Empire of Sorrows: Rhomania in the Little Ice Age
The White Palace, Constantinople, November 9, 1648:
Athena entered the room, coming to the center and stopping to stare silently at the head of the chamber, where her mother, the Dowager Empress Jahzara, lay on the bed. She had gone quietly in the night, her corpse discovered only when one of her chambermaids came to serve her breakfast, at the same time she’d taken breakfast ever since she’d become Empress. Next to the bed on a wooden nightstand were two items, a copy of her father’s A New and Ancient World and a plain silver chalice that had been her father’s as well.
She stared at the chalice for a moment, wondering briefly, but then concluded it didn’t really matter. Dead was dead after all. Her mother’s health had been declining markedly for many months now. She could’ve gone naturally, but if she’d sped the process along, Athena could not blame her. That was because she loved her mother, cared for her, and she did not like to see those she loved in pain, especially pointless pain, futile pain. She had seen more than enough of that with her father, and was quite content if she never saw it again.
The simple truth, as she understood it, was that life simply is. For life to have worth, it had to have, well, worth. Life, purely for the sake of life, being, solely for the sake of being, was meaningless. Life could, and often did, have meaning, and there were many options available, but it was not a given. And if there was no worth left, and all that remained was pain, then there was no shame in ending it. An end was inevitable anyway, and there was enough pain in the world already without adding gratuitously to it.
Her father had suffered much before finally giving it up and ending it himself, and for what? To uphold some cultural taboo that as far Athena could determine, existed out of some form of society’s sadism? That would be in-character for society, she thought. But she knew it was more complicated than that. Probably the taboo had been invented by some rich priests who, when faced with peasants or slaves weary from the endless drudgery of their lives spent solely to feed the unending appetites of their masters, sought to deny them a means of flight, a path of escape. The dead cannot work, after all, and the priests needed their larders stocked and certainly weren’t going to put in the effort themselves.
If her mother had sought to avoid the same fate as her father, then Athena could only just feel relief that she had succeeded in her task. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she whispered, stepping forward. She adjusted some of the white hair on her mother’s head that had fallen down over her forehead, stroking her cheek, which was cool to the touch. “All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.”
She looked over at the silver chalice. She’d wondered sometimes, after the death of her father and especially of that of her brother, if they were damned, the four of them, the four Sideroi. The White Palace had never felt like home, ever, not like Skammandros or Smyrna, especially since the Night of the Tocsins. They’d taken the throne, the four of them, for all of them had been involved, one way or another. And how had the years passed, and what had history decreed, and what had the fates spun on their threads?
Perhaps there was another reason, besides ill health and the terrible memory of her father’s end. Athena knew how the Sideroi had come to power. It had been Jahzara’s drive and ambition that had taken them to these spectacular heights. But while the view was brilliant up here, the air was also thin, too thin for the likes of Demetrios and Odysseus. Jahzara had achieved her heart’s desire, but there were always costs to such things.
She picked up the goblet, looking at her reflection. Perhaps they were damned. But she believed in a merciful God. All things come to an end, and that included the day. But all things come to an end, and that includes the night as well.
She took the chalice with her as she left her mother’s bedchambers. Her time would come, after all, and she would have need of it then. But as she exited, she remembered a few odd scratches in her father’s journal. “Give me not a long life, but a good one. Not more, but better.”
She gave orders for the gathered attendants outside to begin making the proper preparations for the body. And then she ordered another to ask Sophia to come to her chambers; she needed to hug her daughter.
* * *
The White Palace, Constantinople, February 1, 1649:
“It looks like a duck,” Athena said, gesturing at the black blotch. The large paper pinned up on the wall was a ‘solar scape’, as Celeste Galilei called it, a pencil drawing of an image of the sun she’d shone through a telescope onto the wall, then copying it down.
Alexeia Kukuritzia, her secretary/bodyguard, one of the women who’d gone to war dressed as a man and a veteran of the Ruse battles, the 12 Days, and Thessaloniki (where they’d met during the siege), tilted her head and squinted her eyes, looking at the blotch. “Maybe a mutant duck perhaps. But I’m not as drunk as you.”
Athena mock-glowered at her. Before she could say anything to her impertinent subordinate, she was interrupted by a string of muttered Tuscan curses. Both Athena and Alexeia looked over at the person responsible.
Celeste Galilei was hunched over her writing desk, papers in front of her, the light from the adjacent fireplace reflecting off her face. This was her study. She reached over to a stand next to the fireplace, picking up an inkpot from there and setting it on her desk, dipping a quill in it. Athena exhaled, her breath fogging, and she moved over to regain the warmth of the fire. Alexeia followed.
“Is the ink thawed?” Alexeia asked.
“Yes, finally,” Celeste muttered.
“So what’s the problem?” Athena asked. “Aside from the obvious.” It was a bad sign when the Regent of the Roman Empire had to thaw her wine over a fire before she could drink it, and wine wasn’t the only thing freezing in the ridiculous chill.
