Justinian Read online

  The Arabs' dromons sprinted toward ours, their oars churning the water to a frothy wake. Behind them, the other ships of the deniers of Christ made for the Thracian coast south and west of Constantinople.

  Some Roman war galleys broke through the screen the followers of the false prophet tried to set between them and the transports carrying Arab soldiers. My father, my uncles, I, John the patriarch- everyone on the seawall- screamed in delight when a dromon rammed a fat merchantman right amidships. The dromon backed oars after striking. The hole it punched in the other ship's side must have been huge; you could watch the merchantman wallow and start to sink. Heads bobbed in the water: sailors and soldiers, trying to swim for their lives. The archers aboard our dromons must have had fine sport with them, and sent many souls on to eternal torment.

  But my father's exultation did not last. "It is not enough," he said. "They will gain the shore, in spite of all we can do."

  He was right. From the suburb of Kyklobion less than a mile from the Golden Gate at the southern end of Constantinople's double land wall to the town of Hebdomon four or five miles farther west, the Arabs beached their ships and swarmed ashore, onto the soil of Thrace. Peering west and a little south, I could make out some of the nearer landings. At that distance, the deniers of Christ in their white robes reminded me of nothing so much as termites scattering when the piece of rotten wood they infest is disturbed.

  Out on the sea, the fight between the Arabs' dromons and our own went on. From their towers amidships, our bowmen could shoot down onto the decks of the enemy war galleys, and the Arabs could not reply in kind. Little by little, we seemed to gain the advantage.

  But that was not what I wanted to see. "Where is the liquid fire?" I demanded, and then, louder: "Where is the liquid fire?"

  Tiberius and Herakleios looked at each other. I suppose they were hoping my father would slap me across the face and make me be quiet. If he tried, I vowed to myself I would grab his hand and bite it. I had done that before, and drawn blood. Mostly, though, he indulged me, which never stopped irking my uncles. And why should he not have indulged me? I was then his only son. I indulge my little son Tiberius the same way.

  Someone told me what happened to Tiberius, there at the end. He was just like his father at the same age, only more so. Do you know that story, Brother Elpidios? You do? All right. Take no notice of an old man's maunderings, then.

  "Where is the-" I was screeching now, like a cat when somebody steps on its tail. But a rising cry of wonder and delight from all along the seawall made my voice sound small and lost.

  My father pointed out onto the Sea of Marmara. My eyes followed his outthrust finger. There in the water, not far out of catapult range from the wall, a dromon full of the deniers of Christ was burning, flames licking along the deck and smoke billowing up from them. Oh, Mother of Christ, it was beautiful!

  The Arabs on the dromon ran about like men possessed, trying to put out the fire. They were not chanting their accursed "Allahu akbar!" anymore; they were screaming in terrified earnest. And as I watched them do their best to douse the flames, I understood why, for water helped them not at all.

  One of those who followed the false prophet, lent strength, no doubt, by fear, picked up a great hogshead and poured it down onto the fire. It did not quench the flames. Instead, still burning merrily, they floated atop the barrelful of water and, where it stopped, they stopped, too, starting new blazes in those places. When the Arabs perceived that, their screams redoubled.

  They might have learned as much merely by looking down to the slightly choppy surface of the sea, where more fire floated. Indeed, our dromon, the one that had projected the liquid fire onto the Arab warship, had to back oars quickly, lest the flames on the seawater cling to it and make of it a pyre to match its foe.

  My father cried out in a great voice, "Fifty pounds of gold to Kallinikos, to whom God granted the vision of this wonderful fire!" All the people on the seawall cheered like men possessed. Danger was not banished from the Queen of Cities; far from it. But we took new heart from having a weapon our enemies could not match.

  A few minutes later, my uncle Tiberius shouted in a voice that cracked with excitement: "Look! Another galley burns!" And, sure enough, the liquid fire was consuming a second Arab dromon. That victory was not complete, however, for our galley did not escape the liquid fire on the water and also burned. Some of its sailors swam to the base of the seawall, where the soldiers and people of the city let down ropes to rescue them. Others, poor souls, drowned.

