The darkness sighs again, its breath like the rustling of distant branches. Its tone communicates genuine regret, a sadness deeper than any Justinian has ever known.
“And this will be her final mistake.”
The last words hang in the air between them, joining with the smoke that curls from the braziers, further obscuring the figure at the foot of the bed.
Justinian struggles to raise himself onto his elbows. The agony is too great. His mind clouds over, permitting one thought, one word, a name.
He asks, “Is there nothing to be done?”
“Indeed, Your Majesty – there is always something. I come to you on bended knee, but with my hand extended.” A protuberance emerges from its body, thrusting forward and unfurling to reveal five elongated fingers. “We are both dying men,” it says. “Dying kings, after our own fashion. But we need not die. And neither must your empress.”
“What are you proposing?”
“Give me dominion over your empire,” it says. “Make of me an ally and I shall be a friend – the truest that you have ever known. The sickness that eats at you shall be healed. The Empress, too, will live to die, but it shall be in her time.”
“Go on.”
“The plague pits are nearly full. Let them overflow. And for those who die in the streets – alone, unloved and unknown – I ask only that you allow them to go unburied. Let them rot. Let the air grow clotted and foul. In the ensuing chaos, let but one wagon go free of the city walls. I shall be upon it.”
“What, then? What will you do?”
The darkness spreads its hands, its long fingers streaming like candle flames. “I will feed,” it says. “I am … hungry. So hungry.”
Justinian clenches his eyes shut. The future presents itself to him with the clarity of revelation, a vision birthed from the fires of nightmare. From Thrace to Nicomedia, the pestilence will spread, a poison in the blood of Empire, laying waste to one city then another, leading the East to desolation and ruin. His wars, so carefully planned, will come to nothing. The West will revert to its Gothic barbarism and the dream of Rome will die forever, never to be resurrected.
He opens his mouth to speak.
The darkness holds up its hand. “Please,” it says. “You must think this over. Carefully.”
Carefully.
His mind spins as in the orgies of dance. In the smoke of that stifling chamber, he recalls his first sight of Theodora: the sweat that beaded on her brow, the shape of her body as she whirled in the glow of a dozen candles, light following shadow across her churning hips. The flash from her brown eyes, as sharp as polished flints. The squalour of her surroundings. Some men stood and cheered, crying out for more. Others stood ashamed, watching from the shadows of the overhang as she spun with the light, changing shape, taking on one face then another before disappearing into the dark at dance’s end.
He attempts to swallow. His throat is too dry.
He can only nod. “Let it be done,” he croaks.
The smoke wavers, rippled by a sudden wind. The darkness unfolds itself, standing to its full height so that its head nearly scrapes the stone ceiling.
A square of parchment is pressed into Justinian’s hand. It is a writ of passage, permitting the bearer to pass through the city gates. The darkness produces Justinian’s signet ring and holds it out for him to take. The metal scorches his fingertips. He presses the ring to the wax, marking the document with his seal before collapsing, exhausted, onto his back.
“You have made a wise choice,” the darkness whispers. “And I think you will find me the worthiest of allies. I may gorge myself on the fruits of your land, but in eight centuries, I will return to savage your enemies, to avenge your name on the destroyers of your city.”
It leans in across him.
“But a bargain is a bargain,” it says. “And now you shall be healed.”
There is something in its hand, something thin and pointed. Justinian had not noticed it before. The darkness lifts the object above its head, where it catches the faint light. He sees that it is a long needle, more than a foot in length.
“Wait – no,” Justinian manages, the words catching in his throat.
The needle flashes toward him. It punctures the flesh of his neck, lancing the bubo. A stream of warm fluid pours out, washing down his bare chest. He screams – or tries to – but illness has robbed him of his voice and the emerging shriek is no louder than a death rattle.
The darkness takes aim at his arm pits, rupturing one carbuncle and then the other, driving in the lance with practiced ease. Blood and pus bubble from the wounds and stain the blankets. The world blinks white before him. The breath streams out of his chest. He gasps and pants, his vision fading as he lapses toward unconsciousness.
