Narses gathered his guards in the Great Palace and made his way through the Chalkē Gate, across the Augustaion Square, and to the Patriarchate, which was by the entrance to Hagia Sophia. The doors were closed and barred from the inside. He pounded them with his fists just once, very hard, and then slipped down the doors toward the pavement.
Get up, you fucking idiot, get up.
Behind him, his guards must have been exchanging looks. But then Narses jumped back to his feet and pounded the gate again.
“I am Emperor Narses!” he shouted. “Open this gate in the name of Rome!”
“Paul Katena has claimed sanctuary,” came the old sweet voice of Patriarch Eustratios Garidas, on the wall’s far side. “It is sacred and inviolate!”
“So is law and order!” Narses shouted.
Drawing on the farr in his heart, Narses leaped over the wall and landed in the elegant courtyard on the other side. This place was mobbed with big-bearded priests in black robes and headdresses. All the priests whirled around and shouted at him the instant he landed. They raised bejeweled crosses, implored the sky, lifted ikons, opened golden books in his direction, and called him hellspawn, demon, shapeshifter, Sarakenou, Simonite. He pushed through them, knocked the more intransigent ones aside—a number of elderly, white-haired men among them—and pulled the crossbar off the gate, allowing his bodyguards to enter. Though the priests tried to block him, none actually struck him with anything.
Chumps.
Narses felt Paul hiding in the sacristy at the far end of Hagia Sophia’s enormous nave. Some priests ran ahead of Narses and blocked him, but after he drew his rhompaia they stepped aside.
As Narses and his guards walked closer to Paul, the parakoimomenos darted out of the sacristy and ran through the building, his robes flying behind him. Narses followed. His bodyguards also followed, as did the babbling moaning priests, including Patriarch Garidas.
“Majesty, let’s not be too hasty!” Paul gasped over his shoulder, zigzagging through a series of gorgeous black marble columns. “This is a house of god, the house of god, it cannot be profaned by blood or violence!”
“You embarrassed me in front of my fiancée,” Narses said.
“What?”
“I was with Erythro at Blachernae when the criminals attacked. The iron ball they fired damaged her palace. It could have killed us.”
“They hit you in Blachernae? But that means the range on their cannons must have improved by quite a bit—and in just a few months!” Paul was now passing enormous windows and mosaics. His voice echoed across the vast church interior. “From the straits to Blachernae, that must be two or three stadia at least! A few years from now, they’ll be able to hit us all the way from Trebizond!”
“You told me you sent scouts there. You told me they reported that the city was destroyed—and the criminals along with it.”
“Sorry,” Paul cried, running into the baptistry. “I had forgotten. I was ever so busy. When you asked me about it, I lied. Oops!”
“You are working with the criminals. You never explained how you survived the first siege of Trebizond.”
“Majesty, if I may speak frankly—”
“You may.”
“—that is absurd! I may not be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about your reign, given that you’ve managed to destroy half the City, plunder half its churches, and alienate its most important ally in just a few months, so who knows how much damage you’ll cause if you hold on to the throne for even a few years, you could be the end of Rome itself, the last presiding emperor, but the idea that I would join with that riffraff to undermine you—it’s ridiculous, patently ridiculous! I am a true patriot, just as much a red-blooded son of Rome as you are! I believe in its institutions, I believe in compromise and civility and norms, talking with senators, explaining things clearly and logically with evidence, petitioning for grievances, and so on and so forth. We might disagree here and there, but we are still Romans! Don’t you see? I would never seek to undermine the homeland!”
“Yet by your action or inaction, that is what you have done, logothete.” They were now climbing the stairs. “You didn’t send any scouts. You didn’t check on Trebizond. And now the criminals are stronger than ever. They must have somehow rebuilt everything I destroyed.”
They’re always building so much so fast, Narses thought. Always surprising us. Always confounding us.
“I suppose that means there’s hope, then.” Paul was sprinting along the gallery, past the golden mosaics of emperors.
“What?”
“Are you going to kill me, majesty?”
“If you have to ask me that question, the answer is usually yes.”
“But you need me, majesty, or have you already forgotten? Nobody knows the bureaucracy like I do! Nobody can liaise with the logothetes in the sekreta like I can. I’m indispensable—”
“You thought yourself the organized one. You thought yourself the educated, professional, experienced, intelligent one. But you forgot your most critical responsibility—the security of the homeland. Good Romans could have been killed or maimed, Paul.”