  Perhaps the deniers of Christ had intended landing marines at the base of the seawall. Along with the darts the catapults on their dromons could have hurled, such an assault would have stretched our defenses thin. They might have been able to make and then to take advantage of a breach in the land walls.

  But if that idea had been in their minds, the liquid fire put paid to it. Their war galleys drew back from our fleet, and from the walls of the imperial city, protected by God. They made for the Thracian coast, there to guard the Arabs' great flotilla of transports from our dromons.

  Seeing the Arabs' galleys withdraw, the men on the walls burst into cheers. "We've beaten them!" some cried. Others shouted out a Latin acclamation still used in the city: "Tu vincas, Constantine!"

  I looked to my father, proud like any son to hear him praised. I expected him to show he was proud, too, and to show delight in the victory the Romans had won over the barbarians. But his long, thin face remained somber. "We've not won the war," he said, perhaps more to himself than to anyone else. "We've survived the first blow, nothing more."

  I pointed out to sea, where those burning dromons still sent up thick pillars of smoke, and where the wreckage of other vessels, most of them belonging to the followers of the false prophet, bobbed in the waves. Our own warships protected the seawalls like a pack of friendly dogs guarding a farmhouse. "Look, Father," I said, maybe thinking he did not know what we had done.

  He looked. Then he looked westward, where the Arabs were still swarming off the vessels that had reached the Thracian shore. "Now the battle begins," he said.

  ***

  My father was right. The followers of the false prophet had not labored so hard nor come so far to flee when their first assault miscarried. It was to be four years before Constantinople saw the last of them. From April till September, the Arabs would attack the land wall or Roman troops would sally forth from it to raid their encampments at Kyklobion.

  Sometimes they would catch the raiders before our men could regain safety. Then, often, they would kill them before our eyes to put us in fear. Sometimes our men would return in triumph, with prisoners and booty. I remember them singing as they led dejected Arabs up the Mese from the wall to the Forum of Constantine. Our headsmen put some of the prisoners to the sword, to avenge our own butchered men. Others were sold for slaves. Even besieged, our merchants would not turn aside from profit. The deniers of Christ should all have been killed.

  They kept their war galleys busy on the Sea of Marmara. Thanks to the liquid fire, and thanks to the towers on our dromons that gave our archers the advantage over theirs, they quickly grew reluctant to fight great sea battles, as they had done when they came forth from Kyzikos. But they were always out hunting for merchantmen, and, because they were known to be hunting, few merchantmen put to sea. Deprived of much of the harvest of Anatolia that normally fed it, the city became a hungry place.

  I did not know hunger. How could I? I was the Emperor's son. Having made its acquaintance since, I must say I do not regret missing the earlier introduction. But if those years when the Arabs besieged the imperial city were empty of bodily hunger for me, they were full of the spiritual hunger of loneliness.

  When the weather began to grow chilly toward the end of the first September of the siege, the Arabs withdrew from their camps on Thracian soil, sailing back to Kyzikos to winter there. We rejoiced, though even then we expected they would return with the spring like migrating birds. And, n
ear the time of Christ's birth, my mother presented my father with a second baby boy.

  He named the boy Herakleios, partly because that name had been in the family for generations and partly, I think, because he had just made up his latest quarrel with my uncle of that name and wanted to put a tangible seal on their reconciliation. Herakleios proved a weak and sickly baby, which was an omen for the reconciliation as well.

  Bearing my little brother left my mother weak and sickly, too. And, even for an Empress of the Romans with eunuchs and wet nurses and other serving women to attend her should she lift a finger, a new baby sucks time as greedily as it sucks milk. In looking after little Herakleios, my mother all but forgot about me. My father, with the weight of the Roman Empire on his shoulders, already seemed to have forgotten.

