Justinian Read online

  After the men with the money glumly tramped Leontios and Apsimaros, each in the filthy tunic he had worn while imprisoned in the monastery of Delmatos, each with his hands manacled in front of him. So the people could tell which wicked usurper was which, a secretary with a large sign bearing each man's name followed him. And, for the benefit of the many who could not read, the secretaries called out the names of Leontios and Apsimaros in loud voices, as well as their crimes: "These vile worms dared rebel against the vicegerent of God on earth, Justinian, Emperor of the Romans!"

  "Tu vincas, Justinian!" the people shouted, for I rode in a chariot drawn by white horses directly behind the overthrown usurpers. I waved to the right and then to the left, acknowledging the appropriateness of the old salute on this day, as on the day when I first reentered the Queen of Cities.

  At my side marched faithful Myakes, who, of all my guardsmen, did by far the most in trying to prevent my ouster and who served me so long and well in my exile. Not for anything on earth would I have deprived him of the opportunity to share in avenging the outrages Leontios and Apsimaros had inflicted upon us.

  MYAKES

  Truth to tell, Brother Elpidios, by then I just wanted it over with. I would have been every bit as happy if Justinian had taken Leontios's head, and Apsimaros's, too, and then gone on with the rest of his business. Leontios had had his nose sliced, after all, and he'd been locked up for seven years. And I've already said I didn't have anything special against Apsimaros.

  But nobody was going to change Justinian's mind. He'd wanted a show, and he was going to have himself a show. It was as simple as that. Who'd tell him anything different? He was Emperor of the Romans. Anybody who didn't like it would end up hanging on the wall, same as Apsimaros's brother Herakleios and his chums.

  And the people had themselves a good time, same as they do at any parade- same as they did when Leontios stole the throne out from under Justinian, come to that. They cheered Justinian and threw things at Leontios and Apsimaros. If you didn't know better, you had to figure they'd stay on Justinian's side forever. If, I say. If.

  JUSTINIAN

  Behind me came the stalwart friends I'd made in exile: Cyrus first among them, in his patriarchal regalia; Barisbakourios and his brother Stephen; Foolish Paul, without whose fishing boat we never would have reached the land of the Bulgars; and Theophilos from Doros, who kept improving. With them walked the spatharios Leo, who had served me so well on my return journey to the imperial city.

  Another company of excubitores brought up the rear. Like that heading the procession, this company wore fancy parade armor. But the men had everyday weapons at hand, lest some ready-for-aught conspirators attempt a rescue of either usurper- although, in truth, why anyone would have wanted to rescue Leontios passes my comprehension.

  Eggs and fruit and the occasional stone flew at Leontios and Apsimaros both. Without being so ordered, the driver of my chariot increased the distance between them and us so we should not be similarly pelted by accident or by malice under cover of accident. The stratagem succeeded, though I had a surfeit of the gagging stench or rotten eggs by the time we reached the hippodrome. But I was not dripping with them, as the two usurpers were.

  A great cheer rose from the crowd in the hippodrome on our entering through the gate the chariots normally use. The races having been completed, the excubitores led the way around the churned-up dirt of the track toward the stands opposite the Kathisma: to the spot, in other words, where Leontios had had me mutilated a bit more than a decade before.

  Now Leontios and his fellow usurper Apsimaros stumbled after the guards, the shackles they wore clanking with each step they took. On their nearing the grandstand, a chorus posted on the second level of the imperial Kathisma burst into the thirteenth verse of Psalm 91: "Thou hast attacked an asp and a basilisk, and hast trampled down a lion and a dragon!"

  I turned my head to speak to Cyrus: "Surely the Lord wrote that verse for me, and surely He inspired you to recall it."

  "Emperor, it is my duty and pleasure to serve you," the patriarch replied, modestly casting down his eyes.

  No one will deny the city mob is foolish, fickle, and ever demanding new amusements. But neither will anyone deny that the people of Constantinople are the cleverest, best-educated folk in all the civilized world. Understanding at once the verse's multifarious aptness, they burst into a deafening storm of applause. The lion of course signified Leontios, the asp Apsimaros. Some of the more sophisticated no doubt also took in the double meaning of the basilisk, which at the same time implied both reptilian horror and a petty king, a true king or Emperor being not just basiliskos but basileus.

