Harry Turtledove - Justinian

"Tiberius, is this your word also?" my father demanded.

Miserably, Tiberius nodded. He and Herakleios looked to the nobles of the city for support. They found.. none. My father had saved the city from the Arabs, my father and I had restored peace to the church- and my father had mutilated Leo for daring to speak on my uncles' behalf.

"So be it- you have condemned yourselves," my father said to Herakleios and Tiberius. Sighs ran through the throne room: the moment, though expected, was hard when it came. My father passed sentence: "You shall have your noses slit so that, being physically imperfect, you shall no longer be able to aspire to the throne, and you shall be sent into exile."

Tiberius simply stood and stared, perhaps accepting his lot, perhaps unable to believe he was about to suffer the deserved fate of all failed plotters and rebels. But Herakleios stabbed out a finger at my father and cried, "May what you give me fall on you one day, brother!" Then that finger, which at the moment seemed long and thin and sharp as a claw, pointed first to me and then to my little brother. "And may it fall on your heirs as well!" To emphasize what he said, Herakleios spat on the mosaic-work floor.

My father made the holy sign of the cross to turn aside the words of evil omen. So did I. So did my brother, clumsily and a beat late. So did the assembled nobles and the excubitores who crowded the throne room. Neither my brother nor my father lived long after that, but on neither of them did Herakleios's curse fall. On me, by the incontestable judgment of God, it did.

But my uncles, whom the excubitores now led away, never were seen in this God-guarded and imperial city again. Herakleios's curse fell on me, aye, but I have overcome it like every other obstacle in my path. And with him and Tiberius gone, no more obstacles stood between me and eventual imperial rank.

I wondered whether my father would immediately have me crowned as a junior Emperor, now that my uncles were vanished from the scene. In fact, I expected him to crown me: had I not earned a coronation of my own for helping to persuade the soldiers from the Anatolian military districts to stay loyal to him and not go over to Herakleios and Tiberius?

But no ceremony seemed forthcoming. Emboldened by my new status as heir apparent (even uncrowned), I asked him why not. To my relief, he took the question seriously instead of growing angry, and replied, "I think my father made a mistake by crowning all three of his sons. I don't want to imitate him. If I crown you, how can I keep from crowning your brother with you? And if I crown you both, I sow the seeds of strife for a new generation."

"I don't think little Herakleios could ever be a danger to me," I said. I did not think my younger brother was likely to live out the year, but I did not say that to my father.

He set a hand on my shoulder. "You never can tell, son," he said. "When I was a boy, my brothers were so much smaller and younger than I was that I didn't think they could be dangerous, either. But as you both grow older, differences in age become less important than they are when you're children. And so I was wrong, and you might be, too. You never can tell."

When I look back on all the twists of fortune that have gone into the skein of my life, I have to say he was right about that.

And then any notion of crowning me was forgotten, for the Bulgars sent three envoys to Constantinople seeking tribute in exchange for refraining from penetrating deeper into Romania than they already had. Having seen so great a part of his force heedlessly thrown away, my father felt he had little choice but to pay the barbarians what they demanded.

He summoned them to the throne room to impress them with the splendor still remaining in the Roman Empire. My brother and I, as part of that splendor, sat at his left hand. Our three seats were the only ones there; the two additional thrones formerly occupied by my uncles had vanished, I never learned whither.

The Bulgars- their names, as best I can set them down in Greek letters, were Krobat, Batbaian, and Kotrag- were quite the ugliest men I had ever seen. They were short and squat and swarthy, with wide, flat faces, noses almost bridgeless, and narrow eyes set in their heads at a slant. They could raise hardly more beard than a eunuch; a few hairs sprouted on their cheeks and chins, and a few more, enough to make up scraggly mustaches, on their upper lips. They smelled of horses.

Instead of silk and linen, they wore fur and leather, and also, as if to make up for their physical hideousness, great quantities of gold: rings and armlets and necklaces and clasps and even, in the case of Krobat, who was their leader, hoops in his ears. I stared, never having seen a man decked out in that effeminate style.

They all spoke Greek, after a fashion. My father ignored their twittering accent and their endless solecisms, treating them with as much dignity as if they had come from the misnamed commander of the faithful in Damascus. The question was never whether to pay them, only how much, for my father reckoned himself unable to drive them back north of the Danube.

He did not let them know that, however. Instead, he made sure that, wherever they went in Constantinople, they were sure to see large numbers of soldiers, as if he were contemplating renewed war should their demands prove exorbitant. The ploy worked. They cut their demands in half, and then in half again.

"Your people has no great need for gold," my father told Krobat, pointing to the numerous ornaments of precious metal adorning the barbarian. "It is only a symbol of the relationship between us." He then had to spend some time making sure Krobat knew what a symbol was. That done, he went on, "If the symbol is more expensive than the war it replaces, we would sooner fight."

In his bad Greek, Krobat said, "You talk like- what is name?- fish merchant. Like fish merchant, yes." He sneered. He had big yellow teeth, made for sneering.

My father simply stared at him. So did I, adding my indignation to his. My brother may well have done the same thing, but I did not shift my eyes to look at him. I kept staring at Krobat, letting him know without words he could not address an Emperor of the Romans thus.

Silence stretched. At last, Batbaian muttered to his leader in their ugly tongue. Krobat muttered back, angrily. But when Kotrag also spoke to him, he returned to Greek and growled out something that would do for an apology. My father dipped his head to accept it, and the dickering went on as if the insult had never occurred.

Constantine had that knack for looking at you- looking through you- so you knew he thought he had every right to command you, and you believed it, too. Yes, Brother Elpidios, Justinian had it, too. I was about to say so. Patience is a virtue, or so I hear tell. The veterans among the excubitores said Constans had it, so it must have run in the blood. Herakleios, now, Herakleios was forty years dead by then, but he couldn't very well have been without it, not with everything he did.

What's that, Brother? What do I think of Leo, the Emperor we have now? Aside from the icons, I expect you mean? Well, you could compare him to Constantine, I suppose, on account of they both held the Arabs away from the imperial city. But you have to remember, Brother, I knew Leo when, as they say. He may be a strong Emperor now, but he wasn't born to it, and I'd bet that shows.

And who knows what his son, his Constantine, will turn out to be like when his time comes to wear the crown? Is the story they tell true, that when he was a baby he shit himself in the baptismal font? Not the best omen you could have, no indeed it isn't.

You ask me, they don't make 'em the way they used to, and that's a fact. The world isn't the place it was when I was young, and I don't need eyes to see as much. But then, what old man doesn't say the same?