Harry Turtledove - Justinian

He said, "I'm going back inside, boys. I will get some rest." He was giving orders not to us but to his own body, which didn't much feel like obeying. But he was clumsy with his sticks, because he didn't need them all that often, and as he turned himself around to go back, he whacked himself right in the sore foot with one of them.

Poor devil. He started to fall down. I grabbed him, so that didn't happen, but he threw back his head and howled like a wolf. Everybody awake in our camp must have heard him, and he probably woke half the troopers who were sleeping. Except for the sizzle of my own eyeballs cooking, it was the most dreadful sound I ever heard. Christ, wouldn't surprise me if it woke up Asparukh, the Bulgar chief.

He clamped down on it fast as he could- made his mouth close and bit the inside of his lower lip, hard, maybe to make one pain fight another. "I will rest," he said again, in a ghastly voice, and a little blood trickled down off his lower lip.

He made it back inside. My partner and I, we closed the tent flaps after him. He wouldn't rest, not after that. He hadn't a prayer, and we couldn't do a thing to help him. After a while, our reliefs came. I didn't think I'd sleep, either, but I did.

The sun woke me. I sat up, praying God had worked a miracle and healed Constantine overnight. Then I heard a groan from inside the imperial pavilion and knew it wasn't so. God works miracles when He feels like it, not when you feel like it. I snagged myself a mug of wine and went over there to find out what Constantine was going to do. The only thing I was sure of was that, if we attacked, he couldn't lead.

I got to the pavilion about the same time Florus and Kyprianos did. Florus was the ugliest man I've ever seen, with a big nose, no chin to speak of, and big ears that stuck out like open shutters on two sides of a house. Kyprianos, now, Kyprianos looked like a pretty catamite grown up to middle age. You ask me, though, Florus made the better general.

Constantine came out to meet the two of them. He looked worse by daylight than he had in the middle of the night. The purple circles under his eyes said he hadn't slept at all, not even a little bit. When he said, "If I don't get relief, I'm going to die," Florus and Kyprianos both nodded. He meant it, and they could tell as much.

Florus pointed north, toward the Bulgars' camp. "What about the barbarians? What do we do with them if you're not here?"

The Emperor made a rude gesture. "Drag them out of hiding with your lances. You won't need me here for that. They're frightened spitless of Roman power. Make them come out and fight and you'll smash them."

"We shall do as our glorious sovereign commands!" Kyprianos cried. He wore chainmail, but he talked like a courtier.

Florus said, "The men won't like that you're going, Emperor. They'll think you're leaving them in the lurch."

"I have to go," Constantine answered. He wasn't lying about that; just standing up on one foot and two sticks took an effort that left him white and trembling. "I'm sailing down to the baths at Mesembria; after I soak there, I always feel better. I expect I'll see you soon, with captives and booty to show me."

"We shall drag the barbarians forth from their lairs and crush them in your name," Kyprianos said. Constantine nodded. An Emperor always hears yes. Who'd dare tell him no? And Kyprianos wasn't the worst soldier around. He'd helped beat the Arabs a few years earlier, when they'd lost thirty thousand men. I guess he really thought he could do what he promised. But Florus, I noticed, didn't say anything.

Along with five shiploads of excubitores- me among 'em- Constantine sailed down the Danube and then south along the Black Sea coast to Mesembria. It sits out on a rocky peninsula, and makes a good harbor. The Emperor took the waters there. Before too long, he was feeling\a160… not good, but better.

"We should be getting news," he'd say, and try to put his sore foot on the ground. "We should be getting news." He must have felt like a bear in a cage. He talked about going back up to the frontier and taking over again, but he wasn't up to that. He waited. we all waited. If you weren't soaking your foot, Mesembria was a boring place to get stuck. Even the whores were clumsy… Sorry, Brother. That just slipped out.

By luck of the draw, I was attending Constantine when the first messenger arrived from the north. We'd just come out of the basilica called the Old Metropolis, where the Emperor had been praying for victory. A fellow who looked like he'd just about killed his horse getting there galloped up, jumped off the poor, worn beast, and threw himself facedown in the street. "Emperor!" he cried.

"Get up, man," Constantine said. "What news?" He quivered like a bowstring when you've strung it too tight.

The messenger didn't get up. I suppose he didn't want Constantine to see his expression. Still grinding his face into the dirt of the street, he cried, "Disaster!"

Constantine took a step toward him. By the look on his face, he aimed to murder the poor luckless messenger right then and there. Not quite by accident, looking clumsier than I was, I bumbled out between the Emperor and the fellow who'd brought bad news. Constantine had to stop, just long enough to let him start thinking. He was headstrong, but God help you if you thought he was stupid. "What happened?" he ground out.

The messenger spewed out this great long tale of woe. The meat was what Florus had said it would be: without Constantine there, the men wouldn't go forward against the Bulgars. Some of them started saying the Emperor ran away. Then they panicked and ran away themselves, even though the Bulgars weren't after 'em.

"The wicked flee where no man pursueth"? No, not quite, Brother. The stupid fled where no one pursued, more like.

Of course, after a little while the Bulgars figured out the Romans weren't trying to lure them into some kind of trap and really were running away. They came to the Danube and crossed it, sweeping up our soldiers as they went. By the time the messenger got to Mesembria, the barbarians were already down to the Haimos Mountains and threatening Varna, not fifty miles north of where we were.

Constantine listened to it all without twitching a muscle. "Ruined," he said at last, and nothing more. I didn't know what to say. There wasn't much I could say. He wouldn't be able to put together another army like the one he'd thrown away, not for years- too many men gone. Ruined was about right.

He kicked at the dirt, hard, with his bandaged foot. I don't want to imagine the pain that must have cost him. His face didn't so much as twitch. We sailed for Constantinople the next day.

My father's return to the imperial city took everyone by surprise. Stephen the Persian was particularly vexed, for he had no chance to prepare a triumphal procession to celebrate the extermination of the Bulgars. But when my father reached the palace- bare moments after word he was in the city came to us- one look at his face said no procession would be needed.

"Father," I said proudly, stepping forward when everyone else hung back, "the acts of the holy ecumenical synod await your review and approval."

"That is good," he said, and seemed to mean it; he was a good and pious Christian, as concerned with the world to come as with our own. But he had other things on his mind. "I shall review those acts… eventually."

Still full of myself and what I had done while he was gone, I demanded, "Why not now?"

"Because we were beaten, and beaten badly," he answered, getting all the poison out in one sentence.

I gaped, speechless. Despite the grim, pain-filled expression he bore, the last thing in all the world I had imagined was that my father, who had turned back the followers of the false prophet and had received envoys not only from them but from all the lesser kinds of the inhabited world, could have gone down to defeat at the hands of a band of ragged barbarians.