by Marié Heese
“Can we at least depend on them to defend the palace? Or will they cravenly hand us over to the raging mob?”
I stiffen. As Commander of the Imperial Guard, this is a very difficult position for me to be in. “No, Despotes. They will certainly defend the palace. To a man.”
“Small mercy. Already the entrance has been torched!”
“But the fire has been contained, and barricades have been put up.”
He grunts.
General Belisarius comes up and seeks to speak. “Despotes?” His handsome face, normally as open and friendly as any schoolboy’s, is tense.
“Yes?” the Emperor snaps.
“Between us, General Mundus and I have a couple of thousand men, housed in the Imperial barracks. Just say the word, and we–”
“No! I will not let a bunch of barbarian mercenaries loose on the people of Constantinople. Nor will I be dictated to by a rabble. The urban militia should be able to cope. We have had riots before, after all.”
“But, Despotes–”
“No, Belisarius. We’ll wait for calm to be restored. Which will surely be quite soon. This will blow over, if we keep our heads. Come, let’s drink some wine.”
They walk across the triclinium to join General Mundus on a couch. Mundus has a weather-beaten face resembling a saddle-bag left too long in the sun. He looks lugubrious. His hands dangle between his knees and he sighs.
At a handy table sits that plump pale legal fellow Procopius, secretary to Belisarius; he watches everyone with his small, closeset eyes and makes notes; he fancies himself as a historian, and records current events as if preparing one of his frequent despatches from the field of battle.
The Empress Theodora will not sit; she wants to be able to see out of the windows, although the palace complex is so huge that one cannot see the streets of the city. But one can see the flames. She stalks past Procopius, whom she hates for some reason, and comes to stand beside me. I have learned to know her well. I can read the rosy flush that stains her throat when she is angry. I can interpret, exactly, the set of her lips. She communicates with me simply by the way she breathes. Right now, she is both furious and frightened.
“Narses, this is ridiculous. How did it happen?” she demands in an angry undertone. “What set it off?”
I sigh. “Nobody knows, exactly. Doubtless the Greens accused a Blue champion charioteer of cheating, or vice versa, and out came the short swords.”
“But it wasn’t a serious riot, was it? We received no such reports. Besides, these partisan gangs have been allowed to do as they like for years. And never before …”
“True. But a number of people were killed, and Eudaemon knew the city was volatile. He acted to establish order. The enquiry was thorough, Despoina, and conducted with impartiality.”
“It is not clear to me why the seven men found guilty of murder were not all beheaded. Why behead three and then take the trouble to hang four?”
“To create a public spectacle,” I suggest. “Because they were rebel leaders. To quell all further urge to revolt. To demonstrate impartiality. There were two Blues and two Greens, after all.”
Her Royal Highness snorts. “So the Greens felt persecuted, and the Blues betrayed.”
As usual, she has cut to the crux of the issue. Justinian did formerly favour the Blues, and they expected his support. In vain. “True. Anger all around.”
“Were you there, Narses?”
She refers, I know, to the farcical catastrophe of January 10, when the condemned men were supposed to be hanged.
“I was there, Despoina.”
Since I am slightly built and do not have memorable looks, I have been able to move about among the agitated crowds, wrapped in a patched and hooded cloak so that I may pass for a slave. I walk with a slave’s ducked head and apologetic manner, and nobody recognises Narses the Eunuch, Commander of the Imperial Guard.
So yes, I was present when, on January 10, the four condemned men were to be put to death. The scaffold was erected in a square in Sykae, beyond the Golden Horn, near the monastery dedicated to Saint Conon. There were several monks amongst the crowd. I noted far more peasants among the onlookers than one might have expected; but the city has absorbed many of those lately bankrupted and dispossessed, their faces grown gaunt since they have had to scrounge from scrapheaps instead of eating from the land.
The mood was sullen. As ropes were put around the wretched men’s necks, a deep, threatening sound was heard, almost like the throaty rumble of a hungry bear. The executioner stood back, the platform on which the men stood was withdrawn with a jerk and a collective groan went up. All four rebels should have died in an instant as they fell and the nooses tightened.
