Belisarius sits in his bedroom, furred like a bear
against the damp chill of the Bosphorus. The full moon
silvers the Black Sea, floods the sleeping city and the
watching sky. The General observes his sleeping wife,
his troublesome Antonina, slender catch of fire now
gentled in dark dream. Moonlight burdens the room,
chiseling each line of bedclothes and breast, the heavy
spill of her gold hair lunared to white.
Belisarius hugs the furs close about his tired, battle-
scarred body. Not yet an old man, he hungers for the
sun, a garden to hang it above, the leisure to let it seep
inside, hatch its warmth within his bones. Does such a
sun exist? Antonina tells him yes, although it is not yet
theirs for the tasting. Antonina is desire and treachery,
and the eye of love softens her body in its huge coffin of
bright light, the eye of love blinks away the vengeful
cuckold’s glare.
Belisarius closes his eyes, the blazing moonlight shows him
the flicker and flow of tiny veins rivering his inner eyelids.
Straight but quick, fluttering in and out of stillness,
he figures the bony birdlike shoulders, the small hard
rump of a kneeling catamite, sketches the slender boy
on the map of his conquests. Bowed head, pillared in the
wheat fields which feed Byzantium, back and backside
the coastline of Palestine, knees knobbing Gaza, shins where
Alexandria wells its African waters into the Roman world-lake.
Belisarius opens his eyes and the map remains,
settling like stretched silk on his wife’s body, that white
geography he has conquered, occupied, lost, and reconquered,
each mountain and valley explored and plundered and
farmed into richness and shared now, with another,
the gray-eyed bucking stud, who smells of roses rather than
of horses, whose only weapons are his charmer’s pretty
tongue and adultery’s stiffened rod.
The map twitches in Belisarius’ mind, mouse-like dolphins
hump and frolic upon the airy Marmara. He smoothes
the silk, letting the breeze flow from the room into his
mind, rippling the map like a transparent shiver where it
settles on Antonina’s sleeping body. He draws and lines up
and positions: mental silk on kissing skin. The red hieroglyph
of Constantinople moves over her face, touches down like a
rose petal on a saucer of wine, kisses silken the noble mouth,
the ignoble lips of Antonina. That beloved, that maddening
mouth, reckless portal, deliverer of praises, curses, entreaties,
threats, each rounding syllable riding a soft and terrible music.
Belisarius traces Asia on her flesh, his eyes (closed once again)
feverish at their slow exploration. Throat, breasts, belly,
the brindle thatch above paradise, thick as the forests of
Lebanon, and below … the royal purple of Jerusalem
folding perfect between her legs.
Belisarius starts awake, gathers up the sliding fur, feels the
cool and nagging caress of the cold, old and faithful enemy,
eager at his bones, trembling like a crystal glass on the deck
of an African raider.
Belisarius combs the fur of his doubt. It is with him always,
loyal as a pet marmoset. His loyalty to the Emperor,
his Emperor’s seasonal suspicions, and the battles won,
the riots snuffed in reservoirs of blood, names of the dead
stacked like cordwood and proof. He blames the Empress,
Theodora the stunning conniver, best friend to his wife,
whispering into action and protecting that recklessness
which wounds him. Of both he has heard the ugliest rumors,
knows quite well the unspeakable truth, a truth known
and hidden as in a cistern where the sunlight never reaches.
How they lost their virginities in the sprawl of a dozen men
while mere girls, spawned and restless in this or that
Greek backwater. How their naked beauty was first
applauded, drunkenly, on some thrown-together stage,
torch-lit and caravanned in a grove of trees, miles from
the nearest decent town. How they rose to their ambition
by lying back as ordered, one hand clutching free in feigned
ecstasy, the other clamped tight around a trinity of dirty coins.
The General’s wife loves the Empress, and Theodora loves
Antonina. And Belisarius? And his own godson, the gray-
eyed priapic boy? Nothing breaks the grip of those charioteers’
daughters, joined as close as hilt to blade. And yet she was
often with him, was she not? Bidding him teach her how to
read his campaign maps, whether parchment, seawater, or
celestial. The marmoset purrs, taints the memories stained
with love. On the road to Carthage, when the Vandals were
brought down, the old empire re-sealing itself in blood.
Antonina kissed his armored wrist before he rode away
into the smoke and noise and death, and kissed his lips
when he returned, sword blade too crusted with gore
to re-enter its battered scabbard. And on the walls of Rome
itself, the dawn rising round them on Gothic wings,
Antonina welcomed his desperate embrace, welcoming
the spill of something other than blood. And was she there,
the marmoset murmurs, to temper his courage, to fill
his arms with a reason to live, to be brave enough to win
but not brave enough to die? Or was her presence at his
campfire, or mounted at his side, or bedded beneath his
passion, moaning in his war tent, an enactment of the will
of the never-absent ghost, of Theodora, jealous overseer
of Justinian’s throne?
No matter, Belisarius sighs, tired enough at last to sleep.
To dream of gardens, steaming with sun, his scarred fingers
idle and playful in Antonina’s loosened, graying, hair.