Alexios took Sargsyan, Michael, Gowri, and a few other oil slaves who had volunteered to join. In the company of Ifridun and Artvadios, they left the caravanserai and returned to the shore. Here they found other workers and slaves boiling saltwater in iron cauldrons for miles along the curving beach that was lashed with windy surf. Coils of white steam were writhing everywhere. Ifridun explained that Bakuya's owners possessed oil stores that would last months at least. When Alexios said that the owners were free to gather oil themselves whenever they wished, Artvadios’s booming laughter scattered seagulls into the sky.

  “Ay, lad, but what would be the point? The only reason anyone gets rich in the first place is so they don’t have to work!”

  “But I thought owners were the hardest workers of all,” Alexios said sarcastically. “That they provide people with jobs instead of forcing jobs on people?”

  Artvadios narrowed his gleaming eyes. “Sometimes you speak so strangely, I cannot tell if you are serious.” He leaned in to Alexios’s ear and, nodding to Ifridun, whispered: “This one’s set to inherit the whole country, and he hasn’t worked a day in his life!”

  “They might not be perfect, but there are still good owners who do a good job,” Alexios said, maintaining his sarcastic tone.

  Artvadios raised his bushy gray eyebrows. “Well, I don’t see any here.”

  Alexios and his class found a spot some distance from the boiling saltwater cauldrons. He invited everyone to sit. They were hesitant to do this in Ifridun’s presence, but he told them to act as though he was one of them.

  Alright, Alexios thought, imagining himself as an oil slave punching Ifridun’s face hard enough to knock bloody teeth from his jaw.

  Alexios looked at his students and realized he had no idea what to say. Until now he’d been telling himself, whenever he thought about teaching another class, that he had plenty of experience and would figure something out sooner or later. The last class in the Naryn-Kala courtyard with Ifridun’s favorite warriors had gone poorly. Alexios was also feeling insecure about his own accomplishments. His family was still out there, still enslaved, still awaiting his rescue. Since leaving Trebizond, he’d done nothing except lose.

  “We’re here to talk about the farr,” Alexios told his students.

  Where were these words coming from? No matter, let them keep coming.

  “Does anyone know what the farr is?” he continued.

  “It means luck,” Ifridun said. “I remember from your last class. And it has something to do with the sun and moon and stars.”

  “Right, thank you.” Alexios nodded. “That’s what I was talking about in our last class—how we’re all connected to each other, how everything in the world and in society is connected, and how these connections and contradictions—the law of the unity of opposites—cause change.”

  Michael spoke on his own here. “Like how a tree is a seed and a huge plant at the same time.”

  “Exactly,” Alexios said. “We also talked about that last time. Yet how can a tree be both a seed, a giant plant, a fruit, and so on? Does one form invalidate the other? Or are they all part of a greater whole?”

  Silence from his students.

  “We can understand the natural world scientifically,” Alexios said. “By forming theories and testing them with experiments in the real material world. For those questions which go beyond our senses and our technology—such as the creation of the universe—we’re forced to rely upon tools like telescopes to help us see and understand. But sometimes these tools are limited, at which point we must rely upon logic, though nature has shown itself many times to have a logic all its own.”

  Artvadios narrowed his brow. “What’s your point?”

  “Society is part of nature,” Alexios said. “Therefore society can be scientifically and logically understood—just like nature. We can draw connections between different events and synthesize them into a greater moving whole.”

  “Alright,” Artvadios said skeptically, his eyes gleaming with amusement. “We’ll see where you go with this.”

  “The contradiction in a tree is that it is a tiny seed and a huge sprawling trunk at the same time,” Alexios said. “Yet how can this be? How can a tree be both? The seed needs soil, water, and sunlight to grow. But in growing, it changes so much that if you had never seen a tree before, you would never believe that it could come from something so small. How can a tiny seed contain within itself an enormous tree? This is a contradiction. There are so many more. Contradiction is everywhere. It causes all motion and change. Everything is itself and, at the same time, becoming something entirely different. A child ages slowly until, one day, he is a man. A man ages slowly until, one day, he becomes a corpse. A corpse can also change into dust, flowers, or even animals—and, eventually, other people. All of this is contained within itself. There is the contradiction between the particular and the universal, the one and the many—”

  “God is one and many at the same time,” Gowri interrupted.