Celeste gestured at the papers in front of her, Athena recognizing the handwriting of many different correspondents. Celeste communicated via letter with many people, from Ethiopia to Sweden. “It isn’t just here. There’s unusual colds in England, Spain, and Moscow.” She gestured at another sheet, this one in Celeste’s hands. “We’ve been sharing thermometer recordings and I’ve been recording them. Average temperatures are down practically everywhere.”
“What could cause something like this?”
“That’s why I’ve been trying to figure out.” Celeste turned and gestured at the ‘solar scape’. “What do you see there?”
“Well, she sees a mutant duck,” Alexeia replied.
Celeste looked at Athena in bafflement. “Some things are best left in ignorance,” she muttered. “But what else?”
“Uh, nothing.”
“Exactly. Aside from that one sunspot, there’s nothing else.”
“So?”
Celeste dug around in her papers for a bit and then pulled one out. “Here are the solar sketches of the archimandrite of the Sumela. He’s been recording them going back to 1623. Notice a pattern?” Athena looked over the drawings. The black spots themselves on the disk themselves didn’t seem to have any kind of pattern, as far as she could tell. But…
“There’s less of them,” Athena said.
“Exactly. They’ve been decreasing in numbers. He’s not the only one that’s noticed. That’s the first sunspot I’ve seen in over two years. When I started, I’d see one a month.” [1]
“Strange, but what does it mean?”
“I don’t know, and that’s what is bothering me. Whatever is causing the cold has to be big, so an obvious possibility is the sun is responsible somehow. I’ve always thought the sun spots are essentially cool spaces in the solar fire, spots where the sun is colder than its usual, much as one might have pockets in a fire that aren’t as hot. But if that’s true, a lack of spots would suggest the sun is running hotter than usual, not colder. In which case, we should be having a heat wave, not freezing.”
Athena nodded and then patted her comfortingly on the shoulder. “Well, let me know when you do figure it out. Although something like this, even if we knew the cause, I doubt we could do anything about it.” Celeste nodded.
Athena turned and looked out through the window, which gave a fine view of the Bosporus, an excellent display of the insanity of this world. The barrier between Europe and Asia had ceased to exist; the Bosporus had frozen over. [2]
* * *
“The elements, servants of an irate God, combine to snuff out the rest of humankind: mountains spew out fire; the earth shakes; plague contaminates the air.” (OTL: Jean-Nicholas de Parival, Short History of this Iron Century, Brussels, 1653)
“[These] days are days of shaking and this shaking is universal…” (OTL: Jeremiah Whitaker, The Peacemaker, England, 1643)
“This seems to be one of those epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are approaching the end of the world.” (OTL: The Victor, pamphlet, Madrid, 1643)
“Since [1641] I am not afraid of seeing dead people, because I saw so many of them at that time.” (OTL: Yao Tinglin, Record of Successive Years, Shanghai, China, c. 1670)
“Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.” (Bishop Manuel Rekas, sermon in Constantinople)
“The Roman people must become steel. This must be done in fire, and the slag cast out into the waste dump. This is necessary, so let it be done. Mercy will hinder this task, so let it be abandoned.” (Tourmarch Thomas Nereas)
“I sense a great evil in the heart of Rhomania. This tumor must be excised, lest it doom us all. But I fear the surgery will be terrible in its own right.” (Patriarch Adam II of Constantinople)
“Evil must be opposed. No matter the cost, for to surrender to evil is to pay an even greater price.” (Father Andronikos Hadjipapandreou)
“A pebble by itself can do nothing. But a pebble on top of a mountain can start a landslide.” (Anatolian proverb)
“They say, ‘let us go and sell their mother for three hyperpyra, their youngest child for a bag of silver! For why have compassion when one can have money instead?’” (Konon of Galesion)
“What kind of man faithfully stands guard over some cucumbers when his mother is threatened with rape on the other side of the village?” (Kastrophylax Leo Klonares)
“Many people held their lives to be of no value, for the area was so wasted and barren, the common people so poor and had suffered so much, that essentially they knew none of the joys of being alive…Every day one would hear that someone had hanged himself from a beam and killed himself. Others, at intervals, cut their throats or threw themselves into the river.” (OTL: Huang Liuhong, Complete Book concerning happiness and benevolence, about events in Shandong, China, c. 1670)
“Those who live in times to come will not believe that we who are alive now have suffered such toil, pain and misery.” (OTL: Fra Francesco Voersio of Cherasco, Plague Diary, Italy, 1631.)
“Perhaps now we can make a better world, a better life for our people, if we be wise and compassionate to one another. I will not say it will make the cost we have paid worthwhile, but at least it would not make the cost completely meaningless, and provide at least some salve to our grief.” (Bishop Ioannes Grozes)
“A third of the world has died.” (OTL: Abbess Angelique Arnauld, letter, Port-Royale-des-Champs, France, 1654)
[1] This is the Maunder Minimum, the period from 1645-1715 when the number of observed sunspots plummeted, indication of diminished solar activity.
[2] This is copied from OTL. In the winter of 1620-1, for forty days the Bosporus was frozen. See Geoffrey Parker,
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, pg. 342.
(All OTL quotes taken from the beginning of
Global Crisis.)