Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

“Tell me,” the emperor said when he finished prodding the purse, “did he squeal?”

“He screamed in pain, Emperor,” I answered, speaking as evenly as I could.

“Very good,” the emperor said, then, after losing himself in thought and chuckling once more, “you may go.”

I hesitated. I felt as if I couldn’t move and before I knew what I was doing I called out, “Emperor.” He looked back — he had already stepped toward his door — and I held up my bared hand.

The stream purled beneath the silver briars. Above us the eyes of God stared, fixed in stone and gilded glass.

“Theodosios?” Heraclius asked, his face gone pale.

I nodded.

The emperor came to where I was kneeling. He grabbed me by the wrist and examined my hand. “So he was genuine,” he said. “That is unfortunate.”

I quaked. On the ship back, as my fascination with my hand settled into calm acceptance, doubts began to plague me. Surely I had committed a grievous crime. Now I was certain I would be tipped into the briars.

“I will tell you something,” the emperor said. “It is by far not the worst thing I have had done.” He pulled me close. I could see a narrowness in his gaze, the tired narrowness of one long hunted, of a bear in its final moments in the pit as the dogs close in. I thought of Theodosios’s vision, of the emperor as a frightened, blind beast, and waited for the shove, for the prick of the thorns. But before I could close my eyes the emperor let me go, pressed the carnelian berry, and sent me away.

RELEASED FROM THE CHALKE GATE, I picked my way through the Mese’s undulant, squabbling crowd of merchants. Dazed still from my meeting with Heraclius, I paid no attention to the clothier who thrust a wool mantle into my hands, to the tin seller who danced before me, his cups dangling from his arms. I was headed, at last, for home.

“Eusebios,” my mother said when I stepped into the courtyard. She stood there as if knocked still, whispered a veneration to the Holy Mother, then clutched me and wept into my shoulder. My heart — this surprised me — swelled, and for a moment I forgot all that I had done. Only when she pulled away did she see my hand.

“How?” she asked, seizing it and pulling it close to her eyes. I started on about a Grecian spring, but she scoffed. So I told her the truth, and in the telling I felt suddenly proud. What I had done was difficult. I had served the emperor. And mightn’t the hand be a sign that I had done right? But before I could finish, my mother let me go and backed away.

“That was you?” she said. Her flesh seemed to have turned ashen. “You have mocked God,” she pronounced. “That hand is a curse. He has shown you His power.” She looked at me, her face stricken with disappointment, then fled from the courtyard to her room, where she shut herself for the rest of the afternoon.

For several days after, she avoided me. Then one morning, a servant came to my bedchamber as I was dressing and presented me with a new glove. I didn’t need to ask who had sent it. I wanted to throw it across the room. I wanted to send it back torn. But I put it on. When I went down, my mother was waiting in the courtyard. With a brief flick of her eyes she confirmed the glove’s presence. After that, she never again mentioned my hand.

I WAS NOW A GREAT MAN. I rode through the city, shouting across the rabble to other young courtiers I had met, and involved myself in Hippodrome politics, supporting the Blues, as my father had, and standing feasts for the chariot racers. Heraclius had kept his promise of reward. It had been announced that at the Feast of Palms I would be granted an income and subpatrician rank, which, among other privileges, would allow me a title, the use of blue ink, and the right to be drawn in a carriage by four brown ponies.

A month after my return, I received perhaps my greatest honor: an invitation to dine at an imperial banquet in the Triclinium of the Nineteen Couches. I sent for the tailor and commissioned a new tunic, and when the evening came I daubed myself with scent. As I was leaving, I could hear my mother in her room, murmuring her constant prayers. I ignored them, and once I stepped into my litter I slipped off my glove and tossed it to a servant. At the dinner I was given a poor seat, far from Heraclius — a hundred men separated us — and near the twelve paupers. But I was there. I belonged. The musicians played airy tunes, the tableware glittered in the lamplight, and the emperor, I was certain, had looked at me with approval.

It was when the wine was being poured and I had begun talking to the youth on my right — the son of a Bithynian tax farmer — that one of the paupers, seated toward the middle of their table, leapt up and hissed at me. I had noticed him giving me twitchy glances and had hoped it would end there. His beard was matted, his skin burnt to leather, and after he hissed again he pointed at me with a pheasant bone and shouted, “Blood on his hand!” The entire room fell silent and stared. I sat as still as I could, and as my heart beat I felt each pulse’s tremble. Someone seemed to be squeezing my chest, denying me all but the tiniest spoonfuls of breath. The rumors of Theodosios’s gelding had grown more detailed in the recent days, and I feared that at last I had been caught out.

But then a soldier pulled the pauper from where he stood. The next dish, turtles cooked in their shells, was brought. Everyone returned to their conversations as if nothing had happened. They were all well-practiced courtiers. A madman, two or three said. The Bithynian began rattling on about some gossip he’d heard concerning the Greens’ new bearkeeper, and at the next table a general from the east assured his neighbors that the recent Saracen unrest, during which they’d proclaimed a prophet (such an idea raised laughter), would be put down by winter. And yet I couldn’t return so easily. Those latest rumors held that Theodosios had retreated farther into the desert, and since that night there had been no new miracles. As I reclined, I saw again his twisted face. I heard his cries, felt his bloody manhood in my palm, and thought of what my mother had said. A curse.

The musicians changed songs. A slave reached over my shoulder and pulled apart my turtle shell. I hid my hand under the table and forced my mouth into a smile. I had served an empire that would last forever, I had become the son my father died wanting. There could be no regret.

BACK FROM LUNCH, I stood in the early June sun pulling two-by-sixes for somebody else’s load when Mike, the yard manager, came out of the office and yelled, “All right, Brian, I’ve got an easy one for you and Jimmy.”

It took me half a moment to register what he was saying. My mind had nestled itself against the secret, moon-pale skin between the buttons of this shirt Angela sometimes wore at The Hangout, the church club over in the strip mall where the Safeway used to be. But as soon as I did I dropped the two-by-six midpull and said to Mike, “Let me kneel down before you. I swear I’ll get an idol with your face on it and give it flowers and pigeon blood every night.”

Mike colored at that, being Baptist. Forty something at least, with a groomed black beard and sunglasses hanging from his neck by a neon-green band, he was the Prime Mover of the yard’s universe, spinning us into motion with his order sheets. My prayers must have climbed their way through the spheres and gotten to his ear. Ever since morning the minutes had crawled, and all I could think of was getting to quitting time and driving to The Hangout so I could pitch my woo Angela-ward.

“Where’s Jimmy?” Mike said, clutching the order sheet to his chest. Jimmy popped up behind him, out of the main warehouse, where he must have been lazing in the door room. A great place for smoking, he told me once, but not for getting high, not with all those doors. Jimmy was a couple years older than me, taller, muscled, long hair straight and brown, with these little round spectacles like you see on timid townspeople in westerns. I’d been paired with him since I started at the lumberyard. After the tornado hit, they needed some extra people, and my dad was friends with a guy who went to Mike’s church. My first week, though, I managed to put a nail through my foot and drive over a stack of Sheetrock, and Jimmy was the only one willing to take me on. He was a general master of fuckuppery, but he’d worked at East Texas since he graduated from high school and he knew the yard. Those last were Mike’s exact words.