Justinian

JUSTINIAN

While we were awaiting Abimelekh's reply to Mansour's letter asking if he would accept partial rather than complete resettlement of the Mardaites, Eudokia went into labor. Looking back on these leaves, I realize I have scanted my wife, saying little about her since the time we were wed. I can offer no better defense than saying quiet contentment leaves little to record.

My mother brought me the news. "I have attended to everything," she said. "I have summoned the midwife, I have summoned Peter the physician, though God forbid he be necessary, I have summoned the patriarch to bless the baby and to exorcise the evil spirits that attend a birth, and I have ordered a girdle brought from the monastery of the Virgin to make the labor easier."

I bowed to her, as if I were a servant. "And what is left for me to do?"

"Wait," she snapped. "Pray. When the time comes, receive your son or daughter in your arms and say what a beautiful child it is. It won't be- newborns are of an odd color, and their heads are apt to be misshapen. Say it anyhow. Eudokia will expect it of you." Having outlined her plan of campaign and given me her orders, she went off to help Eudokia through her trial.

I waited. I prayed. Those palling, I called for wine. Eventually, I fell asleep. I woke in darkness. My head ached. It was the eighth hour of the night, two thirds of the way from sunset back to sunrise. I called for more wine, and some bread to go with it. Sopping the bread in the wine, I made a nighttime breakfast of it. I prayed some more. I waited some more.

Presently, I summoned a serving woman and told her to bring me back word from the birthing chamber. When she returned, she said, "The physician- Peter is his name, yes?- is busy in there, and shouted at me to go away. I told him you had sent me, and he told me to go away anyhow." Her eyes were wide and astonished: Peter had defied me. "He was most rude."

I hurled across the room the heel of bread on which I had been nibbling. That Peter had shouted was of small moment to me. That he was busy in there, though, made me tremble with fear.

On the one hand, it is against all custom for a husband to enter the chamber where his wife is giving birth. On the other hand, that which is pleasing to the Emperor has the force of law, as the jurists who served my namesake put it. And if I scandalized the midwife, I expected a few nomismata would put things right.

Serving women fled gabbling before me when they saw where I was going. I sighed. I would have to put things right with them, too. I was about to round the last corner when I heard the high, thin, indignant cry of a newborn babe.

The midwife was holding the baby. It had already been washed and swaddled in woolen wrappings. She nodded to me; thanks to the servants, she had known I was coming. "Emperor, you have a daughter," she said, and held the baby out to me. "What will you name her?"

"Epiphaneia," I said shortly. I did not take her from the midwife. Instead, I started for the chamber in which she had been born. The midwife moved to put herself between me and the door. We stared at each other. "My wife," I said. "Eudokia."

"Pray for her," the midwife said, and made the sign of the cross. "It was a hard birth, and she began to bleed. I could not make it stop. I wasted no time calling in the physician, Emperor. Your mother was there- she's in there yet- and she will tell you the same. I know Peter; he is better than most of the butchers who go by the name of doctor. But there is only so much to be done-" She held out the baby again. "You have a fine daughter here, strong and healthy."

"Stand aside," I snarled, and in my fright and fury I would have struck her had she dared disobey. That she did not; she scuttled aside like a frightened mouse. But, at the same time as I set my hand on the latch, a great burst of lamentation came from inside the chamber. I knew my mother's cries of anguish: how could I not, having heard her mourn my brother and my father? Mixed with them were Peter's vile but helpless curses. Death had beaten him again.

Numbly, my hand fell away from the door. As if from very far away, I heard myself say, "Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison." I felt as if I had been rolled in ice: cold and stinging at the same time. A woman who lies down in childbed risks her life, no less than a man going off to war. We men do not think on this, not until- or unless- we are are forcibly reminded.

The door to the birthing chamber opened. Out came my mother, her face haggard and drawn. When she saw me, she cast herself into my arms, tears flooding down her cheeks. "Too much, God!" she screamed. "Too much. How can You let one person, one family, suffer so much?"