But the executioner had bungled his job. Probably he had not knotted the ropes properly. Doubtless his hands had trembled. The crowd saw that two of the men had survived. They lay wriggling on the ground with their hands still tied behind their backs, unable to get up.
“It’s a miracle!” shouted one of the monks. “Hallelujah! The Lord has spared one Blue and one Green!”
“A miracle! A miracle!” The words echoed through the square.
But the hangman, a burly Libyan slave, was not deterred. He may well have feared that his failure could result in his own head being parted from his shoulders. With desperate haste, he hauled the men to their feet, forced them up onto the scaffold again, and once more put the ropes around their necks. The rumble from the spectators grew to an angry growl.
Again the hangman whipped away the platform. As before the wretched men dropped to the ground, still alive, still writhing in their bonds. I was close enough to smell that they had fouled themselves. The crowd roared its disapproval as the hangman bent down to try yet again.
A shout went up: “To the church, to the church!” The monks from St Conon’s rushed forward and took up the two survivors in their arms. The crowd cheered them on.
“Touch them and we’ll hang you, you bastard!” yelled a strapping young fellow.
“Yes, by the heels, and leave you to rot!” shouted someone else.
The monks hurried the condemned men, barely breathing, down to the Golden Horn, put them in a boat and headed to the Church of St Lawrence. There they were granted sanctuary.
Eudaemon the Prefect then sent a detachment of soldiers to the church to prevent anyone from entering or leaving, but even he did not dare to arrest the men inside the church. Supporters of the Greens and Blues rushed to their aid, but the soldiers blocked them. The priests refused to surrender the men, bedded and fed them. It was a stand-off.
Today is the 13th, and the ides of January, a date when the moon is clear and full. A day on which chariot races are traditionally held at the Hippodrome. The Emperor always attends, but given the fraught situation, I strongly advised him to stay away. He would have none of it, though, so I doubled the guards at every point. Naturally, as Commander of the Palace Guard, I brought up the rear as Justinian and Theodora with their usual entourage entered the Kathisma from the palace and took their seats with regal dignity, to be greeted by a tense and angry atmosphere. I kept close observation, standing next to a tall excubitor, whose hand rested on his sword. The great stadium was packed to capacity and people had clambered onto every possible perch, even along the spina down the centre of the horseshoe track where the triple-headed serpent on the Column of Apollo bares its ferocious fangs. There was a pale sun and an icy wind.
Before the first race could begin, the Green demarch, spokesman for the Greens, addressed the Emperor. “Thrice August,” he began, respectfully, “we wish you a long life and a victorious one. Truly you are God’s Vice-regent on earth, and you are all-powerful. We understand that it is your god-given task to uphold order in the kingdom. Yet we beseech you to show clemency this day.”
As the sonorous, formal syllables resounded, a deep-throated roar of agreement rolled around the enormous stadium. The excubitor next to me straightened up.
“Please, Thrice Aug
ust, pardon the two fugitives in the church of Saint Lawrence. It is true that the Prefect Eudaemon condemned them to death, but they miraculously escaped execution not once, but twice. Surely we are meant to read this as a clear indication that God has pardoned them. Basileus, Despotes, we petition for clemency: please will you too pardon them?”
Again the crowd gave voice: “Cle-men-cy! Cle-men-cy!”
Justinian made no answer, staring coldly over the demarch’s head.
Now the Demarch of the Blues rose to his feet. He reminded Justinian that the Blues had long enjoyed his support, that they reckoned him to be a friend, that they appreciated his patronage. He repeated the words of the Green’s representative: “Please, Thrice August, pardon the two fugitives in the Church of Saint Lawrence. Despotes, we beg for mercy!”
“Cle-men-cy! Cle-men-cy!” The crowd stomped their feet.
Still Justinian gave no sign that he had heard a single word. Despite the chilly day, I felt a trickle of perspiration run down my back. I understood that his refusal to respond was his way of emphasising his authority. Yet it seemed to me that the Kathisma shook, and not merely because of the pentup power of the horses milling about below.
