The shahzadeh provided a small private room in the palace for Alexios, who rested there until evening, when Michael the Samian arrived to return him to Ifridun’s room. There the three slaves dined with the shahzadeh, being joined by the Daylamite wrestler Artam Artvadios, whom Ifridun said was a trusted warrior, one sworn to protect him, and familiar with the way to Bakuya.

  Daylam, Alexios thought. That’s where Khorasani said Isato was sold.

  “Artam Artvadios,” Alexios said as they ate their meal on the carpeted cushioned wooden platform. “I’m sorry for asking, but is that a normal Daylamite name? I don’t know anything about Daylam. In fact, I’d barely even heard about it until today…”

  Michael translated, and then Artvadios answered through him.

  “It is my name,” he said, swallowing the substantial amount of wine in his cup in one gulp. “And there is none other like it!”

  Alexios raised his eyebrows. “Fair enough.”

  “He is called a Daylamite,” Ifridun said, looking at Artvadios. “But no one really knows who he is, or where he comes from.”

  “I lived there a good long time.” Artvadios winked at Alexios. “I learned their ways, particularly their fighting prowess, their manner with women.” He eyed Gowri, who had served their food and then joined them at Alexios’s insistence, though she had yet to touch her meal. Artvadios placed his right hand over his chest and bowed to her. “But it is always a respectful manner. For every woman is a sister, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, an Eve.”

  “At least until you get drunk,” Ifridun said.

  “Jest not with me, o my shahzadeh!” Artvadios bowed to Ifridun. “For you know I fight best when I am drunk.” He drank more wine, and refilled his cup from a Seran pitcher no one else had touched. And though he loved wine, he neither spilled a drop, nor slurped as he drank. “I have brought down the tigers of the Kaukasos with my bare hands, I have put entire armies to flight merely by showing myself and challenging them to battle, I carry sixteen scars from duels with the greatest warriors who have ever walked the Earth.” He pulled open his shirt, revealing a chest torn with old wounds.

  We’ll see how much his boasting matches reality, Alexios thought.

  “Yet I always safeguard the helpless,” Artvadios added. “I fight for the weak. I ask nothing in return, except to glory in honor, and I am poor, for I give every coin that comes into my possession to those who are even poorer.”

  “You sound like a Latin knight,” Alexios said. “That’s the way they talk, though it’s not usually the way they act.”

  “I want nothing to do with such wretched scum,” Artvadios said. “What Frank isn’t a rapist, a thief, and a murderer? I kill them whenever I see them. I send them fleeing for the hills, crying for their mothers, whining that I fight them unfairly merely if I glance at them!”

  “I know one Frank who wasn’t so bad.” Alexios was thinking of Gontran.

  “He may act kindly before your gaze,” Artvadios said. “But in his heart, he never fails to commit these crimes, every moment of every day. He knows not that God will know, that God will judge, that he reads the contents of our hearts like open books.”

  “Do you think the same of Romans?” Alexios didn’t consider himself a Roman, but that was what everyone outside the old Roman lands called him no matter how he dressed, acted, or spoke. There was just a romanitas about him, one he was unable to shake.

  “They are just as bad,” Artvadios said. “Lord knows who can tell the difference.”

  Alexios laughed. They finished eating as the last colors of sunset faded into the west, soon replaced with all the colors of the night. For a moment, everyone was silent, as they realized that the time to leave for their destination had come.

  “It is four days’ hard riding to Bakuya,” Ifridun said.

  “Four days!” Alexios winced. “I thought it was just a few hours away, shahzadeh. Have you gotten ready for this journey? We’ll need food, water, horses, weapons…”

  Ifridun nodded to Artvadios. “My man has taken care of everything. Now come, let us go. May God be with us!”

  He stood—from sitting cross-legged on his cushion—quickly and elegantly, without using his hands for balance. Leaving the remnants of the meal behind, Ifridun gave his companions cloaks—“it gets cold here at night”—before they snuck through palace hallways, and climbed stairwells and opened and closed doors in silence. It felt to Alexios more like a game of hide-and-seek than the beginning of a slave rebellion. Ifridun was also well-practiced in the art of slinking about Naryn-Kala, moving through the dark without a candle or a torch, even stuffing his shoes in his pockets—and ordering Alexios, Michael, Gowri, and Artvadios to do the same with their own shoes.

