by Sean Munger
“And it would seem the ghouls have supplanted them,” I remarked.
The Emperor chuckled. “Indeed. It gives me pleasure to think it vexes the Saracens that they’re no longer the center of attention.”
We reached the landing at the top of the stairs. Two guards opened the great gilded doors. A moment later I stepped out into the most astounding grandeur I had ever seen.
The great cathedral of St. Sofia was staggering in its scope. The dome was so high above our heads it seemed the vault of Heaven itself, ringed in a halo of arched windows that glowed with a holy brilliance. The porphyry columns, capped with carved finials that looked like nothing so much as frills of stone lace, marched in endless rows around the central nave. Huge chandeliers—they were colossal rings of iron, as far across in diameter as a man is tall, studded with candles—hung from chains large enough to anchor the largest ship. The altar was a blaze of gold, the Patriarch’s empty throne a grander and more splendid seat than I imagined even the Emperor himself possessed. The room was so large and so quiet that the slightest whisper seemed to echo forever. I recalled hearing that when he dedicated St. Sofia, the Emperor Justinian was supposed to have said, “Solomon, I have surpassed thee!” At this moment I didn’t doubt it.
The great church was empty except for three men, who, when we entered through the Emperor’s secret doorway, were merely dots in the distance. As we approached, I saw that two of the men were in military dress and one the robes of a monk. One of them was the elder Camytzes. The monk was Theophilus, who seemed none the worse for our ordeal in the cistern and the catacombs. The third man had his back to me but he looked familiar. When he turned around, my heart nearly stopped cold from the shock.
“Michael!” I shouted.
“Brother Stephen!” The younger Camytzes broke into a broad grin. We met and he embraced me heartily. “I was very pleased when they told me you survived.”
“I’m stunned. How did you manage to escape the Praetorium?”
“I was the first one out,” he explained. “When the ghouls broke loose from the dungeon, I knew somebody had to ride immediately to warn the Emperor. I fully intended to return with a cadre of troops to subdue the Praetorium, but it was already too late.” His face fell. “I lost many comrades there.”
I patted Michael’s shoulder. Gabriel Camytzes extended his hand, and we shook reticently. “It is agreeable to see you,” the old man admitted.
The Emperor cleared his throat loudly. We all turned to look at him. As he shucked another pistachio nut, he said, “I have two suggestions. Number one–let’s spend the few remaining hours of our lives fellating each other and gushing about how wonderful it is for everyone to have survived the ghouls long enough to permit this happy reunion. Number two—let’s go up to the dome, scope out the situation and figure out how the hell we’re going to defeat this evil before we’re reduced to the last pitiful island of humanity awash in a sea of undead, brain-eating demons. Does anyone wish to argue in favor of suggestion number one?”
He did not wait for an answer. The Emperor brushed shell bits off his hands and began striding toward the Patriarch’s altar. Artabasdos, Eutropius, the Camytzes, Theophilus and I followed. The guards remained.
There was a small door hidden in the elegant gilded panels of the altar. It was incorporated into the wall so completely that no one would have known to look for it unless they already knew it was there. The Emperor manipulated a small hidden latch and the secret door swung open to admit him. “I hope you’re all in shape,” he sighed, and ducked inside. We followed.
The door concealed a tiny narrow staircase barely three feet wide, dimly lit from a skylight hundreds of feet above. After fifty or so such steps, the staircase reached a landing, and then a farther flight of stairs, parallel to the first one, led still higher. The Emperor barely paused on the landing but the rest of us were panting like beasts. Gabriel Camytzes had to brace himself against the wall to catch his breath.
“Come on!” the Emperor goaded us from above. “This is no time to rest. The ghouls aren’t resting, why should we?”
Four flights later the stairway changed. It became even narrower, and its walls were curved. I realized this staircase occupied the tiny space between the inner and outer walls of the cathedral’s great dome. The dome itself was braced with heavy timbers that I guessed must have dated from the church’s original construction. Some of them had graffiti carved into them, Greek initials of builders or tourists who may have been dead a hundred years or more. One such beam brushed my head as we continued to ascend into the dome of St. Sofia.
