Justinian

by Harry Turtledove

  Tervel's face remained impassive on my coming up to him. "They did not hail you as you hoped," he said, a statement of the obvious I could have done without.

  "They mocked your men as much as they mocked me," I said. Tervel said nothing, and his face continued to reveal nothing. Myakes suffered one of his unfortunate, unbecoming, and untimely coughing fits. Despite that, my own words gave me an idea. "Let the Romans come forward," I told Tervel. "Let them and me go up and down the whole length of the wall, showing the garrison that Romans do support me and persuading the soldiers to abandon the usurper and return to me."

  "We will do this," Tervel said, with no hesitation I could discern. "It is the best hope you have." How good a hope it was, he did not express an opinion. Nor did he say what he might do if it failed.

  ***

  The next morning, small bands of Romans rode up and down the length of the wall, haranguing the soldiers inside the city and urging them to come over to my cause. Accompanied by Myakes and, at his usual discreet interval, by Tervel, I myself traveled down past the Kharisian Gate, the southern limit of the Bulgars' encampment.

  I spoke as I had on first approaching the city walls. Now Myakes added his voice to mine. Among others, the formidable Leo was speaking on my behalf elsewhere along the walls. If I could not persuade the soldiers myself, I reckoned the two of them most likely to do it for me.

  What sort of promises Apsimaros was making inside the imperial city, I cannot say with certainty. Whatever they were, they and the familiarity of having been ruled for seven years by the usurper kept the soldiers on the walls from going over to me. I judged them to feel a certain amount of sympathy for my cause, as none of them, no matter how close I approached, tried to slay me with an arrow or a stone flung from a catapult. But none of them made any move to admit me into Constantinople, either, nor did I note any signs of strife among them implying one faction wished to do so but was prevented by another.

  Having shouted myself hoarse to no visible effect, I returned dejected to the encampment the Bulgars had established. Shortly thereafter, Leo also rode into camp. "What news?" I called to him. This was foolishness on my part, for any news he had worth giving would have been sent to me on the instant. Knowing as much now, however, did nothing to help me then.

  Leo shook his head. "I'm sorry, Emperor," he said. "They seem very stupid and stubborn."

  "Justinian, how are we going to get into the city?" Tervel said. "By my sword, everything I had heard of these walls is only a piece of the truth. I would be mad to throw my army at them."

  "I did not ask you to do that," I answered. I had not asked because I did not think he would do it, and I did not think an attack would succeed if he did do it. I had not adequately considered the walls from outside until then. When I was a child, the Arabs had assailed the Queen of Cities with siege engines of the sort the Bulgars lacked, and to no avail. They had also challenged us Romans on the sea, where the Bulgars had no ships whatever.

  Tervel had that same thought in a different context, saying, "We cannot make this city starve, either, not when boats bring in food in spite of everything we are able to do on land." In truth, we could not do that much on land, either, lacking as we did the manpower to extend a tight siege line along the whole length of the wall. I had counted on the soldiers' renouncing Apsimaros at my return. To find that hope mistaken was a bitter blow.

  "Can't hardly quit now," Myakes declared. "We've come too far for that."

  "Yes," Tervel said, but I liked neither his tone of voice nor the look on his face. He could quit our venture without a qualm, return to the lands north of the Haimos Mountains, and, by means of booty and slaves taken, reckon the raid a success. He could take me with him, to use as pretext whenever he cared to attack Romania again. Only gaining the city now would keep me from that fate, but how to gain it?

  "We'll try again tomorrow," I said, with luck sounding more confident than I felt.

  I went to different parts of the wall that next day, traveling past the Golden Gate down toward the Sea of Marmara in my effort to persuade the soldiery with in the Queen of Cities to abandon the usurper and return to their rightful and proper affiliation. I had no more success, however, than I had enjoyed, or rather not enjoyed, on previous days. Some soldiers continued to revile me on the grounds that I was noseless, despite the refutation of that argument being there before their eyes. More cursed me for having come with a host of Bulgars at my back.