  Following the shahzadeh’s lead, they moved with near-silent bare feet through the servant wings, past kitchens and sleeping quarters, darting into shadows and avoiding guards, ascending winding stairways until they found themselves on the battlements, where a chill wind was blowing in from the sea. Here they put their shoes back on, then descended a rope provided by Artvadios to the rocky ground beyond the walls, finding there four tethered horses with water skins and bags of food and feed. Only Ifridun and Artvadios were armed, however.

  “We are not yet desperate enough to arm our slaves,” Ifridun whispered to Alexios.

  If this is a slave revolt, he thought, then why aren’t we arming the slaves?

  Gowri and Michael needed help getting onto their horse, which they were meant to share; Alexios cupped his hands so they could both climb into the saddle. Michael jumped up with his unusual confidence, even though his legs were too stubby to reach the stirrups. Gowri, on the other hand, was rigid and awkward as she sat behind Michael, whom she needed to hold. Otherwise he would fall off.

  She’s afraid of riding all night to Bakuya with a bunch of strange men, Alexios thought. Yet even more afraid of telling her lord ‘no.’

  Alexios, at the sight of his own horse, remembered Rakhsh, and prayed that he was alright.

  The five companions rode quietly from the fortress, following a narrow rocky path in a ravine that led between dark, jagged cliffs whose outcroppings jutted and gaped like gargoyle faces. Alexios realized that their route was leading around the city of Darband, rather than through it.

  No witnesses means no problems.

  Looking back over his shoulder for a moment, he saw Naryn-Kala’s wide dark walls and toothy battlements soaring into a blue sky full of flickering stars. Here and there along the masonry were braziers glowing with flames that burned at the night, the guards on duty raising their hands to the fire for warmth.

  There were no shouts, no horns. No one else knew that the shahzadeh had departed. For Ifridun’s parents’ sake, Alexios hoped that the boy had left a note. If the companions actually managed to reach Bakuya, they would be gone for at least eight days! And Ifridun was not just the Shirvanshahzadeh’s son—he was also the crown prince. His parents would look for him the instant they noticed his absence.

  Once the companions had put some distance between themselves and Naryn-Kala, Ifridun kicked his horse’s sides, and the beast grunted and began to gallop. The other riders did the same, and soon they were hurtling through the dark, the cool salt wind blowing in their faces and tousling their hair. No moon shone that night, but before long they were riding along the Hyrkanian shore, where a million stars were reflected in the tideless sea like it was a mirror stretching to the horizon.

  Don’t know how this whole thing is going to turn out, Alexios thought. The prince doesn’t seem to have a plan. But I’m still having a good time. It’s nice to finally get out of that fortress. I hadn’t even realized how long I’d been in there…

  He soon figured out, as his mount galloped through the night—so dark it seemed at times that the beast was flying like Pegasus through the sky—that it would have taken little effort to flee Ifridun, hide somewhere, and wait for the danger to pass. Artvadios and the Shahzadeh still could have still found him and killed him—they knew the land in the dark, while it was unknown to Alexios even in the light—but there was still a chance of escape. His horse had even come with at least a week’s worth of provisions. And in some ways, the land seemed simple enough, at least from this vantage. The sea lay to the left, and dark forests and flatlands rose to the right.

  Isato is that way, Alexios thought, looking straight ahead. And Basil and Kassia are on my right.

  Thinking about them always brought him to tears. He breathed deeply to control himself.

  I’m coming for you. I’ll never leave you. Never abandon you. Not for as long as I live.

  Yet Alexios decided that running away from Ifridun was too risky. He had no weapons, his farr was still low, and he knew almost nothing about Shirvan—which he had barely even heard of before coming here. On top of that, he was curious about what awaited them in Bakuya. If by some miracle he started a spontaneous uprising, maybe the resulting chaos would give him a chance to escape and find his family. Maybe he could even build a new army of immortals, which he had already done in Trebizond and Assyria, building both almost from scratch. Then he could take revenge on Adarnase. But if he ran away from Ifridun by himself, he would become a fugitive from every power in the region. Every peasant he encountered—whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, pagan, Zoroastrian, or whatever—would gain a reward for reporting him to the authorities.

