It hurt. Mother of God, how it hurt! When the executioner slashed my tongue and cut off my nose, the pain was also very bad. But those two cuts were inflicted quickly, and, once they had been made, my body could turn immediately to the business of healing. Here, Auriabedas not only cut once but kept on cutting and digging and prodding and poking and then at last sewing. I was glad for the wine with poppy juice, but do not think it did much against my suffering. Any man not dead would have suffered as a result of what the small brown trader did to me.
Two things helped sustain me while he cut. First, I had given him my oath I would neither pull away nor try to stop him while he worked. If a man will not tell God the truth, to whom will he tell it? And second, when the executioner had cut me, it was with the express purpose of keeping me from ever regaining the imperial throne. Every time Auriabedas's knife sliced into my flesh, every time he drove needle and thread through me, he brought me that much closer to reclaiming what was rightfully mine. For that, I would have endured the pangs of hell, much less surgery.
I do not know how long it all took. When at last it was over, Auriabedas gave me more of the drugged wine to drink. Again, it did not take away my pain, though for a little while it made that pain seem almost as if it were happening to s omeone else, not to me.
While the little man from India was wiping his knife and needle on a scrap of cloth and returning them to the small box he wore in place of a belt pouch, Myakes asked me, "Can you get up, Emperor?"
"I think so," I answered, and then proceeded to prove myself right. As I had after I was mutilated, I tasted rusty blood in my mouth: less this time than before, though. The bandages barely let me see. I turned back toward the monastery and toward the xenodokheion where I had spent- no, not spent: squandered- so much time. "Help me back," I told my faithful companion. "Now we'll see how bad the fever gets." If I spent a stretch out of my head and raving\a160… so much the better, I thought.
I should be hard-pressed to deny that Auriabedas earned his five nomismata. Rather than cutting me and leaving my recovery to the will of God, he came back to the monastery at first daily and then every other day until my healing was well advanced, changing my bandages and putting ointment on the wounds he had inflicted. The pain the first two or three times he changed the bandages- especially the first, as a result of all the blood that had dried on them- was almost as bad as during the surgery.
But the wounds healed more cleanly than I had expected. Perhaps the ointment he favored, a mixture of boiled butter and honey, had some special virtue to it. I have since tried to interest Roman physicians in this blend, but, if Galen or Oribasios failed to speak of a medicament in glowing terms, they refuse to admit it could be of any value. Nor is a mere imperial command enough to change their opinion.
Myakes would always stay close by while Auriabedas did what he had to do with me. After the little brown man peeled off the latest set of bandages, I would ask, "How do I look today?" The first few times I put the question, Myakes pretended he did not hear it, which I took for something less than a good sign.
But after a week or ten days, when scabs had formed over the raw wounds in my forehead and at the base of my nose, he began to look thoughtful rather than carefully blank. "You know, Emperor" he said one day, "it might not be so bad."
A few days after that triumph, I reached two more milestones. Auriabedas approached me with a small knife. "I need to cut stitches, take out them," he said. "Flesh grow good to flesh, oh yes, not need stitches no more, oh no." I submitted to his ministrations. The feel of the thread sliding out through my flesh as he drew it forth with a pair of tongs was strange and repellent, but soon over.
Having accomplished that, Auriabedas bade me splash warm water on the lower part of my face, over and over again, to loosen the dried blood gluing his little wooden tubes to my flesh. Then he used the tongs to pull the tubes free. More blood, this fresh, not dry, followed. Since he took it as a matter of course, I did as well. And, as I expected from his manner, the flow soon stopped.
He tapped at the thin layer of flesh above the former position of one of the tubes. When it held its shape under his prodding, he looked pleased. "You have nose good as I can make," he said proudly.
"I am glad to hear it," I answered. How good a nose it truly was, I did not yet know, but for Myakes' increasingly hopeful comments. I had not yet found (indeed, I had not yet sought) a mirror or still water in which I could view myself, reasoning it would be wisest to wait until I was more nearly healed before doing so. But I reckoned the day when Auriabedas, having taken the bandages from my forehead, did not replace them with new ones as a sign that my healing had advanced far enough.