  "This is the day the Lord hath made!" Cyrus cried, as Kallinikos had when I was being deposed. Then the people had cheered to see me cast down; now they applauded as I was raised high. Were I to be overthrown again, they might cheer once more, but that shall not come to pass, anyone who might dare such an outrage no longer being among the living.

  When I say I was raised high on that day, I speak not only metaphorically but also literally. Myakes stepped forward and pushed Leontios and Apsimaros down before me. They bent their backs almost as if in prostration; Leontios, I saw with no small amusement, got horse dung in his bushy beard. And I, I sprang atop them, setting one red imperial boot on Leontios's back, the other on Apsimaros's, symbolizing in terms the veriest clod might understand my domination over them. The chorus sang out the prophetic verse once more, and the crowd acclaimed me and derided those who had defiled my throne with their presence on it.

  "Mercy!" Leontios squealed beneath me. "I did not slay you. Have mercy!" Apsimaros, more manly or merely without hope, kept silent.

  I ground my booted foot into Leontios's back. He groaned, but made no move to try to throw me off: excubitores stood round him with swords and spears and bows, ready to punish such insolence with bitter torment. The leeches in the stands, baying laughter at the usurpers' humiliation, would have laughed even louder to see blood flow. However little Leontios knew, he knew that much, having listened to their cheers while my blood spilled for the mob's delight.

  Still standing atop the two toppled tyrants, I shouted to the crowd, as loud as I could: "Let them be taken to the Kynegion, there to have the sword sever their heads from their bodies!"

  Most of the people cheered, jeering the usurpers and applauding the fate I had decreed for them. Leontios's shoulders began to heave under me, not because he was trying to throw me off but because he was shamelessly weeping. Up in the grandstand, I heard catcalls among the cheers, these surely coming from the more bloodthirsty, those who would sooner have had the executions carried out before their avid eyes.

  That privilege, however, I reserved for myself. To placate the masses, I shouted out another announcement: "We shall have a second round of races here in the hippodrome tomorrow!" Universal rapture greeted that proclamation.

  My springing down from the backs of Leontios and Apsimaros signaled to the mob the end of the day's festivities. I tasted the tone of their voices as they streamed out of the hippodrome. Despite not having watched the usurpers' heads leap from their bodies, they seemed well enough pleased with what they had witnessed.

  Excubitores stirred Leontios and Apsimaros to their feet, and the two of them rose. Apsimaros was pale, his lips pressed against each other until they almost disappeared, but he did his best to show a brave front. Leontios, by contrast, presented a disgusting spectacle, and would have done so even without the horse dung in his beard. Not only did his tears of terror cut pale lines down his filthy cheeks, but greenish snot flowed out of the hole in his face where his nose had been and trickled through his mustache.

  "The sooner the world is rid of you, the more pleasant a place it will be," I told him: an aesthetic judgment as well as a moral one. Incapable of coherent speech, he blubbered at me. "To the Kynegion," I told the guardsmen.

  They had to drag Leontios to the amphitheater by the sea northeast of the church of the Hol
y Wisdom, his legs refusing to carry him. Apsimaros walked. I rode in the chariot behind them.

  Was the masked executioner waiting there the man who had mutilated me? No one had- no one to this day has- admitted knowing which executioner that had been. I remaina160… most interested in learning, but at the time passed lightly over the question, other matters being more immediately urgent.

  In the center of the Kynegion stood a chopping block, like that for poultry but larger. The stains on it were old and dried and dark, I having been in the habit of hanging rather than beheading the officers who had supported the cause of the two usurpers. Some fresh stains would go on it now.

  The executioner had a sword on his hip, a weapon larger and thicker-bladed than a cavalryman's sword: one made for chopping. Bowing to me, he asked, "Which of them first, Emperor?"

  Having been weighing that very question in my mind as I traveled from the hippodrome, I replied without hesitation: "Let it be Apsimaros. That way, Leontios can see what lies ahead for him."

