41. The Shadows

  March 22nd. Kwame organised his private religious order. He had half the city already worshipping Helios, but he had won the town with public pressure, now he a black African man came to the city effectively a governor of it as the religious minister. He equipped the Artemis-Hermes Shadows as a skirmishing unit, knives and throwing spears, subversion rather than staying power, he also made a different calculation to the Republic’s generals. Speed.

  “You are agents of the Republic!” Kwame said, “but you are also agents of Helios! Every village, every town, every city, must know the glory of the gods. Artemis and Hermes together are the emblem of our forces, they embody what this force is!”

  An officer with scars on his face of Alan ethnicity came to the fore. Sauromates.

  “I trained them according to my and your recommendations,” he faced the soldiers, the agents, “every day we train conditioning to be stronger! We climb, we crawl, we throw and disable singular enemies and if we fight in a formation we barrage them with knives, axes and spears. We make our presence felt, after organising we took the town of Bitonto, and it is only the beginning!”

  The logic of these men and some women was different to the staying power and lumbering nature of the two generals who had taken towns so far, they marched in large formations, Sauromates had organised something akin to special forces, ideologically trained as well as physically conditioned. Where exactly Kwame had received funding for these men was questionable, but his associates had taken on jobs working, and they had received some ‘donations’ from new believers and old to form something and now they had a city. Still keeping to the Republic’s promises of low taxation, Kwame did not want to extort people, for that would merely reduce the number of converts and reduce his effectiveness, but what he had in mind and what Sauromates had perfected and mobilised was something quite different. It had helped the rabble win the battle against the Bitonto garrison through assassination, but now it mobilised to practice aim, it had done so in secrecy before, but now it was much more open about it.

  “Run soldier!” Sauromates shouted, as a man sprinted.

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  Men sprinted, crawled, sparred in a most provocative manner. They had perhaps 100 horses reserved to the best riders, the rest were expected to run the distance. Climbing up and down the wall, with hay to cushion falls.

  “Work on your grip!” Sauromates shouted, “far from perfect, but they’re improving,” he said to Kwame.

  A bit later, the more ideological lesson began, Kwame talked to his agents about theology.

  “Remember the Christians and Muslims believe in one god, one god made everything good and bad, and yet they claim he is all good and all merciful,” Kwame said, “this is a farce. Even ignoring their history, the idea that a good god can make evil is farcical and false, and their excuses for why are likewise farcical and false. Both ideas were forced with the power of civil government, which were anything but civil,” he let that sink in as some people chuckled, “if we start from the Muslims, they conquered polytheists and forced them to convert and likewise the Christians forced their baptism on the conquered, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Sunni and Shia, they are a result of the ruling imposing their will on the ruled.” He paused, but he continued, “slavery is an abomination, feudalism is an abomination, and both religions perpetuated it, and shamefully even the ancients perpetuated it, our Republic will end it for good and make a just system!”

  “For the gods!” The Shadows shouted.

  Over the course of a day, they refined other arguments.

  “A man in Germania, or Africa could talk to one another and recognise the gods as the same,” Sauromates said, “and now the Christians murder each other over what kind of bread, or what nature god has, the Sunni and Shia schism is also similar, murdering each other over a political conflict at the beginning of their religion; none of these religions teach morality, is it moral to be an unrepentant vile person until the very end only to then repent and see Jesus as lord? No? Of course not. Perhaps we should focus our arguments on the Christians for now friends, but soon enough, soon enough.”

  Elastically strong, they were flexible, they had some darts, among other throwing weapons. Sauromates showed how to dig traps, laying ropes to trip up horses and men, lay net traps, how to start fires. The training program was varied, Norman agents in Bitonto were not so mercifully treated as in Bari with the lot of them imprisoned in the local cell. The existence of the Shadows of Hermes and Artemis weren’t supposed to be known yet, but with Sauromates’s permission they filed out to local villages as not mere priests but agents of his new order.

  “Minister of religion of the Republic!” Sauromates said, holding many throwing daggers and a slightly longer knife, “I am prepared for many things.”

  “May the gods protect you!”

  Riding or running to local hamlets, villages or towns, roughly 500 stayed behind while others effectively fomented unrest in the countryside. Kwame’s role was for now unknown, an inconsequential element to the Normans, for now.