  Sedko shook his head at the passing greenery. “I’m telling you, it’s beautiful, but deadly out there. It’s not like Trebizond, with those thick walls. There’s no walls out here. Nothing between you and the elements. We can turn around and go back whenever you want. No one will blame you.”

  “I wish I could,” Alexios said.

  “It’s dangerous for you,” Sedko said. “For these children of yours. For your woman—to be a woman is dangerous. The moment we drop you off and set sail, you could all be killed or enslaved. We’re heading to a warlike place, and you don’t belong to any people there—you don’t belong to any of the lords or tribes. There’s nobody to protect you. The lands out here are changing hands so often, nobody knows who’s in control, whether it’s the Georgians, the Arabs, the Turks—”

  “Sedko, we’ve been through this before. I told Isato and the kids. They wouldn’t let me go alone.”

  “Course not.” Sedko eyed the tall trees on the shore, doubtless thinking they’d make good masts. “But we’re all alone in the end. All of us die alone, sooner or later.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Even if someone’s with you when you’re on your deathbed. Even if your whole family’s holding your hand, you’re still alone. They aren’t going through what you’re going through. Probably they’re just hoping you get it over with so they can go back to whatever it is they want to be doing—and inherit your stuff, while they’re at it. If they’re nice, they just want you not to be in pain anymore, not to be afraid or upset.”

  “Now who has ‘dark’ views?”

  “I’ve seen it too many times,” Sedko said. “I’m sure you’ve seen it, too. How many people have you cared about, who died right in front of you?”

  Alexios thought of Anna—Basil and Kassia’s mother—the light in her eyes fading as Narses cut her down, as she fell from her horse and rolled through the dust before Trebizond’s walls.

  “Death’s everywhere these days,” Sedko said. “But we all die alone. And so all we can do is enjoy the little we’ve got while it lasts.”

  “And do our best to make a positive difference,” Alexios said. “Leave the world better than we found it. ‘The deeds of men don’t die with their deaths.’”

  Sedko waved his finger at Alexios. “There’s my little upriser!”

  Later, Alexios was sitting on the sunny deck with Isato by the bow. The kids were near the stern with everyone else, listening to the ashik. Alexios and Isato were alone and enjoying as much privacy as was possible aboard the Sparhawk. With his knife, Alexios had cut a pomegranate, and was feeding the purple seeds to Isato, who was lying in his lap and slurping them out of his hand.

  “You know what it means,” he said, “in this part of the world, for one person to give a pomegranate to another.”

  “It means he is her slave,” Isato said.

  Alexios kissed her, pushing pomegranate seeds into her mouth. “I am.”

  “Then let us return to Trebizond,” she said with her mouth full. “Let us forget all of this.”

  “I wish I could. But you heard what Hawajat said.”

  “Then you are not my slave. You are still just a wayward sparrow. A man who does not know his place.” Isato stood and walked past the four horses tethered to the mainmast, joining everyone else at the stern.

  After awhile, Alexios got up and spoke with Rakhsh as he brushed him.

  “You aren’t going to leave me, are you?” Alexios said.

  The horse looked at him as if to say, who knows?

  They soon reached their destination, the ancient Greek port of Phasis, which lay in a land called either Mingrelia, Georgia, Kolchis, or any one of a dozen other names. When Alexios saw this port—where Jason and the Argonauts had come looking for the Golden Fleece one or two thousand years ago—his heart sank. The voyage had been almost a pleasure excursion—like they were vacationing on a yacht—and the sight of Phasis reminded Alexios that he had work, and that he was placing himself and the people he loved in danger.

  Mingrelia was a flat, green country of wetlands, lakes, and forests surrounding a wide and winding river. Seabirds of all kinds were flapping and crying and swimming and nesting, and great mountains rose in the distance to pierce the puffy white clouds in the blue sky. But Phasis itself was just another cluster of hovels, indistinguishable from the others Alexios had seen on this trip, save for its excellent position alongside the river delta that drained its muddy waters into the sea.