  To that charge, I found myself hard-pressed to respond. Perhaps I should have been received more favorably had I come straight down to Constantinople in Moropaulos's fishing boat. At the time I began the journey, I had thought it more likely I would be seized and beheaded.

  That still struck me as having been highly likely. In any case, I had no choice. The die, as Julius Caesar said, was cast. I harangued the soldiers on the walls from first light of dawn till dusk deepened into night. They would not open the gates for me. More dejected than I had ever been in all my life, even in the black days shortly after my mutilation, I rode back toward Tervel's encampment, back past the Golden Gate, back past the Kharisian Gate, back past the ruins of the aqueduct of Valens.

  My supporters seemed as downhearted as I was. The men from Kherson had marveled no less than Tervel at seeing Constantinople. Now, though, its splendor took on a sinister meaning for them. "How are you going to get in there, Emperor, if they won't open up?" Barisbakourios asked gloomily.

  "Whatever you do, Emperor, it's going to take something special," Leo agreed. He had again been unable to persuade the garrison to renounce the usurper.

  Tervel stood listening quietly to our conversation. Eventually, the khagan of the Bulgars would suggest withdrawing to the lands he ruled, the lands north of the mountains. I saw no choice ahead but to go with him, to pursue my dream even as it receded before me, to become the glove inside which rested his hand. Part of me would die every day, but the breathing husk that remained would be enough for him and to spare.

  Moropaulos, in his earnest, dull way, ticked off points on his fingers: "We can't go over the walls- we're not hawks. We can't go under the walls- we're not moles." He knew nothing of mining, but the Bulgars knew nothing of mining, either, which made him correct. He went on, "We can't go through the walls- we're not woodpeckers." He laughed, but only for a moment. Then his heavy face curdled to sadness. "That doesn't leave anything."

  The rest of my followers looked similarly dejected. So did Tervel, although art might have substituted for emotion on his features. For one moment, downheartedness threatened to overwhelm me, too. Then, ever so slowly, I straightened, where before I had slumped. "We are not hawks," I said in a voice that made my comrades turn toward me and pay my words close heed. "We are not moles. But perhaps, by God and His Mother, we can be woodpeckers."

  "Only person a wood pecker'd do any good is a eunuch," Myakes said.

  I glared at him so fiercely that he subsided, mumbling apologies. Pointing south toward the aqueduct of Valens, I said, "The channel there does not bring water into the imperial city these days, nor has it for eighty years or so. But it still goes into Constantinople. God willing, so shall we."

  "What if they have guards in there, Emperor?" Stephen exclaimed.

  "Then we'll fight them," I replied. Then they'll kill us, I thought. "But I never remember guards being posted in the aqueduct. Do you, Myakes?"

  Where a moment before he had been good for nothing but making crude jokes, now he sounded surprisingly thoughtful. "No, Emperor, I don't, not ever. Nobody thinks about the aqueduct, not these days."

  I was thinking about it, thinking about the prospect of making my way through several hundred yards of pitch-black pipe. I wondered how big around the pipe was. Would I be able to stand upright in it, or would I have to crawl all that way? If I did have to crawl, finding guards there was less likely. But who could guess what might have denned there in the many years since water had stopped flowing?

  "Who's with me?" I ask
ed, deliberately not thinking of any of these things.

  Faithful Myakes spoke first, I think, but he beat out my followers from Kherson- and also Leo- by only a fragment of a heartbeat. None of the other Romans who had joined me since I came down with the Bulgars said a word. Neither did Tervel. I tried to make out his expression in the fading light, tried and failed. Was he discomfited at seeing what he had reckoned certain failure suddenly sparked with another chance at success?

  If he was, he was not so discomfited as to keep me from making the effort. On the other hand, he did not offer any aid, either. He simply stood aside and let me and my backers do as we would- washed his hands of us, so to speak, as Pilate had done with our Lord. All the risks were ours, and all the planning was ours, too.

  Not, I must say, that much planning was involved. We had to get up into the opening, go through the pipe, and get down into the city. It would be simple- or it would be impossible.

