by Sean Munger
“I heard that you didn’t even protest,” said Maria, after she unfastened her half-veil. “Eutropius said that when my husband told you that you were going into the Hippodrome to face the ghouls, you just said, ‘Yes, Sire’ and that was that.”
“What point would there have been in arguing? I’ve known the Emperor only a fraction of the time you have, but even I know that once he’s made up his mind it’s impossible to change it.”
“That is true enough.”
“I wish I knew why he wanted me, though. I mean, I figured it was to punish me. Maybe he knows about…well, you know what. Maybe he’s angry.”
Maria shook her head. “No. It’s not that.” She looked down, and then began reaching into her black dress. “I think I do know the reason. There’s something you should know before you die, but I can’t tell it to you here. I wouldn’t want Leo to know either, but if you don’t make it out of that bunker, I suppose it won’t make any difference whether he knows or not.” The Empress drew out a small parchment, folded in thirds and sealed in wax. The seal was a royal one—the emblem of the Empress of Byzantium.
She placed the letter surreptitiously into the sleeve of my cassock.
“Promise me you won’t open it until the very last moment,” she said. “Right before you trigger the Greek fire. If that is your last action on earth, let the opening of this parchment be your second to last.”
I nodded. Choking back tears, I employed one of the Emperor’s own not-very-funny jokes. “Don’t be so hasty to see me dead,” I told her. “We might just survive.”
She embraced me. She was in tears now too.
“God be with you, Brother Stephen,” she said as we parted, her chin quivering.
“And with you.” I kissed her forehead.
I think one of us wanted to say I love you, but that was too heavy a burden for such a moment to bear.
The Empress turned one way down the corridor, and I the other.
There was a secret passageway that led from the Great Palace to the Hippodrome, but it had been decided that we would not use it. In fact, I heard from Eutropius that bricklayers were feverishly bricking it up to prevent any ghouls from wandering into the palace complex, and also to shield the royal buildings from the inevitable blast of fire that would result when we triggered the incendiaries. Thus the Emperor and I would be traveling to the Hippodrome through the streets.
Leo had a special armored carriage that he used to travel to and fro in hostile conditions. It was little more than a large wooden box on wheels with iron-sheathed sides. The royal standard flew on a short pole from above it. At shortly after noon, amidst a cadre of soldiers in the garden of the Great Palace, two guards swung open the heavy doors and we clambered into the little wagon, I in my simple monk’s cassock, the Emperor fidgeting in his finest military tunic, purple cloak and matching boots.
Artabasdos paused at the rear of the wagon. “May God watch over you, my liege,” he said, making the sign of the cross on his forehead and shoulders.
“Oh, stop being so dramatic,” the Emperor grunted. “Close the doors, let’s get this damn thing moving.”
Artabasdos shut the doors of the wagon. I heard a heavy bolt drawing across them. The Emperor laid back on one of the velvet settees built into the sides of the wagon and casually reached for his drawstring suede bag of pistachio nuts.
As I’d climbed into the wagon, I had noticed it was packed with provisions. Much of the floor between the two settees was piled with small wooden boxes as well as several amphorae that I assumed contained wine or olive oil. Hanging from a hook overhead—swinging as the wagon jiggled and swayed—was a cage containing six pigeons. Their cooing was strangely calming.
“What is all this stuff for?” I asked the Emperor.
“We’re going to be in the bunker for two or three days,” he replied. “After they seal us in we have to wait for Maslama to draw both the counterweight and our army away from the walls of the city. It’ll also take some time for the ghouls to smell us and converge on the bunker. I had my stewards stock plenty of bread, some olive oil, dates, and of course some nuts for me. I even brought some books. Do you like Plutarch? If the classics bore you, I think there’s a Bible in one of these boxes. I told them to pack it, but the palace domestic staff is notoriously forgetful. Then again the moaning of tens of thousands of ghouls might be such a racket that concentrating on scripture is impossible.”
“And the pigeons? Do you plan to dine on fresh squabs?”
