I held up a hand. Once moved, it seemed to stay in place of its own accord. "Auriabedas, by God and the Virgin Mother of God I swear I shall not move as you cut me. Do what needs to be done. I shall endure it."
The troubled look did not leave his face. "You say this now. What you do once I start cut, that very very different. I tell you. You hear me?"
"I hear you," I answered. "I shall not move, I tell you. Do you hear me?" I folded my arms across my chest and tilted my head up so he would have the best possible light by which to work. "Begin."
He began.
MYAKES
Brother Elpidios, if somebody told me about it and I wasn't there to see it with my own eyes, I'd call him a liar to his face. You know about poppy juice, don't you? Ah, I thought as much. What it does is, it makes bad horrible pain seem like plain horrible pain. That's all it does. I had some after they put my eyes out. I guess I know.
Well, Justinian, he just sat there like he was a marble statue. Except to breathe, he never twitched, not even once. He didn't scream, he didn't yell, he didn't even hiss. He never once tried knocking Auriabedas's hand away. No, I take it back. Justinian wasn't just like a marble statue. Marble doesn't bleed.
If you could stand it, it was fascinating to watch. Me, I'd seen enough battlefields so it didn't bother me too bad. The little brown man made the first cuts right above the top of Justinian's mustache. When Justinian didn't flinch, he sort of muttered to himself and kept on making little cuts till that whole stretch was raw meat.
Once he was happy he'd chopped Justinian up enough there, he started cutting away at the leaf he'd drawn on his forehead. He cut it from the bottom up, I suppose so the blood wouldn't drip on the line in a place where he hadn't cut yet. Once he'd cut a section, he had to slide the knife under it to free it from the flesh underneath, not that you've got a lot of flesh between the skin of your forehead and the bone there.
After a while, he had the whole leaf free. He gave it a half-twist at the bottom, so it would still be skin side out when he put it over the hole where Justinian's nose used to be. I'd wondered how he was going to manage that. He knew what he was doing, all right. Justinian hadn't made a mistake there.
He sewed the leaf to the raw meat at the very base of what would be the new nose. Justinian didn't wiggle for that, either. "Blood in both," Auriabedas said. "Blood join blood, oh yes, all good." Justinian does a fine job of writing down the funny way he talked. I can hear it in my head, even if I haven't much thought of it over the years between then and now.
I'd wondered what his little wooden tubes were for. He put them into Justinian's nose- or what was going to be his nose- to give shape to his nostrils. Then he did some more sewing and finished bandaging Justinian's face. By then, with all the rags there and more rags around where he'd sliced that leaf-shaped flap out of Justinian's forehead, the little brown fellow had wrapped him up good.
When Auriabedas was all done, he turned to me. He was all smiles. "Now he have nose," he said in his bad Greek. "Hope it good nose. Think it good nose, oh yes. Him brave man. Never see more braver, oh very no. How you say?- deserve good nose."
"Thank you," Justinian said.
JUSTINIAN
It hurt. Mother of God, how it hurt! When the executioner slashed my tongue and cut off my nose, the pain was also very bad. But those two cuts were inflicted quickly, and, once they had been made, my body could turn immediately to the business of healing. Here, Auriabedas not only cut once but kept on cutting and digging and prodding and poking and then at last sewing. I was glad for the wine with poppy juice, but do not think it did much against my suffering. Any man not dead would have suffered as a result of what the small brown trader did to me.
Two things helped sustain me while he cut. First, I had given him my oath I would neither pull away nor try to stop him while he worked. If a man will not tell God the truth, to whom will he tell it? And second, when the executioner had cut me, it was with the express purpose of keeping me from ever regaining the imperial throne. Every time Auriabedas's knife sliced into my flesh, every time he drove needle and thread through me, he brought me that much closer to reclaiming what was rightfully mine. For that, I would have endured the pangs of hell, much less surgery.
