Zombies of Byzantium

by Sean Munger

  That very evening, however, our generalized troubles suddenly became a lot more specific. It was in the first week of August and very hot. We gathered for supper in our usual hall, the monks sitting down at the very long wooden table with Rhetorios at its head. He led us in the typical evening prayers, adding tonight, “We pray for the souls of those warriors, both Byzantine and Saracen, who have met thee, Lord, in the recent fighting.” There was seldom any conversation at supper and the hall was filled with only the sounds of the monks’ utensils clunking against their wooden bowls as we consumed our soup, bread and watered-down wine. Tonight, though, was different. I jumped, startled, as nearly everyone did, when the heavy door to the mess chamber burst open suddenly. Henoch stood there, his eyes wide, his face nearly white. “Hegoumenos, and Brothers!” he cried. “We must beat a hasty retreat from these quarters! Fighting has broken out inside the walls of the monastery!”

  Instantly the mess hall was in an uproar. Several bowls of soup and tankards of wine crashed to the stone floor and a burst of excited conversation was muted by Rhetorios who bolted from his chair and shouted, “Silence!” In the next empty seconds we could hear some sort of commotion coming distantly from elsewhere in the compound, much panicked shouting and screaming. “The Saracens have breached the walls of the monastery?” said Rhetorios.

  “Nay, Hegoumenos,” Henoch replied. “It’s not Saracens. The fighting is in the infirmary. No one’s sure what happened. Several of the soldiers went crazy or something. Brother Ignatius and two others are dead. The berserkers are mauling everyone who comes near them. I ran to warn you all that we must get to safety—they’re overrunning the infirmary!”

  My stomach sank. Theophilus, seated four chairs down and across the table from me, glanced at me and I at him.

  “Maintain order!” the hegoumenos shouted. “Everyone, please go out the west door there, through the cloister. Move quickly but don’t crowd. Henoch, take a horse. Ride down to the wall and bring back some men-at-arms. Everyone, stay calm!”

  The monks of the Monastery of St. John Stoudios moved as one body toward the west door of the dining hall as Rhetorios had decreed—except for two, Theophilus and myself. We both dashed toward the door through which Henoch had entered. “Wait, Brother Stephen, Brother Theophilus!” Rhetorios cried.

  “What did they look like?” Theophilus shouted, grabbing Henoch by the shoulders. “Did they have dead eyes, these berserkers? Impervious to pain? Were there bites on their bodies?”

  “I—I don’t know!” Henoch replied, seeming as terrified by Theophilus’s questions as by the danger we faced. “I only saw one—a man, a soldier, he—”

  “He what?” I said. “He what?”

  Henoch made a pained, disgusted face. “He sprang from his bed and tore off Brother Ignatius’s arm,” he replied.

  Theophilus let go of him. I could feel adrenaline rushing through my veins.

  “Go, Henoch,” said Rhetorios. “You must bring back the men-at-arms. There is a garrison at the Gate of Christ, but half a mile from here—”

  “No,” I said firmly. “Ride to the Golden Gate instead. Find a soldier named Michael Camytzes. You’ll recognize him, he stayed here a few weeks ago. Bring him a message. The message is—“They’re back. Come quickly.’ You can remember that?”

  Henoch was still quaking, but he nodded. “Yes. I can remember that.”

  “You know something of this, Brother Stephen?” said Rhetorios.

  “It takes too long to explain. Go, Henoch! In the meantime we have to defend ourselves.” I looked around at the jumbled chairs, the messes of bowls and wooden spoons littering the table and the floor. “We need weapons. What can we use?”

  “The kitchen!” Theophilus cried.

  We both sprang toward the other door, the hegoumenos shouting after us in bewilderment. There was no time to stop and explain it to him. My legs propelled me almost independently of my brain. All I could think about was—I hope Camytzes can get here in time to stop them. If he can’t, he may find a monastery full of living dead to contend with.