  “Wish we could take you up the River Rioni,” Sedko told Alexios. “But we haven’t the draft. It’s too easy to hit us with fire arrows from the banks.”

  “Yeah,” Alexios said. “I wish you could, too. We’ve had such a nice time here, I don’t want to leave.”

  “Then don’t,” Sedko said. “Let us take you back to Trebizond.”

  Even as he spoke these words, and even as Alexios considered them, heavy rusted iron chains ensnared Sedko’s wrists and ankles, then did the same for the crew, the children, and Isato and Vasilissa—these last two forced to wear makeup and skimpy clothing while hand-feeding grapes to a man dressed in purple Roman robes. Now this man paced the Sparhawk’s deck, his chin raised high, his hands clasped behind his back as his soldiers walked with him. Phasis was in flames, which were mirrored by the sea. Corpses lay in its mud streets. The sky was dark with smoke. Roman centuries were marching into the interior to the martial music of pounding drums and blasting trumpets, Roman cavalry was galloping ahead, their supply train of laden mules and camp followers chasing after. Even in the distance, smoke rose from mountain villages, which flickered with flames.

  It just went on and on—until Alexios put the thought of going home out of his mind. Then the visions stopped. He returned to reality, where the sail was furled, and he was shaking Sedko’s hand, and bidding the Sparhawk’s crew farewell as he descended the gangplank with Kassia, Basil, Isato, and their four horses onto a rickety pier of rotting wood that swayed and creaked as they stepped on, the seawater rippling around wooden supports that were covered in white barnacles. Vasilissa blessed the travelers as they left, and the Muslim crew members said: “May Allah grant you a safe journey, may He protect you and grant bounties and wisdom.” “Go toward peace,” the Jewish oarsmen added.

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  I wish, Alexios thought.

  As soon as the travelers had stepped off the gangplank, Sedko’s crewmen withdrew it. They then rowed the Sparhawk around, turning back southwest to Trebizond. It would be a harder journey, with the summer’s easterly winds now blowing in their faces. But the longship possessed some advanced design features cribbed from Arabian dhows, including an extra Lateen sail that enabled the ship to tack.

  They’ll be alright, Alexios thought.

  The four travelers and their horses stepped off the pier onto the muddy “maidan,” if it could even be called that. Phasis consisted of about a hundred wattle-and-daub homes built more or less at random, their yards fenced with rotting wood slabs. Near the pier was a small stone building, presumably the local lord’s home, with an attached storehouse. The travelers moved out of sight of this place before the lord inside noticed them and charged a fee for their setting foot here.

  Seabirds were everywhere, and mosquitos buzzed in the travelers’ eyes. It was midday, and hot and humid, the sulfur reek of marshlands in the air. Phasis’s townspeople had already left to work the fields, to pasture their flocks, or to fish in the sea, and only a few elders remained to sit in the doorways of their homes and stare at the new arrivals, though they were ignored by naked children playing in the mud with the dogs, pigs, goats, chickens, and ducks.

  Alexios and his companions mounted their horses and urged them on to a trot through the town. Within minutes, they had left the wattle-and-daub houses behind. Even Phasis’s church was made this way, and would have been indistinguishable from the other buildings without the small wooden cross rising from its roof, and the wooden crosses in the adjoining graveyard. The church interior was silent and dark; the priest must have been elsewhere.

  Rome is the light, a character in an old movie had said. Alexios thought of this, now, as he and his companions followed a mud path along the Rioni River. The poverty here was extraordinary, even by Roman standards, and it was amazing how few people were around. There was also nothing to steal, aside from human beings and maybe some food and coins hidden here and there. Sedko had mentioned that the “warlike Mingrelians” seized children from other tribes and then sold them to passing ships or barbarian hordes, using the currency gained to purchase steel weapons and armor.

  “Should we stay and help them?” Kassia eyed the children behind them who were playing in the mud. “We could teach them to read.”

  “We’re just passing through as travelers,” Alexios said. “Not as liberators.”

  “You’re just going to leave them, then,” Kassia said.

  “We have less time than you think,” Alexios said. “We have to reach the east.”

