Harry Turtledove - Justinian

My springing down from the backs of Leontios and Apsimaros signaled to the mob the end of the day's festivities. I tasted the tone of their voices as they streamed out of the hippodrome. Despite not having watched the usurpers' heads leap from their bodies, they seemed well enough pleased with what they had witnessed.

Excubitores stirred Leontios and Apsimaros to their feet, and the two of them rose. Apsimaros was pale, his lips pressed against each other until they almost disappeared, but he did his best to show a brave front. Leontios, by contrast, presented a disgusting spectacle, and would have done so even without the horse dung in his beard. Not only did his tears of terror cut pale lines down his filthy cheeks, but greenish snot flowed out of the hole in his face where his nose had been and trickled through his mustache.

"The sooner the world is rid of you, the more pleasant a place it will be," I told him: an aesthetic judgment as well as a moral one. Incapable of coherent speech, he blubbered at me. "To the Kynegion," I told the guardsmen.

They had to drag Leontios to the amphitheater by the sea northeast of the church of the Holy Wisdom, his legs refusing to carry him. Apsimaros walked. I rode in the chariot behind them.

Was the masked executioner waiting there the man who had mutilated me? No one had- no one to this day has- admitted knowing which executioner that had been. I remain\a160… most interested in learning, but at the time passed lightly over the question, other matters being more immediately urgent.

In the center of the Kynegion stood a chopping block, like that for poultry but larger. The stains on it were old and dried and dark, I having been in the habit of hanging rather than beheading the officers who had supported the cause of the two usurpers. Some fresh stains would go on it now.

The executioner had a sword on his hip, a weapon larger and thicker-bladed than a cavalryman's sword: one made for chopping. Bowing to me, he asked, "Which of them first, Emperor?"

Having been weighing that very question in my mind as I traveled from the hippodrome, I replied without hesitation: "Let it be Apsimaros. That way, Leontios can see what lies ahead for him."

Leontios moaned. Apsimaros nodded to me. "If I had won, you would have ended here," he said. He walked to the block, knelt, and laid his head upon it. "Strike hard," he told the executioner. The fellow looked my way. I nodded. Apsimaros was doing his best to die well. I would allow it.

Up went the sword. Leontios's eyes followed it with horrified fascination, though it would not bite his neck\a160… yet. Down it fell. Anyone who has been in battle, or for that matter anyone who has watched and listened to a butcher cutting up a carcass with a cleaver, will know the sound it made on striking home.

Apsimaros's head sprang from his body. A fountain of blood, brightest red in the winter sun, gushed from the stump of his neck, drenching the head, the dried grass on the floor of the Kynegion, and the chopping block. His legs kicked wildly; but for the manacles, his arms would have flailed, too. He pissed and shit himself, the stench plain even through the overwhelming iron smell of blood.

Leontios slumped forward in a faint. I walked over and kicked Apsimaros's head to one side; my boots already being crimson, contact with the blood-soaked relic would not mar them. To one of the excubitores, I said, "Wash this off so people can see who it is- was- and take it to the Milion for display."

"Aye, Emperor," he said, while his comrades dragged the rest of Apsimaros's corpse out of the way.

No doubt wanting to be helpful, the executioner told the guardsman, "I have baskets here. You can use one to carry that."

"Ah, good," the soldier said. "Thanks."

Other soldiers hauled Leontios over to the chopping block and positioned him so the executioner could do his work. But, before the man could raise that heavy sword, I said, "Wait. I want him to know what is happening to him, just as he knew when he tormented me."

Obediently, the executioner waited. Leontios remaining limp, one of the excubitores stooped and pinched his earlobe between the nails of thumb and forefinger. This produced the desired effect; Leontios writhed and twisted and opened his eyes. On doing so, he discovered his head lay on the block. He let out a hoarse scream-"No!"- and tried to twist away.

"Seize him!" I cried, and several excubitores did exactly that. Even after they forced him back to the proper posture, though, he kept shouting and twisting his head from side to side: exactly as I had done when the executioner serving him had tried to slit my tongue. As the soldiers had done then with me, so now one of them seized Leontios by the hair and held his head still. The wretch tried to bite, his teeth clicking together. It did him no good.

Even so, the executioner did not make a clean job of the kill, as he had with Apsimaros. He had to strike twice, the first blow merely spraying blood in all directions and turning Leontios's screams to half-drowned gurgles. At the second, though, the death the usurper so richly deserved was visited upon him at last.

"I do beg your pardon, Emperor," the executioner said as Leontios's blood poured out over the ground. "I should have done better there." He sounded professionally embarrassed, as a builder might after erecting a house with a leaky roof.

"Never mind," I told him. "He earned what you gave him. Had you taken his head with a carpenter's saw, I should not have said a word against you."

"A carpenter's saw?" the fellow exclaimed. By the way he recoiled from me, he found the idea more nearly appalling than appealing. Executioners are, from my dealings with them, a conservative lot, very much set in their ways.

Leontios's body kept twitching a good deal longer than Apsimaros's had done, whether because the executioner had required two strokes rather than one or simply because he was too stupid to realize he was dead I could not say. Helpful still, the executioner gave the excubitores another one of those baskets in which to carry Leontios's head, then went off to wash the blood from his blade and examine the edge for nicks to be honed away before his next tour of duty.

I watched as the excubitores set the heads of Leontios and Apsimaros on pikes in front of the Milion. Placards proclaimed their crimes to the crowd. Turning to Myakes, I said, "Amazing how far two heads go to make up for ten long years of misery."

"So it is, Emperor," he said. "Now that you've avenged-"

"Avenged?" I broke in. "Not yet!"

"But\a160…" Myakes hesitated, as well he might have, before going on. "You've dealt with the patriarch, there's Leontios and Apsimaros, you've already taken care of Apsimaros's brother, there are all those dead officers-"

I interrupted again: "Plenty more where they came from, by God and His Son, and I aim to root out every one of them, too. I've hardly started sweeping the bureaucracy clean of traitors, and you know what I owe the Khersonites. I'll give it to them, too; see if I don't. I am not yet avenged, Myakes. I have barely begun."

"Can't you let this be enough, what you've already done?" he said.

"While one who opposed me remains alive, it is not enough," I replied. "Treason is a wart on the face of the Roman Empire, and I will cut it off."

Hearing the iron in my voice, he bowed his head. "Yes, Emperor," he said quietly.

I did try, Brother Elpidios. I thought, when he came back to power, he would get rid of the two usurpers and the most important people who had backed them, and then he'd get on with the business of being Emperor again.

It didn't happen. I wish it had. But he'd been thinking about revenge, eating revenge, drinking revenge, breathing revenge, dreaming revenge, all the time he'd been in exile. Once he got the chance to take it, he took and took and\a160…