  Everyone looked at her. This was the first time Alexios could recall Gowri venturing an opinion. She suddenly blushed and averted her eyes.

  “That’s very true,” Alexios said. “Please feel free to contribute more if you wish. Now, I was going to add more contradictions. There is the contradiction between life and death, between animate and inanimate forms of matter, existence and nonexistence, being and nothingness, the finite and the infinite. In mathematics, a straight line can also be a curve; a line is a curve without curvature; it’s like a gateless gate, as the worshippers of the Buddha might say.”

  Artvadios nodded. “The ones who pray to the statues of the golden man. I have seen them here and there in my adventures—often in Baktria.”

  “Contradiction continues in mathematics,” Alexios said. “The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter—pi, in other words—is infinite. How can this be? Action is contradicted by reaction. In physics, the positive electrical charge is contradicted by the negative electric charge—”

  “Wait a moment,” Sargsyan said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Electricity,” Alexios said. “I can tell you more about it later, but it’s the reason lightning comes from thunderclouds, and why if you rub certain kinds of cloth and then touch a metal doorknob, you can get an electric shock.”

  Sargsyan shrugged. “Very well.”

  “Molecules—collections of atoms—come together and fall apart,” Alexios said. “A body versus its organs. In philosophy, subjective versus objective, simple versus complex, internal versus external, similarity and difference, idealism and materialism, dialectics and metaphysics, creation and destruction. Every thing and rock and plant and animal and person and society contains within itself the seeds of its own annihilation. When contradiction ends, so does everything; the universe could not exist without the contradiction between time and eternity.”

  Artvadios nodded. “Very wisely said. Very much so.”

  Alexios thanked him. It’s easy enough to use dialectics in nature. The best scientists do this all the time when they study black holes or evolution. But Mazdakism becomes dangerous when it’s applied to society—since it’s ultimately the science of changing society at the most fundamental level!

  “In society,” Alexios continued, eyeing Ifridun, “classes form and struggle against each other. These classes can take different shapes—one race against another, one religion against another, men versus women, the young versus the old, slaves versus owners, workers versus peasants, the individual versus society as a whole. In war, offense is contradicted by defense, victory by defeat. One cannot exist without the other. The two aspects are at once in conflict and interdependent. You cannot define a word without using other words, each depending upon the others, connected to them, and all of them changing together because of their internal and external contradictions.” Alexios took a breath. “Whew. Everybody got that?”

  They watched him.

  “It is a great deal to take in,” Ifridun said.

  “I’m just getting warmed up,” Alexios said. “Our own society is also driven by contradiction, the main contradiction being that the rich cannot exist except by stealing from the poor—that the rich and poor, in effect, define one another.”

  The students eyed Ifridun without turning their heads; he pretended to ignore them. Otherwise they were silent. The contradiction to the rich and poor was obvious to most medieval slaves, workers, women, children, and ethnic and religious minorities, since they experienced economic exploitation’s nastier side every day of their lives, and rarely benefited from it. What slave excused his master—or the system which placed him in chains, and made his life a living death? The only people who excused slavery—who claimed that the world wasn’t as simple as rich versus poor, that everything everywhere had always been exactly the same since the dawn of time—were the ones who benefited materially from it. A small number of house slaves were included in this equation. But the beneficiaries of exploitation were always a tiny minority compared to the vast masses of the exploited.

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  So far, so good. Ifridun was pretending, at least, to go along with the idea that there was something different about him compared with almost everyone else. Artvadios—who might have had a good heart, and a sharp mind—was nonetheless agreeing with his boss. Alexios was cognizant of the fact that he himself was unarmed, while Artvadios carried at least one weapon: a large sharp scimitar.

  Train Artvadios last, he thought.

  “How did we get here?” Alexios continued. “Where are we going? How can we change things for the better?”

  For an instant he winced at the thought that he sounded like a cult leader when he said this, but he reminded himself that cult leaders rarely mentioned science or society and certainly never mentioned dialectics or class struggle, nor did they ever encourage their followers to read, study the world, and go out into it and learn. Cults were also usually small and at society’s fringes; Mazdakists always thought big and always wanted to be at the center.

  “We need to understand this before we really begin to learn about the farr,” Alexios added.

  His students watched him.

