Justinian

by Harry Turtledove

  More acclamations rose, those rather discordant, some men hailing him as Leo, others who listened but did not hear persisting in calling him Leontios. How he styled himself mattered not in the least to me. I knew who he was. I knew what he was. So long as I had breath in me, even if it should be but for the next moment, I would not forget.

  He held up his hands once more. Silence fell again. He said, "Out of the love and comradeship I feel yet for the Emperor Constantine, I shall not slay his worthless son Justinian, however much he deserves it."

  Now the buzz from the crowd was surprised, confused. I felt surprised and confused myself: did he think he could leave me alive without my seeking to avenge myself and regain the throne rightfully mine? I had known he was a fool. I had not known he was such a fool.

  But he was. He went on, "Let Justinian's nose be cut off, as Constantine cut off the noses of his brothers Herakleios and Tiberius. And for good measure, let his tongue be slit, too, that you may never more hear him order the ministers you rightly killed today to steal from you your money, your property, your freedom. Then off he goes to Kherson, and you'll never hear of him or from him again at all."

  Once more, the cheers from the grandstand redoubled. True, the mob would not have the pleasure of seeing a head leap from a body and bump along the track while blood fountained from the stump of the neck. But they would have their blood, albeit not so much. And, instead of a quick end to their sport, they could enjoy my screams and moans for as long as Leontios chose to indulge them.

  Now he beckoned to the executioner, who advanced upon me. Behind the hood, his eyes were thoughtful: the eyes of any good craftsman measuring the task ahead of him. "Emp- uh, Justinian- it will be easier for you if you hold very still and let me do what I have to do here," he said.

  "May you die of the plague," I told him. "May your prick drip pus and wither. May your daughter couple with a dog on the Mese. May the demons of hell tear your flesh from your bones with pitchforks and throw it in the fire to burn forever."

  I thought I might as well have been cursing a stone. Everything I said rolled off him, leaving him untouched. I suppose he already bore the weight of so many curses from so many men that one more mattered not at all. He turned to my captors. "Hold him tight, if you please. I'm going to do his tongue first." Maybe my words had got through to him after all. It was cold, cold comfort.

  I clenched my teeth so hard, one of them broke. That, at the moment, was the least of my concerns. Matter-of-factly, the executioner went through his bag of tools, finally selecting a small, sharp blade, more a scalpel than a knife. I twisted my head back and forth until someone behind me seized me by the hair and prevented it.

  The executioner stood before me. I spat in his face. The spittle soaked into the black hood and was gone. I vowed he would not force my jaws open. Some vows are wasted. He grabbed my beard in his left hand and pulled down. All at once, to my helpless horror, I understood why Alexander the Great had required his men to shave their chins. Despite all I could do, my mouth came open.

  Fast as a striking serpent, the executioner slashed me with that little knife. At the same moment, though, I was trying once more to jerk my head to the side. I could not move much, but I did shift a little. And so, instead of slitting my tongue from root to tip, he gashed the side of it, also cutting my gum and the inside of my cheek.

  I shrieked, both because the pain was bad and to make it seem worse so he would not inspect the wound to see what sort of job he had made of it. My mouth filled with blood, faster than I can write this. I spat in his face again, a great spurt of red. Some went in through the eyehole of the hood and made him rub at himself to restore his vision: a tiny measure of revenge, but I could take no large ones.

  If I could not, he remained professional about the whole business between us. Wadding up a cloth, he stuffed it into my mouth. "Press it against the wound, hard as you can," he told me. "It will help slow the bleeding."

  In spite of the rag, blood dripped down my chin. More ran down my throat, tasting of rust. But, with the rag in my mouth, I could not curse the executioner again, as I very much wanted to do. That worked to my advantage, he assuming I did not speak because I could not, and that the mutilation had been successfully accomplished.

  As if the executioner were likely to forget, Leontios prodded him: "Now the nose. Remember the nose."

  "Yes, Emperor," the fellow answered, which made me try to break free of my captors all over again: that anyone could presume to call this bumbling fool Emperor of the Romans infuriated every fiber of my being.

