Harry Turtledove - Justinian

Yet the brief silence that followed was not altogether a product of that stunning call's effect on my ears. The Sklavenoi, who had been raucously celebrating their return to the land in which I had resettled them, paused in their no doubt drunken debauch, wondering what the two blasts meant.

They were not left in doubt for long. The noise rising up into the heavens was not like that which I had heard during the battle near Sebastopolis, nor even like that following my soldiers' breaking into the Sklavinian village from which Neboulos had ruled as kinglet. Upon our breaking into that village after penetrating the circle of carts and wagons the Sklavenoi had thrown up around it, the barbarians- warriors, women, even children- could have been in no doubt as to our intention, and comported themselves accordingly. Here\a160…

Here, as I had intended, our onslaught took them altogether by surprise. Their first cries, then, were friendly, even welcoming: they believed the men from the military districts rushing upon them sword in hand had come to join in their revels. Only when they began falling to the Roman soldiers did they realize the trap in which they had been placed, and realize also they had no escape.

How their screams and wails rose to the heavens then! And how unavailing those screams and wails were! Even a well-disciplined force of fully armed soldiers, assailed without warning from three sides at once with cliffs on the fourth, would have suffered catastrophic losses. The Sklavenoi, as they had proved again and again, were anything but well disciplined. They were not fully armed, nor could they fully arm themselves, all their weapons past knives and a few swords being stored in the wagons the men from the military districts controlled. And they were not, or many of them were not, soldiers but the sluts and brats who attached themselves to soldiers.

Everything proceeded exactly as I had hoped it might. It was not simply victory, it was not simply slaughter, it was massacre. Listening to the Sklavenoi d ying under the swords and javelins of the Roman soldiers who set upon them, listening to the screams of those who leaped off the precipices of Leukate to avoid the Romans' avenging weapons and to those of the Sklavenoi whom the soldiers herded over those precipices, that being an easier and safer way to dispose of them than any other, was as exciting, as gratifying, as the chastisement I had given Leontios in partial requital for his failure at Sebastopolis.

I was certain some of the cavalrymen form the military districts were saving some Sklavinian women to enjoy before killing them, or perhaps even to keep. Being filled with bloodlust and simple fleshly lust myself, I envied them their acquisitions. However much I lusted, though, I despatched no messenger with an order to put aside one of the yellow-haired women for me. One experience with a Sklavinian wench brought to me at sword's point sufficed for a lifetime. I stood in the darkness in front of my tent, blood thundering in my ears, listening to those who had betrayed me, betrayed Romania, dying as they deserved.

By midnight, it was over. With a squadron of excubitores bearing torches, I walked through the Sklavinian encampment. Death and the stench of death were everywhere. Here and there, my guardsmen and I had to walk on twisted bodies, no open ground showing beneath or around them. For all that, though, there were fewer corpses than I had expected. "Did our soldiers let some of the barbarians escape?" I growled, not concerned over a few women but rather over any large number of men. "If they did, they shall be punished."

Then the excubitores led me to the white, chalky cliffs. Some of them leaned over, arms extended, thrusting out their torches as far as they could. I leaned over myself and peered down. The light the torches cast on the scene at the base of the precipices was meager, but enough. Corpses were drifted there like snow after a winter blizzard. I still heard an occasional moan, not all the Sklavenoi forced over the edge having died at once.

In the morning, I would send some soldiers down there to finish their work completely. For the time being, what I had accomplished would do. And I saw every thing that I had made, and, behold, it was very good.

How did Justinian dare to take the Holy Scriptures' words about God and use them to speak of himself, Brother Elpidios? Yes, I think it's an outrage, too. If you want to think God punished him for that sin, how can I argue with you, considering the way he ended up?

But he was Emperor of the Romans, remember- God's deputy on earth. And any man who takes pen in hand uses the words of the Bible to help give his own thoughts shape. I think that's what he was doing, nothing worse. I don't think he had blasphemy on his mind.

Something worse? Oh, the massacre. I did try to stop it. You heard what Justinian had to say about that. The Sklavenoi who came back hadn't done anything wrong; they proved as much by coming back. But Justinian wouldn't listen to me. There were times- too many times- when Justinian wouldn't listen to anyone but Justinian.

God was listening? Well, I hope so. I'm an old sinner now, and pretty soon I'll see Him face to face. At least I can hope there's something on the other side of the scales to keep those sins from dragging me down to hell. I can hope. Can't I, Brother?

Having avenged myself against the Sklavenoi, I dismissed the Anatolic troops and those from the Opsikion, allowing them to return to their respective military districts. As they began their journey eastward, many of them thanked me for having allowed them to take part in my vengeance.

"The pleasure was mine," I said, to which they responded with laughter. But what sounded like a witticism was nothing less than simple truth.

Accompanied only by the excubitores and by Leontios, then I went back to Nikomedeia. The guardsmen marched as if expecting combat at any moment, and so perhaps they were, the country through which we were marching still being that upon which I had resettled the Sklavenoi. But the surviving barbarians, instead of attacking us, fled far away, not wishing to invite further chastisement on themselves.

From Nikomedeia to Chalcedon across the Bosporos from Constantinople, the journey along the military road was uneventful. Ferries waited there to take me, the guardsmen, and Leontios back to the God-guarded and imperial city. Although returning sooner and with less glory than I had hoped upon beginning my campaign, I had lost no great stretch of Roman territory despite defeat at the battle by Sebastopolis.

I invited Leontios to accompany me and one company of the excubitores on the ship that would return us to Constantinople. "Thank you, Emperor; that's very kind of you," he said. "I'm glad you're not upset any more, and that you've gotten over being angry at me." He went up onto the deck of the ferry with a broad smile of relief stretched across his face.

The wind blowing from the wrong quarter, oarsmen took us across the narrow neck of water separating Asia from Europe. Before we had gone more than a couple of bowshots from the quays of Chalcedon, I pointed to Leontios and called out to the excubitores near me: "Seize that man and cast him in chains!"

"What?" Leontios bellowed, like a bull at the moment when the knife makes it into a steer. As the excubitores dragged him down, he exclaimed, "Emperor, I thought you'd forgiven me!"

"What do I care what you thought?" I said while the guardsmen were wrapping heavy iron chains around his wrists and ankles and locking them with heavy iron padlocks. "I never forgive those who wrong me. I punish them- as they deserve."

Leontios kept on bellowing, quite unpleasantly. One of the excubitores asked, "Shall we pick him up and fling him into the drink, Emperor? A few bubbles and it'd be all over. With all those chains on him, he'll sink like a rock."