Harry Turtledove: Justinian

Myakes stared at me. "Come back here, little Goldentop," he said. "Don't make foolish jokes." He spoke the same kind of clipped, elided Greek the sailors in the Proklianesian harbor had used. I understood it better now, from more exposure.

"I am not joking," I told him, and I was not. Had he said no, I would have jumped. I suppose they would have taken whatever was left of my body and buried it in the cemetery of Pelagios with the other suicides.

Myakes did not say anything. He took a step toward me. I could not back away from him, for I was up against a crenellation. I bent my knees, readying myself to leap out as far as I could from the wall. But I had forgotten how much faster than a child an adult can move. Myakes sprang forward, grabbed me, and pulled me back onto the walkway of the inner wall even as I was trying to leap to my death.

"Now," he said, breathing hard (and, looking back, I cannot blame him, for what would he have told my father- and what would have happened to him?- had I jumped?), "I am going to give you a choice. I will take you back to your father the Emperor and we will both tell him our stories, or I will give you a beating here and now for what you just did. You decide."

I tried to kick him in the shins. He jerked his leg out of the way. I tried to bite him. He would not let me. I cursed him, using all the words I had learned from the excubitores. He let them roll off him like water from oil-soaked cloth. "You do it," I said then. "Whatever you do to me, my father would do worse." My father was not so mild with me as he had been before the Arabs came; he had worse worries now. He still would not often strike me, but when he did, it was as if a demon seized his arm, for he would not stop.

"Come, then," Myakes said. Recovering his spear and shield, he slung the shield over his back, took the spear in his left hand, and seized firm hold of my arm with his right. We walked along to the nearest fortified tower, for all the world as if he were taking me to piddle at a latrine there, nothing more.

The latrine was empty when we walked into it. It stank of endless years of stale piss, which offended me: in the palace, sewer pipes swept waste away before it grew so ripely odorous. Myakes did not turn loose of me for a moment. No doubt he thought I would try to run off if he did. No doubt he was right.

"Remember our bargain," he said, and set down the shield and spear. He must have had a kindly father for, while the chastisement he gave me left my buttocks hot and tingling, it was all with the open hand, never once with fist or foot or the metal-studded belt he wore. At last he said, "Maybe you will think twice before you play such games with me again."

"I will think twice," I said, but I knew I had made the right choice. Almost I told him how mild he had been, but I refrained. He might, after all, have decided to make amends. Instead, I went on, "Now that the bargain is sealed, take me back out to watch some more of the fighting."

"From the inner wall here," he said. "Not from the outer one."

"Not from the outer one," I agreed.

"Come, then," he repeated, and we went out together.

By She who bore God, I've never been so frightened as I was in those few minutes! I was sorry I'd offered the bargain as soon as it was done. Hit the Emperor's son? Me? Afterwards, he might have said anything at all: that I'd beaten him worse than I had, even that I'd taken him into the latrine to try and sodomize him. Who would Constantine have believed, his firstborn or a guardsman whose name he might not know?

But what would the Emperor have done to me had his firstborn splattered himself on the cobblestones? That bore even less thinking about. And if once I let Justinian get his way with such a ploy, he would try, or threaten to try, again till he owned me. My idea, such as it was, was to make sure that didn't happen.

God was kind to me. It worked. It did more than work: it made Justinian my friend. I'd never imagined that. Poor puppy, he must have been so ignored at the palaces that even the flat of my hand on his backside felt good because it showed I knew he was alive.

And here I sit, past my threescore and ten, blind and shrunken- and how strange to hear myself spoken of as young and brawny and crammed to bursting with the juices of life. So many memories, most of them, I fear, so full of base carnality as to be sinful even to remember, and so I won't trouble your ears with them.

Eh? Oh, very well, just a few. But then you read again.

For five springs in a row, the deniers of Christ sailed forth from Kyzikos against this God-guarded and imperial city. I grew to take their yearly arrival utterly for granted: anything that happens through half a boy's life becomes fixed in his mind as an ineluctable law of nature.

What a host of warlike men they threw away in their futile assaults! They could not breach the land walls, nor, as they found in the last year of the siege, could they undermine them. And, on the sea, the fighting towers on our dromons and the liquid fire they hurled gave us Romans the victory again and again. As if I were a pagan watching Christians martyred by fire in the arena, I stared avidly out from the seawall as the followers of the false prophet burned alive, the unquenchable fires on their galleys foreshadowing the flames of hell. Myakes usually stood at my side, as he had been since the second spring of the siege.

Toward the end of that fifth summer, the Arabs sailed away from their Thracian camps earlier than was their wont. Their warships withdrew from our waters. Cautiously, my father ordered our dromons across the Propontis to spy out the enemy. And when those dromons returned, they did so with hosannas and cries of thanksgiving, for the followers of the false prophet were abandoning their enterprise and their base there, and were returning in disgrace to the lands ruled by their miscalled commander of the faithful.

How we praised God for delivering us from the foe despite the multitude of our sins! And how many more sins, I have no doubt when looking back on the time with a man's years, were committed to celebrate that deliverance. Having then but nine years, I was limited as to the sins of the flesh, but poured two cups of neat wine into my little brother Herakleios, laughing like a madman to hear him babble and watch him stagger.

When my uncles saw little Herakleios, who would have been three then, they laughed themselves hoarse. When my mother saw him, she was horror-stricken- but she laughed, too. And when my father saw him, he laughed so hard, he had to lean against the wall to hold himself upright- and when he was done laughing, he gave me a beating that, like so many of his, made the one I had had from Myakes seem a pat on the back by comparison.

I went looking for my only friend, but did not find him, not then. I had a hard time finding any excubitores. Had an assassin wanted to sneak into the palaces and slay my father, that would have been the time to do it, with so many guardsmen off roistering. But, on that day of days, surely the assassins were off roistering, too.

"Nothing I can do, Goldentop," he said the next day, when I did tell him my troubles. "The Emperor is your father, and he has the right to beat you when you do wrong- and you did wrong." He spoke slowly, carefully, and quietly, not, most likely, for my sake, but for his own, for he must have been nursing a thick head.

With anyone else, I would have been angry, but Myakes could say such things to me, not least because with him, unlike my father and my other kinsfolk, I was the one who chose how much heed I paid. "Where everyone else is glad, I am almost sorry the Arabs have gone away," I said.

"What?" He stared at me. "Are you daft? Why?"