Harry Turtledove - Justinian

Again, my blood streamed after it. The crowd cheered. "He'll never be Emperor again!" Leontios shouted, and the cheers got louder. Again, the executioner, efficient in his craft, pressed a bandage to the hole in my face where my nose had been. That might have kept me from bleeding to death, but made it very difficult for me to breathe.

"Why don't you cauterize the cut?" asked the fellow holding my hair. He laughed nastily. "That'll make this bastard hurt even more."

"From what I've seen, cauterized wounds are more likely to fester," the executioner replied: a serious answer to what he judged a serious question. He turned to Leontios. "Unless you want to give him more pain, of course, Emperor."

"Let it go," Leontios said. "He could have killed me, I suppose, and he didn't. Get him on a ship, get him out of the city, get him out of my sight."

One of his henchmen prodded Myakes with his foot. "What about this one? Strike off his head and have done?"

I expected Leontios would say yes to that. But, through a haze of agony, I saw him shake his big, stupid head. "No, he can go to Kherson, too. The excubitores are my bodyguards now; they'd grumble if an officer of theirs died for no reason but that he was loyal."

Did I think they'd kill me, Brother Elpidios? Let's put it this way: I hoped they wouldn't. If Leontios hadn't killed me back at the Praitorion, back before he knew whether he could steal the throne, I didn't think he'd order it now in cold blood. But was I sure? Kyrie eleison, no! He might have figured the crowd hadn't seen enough blood to satisfy it from watching Justinian get mutilated, and decided to spice up the show with my head.

I didn't mind a bit when my bearers picked me up and slung me on their shoulders again. They weren't taking me to be slaughtered. When that's what your choice is, everything else looks good.

And Justinian, he'd need all the help he could get. Up till then, life had been easy for him. Oh, he'd had family die, but who doesn't? Life's a chancy business. But he'd always had plenty to eat, he'd always been healthy, he'd always been handsome, he'd always had people hop when he told them to hop. Now he didn't have any of that. I wondered if not having it would break him. Emperor to mutilated exile was a long, long step, and here he was with no choice but to make it all at once. Could he? I was glad I was alive to find out.

They dragged me and carried Myakes through the streets of the imperial city toward the Golden Horn, where waited the ship that would take me into exile at Kherson. News of the traitor's vile act had spread through every corner of the city. People jeered at me as I went. "Cut-Nose! Cut-Nose!" was the commonest cry. How I wished the ground would have opened beneath the senseless mockers, letting them fall into the flames of hell as they deserved.

I could not answer their jeers with curses, not with a rag stuffed into my mouth and another tied around the back of my head and over what had been my nose. A few of the jackals threw stones and rotten fruit at me. Some of them hit. I scarcely noticed. Next to the wounds I already had, those were small things. If only the mob had had a single neck, that I might have cut off its head with one blow!

The pain was fire, and would not cease. Every cobblestone I saw through a red haze. I think my senses reeled for a time, for we reached the quays faster than should have been possible for a part y of brigands and ruffians carrying one man and dragging along another who had been wounded.

"Bring him aboard!" called the captain of the ship that would take me into exile. His Greek was peculiar- peculiar enough that I noticed it in the state I was in at the time. With an effort like that of Herakles when in the pagan myth he briefly held up the world for Atlas, I raised my head. That yellow-haired fellow\a160… I had seen him before. After a moment, the name came to me: Apsimaros.

My captors laid me on the deck and cut the ropes that bound me. They did the same for Myakes. The torment of blood coming back to hands and feet helped distract me from my larger anguish. Sailors armed with cudgels and shortswords stood over us, as if we were about to dash back onto the wharf. However little I wanted to leave the imperial city, my flesh was at that moment incapable of further resistance. Whether Myakes could have fought them or not, I do not know. Taking his lead from me, as he had for so long, he did not fight.

Seeing us remain where Leontios's men had left us, most of the sailors soon went back to the business of readying the ship to depart. Three or four remained close by, though: enough to overpower us even had we been at the height of bodily strength. Apsimaros shouted orders in his guttural Greek: "Cast off the lines! Man the sweeps!"

When all satisfied him, Apsimaros shouted again. The sweeps bit into the water. Little by little, the ship moved away from the quay, out of the Golden Horn, and toward the Narrows, the strait separating Europe and Asia and sometimes still known by its ancient name, the Bosporos.

Perhaps the sea breeze in my face helped revive me to some small degree. Though incapable of standing, I made it to my hands and knees and crawled toward the stern of the ship. Several sailors accompanied me on the slow, painful journey. Had I tried to throw myself into the sea, I wonder if they would have stopped me. I suppose they would; the Narrows being such a thin ribbon of water, a miracle might have let me swim to land and survive, and they would not have wanted to take the chance- or to explain their lapse to Leontios.

But I had no thought of throwing myself into the sea: neither to escape, for, whether the sailors did or not, I knew I had no hope of making land, nor to end my life, for the only time I came close to suicide, as a small boy, it was from rage rather than despair.

Nor did I completely give myself over to despair even then. I peered back in the direction from which the ship had come until a swell of land hid Constantinople from my view. I slumped down after that, but one thought still burned in my mind: I will see the city again. By God and His mother, I will. BOOK C

I remember little of my arrival at Kherson. No, I shall be honest: I remember nothing of my arrival at Kherson. I had taken a fever in my wounds while sailing across the Black Sea, and recall only scattered patches of the journey. That may be as well, many of the memories I have lost surely being ones filled with torment.

I wonder what the Khersonites made of my sudden appearance on their distant shore. Till that ship reached them, I was, so far as they knew, Emperor of the Romans. In fact, when conscious I still considered myself Emperor of the Romans. The rest of the world, however, had a contrary opinion for the time being, and I was in no position to demonstrate how wrong it was.

Matter of fact, Brother Elpidios, Kherson isn't quite the end of the world, even if it is a long ways off and tucked up against the Khazars and the other barbarians who roam over the steppe with their herds. Sailing into it is even kind of pretty. It sits in a curved bay on the west side of the peninsula that sticks down into the Black Sea. The land rises up, almost like a stairway, toward the hills that keep the worst of the winter away.

When we came into the harbor, though, the whole place stank of fish. A lot of what they live on there is dried and salted fish. You hear people talking about bread, but you don't see it all that often. Sometimes they even grind up the dried fish into a kind of meal and bake it into wafers and sheets. They aren't so bad as they sound, not once you get used to them.

Church bells were ringing when we pulled up to their quays. They'd seen us from a long ways off, and they knew we weren't one of the little fishing boats that dot their waters like pepper on top of a stew. We were a real ship, from a real civilized place, and they were greedy not only for whatever we might have brought 'em but for whatever gossip we had, too.