Justinian

JUSTINIAN

For five springs in a row, the deniers of Christ sailed forth from Kyzikos against this God-guarded and imperial city. I grew to take their yearly arrival utterly for granted: anything that happens through half a boy's life becomes fixed in his mind as an ineluctable law of nature.

What a host of warlike men they threw away in their futile assaults! They could not breach the land walls, nor, as they found in the last year of the siege, could they undermine them. And, on the sea, the fighting towers on our dromons and the liquid fire they hurled gave us Romans the victory again and again. As if I were a pagan watching Christians martyred by fire in the arena, I stared avidly out from the seawall as the followers of the false prophet burned alive, the unquenchable fires on their galleys foreshadowing the flames of hell. Myakes usually stood at my side, as he had been since the second spring of the siege.

Toward the end of that fifth summer, the Arabs sailed away from their Thracian camps earlier than was their wont. Their warships withdrew from our waters. Cautiously, my father ordered our dromons across the Propontis to spy out the enemy. And when those dromons returned, they did so with hosannas and cries of thanksgiving, for the followers of the false prophet were abandoning their enterprise and their base there, and were returning in disgrace to the lands ruled by their miscalled commander of the faithful.

How we praised God for delivering us from the foe despite the multitude of our sins! And how many more sins, I have no doubt when looking back on the time with a man's years, were committed to celebrate that deliverance. Having then but nine years, I was limited as to the sins of the flesh, but poured two cups of neat wine into my little brother Herakleios, laughing like a madman to hear him babble and watch him stagger.

When my uncles saw little Herakleios, who would have been three then, they laughed themselves hoarse. When my mother saw him, she was horror-stricken- but she laughed, too. And when my father saw him, he laughed so hard, he had to lean against the wall to hold himself upright- and when he was done laughing, he gave me a beating that, like so many of his, made the one I had had from Myakes seem a pat on the back by comparison.

I went looking for my only friend, but did not find him, not then. I had a hard time finding any excubitores. Had an assassin wanted to sneak into the palaces and slay my father, that would have been the time to do it, with so many guardsmen off roistering. But, on that day of days, surely the assassins were off roistering, too.

"Nothing I can do, Goldentop," he said the next day, when I did tell him my troubles. "The Emperor is your father, and he has the right to beat you when you do wrong- and you did wrong." He spoke slowly, carefully, and quietly, not, most likely, for my sake, but for his own, for he must have been nursing a thick head.

With anyone else, I would have been angry, but Myakes could say such things to me, not least because with him, unlike my father and my other kinsfolk, I was the one who chose how much heed I paid. "Where everyone else is glad, I am almost sorry the Arabs have gone away," I said.

"What?" He stared at me. "Are you daft? Why?"

"Because now I won't be able to go out with you and watch the fights by land and sea," I answered.

Myakes laughed at that, but quickly sobered. "They didn't come here for your amusement," he said, his voice as serious as if he were talking to a grown man. Even when I was a boy, he always took me seriously; I had taught him, up on the land wall, I was not to be trifled with. He went on, "They came to sack the city and kill your father the Emperor and kill you, too, or make you a slave or a eunuch or both. War is not a game. If you go into it, you go into it with everything you have. Your father would tell you the same."

He was right, of course. I did not need to ask my father; I could hear the truth in his words. I have remembered them from that day to this, and when I war against the enemies of the Roman Empire, or against the vicious, treacherous dogs who overthrew me once and conspire against me even now, I fight with everything I have.

Even beyond the frontier between this Roman land, this Romania, and the dominions of the miscalled commander of the faithful, the Emperor's reach remained long. My father urged the brigands known as Mardaites to sweep down from their fastnesses onto the plains of Lebanon, which they did, overrunning nearly the whole of the country and discomfiting the Arabs no end.

And God also revealed His love for the Roman Empire and for the Queen of Cities in other ways. Although the followers of the false prophet had abandoned Thrace earlier in the season than was their habit, and although they sailed away from Kyzikos well before the coming of the autumnal equinox in the hope of avoiding the storms that wrack the Mediterranean with the arrival of fall, they could not escape the heavy hand of divine punishment.

