Criers ventured into the City at dawn. Clutching wax tablets, each man was guarded by an entire century of legionaries, and accompanied by large numbers of logothetes, as well as slaves carrying tables, chairs, paper, pens, ink, and royal seals. Konstantinopolis still looked like a war zone in the early morning gloom—buildings were still charred, roads still scattered with rubble—but the survivors of the chaos had organized enough to cart the dead bodies outside the Land Walls into a pit for burning. Once the flames subsided, the bones were blessed by Patriarch Garidas himself—who announced that all those Christians who had lost their lives in the last week would be guaranteed bodily resurrection on Judgment Day, at least so long as good people showed up to church and prayed for the redemption of their immortal souls. Then the cooked bones were buried.

  This indulgence, proffered without regard to the traitorous behavior of the dead when they had still been alive, angered Narses. As everyone knew, it was impossible to achieve salvation by faith in Christ alone. One needed to follow the Ten Commandments, for instance, do good works, and render unto Caesar, etcetera. Garidas was Nikephoros’s appointee—Nikephoros’s dull-witted creature, favored by Helena, the deceased empress dowager—and was showing too much independence and initiative for Narses. The emperor ordered Iwannis to inform Garidas that any major changes in church policy required imperial approval.

  I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone. But let the dead bury the dead.

  Now the criers had announcements of their own to make. Taking up positions below the central columns in the City’s main squares—the Milion, the Forum of Konstantinos, the Forum Tauri, the Philadelphion, the Forum of the Ox, the Forum of Arkadios—the criers would soon begin reading the script they had copied earlier in the morning onto their wax tablets.

  At this point, Narses was inside the upper story of the Chalkē Gate, from which he could watch and hear the crier in the nearby Milion Square. This lay less than a stadion away, straight along the pavement and just past the Baths of Zeuxippos on the left and the Augustaion on the right. The square was already crowded with residents (mostly women), horses, oxen, and even chickens, goats, and sheep. Perhaps people believed that some normalcy was returning to the City.

  If only they knew.

  “People of Rome!” the crier bellowed. “Hear ye this important proclamation from your emperor, His Majesty Narses I!”

  Few in the square even stopped to listen. The only reaction Narses discerned was booing, which stopped when Kentarch Baghdasar blew his whistle: two long bursts and one short burst. This was the signal for his men to draw their swords halfway from their sheathes as a warning.

  Crowd control.

  In response, the mob moved away from the legionaries—they had never gotten close to begin with—and watched the crier. They also eyed the roads that led away from the square. These were still open; Narses was uninterested in yet another riot.

  Baghdasar blew two short bursts and one long burst. His men sheathed their blades, and the crier continued.

  “Yesterday the Holy City of Byzantion was attacked by the cowards and traitors of Trebizond,” the crier shouted. “Among the victims of this unprovoked act of barbarism was the good Senator Scholastikos, may he rest in peace.”

  “I thought Narses said he took care of those bastards!” someone shouted.

  Kentarch Baghdasar glared at this man but took no further action.

  The crier continued. “His Majesty Narses I, in his wisdom and fortitude, swears that these satanic hellspawn, who have neither honor nor regard for the sanctity of human life, will soon answer to the law for their crimes. But because of these unprecedented dangers to our great City, to the divine, to civilization itself, and to all we hold dear, we must take new measures in order to ensure that Rome—and not chaos—dominates the world now and always!”

  An expectant silence from the crowd. What were these new measures?

  “First,” the crier shouted. “His Majesty announces the creation of a new Bank of Rome, to be located at the Great Palace. This will enrich the Roman people and empower the Roman Empire to combat all threats.”

  “What the hell is a bank?” someone yelled. “Do you mean like a riverbank?”

  The crier ignored the heckler. (Criers were only trained to make announcements, not to field questions from the mob.) “Second. Any literate male citizen who knows his figures is encouraged to apply for work at the Great Palace today. Clerks of all kinds are urgently needed. Salaries at the new bank will be competitive.”

  “You didn’t answer my question!”

  “Third. His Majesty announces the creation of paper money. Starting soon, paper money will become legal currency throughout Rome. Anyone who refuses paper payment will face the full force of the law.”

  The mob murmured.

  “You mean we’ll get paper for our work,” someone shouted. “Instead of gold? But paper’s worthless!”

  Before long, this murmuring had turned to shouts of abuse, and declarations that they would only accept paper money over their dead bodies.