  The executioner rummaged through his tools. This time he drew forth a larger blade than he had used before. He tested the edge with his thumb, shook his head, and stropped the knife against the leather sole of his shoe, standing on one leg like a stork to do so. After another test, he was satisfied and walked up to me once more. The early morning sun glittered off the newly touched-up edge.

  "You have to hold him still again," he told the men who had charge of me. "Otherwise, the job won't be as fast and neat as it ought to be." He never spoke of mutilation. I suppose that by thinking of what he did as the job, he saved himself the trouble of thinking about what sort of job it was.

  I think of this now, looking back at the moment across a gap of a decade and a half. Perhaps I should summon one of my executioners, to find out if I am right. I wonder if they would answer me honestly. I wonder if they have even considered the matter. Every trade has its secrets, and every trade has its blind spots, too.

  Looking at these latest sentences, I see that I wish to avoid the narration of what came next, as if, by speaking of something else, I could will that bit of time into nonexistence. The executioner set the edge of the knife against my nose, just below the point where bone gives way to cartilage, and sliced down. The end of my nose, with the nostrils, fell into the dirt at my feet, and that is the last I ever saw of it.

  Again, my blood streamed after it. The crowd cheered. "He'll never be Emperor again!" Leontios shouted, and the cheers got louder. Again, the executioner, efficient in his craft, pressed a bandage to the hole in my face where my nose had been. That might have kept me from bleeding to death, but made it very difficult for me to breathe.

  "Why don't you cauterize the cut?" asked the fellow holding my hair. He laughed nastily. "That'll make this bastard hurt even more."

  "From what I've seen, cauterized wounds are more likely to fester," the executioner replied: a serious answer to what he judged a serious question. He turned to Leontios. "Unless you want to give him more pain, of course, Emperor."

  "Let it go," Leontios said. "He could have killed me, I suppose, and he didn't. Get him on a ship, get him out of the city, get him out of my sight."

  One of his henchmen prodded Myakes with his foot. "What about this one? Strike off his head and have done?"

  I expected Leontios would say yes to that. But, through a haze of agony, I saw him shake his big, stupid head. "No, he can go to Kherson, too. The excubitores are my bodyguards now; they'd grumble if an officer of theirs died for no reason but that he was loyal."

  MYAKES

  Did I think they'd kill me, Brother Elpidios? Let's put it this way: I hoped they wouldn't. If Leontios hadn't killed me back at the Praitorion, back before he knew whether he could steal the throne, I didn't think he'd order it now in cold blood. But was I sure? Kyrie eleison, no! He might have figured the crowd hadn't seen enough blood to satisfy it from watching Justinian get mutilated, and decided to spice up the show with my head.

  I didn't mind a bit when my bearers picked me up and slung me on their shoulders again. They weren't taking me to be slaughtered. When that's what your choice is, everything else looks good.

  And Justinian, he'd need all the help he could get. Up till then, life had been easy for him. Oh, he'd had family die, but who doesn't? Life's a chancy business. But he'd always had plenty to eat, he'd always been healthy, he'd always been handsome, he'd always had people hop when he told t
hem to hop. Now he didn't have any of that. I wondered if not having it would break him. Emperor to mutilated exile was a long, long step, and here he was with no choice but to make it all at once. Could he? I was glad I was alive to find out.

  JUSTINIAN

  They dragged me and carried Myakes through the streets of the imperial city toward the Golden Horn, where waited the ship that would take me into exile at Kherson. News of the traitor's vile act had spread through every corner of the city. People jeered at me as I went. "Cut-Nose! Cut-Nose!" was the commonest cry. How I wished the ground would have opened beneath the senseless mockers, letting them fall into the flames of hell as they deserved.

  I could not answer their jeers with curses, not with a rag stuffed into my mouth and another tied around the back of my head and over what had been my nose. A few of the jackals threw stones and rotten fruit at me. Some of them hit. I scarcely noticed. Next to the wounds I already had, those were small things. If only the mob had had a single neck, that I might have cut off its head with one blow!

