Robert Silverberg

Waiting for the End

The uglier of the two Praetorians, flat-faced and gruff, with close-cropped red hair and thick Slavic cheekbones, said, “The Emperor wants you, Antipater. Has some work for you, he says.”

“Translation work,” said the prettier guardsman, a ringleted blond Gaul. “The latest little love note from our friends the Greeks, I guess. Or maybe he wants you to write one for him to them.” He gave Antipater a flirtatious little wink-and-wriggle, mock-seductive. The Praetorians all thought Antipater was of that sort, probably because he had such a sleek, well-oiled Levantine look about him, but perhaps merely because he was fluent in Greek. They were wrong, though. He was a slim-hipped, dusky-skinned, dark-haired man of somewhat feline gait and undeniably Eastern appearance, yes, but that was simply an artifact of his ancestry, the heritage of his long-ago Syrian forefathers. His understanding of Greek was a requirement of his job, not an advertisement of his sexual tastes. But he was at least as Roman as either of them. And as for his preference for women’s embraces, they need only ask Justina Botaniates, to name just one.

“Where is His Majesty now?” Antipater asked coolly.

“The Emerald Office,” replied the Slav. “Greek Letters, he said. Get me the Master of Greek Letters.” He glanced at his companion and his broad face writhed in a heavy grin. “We’ll all be masters of Greek letters soon enough, won’t we, Marius?”

“Those of us who can read and write, at any rate,” said the Gaul. “Eh? Eh?—Well, get along with you now, Antipater! Don’t keep Caesar waiting!”

They had no respect. They were crude men. Antipater was a high palatine official and they were mere soldiers, and they had no business ordering him about. He glared them down and they backed away, and he gathered up his tablets and stylus and went down the dimly lit halls of the palace annex to the tunnel that led to the main building, and thence to the row of small private offices—Emerald, Scarlet, Indigo, Topaz—clustered along the east side of the Great Hall of Audience. The Emerald Office, the farthest in the series, was the Emperor Maximilianus’s favorite, a long narrow windowless room hung with draperies of Indian weave, dark-green in hue, on which scenes of men with spears hunting elephants and tigers and other fantastic creatures were depicted.

“Lucius Aelius Antipater,” he told the guard on duty, a vacant-eyed boy of eighteen or so, whom he had never seen before. “Master of Greek Letters to Caesar.” The boy nodded him on through, not even bothering with the routine check for concealed weapons.

Antipater wondered about today’s assignment. An outgoing letter, he supposed. In these dark days, three or four went out for every one that came in. Yet what was there to write about, with the Greek army on the verge of pouring across the Western Empire’s porously defended frontiers? Surely not still another stern ultimatum addressed to Roma’s great enemy the Basileus Andronicus, ordering him to cease and desist at once from further military encroachment on the Imperial domain. They had sent the latest in the long series of such ultimatums only last week. The courier most likely was no farther east with it yet than Macedonia, certainly was still a long way from delivering it to the Basileus in Constantinopolis—where it would only be tossed aside with a snort of amusement, like all the rest.

No, Antipater decided. This one had to be something more unusual. A letter from Caesar to some slippery Byzantine lordling on the African coast of the Great Sea, say—the exarch of Alexandria, maybe, or of Carthage—urging him, with the promise of immense bribes, to defect to the Roman side and launch some surprise attack from the rear, one that would distract Andronicus long enough for Roma to recover its balance and mobilize its long overdue counterthrust against the invaders.

A wild stratagem indeed. Nobody but he would ever think of it. “The trouble with you, Lucius Aelius,” Justina liked to tell him, “is that you have too much imagination for your own good.”

Maybe so. But here he was, just thirty-two years old that year—which was the year 1951 since the founding of the city—and for two years now he had been a member of the high palatinate, the Emperor’s inner circle. Caesar had already bestowed a knighthood on him and a seat in the Senate would surely be next. Not bad going for a poor lad from the provinces. A pity that he had achieved his spectacular rise to prominence just as the Empire itself, weakened by its own senseless imprudence, seemed to be about to collapse.

“Caesar?” he said, peering into the Emerald Office.

At first Antipater saw no one. Then, by the smoky light of two dim tapers burning in a far corner of the room, he perceived the Emperor at his desk, the venerable Imperial desk of dark exotic woods that had been occupied in the past by the likes of Aemilius Magnus and Metellus Domitius and Publius Clemens and, for all Antipater knew, by Augustus and Hadrianus and Diocletianus as well. Great Caesars all; but the huge curving desk seemed to swallow their current successor, a pallid wiry little man with a glint of wholly justified worry in his close-set, sea-green, brightly shining eyes. He was wearing a simple gray jerkin and a peasant’s red leggings; only the faint thread of pearls running along one shoulder, flanked by a pair of purple stripes, indicated that his rank was anything out of the ordinary.

He bore a grand name, did Maximilianus. It had been Maximilianus III, Maximilianus the Great, who in his short but brilliant reign had beaten the troublesome barbarians of the north into submission once and for all, the Huns and Goths and Vandals and the rest of that unruly shaggy-haired crowd. But that had been almost seven hundred years ago, and this Maximilianus, Maximilianus VI, possessed none of his famous namesake’s fire and drive. Once again the Empire was at risk, tottering on the brink, in truth, as it had seemed to be in that other Maximilianus’s far-off time. But this latter-day Maximilianus was not very likely to be its savior.

“You summoned me, Caesar?”

“Oh, Antipater. Yes. Look at this, Antipater.” The Emperor held a yellow vellum scroll out toward him. So what needed translation was an incoming document of some sort, then. Antipater noticed that the Emperor’s hand was quivering.

The Emperor, as a matter of fact, seemed to have turned overnight into a palsied old man. There were tics and tremors all over him. And he was only fifty, too. But he had held the throne for twenty grueling years, now, and his reign had been a hard one from its very first hour, when news of his father’s death had reached him virtually at the same moment as word of the Greek thrust westward into the African proconsular region. That African invasion was the first major escalation of what had until then been a slow-burning border dispute confined to the province of Dalmatia, a dispute that had blossomed, through subsequent Greek probes along the border separating the two empires, into a full-scale war between East and West that now seemed to be entering its final dismal phase.

Antipater unrolled the scroll and began quickly to scan it.

“This was intercepted at sea by one of our patrols,” said the Emperor. “Just south of Sardinia. Greek ship, it was, disguised as a fishing vessel, sailing northward out of Sicilia. I can understand some of what the message says, of course—”

“Yes,” Antipater said. “Of course, Caesar.” All educated men knew Greek; but it was the Greek of Homer and Sophocles and Plato that was taught in the academies of Roma, not the very different modern-day Byzantine version spoken from Illyricum eastward to Armenia and Mesopotamia. Languages do change. The Latin of Maximilianus VI’s Roma wasn’t the Latin of Virgil and Cicero, either. It was for his fluency in modern Greek that Antipater had won his place at court.

He moved swiftly through the casually scrawled words. And very quickly he realized why the Emperor was trembling.

“Merciful God defend us!” he muttered, when he was only halfway through.

“Yes,” said the Emperor. “Yes. If only he would.”

“What it was,” said Antipater to Justina that evening in his small but pleasantly situated apartments on the Palatine Hill, “was a dispatch from the Byzantine admiral in Sicilia to the commander of a second Greek fleet that seems to be moored off the western coast of Sardinia, although we didn’t know until now that any such fleet was there. The message instructs the commander of the Sardinian naval force to proceed on a northerly route past Corsica toward the mainland and capture our two ports on the Ligurian coast. Antipolis and Nicaea, their names are.” He had no business telling her anything of this. Not only was he revealing military secrets, an act that in theory was punishable by death, but she was a Greek, to boot. A daughter of the famed Botaniates family, no less, which had supplied illustrious generals to the Byzantine Emperors for three hundred years. It was fully probable that some of the Greek legions that were marching toward Roma at this very moment were under the command of distant cousins of hers.

But he could withhold nothing from her. He loved her. He trusted her. Justina would never betray him, Greek though she was. A Botaniates, even, although from a secondary and impoverished branch of the family. But just as his own people had given up their allegiance to Byzantium to seek better opportunities in the Western Empire, so had hers. The only difference was that his family had Romanized itself three and a half centuries back and hers had crossed over when she was a little girl. She still felt more comfortable speaking in Greek than in Latin. Yet to her the Byzantines were “the Greeks” and the Romans were “us.” That was sufficient for him.

“I was in Nicaea once,” she said. “A beautiful little place, mountains behind it, lovely villas all along the coast. The climate is very mild. The mountains shelter it from the north winds that come down out of the middle of Europa. You see palm trees everywhere, and there are plants in bloom all winter long, red, yellow, purple, white. Flowers of every color.”

“It isn’t as a winter resort that the Basileus wants it,” Antipater said. They had just finished dinner: grilled breast of pheasant, baked asparagus, a decent bottle of the smooth sweet golden-hued wine of Rhodes. Even here in wartime fine Greek wines were still available in Roma, if only to the fortunate members of the Imperial elite, though with the eastern ports suffering from the Byzantine blockade the stocks were unlikely to last much longer.

“Here. Look at this, Justina.”

He snatched up a tablet and quickly sketched a rough map: the long peninsula of Italia with Sicilia at its tip, the coastline of Liguria curving away along the mainland to the west with the two big islands of Corsica and Sardinia in the sea to the south of it, and that of Dalmatia to the east. With emphatic little dots of his stylus he marked in Antipolis and Nicaea on the coast just to the left of the place where Italia began its southward thrust out of the heart of Europa toward the African shore.

Justina rose and walked around to his side of the table so that she could stand behind him and peer over his shoulder. The fragrance of her perfume drifted toward him, that maddeningly wonderful Arabian myrrh of hers that also could no longer be bought in Roma because of the Greek blockade, and his heart began to pound. He had never known anyone quite like this little Greek. She was a light-boned, delicately built woman: tiny, actually, but with sudden and surprisingly voluptuous curves at hip and bosom. They had been lovers for the past eighteen months and even now, Antipater was convinced, she had not yet exhausted her entire repertoire of passionate tricks.

“All right,” he said, compelling himself rigorously to focus on the matter at hand. He gestured toward the lower part of his map. “The Greeks have already come across from Africa, just a short hop, and established a beachhead in Sicilia. It would be child’s play for them to cross the strait at Messana and start marching up the peninsula toward the capital. The Emperor expects that some such move is imminent, and he’s stationed half the home legions down here in the south, in Calabria, to keep them from getting any closer to us than the vicinity of Neapolis, let alone all the way up to Roma. Now, over here in the northeast”—Antipater indicated the upper right corner of the peninsula, where Italia bordered on the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, which now were fully under Byzantine control—“we have the other half of the home army, guarding the border out back of Venetia against the inevitable push from that direction. The rest of our northern frontier, the territories bordering on Gallia and Belgica, is secure at this time and we aren’t anticipating any Greek attempt to break through from that direction. But now, consider this—”

He tapped the stylus against the western shores of Sardinia and Corsica.

