It is 66 BC.  In<strong>Rome</strong>, they are saying that the West is, at last, conquering the East.<br/><br/>Look closer.<br/><br/>In<strong>Asia Minor</strong>, Pompey the Great is addressing the recaptured city of Sinope – famed city of eternal virginity – all its arrayed lords in their red, and the men of commerce, and the women in their garlands.  And he is telling them that when Amasya falls, the insurgent resistance Mithradates has stoked among the tribes will find itself with a broken spine, lying prostrate under a Roman boot.  He is saying that Rome is, at last, conquering the barbaric crown city of the Amazons.<br/><br/>Look closer.<br/><br/>In<strong>Amasya</strong>, the Queen of the Amasyan Amazons, Eris, puppet of old Mithradates, is secure in her high fortress with ten thousand warriors gathering for a siege.  She bites her lip when she thinks no one is looking, and searching glances look to the hard face of Navar, the Gallic mercenary who is Mithradates’ chief operative there.  She finds subtle signs of distress in him, and inscribes them over and over on the slate of her mind.  She hears her lieutenant telling her that word has come that the town of Kumyurt – critical post on the Red River that links Amasya to the battles in the east – has been seen burning.<br/><br/>The lieutenant informs her that the forces in Kumyurt had sallied into the countryside expecting to find an attacking cadre of Pirates readying themselves there.  Kumyurt's forces had planned to ambush the cadre while they were massing in the morning.  Instead, they found a mock camp, lit by unmanned torches.  By the time a scouting contingent was sent back to Kumyurt, it was too late.  The Pirates had snuck up the river, seized the city.  Kumyurt was lost.  The scouting contingent of ten Amazonian warriors and twenty men of Mithradates’ employ did not return to report it.  Only a red grin of fire along the river spoke the tale.<br/><br/>Look closer.<br/><br/><strong>Kumyurt </strong>sits as though with spread legs on the throat of the Red River.  Within those wide, wooden legs, there are terrible fires burning.  It is 66 BC, and the town of Kumyurt is spending its last moments of existence in suffering.<br/><br/>Approach from the Red River, and you might see the docks of Kumyurt.  Under them are cluttered with the fifteen wide, low vessels that the pirates and their Roman “advisors” used to sneak up in the middle of the night and slip into the city.  The contents of the docks are spare – most of the goods stocked there already pushed into the boats, the bodies of the guards rolled into the River.<br/><br/>There are bloodstains to mark where they were murdered unawares.<br/><br/>There is a girl of fourteen summers age in a safflower yellow dress over her dark skin.  She sits on the edge of the docks with her feet in the water.  And shy mouths, slit by her own hand around her dead father’s razor, empty her life into the river.  The Red River drinks the blood of the girl; the girl listens to the air.<br/><br/>There is a song in the air here.<br/><br/><em>“Fare thee well, my Julianna.<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown.<br/>Fare thee well, my Juli-ianna<br/>Shallow, Oh, shallow brown</em><br/><br/>There, by the wide open gates of Kumyurt against the docks, two pirates – still wearing pieces of the garb of the Roman soldiery they served in so many years – rest against the wall.  One wears his breastplate loosely, on it graffiti detailing a flock of winged phalluses.  He slumps.  His face is blank but for the blood that runs from a deep wound in his skull.  His eyes are an idiot child’s, coins of wet slate.  One soldier is an older fellow.  Eyes are drawn all around his helmet, which lies low over a face of flotsam.  He cradles the other soldier, and he sings to him.<br/><br/><em>Well it’s shallow in the morning<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown<br/>Shallow as the day is dawning<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown</em><br/><br/>Look closer.<br/><br/>Inside the gates of Kumyurt, there is a long road leading from the docks to the town square – a road so long that the children of Kumyurt would imagine it to stretch to the end of the world.  They used to play a game, hiding one eye, then the other, watching the road seem to redirect itself in their vision, its course switching back and forth.  They would play with the cosmos in this fashion, thinking the course of the sun and stars and moon would have to shift with their vision, following the road.  The children of Kumyurt play a new game now.<br/><br/>Weeping and screaming, the children of Kumyurt are led in this new game by a group of coarse men festooned with tattoos and clad in black.  The blades and whips and grasping hands of the men shove the children into a solid mass against what used to be a meat market.  They snarl curses at them, cuff them; in this way they control them.  These tattooed men bear no distinguishing marks – they wear no nation’s emblem – but all know who they work for.  These are the pirates who have thrown in their lot with the Scarlet Harvest, a slaving empire that has risen in less than a year to dominate the entirety of Asia Minor, from the Black Sea’s salty waters to Syria’s coast in the south, from Parthia to Thrace.<br/><br/>The pirates separate the children from the women.  