by Sean Munger
A ghoul that was once a woman shot herself at me. Her eye sockets were filled with charred smoldering flesh. I stabbed with my sword directly at her head; it was so burnt that it disintegrated into a shapeless mush of charcoal. I began to see other detritus floating about in the water around us—hands, fingers, bits of severed human scalps with hair still attached, shreds of clothing, a sandal. All were either burning, smoldering or badly singed.
What had happened began to dawn on me—Someone fought these ghouls before, and they used Greek fire. They squirted it into the tunnel and set it alight to prevent the ghouls from reaching the end of the tunnel.
“Gregory, to your right!” shouted one of the archers. Panteugenos narrowly missed being bitten by a short stocky wraith that rose up out of the water next to him. He cleaved its head in two and it fell, smearing blood against the wall of the tunnel.
“There are no more coming,” said Nicetas.
“Beware of the little pieces in the water!” Zonaras warned. “They’re still lethal.”
“And under the water too,” I added.
Within ten minutes or so we had dispatched all the ghouls at the end of the tunnel. Compared to those others we’d faced they were less of a threat. Many of them were already weakened from their previous battle with whoever lay on the other side of the Greek fire blockade. The Emperor’s troops, perhaps?
Still holding my sword, I looked around. The heat from the burning oil at the end of the tunnel—maybe forty or fifty feet away—was considerable. The water around us was now dark, fouled with the blood of the ghouls we’d finished off. But there seemed to be many more body parts floating about than could be accounted for by the ghouls we’d just dispatched. We were not the first ghoul slayers to fight here.
“Some help, please!” shouted Theophilus. He and Basil were still straining to hold the boat in place with the oars. Three of the archers moved back to the boat and braced it with their bodies. I soon joined them, handing my sword up to one of the older boys in the front of the boat. The current was quite powerful. Leaning my entire weight against the side of the boat, I felt like I was barely holding on.
“All right,” said Panteugenos, wiping blood and sewer water out of his face. “What do we do now? With that fire at the end of the tunnel, we can’t move forward.”
“We have to!” I insisted.
“Whoever sprayed Greek fire down here did it specifically to prevent any ghouls from reaching the end of the tunnel. They must have changed direction when they smelled us approaching.”
“But there have to be more ghouls approaching from the direction we came too,” I protested. “And there is no barricade at that end, which means they’ll keep coming indefinitely until they overwhelm us. I’m convinced the palace is on the other side of that pool of fire. Our only hope is to get across it somehow.”
“It’s impossible!”
I thought for a moment. I recalled something that had happened years ago in the art studio at Chenolakkos—I knocked over a candle on a table, which fell onto a beaker of linseed oil, lighting it afire. Like the Greek fire described by Panteugenos, throwing water on it had been useless. The rivulets of burning oil had spread across the table, but when I finally smothered the small fire with a blanket, the wood of the table was unscathed. “You said this stuff, this Greek fire, floats on top of the water, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s possible to swim under it?”
“We have no idea how far the Greek fire stretches. It could be a distance that would take longer to swim under than a man can hold his breath.”
Theophilus, listening to us, grunted against the oar and said, “What about the children? Even if a man could swim underwater beneath a mantle of liquid flame, it’s too much to ask these children to do that.”
In the next tense moments I realized that successfully fighting a plague of ghouls involved much more than swinging a sword. But our greatest weapon against them is the fact that men with live souls can think. We had to think very fast. Theophilus’s and Basil’s strength would soon give out. The boat full of children would then be swept down the tunnel into the conflagration. Perhaps Panteugenos and the other archers could hold the boat in place for a bit longer, but remaining here in the tunnel was not a permanent solution. At any moment I expected to hear the aimless moaning and sloshing of more ghouls coming up behind us. We had not the men or the strength to hold the boat in place and fight ghouls coming at us with the current at their backs, as it had been at ours a few minutes before.
“If there are troops on the other side of that barricade,” said Panteugenos, “they must have boats. Maybe they can navigate their way through the fire long enough to come back for the children. There’s got to be a way.”