  Chapter Five

  The Ghouls’ Incubator

  The implements that we found in the monastery kitchen were only marginally better than the makeshift weapons we’d had on hand at the xenodocheion. There were some large knives, a few cleavers and a colossal wooden fork, but as these were tools for cooking, not fighting, they wouldn’t be very effective except at uncomfortably close range. Theophilus, however, discovered a cache of huge iron skewers, as tall as a man and sharpened at both ends, standing in the corner near the fireplace. They were probably intended to roast pigs or other large animals over the fire. “These will do until the soldiers come,” said Theophilus, grabbing one of the spits.

  “They’d better come fast,” I said, taking a shank. It was quite heavy and unwieldy, but at least it was better than a meat cleaver.

  “Brothers, what is this madness?” cried Rhetorios, who had followed us into the kitchen. “We must get out of the way. If the berserkers are so fierce, you must not risk your lives—”

  I whirled, holding the spit like a spear. “Listen, Father,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Theophilus and I ran into these ghouls out in the country on the way here. We have to destroy every last one of them. Every time a ghoul bites a man, the victim becomes a ghoul himself. If we don’t stop them now, we’ll have dozens, maybe hundreds of them running around by tomorrow.”

  “We need to know where they are,” said Theophilus, peering out the doorway of the kitchen into the monastery’s courtyard. “And which direction they’re coming from.”

  “Father, do as I say, please. We have several of these long spits. Go to the congregation and bring back eight or ten brave monks. Gennadios, Thomas, people like that, young people, strong people. Have someone go to the blacksmith’s shop and see if there are any weapons there—swords, spears, fireplace pokers, anything. We’ve got to hold back the ghouls until Henoch can come back with reinforcements.” The hegoumenos stood dumbstruck, certainly not accustomed to being ordered about by a young monk a third of his age, but he jumped when I cried, “Please, Father, now!”

  “I hear them!” Theophilus shouted. He readied his own spear. “They must be moving toward the courtyard.”

  As Rhetorios bolted back through the dining hall, Theophilus and I made our way cautiously out the other kitchen door that communicated with the monastery’s courtyard. It was dusk and the shadows were long; the darkness would make our task harder. The well-sculpted gardens were full of neatly trimmed trees, long rows of hedges, rosebushes and banks of flowers and a few vegetable crops in rows of soil among the stone passageways. Across the courtyard was the wing of the monastery that contained the infirmary. There were screams and cries coming from that direction. As we stood in the garden, our long pig spits at the ready, we saw a monk come staggering out of the cloister, screaming horribly. “God preserve us!” he cried. “The Devil is afoot!” He slumped against a column, leaving a bloody handprint upon it. His cassock was drenched in carmine. As he stumbled closer to us, I could see that his right hand was gone, ending in a blood-dripping stump that had clearly been torn from him by ravenous teeth.

  “Lord, forgive me,” I whispered with a glance toward the darkening sky. I lunged forward with the spike. The end of the metal rod crunched into the wounded monk’s skull like a stick poking through the shell of an egg. His horrified scream ended abruptly. I pulled the spike from his head, only to see three other monks, who looked to be unscathed, sprinting as fast as they could away from the infirmary. “They’re coming!” one of them shouted. “Run!”

  Another still-human victim staggered from the direction of the infirmary. It was, horribly, a nun. Her black robe was torn and her neck had been bitten by a ghoul. She wailed and wept as she flung herself toward Theophilus. “Brother, bless me,” she stammered as she grabbed at Theophilus’s robes with her bloody hands. “The Devil has come for me!” Theophilus winced. He
closed his eyes, made the sign of the cross over her and then plunged his spit into her head. Soon the nun was a lifeless pile of flesh and black robes lying on the stone pathway.

  We saw no more living victims, but the characteristic wail of the ghouls emanating from the infirmary wing told us that they were there and heading this way. As we crept into the cloister connecting the courtyard to the infirmary wing—its stone floor covered with the bloody footprints of those who’d fled the horror—I heard voices and motion behind me. Gennadios, Thomas and one other monk, a lad of barely seventeen called Alexius, had come from the chapel to lend their aid. “Go to the kitchen and arm yourselves with spears such as these,” I called to them. “They’re stacked in the corner next to the fireplace. Come quickly! The ghouls will be upon us soon.” The other monks did as I bade them. Alexius stopped short of the body of the nun, gaping upon her in horror; Gennadios took his arm and led him away.

