Harry Turtledove - Justinian

Having accomplished that, Auriabedas bade me splash warm water on the lower part of my face, over and over again, to loosen the dried blood gluing his little wooden tubes to my flesh. Then he used the tongs to pull the tubes free. More blood, this fresh, not dry, followed. Since he took it as a matter of course, I did as well. And, as I expected from his manner, the flow soon stopped.

He tapped at the thin layer of flesh above the former position of one of the tubes. When it held its shape under his prodding, he looked pleased. "You have nose good as I can make," he said proudly.

"I am glad to hear it," I answered. How good a nose it truly was, I did not yet know, but for Myakes' increasingly hopeful comments. I had not yet found (indeed, I had not yet sought) a mirror or still water in which I could view myself, reasoning it would be wisest to wait until I was more nearly healed before doing so. But I reckoned the day when Auriabedas, having taken the bandages from my forehead, did not replace them with new ones as a sign that my healing had advanced far enough.

A monastery was not the ideal place in which to seek a mirror, the monks being by the very nature of the lives they had chosen for themselves opposed to the notion of adornment and ornamentation of the body. I knew a place, however, where that notion was embraced rather than opposed. And so, from the xenodokheion I took myself off to the brothel where I had been in the habit of easing my lusts when those grew too strong to be ignored.

The guard standing outside was not the same fellow who had been there when I began patronizing the establishment, nor his immediate successor, either. Yet he had been there long enough to recognize me, which, for a moment, he failed to do as I came round the corner. "You've- you've changed," he managed when I walked up to him.

"I hope so," I answered. He held the door open for me as I went inside, as that first guard had so many years before. From that day to this one, I had not shown my mutilated face there in daylight.

The women lounging within exclaimed in surprise, first at seeing me there with the sun in the sky and then on account of my changed aspect. "What did you do?" they asked, over and over again.

I explained what I had done. Some of them nodded. Some of them made disgusted noises. "May I see myself, please?" I asked. "I came here for the loan of a mirror." That was, in fact, the only reason for which I had come, not having had the crust to borrow- no, to take- more money from Myakes so soon after paying Auriabedas.

Several of the whores had small mirrors, which they used to darken their eyelids and paint their cheeks and lips with red. I looked now in one, now in another. The great scab on my forehead remained, looking as if I had fallen from a horse onto my face. I tried to imagine it gone, replaced by a smooth, pale scar. But I studied it less closely than my nose. As Auriabedas had said, that was still ugly, a far cry from the proud prominence I had once borne. It looked as if someone had smashed it with a rock and done a particularly fine job of flattening it. But it looked like a nose, if a damaged one, not a great gaping hole in the center of my face.

And then, to my astonishment, one of the women took me upstairs to celebrate my improvement in the most enjoyable way possible. "I can't give you anything," I told her- before, not afterwards, to avoid any possible misunderstandings.

She shrugged, which, as she had just got out of her shift, I found inspiring. "Not many men coming in today," she said. "Don't worry about it." And so I did not worry about it. Go to any business long enough, prove yourself a good customer, and you will get favors to which someone walking in off the street for the first time could not hope to aspire.

Afterwards, I strode through the streets of Kherson, looking at the town with new eyes, letting the townsfolk see me with my new face. Not all of them recognized me, which I found almost as satisfying as the girl had been. I went down to the harbor. Myakes, who was rolling barrels of- what else?- salt fish onto a ship, waved to me. I waved back.

One of the laborers with whom he was working walked by and casually slapped him on the shoulder. I envied him, and envy him to this day, that easy contact among equals. It is something I have never known. As prince and then Emperor, I was set above the rest of the world. After Leontios mutilated me and exiled me to Kherson, the rest of the world, by contrast, was set above me. Having seen life from above and below, I own to preferring the former. Of life at the same level as everyone else, I am ignorant.

Coming down close to the sea, I stared south across it. How many times I did that in my years of exile, I could not begin to say. For a long while there, though, that sea sundering me from Constantinople had seemed wide as the unending ocean that flows on forever past the last land of the known world. Now, all at once, I felt the imperial city to be barely below the horizon, so that, if I went up into a high place, I might see the great dome of the church of the Holy Wisdom revealed in all its splendor and ingenuity.

This was not so, of course, but the feeling had a reality of its own. I had never left off saying I was Emperor of the Romans, not through all the weary, empty years in Kherson. Now, all at once, I felt like the Emperor again, as if robbed of my throne only yesterday, not years before.

"I will go back!" I said, fiercely enough to startle a tern walking near me, perhaps in the hope I would throw it a scrap of fish. "It shall be mine again!" The tern mewed and flew away. And I, I started back to the xenodokheion.

I had not gone far before I met the tudun, coming back to his residence after having been away on some business or other. Escorting him were a double handful of his fellow Khazars, swarthy, stocky men in furs and leather. Some of them glanced at me, then looked away: I was not extraordinary enough to be worth staring at. What a triumph!

The tudun's eyes started to slide away from me, too, but then they snapped back. "You Justinian," he said, almost accusingly.

"Yes, I am Justinian," I agreed. My voice was proud.

"What happen to your nose?" he asked. "Not gone no more." He frowned. "No, wait. I hear you have someone cut on it."

"That's right." Rumor was ahead of me, then. I wondered if Auriabedas had been drinking his way through my five nomismata, boasting of his surgical prowess in every dockside tavern. If he got more business from that, I hope he did as well by the rest of his patients as he did by me.

The tudun was not stupid, and knew a surprising amount about Roman ways. "You have nose again, you able to be Emperor again. Romans not laugh at you now, you want to be Emperor again." He stared at me, as if daring me to deny it.

I did not deny it: not quite. "I had not thought so far ahead," I told him, even if I would not have said the same thing while taking a holy oath before God. "I had a chance to not be ugly- not to be so ugly- any more, and I took it."

He frowned. "You come here, you promise you don't try and become Emperor again. You say you live here quiet, not cause nobody no trouble."

"I have not done anything differently since I got this new nose of sorts," I answered. Then I held up one finger. "No, I take that back. I've bedded a woman without the room's being so black, she could not see my face."

He snorted. A couple of his bodyguards understood enough Greek to translate that into their own language- which may be even uglier than that of the Sklavenoi- for their companions. The barbarians laughed. One of them pointed to my face and then down to my crotch. He said something else that engendered more laughter. Didn't cut that off, was my guess as to its meaning.

"Woman I don't care nothing about," the tudun said, snapping his fingers to emphasize the point. "Trouble- I care about. Not want none between Romans and Khazars. I tell you this long time gone- you remember?"