by Sean Munger
As I thought this, I felt the Emperor move next to me for the first time since the conflagration began. Shifting under the hide, I opened a crack of light that illuminated his face in hell-fire orange. He looked strange and desperate. His face and head were covered with sweat. The ends of his long hair had begun to singe, smoking faintly. I could see blistered flesh on the ends of his fingers and the backs of his hands. His mouth opened and closed, but if he was talking, I couldn’t make out his words.
Do I look like that too? I wondered.
The motion was his arm. He was reaching for something—the vial of poison.
With his burned fingers, he managed to grasp it. But his hand shook terribly. Yes, it’s time for this, I thought. God forgive me, but we’re not going to make it. We’re cooking to death and suffocating. We might as well end the torment now. As I saw the Emperor’s quaking fingers pull the stopper from the vial of poison, I said a silent prayer for my unborn child in Maria’s womb, and for the departed soul of Michael Camytzes. I hoped the church would make him a saint.
Leo pulled the stopper from the vial, but then the glass vessel slipped from his fingers. It fell to the floor of the bunker, leaking the poison onto the stones. The Emperor laid his head down on the ground and stuck out his tongue. His hideous visage was like some sort of gargoyle. I realized he was trying to lick the poison from the floor. He failed. The pool of poison began to boil and steam away in the heat. My last coherent thought before I lost consciousness was to try to inhale as much of the steam as possible. We had lost the poison itself, but maybe the steam would kill us if we were lucky.
Chapter Sixteen
Corpronymous
The next thing I remembered was a strange plinking sound, like metal against stone. It was pitch-black and my head was spinning. How is it we’re still alive? I wondered. My entire body was raw and desiccated. My skin felt like leather. I raised my head up off the stone floor. I could see light coming through the crack between the edge of the animal hide and the floor. It wasn’t the dim light of the bunker’s oil lamp, nor the hellish orange glow of the flames shining down through the chimney. It was daylight.
“There they are!” I heard a voice shout.
“Are they alive?”
Plink! Plink! Plink! I saw chunks of stone land on the floor. I felt pebbles striking the animal hide that covered me. I opened my mouth and tried to shout, but my voice was gone. Slowly I began to rouse myself. Being able to take a full deep breath was one of the sweetest experiences of my life.
“One of them is moving!” cried one of our rescuers.
“Is it the Emperor?”
The Emperor. As I struggled to crawl out from under the hide, I was aware of an inert figure next to me. Leo hadn’t moved and I could not hear him breathing. Did he suffocate? Did he manage to take enough of the poison to kill himself? I looked down at him, his body partially covered by the animal skin; I could see one hairy foot protruding from it. His purple boots were split, their leather blistered and singed. I knew for sure he was dead.
I looked up. Several Byzantine soldiers were busy smashing through the bricks with crowbars and picks. Chunks of stone continued to rain down onto me. But I could see the blue sky of day—and I could not see any ghouls.
“At least one of them is alive!” shouted one of the men. With a sudden fury of crowbars the soldiers smashed through the partial hole they had made in the bunker and enlarged the opening so a man could slip through. The soldier clambered down into the bunker, his chain mail scraping against the stone walls. He was almost frantic. “Sire! Sire! Your Majesty! Can you hear me?”
I was still unable to speak. I reached up my hand toward the soldier, but he completely ignored me. Indeed, he squeezed past me so he could attend the Emperor, pulling at the heavy animal hide to uncover his body.
“We’ll need a hook and a sling down here!” shouted the soldier to his comrades. “And have the surgeon stand by!”
Finally an arm grabbed me and began to haul me up toward the hole. I was barely strong enough to hold on. The stab of bright sunlight into my eyes was almost painful. I nearly lost consciousness again, but I was coherent enough to think—It worked. We must have destroyed the ghouls. God indeed has saved us.
As my eyes adjusted to the sunlight, I found the Hippodrome one of the strangest and most nightmarish scenes I’d ever laid eyes upon.