  "Torches," Stephen said, "so we can see what-"

  "No." I cut him off. Pointing toward the aqueduct once more, I continued, "We have no way to tell whether bricks have fallen out or mortar come loose, or whether the pipe itself has cracked. If the usurper's soldiers see light in the aqueduct, whether everything has been dark and quiet since my great-great-grandfather's day, they'll be waiting for us inside the city, and that will be the end of everything."

  "All that way in the dark?" Theophilos shuddered.

  Though dreading that myself, I told him, "Stay here, then." My voice, I daresay, had a lash to it. Having seen what might be a way into the city, I was wild to try it.

  "A pry bar," Myakes exclaimed. "No telling what we'll have to move."

  "I know where to get one," Leo said. That, I confess, made me raise my eyebrows. This was only the third day on which he had been in the neighborhood of the imperial city. But he hurried away with every sign of confidence. My new spatharios was proving a man of no small resourcefulness.

  "Rope, too," Myakes called after him. He waved to show he had heard. To me, Myakes said, "Rope'll give us a way down where we might not have one otherwise."

  Leo came back a few minutes later with a coil of rope around one arm and a stout iron crowbar about a cubit long in his other hand. "Excellent," I said, and then turned to Tervel. "Have we a ladder tall enough to let us climb up into the water channel of that aqueduct?"

  "I don't know," he answered. When he seemed inclined to say no more, I folded my arms across my chest, making it plain I should not be satisfied without his giving me a more responsive reply. Grudgingly, he went on, "I will see. If we do not, we can make one by lashing two or three shorter ones together."

  "Good enough," I said. "Now, I have one more favor to ask of you."

  "What is it?" He did not sound happy. What he sounded like was a man who felt what he had thought to be a puppet jerking his arm.

  "When we go up into the pipe, I want your men to attack the wall," I told him. "I want them to make an enormous din, so any noise from us goes unnoticed." When he simply stood there, saying neither yes nor no, I added, "By this time tomorrow, you will be revealed either as my son-in-law or as a Caesar of the Roman Empire."

  His face did not show what he thought. It seldom did. Up in the country he ruled, he had seemed hopeful about my prospects, but that hope must have faded when few Romans came over to me, and faded again when the garrison of the imperial city held it closed against me. Maybe hope revived in him. Maybe he simply thought he would be rid of me. "I shall do it," he said.

  The ladders the Bulgars had were not long enough. When they lashed two of them together, the resulting contraption still had a bend in the middle on being forced more or less upright, as a man's leg has a bend at the knee. My followers examined it with doubts that, had they been applied to religion, would have amounted to wicked atheism.

  Although having those same doubts myself, I suppressed them. "It will serve," I insisted. "It does not have to hold us long- only long enough to get us up into the aqueduct."

  I wanted to wait until midnight to enter the aqueduct, but was persuaded to begin earlier, around the start of the fourth hour of the night, because I had no way of knowing how long the journey through the channel would take. I hoped to drop down into Constantinople while it was still dark, so as to be able to pick for myself the way in which I would first confront the soldiers and people of the city.

  Several grunting Bulgars carried the spliced ladder to the base of the ruined aqueduct and raised it high. I wonder if they should have joined three, not two, together, it being barely long enough for its required purpose. Changing matters at that point, though, would have taken time I did not wish to spend.

  I started up the ladder. It did flex at that joint, as a man's knee might have done. I climbed as fast as I could. If it broke under my weight and sent me tumbling to the ground, drama would turn to unseemly farce in the blink of an eye.

  It held. Gasping, I got to the top. I reached into the opening of the channel, which was something less than a yard wide: a tiny thing, seemingly, to have supplied the imperial city with so much water. My fingers closed over sticks and twigs. I threw the bird's nest away and scrambled up into the pipe.

  It was too narrow for me to turn around in it. "I'm in!" I shouted, almost as if I had entered a woman. I had to hope they would hear me down below.