“Yes, I heard about what happened to Senator Scholastikos, what a terrible tragedy!”
“He was going to die sooner or later anyway. The Roman people are more immune to the disease of criminality without him.”
“Majesty, he was an old man, yes, but he was also one of your strongest supporters.” Paul was on his way back downstairs now. “At least when he was awake and knew where he was.”
“It will not be difficult to replace him, nor will it be difficult to replace you.”
“That’s not true, majesty! Think about the plans we have together. How are you going to reorganize the City without me? You wanted to turn it into a—what did you call it—a barracks with factories, or something along those lines.”
“The factory barracks.”
“Who else is even going to understand the concept? You were inspired by the criminals, but who else in the City has even seen Trebizond, at least the new Trebizond, except you and me? Who else understands it the way we do?”
Paul dashed out through the vaulted inner and outer narthexes, passing through the Silver Doors, above which was a Biblical inscription. “I am the gate of the sheep,” it read. “By me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.” Once Paul had reached the gardens and the courtyard outside, Narses—who was just behind him—raised his right hand to summon the farr. This knocked Paul flat onto his face. He groaned on the pavement.
The bodyguards and priests were keeping back by the doors, watching the horrifying scene as though afraid not to.
“No, majesty, no!” Paul crawled away on his back.
“I don’t need you.” Narses walked after him. “I’ve never needed you. I’ve never needed anyone.”
“Who is going to take my place, majesty? Who can do what I can?”
“You are a survivor, Paul, but you will not survive me.”
“Give me a name, majesty!”
“How many times have you sought my destruction? How often have you joked at my expense?”
“Who is to be my replacement, majesty?”
“Why did I ever rely on you in the first place? Why did I doubt myself? Why do I not meet with my many ministers, why do I only meet with you?”
“Who will replace me, majesty? Who?”
Narses stopped. It was true. He could think of no one. Paul was either incompetent, traitorous, or both. But no one knew the accounts like he did. And as awful as Paul was, his subordinate logothetes were even more pathetic and useless. The image of Georgatos writhing on the floor in a puddle of his own urine flashed in Narses’s mind.
Yet someone needed to be punished for the Paralos’s cowardly attack on the City, as well as the intelligence failures which had led to the entire imperial government believing that the criminal regime in Trebizond was no more. Who was to blame?
“Besides,” Paul said. “Think about how useful the Trapezuntines are. We can tell the plebs anything about Trebizond, and they believe it. We can blame Trebizond for a cloudy day, for every stubbed toe, and the populace eats it up. The criminals are rather convenient, wouldn’t you say? Anything we do, we can justify by saying it relates to destroying Trebizond. And if anyone questions us, we can say they’re working for the Trapezuntines. We can arrest them, execute them, or destroy their careers. Don’t you see, majesty? If Trebizond didn’t exist, we would have to invent it! So in a way, it’s a good thing that the Paralos attacked us today.”
“You knew all along. You didn’t tell me.”
“Actually, majesty, there was information in our intelligence reports. You just never read them.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“The information was vague.” Paul waved his hand. “From one of our agents, a man named Bryennios—he’s been hiding in a Laz village near Trebizond. The opportunity never presented itself.”
“Did you arm them, Paul? Did you send them money?”
“Are you insane? What sort of man would try to help those monsters?”
Narses stared at him. “You armed them. You sent them money.”
Paul pretended to laugh.
Narses aimed his rhompaia at Paul’s face. “Tell me. If you lie, I will know.”
Paul sighed. “I never sent them so much as a nomisma. Not so much as a single knife.”
“But?”
“I may have encouraged nearby cities to join them.”
“What? Nearby cities have joined Trebizond?”
“Several, I think. It was all I could do, majesty, to keep you in power here.”
“But does that then mean that Herakleia is still alive…?
“Word will no doubt be reaching Konstantinopolis of these defections soon, majesty. Don’t you understand? The people of the City—they need to fear Trebizond so much that their fear drives them into our arms. They need to think: ‘Rome might have problems, but at least it’s not Trebizond. We have to stick together to fight Trebizond.’”
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Narses laughed contemptuously. “You crazy bastard. Paul the Chain, always chaining conspiracies together. What is this CIA bullshit?”
“What? I may be crazy, but I’m also effective.”
“You were the one complaining this whole time about all the tax revenue we lost when our cities were destroyed.”
“Short-term risk can result in long-term gain, majesty.”
