The Alchemist's Revenge

by Martin Archer

  Nicholas, James, and I continued to jog along the top of the interior wall until I finally got tired and had to slow down to a walk. We began to see more and more live Greeks as we got closer and closer to the outer gate.

  Many of the Greeks we saw were pretending to be dead to avoid attracting an arrow. Those who were moving appeared to be frantically running back and forth trying to find a way to escape, and rightly so since captured soldiers were usually killed or sold as slaves.

  Those who were still trying to escape were mostly in the middle of the enclosure. They were there in an effort to stay as far away as possible from the archers on the walls, and most of them were still on their feet were moving towards the gate in the outer wall through which they had entered.

  Heading back to the gate in the outer wall was logical direction for the surviving Greeks to run—they were desperately trying to get back to their camp and best way to get there, so far as they knew, was to go back the way they came. There were also a number of dead and wounded Greeks on the ground, but none who looked able-bodied. They had either run or were pretending to be dead or wounded in order to not attract an archer’s attention.

  We saw a few riderless horses peacefully grazing amongst the remains of the states’ forces camp, but what we did not see were any Greeks on horseback or anyone who looked like a captain or sergeant trying to rally his men.

  It was increasingly clear that the Greek lords and knights had either fallen or abandoned their men. Probably some of both since the Greek riders who reached the inner gate first and were closest to the ribaldis when Aron delivered his revenge. And, of course, some of the riders may have dismounted when they realized that being on horseback made them and their horses splendid targets for the archers on the walls—which had been carefully built along both sides of the roadway with exactly that in mind.

  What we did not see, at least not at first, were any of the states’ forces and their camp followers who had remained in their camp instead of running away when they had the chance.

  At first we thought that the Greeks might have slaughtered them all. But then a few of what appeared to be remainers began coming into view and we realized we might have jogged right past others of them without knowing they were there.

  We had not seen the remainers at first because they were huddled tight up against the wall and we had not stopped to look down over the side to see if anyone was down there.

  The presence of the remainers tight up against the wall was quite understandable—those of them who had not been cut down by the Greek riders galloping through their semi-deserted camp had run when they realized what was happening. And running away from the road had inevitably taken them towards the nearby walls where the archers had arrived hours earlier in the darkness.

  The problem the surviving remainers had then encountered, of course, was that the some of the archers on the wall had not realized they were friendlies and had targeted them along with the invading Greek soldiers. It was similarly difficult to know for sure about the dead and wounded men we saw as we hurried towards the outer gate because most of the attackers and remainers dressed similarly. All we knew for sure was that there were a tremendous number of men on the ground.

  ******

  We met Richard as we came around a curve and could once again see the city huge outer wall in the distance. He was standing atop the interior wall and in the process of moving some of his archers closer to the outer gate where there were more of the surviving invaders.

  According to Richard, those of the surviving invaders who were able to reach the gate were well and truly screwed. They had escaped the ribaldis lightning and stones, and had somehow managed to retreat through the archers’ storm of arrows, only to find the outer gate had been closed and the walls around it were teeming with archers.

  As a result, Richard told us with a great deal of enthusiasm in his voice, the surviving invaders were either playing dead or were leaderless and running about in a desperate search for a place to hide from the arrows being constantly pushed by our men at anything that moved. I agreed and said I had reached the same conclusion.

  The wisest of the surviving invaders, when they realized the gate was closed and there was no chance of escape, had begun falling down and pretending to be dead. Others had raised their hands in an effort to surrender. Nowhere, Richard reported, was there any resistance. We had not seen any either.

  I had been hurrying to the outer gate with the intention of trying to destroy more of the invaders with lightning strikes and stones from the two ribaldi wagons which had been pulled along the top to the wall and positioned above the outer gate. They, the ribaldi wagons that is, were now clearly visible from where we were standing.

  After I finished telling Richard what I intended to do, and why I had ordered some his Reds to return to the inner gate, I started walking toward the remaining ribaldi wagons once again. But then I changed my mind and came to a stop after I had taken only five or six steps.

  It had finally dawned on me that the Greek army was totally defeated and Aron was gone. It meant we could use the Greeks we took as prisoners to trade for the men taken by the Venetians and in any negotiations we had with the Greek commanders. Perhaps even more important for the future of Company, it also meant we did not need to use the remaining ribaldis; we could keep them and use them to learn more about using the lightning to throw stones at our enemies in the years ahead.

  “Stop pushing. Accept surrenders,” I shouted. “Pass the word.”

  Richard looked up in surprise at my sudden change of heart. Then he smiled and nodded his agreement.

  “Do you have anyone nearby who can gobble Greek?” I asked Richard as I turned around and walked back to re-join him.

  Chapter Fifty

  The aftermath.

  It took most of the rest of that long, hot day for my lieutenants and me to organize the surrender of the defeated Orthodox soldiers. Our first move was to stop pushing arrows at them and send some of our Greek-gobbling auxiliaries along the wall calling on the Greek soldiers and their mercenaries to lay down their arms and surrender. We offered them better terms than they could have reasonably expected.