I do not know how long it all took. When at last it was over, Auriabedas gave me more of the drugged wine to drink. Again, it did not take away my pain, though for a little while it made that pain seem almost as if it were happening to s omeone else, not to me.
While the little man from India was wiping his knife and needle on a scrap of cloth and returning them to the small box he wore in place of a belt pouch, Myakes asked me, "Can you get up, Emperor?"
"I think so," I answered, and then proceeded to prove myself right. As I had after I was mutilated, I tasted rusty blood in my mouth: less this time than before, though. The bandages barely let me see. I turned back toward the monastery and toward the xenodokheion where I had spent- no, not spent: squandered- so much time. "Help me back," I told my faithful companion. "Now we'll see how bad the fever gets." If I spent a stretch out of my head and ravinga160… so much the better, I thought.
***
I should be hard-pressed to deny that Auriabedas earned his five nomismata. Rather than cutting me and leaving my recovery to the will of God, he came back to the monastery at first daily and then every other day until my healing was well advanced, changing my bandages and putting ointment on the wounds he had inflicted. The pain the first two or three times he changed the bandages- especially the first, as a result of all the blood that had dried on them- was almost as bad as during the surgery.
But the wounds healed more cleanly than I had expected. Perhaps the ointment he favored, a mixture of boiled butter and honey, had some special virtue to it. I have since tried to interest Roman physicians in this blend, but, if Galen or Oribasios failed to speak of a medicament in glowing terms, they refuse to admit it could be of any value. Nor is a mere imperial command enough to change their opinion.
Myakes would always stay close by while Auriabedas did what he had to do with me. After the little brown man peeled off the latest set of bandages, I would ask, "How do I look today?" The first few times I put the question, Myakes pretended he did not hear it, which I took for something less than a good sign.
But after a week or ten days, when scabs had formed over the raw wounds in my forehead and at the base of my nose, he began to look thoughtful rather than carefully blank. "You know, Emperor" he said one day, "it might not be so bad."
A few days after that triumph, I reached two more milestones. Auriabedas approached me with a small knife. "I need to cut stitches, take out them," he said. "Flesh grow good to flesh, oh yes, not need stitches no more, oh no." I submitted to his ministrations. The feel of the thread sliding out through my flesh as he drew it forth with a pair of tongs was strange and repellent, but soon over.
Having accomplished that, Auriabedas bade me splash warm water on the lower part of my face, over and over again, to loosen the dried blood gluing his little wooden tubes to my flesh. Then he used the tongs to pull the tubes free. More blood, this fresh, not dry, followed. Since he took it as a matter of course, I did as well. And, as I expected from his manner, the flow soon stopped.
He tapped at the thin layer of flesh above the former position of one of the tubes. When it held its shape under his prodding, he looked pleased. "You have nose good as I can make," he said proudly.
"I am glad to hear it," I answered. How good a nose it truly was, I did not yet know, but for Myakes' increasingly hopeful comments. I had not yet found (indeed, I had not yet sought) a mirror or still water in which I could view myself, reasoning it would be wisest to wait until I was more nearly healed before doing so. But I reckoned the day when Auriabedas, having taken the bandages from my forehead, did not replace them with new ones as a sign that my healing had advanced far enough.
A monastery was not the ideal place in which to seek a mirror, the monks being by the
very nature of the lives they had chosen for themselves opposed to the notion of adornment and ornamentation of the body. I knew a place, however, where that notion was embraced rather than opposed. And so, from the xenodokheion I took myself off to the brothel where I had been in the habit of easing my lusts when those grew too strong to be ignored.
The guard standing outside was not the same fellow who had been there when I began patronizing the establishment, nor his immediate successor, either. Yet he had been there long enough to recognize me, which, for a moment, he failed to do as I came round the corner. "You've- you've changed," he managed when I walked up to him.
"I hope so," I answered. He held the door open for me as I went inside, as that first guard had so many years before. From that day to this one, I had not shown my mutilated face there in daylight.