A monastery was not the ideal place in which to seek a mirror, the monks being by the very nature of the lives they had chosen for themselves opposed to the notion of adornment and ornamentation of the body. I knew a place, however, where that notion was embraced rather than opposed. And so, from the xenodokheion I took myself off to the brothel where I had been in the habit of easing my lusts when those grew too strong to be ignored.
The guard standing outside was not the same fellow who had been there when I began patronizing the establishment, nor his immediate successor, either. Yet he had been there long enough to recognize me, which, for a moment, he failed to do as I came round the corner. "You've- you've changed," he managed when I walked up to him.
"I hope so," I answered. He held the door open for me as I went inside, as that first guard had so many years before. From that day to this one, I had not shown my mutilated face there in daylight.
The women lounging within exclaimed in surprise, first at seeing me there with the sun in the sky and then on account of my changed aspect. "What did you do?" they asked, over and over again.
I explained what I had done. Some of them nodded. Some of them made disgusted noises. "May I see myself, please?" I asked. "I came here for the loan of a mirror." That was, in fact, the only reason for which I had come, not having had the crust to borrow- no, to take- more money from Myakes so soon after paying Auriabedas.
Several of the whores had small mirrors, which they used to darken their eyelids and paint their cheeks and lips with red. I looked now in one, now in another. The great scab on my forehead remained, looking as if I had fallen from a horse onto my face. I tried to imagine it gone, replaced by a smooth, pale scar. But I studied it less closely than my nose. As Auriabedas had said, that was still ugly, a far cry from the proud prominence I had once borne. It looked as if someone had smashed it with a rock and done a particularly fine job of flattening it. But it looked like a nose, if a damaged one, not a great gaping hole in the center of my face.
And then, to my astonishment, one of the women took me upstairs to celebrate my improvement in the most enjoyable way possible. "I can't give you anything," I told her- before, not afterwards, to avoid any possible misunderstandings.
She shrugged, which, as she had just got out of her shift, I found inspiring. "Not many men coming in today," she said. "Don't worry about it." And so I did not worry about it. Go to any business long enough, prove yourself a good customer, and you will get favors to which someone walking in off the street for the first time could not hope to aspire.
Afterwards, I strode through the streets of Kherson, looking at the town with new eyes, letting the townsfolk see me with my new face. Not all of them recognized me, which I found almost as satisfying as the girl had been. I went down to the harbor. Myakes, who was rolling barrels of- what else?- salt fish onto a ship, waved to me. I waved back.
One of the laborers with whom he was working walked by and casually slapped him on the shoulder. I envied him, and envy him to this day, that easy contact among equals. It is something I have never known. As prince and then Emperor, I was set above the rest of the world. After Leontios mutilated me and exiled me to Kherson, the rest of the world, by contrast, was set above me. Having seen life from above and below, I own to preferring the former. Of life at the same level as everyone else, I am ignorant.
Coming down close to the sea, I stared south across it. How many times I did that in my years of exile, I could not begin to say. For a long while there, though, that sea sundering me from Constantinople had seemed wide as the unending ocean that flows on forever past the last land of the known world. Now, all at once, I felt the imperial city to be barely below the horizon, so that, if I went up into a high place, I might see the great dome of the church of the Holy Wisdom revealed in all its splendor and ingenuity.
This was not so, of course, but the feeling had a reality of its own. I had never left off saying I was Emperor of the Romans, not through all the weary, empty years in Kherson. Now, all at once, I felt like the Emperor again, as if robbed of my throne only yesterday, not years before.
"I will go back!" I said, fiercely enough to startle a tern walking near me, perhaps in the hope I would throw it a scrap of fish. "It shall be mine again!" The tern mewed and flew away. And I, I started back to the xenodokheion.