  So he kept riding with Shahzadeh Ifridun, even as he noticed how Artvadios kept close, the starlight shining in the Daylamite’s black eyes, which always seemed to be laughing as his topknot bounced on his bald head.

  He knows what I’m thinking. Anyone else would think the same.

  When dawn shone in the pink clouds through the dark green trees on their right, Ifridun led his followers to a stream in the woods to rest. There they splashed their faces, replenished their water skins, watered their horses, and ate some of the flatbread packed in their bags. As Alexios stretched his sore, aching limbs, and looked to the sunlight drizzling the languid Hyrkanian waves, he noticed how alone the companions were, and realized that they had yet to pass even a single fishing village. Shirvan’s coast was sparsely populated—perhaps a consequence of the Varangian longboats which rowed here—and the forest was so dense, it would take weeks at least for people to clear enough space for even a small village. If not for the occasional sail flitting over the horizon like a white moth’s wings, the companions would have seemed like the world’s last humans.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Shahzadeh,” Alexios said to Ifridun, speaking through the sleepy Michael. “Did you leave a note or some kind of message for your parents, so that they won’t worry about you?”

  “Is that your concern, gholam?” Ifridun said. “Is it your job to second-guess royalty?”

  Alexios bowed. “Forgive me, shahzadeh. I’m a father, don’t forget. I was only concerned for—”

  “I did indeed leave a note for my father,” Ifridun said. “For my mother passed away many years ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “But I did not tell my father where I was going,” Ifridun added. “Only that I would return in eight or nine days’ time.”

  “Have you done anything like this before?” Alexios said. “Have you left home for a week with only a single bodyguard?”

  “I will fear for my safety, gholam. What you must fear is whether you can perform more of your fancy magic tricks.”

  How to respond to this? Later, Alexios volunteered to take the first watch—that would be his first trick, the ability to stay awake after such a long night—but Artvadios shook his head (and his enormous salt-and-pepper walrus mustache) and said that slaves were ill-suited for such sensitive tasks.

  “Then free me,” Alexios said to Ifridun. “Make me a ghazi instead of a gholam. Then the two of you can rest.”

  “An infidel cannot be a ghazi,” Ifridun growled. “You cannot fight for that which is true and right when you have no beliefs except your own hypocrisy.”

  “If you free me, you can both rest for longer,” Alexios said to Ifridun and Artvadios. “You’ll be refreshed for the long ride ahead of us tonight. Besides, Allah is all-wise and all-merciful, is He not?”

  “Don’t profane that which is holy and sacred,” Ifridun said. “That which you disdain.”

  Alexios bowed. “Forgive me, shahzadeh. But the point stands.”

  Artvadios and Ifridun looked at each other.

  “He must convert,” Artvadios said. “We cannot trust our lives to a Christian dog.”

  “I’m not a Christian,” Alexios said.

  “Recite the Shahadah,” Artvadios said. “And believe it with all your heart. Otherwise, you are just a slave—not only to the shahzadeh, but to your own passions and foolishness.”

  Alexios thought for a moment. Was it really such a leap, to move from his agnosticism to Islam? He was not a heavy drinker and could live without pork. For a man, the other demands Islam made—pray five times a day, give to the poor, visit Mecca, observe Ramadan—were not onerous. But could he believe with all his heart that God had created the universe? That was harder. He had also thought about all of this before. If God created the universe, who created God? “God is infinite and timeless,” was the answer. But why couldn’t the universe be infinite and timeless? What need was there for that extra step? Hermes Trismegistos would have said that both the universe and God came into existence at the same instant—just as Alexios had argued earlier with the chicken and the egg. But then what had been there before? Saint Augustine had said that people who asked such questions were sent to hell after they died. God was the unmoved mover, He was self-generative, etcetera, etcetera. People had been asking these questions for millennia and had never found an answer. Alexios could not stop asking. He would be what Muslims called a hypocrite if he failed to believe in Islam with all his heart. A superficial acceptance of Islam did nothing to avert his fate—that of burning in hellfire with other unbelievers. On the plus side, in Islam hell and purgatory were the same: no one could sin so grievously that he would never be released from hell. After millennia of suffering, even the most terrible people would merit paradise. But since paradise was eternal, didn’t that mean that life on Earth was meaningless, and that, as the annoying monarchist and Christian fundamentalist Dostoevsky argued, “everything is permitted”?

