Zombies of Byzantium Read online

  Theophilus and I glanced at each other. His eyes, wide and staring, must have looked like mine. “Run!” we both cried, and bolted for the road that led down out of the village.

  The old man was not very quick. After only a few steps he stumbled. He managed to catch himself with the walking stick before we went down, but the flaming ghoul was able to gain on him. I ran back to Theophilus. Shifting the leather bag containing my paints to the other shoulder, I knelt down. “Get up on my back,” I demanded. He did so as best he could, and I began to run. With Theophilus on my back, I was slower than I would have been otherwise, but together we were still faster than the torch pursuing us. Every half-minute or so I paused to look over my shoulder. The incendiary specter continued to pursue us, but it had not increased its pace. It was as dumb and unyielding as it was terrifying.

  “What is it?” I whispered to Theophilus, watching the flaming ghoul stumble on the stones of the road across which we’d just come.

  “The Devil,” the old man said. “We must run!”

  The flaming figure that came from the ruined village continued to trail us, as inexorable a follower as a faithful dog. I would sprint down the road a distance as far as I could carry Theophilus without resting and then stop for a time. The shambling torch never paused but we were able to stay well ahead of it. Eventually it was slowed down by virtue of losing a leg, which, like the arm we’d seen upon its escape from the church, burned clean through and crumbled into ashes. After that, the figure moved with sort of a limping crawl, walking on its stump and dragging its still-good leg behind it. Perhaps half an hour later as the road passed near a creek and a scrubby forest I noticed that most of the flames seemed to be dying, yet the ghoulish creature continued its approach. It was slow enough now where I no longer needed to carry Theophilus to guarantee our escape. Indeed we stopped and rested, both of us panting, and we occasionally glanced back up the road to check on the progress of our pursuer.

  “It must be the Devil,” I said. “No human being could have survived those flames. It doesn’t even appear to be hurt.”

  “I don’t think it’s human,” said Theophilus. “Not anymore, anyway.”

  The moaning made by the ghoul was especially unnerving. As it drew closer, I straightened up, shifted my leather knapsack and wiped sweat from my brow. “What are we going to do? It’s obvious that monster is going to keep pursuing us until we give out.”

  Theophilus looked up and down the road. “The forest,” he said, motioning.

  So we left the road and entered the scrubby thicket. The trees here were small but at least there was shade, merciful shelter from the burning afternoon sun. The crawling, lurching ghoul pursued us right into the forest. “We must put this soul out of its misery and deliver it to God,” Theophilus pronounced. “Find a heavy branch.”

  “Now you’re making sense.” I looked about and found a fallen bough with a thick knot on its end. Feeling its heft I could see its use as a weapon, but the prospect of going near enough to the monster to wield it was unsavory. I confess I felt a twinge of conscience as I looked back at Theophilus. “Do you suppose killing a thing like that is a sin?” I asked him.

  “It would be a sin not to kill it,” he assured me.

  I swallowed. “All right. Here goes.” The creature was perhaps thirty feet behind me. Holding the branch over my head, I ran at it, my heart pounding. One charred arm motioned toward me and its moaning seemed to reach a crescendo. I swung the branch. It knocked off the ghoul’s burnt arm with scarcely more resistance than brushing away a leaf or blade of grass. I swung again, this time connecting with the beast’s head. Immediately its whole body—what was left of it—fell limp. I brought the branch down several more times but it was like hacking apart logs that were little more than charcoal. A cloud of foul-smelling ash rose from the thing. I coughed. Finally I tossed the branch aside and trudged my way back toward Theophilus. He held out a small jeweled cross on a chain about his neck and repeated the prayers for the Eucharist. When he was done, we both stared back at the smoldering remains of the monster. Theophilus found a stump to sit on and brought his thin body down upon it with a sigh.

  “Now we know what happened in that village,” I said. “Those people must have been possessed by demons. They went wild, killing those victims we saw on the ground. The survivors locked the demons in the church and set it on fire to destroy them, and then they fled.”