His visitor flicks back the blankets with the needle-tip, revealing Justinian’s bed-wasted body. The final bubo sits like a tumour in his groin, red and swollen, pulsing with heat. His eyes roll back into his skull. They find a place on the ceiling, even as the darkness grins and lifts its lance to deliver the final blow.
He wakes to a chamber awash in morning sunlight. Cries echo from a distant street – howls of the dying, the damned. Days have passed. His sickness has departed, but it has not left him unscarred. The buboes have crusted over, forming ugly cysts that will never heal. His skin is pocked and ashen, his cheeks sunken, the bones protruding. He is disfigured, horribly so, transfigured by darkness as Christ was in light.
Theodora sits at his side. Veiled in purple, her hands folded in her lap. His blood surges at the sight of her, racing to his throat, though he cannot breathe to speak. His hands tremble uncontrollably. With the last of his strength, he lifts a wasted hand from the blankets and reaches out to her, his fingers settling on her knee.
She flinches. She lowers her gaze to her lap, repositioning herself so that he cannot reach her. He whispers her name. She will not meet his eyes.
The Plague of Justinian – as it is known to history – ravaged the Byzantine Empire for more than two centuries. The Empire entered its final decline during the High Middle Ages, with Justinian’s city falling to Frankish crusaders in 1204.
Years later, a lone traveler, dressed in rags, disembarked from a ship in Sicily. His appearance occasioned some comment, as he was unusually tall and possessed a voice like wind-swept trees, the groan of masts in a winter gale.
He was later heard securing passage to Marseille. He admitted himself fascinated by the West and hoped his visit there might prove an interesting one.
Daniel Mills is a young writer and lifelong resident of Vermont. His first novel, entitled Revenants: A Dream of New England, is available from Chômu Press. He is a graduate of the University of Vermont.
The author speaks: “Silently, Without Cease” is set in the plague-stricken city of Constantinople in 542 CE. It attempts to recreate the suffering of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, whose dreams of reuniting the Roman Empire died with the catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague known as the ‘Plague of Justinian’. The disease first appeared in Egypt, where it was widely believed to have originated. For generations, the plague ravaged the Mediterranean Basin, resulting in general chaos and massive depopulation. The connection to Nyarlathotep – especially the pharaoh-like herald of apocalypse described by Lovecraft’s early prose poem – came all-too-easily. While much of the story has its basis in fact, the quarantine of the city is my own invention.
THE GOOD BISHOP PAYS THE PRICE
Martha Hubbard
The Bishop of Celestia stood on the roof-top of his residence, watching the bulging carts: exhausted, wheeled elephants creaking down to the harbour, taking their places by the imperial triremes waiting to be loaded. “Timos, that’s the last one. How many were there in all?”
“Thirty-three, my Lord.”
“Only! Do you think it’s enough?”
Timos raised his eyebrows, in that eternal gesture of negation mastered at birth by all bureaucrats. He was only a secretary – and
a slave, at that; what did he know of the workings of the Emperor’s court? His master was a bishop, spiritual leader of the dusty flock clustered around the Church of the Holy Martyrs on the eastern shore of the Euxine Sea. It was the Bishop’s responsibility to ‘know’ what was required to persuade the Court of Theodosius that their claim to the disputed relic was just, fair, indisputably correct – that the blasted thing should be returned to its former resting place in the Chapel of Saint Nicholas of Heraclitus.
Bishop Probus scratched his magnificent nose. Then, because it was July and stiflingly hot, he lifted his hat and scratched thoughtfully at the greying tangled nest wound up on his head. He sometimes felt that one of the most difficult aspects of being a bishop was carrying around this itchy mass under his mitre.
“Tell me again. What did we send?”
“Everything?”
“Well, no, maybe just the most important items.”
