Troubled Minds

Intro chapter for a historical fiction novel

Troubled Minds

                      It was that time of the year again when great winds from the north would begin to blow south, pulling the winter with them, letting the farmers know when to begin preparations for the upcoming winter - storing food, mainly, but it was also a time for buying all the little things that the family could possibly need during the dark season. And as always, stories ran circles in the Byzantine Empire, dark stories, prophecies of an impending doom. Doubt was not allowed to grow in the minds of many, however - their work took away most of their time - but if anything, the pressing need for haste only increased, and so the villages were beginning to ready up long before the first snow. Nobody could tell if that was due to the stories - prophecies, really - that began to jump from tavern to tavern like wildfire. Winter was something to prepare for, of course, even if it would not be harder than usual, but the whole process was unnatural. Some could speculate that a change was coming, and to the folk in the walled coastal settlement of Rumelia, it was one of the month's hottest topics.

                      But that was not all the winds brought south. Fleets of northmen raiders came on their longships, sacking several coastal villages, or so the stories told. There were no sightings near Rumelia, either, not before last summer, at least, when a village five miles to the northwest was raided by some unknown foe - probably the Turks - and three months later a small fishing village not ten miles from Constantinople itself. No survivors were found, but if the Turks were allowed to raid the coastal villages so, how could the war be going well? Times were not great, or will not be in the near future was the most common sentence you would hear from a random passersby if you only asked about the state of the realm. Funnily, few knew which of the stories to believe - or even from whom they heard it from - but all seemed to agree that the state of the realm was going to be a lot worse. Surely that would mean something?

                      As some knew, the winds carried more than just tales of distant lands to the south - western peddlers and strange northern merchants arrived every year with wagons and guards to "distribute" their goods to the people, not to mention several groups of adventurers, sellswords and other riffraff that simply looked for an opportunity in the lands marred by hunger and restlessness. Some of the arriving northmen came to join the Royal Varangian Guard, and some were drafted after serving in the army, but it was clear in the peasants' minds that if some of them served the Emperor, then eventually the rest of them would follow their good example, somehow.

                      Then again, these only were the things you heard in the taverns and inns, heard from the mouths of some regular patrons. Most barely lifted an ear to a drunkard's rambling, anyway - aside from that there were northmen serving in the army, most of the stories weren't believed in that much. The word spread, though, slowly but surely, and beneath their unreadable expressions, a growing doubt began to form in their minds, beginning to gnaw at the backs of their heads. A growing fear that somehow a large change was coming, something bad enough to plunge the Empire in turmoil, or shatter its wealth, or cause God to send a plague down at them. Nobody understood why, though. There really seemed to be no reason for any discontent; the army was on a campaign against the Rums in the East, true, but by the spring reports that came a few months earlier, the Empire had regained much of its ancient land back under the leadership of a great northern general. The Empire was strong and its armies huge, but sometimes you could hear a passersby wondering aloud whether the Emperor's armies truly protected them from harm. Or chattering about it with a friend. It never went beyond that, not in Rumelia, but there had been riots in several smaller villages by some God-forsaken fools who could never see beyond their own noses. But the doubt grew; could they really protect their own people?

Author's Note

Do you think it's good for an intro chapter?