  “But they didn’t smite the demons well enough. This wasn’t the only one to survive the burning. There were others in the church—you heard their moans. Any one of them might escape as well.”

  “But why is this happening? What could have caused it?”

  Theophilus hauled himself up off the stump and stepped through the brush in the direction of the road. “Brother Stephen, we can’t know the plans of God in this world. Perhaps the people in that village were wicked in one way or another, and He sent a plague of demons to punish them.”

  “He couldn’t have used a plague of locusts or something that wouldn’t come after us?” I muttered. Theophilus had no answer to this, and I didn’t expect one. There was nothing to do now but continue on. We still needed food and shelter for the night. If the wickedness that God had tried to punish in that unfortunate village was still afoot in the countryside, I rather hoped we would manage to avoid it. Being chased by a flaming formerly human demon, even at low speed, was not precisely the way I’d hoped to begin my new life as an iconographer in Constantinople, but, as Theophilus said, I guess we can’t know God’s plans.

  As the sun sank we came upon a xenodocheion, an inn for public travelers. It was a low ramshackle stone building with a thatched roof and a couple of stinking stables behind it for horses and oxen. In fact, that was the first thing we noticed—the stables were awfully crowded, and one ass was even wandering loose in the street in front of the place, browsing along the dusty lane between a couple of flapping chickens. I could see smoke, thankfully white instead of black, spiraling from the portals in the roof. “Well, they’ve got soup on, at least,” I told Theophilus. “I wonder if they know anything about what happened back there.”

  Judging by the din of voices we could hear all the way from outside, chattering excitedly in Greek, it appeared that there was definitely some excitement afoot. Before Theophilus and I had even reached the doorway the voices hushed. The heavy wooden door burst open and at once a foul-faced man with a rusty sword had sprung out of it, leveling the weapon at our throats. He might’ve been the innkeeper, might not have been; he wore shabby clothes and his boots were splitting at their seams. “Speak!” he cried. He waited only a moment before roaring, “Speak now, or I’ll smite you!”

  “What do you want me to say?” I gasped.

  Theophilus seemed to catch on immediately. “We’re men!” he cried. “We’re not those mindless drones. We’re friendly.”

  “They’re monks, Onophrios,” said a woman’s voice from inside the building.

  “She’s right,” I said. “My name is Stephen Diabetenos of the Chenolakkos Monastery. This is Brother Theophilus of Antioch, also lately from Chenolakkos. We require food, water and accommodation for the night.”

  Onophrios did not lower the sword but suddenly looked as if he wasn’t so inclined to use it as he’d been a moment before. Judging us with a skeptical gaze, he asked, “You’ve come from Mt. Olympus?”

  “Aye. We’ve been travelling all day.”

  “And you came through Domelium, the village?”

  “Aye.”

  The sword finally drooped. “You must be stouter than you look, you men of God,” Onophrios muttered. “Well, come inside. Good luck finding a place to sit, much less sleep. We’re full up.”

  He wasn’t kidding. The large single room we found ourselves in was quite crowded. There were scraggly peasant farmers, women in rough-spun clothes, ragged children, even a man in a well-tailored tunic who I guessed to be an official of some type, perhaps a tax collector. There were rough wooden
benches and a few stools before the fire pits where cauldrons bubbled over with the stench of some unappetizing stew. Everyone stared at Theophilus and me as if our skin were green and we’d sprouted antennae. After shuffling about, looking for somewhere to sit, I finally approached a young man of about twenty sitting on the end of a bench. “Excuse me. Would you be so good as to let Brother Theophilus have your seat? He’s quite aged, and we’ve been walking all day.”

  The young man yielded, as did the woman next to him. We sat down. Within a few moments some of the peasants had passed us rough wooden bowls of the watery meat stew, and I saw two tin beakers of fresh water making their way from hand to hand toward us. A middle-aged man in a dirty brown tunic stood before us. Perhaps he was the (former) mayor of the hell-village. As I took my bowl and beaker, he said, “Were there any left in Domelium? Any survivors?”