  The pain was fire, and would not cease. Every cobblestone I saw through a red haze. I think my senses reeled for a time, for we reached the quays faster than should have been possible for a part y of brigands and ruffians carrying one man and dragging along another who had been wounded.

  "Bring him aboard!" called the captain of the ship that would take me into exile. His Greek was peculiar- peculiar enough that I noticed it in the state I was in at the time. With an effort like that of Herakles when in the pagan myth he briefly held up the world for Atlas, I raised my head. That yellow-haired fellowa160… I had seen him before. After a moment, the name came to me: Apsimaros.

  My captors laid me on the deck and cut the ropes that bound me. They did the same for Myakes. The torment of blood coming back to hands and feet helped distract me from my larger anguish. Sailors armed with cudgels and shortswords stood over us, as if we were about to dash back onto the wharf. However little I wanted to leave the imperial city, my flesh was at that moment incapable of further resistance. Whether Myakes could have fought them or not, I do not know. Taking his lead from me, as he had for so long, he did not fight.

  Seeing us remain where Leontios's men had left us, most of the sailors soon went back to the business of readying the ship to depart. Three or four remained close by, though: enough to overpower us even had we been at the height of bodily strength. Apsimaros shouted orders in his guttural Greek: "Cast off the lines! Man the sweeps!"

  When all satisfied him, Apsimaros shouted again. The sweeps bit into the water. Little by little, the ship moved away from the quay, out of the Golden Horn, and toward the Narrows, the strait separating Europe and Asia and sometimes still known by its ancient name, the Bosporos.

  Perhaps the sea breeze in my face helped revive me to some small degree. Though incapable of standing, I made it to my hands and knees and crawled toward the stern of the ship. Several sailors accompanied me on the slow, painful journey. Had I tried to throw myself into the sea, I wonder if they would have stopped me. I suppose they would; the Narrows being such a thin ribbon of water, a miracle might have let me swim to land and survive, and they would not have wanted to take the chance- or to explain their lapse to Leontios.

  But I had no thought of throwing myself into the sea: neither to escape, for, whether the sailors did or not, I knew I had no hope of making land, nor to end my life, for the only time I came close to suicide, as a small boy, it was from rage rather than despair.

  Nor did I completely give myself over to despair even then. I peered back in the direction from which the ship had come until a swell of land hid Constantinople from my view. I slumped down after that, but one thought still burned in my mind: I will see the city again. By God and His mother, I will. BOOK C

  JUSTINIAN

  I remember little of my arrival at Kherson. No, I shall be honest: I remember nothing of my arrival at Kherson. I had taken a fever in my wounds while sailing across the Black Sea, and recall only scattered patches of the journey. That may be as well, many of the memories I have lost surely being ones filled with torment.

  I wonder what the Khersonites made of my sudden appearance on their distant shore. Till that ship reached them, I was, so far as they knew, Emperor of the Romans. In fact, when conscious I still considered myself Emperor of the Romans. The rest of the world, however, had a contrary opinion for the time being, and I was in no position to demonstrate how wrong it was.

  MYAKES

  Matter of fact, Brother Elpidios, Kherson isn't quite the end of the world, even if it is a long ways off and tucked up against the Khazars and the other barbarians who roam over the steppe with their herds. Sailing into it is even kind of pretty. It sits in a curved bay on the west side of the peninsula that sticks down into the Black Sea. The land rises up, almost like a stairway, toward the hills that keep the worst of the winter away.

  When we came into the harbor, though, the whole place stank of fish. A lot of what they live on there is dried and salted fish. You hear people talking about bread, but you don't see it all that often. Sometimes they even grind up the dried fish into a kind of meal and bake it into wafers and sheets. They aren't so bad as they sound, not once you get used to them.

  Church bells were ringing when we pulled up to their quays. They'd seen us from a long ways off, and they knew we weren't one of the little fishing boats that dot their waters like pepper on top of a stew. We were a real ship, from a real civilized place, and they were greedy not only for whatever we might have brought 'em but for whatever gossip we had, too.

