Poor sod, he couldn't bear to write it, eh, Brother Elpidios? God help me if I blame him. If you want to know the story, though, you'd better know the whole story. The first thing Helias did when he got into Constantinople and found out what Justinian had done to his wife and children was, he went after Justinian. Well, Justinian wasn't there, and neither was Theodora.
So the next thing Helias did was, he went after Tiberius. Tiberius wasn't with us- he'd stayed back in the city with his grandmother. Anastasia knew what was liable to happen to him, too. She'd taken him to the church of the Mother of God next to the Blakhernai palace. The way that fellow coming out from Constantinople told it, she was sitting in front of the church when Mauros and John Strouthos got there.
Tiberius was inside. He was holding onto the altar with one hand and to a piece of the holy and life-giving wood from the True Cross with the other, and he had amulets draped round his neck. Outside, Anastasia was begging Mauros and John the Ostrich to let the little monster live. She said he was too young to hurt anybody. She was right, too, but if he'd had time\a160…
Anyway, it didn't work. Helias had told John to get rid of Tiberius, and John wasn't about to change his mind once he got told to kill somebody. And Mauros hated Justinian almost as much as Helias did- you've seen why. He said, "Helias's children were too little to hurt anybody, too."
John the Ostrich didn't waste time arguing with Anastasia. He went into the church, broke Tiberius's grip on the altar, took the holy wood away from him and tossed it down on the altartop, and then put Tiberius's amulets around his own neck. I don't know why he bothered. They hadn't done Tiberius any good. He brought out the brat. Then he and Mauros took him over to a little porch close by, stripped off his robe, stretched him out like a sheep at slaughtering time, and cut his throat.
When the horseman told all this to Justinian, he just sat there on top of his own horse for the longest time. Then he said, "I will kill them all." He brought it out flat, the way I'd heard him do before, the way that would make you feel like somebody stuffed a handful of snow down the back of your tunic. Not this time, though. The words were there, but not the fury that made them frightening. Something had broken inside of Justinian. I don't know how to put it any better than that. For as long as I'd known him, he'd always been the one to grab fate by the balls and squeeze till things happened the way he wanted them to happen. Not any more. Not after that. He wasn't doing the moving. He was being moved instead.
I don't think I was the only one who felt that, or who felt something like it. I don't know how many men we had when we made camp that night, there under St. Auxentios's hill. I do know one thin g, though: the next morning, we had a lot fewer.
Justinian was going to talk about that, wasn't he? Why don't you pick up from where you stopped when I started running my mouth?