Zombies of Byzantium

by Sean Munger

  “Preposterous,” scoffed Theophilus.

  “Oh? Why don’t you offer your own hand to one of them as a snack, old man, and prove me wrong?” Theophilus recoiled at this retort and was silent. “I need not say this to the men who fought with me in the village this morning,” said Camytzes. “But for the innkeeper and the monks I advise that you aim for their heads. A quick blow to the head will bring them down. Almost nothing else will. These ghouls are utterly relentless. Sever one’s arm and it will still claw at your flesh. They feel no pain, so they won’t recoil from—”

  “I hear them!” cried the apothecary. “They’re coming!”

  A hush fell over us. Indeed, behind the gentle rustle of the tree branches and the song of birds, I could barely discern the shuffling of many clumsy feet and a chorus of the same strange moans that Theophilus and I had heard emanating from the church earlier. The xenodocheion was situated at the bottom of a small hill, which hid from our view whatever was coming up the road from the northwest. We might not see the ghouls until almost the last second.

  “There they are!” shouted a young man.

  At last the ghouls crested the hill. Just looking at them almost made me sick. Their clothes hung in rags and tatters, and most were splattered with blood. One middle-aged woman was naked but her mottled grayish skin was smeared with carmine. Blood dripped and streamed from the mouths of the fiends and often from their clawlike fingers. Their eyes were clouded and blank. A young boy in the front of the procession was missing both hands. Whether he had lost them in life or they had been torn off since his transformation into a demon-ghoul was impossible to tell. The throng of ghouls staggered toward us, moaning incoherently. My grip on the shovel tightened. There were at least thirty of them, possibly more—were we supposed to smite them all?

  Camytzes did not wait for a cue. With a roar of battle lust, he sprang toward the mob of ghouls, swinging his sword in a broad arc that beheaded two of them (including the naked woman) almost instantly. The other men lunged after him in one furious body, and I found myself being swept along with them. For a dizzying moment as the crowd crushed around me I could not tell friend from foe. Then a grayish head with blank eyes—a balding man with rotted teeth and blood dripping down his chin—popped up in front of me. I swung the shovel down on its head with all my might. It split like a gourd, sending a shower of blood in an arc, splattering my cassock. Instinctively I recoiled. “Ugh!” No sooner had this ghoul gone down than another one took its place, a woman, reaching her arm toward me. I swatted the arm with the shovel and took aim at her head. One blow was not sufficient to destroy her, but I had no chance to strike again. A scythe wielded by a swarthy young farmer split the ghoul’s upper torso in two. Her head remained alive, moaning, still attached to a clutching arm, but it fell into the mêlée of lurching demons and thrashing villagers and was lost.

  For the first two minutes of the battle we living souls held our own quite admirably. Camytzes stationed himself in front of all of us as a sort of vanguard, and with his sword and his warrior’s skill, he dispatched more ghouls than any of the rest of us. Those that shambled around his flanks, or that he could not annihilate with one or at most two sweeps of his sword, were left for us to deal with. I had never seen such carnage. The crushing of heads, the brutal stabbing with pitchforks and the messy sweep of bloody scythes soon made a more or less constant shower of blood in the air, mixing with the dust of the road and forming a foul-smelling brownish cloud that hovered over the battle. At one point, after the young man next to me destroyed a demon-ghoul by splitting its skull with the innkeeper’s wife’s meat cleaver, I looked down at the gore-drenched sleeve of my cassock and saw an eyeball lodged in its fold. I flicked it away as my stomach heaved. I staggered, bile spewing from my mouth. I simply couldn’t help myself.

  Unfortunately the instinctive reaction was nearly fatal. The young handless ghoul I’d noticed at the front of the throng had somehow managed to slip by Camytzes and the others. His mouth was open, snarling in demonic famishment; I could see tatters of human flesh hanging from his teeth. The child-ghoul propelled himself toward me much faster than I would’ve thought possible. As I struggled to regain my footing, my stomach still heaving, his little jaws nearly clamped themselves down on my hand. But in an instant the bloody head of a pitchfork shot forward, spearing the ghoul gruesomely in the forehead. The child-demon twitched once and went limp. A foot shod in a blood-slick monastic slipper planted itself on the ghoul’s little chest and shoved, withdrawing the pitchfork. Wiping effluvium from my lips with the back of my hand, I looked and saw Theophilus, the wielder of the pitchfork. He paused only a moment to cross himself and whisper a little prayer.