  “Only three,” said Theophilus. “We have no idea how many ghouls there are.”

  “We’d better hope Camytzes gets here soon.”

  “He may not come at all. Suppose the Saracens chose this precise moment to attack his sector of the wall? He can’t well tear himself away.” Theophilus jumped. “There they are!”

  Three ghouls shambled down the cloister toward us. Two of them were dressed as soldiers, in shirts of mail, armored skirts and boots. One’s arm had evidently been wounded, probably in battle; it hung limply at his side. The third ghoul was mostly naked, clad only in the torn bloodstained shreds of what was a burial shroud. He must have been a casualty of the Saracens. His skin was mottled and horribly burned. Probably he had died, or at least been thought dead, and then reanimated as a ghoul after his body had been set aside for burial. All three were drenched in blood from head to foot. One of the armored ghouls was gnawing on a human hand, perhaps belonging to the monk I’d killed. They approached, emitting their mindless soul-splitting wails. Gennadios, Thomas and Alexius drew up behind me, carrying their spits. All three looked to be in shock. At least I didn’t have to convince them the ghouls were real; they could see what was happening with their own eyes.

  “We must destroy them,” I said to my brethren. “The only way to bring them down is to destroy their brains. They feel no pain and won’t react to wounds as living men do. Whatever you do, don’t let them bite you. We’re now five against three, so we ought to do well.”

  “We go together on three,” said Theophilus. “Take that one first, the one with the hand. Then the one behind him, then the naked one. One…two…three!”

  Five iron spears shot forward at the lead ghoul. The mindless thing could not feel fear, so it did not recoil, but a moment later its head was thoroughly perforated. It twitched, emitted a rattling sound and slumped to the floor. Thomas’s and Alexius’s spikes were difficult to dislodge. Gennadios, seeing his spike withdraw from the ghoul’s head with one of its eyeballs stuck to its end, dropped his spear and staggered backwards, vomit exploding from his mouth.

  “Again!” Theophilus roared, and he and I struck at the second ghoul. A few moments later Alexius had freed his spike and it joined ours stabbing into the ghoul’s brain that disintegrated like a crushed melon. Blood and brain matter splashed backwards onto the naked ghoul, who lurched at us unusually fast. I’d only just withdrawn my spike and had no chance to rear back and lunge again, so I swung my spit like a club. It connected with the ghoul’s head, dashing him against the stone wall opposite the colonnaded side of the cloister. The thing roared and gasped. Theophilus sprang forward, piercing the ghoul’s ear with his spike. He drove it in so hard and fast that it went all the way through him and I heard it chink! against the stone wall. The demon twitched and fell still. Theophilus pulled back his spit and the thing collapsed in a bloody heap.

  Thomas and Alexius stood near me, panting hard, their bloody spears ready. Both looked positively mortified. In the courtyard, poor Gennadios was on his hands and knees, still retching copiously. “This can’t be all,” said Theophilus. “There must be more of them.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Here comes one.” Another ghoul staggered from the direction of the infirmary. It was not a soldier or a monk, but dressed in a white tunic splashed with blood; perhaps it had been one of the surgeons. Someone had already tried to smite it, because the ghoul was missing one foot, cleaved neatly off as if by the blade of a sword. It was slower than the other three because it hobbled along on the stump of its ankle. “I’ll take care of this one,” I said. I jammed my spit into the center of its forehead. This was the easiest kill of the day, but it was still gruesome to see the thing collapse to the floor, its brains shattered. This had once been a human being, probably a man of God. I cursed this pestilence that turned holy men into mindless monsters.

  No more ghouls approached and the infirmary was eerily quiet. “We have to go in there,” said Theophilus. “See if there are more of them.”

  This was the part I dreaded. “There are probably casualties in there too. People who’ve been bitten and haven’t reanimated yet. We must destroy them as well.”

