"Tomorrow," I told Theodore, "we must give orders that no ferries are to cross from Sykai to the imperial city."
"Prince, I have already made those arrangements." Theodore paused, studied me, and slowly nodded. I walked straighter. I felt I had passed a test.
We took the self-styled leaders of those who favored restoring imperial rank to Herakleios and Tiberius back toward the great palace. As we marched east along the Mese, the excubitores surrounded these men more and more closely. Taking alarm at last, one of them cried, "Are we ambassadors or prisoners?"
"I promised you would see my father," I answered, "and so you shall." That kept the leaders quiet as we hustled them along toward the palace.
See my father they did. As soon as they were inside the palace, the excubitores laid hold of them and stripped them of their weapons. Then, with Theodore of Koloneia and me leading the way, they frog-marched the wretches into the throne room.
"So," my father said, fixing them with a glare that had chilled my blood often enough, "you are the traitors who want to give my worthless brothers their crowns back, are you?"
The fellow who had asked if they were prisoners- an officer named Theophylaktos- repeated the senseless jingle they had been bawling all along: "We believe in a Trinity- let us crown all three brothers."
"No, let us not," my father said, his voice deadly cold. "What I believe in, now, is rooting out treason wherever I find it." He turned to Theodore. "Illustrious patrician, take them to the Kynegion and dispose of them, then take the bodies across to Sykai and hang them on gibbets so the troops from the Anatolian military districts have something instructive to contemplate."
Theodore bowed. "Emperor, workmen are already building the gibbets." He nodded to the excubitores, and they took the wretches off to the Kynegion- an amphitheater near the sea, where miscreants were frequently dispatched- for execution. Theophylaktos and the rest bawled like castrated bullocks, screeching they had been betrayed- as if they, having betrayed their sovereign, had any cause for complaint.
All went just as my father and the patrician Theodore devised. Indeed, they even added a refinement: they had scribes write the word TRAITOR on ten large placards, and hung one around the neck of each executed man. Thus, when the executioners tied the wrists of the dead leaders to the upthrusting arms of the gibbets, the corpses displayed the reason for which they had been put to death.
By the altogether immaculate Virgin Mother of God, I wish I could have been in Sykai when the soldiers from the Anatolian military districts woke up and found out what had become of the fools who, they thought, were getting what they wanted from the Emperor. Instead, those fools got what they deserved.
The soldiers could not even take their worthless outrage to Constantinople, for no ferries were crossing the Golden Horn and, should they have tried to march around it, the gates of the city wall were closed against them. Later that day, ferries did go to Sykai, but the only place their captains would take the soldiers was across the Bosporos to Anatolia.
When the soldiers made as if to balk at this, the captains delivered to them my father's warning: "Go home to your farms now, while you still have the chance. Otherwise, you will envy the fate of your leaders."
I am told the men looked long on the ten bodies hanging from the gibbets, then began filing onto the ferries. By the time the sun set, the whole disgruntled lot of them were back in Anatolia, and no one in Constantinople said one word more about crowning Herakleios and Tiberius again.
Somehow, my uncles got back into the city and returned to the palace without my father's knowing of it until they appeared at breakfast the next morning as if nothing had happened. "Go ahead," he told them. "Sit there smug as you like. The crowns will never go on your heads again."
"That's for God to decide, not you," Tiberius said, meaning, I suppose, that my father could not know whether he would die tomorrow, and perhaps also that he and Herakleios might have a hand in my father's demise.
Then Herakleios pointed at me and said, "Better we wear the crowns than this arrogant little bugger."
With ten casually spoken words, my uncle snuffed out the last of my boyhood. I thought we had always got on well, Herakleios and I; we used to mutter to each other as we sat through endless ceremonies where our role was purely ornamental. But my uncle, having seen himself demoted, could not bear the thought that I might gain one day that to which he could no longer aspire: not only rank, but power. I was not his nephew any more, only someone who stood between him and what he wanted above all else.
My father said, "He's done well, by the Virgin, and he's done things for me- the ecumenical synod, to name just one. You, Herakleios, you just want to do things to me."
"Give Tiberius and me our rights," Herakleios said. "That's all we ask."
Tiberius added, "Our father crowned all three of us. Who are you to take away what he gave?"
"Yes, our father crowned all three of us," my father answered, "but he set me to rule from the day he sailed off to Italy and Sicily. Somehow you always manage to forget that. Who am I, you say? I am the Emperor, the Emperor. Give you your rights? I'll give you more than that- I'll give you your deserts!"
Having made up his mind, my father, as was his way, acted at once. He summoned once more the nobles of Constantinople, before whom a few days earlier he had demoted Herakleios and Tiberius from the imperial dignity. Now, though, instead of sitting beside him, they stood in front of the throne like any other men who were to be judged. I sat at his left hand, and my little brother to my left.
My father gave my uncles one last chance even then, asking them, "Well, Herakleios; well, Tiberius- what am I now? Am I your brother or your Emperor? If you tell me I am your Emperor, all will be well for you. But if you say I am only your brother-" He let them draw their own conclusions.
Tiberius stood silent, perhaps hoping silence would be taken for acquiescence. But Herakleios turned, as if appealing to the courtiers and bureaucrats who had been brought together to hear his fate. He answered, "You are our brother, and the eldest, and we honor you for that. But we cannot call you our Emperor, for our father, the Emperor Constans, crowned us all together at the same time."
"Tiberius, is this your word also?" my father demanded.
Miserably, Tiberius nodded. He and Herakleios looked to the nobles of the city for support. They found.. none. My father had saved the city from the Arabs, my father and I had restored peace to the church- and my father had mutilated Leo for daring to speak on my uncles' behalf.
"So be it- you have condemned yourselves," my father said to Herakleios and Tiberius. Sighs ran through the throne room: the moment, though expected, was hard when it came. My father passed sentence: "You shall have your noses slit so that, being physically imperfect, you shall no longer be able to aspire to the throne, and you shall be sent into exile."
Tiberius simply stood and stared, perhaps accepting his lot, perhaps unable to believe he was about to suffer the deserved fate of all failed plotters and rebels. But Herakleios stabbed out a finger at my father and cried, "May what you give me fall on you one day, brother!" Then that finger, which at the moment seemed long and thin and sharp as a claw, pointed first to me and then to my little brother. "And may it fall on your heirs as well!" To emphasize what he said, Herakleios spat on the mosaic-work floor.
My father made the holy sign of the cross to turn aside the words of evil omen. So did I. So did my brother, clumsily and a beat late. So did the assembled nobles and the excubitores who crowded the throne room. Neither my brother nor my father lived long after that, but on neither of them did Herakleios's curse fall. On me, by the incontestable judgment of God, it did.