I cast a wide net of scouts around the open meadows where we encamped. If the Sklavenoi contemplated assailing us, they would not catch us napping. The wait in one place, I must say, did the army good, and was in particular a boon to our wounded, who no longer had to endure jouncing along over roads more imaginary than real in our supply wagons. Several men the doctors had given up for lost recovered, thanks in great part to the quiet rest they were able to enjoy.
And, on the third day, true to his promise, Neboulos came to our camp. He rode in alone, on a better horse than any other I had seen in the Sklavinias. I received him on a portable throne, surrounded by servants and excubitores, reproducing as best I could in the field the splendor of the great palace of Constantinople.
When he dismounted, one of my grooms took charge of the horse. Chainmail rattled on his shoulders as he walked toward my high seat. He also wore an iron helmet, which, like the mailshirt, looked to have been taken from a Roman soldier. He had a sword on his belt- and almost died under the spears of the excubitores when he drew it. But, instead of attacking me, he stabbed the sword deep into the ground. He took off the helmet and hung it on the sword hilt. Then he undid the mailshirt; his armor clattered about him, to use the Homeric phrase, as he let it fall to the ground.
"Emperor, you are too strong for me," he said in Greek that, like his horse, was better than I had looked to find among the Sklavenoi. "I surrender myself to you."
Standing there before me in plain linen tunic and baggy wool trousers, he cut a surprisingly impressive figure. He was not tall- I overtopped him by half a head- but very wide through the shoulders and narrow in the waist, with arms as thick as a thin man's legs: a warrior to reckon with. For a Sklavinian, he was handsome. True, his face was broad, but his features, though blunt, were regular. His eyes were wide and candid and a very bright blue; on a woman, they would have been devastating. He trimmed his buttery hair and beard more closely than most of his countrymen. Looking at him, one might have imagined he was a quarter of the way along the line toward becoming a Roman. He was older than I, but not old: thirty, thirty-five at the most.
"You would have done better- for yourself and for your people- if you had surrendered before," I said.
Those massive shoulders rolled in a shrug. "I thought I could beat you. Till now, I never met any man I could not beat. But you have too many horsemen in iron shirts, and that fire you throw"- it was not a grimace of fear, but one of anger, frustration-"I cannot match it, and my men will not stand against it. And so- you have me."
"And what shall I do with you?" I mused. I had promised not to kill him, and I keep my promises, as both my friends and my enemies have reason to know. I had not promised, however, not to lock him in a tiny chamber somewhere, feeding him bread and water till he eventually had the good grace to expire.
I had not been talking to him, either, but to myself. Nevertheless, he answered me: "Emperor, you send my people off beyond the edge of the world, is it not so? Send me with them. Let me lead army of them for you. You are too strong for me, but I know I can beat every other man who was ever born of woman."
If he could be trusted, it was not the worst idea in the world. The Sklavenoi I was resettling in Anatolia could fight; many of them had been captured in battle at the point of a spear. I intended making military peasants of them, paying them some small wage each year, with which they could maintain their equipment and mounts, and summoning them at need to war. My plan had been to put them under the command of Roman officers, but they might fight better for one of their own. "Neboulos," I said, "if you think you will be a kinglet in Anatolia, as you have been here, think again. The Roman Empire has only one Emperor, and I am he."
Those wide blue eyes went even wider. "You are Emperor. I am your man. I will help you against your enemies." Then he smiled- a provocative smile, almost the smile a man would use to try to bring a woman to his bed. "And, Emperor, you owe me four pounds of gold."
"I what?" I said, partly in amazement, partly because his Greek, while good, was not perfect, and I wondered if I misunderstood him.
But he repeated it: "You owe me four pounds of gold," he said, very clearly. Seeing me still gaping, he condescended to explain: "You say you will give one pound of gold to man who brings me to you. No one does it. You say you will give two pounds. No one does it. You say you will give four pounds. I bring me to you. Here I am." He thumped his chest. "You owe me four pounds of gold."
I could have killed him on the spot for such effrontery. But I had sworn an oath to let him live- and, in any case, I was laughing too hard to think of the headsman's sword. And so, with a smile, he began to betray me.
MYAKES
Ah, Neboulos. I haven't thought about Neboulos in going on forty years not more than once or twice, anyhow. He was a piece of work, Neboulos was, no two ways about it.
You've never heard of him, Brother Elpidios? Not till you read of him in Justinian's manuscript, you say? God and all the saints, you've made me feel ancient often enough before. Why should one more time bother me? And, thinking about it, his heyday was here and gone years before you were born, so there's no real reason you should have heard of him, but still\a160…
I wondered if Justinian would kill him when he came out with that, "You owe me four pounds of gold." Every excubitor who heard him was either snickering or rupturing himself trying not to snicker. Justinian's temper was always chancy, though. If he'd taken it the wrong way, Neboulos was one dead Sklavinian, oath or no oath. But then Justinian laughed, and when the Emperor laughs, everybody laughs.
Neboulos? Yes, he laughed, too.
After Neboulos came into our camp, warfare against the Sklavenoi ended. We rounded up some thousands more of the barbarians and sent them on toward Constantinople for resettlement. In this, Neboulos made himself useful, persuading several petty chiefs they would do better to yield than to waste their lives in useless battle.
With the Sklavinias under Roman sway, I brought the army down to Thessalonike, which, although the greatest European city in the Empire after Constantinople, had been twice besieged by the Sklavenoi over the years, and might have fallen to them if not for the miracles wrought by St. Demetrios, its patron.
I rode into Thessalonike on a white horse, at the head of the soldiers. The people of the town went wild to see me. For so long, Thessalonike had been a Roman island in a Sklavinian sea; now it was linked again to the larger part of the civilized world. Seeing Neboulos walking behind my horse, the inhabitants jeered and cursed him, for they had feared his growing power.
He took no notice of the jeers. Even when they began to pelt him, first with rotten vegetables and then with stones, he dodged only those missiles aimed directly at him, and did so with a quick economy of motion that kept all but a couple from striking him.
"Let him be!" I shouted to the crowd. "He is mine!" The Thessalonikans bayed wolfish approval at that, no doubt construing it to mean I had in mind for him a fate more bitter and lingering than any a mere mob could inflict. Would they had been right. In fact, though, it was only that I admired the courage and self-possession with which he faced them, and did not wish to watch him slaughtered as part of the celebration of my arrival.
Seeing Thessalonike and its walls, I understood how (with the help of St. Demetrios) it, like Constantinople, held out in the face of everything its foes could do. It rises steeply from the Thermaic Gulf, the Via Egnatia entering it less than half a mile from the sea. The citadel stands on the high ground in the northe astern part of the city. The circuit of the walls (counting the seawall, which is in a poorer state of repair than the rest) is about three miles. More than a hundred towers, some rectangular, others triangular, gave Roman soldiers fine vantage points from which to fight.