Harry Turtledove - Justinian

I had not been talking to him, either, but to myself. Nevertheless, he answered me: "Emperor, you send my people off beyond the edge of the world, is it not so? Send me with them. Let me lead army of them for you. You are too strong for me, but I know I can beat every other man who was ever born of woman."

If he could be trusted, it was not the worst idea in the world. The Sklavenoi I was resettling in Anatolia could fight; many of them had been captured in battle at the point of a spear. I intended making military peasants of them, paying them some small wage each year, with which they could maintain their equipment and mounts, and summoning them at need to war. My plan had been to put them under the command of Roman officers, but they might fight better for one of their own. "Neboulos," I said, "if you think you will be a kinglet in Anatolia, as you have been here, think again. The Roman Empire has only one Emperor, and I am he."

Those wide blue eyes went even wider. "You are Emperor. I am your man. I will help you against your enemies." Then he smiled- a provocative smile, almost the smile a man would use to try to bring a woman to his bed. "And, Emperor, you owe me four pounds of gold."

"I what?" I said, partly in amazement, partly because his Greek, while good, was not perfect, and I wondered if I misunderstood him.

But he repeated it: "You owe me four pounds of gold," he said, very clearly. Seeing me still gaping, he condescended to explain: "You say you will give one pound of gold to man who brings me to you. No one does it. You say you will give two pounds. No one does it. You say you will give four pounds. I bring me to you. Here I am." He thumped his chest. "You owe me four pounds of gold."

I could have killed him on the spot for such effrontery. But I had sworn an oath to let him live- and, in any case, I was laughing too hard to think of the headsman's sword. And so, with a smile, he began to betray me.

Ah, Neboulos. I haven't thought about Neboulos in going on forty years not more than once or twice, anyhow. He was a piece of work, Neboulos was, no two ways about it.

You've never heard of him, Brother Elpidios? Not till you read of him in Justinian's manuscript, you say? God and all the saints, you've made me feel ancient often enough before. Why should one more time bother me? And, thinking about it, his heyday was here and gone years before you were born, so there's no real reason you should have heard of him, but still\a160…

I wondered if Justinian would kill him when he came out with that, "You owe me four pounds of gold." Every excubitor who heard him was either snickering or rupturing himself trying not to snicker. Justinian's temper was always chancy, though. If he'd taken it the wrong way, Neboulos was one dead Sklavinian, oath or no oath. But then Justinian laughed, and when the Emperor laughs, everybody laughs.

Neboulos? Yes, he laughed, too.

After Neboulos came into our camp, warfare against the Sklavenoi ended. We rounded up some thousands more of the barbarians and sent them on toward Constantinople for resettlement. In this, Neboulos made himself useful, persuading several petty chiefs they would do better to yield than to waste their lives in useless battle.

With the Sklavinias under Roman sway, I brought the army down to Thessalonike, which, although the greatest European city in the Empire after Constantinople, had been twice besieged by the Sklavenoi over the years, and might have fallen to them if not for the miracles wrought by St. Demetrios, its patron.

I rode into Thessalonike on a white horse, at the head of the soldiers. The people of the town went wild to see me. For so long, Thessalonike had been a Roman island in a Sklavinian sea; now it was linked again to the larger part of the civilized world. Seeing Neboulos walking behind my horse, the inhabitants jeered and cursed him, for they had feared his growing power.

He took no notice of the jeers. Even when they began to pelt him, first with rotten vegetables and then with stones, he dodged only those missiles aimed directly at him, and did so with a quick economy of motion that kept all but a couple from striking him.

"Let him be!" I shouted to the crowd. "He is mine!" The Thessalonikans bayed wolfish approval at that, no doubt construing it to mean I had in mind for him a fate more bitter and lingering than any a mere mob could inflict. Would they had been right. In fact, though, it was only that I admired the courage and self-possession with which he faced them, and did not wish to watch him slaughtered as part of the celebration of my arrival.

Seeing Thessalonike and its walls, I understood how (with the help of St. Demetrios) it, like Constantinople, held out in the face of everything its foes could do. It rises steeply from the Thermaic Gulf, the Via Egnatia entering it less than half a mile from the sea. The citadel stands on the high ground in the northe astern part of the city. The circuit of the walls (counting the seawall, which is in a poorer state of repair than the rest) is about three miles. More than a hundred towers, some rectangular, others triangular, gave Roman soldiers fine vantage points from which to fight.

Kyriakos, the bishop of Thessalonike and also, in effect, its governor, greeted me just inside the Kassandreia Gate. "God bless the Emperor Justinian!" he cried, "the God-crowned maker of peace, benefactor to this city, pious and faithful to Jesus Christ our Lord!"

"God bless Thessalonike," I replied, to which the people cheered. "Through His help and that of the great martyr, Saint Demetrios, we have triumphed against our foes, who are also the foes of the saint." The Thessalonikans shouted louder for their beloved saint than they had for their city.

Kyriakos leading the way, we paraded through Thessalonike. When we passed under a great triumphal arch perhaps a bowshot inside the wall, he crossed himself, saying, "This was built by the arch-persecutors, Galerius and Diocletian."

Reliefs on the arch showed prisoners- easterners: Persians, perhaps- pleading for mercy before a Roman Emperor in antique costume like that which Constantine the Great is often seen wearing on his monuments. As the bishop had said, Galerius and Diocletian savagely persecuted Christians, and no doubt suffer the pangs of hell because of it. But without their victories, the Roman Empire would have suffered untold grief at the hands of its enemies. How was I to feel about them, then? How I felt, at the time, was puzzled.

Just north of the triumphal arch was an impressive church dedicated to St. George: Thessalonike seemed to have, and to need, several churches favoring the military saints. It also had, along the Via Egnatia, a church dedicated to the Mother of God. "In here," Kyriakos said proudly, "rests an icon of our Lord which human hands did not paint." His pride was justified, for by possessing such a holy image Thessalonike showed itself to be no provincial backwater, but a city to be reckoned with.

Shortly after passing the church dedicated to the Virgin, we turned north up a meaner, narrower street leading to the church of St. Demetrios, a church worthy of standing comparison to any I have ever seen, save only the great church in the imperial city. It is an old-fashioned basilica, rectangular in plan, with a wooden roof and with a transept giving it something of a cruciform appearance.

"Here we shall celebrate the divine liturgy," Kyriakos said, "celebrating also your glorious victory against the godless Sklavenoi who have for so long oppressed and harassed Thessalonike."

Notables, both priests and laymen, filled not only the wide nave of the church but also the aisles to either side, aisles separated from that nave by columns of red, green, and white marble, a stone with which Thessalonike is abundantly supplied. I admired the mosaics of St. Demetrios and others, who I learned were a prefect Leontios (the coincidence of names amused me), who had built the first church on the site more than two and a half centuries before, and Kyriakos's predecessor, John, who had led the defense of the city against the Sklavenoi during my great-great-grandfather's reign.