The sum the Bulgars finally agreed to accept was twenty pounds of gold a year: fourteen hundred forty nomismata. They went back to Asparukh with the first year's installment in their saddlebags, and seemed happy enough to get it.
After they were gone from the capital- not before- I said, "That's not what I would have done, Father. I'd fight the barbarians and beat them once for all."
"When the Roman Empire is yours, you'll do as you judge best," he answered. "Now it is mine, and I reckon this course best. We have peace on all our borders, to give us time to recover from our wars, and we take in more than twice as much gold from the followers of the false prophet as we pay out to the Bulgars."
To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with Krobat, at whom I had scowled a few days before: I thought my father was running the Empire as if it were a fishmonger's shop, calculating every follis of profit and loss. But, as he had spoken, I dared not continue the argument, and while he lived we paid the Bulgars their tribute.
The sixth holy and ecumenical synod held its final session a few days before the fall equinox. By then the two hundred eighty-nine bishops, who had labored for ten months, were anxious to depart for their homes, especially those of them who had to travel by sea. My father and I presided together over that last session, which was held in the great church.
"By your acts," my father told the assembled bishops, holding up the copy of those acts to which they had affixed their names, some in the uncial script in which books are usually copied, some in the newer cursive, "by your acts, I say, you have restored peace to all us Christians. May that peace be deep and lasting."
He made the sign of the cross, as did many of the bishops who listened to him. During those last few years of his life, peace was very much on his mind, as if, having seen so much of war and strife in the earlier years of his reign, he wanted to avoid them at all costs thereafter. Understandable enough, I suppose, but not my way.
He went on, "By your acts, you have also rightly defined our holy Christian dogma for the rest of time. A thousand years from now, men may not remember your names- though some of you, surely, shall be among the saints- but, whenever they confess Christ's two natural wills and energies, they will remember what you have done here."
I had not thought of the synod's work in those terms, but no doubt he was right, just as today, no doubt, many confess that Christ and God the Father are of the same substance without ever thinking of St. Athanasios, who saved our holy church from the vile and infamous heresy of Areios.
It seemed also to have been a new thought to many of the bishops, but one of which they approved, not least because it magnified their importance in the scheme of things. Bishop Arculf of Rhemoulakion, for instance, paused long enough in eating whatever he was eating on that particular day to clap both hands together. Arculf did not return to the synod I summoned ten years later to decide questions of canon law left behind by the fifth and sixth ecumenical synods. I sometimes wondered if he safely reached his home in distant Gaul. Later, to my surpise, I learned.
George the ecumenical patriarch blessed the assembled bishops and thanked them for giving of their piety and wisdom for the benefit of all Christians throughout the inhabited world. The bishops bowed to him and then filed out of the church of the Holy Wisdom for the last time. The world will not soon see such a gathering of great theologians again.