  “By what time?” she said. “Next year?”

  “By the end of our lives,” Alexios said.

  “At the very least,” Basil said, “we don’t want to be in the mountains in wintertime.”

  “Why not?” Isato said. “What lies in those mountains?”

  “Snow,” Basil said. “Death.”

  “What makes snow so awful?” Isato asked.

  “It makes everything impossible,” Basil said. “If you live away from water, there’s nothing to eat except whatever you’ve managed to store for winter. Nothing but cold bread and water for months. Nothing to do except struggle to stay warm.”

  “He’s not exactly fond of winter,” Alexios said to Isato.

  “The winter before we met you, we spent outdoors on the road,” Basil said. “That was when we lost father.”

  Kassia lowered her head.

  “And then we spent the next winter traveling to Harran.” Basil shuddered. “It was freezing almost the whole way. Who knew that the Syrian desert gets cold in the winter?”

  “Hopefully you’ve experienced the worst of it,” Alexios said.

  “Not true,” Basil said. “Even in Erzurum, not far from Trebizond, the winters are said to be terrible, with months of endless snowfall, and temperatures so cold, if you spit outside, your spit freezes before it hits the ground.”

  Isato gasped. “How can that be?”

  “It can,” Basil said. “There’s a country out there I found out about when I was putting together the map for this little trip of ours in the library. It’s very far from here, high up in the highest mountains, called Bod. Supposedly it’s even colder there. The air itself is so thin, you can hardly breathe. People can’t farm or fish at all. They just live on butter, milk, and meat from these special mountain cows called yaks. And they have this weird immortal aristocracy there. Each king is said to be the reincarnated soul of the previous one, going back thousands of years. They have millions of slaves.”

  “Sounds like a wonderful place,” Alexios said.

  “It’s not so different from the rest of the places we have to travel through,” Basil said. “Just colder.”

  “I bet no one speaks Roman there,” Kassia said.

  “It’ll be a miracle if anyone even speaks it here,” Alexios said. “We’ll have to do a lot of talking with our hands.”

  “And our weapons,” Basil said.

  After passing a few vegetable gardens and fields of plowed mud, the forest—screeching with insects and birds—surrounded them. According to Basil, Kutaisi, Georgia’s capital, was a day or two away, so long as they rode along the river. Their path would supposedly take them all the way to Sera and the islands of Cipangu at the world’s end.

  “The whole trip is six or seven thousand kilometers, isn’t it?” Alexios said. “From Georgia to Sera.”

  “What’s a kilometer?” Kassia said.

  “An old world measurement,” Alexios said. “These horses can probably do about forty of them in a day. Kassia, you’re good at math. Tell me—”

  “You told us to never say anyone is good at anything,” Basil said. “That talent is really just a question of skill—how much you practice, how well you practice, and what kind of resources you have.”

  “Right, sorry,” Alexios said.

  “The child teaches the elder,” Isato said.

  Alexios spread his arms wide. “Welcome to the uprising.”

  “We have left the Republic of Trebizond,” Isato said. “There is no uprising here.”

  Alexios clutched his hands to his heart. “We bring it with us, princess, wherever we go.” He turned to Kassia. “What I meant to say was: you’ve practiced doing a lot of math. You’ve worked hard at doing math. So tell me: if we do forty kilometers a day, how many days will it take us to travel seven thousand kilometers?”

  “That’s about two forties per hundred,” Kassia said. “Which makes twenty per thousand—times seven, which makes about a hundred and forty days, give or take a month or two, since we’ll have to rest.”

  “And since we’ll be running into trouble,” Basil said.

  “Thanks,” Alexios said to Kassia. “A hundred and forty days. That doesn’t seem so bad. That’s only, what, about five months?”

  “All the merchants say it takes a year for a ream of silk to move from Sera to Konstantinopolis,” Basil said. “Not much of it even makes the journey anymore since the Romans figured out how to make silk on their own. Awhile back I think they sent some spies pretending to be Paulician or Nestorian monks to steal some silkworms and figure out the whole process.”

