Harry Turtledove - Justinian

Bu t as my own heat built, I forgot about restraint, and soon gasped out my spasm of delight. When I came back to myself, I saw her eyes were tightly closed. A tear had run down the side of her face from each of them. She hissed again when I slid out of her. I looked at myself, at her, at the stained sheet, and nodded, happy with the world. No one would have cause to doubt I had taken her maidenhead.

She too sat up and looked at the blood that had come from between her legs. "You are truly my wife," I said.

"Yes." Eudokia got off the bed and, walking as if she had been on horseback for a long time, poured some water from a pitcher into a basin, soaked a rag in it, and washed her private parts. After a moment, I did the same. A wedding night of one round only is a poor wedding night indeed, and I had in mind teaching her some things I had not shown her before our first joining. Being clean would help.

If I had the stamina now that I did then, or if I had known then what I know now, the night might have been even more memorable, but it was quite fine enough as things were. Some time along toward midnight, I stripped the sheet from the bed, put on my robe, and displayed the trophy to all the wedding guests who had not yet drunk themselves to sleep or gone off with a dancing girl. Loud, raucous cheers greeted me. "What are you going to do now?" someone shouted.

"Go back in there and put some more stains on it," I answered, and the shouts that came echoing back were even more raucous than before. To whoops of laughter, I shut the door and proceeded to do as I had said.

I woke the next morning to sunlight streaming into the bedchamber. Eudokia lay naked beside me. I thought about waking her with the same music to which we had fallen asleep: when you are but sixteen, you can contemplate such things after a night like the one we had had. But even at sixteen, that next round was far from urgent. I rolled over and yawned and stretched, feeling lazy and contented.

Eudokia's eyes came open. She let out a startled squeak at finding herself in bed with a man, but quickly remembered how and why that had happened, proof of which being that, although she started to cover herself with her hands, she stopped with the motion half begun and let me look all I pleased.

"My husband," she said. Her eyes traveled from my face downwards. Sure enough, I had begun to rise again. I do not know whether she was impressed; being ignorant of the ways of men, she had no standard for comparison. Looking back across a quarter of a century, I am certainly impressed. And so we did play that same sweet tune over again.

There, you see, Brother Elpidios, you read that all through with only a handful of wheezes and hardly a splutter. First times are strange, but after you've done something once, the second time is always a lot easier.

What do you mean, that wasn't the reason you had an easier time here? Oh. The other was just fornication and this was talking about real marriage, and so not a sin in the eyes of God? I see. If the difference makes you happy, Brother, far be it from me to argue with you, even though Justinian was doing the same things as before.

Not all the same things? Oh, sucking the fig. Yes, they like that, same as we like it when they play the flute for us. No, when you get right down to it, I don't think there's anything in the Holy Scriptures against it. It's not the sin of Onan, for how can a woman spill her seed out on the ground? She has no seed to spill, now does she? She's just fertile soil where a man's seed can grow. You might even say he's watering that ground, eh?

If you're really so curious, Brother Elpidios, why don't you ask the abbot what he thinks? You're not that curious? Mm, might be just as well. Read some more, why don't you?

Marriage agreed with me. Being able to slake my lust whenever I felt like it agreed with me. And Eudokia and I got on when even when not joined together panting on the marriage bed. She had an odd, sideways way of looking at things that went on in the palace- I suppose because she was not accustomed to the life from birth, as I was- that made me take the ancient customs less for granted, too.

George the ecumenical patriarch died in the spring of my first year as Emperor. After rather less bickering than usual, the local synod of bishops chose the three men from among whom I was to choose his successor: Paul, Kallinikos, and Theodore. Now, Theodore is far from the least common of names, but having it presented here gave me pause. I asked Niketas, who as synkellos to George administered churchly affairs until a new patriarch was installed, "Is this the same Theodore my father deposed because he was a monothelite?"

"Emperor, it is," he said, "but since the sixth holy and ecumenical synod anathematized the doctrine to which he formerly adhered, he has truly repented of his earlier error. His orthodoxy is now complete and unquestionable."

"Complete, maybe, but far from unquestionable," I answered, and ordered Theodore brought before me.

It proved to be as Niketas said: he was indeed of perfect orthodoxy. "The Holy Spirit speaks through each ecumenical synod, and makes God's will clear," he declared. "I was in error, but am no longer. Restore me to the patriarchal throne, and I shall prove to you the truth of what I say."

The other two prelates the local synod had named were also worthy men, each of them later serving as patriarch of Constantinople. Now, though, reinstalling the man my father had ousted struck my fancy. I ordered it, and it was done.

"Your father would never have done that," my mother said after I announced my decision. "He never abandoned a friend, and, more important, he never forgot a foe."

I tossed my head. "I am not my father," I said. "Just because he did things a certain way doesn't mean I have to do them that way, too." I was still arguing with my father, as boys do on the way to manhood. Now, though, he could no longer answer back, so I, unlike most boys, won all the arguments.

That would have been better had I been right all the time. Well, I have learned- painfully, as such lessons are often taught. By God, by the Virgin, by the saints, I forgive no foes today.

Everyone who advised me- not my mother alone- seemed passionately convinced all matters should remain as they had been in the time of my father. This applied even to Theodore, the restored patriarch. "If you but continue on his course, Emperor," he said, "the Roman Empire will do well."

"Is that so?" I said. "Shall I depose you, then, because he did?"

Theodore suffered such a coughing fit, he had to retire from the throne room. I laughed till my sides ached at getting the better of the prelate. But, while he no longer importuned me after that, the bureaucrats and soldiers who came before me kept trying to hold back even the idea of change.

This, of course, accomplished the opposite of what they wanted, making me even more eager than I had been to overturn my father's arrangements regardless of whether they had been foolish. What lad has ever reached sixteen years without being certain everything around him is the creation of a pack of doddering idiots and deserves nothing better than being tossed upon the rubbish heap? I had no patience for what had been done; my mind turned instead to what I might do.

As I say, every lad of like age is full of the same ideas, being convinced to the uttermost depths of his soul that all the people older than he, and especially all kinsfolk and men of authority older than he, have not a counterfeit follis's worth of sense among them. Most lads, though, have to accept the authority of their elders, possessing no power, no wealth, of their own.

I was not most lads. I was Emperor of the Romans. I had all the power of the Empire behind me, and all the wealth, too. I could do as I chose, not as anyone chose for me. It had not been done that way before? Precedent and conventional usage argued against it? So what?