Byzantium

The story was, in that time such stories were considered far more normative than they are now, and one wonders, now and again, whether just exactly why such stories were bandied about then as though they were truth. But, to be fair, one need only sit up a few nights by themselves and listen closely to the creaks of a tree outside a window, or a car door shutting in the distance, and then see which roads down which the mind meanders to know that enough darkness, enough silence would find us all believing in a sort of magic

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The king was reputedly a handsome man. It’s hard to tell with kings. He may have had a tongue that he couldn’t put back in his mouth like that fellow from France, but not a person would have spoken of it in his sort of kingdom, where the king was more god than king. 

The king would depart from his ornate throne room to speak with the Lord during the most taxing of times. He crossed over into the Holy of Holies via a brief walkway, illuminated with the six winged and eyed angels keeping watch from the floor below. No one ever knew what the king talked about with the Lord, whether it was the Rule of Law, dividing up what had been learned with the prophets from what had been learned from Christ. Did Christ ever come to these meetings? Was the sort of question that everyone asked themselves in the quiet of their room without being brave enough to inquire.

In the first year of his reign the king approached the Holy of Holies with trepidation, going to speak to the Lord in fear and trembling, nearly wetting his robes that first time as he crossed the threshold.

By that point it was fair to say that the two, or rather four, though we were never clear on that had become friends. And the king would disappear into the Holy of Holies with a backgammon board and fresh mutton. We were always careful to offer him the best before he entered, for we all knew the story of Cain and Abel, and wanted to assure that the last of our kings, the Holy one, would not be found wanting in the sight of the Lord.

He needed to take a wife, this was well known and talked about.

The year 989 was the last that we saw our beloved king, and the last we were to  hold onto the city, the jewel of the ancient world. After his disappearance it was no wonder that the council lost its nerve, and the military men decided to abandon us for easier fare.

Had any of us known what would have befallen our king we’d not have allowed him to ever step foot inside the Holy of Holies. It was said that our God was a jealous God, but I fear we did not know how jealous. The king had been carrying his backgammon board, dressed in a shoddy white robe when last the servants saw him.

We learned to doubt more after that year when it became clear that we weren’t all to be saved, that it was only the king, only the chosen one who would walk away on his own two feet. 

It was said that when the Emperor finally achieved the status of Godhood, that rather than ascend into heaven, he descended into the depths of hell, and brought back the men who had been the scourge of the city on his final days because he did not want their punishment to be as light as it had been had it only gone on for eternity.

The three men called back from hell were initially thankful, and agreed that the emperor had done them a considerable favor in bringing them from eternal torment back to the land of the living. 

The emperor now made God grew strange after the first week, asking that all the serpents in the land be brought to him, and when we complied, he set them all free after a brief talk. We’d expected something more dramatic than that, a hellfire and brimstone speech, a meteor called down from the heavens to imprint his name upon the earth. He explained to us that the Spirit only came forth from the Father, and that Justinian had proved it himself in heaven seventeen years after his death after winning a very heated round of poker with Saint Peter. Most of the stories he told us were implausible, though we all lived in fear of him and accepted his stories as true. He told us that the rains would not come this season, but that they’d come the year after, but that it was but a waste anyhow, as it would be best if folks like us would store up our treasures in heaven. He took a wife, or someone else’s wife and called her his own. In short, he behaved a lot like the emperor had before he’d been killed, and all of us in the quarters began to suspect that we might want to get around to finishing him off before we did anything too drastic. We watched the storm from the window in our night gowns.