"I told Philotheos what to do," I said. "He is doing it. When Bardanes returns, I may use him. He was a good commander. Deny it if you can."
"I don't like it." As was often true, Myakes did not know when to yield.
"I did not ask whether you liked it. I explained my reasons for doing it, which is more than you deserve. I have made my will clear, and my will shall be done. Do you understand that, Myakes?"
He bowed his head at last. How could he do otherwise? I was- I am- the Emperor.
MYAKES
He would have done better to listen to me, Brother Elpidios, then and some other times, too. Or maybe in the end it wouldn't have mattered, anyway. No way of telling that, not really. If you change one thing, most of the others stay the same. You never can know, not for certain.
But, considering how things ended up, I wish Bardanes had stayed on Kephallenia.
JUSTINIAN
All winter long, I had been making plans for Theodora's entrance into Constantinople- and for that of little Tiberius, too. I wanted to see my wife's face as I paraded her down the Mese. From Atil and from Phanagoria, she imagined she knew what the imperial city was like. I smiled whenever I thought of that: she was like a man who, having seen two copper folleis, fancied he could tell his neighbors about a gold nomisma.
I also wanted to remind her how much I valued her, and to show I cared for her still, despite my having returned to the heart of the civilized world. Accordingly, as soon as spring approached, I sent Theophylaktos the eunuch to Phanagoria with a good-sized fleet to take my wife from Ibouzeros Gliabanos and bring her back to the imperial city.
No one said a word to me about the earliness of the season. When I commanded the fleet to sail, sail it did. Having been away from Theodora for most of a year, I was impatient to have her by my side once more, and even more impatient to set eyes on the son I had never seen. I knew, too, that the fleet would have some considerable layover in Phanagoria while Theodora came thither from whatever part of Khazaria to which she had removed herself- Atil, most likely- on my departure from Phanagoria for the land of the Bulgars.
Not to stretch the tale unduly, the fleet turned out to have sailed too early in the season for its own safety. A storm blew up on the Black Sea the day before the fleet would have made port at Phanagoria. Theophylaktos survived, but several ships went down and more than three hundred sailors drowned.
This news I gained from Makarios, the merchant captain who the fall before had brought me news of Theodora's confinement and the birth of Tiberius. He had got to Phanagoria ahead of my fleet, escaping the storm, and set out after the survivors limped into that town. After recounting the unfortunate tale, he added, "The tudun of Phanagoria also told me to give you a message from Ibouzeros Gliabanos."
"Did he?" I said, amused. "Go ahead." I expect it to be a warning against killing any more officials the Khazar khagan had sent out to govern the cities he ruled.
But Makarios said, "He told me to tell you two or three ships would have been plenty to bring your wife back here to Constantinople. He says you didn't need to throw so many men away doing that. Did you think you were taking her by force?" He held up a hasty hand, as well he might have. "These are his words, Emperor, not mine. All I'm doing is delivering them."
"I understand that," I said. "I am not angry at you. But the Khazars will pay for their insolence. All the cities up there will pay for what they did to me. If I were you, Captain Makarios, I'd trade along the southern coast of the Black Sea, not the northern one. Once I am through with those towns, they will have little to trade."
"Thanks for the warning, Emperor," he said, but I could tell by the way he said it that he did not believe I intended my words to be taken literally. He having brought me good news, I hope his business has not suffered in the subsequent years of my reign.
***
Two months and more passed by before Theophylaktos and the ships of his fleet still floating returned to the imperial city. I bore the delay with such patience as I could, knowing from my own experience how long news and people took to travel across the tremendous breadth of the steppe.
At last, though, a messenger brought word that the fleet was pulling into the Golden Horn, whose harbors were closest to the palace at Blakhernai where I still dwelt. Hurrying up to the roof of the palace, I saw the ships with my own eyes. On one of them would be my wife and son, although they were not so near as to let me make them out. I called orders to the servants and departed.