The women lounging within exclaimed in surprise, first at seeing me there with the sun in the sky and then on account of my changed aspect. "What did you do?" they asked, over and over again.
I explained what I had done. Some of them nodded. Some of them made disgusted noises. "May I see myself, please?" I asked. "I came here for the loan of a mirror." That was, in fact, the only reason for which I had come, not having had the crust to borrow- no, to take- more money from Myakes so soon after paying Auriabedas.
Several of the whores had small mirrors, which they used to darken their eyelids and paint their cheeks and lips with red. I looked now in one, now in another. The great scab on my forehead remained, looking as if I had fallen from a horse onto my face. I tried to imagine it gone, replaced by a smooth, pale scar. But I studied it less closely than my nose. As Auriabedas had said, that was still ugly, a far cry from the proud prominence I had once borne. It looked as if someone had smashed it with a rock and done a particularly fine job of flattening it. But it looked like a nose, if a damaged one, not a great gaping hole in the center of my face.
And then, to my astonishment, one of the women took me upstairs to celebrate my improvement in the most enjoyable way possible. "I can't give you anything," I told her- before, not afterwards, to avoid any possible misunderstandings.
She shrugged, which, as she had just got out of her shift, I found inspiring. "Not many men coming in today," she said. "Don't worry about it." And so I did not worry about it. Go to any business long enough, prove yourself a good customer, and you will get favors to which someone walking in off the street for the first time could not hope to aspire.
Afterwards, I strode through the streets of Kherson, looking at the town with new eyes, letting the townsfolk see me with my new face. Not all of them recognized me, which I found almost as satisfying as the girl had been. I went down to the harbor. Myakes, who was rolling barrels of- what else?- salt fish onto a ship, waved to me. I waved back.
One of the laborers with whom he was working walked by and casually slapped him on the shoulder. I envied him, and envy him to this day, that easy contact among equals. It is something I have never known. As prince and then Emperor, I was set above the rest of the world. After Leontios mutilated me and exiled me to Kherson, the rest of the world, by contrast, was set above me. Having seen life from above and below, I own to preferring the former. Of life at the same level as everyone else, I am ignorant.
Coming down close to the sea, I stared south across it. How many times I did that in my years of exile, I could not begin to say. For a long while there, though, that sea sundering me from Constantinople had seemed wide as the unending ocean that flows on forever past the last land of the known world. Now, all at once, I felt the imperial city to be barely below the horizon, so that, if I went up into a high place, I might see the great dome of the church of the Holy Wisdom revealed in all its splendor and ingenuity.
This was not so, of course, but the feeling had a reality of its own. I had never left off saying I was Emperor of the Romans, not through all the weary, empty years in Kherson. Now, all at once, I felt like the Emperor again, as if robbed of my throne only yesterday, not years before.
"I will go back!" I said, fiercely enough to startle a tern walking near me, perhaps in the hope I would throw it a scrap of fish. "It shall be mine again!" The tern mewed and flew away. And I, I started back to the xenodokheion.
I had not gone far before I met the tudun, coming back to his residence after having been away on some business or other. Escorting him were a double handful of his fellow Khazars, swarthy, stocky men in furs and leather. Some of them glanced at me, then looked away: I was not extraordinary enough to be worth staring at. What a triumph!
The tudun's eyes started to slide away from me, too, but then they snapped back. "You Justinian," he said, almost accusingly.
"Yes, I am Justinian," I agreed. My voice was proud.
"What happen to your nose?" he asked. "Not gone no more." He frowned. "No, wait. I hear you have someone cut on it."
"That's right." Rumor was ahead of me, then. I wondered if Auriabedas had been drinking his way through my five nomismata, boasting of his surgical prowess in every dockside tavern. If he got more business from that, I hope he did as well by the rest of his patients as he did by me.
The tudun was not stupid, and knew a surprising amount about Roman ways. "You have nose again, you able to be Emperor again. Romans not laugh at you now, you want to be Emperor again." He stared at me, as if daring me to deny it.