I had not gone far before I met the tudun, coming back to his residence after having been away on some business or other. Escorting him were a double handful of his fellow Khazars, swarthy, stocky men in furs and leather. Some of them glanced at me, then looked away: I was not extraordinary enough to be worth staring at. What a triumph!
The tudun's eyes started to slide away from me, too, but then they snapped back. "You Justinian," he said, almost accusingly.
"Yes, I am Justinian," I agreed. My voice was proud.
"What happen to your nose?" he asked. "Not gone no more." He frowned. "No, wait. I hear you have someone cut on it."
"That's right." Rumor was ahead of me, then. I wondered if Auriabedas had been drinking his way through my five nomismata, boasting of his surgical prowess in every dockside tavern. If he got more business from that, I hope he did as well by the rest of his patients as he did by me.
The tudun was not stupid, and knew a surprising amount about Roman ways. "You have nose again, you able to be Emperor again. Romans not laugh at you now, you want to be Emperor again." He stared at me, as if daring me to deny it.
I did not deny it: not quite. "I had not thought so far ahead," I told him, even if I would not have said the same thing while taking a holy oath before God. "I had a chance to not be ugly- not to be so ugly- any more, and I took it."
He frowned. "You come here, you promise you don't try and become Emperor again. You say you live here quiet, not cause nobody no trouble."
"I have not done anything differently since I got this new nose of sorts," I answered. Then I held up one finger. "No, I take that back. I've bedded a woman without the room's being so black, she could not see my face."
He snorted. A couple of his bodyguards understood enough Greek to translate that into their own language- which may be even uglier than that of the Sklavenoi- for their companions. The barbarians laughed. One of them pointed to my face and then down to my crotch. He said something else that engendered more laughter. Didn't cut that off, was my guess as to its meaning.
"Woman I don't care nothing about," the tudun said, snapping his fingers to emphasize the point. "Trouble- I care about. Not want none between Romans and Khazars. I tell you this long time gone- you remember?"
"I remember." I had tried to stir up trouble for the wicked usurpers- first Leontios, then Apsimaros- from the moment I arrived at Kherson. Because of my mutilation, I had failed. Now, like Lazarus, my hopes were reborn.
The tudun pointed at me. "You raise trouble, any kind, even smallest bit"- he held his hands close together to show how small a small bit could be-"I tell Emperor Tiberius, see if he still want you to stay here."
That brought me up short. I had not known Apsimaros well (I refused to call him Tiberius, even to myself) before my throne was stolen from me, and word of his deeds that reached Kherson was bound to be sketchy and inaccurate, but he, unlike Leontios, seemed to be no sluggard, and to have a fitting concern for maintaining his place, usurped though that was: why else would he have sent Bardanes Philippikos into exile on the strength of a dream?
"You hear me?" the tudun asked. "You understand me?"
"Oh, yes," I assured him. "I hear you and I understand you very well indeed." I understood I would have to be careful as I planned my return to Constantinople. I had understood from the beginning that I would be returning to Constantinople.
Still looking at me in the most dubious fashion, the tudun went on his way. I, for my part, returned to the monastery. A monk, not a man I knew, waited in the xenodokheion. "Emperor, I greet you!" he exclaimed, and prostrated himself before me on the guest-house floor.
No one, not Myakes, not Barisbakourios, not his brother, had prostrated himself before me in Kherson. Because of that, and because I was just arrived from seeing the tudun and listening to his warning to me not to act the part of the Emperor, I stared down at this fellow in some suspicion, wondering if he might not be a stalking horse, intended to goad me into publicly claiming the imperial dignity and thereby giving the tudun an excuse to move against me.
"Get up," I told him, and then had an inspiration. "In lands attached to a monastery, all men are equal before God."
He rose, his face wreathed in smiles. "Emperor, how glad I am to see that your reputation for piety is nothing less than the truth."
If he was a traitor, he was an enthusiastic traitor. "Who are you?" I demanded. I did not reach for the knife I wore, but my hand knew with the body's knowledge where it was.
