Justinian

by Harry Turtledove

  Through the complaints, Helias kept saying, "This is all at the express order of the Emperor."

  "Well, where is he, so that we may protest to him?" one of the functionaries demanded, his voice full of indignation.

  "Here I am," I said, showing myself. Armed and armored excubitores surrounded my erstwhile guests on three sides and, now that I had appeared, moved to cut them off from access to the grand palace as well.

  "What is the meaning of this?" that same loud functionary asked, loudly.

  "The meaning is simple," I replied. "The lot of you prostituted yourselves with the usurpers. For your whoredom you shall pay. 'Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.'a160" Where before I had quoted the nineteenth verse of the twelfth chapter of Luke, now I used the verse following, the twentieth. Pointing to the big-mouthed wretch, I said, "Go up to Helias."

  As if in a daze, he obeyed. My spatharios tossed a nomisma in the air, caught it, and looked to see whether it showed my image or that of the Son of God. "Emperor, it is the Emperor," he told me.

  "That is the power of the sword," I replied. Fitting action to word, Helias drew his own sword, which came free from the scabbard with a rasp of metal. Without a word of warning, he drove it deep into the bureaucrat's belly, twisting his wrist to insure the stroke was mortal. The bureaucrat fell with a shriek, futilely clutching at his torn flesh.

  The other functionaries shrieked, too, in horror and anticipation rather than anguish, though their anguish would come soon enough. I pointed to one of them, whom I chose at random. "You. Go to Helias." When he balked, I added, "Whatever happens to you afterwards, it will be worse if you disobey me now."

  Trembling, the fellow approached my spatharios. Helias tossed the coin again. He looked at it, then toward me. "Emperor, it is the face of our Lord."

  "These days," I said, "we no longer use the cross, out of reverence for Him Who was crucified on it. The gibbet serves instead. Truss up this son of a whore and hang him, once you've found out how many of his traitor friends go with him."

  Two excubitores seized the functionary. Thoughtfully, Helias had made sure he brought plenty of rope. Even more thoughtfully, he had brought gags with which to silence the cries of the men bound and awaiting execution. That, however, lessened the racket only a little, for my guests, realizing they were all fated for one death or the other, howled like dogs crushed under wagon wheels. They surged against the excubitores, only to be driven back by bared blades.

  One by one, with me picking some and Theodora the rest, the functionaries and bureaucrats, weep and bawl and blubber and foul their clothes as they might, were compelled to go before Helias for the toss of the coin. As I recall, rather more than half of them were put to the sword, the rest bound and gagged and then hauled off to the gibbets to meet the fate fortune had decreed. The last few died (or were gagged) cursing me. Die they did, though.

  When the last one had been cut down, I spoke to the excubitores: "Take this carrion and throw it into the cemetery of Pelagios with the suicides, for these vile beasts brought their deaths upon themselves." Turning to Theodora, I added, "Tomorrow morning, the servants will have to wash down the walk with buckets of water, lest this blood draw flies."

  "Good," she said. "Yes. We will do that."

  We went back into the palace. We saw no servants as we hurried toward the bedchamber in which, I suppose, I had been conceived- the night's work had put fear in the hearts of everyone who heard it, as I had hoped it would. Once in the bedchamber, we coupled like ferrets, both of us heated red by the spectacle we had watched. Theodora bit my shoulder, hard enough to draw blood. "Have to get a bucket of water poured on that, too," I said. We laughed, loud and long.

  MYAKES

  Look, Brother Elpidios, if Justinian felt like getting rid of people who had done something to him, I didn't have a word to say against that. Besides, people who had done things to him had done things to me, too.

  But he's right. I wasn't happy about this. It wasn't that I was jealous of Helias. Really, it wasn't. It's just that I didn't see much point to slaughtering the men Justinian felt like killing that night. The only thing they'd done was, they'd kept working while Leontios and Apsimaros were Emperor. If they hadn't kept working- them and people like them- the Empire would have started falling apart. Why did he blame them for that?

