Justinian

by Harry Turtledove

  She claws my face when I pull out. The Sklavinian baggage hanged herself. This one may stick a knife in me. Ha! Let her try. I set drawers to rights. She starts to cry.

  First Kill Bardanes. Kill Helias. Kill Mauros. Kill the Khersonites, the Phanagorians, the Goths in Doros. Kill them all. Then Theodora will be happy.

  ***

  Amastris. Dreadful hole. No won der Cyrus left. Makes Kherson look like a city. Christ, what a thing to say! But true, true. Marched by now. Halfway to Sinope. More than halfway. Faster. Must push faster.

  MYAKES

  Whew! Rest a bit, why don't you, Brother Elpidios? That's hard stuff to take. I knew he was coming apart at the seams while we were marching to Sinope, yes. I think everybody who had anything to do with him knew he was coming apart at the seams. But listening to him, you wouldn't have thought it was as bad as that- not even close. He'd always wanted to pay back the Khersonites, and there's never been an Emperor who was happy about rebels rising up against him. Nobody thought it was anything more than that.

  And maybe, if things had worked out different, it wouldn't have been. You may as well go on, Brother. Why not? Can't be much of that left.

  JUSTINIAN

  Sinope. At last. God be praised. I stand at the end of the land. I spit out into the sea. Almost I can hit Kherson, Phanagoria. Almost. I look across. Nothing but water. The towns? Just below the horizon. So it seems. Ships go back and forth. All the time. Boats, even. One must be in port. Maybe more than one.

  Theodora speaks with me again. I let her. Now she knows not to quarrel with the vicegerent of God on earth. She will be better for it. God would not have led me here but to destroy my foes. I will destroy them all. No mercy.

  I look to the harbor. There must be a ship in port.

  ***

  A ship from Kherson! Found!

  ***

  Sailed for Constantinople. They sailed for Constantinople. While I was marching here. Curse them to hell. Satan fill their bones with molten lead. Demons stab them with red-hot pitchforks. Fiends rip their flesh to pieces. Days ahead of me. Curse them to hell.

  Theodora says not a word.

  MYAKES

  Me, Brother Elpidios, I think Theodora was dead right. Justinian should have stayed in Constantinople and made the rebels come to him. Taking the imperial city is always the hard part in a civil war. As long as you hold the center, you hold the Empire. If you leave it, you're liable to be in trouble.

  But going to Sinope wasn't the worst idea in the whole world, either. Sinope is closer to Kherson than Constantinople is. Sinope is also closer to Constantinople than Kherson is. If Justinian had heard Bardanes and his pals were getting ready to move against the capital, he had time to get back.

  Or he would have had time. Bardanes left for Constantinople while we were still heading toward Sinope, and stole a march on us that way. He got a bigger start toward the imperial city than Justinian thought he could.

  Oh, yes, I was there when he got the news. The fellow who brought it just thought he had an interesting bit of gossip. He didn't know- he couldn't have known- Justinian was in Sinope. He turned as many different colors as a mullet being boiled when he got hailed before the Emperor.

  He told him the news. He didn't have any choice about that. We all looked at Justinian, waiting to see what he would do. Have you ever heard a lion roar, Brother? You have? Ah, good. You know how, when you hear it, your belly knows you should be afraid before your head does? The noise Justinian made was like that. My hand went halfway to the hilt of my sword before I realized it was just a noise and couldn't hurt me.

  "We have to go back," Justinian said, and he was right about that. "We have to beat the cursed, stinking rebels back to the imperial city."

  He was right about that, too, if he wanted to go on being Emperor. But Bardanes had a good start on us.

  JUSTINIAN

  Back to the city. On the road, back to the Queen of Cities. Rain, turning the road to mud. Christ, why rain now? Has God turned His face from me? Is it because I spared Ibouzeros Gliabanos when I had vowed to kill all who wronged me? What else can it be? I made the vow. I broke it. Now I am punished. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

  Rain, turning the road to mud. Christ.