  “All those who surrender immediately will be treated well and eventually ransomed and released; those who do not surrender immediately will be killed or sold to the Moors for slaves.”

  It took a while for the message to reach everyone. But it did and the Greek survivors gratefully surrendered, and rightly so since they were surrounded by archers on the walls around them and had no hope of escape. Almost all of the Greeks quickly threw down their arms and hurried to where we initially ordered them to assemble—to the road that ran through the middle of the states’ camp.

  Our second move was to walk in the hot sun among the prisoners, and separate them into groups and count them. It was harder than one would have expected to get to the prisoners since there was, at first, no way for us to climb down from the interior walls.

  It took time, but it was an easily solved problem. Men were sent running to the outer wall to bring ladders from our ill-fated sally down the steps next to the gate, and then bring them through the enclosure to where the archers were waiting to descend on both sides of the enclosure.

  Whilst we waited for the ladders to arrive we gathered the captains and sergeants from the nearby galley companies and gave the necessary orders and explanations.

  The orders they were given were quite simple—every prisoner who had entered the enclosure of the states’ forces on horseback, or whose clothes suggested he might be able to pay a ransom, was to be moved south to a position on the road next to the gate in the inner wall; all who might be Orthodox priests were to be moved north to the gate in the outer wall. Everyone else, meaning the Orthodox army’s great mass of rank and file foot soldiers, was to be gathered in the middle of the enclosure.

  A message was sent to my father tasking him to send wagons to gather up the wounded prisoners and bring them into the shade alo
ng the walls for barbering by their fellow Greeks. He was also to arrange for the watering of our prisoners. Their food would have to come from their commanders and camp followers.

  Letting them live was one thing; spending our coins to feed them was a step too far.

  ****** Commander George Courtenay.

  The Orthodox army’s common soldiers were the first to be counted and questioned. I took charge of them with Adam as my interpreter whilst Richard went off to question the prisoners from the city, the men who had attacked us in the rear just before the Orthodox army attacked.

  Amongst the many things I asked Richard to try to discover was who sent them and why the first half of the coins was paid, but not the second. And what happened to the second half of the coins? Did they even exist and, if they did, how could we get out hands on them?

  For my part, I particularly wanted to know if all the Orthodox army’s fighting men had participated in the early morning attack, and also what, if anything, the Greek soldiers had been told before the attack. Most of all, however, I wanted to know who was left in the Greek camp. In other words, did we catch enough of their effective soldiers to end the fighting?

  Translators who could gobble Greek were rounded up and our apprentice sergeants were put to work asking questions and periodically sending someone off with an escort of archers to join the priests and nobles who were being held elsewhere.

  Late that afternoon, whilst we were still counting, separating, and questioning the prisoners, the Empress and my father arrived with a great guard of the Empress’s Varangians. Richard opened the inner gate so she could ride into the roadway and he proudly accompanied her. It was a triumphal procession complete with a beating drum and a horn blower to announce her arrival.

  The Empress was obviously savouring her victory even though she was clearly appalled when she saw the wretched condition of the wounded prisoners and the mangled bodies and body parts of the dead and badly wounded Greeks lying in front of the gate. It was a hot day and already some of the dead Greeks were beginning to swell and smell and attract seagulls and other birds. She arrived savouring her victory and ended up leaving abruptly in a state of distress with my father holding her arm to steady her.

  By the end of the day we knew we had captured almost forty thousand men, and had killed and wounded more than ten thousand. It was my initial impression that the prisoners had been totally cowed by the noise of the ribaldis, but that most of the dead and wounded had fallen to arrows pushed out of our longbows.

  It also appeared to me that, for all practical purposes, the Orthodox army had ceased to exist as a fighting force. I certainly hoped so, and so did my men. As the soldiers’ song the men often sang around our campfires at night said so true—“I want to go home, oh how I want to go home”

  ***** Lieutenant Commander Richard Ryder

  My apprentice sergeant, Paul Cartwright, and I returned to the inner gate to question the men from the city who had attacked the inner gate just prior to the arrival of the Orthodox army. We took one of the auxiliaries with us to translate.

  We started with the Greek-gobbling Orthodox priests. One was mortally wounded and asleep, but the other quickly became quite forthcoming, particularly after a bit of persuasion involving an offer of some pain-killing flower paste for his mortally wounded friend. What he told us absolutely astonished me.

  According to the priest, it was the Empress’s own guards, the Varangians, who had organized the bribery effort to open the outer gate to the Orthodox army and arranged for the necessary coins to be paid to the archer they thought was a turncoat.

  He believed the story to be true, he said, because he had heard the “Metropolitan Andreas,” the leader of the Orthodox Church in and around Constantinople, tell the priest’s bishop what the Church’s spies had learned about the Varangians’ plan.

  What was also stunning was that the captured priest also claimed to have heard the Metropolitan tell his bishop why the Varangians did it—because they assumed that sooner or later someone would be bribed to open the city’s gates at a time and place when they and the other defenders, meaning the Company’s archers and the states’ forces, were not fully prepared to fight them off.