"My name is Cyrus, Emperor," he said, smiling more broadly yet: if a traitor, genial as well as enthusiastic. "I have sailed from Amastris to Kherson for, among other reasons, the pleasure and honor of making your acquaintance."
"And why is that?" I was determined to play my own game at my own speed. If this Cyrus proved the tudun's agent, he would get nothing from me.
He looked around, although the two of us were alone in the large hall. Dramatically lowering his voice, he answered, "Because I have seen in the stars that you are destined to rule the Roman Empire once more."
Again, I did not know how to take that. A man in the tudun's pay would say the same thing, seeking to entice me. And, even if Cyrus was sincere, I still did not know how to respond to his words. That one can foresee the future in the stars violates the proved fact of God's omnipotence, and for that reason is condemned by the holy church. But Cyrus was far from the only churchman to have dabbled in such waters; Leontios's puppetmaster, Paul, also claimed to have seen in the heavens his patron's rise.
Cyrus suddenly seized my hands in his. "Emperor, have faith in me," he said. "When I sailed from Amastris, I had no idea how what I had seen might come to pass, you having suffered such cruel injuries at the hands of your foes. And here I meet you and find you"- he cast about for a word, and found one-"restored. Is it a miracle?"
Gently, I touched my new nose. Flat, aye. Ugly, aye. A nose? Unquestionably. How to explain to a monk I had received it thanks to the arts of a little brown man who scoffed at the notion of Christ's being the Son of God, or even of there being but one God? I did not explain. If Cyrus wanted to reckon it a miracle, I would let him.
"When do you intend to go back to Amastris?" I asked.
"Go back?" He shook his head in puzzlement. "Emperor, I do not intend to go back. I aim to make myself a place here, and to aid you in recovering your throne in every way I can. Once that is done, I shall return to Romania, but not until then."
If he spoke the truth, he easily passed the test I had set him. Over the next few days, I learned from longshoremen that he had indeed disembarked from a ship from Amastris. "He was an abbot there, I hear," one of them said, which explained how Cyrus had got permission from his superior to abandon his monastery for another, or rather that he had needed no one's permission. Oh, he might have asked his bishop, but then again, he might not have, too, abbots being largely autonomous within the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
In Kherson, he lived as a monk among other monks. If taking orders when he had once given them troubled him, he showed no sign. He spoke more openly about my return to Constantinople than I did. Sometimes he did so within the hearing of Khazar soldiers. I saw how they glared. If he was an agent of the tudun's, either they did not know it or they made a better show of hypocrisy than I suspected to lie within the abilities of such barbarians. I was convinced.
And so, little by little, was Myakes, who initially had distrusted Cyrus even more than I had. "He's the straight goods, Emperor," he said one day when we were drinking wine in a tavern. "I wouldn't have believed it, but he is. Nice to have a man of God who's on our side seven days a week."
"Yes," I said, drawing the word out into a hiss. Kallinikos had been perfectly happy to work with me- and to bless Leontios in my place\a160… and to bless Apsimaros in Leontios's place. If I regained the throne, no doubt he would bless me again\a160… for a while.
Barisbakourios and Stephen- I more often thought of him that way than as Salibas, Stephen being the good Greek name it was- walked into the tavern. They hurried over to the table where Myakes and I sat. "That monk of yours, Emperor, he's something!" Barisbakourios exclaimed. "You listen to him, the devils of hell already have Apsimaros on their forks, and they're toasting him over the fire." His eyes glowed. He was ready for anything, was Barisbakourios, the best of the handful who had rallied to my side in Kherson.
"People were listening to Cyrus, too, and nodding at everything he said," Stephen added. Had his brother gone against me, I think he would have, too. Though lacking the spark of Barisbakourios, he was brave and- because his brother was- loyal. Not all can lead, and without followers a leader is no more than a voice that crieth in the wilderness.
"Were any Khazars there?" I asked.