“Somehow,” he said, “Andronicus seems to have managed to get a fleet up the far side of these two islands, where we haven’t expected them to go sniffing around at all. Possibly they marched westward along the African shore and secretly built a bunch of ships somewhere on the Mauritanian coast. However they did it, they’re there, apparently, and now they’re in a position to outflank us on the west. They sail up past Corsica and seize the Ligurian seacoast, and then they use Nicaea and Antipolis as bases to send an army down the peninsula through Genua and Pisae and Viterbo and right on into Roma, and there’s not a thing we can do about it. Not with half our army tied up on the northeast frontier to keep them from moving against us out of Dalmatia and the other half waiting south of Neapolis for an invasion from Sicilia. There isn’t any third half to defend the city from a fast attack on our unguarded side.”

“Can’t the frontier legions be pulled down out of central Gallia to defend the Ligurian ports?” Justina asked.

“Not quickly enough to head off a Greek landing there. And in any case if we yanked troops out of Gallia, the Greeks could simply move their forces westward from Dalmatia, break into Gallia Transalpina themselves, and come down out of the mountains at us the way Hannibal did fifteen hundred years ago.” Antipater shook his head. “No, we’re boxed in. They’ve got us on three sides at once, and that’s one too many.”

“But the message to the Sardinian commander was intercepted before it got to him,” Justina pointed out. “He doesn’t know that he’s supposed to bring his ships north.”

“Do you think they sent only one such message?”

“What if they did, and it was never intended to reach the Sardinian commander in the first place? I mean, what if it was a hoax?”

He stared. “A hoax, did you say?”

“Suppose that in fact there’s no Greek fleet at all anchored west of Sardinia. But Andronicus wants us to think that there is, and therefore he had this fake message sent out for us to intercept, so that we’d get flustered and move troops toward Liguria to meet the nonexistent invasion force there. Which would open up a hole on one of the other fronts that his forces could stroll right through.”

What a bizarre notion! For a moment Antipater was taken aback by the thought that Justina could come up with anything so far-fetched. Far-fetched ideas were supposed to be his specialty, not hers. But then he felt a surge of delight and admiration at the fertility of her imagination.

He grinned at her in an access of overflowing love. “Oh, Justina! You really are a Greek, aren’t you?”

A quick flash of surprise and puzzlement sparkled in the shining black depths of her eyes.

“What?”

“Subtle, I mean. Inscrutable. Dark and devious of thought. The mind that could hatch an idea like that—”

She did not seem flattered. Annoyed, rather: she responded with a quirk of the full lips, a toss of her head. The carefully appointed row of jet-black curls across her forehead was thrown into disarray. She swept them back into place with a crisp peremptory gesture. “If I could hatch it, so could the Basileus Andronicus. So could you, Lucius. It’s perfectly obvious. Cook up a false message and deliberately let it be captured, precisely so that Caesar will go into a panic, and start pulling his forces away from places they ought to be and into places where they aren’t needed.”

“Yes. Of course. But I think the message is genuine, myself.”

“Does Caesar? How did he react when you read it to him?”

“He pretended to be calm and cool and completely unruffled.”

“Pretended?”

“Pretended, yes. But his hand was shaking when he gave me the scroll. He already knew roughly what it said, and it frightened him.”

“He’s an old man, Lucius.”

“Not really. Not in terms of years, anyway.” Antipater rose and went to the window, and stood there staring out into the gathering gray of dusk. The lights of the capital were beginning to gleam on the dark hills all around. A beautiful sight; he never tired of it. His place, well down the hill from the royal palace itself, was far from majestic, but it had a choice location in the quarter of the Palatine reserved for top-level civil servants. From his portico he could see the great grim bulk of the ancient Coliseum where it rose against the horizon, and the lower end of the Forum below it, and the nearby sector of the splendiferous jumbled arc of marbled buildings of all eras that stretched off to the east, awesome structures going back hundreds and hundreds of years: back, some of them, to the time of Augustus and Nero and the first Trajan.

He had been fifteen, a greenhorn from the not very significant city of Salona in the not very significant province of Dalmatia, when he first saw the city of Roma. He had never outgrown the wonder that the capital inspired in him, not even now, when he moved daily among the great men of the realm and had come to understand only too clearly how far from great in truth they were. Yes, of course, they were mere grasping mortals like everyone else. But the city was great, the greatest, indeed, that had ever existed in the world, or ever would.

Was all this to be looted and torched now by the triumphant Byzantines, as it had been by the Gauls, so it was said, sixteen hundred years before? Or—what was more likely—would the Greeks just walk in and effortlessly take possession, destroying nothing, simply making themselves the masters of the city out of which their own empire had sprung once upon a time?

Justina came up behind him and pressed herself close. He felt her breasts flattening against his back. Their tips seemed to him to be hard.

Softly she said, “Lucius, what are we going to do now?”

“In the next five minutes, or the next three months?”

“You know what I mean.”

“If the Greeks take Roma, you mean?”

“Not if. When.”

He answered without turning toward her. “I don’t actually think that will happen, Justina.”

“You just said that there’s no way we can defend ourselves against attacks coming from three directions at once.”

“I know. But I want to believe that I’m wrong. The Emperor has called a meeting of the Great Council first thing tomorrow, and maybe someone’s got a battle plan that I don’t know about.”

“Or maybe not.”

“Even so,” Antipater said. “Let’s say that the worst happens: that they march against the city and we surrender, and the Greeks take control of the Western Empire. Nothing much should change, if they do. They’re civilized people, after all. They might even want to keep the Emperor around as a puppet ruler, if he’s willing. In any event they’ll still need civil servants who are fluent in both languages. My position should be safe.”

“And mine?”

“Yours?”

“You’re a Roman citizen, Lucius. You look like a Greek, yes, and why not, considering that your people came originally from Syria—from Antioch, isn’t that so? But your family’s been living in the Western Empire for centuries and centuries and you were born in a Roman province. Whereas I—”

“You’re Roman too.”

“Yes, if you believe that Byzantines are Romans just because they say that their country is the Roman Empire and their emperor calls himself King of the Romans. But Greek is what they speak and Greek is what they are. And I’m a Greek, Lucius.”

“A naturalized citizen of Roma, though.”

“Am I?”

Startled, he swung around to face her. “You are, aren’t you?”

“What I am is an Asian Greek. That isn’t any secret. My family’s from Ephesus, originally. When my father’s shipping business went bad we moved to Athens and he started over. When he lost three ships in the same storm he went bankrupt and we left for the Western Empire to escape his creditors. I was three years old then. We lived in Syracusae in Sicilia at first, and then in Neapolis, and after my father died I moved to Roma. But nowhere along the way did I become a Roman citizen.”

“I never knew that,” Antipater said.

“Well, you do now.”

“All the same, what does it matter?”

“It doesn’t, maybe, so long as Maximilianus is Emperor. But what happens after the Byzantines take over? Can’t you figure that out, Lucius? A Botaniates who sleeps with Romans? They’ll punish me as a traitor!”

“Nonsense. Roma’s full of Greeks. Always has been. Syrian Greeks, Armenian Greeks, Aegyptian Greeks, Cappadocian Greeks, even Greek Greeks. Once Andronicus’s crowd is in charge, they won’t care a rat’s ass who was sleeping with whom.”

But she clung to him, terrified. He had never seen her like this. “How do you know? I’m afraid of what might happen. Let’s run away, Lucius. Before they get here.”

“And go where?”

“Does it matter? Somewhere. Anywhere. Just so long as it’s far from here.”

He wondered how he could calm her. She seemed to be in the grip of inordinate unthinking fear. Her face was pale, her eyes had a glassy sheen, her breath was coming in little sobbing gusts.

“Please, Justina. Please.”

He took her hands in his for a moment, then slid his fingers up her arms until they rested along her collarbones. Tenderly he kneaded the muscles of her neck, trying to soothe her. “Nothing will happen to us,” he said gently. “The Empire hasn’t fallen yet, for one thing. It isn’t necessarily going to, despite the way everything looks right now. It’s survived some pretty bad things in the past and it may well survive this. The Basileus Andronicus might drop dead tomorrow. The sea might swallow his fleet the way it did your father’s ships. Or Jupiter and Mars might suddenly appear in front of the Capitol and lead us to a glorious victory. Anything might happen. I don’t know. But even if the Empire does fall, it won’t be the end of the world, Justina. You and I will be all right.” He stared intensely into her eyes. Could he make her believe something that he didn’t fully believe himself? “You—and—I—will—be—all—right—”

“Oh, Lucius—”

“We’ll be all right. Yes.” Antipater folded her small body up against his and held her close until her breathing sounded normal again and he could feel her taut frame beginning to relinquish its tension. And then—a transition so swift that it almost made him want to chuckle—her entire body softened and her hips began to move slowly from side to side. She pressed herself close, wriggling in unmistakable invitation. Her eyes were closed, her nostrils were distended, her tongue flickered like a serpent’s between her lips. Yes. Yes. Everything would be all right, somehow. They would close the walls in around themselves and ignore all that was going on outside. “Come,” he said. He drew her toward the waiting bedchamber.

The Great Council of State assembled at the second hour of morning in the grand velvet-hung chamber known as the Hall of Marcus Anastasius on the northern side of the Imperial palace. Both Consuls were there, and half a dozen senior figures of the Senate, and Cassius Cestianus, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and Cocceius Maridianus, the Secretary for Home Affairs, and seven or eight other government ministers as well, and a formidable battery of retired generals and naval officers. So, too, were the key members of the Imperial household: Aurelius Gellius, the Praetorian Prefect, and Domitius Pompeianus, the Master of Latin Letters, and Quintilius Vinicius, the Keeper of the Imperial Treasury, and more. To Antipater’s astonishment, even Germanicus Antoninus Caesar, the Emperor’s rascally younger brother, had come. His presence was appropriate, since at least in theory he was the heir to the throne; but never had Antipater seen that wastrel prince at any sort of council meeting before, nor, to Antipater’s recollection, had Germanicus ever been visible in public at all at such an early hour of the day. When he came sauntering in now, it caused a palpable stir.

The Emperor began the proceedings by asking Antipater to read the captured Greek scroll aloud.

“Demetrios Chrysoloras, Grand Admiral of the Imperial Fleet, to His Excellency Nicholas Chalcocondyles of Trebizond, Commander of Western Naval Forces, greetings! Be advised by these documents, O Nicholas, of the unanswerable will of His Most Puissant Imperial Majesty and Supreme Master of All Regions, Andronicus Maniakes, who by the grace of God holds the exalted title of King of the Romans and Lord Autocrat of—”

“Will you spare us this Greek foolishness, Antipater, and get to the essence of the matter?” came a drawling voice from the side of the chamber.