  The Varangians did the bribing themselves, according to the priest, in the belief that knowing when and where the attack would occur made it likely that the attack would fail. It would also allow the Varangians to be fully prepared to move the Empress to safety in the event the defenders could not hold the city despite knowing the time and place of the attack.

  In essence, the priest told us the Varangians took the lead in organizing the bribery to open the outer gate so they and their allies would know exactly when and where the attack would come. And even more importantly, so the attack would come when and where the Empress’s supporters, meaning the archers, were most likely to defeat them.

  We, of course, could hardly fault the Varangians since we had effectively solicited the bribes and accepted them for exactly the same reasons. The Orthodox priests and their “Metropolitan” apparently did not know this.

  Where the Varangian’s plan almost went wrong, according to the priest, was when the Metropolitan heard of the Varangians’ plan. He decided that his city’s faithful should be mobilized to make sure that the entrance of the Orthodox army did not fail as the Varangian’s commander intended.

  If what the priests told us was true, the Metropolitan himself was deeply involved in all aspects of the effort to get the inner gate opened so the Orthodox soldiers coming through the outer gate could continue on and get through the inner gate as well.

  The Metropolitan’s efforts, they said, had two parts. The first was to bribe the Latin priest whom the Varangians had used to bribe Adam to open the outer gate so that the priest would additionally bribe Adam to open the inner gate.

  Secondly, according to the Orthodox priest, the Metropolitan did not trust the Latin priest to keep his word to additionally bribe Adam to open the inner gate, so he had also ordered the Orthodox Church’s protection gangs to prevent the inner gate from being closed when the Orthodox army made its appearance.

  A certain Konstantinos was charged by the Metropolitan with preventing the inner gate from being closed when the Orthodox army arrived.

  Konstantinos was just the man for the job, the priest explained, being as he was the leader of the Orthodox Church’s protection gangs in the city. As such, he was the only man in the city who could gather up a force of men on such short notice that the Empress’s spies would not be able to learn about it in time to warn her so she could stop it.

  We were in process of trying to verify the priest’s astounding stories when who should appear but the Empress accompanied by her son and daughter, George’s father, and a large number of her Varangian guards and courtiers. She wanted to see her victory so I, of course, stopped questioning the prisoners from the city and accompanied her and her retinue to the scene of her forces’ triumph.

  Unfortunately, she became a bit overbalanced by what she saw and decided to leave with George’s father solicitously holding her elbow to steady her. That was fine by me; we had work to do and there were only a few hours left before darkness fell.

  ****** Commander George Courtenay

  It was late in the evening by the time Richard and I, and our various lieutenants, finally sat down at the Commandery table to compare notes and discuss what we should do next.

  Ours was not the victory supper and celebration one might have expected. To the contrary, it quickly became quite subdued when Richard told us that it was Eric and his Varangians who had bribed the outer gate open, and about the attempts of the attempts of the Orthodox Church’s Metropolitan to both bribe open and force open the inner gate so the Greek army could enter the city.

  We broke up earlier in order to get some rest. It had been a long and exhausting day and the prisoner counting and initial questioning was just beginning.

  Our reality was that we faced a huge immediate problem because w
e had so many prisoners. Should we fatten up and sell our prisoners as slaves the way Uncle Thomas said the first Caesar did to enrich himself, or would the Company being known as a slaver be counterproductive in the long run?

  It was an interesting question, but I quickly put the thought out of my mind and told everyone to forget it; it was contrary to the Company’s policies about slaves and would piss off my father and Uncle Thomas for sure.

  The decision I announced as I got up to leave the table was firm and somewhat of a compromise.

  “We will not sell them and we will not spend a penny to feed and barber them.”

  Chapter Fifty-one

  The war is over and we turn our

  thoughts to profiting from it.

  My lieutenants and I spent the night of the battle sleeping on the battlefield and on the wall with our men. The next morning we put some of the prisoners to work gathering their dead and loading what was left of them into the horse-drawn wagons we had used the day before to gather up the Greek wounded.

  Our initial thought had been to dump the dead Greeks outside the gate in the outer wall for their own army to bury. But we reconsidered and changed our minds the next morning. What we saw that changed our minds was that there were too many dead Greeks and that what was left of their army was packing up to leave or had already left. So we had some of the prisoners dig a big hole and tossed them in.

  What we also did on the morning after the fighting was send the wounded Greeks out beyond the moat to be cared for by their own people. We repaired the drawbridge, carried them out to the other side of the moat in wagons, and set them down in long rows of moaning and distressed men. Then we withdrew. Within minutes soldiers and camp followers could be seen passing amongst them.

  “More likely to rifle through their clothes for something they can steal.”

  That was what I heard one of our grizzled sergeants say as we stood above the gate later that morning and watched the activity around the Greek wounded. The Greeks were out of luck if that was what they were doing—our lads had already cleaned them out.