“In any event,” I said, “somebody has to try to swim under that barricade.”
We hesitated for only a moment. In the next instant Panteugenos began stripping off his chain mail and I dispatched my monk’s cloak. I handed it up to the older boy who had taken my sword.
I stood, in my thin sopping linen undergarment, wiping wet hair out of my face. “Ready?” I said to Panteugenos. He nodded.
“God be with you!” Theophilus shouted.
I took as deep a breath as I could suck in and dove into the murky, blood-fouled water.
Swimming underneath the fiery barricade was one of the strangest experiences of my life—and, given what I’d already been through, that’s saying something. The bottom of the tunnel was a ghoulish charnel house of carnage. There were hands, feet, limbs, bones, some still moving and clutching, others dead and silent. The water was so murky and filled with blood, oil and effluvia that I could barely see more than three or four inches in front of me, and my eyes stung horribly all the while. But I knew where the fire was because there was a brilliant yellow-orange blaze above me, illuminating the water in an eerie spectral glow.
My lungs ached. I could feel the heat from the fire crisping my flesh. I was only inches under the water. If I hadn’t been immersed, I was certain the thin linen of my undergarment tunic would have burst into flames. I was less swimming than crawling along the irregular bottom of the tunnel. Whenever I felt something grab me—usually a ghoul’s severed hand—I thrashed and shook about until it let go.
Still so light up there. The fire must extend a long way.
Gradually the water became clearer. There was less blood here, but now I could see bits of soot and ash raining down from above. The fire was certainly raging at its peak right above me. My lungs were nearly giving out. I’m not going to make it! I fought the compelling impulse to surface for air. Just one breath—just one split second with my head above water—that wouldn’t kill me, would it?
Yes, it will. I’ll surface under a flaming sheen of Greek fire. My face will burn instantly. After that it’s all over.
I kept swimming, crawling, stumbling. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. Please, God, let this be over soon, I prayed. It occurred to me that if I died here at least I could ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven knowing that I fought as a man, and a soldier of Christ, to my very last breath. That was somehow comforting.
Then the water began to grow darker. I still couldn’t see what was above me, except it glowed with a dimmer light than before.
I couldn’t hold out any longer. I had to take a chance that the Greek fire was no longer directly above me.
My head broke the water, and I gasped. My head wasn’t burning. There was a terrible blast of heat on the right side of my face—a flaming pool of the oily stuff was only a few feet away—but I was not on fire.
“Help!” I cried. “Help, help!”
I stumbled and splashed out of the water, coughing and sputtering, feeling my flesh sizzle. Instead of the narrow tunnel half-filled with water, I was in what looked like part of a submerged church. There was a pillar in its center decorated with a mosaic of Christ the Pantocrator. I stumbled toward it, draping myself over it, forcibly expelling the fetid water f
rom my lungs. I looked about. Niches had been carved from the ancient brick walls, and in the eerie hellish firelight in them I could see skeletons, resting in repose, some of them still clutching crosses or with swords at their sides.
This must be the burial catacombs beneath the Church of St. Euphemia! I made it!
“Panteugenos!” I cried. “Panteugenos, where are you?”
A dark shape floated at the edge of the pool of Greek fire. At first I thought it was a ghoul, but I saw it still had a head. It was Panteugenos, half his face burned off, one arm frozen in a desperate clawlike stance. He must not have been able to suppress the temptation to come up for a breath.
I crossed myself and said a little prayer for his soul. There was nothing else I could do for him.
I let go of the pillar and splashed through the water toward the darkened doorway of the catacomb. “Hey, hello!” I shouted, my voice echoing on the stone walls. “Is anybody up there? We need help! There are children trapped down here!” The doorway was almost pitch-black, and I stumbled. I could feel stone steps beneath me. I began ascending them, but it was difficult. Under my hands and feet I began to feel the shapes of human forms—or at least pieces of them. I felt chain mail slick with a substance I knew must be blood. I touched what felt like an arm, and it was warm; then another extremity, which was cold, definitely ghoul flesh. My foot slipped on something that must have been entrails or possibly brains. Some real human beings were among the dead, suggesting the battle with the ghouls that had taken place here had been a desperate struggle.