  We crawl. We limp. With the rain turning the road to mud, we lurch on. The horses tire. They slow. We crawl.

  Where are Bardanes and Helias and Mauros? Out on the sea, out on the sea. God, let this storm that slows me drown them. Do not forsake me, sinner that I am. Blow up a new storm to sink the rebels and Ibouzeros Gliabanos dies at my hands. I know not how, not yet, but it shall be. I will make my word good.

  In the tent, the third night out from Sinope, Theodora says, "Once you have killed the rebels, do not go out of Constantinople again."

  For her sake, I let her brother live. But that is done. I say, "No." We nod at each other, wary as a Roman soldier and an Arab. She puts a hand on my shoulder. She forgives. She forgives. Lord, have mercy on me.

  Christ, have mercy on me. Rain, turning the road to mud.

  ***

  Amastris again, dull and dead as before. The horses half dead, too. Not enough fresh ones. Rain every day since we left Sinope. Where is Bardanes? Did this storm roar through the Black Sea? Did it take the rebels' dromons down to ruin? God, let it be so. God, make it be so.

  The soldiers slog on. They say not a word. They know the need. But they are as tired as their horses. Sometimes they cannot ride, or the horses sink. They march. They sink. Three drown in the mud.

  Past Amastris. Where is Bardanes? Every horseman I see fighting his way east, going about his business, puts me in fear. Will the rider hail us? Will he say we are too late? Will he say we have lost the race? Is the rebel at Constantinople? May it not come to pass! Heaven forbid!

  ***

  Damatrys. Ten miles from Chalcedon. Under the shadow of St. Auxentios's hill. Beacon fire on top of the hill, part of the chain of beacon fires that warns when the Arabs invade. Are there beacon fires for rebels? Would to God there were, to burn them up in.

  Another horseman on the road. He sees us. Some of the riders had gone into the fields. They feared my soldiers. This one rides up. "Emperor!" he calls. "Justinian!" My regalia is the color of mud. Everything is the color of mud. He needs a little while to spot me. When he does, he says, "Emperor, Philippikos is in the city."

  "Did anyone fight to hold him out?" I ask.

  "Emperor, not a soul," he answers.

  My hand goes to my ruined nose. Now I know a worse hurt. I look round at my army. The word hits the men like an arrow in the guts. To come so far. To labor so hard. To fall so short. I see their minds. Now we are not the Emperor's soldiers, they think. Now we are rebels and bandits.

  "In Kherson, I was Emperor of the Romans with one subject," I shout. Faithful Myakes steps up and waves. Good after all I did not kill him.

  "Two subjects, soon," Barisbakourios says. He remembers I gave him his rank.

  "I am still Emperor now," I say. "I got Constantinople back once. I will get it back again."

  Four men cheer. Five. Six. Worse than none. Like a dying ghost of what a cheer ought to be. Hope drips out like blood from a cut vein.

  The rider still sits his horse. "Emperor. There is more."

  ***

  Morning. Barisbakourios is-

  MYAKES

  Poor sod, he couldn't bear to write it, eh, Brother Elpidios? God help me if I blame him. If you want to know the story, though, you'd better know the whole story. The first thing Helias did when he got into Constantinople and found out what Justinian had done to his wife and children was, he went after Justinian. Well, Justinian wasn't there, and neither was Theodora.

  So the next thing Helias did was, he went after Tiberius. Tiberius wasn't with us- he'd stayed back in the city with his grandmother. Anastasia knew what was liable to happen to him, too. She'd taken him to the church of the Mother of God next to the Blakhernai palace. The way that fellow coming out
from Constantinople told it, she was sitting in front of the church when Mauros and John Strouthos got there.

  Tiberius was inside. He was holding onto the altar with one hand and to a piece of the holy and life-giving wood from the True Cross with the other, and he had amulets draped round his neck. Outside, Anastasia was begging Mauros and John the Ostrich to let the little monster live. She said he was too young to hurt anybody. She was right, too, but if he'd had timea160…

  Anyway, it didn't work. Helias had told John to get rid of Tiberius, and John wasn't about to change his mind once he got told to kill somebody. And Mauros hated Justinian almost as much as Helias did- you've seen why. He said, "Helias's children were too little to hurt anybody, too."

