Naksou City, 1081 A.D.

When dawn came to the city, it found Armatos ek Naksou standing on the pier.

News of his invitation to the Royal Court had come as a great surprise to him, not that it should have. After all, his old man must have had a way with people if he was able to become governor of the island in the first place. Still, it had taken him longer than he would have liked to get his affairs in order. He didn’t want to have to return here for any reason until he was good and ready.

Oh sure, Naksou wasn’t the most boring island in the Cyclades; it certainly wasn’t as bad as Iou or Parou, but by the word of the Lord it was not cosmopolitan. Armatos had been to Constantinople when he was a kid and there was no comparison, here the only entertainment was gambling and reading, neither of which were very interesting to him. The most fun he ever had here were the occasional pirates and other outlaws.

He smiled as he remembered the grain riots that had sprung up just a year ago. A great mess that was, with some former gladiator or whatnot inspiring rebellion in the streets. Armatos knew this about the guy because one day, after a particularly boring lesson about city administration he decided to work of some energy by finding the guy and challenging him to single combat. A hasty decision in retrospect, seeing as how the first words out of the guys mouth were about how Armatos would make a good hostage. Turned out the guy was pretty decent with a sword too, almost taking Armato’s jaw off and leaving a scar that still hadn’t quite healed. Perhaps it was all that talk of ‘rebellion’ and ‘regicide’ and the ‘blood’ coming out of Armatos’s ‘head’, but whoever that gladiator was he had breathed his last. It was a good thing Armatos had all that adrenaline pumping through his veins, or he may not have been able to high-tail it out of their fast enough after he was done.

And if the scar wasn’t bad enough, it didn’t take long for his old man to hear the rumors about how the first-born son of the island’s ruling noble stopped a rebellion-in-the-making via single combat. It may have put all the malcontents in a tizzy long enough for the next shipment of grain to arrive, but that didn’t stop his father from smacking him around and locking him in his room for a week. Armatos was going to write the whole experience off as a big mistake, until he received a letter from some guy named Makedonios.

Armatos had never heard of the guy before, but he liked what he was offering. Although Armatos had never seen a battle worthy of the name before, he had read lots of books about the glorious history of the Romans and the Greeks, particularly their military histories. In his boredom he had always imagined himself as one of the heroes in those stories, someone whose strength, wisdom and courage had made lives of his subjects all the better. What’s more, the man spoke about a mission for the Lord. Armatos knew he could never get a better deal than helping to establish good, Christian government over the Holy Places.

And know, his time was at hand. Soon the Dromon would arrive to take him to Constantinople, and after the Diet Session his new life with the Order of St. John would truly begin.