MYAKES
Brother Elpidios, I tell you the truth, I never came so close to pissing myself as I did in that damned pipe. I was blinder then than I am now. I can tell the difference between light and dark to this day. I can't see anything, mind you, but I can tell the difference. There wasn't any difference to tell, not inside that pipe there wasn't. It was all black, nothing else but.
I would have had the screaming hobgoblins in there, I think, if it hadn't been for Justinian. What? No, he didn't pat me on the shoulder and keep me brave, or anything like that. Yes, I'll tell you what I mean, if you let me, Brother. What I mean is, if I'd gone to pieces in there, I figured he'd tell somebody to cut my throat or knock me over the head, and then everybody behind me would have crawled over my body and gone on.
Let me put it like this: frightened as I was, part of me knew it wasn't a real fear, if you know what I mean. I was doing it to myself. I could feel I was doing it to myself. I couldn't stop doing it, but I could slow me down a little.
And I knew being afraid of Justinian was a real fear. Can't think of one any realer, not offhand. Stand between him and getting into the city then and you'd end up with footprints up your front and down your back- and a knee in the balls for good measure.
Was I more afraid of Justinian than my own imagination? Brother Elpidios, you'd best believe I was. You would have been, too.
JUSTINIAN
We were not the only living things in the aqueduct pipeway. I have spoken of the nest my hand found when I climbed off the ladder. A couple of bats flapped past me, too, squeaking indignantly at having their seclusion disturbed. Hitting out at them, I succeeded only in barking my knuckles.
Skitterings told me mice or rats had climbed the masonry of the wrecked aqueduct to make their homes in the pipe. None of them ran toward me; they all fled away, sensing that I and the men with me were larger and more dangerous than they.
I crawled headfirst through spiderwebs beyond number, wondering what their patient weavers found to eat in this dark, wretched hole. More than one spider dropped down onto me and crawled away. At first I swatted at them, but, finding crushing their soft, hairy bodies more revolting than letting them run on me, I soon desisted. Soft cries of disgust from my followers said not all the eight-legged creatures were descending on me.
How far had I come? In the Stygian darkness, I had no sure way to judge. Something like panic ran through me. Was it a spear-cast? A bowshot? A mile? Had we reached the wall? Had we passed it? I stopped. Myakes promptly ran into me, each of the others colliding in turn with the man in front of him.
"Wait," I said. "Quiet." Echoing weirdly up the tube through which we crawled came the sounds of battle. Tervel, then, had kept his pledge to me. But so attenuated were the sounds, I could not use them to judge how far or how long we had traveled. On asking my companions, I discovered that their opinions varied so widely as to be of little value.
The argument threatened to engulf us as thoroughly as darkness had done. "Wait," I said again. "Let us assume we've come about a bowshot, say, two hundred fifty cubits." That was in the middle range of the guesses they had put forth. "From now on, I will keep track of how many times my right leg advances. For each of those times, I will add one cubit. It will not be a perfect reckoning, but better than the nothing we have now."
No one argued with me. I was in the lead. I had a plan, where the rest had none. And I was the Emperor. Muttering under my breath to keep the count straight, I moved on once more. They followed.
If my beginning guess was right, we should have been approaching the outer wall. Setting my ear against the rough side of the pipe, I tried to find out whether I could hear the Romans who were resisting the Bulgars' onslaught. All I could make out was my own blood pounding. Sighing, I went on.
At the count of, I believe, three hundred seventeen, my hand came up against an obstruction. A moment later, my head ran into it, too. "Hold up," I said to Myakes and the rest behind me. I felt of the obstruction. It was an iron grate, rough and scaly with rust under my fingers. At some time after the Avars had worked their destruction, then, Roman engineers had done their best to make sure no one could do as I was doing. By the feel of the iron, though, it had been a long time ago, and forgotten since. Explaining what I had found, I ordered, "Pass the pry bar up to me."
Leo, who was still carrying it, handed it to Stephen, from whom it went to Barisbakourios, Myakes, and me. The artisans who had installed the grating had cut holes into the channel, in which they inserted the ends of the bars of the grill. Working as they had been doing under cramped, difficult circumstances, they had not made the fit perfect, as they otherwise might have done. That carelessness, and perhaps the feeling that they were taking needless precautions, caused them to leave space into which I could set the pointed beak of the pry bar.
Using it was not easy, even after having set it in place. If I could have stood on my knees, I would have been in excellent position to exert full leverage. The pipe was too low and narrow to permit that, however. I had to lie at full length, as both my arms, which otherwise would have supported me, were engaged in prying.
With a sharp snapping sound, a piece of the grate flew off. It hit me in the back, and then hit Myakes in the head. We both cursed, there in the cramped blackness. I tugged at the grate. It still refusing to come free, I used the pry bar once more. When the next chunk of rusted iron broke away, it hit me in the head; I felt blood trickling through my scalp.
I tugged again. The grate shifted under my hands, but remained in place. I had to break off two more pieces of iron before I could wrestle it out of its position. Even then, it being essentially as wide as the channel in which it was set, I could not simply put it to one side. I and my followers had to scramble over or under it to advance. Moropaulos, the bulkiest of us, had a dreadful time. I feared he might prove a cork in the bottle for Theophilos, but at last he made it past the grate.
Then I had to remember the count of cubits. In my exertions, I had for the moment lost the exact number, but I did not admit that to Myakes and the rest of them. On we went, one obstacle overcome. Forty-seven cubits, or rather, forty-seven advances of my right leg, later, I ran headlong into another grate. I hissed in pain, it having struck close by the place where the chunk from the first grate had hit me.
This new grate was as scabrous with rust as the first had been. Since I now carried the pry bar, I went straight to work. I needed to break the grate at only three places before becoming able to shift it. Once we had all struggled past, I said, "If my reckoning is true, we've passed beyond the inner wall and are now inside the city."
Theophilos started to raise a cheer. Myakes hissed, "Shut up, curse you, or we're all dead inside the city."
We crawled on. Having come so far, I began to wonder how I would be able to leave the aqueduct. Dropping down into a cistern half full of water from other sources, although it might clean us of the filth through which we had been traveling, struck me as being less than ideal.
But God, Who had heard my pledge and saved me from the storm, provided for me once more. Looking ahead, I spied on the inside of the pipe a short strip of light in what had been darkness absolute and impenetrable. Hurrying to it, as best I could hurry in that cramped place, I discovered a door had been set into the roof of the channel, no doubt for the convenience of workmen who might have to enter to clear obstructions. Like everything else pertaining to the aqueduct, the door had not been cared for since my great-great-grandfather's day. Its timbers had shrunk and split, allowing a little moonlight to pierce the darkness. I wondered if we had crawled past other doors in better repair, but then decided I did not wish to know.