The Grand Chamberlain attempted to impose order on the threatening chaos by starting the day’s racing. Shouts, neighs, the snap of whips and the crunch of wheels: we smelled dust as the chariots rolled into position for the first race. The signal was given and the gates sprang open. The charioteers hurled their teams into the arena. But not even the most brilliant, death-defying dashes and hair’s-breadth wins could serve to distract the people from their grievances.
At the end of each race, the demarchs rose and again put forward their eloquent pleas for the release of the fugitives.
“Cle-men-cy! Cle-men-cy!” demanded the spectators.
Race after race, they waited for the Emperor to respond through his own spokesman, the Mandator. Still: nothing. Justinian maintained his indifferent gaze over the heads of the crowd, looking like a bust of himself: hewn from granite, obdurately silent. The Empress Theodora clearly found this extremely hard to sit through. Though she held her head regally high, she appeared very small and pale, and her knuckles were bone white as she clutched her furlined cloak around her narrow shoulders. At times she cast agonised glances at her husband, as if she would urge him to speak. But his only response was silence.
This continued until the twenty-second race: more pleas, delivered with increasing urgency. Sustained refusal to respond from the Kathisma. Frustration and anger smouldering among the people.
Then, suddenly, before race number twenty-three could form up, a stentorian voice bellowed: “Long! Live! The benevolent! Greens AND Blues!”
Shocked to hear the names of the usually feuding factions linked in this way, the excubitor unsheathed his sword with a hissing clatter. “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed.
The rallying cry was repeated, with more and more people joining in. Tens of thousands of hostile voices roared their anger.
“Must have been planned,” I said, seriously alarmed. The faction leaders had clearly decided in advance that if all else failed, they would act together to force the Emperor to grant a pardon. I signalled to the other guards. “Form a cordon.”
The Emperor and Empress were swiftly surrounded by a circle of steel. Shaken, Justinian rose to his feet, ordered the Grand Chamberlain to cancel the remaining races and turned to leave.
Suddenly a different battle cry resounded: “Nika! Nika!” But this was not, as usual, the opposing factions exhorting their champions to win. No, this day it took on a new and frightening meaning. It became a rallying shout for the disaffected. Alas, at the present time there are many such.
Justinian hastily left the Kathisma, surrounded by his guards and trailing an entourage of senators and courtiers. We all retreated to the Sacred Palace, his safe haven.
The crowd streamed to the office of the Prefect Eudaemon and demanded to know what he intended the fate of the fugitives to be. He too greeted them with contemptuous silence.
That was the final, fatal error. That was the spark that set off the conflagration that has engulfed the city. The crowd became a mob, and the mob became a vicious creature bent upon destruction. And here we are, inhaling the smoke and bitter ash.
“He should have spoken,” Theodora whispers to me. I note that her delicate, pale face is even whiter than usual. “He should have answered them. Silence is cruel.” She shivers in her fine cloak.
“Wisdom in hindsight changes nothing.” I wish I could take her in my arms to comfort her. To smooth her ebony hair, to pat her back. I would hold her like a child, I would keep all harm from her. I have adored her ever since the first time I saw her venture into the opulent and hostile Imperial Palace: so small, so pale, so resolute. Of course I keep my arms straight at my sides.
“You sent the messenger?”
“He is on his way to Hieron as we speak, Despoina. Do not fear, Juliana and the baby will be kept safely under guard. Zeno will not bring them home till this is over.”
“You have been outside, haven’t you? How bad is it? Will it burn itself out?”
I tell her the truth. I cannot give her comfort, nor may I offer love. All I have to give her are words, but she knows she can rely on them. “I do not know. It is very bad.”
“Hagia Sophia is ruined, isn’t it?”
“Yes. The Senate Building also.” Well-chosen targets, I think but do not say. Both of them symbols of power: sacred and profane.
The Empress steps over to a window, pushing aside the velvet curtain. Together we stare out at the angry scarlet glow lighting up the stricken city. Over all a full moon presides, glowering redly through the windblown ash and smoke. I hear her draw in a breath. A bloody moon. The earth burns; the moon bleeds. A cosmic catastrophe.
