There was a stir in the brightly clad rows of prominent men as a certain Leo, a functionary in the imperial mints, came forward to stand before my father. True to his calling, he reached into the leather pouch he wore on his belt and drew from it a gold coin, which he held up so the torchlight flashed from it.
"Emperor, this is a nomisma of Carthage," he said in a loud, harsh voice; Carthage then remained under the sway of the Roman Empire, not yet having been fecklessly thrown away by the bungling brigand who stole my throne from me. "Do you see the stamp on it? You and your brothers, Emperors all three. Do not cast them down now. That would be treason against them, for they were raised up at the same time you were."
From that day to this, I have wondered what Leo thought he would accomplish with such foolish freedom of speech. Was he in the pay of my uncles? I had never seen him around them before. Or did he think his simple words would make my father change his mind? Could he have been so naive?
Whatever he was, he paid for it. My father turned to a couple of the excubitores nearest him and said, "This dog's tongue is too forward. Seize him and take him to the executioner, so he can cut it out."
Leo did not even try to flee. He stood staring till the guardsmen laid hold of him and, amid awful silence, began to drag him away. Then, seeming to regain some of his senses, he cried out, "We confess a Trinity in heaven. Let there be a trinity on earth as well!"
Up to that moment, my father had dealt with the unseemly interruption as smoothly as might be expected. Hearing his brothers compared to Persons of the holy Trinity, though, enraged him, and he shouted to the excubitores, "That will cost him his hands and feet along with his tongue! Tell the executioner."
After Leo got what he so richly deserved for his insane insolence, my father looked around the throne room again, as if seeing whether anyone else had the temerity to challenge him. The nobles all tried to pretend they were elsewhere, none of them anxious to meet Leo's fate. Then my father turned his terrible gaze on his brothers.
Tiberius quickly bowed his head. My uncle Herakleios was made of sterner stuff, which was, I suppose, why my father occasionally had to placate him but always rode roughshod over Tiberius. Today, though, my father would placate no one. At last, Herakleios too lowered his eyes in submission.
And then my father looked at me. I met his gaze unflinching. Partly this was pride- was I to humble myself when he had just cleared the way to exalting me above everyone else in the Roman Empire save him alone? And partly, I admit on this page where I must be truthful before the Lord, it was calculation. Having just degraded my two uncles, my father could hardly take vengeance against me. Upon whom would he then rely? My brother? Little Herakleios was not even in the throne room, being confined to his bed by yet another sickness. He had already come close to dying several times in his short, unhappy life. He would have to succeed only once to ruin all my father's plans if he set me aside along with my uncles.
Whatever my reasons, I had gauged my father aright. When he saw I would not bend my neck before him, he nodded and said, "This is the spirit an Emperor must have to rule, yielding to nothing and no one until he is dead."
I have remembered those words all my life, and lived by them.
My uncles, also being of the line of the great Herakleios, had their share of his indomitable spirit. Had they accepted their demotion and lived quietly afterwards, I think my father would have left them at peace: had he wished to inflict harsh punishment on them, he could have done so at the outset, rather than merely depriving them of the imperial dignity.
But Herakleios and Tiberius, having had the title of Emperor since they were children, had never lost the appetite for the power accruing to the title, power they had never tasted but always seen, just as in the pagan myth Tantalos never ate the grapes that hung always barely out of reach.
And so, rather than choosing retirement, they slipped out of the palace before dawn broke the next morning and rowed in a small boat across the narrow water of the Golden Horn to Sykai. Forgetting what had happened to Leo in the throne room, they used his argument with the soldiers from the Anatolian military districts, and succeeded with it better than they deserved.
My father and I had our first inkling of this at breakfast, when a servant, looking apprehensive (and rightly so!), reported to us that Herakleios and Tiberius were neither in their bedchambers nor, so far as anyone could tell, anywhere within the great palace. The eunuch said, "Perhaps they have withdrawn to a monastery, there to pursue a contemplative life."
"I don't believe it," I said loudly. "They're plotting against me."
"I don't believe it, either," my father said; he knew what spirit his brothers had in them: one all too much like his own. He dipped the bread he was eating in fine olive oil, then took a sip of wine. "I don't think we'll have to wait long to find out, one way or the other."
He soon proved right. A great many ferries pass back and forth between Sykai and the Queen of Cities, and this day those entering Constantinople were filled with soldiers from the Anatolian military districts. Some of them brandished swords, not knowing or not caring that the penalty for rioting with swords was the amputation of their thumbs. Their cry was the same as that Leo's had been: "We believe in a Trinity: let us crown the three"- by which they meant my father and both my uncles.
Had they been a true army, they could have launched civil war within the walls of the God-guarded and imperial city that had repelled all foreign foes. But they were not an army, and Herakleios and Tiberius, who had never commanded soldiers (their function in the Empire having been purely ceremonial), could not make them one. They were only a mob. When my father heard reports that they were robbing shops and sacking taverns, he smiled from ear to ear.
I did not understand. "This makes them worse, not better!" I cried. "Not only are they traitors, they are criminals, too."
"Criminals are easier to deal with," he answered, then turned to Stephen the Persian. "Bring Theodore of Koloneia to me."
The eunuch bowed and soon returned with the patrician. Theodore was a blocky, muscular man with features that looked chiseled from granite- if you allow that the sculptor, after thinking he was done, went back and started several new cuts he then decided not to finish: half a dozen scars seamed Theodore's cheeks and nose and forehead. Although he was only the mandator- the chief deputy- to Christopher the count of the excubitores, he had far more to do with commanding them from day to day than the count did.
MYAKES
Ah, Theodore. Been a good many years since I thought of him, and that's a fact. What? Justinian mentioned him before? I missed it. I am sorry. I am old. He was one harsh man, every bit as rough as Justinian makes him out to be here. A few years after this, still far from an old man, he retired to a monastery. I wonder how he fared as a monk: he was used to having people obey him, not to obeying other folk himself.
But if he was harsh, he was also able. He had to be, to rise so high with a nature like that. Give him time in a monastery and he'd probably wind up the abbot there. And then Kyrie eleison on all the monks under him! He'd enforce every last rule St. Basil ever thought of, and likely a good many Basil never imagined.
Unseemly levity, Brother Elpidios? What? You think I was joking? Read on about Theodore, then. Did I tell you he was sneaky, too? You don't have to believe me. Justinian will tell you. He was there, along with me.
My father and Theodore put their heads together. My father was all for mustering the excubitores and turning them loose on the Anatolian rabble. "If they ran away from the Bulgars, they'll shatter like glass facing real soldiers," he growled.