  So be it, Narses thought. You must embrace progress. I will lead you forward whether you like it or not.

  “Fourth,” the crier said. “New factories are to be established for the production of weapons, armor, clothing, and other commodities. Workers will be needed to construct and staff these factories, so make sure to apply today!”

  “Not if they’re paying us in paper,” another heckler said. “Not if the collegia have anything to say about it. There are rules you have to follow. You can’t just start building factories and putting workers in ‘em!”

  The crier went on. “Since His Majesty anticipates an influx of labor which shall have to be fed, all farmland in the countryside is to be sold to the highest and most productive bidder. Common land will be enclosed.”

  No reaction from the crowd. City folk hardly knew that the countryside existed to begin with. Their whole world lay within Konstantinopolis’s walls.

  “To pay for these initiatives,” the crier said, “most church and monastic property will be confiscated. The collegia are abolished; their property, tools, buildings and so on revert to the emperor. Any Roman who refuses to work shall not eat.”

  Now the mob was shouting so loudly the crier could barely be heard. Narses only knew the contents of the speech because he had dictated them himself.

  “Fifth,” the crier said. “All Roman males of marriageable age must marry. Eunuch surgery will be outlawed. Any woman who induces a miscarriage shall forfeit her life, as shall anyone who assists women in partaking of this unholy act that goes against God, nature, and family. Barbarians will be encouraged to settle within the City so long as they swear allegiance to Rome, in order to combat the labor shortage. All Romans in Konstantinopolis must now register with logothete census takers—declaring age, marital status, work status, and home address—on pain of death.”

  This flurry of announcements overwhelmed the mob. Narses feared that another riot would begin, but the radical leaders and their supporters had already perished in the violence of the past few days. Now, when the century in the Milion Square drew their swords a second time, that was enough to quiet the crowd. Soon infantry squads were herding people into lines, and logothetes were taking their information and issuing stamped identity tokens—which needed to be inked onto wood chips, paper being in such short supply.

  Narses recalled how even acquiring ink had been a problem. Like everything, it was in short supply. But these tokens were only temporary. Once the paper and ink supply chain and production processes were standardized, industrialized, and optimized, every Roman would have an official identity card.

  For now, the logothetes told the crowd to keep their identity tokens on their persons, on pain of the whip, otherwise they could not be paid for their labor.

  “You can’t build an empire when you’re blind,” Narses told his bodyguards Axouch and Sulayman inside the upper story of the Chalkē Gate. He was pacing back and forth and gesturing, almost breathless with excitement. “You need to know exactly how many people you have, what they can do with their time, whether they can work on farms, for instance, or whether they need to weave cloth at home. We have the birth and death records from each parish register, so we have a rough idea of our population numbers, but that’s all.”

  “Yes, aphéntēs,” the guards said in unison.

  “As for what happens between everyone’s birth and death, so long as they’re not in the military or working in the government, we don’t know what they’re doing, and until now, we never cared, as long as they paid their taxes. The collegia know what their guildsmen and their families are up to, or I should say—they did know. Because now the collegia are broken.”

  The guards were silent. Narses laughed.

  “The collegia and the monasteries are no more. They cannot hold us back any longer. The workers have nowhere else to go, nothing else to depend on, no other way to survive. They must sell their labor to us for a wage—and then must use that wage to purchase necessities like food or clothing or housing or whatever from us. But we are different. We are not like workers. They sell labor in order to buy necessities, but we buy their labor in order to sell necessities. Their ancient cycle of exchange stops after one round because they buy only for use: exchanging their wages for food which they consume, for example. But our new cycle of exchange continues infinitely. It’s undertaken in the name of exchange itself, rather than use, accruing more and more value with each round. We buy workers’ labor in order to make cloth, then sell that cloth for a profit, then invest that profit in more labor and more cloth to sell, and on and on!”

  The soldiers kept still and silent.

  “This is how we’ll build our empire. Our men will put people to work so we can fund conquests for more land, more resources, more labor. Once we acquire these, we can train more soldiers, and then conquer more land, until all the world belongs to us!”

  “Yes, aphéntēs.” The guards nodded.

  “You have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s just gibberish to you, isn’t it? Of course it is. The words of a genius sound like gibberish to fools. Nobody is paying you for your intellects. Nobody ever has. But that’s what they pay me for. That’s why I’m here. To save the empire. You can’t do it with brute strength alone. You need will. You need mind. And so this is the way. I always sensed the importance of economics, even when I was a child. Now I understand that if we change the economics of this place, we can conquer the world. We will take back our lands, instead of losing them. We will defend our nation’s rights, the way individuals defend their rights. In this world, gentlemen, you are either the hammer or the anvil. I intend to make Rome into the hammer once again. Do we not tire of always being the anvil? Of having our lands and honor, our very people, torn from us by merciless savages?”

