Zombies of Byzantium

by Sean Munger

  The Emperor paused a moment. Then he reached inside his tunic and took out a small glass vial with a cork stopper. “I didn’t tell anyone about this,” he said, “because if we die here I want to go down in history unbesmirched by any hint of cowardice. It’s the same stuff I gave Eutropius to use on Maria if Maslama had double-crossed us. If the heat and the pain are too unbearable and there seems to be no hope left, I’ll swallow half of it. You can take the other half. It’s very quick, so they tell me.”

  “Suicide is a mortal sin,” I said. “I wouldn’t dash my chances of reaching Heaven at the last moment of my life.”

  Leo chortled. “You make your living as an idolater, you lay with my wife, and you bred an army of undead brain-eating ghouls to slay your fellow man. Do you really think, Brother Stephen, that swallowing a few drops of poison is going to make that much difference with the Almighty in our present circumstances?”

  I took the vial from him. The liquid inside was colorless and looked like water.

  “All right,” I finally agreed.

  I handed the vial back to Leo. He put it on the floor under his chair, next to the chamber pot. He craned his neck to peer up the chimney. “Not much longer, then,” he said.

  I recalled the letter that Maria had given me. I suppose now is the time, isn’t it? Reaching into my cassock for it I said, “Sire, there’s one more thing. Before I left the palace your wife gave me a letter that she specified I was to open it only just before we triggered the Greek fire. She bade that I keep it secret, but considering that you already know everything…” My voice trailed off and I offered the sealed envelope to him.

  Leo looked down at it, but then drew his hand away. “No thanks,” he replied. “I think I already know what it says.”

  “I am profoundly sorry, Your Majesty, for violating the sanctity of your marital bed.”

  The Emperor rolled his eyes. “Don’t start with that. Just open it.”

  With my pulse quickening I stuck my thumb under the flap of the parchment and broke the Empress’s seal. Her handwriting was clear and bold. The letter was not long, but my eyes grew wide as I gazed upon it.

  Stephen, my love:

  If this is to be the hour of your death, I want you to know that I love you and care for you deeply. While I will mourn your passing, all is not lost. I am with child. I will cherish your son or daughter forever, knowing that your blood beats within their veins. Go to God with satisfaction and joy.

  Love, Maria

  “Congratulations,” smiled the Emperor. He couldn’t even see the writing on the parchment but he’d correctly guessed the message.

  I was nearly speechless. My mouth opened and closed. “I…I don’t know what…”

  “You’d better hope it’s a boy. If it is, he has at least a chance of sitting on the throne of Byzantium someday. If it’s a girl—well, the Empire can always use one more nun!” Leo laughed, and I detected in his laughter a slight ring of bitterness, which was as close as he ever came to reproaching me. It was shame enough. I folded the letter and put it back in my cassock.

  He did not announce that the time had come upon us to do our duty, but it was obvious that it had. Leo reached casually for the end of the pitch-smeared fuse. “It may not make much difference,” he said, handing the end of the fuse to me, “but I think as the Emperor that I should be the one to light the wick. Do you want to pray or anything beforehand?”

  I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know what good it would do now.”

  There was a moment of silence as the Emperor took the oil lamp from the cord on which it hung. Well, not silence—the moaning of the ghouls outside was as strong as ever, but it was now so steady and relentless that it had faded to the level of ambient noise. I held the end of the wick out to him. He held the small flame of the oil lamp an inch or so from the fuse.

  “God bless the Byzantine Empire!” cried the Emperor. He touched the flame to the end of the wick. As it blazed to fiery life, I let go instantly, but my fingers were still slightly singed. A knot of fire lengthened into a glowing line, crawling quickly up the rope, showering sparks and cinders down on us.

  And now, we probably die, I thought, as I watched the fire dance its way up the chimney. As the flame moved past the pigeon cage, the terrified birds—we had seven now—squawked and flapped furiously.

