Harry Turtledove - Justinian

Not long afterwards, news came that the prince of Lazika, whose name, if memory serves, was Sergios, brought his district, which lies on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea east of Trebizond, under the dominion of the deniers of Christ, as Sabbatios the Armenian had with his a few years before.

Both these tidbits reached Kherson months after they happened. Myakes heard the first of them on the wharves, I the second in a tavern. When I brought it back to him at the xenodokheion, he looked thoughtful and said, "The generals in the military districts aren't going to be very happy with Leontios."

I snorted. "Who would be happy with Leontios? No one with his wits about him, that's certain." Then, unbidden, a horrid thought struck me. "By the Virgin Mother of God, Myakes, suppose one of those generals overthrows Leontios and takes the throne while I rot here, across the sea from everything that matters?"

"Don't really know what you can do about that, Emperor," Myakes said. He twisted awkwardly, trying to scratch the small of his back. "Something bit me."

Something had bitten me, too: fear. Back in Romania, as Myakes had said, the generals were undoubtedly seething at Leontios's ineptitude. And, if one of them took it into his mind to do more than seethe, he had the resources with which to topple the sluggard: men and weapons and gold.

And what had I? A pallet in a xenodokheion in a half-barbarous town owing first allegiance to the Khazar nomads, and one former guardsman who had constituted himself my servant still. And somehow, incredibly, more than two years had passed since Leontios shipped me into exile. Save for being hale in body once more, I was no closer to returning to what was rightfully mine than I had been when Apsimaros poured my fever-wracked carcass onto the Kherson quay.

"Suppose someone who actually knows how to rule seizes the throne," I said, clutching at Myakes' arm. "Leontios is an easy target, but I can think of half a dozen men who would be very devils to put down."

"So can I," he answered, scratching still. He did not sound greatly concerned. He was always calmer by nature than I, and he had also come to be contented with the life he was living. And yet how can I say that, having spent so long content to live like a beast satisfying animal lusts but no others? Nor, though I did not yet know it, was my exile anywhere near complete.

My trouble was simplicity itself: how was I to go about establishing an army that could retake Constantinople in a town lacking enough men to form a proper regiment, and in a town, moreover, where, being who I was and what I was, I could not hide, and where the tudun was determined I should do no such thing? Easy enough to discover the difficulty. Discovering a solution to it was years away.

I had, by then, made a couple of tavern friends I felt I could trust: a half-Khazar named Barisbakourios and his brother Salibas, who sometimes went (and whom I preferred to call) by the more properly Greek name, Stephen. Drunk and sober, they proclaimed they would be glad to help me regain my throne. With faithful Myakes, they made me an army of three. With an army of three, I stayed in Kherson.

News continued to trickle into the town, however distantly removed from the time when it had actually occurred. One of the relatively rare ships from Constantinople itself brought word that the Arabs had seized Carthage. I drank myself senseless when I heard that. One of the reasons my grandfather, Constans, had sailed to Italy and Sicily and his eventual murder in the barbarous west was to protect Carthage from the followers of the false prophet. And now, Constans having given his life to defend it, Leontios fecklessly threw it away.

"Leontios will have to do something about that, Emperor," Myakes said when, the next day, I took word back to the xenodokheion.

"Will he?" I had a headache like death, which inclined me even more than I would have been otherwise toward doubting any possible link between Leontios on the one hand and doing something on the other.

"Aye, he will," Myakes answered through a mouthful of salt-fish stew. He was eating in a hurry, as he intended to go up to the harbor to look for work. But he spared me a couple of more sentences, saying, "Losing Carthage is like losing Thessalonike or Ankyra would be. He can't ignore it."

"Who says he can't?" I returned. Ignoring inconvenient difficulties was one of the few things Leontios had proved he did well.

Here, however, Myakes proved correct. Leontios set out a fleet, I learned eventually, and, to my astonishment, succeeded in driving the Arabs from Carthage. Returning in larger numbers, however, they then defeated us Romans. The commander of the Roman expedition, a certain John, sailed back to the Empire for reinforcements, not having enough men with him to stand up to the larger army the deniers of Christ had moved against him.

On his reaching Crete, though, his junior officers revealed a plan of their own: to sail east rather than returning to the west. They struck for Constantinople, having proclaimed one of their own number Emperor of the Romans.

"He has a funny name, a foreign kind of name," the sailor who was telling me the story said, "so people are calling him Tiberius instead of, of\a160…" His memory failed until I bought him another cup of wine. "Of Apsimaros, that's it."

"Apsimaros?" I had been drinking wine myself; at that name, I swallowed wrong, coughed, and sprayed little drops of red over the tabletop in front of me. "They couldn't have dug up a bigger nobody if they tried for a year."

Strictly speaking, I suppose that is not true. Phokas, whom my great-great-grandfather overthrew to the salvation of the Roman Empire, had been but a commander of a hundred before a mutiny raised him to imperial rank- in his case, I shall not say imperial dignity. Apsimaros was of higher standing than that.

After dabbing at himself, my informant said, "That's the name, all right. Once you hear it, how can you forget it?" Except, of course, as a means of gaining more wine. "He's in Sykai now, they say, across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, and trying to figure out how to break in."

I bought him still more wine in the hope that he could tell me something else, but he, wine or no, had run dry, leaving me disappointed. To become Emperor, a rebel must seize the Queen of Cities. My great-great-grandfather had managed it against Phokas, for no one defended the vicious tyrant. Leontios had managed against me, seizing the city from the inside out, so to speak. Apsimaros, though, was attempting what I would also have to do when my day came: breaking into Constantinople against opposition. The followers of the false prophet had not managed that. Could anyone?

The next ship up from Constantinople brought the announcement of the accession of Tiberius, Emperor of the Romans, who, it was reluctantly admitted, had once borne the barbarous appellation of Apsimaros. That was all the official word given forth. Myakes got more out of the sailors, who, remembering what they reckoned my former rank, were reluctant- were afraid- to speak to me.

"He bribed Leontios's soldiers up at Blakhernai, that's what he did," Myakes reported. "They opened the gates for his men, and in he came. Did some pretty good plundering, the soldiers he had with him." His sigh said he wished he'd been there himself. But then he brightened. "Ah, that's the other thing: Apsimaros caught Leontios." He beamed from ear to ear.

I shrugged. "Since he's calling himself- miscalling himself- Emperor now, I suppose he would have. Leontios must be shorter by a head." It was my turn to sigh. "Too bad. I wanted to kill him myself."

"He's not dead, Emperor." Myakes beamed wider than ever. "Apsimaros the asp bit him, sure enough, but not to death. He packed him off to the monastery of Delmatos, but first- do you know what he did first?"