by Eric Flint
Chapter 9—Councils of the Mighty
Location: Edirne, Formerly Adrianopolis, Ottoman Capital
Time: Mid-afternoon, November 4, 1372
Sultan Murad I didn’t shout at the courier. He wanted to, but by this time in his life what he wanted to do almost never took precedence over what he needed to do. He was a large man with a tendency toward corpulence, mostly held in check by the fact that he rode with his army and worked out with sword and shield. Instead of shouting, he heard the man out, then thanked him for his service. With a gesture, he indicated that his aide should reward the man for his hard ride.
Then he ended court for the day and called his advisors. Especially Candarli Kara Halil, who was his first adviser in war and government, and his closest surviving friend. Almost the only person in the Ottoman Empire who wasn’t a threat to his throne.
Candarli Kara Halil Pasha said, “It’s the magic,” when John V’s insulting response to his command was described. “You know that he was trying for aid from the west. And you know that he failed. But this party from France . . . The western church has sent magi instead of troops to aid his cause. And now, with magic working in the world, that is a mighty gift. A gift mighty enough to make sniveling John brave.” Kara Halil tapped his pen against the inkwell as he thought. “And if it’s true that the wizards are from the future and bring with them magics that we cannot learn from our demons, that would make it an even greater gift.”
“So we should abandon Anatolia and attack Constantinople now?”
The crow that sat on a perch and was Kara Halil’s familiar cawed “No!”and the pasha looked at it. “You think not, my djinn?”
The crow said, “It’s the Mongols. They have an army of demons and they are encouraging the rebellion in Anatolia. The Mongols are the true threat.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Kara Halil looked at the crow and considered. He knew that the djinn was from Themis, the land of Themis that was this land a thousand and more years gone by. He knew that the djinn didn’t really approve of the war in the mortal lands that were Themis’ lands. At the same time, the djinn couldn’t lie to him. So what it said was true. “My friend, is your view on this matter affected by your loyalty to the land of Themis?”
The crow hesitated. “I cannot be sure, though I am convinced that the greater threat is in Anatolia. But I am the most minor of djinn. You know that, Master. Not much greater than what the westerners would call a puck.”
Kara Halil turned back to Murad. “My lord, I think the djinn may well be right, but in the meantime we need to send spies to Constantinople to find out about these ‘twenty-firsters,’ as they are called, and perhaps to remove them from play.”
Kara Halil and Murad often spent pleasant evenings playing chess.
In this case, though, his lord shook his head. “No, my friend. We can’t let John’s rebellion stand. To do so would be to encourage others to rebel.”
Kara Halil looked at his lord and knew that the reason was valid, but not the true reason. Murad had much more control over his anger now than when he was younger, but the anger still lived deep in the core of the man. John’s failure to bow before Murad had angered him and John would be made to pay.
Location: Edirne, Formerly Adrianopolis, Ottoman Capital
Time: Shortly After Dawn, November 8, 1372
The Ottoman armies were moving out. One would travel south and cross the Straits of Marmara at Gallipoli under Candarli Kara Halil Pasha’s command, and move in the direction of the rebellion in Anatolia. Meanwhile, a much smaller force under the command of Murad I himself would go to Constantinople and cow the self-styled emperor of Byzantium, gather up the armies of Constantinople, such as they were, and take them across the Bosporus to Anatolia, where the two armies would combine to defeat the upstart beyliks of Anatolia.
Location: Royal Palace, Constantinople
Time: 10:35 AM, November 12, 1372
Bertrand du Guesclin stood in the council chamber and looked at the map. It was a beautiful thing. Five feet tall and eight wide, drawn on parchment in colored inks, and—if they could convince the crown—it would soon be enchanted. For the moment, it was hanging on the wall of the emperor’s privy council chamber. It covered north to the Danube and east to include all of Anatolia and west to the Adriatic Sea. The broad outlines were provided by the textbooks and maps shared across the computers of the twenty-firsters. They also provided locations of several key places like Constantinople, Thessalonica, and Edirne.
The coastline wasn’t perfectly accurate. Over more than seven hundred years it had changed, so the twenty-first century maps that came with the twenty-firsters were off. That would need to be fixed, but the basic idea was clear and not at all new to the people in the room. Control the narrows between the Black Sea and the Aegean and you had a good chance of holding Murad at bay. Fail to hold them and Murad would win.
What they didn’t have was any practical way of holding those narrows or preventing Murad from crossing them at will. Their ships were galleys and small sailing ships. Murad had more troops, more galleys, and more and better of nearly everything.
Further, the crown of Byzantium was broke. The royal purse was empty and the crown jewels in hock. Their credit was nonexistent and if the emperor went anywhere outside his shrinking borders, he was likely to be grabbed up by the locals for bad debts.
Only the twenty-firsters—and those they had told—had ever heard the word “gunboat.” That was about to change. “The sea route from Constantinople to Thessalonica is 377 miles. At a speed of ten miles an hour, traveling constantly, it’s a day and a half trip,” Bertrand said.
“Closer to a week,” Manuel II said. “I traveled from there to here a week before you people arrived. I was on a galley and we stopped when the weather was up and for a few hours most nights.”