  Leontios moaned. Apsimaros nodded to me. "If I had won, you would have ended here," he said. He walked to the block, knelt, and laid his head upon it. "Strike hard," he told the executioner. The fellow looked my way. I nodded. Apsimaros was doing his best to die well. I would allow it.

  Up went the sword. Leontios's eyes followed it with horrified fascination, though it would not bite his necka160… yet. Down it fell. Anyone who has been in battle, or for that matter anyone who has watched and listened to a butcher cutting up a carcass with a cleaver, will know the sound it made on striking home.

  Apsimaros's head sprang from his body. A fountain of blood, brightest red in the winter sun, gushed from the stump of his neck, drenching the head, the dried grass on the floor of the Kynegion, and the chopping block. His legs kicked wildly; but for the manacles, his arms would have flailed, too. He pissed and shit himself, the stench plain even through the overwhelming iron smell of blood.

  Leontios slumped forward in a faint. I walked over and kicked Apsimaros's head to one side; my boots already being crimson, contact with the blood-soaked relic would not mar them. To one of the excubitores, I said, "Wash this off so people can see who it is- was- and take it to the Milion for display."

  "Aye, Emperor," he said, while his comrades dragged the rest of Apsimaros's corpse out of the way.

  No doubt wanting to be helpful, the executioner told the guardsman, "I have baskets here. You can use one to carry that."

  "Ah, good," the soldier said. "Thanks."

  Other soldiers hauled Leontios over to the chopping block and positioned him so the executioner could do his work. But, before the man could raise that heavy sword, I said, "Wait. I want him to know what is happening to him, just as he knew when he tormented me."

  Obediently, the executioner waited. Leontios remaining limp, one of the excubitores stooped and pinched his earlobe between the nails of thumb and forefinger. This produced the desired effect; Leontios writhed and twisted and opened his eyes. On doing so, he discovered his head lay on the block. He let out a hoarse scream-"No!"- and tried to twist away.

  "Seize him!" I cried, and several excubitores did exactly that. Even after they forced him back to the proper posture, though, he kept shouting and twisting his head from side to side: exactly as I had done when the executioner serving him had tried to slit my tongue. As the soldiers had done then with me, so now one of them seized Leontios by the hair and held his head still. The wretch tried to bite, his teeth clicking together. It did him no good.

  Even so, the executioner did not make a clean job of the kill, as he had with Apsimaros. He had to strike twice, the first blow merely spraying blood in all directions and turning Leontios's screams to half-drowned gurgles. At the second, though, the death the usurper so richly deserved was visited upon him at last.

  "I do beg your pardon, Emperor," the executioner said as Leontios's blood poured out over the ground. "I should have done better there." He sounded professionally embarrassed, as a builder might after erecting a house with a leaky roof.

  "Never mind," I told him. "He earned what you gave him. Had you taken his head with a carpenter's saw, I should not have said a word against you."

  "A carpenter's saw?" the fellow exclaimed. By the way he recoiled from me, he found the idea more nearly appalling than appealing. Executioners are, from my dealings with them, a conservative lot, very much set in their ways.

  Leontios's body kept twitching a good deal longer than Apsimaros's had done, whether because the executioner had required two strokes rather than one or simply because he was too stupid to realize he was dead I could not say. Helpful still, the executioner gave the excubitores another one of those baskets in which to carry Leontios's head, then went off to wash the blood from his blade and examine the edge for nicks to be honed away before his next tour of duty.

  I watched as the excubitores set the heads of Leontios and Apsimaros on pikes in front of the Milion. Placards proclaimed their crimes to the crowd. Turning to Myakes, I said, "Amazing how far two heads go to make up for ten long years of misery."

  "So it is, Emperor," he said. "Now that you've avenged-"

  "Avenged?" I broke in. "Not yet!"

