The Shadow of Ararat (9 page)

Aurelian barked with laughter, throwing his head back, teeth bright in the forest of his beard. "Ah, you give the game away, Imperial brother! Little mouse is too sharp eyed not to see your mental state."

Swinging off the stool, Aurelian weaved his way through the tumbled debris to the cool stone and the wine residing in it. Galen, having pulled up at Maxian's exclamation, nervously scratched his head, turning around again. The Emperor went to the inner wall of the room, where a space had been cleared among the benches and a square pedestal set up to hold the second new thing. On the stone block, a drape lay over a round object. Galen drew back the heavy wool covering, revealing a glossy plate, or dish, inscribed with thousands of tiny markings.

"Do you know what this is?" the Emperor muttered, nervous hands folding the coverlet up into neat squares.

"No, I cannot say that I do," the youngest Prince answered. He sipped from the goblet Aurelian had given him, then choked and spit out the vintage on the floor. "Pah! This is terrible!"

He glared at Aurelian, who was blissfully pulling a long draft from his own glass. "You have the wine-taste of a donkey..."

"It is a
telecast
," the Emperor said, ignoring the by-play of his siblings.

"It is very old, older than the Pharoahs, brought to Rome by the Republican general Scipio from Egypt when he was governor of that province. It allows a seer, or one with the power, to gain sight over great distances or even conversation if there is such a device where one looks upon." Now the Emperor was very calm, gesturing to his youngest brother. "I need you to make it work."

Galen stepped aside, clearing off the table nearest to the bronze plate. Maxian stared at him in amazement, giving the wineglass back to Aurelian without thinking. Aurelian hiccupped and poured the remaining wine from his brother's glass into his own.

"Ah, brother," Maxian said, "dear brother. I am not a wizard. I am a healer, and not a very powerful one at that. This, this telecast, is the province of the Imperial Thaumaturges, not I."

The Emperor shook his head, leaning back on the edge of the map table. Now his gaze, normally quick to dart about the room, settled on Maxian, and the young man felt the full power of personality that his brother possessed. Maxian shivered, their father had often had such a look upon his face. Galen gestured to the plate again. His will was not to be denied.

Maxian stood up, rubbing his hands on his tunic. Cautiously he approached the device. From a distance, it seemed a plain metal plate, save for the tiny markings. Up close, however, it was revealed to be a series of interlocking bronze rings on a sturdy stand of greenish metal. As the Prince circled it, the rings separated, brushed by the wind of his passage, and slowly spun apart from one another. Maxian pulled up short, becoming utterly still. Behind him, Galen backed slowly away toward the door.

Involuntarily Maxian centered himself and extended his sight, seeking the source of the unfelt wind that now accelerated the rings of the plate into an irregular sphere. As he did so, a dim blue light began to form at the center of the rings. No zephyr drove the whirring sphere of pale incandescence that now gleamed before him. Unconsciously he raised a hand to shield his eyes from a dull flash that he felt building in the device.

It came, filling the room with a blurring glow, and then faded. The Prince stepped forward to the edge of the stone block. Behind him he heard the shuffle of feet as his brothers raised themselves from behind the bench. A tart smell hung in the air, like a summer storm. The spinning rings were gone, now only a blue-white sphere a foot or more across, mottled with green and brown, hung in the air before them. The orb whispered, filling the room with a barely audible hum.

"What is it?" Aurelian whispered, his eyes wide.

"It is the world," both of his brothers answered, their voices as one.

Galen and Maxian turned, staring first at the map table spread out behind them, then back to the slowly rotating globe that was now suspended above the stone block. Half of it stood in shadow, the other half in light. As they watched, they could see white drifts of cloud slowly boil up as they grew over the
Mare Internum
.

Maxian leaned very close to the device, seeing the coastline of Italia inch past. He looked up at his brother, the Emperor.

"It's going to rain in Puetoli this afternoon," he said.

Galen blinked slowly, his face hardening as he struggled against the fear the device inspired.

"Clever." He sneered. "Show me the Eastern Capital."

Maxian sighed, all too used to Galen's short temper. He backed up and slowly circled the sphere. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his brothers begin to edge back to the other side of the room. Now started, it continued to spin at an almost unnoticeable rate. Puzzled, the young healer tilted his head, trying to catch the odd thought that was nibbling at the edge of his thought.