Paul was still trembling, gasping, sweating as he watched Narses. The sales pitch had been made; now was the time to keep silent. Whoever spoke first would lose.
“Do not fail me again.” Narses wagged his finger. “Logothete.”
“Oh, thank you, majesty!” Paul sprang forward, bowed on his face before Narses, and even kissed the emperor’s purple buskins. “You won’t regret this, I swear to God!”
“Get up,” Narses said.
“Yes, majesty.” Paul stood, but bowed his head, averted his eyes, and clutched his hands together.
“Go behind my back again, and I’ll kill you.”
Paul swallowed nervously. “Never again, majesty. My heart is an open book from now on.”
“It will be an open wound if you aren’t careful.”
“Of course, majesty.”
“Now,” Narses said. “We have work to do. Everything must change. Especially now that multiple cities may have joined the criminals.”
They returned to the palace, followed by Narses’s bodyguards. The priests hung back by the Great Church, and seemed almost disappointed that Narses had decided against taking Paul’s soul. But Narses never would have done that. Paul’s soul was disgusting.
Better to let the devil take him. If he even wants him.
Narses went to his office with Paul, his guards, and several eunuch secretaries. There, with Paul still disheveled from his near-death experience with Narses in Hagia Sophia, they struggled to figure out how to raise more money in order to build the factories and armies that the empire needed.
“There is nothing left to tax, majesty.” Paul bent over his massive account book. “You and your thugs have looted all but the great churches, stripping them of every last grain of golden dust. I estimate that we will now run out of money and go over the fiscal cliff, as it were, in approximately three weeks.”
Before Narses could speak, the slave Iwannis rushed inside the office, bowed, and then apologized for the interruption. “Two dromons have been reported lost in the pursuit of the criminal ship,” he said. “Along with all hands aboard.”
Paul covered his face and sighed; Narses struggled to keep from choking Iwannis to death.
“The Wolf,” Narses said. “Was it sunk?”
Iwannis gulped. “It was, aphéntēs.”
“Get out!” Narses screamed. “Get out!”
Iwannis bowed and ran away.
“Eight dromons in the fleet remain,” Paul said. “It was a miracle I was able to have them built and crewed in the first place…”
“Can they stop the Paralos, logothete? Can they do anything?”
“The crews are untrained, majesty. We went to war with the military we had at the time, one woefully under-equipped and underfunded ever since the disaster at Mantzikert—”
Narses bashed his desk with his fist. Everyone else in the office—Paul, secretaries, guards—jumped. Even the office’s many busts and statues almost jumped.
“I tire of hearing about what we cannot do,” Narses said. “I want to know what we can do.”
“Yes, majesty.”
“We must offer a bounty for that ship and its crew,” Narses said. “I would pawn the imperial crown in exchange for the head of its captain.”
“Do you even know his name, majesty?”
“Gontran Koraki,” Narses said. “More Latin scum. We interrogated him in Kitezh. He will not have forgotten us.”
“Ah, yes, I remember that group. They were most intransigent. No matter what advanced interrogation techniques we applied, they simply refused to provide us with any actionable intelligence. One has to wonder why they sailed that ship through the straits in the first place. Where could they possibly be going?”
Narses had stood from his desk to examine the huge, nearly inscrutable map on the office wall. “Doubtless they seek allies in the Middle Sea. Sarakenoi, Venetians, Normans.”
“All more or less as unenthusiastic about the criminals as we are,” Paul said. “This Koraki will not have an easy task ahead of him.”
“I would destroy them all at once, if I could.” Narses was looking at the different countries marked on the map. “Turkdom, Aegyptos, Cordoba, Sicilia, Venetia. All of them. I would drink the blood of every last man, woman, and child in these places. If I could make them all vanish forever with a snap of my fingers, I wouldn’t hesitate.”
“We dislike their governments but not their people, majesty. Besides, we need to think about who will be doing all the nastier jobs in this reconstituted Roman Empire you wish to establish across the world. If we kill everyone, who will mine our gold for us?”
This question brought Narses back to Earth. How to fund world conquest? Three tagmata plus just over a dozen dromons and their crews had nearly bankrupted the Roman government. The medieval world had no answers to this question. None of the Middle Sea powers possessed the ability to conquer the rest. The only recent changes in the regional status quo had been the expansion of the Turks in the east and that of the Venetians and Normans in the west. Everything else had stayed more or less the same for centuries. No matter what anyone did, they almost always ended up back where they had started.
