A broad, sincere smile was on his face as he left the Sklavenoi and approached me. "Have a care, Emperor," Myakes muttered. "Anybody in charge of soldiers who looks that cheerful, there's something wrong with him."
"Ah, Emperor!" Neboulos called. "You come to see my special army- your special army? I have them go through their paces for you."
"That is what I came to see," I told him, wondering if he was not too eager to show off the barbarians. How convenient that he should have had a unit of them exercising just when I arrived. Was it too convenient? Word of my coming might have got there ahead of me, giving him the chance to show me what he wanted me to see.
Nothing I could do about that, though. Being shown what others want him to see is a bane of the Emperor's existence. Everything is always prettied up, everyone on his best behavior. And so I watched perhaps a thousand Sklavenoi march and countermarch, throw javelins, and shoot arrows at bales of hay. They did well enough to look to be a useful addition to the Roman army.
"Are these the only men with whom you've been working?" I asked Neboulos. "How many men do you propose having in the special army?"
"These are not only men, no," Neboulos answered. "How many men do you want in special army? You resettled lot of Sklavenoi in this country. If you want twenty thousand men, I give you that many."
"If you can give me twenty thousand men…" I felt weak and dizzy with desire, as if, like David spying Bathsheba, I had suddenly and unexpectedly come upon a beautiful woman in her nakedness. But my lust was for martial conquest, not carnal. With twenty thousand fierce Sklavenoi joining the cavalry from the military districts, I might be able to seize Damascus, the Arabs' capital. I might even be able to take back from the followers of the false prophet the holy city of Jerusalem, as my great-great-grandfather Herakleios had regained it from the Persians.
"I put twenty thousand men in your army, Emperor," Neboulos promised. "Maybe thirty thousand, even. We march where you march, we fight where you fight."
That promise he ended up keeping, too. My own euphoria did not last long, for I was used to men exaggerating what they could do in hope of gaining advantage they did not deserve. I would have been satisfied had he ended up giving me half of what he claimed, but, as I say, he, unlike so many, did fulfill his promise. That, unfortunately, proved to make matters worse rather than better… but, as I do too often, with such comments I get ahead of myself.
At Neboulos's command, the Sklavenoi cut the throats of enough sheep to feed me and my escort along with themselves, then butchered the carcasses and roasted them over fires made in pits they dug in the ground. They served us the mutton along with both wine and the barley drink they brew: rough fare, rougher even that I had eaten when campaigning against them, but filling and in its own way satisfying even so.
I had mutton fat in my mustache, and could smell it every time I inhaled no matter how often I wiped my mouth. Neboulos leaned over to me and asked, "Do I hear right, Emperor: your wife is dead?"
"Yes," I said shortly. Who could expect a barbarian to have manners?
"You stay here with us tonight, yes?" he said, and went on without waiting for my answer: "Shall I bring you pretty woman, to keep you warm, to keep you happy?"
Most times, most places, I should have said yes to that in those days. But hearing Neboulos put me in mind of the night after we sacked his village, and of the Sklavinian woman I had chosen from among the captives. "No!" I exclaimed, perhaps more sharply than I had intended.
Neboulos, being an ignorant heathen who knew no better, then asked, "If you do not want pretty woman, shall I bring you pretty boy?"
"No!" I said again, even more sharply that before: so sharply, in fact, that Neboulos's eyes widened in surprise. I explained: "In the law of the Roman Empire, those who partake of this impious practice are put to the sword: it is criminal, as the Holy Scriptures clearly set forth. Even bishops who succumb to it face harsh punishment. I know of one who was tortured and sent into exile, and another who was castrated and paraded through the streets for the people of his city to mock."
"Seems silly to make such fuss over this thing," Neboulos said, never having had the privilege of learning the precepts of the true and holy Christian faith. Then, though, he shrugged. "If you do not want pretty girl or pretty boy, I do not bring you pretty girl or pretty boy. You sleep by yourself. You are Emperor; you can do as you like."
I was not altogether by myself in bed that night, being accompanied by an inordinate number of mosquitoes. But pederasty is not only against the law of God and man, it has never been to my taste. And, remembering the one untamed Sklavinian woman, I was not anxious to try another.
What Neboulos had shown me left me encouraged on my return to the imperial city. He did seem at least to be attempting to do as he had promised when he surrendered up north of Thessalonike. Perhaps the special army he had vowed to create would be worth hurling at the Arabs. Better by far, I thought, to spend Sklavinian lives than Roman.
"Emperor," Stephen the Persian said, "I want you to examine these coins we have received from the followers of the false prophet in their latest tribute payment." His voice quivered with indignation. Stephen could be relied upon to take seriously anything pertaining to gold.
The coins he handed me were not Roman nomismata, though their obverses, copied from goldpieces of my predecessors, closely resembled our mintings. When I turned the coins over, though, I saw at once what had upset him. It was not so much that the deniers of Christ truncated the cross on the reverse of their goldpieces; thanks to their false religion, they had been doing that for some time. But the inscriptions on these new coins were not in the Greek and Latin characters we Romans use on our nomismata; they appeared instead in the sinuous, ophidian letters the Arabs employ to write their own jargon.
"What do they say?" I asked.
"Something extolling their false prophet and senseless god, I have no doubt," Stephen replied. "That they copy our coins is bad enough. That they do such a thing as this is much worse."
"I wonder how they would like it if we minted coins with legends calling their Mouamet a liar," I said, and then, in an altogether different tone of voice, "I wonder how they would like it if we minted coins calling their Mouamet a liar." The idea appealed to me, not least because it would be the plain and simple truth.
"That is an interesting notion, Emperor," Stephen the Persian replied, "but not one that is germane here, the question at hand being, what is to be done about the presence of these anomalous coins in this year's tribute?"
As I had seen, in matters having to do with money he was single-mindedness itself. The notion of calling the false prophet a liar and a blasphemer on our nomismata remained most tempting, for those coins pass current far beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, and it was an opportunity for us to tell the Arabs what we thought of their misguided, diabolically inspired heresy. Reluctantly, I brought my mind back to the question the sakellarios had asked, and I asked a question of my own: "Are these goldpieces of the proper weight and purity?"
"They are," he said, sounding as if he hated to admit it.
"Then this year, at least, we shall accept them," I said. "We can melt them down and remint them so these offending messages do not spread through the Empire. It is a nuisance, I know, but I am not yet fully prepared to go to war with Abimelekh."
"As you wish," he said, again unhappily. Listening to him, I got the idea that, for the sake of any tiny alteration in the goldpieces we received as tribute, he would have sent every soldier we had marching against the miscalled commander of the faithful.