  "Buta160…" Myakes hesitated, as well he might have, before going on. "You've dealt with the patriarch, there's Leontios and Apsimaros, you've already taken care of Apsimaros's brother, there are all those dead officers-"

  I interrupted again: "Plenty more where they came from, by God and His Son, and I aim to root out every one of them, too. I've hardly started sweeping the bureaucracy clean of traitors, and you know what I owe the Khersonites. I'll give it to them, too; see if I don't. I am not yet avenged, Myakes. I have barely begun."

  "Can't you let this be enough, what you've already done?" he said.

  "While one who opposed me remains alive, it is not enough," I replied. "Treason is a wart on the face of the Roman Empire, and I will cut it off."

  Hearing the iron in my voice, he bowed his head. "Yes, Emperor," he said quietly.

  MYAKES

  I did try, Brother Elpidios. I thought, when he came back to power, he would get rid of the two usurpers and the most important people who had backed them, and then he'd get on with the business of being Emperor again.

  It didn't happen. I wish it had. But he'd been thinking about revenge, eating revenge, drinking revenge, breathing revenge, dreaming revenge, all the time he'd been in exile. Once he got the chance to take it, he took and took anda160…

  This wasn't the only time I tried to get him to slow down, to think about what he was doing, to see if maybe he'd had enough. You just saw how much good it did me. As time went on, I tried less and less often. What, Brother? The sin of despairing? Well, maybe it was. The sin of not being listened to, that's certain.

  JUSTINIAN

  With winter wearing on toward spring, the logothete in charge of petitions approached me with a rolled-up parchment. This was no longer the elderly- indeed, the ancient- Sisinniakes, who had died during my years in exile, but a certain Philotheos, the successor appointed by one of the usurpers. Thus far, having nothing more against him than that fact, I had permitted him to remain in office.

  After prostrating himself and gaining my permission to rise, he handed me the parchment, saying, "Emperor, this petition for return from exile comes to you from an island in the Ionian Sea, Kephallenia by name. The petitioner is a certain Bardanes, son of the patrician Nikephoros, who, he writes, is also sometimes known as Philippikos." Seeing me stir, Philotheos said, "Am I to gather that this man is known to you, Emperor?"

  "I first met him almost twenty years ago," I answered.

  "Ah. I see." The logothete coughed delicately. "Are you aware of the crime for which he was sent into exile on this distant, inhospitable island?"

  "Yes, word of that reached me in the distant, inhospitable land to which I was sent into exile," I said, which served to take Philotheos's toploftiness down a peg. "He dreamt of an eagle, and Apsimaros he
ard about it."

  "This is correct." Philotheos licked his lips in anticipation of what would follow. "Do I assume, therefore, that, should you deign to recall him, you shall to so to requite him as you did those two whose heads remain on display at the Milion?" His tone said he had confidence in the assumption.

  So much confidence had he, indeed, that his jaw dropped on my saying, "No." I went on, "I gave the usurpers what they deserved: they were my foes. Bardanes Philippikos always served me well. Not only do I intend recalling him, but I shall restore him to the rank formerly his. Prepare for my signature the necessary orders for his release and convey them to the governor of Kephallenia, whoever he may be." The island and its affairs, such as they were, had before that moment not drawn my notice since my return to Constantinople.

  Looking flabbergasted, Philotheos went off to do as I had ordered of him. From behind me, I heard another cough. I turned to find Myakes' face set in disapproving lines, as it often was at that time. "Emperor, Bardanes has done well enough on Kephallenia all these years," he said. "Why don't you leave him there for the rest of his days?"

  "Now that the whole Roman Empire recognizes me as Emperor once more, I can repay all my debts," I answered: "the ones I owe to those who wronged me, and the ones I owe to those who served me well. When we were campaigning in Thrace, Bardanes might well have saved my life from that Sklavinian hidden in the river."

  Myakes snorted. "The only thing that poor barbarian wanted was for the lot of us to go away so he could run without anybody seeing him. He was about as dangerous as a weanling calf."

  "You were jealous then of the favor I showed him," I said. "Are you still, after so many years?"

  "Call it whatever you please." He stubbornly stuck out his chin. "I say that anybody who dreams of becoming Emperor isn't safe to have around. Let him stay on his island and imagine he's Emperor of that."