Hundreds of stairs wound their way in zigzag layers ascending the dome. In some places they ascended through near-total darkness. Eventually a square hazy light loomed ahead. It was a hatchway barely large enough to admit a man, and the only access to it was a rickety wooden ladder. The Emperor, chubby and large-statured as he was, had to suck in his breath (and his gut) in order to squeeze through the hatch. Michael Camytzes was next, and I followed. In the darkness below I could hear the wheezing breaths of the elder Camytzes, the eunuch Eutropius, Theophilus and the kouropalates Artabasdos. It seemed a great effort for all of them. An ascent to the top of the dome of St. Sofia was certainly not for the faint of heart.
We found ourselves on a tiny circular catwalk, barely eighteen inches wide, surrounding the gilded onion-shaped finial at the top of the dome. There was no railing preventing us from toppling over and sliding down the curved exterior of the dome to our deaths. The little catwalk became even more crowded and precarious when the elder Camytzes and the Emperor’s two adjutants finally reached the top and joined us there.
If the Emperor had even been winded on the long ascent up the dome, he gave no sign of it. Shading his eyes from the sun, he looked off to the east, and his breathing was entirely normal. By contrast, I was panting and I paused to wipe sweat from my brow with the sleeve of my tunic.
“Take a good look, gentlemen,” said the Emperor. “Unless we miraculously sprout wings and take flight, this is as good a vantage point on the whole of Constantinople as we’re likely to have in our present circumstances.”
Looking out across the city, I was struck by the same sense of awe I felt when I had first laid eyes on the capital. It truly was magnificent. The domes of churches, the Column of Justinian, and the tops of various other majestic monuments gave the city the look of a rich child’s gilded toy. Along the top of the Hippodrome I could see a golden smudge that I knew was the sculpture of four horses, covered in gold leaf, adorning the entrance to the Emperor’s box. Even at a distance the Land Walls looked stout and hardy, the towers impregnable redoubts against the wickedness of the Saracens. For a few precious seconds I might have been able to believe that nothing was wrong and that Byzantium’s awe-inspiring first city was forever secure in its glory. But that illusion disintegrated quickly enough.
The air above Constantinople was quite hazy. Several columns of black smoke lumbered languidly into the stratosphere from fires in various quarters. A large building, obviously a church of some type, was in flames perhaps half a mile from St. Sofia. There was a much larger fire on the far side of the city where it appeared many buildings were burning. Closer to the great cathedral, I could see into the streets. They were littered with corpses. I could also see a dead horse and a broken-down, half-burnt wagon. In one of the gardens near St. Sofia there were small gray figures moving about. Squinting to see them more clearly, I shuddered to realize they were ghouls, wandering aimlessly in search of fresh human meat.
“Droungarios and Captain Camytzes,” said the Emperor calmly, “may I ask for your respective military assessments of the situation, based on what you can see from here?”
“Each one of those smoke plumes,” Michael replied, “probably represents the site of a major battle against the ghouls. Look, you can see that closest one over there, right where the Mesē begins—there are carts piled up and some other junk that was set on fire. Soldiers or townspeopl
e probably made that as a barricade to block off the streets and contain the ghouls in a specific area.”
“It wouldn’t have been soldiers,” the Emperor replied. “Last night I ordered all our troops to retreat to the inner walls and barricade themselves inside the towers. I gave specific instructions to all commanders not to engage the ghouls or the Saracens unless they were in imminent danger of being overrun.”
Gabriel Camytzes seemed surprised by this. “Sire?” he said, with an incredulous tone in his voice. “May I ask—” He stopped himself, most likely when he realized he was about to question his sovereign’s judgment—something he had once admonished his son and myself for having done.
“May you ask why?” said Leo, finishing his thought for him.