  “Thousands of years ago,” Alexios said, “every human being on Earth was a nomad, moving from place to place, hunting and gathering but rarely if ever farming.”

  “Like in the Garden of Eden,” Sargsyan said.

  Alexios nodded. “Very much so. We lived like that for hundreds of thousands of years.”

  Artvadios leaned in. “But the world began only five thousand years ago.”

  “We should follow scripture metaphorically on this point.” Before anyone could interrupt, Alexios continued. “Now we’re not exactly sure why, but perhaps because of overhunting, population growth, the discovery of agriculture, or other factors, some people began to settle down, farm, and build the first towns and cities. Farmers work much harder and longer than hunter-gatherers, and because their labor is so intensive—they were barely able to produce more food than they ate—they required more workers. This meant that women needed to have more babies. Where else were the first farmers supposed to find more labor power to help on their farms? Domesticating the first animals wasn’t enough. But in hunter-gatherer societies, women can’t have too many babies because they’re always on the move, and babies slow everyone down. For the most part, hunter-gatherer women rarely have more than one or two kids. But women in agrarian societies like the one we live in today are forced by men to keep having kids until they either die or go through menopause. Disease also makes their job so much harder and more dangerous. Large numbers of humans living around large numbers of farm animals means that disease can spread far more easily than in isolated bands of hunter-gatherers. Babies and young children are also highly vulnerable to disease, which meant that agrarian women needed to have even more babies, which also meant that these women were unable to maintain the power and equality they had possessed as hunter-gatherers. Therefore, the first slavery was the slavery of women. In some languages today the word ‘slave’ is the same or very similar to the word for ‘woman.’”

  Ifridun was drinking in every word. “No one I’ve ever met has ever spoken like this. It’s so different from what we hear from our so-called ‘teachers.’ It never made sense, what al-Rashid told me, but I was just supposed to memorize whatever he said, and he would beat me if I questioned him. He was the only one permitted to lay his hands on me.”

  Alexios shrugged. I’ll take what I can get. “Plenty of people still live as hunter-gatherers or as nomads today. But a quantitative buildup in the forces of production in the past produced the qualitative change resulting in the society we all live in now. Other quantitative buildups—other intensifying contradictions—can produce other societies. Think about the contradiction today between the city and the countryside, for instance. Who has the advantage in war: the settled soldiers, or the barbarian cavalry riding in from the steppe?”

  “The Turkish cavalry is often unstoppable,” Artvadios said.

  “And yet what happens when the Turks conquer a city?” Alexios said. “Some changes take place, but the overall form is still much the same. Either the government extracts taxes from farmers, as is the case in Rome, or lords and priests extract rent and tithes from serfs, as is the case among the Latins. Yet there are other possibilities. Other contradictions. It is often the underclass that destroys the old order. Look at how, for instance, barbarian mercenaries overthrew the Roman Empire in the west—and how they are in the process of doing the same right now in the east, many of the emperor’s soldiers being Turkish mercenaries. There are different underclasses today which can produce new societies. There are workers, who can produce societies in which workers are the ruling class. There are peasants, who can produce societies in which peasants are the ruling class. And there are merchants, who can produce societies in which merchants are the ruling class.”

  Ifridun laughed. “Merchants running a country? It could never happen. They are far too busy haggling over the price of this and that!”

  “Oh, if only you knew about the nightmares that might lay in store for all of us,” Alexios said. “But the way to change society is to work together—for the underclasses to join together in building a new society that’s more fair for everyone. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.’ This is our guiding principle. This is what we as Mazdakists aim to achieve.”

  Sargsyan cleared his throat. “How can we bring such a society about?”

  “We analyze problems scientifically,” Alexios said. “We help each other. We sacrifice for each other. Ensure that everyone has what they need—good food, water, housing, education, medicine—and can reach their full potential. Necessities for all come before luxuries. Choose what to do democratically, including everyone in every decision. We struggle. We criticize. The most advanced workers act as a vanguard on behalf of the workers and peasants, constantly consulting them and interpreting their desires through the lens of Mazdakism.”

  “It sounds aggressive,” Ifridun said. “And violent.”

  “If we want to overthrow the ruling class,” Alexios said, “we need to be even more aggressive, violent, and organized than they are—though we should always do our best to ensure that our violence affects no one except the ruling class.”