“Hello! Hello!” I shouted until my voice gave out. “Help, we need help!”
At last I saw a flicker of light above and ahead of me. I heard the clatter of swords and chain mail. Two soldiers in shimmering mail descended toward me.
“Help, we need help!” I cried. “There are people trapped down here—women and children, beyond the Greek fire. We’ve got to get them out.”
The soldiers reached me. I fell into their arms like a limp rag doll. “Who are you?” one of them gasped. “You came from the tunnel?”
I was panting. My breath had nearly given out. “Children…trapped,” I gasped. “You have to…get them…out.”
My last conscious thought was a comforting one. The soldiers were both wearing purple tunics decorated with gilded crosses over their chain mail. They were members of the Emperor’s personal guard.
Chapter Eleven
The View from the Dome
I must have been dreaming of ghouls, because the moment I awakened I lurched, expecting to see one of their hellish blood-streaked visages charging at me. “No!” I cried. Only then did I realize I was not in danger. There were no ghouls around. It occurred to me that the whole thing might have been a dream, but as rational thought kicked in I knew I couldn’t get that lucky.
I was sitting up in a bed larger and more luxurious than any I’d ever slept in. Its feather-stuffed mattress was gloriously soft and I was draped in silk sheets with brocaded designs. The bedframe was rosewood inlaid with ivory and silver. A large curtain, also brocaded, draped diagonally from the ceiling down to one of the corners of the bedframe. Beyond it I could see walls and floors of stone, several gilded chairs and a silver cross on a large mahogany table. The richness of these surroundings told me immediately that I was in the Great Palace.
My head was still pounding. As I slid out of bed, I realized somebody had smeared a sort of ointment on my back. When I touched it, I felt violent pain and a mantle of blisters. Given the intense heat of the water underneath the Greek fire, the fact that I’d come through the ordeal with nothing more than a blistered back seemed nothing short of miraculous.
There was a chair just off to the side of the bed. Draped across it were clothes—a linen undershirt, a warrior’s tunic and a pair of boots. There was also a silver chamber pot with a gilded rim. As I urinated into it, I marveled that the chamber pot bore intricate bas-relief designs that appeared to illustrate scenes from the Iliad. “I definitely am in the palace,” I said aloud.
So what happened? How much time has passed? What about the ghouls? There were no answers to these questions. As I pulled on the clothes, I noted overcast daylight streaming through the small window high up in the stone wall of the chamber. I then noticed on the other side of the room that a small table had been laid with bread, a glass jar of olive oil and a silver flagon of wine. Realizing only then that I was famished, I fell upon the victuals like a starving animal. I drew up a chair to the table and ate ravenously.
While I was eating, I heard the heavy bolt of the door sliding back. It swung open a moment later and I was astonished to see the Empress enter. She was as beautiful and as charming as ever, and her sea-green eyes seemed almost to twinkle as she met my gaze. Her dress was much simpler than usual, a plain gray tunic, but she was ravishing nonetheless.
“Brother Stephen!” she said, in almost a whisper. “It’s very good to see you alive and well. Very good indeed.”
I stood up, and we embraced. Under normal circumstances I would never have thought of being familiar with the Emperor’s wife under his own roof, but I hadn’t appreciated until this moment how the crisis with the ghouls had painted everything with a sort of desperate end-of-the-world quality in which decorum, propriety and genuflection to the Emperor were simply inapplicable. I seized Maria’s face between my hands and kissed her deeply.
“It’s good to see you,” I said when I came up for air. “I almost can’t believe I’m alive.”
“Your survival was nothing less than a miracle. For a humble iconographer and occasional tanner, Brother Stephen, you have the stout heart of a Grecian hero.”