Antipater, rattled, looked up. His eyes met those of Germanicus Caesar. It was he who had spoken. The Emperor’s brother, lounging in his chair as though at a banquet, was rouged and pomaded to gaudy effect, and his purple-edged white robe was rumpled and stained with wine. Antipater understood now how Germanicus had managed to be here at this early hour: he had simply come directly to the palace after some all-night party.

The prince, smirking at him across the room, made a little impatient circling gesture with his hand. Obediently Antipater skimmed silently through the rest of the flourish of Byzantine pomp with which the letter opened and began reading again from the middle of the scroll:

“—to hoist anchor forthwith and undertake the northerly road, keeping well clear of Corsica isle, so that you journey straightaway to the Ligurian province of the Western Empire and make yourself the master of the ports of Antipolis and Nicaea—”

There was murmuring in the chamber already. These people had no need of maps in order to visualize the maritime movements that were involved. Or to grasp the nature of the danger to the city of Roma that the presence of a Greek fleet in those waters would pose.

Antipater closed the scroll and put it down.

The Emperor looked toward him and said, “Would you say, Antipater, that this document is authentic?”

“It’s written in good upper-class Byzantine Greek, majesty. I don’t recognize the handwriting, but it’s that of a capable scribe, the sort who’d be attached to an important admiral’s staff. And the seal looks like a genuine one.”

“Thank you, Antipater.” Maximilianus sat quietly for a moment, staring into the distance. Then he let his gaze travel slowly along the rows of Roma’s great leaders. At last it came to bear on the frail figure of Aurelianus Arcadius Ablabius, who had had command of the Tyrrhenian Sea fleet until his retirement to the capital for reasons of health a year before. “Explain to me, Ablabius, how a Byzantine armada could make its way up from Sicilia to the Sardinian coast without our so much as noticing the fact. Tell us about the Empire’s naval bases along the west coast of Sardinia, if you will, Ablabius.”

Ablabius, a thin, chalk-white man with pale blue eyes, moistened his lips and said, “Majesty, we have no significant naval bases on the west coast of Sardinia. Our ports are Calaris in the southeast and Olbia in the northeast. We have small outposts at Bosa and Othoca in the west, nothing more. The island is desolate and unhealthy and we have not seen the need to fortify it greatly.”

“Under the assumption, I suppose, that our enemies of the Eastern Empire were not likely to slip around us and attack us from the west?”

“This is so, majesty,” said Ablabius, visibly squirming.

“Ah. Ah. So nobody is watching the sea from western Sardinia. How interesting. Tell me about Corsica, now, Ablabius. Do we have a military base somewhere along the western coast of that island, perhaps?”

“There are no good harbors in the west at all, Caesar. The mountains come right down to the sea. Our bases are on the eastern shore, at Aleria and Mariana. It is another wild, useless island.”

“So, then, if a Greek fleet should succeed in entering the waters west of Sardinia, it would have clear sailing right on up to the Ligurian coast, is that right, Ablabius? We have no naval force whatsoever guarding that entire sea, is what you’re saying?”

“Essentially, yes, your majesty,” said Ablabius, in a very small voice.

“Ah. Thank you, Ablabius.” The Emperor Maximilianus once more traversed the room with his gaze. This time his eyes did not come to rest, but circled unceasingly about, as though he saw no place to land.

The tense hush was broken at last by Erucius Glabro, the senior Consul, a noble-looking hawk-nosed man who traced his ancestry back to the earliest years of the Empire. He had had Imperial pretensions himself, once, thirty or forty years back, but he was old now and generally thought to have become very foolish. “This is a serious matter, Caesar! If they land an army on the coast and begin marching toward Genua, we’d have no way of keeping them from coming on all the way down to the city itself.”

The Emperor smiled. He looked immensely weary. “Thank you for stating the obvious, Glabro. I was certain that I could count on you for that.”

“Majesty—”

“Thank you, I said.” The senior Consul shriveled back into his seat. The Emperor, his glinting narrow eyes roaming the group once more, said, “We have, I think, four choices here. We could transfer the army under Julius Fronto from the Gallian frontier to the vicinity of Genua, and hope that they’ll get there in time to meet any Greek force coming eastward along the Ligurian coast. But in all probability they’d be too late. Or we could bring the forces commanded by Claudius Lentulus across from Venetia to hold the Genuan border. That would probably work, but it would leave our northeastern frontier wide open to the army that Andronicus has in Dalmatia, and we’d see them in Ravenna or even Florentia before we knew what was happening. On the other hand, we could call the army of Sempronius Rufus northward from Calabria to defend the capital, bring Lentulus south to Tuscia and Umbria, and abandon the rest of the peninsula to the Greeks. That would put us back to where we were two thousand years ago, I suppose, but the chances seem fairly good that we could hold out here in the ancient Roman heartland for a long time.”

There was another long silence.

Then Germanicus Caesar said, in that lazy, offensive drawl of his, “I think you mentioned that we had four choices, brother. You mentioned only three.”

The Emperor did not look displeased. He seemed actually to be amused. “Very good, brother! Very good! There is a fourth choice. Which is to do nothing at all, to ignore this captured message entirely, to sit tight with our defenses in their present configuration and allow the Greeks to make whatever moves they have in mind.”

Antipater heard a few gasps of astonishment; and then there commenced a wild general hubbub. The Emperor, motionless, arms folded across his breast, lips curving into the faintest of smiles, waited for it to die down. As order began to return the voice of the Consul Herennius Capito could be heard clearly asking, “Would that not be the suicide of our nation, Caesar?”

“You might argue that any response at all that we might make at this time would be suicidal,” said the Emperor. “Defending ourselves on some new front means leaving some existing front unguarded. Pulling troops from any of our borders now will create a breach through which the enemy can easily move.”

“But to take no action whatever, Caesar, while the Greeks are landing an army virtually in our back yard—!”

“Ah, but are they, Capito? What if this message Antipater has just read to us is merely a fraud?”

There was a moment of astounded stillness, after which came a second uproar. “A fraud? A fraud? A fraud?” cried a host of high ministers and Imperial counselors all at once. They seemed stunned. As was Antipater as well, for was this not precisely the idea—implausible, absurd—that Justina had proposed to him in the privacy of his apartments the night before?

Antipater listened in amazement as Maximilianus now set forth the argument that the supposed letter of the Grand Admiral Chrysoloras might have been designed purely as a trap, that its intention was to induce the Romans to draw their forces away from a military front that was in genuine need of defending and move them to a place where no real threat existed.

That was possible, yes. But was it in any way likely?

Not to Antipater. His father had taught him never to underestimate an enemy’s cunning, but by the same token never to overestimate it, either. He had seen often enough how easily you could outsmart yourself by trying to think too many moves ahead in a game. It was far more reasonable, he thought, to believe that the Greeks really did have warships out there beyond Sardinia and were at this moment making ready to grab the Ligurian ports than it was to suppose that the Chrysoloras letter was merely a clever ploy in some game of—what was that game the Persians liked to play?—chess. A gigantic game of chess.

But no one could tell the Emperor to his face that a position he had put forth was absurd, or even just improbable. Very swiftly the assembled ministers and counselors could be seen bringing themselves around to an acceptance of the argument that it might not be necessary to react to the Grand Admiral’s purported orders to the commander of the Sardinian fleet, because there just might not be any Sardinian fleet. Which was the safest way to deal with it, anyway, politically speaking. A decision to do nothing spared them from having to yank Roman legions away from a border point that was quite definitely in danger of imminent attack. Nobody wanted the responsibility for doing that.

In the end, then, the Grand Council voted to take a wait-and-see position; and off went everyone to the Senate House in the Forum to go through the meaningless ritual of presenting the non-decision to the full Senate for its foreordained ratification.

“Stay a moment,” said the Emperor to Antipater, as the others headed for their waiting litters.

“Caesar?”

“I saw you shaking your head, there at the end, when the vote was being tallied.”

Antipater saw no purpose in offering a reply. He regarded the Emperor with a blank bland subservient stare.

“You think the Admiral’s letter is real, don’t you, Antipater?”

“Unquestionably the penmanship and the style of phrasing are Byzantine,” said Antipater cautiously. “The seal looks right also.”

“I don’t mean that. I’m talking about the fleet that we’re supposed to believe is lying at anchor off western Sardinia. You think it’s actually there.”

“Caesar, I am in no position to speculate about—”

“I think it’s really there, too,” Maximilianus said.

“You do, Caesar?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then why did you—?”

“Allow them to vote to take no action?” A look of terrible fatigue crossed the Emperor’s face. “Because that was the easiest thing, Antipater. It was my duty to bring the letter to their attention. But there’s no way we can respond to it, don’t you see? Even if the Greeks are on their way to Liguria, we don’t have any troops to send out there to meet them.”

“What will we do, Caesar, if they invade the peninsula?”

“Fight, I suppose,” said Maximilianus dully. “What else is there to do? I’ll pull Lentulus’s army down from the Dalmatian border and bring Sempronius Rufus’s men up from the south and we’ll hole up in the capital and defend ourselves as well as we can.” There was no trace of Imperial vigor in his voice, not a shred of conviction or fire. He is just striking a pose, Antipater thought, and not working very hard at it, either.

To Antipater the outcome seemed utterly clear.

The Empire is lost, he thought. All we’re doing is waiting for the end.

Once he had translated the Chrysoloras letter for the benefit of the Senate, there was no need for Antipater to remain for the rest of the debate, nor did he feel any desire to do so. Disdaining the litter-bearers who were waiting outside to take him back to his office at the palace, he set out on foot into the Forum, wandering blindly and purposelessly through the dense crowds, hoping only to soothe the agitation that pounded through his brain.

But the heat and the myriad chaotic sights and smells and sounds of the Forum only made things worse for him. The Empire’s present situation seemed all the more tragic to him here amidst the Forum’s multitude of glorious gleaming buildings.

Had there ever been an empire like the Roman Empire, in all of history? Or any city like mighty Roma? Surely not, thought Antipater. The greatness of Roma, city and Empire, had been growing steadily with scarcely any check for nearly two thousand years, from the era of the Republic to the coming of the Caesars and then on to the period of grand Imperial expansion that took the eagles of Roma into almost every region of the world. By the time that great age of empire-building had come to its natural end, with as much territory under control as was practical to administer, the power of Roma prevailed from the cool gray island of Britannia in the west to Persia and Babylon in the east.

He was aware that there had been a couple of occasions when that pattern of never-ending growth had suffered interruptions, but those were anomalies of long ago. In the modest early days of the Republic the barbarian Gauls had burst in here and burned the city, such as it had been then, but what had their invasion achieved? Only to strengthen the resolve of Roma never to let such a thing happen again; and the Gauls today were placid provincials, their warrior days long forgotten.