  The guards bowed in silence.

  Activities were proceeding in the Milion Square, meanwhile. Once the workers had their identity tokens, the logothetes ordered them to report to this or that part of the City, mostly to construct factories or new housing. Some workers threw their tokens away, but picked them up again at the soldiers’ behest. Other workers were shocked into silence, or crying with disbelief. For them, this was like the apocalypse. All their material possessions and even their workplaces in the collegia—their entire worlds—had been signed away. Was this really happening? How could it be possible?

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Soon enough, the money drowning all existence—the money produced by their own desperate labor—would separate these workers even from their friends and family. Every relationship would become a money relationship. All your relatives would simply be awaiting your death so they could get your stuff. Everyone would be miserable and alone, with few having any idea why, since every problem would be blamed on minorities or other countries, rather than on the new way of doing things, the new system. But this was the price of world conquest, of a dignified and glorious revolution. This was the only kind of society which could go all the way.

  Narses had spent the previous night pouring over maps of the City with his slaves, marking the ruins that needed to be torn down and replaced with factories. There was more space than might have been expected, particularly near the walls, where you could even find plots of farmland, orchards, vegetable gardens. But all of this needed to be torn down or torn up. Stone needed to be quarried, foundations laid, metal forged, engineers and architects trained, new alchemical materials developed, the ancient formula for concrete rediscovered.

  So much work. So little time.

  Narses was trying to recreate the old world market economy here in Konstantinopolis. Yet he suspected that his methods were different—less natural and organic—compared to how the old world had built itself. Normally, you were supposed to just let entrepreneurs innovate, then things take care of themselves. But he was probably the only entrepreneur on Earth right now, so it was up to him to jumpstart that innovation process, to use shock therapy to wake the medieval world from its slumber, its mystical demon-haunted dreams of constellations shining in the night.

  Everyone needed to be buying and selling everything using money. The more it was used, the more valuable it would become. Soon enough, Narses would even form the first joint stock companies. All of these changes and cycles of exchange would precipitate an economic nuclear chain reaction, one which would consume and destroy everything, in the process creating something that no one here had ever seen before.

  But to do this, they needed more labor. There was plenty in the countryside, where peasants and slaves had been farming for their own consumption in more or less the same backward, inefficient fashion for thousands of years. With improved tools and agricultural techniques, with the market dictating terms rather than peasants’ bellies, Rome could produce more food with less labor. This would require cutting down forests and draining swamps and turning these into farmland. Unproductive freeholders would be driven off their lands and put to better use working for a wage in the cities. Their farms would be consolidated for efficiency. You could get a good price for wool and cloth these days, so why not replace farmland with sheep walks?

  To begin this process, Narses needed to send Konstantinopolitans into the countryside. Yet this was the last thing any of them wanted. What was the countryside, to even the lowliest Konstantinopolitan, except a wretched wasteland of barbarism, where Turks or god knows who could charge out of nowhere at any moment to kill you and destroy your farm and enslave your women and children? Many people had come to the City in the first place to escape the countryside. They were always searching for better lives. Half the City population these days seemed to be Anatolian refugees.

  But Narses had an answer for that, too. Basiliks—miniature basiliks, like the one that Latin bastard Gontran Koraki had shot him with at the first Siege of Trebizond—would stop the barbarians. Miniature basiliks would end the age of barbarian hordes galloping across the map, conquering nations, plundering cities. Thanks to new guns, new laws, new markets, the countryside would become safe for investment.

  Yet even with guns for protection, the regular Konstantinopolitan worker would die before agreeing to live in the countryside. But the merchants might behave differently if there was a financial incentive—if the market was the only limit on what they could buy or sell, and if they likewise had the right to evict tenants or even to seize unproductive tenancies or common lands. Narses would guarantee all of this with his legionaries. Merchants, legionaries, and logothetes would march into the countryside to tear up the ancient ways. Narses would write new laws with letters of blood and fire.

  But he knew better than to trust his thousands of servants to accomplish these tasks. Even if these people wanted to please him, they were old dogs, and these were new tricks. The world market was just a little flame in his hand, one he was guarding from black whirling gales.

