Zombies of Byzantium

by Sean Munger

  We spent a restless night at the xenodocheion. At every shudder of the trees in the wind outside or the snort of one of the sleeping villagers in the big dirt-floored room I jerked awake, thinking that the ghouls were attacking again. I wasn’t in very good shape when we set out in the morning but at least we hadn’t been attacked. Fortunately for us, Camytzes managed to convince one of the villagers to lend him two donkeys so Theophilus and I wouldn’t have to walk the whole way to Kios. “Aye, if you can sell them in Kios or Constantinople, please do so,” said the farmer. “And if you can subtract a few solidi from your father’s bill for them, I’d be very grateful.”

  After we set out on the road, I asked Camytzes, “Your father’s bill? What did he mean?”

  “All the villagers of Domelium rent their homes and farms from my father, who is a droungarios of the theme,” he explained. “When he is taxed by the Emperor on his lands, my father must pass on the cost of the taxes in the form of rents. The harvest has been poor the past few years and most of the villagers are indebted to him.”

  “What’s going to happen to them now that their village is in ruins?” Theophilus asked.

  Camytzes shrugged. “No idea. Some will probably make homes in other villages. Likely many will end up destitute, begging for charity at the monasteries.”

  I said, “Surely with their village destroyed your father will forgive their debts, or at least make it possible for them to rebuild and return to their homes.”

  Camytzes replied with a sad shake of his head. “You don’t know my father.”

  “Hard-ass, eh?”

  “He’ll probably say that so long as the Emperor taxes him, he must collect his rents. I confess this is one of my aims in seeking an audience with the Emperor—to see if he’ll forgive my father’s taxes on Domelium—but I don’t expect much success.”

  The Emperor. As we rode that long and uncomfortably hot day, I began to wonder if we might actually meet him. There was no telling whether we had a real chance of getting in to see him; Camytzes and his family seemed to be big shots out here in the country, but they were probably small fry in Constantinople. I confess I was curious to see what sort of man our new ruler really was. At Chenolakkos I kept up with politics more closely than did most of the monks, who considered earthly affairs sinful. Leo III was something of an unknown quantity. That in itself was nothing new. The last three emperors had been pitiful nonentities. It was difficult to decide which of them among Philippicus Bardanes, Anastasius II or Theodosius III had been worse; they were all deposed in turn by ambitious army officers, and Leo came from that class too. But it was said that Leo, in contrast to his predecessors, was even a more ruthless, cold-blooded ass-kicker than any of the others could have dreamed of being. He had come to the throne through the ingenious strategy of taking Theodosius’s son hostage, and the old emperor had thus “decided” that perhaps stepping down in favor of Leo would be a prudent thing to do. You have to admit you’d need brass balls to even attempt something so brazen, and considering the prospect of a Saracen invasion didn’t seem to spook Leo in the slightest, I thought he might be just the sort of emperor we needed right now. Whether he’d sit still for wild tales of undead ghouls rampaging through the provinces, though, was another matter.

  It was three more days to Kios, and because our borrowed donkeys were much slower on the trail than Camytzes’s horse, we didn’t make as much daily progress as the soldier had hoped. On the second night we found another xenodocheion that took us in, but after that, when we were in the brushy hill country far from the nearest villages, we had to camp for a night. Being a soldier, Camytzes at least had some gear—a blanket, some tins for cooking and some flour he kept in a leather sack. “You brought nothing with you at all?” he scoffed. He had asked what wares we had to contribute to our supper. “Well, I guess that’s the difference between monks and soldiers. A monk can usually expect to find a friendly place to bed down for the night. Not so for soldiers.”

  With the flour and his tins, Camytzes made a sort of hardtack bread called paximadion, which I actually found quite filling, if tasteless. We kept watch for ghouls, one of us awake and with our hand on the hilt of the sword at all times. Camytzes spent the most time on watch of all of us, probably figuring that neither Theophilus nor I would be very effective in fending off a gaggle of the fiends if they ambushed us in the middle of the night. Fortunately we saw no demons. We spent another night in much the same circumstance, and then shortly after noon on the next day our road snaked around a high ridge that offered us a view of Kios—an expanse of stone houses, bell towers and church domes carpeting the olive-green hillside down to the water cluttered with the sails of vessels, one of which would hopefully take us to the capital.