The fleet was just tying up at the docks when I rode up on a bay gelding: a much handsomer piece of horseflesh than the Bulgar pony aboard which I had come down to Constantinople, even if lacking in both intelligence and endurance by comparison. As I hurried down the pier toward Theodora and Tiberius, I prayed they had had a smoother voyage on the Black Sea than my last one.
"Justinian!" A familiar voice made me spot one waving hand among many. I waved back to my wife, who held up my son for me to see.
I stared and stared at the child of my flesh, he who will succeed me when that flesh is subjected to the common fate of all mankind. He was plump and reddish and, like his mother, had a full head of dark brown hair. After noting these characteristics of his, I noted one of my own: intense surprise that I could view a child of mine without being filled with anger and hatred, the only emotions suffusing me whenever I set eyes on my daughter Epiphaneia.
Sailors having extended the gangplank from the ship to the wharf, Theodora left the vessel and entered the imperial city. "Justinian, here is your son," she said in Greek that showed she had been practicing with merchants or priests during her sojourn in Khazaria, and she handed Tiberius to me.
My hands were unpracticed at holding babies. Tiberius cared not at all. Seeing me smile at him, he smiled back, enormously. I laughed, and so did he, a baby's squeal of joy unadulterated. Whatever his elders might have thought, he cared no more about my nose's being less that it might have than he did about the unpracticed fingers out of whose grip he tried to squirm. His sublime indifference to my features would of itself have sufficed to endear him to me.
Then, continuing to hold him in the crook of one arm, I turned and used the other to wave out to Constantinople, imitating my wife's diction as I did so: "Theodora, here is your city." I could not resist adding, "Is it not almost as grand as Phanagoria?"
Taking a wifely privilege, Theodora stuck out her tongue at me. "You told me stories about Constantinople," she said. "I thought you were as big a liar as a bard who sings songs to my brother the khagan. Now I see you did not tell the truth because you did not say enough."
"Tervel the Bulgar told me the same thing," I answered. "His ambassadors would come back from the Queen of Cities and say what they saw, and he would not believe them. When he saw for himself, he too knew they had been keeping much to themselves."
"I want to see all of this city," Theodora said. "If it is mine, I need to know it."
"Soon you will see the most splendid pearl in the necklace, when I crown you Augusta and Tiberius Emperor in the church of the Holy Wisdom," I said, pointing southeast to show her where in the city the great church lay. Because of its height, the exterior of the huge dome was visible from most of Constantinople, though no one, viewing only the exterior, could gain the smallest inkling of the magnificence housed within.
After we had stood talking for a little while- and after Theophylaktos had got down on his hands and knees, not to prostrate himself before me but to kiss the tarred, gull-dung-smeared timbers of the harbor belonging to his native city in thanksgiving for having come home safe at last- a commotion at the foot of the pier made me look in that direction. Approaching amidst a considerable retinue was a litter carried by bearers with eagles embroidered on the chests of their silk tunics. The walls and even the handles of the chair were gilded; silk worked with golden threads curtained the windows.
Theodora's eyes, already wide, grew wider. "Who rides in this- thing?" she asked. Her Greek, though much improved, had no
words for what she was seeing.
One of the attendants opened the door to the litter. The woman who descended wore robes very much like mine. "Come with me," I said to Theodora. "I'll introduce you to my mother." Word of my wife's arrival must have reached the grand palace almost as soon as it got to me.
My wife inferred a good deal from my tone. Quietly, she asked, "You and your mother do not like each other?"
"Not always," I answered, as quietly. "God willing, you and Tiberius will make a difference." That, after refusing my mother's urging to remarry, I had wed a barbarian princess had made a difference, and not a good one. But a grandson would set no small weight in the other pan of the scale. Raising my voice, I said, "Mother, I present to you my wife, Theodora, who shall be Augusta, and my son Tiberius, who con tinues our line. My wife, I present to you my mother, the Augusta Anastasia."
