Justinian

JUSTINIAN

While I stayed there in Kherson, days began to blur together in a fashion I had never known before. With nothing to distinguish one from another, they slipped past me without my fully realizing they had gone. I was taken by surprise when the first winter storm roared over the mountains north of the town. Surely only a month- six weeks at the most- had passed since the warm summer day when Leontios and his pack of traitors stole my throne from me. But no, looking at the position of the sun in the sky and the stars at night convinced me that storm was no freak, but came at its proper time.

Not many storms came roaring over the mountains. Although lying the breadth of the Black Sea north of Constantinople, Kherson has winters generally milder than those of the imperial city, this being due to the shielding effect of the high ground. Snow was more frequently an amusement for the children than a drudgery for their elders. And, in fact, Myakes and I had a fine time, or more than one, pelting each other with snowballs and then retreating into the comfortable warmth of the xenodokheion.

But, though I continued to live in the guesthouse attached to the monastery, I was no monk, lacking as I did the temperament for the solitary life. One day I borrowed some silver from Myakes- or rather, I asked it of him and he gave it to me- and went walking up into Kherson.

I knew the sort of place I was looking for, and expected to find such a place close by the harbor. Sure enough, when I came to a large two-story building with a muscular fellow lounging outside, a sword on his hip and a club in his hand, I suspected my search was done. Nodding to him, I said, "Are the girls pretty?" and pointed inside.

"Aye, they are," he answered- would a whorehouse bouncer deny it, thereby turning away trade? He looked at me in a thoughtful way. "I'm not so sure they'll think you're pretty, though."

I made the miliaresia jingle in my pouch. "They'll think these are pretty."

He surprised me then, saying, "Maybe, maybe not. This is a town full of sailors. Business is good enough, the girls can afford to be choosy."

He was not offensive about my mutilation, treating it as a simple business problem. That left me untroubled; indeed, it pleased me more than his simply ignoring it would have done. Responding in a like vein, I said, "May I try my luck?"

He studied me again. "You're not going to raise a fuss if they turn you down?"

"By the Mother of God, I swear it," I said, whereupon he started to laugh, as did I a moment later. An ordinary enough oath, yes, but not when offered outside a brothel. Not only did he wave me forward, he opened the door so I could enter.

I had never been inside such a place before. As prince and then as Emperor of the Romans, I had had women brought to me, and no need to go forth to seek them. Thus I looked around with some curiosity. It was as I might have expected: several women, some comely, some not, sat on chairs or lolled on couches, waiting for trade. They wore thin, clinging tunics cut very short; none of them bothered with drawers. Each and every one looked bored. The hall smelled of cheap scent and old sweat.

A plump fellow, evidently the master of the place, came up to me, looking very important. "What do you want here?" he demanded.

That question I had not expected. Others, perhaps, but not that one. I stared at him, then answered, "I've come to buy some paint."

The whores realized I was jesting before their pimp did. At their laughter, he pasted a broad, insincere smile across his broad, insincere face. "I don't know, friend," he said- when a man like that calls you friend stand with your back to a wall and keep one hand on your belt pouch and the other on your knife. He went on, "You're not the prettiest fellow who ever came in here, you know."

I daresay he was not the prettiest fellow who had ever come in there, either, but if I angered him, I would not get what I had come to pay for. And so, as I had for the bouncer outside, I showed I had money to spend. "The silver looks the same any which way."

He ran his tongue over broad, fleshy lips. Even so, he spread his hand. "If I order one of the girls to serve you, I'll make all of them angry- you see how it is? If one of them will go to you by herself, fine. Otherwise\a160…" He let that hang.

I turned to the women, not pleading- if I had not pleaded for Leontios, I would not plead before a pack of prostitutes- but showing myself to them and waiting to learn what they would do. What they did was nothing. Not one made any move to join me. I jingled the pouch again. "Twice the money," I said, but, one by one, they shook their heads.

"You see how it is," the brothel keeper said again.

"I see," I said, less angry than I had thought I would be. Like the muscular lout outside, they were matter-of-fact, not scornful. That gave me an idea: "What if I come back after dark, and we go to a dark room?"

"For twice the usual?" one of the girls asked. Yes, it was business.

"A deal," I said at once. She was thin and rather plain, but not outright ugly. And, if she would not be able to see me in the night, I would not be able to see her, either. There in the blackness, I could imagine her as I pleased.

When I went outside after completing the bargain, the ruffian out there said, "No luck, eh?" Seeing me doing as I had sworn, he was inclined to be sympathetic rather than harsh.

"They told me to come back after dark," I answered.

"Ah," he said understandingly. "I'll see you then, I guess." As I started to go, he added a question: "Is it true what they say, that you used to be Emperor of the Romans?"

"No," I replied. I saw that I had disappointed him, but I had not finished: "It's not true I used to be Emperor of the Romans. I am the Emperor of the Romans."

"All right, chum," he said, in the tones of one humoring a man mad but not dangerously so- as guardsman for a brothel, he must have come across a good many of that sort. Even in his amusement, though, he remained civil.

I had enough money to pay the double rate, but not much more. Instead of going into a tavern, then, or an eatery, to while away the time till sunset, I walked down to the wharves, strode out on one to the very end, and peered south over the waters of the Black Sea toward the Constantinople I could not see. No ships from the Roman Empire were tied up there, only the little local fishing boats. No ship from the Empire had come in since the one bringing me, unless while I lay in my delirium. I felt very much alone, very much a mote adrift. If a whorehouse bouncer would not believe me the Emperor of the Romans, why should I? How could I?