Leo chuckled. “I wish, as I do love squab. No, they’re homing pigeons. For messages. I made sure the bunker was designed with a small chimney, large enough to give us some air and let the pigeons in and out, but too small for a ghoul to climb through. So far as we’ve been able to observe the ghouls ignore all forms of animal life so the pigeons should have no problem. I’ve asked Artabasdos to keep me updated on the mop-up operations, and of course your friend Camytzes will alert us when he believes all the ghouls are in the Hippodrome and ready to be ignited, because without windows we won’t be able to see for ourselves.”
I nodded. “Clever.”
The Emperor crunched another nut, and then he turned around and peered out the narrow slit, barricaded by heavy bars, that served as one of the battle wagon’s windows. “I think we’re moving out of the palace complex,” he said. “I’m curious about the extent of the destruction.”
I was curious too, so I took up position at my own window. Once we passed out of the Great Palace gates, the wagon rumbled through the open streets of Constantinople. At first there was very little to see. The houses, churches and shops were empty and dark, and there was no sign of life in the streets. But there were subtler signs of the disaster. When we reached the Milion, we passed an alleyway in which I could see the burnt remnants of a barricade that had been erected against the ghouls, and several buildings in this area had scorched windows and collapsed roofs. Puddles of blood stood in the streets. I saw weapons—a discarded sword, many arrows, a crushed shield, even an abandoned trebuchet, its timbers splashed and smeared with blood. But there were no bodies nor parts of bodies. The corpse detail had done their grisly job with efficiency.
The Emperor didn’t seem distressed. “On the whole, it’s not as bad as I thought,” he commented. “We’ll have to pull down some buildings here and there, but I bet we can have Constantinople as good as new in six months. Eight months tops. I’ll tell the Patriarch to pressure the churches to give generously for rebuilding funds.”
Are buildings all he’s concerned about? “How many dead, do you think?” I asked.
“No way of knowing,” he shrugged. “The size of the ghoul army is estimated at between fifteen and twenty thousand. Surviving corpse detail guesses they dumped about ten thousand into the Bosporus. So that’s thirty there. But those numbers could be wildly overestimated. We won’t know until this is over.”
The wagon approached a street from which a large column of smoke rose toward the sky. We drew to a halt before one of the secondary entrances to the Hippodrome, and another cadre of guards surrounded us. The reason for the smoke was evident—the street outside the great horse-racing arena had been turned into a makeshift brick foundry. Men, stripped to the waist and sweating profusely, moved large smoking bricks with metal tongs, shuttling them in and out of large earthenware ovens set up on blocks. Soot-smeared stokers tended the fires beneath the ovens. A line of workers had formed a bucket brigade to ferry vessels of cool water to douse the still-hot bricks; others mixed huge vats of mortar. Flatbed carts filled with bricks, drawn by exhausted horses with foamy mouths and sweat-glistening flanks, rolled back and forth between the foundry and the Hippodrome.
Two guards unbolted and swung open the doors of the battle wagon. “Well, here we go,” said the Emperor, clambering over me to exit the carriage.
I followed. The guards bowed to the Emperor. A bedraggled-looking man in a sweat-stained tunic approached. It was Michael Camytzes. He bowed to the Emperor duti
fully, but he seemed especially happy to see me.
“Brother Stephen,” he smiled. “The ghouls haven’t yet been able to smite you.”
“Nor you,” I replied.
“We have no time to lose,” said the Emperor. “Captain Camytzes, will you be so good as to escort us to the small brick oven in which Brother Stephen and I will likely meet our ends?”
“This way, Sire.”
We followed Camytzes through the gate and into the Hippodrome. Even the grandeur of Constantinople that I’d witnessed thus far couldn’t prepare me for the moment where we stepped through the archway into the grand arena itself. St. Sofia had been impressive, but this was truly the marvel of the ages.