  It was too complicated. It was simpler and much more honest to say what Alexios had always said: “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t do it,” Alexios said to Artvadios. “I can’t convert. I can’t make myself believe.”

  Artvadios laughed, and clapped Alexios’s shoulder with his rock-hard gigantic hand. “And I would have killed you where you stand, son, had you said otherwise! For I know the look of a hypocrite when I see one. I know the look of a rat!”

  Alexios laughed uneasily.

  “He is an infidel,” Artvadios said to Ifridun. “But an honest infidel.”

  “Very well,” Ifridun said. “What does it matter to me? I can be magnanimous. I am tired. He can go free and take the first watch.”

  Alexios didn’t take even a moment to celebrate. “Only one more thing. Free Michael and Gowri, too.”

  Ifridun stared at him. Artvadios burst into more laughter.

  “You will turn the world upside-down!” Artvadios exclaimed. “You will make the masters the slaves, and the slaves the masters!”

  “Actually,” Alexios said, “I would do away with slavery entirely—”

  “Ah, but this is the way it has always been!” Artvadios said. “It is a completely natural thing, as awful as it may be—like death itself. Wolves devour sheep, and lords have tenants and slaves.”

  “Life would have no meaning without death,” Alexios said. “But it would have a great deal of meaning without slavery.”

  “Enough philosophizing,” Ifridun said. “I will free you all, but I need you to remain my servants. Once we have completed this adventure in Bakuya and returned to Naryn-Kala, you will be free to do as you please.”

  “So we are free?” Alexios said.

  Ifridun nodded. “You are free.” He cleared his throat. “Free servants, that is.”

  Alexios smiled, and felt the farr shining within him. He glanced, once more, at the scimitars sheathed at the sides of Ifridun and Artvadios. Alexios could have stretched out his hands and seized their weapons with little effort. Michael and Gowri seemed less excited, however. The former was so exhausted he could barely translate anymore, while the latter was just as tired, but afraid to lie down and sleep in the company of unfamiliar men. Except for Michael, she kept her distance from the others, and also refused to turn her back on any of them.

  “I will keep you safe,” Alexios whispered to her, while Ifridun and Artvadios were chatting with each other. “I will defend your honor.”

  She responded only by lowering her eyes.

  “So it is done!” Artvadios boomed, his voice loud enough to scatter a dozen annoyed, cawing crows from a nearby acacia.

  Ifridun told the warrior to be quiet, but Artvadios said that he would defeat anyone who attacked them—even if it was all the Turks in Turkestan charging from every direction at once.

  Alexios couldn’t keep from laughing at Artvadios’s endless boasting.

  “Wake me at noon, freeman.” Artvadios winked at Alexios. “I will take the second watch. And do us a favor: since the shahzadeh freed you, don’t cut our throats while we asleep.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Alexios said. “I still don’t have a weapon, by the way.”

  “That is because we brought none to give you,” Ifridun said.

  Within moments, the shahzadeh and his Daylamite warrior were snoring on the ground in their cloaks. Gowri opened her arms to Michael, and laid down with him. Soon Alexios was left, once more, to battle one of the more powerful, merciless, and unrelenting foes he had encountered in his journeys: fatigue.

  He paced in the woods, watched the sea, brushed and fed the horses, and listened to the seagulls, crows, and peepers. But, lacking a book, lacking anyone to talk with, Alexios was soon bored. Time slowed almost to a standstill while one was on guard duty. Being a soldier meant spending many days experiencing a life-threatening level of boredom. Adventure could often be dull.

  Stay awake, he told himself. Everything I do, I do for my family. I’ll see them again.

  When the sun seemed more or less overhead, Alexios shook Artvadios’s shoulder. Instantly the Daylamite sprung up and pressed his scimitar to Alexios’s throat. Alexios widened his eyes and raised his hands into the air. He felt the cold sharp steel blade pressed to his flesh. Then Artvadios lowered his blade, laughed, and said something in Persian which Alexios was unable to understand, since Michael was drowsing deeply in Gowri’s arms.