"Because I am," I said. A seagull standing near me flapped up into the air with a startled squawk.

The sun plunged into the sea. I waited until almost all the twilight had drained from the sky before making my way back toward the brothel, not wanting to be turned away because I was too visible. On account of that, I arrived at the place later than I expected, having lost my way more than once in the gathering gloom.

"Should have brought a torch with you," the guard remarked when at last I found the proper lane. I shrugged and nodded, yielding the point- why not? As he had before, he opened the door for me.

My greatest worry was that the one who had said she would go upstairs with me was already upstairs with someone else. She would eventually have come down again, yes, but imagining her all my own would have come harder. But there she sat. When she saw me, she got to her feet. She put out her hand, palm upturned. I crossed it with silver. Having made sure I had paid her enough, she nodded.

She took me up to a room big enough for a bed and not much more. She closed the door behind us, and I barred it. Going to the little window, she pulled the shutters across it and tied them so they would not open. It might have been something less than perfectly black in there, but it lacked little of that perfection.

In the darkness, something rustled: her tunic sliding off over her head. I quickly pulled off my own tunic, then took a step backward toward the bed. It proved to be but half a step away; rather than sitting down, I almost fell onto it, saving myself only by jerking back at the last moment.

Fresh pressure on the mattress said the woman had got down beside me. I groped for her. My hand closed on firm, rounded flesh. I caught her in my arms. She felt like a woman against my skin. She smelled like a woman. I did not need to see her to rise tall and proud.

As I began to caress her, she said, "Don't try kissing me. It would remind me of-" Of your being noseless. She might as well have shouted it.

It did not kill my ardor. Nothing would have killed my ardor that night, not after so long without. "All right," I answered, my voice mild as wine three-quarters water. I had not int ended kissing her anyhow; who could say where her lips had been and what they had done before touching mine? My own lips and teeth closed on the tip of her breast as my hand went between her legs.

"What do you want from me?" she asked. "You're paying, after all."

Rough games had pleased me now and then in days gone by. Instead of making as if to take her by force, though, I answered, "Treat me like a lover, not a customer." What I wanted, most of all, was to feel as if my mutilation did not cut me off- indeed!- from the rest of mankind. The blackened room in which we lay gave that the lie, but what we were doing helped me not think about its being a lie.

She let out a tiny sigh, as if I could have asked nothing more onerous of her. But then, in the darkness, she played the part well enough. She nibbled my earlobes and kissed my neck and licked my nipples, every now and then teasingly stroking my manhood as she did. Then she took me in her mouth. She was not particularly skilled, but I was not particularly demanding, not then.

"Shall I finish this way?" she asked when I began to gasp.

"No," I said, and so she straddled me, as Irene the Sklavinian serving girl had done all those years before for my first time. But I put my arms around her and rolled us over so I rode her. Not much later, I spurted my seed deep into her. When she began to pull away, I held her to me, for I was still hard. I had not gone twice, one time right after the other without dislodging myself, for a few years, but that night, after such long abstinence, I had no trouble.

She let me have her again. If she took pleasure from it herself, she gave no sign I could discern. When I rolled off her after the second round, she said, "You should pay twice again." But she meant that either as a joke or as a ploy to see if she could get the extra silver from me.

Having faced down angry nobles in the imperial city, I had no trouble with a Kherson whore. "I paid enough," I answered firmly. "I don't think I kept you up here long enough to lose much other trade."

Had she threatened to scream for the bouncer, I do not know what I should have done, he being both larger and, more to the point, much better armed than I. But all she did was sigh and begin to grope around on the floor for the tunic she had doffed. A tiny victory for me, perhaps, but the first I had won since being treacherously ousted from my throne, and so one to cherish.

Finding my way back to the xenodokheion in the darkness was another victory, one that at the time seemed as large. On leaving the brothel, I paid a couple of coppers for a torch- nothing came free there- to light my way southward, but the cursed thing went out before I was halfway there, leaving me alone in a darkness almost as stygian as that inside the chamber where I had coupled with the whore.

I stumbled on- literally, seeing (or rather, not seeing) how full of stones and mud-filled potholes the streets were- by God and by guess and by occasional glimpses of stars overhead through rents in the clouds scudding past. So long as I kept going south I told myself, I would eventually come upon the monastery to which the guesthouse was attached.

Such assurances are often less than reassuring even by light of day. In the chilly blackness of night, I might as well have been a little boy murmuring charms against the monsters that dwell only in his imagination and so can follow him even under the blankets of his bed. I was looking around for monsters, I must say, but, as much by luck as by design, found the monastery instead.

When I walked in through the door of the xenodokheion I found Myakes, wearing a sword I had not known he possessed and about to come out after me. "Where were you?" he cried out on seeing me, his tone quite different from that by which a subordinate customarily addresses his superior.

One of the monks was hovering in the chamber: "Never mind," I replied in dull embarrassment, not wanting to wreck the reputation for piety I had built up since arriving at the monastery.

Myakes, though not always what one would call quick-witted, was in certain matters no fool. "Oh," he said, realizing where I must have been, and then, a moment later, "Oh" again when he figured out the likely reason I had had to wait so long before faring homeward. "Hope it was worth it." God bless him, he sounded almost as matter-of-fact as the bouncer had been.

"I think so," I said. The monk looked from one of us to the other in confusion, unable to follow our elliptical conversation. Just as well, I thought.