  The flame reached the top of the chimney and flashed brightly as it reached the top of the rope. It would be seconds now before the fire traveled down the length of the fuse to the Greek fire canisters surrounding the bunker. I crossed myself. Both of us were transfixed by the sight of the flame blazing out of sight. My heart pounded as we awaited the explosion—the roar of fire, the hot blast and the screech of the ghouls in their final destruction.

  We waited.

  And nothing happened.

  The Emperor, peering up the chimney, stood up from his chair. “What the hell?” he grumbled.

  “The fuse must have gone out!” I gasped. “Somewhere up there outside the bunker.”

  For the first time ever I saw the Emperor angry. His jaw hardened, his eyes blazed with consternation and he cried, “The bastards! The fucking ghouls—they must have cut the fuse somehow out there.”

  “How could they do that?” I asked. “They can’t think.”

  “It was probably an accident. The fuse was out there in the open. Idiots! Why didn’t Camytzes rig a backup? How fucking hard was that to figure out?”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Leo stood on his chair, peering up the chimney, as if standing closer to the portal would somehow help. “The idiots—the idiots! There shouldn’t have been one fuse. There should have been ten or twelve of them!”

  Railing against what should have been done didn’t strike me as productive in figuring out how to proceed. “We’ve got to reconnect the fuse somehow,” I said. “Figure out where it broke, and light the remainder. Either that or we come up with some way to trigger the Greek fire ourselves.”

  “And how do you propose to do that? There’s not even a door or a window in this bunker. What, we’re going to disassemble the bricks with our bare hands? Good luck!”

  He climbed down from his chair. He was fuming with rage and frustration. Finally I reached for the pigeon cage. “We have to tell Camytzes and Artabasdos. Maybe they can figure out some way to relight the fuse.”

  “How? They’re nine miles away. We’re the only two people left in Constantinople who aren’t undead.”

  I took a parchment and the quill and penned a short note.

  We triggered the fuse but it didn’t ignite the Greek fire. We suspect the rope broke somewhere outside the bunker where we can’t reach it. Please advise.

  Brother Stephen

  Just as I finished the note the Emperor tore it out of my hands. “No pun intended, but we need to light a fire under these assholes,” he muttered. Underneath my note he scrawled—

  You morons better figure out how to light up the Hippodrome, and fast! Otherwise someone’s head will roll for this!

  YOUR VERY PISSED OFF EMPEROR.

  He attached the parchment to the leg of one of the pigeons and flung it up the chimney. “Now we’ll probably have to wait all night for a response,” he grunted.

  He wasn’t far wrong. After the pigeon departed there was nothing for the two of us to do but wait. We’d been sealed in the bunker for two stifling, cramped, butt-numbing, foul-smelling, ego-bruising nights. Being forced to wait even longer was more excruciating than ever. The wailing of the ghouls was an endless torment. I thought I could now actually feel them pressing against the walls of the bunker. One ghoul in particular must have been especially ravenous for our flesh, for I could feel very faintly through the bricks a rhythmic thud like a body flinging itself against the side of the bunker repeatedly.

  I could sense the Emperor was nearly going stir-crazy. He could not sit still and fidgeted endlessly in his chair. Ultimately he couldn’t take it any longer. He stood on his chair, clawing
his hair, pounding impotently against the brick walls. “God, please let this be over!” he wailed. “At this point I don’t even mind if we do bake to death in here. I just want this to be over with. Please, God, strike the Hippodrome with lightning or something! I want to get out of here!”

  By contrast, I was very melancholy. I sat in my chair, chin in my hand, mulling all that had gone wrong. I guess we aren’t going to defeat the ghouls after all, I thought dejectedly. Maybe we were wrong to believe that we could. Maybe God is teaching us a lesson about pride and hubris. Maybe tinkering with death and evil, trying to shape it to our ends, has poisoned Him against us once and for all.

  I had the disturbing image of the ghouls of Constantinople breaking out of their prison and fanning out across the world. There would be no way to contain them. In a few years—or even months—the entire earth could be nothing but a charnel house of flesh-eating monsters, and mankind would exist only so long as it could supply food to the demons. God would want nothing to do with such a world.

