Places
Andreas knows these places as a modern man knows them: as ruins, museums and traffic. In 599 they are working cities, and some of what he expects to see has not been built yet.
No spoilers beyond the opening chapters of Volume I.
Syracuse
The first city of Sicily, taken back for the Empire by Belisarius in 535, and a Greek-speaking city, as it had been for a thousand years. The old town stands on the island of Ortygia, packed down to the water, with the freshwater spring of Arethusa at its edge. Above its roofs stand the grey Doric columns of Athena's temple, a thousand years old, with part of the roof fallen in and goats grazing between the columns. The bishop's church is across the isthmus, on the rise above Achradina: the basilica of Saint John the Evangelist, with the catacombs of the Christian dead beneath it and a hostel for the poor beside it.
Today: Athena's columns still stand, built into the walls of the cathedral of Syracuse, which the temple became in the seventh century. The fountain of Arethusa still runs, with papyrus growing in it. The catacombs of San Giovanni are open to visitors.
The sea-cave
Somewhere on the coast of south-east Sicily, below a rented villa, there is a cave you can walk through only at the bottom of the lowest tides, at dawn. Where exactly, the book does not say.
Cape Malea
The southern tip of the Peloponnese, where the winds of two seas meet. Sailors have feared it since Odysseus was blown off course there, and every ship from Sicily to the Aegean must round it.
Thessalonica
The second city of the Balkans and the city of Saint Demetrios, its soldier-saint and defender. The Via Egnatia, the great road from the Adriatic to Constantinople, runs through it from gate to gate. Above it rise the brick arch and the round domed hall that the emperor Galerius built three centuries earlier; along the walls of its harbour the grain ships unload; and up the hill, in the upper town under the citadel, the better families live upwind of the harbour smells, on lanes that people find by whose house stands where.
Andreas was born in this city. He knows its walls, its churches and its hills. The tower he grew up with on the seafront is not there.
Today: the Arch of Galerius and the Rotunda still stand at the heart of modern Thessaloniki, and the great basilicas of Saint Demetrios and the Acheiropoietos are still in use. The walls survive for long stretches in the upper town, the Ano Poli. The White Tower on the seafront was built centuries later.
The Danube
The frontier. North of it lie the Avars and the Slavs; south of it, the Roman provinces they raid. In 599 the Emperor's armies are fighting along it, and some of his soldiers are in the Khagan's hands.
Constantinople
New Rome, the Queen of Cities, simply "the City". Volume I ends with its walls in sight. Volume II goes inside.