“With better navigation and a steam engine, you could make the trip much faster,” Annabelle Cooper-Smith said.
Bertrand cleared his throat. “The issue is that even a day and a half is too long if you are to maintain control of the straits. You need faster communications. There are a few ways we can do that, but the best and simplest is through a magical phone system.”
“What are the others?” Andronikos IV asked, giving the twenty-firsters a hard look.
“Fires on hilltops, semaphore towers. You don’t have the equipment to do non-magical radios or phones.” And as Andronikos bristled, Bertrand added hastily, “No one in this century truly does. What we learned in Paris was that we could use a combination of twenty-firster knowledge and demonic enchantment.” Bertrand silently cursed himself for using “demonic.” It was the way the demons—at least most of them—referred to themselves. But Andronikos was furious with his father over Manuel’s elevation to co-emperor and heir, and disliked anything his father liked at the moment. He was also strongly under the influence of Patriarch Kokkinos, who intended to control Christianity by making sure that only his “demons” were counted as “angels.” By now Bertrand was unconvinced that any of them were what the world had thought of as angels and demons before the veil was ripped asunder.
“The beings of the netherworld commonly called demons can be induced to occupy twenty-firster designed crystal radios that have speakers and microphones built in, and those devices can be networked through a phone or computer left in Pucorl’s lands. And as long as the crystal set is maintained in a single location with a pentagram around it connecting it to Pucorl’s lands, we can have almost instant communications anywhere we have a crystal set.
“We could also use Themis’ lands,” Roger interrupted, “if His Imperial Majesty can come to an agreement with Themis. That wouldn’t require a phone or computer to sort through the calls. Themis could create demons to manage the phone system.”
“How does Themis create demons?” Manuel asked. “I thought they were always there.”
“Demons make other demons out of their own substance. The process is a bit different from a
mortal having a child, but it’s how new demons are made. According to Raphico, all the demons in the netherworld from whatever level were once part of God and will be again.”
“You’re saying they are all angels,” Andronikos said. “That’s blasphemy.”
John V pounded a small paperweight on the table. “That can be discussed at a later time. You were talking about demo— ‘angel’ enchanted crystal sets. But you have yet to explain their great advantage.”
“Communications are a force multiplier,” Roger said, and Bertrand cleared his throat again.
Roger held up both hands. “Sorry.”
“He’s right,” Bertrand said. “The person who wins the battle is usually the person that has the most people there when the fight happens. If you can get word to your forces faster, they can gather faster, and you can have more force in one place faster than your enemy.”
John V nodded.
“The phones remove the time that it would take for a messenger to travel to forces you have elsewhere, and it also lets you communicate more fully what you need and where you need it. It’s hard to get answers from a scrap of paper with writing on it.”
“And you can make these?”
“Yes, but not cheaply.”
“In that case, we can’t do it at all,” John said. “We have discussed this, Bertrand. Byzantium has a lack of funds because of the costs we have faced in holding the Turks as long as we have.”
“We may be able to help with that, at least some,” Jennifer Fairbanks said, “but it’s not a blank check.”
“What is a check?”
“Never . . .” Jennifer started to say, then changed her mind. “It is a document that can be used to retrieve money from a bank after it has been placed there.” That led to a careful discussion of banking and the way money worked in the twenty-first century, which Jennifer managed to explain without ever once using the term “fiat money.” Instead, she talked about fractional reserve banking, implying that you needed to keep at least half the deposited money on account, and in which she stressed again and again how vital it was that the government accept such money for payment of taxes and rents.
This wasn’t the twenty-first century with income tax and property tax. It was the fourteenth, where tax time meant guys with swords pounding on your door with a book and taking everything you had, and calling it taxes or rent.
This was the time of the tax farmer, who bought the right to collect taxes for the king and kept as much as they ever remitted to the crown. This, in other words, was a time when the poor were even more screwed than they were in the twenty-first century. Jennifer didn’t want to screw them any more by introducing paper money that they got paid in, but wouldn’t be able to buy anything with.
It was a long and mostly boring meeting, but by the end of it, they had a few things at least sort of straight.
Empress Helena would be in charge of the imperial bank, and certain kinds of transactions would have to be done through the bank.
The twenty-firsters would be contracted to make and enchant a series of crystal sets. Those crystal sets would have about the same relationship with the crystal sets built in the future by hobbyists as a model does a sketch. They would be fancy. They would have screens and microphones and speakers, as well as eyes, all built into the system so that all of them could be shared through the antenna.
And, finally, production would start on a series of rocket boats. Gunboats would be better, but cannons of the sort that a gun boat needed were at least a year away. They had heard of cannon in Constantinople, and John, on his visit to Rome, had even seen some. But there were no cannon factories in Constantinople, not even the primitive sort they had in Paris.
That wasn’t all bad. Starting from scratch they could avoid the flower pot cannons that were all the rage back in Paris, and go straight to something practical. Roger and Wilber would be in charge of that. Bill Howe would be working with the city guard of Constantinople to try and turn it into an actual police force that was capable of investigating crime and finding the culprit.