Standing nearby is a single Roman operative – a man with dishwater eyes and a manner like melted wax, wearing a breast plate that has ‘EVER HARD’ written above a crude depiction of a bull’s head.  The Roman hardly watches; he seems to be looking elsewhere, somewhere behind the smoke-sewn fabric of Kumyurt’s air, somewhere that perhaps smells of wheat fields or of his wife’s sleeping body.  The pirates separate the children quickly, viciously, from the women, and they do so under the direction of a man with a chest like a stolen relief from an Egyptian temple.  This man hides the lower half of his face under a dark blue half-mask, but his broad, hard chest is bare to display the elaborate tattoos there – depictions of orgies, of violence, of sweeping, thunder-eyed eagles and lions arched with an ecstasy of blood running from their mouths.  This man watches with his arms crossed, cradling a still-wet sword.  He directs them.  But there is no question who really leads the Scarlet Harvest.  And the degree of savagery in the town indicates that though he is not present here on the long road, he is surely present in Kumyurt.<br/><br/><em>Well, you are my only treasure<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown<br/>And I love you well full measure<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown</em><br/><br/>Look closer.<br/><br/>Up the long road, the women are in the hands of the pirates.  Here, where there was once thriving mercantile, there is now calamity.<br/><br/>Women are tossed between pirates in a game of how much of their clothing can be torn away in a single grasp and push.  Hair is shorn to be taken as trophies.  The air is cut with names – names cried in desperation, in protest, in defiant statement of humanity.  The air boils with the laughter of pirates.<br/><br/>Pirates and black-clad outlaws burn the faces of effigies and dolls in the street and laugh at how the flames deform the features.  Two stand off to the side, one doubled over with giggles while the other pantomimes playing a piece of a crib like a lyre and sings a bawdy melody.  A group is on the edge of the school building roof, pissing off of it and trying to hit jugs they’ve placed in the mouths of supine women below.  Pirates cough and vomit in drinking contests.  One staggers about, calling out his mother’s name, his pants around his knees and one hand cupping where a woman’s teeth tore open his scrotum.  His fellow pirates laugh at him.  They laugh at everything.  Those that do not laugh, drink, or have found shadows elsewhere to sob in.  In other shadows, in the alleys and in the shops, the quiet, whimpering sounds of a dozen rapes boil out.<br/><br/>The women here are played with, stripped and shackled.  The Scarlet Harvest has come.<br/><br/>There are no men here.<br/><br/><em>Oh, my wife and baby grieve me<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown<br/>And that I’ll not deceive ye<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown</em><br/><br/>Look closer.<br/><br/>In the square of Kumyurt, there is a ring of fires.<br/><br/>The fire rings the tight square, illuminating the spread of hay and dung and old flower petals that cluster, discarded, in the grooves between the paving stones like lines in a secret history.  There are fourteen fires, and they stand on the ends of high stakes driven into the ground by pirate hammers.  As the fires rise, wreathing the shocked and stern faces of black-clad men standing guard around the well of Kumyurt, the fires shriek through gagged mouths.<br/><br/>The men of Kumyurt are here, and they are burning.<br/><br/>Fourteen survivors of the battle were taken, and fourteen bound to stakes driven in a circle around the square.  They were stripped of all but their personal effects – lockets, momentos, icons – which were set about their necks.  Their legs were wrapped in tar paper up to their groins.  Their mouths were sheathed in wet cotton rags.  Then the tar paper was set alight.<br/><br/>These fourteen men will burn, but not quickly.  They will burn slowly, like candles.  The wet cotton will keep them from expiring from smoke inhalation.  They are not allowed that mercy.  They will feel every inch of the fire that takes them – that, at last, will burn them up to their manhood as it kills them.  They will feel their personal effects – their wives portraits; their Gods – melt into their skin before they die.<br/><br/>This is not a punishment appropriate to the Romans.  It is not common to the pirates.  It was issued on the order of the leader of the Scarlet Harvest – the monstrous man who slouched from the sinking pirate hordes of the Mediterranean less than a year before, and has since climbed to the summit of the slaving business.  The men of Kumyurt burn because the stern-faced pirates were ordered to do it.  They were ordered by the leader, so that he might tell all around a message delivered in fire, screams and the extremity of suffering:  The Scarlet Harvest has come.  The Reaver has come.<br/><br/>The men of Kumyurt here will burn well into morning.  The message of The Reaver will burn far, far longer.<br/><br/><em>I must get my clothes in order<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown<br/>For my packet leaves tomorrow<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown</em><br/><br/>Look closer.<br/><br/>The eye of the storm that came to Kumyurt is not in the town hall.<br/><br/>In the town hall, there is but a single woman.  