  We descended to the city. In the bustling marketplace of Kios we found a merchant who was bringing a hold full of wines to Constantinople, and he agreed to take us in exchange for one of the two borrowed donkeys. The ship was not due to sail until the morning. Since the only inns about were pandocheia, for which you had to pay—as opposed to xenodocheia which were free—we decided to save what few gold sovereigns we had left and sleep on the deck of the ship.

  With the hard plank deck under my back, it took a long time for me to get to sleep. Unfortunately I dreamt of undead ghouls, their cold clawing fingers digging into my flesh and tearing the life from my body. The horrors I’d seen at the xenodocheion were enough to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. The bad dreams wasted no time in getting started.

  Chapter Three

  Constantinople

  Three Days Later

  “Okay, I’m confused,” said the Emperor of Byzantium, God’s Vice-Regent on Earth, as he nibbled at the trout in gakos sauce on the elegant silver plate in front of him. “Living dead? What does that mean exactly, living dead? Isn’t that something of an oxymoron?” With an elegant gilded fork, held by fingers bejeweled with gold rings, he took another bite of the fish.

  “Ghouls,” replied Michael Camytzes. “Demons. Corpses of dead people that were possessed by some terrible evil. They can move and walk and attack. They feel no pain. They cannot communicate and possess only the instincts of mute animals. Yet they are relentless. They seek only one thing—human flesh. Any living person who is bitten by them will die, and will subsequently reanimate and become one of them.”

  We’d been in the presence of the Emperor for barely five minutes and I could already tell that the interview, for which we’d waited, pleaded, bargained and implored for the better part of three days, wasn’t going well. After waiting nearly all morning in an antechamber of the Great Palace, one of the Emperor’s eunuchs—an unpleasant bald man called Eutropius—had finally ushered us into a minor room of the palace, where he said the Emperor would entertain us for exactly seven minutes while he ate lunch. I have to admit the palace was as dazzling as anything I’d seen in Constantinople in the past three days. Though this was a minor room, far from the grand triklinos reception hall with gold-inlaid mosaics on his floor that the Emperor supposedly used to entertain persons on state business, it was still pretty posh. There were carpets on the floors and hanging along the stone walls. The one behind the Emperor’s small marble-topped lunch table bore a rich depiction of a hunting scene. An elegant rosewood table in the corner was mounded with books, parchments, golden scales, half-drained flagons of wine and a gilded candelabrum. If this was a little-used workroom where the Emperor paused in his busy day for a bite of lunch, I wondered what the rest of his place looked like.

  The Emperor himself surprised me. With all the stately marble busts of previous Roman emperors studding the palace in various well-dusted niches, you wondered why anybody in their right mind would give the crown to this weird-looking guy. Leo was short, five-foot-six at the maximum. He was in his early thirties, quite chubby and so ugly I almost winced to think of what he’d look like at sixty. Just looking at him I could see the basis of the rumors that he was half Saracen, for he was swarthy and of dark comp
lexion. He bore a shock of long curly black hair and his scraggly beard looked like nothing so much as overgrown pubic hair coating his chin. His eyes, narrow slits of dark brown, were impossibly far apart and covered with thick brush-stroke brows balanced precariously over a wide pug nose. His lips were full and thick, almost feminine. Leo was extremely stocky with broad shoulders and when he’d come into the room, his purple cloak billowing about his thick legs, he’d walked with an awkward gait I can only describe as an elegant waddle. The most powerful man in Byzantium, and possibly the world, looked more like an awkward country peasant who’d snuck into the palace to try on the Emperor’s clothes to see what they looked like on him. Yet the way he cut his meat, handled his fork and spoon and reached daintily for the golden goblet of wine on the table next to him seemed very aristocratic in bearing. He was an Isaurian, like my own family, but spoke perfect Greek without a hint of a provincial accent. It was also said that he spoke Arabic fluently. That he was very smart was obvious just by observing him, once you got past how ugly he was.