And then the business with Carthago—that affair was ancient history, too. The Carthaginian general Hannibal had caused his little disturbance, true, the thing with the elephants, but his invasion had come to nothing, and Roma had razed Carthago to its foundations and then built it all up again as a Roman colony, and the Carthaginians now were a nation of smiling hotel-keepers and restaurateurs who existed to serve the sun-seeking winter-holiday trade from Europa.

This Forum here, this crowded array of temples and law courts and statues and colonnades and triumphal arches, was the heart and core and nerve center of the whole splendid Empire. For twelve hundred years, from the time of Julius Caesar to the time of the present Maximilianus, the monarchs of Roma had filled these streets with a stunning conglomeration of glistening marble monuments to the national grandeur. Each building was grand in itself; the totality was altogether overwhelming, and, to Antipater just at this moment, depressing in the very fact of its own splendor. It all seemed like a giant memorial display for the dying realm.

Here, today, this sweltering humid blue-skied day in early autumn, Antipater wandered like a sleepwalker under the blazing golden eye of Sol among the innumerable architectural wonders of the Forum. The mammoth Senate House, the lofty temples to Augustus and Vespasianus and Antoninus Pius and half a dozen other early Emperors who had been proclaimed as gods, the colossal tomb of Julius that had been built hundreds of years after his time by some Emperor who had claimed disingenuously to be his descendant. The arches of Septimius Severus and Constantinus; the five great basilicas; the House of the Vestal Virgins, and on and on and on. There were richly ornamented buildings everywhere, a surfeit of them, occupying every possible site to north and south and even up the sides of the Capitoline Hill. Nothing ever was torn down in the Forum. Each Emperor added his own contribution wherever room could be found, at whatever cost to rational planning and ease of movement.

At any hour, therefore, the Forum was a noisy, turbulent place. Antipater, numbed by the fierce heat and his own despair and confusion, was jostled again and again by unthinking common citizens hurrying blindly on to the shops and marketplaces along the fringes of the great public buildings. He began to feel a little dizzy. Clammy sweat soaked his light robe and his forehead was throbbing.

I must be somewhat ill, he decided.

Then, suddenly bewildered, he staggered and lurched and it was all he could do to keep from falling to the ground. He knew that he had to pause and rest. A high-domed eight-sided temple with massive ochre walls loomed up before him. Antipater lowered himself carefully to the bottommost of its broad stone steps and huddled there with his face in his hands, surprised to find himself shivering in this great warmth. Exhaustion, he thought. Exhaustion, stress, perhaps a little touch of fever.

“Thinking of making an offering to Concordia, are you, Antipater?” a cool mocking voice from above asked him.

He looked blearily up into the dazzling glare of the midday sunlight. A long smirking angular face, fashionably pale, caked with cracking makeup, hovered before him. Shining sea-green eyes, eyes precisely the color of the Emperor’s, but these were bloodshot and crazed.

Germanicus Caesar, it was, the royal heir, the profligate, sybaritic younger brother.

He had descended from a litter right in front of Antipater and stood rocking back and forth before him, grinning lopsidedly as if still drunk from the night before.

“Concordia?” Antipater asked muzzily. “Concordia?”

“The temple,” Germanicus said. “The one you’re sitting in front of.”

“Ah,” Antipater said. “Yes.”

He understood. The steps on which he had taken refuge, he saw now, were those of the magnificent Temple of Concordia. There was rich irony in that. The Temple of Concordia, Antipater knew, had been a gift to the city of Roma from the celebrated Eastern Emperor Justinianus, six hundred fifty years earlier, by way of paying homage to the spirit of fraternal harmony that existed between the two halves of the Roman Empire. And here was the Eastern Empire now, no longer so touchingly fraternal, about to invade Italia and subjugate as much of the senior Roman realm as it could manage to conquer, up to and including the city of Roma itself. So much for Concordia. So much for the harmony of the two empires.

“What’s the matter with you?” Germanicus demanded. “Drunk?”

“The heat—the crowds—”

“Yes. That could make anybody sick. What are you doing walking around by yourself here, anyway?” Germanicus leaned forward. His breath, stinking of wine and overripe anchovies, was like a blast out of Hades. Nodding toward his litter, he said, “My chair’s big enough for two. Come on: I’ll give you a ride home.”

That was the last thing Antipater wanted, to be cooped up with this foul-smelling lascivious prince inside a covered litter, even for the quarter of an hour it would take to cross the Forum to the Palatine. He shook his head. “No—no—”

“Well, get out of the sun, at least. Let’s go into the temple. I want to talk to you, anyway.”

“You do?”

Helplessly Antipater allowed himself to be tugged to his feet and herded up the dozen or more steps of Justinianus’s temple. Within, behind the great bronze door, all was cool and dark. The place was deserted, no priests, no worshipers. A brilliant shaft of light descending from an opening high overhead in the dome illuminated a marble slab above the altar that proclaimed, in fiery letters of gold, the Emperor Justinianus’s eternal love for his kinsman and royal counterpart of the West, His Imperial Roman Majesty Heraclius II Augustus.

Germanicus laughed softly. “Those two should only know what’s going on now! Could it ever have worked, d’ye think—dividing the Empire and expecting the two halves to live together peacefully forever after?”

Antipater, still dizzied and faint, felt little wish to discuss history with Prince Germanicus just now.

“Perhaps, in an ideal world—” he began.

Germanicus laughed again, this time a harsh cackle. “An ideal world, yes! Very good, Antipater! Very good! But we happen to live in the real one, is that not so? And in the real world there was no way that an empire the size of the one we once had could have been maintained intact, so it had to be divided. But once the first Constantinus divided it, Antipater, war between the two halves was inevitable. The wonder of it is that it took so long to happen.”

A discourse on history from the Emperor’s drunken dissolute brother, here in Justinianus’s serene temple. How strange, Antipater thought. And was there any truth in the point Germanicus was making, Antipater wondered? The war between East and West—inevitable?

He doubted that Constantinus the Great, who had split the unwieldy Roman world in half by setting up a second capital far to the east of Roma at Byzantium on the Bosporus, ever had thought so. Beyond question Constantinus had supposed that his sons would share power peacefully, one reigning over the eastern provinces from the new capital of Constantinopolis, one in Italia and the Danubian provinces, a third in Britannia and Gallia and Hispania. Hardly was Constantinus in his grave, though, than the divided Empire was embroiled in war, with one of the sons attacking another and seizing his realm; and for sixty years after that all was in flux, until the great Emperor Theodosius had brought about the final administrative division of the Roman world, separating its Greek-speaking territories from the Latin-speaking ones.

But Theodosius hadn’t accepted the inevitability of East-West war either. By his decree the two Emperors, the Eastern one and the Western one, were supposed to consider themselves colleagues, joint rulers of the entire realm, consulting each other on all high matters of state, each even having the power to name a successor for an Imperial colleague that died. It hadn’t worked out that way, of course. The two nations had drifted apart, though some measure of cooperation did continue for hundreds of years. And now—the friction of the past half century, culminating in the present slowly escalating war of East against West—the foolish, needless, ghastly war that was about to burst in all its fury upon this greatest of all cities—

“Look at this stuff!” Germanicus cried. He had left Antipater’s side to go roaming about in the deserted temple, peering at the paintings and mosaics with which Justinianus’s Byzantine craftsmen had bedecked the sides of the building. “I hate the Greek style, don’t you? Flat and stiff and creaky—you’d think they didn’t understand a damned thing about perspective. If I had been Heraclius, I’d have covered the walls over with plaster the moment Justinianus’s people were out of town. Too late for all that now, though.” Germanicus had reached the far side, and peered up for a moment at the vast regal portrait of solemn scowling Justinianus, done in gleaming golden tile, that loomed out from the belly of the dome like Jupiter himself glowering down. Then he whirled to face Antipater. “But what am I saying?” he bellowed through the echoing dimness. “You’re a Greek yourself! You love this kind of art!”

“I am a Roman citizen born, sir,” said Antipater quietly.

“Yes. Yes, of course. That’s why you speak Greek so well, and why you look the way you do. And that hot little dark-eyed lady you spend your nights with—she’s Roman, too, right? Where are you from, anyway, Antipater? Alexandria? Cyprus?”

“I was born in Salona in Dalmatia, sir. It was Roman territory at the time.”

“Salona. Yes. The palace of Diocletianus is there, isn’t it? And nobody would say that Diocletianus wasn’t a Roman. Why do you look so damnably Greek, though? Come over here, Antipater. Let me look at you. Antipater. What a fine Roman name that is!”

“My family was Greek originally. We were from Antioch, but that was many hundreds of years ago. If I am Greek, then Romans are Trojans, because Aeneas came from Troia to found the settlement that became Roma. And where is Troia today, if not in the territory of the Greek Emperor?”

“Oh-ho! Oh-ho! A wise man! A sophist!” Briskly Germanicus returned to Antipater’s side and grasped at the front of his robe, clutching it into a tight bunch. Antipater expected a stinging slap. He lifted one hand to protect his face. “Don’t cower like that,” the prince said. “I won’t hit you. But you’re a traitor, aren’t you? A Greek and a traitor. Who consorts nightly with the enemy. I’m speaking of that Greek wench of yours, the little bosomy spy. When the Basileus comes in triumph to Roma, you’ll go rushing to his side and tell him you were loyal to him all along.”

“No, sir. By your leave, sir, none of that is true, sir.”

“Not a traitor?”

“No, sir,” said Antipater desperately. “Nor is Justina a spy. We are Romans of Roma, faithful to the West. I serve your royal brother the Caesar Maximilianus Augustus and no one else.”

That appeared to be effective. “Ah. Good. Good. I’ll accept that. You seem sincere.” Germanicus winked and released him with a light shove, and spun away to stand with his back toward Antipater. In a much less manic tone, sounding almost subdued, he said, “You stayed at the meeting after the rest of us left. Did Caesar have anything interesting to say to you?”

“Why—why—he merely—”

Antipater faltered. What kind of loyalty to Caesar would it be to betray his private conversations to another, even Caesar’s own brother?

“He said nothing of significance, sir. Just a bit of recapitulation of the meeting, was all.”

“Just a bit of recapitulation.”

“Yes, sir. Nothing more.”

“I wonder. You’re very thick with him, Antipater. He trusts you, you know, shifty little Greek that you are. Emperors always trust their secretaries more than they do anybody else. It doesn’t matter to him that you’re a Greek. He tells you things that he doesn’t tell others.” Germanicus swung round again. The sea-green eyes drilled with sudden ferocity into Antipater’s. “I wonder,” he said once more. “Was he speaking the truth, when he said that we don’t need to do anything about this fleet off Sardinia? Does he actually and truly believe that?”