How did it come to this? Where did it begin?
Part 1: The bearkeeper’s daughter AD 505-507
Chapter 1: Exit Acasius
Her very first memory was of a dancing bear. She loved going to the stable where the bears were kept to watch the training sessions, sitting quietly, entranced. The bear was taller than a man, taller than her father the bearkeeper; it seemed to loom almost up to the roof as it lumbered heavily to and fro, a dark, furred dancer, in a grotesque travesty of grace. The child did not think that, though. She thought that her father was a man of power, because he was the master of the bear. Clearly, the bear was very big, and very dangerous, but her father could make it do exactly what he wanted it to. So his power had to be even greater than the bear’s.
She sat on a bale of hay, dainty little feet dangling, and regarded her father gravely with huge, dark eyes. He concentrated with fierce intensity on the animal, gesturing boldly to keep it moving in time to the merry dance music his elderly one-legged assistant coaxed out of a fiddle.
“Hup!” he cried. “Hup, and two and three and four, this side, that side, hup!” She knew it was a black mountain bear from Illyria that had been trained by someone else before, and it was not easy to master an animal that you hadn’t trained yourself, her father said. But he had learned to work with bears when he was a child. That had been in another country. He used to visit his grandfather in a little mountain village, he told her, where there were Gypsies, and they had taught him their skills with wild animals.
She wrinkled her small nose. The place smelled powerfully: there was the rank scent of bear, her father sweating with effort and Ragu, his assistant, who always smelled sourly unwashed. Also, less pungent, the grassy smell of the bales of hay and the sawdust underfoot. A pity that such an interesting place did not smell sweeter, she thought. Yet she would come all the same, to bring her father his lunch and to watch him master the bears.
The assistant stopped playing and the bear stopped rocking, but still waved its heavy arms and whuffled through its nose.
“Well done, Bruno,” said the bearkeeper. “You are a good bear. You are the best dancer.” He leaned forward toward
s the bear, stretched his neck, placed his hands on either side of its head and raised his face so that he was intimately close to it. With great control he breathed right into its nostrils. So close, she thought, shivering with dread and delight. So close to such terrible teeth.
“Why does he do that?” she whispered to the assistant.
“Calms ’em,” said Ragu as he packed up his instrument. “And shows ’em who’s the boss.” His one good eye peered warily at the bearkeeper and the hulking animal. She knew that a lion in a hunting game had clawed his other eye out, right here in the Hippodrome; the same lion had chewed off half of his left leg. That was before the Emperor had banned hunting games altogether. The physicians that served the Hippodrome had managed to save his life, but, her father said, his nerve was gone.
“This breathing act that Acasius does gives me pains in the stomach,” said Ragu. “Man’s mad.”
“Do bears like dancing, Ragu?”
“Huh! No,” and he spat into the sawdust. “See, what the trainers do, they put a burning hot metal plate under the bear’s feet and they play a tune at the same time. The bear hops about to avoid the pain and cool its feet. After a while, when it hears the music, it starts to hop, pain or no pain. Then the trainer teaches it to keep time to the music.”
“Did my father do that to Bruno?”
“Nah. That was the trainer before him. Your father believes in other ways.”
Acasius patted the great bear and fed it honey-cake. “There! Now, off you go, into your cage, get along, get along, there’s a good bear.” The huge animal ambled away, rumbling softly to itself. The gate of its cage clanged shut.
“Come out and watch the next chariot race,” Acasius said to his daughter. “We can stand at the back where nobody will see you.”
She loved her father’s place of work under the vast Hippodrome, where the chariot races took place. Next to the Hippodrome there was the huge palace complex where the Emperor lived. Her father explained to her that the Imperial Palace was linked to the upper part of the Hippodrome by a corridor that led to a balcony, called the Kathisma, where the Emperor would sit surrounded by important visitors and by many men who served him, to watch the bears dancing, the tournaments and, above all, the chariot races.
