Florus, now, was another matter. No one faulted either his cleverness or his generalship. And yet\a160… having had the chance to marry Florus's daughter but instead having chosen another, I hesitated. Did he harbor, did he hide, did he nurture resentment under that clever mask? If he did, his strategic ability might prove more dangerous to me than to the deniers of Christ. When my house rose to power through civil war, when my grandfather was murdered as the overture to uprising, I had to make these calculations. Florus might have done well, but I did not send him east.
Having eliminated all these candidates, I summoned a man I knew much less well, a man of my father's generation: Leontios, whom I last remembered seeing at the time of the ecumenical synod. He was as I remembered him: round-faced, broad-shouldered, with open, smiling features and a hearty manner.
"Turn me loose on them, Emperor," he boomed. "That's all I ask- turn me loose on them. I'll beat 'em for you. You just see if I don't."
This was what I wanted to hear. One of the things I had already found out, though, was that the Emperor always heard what he wanted to hear, or what the man speaking to him thought he wanted to hear, regardless of its truth. And so I asked Leontios, "Why are you so confident?"
"Why? I'll tell you why, Emperor." He had the habit of repeating himself. As he spoke, he ticked points off on his fingers, something else he did all the time. "The Arabs, they've been through civil war. And they've been through famine. And they've been through plague. And the Armenians hate them, because the Armenians, they're Christians even if they're heretics, and they don't have any use for the false prophet. If I march an army into Armenia, the princes there, they'll rise up and help my boys throw the Arabs out. That's why I'll beat 'em."
"Good," I said- and the reasons he had named were good. Coupled with his confidence, they gave me reason to hope he could do as he claimed. I said, "I shall send you forth, Leontios, and may God grant you the victory you deserve. And, to help ensure it, I will write to the Mardaite chieftains and turn them loose against the deniers of Christ, too."
Leontios's eyes glowed. "That's fine, Emperor. That's mighty fine. With them and me hitting the Arabs at the same time, their caliph"- having fought a good deal in the east, he used the Arabs' own name for their miscalled commander of the faithful-"he'll be itching so many places at once, he won't know which one to scratch."
He was not an educated man. He was not a particularly clever man. But he had a bluff vitality to him that made those deficiencies matter less than they would have in many another. Soldiers followed him, not just willingly but eagerly. I also heard that women fell all over him, but that, true or not, had nothing to do with matters military.
He having satisfied me, I sent him forth. And, thanks to him and to the Mardaites, I showed my quivering, cowardly advisers what fools they were. Leontios ravaged that part of Armenia under Arab control, and succeeded so well there that he went on to plunder not only Iberia but also Media, the northwesternmost province of what had been the Persian Empire before the followers of the false prophet burst from the desert and subjected Romania's ancient foes.
From all these lands he sent back to Constantinople a large sum of money, which was most welcome. I knew the fisc would make good use of every follis Leontios sent, too, having replaced Romanos as sakellarios with Stephen the Persian. Many eunuchs could care for my comfort as well as Stephen had; few men, entire or not, had the gift of caring for the revenue accruing to the imperial treasury.
And while Leontios was campaigning in and beyond Arab-held Armenia, the Mardaites ravaged the borderlands from Mopsuestia in Kilikia- not far from Antioch- north and east up to the Roman province of Armenia, from which my general had set out. For a long time, their depredations kept Abimelekh from responding in any way to Leontios's invasion.
God granted us Romans another boon at this time, in that one more spasm of civil war convulsed the deniers of Christ not long after Leontios attacked them. Distracted as Abimelekh was- one of the rebels against him even succeeded in briefly seizing Damascus, his capital- he could not hope to withstand our armies. And so, for almost three years, we swept everything before us.
As Mauias had after his force shattered itself against the walls of this God-guarded and imperial city, the miscalled commander of the faithful sent an embassy to Constantinople, asking our terms for breaking off the conflict. Abimelekh's ambassador, a Greek-speaking Christian named Mansour, had the gall to protest that I had broken the thirty years' truce to which my father had agreed.
In his presumption, he might as well have been one of my own advisers, not Abimelekh's. "I am not my father!" I shouted to him, as I had to my own bureaucrats. "Unless I so choose, his acts do not bind me. Here, I do not so choose."
Mansour bowed his head. What I had said was simple truth, as any fool could see. Was Abimelekh likely to do exactly as his predecessors had in all things? Of course not! It was a diplomat's trick, an effort to make me feel I was in the wrong. But I did not fall for it.
Having put old Mansour in his place, I turned him over to the diplomats whose job it was to negotiate the fine details of treaties and let him haggle with them. Unlike my father, I reckoned it beneath my dignity to dicker like a tradesman with foreign envoys.
And I had other things on my mind. I had never sired a bastard on any of the serving girls with whom I had dallied, but Eudokia's courses failed and, presently, her belly began to bulge. I puffed up with pride like a pig's bladder. To tell the truth, I had feared my seed was cold within me, and was relieved and delighted to find this not so.
"What shall we name the baby?" Eudokia asked when she was certain she was with child.
I had been thinking about that since we both began to wonder. I would have liked to name a boy Herakleios, after the founder of my dynasty, but that also meant naming him after my uncle, the traitor. "We'll call him Constantine," I said instead. I had not been overfond of my father, but he had been a strong Emperor- and the name would make my mother happy.
Timidly- more timidly than she usually spoke- Eudokia asked, "And if it should be a girl?"
My mind and my hopes being set on getting an heir, I had not worried about what name to give a girl. By chance, Eudokia herself bore the same name as the first Herakleios's first wife, from whom I am descended. "There's always Maria," I said, a careless, indifferent answer that left Eudokia visibly discontented. As I was assotted of her, I did not want that, and so put some thought into my next essay: "What about Epiphaneia? That's the name of the first Herakleios's mother."
"Epiphaneia." Eudokia tasted the name on her tongue. Her brow smoothed. "Yes, it will do."
That problem was easily solved. For my part, whenever I spoke of the child to come, I called it Constantine. Everyone around me took up the habit, as was only naturaclass="underline" an Emperor needs a successor. Sooner than leaving the throne empty, an Emperor might marry three or even four times, I would say.
MYAKES
Brother Elpidios, if you set fire to the book, you won't be able to read the rest of it. What do you mean, you don't care? You've come all this way, you've read lewd things and turned- well, hardly a hair, and now you want to feed the codex to the brazier a leaf at a time? I don't understand, and I'll own as much. Justinian was just talking about what he might have done if-
Heresy? Blasphemy? Brother, if you don't calm down, you'll feed yourself to the brazier a leaf at a time, sounds like. Tell me what's on your- Oh, marrying three or four times. He wasn't talking about it for the sake of fornication, Brother Elpidios, but for the sake of getting an heir. "It is better to marry than to burn," eh?