Justinian

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.