Purple Born

By Harrison Voss

There’s thunder in your eye the day you return with the rebel’s head, white sunlight heralding your arrival. It ignites you, I think—a flashing areole glancing off your cuirass’s bronze scales, motes of gore still clinging at their edges. You never knew how to get them out completely.

“Why don’t you have a slave wash it?” I asked once. You’d just returned from another war then, another noble’s rebellion skewered beneath your spear.

You looked up at me from your crouch beside your armor stand, sweat balling on your brow as you wiped your dangling greaves. “A soldier who lets another handle his armor invites sabotage,” you said. Your stepfather had taught you that—your first one, that is. Your mother married enough times to make me wonder which of her men you’d seek to follow in form. It seemed, however, that Nikephoros’s aphorisms stuck with you the most.

You look like him, I think, gliding down the boulevard atop a snowy mare, throngs of Romans cheering in the colonnades, flowers wafting from the balconies. You don’t smile at them—a soldier once told me you never did.

We were hardly men when I asked why you never invited me to join you on your campaigns. You’d just left a meeting with your generals and caught me in the garden wandering up from the palace’s polo fields. We sat beside the reflecting pool, a pair of steel clad hetaireia watching us at arm’s length.

“You’d never asked to come before,” you said. “Don’t you want to be a judge?”

“Armies need judges to keep justice on the road, and scribes to go along with them.”

You began tapping your knee. “Aren’t there more judges in need of scribes here in the City? I’d imagine very few prefer going on campaign.” Your glance sent a shiver up my spine. “I wouldn’t want to see you hurt besides.”

You said this again that night beneath your bed’s canopy, your naked belly awash in silver moonlight. My palm rested against it. “I would let you fight if you asked to,” you said slowly.

“I didn’t want to have to ask,” I whispered. You sat up beside me, dragging my hand over your thigh. I remember being afraid to look at you, to reckon with the face of an emperor enraged.

My chest splintered when I saw the tears rolling down your cheeks. I kissed them each as fast as I could. “We’re safer together here,” you said. You turned your eye towards the window overlooking the Bosporos, over Asia. Bizarre as it was, I knew this to be true. Men might question my place with you in the field, why others with greater martial prowess weren’t at your side instead. Here in the palace, where we still had some semblance of innocent boyhood between us, I could remain a Senator’s son, one lucky enough to accompany the Emperor to his sessions with his tutors and sword-masters. I’m not sure how my father managed to secure my place in your lessons. He was an old friend of your great-uncle, I think. Sometimes you’d let me read to you lines from Homer, the way our grammarians taught us, with pitched inflections and choral verbs. You’d lie on your chaise and scrunch your brow, sunlight pooling over your eyes, mixing them to blue-glass. I knew you didn’t like it. You hardly paid attention during our tutoring. But you let me practice anyway because you knew I loved the way those old pagan poets sang, the way they made evident truths neither you nor I could perceive on our own.

I pressed my lips to your brow. “I never really wanted to go anyways,” I said.

* * *

I don’t see you up close until you parade into the Augustaion, dismounting beside the column of the Emperor Justinian. I stand across the plaza beside the entrance to the Hagia Sophia with a throng of Senators my own rank, each of us decked in gold belts and samite tunics, melting beneath the midday sun.

A long cry ascends over the square as you mount the steps of the Great Church. Hail, Basileios the Purple-Born, Emperor of the Romans! You raise a hand, casting a small shadow over your chestnut beard. It grew out better this campaign than it had the last. Without a sound, you smooth a palm over your violet raiment, and the church doors open before you.

Purple-born, purple robes. More blood than violet, you always said. Comfortable for the most part, though I knew you hated your Easter costume most—too many layers, especially when the celebration landed on a particularly warm day. You let me wear your cape at night once, I remember. We ran circles around your bed like children, our eyes catching through its curtains. You ripped the fabric when you caught me, failing to bite my chest underneath. “Tastes like fish,” you laughed, spitting the cloth out.

You claimed later that I tasted much better.

The Patriarch receives you beneath the church threshold, his white beard flowing down to his belt, a soft prayer uttering off his lips. I smile.

“Would you ever want to be Patriarch?” you asked. We were eighteen. I stood beside your window watching rosy dawn kindle the glittering straits, and felt you wrap a cloak around my shoulders to hinder the morning chill.

“Can’t say I’m fit for the charge,” I laughed.

Your voice was stern, distant. “There’d been worse sinners in the role.” You ran a hand over my chest, felt around its slender lines. “How about a governor?” You drew a long alpha near my collar. “I can make you one of anywhere.”

“You don’t want me around?”

“Valid point.” You smirked then, your fingers stepping over my collarbone, flinching my neck.

“I don’t need anything,” I said. I remember taking your hand, how strong each finger felt within my palm. “This is enough.”

***

I didn’t become governor, or Patriarch. But I did leave the palace. I moved into my own apartments down near Theodosios’s Forum, became a judge underneath the Hippodrome, my courtroom’s rafters sometimes shaking from the chariot races above. And we still saw one another. You granted me access to your royal person and even gifted me the title of patrikios, unheard of for someone my age. Whatever whispers passed around the Senate you didn’t seem to mind; whenever there was a banquet, or a holy festival, I would be there, among the crowd, free to slip to your bedchamber after all had left for a glass of wine or a game of tabula, and an intermittent chance to return home to your bed.