  And if he was going to kill them, he shouldn't have made a game out of it. I was a soldier for a long time, Brother; killing is a serious business, or it should be. Doing it that way makes it cheap. Degrades it, you say? Yes. thanks. That's a word I wouldn't have come up with on my own.

  Justinian said he wanted the people afraid of him. And they were, all right. But when a ruler is strong and they know he'll land on them if they get out of line, that's one kind of fear. If they're afraid of him on account of they don't know what the devil he's liable to do next, that's fear, too, but it's a different kind. Justinian either didn't care about the difference or couldn't tell there was one.

  He'd sworn he wouldn't spare one of his enemies. The way he acted, he was making sure he'd have plenty of 'em.

  JUSTINIAN

  When morning came, my mother raised a fuss, as I had known she would. "They were traitors to our house, and so deserved whatever fate I chose to give them," I told her. She would have kept on complaining, but I turned my back on her and walked out of the grand palace.

  Outside, servants were still busy cleaning up the mess. Had I had it to do over, I would have had the excubitores slay the functionaries farther from the palace: something to remember in case I decided to play the same game again instead of inventing a new one.

  Having called for a horse, I rode west from the palace to the city wall to view the gibbets that had gone up there the night before to accommodate those of my guests to whom chance had given that death. A couple of gibbets stood empty, as more than half the functionaries had been put to the sword. I was sure I could find deserving men for those empty gibbets, and vowed to myself they would not stay empty long.

  Only a few crows and gulls attended the corpses, the meat not yet being ripe. Down below the inner wall, people stared up at the bodies on display, but not with such avid curiosity as they had immediately after my return to the capital: to the Constantinopolitan urban sophisticates, mere executions had lost some of their power to entertain, if not to edify.

  I also surveyed the dead courtiers with something less than the pleasure I had expected. Turning to one of the guards, I said, "The trouble with these wretches is, they didn't die well. Once they knew that would be their fate, they should have accepted it. Herakleios- the usurper's brother- was worth all of them and more besides."

  "Yes, Emperor," the guard answered. What else could he possibly have said? If he disagreed with me, he might have gone up on one of those empty gibbets himself.

  Having viewed all of last night's guests, today's executed traitors, I rode back to the Blakhernai palace, to which, by that time, Theodora and Tiberius had also returned. "You go, and your mother shouts and shouts at me," Theodora said. "I tell her I think they should die, too, and she shouts louder."

  "My mother will speak her mind," I said. "Anyone would think I was related to her." For a moment, Theodora looked puzzled at that. Then understanding spread over her face and she laughed.

  In truth, I was not paying full attention to her words or my own. Ever since my mentioning Herakleios up on the wall, he had been in my mind. As general of the military district of the Anatolics, he might well have been able to give me a harder fight than he did. Most of west-central and southwestern Anatolia fell into that military district. Had he stayed there and resisted with his full power, he would have been harder to overcome than he was, caught with a scratch force in Thrace after I had seized Constantinople.

  Summoning Myakes, Leo, and Helias, I put my sudden insight to them: "God did not speak from a burning bush to ordain that the military district of the Anatolics should be as it is. Any general there has to think of
becoming a usurper, if for no other reason than that he commands such a large army."

  "He needs a large army," Helias said, "to help fight the Arabs."

  "Not that large," I answered, "and the soldiers would still be there, only under two commanders rather than one."

  "Ah." Leo's eyes lit. "You want to divide the military district, not pension off soldiers. Yes, that is good, I think, or at least not bad."

  "If you do it that way, who would the new general be?" Myakes asked.

  "Barisbakourios writes that a tourmarch of the military district of the Opsikion, a certain Christopher from Philippopolis in Thrace, has done good work and deserves a reward," I said. "Do any of you know this man?"

  Myakes and Helias both shook their heads. Leo, however, spoke up at once, saying, "Yes, he is a good fighter. He gave the Bulgars fits a few years ago, when he was still in Thrace." That Leo should have known Christopher surprised me not at all. By then, I had come to suspect that, if I asked him about some petty Frankish noble in a land no Roman has seen for a hundred years, he would have furnished accurate particulars without batting an eye.