The entire arena seemed to be completely covered in what looked at first like gnarled black rosebushes. There were mounds upon mounds of stringy, thorny blackish things, some in towering piles, and so many of them piled up on the bunker itself that the bricks of the structure were barely visible. When I saw that some of the burnt rosebushes seemed to have hands, feet and even heads, I realized that these stinking black mounds were all that remained of the ghouls. I was being hauled bodily across the shoulders of two Byzantine soldiers, and their mail-clad legs crunched and snapped through the piles of burnt ghoul bodies that were impossible to avoid because they stretched in every direction.
The soldiers were carrying me to a horse-drawn cart not far from the bunker. A sort of pathway had been literally shoveled through the layers of ghoul carcasses to make way for the cart and the cadre of soldiers who were busy dismantling the bunker. Across the arena I saw several more carts, and a platoon of soldiers shoveling and flinging burnt ghoul corpses into them. All the grand marble statues and fountains of the Hippodrome were now totally invisible, buried beneath mountains of ghouls. The grand white columns supporting the perimeter of the arena were uniformly black. Even the great gilded horses atop the Emperor’s viewing box were charred and singed. The heat of the fire had been so intense that it had partially melted the horses, whose legs and hindquarters were now formless lumpy masses of melted and re-solidified metal.
There were many people gathered around the cart onto which the soldiers lifted me. I saw Eutropius, the kouropalates Artabasdos, Theophilus, Nicetas and even Gabriel Camytzes. As they laid me on the cart—one of the soldiers put a pillow under my head—another figure, robed in blue, appeared. Bits of charcoal and fluttery remnants of the ghouls’ burnt clothes and skin swirled about the Empress Maria as she approached. She rushed toward the cart, seized my head and planted a kiss upon it.
“You survived!” she gushed. “Dear God in Heaven, I can’t believe you made it!”
I finally had the strength to speak. “The…Emperor,” I croaked. “I don’t think he—”
“They’re bringing him out now!” Artabasdos cried.
The soldiers hauled out the Emperor’s limp body in a canvas sling. I raised my head off the pillow and could see only a fat black lump silhouetted against the sky. Maria looked over, wailed in anguish and buried her head against my chest.
“Dear God,” Eutropius whispered.
Four soldiers carried the Emperor to the cart and gently laid him next to me. At first I wondered, with his singed hair, blistered fingers and charcoal-smeared face, how he had come through the ordeal so much worse than I had. Then I realized—That’s the kind of shape I’m in too. My whole body was one vast repository of pain.
Maria rushed around the side of the cart and clutched her husband’s hand. “Leo! Leo! Can you hear me? Give me a sign. Please!”
Artabasdos came up next to her. As she began sobbing, he put his arm around her. “I’m very sorry, Your Majesty,” he said softly.
Theophilus approached the cart too. He took my hand.
“Michael?” I whispered, hoping against hope. Maybe by some miracle he had managed to survive.
Theophilus shook his head. His old wrinkled face registered an expression of sorrow.
Eutropius leaned over the Emperor’s body, listening for any signs of life. When the eunuch straightened up, his blank visage communicated everything. He looked over at the Empress, still sobbing, and then bowed deeply before her.
“Your Majesty,” he said. “You are the new ruler of Byzantium. What are your orders?”
At that moment the Emperor’
s mouth dropped open and a sudden ugly hacking sound emerged.
It was like a sudden electric shock. Everyone crowded around Leo again, Maria frantically squeezing his hand, Eutropius and Artabasdos shaking him. “Your Majesty! Your Majesty! Can you hear me?”
The Emperor’s body shifted on the cart next to me. He squirmed; then his loins issued a long, deep, wet-sounding fart. He opened his eyes.
“Pistachios,” said the Emperor, in a labored and anguished gasp. “Somebody bring me my pistachios!”
The day after the soldiers hauled us out of the pitted bunker the people began to return to Constantinople. In a driving autumn rain our army marched the thousands of civilians who had survived the ghoul catastrophe back to the city to reclaim their homes, businesses and churches—or what was left of them. In the meantime the Saracens began to pack up their camp and prepare for the long march back to their own lands.
The torrential rains were something of a baptism. The gutters of Constantinople ran with blood, cinders and soot, especially from the Hippodrome. The rain washed off the layers of filth and tragedy that had settled upon the city during the ghoul rampages, leaving our great Christian capital clean and unblemished, ready to shine again as the jewel in God’s own empire.
