Until you have seen more than your own home, you do not understand even that home, for you have nothing with which to compare it. So I discovered in this journey. I knew Constantinople was the greatest city in the Roman Empire. Knowing that, I expected other cities to be very much like the city, but smaller. It was not so, I saw. Most of the towns along the way to Sebasteia were hardly more than fortresses, strongpoints from which to defend the local countryside. Ruins around the walls said many had once been more than that, but how can a town survive, how can its hinterland feed it, when it is continually oppressed by war, as the towns of Anatolia had been since the Persian invasions in the reign of Phokas a long lifetime before?
So much of the countryside, both in the coastal lowlands and in the plateau that makes up the heart of Anatolia, was also all but empty. Save for the soldiers settled on the land in the military districts in exchange for their service in time of need, broad tracts of what should have been good crop- and pastureland had no farmers or herders on them. Who would want to, who would be mad enough to, work land that would surely be despoiled by an invader in a few years' time?
But the land needed to be worked, for the sake of the towns and for the sake of the fisc. The Mardaites whom I would meet in Sebasteia would not be nearly enough to fill these broad territories, and, in any case, I had more urgent need for them in Europe. Still, I resolved that, if ever I had more folk to resettle, I would put them in Anatolia.
Sebasteia lies just north of the Halys River, a dusty fortress of a place much like the other dusty fortresses I had seen. But when I was riding down the road from Sebastopolis and Siara and first drew near Sebasteia, I cried out in wonder, saying, "Have they given their fields over to flowers?" For the precincts surrounding the town were awash with bright colors, reds, and blues and golds and greens, as splendid a sight, and as unexpected a splendor, as I have ever found.
They were not flowers. They were, as I discovered on coming closer, the tents of the Mardaites. Twelve thousand warriors and their families are not just an army; they are a city. And all that city did me honor as I rode through it, men in white robes and others in rusty mailshirts prostrating themselves in the dirt and shouting my praises in Greek, in Arabic, in Armenian, and Persian, and, for all I know, in other tongues as well.
Sebasteia's garrison had been beefed up by summoning some of the soldiers off their fields in the Armeniac military district. Even so, the local commander, a certain Basil, was nervous. "They outnumber me, Emperor," he said. "They outnumber me by a lot. If they want this place, they can take it."
"Why on earth would they want it?" I said, very much as if I meant it. "The only reason they have come here is to meet me before they resettle them. We'll invite the chiefs into the city and feed them full of wine and mutton. We'll feed the warriors full of wine and mutton outside the walls, and give their brats candied figs. Everyone will stay happy, and then, a few at a time, everyone will start on the long road west. No one will even think of doing anything else."
He gave me an odd look, one I did not fully understand until later. I did not realize then how, while I took intrigue utterly for granted, having grown to manhood at its very heart, the court, others, especially others far from Constantinople, had to have things spelled out for them. Very well: the Mardaites could, if they so desired, take Sebasteia. We could do nothing about that, not in a military sense, for the time being. The key, then, was making sure they did not so desire- that, in fact, the idea of taking Sebasteia never so much as entered their minds.
How to do that? But putting extra men on the walls, by having the garrison prepare to sell its lives dear if attacked? What better way to show the Mardaites our secret fear, to plant the idea of attacking in their minds when it might not even have been there before? They were warriors; they could smell weakness.
We gave them nothing to smell. By proceeding as if everything was perfectly normal, we made certain everything stayed perfectly normal. I got drunk with their chiefs, and listened to stories of throat-cuttings and town-burnings all along the border, mostly told in a vile Greek I had trouble following. Even when I could not follow, I kept smiling, and promised them many throats to cut and many towns to burn in the places they were going. I promised no one would collect taxes from them for five years. I promised myself I would make sure the wine was better at the next such carouse, but the Mardaites did not need to know about that.