Ah,
he realized,
the sphere is tilted a little around its center of spin. Odd—why would that be?

He put the thought aside. In his expanded sight, there was a faint glimmer of energy around the globe and as he approached it, it brightened. Carefully he leaned close to the sphere and concentrated on picking out the city of Constantinople, now the capital of the Eastern Empire.

The surface of the
telecast
swirled and suddenly there was a great rushing sensation. Maxian leapt back in surprise, crying out and cracking his hand against the edge of the map table. A flashing afterimage of seas and lands and city walls hurtling toward him at an impossible speed faded. Behind him, his brothers had scattered at his sudden movement.

"Damn!" Maxian snarled, shaking the pain out of his hand. "That was unexpected."

"What was?" came a muffled question from behind the couches.

"It shows us the city, brothers, but it is not a pretty sight," he answered.

Galen placed a hand on his younger brother's shoulder as he edged up, peering in the murky scene in the surface of the sphere. His face twisted in amusement.

"Ah, my brother Emperor is having an interesting day," the Western Emperor said.

Constantinople was burning.

The blow came with a ringing gong-sound and a blur of sparkling white light. Stunned, Heraclius fell heavily on his side, all vision gone in his right eye. Booted feet kicked at him and he struggled to roll upright. Nothing but instinct dragged his shield across his body to cover his face and upper torso. A second blow slammed into the leather-and-brass shield, crushing the breath from the Roman's chest. Nerveless, his right hand scrabbled in the muck of blood and rainwater for his sword. Suddenly his fingers caught on the wirebound hilt.

Another blow smashed into the shield, but the Roman surged off of the ground, thrusting up with the short stabbing sword. The tip slid off metal rings and bit into flesh. A man gasped in pain. Heraclius shook his head to clear the blood from his eyes. When he could see again, the line of battle on the parapet had surged back, away from him. Red cloaks swarmed around him now as the Guard crowded forward against the Slavic swordsmen fighting on the walkway between the two towers. There was a high shrieking as the Guardsmen's axes rose and fell, flashing with blood. A monstrous ringing of steel on iron drowned out all other sounds. Rain fell out of the dead gray sky in billowing sheets. Water ran down the side of Heraclius' neck and in the hot armor, that was a blessed feeling for a moment.

Now the melee had run aground on the clutch of grapnels and ladders that the barbarians had managed to lodge on the outer wall. Towers rose up at either end of the rampart, joining the great exterior wall of the city and the lesser wall that fronted the narrow inlet called the Golden Horn. Seeing that the critical moment had passed, Heraclius strode back to the nearest tower.

Sappers in padded leather armor and open-faced helmets were crowding out of the narrow doorway, each carrying thick green-glass jars in frames of cotton batting. Heraclius stood well aside, his back against the low retaining wall that faced the inner wall of the battlement, as they passed. Behind the sappers came slaves in tunics of dirty cotton carrying long brass tubes, ornamented with curling dragon faces. They also had an odd valve slung over their shoulders and heavy leather gloves that reached up to their elbows. Moisture continued to drizzle out of the sky, making the footing difficult on the walkway.

Heraclius struggled to pull the heavy helmet off of his head, finally succeeding. Gasping, he turned his face to the heavens, feeling the hot sweat sluice away in the rain. With one broad hand, he slicked back his hair, the heavy blond curls catching at his fingers. He tucked the helmet under his left arm.

"Brother!" came a shout from the tower above. Heraclius looked up. On the fighting platform twenty feet over his head, Theodore waved at him, sun-browned face creased with a wide smile. "Come up, the Avars are taking to their boats!"

Heraclius turned and surveyed the situation on the battlement. The Guard was kicking the last of the bodies off the walkway onto a great heap in the narrow street below. None of the raiders seemed to have escaped. The grapnels and ladders that they had raised under the cover of the mists and rain had been thrown down or cut away. The sappers were fitting their hoses and pipes to the glass bottles and bronze tubing. In moments, he knew, the battlement would be hellishly hot and tremendously dangerous, particularly half flooded with rainwater as it was. He shouldered his way past a file of slaves and climbed the wooden stairs to the top of the tower.

