"All right, chum," he said, in the tones of one humoring a man mad but not dangerously so- as guardsman for a brothel, he must have come across a good many of that sort. Even in his amusement, though, he remained civil.
I had enough money to pay the double rate, but not much more. Instead of going into a tavern, then, or an eatery, to while away the time till sunset, I walked down to the wharves, strode out on one to the very end, and peered south over the waters of the Black Sea toward the Constantinople I could not see. No ships from the Roman Empire were tied up there, only the little local fishing boats. No ship from the Empire had come in since the one bringing me, unless while I lay in my delirium. I felt very much alone, very much a mote adrift. If a whorehouse bouncer would not believe me the Emperor of the Romans, why should I? How could I?
"Because I am," I said. A seagull standing near me flapped up into the air with a startled squawk.
The sun plunged into the sea. I waited until almost all the twilight had drained from the sky before making my way back toward the brothel, not wanting to be turned away because I was too visible. On account of that, I arrived at the place later than I expected, having lost my way more than once in the gathering gloom.
"Should have brought a torch with you," the guard remarked when at last I found the proper lane. I shrugged and nodded, yielding the point- why not? As he had before, he opened the door for me.
My greatest worry was that the one who had said she would go upstairs with me was already upstairs with someone else. She would eventually have come down again, yes, but imagining her all my own would have come harder. But there she sat. When she saw me, she got to her feet. She put out her hand, palm upturned. I crossed it with silver. Having made sure I had paid her enough, she nodded.
She took me up to a room big enough for a bed and not much more. She closed the door behind us, and I barred it. Going to the little window, she pulled the shutters across it and tied them so they would not open. It might have been something less than perfectly black in there, but it lacked little of that perfection.
In the darkness, something rustled: her tunic sliding off over her head. I quickly pulled off my own tunic, then took a step backward toward the bed. It proved to be but half a step away; rather than sitting down, I almost fell onto it, saving myself only by jerking back at the last moment.
Fresh pressure on the mattress said the woman had got down beside me. I groped for her. My hand closed on firm, rounded flesh. I caught her in my arms. She felt like a woman against my skin. She smelled like a woman. I did not need to see her to rise tall and proud.
As I began to caress her, she said, "Don't try kissing me. It would remind me of-" Of your being noseless. She might as well have shouted it.
It did not kill my ardor. Nothing would have killed my ardor that night, not after so long without. "All right," I answered, my voice mild as wine three-quarters water. I had not int ended kissing her anyhow; who could say where her lips had been and what they had done before touching mine? My own lips and teeth closed on the tip of her breast as my hand went between her legs.
"What do you want from me?" she asked. "You're paying, after all."
Rough games had pleased me now and then in days gone by. Instead of making as if to take her by force, though, I answered, "Treat me like a lover, not a customer." What I wanted, most of all, was to feel as if my mutilation did not cut me off- indeed!- from the rest of mankind. The blackened room in which we lay gave that the lie, but what we were doing helped me not think about its being a lie.
She let out a tiny sigh, as if I could have asked nothing more onerous of her. But then, in the darkness, she played the part well enough. She nibbled my earlobes and kissed my neck and licked my nipples, every now and then teasingly stroking my manhood as she did. Then she took me in her mouth. She was not particularly skilled, but I was not particularly demanding, not then.
"Shall I finish this way?" she asked when I began to gasp.
"No," I said, and so she straddled me, as Irene the Sklavinian serving girl had done all those years before for my first time. But I put my arms around her and rolled us over so I rode her. Not much later, I spurted my seed deep into her. When she began to pull away, I held her to me, for I was still hard. I had not gone twice, one time right after the other without dislodging myself, for a few years, but that night, after such long abstinence, I had no trouble.
She let me have her again. If she took pleasure from it herself, she gave no sign I could discern. When I rolled off her after the second round, she said, "You should pay twice again." But she meant that either as a joke or as a ploy to see if she could get the extra silver from me.