This world had no answers. Narses needed an answer from the old world. How had powerful countries in the old world funded war? Where did money come from? Why was the dollar valuable, while other currencies were worthless? Narses was no historian. He had always taken the easiest social studies classes in high school, the ones taught by gym teachers, their curriculums amounting to little more than the memorization of random dates. Yet there was so much the old world possessed that this world lacked. The internet, computers, airplanes, tanks, battleships, electricity, cars, satellites, and on, and on. There was so much that needed to be built, and Narses had no idea how to pay for it, much less how any of it worked. That he had even jumpstarted the basilik project in the first place was a miracle, and a sure sign of his genius. In the old world he had just been a football player, a lobsterman’s son who was planning to join the police, military, or business if his sports career failed to take off. That was it. He was no engineer, no economist, no historian, no pencil neck poindexter. You needed to know so much to rebuild the old world here, a task which had taken Europeans centuries to pull off.
Yet the empire’s financial situation kept frustrating him. He remembered, in the old world, how the news his parents left on the TV in the living room all day, every day talked about the national debt and kicking the can down the road. Somehow the old world government borrowed money from itself in order to pay for what it needed. Narses had never understood this. Nobody did, especially because the government also collected taxes. Why collect taxes if you could just generate all the money you needed out of thin air? It made no sense. From a financial perspective, the government was like a family, like a household, but also completely different. No family could generate money out of thin air. It always needed to come from somewhere.
He had definitely noticed, in Romanía, that there were no banks. But not only that—the very idea of banking was nonexistent. People saved money on their own for themselves, but Christ forbid loaning money at interest. You could either pay for things, or you couldn’t. There was no in-between. There was no borrowing, at least not on a large scale. Loaning money was illegal, peasants did occasionally complain to the government, and the government did occasionally take action on their behalf. This meant that if you had money, you sat on it. You really did literally hide it under your bed, or in a hole in your farmland.
Even if you could invest in something like a factory, there was little paper to track it, no legal liability, and then who could even be sure that the workers would show up on time to work? There were no clocks! Time here was measured in hours, not in the minutes used to work out old world pay scales. Even the prison and police systems were woefully underdeveloped. There were a total of maybe a dozen prison cells in all of Konstantinopolis. Convicts were usually killed, branded, enslaved, or exiled. Period. The only thing in Rome resembling a local police force were slave catchers, and they were employed privately. A few hundred guards protected the Great Palace, and the army protected the frontiers and garrisoned the cities in case of attack. That was it. If workers started organizing, who was going to stop them without the police? If a barbarian army destroyed your factory, who was going to pay for it? No one!
Yet the empire’s financial system, such as it was, had worked, after a fashion, once upon a time. Paul had spoken of almost limitless chambers under the Great Palace which prior penny-pinching emperors had packed with mountains of gold coin so high you could climb them, the valleys between so deep you could dive inside them like they were oceans. Now they were empty.
Narses needed to fill them again.
Banks were the answer. People hated banks, but old world economic life was impossible without them. It was also impossible to build up his army without the kind of wealth that came from banks. So Rome needed a bank. A national bank. Whatever that meant. All the rich property owners needed a safe place where they could deposit their money—instead of hiding it—so that their money would work for them, just as Narses had told that stupid soldier Autoreianos, just as Narses’s old world father had told him, on one of the very rare occasions in which they had spoken with each other. The bank could invest that money in factories, and then use the profits to pay dividends back the investors, who would then reinvest those dividends in more profitable factories, and on and on, so that everyone won. Narses remembered from his history textbooks that this was called industrialization. That was what he would call it. As with the Defense Force, the entire project would take on a momentum all its own, once it was set in motion. The deposits could be insured by the imperial government and backed by the Roman sword, so that as long as the empire existed, it was impossible for investors to lose. And if they failed to invest—if they refused to join the party—they would be outcompeted and driven into poverty by those rich people who did invest.
On top of that, the bank could issue those IOUs—paper money—Narses had been talking about before with Paul, in order to get over the relentless fact that it was impossible to pay for anything. They had a printing press in the palace somewhere; it had been stolen from the Venetians in Galata, and the had stolen it from the Trapezuntines. Now all Narses needed was paper, ink, and some creative blacksmiths who could forge the proper type. Carpenters also needed to build more printing presses. Clocks needed to be designed, constructed, and installed in the City squares so that workers showed up to work on time. Weights and measures needed to be standardized in order to keep everyone on the same page. Everything needed to expand. Entire forests needed to be transformed into paper money, the hearts of mountains mined to provide the iron needed for the type and the new machines.
