Harry Turtledove - Justinian

"It looks like you're drawing a leaf," Myakes told him, he being able to see the shape I was trying to discern from sense of touch alone.

"Leaf, oh yes," Auriabedas said. "For center of nose bottom and for sides. You understand?" He touched the wings of flesh around his nostrils to show what he meant. Then he looked at Myakes, seeming troubled as he did so. "I cut. I hurt. I make pain. You are understanding this, oh yes? I need mans to hold. Not one man. Two mans, three mans, maybeso more mans. Not have here."

I held up a hand. Once moved, it seemed to stay in place of its own accord. "Auriabedas, by God and the Virgin Mother of God I swear I shall not move as you cut me. Do what needs to be done. I shall endure it."

The troubled look did not leave his face. "You say this now. What you do once I start cut, that very very different. I tell you. You hear me?"

"I hear you," I answered. "I shall not move, I tell you. Do you hear me?" I folded my arms across my chest and tilted my head up so he would have the best possible light by which to work. "Begin."

He began.

Brother Elpidios, if somebody told me about it and I wasn't there to see it with my own eyes, I'd call him a liar to his face. You know about poppy juice, don't you? Ah, I thought as much. What it does is, it makes bad horrible pain seem like plain horrible pain. That's all it does. I had some after they put my eyes out. I guess I know.

Well, Justinian, he just sat there like he was a marble statue. Except to breathe, he never twitched, not even once. He didn't scream, he didn't yell, he didn't even hiss. He never once tried knocking Auriabedas's hand away. No, I take it back. Justinian wasn't just like a marble statue. Marble doesn't bleed.

If you could stand it, it was fascinating to watch. Me, I'd seen enough battlefields so it didn't bother me too bad. The little brown man made the first cuts right above the top of Justinian's mustache. When Justinian didn't flinch, he sort of muttered to himself and kept on making little cuts till that whole stretch was raw meat.

Once he was happy he'd chopped Justinian up enough there, he started cutting away at the leaf he'd drawn on his forehead. He cut it from the bottom up, I suppose so the blood wouldn't drip on the line in a place where he hadn't cut yet. Once he'd cut a section, he had to slide the knife under it to free it from the flesh underneath, not that you've got a lot of flesh between the skin of your forehead and the bone there.

After a while, he had the whole leaf free. He gave it a half-twist at the bottom, so it would still be skin side out when he put it over the hole where Justinian's nose used to be. I'd wondered how he was going to manage that. He knew what he was doing, all right. Justinian hadn't made a mistake there.

He sewed the leaf to the raw meat at the very base of what would be the new nose. Justinian didn't wiggle for that, either. "Blood in both," Auriabedas said. "Blood join blood, oh yes, all good." Justinian does a fine job of writing down the funny way he talked. I can hear it in my head, even if I haven't much thought of it over the years between then and now.

I'd wondered what his little wooden tubes were for. He put them into Justinian's nose- or what was going to be his nose- to give shape to his nostrils. Then he did some more sewing and finished bandaging Justinian's face. By then, with all the rags there and more rags around where he'd sliced that leaf-shaped flap out of Justinian's forehead, the little brown fellow had wrapped him up good.

When Auriabedas was all done, he turned to me. He was all smiles. "Now he have nose," he said in his bad Greek. "Hope it good nose. Think it good nose, oh yes. Him brave man. Never see more braver, oh very no. How you say?- deserve good nose."

"Thank you," Justinian said.

It hurt. Mother of God, how it hurt! When the executioner slashed my tongue and cut off my nose, the pain was also very bad. But those two cuts were inflicted quickly, and, once they had been made, my body could turn immediately to the business of healing. Here, Auriabedas not only cut once but kept on cutting and digging and prodding and poking and then at last sewing. I was glad for the wine with poppy juice, but do not think it did much against my suffering. Any man not dead would have suffered as a result of what the small brown trader did to me.

Two things helped sustain me while he cut. First, I had given him my oath I would neither pull away nor try to stop him while he worked. If a man will not tell God the truth, to whom will he tell it? And second, when the executioner had cut me, it was with the express purpose of keeping me from ever regaining the imperial throne. Every time Auriabedas's knife sliced into my flesh, every time he drove needle and thread through me, he brought me that much closer to reclaiming what was rightfully mine. For that, I would have endured the pangs of hell, much less surgery.

I do not know how long it all took. When at last it was over, Auriabedas gave me more of the drugged wine to drink. Again, it did not take away my pain, though for a little while it made that pain seem almost as if it were happening to s omeone else, not to me.

While the little man from India was wiping his knife and needle on a scrap of cloth and returning them to the small box he wore in place of a belt pouch, Myakes asked me, "Can you get up, Emperor?"

"I think so," I answered, and then proceeded to prove myself right. As I had after I was mutilated, I tasted rusty blood in my mouth: less this time than before, though. The bandages barely let me see. I turned back toward the monastery and toward the xenodokheion where I had spent- no, not spent: squandered- so much time. "Help me back," I told my faithful companion. "Now we'll see how bad the fever gets." If I spent a stretch out of my head and raving\a160… so much the better, I thought.

I should be hard-pressed to deny that Auriabedas earned his five nomismata. Rather than cutting me and leaving my recovery to the will of God, he came back to the monastery at first daily and then every other day until my healing was well advanced, changing my bandages and putting ointment on the wounds he had inflicted. The pain the first two or three times he changed the bandages- especially the first, as a result of all the blood that had dried on them- was almost as bad as during the surgery.

But the wounds healed more cleanly than I had expected. Perhaps the ointment he favored, a mixture of boiled butter and honey, had some special virtue to it. I have since tried to interest Roman physicians in this blend, but, if Galen or Oribasios failed to speak of a medicament in glowing terms, they refuse to admit it could be of any value. Nor is a mere imperial command enough to change their opinion.

Myakes would always stay close by while Auriabedas did what he had to do with me. After the little brown man peeled off the latest set of bandages, I would ask, "How do I look today?" The first few times I put the question, Myakes pretended he did not hear it, which I took for something less than a good sign.

But after a week or ten days, when scabs had formed over the raw wounds in my forehead and at the base of my nose, he began to look thoughtful rather than carefully blank. "You know, Emperor" he said one day, "it might not be so bad."

A few days after that triumph, I reached two more milestones. Auriabedas approached me with a small knife. "I need to cut stitches, take out them," he said. "Flesh grow good to flesh, oh yes, not need stitches no more, oh no." I submitted to his ministrations. The feel of the thread sliding out through my flesh as he drew it forth with a pair of tongs was strange and repellent, but soon over.