Politely, Theodora inclined her head. "I greet you, mother of my husband," she said. The words were Greek, but I got the idea she was translating them from Khazar ceremonial.
"Welcome to Constantinople," my mother said, and then, more warmly, "Welcome home." She held out her arms. "Let me see your son."
She knew how to hold an infant, having gained experience with me, with my brother Herakleios, and, now that I think on it, with Epiphaneia as well. She smiled down at Tiberius, and he up at her: he would smile at anyone who smiled his way. He made the sort of noises infants make when they are happy. And then, his grandmother still holding him, he pissed himself.
I thought she would be annoyed. She started to laugh. "These things happen," she said, and turned a thoughtful eye my way. "They happened with you." To Theodora, she added, "He is a handsome boy."
"Thank you," my wife said. She turned and called in the Khazar language, waving as she did so. A slave woman who had accompanied her on the ship from Phanagoria came hurrying up. Theodora took Tiberius from my mother and handed him to the woman. She spoke some more as well. Not having used the barbarous jargon of the nomads who dwell north of the Black Sea since my own departure from Phanagoria, I understood not a word she said, but context made her desire plain: that Tiberius's deplorable state be corrected. This duly came to pass.
My mother said, "I know Justinian will have you live with him at the palace he has chosen for his own, Theodora, but you must bring your grandson to me often, so I can see him and play with him."
"I will do this," Theodora replied. If she saw anything unusual in the separate households my mother and I maintained, she kept quiet about it. I do not believe she did, it being the custom among the Khazars for the khagan to live apart from even his closest family.
Theodora having ridden across the steppe with me from Atil to Phanagoria, I felt certain she would prefer a horse to a litter for the far shorter journey from the harbor to the Blakhernai palace. A litter waited nonetheless, to convey Tiberius (and, incidentally, the slave who had charge of him) to the palace.
My mother's eyes grew wide when she saw Theodora swing up into the saddle, riding astride like a man. Somewhat to my surprise, she said nothing; she had made up her mind to be polite to my wife, even if more for Tiberius's sake than on account of Theodora's own multifarious virtues.
I rode back to Blakhernai alongside Theodora: a little ahead of her, in fact, not only because I was Emperor but also because I knew the way. She exclaimed at everything, as any newcomer to this God-guarded and imperial city will do. But, for her, everything was more all-encompassing than it might have been for, say, a Roman from an Anatolian town. "Stones in the roadway!" she murmured at one point, the very idea of paving being exotic to her.
"Yes," I said happily, as if I had invented cobblestones myself.
She kept craning her neck. "All the buildings are so high," she said; we were riding between rows of three- and four-story apartment houses, nothing at all out of the ordinary for Constantinople. People on the balconies overhanging the street peered down at us. Some of them waved. None presumed to empty chamber pots on our heads, which has happened before in the history of the city. "So high," she repeated. "Why don't they fall down?"
From time to time, in earthquakes, they do fall down. I forbore to mention that, saying instead, "Our builders know what they're about."
She accepted it: how could she do otherwise, this being her first journey through Constantinople? When we got to the palace wherein I had dwelt since returning to the imperial city- and where I dwell yet- servants and slaves and eunuchs came out and prostrated themselves before us. Though the Khazars have a somewhat different ritual, she grasped what that meant. "These are all yours?" she asked in no small astonishment.
That I understood; her brother the khagan, though living in great luxury, had but a fraction of my retainers. "These are some of what is mine," I answered proudly- and truthfully. "They are also some of what is yours."
Theophylaktos, ever so delighted to be back in the imperial city, took charge of Theodora then, conveying her to the chamber off the hall of Okeanos that had been readied against her arrival. I saw no more of her until we dined together as the sun was setting. By then, serving woman had plucked her eyebrows, powdered and rouged her cheeks, painted her lips, and curled her hair. She would never look like a woman born in the Roman Empire, but she looked more like one than I had ever seen her. "You are lovely," I told her.