Yet Narses’s time as a general and now an emperor had taught him that there was always resistance to progress.
The first rule of life is: people are stupid.
You couldn’t just build factories and offer wages and expect people to show up and work. People weren’t just stupid—they were also lazy. They would have to be inspired to work.
After all, Rome was content with its backwardness and mediocrity. The senators and imperial houses would refuse to invest. The people would refuse to accept paper money in exchange for their labor. Neither the rich nor the poor would trust any of these ideas. Why should they? That was why none of them had thought up anything like this on their own—and why they needed a genius like Narses to do everything for them. Even in the old world, plenty of people asked questions about the system. Narses’s dad had invested how much of their savings in gold that was advertised on TV commercials in between news segments? Yet the funny thing was, all you got in exchange for your money was a slip of paper saying that it was worth so much gold. Who even knew where this gold was stored, if the paper could be actually redeemed for it, or if it even existed.
Stupid people would resist Narses’s brilliant ideas, just like always. This meant that everything would have to be done at sword point. Narses still thankfully had his Defense Force—his three tagmata of loyal troops, plus twelve dromons and their crews. He needed to use them to compel the senators and imperial houses—the dynatoi—to invest in his national bank. Then he needed to force the people to accept promissory notes as wages for their labor. Somehow he needed to draw up a bank charter or something with Paul, even though neither of them knew anything about how to do this.
But that wasn’t the end of Narses’s plans. Banks and paper money by themselves were meaningless without investment opportunities. And the economy, at the moment, was anything but prospective. Everything was either stuck in the same place or in a state of obvious accelerating decline. The go-getter spirit of entrepreneurship was nonexistent because the government, the church, the dynatoi, and even the collegia (the ancient Roman guilds) refused to allow innovators like Narses to get to work. Instead, any potential entrepreneurs were suffocating beneath mountains of regulations, all in the name of supposed stability.
Months ago, for instance, Makrenos had mentioned the government’s price controls, and Narses had never forgotten this, since the idea had seemed so foreign. Yet price controls were everywhere here. Narses had looked into the issue with Paul. It was almost as though the government was trying to hold business back for some reason, like it was afraid of something. In the old world, nobody told business how to set prices. The market decided that. And everyone knew that any interference in the market would destroy the economy. You needed to let the market work its magic. That was how innovation, creativity, and synergy happened. As it was there, so it needed to be here. Unleash the market, and you could lead the world.
Narses would therefore remove all price controls. Let businesses compete to provide the best prices, products, and services. Put everything up for sale. Make it so that anyone could invest in anything—housing, farmland, you name it. Put all the City’s lazy, stupid beggars—who constantly took advantage of the church’s generosity—to work. Put everyone to work. Free them from the inefficient, backward, counterproductive regulations of church, government, and collegia, throw them all onto the labor market, and let the ones who worked the hardest and smartest rise to the top. Most importantly, keep taxes low. Don’t punish people for their success.
That would supercharge the economy and incentivize growth. Narses would have so much money, he wouldn’t even know where to spend it.
The Paralos’s attack on the City was a disaster, yes, but also an opportunity to change everything. Everyone everywhere could voluntarily exchange goods and services, just as they had always wanted. And if anyone stood in the way, Narses would kill them.
He explained this to Paul, who took notes, and asked questions. Yet for once, the parakoimomenos had little to say in the way of opposition. This great thinker—contemptuous of anything Narses said, thought, or did—was out of ideas, and still shaken by the Paralos’s attack, by his own machinations blowing up in his face.
Blowback. That’s what it’s called.
Rome’s situation was desperate—more desperate than when the geese had warned of the invading Gauls a thousand years ago, when the future universal empire was just a few mud huts on the Tiber. Now the imperial government had little to lose from trying something new.
When Narses and Paul finally took a break, it was black outside the windows. Time had rushed past with a speed that shocked Narses. He had thought it was still afternoon, and had failed to notice the slaves lighting candles and torches while he and Paul talked, wrote, planned. They had also forgotten dinner. Yet Paul told him that in the morning, he would put these plans into action. Criers would be sent into the City announcing this new word—this new world—“industrialization”—and Paul would recruit the bureaucrats needed to staff the immense new government apparatus. A new era would begin.
