Excerpt from Nicked by M.T. Anderson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Nicephorus rolled the wheelbarrow around a rut. "There is no cargo on that final journey."

They bumped and rolled through a tunnel, out an old triumphal arch, and toward the blue Adriatic.


As they approached the wharves and warehouses outside the city walls, the piazzas of Bari were no longer empty. There were the crowds of sailors, the merchants, the grandees in their capes, the familiar heckling and haggling. Turbaned Byzantine workmen, Norman soldiers, accountants from the Caliphate in Egypt. Bari sat at the heel of Italy, the crossroads of the Mediterranean, a port at the center of the world: a city once Roman, once Arabian, twice Byzantine, and now Norman. Nicephorus had never been far from Bari, but he was used to foreign crowds: Jewish merchants who traveled back and forth from Córdoba to Samarkand; Christian pilgrims striking out for distant shrines with their trains of slaves; Muslim sailors stopping for a few days on their way to Venice; and those wanderers who spoke of no allegiance to nation and homeland, just to litanies of goods (Widhari cloth, Palermo silk, Basran sugar, borax from Lake Van). They teemed upon the Barese quays and thoroughfares.

Amid the grain ships and the fishing boats with their sails furled and the great warships, the dromons, at dock with their ranks of oars up like the flippers of Leviathan, there was a table set outside a taverna with a crowd gathered around it, pushing for a glimpse of the dog-headed man. Comedians shouted things like "Over here, boy—there's a good boy!" and "Bowwow!" which seemed blunt and unwelcoming. Nicephorus winced.

The man in the barrow yelled out, "Let me scratch you between your ears!"

"Maybe quieter," said the monk.

"Sure," said the man in the barrow. "He might be startled by loud noises."

The dog-man was seated at the table next to some sort of Tartar. Both were dressed in old brocade qabas, scalded with sea salt and smudged with labor. The Tartar ate with his hands, like all decent men did. The dog-man had brought with him a weird metal claw on a stalk which held the meat down with three tines as he cut with a knife.

"All very entertaining, gentlemen, ladies," said the dog-man, waving irritably at the crowd agog.

"A dog-man and a Tartar in one day," said the man in the wheelbarrow. "Sometimes life serves me shit on a trencher, but today Fortune hands me a fucking dumpling."

"I will leave you briefly," said the monk. "I need to call upon the Sisters of Saint Scholastica. If you need something, stagger."

Nicephorus went to see the sisters in their convent by the seawalls. They had suffered only one death within their whited chapel. Several more were fevered.

"Could you intercede with your new friend?" said the Abbess.

"In the wheelbarrow?"

The Abbess squinted. "The Blessed Nicholas. Abbot Helias told me you'd had a dream. The Archbishop is thrilled."

"I do not know the dream was inspired," said Nicephorus unhappily.

"Ask the saint what we can do to lift this sickness."

"I simply received a dream."

"Ask him on our behalf."

Nicephorus insisted: "I have no reliable avenue of communication with the undead Bishop of Myra."

The Abbess drew her fingers across the sacred linens on the altar. She did not meet his eyes. "He looks so severe in his icons."

"Not severe," said Nicephorus. "Just balding."

He asked whether the Abbess needed any little thing sent over from the monastery of St. Benedict. His abbot, he said, would be happy to comply.


When he got back to the taverna, the crowd had thinned around the Tartar and the cynocephale. The two adventurers were chatting with some port girls who Nicephorus knew from his dealings in the town: Gallenice and Aquilina. Nicephorus's sick charge was listening to the chitchat with wide-eyed curiosity. Some Samaritan had rolled the man's wheelbarrow closer to the table.

Excerpted from NICKED by M.T. Anderson. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by M.T. Anderson.