I did not deny it: not quite. "I had not thought so far ahead," I told him, even if I would not have said the same thing while taking a holy oath before God. "I had a chance to not be ugly- not to be so ugly- any more, and I took it."
He frowned. "You come here, you promise you don't try and become Emperor again. You say you live here quiet, not cause nobody no trouble."
"I have not done anything differently since I got this new nose of sorts," I answered. Then I held up one finger. "No, I take that back. I've bedded a woman without the room's being so black, she could not see my face."
He snorted. A couple of his bodyguards understood enough Greek to translate that into their own language- which may be even uglier than that of the Sklavenoi- for their companions. The barbarians laughed. One of them pointed to my face and then down to my crotch. He said something else that engendered more laughter. Didn't cut that off, was my guess as to its meaning.
"Woman I don't care nothing about," the tudun said, snapping his fingers to emphasize the point. "Trouble- I care about. Not want none between Romans and Khazars. I tell you this long time gone- you remember?"
"I remember." I had tried to stir up trouble for the wicked usurpers- first Leontios, then Apsimaros- from the moment I arrived at Kherson. Because of my mutilation, I had failed. Now, like Lazarus, my hopes were reborn.
The tudun pointed at me. "You raise trouble, any kind, even smallest bit"- he held his hands close together to show how small a small bit could be-"I tell Emperor Tiberius, see if he still want you to stay here."
That brought me up short. I had not known Apsimaros well (I refused to call him Tiberius, even to myself) before my throne was stolen from me, and word of his deeds that reached Kherson was bound to be sketchy and inaccurate, but he, unlike Leontios, seemed to be no sluggard, and to have a fitting concern for maintaining his place, usurped though that was: why else would he have sent Bardanes Philippikos into exile on the strength of a dream?
"You hear me?" the tudun asked. "You understand me?"
"Oh, yes," I assured him. "I hear you and I understand you very well indeed." I understood I would have to be careful as I planned my return to Constantinople. I had understood from the beginning that I would be returning to Constantinople.
Still looking at me in the most dubious fashion, the tudun went on his way. I, for my part, returned to the monastery. A monk, not a man I knew, waited in the xenodokheion. "Emperor, I greet you!" he exclaimed, and prostrated himself before me on the guest-house floor.
No one, not Myakes, not Barisbakourios, not his brother, had prostrated himself before me in Kherson. Because of that, and b
ecause I was just arrived from seeing the tudun and listening to his warning to me not to act the part of the Emperor, I stared down at this fellow in some suspicion, wondering if he might not be a stalking horse, intended to goad me into publicly claiming the imperial dignity and thereby giving the tudun an excuse to move against me.
"Get up," I told him, and then had an inspiration. "In lands attached to a monastery, all men are equal before God."
He rose, his face wreathed in smiles. "Emperor, how glad I am to see that your reputation for piety is nothing less than the truth."
If he was a traitor, he was an enthusiastic traitor. "Who are you?" I demanded. I did not reach for the knife I wore, but my hand knew with the body's knowledge where it was.
"My name is Cyrus, Emperor," he said, smiling more broadly yet: if a traitor, genial as well as enthusiastic. "I have sailed from Amastris to Kherson for, among other reasons, the pleasure and honor of making your acquaintance."
"And why is that?" I was determined to play my own game at my own speed. If this Cyrus proved the tudun's agent, he would get nothing from me.
He looked around, although the two of us were alone in the large hall. Dramatically lowering his voice, he answered, "Because I have seen in the stars that you are destined to rule the Roman Empire once more."
Again, I did not know how to take that. A man in the tudun's pay would say the same thing, seeking to entice me. And, even if Cyrus was sincere, I still did not know how to respond to his words. That one can foresee the future in the stars violates the proved fact of God's omnipotence, and for that reason is condemned by the holy church. But Cyrus was far from the only churchman to have dabbled in such waters; Leontios's puppetmaster, Paul, also claimed to have seen in the heavens his patron's rise.
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