Antipater felt his cheeks growing hot. He was grateful for the faintness of the light in here, and for his own swarthy skin, that would hide his embarrassment from the prince. It seemed odd to him that the famously idle Germanicus, who had never to Antipater’s knowledge demonstrated a shred of interest in public affairs, should be so concerned now with his Imperial brother’s military intentions. But perhaps the imminence of a Greek invasion of the capital had aroused even this roguish, lackadaisical, irresponsible lordling to some alarm. Or, perhaps, all this was just some passing whim of his. No matter which, Antipater could not evade a reply this time.

Carefully he said, “I would not presume to tell anyone what I imagined the Emperor was thinking, sir. My understanding of his position, though, is that he sees that there’s very little we can really do against the Basileus—that we are hemmed in on two sides already and that we are unable to protect ourselves against an attack on some new front.”

“He’s absolutely right,” said Germanicus. “Our goose, as the Britannians say, is cooked. The question is what kind of sauce will go on the dish, eh? Eh, Antipater?” And then, abruptly, Antipater found himself being seized once again and swept forward into a hard, crushing embrace. Germanicus’s bristly cheek rubbed across his with stinging force. The reek of the young prince brought a new surge of dizziness to him. He is crazy, Antipater thought. Crazy. “Ah, Antipater, Antipater, you know I mean you no harm! I do love you, man, for your devotion to my brother. Poor Maximilianus! What a burden it must be to him to be Emperor at a time like this!” Letting go of Antipater once more, he stepped back and said, in yet another new tone of voice, somber now and oddly earnest, “You will not speak a word of this meeting to my brother, will you, eh? I think I’ve disturbed your tranquility, and I wouldn’t want him thinking ill of me for that. He’s terribly fond of you. He relies on you so very much.—Come, Antipater, will you let me take you home, now? That hot little Greek of yours very likely has a sizzling noontime surprise for you, and it would be rude to keep her waiting.”

He said nothing to Justina of his strange encounter with the Emperor’s brother. But the episode stayed in his mind.

Beyond much doubt the prince was mad. And yet, yet, there had seemed to be some undertone of seriousness in his discourse—a side of Germanicus Caesar that Antipater had never seen before, nor, perhaps, anyone else either.

Germanicus’s belief that the original Empire, the one that had spanned the world from Britannia to the borders of India, had been too large to govern from a single capital—well, yes, nobody would dispute that issue. Even in Diocletianus’s time the job had been so big that several Emperors reigning jointly had been needed to handle it, not that that had worked particularly well; and a generation later the great Constantinus had found governing the entire thing impossible even for him. And so had come the formal division of the realm, which under Theodosius had become permanent.

But what about the other point, the inevitability of war between East and West?

Antipater had no love for that line of thinking. Yet he knew that the historical record provided strong support for it. Even in the era of supposed East-West concord, that time when Justinianus reigned in Constantinopolis and his nephew Heraclius in Roma, great trade rivalries had sprung up, each Empire trying to outflank the other, Latin Romans reaching out around Byzantium toward remote India and even more remote Khitai and Cipangu where the yellow-faced men live, and Greek Romans seeking influence to the south in black Africa and to the far frozen northern territories that lay behind the homeland of the half-savage Goths.

That had all been sorted out by treaty; perhaps, thought Antipater, Justinianus’s temple in Roma had been erected in commemoration of some such agreement. But the frictions had continued, the jockeying for prime position in the world’s commerce.

And then, beginning eighty or ninety years ago, the West’s big mistake, the colossally foolish expedition to the New World—what a calamity that had been! Certainly it was exciting to discover that two great continents lay beyond the Ocean Sea, and that mighty nations—Mexico, Peru—existed there, strange lands rich in gold and silver and precious stones, inhabited by multitudes of copper-skinned people ruled by lordly monarchs who lived in pomp and opulence worthy of Caesar himself. But what lunacy had possessed the megalomaniac Emperor Saturninus to try to conquer those nations, instead of simply to enter into trade relations with them? Decades of futile overseas expeditions—millions of sesterces wasted, whole legions sent out by that obstinate and perhaps insane Emperor to die under the searing sun of the inhospitable continents that Saturninus had optimistically named Nova Roma—the pride of the Western Empire’s military destroyed by the spears and arrows of unstoppable torrents of demonic wild-eyed warriors with painted faces, or swept away by the overwhelming force of great tropical storms—hundreds of ships lost in those perilous alien waters—the spirit of the Empire broken by the unfamiliar experience of defeat after defeat, and the ultimate grim capitulation and evacuation of the final batch of shattered Roman troops—

That ill-advised adventure had, as Antipater and everyone else recognized now, drained the economic resources of the Western Empire in a terrible way, and, perhaps, weakened its military power beyond repair. Two entire generations of the most gifted generals and admirals had perished on the shores of Nova Roma. And then, the idiotically arrogant Emperor Julianus IV compounding the error by evicting a Greek mercantile mission from the island of Melita, a trifling dot in the sea between Sicilia and the African coast that both Empires long had laid claim to. To which Leo IX of Byzantium had retaliated not only by landing troops on Melita and taking control of it, but by unilaterally redrawing the ancient dividing line of the two empires that ran through the province of Illyricum, so that the Dalmatian coast, with its valuable ports on the Adriatic Sea, now came under Byzantine rule.

That was the beginning of the end. The Western Empire, already badly overextended by its doomed project in the New World, could not resist the takeover with any real force. Which had encouraged Leo and his successors in the East, first Constantinus XI and then Andronicus, to reach deeper and deeper into Western territory, until by now the capital itself was in jeopardy and the West seemed certain to fall into Byzantine control for the first time in history.

Still, Antipater wondered whether it all had been, as Germanicus maintained, inevitable from the start.

Rivalry, yes. Friction and occasional outright conflict, yes. But the conquest of one Empire by the other? There was nothing in the divided-Empire schemes of Constantinus and Theodosius that had made it obligatory for the West to undertake a stupid and ruinous overseas campaign, one that no Caesar would abandon until the Empire had crippled itself. Nor anything requiring the crippled Empire to have wantonly given its eastern rival provocation for attacking it, on top of the previous folly. Under wiser Emperors, Roma would have remained Roma for all eternity. But now—

“You brood too much,” Justina told him.

“There’s much to brood about.”

“The war? I tell you again, Antipater: we need to flee before it gets here.”

“And I answer you again: go where?”

“Some place where no fighting is going to happen. Some place far to the east, where the sun is always bright and the weather is warm. Syria or Aegyptus. Cyprus, maybe.”

“Greek places, all of them. I’m a Roman. They’ll say I’m a spy.”

Justina laughed indelicately. “We don’t fit in anywhere, is what you say! The Romans think you’re a Greek. Now you don’t want to fly to the East because they’ll say you’re a Roman. How will they be able to tell, anyway? You look and sound as Greek as I do.”

Antipater stared at her gloomily. “The truth is, Justina, we don’t fit in anywhere. Not really. But the main point, completely aside from whatever I may look and sound like, is that I’m an official of the Western Imperial court. I’ve signed my name to endless pieces of diplomatic correspondence that are on file in Constantinopolis.”

“Who’s to know? Who would care? The Western Empire is a dead thing. We escape to Cyprus; we raise sheep, we grow some grapes; you earn some money, perhaps, by working as a Latin translator. You tell people you lived for a time in the West, if anybody wonders where you came from. What of it? Nobody will accuse you of being a spy for the Western Empire when the Western Empire doesn’t exist any more.”

“But it still does exist,” he said.

“Only for the time being,” said Justina.

He had to admit that the idea was tempting. He was being overly apprehensive, perhaps, in thinking that anyone would hold his service under Maximilianus Caesar against him if he ran away to the East. No one would care a fig for that, back there in the sunny, sleepy, sea-girt lands of the Greek world. He and Justina could start new lives together.

But still—still—

He didn’t see how he could desert his post while the government of Maximilianus was still intact. That seemed a vile deed to him. Unmanly. Treacherous. Greek. He was a Roman; he would stay at his post until the end came. And then—

Well, who knew what would happen then?

“I can’t leave,” he told Justina. “Not now.”

The days passed. The bright skies of early autumn gave way to gray, dreary ones that betokened the oncoming rainy season. Justina said little to him about the political situation, now. She said little about anything. The Roman winter was a difficult time for her. She had lived nearly all her life in the Western Empire, yes, but she was Greek to the core, a child of the south, of the sun. A life down in Neapolis or, even better, Sicilia, might have been warm and bright enough for her, but not Roma, where the winters were wet and chilly. Antipater often wondered, as he made his way homeward from his duties at the palace under the darkening skies, whether he would discover, some afternoon, that she had packed up and vanished. Already it was possible to detect signs that a small abandonment of the capital might be getting under way: the crowds in the streets seemed more sparse, and every day he noticed another shop or two closed and boarded up. But Justina remained by his side.

His palace duties became more pointless day by day. No more ultimatums went forth to the Basileus Andronicus. What was the use? The end was in sight. Antipater’s work consisted now mainly in translating the reports that came in from the spies that Caesar still had posted all around the perimeter of the Greek world. Troop movements in Dalmatia—reinforcements of the already huge Greek army sitting up there opposite the northeastern end of the peninsula within striking distance of the Roman outpost at Venetia. Another Greek army on the march down in Africa, heading westward along the shore from Aegyptus toward Carthago and the other ports of the Numidian coast: backup forces, no doubt, for the troops already in Sicilia. And still other shufflings about of the apparently infinite Byzantine military power were going on to the north: a legion of Turks supposedly being sent up into Sarmatia, along the German border, presumably for the purpose of stretching the already thin Roman lines of defense even further.

Punctiliously Antipater read all these dispatches to the Emperor, but Maximilianus only occasionally seemed to pay attention. The Emperor was moody, remote, distracted. One day Antipater entered the Emerald Office and found him poring over a huge book of history, open to the page that bore the long list of past Caesars. He was running his finger down the list from the beginning, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and onward through Hadrianus, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Titus Gallius, into the time of the division of the realm, and beyond that to medieval times and the modern era. The list, just the Western Emperors now, stretched on and on beyond his pointing finger, scores of names great and small, Clodianus, Claudius Titianus, Maximilianus the Great, all the Heracliuses, all the Constantinuses, all the Marcianuses.

Antipater watched as Maximilianus drew his quivering fingertip down into recent time: Trajan VI, Julianus IV, Philippus V, and Maximilianus’s own father, Maximilianus V. There the list had originally stopped. It had been compiled before the commencement of the present reign. But someone had written in at the bottom, in a different hand, the name of Maximilianus VI. Maximilianus’s finger, tracing its way downward, halted there. His own name. He began slowly to shake his head from side to side. Antipater understood at once what was passing through the Emperor’s mind. Staring at that great list, encompassing it from top to bottom, he was recapitulating all the long flow of the river of Roman time, from the Empire’s grand inauguration under the immortal Augustus to…its end…its end…under the inconsequential, insignificant Maximilianus VI.