The people returned humble and pious. The next day after the march was Sunday, and nearly every church in Constantinople was full of parishioners giving thanks for their deliverance. The Emperor was still too ill to appear in the gallery of St. Sofia—as was I—but the Patriarch himself led the congregation in a lengthy series of prayers and thanksgivings to praise God for having delivered us from the greatest evil Byzantium had yet faced. The siege towers and twinkling nighttime fires against the Walls of Theodosius were gone. So too were the Saracen ships; one could look out onto the Bosporus, the Marmara and the Golden Horn and see instead the distant sails of Byzantine trade ships returning to bring the city much-needed grain, lumber and other materials to fuel its inevitable resurrection.
The Saracens didn’t attack, but they did linger for an uncomfortably long time beyond the walls. After a few days their presence became concerning. As I convalesced in the Great Palace, I heard rumors that Maslama had broken his word and was preparing to renew the siege. As it turned out, however, he and his army remained because he demanded a personal meeting with the Emperor before departing, and Leo was still too sick to see him. When the weather cleared the audience finally happened, Leo was carried to the meeting on a litter. I wasn’t there, but Artabasdos was. He said that the two commanders met alone in Maslama’s command tent for nearly an hour, and when he was carried out, the Emperor was tight-lipped about whatever had gone on inside. “You can be assured, however,” the Emperor reportedly told Artabasdos, “that the Saracens will be marching away no later than dawn tomorrow morning.” And they did, heading back to the south in a long train of clinking armor and fluttering green banners. They left nearly ten thousand of their own dead, many of them ghouls, which they had burned. They dumped the ashes into the Sea of Marmara.
Two weeks or so after the Great Deliverance, as the people of Constantinople had begun to call it, the Emperor held an intimate banquet at the Great Palace to bid farewell and thanks to those of us who were instrumental in defeating the ghouls. The long table draped in brocaded cloth was mounded with gilded plates of plenty—roast duck, roast chickens, beef, tureens of steaming sauces, colossal wheels of cheese, mountainous loaves of bread, and endless silver flagons of the finest wine. It was one of the greatest feasts of my life. I sat next to Theophilus on one side and Gabriel Camytzes on the other. The elder Camytzes had insisted that an empty chair be placed at the table to symbolize the absence of his son.
After we’d eaten quite a lot and the Emperor began the toasts, he raised his jewel-encrusted goblet to the fallen hero. “Every man, woman and child in the Byzantine Empire, from me on down to the rudest peasant, owes a debt of gratitude to Michael Camytzes—truly one of the greatest, bravest and most selfless men our country has ever produced. He gave his life without hesitation to destroy the ghouls, and we’ll forever remember him. I want you all to know that not only do I intend to respect his last wishes regarding the reconstruction of the church in his home village of Domelium, but I’ve ordered the finest architects, craftsmen and stonemasons to rebuild the church as a grand cathedral. It shall be called the Church of St. Michael the Martyr. May God bless him and all his kin!”
“Hear hear!” We all raised our goblets.
The Emperor led us in many more toasts—to the elder Camytzes, to the military commanders of the various cadres, the builders of the bunker, to Maslama and the Saracens for keeping their word, and to me for my ingenuity and bravery. I felt somewhat uncomfortable with all the accolades. It’s good that we’re leaving and going back to our homes and monasteries, I thought during the toast. I’m just a simple monk, and I should get back to the cloister.
At the end of the toasts, however, the Emperor gave a strange little speech. Raising his goblet one more time he said, “In concluding this evening of celebration, I must say a few words to you about how we’ll look back on this incident. Some of you may recall that I had a meeting with Maslama shortly before the Saracens marched away. I was somewhat concerned with how our recent travails will go down in the history books. It’s not just my own vanity and my desire to be remembered as the savior of Byzantium—which, of course, I am. But while I was convalescing the Patriarch came to my chambers to bless my recovery, and I asked him to say a prayer for the Saracens. He startled me by refusing. The Saracens, being infidel Mohammedans, are eternally damned in the eyes of God. It would be blasphemy, said the Patriarch, to admit that they’re capable of Christian virtues such as honor, piety and dignity in the eyes of the Lord. When I asked him how it would look, then, that I cooperated with Maslama during the siege, and that he and I had worked out a deal for the deliverance of our city from the ghouls, the Patriarch replied, ‘It will be looked upon as rank blasphemy, an abomination to God, and it is right that it be so, for it is.’”