  Dawn came and there was no reply to our pigeon. After a long silence, I finally gave voice to my suspicions. “What if they gave up?” I asked the Emperor. “Suppose Artabasdos and Eutropius and the others got our note and decided there was no way to set off the incendiaries. Suppose they decided to take the suggestion that you rejected—to close the gates of Constantinople and abandon it to the ghouls forever. Why would they bother to tell us if they’d done that? They wouldn’t want to panic us, after all.”

  “It could be worse than that,” said the Emperor. “There could have been a coup. Maybe Artabasdos took the throne as soon as they walled us up in here. I wouldn’t put it past the old bastard to double-cross me.”

  I thought ominously of the vial of poison under his chair. “When do you think—” It’s a sin! screamed part of me, but another part protested, It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? “When do you think we’re past the point of no return? I mean, when do you think there’s no hope?”

  “Honestly,” sighed the Emperor, “I think it was about six hours ago. Maybe there’s still hope. I suppose Artabasdos and the others could be scrambling to come to some kind of decision. I could see maybe some sort of harebrained scheme to surround the Hippodrome with catapults and lob flaming projectiles over the walls in the hopes that one might light the fuse accidentally. But that’s pretty farfetched. It would take a lot of men to do that, and any large force of men they send into the city is going to divert the ghouls away from us and scatter them all over again. No—if I were Artabasdos, I don’t think I’d really have any—”

  A sudden flapping at the top of the chimney stopped his words in midsentence. We both sprang up, colliding with each other in the small space, reaching into the air for the pigeon that was now fluttering down the chimney.

  “Grab it! Get it!” shouted the Emperor.

  I literally snatched the pigeon out of the air. The Emperor, scrambling for the parchment tied to its leg, nearly tore the poor bird apart. “It’s from Michael Camytzes,” he said breathlessly, once he’d unfolded the paper. He read the note to me.

  Received your news about the broken fuse. There is no option we can think of except to send a single man into the Hippodrome to try and trigger the Greek fire by any means possible. It must be one man because any more would risk drawing the ghouls away from the bunker.

  “Thank God!” I gasped.

  “They’re using their heads,” said the Emperor. “There’s more.”

  He read it, and my face grew white.

  There can be no question about this man returning from this mission. I doubt even that there will remain of him anything left to bury. If I may make one further request of the Emperor, it is that the church in the town of Domelium be reconstructed. I would like to have a memorial stone erected there. I will not lie beneath it, but I want it known for all time that I have given my life in the service of my people, my village, and my God.

  Michael Camytzes

  “Hell, I’ll build him the grandest cathedral in Byzantium if he pulls this off,” said the Emperor.

  I was devastated. “Michael,” I whispered. I sat down heavily. No, not Michael! Please—anyone but him! He’s been so brave and so valiant throughout this turmoil. Byzantium needs warriors like him. How can he think to sacrifice himself?

  “He’s probably already on his way here. Let’s hope he’s bringing plenty of fire arrows with him. He’s only going to have one chance at this, so he’d better make it count.”

  “He was my friend.”

  The Emperor patted my shoulder. “I’m sorry.” This was the first time I’d ever heard him express sympathy for a single one of the ghouls’ multitudinous victims. “He was a good man.”

  “He is a good man.” I felt tears coming to my eyes.

  Leo sat back down in his chair. He reached for the edge of the animal hide that we had used to protect ourselves from the dripping of the mortar. “We have no way of knowing when this thing is going to light up,” he said. “We’d better be prepared for it at any moment.” He began to pull the hide up over our heads. It wouldn’t be much protection against the heat, but it might keep any flaming cinders or other debris off of us.