It was Artabasdos who answered, “We must keep the army intact until we can determine how best to combat the ghouls. Whatever we decide here today, it’s going to take thousands of heavy troops to get Constantinople back under control. It won’t do to have our men getting slaughtered in pointless battles until we can come up with some sort of unified strategy.”
“And what of the Saracens?” asked Gabriel.
“I wouldn’t worry about them,” the Emperor replied. He pointed off to the east toward the land walls. “That’s where they’re all camped, there beyond the walls. See all the plumes of smoke coming from that area? That means they’re fighting the ghouls too. And the fact that they haven’t mounted a massive coordinated attack against us, despite my troops having disengaged, means the Saracens have got as big or an even bigger problem with ghouls on their side of the wall as we do on ours.”
“Maybe they figure that you’ve drawn back your forces to mass for an attack against them,” Michael suggested.
“With what?” Leo shrugged. “If I had the strength to do that, wouldn’t I have done it already? No—the ghouls are running rampant through the Saracens’ lines. I’m convinced of that. Maslama can’t renew his attack against us until he exterminates the ghouls in his own camp, and you can see from all the smoke over there that the effort isn’t going particularly well. Brothers Theophilus and Stephen, I tip my crown to you. Your plan to introduce the ghouls into the Saracens’ camp seems to have worked brilliantly.”
“At the cost of losing our own city,” I scoffed.
“How dare you!” blasted Eutropius.
Leo held up a hand. “It’s all right. Brother Stephen’s criticism isn’t entirely baseless. It is…possible that I may have miscalculated the danger that the ghouls posed to our own people.”
I nearly fainted away right then and there. In a fleeting moment I realized this was as close as I would ever get to hearing the Emperor admit that he was wrong.
“The city is not yet lost,” said Artabasdos.
I wasn’t the only one in a spiteful mood. At Artabasdos’s hopeful comment I heard Michael Camytzes grunt. Shaking his head, he said, “With all due respect, Kouropalates, take a look at what’s going on out there. How many plumes of smoke do you see? Fifteen? Eighteen? Each one represents a battle with the ghouls, probably a hopeless one. Look, over there—the entire Jewish quarter is on fire. Look at all the corpses in the streets that we can see from this vantage point alone. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the civilian population of Constantinople is dead. And the ghouls have been on the loose for little more than a full day. What are things going to be like in two days, or three? Have we even a chance of surviving this?”
“Not half,” said the Emperor.
“Sire?”
“You said half the civilian population of Constantinople is dead. I don’t believe it’s that many.”
Camytzes looked a bit taken aback. “Well, whatever the toll, Sire,” he sputtered, “it must be extremely—”
“What would you do?” Leo interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“Let’s say you’re a civilian, a completely ordinary schmoe off the street here in Constantinople. Your church, workshop or home is besieged by legions of flesh-eating ghouls. There are no troops in the streets because your Emperor, in his infinite wisdom, has withdrawn all his forces to the towers, which means no one is going to come rescue you. How would you deal with the situation and protect your wife and children?”
Camytzes’s mouth opened and closed several times but no sound emerged. Instantly the Emperor’s expression soured. “Never mind, you’re a soldier,” he grunted. “Your answer would no doubt be influenced by your military experience. You, Brother Stephen—if you were in that situation, how would you respond?”
I felt very put on the spot. “Well, I would…” The Emperor’s eyes seemed to burn into my soul. I finally thought of something rational. “I’d probably band together with others in my neighborhood and do the best I could to defend our families against the ghouls, with whatever weapons were at hand.”