But then you exiled your great-uncle from court and these trysts of ours ceased. The letters you wrote me, the private evenings in your chamber—it all came to an end without even a word. Your great-uncle had been using me against you, or so your brother claimed when I asked of you. For years the old man hinged on our romance as a means of pivoting your attention away from the fact that he ran the affairs of state while you played emperor in ceremony alone. I wasn’t there the day his illusion dissolved, the day you awoke with thunder in your eye—perhaps that’s why you awoke in the first place, that my growing time away from the palace had given you a chance to perceive your great-uncle’s game.

Within a year all your enemies had been exiled, demoted, or killed. Your stepfather Nikephoros’s family took none of this lightly. Your great-uncle had installed his kin as your generals, and knew he could count on them to launch a rebellion against you in retaliation. And so, not yet thirty and with no mentor to rely upon, you took the spear in your own hand and brought your stepfather’s family to ruin. It’s a shame how of all your parents you loved him the most.

“The Saracens call him the pale death,” you told me once. We sat on flagstones in the middle of a yard down by the seawalls, our wooden sabers splintered from hours of swordplay.

“Because of all the cities he took from them?”

A nod.

“Do you think you’ll take that name after him?”

You laughed, fetching the sword at your side. “I wouldn’t mind it.” A gull’s lone song cleared the air.

“What about guardian of New Rome?”

You hopped back to your feet, extended your hand for me, your smile radiant as a halo. “I’ll take that too.”

***

“Hail, Basileios, Emperor of the Romans! Hail, Basileios, Guardian of New Rome!”

A table of Senators cry out from the far end of the dining room, and I feel my cheeks flush. You sit in the center of the room, your own couch atop a low daïs with your brother lounging beside you. Boys in the bloom of their youth wander between couches and diners carrying flagons of wine; there are sword-jugglers on stilts, flourishes of girls and eunuchs dancing beneath them in sheer silk gowns.

Your brother laughs in your ear at the acclamation and calls up another round. Halfway through the roar, as I make my way out towards the courtyard adjoining the room’s eastern wall, our eyes manage to meet for the first time that day. And then, another first: you smile, if a smile’s what it could be called—a gentle rise at the corners of your mouth, a shift in the bristles of your beard.

I turn my attention away and meander through the courtyard out into the gardens, wandering back to that same reflecting pool from nearly a decade earlier. Glimmers of starlight pinprick its face.

“I’m wedding Eudocia,” my reflection says to me. Over and over again. “I’m wedding Eudocia, I’m wedding Eudocia, I’m…”

My father had arranged the marriage, though I’m sure my mother played no small part in it as well. Eudocia was comely enough—fair-haired, brown-eyed, round-faced –the daughter of some dignitary or other that’d survived your overhaul of the palace hierarchy. I think you saw us together at your last palace affair, but I couldn’t tell; you’d only appeared for a moment before withdrawing to discuss the rebellion against you.

“Kyrios Symeon.” A eunuch arrives to fetch me from my seat beside the pool. Most of the diners had either gone home or slipped outside to play with one another in the gardens, their shadows flickering by. I follow the clean-shaven lad back into the Daphne where you sleep, winding up its polished stairs just as I had countless times before.

My sandals rattle off the marble leading to your door. For a moment I think I can hear our voices whispering between them and I wonder, pray perhaps, that the threshold will be magic, that the moment my foot crosses over I’ll step back into a lazy afternoon between lessons, my head bouncing on your belly as it shook at all my jokes, no thunder in sight.

“Do you want to marry?” you asked.

We weren’t yet ten when the question arose.

“Won’t we have to?” We’d stretched ourselves out at the foot of your bed, tossing a fig from your lunch platter between us.

“Not if we become monks.”

“I could do without that—all they eat is vegetables.” I remember you laughing at the face I made, how the birds at your window sang in answer. “I guess I will then. You?”

I tossed you the fig and you held it for a moment, studying its bruised, fuchsia skin. “I’m not sure.” Our eyes met at your smirk. “I’ll have to like her as much as you at least.” Your tutor arrived moments later, and no more was said on the matter ever again.

I draw a hard breath before asking your guards to tell you I’d arrived. One of the axe-men slips inside before beckoning me forward.

The guards crash the bronze doors behind me. You hardly turn to look. Slowly, desperately, I begin to wonder whether I even saw you smile across the banquet floor.

“I’m marrying Eudocia,” I say. I don’t know what I expect. Perhaps a grunt, a protest, some laconic quip. Instead you linger silently beside the open window, a flurry of stars glinting over your shoulder, and touch the hard-won diadem strapping your skull.

Without another word, I turn my face to the door.

About the author

Harrison Voss is a recent graduate of Columbia University where he studied History with a specialization in Ancient Mediterranean Studies. He has published research and essays on the Byzantine Empire, Classical Athens, and the Roman poet Vergil, and has participated in Columbia University's ongoing excavation of Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. Follow him on twitter @htv498, or follow his blog for excerpts from his writing and occasional general musings.

About the illustration

The illustration is "Byzantine Warrior and Chancellor". Origin unknown.