The banquet room was silent. Theophilus glanced at me uneasily. I certainly don’t agree with that, I thought, but I couldn’t say it; the Patriarch was the head of our church and the leader of our faith, and it would be heresy to disagree with him publicly, especially in front of the Emperor.
“As you know,” the Emperor continued, “my office is a secular one, and under Byzantine law I’m bound by the ecclesiastical authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Therefore, his word on the subject is final and beyond dispute. As it turns out, Maslama had a similar problem. He sent a message to me stating that he couldn’t very well march back to Baghdad and tell his brother the Caliph that he voluntarily abandoned the almost certain conquest of Constantinople, electing instead to help the hated Byzantines save the very city the Saracens wanted to conquer. Furthermore, it is heresy in his faith, as it is in ours, to suggest that the ghouls—which the Patriarch believes are a punishment from God—afflicted Christians and Muslims equally, because that would suggest that the two faiths are coequal in the eyes of God. Naturally that can’t be. So, Maslama and I came to an accord that I believe solves the very thorny religious questions raised by the ghoul plague.
“At our brief summit meeting Maslama and I agreed that we would tell our respective chroniclers to record that a great clash occurred between the armies of Byzantium and those of the Saracens. The Saracens besieged Constantinople. We held fast. Decimated by hunger, disease and cold—after all, Maslama has to explain to the Caliph why ten thousand of his men didn’t return—the Saracens abandoned the siege and withdrew. There is to be no mention of ghouls. Let me repeat that—the infestation of ghouls never happened. From this day forward no one is to speak of ghouls, of corpses, of fireballs or anything of the kind. We owe the deliverance of the city to the intercession of the Virgin Mary. Even the very word ‘ghoul’ is to be banished from the Greek language for all time. This is my decree. Anyone who violates it will suffer the ultimate pena
lty.”
The Emperor looked around the room, making eye contact with each and every one of us present. The last person he looked at was his wife. She nodded obediently.
Leo’s expression brightened. He sat down, set his goblet on the table and then clapped his hands. “Bring forth the desserts!”
And so, our history was written.
The next day I returned to the Monastery of St. Stoudios, which was a curious pastiche of ruin and triumph. The courtyard where we’d battled the ghouls before was ruined, and every monk who could lift a spade or carry a potted tree was set to work trying to restore the gardens to their former glory. The infirmary was a gloomy chamber of gore and carnage. Brownish bloodstains splattered the walls, most of the wooden bedsteads were broken and the tile floor was littered with bones, shattered glass and crockery, and stained shreds of clothes. Our chapel was also a shambles. It seemed that a large group of ghouls had congregated inside of it during the siege. On the second day after my arrival my friend Henoch, cleaning up the debris in the chapel, made a horrifying discovery—the skeleton of a little girl, bits of rotting flesh still clinging to her blackened bones, was wedged behind the altar. This type of thing was hardly unique in our monastery; such dreadful surprises were turning up all over Constantinople, and they probably would be for years to come.
I supervised the cleanup efforts. Rhetorios, the former hegoumenos, had regrettably been killed by ghouls—one of the tens of thousands of sad losses with which the city was grappling—and his replacement had not yet been selected. Those of us who had survived didn’t think much of rules and hierarchies, for we were all laboring as hard as our bodies would permit just to make the monastery livable again and to erase all traces of the horrors that had occurred there. We had charred and gnawed bones to bury, bloodstains to scrape and cleanse from walls, larders to restock with grain and fowl, the garden to repair, and our infirmary to set in order so it could again serve the poor and destitute of the city. This was a full-time job. Although I’d returned to my little cell and found it had been relatively unscathed during the ghoul siege, I gave little thought to the Empress’s secret icon, which was right where I’d left it under my sleeping pallet. Worry about that later, I told myself. There’s still so much to do. Everybody in Constantinople will be very busy for the foreseeable future.