  John the Ostrich didn't waste time arguing with Anastasia. He went into the church, broke Tiberius's grip on the altar, took the holy wood away from him and tossed it down on the altartop, and then put Tiberius's amulets around his own neck. I don't know why he bothered. They hadn't done Tiberius any good. He brought out the brat. Then he and Mauros took him over to a little porch close by, stripped off his robe, stretched him out like a sheep at slaughtering time, and cut his throat.

  When the horseman told all this to Justinian, he just sat there on top of his own horse for the longest time. Then he said, "I will kill them all." He brought it out flat, the way I'd heard him do before, the way that would make you feel like somebody stuffed a handful of snow down the back of your tunic. Not this time, though. The words were there, but not the fury that made them frightening. Something had broken inside of Justinian. I don't know how to put it any better than that. For as long as I'd known him, he'd always been the one to grab fate by the balls and squeeze till things happened the way he wanted them to happen. Not any more. Not after that. He wasn't doing the moving. He was being moved instead.

  I don't think I was the only one who felt that, or who felt something like it. I don't know how many men we had when we made camp that night, there under St. Auxentios's hill. I do know one thin g, though: the next morning, we had a lot fewer.

  Justinian was going to talk about that, wasn't he? Why don't you pick up from where you stopped when I started running my mouth?

  JUSTINIAN

  Barisbakourios is gone. To think- I called him loyal. Many men from the military district of the Opsikion with him. And some of the Thrakesians. And some of the Bulgars, too. The ship sinks. The rats dive into the sea. Fools. No safe harbor near. Can the ship float? Does it matter?

  I am forty-two. I think I am forty-two. My father did not live so long. Nor my grandfather. Nor my great-grandfather. I am old. I burn hard. I burn fast. Now I burn out.

  Theodora beside me. She does not weep. She cuts her cheeks. Blood flows, not tears. Nomads mourn so. She forgets she is a Christian. God forgets I am a Christian.

  Scouts must go forward. Rebels between us and Chalcedon? Followers of the usurper? Must know. Can we get to Chalcedon? Get to boats? Get to Constantinople? Must try. Mine.

  ***

  Scouts back. Enemy soldiers not far west. I call the men together. I order the attack. The men stare. They mutter. They do not form by companies. Not by troops. They do not attack. I should kill them. How?

  They do not seize me. They do not give me to Bardanes, to Helias, to Mauros. They stay with me. They will not attack. Maybe they will defend. Maybe they will defend and win and then attack. Maybe maybe maybe may-

  ***

  Morning again. More men gone. Not so many. When I come out of my tent, Myakes orders a cheer. The men shout. The ones who are here. Not the others. A better cheer than the last one. A good cheer? A better cheer.

  Maybe they will defend. The usurper's men do not attack. Maybe they fear me. They should fear me. If I can go forward, I will beat them. I order the men forward. They will not go.

  ***

  More of the usurper's men about. Fewer of mine. Again, fewer of mine. They forsake me. God forsakes me. Five generations, all in ruins. The sixth generation, cut down in ruins. God forsakes me. I do not forsake God. I pray. Let me go on, I pray. Let me slay my enemies, I pray. I have enemies left alive. It is not right. How can I die with enemies left alive?

  Avenge me, God. If it be Thy will that I die without slaying Ibouzeros Gliabanos, avenge me. I read once of a bishop who was a heretic, who suffered what the physicians called an abdominal obstruction and died vomiting shit out of his own mouth. If I must die, give the Khazar this death, I pray Thee.

  Bardanes' men spying on the camp. Trying to see what I have left. My men shoot arrows at them. They ride away. A cheer, almost, that sounds like a cheer. My men can fight. They have fought. Will they fight? For me? How to make them?

  ***

  Dead. Barisbakourios dead. The best of the ones from Kherson. Dead. Loyal. Loyal as could be, till these last days. Dead. Hunted down. Killed. Dead.