Having faced down angry nobles in the imperial city, I had no trouble with a Kherson whore. "I paid enough," I answered firmly. "I don't think I kept you up here long enough to lose much other trade."
Had she threatened to scream for the bouncer, I do not know what I should have done, he being both larger and, more to the point, much better armed than I. But all she did was sigh and begin to grope around on the floor for the tunic she had doffed. A tiny victory for me, perhaps, but the first I had won since being treacherously ousted from my throne, and so one to cherish.
Finding my way back to the xenodokheion in the darkness was another victory, one that at the time seemed as large. On leaving the brothel, I paid a couple of coppers for a torch- nothing came free there- to light my way southward, but the cursed thing went out before I was halfway there, leaving me alone in a darkness almost as stygian as that inside the chamber where I had coupled with the whore.
I stumbled on- literally, seeing (or rather, not seeing) how full of stones and mud-filled potholes the streets were- by God and by guess and by occasional glimpses of stars overhead through rents in the clouds scudding past. So long as I kept going south I told myself, I would eventually come upon the monastery to which the guesthouse was attached.
Such assurances are often less than reassuring even by light of day. In the chilly blackness of night, I might as well have been a little boy murmuring charms against the monsters that dwell only in his imagination and so can follow him even under the blankets of his bed. I was looking around for monsters, I must say, but, as much by luck as by design, found the monastery instead.
When I walked in through the door of the xenodokheion I found Myakes, wearing a sword I had not known he possessed and about to come out after me. "Where were you?" he cried out on seeing me, his tone quite different from that by which a subordinate customarily addresses his superior.
One of the monks was hovering in the chamber: "Never mind," I replied in dull embarrassment, not wanting to wreck the reputation for piety I had built up since arriving at the monastery.
Myakes, though not always what one would call quick-witted, was in certain matters no fool. "Oh," he said, realizing where I must have been, and then, a moment later, "Oh" again when he figured out the likely reason I had had to wait so long before faring homeward. "Hope it was worth it." God bless him, he sounded almost as matter-of-fact as the bouncer had been.
"I think so," I said. The monk looked from one of us to the other in confusion, unable to follow our elliptical conversation. Just as well, I thought.
MYAKES
Easy, Brother Elpidios, easy. We don't ask guests at our xenodokheion here to be saints, now do we? Of course we don't. Every man's a sinner, right? The only perfect man was the Son of God.
Yes, Justinian went out and fornicated with prostitutes. Why are you asking me when he admits it himself? Yes, I know he was the man who fought so hard for the canons of the fifth-sixth synod that condemned brothels and those who kept them. No, that didn't stop him. Pretty plain it didn't stop him, wouldn't you say?
A hypocrite? Justinian? Less so than most men I've known. But he was a man, and even then well on the sunny side of thirty. Once his wounds healed up, his body drove him, same as it does any man that age. Yes, he fell into sin every now and again. You get rid of every man who's fallen
into sin that way every now and again, all of a sudden the world starts looking like a pretty empty place.
Me, Brother? What did I do when we were up there in Kherson? Oh, this and that. I was working a lot of the time, remember. Was I working all the time? Now, what ever would you mean by that, Brother Elpidios?
JUSTINIAN
I did not pander to my lusts. Every so often, though, when they grew unbearable, I would ask money of faithful Myakes and go off after sunset to slake them. Some of the other women at the brothel gradually came to accept me, so I did not have to rely entirely on the complaisance or availability of that one.
As I have already said, days and weeks and months in exile began to flow into one another, with little to distinguish any particular day from any other. Only the unusual was worthy of note, and little enough of that happened. A few times a year, a ship from Constantinople or one of the Anatolian cities of Romania, Sinope or Amastris mostly, would tie up in the harbor. Then we would have a brief orgy of catching up on news from the wider world, much of it old news by the time it reached us.