This answer seemed to please Leo. “Aha!” he cried, stabbing a chubby finger toward me. “You would do precisely that. And the evidence we see here bears out that most of the good citizens of Constantinople would be like-minded. Having no weapons to speak of, they piled carts and furniture in the streets and lit them afire to drive the ghouls this way and that. Surely they would not—could not—mount a coordinated offensive to reclaim their city. Only cadres of well-armed troops could do that. What, then, would the people do? Well, the answer is obvious–once they realized they couldn’t defeat the ghouls themselves, they’d hole up in their houses, churches and other defensible structures and wait for help to arrive. That is why the ghouls have free reign of the streets now. They’re lurching around out there looking for fresh victims, while everyone who’s still left alive is hunkered down under cover, desperately hoping that I’ll send troops to rescue them. I credit the people of Constantinople with more resilience and fortitude, Captain Camytzes, than you seem to. I don’t think half of them are dead. A distressing number are, to be sure, but not half. There’s still quite a wellspring of talent and courage remaining in those streets to be tapped, gentlemen. Combine that with the force of an army that I was prudent enough to preserve from destruction, and we have in our hands the seeds of victory not only against the ghouls, but against Maslama as well.”
Gabriel Camytzes was the only one of us brave enough to speak up in the wake of the Emperor’s rousing—but wholly unsatisfying—oration. “But, Sire,” he said, “how can we possibly retake the city with all of these ghouls running wild in the streets? We have, what—ten, fifteen thousand troops, and no hope of gaining any more? The ghouls’ numbers are increasing geometrically. With nearly every casualty they take, they gain yet another of their kind to swell their numbers. As more and more victims reanimate, our forces are further outnumbered, and our chances of regaining Constantinople become ever more remote. Not to mention the fact that sending our troops through the streets of the city to fight ghouls necessarily means abandoning the defense of the walls against the Saracens. We haven’t enough men, Sire. We should be thinking in terms of evacuating our essential people and withdrawing to some place where we can regroup with fresh troops from the themes. In my view, that’s the only sensible course of action.”
Leo looked off toward the east. A new plume of smoke had just begun to rise from some street within a few blocks of St. Sofia. I couldn’t see what caused it, but I could imagine what was happening down there—the terrible lurching and moaning of the ghouls, the screams of their victims, the desperate panic of the survivors trying something—anything—to stem the monsters’ inexorable advance.
“We shall have to make peace with Maslama,” said the Emperor. “That much seems certain.”
“What will you offer him for peace?” inquired Artabasdos of his liege.
“If you were Maslama, what would you want more than anything else right now?”
“To take Constantinople, of course.”
“Are you sure about that?” The Emperor was smiling, and it struck me as woefully inappropriate. “Wouldn’t you rather have the same thing that we’re hoping in
the back of our minds to receive—that is, some sort of magic deliverance from the pestilence of the ghouls?”
The Emperor Leo left this question hanging in the air. He pushed past me—not an easy task given his girth and the narrowness of the catwalk—and mounted the top step of the small wooden ladder leading back down into the narrow passageway. The rest of us did not need to be told—the reconnoitering atop Byzantium’s grandest cathedral was over. As we started back down the stairs, I had the sense that Leo’s cool self-assurance was not necessarily a bluff. Yes, he was arrogant; yes, he was self-obsessed, conceited and vain, and the conclusion that he was utterly without scruples lay beneath these realizations. But I suspected that he might just have an idea on how to reclaim our city from the ghouls. Since I had none, I was more than willing to give our eccentric ruler the benefit of the doubt.
Chapter Twelve
The Saracens
The Emperor led us down the steps of the dome, through the cavernous main room of St. Sofia and back down the shrouded hallway that led to the Great Palace. No one spoke. As the guards opened the heavy bolts of door after door in front of our party, it seemed the Emperor was leading us ever deeper into the compound.
At the top of another stone staircase we emerged into a large sunny room with arched windows. I guessed it was some sort of military conference room. The walls were hung with maps of the Empire, some of them woven into elaborate tapestries. There was a large central table surrounded by armchairs with gilded armrests and feet carved like the talons of eagles. But this was no ordinary table. It was more like a large rectangular wooden chest, ten or twelve feet long. The kouropalates strode over to a fixture on the wall which looked to be some sort of winch. As he manipulated its wooden crank, the top of the conference table split into two halves which swung upward and outward like the doors of a wardrobe chest. With the creaking of ropes and pulleys, something hidden inside the table began to rise out of it.