  The tudun himself came down to the harbor to look us over. The tudun is like the eparch of the city, you might say, Brother. Kherson is a town where Romans live and Romans trade, but it's not exactly a Roman town. The tudun is in charge of it for the Khazar khagan. He has more say there than anybody else. The Khazars roam right next to Kherson, like I said, and the Roman Empire is across the sea. That would give the nomads every sort of edge in a fight, so there is no fight.

  "Are you from Amastris?" the tudun asked us in Greek with a funny accent different than Apsimaros's. You know about Amastris, Brother? That's right- one of the towns in Anatolia right across the Black Sea from Kherson.

  "No, we are from Constantinople," Apsimaros answered.

  The tudun's eyebrows went up. He was a funny-looking fellow, fat as a eunuch, with a flat, swarthy face and scraggly whiskers, dressed all in furs and hides. "What do you bring us from Constantinople?" he asked. "We do not have ship from Constantinople for a long time."

  "I bring you greetings from Leontios, er, Leo, Emperor of the Romans," Apsimaros told him. That was plenty to make the tudun and everybody else who understood Greek start hopping up and down like their tunics had just caught fire. Apsimaros had style. He waited, patient as you please, till they'd simmered down a little. Then he said, "And I bring you Justinian."

  Justinian, right then, was lying on the deck. I had no idea whether he was going to live or not. Apsimaros didn't care. He pointed to Justinian, then to a couple of sailors. They hauled him up between them so the tudun and everybody else could see he was missing most of his nose.

  Several of the dockworkers and touts and whores and such who had come down to see the ship crossed themselves. The tudun didn't. He wasn't a Christian. Some of the Khazars follow pagan gods, some follow Mouamet, and some are even Jews.

  Whatever the tudun was, he asked Apsimaros, "What are we supposed to do with him?"

  "If he dies, bury him," Apsimaros answered. "If he lives, let him live, but don't let him leave. Here he stays, for as long as he lives. Leontios"- he shook his head; he wasn't used to Leontios's new name-"Leo, I mean, will send you money to keep him here." I don't know whether that meant money for Justinian's upkeep or a bribe to make sure nobody let him leave. Probably both, I suppose.

  "Who will take care of him?" the tudun said. "He needs someone to take care of him." By the way Justinian hung in the sailors' arms, limp as asparagus that's bee
n boiled too long, that was plain to anybody with eyes.

  Apsimaros pointed my way. "This is Myakes. He was one of Justinian's guard captains, and he went into exile with him instead of giving up his head."

  "All right," the tudun said. "He is not the first exile here. He is not going to be the last exile here, either. We take him."

  "The Emperor Leo"- now Apsimaros spoke carefully-"thanks you, and thanks the khagan of the Khazars, too." He turned to the sailors. "Put out the gangplank. Get him off this ship."

  They didn't just obey him- they jumped. They wanted Justinian off that ship. I don't really suppose they could have imagined he'd do anything to them, not in the state he was in, but I don't know what else they could have been thinking, either. Apsimaros might have been convinced Leontios- no, I won't call him Leo- was Emperor now, but it didn't seem to have sunk in for the sailors.

  They dragged Justinian up onto the wharf. I followed them. I hadn't made any trouble on the ship- didn't see any future in it- so they didn't give me a rough time, either. They even draped one of Justinian's arms around my neck. I'd figured they would dump him on the planks for me to pick up.

  "You come with me," the tudun said. He pointed off to the south, toward a low building of the red-brown local stone. "We put Justinian there. It is a place for Christian monks, but it has a xenodokheion, a guesthouse, too. We see if he lives." He looked at Justinian. His eyes were narrow already. They got narrower. "Right now, I think he dies."

  Right then, I thought Justinian was going to die, too. Fever came off him in waves. The wound where his nose had been was raw and inflamed. I wasn't going to admit what I thought, though. "Take me to the monastery," I said. "It's in God's hands, not mine." Yes, I said that. More pious back then than you thought, eh, Brother Elpidios? Well, I daresay we all have a surprise or two in us. Justinian, he had more than that. You'll see.