Are you all right, Brother Elpidios? I haven't heard you sputter that way since the first time Justinian talked about having a woman. What's your trouble now? Oh, calling Kallinikos a lump of suet. Brother, I saw Kallinikos a good many times. If you rendered him down for fat, you'd need a big tun to hold it all.
The prayer when they knocked down the church? No, Justinian never figured out the patriarch meant God was long-suffering for putting up with him. A good thing for Kallinikos he didn't, too, or we'd have found out exactly how much fat he had in him. Justinian would have cooked him over a slow fire.
Yes, Justinian should have paid more attention to what the nobles were telling him. He should have paid more attention to what a lot of people told him. He didn't listen to me, either. You've seen that. You'll see it again, God knows. Justinian was good at a lot of things. Listening wasn't any of them.
Zachariah did not bring Pope Sergios back to the imperial city under arrest, as I had charged him to do. He went with an army of soldiers from Ravenna and some of the cities south of it down to Rome, intending to arrest Sergios and put him on a ship.
Unfortunately, however, through some mischance word of what the exarch intended to do reached Rome ahead of him. The people of Rome prevailed upon Zachariah's army not to let Sergios be taken out of the city and carried away to Constantinople. Although Zachariah himself was a fine man, steadfast both in his loyalty to me and in his purpose here, the soldiers under his command, being for the most part of the same Italian blood as the city mob of Rome, were persuaded by them, and mutinied against the exarch.
Some few of the soldiers remaining loyal to Zachariah, he used them to seize the pope in his residence. But his force was so small and that outside so large and inflamed that he lost hope of accomplishing the command I had given him. All at once, it was as if the wretched Sergios were holding him and his few faithful followers, rather than the other way round.
In his letter to me retailing these events, Zachariah maintained he yielded to necessity. Years later, I heard he cowered under the pope's bed, with the mutineers baying for his blood. God knows the truth in this matter. I do not. I do know Sergios, perhaps fearing my vengeance if the exarch were slain, did not let the mob work its full and ugly will upon him. Instead, he was merely expelled from Rome after being reviled and beaten.
Had the exarch been murdered by these semibarbarous Italians, I would unquestionably have sent a fleet from the imperial city to burn Rome to the ground and to bring Sergios here for trial as a common murderer. As things were, I by no means abandoned my intention of arresting Sergios and placing on the episcopal throne of Rome another, more tractable, man.
Before I could make arrangements to bring that to pass, however, another concern forced itself upon me: I received from Thessalonike word that Dorotheos, whom I had appointed general of my new military district of Hellas, had without warning lost his life. Having read so far and no farther in the announcement informing me of this, I assumed him to have fallen to some unsubdued Sklavenoi. But I soon discovered such was not the case. Rather, his horse threw him as he was riding into Thessalonike after hunting. His head smashed into the ground. He lay without speaking or moving for three days before breathing his last.
Military districts need generals at their head. This was especially true of one such as Hellas, with barbarians to the north and to the west. Leaving a vacancy there would have invited the Sklavenoi in the area to make trouble, perhaps negating everything my campaign against them had accomplished a few years before.
As one must do in such circumstances, I pondered whom to appoint as Dorotheos's successor. None of the other officers in Thessalonike at that time had particularly impressed me (nor, for that matter, had Dorotheos; his virtue, such as it was, lay in avoiding serious error, not in accomplishing anything great). That meant I would need to choose a general either in Constantinople or from one of the Anatolian military districts. Who, I wondered, would be willing to leave the imperial city or the long-civilized lands of Anatolia for a frontier district like Hellas?
And then I had what struck me as a happy inspiration. Having a pretty good notion of where the monks Paul and Gregory the Kappadokian were to be found, I sent messengers thither, summoning them to the throne room. While waiting for their arrival, I sent other messengers to the Proklianesian harbor in the southern part of the city.
The monk and the former kleisouriarch did not reach the palace until late afternoon, coming in with the stink of prison still clinging to their clothes. Ignoring that, I waited until they had prostrated themselves before me and arisen before saying, "You want Leontios free, not so?"
Their eyes widened. They glanced at each other, though neither of them turned his head. Cautiously, Paul said, "Emperor, that is so." He could scarcely deny it, but, for all he knew, I was about to order their heads taken for persisting in a desire I had no wish to fulfill.
Instead, I said, "Take him, then, and go." I held out an order to them. "This will authorize his release. You may tell the guards they shall answer to me if they fail to obey my command."
Now they were both frankly staring. Gregory took the sheet of papyrus from my hand as if afraid it would burst into flame if he touched it. His lips moving, he read it to assure himself it was what I had said. When he saw it was, he blurted, "What made you change your mind, Emperor?" The order said nothing about that, concerning itself only with Leontios's release from imprisonment.
"I am naming him general of the military district of Hellas," I answered. "Three dromons wait in the Proklianesian harbor to take him- and you- to Thessalonike. Once you get him from the prison, go to the harbor without delay. If you are in Constantinople when the sun comes up tomorrow, you are dead men. Do you understand?"
"We do," Gregory said with a crispness proclaiming him a former officer.
"We thank you for your mercy, Emperor," Paul added.
"Go," I told the two of them, "and remember what I have said." They hurried out of the throne room. I never expected to see them or Leontios again. What I hoped was that Leontios, trying to accomplish something great and redeem himself from exile (not that I ever expected to allow him to return to the imperial city), would make the intimate acquaintance of a Sklavinian arrow and die a slow, painful, lingering death. I was pleased at my cleverness in sending him away; not only was he likely to perish, but I would get some use from him before he did. Not even Stephen the Persian could have found a more economical solution- so, at any rate, I told myself.
But the dawn of each new day does not necessarily bring that which one expected the afternoon before, nor that for which one had hoped.