  "What will you call the new military district, Emperor?" Myakes asked.

  "Not the military district of the Philippopolitans, I hope," Helias said. "No one could hope to say it." He had stumbled over it himself. We all laughed.

  Leo said, "How about the military district of the Thrakesians, after Christopher of Thrace?"

  Having savored that, I dipped my head in assent, like pagan Zeus in the Iliad. "Let it be so," I said, and so it was. Christopher, receiving his new appointment, worked diligently to separate the men and town under his command from those remaining in the military district of the Anatolics. He did this, of course, to enhance his own position, but it served my purposes, too, placing two potential rivals in an area that had formerly known but a single powerful- too powerful, sometimes- leader.

  ***

  When I invited a couple of dozen bureaucrats of middling station to a feast at the Blakhernai palace, only eight of them came to the Anastasiakos dining hall. The rest were suddenly taken ill with such an astonishing variety of diseases that anyone would have thought a whole wave of plagues had suddenly descended on Constantinople- which God prevent from ever actually taking place.

  With so few guests attending, we all gorged ourselves, the cooks having prepared far more than our small party could consume. I thought we could have done better still, but some of the bureaucrats seemed slightly off their feed, for no reason I could fathom.

  "Here," I told them after the servants cleared away what was left. "I had planned to give each of my friends five nomismata, but, since so many of your colleagues were taken ill, each of you gets t hree purses, not one, and fifteen nomismata in all." I passed out the presents with my own hands.

  "God bless you, Emperor," they gasped out almost in unison, and, on my giving them leave to go, all but fled the palace.

  Turning to Theodora, I remarked, "Anyone would think they expected to find soldiers waiting for them out there."

  "I do not know why," she answered in her slow, deliberate Greek. "This is not the grand palace." We both found that very funny.

  Our guests having departed, I summoned Myakes. Before the feast, I had taken pains to learn the dwelling places of all the functionaries I would invite. At my order, Theophylaktos brought me this list, a pen, and a jar of ink. I lined through the names of the men who had joined me at supper. That done, I gave the list to Myakes, saying, "Gather your men together and arrest everyone whose name you see here. I want all of them back at this palace before the sun comes up tomorrow morning."

  "Yes, Emperor," Myakes said. "I'll see to it." He had never had my fire, and some of what he had had was gone out of him. But he would obey, even if he persisted in asking questions like, "What will you do with them?"

  "Wipe their noses," I snarled. "Get you gone." He bowed and departed.

  MYAKES

  Yes, of course I knew what he'd do with them, Brother Elpidios, or I had a pretty good idea, anyhow. No, I didn't want to see him do it, especially not so soon after the last massacre. But he gave the orders. If I didn't do what he said, I figured I'd be next up on a gibbet. All he could think about, near enough, was paying back everybody he thought had ever wronged him.

  I took a look at the list, divided it into four parts, and sent out four troops of excubitores. I led one of them. I can do my own dirty work, I can. First door we knocked on, the fellow we came for opened it himself. "You don't look sick," says I to him. He tried to slam the door, but I stuck a foot in it and my boys went in and grabbed him. His wife and brats were wailing behind us when he left.

  The other three were just as easy, and none of them looked sick, either. Back we went to Blakhernai. Getting all four of them hadn't taken two hours. "Have mercy on us!" they kept saying, over and over. "In the name of Christ, have mercy!"

  But that wasn't for me to say. It was up to Justinian. I didn't think any of those sixteen poor bastards would get away with his neck. Turned out I was wrong, though.

  JUSTINIAN

  All the bureaucrats who had refused my invitation to dine having been assembled, I inspected them. One, a thin, pale fellow with shadows under his eyes, coughed wetly, rackingly. Thick yellowish mucus kept streaming from his nose, which he wiped on the sleeve of his tunic.

  "You area160… John son of Eusebios, the customs inspector, not so?" I said.

