And maybe, if things had worked out different, it wouldn't have been. You may as well go on, Brother. Why not? Can't be much of that left.
Sinope. At last. God be praised. I stand at the end of the land. I spit out into the sea. Almost I can hit Kherson, Phanagoria. Almost. I look across. Nothing but water. The towns? Just below the horizon. So it seems. Ships go back and forth. All the time. Boats, even. One must be in port. Maybe more than one.
Theodora speaks with me again. I let her. Now she knows not to quarrel with the vicegerent of God on earth. She will be better for it. God would not have led me here but to destroy my foes. I will destroy them all. No mercy.
I look to the harbor. There must be a ship in port.
A ship from Kherson! Found!
Sailed for Constantinople. They sailed for Constantinople. While I was marching here. Curse them to hell. Satan fill their bones with molten lead. Demons stab them with red-hot pitchforks. Fiends rip their flesh to pieces. Days ahead of me. Curse them to hell.
Theodora says not a word.
MYAKES
Me, Brother Elpidios, I think Theodora was dead right. Justinian should have stayed in Constantinople and made the rebels come to him. Taking the imperial city is always the hard part in a civil war. As long as you hold the center, you hold the Empire. If you leave it, you're liable to be in trouble.
But going to Sinope wasn't the worst idea in the whole world, either. Sinope is closer to Kherson than Constantinople is. Sinope is also closer to Constantinople than Kherson is. If Justinian had heard Bardanes and his pals were getting ready to move against the capital, he had time to get back.
Or he would have had time. Bardanes left for Constantinople while we were still heading toward Sinope, and stole a march on us that way. He got a bigger start toward the imperial city than Justinian thought he could.
Oh, yes, I was there when he got the news. The fellow who brought it just thought he had an interesting bit of gossip. He didn't know- he couldn't have known- Justinian was in Sinope. He turned as many different colors as a mullet being boiled when he got hailed before the Emperor.
He told him the news. He didn't have any choice about that. We all looked at Justinian, waiting to see what he would do. Have you ever heard a lion roar, Brother? You have? Ah, good. You know how, when you hear it, your belly knows you should be afraid before your head does? The noise Justinian made was like that. My hand went halfway to the hilt of my sword before I realized it was just a noise and couldn't hurt me.
"We have to go back," Justinian said, and he was right about that. "We have to beat the cursed, stinking rebels back to the imperial city."
He was right about that, too, if he wanted to go on being Emperor. But Bardanes had a good start on us.
JUSTINIAN
Back to the city. On the road, back to the Queen of Cities. Rain, turning the road to mud. Christ, why rain now? Has God turned His face from me? Is it because I spared Ibouzeros Gliabanos when I had vowed to kill all who wronged me? What else can it be? I made the vow. I broke it. Now I am punished. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.
Rain, turning the road to mud. Christ.
We crawl. We limp. With the rain turning the road to mud, we lurch on. The horses tire. They slow. We crawl.
Where are Bardanes and Helias and Mauros? Out on the sea, out on the sea. God, let this storm that slows me drown them. Do not forsake me, sinner that I am. Blow up a new storm to sink the rebels and Ibouzeros Gliabanos dies at my hands. I know not how, not yet, but it shall be. I will make my word good.
In the tent, the third night out from Sinope, Theodora says, "Once you have killed the rebels, do not go out of Constantinople again."
For her sake, I let her brother live. But that is done. I say, "No." We nod at each other, wary as a Roman soldier and an Arab. She puts a hand on my shoulder. She forgives. She forgives. Lord, have mercy on me.
Christ, have mercy on me. Rain, turning the road to mud.
Amastris again, dull and dead as before. The horses half dead, too. Not enough fresh ones. Rain every day since we left Sinope. Where is Bardanes? Did this storm roar through the Black Sea? Did it take the rebels' dromons down to ruin? God, let it be so. God, make it be so.
The soldiers slog on. They say not a word. They know the need. But they are as tired as their horses. Sometimes they cannot ride, or the horses sink. They march. They sink. Three drown in the mud.
Past Amastris. Where is Bardanes? Every horseman I see fighting his way east, going about his business, puts me in fear. Will the rider hail us? Will he say we are too late? Will he say we have lost the race? Is the rebel at Constantinople? May it not come to pass! Heaven forbid!
Damatrys. Ten miles from Chalcedon. Under the shadow of St. Auxentios's hill. Beacon fire on top of the hill, part of the chain of beacon fires that warns when the Arabs invade. Are there beacon fires for rebels? Would to God there were, to burn them up in.
Another horseman on the road. He sees us. Some of the riders had gone into the fields. They feared my soldiers. This one rides up. "Emperor!" he calls. "Justinian!" My regalia is the color of mud. Everything is the color of mud. He needs a little while to spot me. When he does, he says, "Emperor, Philippikos is in the city."
"Did anyone fight to hold him out?" I ask.
"Emperor, not a soul," he answers.
My hand goes to my ruined nose. Now I know a worse hurt. I look round at my army. The word hits the men like an arrow in the guts. To come so far. To labor so hard. To fall so short. I see their minds. Now we are not the Emperor's soldiers, they think. Now we are rebels and bandits.
"In Kherson, I was Emperor of the Romans with one subject," I shout. Faithful Myakes steps up and waves. Good after all I did not kill him.
"Two subjects, soon," Barisbakourios says. He remembers I gave him his rank.
"I am still Emperor now," I say. "I got Constantinople back once. I will get it back again."
Four men cheer. Five. Six. Worse than none. Like a dying ghost of what a cheer ought to be. Hope drips out like blood from a cut vein.
The rider still sits his horse. "Emperor. There is more."
Morning. Barisbakourios is-
MYAKES
Poor sod, he couldn't bear to write it, eh, Brother Elpidios? God help me if I blame him. If you want to know the story, though, you'd better know the whole story. The first thing Helias did when he got into Constantinople and found out what Justinian had done to his wife and children was, he went after Justinian. Well, Justinian wasn't there, and neither was Theodora.
So the next thing Helias did was, he went after Tiberius. Tiberius wasn't with us- he'd stayed back in the city with his grandmother. Anastasia knew what was liable to happen to him, too. She'd taken him to the church of the Mother of God next to the Blakhernai palace. The way that fellow coming out from Constantinople told it, she was sitting in front of the church when Mauros and John Strouthos got there.
Tiberius was inside. He was holding onto the altar with one hand and to a piece of the holy and life-giving wood from the True Cross with the other, and he had amulets draped round his neck. Outside, Anastasia was begging Mauros and John the Ostrich to let the little monster live. She said he was too young to hurt anybody. She was right, too, but if he'd had time\a160…