A great tempest overwhelmed their expedition off the southern coast of Anatolia. The fleet was smashed to bits by Pamphylian Syllaion, with only a handful of men coming home to Phoenicia and Palestine and Egypt and Alexandria to tell the tale of what had befallen them.

Hardly had this news reached our God-guarded and imperial city when word came that three of my father's generals, Florus, Petronas, and Kyprianos, had crushed an Arab army, slaying, it was said, thirty thousand of the followers of the false prophet. Truly God was merciful to the Romans in that year and at that season.

Again and again, folk reveled in the streets of Constantinople. Again and again, the great church- the church of the Holy Wisdom- the church of the Holy Apostles, and all the other innumerable churches in the city filled as worshipers offered up thanksgiving to God and His wholly immaculate Virgin Mother for delivering the Roman Empire from the jaws of the Arabs. The sweet savor of incense rose from the churches in clouds so thick that for hours at a time you could scarcely discern the usual city odors of horse dung and slops.

Mauias, the Arabs' leader, concluded further warfare against Romania was useless because of our divine protection. He sent two men to Constantinople to seek peace.

All the imperial family received them sitting in a row: my father, I, my uncle Herakleios, my uncle Tiberius, and my brother Herakleios. This display of might, or at least of fecundity, was intended to overawe. The Arabs' envoys prostrated themselves before us. When they rose, one of them addressed my father, in whom, of course, all true power rested: "Very well, Emperor, you have won this round. The commander of the faithful will pay you a tidy sum to put the Mardaites back on the leash."

"He speaks Greek," I whispered to my uncle Herakleios. "He speaks good Greek."

He was glad to whisper back: like me, he was there only for show. "Why shouldn't he speak Greek? The Arabs still use it in their chancery, and Damascus was still a Roman city when he was a boy."

I started to say something more, but my father chose that moment to reply to the ambassador. I looked for him to hurl anathemas and the fear of hell like a churchman; how often, in years gone by, he had scorned the Arabs as infidels and heretics and urged our Roman people to defend not only the Queen of Cities but also the true and holy faith.

But what he said was, "He'd better. It'll cost him plenty, too, after everything he put us through the past few years. I'm going to squeeze him by the money bags till his eyes pop."

Of all the sovereigns in the world, only the Arabs' ruler stands in rank with the Emperor of the Romans. My father, then, addressed him as an equal through his emissaries, and not only as an equal but almost as a near neighbor. I thought- and think still- this beneath the dignity of the Emperor, but it was my father's way. Who would have presumed to differ with him?

In my years of lonely exile at Kherson, I watched men in the marketplace dicker for hours over the price of the smoked flesh and salted roe of the mourzoulin and other fish like it. So, like a man buying salt fish in the market, my father dickered with the Arabs. The haggling went on not just for hours but for days. In the end, coming to no agreement with Mauias's envoys, my father sent them back to Syria, and sent with them an ambassador of his own, John Pitzigaudis.

He chortled after sending them off by land, and told me and whoever else in the palaces who would listen to him: "John will do better with Mauias than I could with his emissaries. He's sure of heaven, for if by some mischance or great sin he winds up in hell, he'll dicker his way free out of the devil."

He knew whereof he spoke. He never lived to grow old- I am one-and-forty as I go over these words, and have not far from a decade more than he ever attained, while at the time of which I speak he was but twenty-seven- but even without great experience he was a keen judge of men. After long discussion, John Pitzigaudis came back from Damascus with an agreement that the followers of the false prophet were to send us three thousand nomismata, fifty high-bred horses, and fifty bondsmen a year for the next thirty years.

One of the eunuch parakoimomenoi, Stephen the Persian, rubbed his hands together in delight and crooned, over and over again, "Three thousand pieces of gold a year," as if every one of them were to be delivered straight to his chamber.

He carried on for so long and acted so foolish that at last my mother, who hardly ever spoke up to rebuke anyone, reminded him, "The money goes to the fisc, not to you." Stephen turned red, then white. He bowed to my mother and took his leave, but he was still mumbling of nomismata. I never saw a man with a passion for gold to match his, but then, he had no other passions he could satisfy.