  And so we spent the last hours of our imprisonment cowered together in the darkness under an animal hide, listening to the wailing of the ghouls, the scraping and scrabbling of their claws against the bricks, and wondering how much longer it would be before Michael Camytzes brought about our hellish deliverance. I had never in my life felt more helpless. When you become a monk, supposedly you abandon yourself entirely to God, but until this terrible night I hadn’t really known what that truly meant. Now I thought I understood. Crouching there in the dark bunker inside the Hippodrome, even though I was inches away from the most powerful man in the world, all of his power was meaningless. God would rap his gavel on this exact spot, and the outcome of our great battle could be affected only by Him.

  And Michael Camytzes.

  At just after dawn on the Day of St. Gregory the Wonder-Worker, Bishop of Neo-Caesaria, in the year Anno Mundi 6226, the greatest explosion ever known in the history of the world since the fire of Creation blossomed into the morning sky above the city of Constantinople.

  The colossal fireball erupted into the air without warning. The Byzantine Army and the surviving civilians of the city, camped amidst the Saracens nine miles west of the city, watched the flash rise into the reddish sky like a huge fiery mushroom. The Patriarch had assured them that seeing a great holy fire over Constantinople meant that God was personally intervening to smite the ghouls once and for all. Oddly enough the Saracens were praying for the same thing. Two peoples prayed to their different gods for the same result, hoping that the fire in the sky would bring the renewal of the world. Ironically I was told later that the fireball blossomed just as the muezzins were calling the Mohammedan faithful in the Saracens’ camp to prayer. Maslama was reported to have clapped his hands and said, “Allah has smiled upon the world this day.”

  It happened inside the bunker without warning too. The first thing we heard was a loud wumph! and then the Emperor and I, our food and amphorae, the chamber pots, the pigeon cage and the terrified squawking birds were rocked by a shock wave that dashed us about in our tiny bunker like dice shaken in a cup. Instantly I was nearly deaf from the roar of the explosion. I could see a shower of sparks falling across the edge of the animal hide that protected us. Only then did we begin to feel the wave of intense heat. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. I remained there on the floor of the bunker, gasping for breath, trying not to touch anything, for the walls of the bunker and any object inside of it made of metal, porcelain or masonry was now so hot that it would have burned the skin off my body to have come in contact with it.

  Because I was deafened by the explosion of the Greek fire, I couldn’t hear the ghouls die. But I imagined them—hordes of screaming, wailing demons, splashed with flaming oil, seething and writhing together in one panick
ed mass, flesh melting off their bones and the bones themselves crumbling into charred and blackened dust. The initial ignition of the incendiaries was only partial. A few minutes after the first explosion there was a second, most likely the outer ring of Greek fire canisters going up; it was less powerful but certainly increased the heat inside the bunker.

  And Michael is dead, I thought. I wondered how he had detonated the canisters. Perhaps he shot one of the fuses with a flaming arrow. Maybe he fought his way through legions of ghouls, slashing frantically with his sword, until he reached a fuse, and maybe he lit it directly. Perhaps he had died only feet away from us, separated by the thick wall of masonry whose construction he had commanded. However he did it, the plans seemed to have worked.

  Over the whole course of my life I never knew anything as close to Hell as I did inside that bunker while the ghouls burned outside. Leo and I remained on the floor of the brick oven, covered by the thick tanned hide, too afraid even to move. There was a small gap between the edge of the hide and the floor and through it I could see sparks, bits of charcoal and other flaming debris raining down. At one point I saw one of the pigeons, its feathers blackened and smoking, fall dead to the floor, twitch twice and then lie still. In the explosion, the chamber pots had overturned. There was a puddle of piss on the floor inches away from me, and as the heat mounted, I watched it boil away in a cloud of foul-smelling steam. I wondered how long it would be before our own skin and hair simply burst into flame.

  I don’t know how long the intense heat lasted. After a while it became difficult to breathe. The fire had sucked most of the oxygen out of the bunker, and there was very little filtering down to us from the chimney. The reddish-orange light of the flames had begun to fade slightly by the time I became dizzy. So maybe this is how it’s going to end, I thought. We don’t burn to death, but rather suffocate.