"This is the day the Lord hath made!" Cyrus cried, as Kallinikos had when I was being deposed. Then the people had cheered to see me cast down; now they applauded as I was raised high. Were I to be overthrown again, they might cheer once more, but that shall not come to pass, anyone who might dare such an outrage no longer being among the living.
When I say I was raised high on that day, I speak not only metaphorically but also literally. Myakes stepped forward and pushed Leontios and Apsimaros down before me. They bent their backs almost as if in prostration; Leontios, I saw with no small amusement, got horse dung in his bushy beard. And I, I sprang atop them, setting one red imperial boot on Leontios's back, the other on Apsimaros's, symbolizing in terms the veriest clod might understand my domination over them. The chorus sang out the prophetic verse once more, and the crowd acclaimed me and derided those who had defiled my throne with their presence on it.
"Mercy!" Leontios squealed beneath me. "I did not slay you. Have mercy!" Apsimaros, more manly or merely without hope, kept silent.
I ground my booted foot into Leontios's back. He groaned, but made no move to try to throw me off: excubitores stood round him with swords and spears and bows, ready to punish such insolence with bitter torment. The leeches in the stands, baying laughter at the usurpers' humiliation, would have laughed even louder to see blood flow. However little Leontios knew, he knew that much, having listened to their cheers while my blood spilled for the mob's delight.
Still standing atop the two toppled tyrants, I shouted to the crowd, as loud as I could: "Let them be taken to the Kynegion, there to have the sword sever their heads from their bodies!"
Most of the people cheered, jeering the usurpers and applauding the fate I had decreed for them. Leontios's shoulders began to heave under me, not because he was trying to throw me off but because he was shamelessly weeping. Up in the grandstand, I heard catcalls among the cheers, these surely coming from the more bloodthirsty, those who would sooner have had the executions carried out before their avid eyes.
That privilege, however, I reserved for myself. To placate the masses, I shouted out another announcement: "We shall have a second round of races here in the hippodrome tomorrow!" Universal rapture greeted that proclamation.
My springing down from the backs of Leontios and Apsimaros signaled to the mob the end of the day's festivities. I tasted the tone of their voices as they streamed out of the hippodrome. Despite not having watched the usurpers' heads leap from their bodies, they seemed well enough pleased with what they had witnessed.
Excubitores stirred Leontios and Apsimaros to their feet, and the two of them rose. Apsimaros was pale, his lips pressed against each other until they almost disappeared, but he did his best to show a brave front. Leontios, by contrast, presented a disgusting spectacle, and would have done so even without the horse dung in his beard. Not only did his tears of terror cut pale lines down his filthy cheeks, but greenish snot flowed out of the hole in his face where his nose had been and trickled through his mustache.
"The sooner the world is rid of you, the more pleasant a place it will be," I told him: an aesthetic judgment as well as a moral one. Incapable of coherent speech, he blubbered at me. "To the Kynegion," I told the guardsmen.
They had to drag Leontios to the amphitheater by the sea northeast of the church of the Holy Wisdom, his legs refusing to carry him. Apsimaros walked. I rode in the chariot behind them.
Was the masked executioner waiting there the man who had mutilated me? No one had- no one to this day has- admitted knowing which executioner that had been. I remain\a160… most interested in learning, but at the time passed lightly over the question, other matters being more immediately urgent.
In the center of the Kynegion stood a chopping block, like that for poultry but larger. The stains on it were old and dried and dark, I having been in the habit of hanging rather than beheading the officers who had supported the cause of the two usurpers. Some fresh stains would go on it now.
The executioner had a sword on his hip, a weapon larger and thicker-bladed than a cavalryman's sword: one made for chopping. Bowing to me, he asked, "Which of them first, Emperor?"
Having been weighing that very question in my mind as I traveled from the hippodrome, I replied without hesitation: "Let it be Apsimaros. That way, Leontios can see what lies ahead for him."
Leontios moaned. Apsimaros nodded to me. "If I had won, you would have ended here," he said. He walked to the block, knelt, and laid his head upon it. "Strike hard," he told the executioner. The fellow looked my way. I nodded. Apsimaros was doing his best to die well. I would allow it.
Up went the sword. Leontios's eyes followed it with horrified fascination, though it would not bite his neck\a160… yet. Down it fell. Anyone who has been in battle, or for that matter anyone who has watched and listened to a butcher cutting up a carcass with a cleaver, will know the sound it made on striking home.
Apsimaros's head sprang from his body. A fountain of blood, brightest red in the winter sun, gushed from the stump of his neck, drenching the head, the dried grass on the floor of the Kynegion, and the chopping block. His legs kicked wildly; but for the manacles, his arms would have flailed, too. He pissed and shit himself, the stench plain even through the overwhelming iron smell of blood.
Leontios slumped forward in a faint. I walked over and kicked Apsimaros's head to one side; my boots already being crimson, contact with the blood-soaked relic would not mar them. To one of the excubitores, I said, "Wash this off so people can see who it is- was- and take it to the Milion for display."
"Aye, Emperor," he said, while his comrades dragged the rest of Apsimaros's corpse out of the way.
No doubt wanting to be helpful, the executioner told the guardsman, "I have baskets here. You can use one to carry that."
"Ah, good," the soldier said. "Thanks."
Other soldiers hauled Leontios over to the chopping block and positioned him so the executioner could do his work. But, before the man could raise that heavy sword, I said, "Wait. I want him to know what is happening to him, just as he knew when he tormented me."
Obediently, the executioner waited. Leontios remaining limp, one of the excubitores stooped and pinched his earlobe between the nails of thumb and forefinger. This produced the desired effect; Leontios writhed and twisted and opened his eyes. On doing so, he discovered his head lay on the block. He let out a hoarse scream-"No!"- and tried to twist away.
"Seize him!" I cried, and several excubitores did exactly that. Even after they forced him back to the proper posture, though, he kept shouting and twisting his head from side to side: exactly as I had done when the executioner serving him had tried to slit my tongue. As the soldiers had done then with me, so now one of them seized Leontios by the hair and held his head still. The wretch tried to bite, his teeth clicking together. It did him no good.
Even so, the executioner did not make a clean job of the kill, as he had with Apsimaros. He had to strike twice, the first blow merely spraying blood in all directions and turning Leontios's screams to half-drowned gurgles. At the second, though, the death the usurper so richly deserved was visited upon him at last.
"I do beg your pardon, Emperor," the executioner said as Leontios's blood poured out over the ground. "I should have done better there." He sounded professionally embarrassed, as a builder might after erecting a house with a leaky roof.
"Never mind," I told him. "He earned what you gave him. Had you taken his head with a carpenter's saw, I should not have said a word against you."