William Dietrich: The Scourge of God

So now the emperor’s party dismounted in the shadow of the gate, not wanting the clatter of horses to give warning.

They drew long swords but held them tight to their legs to minimize their glint in the night. Cloaked and hooded, they moved toward Honoria’s palace like wraiths; Ravenna’s streets dark, its canals gleaming dully, and a half-moon teasing behind a moving veil of cloud. As a town of government instead of commerce, the capital always seemed desultory and half deserted.

The emperor’s face startled sentries.

“Caesar! We didn’t expect-”

“Get out of the way.”

Honoria’s palace was quiet, the tapestries and curtains bleached of color by the night and the oil lamps guttering.

Domes and vaults bore tile mosaics of saints who looked serenely down at the sins below, the air languid with incense and perfume. The emperor’s entourage strode down dark marble hallways too swiftly for any challenge; and Honoria’s chamber guardian, a huge Nubian named Goar, went down with a grunt from a crossbow bolt fired from twenty paces before he even understood who was approaching. He struck the marble with a meaty thud. A wine boy who startled awake, and who might have cried warning, had his neck snapped like a chicken’s. Then the soldiers burst into the princess’s quarters, knocking aside tables of honeyed sweets, kicking a cushion into the shallow pool of the bath, and butting open the door of her sleeping chamber.

The couple jerked awake, clutching and crying out behind the gauze of the curtains as a dozen dark shapes surrounded their vast bed. Was this assassination?

“Light,” Valentinian ordered.

His men had brought torches, and they turned the scene bright and lurid. The steward, Eugenius, slid away on his backside until he bumped against the headboard, his hands seeking to cover himself. He had the look of a man who has stumbled off a cliff and, in one last moment of crystalline dread, knows there is nothing he can do to save himself.

Honoria was crawling toward the other side of the bed, naked except for the silken sheet draped over her, her hip bewitching even in her terror, clawing as if distance from her commoner lover would provide some kind of deniability.

“So it is true,” the emperor breathed.

“How dare you break into my bedchamber!”

“We have come to save you, child,” the bishop said.

The exposure of his sister strangely excited Valentinian.

He’d been insulted by her mockery, but now who looked the fool? She was on humiliating display for a dozen men, her sins apparent to all, her shoulder bare, her hair undone, her breasts dragging on the sheet. The situation gave him heady satisfaction. He glanced back. Goar’s prostrate form was just visible in the entry, blood pooling on the marble like a little lake. It was his sister’s vanity and ambition that had doomed those around her. As she had doomed herself! The emperor spied a golden cord holding the drapery around the bed and yanked, pulling it free. The diaphanous shelter dropped to the floor, exposing the couple even more, and then he stepped forward and began flailing with the cord at Honoria’s hips and buttocks as she flinched under the sheet, his breath quick and anxious.

“You’re rutting with a servant and plotting to elevate him above me!”

She writhed and howled with outrage, pulling the covering away from poor Eugenius in order to wrap herself.

“Damn you! I’ll tell Mother!”

“Mother told me when and where I’d find you!” He took satisfaction in the way that betrayal stung. They had always competed for Placidia’s affection. He whipped and whipped, humiliating more than injuring her, until finally he was out of breath and had to stop, panting. Both he and his sister were flushed.

The soldiers dragged the steward out of bed and wrenched his arms behind his back, forcing him to his knees. His manhood was shrunken, and he’d not had time to muster a defense. He looked in beseeching horror toward the princess as if she could save him, but all she had were dreams, not power. She was a woman! And now, in gambling for her affections, Eugenius had doomed himself.

Valentinian turned to study the would-be emperor of Ravenna and Rome. Honoria’s lover was handsome, yes, and no doubt intelligent to have risen to palace steward, but a fool to try to climb above his station. Lust had bred opportunity and ambition had encouraged pride, but in the end hers was a pathetic infatuation. “Look at him,” Valentinian mocked, “the next Caesar.” His gaze shifted downward. “We should cut it off.”

Eugenius’s voice broke. “Don’t harm Honoria. It was I who-”

“Harm Honoria?” Valentinian’s laugh was contemptuous.

“She’s royalty, steward, her bloodline purple, and has no need of a plea from you. She deserves a spanking but will come to no real harm because she’s incapable of giving it.

See how helpless she is?”

“She never thought of betraying you-”

“Silence!” He slashed with the cord again, this time across the steward’s mouth. “Stop worrying about my slut of a sister and start pleading for yourself! Do you think I don’t know what you two were planning?”

“Valentinian, stop!” Honoria begged. “It’s not what you think. It’s not what you’ve been told. Your advisers and magicians have made you insane.”

“Have they? Yet what I expected to find I found-is that not right, bishop?”

“Yours is a brother’s duty,” Milo said.

“As is this,” the emperor said. “Do it.” A big tribune knotted a scarf around Eugenius’s neck.

“Please,” the woman groaned. “I love him.”

“That’s why it is necessary.”

The tribune pulled, his forearms bulging. Eugenius began to kick, struggling uselessly against the men who held him.

Honoria began screaming. His face purpled, his tongue erupted in a vain search for breath, his eyes bulged, his muscles shuddered. Then his look glazed, he slumped; and after several long minutes that made sure he was dead, his body was allowed to fall to the floor.

Honoria was sobbing.

“You have been brought back to God,” the bishop soothed.

“Damn all of you to Hell.”

The soldiers laughed.

“Sister, I bring you good news,” Valentinian said. “Your days of spinsterhood are over. Since you’ve been unable to find a proper suitor yourself, I’ve arranged for your marriage to Flavius Bassus Herculanus in Rome.”

“Herculanus! He’s fat and old! I’ll never marry him!” It was as hideous a fate as she could imagine.

“You’ll rot in Ravenna until you do.” Honoria refused to marry and Valentinian held to his word to confine her, despite her begging. Her pleas to her mother were ignored. What torture to be locked in her palace! What humiliation to gain release only by marrying a decrepit aristocrat! Her lover’s death had killed a part of her , she believed; her brother had strangled not just Eugenius but her own pride, her belief in family, and any loyalty to Valentinian. He had strangled her heart! So, early in the following year, when the nights were long and Honoria had entirely despaired of her future, she sent for her eunuch.

Hyacinth had been castrated as a child, placed in a hot bath where his testicles were crushed. It had been cruel, of course, and yet the mutilation that had denied him marriage and fatherhood had allowed him to win a position of trust in the imperial household. The eunuch had often mused on his fate, sometimes relieved that he had been exempted from the physical passions of those around him. If he felt less like a man because he’d been gelded, he suffered less, too, he believed. The pain of emasculation was a distant memory, and his privileged position a daily satisfaction. He could not be perceived as a threat like Eugenius. As a result, eunuchs often lived far longer than those they served.