Shadow of Ararat

CONSTANTINOPLE, CAPITAL OF THE EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE

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 of the 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.

The narrow sea filled with burning boats and the men who had drowned flickered under the water, dying stars that faded, still aflame, into the depths. Shoals of charred limbs clogged the beach.

On the fighting platform, Theodore and Heraclius staggered back as a sudden updraft of air rushed past, bearing the stink of burning flesh and the peculiarly sweet odor of ignited phlogiston. The archers who had shared the platform with them scrambled away from the edge, wrapping their dark-blue cloaks around their faces. A vast roar, like a titan enraged, echoed around the tower and through the mists that hung over the city. Green flames lit the low-lying clouds and echoed off the wavetops of the Golden Horn.

Heraclius stood up shakily and made his uneasy way down the stairs into the tower. The attack was over and there was much to do. A soft gagging sound followed him down into the darkness of the tower chamber. Theodore was retching off the back of the platform.