  And so, by the time I had six years, I did whatever I chose, for who besides my father and mother would tell me no? Often I would gather up a couple of excubitores and, with them as escort, go atop the seawall to watch our dromons and those of the Arabs clash on the Sea of Marmara. The excubitores never protested when I put them to such work. Why should they? They were imperial bodyguards and I was the Emperor's son; therefore, their duty included guarding me. Aristotle could not have made a clearer syllogism.

  When the warships did not put to sea, I sometimes had my bearers carry me to the land wall so I could peer down at the Arabs vainly trying to break into the God-guarded imperial city. I even went out to the lower, outer wall- once. When word of that got back to my father, he remembered me long enough to forbid it. That only made me want it more.

  The bearers, as was natural, stood in too much fear of my father to give in to my wishes, and withstood even my fiercest tantrums. So did the excubitores. That wounded me to the quick. They were fighting men. Could they not see I wanted to put myself at the forefront of the battle?

  When tantrums failed, another boy might have tried wheedling. Not I. I had a different plan. One morning on the inner wall, I turned to the excubitor standing alongside me and complained, "I'm too short to see anything from the walkway. Lift me up to the top of the forewall, Myakes."

  The forewall running between crenellations is perhaps a foot thick and a little taller than a man's waist. It is so high it need not withstand stones from a catapult or the pounding of a ram, but only give cover to archers behind it.

  Myakes frowned. He must have been thinking about something else, and only half heard what I said. "What was that, little Goldentop?" he asked, using a nickname the excubitores often gave me.

  MYAKES

  Little Goldentop, Brother Elpidios? Yes, Justinian was blond. So was his father, come to that. The house of Herakleios sprang from Armenia, that's true, but as soon as they got out of Armenia and found there were yellow-haired women in the world, they started swiving them. Why, Constantine once told me old Herakleios himself had a bastard boy by a Visigoth from Spain, and let her name him Athalaric after her own father. She must have been a beauty, or good between the sheets, to get away with that.

  Oh, quit spluttering, Brother. If you don't hear worse from Justinian later on than you just have from me, I'll be much surprised, that I will.

  Justinian? If you want to know the truth, he reminded me of nothing so much as a cat. His face was long- that was true of everyone in his family I saw, and of the others, too, if their coins don't lie- but it narrowed sharply from the cheekbones down, so that he had almost a woman's rosebud mouth and a pointed little chin. And he was graceful, too. Even that young, he always held his body just so: tight-strung, you might say.

  JUSTINIAN

  "Lift me up!" I repeated. "I want to see what's going on out there."

  Myakes frowned but did nothing else. To me, then, he was a man grown: he was man-tall, with a peasant's broad shoulders and broad face. He carried a spear taller than he was and a shield with Christ's holy labarum painted on it: x p. I could make up my mind in an instant. Why could he not?

  I did not realize two things, being but a boy myself. For one, though my father and uncles, like me, decided and acted all at once, not all men matched my kin in that; and, for another, Myakes was scarcely more than a boy himself, despite height, despite shoulders. When the sun shone on his face, you could see his cheeks and the outline of his jaw through the beard that sprouted there, a sure proof he had not long been able to raise it. Thus inexperience and uncertainty also made him hesitate.

  At last, after what seemed a very long time but probably was not, he laughed and said, "Well, why not? Not much to see, but what there is, you can."

  He leaned the spear and shield against the forewall and picked me up. I could tell at once how he had got to be an excubitor, for he was strong as a bull. He might have been lifting a mouse, not a boy. I felt I was flying as he set my feet on the forewall. He kept a grip on my waist, but only to steady me, not to hold me tight.

  I had counted on that. I twirled away from him and ran along the forewall, saying as I went, "Promise you'll take me to the outer wall, Myakes, or I'll cast myself down between them right now!" I looked down at the outer wall, there perhaps a hundred feet in front of me. It was quite handsome, bands of stone alternating with brick, the same scheme the inner wall used. I have always had a good head for heights; I was not frightened or giddy. But I remember thinking, How far down the ground looks!

