Harry Turtledove - Justinian

That explained why Theoktistes was there, then. George the patriarch, who was present in lieu of the pope, prayed while Theoktistes snipped a lock from where my hair grew long behind my ears and then did the same with my brother, whose hair was several shades darker than mine. The barber wrapped my hair in a square of red silk, Herakleios's in a square of green, and handed them both to my father.

"Well done," my father said, as if Theoktistes did not make his living trimming hair. "I shall have the artisans fashion a container suitably fine for such a rich gift, and send it on to the pope in Rome. May his prayers sustain both of you as the blessing of the bishops of Rome have helped me since I decided to convene the ecumenical synod and restore and renew the orthodox faith."

"May it be so," Herakleios and I said together, both of us crossing ourselves. Alas! God, Whose judgment in all things is beyond the ken of mere men, chose for His ineffable reasons not to grant my father's wish.

My brother Herakleios died three months to the day after Theoktistes cut the locks from our hair. When he fell ill, no one, not ever Peter the physician, was much concerned; over the years, he had shown he fell ill at any excuse or none, and always managed to recover.

But not this time. I hardly remember the earliest course of his illness; at most, I would have thought something like, Mother of God, has the little wart caught another cold? He milked his diseases for all they were worth, and I often wondered whether he was as sick as he made himself out to be, or if he was faking to get sympathy he did not deserve.

After a couple of days, neither I nor anyone else thought he was faking. His fever rose till his face looked and felt like red-hot iron. He coughed and coughed and coughed and would not- could not- stop. Weak lungs had been the death of our great-grandfather, and they were the death of Herakleios, too. Peter did everything he could, with poultices and plasters and fomentations smelling tinglingly of mint, but to no avail. After raving in delirium, Herakleios slipped into a sleep from which he never wakened. He had just reached his tenth year.

Anyone's death brings mourning and lamentation from those who knew and loved him. A child's death comes doubly hard, for in it the natural order of things is reversed and the old must lay the young in his grave. And when the child who died was son to the Emperor of the Romans, that cast all of Constantinople into gloom.

Because Herakleios, like me, had never been crowned junior Emperor, my father chose not to bury him in the church of the Holy Apostles, which has served as the final resting place of Emperors and their consorts since the days of Constantine the Great. Instead, he was laid to rest in one of the hypagogai, the underground vaults, used for the interment of the nobles of the imperial city.

My father, my mother, and I, all wearing black robes, all beating our breasts and wailing, followed the servants who bore my brother's pitifully small corpse, shrouded in white linen, to its tomb. Beneath the rituals of grief, my feelings were curiously mixed. He was my brother, true, and I had grown used- resigned might be a better word- to having him around. But then again, in the imperial family, having brothers was dangerous. I needed to look no further than the case of my father and my uncles to prove that to me. Suppose I became Emperor of the Romans. Would Herakleios have tried to steal the throne from me, as his uncle Herakleios tried to steal it from my father? Maybe I was better off without him.

"Surely God will take his soul into heaven!" my mother wailed. "Poor chick, he was too young to have stained himself with sin."

I made the sign of the cross. Now that Herakleios was gone from the earth, I did wholeheartedly wish him to join God rather than having demons drag him down to eternal torment. But I also crossed myself for the sake of my own soul. Every fornication with a maidservant, back to that first one with Irene, smote me like a slap in the face. How would I defend myself before the Judge of All when my time came to stand in His presence?

Fear of death fires every man's faith. Could we live our lives thinking each moment likely to be our last, how much better and more pious the world would be!

We went down into the hypagoge and laid Herakleios's body in the niche that had been readied for it. Lamps made the underground chamber bright; incense spiced the still, quiet air. George the ecumenical patriarch prayed for my brother's soul, though what he might have said that would have moved God if my mother's plea failed was beyond me.

Then the mourners who had accompanied us departed one by one, taking their lamps with them, until at last only we and the patriarch and a single lamp burning before Herakleios's last resting place were left. We went upstairs. He stayed behind, all alone. Soon, so soon, the lamp would gutter out, as had his poor life.

It had begun to rain while we were in the hypagoge. "The very heavens mourn your loss," George said.

"If the heavens mourn, why did they allow it?" my mother said harshly. George did not answer. That question has no answer, nor ever had, nor ever shall have, save only the will of God, which may not be questioned.

Sorrows hunt in packs, or so it seems. Just when you are over the first- or sometimes before you are over the first- along comes another to tear at you, till you wonder how you can bear griefs piled one upon another like Pelion upon Ossa. The only way to make them more terrible would be to have them known in advance, as they are to God, and even that might let you prepare for them, so far as it is granted to mankind to prepare for anything.

Autumn passed into winter, winter into spring, spring into summer. I wish I could say the sense of sin that filled me at my brother's funeral persisted and enabled me to maintain bodily continence, but I know too well it is not so. Within weeks- no, the truth here: within days- I found a new washerwoman (a girl, actually; she was younger than I) who stirred me, and nothing would do but that I storm the fortress of her virginity, which, I discovered in due course, someone had conquered before me. My life, as life has a way of doing, went back to its usual rut, in all senses of the word.

The same was true for my parents, though for them, and especially for my mother, sorrow lingered longer. My father seemed in better health than he had in some time, being less afflicted by both his gout and his kidney stones than had been so of late. Perhaps to celebrate his reborn feeling of well-being, one hot, muggy evening not long after the summer solstice he doused his plate of roast kid with half a pitcher's worth of fermented fish sauce.

I remember my mother wagging a finger at him. "I wish you wouldn't do that in this weather," she said in mild reproof. "Fish doesn't stay good."

"Oh, rubbish, Anastasia," he said, and, to show he would not be thwarted, poured on the rest of what was in the pitcher, till his meat was fairly swimming in sauce, far more than he would have normally used. He ate it with every sign of enjoyment. Being the man he was, he would have done that, I am certain, even had he despised it, but he always was fond of kid in fish sauce.

Dessert was as splendid a honey cake as the cooks ever made, with fine, fine flour mixed with boiled must to give the sweetness a winy tinge, and covered over with candied figs and apricots. Had it been given to me alone, I would have gone through it like an army sacking a town without a wall; as things were, I begrudged my parents the slices a servant set on their plates.

My father did not finish his, at least not right away. He left the table suddenly, with a startled look on his face. "I'll be back," he told my mother and me. "Keep eating." Had he not spoken up, we should have had to stop, too, the custom being that everyone is done when the Emperor rises.