Harry Turtledove - Justinian

Which, by ineluctable logic, meant Cyrus was unlikely to be an agent, and likely in fact to have seen in the stars that I would indeed return in triumph to Constantinople. Which, in turn, meant- or probably meant- I could trust him. One thing an Emperor soon learns is that men he can truly trust are few and far between.

Writing out the pathway my reasoning followed takes longer than the reasoning itself did to pass through my mind. After taking only a couple of breaths, I raised my mug of wine in salute. "To Cyrus!" I said.

"To Cyrus!" Myakes, Barisbakourios, and Stephen drank with me.

Even with Cyrus vigorously espousing my cause, it advanced more slowly than I would have liked. Having spent so long in Kherson, I felt every added day like another heavy stone dropped onto my back. The first white hairs appeared in my beard while I spent time doing nothing in exile.

Not all the time passed to no good purpose. The scabs crusting my forehead finally fell away, and the raw pink scar under them began to weather on being exposed to sun and air. A year having passed after the Indian cut me, the scar was no longer pink but a shade only a little paler than the rest of my skin. When I visited that brothel, none of the whores there hesitated to join with me during the day, and they no longer charged me twice the going rate. I was no longer so conspicuous as I had been.

This was true of my physical appearance. In other ways, though, Cyrus's vigorous advocacy of me and my cause was making me more conspicuous than I had been. I was walking into Kherson early one morning when a couple of Khazars on ponies came trotting down toward the monastery where I had stayed so long. Recognizing me, they reined in. One of them said, "You come with us. The tudun is to see you now."

I ended up walking into town between their horses. In all the time I had spent at Kherson, the tudun had never before honored me by inviting me into his residence: to do that would have been to acknowledge I was worthy of honor. Nor was he in truth honoring me now; it was more that I had become a nuisance to him.

The building to which I was conveyed, while made from the local stone, had the spare lines that said it dated from the early days of the Roman Empire, perhaps from the first couple of hundred years after our Lord walked the earth as a man. I wondered if the governors the Emperors of those times had sent to this distant outpost of Roman soil reckoned their tenure here as much an exile as I did mine.

The Khazars who had led me to the residence turned me over to the guards standing in front; the half-bored, half-alert demeanor of the latter put me in mind of the fellows who had stood outside my favorite brothel down through the years. Their boredom fell away, though, on their taking charge of me.

Rather than doors, the tudun's residence had a carpet hanging over the entranceway, no doubt to imitate the tents to which the governor was more accustomed than he was to permanent housing. Inside, as I soon discovered, this imitation of the nomadic life continued. More carpets lay all over the floors, making my feet feel as if they were stepping on thick grass. Instead of the chairs and couches the Roman governors had used, cushions whose covers were as fantastically embroidered as the rugs did duty for furnishings. The lamps stank of butter.

In lieu of a throne or other high seat, the tudun lolled atop a mound of cushions. I looked around, finding none provided for me. Having contemplated remaining upright so I could look down on him, I decided it were wiser to sit, he having a position I acknowledged and I possessing none to which he admitted.

"You have friends making noises over you," he said ominously, "friends making noises about Emperor. Merchants not like."

He said nothing about the khagan of the Khazars, which I found interesting, but, if he was to govern the town, he had to pay attention to its prominent folk as well as to his distant master. I answered his first comment: "I am not responsible for what my friends say. They think I was treated unjustly." I thought the same, but again decided wisdom lay in keeping silent on that. Looking up at him, I went on, "Have any of your spies ever reported that I claimed I would go back to the imperial city and regain the crown?"

He did not bother denying he had set spies on me. "They not say that, no." I breathed an invisible sigh of relief, for I had said it, but, evidently, only among men who genuinely backed my cause. His words also confirmed Cyrus's loyalty to me. Still, he held the power here, and I had trouble bearing up under his gaze. After a pause, he said, "But your friends, they say what you want, yes?"

Yes indeed. "I cannot control what my friends say," I repeated. "Some say one thing, some say another, as is true of all men. But is it just to condemn me for words I cannot control? Would you want anyone to do that to you?"

Those narrow eyes glinted. He jabbed a thumb at his chest. "I never want to be Emperor of Romans at Constantinople. Never."

"Ah, but suppose your friends started saying you wanted to be khagan of the Khazars?" I shot back. "It would not be true. Would you want Ibouzeros Gliabanos to judge you from their loose talk?"

"I never want to be khagan, either," he said, but that was not the point, and he was clever enough to realize it. From atop that mound of cushions, he stared down at me. At last, grudgingly, he said, "Maybe." He spoke to the guards in the language of the Khazars, which has always put me in mind of the noises an egg makes frying in a pan. Without a word to me, the guards gestured out toward the curtain. They did not follow on my departing. The tudun having finished with me, I was no longer of any interest to them.

I reported my conversation with the Khazar governor to my comrades. Myakes, ever the most cautious of us, said, "We have to go easy for a while. If we get the Khazars and the merchants angry at us, we lose everything, and fast."

"That's so, but there's such a thing as being too careful, too," Barisbakourios returned. He was ready to sail for Constantinople that day or any day, so long as the ship held him and me- and perhaps his brother as well, though I suspect he would have done without Stephen at a pinch.

Cyrus said, "The truth of your right to rule, Emperor, is no less than the truth of the Lord. And, like the truth of the Lord, it must be proclaimed to those who know it not."

"Sometimes the truth of the Lord is proclaimed loudly, sometimes quietly," I said. "As the Holy Scriptures say, to every thing there is a season. Now is our season for quiet ripening. When the harvest is ripe, we shall reap it."

Cyrus and Barisbakourios protested but, recognizing me as Emperor of the Romans, recognized also that they were bound to obey me. And so, for the next few months, they were less vehement about putting forward my claim, regardless of how proper they knew it was. The tudun did not summon me again during that time, proving he was to some degree lulled.

But what I had asked of my followers, however necessary it seemed, went against their grain and mine. Little by little, almost without knowing it, Cyrus and Barisbakourios once more began to speak of my returning to Constantinople and to the throne waiting there. Had the tudun sought to silence them when they first began this, I should have eased their eagerness again. But he did not, and so I did not.

And so when, one day, Cyrus stood half preaching to, half haranguing, a crowd of lazy loafers who, like lazy loafers everywhere, took their entertainment where they could find it, he cried out, "In the eyes of God, this Apsimaros and Leontios before him were and are base usurpers, surely doomed to damnation and eternal torment at the clawed hands of Satan and his demons. Here before me stands the rightful Emperor of the Romans. Is it not so, Emperor Justinian?"