  “Am I right in assuming,” said Leo, between bites of fish, “that this condition, this sort of demonic possession of the dead, was God’s punishment, brought on by some terrible wickedness of the people of that village—er, what did you say it was called?”

  “Domelium,” said Camytzes. “The churchmen may answer that more ably than I.”

  Leo’s dark eyes turned to me and I suddenly felt terribly on the spot. Theophilus was standing next to me, clutching his walking stick with his white-knuckled hand, but he hadn’t said a single word during the interview and I didn’t expect him to break his silence now. My mouth opened and closed a few times before any words came out. My instinct was to say Yes, Sire, but I recalled the conversation Camytzes and I had had at the inn after the ghoul attack. I realized I had to choose my words carefully.

  Camytzes said we need to convince the Emperor to send troops to wipe out the ghouls before they get out of control, I reminded myself. If I tell him that the undead plague was punishment from God for Domelium’s sins, that’ll be the end of it. He’ll just say it was God’s will and only those who continue to do wicked deeds have anything to fear.

  Evidently I didn’t answer fast enough because the white-robed official, the kouropalates standing next to the Emperor’s table—he too was dark and swarthy, though much taller than his liege—said sharply, “The Emperor asked you a question! He expects an answer!”

  “No, Sire,” I finally replied. “That isn’t correct.”

  One of Leo’s dark brush-stroke eyebrows went up. “No?” he said.

  At last some words seemed to come to me. “While I have no doubt that God sent this evil upon us, I don’t believe it afflicts only the wicked. It’s more in the nature of a plague. Fresh ghouls are not made by God alone, but by being bitten by another ghoul. Once someone is bitten, they themselves—”

  “Yes, yes, they themselves become a ghoul. I think I got that part.” Leo drank some wine. “And you killed how many of them?”

  “Thirty-six in the village,” Camytzes replied, “and another forty-one who attacked us at the inn the following evening. That doesn’t count the nine of our own number we had to slay in order to prevent their own transformation into ghouls.”

  “So we had seventy-seven of these ‘living dead’ ravaging the countryside,” said Leo, “all of whom were slain by you and the surviving villagers, is that right?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “But if they’re truly living dead, how do you know you killed them? I mean, if according to you they’re already dead, won’t they just get up and walk away after a while? Is it necessary to just keep killing them over and over again? Sounds exhausting.” Leo said this with a little chuckle that told me he wasn’t taking any of this seriously.

  “They can be destroyed with strong blows to the head. Crush their brains, Sire, and they’ll go down for good. We learned this process by trial and error, very much to our peril, during the first outbreak in Domelium.”

  With his chubby fingers Leo picked up the fish bone and licked the remaining shreds of meat from it with a knobby tongue. “How charming to be speaking of crushing brains while I’m eating lunch.” He tossed the fish skeleton back on his plate, which in seconds was whisked away by one of the robed eunuchs who’d been hovering to clear his table. A moment later the fish plate was replaced with a gilded dish of pistachio nuts. Cracking one open, the Emperor said, “I still don’t understand the point of your visit. Assuming for the sake of argument that these ghouls exist, you just told me you defeated them, crushing their heads to the last man. Congratulations. Good work. Are you here seeking recognition for your heroic deeds? Decorations, perhaps? A promotion into the regular army? You two monks, do you wish to be released from your monastic oaths so you can follow your friend here into the crushing-ghouls’-heads business? If that’s what you seek, you certainly have my leave to do so, as well as my enthusiastic encouragement of your future ghoul-crushing activities.”

  It was obvious the Emperor liked pistachios. In the course of this little speech he had cracked open no less than six of them, popping them into his mouth and devouring them without skipping a word. He tossed the shells casually onto the polished porphyry floor. He continued eating as he listened to Camytzes’s somewhat flustered reply.