He closed the book, and looked up at Antipater, and smiled a bleak, chilly little smile. Antipater had no difficulty in reading the Emperor’s thoughts. The last of all that great list! What a distinction, Antipater! What an extraordinary distinction!

That night Antipater dreamed of wild-eyed drunken Greek soldiers in bulky blue-green linen jerkins running jubilantly through the streets of Roma, laughing and shouting, looting stores, pulling women into alleyways. And then the Emperor Andronicus riding in glory down the Via Flaminia into the city, resplendent in his purple chlamys, his robe of authority, with his great mane of golden hair flowing behind him and his enormous yellow beard tumbling over his chest. Throngs of Roman citizens lined the great highway to pelt him with flower petals and cheer him on, crying out enthusiastically in praise of their new master, hailing him in his own language, calling him Basileus Romaion, “King of the Romans.” Spurning the use of a chariot, the conquering monarch sat astride a colossal white horse bedecked with jewels; he wore the shining Greek crown crested with peacock feathers and carried in one hand the eagle-headed scepter of rule, and with the other he waved magnanimously to the crowds. And went on toward the Forum, where he dismounted and looked around in satisfaction. And, sauntering on into the avenue running below the Capitoline Hill, paused there and gestured to a member of his entourage with a broad sweeping movement of his hand, as though to indicate where he intended to erect the triumphal arch marking his victory.

The next day—a day of endless pelting driving rain—a messenger arrived at the palace bearing word that Greek forces had landed on the Ligurian shore. The ports of Antipolis and Nicaea had fallen to them without a battle, and the Greeks were presently en route along the coastal highway toward the city of Genua. In the afternoon came a second runner, half dead on his feet, who carried news from the south that a tremendous military engagement was under way in Calabria, where the Roman army was hard pressed and slowly retreating, while a second Greek force out of Sicilia had unexpectedly landed farther up the peninsula, had captured the harbor of Neapolis, and was laying siege to that essential southern city, whose fall was imminent.

The only piece missing, thought Antipater, was an attack on the northeastern frontier by the Byzantine forces in Dalmatia. “Perhaps we’ll get news of that invasion too, before long,” he said to Justina. “But it hardly matters, does it?” The soldiers of Andronicus were already moving through the Italian peninsula toward Roma from both the north and the south. “The goose is cooked, as Germanicus would say. The game is lost. The Empire’s finished.”

“You will take a letter to the Basileus Andronicus,” said the Emperor.

They were in the little Indigo Office, next door to the Emerald one. In dank, rainy weather it was a little warmer there than in the Emerald. This was the fourth day of rain, now. Neapolis had fallen, and the Greek army of the south, having polished off most of the southern Roman garrison, was moving steadily up the Via Roma toward the capital. The only difficulties it was encountering were from mudslides blocking the roads. The second Greek force, the one coming down from Liguria, was somewhere in Latium, it seemed, perhaps as far south as Tarquinii or Caere. Apparently it, too, was meeting no resistance other than from the weather. Caere was just thirty miles north of Roma. There had also been a Byzantine breakthrough on the Venetian front out of Dalmatia.

Maximilianus cleared his throat. “‘To His Royal Splendor Andronicus Maniakes, Autocrat and Imperator, by the grace of God King of Kings, King of the Romans and Supreme Master of All Regions’—you have all that, Antipater?—”

“‘Basileus basileion,’” Antipater murmured. “Yes, majesty.” He gave Maximilianus a carefully measured glance. “Did you say ‘Supreme Master of All Regions’?”

“So he styles himself, yes,” said Maximilianus, a little irritably.

“But, begging your pardon, the implication, sire—”

“Let us just continue, Antipater. ‘And Supreme Master of All Regions. From his cousin Maximilianus Julianus Philippus Romanus Caesar Augustus, Imperator and Grand Pontifex, Tribune of the People, et cetera, et cetera’—you know all the titles, Antipater; put them in—‘Greetings, and may the benevolence of all the gods be upon you forever and ever, world without end.’” Again the Emperor paused. He took two or three deep breaths. “‘Whereas it has been the pleasure of the gods to permit me to occupy the throne of the Caesars these past twenty years, it has lately begun to seem to me that the favor of heaven has been withdrawn from me, and that it is the will of the most divine gods that I lay down the responsibilities that were placed upon me long ago by the command of my royal father, His Most Excellent Majesty the Divine Imperator Maximilianus Julianus Philippus Claudius Caesar Augustus. Likewise it is evident to me that the favor of heaven has fallen upon my Imperial cousin His Most Puissant Majesty the Basileus Andronicus Maniakes, Autocrat and Imperator, et cetera, et cetera,’—give his full titles all over again, will you, Antipater?—”

Antipater was on to his second wax tablet by this time, and he had scarcely written down anything but strings of royal titles. But the sense of the message was already quite clear. He felt his heart beginning to thump as the meaning of what the Emperor was dictating to him sank in.

It was a document of abdication.

Maximilianus was handing the Empire over to the Greeks.

Well, of course, the Greeks had grabbed the Empire already, essentially, everything but the capital itself and a few miserable miles of territory surrounding it. But still, was this proper Roman behavior? There was hardly any precedent for the capitulation of a Roman Emperor to a foreign conqueror, and that was what Andronicus was, a Greek, a foreigner, whatever pretense the Byzantines might make toward being a legitimate half of the original Roman Empire. Rulers had been deposed before, yes. There had been civil wars in ancient times, Octavianus versus Marcus Antonius, and the squabble over the succession to Nero, and the battle for the throne after the assassination of Commodus. But Antipater couldn’t recall any instances of a defeated Emperor supinely resigning the throne to his conqueror. The usual thing was to fall on your sword, wasn’t it, as the troops of the victorious rival drew near? But what had been usual a thousand years ago might no longer be considered appropriate behavior, Antipater decided.

And Maximilianus was still speaking in a steady flow, every sentence constructed with a careful sense of style and precise in its grammar, as though he had begun drafting this letter many weeks back, revising it again and again in his mind until it was perfect, and nothing remained now but for him to express it aloud so that Antipater could render it into Byzantine Greek.

Definitely, a document of abdication. To Antipater’s astonishment, Maximilianus was indeed not merely giving up his throne, he was designating Andronicus as his legally valid successor, the true and lawful wielder of the Imperial power.

There was, of course, the problem that Maximilianus had not managed to produce any children, and the official heir to the throne, Germanicus, was hardly suitable for the job. But Maximilianus was basically handing Andronicus clear title to the crown, not just by right of conquest but by the explicit decree of the outgoing monarch. In effect he was reuniting the two halves of the ancient Empire. Was it really necessary for him to carry the thing so far? If he didn’t plan to kill himself, Antipater thought, and who could blame him for that, couldn’t he simply acknowledge his defeat with a curt letter of surrender and go off into history with a certain degree of dignity intact?

But Maximilianus was still speaking, and suddenly Antipater realized that there was another, and deeper, purpose to this document.

“‘I have grown old in office’”—not true; he was hardly more than fifty—“‘and the burden of power wearies me, and I seek only now to live a quiet life of reading and meditation in some corner of Your Imperial Majesty’s immense domain. I cite the precedent of the Caesar Diocletianus of old, who, after having reigned exactly twenty years, as I have, voluntarily yielded up his tremendous powers and took up residence in the province of Dalmatia, in the city of Salona, where the palace of his retirement stands to this day. It is the humble request of Maximilianus Caesar, my lord, that I be permitted to follow the path of Diocletianus, and, in fact, if it should be pleasing to you, that I even be allowed to occupy the palace at Salona, where I spent a number of nights during the years of my reign, and which is to me an agreeable residence to which I could gladly retire now—’”

Antipater knew the palace at Salona well. He had grown up virtually in its shadow. It was quite a decent sort of palace, practically a small town in itself, right on the sea, with enormous fortified walls and, no doubt, the most luxurious accommodations within. Many a Caesar had used it as a guest house while visiting the lovely Dalmatian coast. Perhaps Andronicus had stayed in it himself, inasmuch as Dalmatia had been under Byzantine control the past couple of decades.

And here was Maximilianus asking for it—no, begging for it, the fallen Emperor making a “humble request,” addressing Andronicus suddenly as “my lord,” using a phrase like “if it should be pleasing to you.” Turning over legal title to the Empire to Andronicus on a silver platter, asking nothing more in return than to be allowed to go off and hide himself behind the gigantic walls of Diocletianus’s retirement home for the rest of his life.

Dishonorable. Disgraceful. Disgusting.

Antipater looked hastily away. He did not dare let Caesar see the blaze of contempt that had come into his eyes.

The Emperor was still speaking. Antipater had missed a few words, but what did that matter? He could always fill in with something appropriate.

“‘—I remain, I assure you, dear cousin Andronicus, yours in the deepest gratitude, offering herewith the highest regard for your wisdom and benevolence and my heart-felt felicitations on all the glorious achievements of your reign—cordially, Maximilianus Julianus Philippus Romanus Caesar Augustus, Imperator and Grand Pontifex, et cetera, et cetera—’”

“Well,” Justina said, when Antipater summarized the abdication document for her the next evening after he had spent much of yet another rainy day copying it out prettily on a parchment scroll, “Andronicus doesn’t have to give Maximilianus anything, does he? He can simply cut his head off, if he likes.”

“He won’t do that. This is the year 1951. The Byzantines are civilized folk. Andronicus doesn’t want to look like a barbarian. Besides, it’s bad politics. Why make a martyr out of Maximilianus, and set him up as a hero for whatever anti-Greek resistance movement is likely to come into being in the rougher provinces of the West, when he can simply give him a kiss on the cheek and pack him off to Salona? The whole Western Empire’s his, regardless. He might just as well make a peaceful start to his reign here.”

“So Andronicus will accept the deal, do you think?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course. If he has any sense at all.”

“And then?”

“Then?”

“Us,” said Justina. “What of us?”

“Oh. Yes. Yes. The Emperor had a few things to say about that, too.”

Justina drew her breath in sharply. “He did?”

Uneasily Antipater said, “When he was finished dictating the letter, he turned to me and asked me if I would come with him to Salona, or wherever else Andronicus allowed him to go. ‘I’ll still need a secretary, even in retirement,’ he said. ‘Especially if I wind up in the Greek-speaking part of the Empire, and that’s surely where Andronicus will want to put me, so that he can keep me under his thumb. Marry your little Greek and come along with me, Antipater.’ That’s exactly what he said. ‘Marry your little Greek. Come along with me.’”