  “Yet innocent casualties are inevitable in war, are they not?” Ifridun said.

  “We target only the ruling class and their running dogs,” Alexios said. “The ruling class, in contrast, is indiscriminate in its response, always raging like rabid beasts. They have already been far more violent than we ever could be. To turn people against us, they will commit terrible crimes, then use their priests and criers to claim that we are the ones responsible. The Romans have ruled the world for centuries, stealing most of its wealth, murdering and enslaving millions in the name of glory, honor, conquest, riches. Even if we killed every last living supporter of the Roman Empire, we would never come close to the carnage they’ve visited upon so many innocents. This is why knowledge of theory isn’t enough. We must read dialectical materialist history so we know the historical context—we must take action informed by theory, history, self-criticism, experimentation, teamwork.”

  “It’s a good thing Shirvan doesn’t act like Rome,” Ifridun said.

  Artvadios laughed, then covered his mouth and apologized.

  “Enough talk!” he exclaimed, perhaps to distract from his outburst. “This farr of yours, Eskandar-jan—it is the guiding light of the criminals in Trabzon, is it not? It is the reason, you say, for their victories? Very well! Then show us how to use it! What is the point of listening and learning if we take no action, if we change nothing?”

  “Good question,” Alexios said. “I’ll finish up. The thing you need to understand is that the farr can only be used to destroy the old society in the name of making the new. This means that it can only be used by the exploited underclasses of the old society as well as those members of the ruling class who have turned against it.” Alexios looked at Ifridun. “Does that include you?”

  Ifridun glanced back and forth. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want Shirvan to be run by peasants, workers, slaves, women, and children?” Alexios said. “Or do you want your family to continue to rule here?”

  Ifridun looked at his classmates and cleared his throat. “I was curious about the farr because I was tired of always being ordered around by my father, always having so many duties and responsibilities, never free to be who I wish. My father is young and strong, many believe he will rule Shirvan for many years. Doubtless he will remarry, and if his new wife produces a male heir, where will that leave me? I had heard rumors about Trabzon—that there was more indeed than mere luck to their victories. Always we are told that Trabzon is full of lying corrupt criminals, that it’s on its last legs and about to collapse, but that we also need to strengthen ourselves to defend against it. How can one be strong and weak at the same time? That made no sense to me.”

  “I need to be clear about something.” Alexios eyed his students. “We’re not here to put you on the throne. We’re here to get rid of the throne entirely.”

  Ifridun looked at Artvadios. “Is that not treasonous?”

  Artvadios shifted his weight, glanced back and forth, then returned his gaze to Ifridun. “It is whatever the Shirvanshahzadeh says it is.”

  “If you join us,” Alexios said to Ifridun. “If you make this happen, it’s not going to be comfortable. Fighting a class war—the only war that really matters—if you fight on the side of the poor, it means that you’re going to be poor, too. That you’re going to have to march through rainy, snowy days, sleep outside in the elements, flee powerful enemies, suffer from hunger and thirst and disease, lose your closest friends and family—indeed, lose many battles of all kinds. You may die long before we achieve victory, which itself is not guaranteed. Many movements before ours were completely wiped out. Your sole consolation is going to be the knowledge that you’re fighting for what’s right, that the world can be better, that it doesn’t have to be this way. Every person can learn to read and write, every person can eat and live well every day, there is more than enough in the world for everyone to live in peace.”

  Ifridun looked to Artvadios, who shrugged, and then turned back to Alexios. “I know I’m young, but I’ve lived long enough. Am I going to spend the rest of my life just relaxing, drinking good wine, eating good food? Will I take money from the peasants, send armies into battle, have children with some princess, patronize the arts, and then die of old age? How many other princes have lived exactly that life? What need is there for me to do the same?”

  “So will you join us?” Alexios said.

  “I have only one question,” Ifridun said. “Trabzon is far from here. Must we swear allegiance to it?”

  Alexios shook his head. “Each people, each culture has a right to determine its own destiny. I think that Shirvan and Trabzon should work together, but that’s for the people of these respective places and their representatives to decide. If Shirvan chooses to join the uprising, I doubt Trabzon will have a problem. If Shirvan wishes to ally with us, but maintain its own independence, that can also be arranged.”

  Ifridun nodded. “It sounds good to me.”