I had no tears, not yet. Those would come later, when I started to believe. Now\a160… now Peter the physician came out. He had washed his hands and arms, but Eudokia's blood, still fresh and red, splotched his tunic; on looking more closely, I saw it under his fingernails as well. Behind him lay a still form covered by a sheet. The sheet was stained with blood, too.

Noting the direction in which my eyes had moved, he made haste to close the door after himself. Then he stood very straight, as if he were a sentry acknowledging a general's presence. "I failed you, Emperor," he said baldly. "She hemorrhaged. I did everything I could to stop it. Nothing worked." He spread his hands- his bloodstained hands, I thought, although, as I have said, the only blood physically on them lay under his nails. "Do what you will with me."

It occurred to me then that I could order him slain, as Alexander had the physician who could not save his beloved companion Hephaistion. The temptation, the desire, were very strong. That must have shown, for Peter's face, already pale, went paler. "Get out of my sight," I said, my voice thick with the fury I strove to hold in.

Peter, if not wise enough to save either my father or my wife, had the sense to obey me. His withdrawal was the next thing to headlong flight. He did not show himself before me for some weeks thereafter. By then, my grief having lost its edge, I was willing to suffer him to live.

My mother took Epiphaneia from the midwife. The baby made noises that put me in mind of an unhappy kitten. As the midwife had, my mother held her out to me. "Take your daughter," she said.

But I backed away as if she had offered me a viper. "No," I said. "If it weren't for her, Eudokia would be, would be\a160…" Then I felt myself start to cry, although I had not willed it. I tried to stop. I could not. I stood there in the hallway, tears streaming down my face, my hands balled in useless fists at my sides.

My mother gave the midwife back the baby. She took me in her arms. We clung to each other and wailed to a Heaven that had proved itself deaf to us. My brother, my father, my wife, all young, all stolen from me in the span of four years. To this day I pray God forgives me for the blasphemies I loosed against Him in the madness of my grief.

The door to the chamber where Eudokia had died opened once more. Out came the ecumenical patriarch, looking as grim and mournful as Peter the physician had. Thinking back on it, seeing the man's face once more in my mind, I recall that the patriarch was Paul, not Theodore, who had suffered a fit of apoplexy and expired while conducting the divine liturgy a little more than a year after I restored him to his throne: not the worst way for a bishop to be called to God.

Paul must have heard my vain, useless, senseless railing against the Lord of all. Being a kindly man, he forbore to mention it, saying only, "Because of her great virtue, your wife is surely in heaven even as we speak." He made the sign of the cross.

I remembered myself enough to do the same. "I am glad you were here to give her unction," I said.

"As I am," he said gravely, "even if I was summoned for another purpose." He turned to the midwife and pointed to tiny Epiphaneia. "But you are blessed with a fine and, God willing, healthy daughter to remind you of her."

"Get out!" I shouted. Had my mother not restrained me, I would have set on him. But she held me back, and Paul, shock and fear both on his face, half staggered away from me. "Get out of here!" I cried again. "I never want to have anything to do with her- never, do you hear me? She killed my wife. She killed Eudokia. If it weren't for her\a160…" I dissolved in tears once more.

Paul crossed himself again. "You are distraught, Emperor," he said, which was certainly true. "When you are more fully yourself, I trust you will change your mind. You cannot blame the child for what is surely God's will."

But I did blame Epiphaneia, and I never changed my mind. I could not stand to be near her; she reminded me too much of what I had lost. And even the marriage I eventually tried to arrange for her was as much a punishment, a revenge, as anything else.

Having already written overmuch in these pages of funerals, I shall say little here of Eudokia's. She was laid to rest in the church of the Holy Apostles, in a sarcophagus of rose-pink marble. May God have had mercy upon her. If I am lucky enough to be forgiven the many sins staining my soul, I shall see her again in heaven.

With Eudokia I buried, I think, a great part of my own youth. It is, I daresay, no coincidence that shortly after this time I summoned to the palace Cyrus the engraver and ordered him to mint nomismata of a new type, showing me as the man I was rather than the beardless youth I had been. The portrait he produced for these new nomismata had all his usual skill. I approved it, and the goldpieces were duly struck. Yet it left me dissatisf ied in a way I could not define even to myself. I was searching for something else, but would not find it for another couple of years.