  “Nay, Sire. We can’t be sure that we destroyed all the ghouls. Even if we did, the ultimate source of the pestilence remains unknown, which means that sooner or later someone else will be bitten and the cycle will begin again. I’m convinced that there are more ghouls out there. What I think is required—if I may beg the Emperor’s pardon—is for several regular army units of heavy troops to be sent to the Olympus area to scour the countryside in a wide swath and positively ensure that all the ghouls are destroyed. Only then can we be certain that the plague won’t strike again.”

  Leo, his mouth full of pistachios, laughed. His giggle was airy and annoying. As more pistachio shells fell to the floor, he scoffed, “You want me to send heavy troops to the provinces in search of undead ghouls? Is that what you’re asking me for?”

  Camytzes swallowed. “Aye, my liege. I am.”

  “You wish to command these troops, I take it?”

  “No. I’m just a foot soldier. My father is a droungarios. My job is to patrol his lands to keep order and fend off raids by bandits and brigands. I’m not fit to command large bodies of men.”

  “Ah, but—” said Leo, raising a green-stained finger, “—how would these regular army troops recognize these ghouls when they see them, and how would they know the best way to annihilate them most efficiently? You would naturally have to go along to advise them, wouldn’t you? And you would need special imperial orders to ensure that the regular army commanders would take your advice, which is tantamount to command in every way that matters. I see your game, Camytzes. Convince me that some obscure and exotic threat exists and that you’re the Empire’s sole expert at combating it. Then you convince me to give you a couple of divisions of heavy troops to do with as you please, and you become the big cheese on the slopes of Mt. Olympus. Fancy your own little fiefdom down there in Anatolia, do you? Or is it more personal than that—perhaps you want the troops to overthrow your father and take over as droungarios of the Anatolikon theme?”

  Camytzes looked shocked and wounded by these accusations. “No, Sire,” he stammered. “It’s not like that at all—”

  “Oh, no worries,” chirped the Emperor cheerfully, tossing nutmeats into his mouth. “In fact, I commend you for such a unique and original form of intrigue. I could use a man with your gumption. Most of my military commanders are whimpering idiots. And honestly, I wouldn’t care if you did take over the Anatolikon theme, so long as your troops wouldn’t eventually raise you up on a shield and proclaim you Emperor to supplant me, which they probably would. Then I’d have to go down there with more troops and kick your ass. Such are the weary burdens of office. But none of that’s going to happen anyway beca
use sending heavy troops to the provinces to smite imaginary ghouls is quite out of the question. If we were at peace, we had money to burn and I had, say, a hundred-thousand infantry and cavalry sitting around playing with themselves for lack of something to do, I might be inclined to grant your request just for the sheer novelty of it. As you know, however, that’s not the situation. We happen to have two colossal Saracen armies camped this very moment at Sardis and Pergamum, and the Saracen navy is about to come out of their winter rest at Cilicia. If you really want to go ghoul-crushing with my troops, perhaps you ought to saunter on down to Damascus and convince Caliph Suleiman to withdraw his troops so your grand project can be given a chance. Then you’ll have to zip right up to Ochrid and get Khan Tervel’s assent as well since he’s hovering on our border like a spider to duke it out with whichever one of us, Emperor or Caliph, is left alive when it’s over. Such a diplomatic mission would be a great help to me. Pull it off and I’ll make you commander of anything you want. I’ll proclaim you Grand God-Emperor Messiah with the Biggest Cock in the Universe and I’ll give you a golden ghoul-crushing sword blessed by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope in Rome. Come back to me when you’ve secured the kind cooperation of the Caliph and the Khan, and then you can claim your rewards.”

  It was obvious that Leo considered the interview over, but because there were still six or eight pistachios left in the golden bowl he didn’t dismiss us immediately. Camytzes boldly seized the delay. “Sire, I understand that the Saracens have invaded us,” he spoke up. “That’s exactly why I urge you to take this step. The plague of undead could become a mortal threat festering in our rear, demanding military attention when all our effort is needed to resist the Saracens. You must send troops to wipe out the ghouls now, before the Saracens get here. Eliminate the threat as quickly as possible. Otherwise we risk enlisting hordes of living dead as de facto allies of the Caliph.”