There was a knock on the door and all the plans went away. Murad I was on his way to Constantinople with a force of four thousand.
An army doesn’t move fast, so they had a few days to get ready. But only a few.
Location: Land of Themis, Netherworld
Time: Roughly 2:35 PM, November 16, 1372
Zeus appeared in Themis’ great hall. “Well,” he bellowed, “what are you going to do about the mortals?”
Themis rolled her eyes. Not like an annoyed teenager rolled eyes. In Themis’ case, they made a complete rotation, which gave her a view of her entire kingdom and the ones around her. Not that that was the point. She could have gained the same information without moving her eyes at all. She was simply making her opinion of Zeus’ arrival clear. “Do sit down, Zeus.” She gestured and a golden throne appeared. “So nice of you to call ahead. Oh, wait. You didn’t, did you?”
Zeus had, on occasion, been her lover, fathering all of her fathered children. A titan like Themis created her world out of her own substance, the land, the plants, the animals, the people. The new computer beside her throne and the desk it was on were all created from her substance. For the most part, they were created to her own design, often copied from the mortal realm. In the case of her children, though, the process was more cooperative. Zeus, as the father, provided much of the design, but more of the substance came from Themis. It was not really like the sex that mortals had, but it did carry much of the same emotional and social connotations. So, to put it in human terms, Zeus was a bully and a horse’s ass, but he was also the father of her children.
Zeus flounced onto the throne. That was the only way to put it. He flounced. Every part of the movement evocative of pouting disapproval. Zeus’ lands, Olympus, were to the southwest and a half a level of entropy above Themis’ lands. Her worshipers had lived, prayed, and died over a thousand years before those of Zeus, although there was overlap.
“What would you have me do about them? It was not the mortals who tore the rifts in the veil between the worlds.”
“How do you know that?”
Themis stopped. She didn’t know that. She had assumed that it was a being of great power, one of the origins, what her followers had called Gaia or Uranus. What the Persians called Angra Mainyu and Ahura Mazda. What the Christians called God and the devil. What other lands called other things, but which meant either the first being, or one of the first few, as the origin started to divide itself into parts.
Could they have done it, the humans? They might have stumbled onto something. After considering for an eternity of half a second, she decided that it was unlikely, but not impossible. “I don’t. But it seems unlikely that the humans could have made the rifts.”
“Maybe they released one of the first ones,” Zeus said.
“That seems more likely. But even if that is the case, what do you want me to do about it?”
“Find them and make them put it back. Put them back in their place and make them behave.”
“That would seem to be a job for the Furies, or perhaps Nemesis.” With a thought, Themis called her sister, and created a new throne.
Nemesis appeared a moment later, with her black wings extended and her sword in hand. She looked at Zeus and then at Themis, shook her head, and folded her wings, which disappeared into her back as she sat on the throne. “I take it you didn’t ask me here because you are ready to let me destroy France for the insult they offered you?”
“No, Sister. The one who did the deed is gone now, eaten by a puck, to add insult to his injury. And his mortal tool is in Hades’ hands, and Hades assures me that Philip the Bold will spend eternity being devoured by demons of the pit. At least, his soul will.”
In spite of herself, Themis took a certain pleasure in that fact, even knowing that Philip was never more than a tool of the elder demon, Beslizoswian.
“We have to make the humans stop calling us into the
mortal realm,” Zeus bellowed.
“And how do you propose we do that?” Nemesis asked.
“Do you really think that is a good idea?” Themis asked. “They have the right to make their own choices.”
“Not when they compel demonkind,” Zeus insisted.
“Well, I agree to that.” Themis nodded. Then she gave Zeus a sharp look. “Now I understand. Someone managed to get enough of your name to compel you.”
The call of a mortal to a demon great or small was dependent on the degree to which the caller knew the demon’s name. Zeus’ name wasn’t only Zeus. It was also Jupiter and ten thousand more words of power and legend. The larger and more powerful the demon, the longer and more complex the name. If the caller, be they mortal or demonic, had enough of the name, they could compel a demon, force it into a container of their choosing and make it obey them. That had happened to Themis because a human’s call is stronger than a demonic call. So the same knowledge of her name that failed to allow Beslizoswian to compel her, did allow his human tool to do so. Zeus was afraid that a human would get enough of his name to lock him into a container and control him.
Zeus confirmed her assessment with his next words. “Some pissant Greek scholar in Athens built himself a pentagram, put a statue of me in it, and tried to force me to throw a lightning bolt at the Church of the Conception in Athens.
“If he’d asked, I might have been tempted. The priest in that church is looking to burn heretics who pray to ‘false’ gods.”
“And where is he now?” Nemesis asked with a grin.
“Still there,” Zeus grumbled. “I didn’t want to give the torch-bearing Christians an excuse to go on a burning spree when I am starting to get actual worshipers again. Besides, moving into the mortal realm without a container is difficult and dangerous. I have no desire to have a puck in an enchanted cart run me down like Pucorl did Beslizoswian. Speaking of which, why in all the netherworld did you cede Beslizoswian’s lands to Pucorl?”