Band by band, a few hundred at a time, they set out west along the highway back to Constantinople. By the time four or five bands had departed, the ones who were left were a far smaller threat to the town or the garrison. Basil looked at me as he might have at a wizard. I looked at him with something like pity, doubting any chronicler would ever remember his name.
I soon headed west across the same highway myself. When in the course of my journey I came to Ankyra, about halfway between Sebasteia and the imperial city, I passed the night in the fortress there. Indeed, the capital of the military district of the Opsikion is little more than its fortress these days: the citadel, a strong rampart with pentagonal towers, sat on its hill overlooking a bathhouse, grand public buildings, several churches, and many, many houses- all dusty ruins, destroyed first in the Persian invasions and then in the onslaughts of the followers of the false prophet. As at so many stops on my journey, the contrast between what had been and what was now saddened me.
At the feast that night, a black-haired serving girl made certain my wine cup was never empty. When, wobbling as I walked, I went back to the chamber in which I was to sleep, I found her waiting under the covers for me. I started to order her out of the room, having had no congress with women since Eudokia died.
Before I could speak, though, she flipped back the blanket, the flickering lamplight showing she was naked. "Come," she said. "It is only a night." Her accent, absurdly, reminded me of Myakes'.
Had I had less to drink I think I should have sent her away, her abundantly displayed charms notwithstanding. But "wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging." My lust raged in me, and I had not the will to withstand it. Throwing off my robes, I got into the bed as naked as the girl and took her with the light still burning.
She was gone when I woke the next morning. My head pained me, as did my conscience, fornication being a sin in the eyes of God. But, oddly, along with the guilt I also knew a curious sense of release, as if I had taken a long step toward accepting that Eudokia's death was in the past, and irrevocable.
Those two feelings warred in me until I returned to the imperial palace. No sooner had I arrived than my mother thrust Epiphaneia in my face, exclaiming, "See how much she has grown while you were gone? See how she can smile now? Smile for your father, little pretty one."
Ephiphaneia smiled a toothless smile. I recoiled from it as from a demon; seeing the baby still reminded me unbearably of her mother's fate. My own mother began to cry. I pushed past her, and past my daughter, calling loudly for wine as I went. I stayed drunk for two days and bedded three maidservants. Yes, a sin- two sins- but sins that pushed aside pain.
MYAKES
He was a man, Brother Elpidios, and not a perfect one. You'll notice he admits he was a sinner. I've known a whole great swarm of men, out in the world and here in the monastery, too, who, if you listen to them talk, never did one wrong thing in all their born days. Well, maybe so, but maybe not, too. I haven't heard of a whole lot of people walking on water lately. Have you?
No, I wasn't along on this trip to Sebasteia. I'd come down with a flux of the bowels, and for a while there I wondered if I was going to go the same way Constantine had. I ended up getting better instead, but I was flat on my back for more than a month.
I'll tell you something, though. If I had been along, I'd have arranged to put a girl in Justinian's bed. That was the medicine he needed, sure as sure.
Yes, I'm a wretched reprobate. God will punish me. No doubt you're right about that, Brother. God has already punished me in this world, and He has all eternity to do as He likes
with me in the world to come.
But I don't have all eternity here. I don't know how much time I do have, but I'd doubt it's a whole lot. I'd like to hear some more of the words Justinian left behind, if you don't mind too much.
JUSTINIAN
I had peace with the followers of the false prophet, and had it on better terms than my father had managed to wring from them. Not only that, but Abimelekh faced yet another uprising against his rule. My judgment was that my eastern frontier was as safe as it would ever be. I called up the cavalry from the military districts of Anatolia and ordered the horsemen to cross into Europe, as my father had in his ill-fated campaign against the Bulgars.
I intended to campaign against the Bulgars, too, and sent their emissaries away empty-handed when they came to collect the tribute to which my father had agreed. But the campaign I had in mind would not merely put the Bulgars in their place; it would also deal with the Sklavenoi, some of whom were under the control of the Bulgars and some of whom, in their revolting freedom, plundered Roman settlements all on their own. The suffering the land south of the Danube had endured made that of Anatolia seem as nothing beside it.