Avid to find out how the Roman Empire was faring, I pestered captains and sailors alike for word of what Leontios was doing. For the first year the usurper's fundament defiled the throne, the answer was, as best I could tell, that he did nothing whatsoever. This in no way surprised me, being in perfect accord with the character Leontios had previously exhibited.
"Everything is peaceful," the seafaring men would say, perhaps hoping to wound my spirits by showing that the Empire was doing well without me.
If that was their intent, it failed. In calm weather, a ship's captain may fall asleep whenever he pleases with nothing evil befalling his vessel. But if he is asleep when a storm blows up, the ship will go to the bottom before he can wake and try to make amends for his carelessness. So I judged it would be with Leontios, and my judgment was vindicated.
That, however, as yet lay ahead, for news from the Roman Empire trickled in slowly. News from all over the world trickled into Kherson… slowly. It lay on a trade route that stretched east all the way to the land of Serinda, whence we Romans learned the secret of manufacturing silk during the reign of the Emperor for whom I was named, and west to the island of Britannia and even to another island beyond Britannia, of which geographers may speak but of which I was previously ignorant.
Most merchants travel back and forth across a single section of the trade route, but some, pulled by greed or the desire for adventure, wander far from their homes. In taverns in Kherson, I met men from India- the eastern India, the one Alexander conquered, not the one also known as Ethiopia- and Persia, from Germany (the source of so many barbarous tribes that have harmed us Romans) and from this distant island I mentioned, which is called, I think, Ibernia.
"No, I've never been to Constantinople my own self," a traveler told me in a hideous mixture of Greek and Latin enlivened by a barbarously musical accent, "but I know a man who has. A priest, he was, out of some little town in Gaul-"
"Arculf!" I exclaimed. The odds were against it, I knew, but he was the sole priest from a little town in Gaul I had met in the imperial city.
And may I be condemned to the eternal fires of hell if the merchant did not nod. "Aye, that's the man," he said. "A good and holy soul he is, too."
"Yes," I said, agreeing with him completely. "How did he come to distant Ibernia?"
I needed some time to puzzle out the answer to that. Arculf, it seemed, had in fact not gone to Ibernia but to Iona, a small island off the western coast of Britannia. There the trader's uncle, a certain Adamnan, was abbot of a monastery. Arculf, being shipwrecked there, related his tales of travel in Romania to this Adamnan, who took them down in Latin. And so, knowledge of the civilized world does reach, distantly and in dreamlike wise, even those far-off places.
What happened to Arculf after his ship foundered at this island of Iona, the trader with whom I was drinking did not know. Learning even so little of my old acquaintance, though, brightened that day and several after it, and also gave me my own tavern tale to spin out in later times.
"Not a bad story, for a man without a nose," another merchant judged a few weeks later, and bought me a cup of wine.
"I am Emperor of the Romans," I declared, having already had a good deal of wine that day.
"Not a bad story, for an Emperor without a nose," he said, and the laugh he got gave him the last word.
***
As I have intimated, no great stretch of time passed before Leontios began demonstrating on the throne the qualities on account of which he had so singularly failed to endear himself to me. A ship crossing the sea from Sinope brought word that raids into Romania led by the Sklavenoi, which had diminished thanks to the vigorous efforts I undertook to combat them, were once more increasing in both frequency and ferocity.
Not long afterwards, news came that the prince of Lazika, whose name, if memory serves, was Sergios, brought his district, which lies on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea east of Trebizond, under the dominion of the deniers of Christ, as Sabbatios the Armenian had with his a few years before.
Both these tidbits reached Kherson months after they happened. Myakes heard the first of them on the wharves, I the second in a tavern. When I brought it back to him at the xenodokheion, he looked thoughtful and said, "The generals in the military districts aren't going to be very happy with Leontios."