"Am I?" She shrugged. "In Khazaria, we decorate horses like this, not women."
From that day forth, though, she voiced no further complaints against Roman fashion. And she praised the food highly. Full of roast goat soused with fat myself, I said, "These are the dishes they imagined they could make in Phanagoria. Now you taste them as they should be." A servant poured me more wine. "The vintages are better, too."
"Yes," she said emphatically, having also been sampling those vintages.
Presently, Theophylaktos escorted her to my bedchamber, then departed to let us celebrate a mystery in which he had no hope of sharing. Two or three of the serving women would no doubt be downcast at Theodora's return, for the attentions I had given them in her absence would cease, except, perhaps, for occasional amusements.
"My wife," I said, barring the door.
"My husband," she answered. A proper Roman wife would have cast her eyes down to the floor in modesty. Theodora boldly met my gaze. I had not the heart to reprove her, not when she had proved herself loyal to me at her brother's expense. For treachery, the sword; for its reverse, rewards.
All at once curious, I asked, "What did Ibouzeros Gliabanos say when you came back to him and Papatzun didn't?"
Her smile was exactly that which I should have used had I been in her place. "He said many, many, very many very bad things. But all the time he said them, the way he said them was-" Running out of Greek, she used a word in the Khazar language, expecting me to know what it meant.
And, for a wonder, it was a word I chanced to recall. "Admiring?" I said, giving it to her in the tongue of the Roman Empire.
"Admiring, yes, thank you," she said. "Like he hated and had pride for you at the same time."
That probably went a long way toward accounting for the khagan's mocking message after my fleet met shipwreck. Having thrown in his lot with Apsimaros, he must have hoped I would fail in overthrowing the usurper, but, on my success (and, indeed, on my successful escape from his trap before that), he could not help but show a certain reluctant respect.
Theodora looked from the barred door to the bed in front of which I stood. Pointedly, she said, "Did you call me here to talk about my brother?"
I burst out laughing, half scandalized, half delighted. As I knew, Theodora had been a maiden the night we wed. But, on being properly introduced thereto, she had come to take no small delight in that which passes between man and woman. Once I left Phanagoria, she would have done without. Of my own amusements in that regard during the time we were apart, I said nothing, nor did she inquire, knowing the man's prerogative in such affairs.
But we were apart no longer. After putting out all
the lamps in the bedchamber save one alone, I divested her of the robe she wore. Even by the light of that single lamp, I saw how childbirth had changed her body. Her breasts were larger and softer than I remembered, her hips thicker, the skin on her belly looser and marked with fine pale tracings it had not held before the child she'd carried stretched it. As far as fleshly perfection went, the serving maids with whom I had been dallying in Theodora's absence were without doubt her superiors.
None of them, however, had saved me in time of need. None of them had stood apart from their brothers to save me. None of them had given me a son to be Emperor after me. And so, while they were pleasant and diverting, Theodora was my wife.
After I made myself naked, she had no cause to complain of the salute I gave her, wordless though it was. When we embraced, standing there by the bed, my lance stood between us, but only for a moment. "So warm," she said, moving it to rub against her belly.
Before long, we lay down together. Each of us knew what pleased the other; I had nothing in which to instruct her, as I had needed to do when bedding a new serving girl. Once kisses and caresses had excited us both, she rolled onto her back, her legs open, inviting me to complete the conquest of her secret place.
That I wasted no time in doing. Theodora's breath sighed out as I thrust myself deep into her. Her thighs gripped my flanks, I rode her until she gasped and called out my name and what I have always taken to be a string of Khazar endearments, though I have never asked her the meaning of the words.
I had not yet spent myself within her, as I had usually done at her moment of delight when we enjoyed the marital couch before my enforced departure from Phanagoria. Enormous in the dim lamplight, her eyes looked past me, through me, rather than at me. Realizing my lance retained its temper, she murmured, "Go on. Oh, go on"- again, immodest, but in its way immensely flattering.
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