With the universal sigh of martyred civil servants, Timos took up the first of 100 scrolls and considered where to begin. He wished Probus would read them for himself, but he couldn’t read. Although, as a boy, he had failed to master any language beyond his native Armenian, his father, General Marcus Probus, had managed, through assiduous use of family connections, to secure this sinecure in remote Eastern Anatolia for his only son.
“Six bales of red-and-azure Phrygian silk, 100 lengths of purple-dyed wool-stuffs suitable for winter cloaks, ten gold-and-silver embroidered altar cloths for which five holy sisters from the Convent of Saint Eulalia forfeited their eyesight, three caskets of saffron – hand-picked locally by children under three, especially selected for their tiny fingers, 20 prepared hides of unborn spring lamb – suitable for inscriptions, four caskets of whole black peppercorns, two caskets of cinnamon, two of whole cloves, and one of ground; in a separate vessel, two barrels of smoked sturgeon roe and three of salted carp ….”
As Timos recited the list of treasures prepared to entice the Emperor to order the return of the precious stolen relic, Probus drifted into dreams. He imagined the Abbot’s outrage when the Caesarean Guard, come especially from Constantinople for the job, would escort him and his congregation up the mountainside to that accursed monastery. That brigand’s lair wouldn’t protect the thieving Abbot and his scurrilous band, then. What Caesar declared would be effected.
It wasn’t as if it were just any old relic: not a supposed feather from the Archngel Gabriel’s wings – there were hundreds of those around – or one of the coals Diocletian had used to roast poor old Laurentious (God keep his soul), or a beaker of dust stirred up when Giorgios of Konya slaughtered the dragon. Oh, no, this was an authenticated pouch belonging to the Holy Nicholas of Myrna, which had contained gold pieces used as dowry for an impoverished young woman. It belonged in the church recently renamed in his honour. And blast those monks, anyway, for thinking they could just carry off one of his Bishopric’s finest, holiest treasures without so much as a ‘by-your-leave’ – as if he, Probus, would have consented to such a thing, anyway.
Probus drifted on cushions of reverie. It had been a hectic and expensive few weeks, ordering and assembling all those luxuries for the Emperor – even if Timos had done most of the work. When he awoke, half an hour later, Timos was just coming to the end of the 99th scroll and the ships sailing for the Holy City of the Emperors were tiny specks on the horizon. “Are you finished? I’ve just had such a wonderful dream.”
“Have you? Before you tell me, perhaps I should get some of the yellow wine we brought in last week ….”
“Some olives would go nicely with the wine. How kind you are to me.”
Most of the time, this far from the upheavals and intrigues of New Rome, life in Celestia, a Byzantine seaport city in the middle of the fifth century after the birth of Jesus Christ, was quiet and orderly. Bishop Probus had been flung into a niche that perfectly suited his talents and abilities. Possessing neither strong political nor passionate religious convictions, his genial tolerance of the swirling multiplicity of cultures and populations that called Celestia home had won him the overwhelming affection and support of his congregants.
In this, he was assisted by Timos, his clerk, scribe, friend and – ah ... er ... slave. Many years before, Probus’ father, the General, recognising his son’s limitations, had conscripted a Bulgarian village boy – grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, in fact – and brought him back to Constantinople to be young Probus’ companion, bodyguard and helpmate. Timos, possibly too smart for his own good, had attended and benefited from all the classes through which Probus slept and dreamed such pleasing dreams.
But, as some wit would one day write, the times they were a-changing. After years of regency by his sister Pulcheria, the Emperor Theodosius, now in his full majesty, had commissioned:
“... a full and proper compilation of all laws promulgated since the assertion of Christianity as the one true religion by the blessed Emperor Constantine ….”
Timos, wishing, not for the first or thousandth time – the ponderous language made his teeth hurt – that the Bishop could read for himself, was interrupted.
“Damn! Why has he wanted to go and do that?” Bishop Probus, disappointed that the missive just arrived did not contain the confirmation of his claim to the purloined relic, expressed his irritation with emperors, overlords and bureaucracy, in general.
“What’s wrong with trying to bring order to the snakes’ nest of rules and regulations that every half-wit emperor has dumped on the empire since Diocletion?”
