Harry Turtledove - Justinian

At Neboulos's command, the Sklavenoi cut the throats of enough sheep to feed me and my escort along with themselves, then butchered the carcasses and roasted them over fires made in pits they dug in the ground. They served us the mutton along with both wine and the barley drink they brew: rough fare, rougher even that I had eaten when campaigning against them, but filling and in its own way satisfying even so.

I had mutton fat in my mustache, and could smell it every time I inhaled no matter how often I wiped my mouth. Neboulos leaned over to me and asked, "Do I hear right, Emperor: your wife is dead?"

"Yes," I said shortly. Who could expect a barbarian to have manners?

"You stay here with us tonight, yes?" he said, and went on without waiting for my answer: "Shall I bring you pretty woman, to keep you warm, to keep you happy?"

Most times, most places, I should have said yes to that in those days. But hearing Neboulos put me in mind of the night after we sacked his village, and of the Sklavinian woman I had chosen from among the captives. "No!" I exclaimed, perhaps more sharply than I had intended.

Neboulos, being an ignorant heathen who knew no better, then asked, "If you do not want pretty woman, shall I bring you pretty boy?"

"No!" I said again, even more sharply that before: so sharply, in fact, that Neboulos's eyes widened in surprise. I explained: "In the law of the Roman Empire, those who partake of this impious practice are put to the sword: it is criminal, as the Holy Scriptures clearly set forth. Even bishops who succumb to it face harsh punishment. I know of one who was tortured and sent into exile, and another who was castrated and paraded through the streets for the people of his city to mock."

"Seems silly to make such fuss over this thing," Neboulos said, never having had the privilege of learning the precepts of the true and holy Christian faith. Then, though, he shrugged. "If you do not want pretty girl or pretty boy, I do not bring you pretty girl or pretty boy. You sleep by yourself. You are Emperor; you can do as you like."

I was not altogether by myself in bed that night, being accompanied by an inordinate number of mosquitoes. But pederasty is not only against the law of God and man, it has never been to my taste. And, remembering the one untamed Sklavinian woman, I was not anxious to try another.

What Neboulos had shown me left me encouraged on my return to the imperial city. He did seem at least to be attempting to do as he had promised when he surrendered up north of Thessalonike. Perhaps the special army he had vowed to create would be worth hurling at the Arabs. Better by far, I thought, to spend Sklavinian lives than Roman.

"Emperor," Stephen the Persian said, "I want you to examine these coins we have received from the followers of the false prophet in their latest tribute payment." His voice quivered with indignation. Stephen could be relied upon to take seriously anything pertaining to gold.

The coins he handed me were not Roman nomismata, though their obverses, copied from goldpieces of my predecessors, closely resembled our mintings. When I turned the coins over, though, I saw at once what had upset him. It was not so much that the deniers of Christ truncated the cross on the reverse of their goldpieces; thanks to their false religion, they had been doing that for some time. But the inscriptions on these new coins were not in the Greek and Latin characters we Romans use on our nomismata; they appeared instead in the sinuous, ophidian letters the Arabs employ to write their own jargon.

"What do they say?" I asked.

"Something extolling their false prophet and senseless god, I have no doubt," Stephen replied. "That they copy our coins is bad enough. That they do such a thing as this is much worse."

"I wonder how they would like it if we minted coins with legends calling their Mouamet a liar," I said, and then, in an altogether different tone of voice, "I wonder how they would like it if we minted coins calling their Mouamet a liar." The idea appealed to me, not least because it would be the plain and simple truth.

"That is an interesting notion, Emperor," Stephen the Persian replied, "but not one that is germane here, the question at hand being, what is to be done about the presence of these anomalous coins in this year's tribute?"

As I had seen, in matters having to do with money he was single-mindedness itself. The notion of calling the false prophet a liar and a blasphemer on our nomismata remained most tempting, for those coins pass current far beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, and it was an opportunity for us to tell the Arabs what we thought of their misguided, diabolically inspired heresy. Reluctantly, I brought my mind back to the question the sakellarios had asked, and I asked a question of my own: "Are these goldpieces of the proper weight and purity?"

"They are," he said, sounding as if he hated to admit it.

"Then this year, at least, we shall accept them," I said. "We can melt them down and remint them so these offending messages do not spread through the Empire. It is a nuisance, I know, but I am not yet fully prepared to go to war with Abimelekh."

"As you wish," he said, again unhappily. Listening to him, I got the idea that, for the sake of any tiny alteration in the goldpieces we received as tribute, he would have sent every soldier we had marching against the miscalled commander of the faithful.

Never having been one to turn the other cheek to slights no matter how small, I might under other circumstances have felt the same. When I did not, I wondered why, and realized I wanted to wait until Neboulos's special army should be ready before warring against the Arabs. Only then did I fully understand how much hope I had for that army.

"The tribute will stop, at least for a while, when we do go to war against the deniers of Christ," I reminded him. "I want to be certain we have enough in the treasury to fight for a long time even without the tribute's coming in, and also to run the state afterwards without it."

"You may depend on me for that," Stephen the Persian said. "I should also note that my colleague Theodotos, whom I commended to you before, has proved most ingenious in gaining for the fisc all taxes due it."

"Good," I told him. "Congratulate him on his diligence. Gold will be scarce when the Arabs leave off paying tribute. However large a store of nomismata we can build in advance will help us pay for the war. We must get this money, by whatever means prove necessary."

"By whatever means prove necessary," Stephen repeated. "You may depend on me- and on Theodotos- for that."

He was as good as his word, and so was Theodotos, who proved so capable, I promoted him to general logothete, a position of equal rank to Stephen's. Over the next few months, petitions pertaining to the collection of taxes increased sharply. So did the anguished tone of those petitions. When handing me one sheaf of them, the logothete in charge of petitions, a white-bearded bureaucrat named Sisinniakes who might have served the Empire since the days of my great-great-grandfather, said, "Emperor, these people hate your tax collectors so much, they and others like them are liable to end up hating you, too."

If I had not heeded that advice from my mother, I would not heed it from Sisinniakes, either. I stared at him until he lowered his eyes and muttered in embarrassment at having spoken out of turn. "The fisc must be served," I said. "Those who seek to cheat it of its rightful due must be discovered and made to pay in full. Remember, your pay comes from the treasury, too." He bowed and withdrew, leaving the petitions behind.

More soon came in to the palace: fools kept grumbling because the state that protected them from the ravages of the barbarians and the followers of the false prophet could not do so free of cost. But Sisinniakes was right at least to the extent that even the grumbling of fools could prove dangerous. And so, summoning Stephen and Theodotos to the throne room in the grand palace, I allowed some of those alleging my officials had wronged them to come before me and try to convince me they were right.