  The ladder scraped against the broken end of the aqueduct: someone else was on it. I scuttled farther down the pipe, to give whoever it was room to climb in. "Don't put more than one man on this cursed thing at a time." It was Myakes' voice. I might have known he would let no one come between me and him. Cursing, he made it into the pipe in the same ungainly way I had used. "You there, Emperor?"

  "I'm here." His bulky body cut off what little light had come from the opening of the channel. "We'll both move down now."

  That came none too soon, for someone else was already climbing toward us: Barisbakourios, followed by Stephen, then Leo, then Moropaulos, with Theophilos last of all. By the time Theophilos joined us, I was some distance down the pipe, moving ahead in utter darkness.

  Some men, I have heard, suffer a deadly fear of being enclosed in a small space. Had any such sufferer been among us, he would without a doubt have gone screaming mad. Not only were we literally in a space of small compass, again and again banging our heads or barking our backs when we rose up more than the pipe would permit, but it seemed even smaller than it was because of the utter lightlessness there. It would have been easy to imagine the pipe closing in on us until it squeezed us as an Aesculapian snake squeezes a rat. Fortunately, none of us was afflicted by this sort of morbid imagining.

  MYAKES

  Brother Elpidios, I tell you the truth, I never came so close to pissing myself as I did in that damned pipe. I was blinder then than I am now. I can tell the difference between light and dark to this day. I can't see anything, mind you, but I can tell the difference. There wasn't any difference to tell, not inside that pipe there wasn't. It was all black, nothing else but.

  I would have had the screaming hobgoblins in there, I think, if it hadn't been for Justinian. What? No, he didn't pat me on the shoulder and keep me brave, or anything like that. Yes, I'll tell you what I mean, if you let me, Brother. What I mean is, if I'd gone to pieces in there, I figured he'd tell somebody to cut my throat or knock me over the head, and then everybody behind me would have crawled over my body and gone on.

  Let me put it like this: frightened as I was, part of me knew it wasn't a real fear, if you know what I mean. I was doing it to myself. I could feel I was doing it to myself. I couldn't stop doing it, but I could slow me down a little.

  And I knew being afraid of Justinian was a real fear. Can't think of one any realer, not offhand. Stand between him and getting into the city then and you'd end up with footprints up your front and down your back- and a knee in the balls for good measure.

  Was I more afraid of Justinian than my own imagination? Brother Elpidios, you'd best believe I was. You w
ould have been, too.

  JUSTINIAN

  We were not the only living things in the aqueduct pipeway. I have spoken of the nest my hand found when I climbed off the ladder. A couple of bats flapped past me, too, squeaking indignantly at having their seclusion disturbed. Hitting out at them, I succeeded only in barking my knuckles.

  Skitterings told me mice or rats had climbed the masonry of the wrecked aqueduct to make their homes in the pipe. None of them ran toward me; they all fled away, sensing that I and the men with me were larger and more dangerous than they.

  I crawled headfirst through spiderwebs beyond number, wondering what their patient weavers found to eat in this dark, wretched hole. More than one spider dropped down onto me and crawled away. At first I swatted at them, but, finding crushing their soft, hairy bodies more revolting than letting them run on me, I soon desisted. Soft cries of disgust from my followers said not all the eight-legged creatures were descending on me.

  How far had I come? In the Stygian darkness, I had no sure way to judge. Something like panic ran through me. Was it a spear-cast? A bowshot? A mile? Had we reached the wall? Had we passed it? I stopped. Myakes promptly ran into me, each of the others colliding in turn with the man in front of him.

  "Wait," I said. "Quiet." Echoing weirdly up the tube through which we crawled came the sounds of battle. Tervel, then, had kept his pledge to me. But so attenuated were the sounds, I could not use them to judge how far or how long we had traveled. On asking my companions, I discovered that their opinions varied so widely as to be of little value.

  The argument threatened to engulf us as thoroughly as darkness had done. "Wait," I said again. "Let us assume we've come about a bowshot, say, two hundred fifty cubits." That was in the middle range of the guesses they had put forth. "From now on, I will keep track of how many times my right leg advances. For each of those times, I will add one cubit. It will not be a perfect reckoning, but better than the nothing we have now."