  Myakes stared at me. "Come back here, little Goldentop," he said. "Don't make foolish jokes." He spoke the same kind of clipped, elided Greek the sailors in the Proklianesian harbor had used. I understood it better now, from more exposure.

  "I am not joking," I told him, and I was not. Had he said no, I would have jumped. I suppose they would have taken whatever was left of my body and buried it in the cemetery of Pelagios with the other suicides.

  Myakes did not say anything. He took a step toward me. I could not back away from him, for I was up against a crenellation. I bent my knees, readying myself to leap out as far as I could from the wall. But I had forgotten how much faster than a child an adult can move. Myakes sprang forward, grabbed me, and pulled me back onto the walkway of the inner wall even as I was trying to leap to my death.

  "Now," he said, breathing hard (and, looking back, I cannot blame him, for what would he have told my father- and what would have happened to him?- had I jumped?), "I am going to give you a choice. I will take you back to your father the Emperor and we will both tell him our stories, or I will give you a beating here and now for what you just did. You decide."

  I tried to kick him in the shins. He jerked his leg out of the way. I tried to bite him. He would not let me. I cursed him, using all the words I had learned from the excubitores. He let them roll off him like water from oil-soaked cloth. "You do it," I said then. "Whatever you do to me, my father would do worse." My father was not so mild with me as he had been before the Arabs came; he had worse worries now. He still would not often strike me, but when he did, it was as if a demon seized his arm, for he would not stop.

  "Come, then," Myakes said. Recovering his spear and shield, he slung the shield over his back, took the spear in his left hand, and seized firm hold of my arm with his right. We walked along to the nearest fortified tower, for all the world as if he were taking me to piddle at a latrine there, nothing more.

  The latrine was empty when we walked into it. It stank of endless years of stale piss, which offended me: in the palace, sewer pipes swept waste away before it grew so ripely odorous. Myakes did not turn loose of me for a moment. No doubt he thought I would try to run off if he did. No doubt he was right.

  "Remember our bargain," he said, and set down the shield and spear. He must have had a kindly father for, while the chastisement he gave me left my buttocks hot and tingling, it was all with the open hand, never once with fist or foot or the metal-studded belt he wore. At last he said, "Maybe you will think twice before you play such games with me again."

  "I will think twice," I said, but I knew I had made the right choice. Almost I told him how mild he had been, but I refr
ained. He might, after all, have decided to make amends. Instead, I went on, "Now that the bargain is sealed, take me back out to watch some more of the fighting."

  "From the inner wall here," he said. "Not from the outer one."

  "Not from the outer one," I agreed.

  "Come, then," he repeated, and we went out together.

  MYAKES

  By She who bore God, I've never been so frightened as I was in those few minutes! I was sorry I'd offered the bargain as soon as it was done. Hit the Emperor's son? Me? Afterwards, he might have said anything at all: that I'd beaten him worse than I had, even that I'd taken him into the latrine to try and sodomize him. Who would Constantine have believed, his firstborn or a guardsman whose name he might not know?

  But what would the Emperor have done to me had his firstborn splattered himself on the cobblestones? That bore even less thinking about. And if once I let Justinian get his way with such a ploy, he would try, or threaten to try, again till he owned me. My idea, such as it was, was to make sure that didn't happen.

  God was kind to me. It worked. It did more than work: it made Justinian my friend. I'd never imagined that. Poor puppy, he must have been so ignored at the palaces that even the flat of my hand on his backside felt good because it showed I knew he was alive.

  And here I sit, past my threescore and ten, blind and shrunken- and how strange to hear myself spoken of as young and brawny and crammed to bursting with the juices of life. So many memories, most of them, I fear, so full of base carnality as to be sinful even to remember, and so I won't trouble your ears with them.

  Eh? Oh, very well, just a few. But then you read again.

  JUSTINIAN