Harry Turtledove - Justinian

At the close of the liturgy, I took communion from Kyriakos, eating of our Lord's flesh and drinking His blood. Afterwards, the bishop introduced me to a whole great swarm of prominent Thessalonikans, men whose names vanished from my head the moment I left the city they inhabited. And why not? Men who think themselves worth remembering come to Constantinople, to see if they can prove it.

A partial exception was Dorotheos, commander of the garrison of Thessalonike. Even he, though, was less than he might have been, allowing Kyriakos to take the leading role in administering Thessalonike; in that, though, he but acquiesced to a long-standing tradition of episcopal control in city affairs.

To me, Dorotheos said, "You have done a great thing, Emperor, in subduing the Sklavenoi hereabouts. They've made life miserable for us the past hundred years."

"Your hinterland is free of them now, for I've cleared them out by the tens of thousands," I answered, and then paused, struck by a happy thought. I had been contemplating making Thrace a military district on the order of those in Anatolia; doing the same around Thessalonike would give the city warriors on whom to draw should the barbarian menace revive. I said, "I will send military peasants here, to settle on some of the lands cleared of the Sklavenoi. And you, Dorotheos, you I shall name the first commander of the military district of Hellas." At the last moment, I chose that more sweeping title instead of naming the district after Thessalonike.

"Thank you, Emperor!" Dorotheos exclaimed. We both knew, of course, that great stretches of Hellas remained outside effective Roman control- indeed, outside any Roman control at all- being overrun by more bands of Sklavenoi. All the same, the name offered the promise of eventual redemption for the territory named.

Then Kyriakos said, "What a splendid promotion for you, Dorotheos," in tones suggesting he did not find it splendid at all. I realized the bishop was used to being the leading man in Thessalonike, and found anything tending to aggrandize a rival distasteful in the extreme. I also realized I would be wise to do something to placate Kyriakos, as he would probably remain more important here than Dorotheos even after the military district of Hellas was established.

At a supper later that evening, I found a way to grant Kyriakos a favor without diminishing the new authority I was conferring upon Dorotheos. The centerpiece at the feast was a roast kid basted with olive oil and crushed garlic. Watching Neboulos amused me; while relishing the fatty richness of the dish, he cut away the crisp outermost slices of meat and shoveled on salt with both hands to kill the taste of the garlic, the Sklavenoi, like many barbarians, being less fond of it than we Romans.

When he noticed my eye on him, he said, "Emperor, I am glad again I surrender to you. You Romans live by sea, make all salt you want. You do not sell salt to me. You do not sell it to my people. Now at last I can eat all I want." And he reached for the saltcellar again.

"Selling salt is against our law," I said, and let it go at that. Without salt, preserving food is much harder. That makes the stuff a weapon of war, hardly less than iron. Anyone selling his foes that which strengthens them deserves what happens to him.

Neboulos sprinkled still more salt over the fresh surfaces of kid his knife exposed. Turning to Kyriakos, I adapted the text of the Book of Matthew, saying, "In the Sklavinian you see a man for whom the salt has not lost his savor."

"True enough, Emperor," he said, and then, lowering his voice, "I would not mind if, like Lot's wife, he were turned into a pillar of salt. Not only would we be rid of him as a man- which, thanks to you, we are in a different way- but we could break him up and sell him for a good price."

I laughed, but quickly grew thoughtful. "You want to sell salt for a good price? I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll give the church of Saint Demetrios a salt pan all to itself, and all the revenues from it, to thank the saint for aiding us against the Sklavenoi. Let the salt pan be entirely free: you'll pay no taxes for it, and you will not be obliged to furnish salt from it to the soldiers without payment. Does that suit you, Kyriakos?"

"God bless you, Emperor!" the bishop exclaimed, which I took for an affirmative.

"My secretaries will draw up the edict tomorrow," I said, and Kyriakos looked more joyful still. Thessalonike lying by the sea, granting the church he headed the privilege of producing its own salt would bring it extra revenue without seriously inconveniencing the garrison, which had other salt pans upon which to draw. It also helped salve the bishop's bitterness at the greater authority Dorotheos was to acquire.

If I could not live in Constantinople, I would sooner make my home in Thessalonike than in any other city I have seen. But I could not stay there long. It was already September, the beginning of a new year, and I wanted to strike a blow at the Bulgars before returning to the imperial city for the winter.

To reach the Bulgars, the Roman army had to pass through the territory of the seven tribes of Sklavenoi they had subjected to themselves when they settled south of the Danube after my father failed to crush them north of the river. The roads leading up to that country were frightfully bad. Even when it was under Roman rule, it had been a raw frontier district, and it had been ravaged by Goths and Huns and Avars and Sklavenoi and Bulgars; whatever highways had existed were now dirt tracks at best, memories at worst.

The Sklavenoi of the Seven Tribes tried to withstand us from villages surrounded by a circle of wagons, as Neboulos had; the dreadful roads must have prevented word of what we could do to such works from reaching so far north. Liquid fire proved as effective against them as it had against him.

He stood at my side as the flames leaped forth and seized the wagons. "How do you Romans do that?" he asked me, watching the Sklavenoi try and fail to douse the flames, watching our soldiers take advantage of the chaos the fire caused and cut down the barbarians.

"It is a gift from God," I answered. Neboulos was free enough within the camp, but not so free as to be able to sniff around the wagons where the liquid fire and the tubes and bellows used to project it were stored. I had warned his guards their heads would answer for that. They believed me, which was as well, for I meant every word of it.

"Your god is a strong god," Neboulos said. He knew little of the true and holy Christian faith, worshiping instead the lying demons who, calling themselves gods, have deceived and damned the Sklavinian race.

These Sklavenoi did not resist so stoutly as had the barbarians Neboulos had led. On our breaking into their village, they threw down their bows and javelins and cried for mercy in their own tongue and in such fragments of Greek and even of Latin (this having been, before the barbarians' invasions, a Latin-speaking land, they must have learned it from a few surviving peasants) as they had. We took prisoners by the thousands, and sent them down toward the Via Egnatia for resettlement.

Among the prisoners were many comely women. As far as I was concerned, the soldiers who wanted them were welcome to them.

Having defeated the Sklavenoi of the Seven Tribes, we pushed north and east over the Haimos Mountains, invading the land the Bulgars held directly. They fled before us, driving their herds of cattle and sheep with them. Unlike the Sklavenoi, who lived in villages and farmed, the Bulgars were nomads without fixed abode, and the more difficult to bring to battle against their will on account of that.

We might yet have punished them as they deserved, they being unprepared to resist so many Romans roaming through the land they had stolen, had not the weather turned against us. It might as well be a different world north of the mountains; the olive does not grow there, nor does the grapevine: the winters in that benighted province are too fierce to let either survive. And the first snowstorms came early that year, covering the land in white.