  And so on that first day, Narses supervised everyone. Leaving the Chalkē Gate, he rode through the City with dozens of bodyguards, and checked all his projects, mindful of how he was the guiding force of this new top-down revolution, and how the scum that had been sleepwalking into oblivion before his seizure of power would regress to their old ways the instant he turned his back.

  “Your majesty, please!” an old woman cried, clutching two children to her sides. “We used to be citizens, but now you’ve made us slaves!”

  Narses reined in his white courser, and his bodyguards reined in their mounts.

  “You aren’t slaves,” he said. “You’re still citizens, you still have certain rights. If you don’t like one employer, you can always work for another. You’ll be paid a wage, too, which you can use however you please. Slaves aren’t paid wages, and serfs live off their own produce. We will, in fact, be abolishing slavery and serfdom wherever it exists, because wage labor is so much more productive.”

  The old lady and her two grandchildren stared at him.

  Narses continued. “Slaves and serfs eat up much of the value they produce, but when you spend your wages at my stores, all your value comes back to me and my ruling class, and I can invest it much more effectively than you ever could.”

  “But,” the old lady stammered. “But what are we to do? We have lost everything! You’ve taken everything from us—”

  “Work hard, work smart,” Narses said. “Learn new marketable skills. Educate yourselves. For work will set you free. All of us are in more or less the same situation. We are liberated from the backwardness of slavery and serfdom, and now have the opportunity to rise to the top by our own labor and intelligence. You, too, can become rich, grannie.”

  Laughing, Narses rode off with his men before she could answer. The old lady and her two grandchildren watched him leave.

  As it turned out, almost no one favored Narses’s new initiatives. Resistance was constant and omnipresent, and took countless forms, from outright rebellion, to incivility, to simple laziness. Why work, after all, if almost all your labor was just going to get sucked up by the ruling class?

  Yet Narses’s men kept things under control. The City was exhausted from so many days of chaos, while his Defense Force, in contrast, thrived on that chaos. They delighted in fanning out across all the different neighborhoods, rooting out everyone who was hiding from the logothete census takers, hauling them outside, taking their information, granting them their identification wood chips, and putting them to work. Every room, chest, and closet in the City was checked. Even the latrines were checked. (Some small children were hiding in one; they were hauled out, cleaned, and put to work.) Monasteries were closed, and the monks inside driven out. The headquarters of the various collegia were ransacked, and any guildsmen who resisted were put to the sword. Narses’s men were incentivized via bonuses and percentages based on how much they seized and how many people they found. Workers themselves were divided based on gender, language, and ethnos, with the easiest and best-paid jobs going to Roman men, while women fulfilled their honorable duties by working at home, birthing and raising children, and weaving textiles. Any male Roman worker with a positive attitude was rewarded with management positions and access to new university programs which would grant them better jobs, plenty of prestige, and more education with less actual labor. Who would prefer laboring in a coal mine, for instance, to pushing paper at a desk?

  When more printing presses were constructed, these intellectuals would become the first journalists, who would be careful to always blame anyone and anything except Narses’s new system. What to even call it? Narsesism? Narsianism? Narcissism? And actually, whatever the new system was called, future journalists could occasionally blame it, at least as long as they did so with modifiers. They would blame the free market, not the market itself. They would blame crony Narses-ism, not Narses-ism itself. The Roman Empire might be imperialist, but every country it fought was also imperialist. Persia was no angel. Venetia was no angel. “Once upon a time,” these journalists and university professors would write, many years in the future, “Narsesism was fair. But now it is corrupt. If we just replace the bad emperor with a good one, everything will work itself out. The only effective social movements are peaceful, polite, legal, and unobtrusive.”

  As a result, the workers were so busy bickering with each other that they were unable to unite against Narses. The old Byzantine trick of playing different barbarian hordes against one another could just as easily be applied to factions inside the City. Some workers were hilariously ignorant of the fact that Narses was their common enemy, and were willfully unaware of the fact that he would never give up power, no matter how many petitions they sent, no matter how many times they sued him in the courts he controlled, no matter how many times they managed to convince senators or the green or blue factions to oppose him.

