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I SAY UNTIL MY TWENTY-EIGHTH YEAR because it was in that year — the first of that brief, confident era following Heraclius’s crushing victories against the Persians in the east — that an imperial courier burst into the garden where I was sitting with my mother, drinking tea, and handed me a summons. It came from the Keeper of the Seals, and when my mother saw the purple ink she began to fret. She declared I was to be given some high rank and fussed over my appearance, then decided I was to be executed and began to cry, then reversed herself a dozen times more. I didn’t know what to think. The summons itself offered no hints: it only gave directions for when and how I should come to the palace. I was surprised that anyone, much less the Keeper of the Seals, would wish to seek me out. I brushed my mother away and went up to my chamber to spend the rest of the day alone.

When morning came I hired a litter to take me to the Chalke Gate, as instructed. There I showed my summons to the guards, and they admitted me to a courtyard where a large ivy grew. I knew, from one of my father’s stories, what I was seeing. The ivy was nurtured from a clipping taken from the old palace at Rome, and the fountain in the courtyard’s middle, surmounted by a bronze Romulus and Remus, ran with waters brought from all the empire’s corners: the Tiber, the Danube, a spring in Syria, the upper reaches of the Nile. Just beyond the fountain, three men were contesting with an elephant, a spoil from the wars. A crowd of servants and soldiers had gathered to watch them fit gold covers onto his tusks. Some had their arms to their noses in imitation of the elephant’s trunk, and were whistling, trying to get him to trumpet.

Stacks of crates filled the other side of the courtyard, and it was from behind one of these that a eunuch, spare and with a shaved head, emerged. Squeezing out of his hiding place, he dusted himself off and came up to me and demanded the summons. After he read it he gave me an oddly close look. Then he ordered me out of the litter and took me past the elephant and through a guarded archway. We walked a few steps down a grand corridor of white marble before he stopped and pulled back a tapestry. Behind it, a narrow passageway snaked off into darkness. He went in ahead of me, guiding me by the sleeve, running his other hand along the brick and repeating something to himself. When we came to a tiny iron door he stopped and faced me.

“Say nothing,” he said. “Stand and wait.” Then, twisting and pulling a ring in the door, he opened it and told me to step through.

I had to stoop to clear the topstone, and by the time I stood on the other side, the door had shut behind me. Turning back, I could barely make it out, its lines fitting smoothly into the wall. But as I looked around me I soon forgot the door. The room glittered with gold. A stream ran through its middle, bounded by golden shrubs hung with carnelian fruits and silver briars hooked with thorns. High green trees of mosaic climbed the walls to the ceiling, where light fell from shafts and a sun glided on a circuit. In the center of the ceiling’s vault, God stared down, His hair flowing, His eyes gleaming in angry judgment. I knew where I was. I had always thought the Chamber of the Golden Meadow a legend, like the chamber that contained a living map of the sea. I looked again at the silver briars. I had heard it said that some of the thorns were poisoned; only the emperor knew which ones. He would meet his spies and servants here and take them for a stroll alongside the briars. If he grew displeased, he would give his interlocutor a nudge, and the unfortunate’s soul would be parted from his body by morning.

The stream trickled, the sun clicked on its track, and I waited, even more uncertain of what was to come.

A half hour passed, then another. Finally, a door on the far side of the room opened. It wasn’t the Keeper of the Seals who stepped through but Heraclius himself. The door closed behind him and he took a few steps toward me, then stopped. He was dressed in a simple tunic and a studded leather belt. His beard, grayed by his campaigns, hung below his chest. I stood still as stone — to suddenly be alone with the emperor, the man on whom all the eyes of the known world were fixed! — before it dawned on me that I was to go to him. I did so, bowing two or three times (in my nervousness I forgot the specific demands of protocol), and once I came near he put his hand on my shoulder and looked me over with his fading blue eyes.

“You are Eusebios Lekapenos, John Lekapenos’s son?”

“I am,” I answered, keeping my head bowed.

“Show me your hand.”

He did not specify, but it was not difficult to guess which he meant. I brought my withered hand forward, slipped off the glove, and let him see. He glanced at the bent knobs that were my fingers, the wrinkled crook that was my wrist, then motioned for me to put the glove back on. Once I’d done this, he took me by the arm and led me toward the stream.

“I knew your father,” he said. “We campaigned together. It was a shame that—” He broke off, then nodded at me. After a moment’s silence, he started again, using a tone that, coupled with the unsubtle shift in subject, told me he was getting down to business. With a shiver I realized he was guiding me along the silver briars. “I recall hearing a story that when you were a child you visited several holy men, each of whom promised to heal your hand for you.”

The story was true. Two years after my father died, my mother conceived the notion that a holy man could heal my hand, and she broke our isolation to take me through the streets to find one. In those days, as now, holy men flocked to the capital. They set themselves up in the houses of the rich, where they dressed in rags, refused baths, and spat out the delicate morsels offered them at dinner while shouting about fleshpots and the temptations of Babylon. Others, claiming to shun the world, lived in caves or on mountaintops a day’s walk from the city, where they received crowds. And yet others set themselves on pillars in the streets and in the fora, shaking their beards at the people below and warning of coming cataclysms. The first holy man she took me to, chubby and with matted hair, grabbed my hand, put it to his mouth, and licked it. The second made me wait in his cave for two hours while he received other pilgrims, then told me that my hand was twisted because the devil had taken hold of it and that I must repent of my sins. The third spat at me from his pillar, claiming that would be enough, and the fourth told me to fast for six days and then return, by which time, forgetting me, he had left the city. Only with the fifth did I rebel. He had set himself up in one of the grandest houses on the Golden Horn, and promised to heal my hand if I would show my faith in his works by plunging it into a pot of boiling water. I had been given hope, I had believed in them, and when the healings failed I had blamed myself. But as I trembled beneath this holy man’s half-blind stare, his toothless scowl, I understood: he was a charlatan. They were all charlatans. I kicked the pot over, scalding the holy man’s legs, and ran out. The story passed through the city for a week — this I heard from the servants — before dying out. It was painful to recall, and I wondered why the emperor was interested.