Jaw broken, legs broken, she was discarded by the tattooed man with the half-mask who now oversees the separation of the captive women from their captive children.  She is mute, dying; she will welcome death when it comes.  And when the low, wide boats of the Scarlet Harvest bear away the captive women to the markets in the north, some of the women will whisper of her.  They will whisper that it was she who opened the gates of the city for the sneaking cadre of pirates and outlaws – they will have poison on the tips of their tongues as they spit her name, and sting the air with insistence that she did so out of love for a man.  They will not nod though, or shake their heads; they will simply say that the broken woman betrayed Kumyurt’s defenses out of affection for a man who is the blackest lure for female hearts – a man who uses affection like a chain, and cares for it as little as any crude metal.  They will whisper, and whispers will gather like sheaves of cotton, and a new tract of that man’s legend will be woven.  His legend will stretch yet wider.<br/><br/>Only the woman dying in the town hall knows the truth of that story.  And she was killed because truth is the enemy of the man she will be said to have loved, betrayed her city for and been betrayed in turn by.  It is his enemy, for his legend makes him invincible, immortal, so long as its darkness continues to be woven.<br/><br/>In the eye of the storm in Kumyurt, that man is sitting.<br/><br/>Off the square, one door down an alleyway, there is a store that is Kumyurt’s principal claim to fame, and inside sits the man of legends.  This is where he holds his court.  Not in the town hall – every town has a town hall – but in the heart of the dying fame of Kumyurt.  For, since the store’s opening, moneyed men from all around Asia Minor, even the Roman General Lucullus himself, had come here for its wares: Sculptures of eagles.<br/><br/>All around the dimly-lit store are figures of eagles.  Eagles of bronze, eagles of clay, eagles of iron, eagles of brass, eagles made of quartz and tuff and black, igneous rock.  There are eagles in flight, eagles swooping to snatch with their claws, noble eagles gazing off into unseen horizons ripe with prey, eagles bent as if in mourning over lost nests.  Eagles in miniature flock in the corners of the room, and eagles in life size roost in tidy shelves lining the walls.  And a vast eagle, the size of a pony, occupies the store’s front chamber, near the doorway that leads to the kiln room.  This is an eagle that was commissioned years ago to sit atop a Roman curia – a Senate building.  But the insurgents among the tribes incited by Mithradates came here first, and so the curia never rose up.  But now, Rome has returned.  And the man who unlocked the gates – by guile over a woman’s heart or by some other incomparable cunning – sits on that eagle like a throne.<br/><br/><strong>Azuriel Luan</strong>sits on the eagle like the God he fancies himself to be.<br/><br/>From head to toe, he wears black.  Black cloak about a black tunic, sweeping down under black bandoliers and belts to black breeches fit into black boots.  Beneath his black mask, only black eyes are visible.<br/><br/>Moments before, they had been idle – as idle as this rapacious man’s eyes ever are.  They directed his bow’s shots into eagles throughout the room, using them for target practice. Numerous clay eagles lay pierced or shattered by the black arrows from that stained black bow.  But now the bow is set casually aside.  Now his black form rests as casually and as sinister as a shadow on the great bronze eagle, boots set on smaller eagles in front of him.<br/><br/>Now Azuriel Luan is giving an audience, and the jet black arrowheads of his eyes bore into them.<br/><br/>Look closer.  You are looking into the eyes of Azuriel Luan, Bandit God, Tamer of Hearts, King of the Seven Rings, Fool’s Good Brother, Temple Key and Commander of the Raiders of Galatea.<br/><br/>He is looking into you.  You may be an outlaw or a pirate new to the ranks of his storied band, here to accept a chance at fortune and glory under his charge.  You may be a captive – one of the sole survivors from the ill-fated Amasyan Amazon scouting expedition, or a woman taken in town.  Whichever you are, you feel that Azuriel’s eyes are aimed directly into you.<br/><br/>On the point of those eyes, there are few distractions.  The screams and laughter convulsing from the dying town are faded here.  The song of the man on the dock is coming to its close.<br/><br/><em>Fare thee well, my Juli-anna<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown<br/>Fare thee well, my Juli-anna<br/>Shallow, oh, shallow brown</em><br/><br/>Only one sound continues undiminished.  It comes from the kiln room.  It is a wet, tight, ripping noise.  It is regular, slow and unceasing.  And though it is trimmed with other, smaller noises – moist sucking noises, whimpers, the breathing of what sounds to be a bear – it is unmistakable:  It is the sound of a dull knife, slowly cutting open skin.<br/><br/>It is the sound of The Reaver at his work.<br/><br/>But look closer now.  The black arrowheads have sharpened themselves, and black gloved arms crossed before a black chest.  Azuriel is speaking to you.<br/><br/><strong>“I’ve got a conquest for you.”</strong><br/><br/>It is 66 BC, and here the real story is to be told.<br/>