Harry Turtledove - Justinian

"An excellent idea," I said.

She kept on talking, right through me: "And he picked up one of the switches he uses to thrash those who will not pay what he demands, and he hit me once across the back with it, as if I were a schoolboy who had not learned his lessons."

She was my mother. Had she not also been nagging me, pushing me in directions in which I did not wish to go, no doubt I should have been outraged. As things were, the first thought crossing my mind was, Good- you deserve it. Saying that, though, would only have made our quarrel worse. What I did say was, "Now that I am back in the imperial city, I will tend to matters of the fisc myself. You need never have anything to do with Stephen the Persian again."

It was not enough. Looking back, I see that. At the time, I deemed it the height of generosity. My mother's mouth thinned to a pale, narrow line. "Thank you so much, Emperor," she said, and left the dining chamber quite abruptly- and quite against etiquette.

I do not think she spread the story through the city. In spite of our spats, she was always loyal to the family. I know I did not spread the story. Nevertheless, it did spread, which meant it must have spread from the lips of Stephen the Persian, boasting of the power he wielded. Perhaps he made himself feared with such tales; he surely made himself hated. And, as my mother had warned me, he made me hated, too. We both paid the price for it a few years later.

"Emperor, have mercy!" The fat little man- John, his name was- arose from his prostration with a wail like that of a distraught mourner in a funeral procession. "Have mercy on the pitiful island of Cyprus!"

He was the archbishop of Cyprus. Even so, having learned that anyone coming before the Emperor of the Romans on his throne will make a small problem seem large and a large one seem the end of the world, I discounted at least half that anguished wail. What remained after such discounting, though, was enough to concern me. "Have mercy on Cyprus?" I said, raising an eyebrow. "I thought I have had mercy on Cyprus, arranging for the taxes from the island to be shared between us and the followers of the false prophet. The island has had no share of fighting ever since."

"Not no fighting, Emperor- less fighting," John said. "Your armies and those of the Arabs' miscalled commander of the faithful do not clash there, but s trife between their villages and ours remains. And we Christians there have to pay a tax for the privilege of practicing our true and holy faith."

"Do they make you pay that tax over and above their half of what they collect? Or is it part of that half?" I asked, knowing the deniers of Christ made their Christian subjects pay that tax through all the lands they ruled.

John's face twisted; he must have hoped I would not ask that question. "As part of their half of the total tax to be paid," he said unwillingly.

"Idiot!" I shouted, and he blanched. "Blockhead! Imbecile! Cretin! Dolt! For a tax which he is within his rights to levy, you want me to go to war with Abimelekh?"

"And for the harassment our villages endure, yes," John said.

"It is not enough, not close to enough," I told him. "Begone! Since you are in a Christian land here, go to the church of the Holy Wisdom and thank God for my mercy in not sending you home with stripes on your back. And while you are there, pray to God to grant you some of His wisdom, for plainly you have not got enough of your own."

He fled. Some of the oldest courtiers had served since the last days of my great-great-grandfather's reign, nearly half a century before. They united in telling me they had never seen anyone withdraw from the imperial presence so precipitously. "Anybody'd think he'd been struck with the urgent squats," one of them said, chuckling.

I froze him with a glance, whereupon he withdrew from my presence almost as fast as John the Cypriot had done. I remembered too well how my father had died. At the next imperial audience, the old fool did not attend me, pleading an indisposition. I sent word that the longer he remained indisposed, the happier I would be. He never returned to court, and died the following year. His funeral, for that of a man of such high rank, was remarkably ill-attended.

John soon went back to Cyprus, sadder and probably not wiser. His pleas, even if I could not honor them, left me thoughtful. If I resettled the Cypriots on territory definitively Roman, I could gather for myself all the taxes they yielded, sharing none with Abimelekh. Since the treaty between us said not a word about such resettlement, I would have been within my rights to do so.

But the time was not yet ripe. The war with the Bulgars might well have continued into the following campaigning season, and I did not wish to embroil myself with them and with the followers of the false prophet at the same time. So long as Abimelekh paid his tribute as he should, Cyprus would have to wait.

Not long after John had returned to Cyprus, the ecumenical patriarch Paul approached me, saying, "Emperor, your piety is renowned among Christians throughout the civilized world."

"For which I thank you," I said. His opening obviously being preface for a request of one sort or another, I said no more, waiting instead to see how he would proceed.

"The sixth holy and ecumenical synod was a splendid jewel in your father's crown of accomplishments, perhaps the most splendid in all his reign," he said.

"Perhaps, though he would have been in a poor position to call the synod had he not protected Constantinople from the deniers of Christ," I returned.

"Rooting out the misguided doctrines of monotheletism and monenergism weighs more in the scales of God, Who surely aided him in preserving the imperial city so that he could restore correct dogma to the true and holy faith," the patriarch said.

"It may be so," I admitted after a little thought, for who can deny that the world to come, wherein we shall exist for all eternity, is of greater moment than our tiny eyeblink of life here on earth?

"It is so," Paul declared, luminous faith on his face. After a moment, he went on, "Magnificent as the ecumenical synod was, however, and marvelously as it established the doctrines of the holy Christian church, its work, regrettably, was incomplete. As had the fifth ecumenical synod before it, convened by the great Roman Emperor who bore the name with which your father endowed you, it dealt with doctrine at the expense of discipline."

I knew that, as my father had known it before me. Some questions of discipline, now, had awaited settlement for nearly a century and a half: not surprisingly, dogma had to be established first, whereupon, all too often, the zeal of the holy fathers flagged. I asked the question he no doubt expected me to ask: "What remedy do you propose?"

"A new synod, Emperor," he replied, "one that will deal solely with the matters of discipline the last two holy and ecumenical synods failed to cover. You must agree, these matters have gone neglected too long."

"I do agree," I said.

Paul took no notice. Once started on a chain of thought, he would pursue it link by link, even if the person to whom he was speaking had skipped several links and reached the end before him. Now he said, "Matters such as ordination, proper clerical dress, simony, and alienation of monastic property stand in urgent need of definition and legislation. So do less purely ecclesiastical matters like marriage and public morality, manumission of slaves, and the correct representation of our Lord Jesus Christ and the suppression of base and ignorant superstition."

He ticked off the points on his fingers, one by one, as if to make sure he omitted none. Plainly, he had forereadied them. I thought more of him for that, not less, having had many hours of my life wasted by lackwits unprepared for the audiences they had gained with me.