  Priests and City criers blamed any problems on criminal sabotage or corrupt elites, priests, or bureaucrats, or even the other racing demos. If you were a green, you blamed the blues; if you were a blue, you blamed the greens, all while Narses sat on his throne, gave orders to both racing factions, and laughed in your face. People argued that the new way of doing things, which was only months old, was normal. They thought it absurd, the idea that Narses controlled every last aspect of their lives (even though this is what he actually did). Soon enough, everyone wanted to be rich. This meant that the best you could do was start your own business, become a landlord, buy up some land, and look out for yourself and your own family and maybe a few close friends. That was it. For workers to form associations was too risky, especially after the destruction of the collegia—which, for all their faults, always made an effort to protect their workers. And besides, organizing was pointless, since you couldn’t depend on anyone.

  Every man for himself.

  Paper money needed to be printed, in the mean time, with more ink and paper gathered, and stamps and moveable type forged by the City’s blacksmiths. They only had one printing press; many more were being sawed and hammered into shape. Yet even from that first day, some promissory notes and investment certificates were printed. This latter initiative Narses undertook on behalf of the richer senators, aristocrats, and merchants in the City. In exchange for their gold coins, which he insisted rather forcefully that they provide, he gave them these receipts, which they could keep or exchange among themselves at their pleasure. Eventually a market for their buying and selling would be established. In the future, promissory notes could be exchanged for gold from the treasury. These rich men were investing in all the new different enterprises in the empire, and as these enterprises grew in value, so would their investments. Thanks to this single stroke, Narses managed to get the senate on his side, even if they joined him unwillingly. Now everyone was hitched to the same chariot. He also had their money in his new bank, and spent it on the most promising and profitable ventures.

  Then there was the countryside. Narses found Goudeles, and through him many other merchants in the City, and brought these outside the walls through the Golden Gate and into the dangerous hinterland, riding a few miles along the Via Egnatia to Hebdomon, the old mustering ground for the Roman legions. Yet even here in Thrakía, among the ransacked monasteries that lay within sight of the Land Walls, there was simply too much land, and not enough hands to work it. Narses had already banned the inducement of miscarriages, which would grow the population and keep women under control—the women of the lower orders were always the rudest and most violent and problematic—but this new initiative was a seed which would take years to bear fruit.

  The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is…

  For now, the Defense Force put whoever they could find to work. Mostly these new workers were former monks and the useless retainers of the aristocracy, all of whom had been flung onto the labor market after being cast out of their traditional abodes of comfort and laziness. Narses, Goudeles, and the other merchants laughed to see these new laborers—who had once thought themselves so high and mighty—doing real work for the first time. The overseers’ whips cracked whenever they slowed down.

  But Narses needed more men. Always the maw of this new god was slavering with hunger, gorging itself on human flesh and shitting out bricks of gold. In those early weeks, many workers ran away. People simply fled into the countryside—despite their distaste for it—rather than do a day’s honest work. Legionaries in the Defense Force rode after them, catching and bringing back a few in chains, cutting off their ears as a punishment for their laziness. But most escapees never returned. It seemed that they were also warning the outlying towns; mounted legionaries reported that these had been abandoned. Adrianopolis and Thessaloniki had both closed their gates. In the latter city—the second city of the empire—the longshoremen had seized power, expelled the ruling elite, and declared their allegiance to the criminals. In their insanity, they draped red flags from the city walls.

  Even as we clench our fist tighter, the opposition grows. But we are so close to victory!

  Other people in Konstantinopolis were so upset about all the changes that they hurled themselves from the Land Walls to their deaths. The former priests and monks wandering the toiling masses ranted about how these were the end times, the apocalypse foretold, the Four Horsemen riding. Even in Narses’s mind he often saw a mounted skeleton clutching an hourglass in one hand and a scythe in the other, charging out of dark thunderclouds which flashed with lightning.

  He wanted everything to change instantly, but history still moved slowly. It took time for men who possessed little more than the simplest tools to build new factories and clear and enclose farmland. Even a new project of sheep-breeding—combined with destruction of all the wolves in the countryside—would take years to realize. Dozens of steps lay between shearing a sheep and turning the wool into cloth, and some of those steps took days to accomplish.

  Narses was also just one man. It was impossible to do everything himself. Yet his Defense Force was with him. The senate and some City merchants were with him. A small number of enterprising workers were with him.

  We’re going to revolutionize the world, Narses thought. And make a little money while we’re at it.

  In fact, so many people were all so busy with this revolution—this total transformation of every aspect of being—that by the time summer was coming to an end, they had almost forgotten about the criminals and the Venetians. These would soon be dealt with, and the criers made sure to blame them every day for every problem. But mentally, at least, Rome had already soared above such petty concerns.

  It was a great surprise, then, when the City came under attack.