I snorted. "Who would be happy with Leontios? No one with his wits about him, that's certain." Then, unbidden, a horrid thought struck me. "By the Virgin Mother of God, Myakes, suppose one of those generals overthrows Leontios and takes the throne while I rot here, across the sea from everything that matters?"
"Don't really know what you can do about that, Emperor," Myakes said. He twisted awkwardly, trying to scratch the small of his back. "Something bit me."
Something had bitten me, too: fear. Back in Romania, as Myakes had said, the generals were undoubtedly seething at Leontios's ineptitude. And, if one of them took it into his mind to do more than seethe, he had the resources with which to topple the sluggard: men and weapons and gold.
And what had I? A pallet in a xenodokheion in a half-barbarous town owing first allegiance to the Khazar nomads, and one former guardsman who had constituted himself my servant still. And somehow, incredibly, more than two years had passed since Leontios shipped me into exile. Save for being hale in body once more, I was no closer to returning to what was rightfully mine than I had been when Apsimaros poured my fever-wracked carcass onto the Kherson quay.
"Suppose someone who actually knows how to rule seizes the throne," I said, clutching at Myakes' arm. "Leontios is an easy target, but I can think of half a dozen men who would be very devils to put down."
"So can I," he answered, scratching still. He did not sound greatly concerned. He was always calmer by nature than I, and he had also come to be contented with the life he was living. And yet how can I say that, having spent so long content to live like a beast satisfying animal lusts but no others? Nor, though I did not yet know it, was my exile anywhere near complete.
My trouble was simplicity itself: how was I to go about establishing an army that could retake Constantinople in a town lacking enough men to form a proper regiment, and in a town, moreover, where, being who I was and what I was, I could not hide, and where the tudun was determined I should do no such thing? Easy enough to discover the difficulty. Discovering a solution to it was years away.
I had, by then, made a couple of tavern friends I felt I could trust: a half-Khazar named Barisbakourios and his brother Salibas, who sometimes went (and whom I preferred to call) by the more properly Greek name, Stephen. Drunk and sober, they proclaimed they would be glad to help me regain my throne. With faithful Myakes, they made me an army of three. With an army of three, I stayed in Kherson.
News continued to trickle into the town, however distantly removed from the time when it had actually occurred. One of the relatively rare ships from Constantinople itself
brought word that the Arabs had seized Carthage. I drank myself senseless when I heard that. One of the reasons my grandfather, Constans, had sailed to Italy and Sicily and his eventual murder in the barbarous west was to protect Carthage from the followers of the false prophet. And now, Constans having given his life to defend it, Leontios fecklessly threw it away.
"Leontios will have to do something about that, Emperor," Myakes said when, the next day, I took word back to the xenodokheion.
"Will he?" I had a headache like death, which inclined me even more than I would have been otherwise toward doubting any possible link between Leontios on the one hand and doing something on the other.
"Aye, he will," Myakes answered through a mouthful of salt-fish stew. He was eating in a hurry, as he intended to go up to the harbor to look for work. But he spared me a couple of more sentences, saying, "Losing Carthage is like losing Thessalonike or Ankyra would be. He can't ignore it."
"Who says he can't?" I returned. Ignoring inconvenient difficulties was one of the few things Leontios had proved he did well.
Here, however, Myakes proved correct. Leontios set out a fleet, I learned eventually, and, to my astonishment, succeeded in driving the Arabs from Carthage. Returning in larger numbers, however, they then defeated us Romans. The commander of the Roman expedition, a certain John, sailed back to the Empire for reinforcements, not having enough men with him to stand up to the larger army the deniers of Christ had moved against him.
On his reaching Crete, though, his junior officers revealed a plan of their own: to sail east rather than returning to the west. They struck for Constantinople, having proclaimed one of their own number Emperor of the Romans.
"He has a funny name, a foreign kind of name," the sailor who was telling me the story said, "so people are calling him Tiberius instead of, ofa160…" His memory failed until I bought him another cup of wine. "Of Apsimaros, that's it."
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