  "Yes, Emperor." He coughed again. "I am sorry I could not"- still more coughs-"join you tonight, but may I ask why your men hauled me from my bed?"

  "No, you may not," I told him. He bowed his head, whereupon snot dripped down onto his sandals. "Go home and go about your business." I turned to Myakes. "Give him an escort, so no footpad falls on him in the night." To Theophylaktos, I added, "See that John is sent fifteen nomismata in the morning."

  "Yes, Emperor." The eunuch bowed. John, afflicted or not, suddenly walked with longer, straighter strides as the excubitores led him out of the palace.

  My giving him presents eased the minds of the other guests brought so late to the dining hall. John having departed, however, I said to those bureaucrats, "One of your number truly was ill. What have the rest of you to say for yourselves? When the Emperor of the Romans summons you to a feast, should you not make every effort to attend him?"

  They all began talking at once, some trying to justify claiming illness while hale, others still trying to claim illness despite healthy appearance. In the course of a day's work, the Emperor of the Romans normally hears a good many lies. In the course of a few minutes, I heard as many lies as I normally do in a day's work.

  "Enough!" I said at last, whereupon the bureaucrats mercifully fell silent. "The plain and simple truth is, you did not come because you were afraid of what I might do to you."

  "After what happened at your last feast, Emperor," one of them blurted, "can you blame us?"

  "Of course I can blame you," I answered. He cringed. They all cringed. "The men I had killed after my last feast were every one of them traitors," I went on. "Are you traitors? Do you think I think you are traitors? Do you think you are traitors? Is that why you stayed away from me?"

  I listened to denials as empty and pointless and useless as their pretenses at sickness had been. Had I believed them, the only course left open to me would have been to promote every one of the rascals making them, or perhaps to order Cyrus the patriarch to declare them numbered among the saints.

  But I did not believe them. Their evident good health and their equally evident fear of me convicted them all. "Liars!" I shouted, cutting through their babble. "By your own actions shall you be judged. If you do not trust me, how can I be expected to trust you? You are all sacked, every last one of you."

  This they bore up under with equanimity. I heard one of them mutter to another, "Better to lose my position than my neck." Doing their deceitful best to appear dejected, they turned and made for the door of the dining hall where they had
not eaten.

  "Stop!" I said sharply. "I did not give you leave to go. When I say you are sackeda160…" Now I stopped. They would find out soon enough. Meanwhile, at my order, the excubitores bound their wrists behind them. "Is everything in full readiness?" I asked Myakes.

  "Oh, yes, Emperor," he answered, rare in that he was loyal and obedient even when not altogether happy with my purposes. "What with that John who really was sick, we even have one left over."

  "Fine. Let's get on with it, then," I said. At swords' point, the excubitores made the functionaries leave the palace of Blakhernai. We marched them to a dromon moored on the Golden Horn not far from the palace: not far from the pier at which Theodora had reached the imperial city, either.

  Torches blazed by and on the galley, which carried a full crew of oarsmen and sailors. Two piles of coarse canvas, smaller than the sail, stood on deck. So did stacked stones, as if for a catapult. One by one, the miscreants I had seized stumbled up the gangplank onto the dromon. The captain was a young fellow named Stephen, whom I had recently raised to the dignity of patrician. He prostrated himself on the deck as soon as I came aboard.

  "Rise," I said impatiently. "I want this done."

  "Shouldn't be too hard, Emperor." He looked at the prisoners, nodding on approval on seeing them already in bonds. "No, shouldn't be too hard. They aren't going anyplace." His smile gleamed in the torchlight.

  At his orders, the sailors cast off the lines mooring the dromon to the wharf. The rowers backed oars, then turned and took us out of the Golden Horn, past the lighthouses marking the channel, and into the middle of the Sea of Marmara. Lamps and torches and candles made Constantinople glow and twinkle far more brightly than the star-strewn sky overhead.

  "What are you going to do to us, Emperor?" asked one of the bureaucrats who had not cared to enjoy my hospitality. "Are you exiling us to Anatolia?"