Justinian

MYAKES

Brother Elpidios, if somebody told me about it and I wasn't there to see it with my own eyes, I'd call him a liar to his face. You know about poppy juice, don't you? Ah, I thought as much. What it does is, it makes bad horrible pain seem like plain horrible pain. That's all it does. I had some after they put my eyes out. I guess I know.

Well, Justinian, he just sat there like he was a marble statue. Except to breathe, he never twitched, not even once. He didn't scream, he didn't yell, he didn't even hiss. He never once tried knocking Auriabedas's hand away. No, I take it back. Justinian wasn't just like a marble statue. Marble doesn't bleed.

If you could stand it, it was fascinating to watch. Me, I'd seen enough battlefields so it didn't bother me too bad. The little brown man made the first cuts right above the top of Justinian's mustache. When Justinian didn't flinch, he sort of muttered to himself and kept on making little cuts till that whole stretch was raw meat.

Once he was happy he'd chopped Justinian up enough there, he started cutting away at the leaf he'd drawn on his forehead. He cut it from the bottom up, I suppose so the blood wouldn't drip on the line in a place where he hadn't cut yet. Once he'd cut a section, he had to slide the knife under it to free it from the flesh underneath, not that you've got a lot of flesh between the skin of your forehead and the bone there.

After a while, he had the whole leaf free. He gave it a half-twist at the bottom, so it would still be skin side out when he put it over the hole where Justinian's nose used to be. I'd wondered how he was going to manage that. He knew what he was doing, all right. Justinian hadn't made a mistake there.

He sewed the leaf to the raw meat at the very base of what would be the new nose. Justinian didn't wiggle for that, either. "Blood in both," Auriabedas said. "Blood join blood, oh yes, all good." Justinian does a fine job of writing down the funny way he talked. I can hear it in my head, even if I haven't much thought of it over the years between then and now.

I'd wondered what his little wooden tubes were for. He put them into Justinian's nose- or what was going to be his nose- to give shape to his nostrils. Then he did some more sewing and finished bandaging Justinian's face. By then, with all the rags there and more rags around where he'd sliced that leaf-shaped flap out of Justinian's forehead, the little brown fellow had wrapped him up good.

When Auriabedas was all done, he turned to me. He was all smiles. "Now he have nose," he said in his bad Greek. "Hope it good nose. Think it good nose, oh yes. Him brave man. Never see more braver, oh very no. How you say?- deserve good nose."

"Thank you," Justinian said.