Robert Silverberg - Waiting for the End

That ill-advised adventure had, as Antipater and everyone else recognized now, drained the economic resources of the Western Empire in a terrible way, and, perhaps, weakened its military power beyond repair. Two entire generations of the most gifted generals and admirals had perished on the shores of Nova Roma. And then, the idiotically arrogant Emperor Julianus IV compounding the error by evicting a Greek mercantile mission from the island of Melita, a trifling dot in the sea between Sicilia and the African coast that both Empires long had laid claim to. To which Leo IX of Byzantium had retaliated not only by landing troops on Melita and taking control of it, but by unilaterally redrawing the ancient dividing line of the two empires that ran through the province of Illyricum, so that the Dalmatian coast, with its valuable ports on the Adriatic Sea, now came under Byzantine rule.

That was the beginning of the end. The Western Empire, already badly overextended by its doomed project in the New World, could not resist the takeover with any real force. Which had encouraged Leo and his successors in the East, first Constantinus XI and then Andronicus, to reach deeper and deeper into Western territory, until by now the capital itself was in jeopardy and the West seemed certain to fall into Byzantine control for the first time in history.

Still, Antipater wondered whether it all had been, as Germanicus maintained, inevitable from the start.

Rivalry, yes. Friction and occasional outright conflict, yes. But the conquest of one Empire by the other? There was nothing in the divided-Empire schemes of Constantinus and Theodosius that had made it obligatory for the West to undertake a stupid and ruinous overseas campaign, one that no Caesar would abandon until the Empire had crippled itself. Nor anything requiring the crippled Empire to have wantonly given its eastern rival provocation for attacking it, on top of the previous folly. Under wiser Emperors, Roma would have remained Roma for all eternity. But now—

“You brood too much,” Justina told him.

“There’s much to brood about.”

“The war? I tell you again, Antipater: we need to flee before it gets here.”

“And I answer you again: go where?”

“Some place where no fighting is going to happen. Some place far to the east, where the sun is always bright and the weather is warm. Syria or Aegyptus. Cyprus, maybe.”

“Greek places, all of them. I’m a Roman. They’ll say I’m a spy.”

Justina laughed indelicately. “We don’t fit in anywhere, is what you say! The Romans think you’re a Greek. Now you don’t want to fly to the East because they’ll say you’re a Roman. How will they be able to tell, anyway? You look and sound as Greek as I do.”

Antipater stared at her gloomily. “The truth is, Justina, we don’t fit in anywhere. Not really. But the main point, completely aside from whatever I may look and sound like, is that I’m an official of the Western Imperial court. I’ve signed my name to endless pieces of diplomatic correspondence that are on file in Constantinopolis.”

“Who’s to know? Who would care? The Western Empire is a dead thing. We escape to Cyprus; we raise sheep, we grow some grapes; you earn some money, perhaps, by working as a Latin translator. You tell people you lived for a time in the West, if anybody wonders where you came from. What of it? Nobody will accuse you of being a spy for the Western Empire when the Western Empire doesn’t exist any more.”

“But it still does exist,” he said.

“Only for the time being,” said Justina.

He had to admit that the idea was tempting. He was being overly apprehensive, perhaps, in thinking that anyone would hold his service under Maximilianus Caesar against him if he ran away to the East. No one would care a fig for that, back there in the sunny, sleepy, sea-girt lands of the Greek world. He and Justina could start new lives together.

But still—still—

He didn’t see how he could desert his post while the government of Maximilianus was still intact. That seemed a vile deed to him. Unmanly. Treacherous. Greek . He was a Roman; he would stay at his post until the end came. And then—

Well, who knew what would happen then?

“I can’t leave,” he told Justina. “Not now.”

The days passed. The bright skies of early autumn gave way to gray, dreary ones that betokened the oncoming rainy season. Justina said little to him about the political situation, now. She said little about anything. The Roman winter was a difficult time for her. She had lived nearly all her life in the Western Empire, yes, but she was Greek to the core, a child of the south, of the sun. A life down in Neapolis or, even better, Sicilia, might have been warm and bright enough for her, but not Roma, where the winters were wet and chilly. Antipater often wondered, as he made his way homeward from his duties at the palace under the darkening skies, whether he would discover, some afternoon, that she had packed up and vanished. Already it was possible to detect signs that a small abandonment of the capital might be getting under way: the crowds in the streets seemed more sparse, and every day he noticed another shop or two closed and boarded up. But Justina remained by his side.

His palace duties became more pointless day by day. No more ultimatums went forth to the Basileus Andronicus. What was the use? The end was in sight. Antipater’s work consisted now mainly in translating the reports that came in from the spies that Caesar still had posted all around the perimeter of the Greek world. Troop movements in Dalmatia—reinforcements of the already huge Greek army sitting up there opposite the northeastern end of the peninsula within striking distance of the Roman outpost at Venetia. Another Greek army on the march down in Africa, heading westward along the shore from Aegyptus toward Carthago and the other ports of the Numidian coast: backup forces, no doubt, for the troops already in Sicilia. And still other shufflings about of the apparently infinite Byzantine military power were going on to the north: a legion of Turks supposedly being sent up into Sarmatia, along the German border, presumably for the purpose of stretching the already thin Roman lines of defense even further.

Punctiliously Antipater read all these dispatches to the Emperor, but Maximilianus only occasionally seemed to pay attention. The Emperor was moody, remote, distracted. One day Antipater entered the Emerald Office and found him poring over a huge book of history, open to the page that bore the long list of past Caesars. He was running his finger down the list from the beginning, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and onward through Hadrianus, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Titus Gallius, into the time of the division of the realm, and beyond that to medieval times and the modern era. The list, just the Western Emperors now, stretched on and on beyond his pointing finger, scores of names great and small, Clodianus, Claudius Titianus, Maximilianus the Great, all the Heracliuses, all the Constantinuses, all the Marcianuses.

Antipater watched as Maximilianus drew his quivering fingertip down into recent time: Trajan VI, Julianus IV, Philippus V, and Maximilianus’s own father, Maximilianus V. There the list had originally stopped. It had been compiled before the commencement of the present reign. But someone had written in at the bottom, in a different hand, the name of Maximilianus VI. Maximilianus’s finger, tracing its way downward, halted there. His own name. He began slowly to shake his head from side to side. Antipater understood at once what was passing through the Emperor’s mind. Staring at that great list, encompassing it from top to bottom, he was recapitulating all the long flow of the river of Roman time, from the Empire’s grand inauguration under the immortal Augustus to…its end…its end …under the inconsequential, insignificant Maximilianus VI.