Anyone's death brings mourning and lamentation from those who knew and loved him. A child's death comes doubly hard, for in it the natural order of things is reversed and the old must lay the young in his grave. And when the child who died was son to the Emperor of the Romans, that cast all of Constantinople into gloom.
Because Herakleios, like me, had never been crowned junior Emperor, my father chose not to bury him in the church of the Holy Apostles, which has served as the final resting place of Emperors and their consorts since the days of Constantine the Great. Instead, he was laid to rest in one of the hypagogai, the underground vaults, used for the interment of the nobles of the imperial city.
My father, my mother, and I, all wearing black robes, all beating our breasts and wailing, followed the servants who bore my brother's pitifully small corpse, shrouded in white linen, to its tomb. Beneath the rituals of grief, my feelings were curiously mixed. He was my brother, true, and I had grown used- resigned might be a better word- to having him around. But then again, in the imperial family, having brothers was dangerous. I needed to look no further than the case of my father and my uncles to prove that to me. Suppose I became Emperor of the Romans. Would Herakleios have tried to steal the throne from me, as his uncle Herakleios tried to steal it from my father? Maybe I was better off without him.
"Surely God will take his soul into heaven!" my mother wailed. "Poor chick, he was too young to have stained himself with sin."
I made the sign of the cross. Now that Herakleios was gone from the earth, I did wholeheartedly wish him to join God rather than having demons drag him down to eternal torment. But I also crossed myself for the sake of my own soul. Every fornication with a maidservant, back to that first one with Irene, smote me like a slap in the face. How would I defend myself before the Judge of All when my time came to stand in His presence?
Fear of death fires every man's faith. Could we live our lives thinking each moment likely to be our last, how much better and more pious the world would be!
We went down into the hypagoge and laid Herakleios's body in the niche that had been readied for it. Lamps made the underground chamber bright; incense spiced the still, quiet air. George the ecumenical patriarch prayed for my brother's soul, though what he might have said that would have moved God if my mother's plea failed was beyond me.
Then the mourners who had accompanied us departed one by one, taking their lamps with them, until at last only we and the patriarch and a single lamp burning before Herakleios's last resting place were left. We went upstairs. He stayed behind, all alone. Soon, so soon, the lamp would gutter out, as had his poor life.
It had begun to rain while we were in the hypagoge. "The very heavens mourn your loss," George said.
"If the heavens mourn, why did they allow it?" my mother said harshly. George did not answer. That question has no answer, nor ever had, nor ever shall have, save only the will of God, which may not be questioned.
Sorrows hunt in packs, or so it seems. Just when you are over the first- or sometimes before you are over the first- along comes another to tear at you, till you wonder how you can bear griefs piled one upon another like Pelion upon Ossa. The only way to make them more terrible would be to have them known in advance, as they are to God, and even that might let you prepare for them, so far as it is granted to mankind to prepare for anything.
Autumn passed into winter, winter into spring, spring into summer. I wish I could say the sense of sin that filled me at my brother's funeral persisted and enabled me to maintain bodily continence, but I know too well it is not so. Within weeks- no, the truth here: within days- I found a new washerwoman (a girl, actually; she was younger than I) who stirred me, and nothing would do but that I storm the fortress of her virginity, which, I discovered in due course, someone had conquered before me. My life, as life has a way of doing, went back to its usual rut, in all senses of the word.
The same was true for my parents, though for them, and especially for my mother, sorrow lingered longer. My father seemed in better health than he had in some time, being less afflicted by both his gout and his kidney stones than had been so of late. Perhaps to celebrate his reborn feeling of well-being, one hot, muggy evening not long after the summer solstice he doused his plate of roast kid with half a pitcher's worth of fermented fish sauce.
I remember my mother wagging a finger at him. "I wish you wouldn't do that in this weather," she said in mild reproof. "Fish doesn't stay good."
"Oh, rubbish, Anastasia," he said, and, to show he would not be thwarted, poured on the rest of what was in the pitcher, till his meat was fairly swimming in sauce, far more than he would have normally used. He ate it with every sign of enjoyment. Being the man he was, he would have done that, I am certain, even had he despised it, but he always was fond of kid in fish sauce.
Dessert was as splendid a honey cake as the cooks ever made, with fine, fine flour mixed with boiled must to give the sweetness a winy tinge, and covered over with candied figs and apricots. Had it been given to me alone, I would have gone through it like an army sacking a town without a wall; as things were, I begrudged my parents the slices a servant set on their plates.
My father did not finish his, at least not right away. He left the table suddenly, with a startled look on his face. "I'll be back," he told my mother and me. "Keep eating." Had he not spoken up, we should have had to stop, too, the custom being that everyone is done when the Emperor rises.
He returned some little while later, by which time I had done formidable damage to that part of the cake which had not been served out at once. In the lamplight, his face was shiny with sweat and a little pale as he sat down once more. "Are you all right?" my mother asked, for he had been fine when he left.
His chuckle sounded both forced and self-conscious, which last was most unlike him. "Perhaps I should have listened to you about the fish sauce, dear," he said- again, the sort of admission he seldom made. "That was- unpleasant."
He picked up his slice of honey cake and began to eat, but had taken only a couple of more bites when he had to rush away again. "There, do you see?" my mother said severely when he came back once more. "You've gone and given yourself a flux of the bowels."
"So I have," he said through clenched teeth. He made no move to finish the cake now, but gulped wine, no doubt hoping it would restore him. A little color came back to his face, a hectic splotch of red over each cheekbone. He breathed slowly and carefully, as if each inhalation hurt.
"Maybe you should go to bed, Father," I said, for he had not looked much worse during his most savage attacks of stone.
"Yes, maybe I should," he answered, and I knew then he was seriously ill. He rose and started for the door. Halfway there, his departure turned into an undignified dash. With that gait, he was running for the latrine, not the bedchamber.
"I'm going to send for the physician," I declared, as if I expected my mother to argue with me. Had she argued, I would have overridden her. But she said not a word. She nodded to me, her eyes wide and worried. I pointed to a servant and told him to fetch Peter at once.
Instead of leading Peter to my father, the idiot brought him back to the dining room. The physician looked first at my mother, then at me. "Dyspepsia?" he asked. He could be more cutting with fewer words than any other man I have known, the others approaching him also mostly being physicians. Seeing so many sick and dying people they have but small chance of helping does something to their spirits, just as experience in war inures a man to gore.