Byzantium Read Online Free PDF Page B

nervous, every organ beneath my chest grown cold, my palms and my scalp beading with sweat. I returned triumphant, but what if Heraclius had lied to me? What if my reward awaited me here, among the silver thorns? I glanced at them now, wishing I knew which were poison-tipped.
    I had just begun counting the drops of sweat falling from my forehead when the emperor burst through the door and strode toward me, roaring gleefully. “I have heard the reports!” he said. “There’ll be no more talk of a monk on the throne, that’s for certain.”
    I kept my head bowed. Warm relief flooded through me. My fears now seemed groundless.
    “Your father would be pleased,” Heraclius went on as he stood over me. “You have done your duty.” Then he chuckled and seemed to play out the gelding in his mind, for I saw him make a flick of the wrist like a man slicing grapes from a vine. After two more of these flicks, he asked, “Do you have them?”
    I bowed lower and offered up the leather purse, which I had kept tied to my tunic since fleeing the monastery. Before leading me to the Chamber, the eunuch had made sure I remembered to bring Theodosios’s testicles. It seemed Heraclius possessed a cabinet near his bed in which he stored, preserved in vinegar, similar artifacts taken from vanquished pretenders and Persian generals.
    “Tell me,” the emperor said when he finished prodding the purse, “did he squeal?”
    “He screamed in pain, Emperor,” I answered, speaking as evenly as I could.
    “Very good,” the emperor said, then, after losing himself in thought and chuckling once more, “you may go.”
    I hesitated. I felt as if I couldn’t move and before I knew what I was doing I called out, “Emperor.” He looked back—he had already stepped toward his door—and I held up my bared hand.
    The stream purled beneath the silver briars. Above us the eyes of God stared, fixed in stone and gilded glass.
    “Theodosios?” Heraclius asked, his face gone pale.
    I nodded.
    The emperor came to where I was kneeling. He grabbed me by the wrist and examined my hand. “So he was genuine,” he said. “That is unfortunate.”
    I quaked. On the ship back, as my fascination with my hand settled into calm acceptance, doubts began to plague me. Surely I had committed a grievous crime. Now I was certain I would be tipped into the briars.
    “I will tell you something,” the emperor said. “It is by far not the worst thing I have had done.” He pulled me close. I could see a narrowness in his gaze, the tired narrowness of one long hunted, of a bear in its final moments in the pit as the dogs close in. I thought of Theodosios’s vision, of the emperor as a frightened, blind beast, and waited for the shove, for the prick of the thorns. But before I could close my eyes the emperor let me go, pressed the carnelian berry, and sent me away.
    RELEASED FROM THE CHALKE GATE, I picked my way through the Mese’s undulant, squabbling crowd of merchants. Dazed still from my meeting with Heraclius, I paid no attention to the clothier who thrust a wool mantle into my hands, to the tin seller who danced before me, his cups dangling from his arms. I was headed, at last, for home.
    “Eusebios,” my mother said when I stepped into the courtyard. She stood there as if knocked still, whispered a veneration to the Holy Mother, then clutched me and wept into my shoulder. My heart—this surprised me—swelled, and for a moment I forgot all that I had done. Only when she pulled away did she see my hand.
    “How?” she asked, seizing it and pulling it close to her eyes. I started on about a Grecian spring, but she scoffed. So I told her the truth, and in the telling I felt suddenly proud. What I had done was difficult. I had served the emperor. And mightn’t the hand be a sign that I had done right? But before I could finish, my mother let me go and backed away.
    “That was you?” she said. Her flesh seemed to have turned ashen. “You have mocked