"No, no Khazars, but a couple of the rich merchants' bodyguards were hanging around the edge of the crowd," Barisbakourios answered. "The longer they listened, the unhappier they got. They're afraid of Apsimaros, the fools."
What they were afraid of was the wrath of the Roman Empire, which, even when the Empire was headed by a usurper so little Roman that he had to change his name to have one fit for putting on his nomismata, was nothing to be despised. I also took the bodyguards' unhappiness to mean that their masters would be unhappy when Cyrus's words were reported to them, and very possibly that the tudun would be unhappy, too. If he was, odds were that Cyrus truly did support me.
My other choice in looking at Cyrus was to reckon that he sought to incite me to actions by which the Khazars or the rich merchants (whom I had not previously considered) could justify taking my head. The more I pondered that, the less likely it seemed. The merchants' reach did not extend to Amastris, whence Cyrus had indubitably come. And, if the Khazars intended taking my head, they could do it. They needed no justification: to the contrary. If they did do it, they had no need to fear the wrath of the Roman Empire: again, to the contrary. Apsimaros would shower them with presents on learning they had killed me.
Which, by ineluctable logic, meant Cyrus was unlikely to be an agent, and likely in fact to have seen in the stars that I would indeed return in triumph to Constantinople. Which, in turn, meant- or probably meant- I could trust him. One thing an Emperor soon learns is that men he can truly trust are few and far between.
Writing out the pathway my reasoning followed takes longer than the reasoning itself did to pass through my mind. After taking only a couple of breaths, I raised my mug of wine in salute. "To Cyrus!" I said.
"To Cyrus!" Myakes, Barisbakourios, and Stephen drank with me.
Even with Cyrus vigorously espousing my cause, it advanced more slowly than I would have liked. Having spent so long in Kherson, I felt every added day like another heavy stone dropped onto my back. The first white hairs appeared in my beard while I spent time doing nothing in exile.
Not all the time passed to no good purpose. The scabs crusting my forehead finally fell away, and the raw pink scar under them began to weather on being exposed to sun and air. A year having passed after the Indian cut me, the scar was no longer pink but a shade only a little paler than the rest of my skin. When I visited that brothel, none of the whores there hesitated to join with me during the day, and they no longer charged me twice the going rate. I was no longer so conspicuous as I had been.
This was true of my physical appearance. In other ways, though, Cyrus's vigorous advocacy of me and my cause was making me more conspicuous than I had been. I was walking into Kherson early one morning when a couple of Khazars on ponies came trotting down toward the monastery where I had stayed so long. Recognizing me, they reined in. One of them said, "You come with us. The tudun is to see you now."
I ended up walking into town between their horses. In all the time I had spent at Kherson, the tudun had never before honored me by inviting me into his residence: to do that would have been to acknowledge I was worthy of honor. Nor was he in truth honoring me now; it was more that I had become a nuisance to him.
The building to which I was conveyed, while made from the local stone, had the spare lines that said it dated from the early days of the Roman Empire, perhaps from the first couple of hundred years after our Lord walked the earth as a man. I wondered if the governors the Emperors of those times had sent to this distant outpost of Roman soil reckoned their tenure here as much an exile as I did mine.
The Khazars who had led me to the residence turned me over to the guards standing in front; the half-bored, half-alert demeanor of the latter put me in mind of the fellows who had stood outside my favorite brothel down through the years. Their boredom fell away, though, on their taking charge of me.
Rather than doors, the tudun's residence had a carpet hanging over the entranceway, no doubt to imitate the tents to which the governor was more accustomed than he was to permanent housing. Inside, as I soon discovered, this imitation of the nomadic life continued. More carpets lay all over the floors, making my feet feel as if they were stepping on thick grass. Instead of the chairs and couches the Roman governors had used, cushions whose covers were as fantastically embroidered as the rugs did duty for furnishings. The lamps stank of butter.
