Harry Turtledove - Justinian

"Rope, too," Myakes called after him. He waved to show he had heard. To me, Myakes said, "Rope'll give us a way down where we might not have one otherwise."

Leo came back a few minutes later with a coil of rope around one arm and a stout iron crowbar about a cubit long in his other hand. "Excellent," I said, and then turned to Tervel. "Have we a ladder tall enough to let us climb up into the water channel of that aqueduct?"

"I don't know," he answered. When he seemed inclined to say no more, I folded my arms across my chest, making it plain I should not be satisfied without his giving me a more responsive reply. Grudgingly, he went on, "I will see. If we do not, we can make one by lashing two or three shorter ones together."

"Good enough," I said. "Now, I have one more favor to ask of you."

"What is it?" He did not sound happy. What he sounded like was a man who felt what he had thought to be a puppet jerking his arm.

"When we go up into the pipe, I want your men to attack the wall," I told him. "I want them to make an enormous din, so any noise from us goes unnoticed." When he simply stood there, saying neither yes nor no, I added, "By this time tomorrow, you will be revealed either as my son-in-law or as a Caesar of the Roman Empire."

His face did not show what he thought. It seldom did. Up in the country he ruled, he had seemed hopeful about my prospects, but that hope must have faded when few Romans came over to me, and faded again when the garrison of the imperial city held it closed against me. Maybe hope revived in him. Maybe he simply thought he would be rid of me. "I shall do it," he said.

The ladders the Bulgars had were not long enough. When they lashed two of them together, the resulting contraption still had a bend in the middle on being forced more or less upright, as a man's leg has a bend at the knee. My followers examined it with doubts that, had they been applied to religion, would have amounted to wicked atheism.

Although having those same doubts myself, I suppressed them. "It will serve," I insisted. "It does not have to hold us long- only long enough to get us up into the aqueduct."

I wanted to wait until midnight to enter the aqueduct, but was persuaded to begin earlier, around the start of the fourth hour of the night, because I had no way of knowing how long the journey through the channel would take. I hoped to drop down into Constantinople while it was still dark, so as to be able to pick for myself the way in which I would first confront the soldiers and people of the city.

Several grunting Bulgars carried the spliced ladder to the base of the ruined aqueduct and raised it high. I wonder if they should have joined three, not two, together, it being barely long enough for its required purpose. Changing matters at that point, though, would have taken time I did not wish to spend.

I started up the ladder. It did flex at that joint, as a man's knee might have done. I climbed as fast as I could. If it broke under my weight and sent me tumbling to the ground, drama would turn to unseemly farce in the blink of an eye.

It held. Gasping, I got to the top. I reached into the opening of the channel, which was something less than a yard wide: a tiny thing, seemingly, to have supplied the imperial city with so much water. My fingers closed over sticks and twigs. I threw the bird's nest away and scrambled up into the pipe.

It was too narrow for me to turn around in it. "I'm in!" I shouted, almost as if I had entered a woman. I had to hope they would hear me down below.

The ladder scraped against the broken end of the aqueduct: someone else was on it. I scuttled farther down the pipe, to give whoever it was room to climb in. "Don't put more than one man on this cursed thing at a time." It was Myakes' voice. I might have known he would let no one come between me and him. Cursing, he made it into the pipe in the same ungainly way I had used. "You there, Emperor?"

"I'm here." His bulky body cut off what little light had come from the opening of the channel. "We'll both move down now."

That came none too soon, for someone else was already climbing toward us: Barisbakourios, followed by Stephen, then Leo, then Moropaulos, with Theophilos last of all. By the time Theophilos joined us, I was some distance down the pipe, moving ahead in utter darkness.

Some men, I have heard, suffer a deadly fear of being enclosed in a small space. Had any such sufferer been among us, he would without a doubt have gone screaming mad. Not only were we literally in a space of small compass, again and again banging our heads or barking our backs when we rose up more than the pipe would permit, but it seemed even smaller than it was because of the utter lightlessness there. It would have been easy to imagine the pipe closing in on us until it squeezed us as an Aesculapian snake squeezes a rat. Fortunately, none of us was afflicted by this sort of morbid imagining.

Brother Elpidios, I tell you the truth, I never came so close to pissing myself as I did in that damned pipe. I was blinder then than I am now. I can tell the difference between light and dark to this day. I can't see anything, mind you, but I can tell the difference. There wasn't any difference to tell, not inside that pipe there wasn't. It was all black, nothing else but.

I would have had the screaming hobgoblins in there, I think, if it hadn't been for Justinian. What? No, he didn't pat me on the shoulder and keep me brave, or anything like that. Yes, I'll tell you what I mean, if you let me, Brother. What I mean is, if I'd gone to pieces in there, I figured he'd tell somebody to cut my throat or knock me over the head, and then everybody behind me would have crawled over my body and gone on.

Let me put it like this: frightened as I was, part of me knew it wasn't a real fear, if you know what I mean. I was doing it to myself. I could feel I was doing it to myself. I couldn't stop doing it, but I could slow me down a little.

And I knew being afraid of Justinian was a real fear. Can't think of one any realer, not offhand. Stand between him and getting into the city then and you'd end up with footprints up your front and down your back- and a knee in the balls for good measure.

Was I more afraid of Justinian than my own imagination? Brother Elpidios, you'd best believe I was. You would have been, too.

We were not the only living things in the aqueduct pipeway. I have spoken of the nest my hand found when I climbed off the ladder. A couple of bats flapped past me, too, squeaking indignantly at having their seclusion disturbed. Hitting out at them, I succeeded only in barking my knuckles.

Skitterings told me mice or rats had climbed the masonry of the wrecked aqueduct to make their homes in the pipe. None of them ran toward me; they all fled away, sensing that I and the men with me were larger and more dangerous than they.

I crawled headfirst through spiderwebs beyond number, wondering what their patient weavers found to eat in this dark, wretched hole. More than one spider dropped down onto me and crawled away. At first I swatted at them, but, finding crushing their soft, hairy bodies more revolting than letting them run on me, I soon desisted. Soft cries of disgust from my followers said not all the eight-legged creatures were descending on me.

How far had I come? In the Stygian darkness, I had no sure way to judge. Something like panic ran through me. Was it a spear-cast? A bowshot? A mile? Had we reached the wall? Had we passed it? I stopped. Myakes promptly ran into me, each of the others colliding in turn with the man in front of him.

"Wait," I said. "Quiet." Echoing weirdly up the tube through which we crawled came the sounds of battle. Tervel, then, had kept his pledge to me. But so attenuated were the sounds, I could not use them to judge how far or how long we had traveled. On asking my companions, I discovered that their opinions varied so widely as to be of little value.