  I opened my mouth but realized this was a trick question. “Well,” I finally said, “that depends on what you consider a ‘survivor’.” I drew from my leather satchel a silver spoon with which to eat my stew.

  “We’re glad you were not harmed,” said a woman.

  “Not for lack of trying.” I took a spoonful of the foul stew and looked up at the mayor. “What happened in the village?”

  He looked puzzled at the question. Glancing between Theophilus and me, he said, “We were hoping you could tell us.”

  “How would we know what happened? All we saw were the bodies and the burning buildings.”

  “But you’re men of God,” said the woman who had stepped aside to make room for Theophilus. “Surely you must be able to make sense of these dreadful things. Why were we punished? We weren’t wicked or sinful.”

  Theophilus and I glanced at each other with the same puzzled expression. Suddenly I felt out of my depth. I’m an icon painter. Sure, I’ve read the Bible, but I can’t pronounce sentence on an entire village or diagnose why God chose to screw with them in whatever particularly ghastly way He had done so today. Meekly I asked the mayor, “What did you see? How did it start?”

  The story came out in hesitant little bits, some from the mayor, some from the woman, parts from others of the villagers. Evidently the ordeal had begun with a mysterious traveler who arrived on horseback the night before last, seeking shelter in the village. He was a Byzantine, but the clothing he wore and the weapon he carried suggested he had spent considerable time among the Saracens, perhaps in Syria beyond the Empire’s borders. He was very sick and nursing what he claimed was a wolf bite, and he said he was on his way to Constantinople to warn the Emperor of the latest intelligence of the Saracen armies that were encamped to the southeast. Within a few hours of bedding down with a local family the traveler died. When the man and his wife who owned the house tried to swaddle him for burial the stranger suddenly sprang up and attacked them with a murderous look in his eyes. He was ravenous, biting the flesh from their bodies, killing them in the most horrible fashion. The visitor was smitten with a sword blow to the neck, but a few hours later the man and woman whom he had killed rose from their rough-hewn biers, attacking everyone in sight in exactly the same manner. By nightfall ten in the village were dead and many of those resurrected to wreak bloody havoc. Early in the morning, after considerable toil and several more casualties, the men of the village had herded the flesh-seeking fiends into the church, bolted the doors with chains and set it afire. The survivors had time only to grab what was closest at hand and they fled the village, vowing never to return.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “These people were dead, and yet they rose up again to attack others?”

  “Stone-cold dead,” said an old man, evidently the former apothecary for the town. “I examined them myself.”

  “The rising of the dead is a curse of damnation,” Theophilus muttered.

  “Is it a sign of the end times?” asked a woman meekly.

  I shook my head. “Let’s not go there just yet. You’re sure they were dead? They weren’t just knocked out or something? I mean, a lot of things could make you think someone was dead.”

  “I’m sure,” swore the apothecary. “They didn’t breathe. They were quite dead, and they remained so, even after they rose. Their eyes were glazed and blank. They felt no pain. They recognized none of their families or their comrades. They could not speak, only moan like the damned. I’ve lived a long life, young friar. I know a dead man when I see one.”

  “All right, all right, no need to take it personally.” I picked up my bowl and my spoon again but the cold stew had suddenly become dreadfully unappetizing. “Well, I don’t know what it’s all about. I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”

  “A curse!” said a woman.

  My brow furrowed. “Gee, you think?” I scoffed. “Of course it’s a curse.”

  Theophilus put a cautioning hand on my arm. “We will pray for the dead, and for the deliverance of your village,” he said to the townspeople, and rose from the bench. “Brother Stephen, will you join me?”

