On our sailing closer to that shore, we discovered we had reached one of the several mouths of a considerable river. "Does the Danube break up before it flows into the sea, the way the Volga does?" Barisbakourios asked, the simple word delta evidently being unfamiliar to him.
He, his brother, Theophilos, and Foolish Paul all looked toward Myakes and me. None of them had been in his part of the world before. We being Romans and this having been Roman territory before the Bulgars raped it away from my father, they expected us to know the answer.
And Myakes, who had accompanied my father on his ill-fated campaign against the Bulgars, did know. "Aye, that's the Danube, all right," he said. "All we have to do now is sail up it a ways and wait for the Bulgars to notice us." He shook his head. "No, that's not all. We have to hope they feel like talking with us instead of killing us for the fun of it."
"A point," I admitted. I had been so full of thought for what the Bulgars might do for me, I had not asked what I might do for the Bulgars. After a moment's doubt, though, I straightened in the battered fishing boat. "I do not- I will not- believe God, having spared me from the storm, will let me perish at the hands of the barbarians."
"Here's hoping you're right." Myakes was seldom inclined to take on faith the goodwill of potential foes.
With Moropaulos skillfully using the steering oar and turning the sail so as best to catch the wind, we made our way up one of the channels of the Danube, waiting to be noticed. I began to wonder whether any Bulgars lived in that part of the land until I saw a large herd of cattle grazing in the distance. Where there were animals, there their masters would also be found.
And, before long, one of the Bulgars riding with the cattle spied the boat on the river and came riding up to the riverbank for a better look at us. Barisbakourios and Stephen called to him in the language of the Khazars, and he shouted back to them, but neither side could understand the other.
My turn, then. "Do you speak Greek?" I called across the water. Some Bulgars did, I knew, having acquired the tongue either from the luckless Romans who had inhabited the land they now ruled or from traders coming up out of the Roman Empire.
The good fortune that had smiled on me since the storm abated continued. "Greek? Yes, I speak little Greek," the horseman answered. "Who you? What you want here?" He leaned forward on his horse like a hound seeking a scent. Every line of his body seemed to shout, Are you fair game? Can I slay you?
"I am Justinian, Emperor of the Romans, the son of Constantine, Emperor of the Romans," I answered, and had the satisfaction on watching his jaw drop and him go slack with astonishment on the ugly little pony he rode. I continued, "I have come to see your khagan, Tervel. Will you take me and my friends to him?"
For all I knew, the barbarian might have thought I still sat on the throne in Constantinople. True, I had been cast down ten years before, but who can say how swiftly, if at all, news reaches a Bulgar herder? Maybe he thought I had come to take supper with my fellow sovereign, and would then return to the Queen of Cities.
On the other hand, maybe he merely thought me a liar. But if I lied, I lied on a scale greater than he had ever imagined. "You stay," he said. "Not go. I bring you another man. He talk toward you." Riding away, he booted the pony up into a gallop, getting a better turn of speed from the animal than I had expected.
"Shall we beach the boat, Emperor?" Moropaulos asked.
"Yes, do," I said. "We've come to see the khagan. If the Bulgars fall on us before we can do that\a160…" I did not go on. But if the Bulgars chose to fall on us before I could see the khagan, I had no place else to go in any case. Tervel was, and how well I knew it, my last hope.
The fishing boat glided up onto the muddy bank of the Danube. We all got out of it as fast as we could. Solid ground, however muddy, beneath my feet for the first time since escaping the storm felt monstrous fine. I walked up from the mud to the grass beyond and lay at full length upon it.
Myakes came over and sat down beside me. "If I ever go to sea, Emperor, I mean to say, if I'm ever that stupid-"
"What? You won't even cross from Constantinople to Asia?" I teased.
"Maybe I'll go that far," he said. "Maybe. And maybe I won't, too." Plucking a blade of grass, he set it between his teeth, as if to say he was at one with the ground from which it sprang.
We rested for perhaps two hours before that first Bulgar returned not with one but with several of his fellows. One of them wore gold hoops in his ears and a gold armlet on his left wrist: a chief of sorts, unless I missed my guess. He did not dismount, staring down at me from horseback. In better Greek than his countryman had used, he said, "I hear Justinian had the nose of him cut off when they threw him out of Constantinople."
"I did," I answered, and touched first my repaired nose and then the scar on my forehead above it. "You see how the surgeon covered the hole with skin, so now I have a nose again, even if it is not such a good nose as I owned before."
Having studied me, he answered, "Why do you want to see the khagan?"
"I shall discuss that with the khagan," I answered haughtily. "Or is he in the habit of talking over his business with everyone he chances to meet?"
As nothing else had done, that show of arrogance went far toward convincing him I was what I said I was. Like the first Bulgar who had found me, he said, "You have to wait here a little while." He shouted orders in his own tongue to his men, a couple of whom rode away. Returning to Greek, he told me, "They will bring horses for you and your friends to ride."
While we waited, I introduced my companions to him and learned he was called Omurtag. He paid me the compliment of not asking again what I wanted of Tervel. But for the Bulgar who had found us, none of his followers spoke Greek. Seeing that, I realized how fortunate I had been on the initial encounter.
The Bulgars he had sent forth returned to the riverbank more quickly than had been the case after the first meeting. Moropaulos was the only one of us not an experienced horseman. He also fretted over his boat, saying, "What shall I do without it?"
"If I win," I said, "I'll make you rich enough to buy twenty boats, a hundred boats. If I lose, you'll die in battle or Apsimaros will cut off your head. You won't need this boat either way, will you?"
"But this is my boat," Moropaulos said, showing how he'd got his name. After a while, we cajoled him into leaving it behind. He awkwardly scrambled up into the saddle of the horse the Bulgars identified as the calmest of those they had bought. Calmest proved less than identical to calm, but Foolish Paul managed to keep from being pitched off onto his head.
We rode south and west from where we had come to solid ground. The countryside resembled the plain across which I had traveled to reach the court of Ibouzeros Gliabanos, but was not so limitless; to the south, silhouetted against the sky, I could see the mountains separating the land the Bulgars had stolen from us from that still under Roman rule.
Omurtag being a man of authority in his own right, he commandeered the services of a band of Bulgars we encountered as evening drew near. Thus we had plenty to eat, plenty to drink even if it was fermented mare's milk, and tents in which to sleep. The accommodations were similar to those we had had of the Khazars, one band of nomads apparently living as much like another as peasants near Thessalonike live like peasants near Nikomedeia.
We rode out again at first light the next morning and, after riding all day, came to Tervel that evening. Atil, where Ibouzeros Gliabanos dwelt, had come more than halfway toward transforming itself from a nomadic encampment to what might one day become a considerable city. The camp at which Tervel ruled had barely begun the same process. The Bulgars had built a wooden fence around a good stretch of territory surrounding Tervel's tent and those of his followers, but the khagan and his men still made their living from the herds that fence enclosed.