Instantly Justina’s eyes were glowing. Her face was flushed, her breasts were rising and falling quickly. “Oh, Antipater! How wonderful! You accepted, naturally!”

In fact he had not, not exactly. Not at all, as a matter of fact. Nor had he refused, exactly, either. Not at all. He had given Caesar no real answer of any sort.

In some discomfort he said, “You know that I’d be delighted to marry you, Justina.”

She looked perplexed. “And the part about following Caesar to Dalmatia?”

“Well—” he said. “I suppose—”

“You suppose? What other choice do we have?”

Antipater hesitated, fumbling in the air with his out-spread hands. “How can I say this, Justina? But let me try. What Caesar is asking is, well—cowardly. Shameful. Un-Roman.”

“Perhaps so. And if it is, so what? Better to stay here and die like a Roman, do you think?”

“I’ve already told you, Andronicus would never put him to death.”

“I’m talking about us.”

“Why would anyone harm us, Justina?”

“We’ve been through all this. As you yourself pointed out last week, you’re an official of the court. I’m a Greek citizen who’s been consorting with Romans. Surely there’d be a purge of the old bureaucracy. You wouldn’t be executed, I guess, but you’d certainly be given a hard time. So would I. A worse time than you, I’d think. You’d be reassigned to some grubby menial job, maybe. But they’d find some very nasty uses for someone like me. Conquering soldiers always do.”

It was hard for him to meet the implacable fury of her eyes.

All yesterday afternoon since he’d taken his leave of Caesar in the Indigo Office, and most of today as well, his head had been swirling with ringing heroic phrases—in the end, one must comport oneself as a Roman must, or be seen to be nothing at all—our great heroic traditions demand—history will never forgive—a time comes when a man must proclaim himself to be a man, or else he is nothing more than—how shameful, how unutterably and eternally shameful, it would be to affiliate myself with the court of so despicable a coward, an Emperor who—and much more in the same vein, all leading up to his grand repudiation of the invitation to accompany Maximilianus into a cozy Dalmatian retirement. But now he saw only too clearly that all that was so much nonsense.

Our great heroic traditions demand, do they? Perhaps so. But Maximilianus Caesar was no hero, and neither was Lucius Aelius Antipater. And if the Emperor himself could not bring himself to behave like a Roman, why should his Master of Greek Letters? A man who was no sort of warrior, only a clerk, a man of books, and not all that much of a Roman, either, not so that Cicero or Seneca or Cato the Censor would have believed. They would have laughed at his pretensions. You, a Roman? You with your oily Greek hair and your little snub nose and your ballet-dancer way of walking? Anybody can call himself a Roman, but only a Roman can be a Roman.

The time of Seneca and Cato and Cicero was long over, anyway. Things were different today. The enemy was at the gates of Roma, and what was the Emperor doing? Serenely falling on his sword? Calmly slitting his wrists? No. No. Why, the Emperor was busy composing a letter that pleaded abjectly for a soft safe withdrawal to a big palace on the Dalmatian coast. Was the Master of Greek Letters supposed to stand at the bridge facing the foe with a blade in each hand like some indomitable hero of old, while the Emperor he served was blithely running out of town the back way?

“Look,” Justina said. She had gone to the window. “Bonfires out there. A big one on the Capitoline Hill, I think.”

“We can’t see the Capitoline from that window.”

“Well, some other hill, then. Three, four, five bonfires on the hills out there. And look down there, in the Forum. Torches all along the Sacra Via. The whole city’s lit up.—I think they’re here, Antipater.”

He peered out. The rain had stopped, and torches and bonfires indeed were blazing everywhere. He heard distant shouts in the night, but was unable to make out any words. Everything was vague, blurry, mysterious.

“Well?” Justina asked.

He let his tongue slide back and forth across his upper lip a couple of times. “I think they’re here, yes.”

“And now? It’s too late for us to run, isn’t it? So we stand our ground and await our fates, you and I and the Emperor Maximilianus, like the stoic Romans that we are. Isn’t that so, Antipater?”

“Andronicus won’t harm the Emperor. No harm will come to you or me, either.”

“We’ll find that out soon enough, won’t we?” said Justina.

The next day was a day like none before it in the long history of Roma. The Greeks had come in the night before just as darkness was falling, thousands of them, entering through four of the city’s gates at once; and they had met with no opposition whatever. Evidently the Emperor had sent out word to the commanders of the home guard that no attempts at resistance were to be made, for they surely would be futile and would only lead to great loss of life and widespread destruction within the city. The war was lost, said the Emperor; let the Greeks come in without prolonging the agony. Which was either a wise and realistic attitude, thought Antipater, or else a despicably faint-hearted one, and he knew what he believed. But he kept his opinions to himself.

The rain, which had halted for most of the night on the evening of the conquest, returned in the morning, just as the Basileus Andronicus was making his triumphal entrance into the city from the north, along the Via Flaminia. The scene was almost as Antipater had seen it in his dream, except that the weather was bad, and there were no flower petals being thrown, and the people lining the road looked stunned rather than jubilant and no one hailed the new Emperor in Greek. But Andronicus did ride a huge white horse and looked rather splendid, even in the rain with his great mass of golden hair pasted together in strings and his beard a soggy mop. He went not to the Forum, as Antipater had dreamed he would, but straight to the Imperial palace, where, the conqueror had been told, he would be presented with the document of abdication that the Emperor had dictated to Antipater the previous day.

The entire Great Council was present at the ceremony. It took place in the glittering Hall of the Hunting Mosaics, built by one of the later Heracliuses, where the Emperor usually received delegations from distant lands under showy depictions in glowing red and green and purple tiles of the spearing of lions and elephants by valiant men in ancient Roman costume. Today, though, instead of seating himself on the throne, Maximilianus stood meekly at the left side of it, facing the Byzantine monarch, who stood just opposite him at a distance of some eight or ten paces. Behind Maximilianus were arrayed the members of the Council; behind Andronicus, half a dozen Greek officials who had traveled with him in the parade down the Via Flaminia.

The contrast between the two monarchs was instructive. The Emperor seemed dwarfed beside Andronicus, a giant of a man, by far the tallest and burliest in the room, who had thick heavy features and the coarse unruly yellow hair of a Celt or a Briton tumbling far down his back. Everything about him, his broad shoulders, his massive chest, his long drooping mustaches, his jutting jaw and vast beard, radiated a sense of bull-like, almost brutish, strength. But there was a look of cold intelligence in his small piercing gray-violet eyes.

Antipater, standing at Maximilianus’s side, served as interpreter. At a nod from the Emperor he handed the scroll to some high magistrate of Andronicus’s court, a man with a tonsured head and a richly brocaded robe inset with what looked like real rubies and emeralds; and the magistrate, giving it only the merest glance, solemnly rolled it up and passed it on to the Basileus. Andronicus unrolled it, quickly ran his eyes along the first two or three lines in a nonchalantly cursory way, and let it roll closed again. He handed it back to the tonsured magistrate.

“What does this thing say?” he asked Antipater brusquely.

Antipater found himself wondering whether the King of the Romans could be unable to read. With some astonishment he heard himself reply, “It is a document of abdication, your majesty.”

“Give it here again,” said Andronicus. His voice was deep and hard and rough-edged, and his Greek was not in the least mellifluous: more a soldier’s kind of Greek, or even a farmer’s kind of Greek, than a king’s. An affectation, most likely. Andronicus came from one of the great old Byzantine families. You would never know it, though.

With a grandiose gesture the tonsured magistrate returned the scroll to the Basileus, who once more made a show of unrolling it, and again seemingly reading a little, another line or two, and then closing it a second time and casually tucking it under his arm.

The room was very quiet.

Antipater, uncomfortably conscious of his place much too close to the center of the scene, glanced about him at the two Consuls, the assembled Ministers and Secretaries, the great generals and admirals, the Praetorian Prefect, the Keeper of the Imperial Treasury. Unlike the Emperor Maximilianus, who bore himself now with no sign whatever of self-importance, a small man who knew he was about to be diminished even further, they were all holding themselves bolt upright, standing with ferocious military rigidity. Did any of them realize what was in the letter? Probably not. Not the Salona part, anyway. Antipater’s eye met that of Crown Prince Germanicus, who looked remarkably fresh for the occasion, newly bathed and spotless in a brilliant white robe edged with purple. Germanicus too had adopted today’s general posture of martial erectness, which seemed notably inappropriate on him. But he seemed almost to be smiling. What, Antipater wondered, could there be to smile about on this terrible day?

To Antipater the Basileus Andronicus said, “The Emperor resigns his powers unconditionally, does he not?”

“He does, your majesty.”

From members of the Great Council here and there around the room came little gasping sounds, more of shock than surprise. They could not be surprised, surely, Antipater thought. But the blunt acknowledgment of the reality of the situation had an unavoidable impact even so.

Prince Germanicus’s demeanor did not change, though: the same lofty stance, the same calm, cool half-smile at the corner of his lips. His elder brother had just signed away for all time the throne that Germanicus might one day have inherited; but had Germanicus ever really expected to occupy that throne, anyway?

Andronicus said, “And are there any special requests?”

“Only one, majesty.”

“And that is?”

All eyes were on Antipater. He wished he could sink into the gleaming stone floor. Why was it necessary for him to be the one to speak the damning words out loud before the great men of Roma?

But there was no escaping it. “Caesar Maximilianus requests, sire,” said Antipater in the steadiest voice he could muster, “that he be permitted to withdraw with such members of his court as may care to accompany him to the palace of the Emperor Diocletianus in Salona in the province of Dalmatia, where he hopes to spend the rest of his days in contemplation and study.”

There. Done. Antipater stared into the air before him, looking at nothing.

The hard gray-violet eyes of the Basileus flickered shut for half an instant; and something like a scornful smirk was visible just as briefly at a corner of the Byzantine Emperor’s mouth. “We see no reason why the request cannot be granted,” he said, after a time. “We accept the terms of the document as proposed.” Yet again he unrolled it; and, taking a pen from the magistrate beside him, he scrawled a huge capital A at the bottom. His signature, evidently. “Is there anything else?”

“No, your majesty.”

Andronicus nodded. “Well, then. Inform the former Emperor that it is our pleasure to spend this night in our camp beside the river, among our men. Tomorrow we intend to take up residence in this palace, from which nothing is to be removed without our permission. Tomorrow, also, we will present to you our brother Romanos Caesar Stravospondylos, who is to reign over the Western Empire as its Emperor thenceforth. Tell all this to the former Emperor, if you will.” He beckoned to his men, and they strode in a stiff phalanx from the room.

Antipater turned toward Maximilianus, who stood completely still, like a man transformed into a stone statue of himself.