The arena was an immensely long U-shaped track surrounded on all sides by vast terraced risers of marble. In the center of the arena was a long row of fountains crowned with majestic statues—horsemen, cherubim, and sculptures of the great heroes of Byzantium perched atop lofty columns. The very center was marked with an obelisk, no doubt taken from one of the many Roman sacks of Egypt. Around the entire perimeter of the Hippodrome marched a majestic row of stone columns, often punctuated with grand arches, gables, staircases and gates. The sheer size of the place was daunting. The men working feverishly at the center of the arena seemed to be tiny ants dwarfed by the enormity of masonry. As my eyes moved along the rim of the great building, I beheld more splendor—great towers, glinting statues, and crowning the apex of the rounded side, the four gilded horses that stood watch over the imperial entrance.
The signs of the coming battle with the ghouls, however, were everywhere in evidence. The perimeter of the arena floor was lined with dozens of earthenware vats. Ropes smeared with an oily black substance—pitch, maybe, or perhaps Greek fire itself—drooped between them, some dripping the foul-smelling stuff onto the sandy floor of the track. Another row of such vats had been established midway between the center of the arena and its edge. In the center of the great space, just under the obelisk, a boxy shape of masonry, sheathed in wooden scaffolding, was taking shape. Bricklayers buzzed about it like bees around a hive. A pit of dread grew in my stomach when I realized I had just laid eyes on my own tomb.
But it’s not totally certain that we’ll die, I tried to reassure myself. It’s at least possible that we’ll survive.
If he was impressed, the Emperor, true to form, made no big show of it. “Not bad for the work of forty-eight hours,” he said as we continued walking toward the bunker.
“We’ve had hundreds of men working around the clock,” Camytzes replied. “In the early stages we had to deploy a perimeter of troops to ward off ghoul attacks, and the occasional stray one will still wander close to the Hippodrome and have to be slaughtered. But since most of the ghouls have concentrated in the Blachernae Quarter we’ve been able to make much better progress.”
We reached the bunker. It was a very plain box made of bland-looking tan bricks, perhaps fourteen feet on a side. There were no doors, windows or portals of any kind. A wooden ladder had been erected on one side by which I guessed we would make our entrance. The bunker was ugly. In marked contrast to the grandeur of the rest of the Hippodrome, no artistry had gone into the design of this structure. It was a utilitarian wart sprouting in the midst of a garden of splendor.
“How long do you think we’re going to have to be inside of this thing?” I asked Camytzes.
“Well, it will take about twelve hours for the mortar to set. We don’t want it melting when the Greek fire goes off, so we have to be sure it’s cured. After that, who knows?”
The Emperor, stoic as always, did give one indication that what he was seeing and hearing was disturbing to him. I saw his left cheek bulge out as if he had stuck his tongue into it. Still, he voiced no protest. A moment later he said, “Do you think we have any realistic chance of surviving this?”
“Actually, Sire, I do,” Camytzes replied. “Come over here.”
He took us around the side of the bunker. One of the bricks like those used to build the bunker—it was perhaps two feet long by a foot high and a foot wide—had been suspended on sawhorses over a small pit in the sand. The pit was filled with flames and I knew instantly it was Greek fire because it smelled exactly like the watery catacombs through which we’d made our escape across the city. Camytzes gingerly approached the brick. Its bottom was thoroughly blackened and the flames had painted ghostly ebony streamers up its sides, but the top surface was unmarred.
“We decided to test the bricks using this little demonstration,” said Camytzes. “They’re specially designed to dissipate heat. The fire has been burning underneath this block for over twelve hours. Go ahead, touch the top.”
The Emperor crept closer. He put out his hand but couldn’t seem to bring himself to touch the block. His hand withdrew, and then he finally made contact with it. He looked up at me. I joined him and set my index finger on the top of the stone surface. It felt warm, but not so warm as to burn my skin. It was about as warm as a hot bath.
“Ingenious,” the Emperor remarked.
