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 Emperor Anastasius, their uncle; moreover, said Theodora, with characteristic pragmatism and clarity, Hypatius had been crowned. Even such a travesty as it had been, lacking the blessing of the Patriarch and enacted with a borrowed golden chain fashioned into a makeshift diadem – even so, he had been crowned. But the Empire of Byzantium can have only one emperor.
They had to be executed. So they were. And I saw them taken away like flotsam, drifting out to sea on an ebbing tide, the would-be emperor nothing more than food for nibbling fish.
No, no easy task to unseat a reigning emperor. Justinian has reasserted his right to the throne and his power in utterly convincing terms.
And yet he has been weakened. The formerly unthinkable has been thought, and almost turned to deed: there nearly was another emperor. The populace desired another emperor. So did the great landowners and the nobility, who have never truly accepted a peasant and a former actress and courtesan on the throne. Everybody has considered this possibility: there could be another emperor.
Perhaps this end may yet be striven for, though possibly by other means.
We must be vigilant.
Chapter 1: A particular question
Theodora sat on the terrace of the Hormisdas Palace, a wedding gift from Justinian. Since the Emperor and Empress had other quarters, it currently housed her friends from her acting days who had fallen on hard times – Chrysomallo and Indaro – and many Monophysite religious refugees. It was cold, but she was well muffled in a fur-lined cloak, with her small feet on a foot warmer filled with coals. She always loved to sit here, but now even more so, since the view was out across the Sea of Marmara with the houses of the rich dotted on a slope to the side and there were no blackened ruins to remind her of the convulsion the city had just gone through. No smell of smoke on the clean and salty air. Just heaving water the colour of pewter with white foam glistening where the waves broke on the shore, a vaulted sky white with cloud cover and one black cormorant perched on a rock, drying its wings.
A month and a half had passed since the rioting had ended. The Greens and the Blues, the two semi-military factions that held so much power in the capital, had joined forces in the recent insurrection, but their militant ambitions had been eradicated by the slaughter of thirty thousand rebels in the Hippodrome. A dull calm had settled on the stricken city. But Theodora was still in a state of shock. She had not yet been able to gather her strength to follow her customary routine and to pursue her usual goals. She sat like an invalid, unaware of the outside world, turned inward, nursing her injured spirit.
She felt as if she had been dealt a grievous wound by some powerful, half-tamed creature that she had mistakenly come to trust; a creature she had fed and tended, sheltered and loved. A creature that had turned on her in rage and violence beyond any expectation or understanding and had left her devastated. She felt completely sundered from the people – her people, for whom she had, by her lights, tried to do so much. She did not want to go out and see what had become of her many charitable institutions. She did not want to take part in the regular ceremonial processions in which she had delighted before. She did not want to set one small foot out into the ravaged streets of her beautiful city.
Justinian and Narses were baffled. In their view, the insurrection was over, the ringleaders dealt with, calm and order restored. They were looking forward. She could not explain to them that when she walked out into the streets of her city, or rode in state, she sensed at her back and shoulder the massed spectres of the rebels who had bled and died in the Hippodrome, the silently accusing ranks of the fallen: thousands upon thousands of men – husbands and fathers, lovers and brothers and sons, cut down by the swords of the