  Do the rebels lie? No. They shout at our camp. They know. I have heard lies. I have told lies. I know lies. They tell the truth. A staff I hoped to lean on. First fled- now dead.

  ***

  My men melt now like snow in spring. They trickle away. They dribble away. They stream away. Myakes comes to me. "Emperor," he says, "run away. Hide somewhere. Hole yourself up. Bardanes is nothing much. He won't find you."

  "I never run away," I said. "I never did. I never will."

  "What about when the Bulgars hit us outside Ankhialos?" he says.

  "Not the same," I answer. "I never run away from the Queen of Cities."

  He bows his head. "Never a dull moment around you," he says at last.

  "Go on." I clap him on the back. "Save yourself. Go on. No one will look for you."

  "I wouldn't know what to do without you," he says. "Maybe, some kind of way, we'll beat the bastards yet."

  Someone stays loyal. A small miracle. One more miracle, God?

  MYAKES

  He's probably right, Brother Elpidios- I could have gotten away. It never would have occurred to me on my own. I turned him down without even thinking about it, same as I would have if he'd told me to worship Mouamet. I might still have my eyes if I'd run, but I don't suppose I'd be a holy monk now. What? It all worked out for the best, you say? I- oh, never mind.

  The only time he had any juice in him was when he talked about revenge. That was what fed him, the last part of his life. He never quite figured out it could feed other people, too, though. He got his. He made other people want to get theirs. When they wanted to pay him back, he wondered why. But he didn't lay down at the end. He fought on. I give him that much.

  JUSTINIAN

  Iwake to more desertions in the morning. Around the third hour of the day, with the sun halfway up the sky, a rider comes. "Truce!" he shouts. "Truce! Hear me out!"

  I hope the bandits have fallen to fighting among themselves. If they have, I can play them off, this one against that. "Go ahead," I tell him. "Say your say."

  "My commander is Helias, chief general to the Emperor Philippikos," he says. "By God and His Son, he swears that none of the soldiers who leave Justinian's army will be harmed in any way because they fought for him till now. He's lost; Philippikos has won. Anyone with eyes in his head can see that. Anyone who wants to keep eyes in his head had better see that. Day after tomorrow, Philippikos overruns this camp. Anyone who's still fighting for Justinian is going to pay."

  "Helias leads that army?" I called to the horseman.

  "Aye." He peered in at me. "You bloodthirsty madman, you'll pay, sure enough, when he catches up with you."

  "Me?" I cried in a great voice. "That vile, murdering son of a whore you call your master, let him come. Let him come with an army of ten thousand against me alone. He wantonly murdered my son, and thinks to escape unscathed? Christ, let him come! Let him not wait so long! Let him come tomorrow. No- let him come today!" I drew my sword and brandished it. "Let him come this minute, and I will cleave his filthy head from his shoulders."

  "He'll come when it suits him, not when it suits you," the messenger ans
wered: a whipworthy rogue if ever there was one. "It's not like you're the Emperor any more. He doesn't have to do what you say."

  "Kill him!" I shouted to my men. "Kill him for the disgusting, debased liar that he is."

  A couple of arrows flew out toward Helias's toady. Coward that he was, he fled away from the camp, back to the savage brute's other diseased arse-lickers. I shouted in triumph to see him run, but even then my own men were slipping out of camp.

  ***

  Morning again. I have three hundred left. At Thermopylai, the Spartans won glory forever against the Persians with no more.

  But the Spartan three hundred would not flee, would not run, would not give up, would not abandon, would not think of themselves ahead of the cause. My mena160…a160?

  ***

  Evening. Maybe a hundred remain. They eat well. Why not? We have food for an army dozens of times this size.

  These are the last words I shall set down in this book. After I write them, I shall send for Myakes. Perhaps he will escape. Perhaps my words will live, even if it be God's will that I do not. Ah, Ibouzeros Gliabanos, I should have slain you and kept my vow. See what loving your sister brought me?