As had my father and grandfather and great-great-grandfather before me, I took the field in person. If the soldiers would not perform well under my eye, they would never perform well. And the Sklavenoi were so barbarous, I was certain they could produce no leaders with the wit to stand against us.
They were also divided among themselves, each little Sklavinia existing in a state of squalid independence, as often at war with its neighbors as with the Roman Empire. Like a foolish man in a fight who covers up where he has been hit rather than trying to anticipate where he will be hit next, they (or at least those not dominated by the Bulgars, who had better sense) were not likely to come to the aid of one another.
I had been out to the Long Wall before, but no farther. Philaretos, the count of the Long Wall, greeted me at Selymbria, the town anchoring the wall to the Sea of Marmara. I had not seen him since Eudokia's funeral. "God grant that my granddaughter thrive," he said, "for she is all I have left by which to remember the girl."
"God grant it," I echoed, and said no more. He made the sign of the cross, thinking me pious. But what I meant was more on the order of, God had better grant it, for I intend to have nothing to do with it.
The Long Wall is different from that of the imperial city. Rather than alternating courses of brick and stone, it is built of hard, pinkish cement with chunks of brick embedded in the cement. It also, I must sadly say, differs from Constantinople's wall in its effectiveness, or lack thereof. Where, along with the protection of God, Constantinople's wall has kept the city inviolate since it was built, barbarians have repeatedly penetrated the Long Wall and plundered the suburbs it was meant to protect. Stretching more than thirty miles from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, the Long Wall was too long to garrison adequately.
Still, though, it did offer the regions nearest the imperial city some protection. Passing beyond it, I felt I was leaving safety and entering land that, while nominally under the rule of the Roman Empire, was in fact detached from Romania. I aimed to make Roman rule real there once again, and nominal no more.
Had I wanted to push the army straight down the Via Egnatia, the military highway of the Romans for the past eight hundred years and more, I could have been in Thessalonike very soon. But I had planned a campaign, not a military parade, and so in search of Sklavenoi the army plunged off the highway and into the forested, sometimes marshy valleys that lay to the north.
I prayed at the church of St. Glykeria in Herakleia (or, as the antiquarians call it, Perinthos), and had my prayer answered the very next day, the army flushing out several little Sklavinian farming villages north of the town. The barbarians seemed utterly astonished at the presence of Roman soldiers in land they obviously believed to be theirs.
None of them spoke Greek. I had their headmen haled before me and asked them, "Would you sooner die or obey me?" I thought at first that my interpreter had suffered a coughing fit, but he was merely translating the question into their hideous, guttural dialect. Their answers were as full of choking, wheezing noises.
"They say they will obey, Emperor," the interpreter said.
"Good. I thought that would be a choice even a Sklavinian could understand," I said. "Since they say they will obey, tell them I am going to resettle their whole clan or tribe or whatever they call themselves in Anatolia. Tell them they can farm there and pay taxes to the fisc and furnish us with soldiers when we need them."
"Emperor, I can tell them they will farm," the interpreter said. "I can tell them they will give us soldiers. But I cannot tell them they will pay us taxes. Their language has no words for such things."
"What? They don't know about taxes?" I threw back my head and laughed. "Very well. Tell the poor barbarians what you can. They'll learn about the other soon enough. The officials of the fisc will give them detailed lessons, I have no doubt."
A small escort of Romans led the Sklavenoi down the Via Egnatia and then east toward Constantinople, whence they would cross into the empty lands of Anatolia. I allowed them no more than they could carry in their hands. Considering how little they had, I did not greatly deprive them.
The season being summer, the millet and barley in their fields were too far from ripe to feed my army. They did, however, have a good store of grain hidden in underground pits, as those familiar with their habits had foretold. We added that to our own supply, and our horses had good grazing in the fields.