  No sooner had we stood up and Theophilus produced his little jeweled cross than there was a commotion outside, a clatter of hooves and the excited shouting of a male voice. Onophrios, the innkeeper, bolted for the door, sword drawn. The door burst open. A young man rushed inside, panting from hard riding. He was a bit older than me, but still in his twenties. He had flowing blond hair and a close-trimmed beard. His blue eyes had a very piercing stare. From his chain mail shirt, armored skirt and boots I could tell he was a soldier, but he did not appear to be of the regular army. He carried a sword but no shield of any kind. Onophrios lowered his sword. The young man, before he said a word, seized a flagon of wine that one of the women had handed him. He drank down several swallows, passed back the flagon and then burst out, “A force of shambling demons approaches up the road from the northeast. We must make ready!”

  This news was followed by another blast of alarm and excitement from the villagers, which again the mayor shushed. “From the northeast?” he said.

  “Yes,” replied the soldier. “The northeast—the opposite direction from Domelium.”

  “How many?” said the apothecary.

  “I didn’t stop to count. At least twenty, perhaps as many as fifty. I was scouting, came upon a hill, and when I saw them approaching, I rode back here as fast as I could. We must get the women and children to safety.” The steely-eyed soldier finally noticed Theophilus and myself. “Who is this?”

  “Travelers from Chenolakkos,” I said. “I’m Brother Stephen. This is Brother Theophilus.”

  The soldier made a grunting little scoff. “We need soldiers, and the Lord sends us monks,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Well, no matter. Every man who can wield a sword, club or pitchfork must make ready to defend this inn. Women, children, elderly, those unable to fight, will gather in the stables behind the building. I’ll need two able-bodied men to guard them. These are the wishes of Lord Camytzes.” All were frozen, rooted on their spots for a long dreadful moment, but the soldier wasted no time. “Let’s go!” he shouted, and the villagers, perhaps fearing him more than the ghouls, at last began to move.

  “Great,” I said to Theophilus. “Just what I wanted to be doing after hiking all day—fighting off the walking dead.” I pulled the strap of the paint bag from over my shoulder and handed it to him. “Here, you’d better take this with you to the stables to keep it safe.”

  Theophilus glared at me as if I’d told him he were the walking dead. “I’m not going to the stables,” he said sharply. “I’ll not be pushed aside like an old woman with the horses and cattle while the minions of the Devil run free!” He turned to the room. “Who will give me a weapon?” When a rough-hewn pitchfork, tossed by one of the villagers, sailed through the air and Theophilus caught it one-handed, as effortlessly as if he’d practiced it a thousand times, I willed myself to close my gaping mouth. For being a humorless old fossil who barely said a word, Theophilus couldn’t have surprised me more.

  Chapter Two


  The Battle of the Xenodocheion

  There were, alas, only a handful of swords to be had. The soldier—Camytzes, if I’d heard the name correctly—had one, Onophrios had another, and some of the villagers managed to produce a few other badly rusted and brittle blades. There were pitchforks, several scythes and a hammer that had evidently been taken from the village blacksmith (who had become a ghoul), plus the fireplace tools, and Onophrios’s wife gave one of the younger men a large cleaver with which she had cut the meat for our indigestible dinner. The mayor of Domelium handed me a shovel, and I wasn’t quite sure exactly of what use it might ultimately be. In the lengthening golden-red light of sunset, the women took their children and the elderly toward the stables, and we men, perhaps twenty-five in all, filed out of the front door of the xenodocheion with our makeshift weapons. Standing there in the dust before the road, we could hear or see nothing but the gentle rustling of the evening breeze in the trees and the cheerful chirp of birds. One of the men even commented, “I don’t see anything,” but Camytzes, at the front of the congregation, set his mouth in a terse line and replied, “They’re definitely coming.”

  “How do you know?” I asked him.

  “I was among the first to observe them in the village last night,” the soldier replied. “They’re attracted to any living person like moths to a flame. They mean to make food of us.” To all the men he cried, “Do not let one of the demons bite you! Any man whose flesh is bitten by one of them is doomed to become a ghoul himself.”