  After the first two minutes—during which I thought we were doing quite well—things became much more difficult. The ghouls were senseless, moved slowly and utilized no form of strategy or cunning to defeat us; they merely kept up their inexorable assault, lurching ever forward, lunging for the nearest human to satiate their dreadful hunger. But their numbers and their imperviousness to pain or fear made them a formidable enemy. Suddenly it seemed they were right upon us. I seemed to be surrounded by a solid wall of writhing arms and legs, some human, others demonic. A ghoul’s head popped up in front of me and I stabbed upward with the shovel, driving its blade under the demon’s jaw and into its head. When I raised my own head, gasping for breath against the cloud of blood and dust, I realized the ghouls had driven all of us back against the front of the inn. I watched the mayor of Domelium, inches away from me, screaming in pain and horror as two of the ghouls, a man and a woman, bit down on his arm simultaneously. A moment later the ghouls’ heads were split by Camytzes’s sword—together with the mayor’s arm—and that was followed, swiftly and horrifically, by the beheading of the mayor himself. His face bore a surprised expression as his head toppled to the dust. At least he did not suffer.

  It seemed the battle dragged on for hours, but in reality I doubt it was more than a few minutes. During those few minutes I saw sights of deep and profound horror. It occurred to me that this terrible paroxysm of fear, brutality and shock was what warriors such as Camytzes experienced every time they went into battle, and I pitied the soldiery of the Empire. I lost count of the ghouls that I myself dispatched. I merely swung and lunged with the shovel indiscriminately and with every ounce of strength I could muster. At one point I fell to the dust, where amidst the thundering, squirming feet of the villagers and the lurching legs of the ghouls I beheld a perfectly ghastly sight—the severed head of a woman demon, still quite animate, inching along the ground through the dirt by opening and closing her jaw. The head was advancing toward my leg. I brought my shovel down on it, crushing the horrid thing, and I retched again.

  For several moments I couldn’t rise. Then the crush of the crowd seemed suddenly to lighten. More heads fell to the dust, and more grisly arcs of blood sprayed into the air; but it seemed the villagers were at last gaining the upper hand. I looked up and witnessed Camytzes strike two ghouls at once with his blade. At that instant they happened to be in perfect alignment, one ahead of the other, and he was thus able to split both of their skulls with his sword, cleaving their heads neatly in two. They slumped and fell in opposite directions. “Don’t neglect the stragglers!” he cried to the villagers who still clutched their weapons. “There, and there! Don’t let them get closer!”

  The main body of demons was mostly destroyed, but a few still staggered pell-mell up the road. Camytzes and two of the young men with the scythes—which had proved almost more effective as weapons than swords—ran to meet them head-on. Theophilus, shockingly, seemed affected by bloodlust. He leaped over a pile of dead ghouls, pitchfork in hand, roaring like a lion at the top of his lungs. A demon obliged him by lunging at him. He stabbed it first in the gut with his pitchfork, then in the head. Another turned toward him and received the same treatment. “Blast ye, Satan!” Theophilus cried. “Is that all you have to send? Has your dark power reached its pitiful l
imit? Come forward and receive the wrath of the Lord!” A third ghoul staggered out of the trees, moaning horribly. The old monk swung the pitchfork so forcefully that the demon’s head crushed like an egg and its body collapsed like a sack of grain. “Anyone else?” Theophilus roared.

  I surveyed the bloody ground in front of the xenodocheion. The carcasses of the ghouls lay in bloody heaps. The dirt was saturated with blood in a broad crescent-shaped swath thirty or forty feet out from the front of the building. Severed arms and legs of ghouls still twitched. A few continued to inch forward, blindly seeking prey. It was impossible to tell at first how many villagers had been wounded. A portly man who I remember seeing inside the inn staggered on his knees, wailing, clutching his hands to his neck that was spurting blood. Camytzes caught sight of him. The soldier bounded over the piles of corpses, swung his sword and beheaded the man cleanly and almost effortlessly. Instinctively I raised my arms—“No! Stop! Don’t!”—but before the cries died on my lips Camytzes had beheaded another of the villagers who had obviously been bitten. Camytzes glanced up at me, lowering the sword, its tip dripping with blood. “Don’t!” I shouted.