“What about the others? Theophilus, Pulcheria, the children—”
Maria put a finger to my lips. “Be calm. They’re safe here in the palace. My husband had the clever idea to turn boats upside down and use them as shields against the flames. Several of his men were badly burned, but they brought your friends out alive.”
I melted into her arms in a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” I whispered. “At least He’s still smiling on some of us.”
The way Maria hung against me suggested that perhaps her interest in me was more than merely carnal, as it had seemed when she’d come to visit me in my cell. But moving in on the Emperor’s wife was the furthest thing from my mind at that moment. The world is coming to an end, but I’m still alive, and I’m with this woman, I thought. There is still hope, however slender it may be.
The sound of another bolt, from a different door than the one through which the Empress had entered, jarred both of us from our embrace. The door across the room swung open on colossal iron hinges. A stocky chubby man in chain mail and purple boots stood there, casually cracking pistachio nuts. Next to him stood an unpleasant-looking bald fellow and a tall swarthy man with a ratlike visage. The Emperor’s narrow slitted brown eyes fixed directly on me. I let go of the Empress instantly. For a brief moment I was as afraid of him as I was of the ghouls.
Fine thing! I thought. If we manage to survive the ghoul holocaust, the Emperor will probably have me executed for philandering with his wife.
If he was upset at having witnessed our embrace, Leo said nothing of it. He cracked a nut, popped its meat into his mouth and said, “Brother Stephen! Your presence is requested for a strategy meeting.” He brushed pistachio shells off his uniform. “That is, if you’re not too busy.”
“Of course not, Sire.” I backed away from Maria.
“My dear, why don’t you go look in on our daughter?” said the Emperor to his wife, with an edge of frostiness to his voice. “I’ve seen to it that her chamber is heavily guarded, but you know how skittish she is. With these ghouls running loose, she’s bound to need some reassurance from time to time.”
Maria said nothing, but she nodded deferentially. So we parted, Maria through the door from which she’d come, and me into the hallway where I found myself flanked by the eunuch Eutropius and the kouropalates Artabasdos. The Emperor
casually extended his hand, which was full of nuts. “Want a pistachio?” he said, with a hint of a smile on his face.
I shook my head. The iciness of this man amazed me. With his capital besieged by Saracens and infested with undead ghouls, he was completely unflappable. I guessed there wasn’t a crisis on Earth that could cause him to break a sweat.
We were soon joined by a cadre of sword-wielding guards, who led us deep through the broad colonnaded corridors and windowless candle-lit passageways of the Great Palace. I didn’t dare ask where we were going. Eventually we found ourselves in a large hallway with marble stairs leading to a set of gilded doors decorated with giant crosses. The stone of the walls was a purplish rose color, exactly the hue that the great church of St. Sofia seemed to glow in the light of sunset. I’d heard that there was a secret passageway between the Great Palace and the Church of the Holy Wisdom, but why we would be going to St. Sofia at a moment like this baffled me.
Is the Emperor giving up? I thought. Maybe he’s decided the situation is hopeless, and he’s bringing us there so the Patriarch can administer our last rites. Or perhaps the Emperor had decided that St. Sofia—which had survived many earthquakes in the two centuries since Justinian built it—was the safest redoubt against the ghouls.
As we began climbing the stairs toward the golden doors, I noticed a curious thing—the walls of this alcove were draped. Large sheets of plain flaxen cloth, like painters’ drop cloths, shrouded them, but in a crack between two such draperies I saw a silver of a fabulous mosaic, glittering with tiny tiles inlaid in gold and lapis. The Emperor, still leaving a trail of pistachio shells behind him, seemed to read my mind. He motioned to the walls and said, “If you’re wondering why these are hidden, it’s because they contain graven images of the Lord and saints, which is blasphemous idolatry utterly forbidden by scripture. I ordered them shrouded from my sight until such time as I can employ a team of artisans to tear them down. It would’ve been my first directive as Emperor—until Maslama and the Saracens so rudely placed themselves at the head of the priority list.”