In lieu of a throne or other high seat, the tudun lolled atop a mound of cushions. I looked around, finding none provided for me. Having contemplated remaining upright so I could look down on him, I decided it were wiser to sit, he having a position I acknowledged and I possessing none to which he admitted.
"You have friends making noises over you," he said ominously, "friends making noises about Emperor. Merchants not like."
He said nothing about the khagan of the Khazars, which I found interesting, but, if he was to govern the town, he had to pay attention to its prominent folk as well as to his distant master. I answered his first comment: "I am not responsible for what my friends say. They think I was treated unjustly." I thought the same, but again decided wisdom lay in keeping silent on that. Looking up at him, I went on, "Have any of your spies ever reported that I claimed I would go back to the imperial city and regain the crown?"
He did not bother denying he had set spies on me. "They not say that, no." I breathed an invisible sigh of relief, for I had said it, but, evidently, only among men who genuinely backed my cause. His words also confirmed Cyrus's loyalty to me. Still, he held the power here, and I had trouble bearing up under his gaze. After a pause, he said, "But your friends, they say what you want, yes?"
Yes indeed. "I cannot control what my friends say," I repeated. "Some say one thing, some say another, as is true of all men. But is it just to condemn me for words I cannot control? Would you want anyone to do that to you?"
Those narrow eyes glinted. He jabbed a thumb at his chest. "I never want to be Emperor of Romans at Constantinople. Never."
"Ah, but suppose your friends started saying you wanted to be khagan of the Khazars?" I shot back. "It would not be true. Would you want Ibouzeros Gliabanos to judge you from their loose talk?"
"I never want to be khagan, either," he said, but that was not the point, and he was clever enough to realize it. From atop that mound of cushions, he stared down at me. At last, grudgingly, he said, "Maybe." He spoke to the guards in the language of the Khazars, which has always put me in mind of the noises an egg makes frying in a pan. Without a word to me, the guards gestured out toward the curtain. They did not follow on my departing. The tudun having finished with me, I was no longer of any interest to them.
I reported my conversation with the Khazar governor to my comrades. Myakes, ever the most cautious of us, said, "We have to go easy for a while. If we get the Khazars and the merchants angry at us, we lose everything, and fast."
"That's so, but there's such a thing as being too careful, too," Barisbakourios returned. He was ready to sail for Constantinople that day or any day, so long as the ship held him and me- and perhaps his brother as well, though I suspect he would have done without Stephen at a pinch.
Cyrus said, "The truth of your right to rule, Emperor, is no less than the truth of the Lord. And, like the truth of the Lord, it must be proclaimed to those who know it not."
"Sometimes the truth of the Lord is proclaimed loudly, sometimes quietly," I said. "As the Holy Scriptures say, to every thing there is a season. Now is our season for quiet ripening. When the harvest is ripe, we shall reap it."
Cyrus and Barisbakourios protested but, recognizing me as Emperor of the Romans, recognized also that they were bound to obey me. And so, for the next few months, they were less vehement about putting forward my claim, regardless of how proper they knew it was. The tudun did not summon me again during that time, proving he was to some degree lulled.
But what I had asked of my followers, however necessary it seemed, went against their grain and mine. Little by little, almost without knowing it, Cyrus and Barisbakourios once more began to speak of my returning to Constantinople and to the throne waiting there. Had the tudun sought to silence them when they first began this, I should have eased their eagerness again. But he did not, and so I did not.
And so when, one day, Cyrus stood half preaching to, half haranguing, a crowd of lazy loafers who, like lazy loafers everywhere, took their entertainment where they could find it, he cried out, "In the eyes of God, this Apsimaros and Leontios before him were and are base usurpers, surely doomed to damnation and eternal torment at the clawed hands of Satan and his demons. Here before me stands the rightful Emperor of the Romans. Is it not so, Emperor Justinian?"
I turned to the crowd and, as if seized by something more than myself, shouted in a great voice, "Yes, it is so, every word! I was and am and will be Emperor of the Romans, and will return to Constantinople to wear the crown once more!" How the loafers cheered!