  “We must stop this devilish pestilence,” Camytzes replied. He turned his head and saw another ghoul approaching up the hill. He ran, beheaded it, and bounded back toward the inn. “You two!” he said, motioning toward the young farmers with the scythes. “Guard the door. Only those who have not been bitten by demons will be allowed back into the xenodocheion. We must make sure and examine everyone.”

  The villagers began to shuffle into a rough queue toward the front door of the inn. As Camytzes turned, he saw the apothecary standing amidst a pile of ghoulish bodies. The man, tears streaming down his face, handed the fireplace poker he’d been using to one of the other villagers. He limped toward Camytzes; it was obvious his knee had been injured. I could see the bloody bite through the tear in his clothing. He stopped before the soldier, and then glanced at me. “Brother—will you bless me?” he said.

  It took me a moment to react but finally I spurred myself to action. I made the sign of the cross in the air and murmured the prayer of the Eucharist. The apothecary knelt down, wincing at the pain in his knee. He put his hands together, prayed one last time and then looked up at Camytzes and nodded. A moment later his head fell to the dust and his body slumped forwards.

  “Monstrous,” said Theophilus.

  “No doubt,” I echoed. “At least it’s over.”

  Camytzes moved a few steps toward me. “You’re going to wish it was,” he said, his low voice seeming all the more menacing considering his face and hair were covered in blood. “We have no idea how many more of them there may be out there. This could be just the beginning.”

  With this unsavory thought, Camytzes appointed himself inspector general of the inn, standing guard at the door and searching the villagers for wounds and injuries. Considering that most of us were drenched in gore from head to foot, it was not an easy task. I was relieved that both Theophilus and I were unharmed. Once admitted inside the building, we sat heavily on a bench. The women had been admitted through the rear door, and several of them were fanning out with buckets and cauldrons of water to clean our bloody bodies. “Let’s hope the soldier is wrong,” I said to Theophilus. “I’d rather not see anything like that again as long as I live.”

  Theophilus, using a wet rag passed to him by one of the women to mop blood from his long white locks, replied, “You did well, Brother Stephen. Sometimes being in the service of the Lord means praying in the cloister. Other times it gets a little more—intense.” An eighty-year-old monk wringing ghoul blood out of his hair was the last sight I had expected to see when I rose from bed this morning. But God’s paths for us sometimes take very sharp detours.

  The cleanup from the battle took several hours and in many respects was as grisly as the struggle itself. We learned that fourteen of our number were casualties, five killed directly by the ghouls themselves and nine more bitten and subsequently executed by Camytzes. One young man, barely seventeen, had been slightly bitten on the finger and tried to conceal the wound; he’d made it through the cordon at the door but a young woman noticed his condition and gave alarm. The boy protested, shouting that it was just a scratch and he was sure God would protect him. It did no good, and Camytzes beheaded him as he had done the others. The boy’s mother wailed and cursed and had to be dragged away. To his credit, the soldier seemed truly pained by the experience. Clearly he didn’t relish these horrors. His gruff manner and endless shouts of orders seemed disagreeable to many of the villagers, but none openly defied him. The fact that not a single woman or child had been harmed by the ghouls—who, thanks to us, had never come close to the stables—attested that many in the crowd owed Camytzes their lives.

  When the pile of ghoul corpses (and our own dead) was assembled behind the building, Camytzes and Onophrios emptied the inn’s entire supply of lamp oil over and around it, pouring and shaking it from big earthenware jugs. Then we all stood back. “I suggest the friars lead us in prayer,” said Camytzes somberly. “Not merely for ourselves, but also for the souls of the poor wretches that have been dispatched from this earth by God’s hand and by our own.” Theophilus and I prayed. A torch was lit and Camytzes himself tossed it on the pyre. It was dark now and the foul-smelling smoke made the nearly full moon glow ruddy red. We lingered only a few moments due to the stench and then we returned to the inn.