It soon became clear that, although we had captured their villages, we had not sent all of the Sklavenoi off to the imperial city for resettlement. Some of them must have escaped into the woods and run off to warn their fellow tribesmen, for the next Sklavinian settlements we came upon were deserted, not only the people but also the livestock being gone.
I required no training in logic to realize the Sklavenoi from the abandoned villages were in turn surely letting more barbarians know we were on the march. A young officer familiar with the Sklavenoi, Bardanes the son of the patrician Nikephoros, confirmed my impression- not, I say, that it needed much confirmation. "Emperor, the next ones we meet will resist us," he said.
"No doubt you're right, Philippikos," I replied, and he beamed at me: he preferred that thoroughly Greek name to the Armenian one his father had given him as a sign of his ancestry. I went on, "I trust the army will be ready to meet their onslaught man to man, shield to shield."
"In an open fight, we'd smash them to bits," he said. "They aren't likely to give us an open fight, though. They'd rather spring ambushes, and"- he looked around-"this country is made for that sort of thing."
He was right, the land being rough and broken and woody, the roads leading north off the Via Egnatia no better than cattle tracks and, now that we had moved a couple of days' journey inland, sometimes disappearing altogether. He was also right about the Sklavenoi. As our horsemen, having no other choice, went up a game path in single file, javelins flew out of the woods and wounded one of them and two horses. After that, I dismounted some of the soldiers and sent them through the undergrowth to either side of the road. The Sklavenoi shot arrows, some poisoned, at them, but they caught and killed a good number of barbarians, too. Our advance through the Sklavinias continued.
Not all the Sklavinian chiefs and petty kings fled on hearing of our approach. Some yielded themselves and all their people up to us. I resettled them just as I had the Sklavenoi we had captured and overcome in war, although I allowed them to take along their livestock and carts and wagons filled with their belongings, the better to start their new lives in Anatolia.
You could never tell what would happen in any particular little Sklavinia. All depended on the will of the chieftain who ruled that patch of ground. Rather more of them, I think, chose to fight than to surrender. Their poisoned arrows were weapons not to be despised. Several of our men died from them, while others were mutilated: the sole cure the physi
cians knew was to cut away the flesh around the arrowhead to keep the venom from spreading throughout the victim's system. The physicians gave these poor fellows great draughts of wine infused with poppy juice before plying their scalpels, but screams still echoed through the gloomy forests of Thrace.
A certain Neboulos was kinglet of the largest and strongest Sklavinia not under the control of the Bulgars; it lay north and east of Thessalonike. This Sklavinian had the arrogance to send envoys to me warning me not to enter the territory he reckoned his. "You do that, he kill all your men, all your horses," one of these men said in bad Greek.
"He will have his chance," I said.
"He kill you, Emperor, in particular especial," the envoy warned redundantly.
"He will have his chance," I repeated, and sent the Sklavenoi away with the message that Neboulos could either yield or face the weight of Roman wrath.
That evening, our army camped by a stream with a marsh and reeds on the far bank. More reeds grew on the western bank, where we were encamped. I took my horse down to the edge of the stream to water it and to get a drink for myself, having been in the saddle all day. Nikephoros's son Bardanes (or, again to use his own coining, Philippikos) went down to the stream alongside me, intent on the same errands. Stooping to fill a cup of water for himself, he suddenly froze in place. Then he pointed to one of the reeds that seemed to me no different from any of the others. "Do you see that, Emperor?" he asked quietly.
"Yes, I see it," I said. "But what-?"
Bardanes did not answer, not in words. Instead, he reached out and yanked the reed out of the water. It had, I saw to my surprise, neither roots nor leaves, being merely a length of stem. A moment later, I got another, larger, surprise. A Sklavinian popped to the surface where the reed had been. Bardanes had dropped it and snatched up his bow. I quickly drew my sword.
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