“Careful whom you’re calling a ‘half-wit’ – one of them was my namesake.”
“I rest my case. But what’s wrong with trying to bring order out of chaos?”
“It’s not the ordering I object to; it’s the imposing of that order, afterwards, that’s going to cause the problems.”
“What problems?”
“Wait and see. This will not end well.”
“What’s happened? You’re not usually so pessimistic.”
“I had a very bad dream last night.”
“Oh ….”
Probus’ dreams were as good a barometer of portentous events as eagle droppings or the appearance of two-headed mice in the marketplace.
“I dreamt the Emperor had sent us a proclamation confirming our right to Saint Nicholas’s pouch. As we processed up the mountain to the monastery, I heard a noise like waves breaking over the seawall. Rocks, sand, great pink-and-ochre boulders began to tumble down, rumbling, bouncing and cracking. I jumped out of their path and hid in a cave ….”
“… that appeared conveniently.”
“Don’t jest! This is serious. Once the avalanche ended, a quarter of our town was buried under fallen stone.”
“That does sound ominous. Was there anything else in the dream?”
“No. I woke myself up at that point.”
“There’s nothing more in this missive. The Emperor has compiled his new Codex and wants you to announce his achievement from the pulpit this Sunday. That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Don’t count on it. Great disasters are oft-times born from grains of sand.”
As the Bishop had predicted, the unpleasant codicil was not long in arriving. A scant month after the announcement of the Codex, a phalanx of soldiers in austere trappings marched through the Porta Hesperia and clanked down the Strada Memoriam to present a papyrus signed by the emperor’s sister:
In gratified cognisance of the magnificent work created by our beloved brother, the Emperor Theodosius, Second of that name, and out of our great and abiding love for the Basileus, we, the Honourable Pulcheria, Bride of our Lord Jesus Christ ….
“Dear saints and little chickens, she goes on worse than her brother. Skip the preamble and get to the point – if there is one.”
“Let me see if I can find it. Ah ... here: I command you to search out, and consign to cleansing holy flame, all pagan, heretical or otherwise impious writings which have heretofore despoiled the minds and hearts o
f our innocent subjects ….”
“I told you. We’re to organise a book burning. How long before she turns that vicious mind to putting people to the ‘cleansing flame’?”
Guided by definitions in the new law code, the ‘what’ of the task was clear. Any scroll, papyrus or text, any scrap of writing not sanctioned by this code, was to be seized and burned. The ‘how’ of it was another matter.
Celestia, a metropolis, of more than eight thousand souls – give or take a slave or two – had created itself down the side of a mountain, a cascade of fading rose, ochre and sienna limpets stuck fast to a crumbling hillside of low bushes, pines and olive trees, that tumbled, without form or reason, to a curve of harbour far below. Houses carved from the soft tufa, in many cases fronted cave dwellings burrowing far back into the mountain. Streets were vertical, better suited to donkeys than heavily armed soldiers. In a few places, fora, essential places of assembly, had been carved and levelled out of the rock.
At least, thought Timos, we won’t have to carry the debris all the way down to the harbour for burning. We can dispose of it on-site. Scouring each neighbourhood for proscribed material and wrenching it from protesting owners would be a despicable job. This damned project would waste days.
Muttering to himself, stepping over Pulcheria’s scroll as if it were a dead viper, Timos exited the Bishop’s study without saying goodbye.
Watching Timos’ departing back, Probus thought, I hate being right. This is going to be a nightmare.
On Sunday, Timos read Pulcheria’s proclamation from the pulpit. Notices were posted throughout the town, giving the times on which, and locations to which, proscribed materials were to be delivered. On Monday, Timos and a small guard arrived at the first location, Plaka Ilonia. The fire materials had been prepared, but remained unlit. To one side, the commune elder, Antonios, stood with a small collection of scripts from the community center, ragged, scribbled over by many hands. He pointed to them. “Take and destroy these, if you must. It is all we have.”
Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time Page 8