  Camytzes had posted guards; we had no idea where the ghouls had come from and if there might be more of them on the way. But in the absence of any evidence of an imminent attack the cauldrons were fired again and at last we exhausted defenders of the xenodocheion were given food and drink—at least those of us who still had appetites. As Theophilus and I ate, this time not minding the horrid taste of the dreadful stew, Camytzes invited himself to sit among us, carrying a soup bowl and half a circle of bread. He’d by now doffed his mail shirt and washed his hair and beard. He looked quite different, almost normal, a young man not much older than I and considerably less fearsome-looking without his armor on and his sword in hand. “We haven’t been properly introduced,” he said. “My name is Michael Camytzes.”

  “Stephen Diabetenos. You’re the lord of these lands?”

  For the first time since he’d been in our presence Camytzes laughed. His teeth were crooked and jumbled, but he looked totally different when he smiled than the fierce warrior he had been a few hours ago, now mirthful and gentle. “Oh, no. I’m no lord.”

  “I heard you say ‘Lord Camytzes wishes it’ earlier,” said Theophilus.

  “I was speaking for my father.” Camytzes bit off some bread. His mouth full he said, “He’s a colonel in the thematic army. Owns a lot of the land around here. Most of the villagers of Domelium pay rent to him—well, paid, past tense. I’m pledged to the peoples’ defense.”

  I knew of the themes, the estates that were also military commissions. A hundred or so years ago the Emperor had granted military men lands and hereditary titles in exchange for the pledge that they and their families would defend those lands against all invaders, most likely Persians or Saracens. “Where’s your father now?” I asked Camytzes.

  “He’s in Ancyra with the regular army. They’re assembling to oppose the invasion by the Saracens.”

  “Invasion?” said Theophilus. “You mean it’s begun already?”

  “Oh, yes,” Camytzes replied. “The Saracens took Sardis and Pergamum last fall and have been wintering there ever since. The Caliph Suleiman has his sights fixed firmly on Constantinople, and our new Emperor seems to have run out of hollow promises of territory or tribute with which to buy him off.” With his crooked teeth, the soldier tore off more bread. “You two are headed to Constantinople, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have a commission awaiting me at the Monastery of St. Stoudios. Theophilus here is my chaperone.”

  “What would you think if I came with you?” said Camytzes.

  “I don
’t need a second chaperone. I can’t get into that much trouble between here and Constantinople.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. Somebody has to tell the Emperor about what happened here. We must convince him to send regular army troops here to scour the villages and destroy what ghouls remain. If so many as one of those things remains at large, the whole Empire could be at risk.” He bit off another piece of bread.

  “You really think it’s that bad?” said Theophilus.

  “Aye. Some of the villagers think I’m arbitrary and cruel, executing those who were bitten by demons. I have no wish to destroy the people I’m pledged to protect. But we must stop the pestilence from spreading further.”

  Theophilus said, “This evil is a judgment by God. He sent the demons to punish your village. There must have been some wickedness afoot.”

  Camytzes grunted. “Wickedness has not a thing to do with it, and neither does God,” he shot back. “This is a plague. The evil is spread from person to person through the bites of ghouls. The apothecary I beheaded this evening was as good a man as you could find in Domelium. There was nothing wicked about him. He submitted passively to my sword, bravely thinking of the welfare of the others before himself. No—we must make clear to the Emperor that this is a plague that must be controlled quickly. I’ll come with you to Constantinople. There you will help me bear my witness to the Emperor of what happened here, and to impress on him the gravity of the situation. You want to serve God? That’s how you can best be of service.”

  We were quickly learning that it was impossible to argue with Michael Camytzes. I didn’t know Theophilus’s feelings on the matter, but I for one was glad at the prospect of having an armed escort for the remainder of our journey. It occurred to me that the plague of ghouls might not necessarily have a theological cause after all. It was blasphemy for a monk to think that, yes, but Camytzes seemed to know what he was talking about. If there were more of those things out there on the road, at least we would have our own private bodyguard to protect us.