  Alexios wrapped himself in his cloak, lay on the hard ground among roots and rocks and bugs, and was soon asleep. Moments later, a hard, calloused hand shook him awake to darkness. Alexios ate, got on his horse, and rode through the night along the winding strand that stretched from horizon to horizon, washed by foamless wavelets, the sand puffing from his horses’s thumping hoofs. It was taking so long to get to Bakuya. Alexios wondered if it might have been better to incite an uprising back in Darband. But these rock oil miners had the worst jobs of all, according to Ifridun, and the least to lose from raising their fists against their masters, which meant that they would be the quickest to riot. Hard as it could be to believe, some slaves were more frightened of breaking free than remaining in chains.

  Those who benefit from unjust systems cannot see them as unjust. They’ll invent any excuse to justify the unjustifiable.

  How many times had he seen it? A thousand protestors standing around ten police officers. A classroom with dozens of students versus one teacher. A factory full of workers versus a few supervisors. There were so many examples where it seemed so obvious: you have the numbers, take power now while you still can! And yet fear held people back. They feared to lose what little freedom they possessed, plus their lives or their possessions. It took so much societal abuse before people really started looking for answers, reading forbidden texts—and challenging and even overthrowing authorities they had obeyed all their lives.

  The companions kept riding, night after night. Ifridun showed no sign of doubt, and Artvadios remained as true to his shahzadeh as a dog to his master. Michael grew more used to their schedule, but only translated for the adults, and remained silent otherwise. Gowri only spoke when spoken to, and even then, all she said was “yes, sir,” keeping her head down and her eyes averted, preparing the men’s food, washing their clothes. Alexios thought of somehow trying to reassure her, but she would always shake her head and look away whenever he spoke to her. She might have been thinking that it was dangerous to be seen speaking with a criminal, a nonperson like Alexios. It seemed that all she could hope for was that, by being the perfect servant, and performing any task without question—often long before she was asked—she would escape this adventure unscathed. And although Ifridun had freed Gowri, her servile status was more or less unchanged. As a woman, all the men assumed, for instance, that she would care for Michael and be responsible for him.

  Alexios passed his time on the saddle by practicing Persian with Michael and Artvadios. Learning a new language was always humbling. One needed to stretch one’s brain, and endure being corrected and laughed at again and again. Although Alexios had already spent many hours conversing both here on this journey and back while he was recovering from his wounds in Naryn-Kala, he still had trouble uttering or understanding anything beyond the basics. Still, that was how most people got around in this world, where each village spoke its own language—its own “dialect” which was incomprehensible everywhere else. Being a poet, an educated literary master, was unnecessary except for monks, scholars, and troubadours. For the most part, all people needed was the ability to understand the basics and be understood. Hello, goodbye, how are you, where is this, I don’t know, how much for this, I need water, please, thank you, sir, ma'am, and basic numbers. Traveling merchants got along just fine with hand signals.

  But Alexios was thinking of how he was supposed to radicalize the oil well workers. What could he say? What were the magic words which would transform them into uprisers? Did they even understand Persian to begin with? None of these questions would be answered until he met them. His future was a question mark. In Trebizond, things were easier, because people came to him, but here Alexios was supposed to go to the people. It was likely they would look at him as a madman if he showed up out of nowhere one day, waving his arms and shouting about the uprising. They would view him as a test, a trick. Why, after all, should they trust anyone who was riding with the shahzadeh? Perhaps Ifridun had gotten tired of hunting boar, and instead preferred hunting escaped prisoners. The oil well workers could trust no one except each other, and even then, there would be contradictions. Informants. It was easier to betray your closest friend, and get some sort of reprieve, than to expect liberation from infuriated workers and peasants.

  You will know a tree by its fruit.

  To truly get such people onboard with the uprising, Alexios would need to work alongside them—for months, at least. And the work was so hazardous, half would be dead by the time they became his friends.

  One evening, the shore began to curve left, to the east. This meant that the riders had reached the Absheron peninsula, and were nearing Bakuya. They proceeded south, following a road that led through a flat dusty savannah marked only with the occasional green bush.

  “Absheron!” Ifridun exclaimed, while Artvadios cheered alongside him, their horses thundering through dust clouds lit by the rising crescent moon.

  The scent of rock oil was in the air here in the Land of Fire, though the wind was blowing hard, the peninsula buffeted by both the warm southerly gilavar and the cold northerly khazri swirling around each other. Dust was getting in the riders’ eyes. They had reached their destination at last.