  “This is madness,” Thomas gasped.

  “If we don’t,” Theophilus retorted, “the whole monastery, and probably the whole of Constantinople, is at risk.”

  “Maybe we should wait for the soldiers,” I suggested. “Stake out a perimeter here, where the infirmary leads to the cloister and the other parts of the monastery. If they come out one by one, we should be able to take them, among the five of us.”

  Theophilus crept closer. Through a distant stone doorway, illuminated like a cavern of Hell with the flicker of a torch, we could see or hear nothing from the direction of the infirmary. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “Okay. Stephen, Thomas, you two here on this side. Alexius and I will take the other. Gennadios! Get up off your knees. Go back and tell the others not to come this way, and that no one must enter the infirmary wing for any reason until the troops get here. Bring the spike with you in case a ghoul has gotten loose and ambushes you on the way.”

  All did as they were told, but as we stood there, spikes at the ready, Thomas began to weep. “I can’t believe what we did,” he blubbered. “God will surely damn us forever.”

  “He’ll do nothing of the kind!” Theophilus retorted angrily. “Whatever is the source of this pestilence, the ghouls take the forms of our friends and loved ones so that we’ll hesitate to destroy them. Any hesitation means death. Remember that.”

  For nearly an hour we stood as the sentinels at the door of the infirmary wing. During that time only one more ghoul delivered itself into our hands, and it was a plenty horrifying one. We heard ghoul moaning in the stone hallway and a long slow shuffling sound, but the demon didn’t show itself right away. After a while it became evident why—the ghoul was half a man, a wounded soldier whose body simply did not exist from the waist down. It crawled along the ground with its arms, in the manner of a seal, making very slow progress toward the human meat it inexorably craved.

  “Vile!” Theophilus gasped when he saw it. He quickly smote the ghoul with his own spike. Perhaps twenty minutes after that we heard the wailing of a human voice from the infirmary, a man’s, “Is anybody there? Help me, please help! I’m wounded! I can’t move! Please, help!” Theophilus forbade any of us to go to his assistance. “He may reanimate and become a ghoul at any moment,” he said. It was heartbreaking listening to the man’s incessant wail. “I can hear you out there! Please, why won’t you help me? God will damn you for not coming to my aid!” Thomas couldn’t take it anymore. He threw down his spit, crumpled against the wall and sobbed, crossing himself incessantly and murmuring unintelligible prayers.

  We were all relieved when we heard a clatter of hoofbeats and considerable commotion outside the walls of the monastery. “They’ve come!” Alexius gasped. Theophilus warned us to remain on our guard; we could still be attacked at any moment. A few minutes later—it was now night, and only a few small torches illuminated the courtyard—a cadre
of Byzantine soldiers armed with swords rushed among the trees and hedges, their chain mail clinking. I heaved a sigh of relief and nearly collapsed backwards as I lowered my spear.

  “Brother Stephen and Brother Theophilus!” boomed a familiar voice across the courtyard. Michael Camytzes, now dressed in the uniform of a regular soldier, followed his men toward the cloister. “Why am I not surprised to see you on the forefront against the demons? And it seems you’ve been victorious too. If the ghouls of Byzantium had the sense of men, they would tremble at the mention of your names!”

  Camytzes strode confidently up to the doorway leading from the cloister. To one of his men he said, “Post sentries to relieve the monks. Then assemble a detail to clean out those rooms back there. Everyone remains on their guard at all times.”

  “It’s good to see you,” I told him. Looking at his uniform, and his cloak bearing the mark of the Roman Legions, I said, “You’ve been promoted?”

  “I’ve been appointed official aide-de-camp to my father. Our task is the defense of the Golden Gate and the Marble Tower.”

  “I’ve seen fighting in that quarter. Has it been heavy?”

  Camytzes laughed. “Oh, the Saracens have just been toying with us, testing out their new siege towers and trebuchets. We’ve given as good as we’ve gotten, but the real fighting won’t start until the Saracens’ fleet gets here.” He motioned toward the doorway. “So, what’s the story in there?”