  Isato winced. “Six months or a year on horseback, what difference does it make? I already stink of horse, and my whole body aches.”

  “We just got off the ship less than an hour ago and you’re already complaining,” Alexios said. “You’ve already traveled a long way. You came all the way out here from Aethiopia! What a trip that must have been!”

  “It was not easy,” Isato said. “Especially with no one to keep me company but the debtera Za-Ilmaknun, who was possessed by some zar or adbar spirit half the time. And the great desert between Aethiopia and Fustat…I fear I shall never take such a journey again. The first time almost killed us both. Next time, if there is ever a next time, I will take ship from Sinai.”

  Kassia smiled at Isato. “Riding on horseback isn’t like the palaces in Aethiopia, where everyone rests on silk pillows all day, and each member of the royal family has a hundred servants at their beck and call.”

  “Here it is certainly not like that at all, little one.” Isato reached forward and pinched Kassia’s cheek. “Yet one day, if you are lucky, you may see the Palace of Zagwe in Roha, where I am from and where my family lives.”

  “See it and destroy it,” Basil said. “It’s a feudal palace, isn’t it? A palace built by slaves?”

  “That it is,” Isato said. “And though you are only a boy, young Basil, you are right. The veil has been lifted from my eyes. Now I know it must be destroyed. It must become a people’s palace.”

  “What kind of a princess are you?” Basil said.

  “One who has lost one world.” Isato looked at her three companions. “And gained another.”

  Though the travelers met no one else on that first day, they camped away from the road and out of sight. It was warm, so they set no fire. Watering the horses was easy by the river, but Alexios kept an eye on how much feed and food they were carrying, plus how much money they possessed. He had convinced the council to invest four hundred golden nomismas in their trip, divided into four bags, each of which was carried by a different horse. The total amount was worth the annual salaries of dozens of workers.

  Hopefully it’ll be enough to get us to Sera.

  It was obviously more expensive to bring four people rather than just one across such a distance, but there were benefits to traveling together. You never got lonely, and only needed to keep watch for a few hours each night. Isato was a night owl, while Alexios was an early bird. Neither trusted the children to keep awake through the night, and this was one grownup responsibility Basil and Kassia were uninterested in assuming. After their long day aboard the Sparhawk, followed by riding at an easy pace through Phasis and the countryside, the children ate their bread and meat and cheese, drank some water, and slept near the snoring horses, who had been brushed and fed and hobbled, their shoes cleaned.

  Isato nodded to the children, then whispered: “They look like mela’ikiti. Like angels.”

  “Only when they’re quiet,” Alexios said. “Only when they’re sleeping.”

  They needed to draw their cloaks about themselves to keep the mosquitos away. This was uncomfortable and took some getting used to. The uprising’s medical seminars—given to everyone in Trebizond—had taught that mosquitos spread disease and were far more dangerous than they seemed. Being from Aethiopia, Isato and Za-Ilmaknun had already known this, but it was almost always a revelation to nearly everyone else who had grown up in this time and place. Beforehand they had believed that disease was spread by bad air. Yet the uneducated peasants and workers still devoured this new knowledge from the uprising, since it would keep them alive and grant better lives. Only the occasional rich and educated Trapezuntine resisted new ideas.

  Alexios found it cozy to sit for a while in the dark with Isato, with neither of the kids awake to bother them. Together they leaned against a great box tree covered in moss and lichen…

  It seemed Isato was waking Alexios as soon as he fell asleep, but he took his night watch duties seriously. Everyone snored around him as he sat awake in the dark. The peepers peeped, the creepers creeped—and, for once, no monsters attacked. No throat-cutters snuck up on them. The forests were dense, and swarming with wildlife: foxes, wolves, bears, deer, pheasants, even the occasional lynx. But neither people, animals, nor demons bothered the four travelers that night.

  This is what I wanted, he thought, as he struggled to stay awake for hour after hour, alone with his thoughts and memories. This is what I asked for.

  When the air was blue with dawn, Alexios packed up everything and fed the horses. Kutaisi lay ahead.