“The Basileus says, Caesar, that he—”

“I understood what the Basileus said, thank you, Antipater,” said Maximilianus, in a voice that seemed to come from the tomb. He smiled. It was a death’s-head smile, the merest quick flashing of his teeth. Then he, too, went from the room. The members of the Great Council, most of them looking dazed and disbelieving, followed him in twos and threes.

So this is how empires fall in the modern era, Antipater thought.

No bloodshed, no executions. A parchment scroll passing back and forth a couple of times from conqueror to conquered, a scrawled letter A, a change of occupants for the royal apartments. And so it will go down in history. Lucius Aelius Antipater, the defeated Emperor’s Master of Greek Letters, presented the statement of abdication to the Basileus Andronicus, who gave it the most perfunctory of glances and then—

“Antipater?”

It was Germanicus Caesar. He alone remained in the great room with the Master of Greek Letters.

The prince beckoned to him. “A word with you on the portico, Antipater. Now.”

Outside, strolling together down the long enclosed porch that ran along this wing of the palace, with the rain clattering on the wooden roof overhead, Germanicus said, “What can you tell me about this Romanos Caesar, Antipater? I thought the Basileus’s brother was named Alexandros.”

There was something strange about his voice. Antipater realized after a moment that the prince’s indolent drawl was gone. His tone was crisp, business-like, curt.

“There are several brothers, I believe. Alexandros is the best-known one. A warrior like his brother, is Alexandros. Romanos is very likely of a different sort. The name ‘Stravospondylos’ means ‘crook-back.’”

Germanicus’s eyes widened. “Andronicus has picked a cripple to be Emperor of the West?”

“It would seem so from the name, sir.”

“Well. His little joke. So be it, I suppose.” Germanicus smiled, but he did not look amused. “One thing’s clear, anyway: there’ll still be two Emperors. Andronicus isn’t going to try to rule the whole united Empire from Constantinopolis, because it can’t be done. Which is what I told you, Antipater, in the Forum that day, at the Temple of Concordia.”

Antipater found himself still amazed by the abrupt change in Germanicus, this new seriousness of his, this no-nonsense manner. Even his posture was different. Gone was the easy aristocratic slouch, the loose-limbed ease. Suddenly he was holding himself like a soldier. Antipater had not noticed before how much taller Germanicus was than his brother the Emperor.

“How long,” Germanicus asked, “do you imagine that this Western Greek Empire will last, Antipater?”

“Sir?”

“How long? Five years? Ten? A thousand?”

“I have no way of knowing, sir.”

“Give it some thought. Andronicus marches west, knocks over our pitiful defenses with two flicks of his fingers, sets up his deformed little brother as our Emperor, and goes back to the good life in Constantinopolis. Leaving a dozen or so legions of Greek troops to occupy the entire immensity of the Western Empire: Hispania, Germania, Britannia, Gallia, Belgica, on and on and on, not to mention Italia itself. For what purpose has he conquered us? Why, so our taxes will flow eastward and wind up in the Byzantine treasury. Are the farmers of Britannia going to be happy about that? Are the wild whiskery men up there in Germania? You know the answer. Andronicus has captured Roma, but that doesn’t mean he’s gained control of the whole Empire. They don’t want Greeks running things, out there in the provinces. They won’t put up with it. They’re Romans, those people, and they want to be ruled by Romans. Sooner or later there’ll be active resistance movements flourishing all over the place, and I say it’ll be sooner rather than later. The assassination of Greek tax collectors and magistrates and municipal procurators. Local rebellions. Eventually, wide-scale uprisings. Andronicus will decide that it’s not worthwhile, trying to maintain supply lines over such long distances. He’ll simply shrug and let the West slide. He’s not going to come out here twice in one lifetime to fight with us. Either we’ll kill all the Greek occupiers, or, more likely, we’ll simply swallow them up and turn them into Romans. Two or three generations in the West and they won’t remember how to speak Greek.”

“I dare say you’re right, sir.”

“I dare say I am.—I’ll be leaving Roma tomorrow evening, Antipater.”

“Going to Dalmatia, are you? With the Emp—with your brother?”

Germanicus spat. “Don’t be a fool. No, I’m going the other way.” He leaned close to Antipater and said, in a low, hard-edged voice, “There’s a ship waiting at Ostia to take me to Massalia in Gallia. I’ll make my capital there or at Lugdunum, I’m not yet sure which.”

“Your—capital?”

“The Emperor has abdicated. You wrote the document yourself, didn’t you? So I’m Emperor now, Antipater. Emperor-in-exile, maybe, but Emperor none the less. I’ll proclaim myself formally the moment I land in Massalia.”

If Germanicus had said that a week ago, Antipater thought, it would have sounded like madness, or drunken folly, or some derisive joke. But this was a different Germanicus.

The prince’s sea-green eyes bore down on him mercilessly. “You’re a dead man if you say a word of this to anyone before I’m gone from Roma, of course.”

“Why tell me in the first place, then?”

“Because I think that in your weird shifty Greek way you’re a trustworthy man, Antipater. I told you that at the Temple of Concordia, too.—I want you to come with me to Gallia.”

The calmly spoken sentence struck Antipater like a thunderbolt.

“What, sir?”

“I need a Master of Greek Letters, too. Someone to help me communicate with the temporary occupying authorities in Roma. Someone to decipher the documents that my spies in the East will be sending me. And I want you as an adviser, too, Antipater. You’re a timid little man, but you’re smart, and shrewd as well, and you’re a Greek and a Roman both at the same time. I can use you in Gallia. Come with me. You won’t regret it. I’ll rebuild the army and push the Greeks out of Roma within your lifetime and mine. You can be a Consul, Antipater, when I come back here to take possession of the throne of the Caesars.”

“Sir—sir—”

“Think about it. You have until tomorrow.”

Justina’s expression was entirely unreadable as Antipater finished telling the tale. Whatever was going on behind those dark glistening eyes was something he could not guess at all.

“It surprised me more than I can tell you,” he said, “to find out how much deeper a man Germanicus is than anybody knew. How strong he really is, despite that foppish attitude he found it useful to affect. How truly Roman, at the core.”

“Yes,” she said. “It must have been quite a surprise.”

“It’s a noble romantic idea, I have to admit, this business of proclaiming himself Emperor-in-exile and leading a resistance movement from Gallia. And his invitation to be part of his government, I confess, was very flattering.—But of course I couldn’t possibly go with him.” He would not go, Antipater knew, because Justina surely would not; and if one thing was clear in his mind just now amidst all the chaos of the suddenly whirling world, it was that wherever Justina wanted to go, that was where they would go. She was more important to him than politics, than empires, than all such abstract things. He understood that now as never before: for him it all came down to Justina and Lucius, Lucius and Justina, and let other men fret over the burdens of empire.

“Will he succeed, do you think, in overthrowing the Greeks?” she asked.

“He stands a good chance,” said Antipater. “Everyone knows that the Empire’s too big to be governed from one capital off in the East, and appointing a Greek Emperor for the West won’t work for long either. The West is Roman. It thinks Roman. For the time being the Greeks have the advantage over us, because we weakened ourselves so much through our own imbecility in the past fifty years that they were able to come in and take us over, but it won’t last. We’ll recover from what’s just happened to us, and we’ll return to being what we once were.” He had a sudden vivid sense of the river of time flowing in two directions at once, the past returning even as it departed. “The gods intended that Roma should govern the world. We did for a thousand years or more, and did it damned well. We will again. Destiny’s on Germanicus’s side. Mark my words, there’ll be Latin-speaking Emperors in this city again in our lifetime.”

It was a long speech. Justina greeted it with a spell of silence that lasted almost as long.

Then she said, “It gets very cold in Gallia in the winter, does it not?”

“Rather cold, yes, so I’m told. Colder than here, certainly.”

Too cold for her, that much he knew. Why would she even ask? It was unthinkable that she would want to go there. She would hate it there.

“It’s very strange,” he said, since she was saying nothing. “The Emperor is worthless and the brother that I thought was worthless turns out actually to be a bold and courageous man. If there’s such a thing as a Roman soul, and I think there is, it goes westward with Germanicus tomorrow.”

“And you, Lucius? Which way do you go?”

“We’re Greeks, you and I. We’ll be going the other way, Justina. Toward the East. Toward the sun. To Dalmatia, with Caesar.”

“You’re a Roman, Lucius.”

“More or less, yes. What of it?”

“Roma goes west. The coward Maximilianus goes east. Do you truly want to go with the coward, Lucius?”

Antipater gaped at her, stunned, unable to speak.

“Tell me, Lucius, how cold does it really get in Gallia in the winter? Is there very much snow?”

He found his voice, finally. “What are you trying to say, Justina?”

“What are you trying to say? Suppose I didn’t exist. Which way would you go tomorrow, east or west?”

He paused only an instant. “West.”

“To follow the Emperor’s brother into the snow.”

“Yes.”

“The brother that you thought was worthless.”

“The Emperor is worthless. Not so the brother, I begin to think. If you weren’t in the equation, I’d probably go with him.” Was it so, he wondered? Yes. Yes. It was so. “I’m a Roman. I’d want to act like a Roman, for once.”

“Then go. Go!”

He felt the room rocking, as if in an earthquake. “And you, Justina?”

“I don’t have to act like a Roman, do I? I could stay here, and continue to be a Greek—”

“No, Justina!”

“Or I could follow you and your new Emperor into the snow, I suppose.” She wrapped her arms around her body and shivered, as though white flakes were already falling, here in their snug room. “Or, on the other hand, we still have the option, both of us, of going east with the other Emperor. The cowardly one who gave his throne away to be safe.”

“I’m not very brave myself, you know.”

“I know that. Yet you would go with Germanicus, if I were not here. So you just said. There’s a difference between not being very brave and being a coward. Which is worse, I wonder, to walk through the snow once in a while, or to live in warmth among cowards? How can you live among cowards, unless you’re a coward yourself?”

He had no answer. His head was throbbing. She had him outflanked on every front. He understood only that he loved her, he needed her, he would make whatever choice she wanted him to make.

From outside came shouting again, raucous, jubilant. He could hear what sounded like screams, also. Antipater glanced toward the window and saw new fires burning on the hills. The conquest was beginning in earnest, now. The victors were raking in their spoils.

Well, that was only to be expected, Antipater thought. It made no difference to him. The one question that mattered was which way to go: eastward with the fallen Emperor, westward with his brother.

He looked to Justina. Waited for her to speak.

She was still holding herself against the imagined cold of an imagined winter, but she was smiling now. The cold was imaginary; the smile was real. “And so,” she said. “A Roman, I will be. With you, in the snow, in Gallia. Is that a crazy thing, Lucius? Well, then. We can be crazy together. And try to keep each other warm wherever we go.—We should start packing, love. Your new Emperor is sailing for Massalia tomorrow, is that not what you said?”

Content

Robert Silverberg
Waiting for the End