The waters of the Golden Horn were only partially visible in the gusts of rain. The vast city that stood at his back was clouded by mists and vapors, only the nearest tenements and buildings partially visible through the murk. It seemed that the tower rode in an endless sea of gray, with only ghosts and apparitions for company. Theodore had joined a troop of archers surveying the narrow strand at the base of the walls. Theodore waved his brother over, his own light-blond beard and blue eyes obscured by his helm.

"Brother, dear, I thought that Martina had finally trained you not to wear the Red Boots out into the field." Theodore's pale face was creased by a particularly sly grin.

Heraclius shook his head, answering "It's the garb of a soldier I wore today."

"Ah, then it must be the foundation of your majesty staining them so."

Heraclius glanced down; his riding boots, a plain brown leather pair, were caked with blood from the fight on the walkway, a dark red now fading to black. He cuffed his younger brother on the side of the helmet. "Fool."

"I am no fool!" Theodore said, in feigned outrage. "I am a philosopher, pointing out obvious truths to those too dense to find them for themselves."

Heraclius ignored him with the ease of long practice and stared over the edge of the tower. Fifty feet below him, the narrow beach was swarming with barbarians and hundreds of boats. The Varangians on the lower parapet were shouting insults down and following them with the heads of those attackers who had managed to reach the wall.

A piercing whistle cut through the din as the master sapper stood back, waving a green flag. The Guardsmen, hearing the whistle, hurried to the shelter of the far tower. The other soldiers also drew back from the crew of engineers. The leather-clad men hoisted the long bronze tubes over the edge of the wall. Behind them, the slaves hung onto the ends of long poles attached to pump bladders. A second whistle rang out and the slaves dragged down on their handles. Even from the height of the tower, Heraclius shivered in his hot armor at the faint gurgling sound that came as the hand-pumps sucked the black fluid out of the green-glass bottles. The engineers holding the brass tubes leaned out into the embrasures, a slow-match extended on an iron holder. Pitch daubed around the mouthpieces of the tubes flickered into a pale flame. The engineers handed the matchsticks back to a second set of slaves who immediately doused them in buckets of sand held close for such a purpose. The pump slaves dragged down again, and now the canvas tubes flexed as the black liquid pulsed through them.

Heraclius forced himself to look down through the falling rain and mist to the tiny shore. While the barbarians were still swarming about below, many were clambering back onto their makeshift boats. There were thousands of Avars and their Slavic allies on the beach or in the water. Their faces with pale, distant ovals—the Avars marked by a sallow cast and the Slavs by a wealth of red hair. The Emperor felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned to see the pale face of Theodore.

"You do not have to watch, brother," the Prince whispered. "They chose to come against the great city in arms..."

Heraclius gently brushed Theodore's gauntlet aside, saying "I am Emperor, I should look fully upon the works that I set in motion." He turned back.

The first jet of yellow-green flame arced out into the air. For a moment it hung, suspended, almost motionless, above the upturned faces of the barbarians packed into the narrow space between the sea and the foot of the wall. Then another dragon-tongue licked out. Then another, and another. In the misty air, the jets of
phlogiston
began to diffuse as they fell, becoming a blazing cloud of superheated air and incandescent fire. The first cloud drifted onto a great clump of Slavs, struggling to climb onto one of the larger barges. Like a delicate veil, the burning air settled around the men on the boat and in the water. Then it seemed to go out, though men began to scream, and smoke leapt from their hair.

In only a grain, the entire beach burst into raging green-white flame and the tumult of hysterical screaming shot up from below like a signal rocket. Heraclius flinched as the sound of unendurable agony tore at his eardrums. Below him, men writhed in flames that burrowed and tore at their flesh. Hundreds tried to dive into the water to douse the crawling green-gold flames, but the
phlogiston
stuck and hissed and continued to burn, even in the waters. The whole mob surged back and forth in the narrow space, unable to flee, trampling one another, bones cracking under the weight of the frenzied crowd. Air burned away, strangling men the fire had not yet consumed. Flesh bubbled and popped as the fire clawed through holes in armor and eyepieces in helmets. The boats, overloaded, suddenly tipped over, sending hundreds more to a watery embrace in death.