“Dire poverty.”
“Well, I grew up poor,” he said. “Also common knowledge.”
“No, no. Still to come.”
“Poverty? Nonsense. I am very, very well off.”
“You shall be poor again,” she insisted.
“I don’t believe you. I have so much … No, no. Impossible.”
She shrugged.
“What else can you tell me?”
“What is your chief concern?”
He leaned forward eagerly. “The future of … my career?”
She considered, drawing circles on his palm.
“And don’t tell me I have been dismissed from my post. There’s nobody in this city that doesn’t know that.”
“That which has been taken away, shall be restored,” she told him.
He sighed with relief. “When?”
“I cannot say exactly. But probably quite soon.”
He grunted with satisfaction. “The same post? I’ll be Prefect of the East again? In charge of taxes?”
“If you are careful, yes. Wait patiently and do nothing to attract attention.” Her questing fingers pressed more firmly on his palm. “Eventually,” she said, “the mantle of Augustus will fall upon your shoulders.”
He drew in a deep breath. Now, suddenly, he was ready to believe her. “The mantle of Augustus? Are you sure?”
“I read it, here. I tell you truly. The mantle of Augustus.”
“When?”
“I cannot tell exactly when. Eventually.”
“It will take time,” he breathed. “I can wait. And plan. And be ready.”
She continued to stroke his hard hand. “A girl,” she said. “A young girl. Important in your life.”
“My daughter,” he told her. “Only one of any importance.”
She nodded. “She is your weakness. You must beware.”
“Beware? But not of her, surely! She loves me! She is my one ewe lamb!”
“Beware,” she reiterated. “There is danger here, associated with her.”
“I must take care of her,” he said, interpreting the warning in the only way it made sense to him. “People could strike at me through her. It is right that you should make me more aware of this.” He was now completely convinced of the sibyl’s capabilities. “She shall have bodyguards. Well, well. And … anything else of import?”
“You have been a follower of Mithra,” she said, suddenly.
He drew in a deep breath, horrified that she should say this. Paganism was completely forbidden and could cause him to be exiled, if not executed. Certainly it would keep him out of a civil post. “But no longer,” he said quickly.
“No. Now you are a man who knows no god.”
At this he sat mute.
“But one day you will turn to the Christ … This will happen when … the mantle of Augustus falls upon you.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “The Emperor is God’s Vice-regent here on earth. He must be seen to be devoutly Christian. Yes, that makes sense. And? What more?”
She sighed. “I have told you all I am able to divine.”
“You can’t say how … or when … ?”
“I have told you all I can,” she said. “But you have heard what you wanted to hear, no?”
He cleared his throat. “I suppose so. Yes.”
She smiled, a smile still as sweet as it must have been when she was young and comely, revealing rotten teeth. She let go of his hand, turned her two slender hands upward and extended them toward him. He filled them with gold, before stalking off into the night.
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 532
No easy thing
2 February, AD 532
It is no easy thing, to get rid of an emperor. One who has been chosen by the Senate, supported by the army and proclaimed to the populace. Thrice August. Crowned and consecrated, God’s Vice-regent here on earth. Even when that same populace has varied and deeply felt grievances and wants to get rid of the man they once hailed and revered.
The people of Constantinople now know this fact. The Sanitation Department has removed the corpses, all thirty thousand of them, from the Hippodrome, and the tiers of seats that ran red with blood have been scrubbed with lye. But memories are harder to eradicate. All over the city there are walking reminders of the day they tried to put a different despotes on the throne: men marked with terrible scars or mutilations. But the most grievous reminders are invisible; they are the empty places where once there was a father, a brother or a son, a friend or lover, forever lost when the generals Belisarius and Mundus, with their Goths and Heruls, fell upon the mutinous gathering in the great circus, and cut out the heart of the revolt.
I was there, that day, I saw it all. Disguised as a slave in a tattered cloak, I stood with my back to the wall near the Nekra gate and I watched the slaughter. I saw the blood of thirty thousand men spilled in one day in one place, an urban place, not the kind of ground where battles are usually fought. I saw the blood drip and puddle on wooden stands and marble seats and on the hard earth compacted by thousands of thundering horses’ hooves. I saw the entire Hippodrome painted red. That frightful scene brought a sudden insight to my mind: red, rather than purple, is the true colour of power. Whoever wields absolute power will, sooner or later, have to consolidate it with blood. No matter how noble the autocrat’s ideals, it will inevitably come to this.
I saw, also, framed above the holding pens for racing chariots like a puppet show, the palace guards come rushing into the Kathisma to lay hold of the newly crowned Hypatius and his brother Pompeius and drag them back into the palace through the Ivory Gate, together with their recently assembled entourage. I witnessed the brief reign of the usurper coming to an ignominious end. I remember that I noticed the sun glinting on the ferocious fangs of the triple-headed serpent that tops the tower of Apollo on the spina around which the racing chariots hurl themselves to victory or disaster. The three heads appeared to me to be grinning in mockery.
As the Commander of the Imperial Guard, I oversaw the execution of the brothers as ordered by Justinian, and I stood on the icy shore when their bodies were cast into the sea. I saw the usurper float away into the deep.
I believe that Justinian, left to himself, would have been merciful. But the Empress Theodora, whose stirring words had stiffened the resolve of those who had been suggesting flight, pointed out that the sorry pair would always remain a possible focus for discontents, since they do have royal blood from the late
