They dragged me and carried Myakes through the streets of the imperial city toward the Golden Horn, where waited the ship that would take me into exile at Kherson. News of the traitor's vile act had spread through every corner of the city. People jeered at me as I went. "Cut-Nose! Cut-Nose!" was the commonest cry. How I wished the ground would have opened beneath the senseless mockers, letting them fall into the flames of hell as they deserved.
I could not answer their jeers with curses, not with a rag stuffed into my mouth and another tied around the back of my head and over what had been my nose. A few of the jackals threw stones and rotten fruit at me. Some of them hit. I scarcely noticed. Next to the wounds I already had, those were small things. If only the mob had had a single neck, that I might have cut off its head with one blow!
The pain was fire, and would not cease. Every cobblestone I saw through a red haze. I think my senses reeled for a time, for we reached the quays faster than should have been possible for a part y of brigands and ruffians carrying one man and dragging along another who had been wounded.
"Bring him aboard!" called the captain of the ship that would take me into exile. His Greek was peculiar- peculiar enough that I noticed it in the state I was in at the time. With an effort like that of Herakles when in the pagan myth he briefly held up the world for Atlas, I raised my head. That yellow-haired fellow\a160… I had seen him before. After a moment, the name came to me: Apsimaros.
My captors laid me on the deck and cut the ropes that bound me. They did the same for Myakes. The torment of blood coming back to hands and feet helped distract me from my larger anguish. Sailors armed with cudgels and shortswords stood over us, as if we were about to dash back onto the wharf. However little I wanted to leave the imperial city, my flesh was at that moment incapable of further resistance. Whether Myakes could have fought them or not, I do not know. Taking his lead from me, as he had for so long, he did not fight.
Seeing us remain where Leontios's men had left us, most of the sailors soon went back to the business of readying the ship to depart. Three or four remained close by, though: enough to overpower us even had we been at the height of bodily strength. Apsimaros shouted orders in his guttural Greek: "Cast off the lines! Man the sweeps!"
When all satisfied him, Apsimaros shouted again. The sweeps bit into the water. Little by little, the ship moved away from the quay, out of the Golden Horn, and toward the Narrows, the strait separating Europe and Asia and sometimes still known by its ancient name, the Bosporos.
Perhaps the sea breeze in my face helped revive me to some small degree. Though incapable of standing, I made it to my hands and knees and crawled toward the stern of the ship. Several sailors accompanied me on the slow, painful journey. Had I tried to throw myself into the sea, I wonder if they would have stopped me. I suppose they would; the Narrows being such a thin ribbon of water, a miracle might have let me swim to land and survive, and they would not have wanted to take the chance- or to explain their lapse to Leontios.
But I had no thought of throwing myself into the sea: neither to escape, for, whether the sailors did or not, I knew I had no hope of making land, nor to end my life, for the only time I came close to suicide, as a small boy, it was from rage rather than despair.
Nor did I completely give myself over to despair even then. I peered back in the direction from which the ship had come until a swell of land hid Constantinople from my view. I slumped down after that, but one thought still burned in my mind: I will see the city again. By God and His mother, I will. BOOK C