“Depending on how long the fire burns,” Camytzes explained, “it will no doubt be very warm inside the bunker. And it could be quite some time before the Greek fire burns itself out and we’re able to dismantle the bunker to rescue you. But you may well survive.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“No, Sire. There’s no way to know.”
I looked back at the gate through which we’d entered. Several of the Emperor’s guards were approaching, hauling the provisions from the battle wagon.
“Well, I guess it’s time for us to take our places,” the Emperor sighed. He patted Camytzes’s shoulder. “Good work, Captain. If anything should happen to us, I’ve left word for Artabasdos that you’re to be promoted. Any position you want in the Byzantine army or bureaucracy is yours for the asking. We need good men like you.”
“Thank you, Sire. There is one thing.”
“Yes?”
“The village of Domelium—the place where we first came upon the ghouls—lies in my father’s lands. With their village destroyed, the townspeople are destitute. They can’t pay their rents to my father. I respectfully ask that you forgive the taxes due to the Empire on Domelium, at least until the people can rebuild their homes and regain their livelihoods. I would much rather see the people of Domelium given a fair chance to put their lives back together than to occupy an office that would benefit only myself.”
Without even pausing the Emperor replied, “Taxes on the village of Domelium are hereby rescinded until further notice. Send word to Eutropius. He’ll get it straightened out.”
“Thank you, Sire.”
The Emperor looked at me. “All right, let’s do this,” he grunted, and approached the ladder, that seemed to me for a moment like Jacob’s ladder leading to Heaven.
The interior of the bunker was barely twelve feet square. When packed with our provisions, two chairs, the pigeon cage and the two of us, it was dreadfully cramped and claustrophobic. The only free space inside the bunker where a person could stand upright was just to the side of our chairs, and it was only big enough for one person to stand at a time. I didn’t relish spending the next several days literally inches away from the Emperor. I hadn’t noticed it before but in close proximity his body odor was extremely disagreeable, and he continually breathed the aroma of stale pistachios into my face. He farted and the stench lingered in the tiny room for nearly an hour.
The palace courtiers had provided us each with an elegant silver chamber pot in which to relieve ourselves, but when not in use they had to be stowed under our chairs with only a thin cloth laid over them to provide whatever minimal restraint was possible on the smell of their contents. As much as a hero that he might turn out to be for Byzantium, watching—and hearing—Emperor Leo III, God’s Vice-Regent on Earth, urinating and defecating six inches away from me was a trying experience. At least the Emperor had the decency to acknowledge the hardship. “Sorry, Brother,”
he said when he was done, stashing the stinking chamber pot under his chair. “I had too much olive oil with breakfast. Olive oil always makes my bowels loose and runny. But don’t worry, all the pistachios I eat will prove an effective antidote.”
Adding to the misery of being trapped in the bunker was the trial of the construction work going on above us. After we were safely inside, the bricklayers began laying the bunker’s roof and chimney, and at one point Leo and I were obliged to cower under an animal hide to protect us from dollops of fresh mortar that splattered down from above. There was also the matter of the pigeons’ shit; the birds squirted endless blots of whitish effluvia out of their cage which soon dotted and streaked the plain tan walls. As the ceiling took shape—only a small hole a foot square communicated with the outside world—the inside of the bunker was plunged into darkness. Among the Emperor’s provisions was a small oil lamp which we soon lit. It helped, but it was too dark to read. Thus the Emperor and I had to entertain each other by talking.
“Okay, I’ve got an idea,” said Leo, brushing pistachio shells off his tunic. “I’ll think of an animal. You can ask me twenty questions, only answerable with yes or no. From my answers you guess what animal I’m thinking of. Go!”
The workmen finished the bunker long after darkness had fallen in the world outside our little stinking universe. The square hole in the ceiling led up into a chimney nearly ten feet tall, and through it I could see a tiny patch of deep blue sky and a few stars. The bricks were so thick we could see very little of what was happening outside, so we were unprepared to hear Camytzes’s voice booming down the shaft. “Helloooooooooooo! Your majesty and Brother Stephen, how fare you?”