And I was still very young. When you are twenty or so, an endless sweep of years seems to stretch out before you. Ignoring the past history of my family, I was certain I had all the time in the world to marry again and get an heir. Little did I know then the fate God, in His ineffable wisdom, had decreed for me.
And further, not to put too fine a point on it, I was and am a man of my house, meaning a man of strong will. The quickest way to set me against an idea forever was and is to urge it on me too strongly. No donkey or mule could dig in his heels more stubbornly than I under such circumstances. The course my mother advocated was one for which I did not care, the more vehemently and persistently she advocated it, the less I cared for it.
She was stubborn herself, no doubt having acquired the trait from my father if it was not inborn in her. All through the time before my throne was stolen from me, she kept urging- no, she kept nagging- me to wed again. I can think of no more important reason for my failure to do so then.
Thinking to distract her so I could finish my supper in peace, I said, "I hope you don't miss Stephen the Persian too much here in the palace. He is as good in the treasury as I hoped he would be, and the hopes I had for him were of the highest."
Distract her I did. "That eunuch is a shark in man's clothing," she said, her eyes flashing angrily. "Were it not for his robes, you would see the pointed fin on his back. He has not held office long, but already everyone in the city hates him."
"What better recommendation for a tax collector?" I said with a smile.
"Don't joke about it," my mother snapped. "He goes too far- he goes much too far. Anyone who dares protest either how much he collects or how he collects it suffers. He is fond of the switch and, if that fails, the whip."
I shrugged. "The fisc must be fed, or the Roman state starves."
"He is a bloodsucking wild beast, and he thinks the fisc is the soul of the Roman state, not its belly. I told him as much, to his smooth, fat, evil face. I told him he was making you hateful to your subjects, too."
"And what did he say to that?" I asked.
"He said that, if he didn't collect all he could, he would make himself hateful to you," my mother replied, "and that is not all-"
"And do you think he was wrong?" I broke in.
My mother held up her hand. "You are the Emperor now, and so you may speak when you like. But you are also my son, and so you will hear me out. I had not finished." She paused, waiting to see how I would respond. She was indeed my mother, no matter how annoying to me she made herself at times, so I waved for her to go on, which she did: "As I was saying before you interrupted me, that is not all your precious Stephen the Persian said, nor all he did. He said I should mind my own business and let him mind his-"
"An excellent idea," I said.
She kept on talking, right through me: "And he picked up one of the switches he uses to thrash those who will not pay what he demands, and he hit me once across the back with it, as if I were a schoolboy who had not learned his lessons."
She was my mother. Had she not also been nagging me, pushing me in directions in which I did not wish to go, no doubt I should have been outraged. As things were, the first thought crossing my mind was, Good- you deserve it. Saying that, though, would only have made our quarrel worse. What I did say was, "Now that I am back in the imperial city, I will tend to matters of the fisc myself. You need never have anything to do with Stephen the Persian again."
It was not enough. Looking back, I see that. At the time, I deemed it the height of generosity. My mother's mouth thinned to a pale, narrow line. "Thank you so much, Emperor," she said, and left the dining chamber quite abruptly- and quite against etiquette.
I do not think she spread the story through the city. In spite of our spats, she was always loyal to the family. I know I did not spread the story. Nevertheless, it did spread, which meant it must have spread from the lips of Stephen the Persian, boasting of the power he wielded. Perhaps he made himself feared with such tales; he surely made himself hated. And, as my mother had warned me, he made me hated, too. We both paid the price for it a few years later.
"Emperor, have mercy!" The fat little man- John, his name was- arose from his prostration with a wail like that of a distraught mourner in a funeral procession. "Have mercy on the pitiful island of Cyprus!"
He was the archbishop of Cyprus. Even so, having learned that anyone coming before the Emperor of the Romans on his throne will make a small problem seem large and a large one seem the end of the world, I discounted at least half that anguished wail. What remained after such discounting, though, was enough to concern me. "Have mercy on Cyprus?" I said, raising an eyebrow. "I thought I have had mercy on Cyprus, arranging for the taxes from the island to be shared between us and the followers of the false prophet. The island has had no share of fighting ever since."
"Not no fighting, Emperor- less fighting," John said. "Your armies and those of the Arabs' miscalled commander of the faithful do not clash there, but s trife between their villages and ours remains. And we Christians there have to pay a tax for the privilege of practicing our true and holy faith."
"Do they make you pay that tax over and above their half of what they collect? Or is it part of that half?" I asked, knowing the deniers of Christ made their Christian subjects pay that tax through all the lands they ruled.
John's face twisted; he must have hoped I would not ask that question. "As part of their half of the total tax to be paid," he said unwillingly.
"Idiot!" I shouted, and he blanched. "Blockhead! Imbecile! Cretin! Dolt! For a tax which he is within his rights to levy, you want me to go to war with Abimelekh?"
"And for the harassment our villages endure, yes," John said.
"It is not enough, not close to enough," I told him. "Begone! Since you are in a Christian land here, go to the church of the Holy Wisdom and thank God for my mercy in not sending you home with stripes on your back. And while you are there, pray to God to grant you some of His wisdom, for plainly you have not got enough of your own."
He fled. Some of the oldest courtiers had served since the last days of my great-great-grandfather's reign, nearly half a century before. They united in telling me they had never seen anyone withdraw from the imperial presence so precipitously. "Anybody'd think he'd been struck with the urgent squats," one of them said, chuckling.
I froze him with a glance, whereupon he withdrew from my presence almost as fast as John the Cypriot had done. I remembered too well how my father had died. At the next imperial audience, the old fool did not attend me, pleading an indisposition. I sent word that the longer he remained indisposed, the happier I would be. He never returned to court, and died the following year. His funeral, for that of a man of such high rank, was remarkably ill-attended.
John soon went back to Cyprus, sadder and probably not wiser. His pleas, even if I could not honor them, left me thoughtful. If I resettled the Cypriots on territory definitively Roman, I could gather for myself all the taxes they yielded, sharing none with Abimelekh. Since the treaty between us said not a word about such resettlement, I would have been within my rights to do so.
But the time was not yet ripe. The war with the Bulgars might well have continued into the following campaigning season, and I did not wish to embroil myself with them and with the followers of the false prophet at the same time. So long as Abimelekh paid his tribute as he should, Cyprus would have to wait.
Not long after John had returned to Cyprus, the ecumenical patriarch Paul approached me, saying, "Emperor, your piety is renowned among Christians throughout the civilized world."