Constantine listened to it all without twitching a muscle. "Ruined," he said at last, and nothing more. I didn't know what to say. There wasn't much I could say. He wouldn't be able to put together another army like the one he'd thrown away, not for years- too many men gone. Ruined was about right.
He kicked at the dirt, hard, with his bandaged foot. I don't want to imagine the pain that must have cost him. His face didn't so much as twitch. We sailed for Constantinople the next day.
JUSTINIAN
My father's return to the imperial city took everyone by surprise. Stephen the Persian was particularly vexed, for he had no chance to prepare a triumphal procession to celebrate the extermination of the Bulgars. But when my father reached the palace- bare moments after word he was in the city came to us- one look at his face said no procession would be needed.
"Father," I said proudly, stepping forward when everyone else hung back, "the acts of the holy ecumenical synod await your review and approval."
"That is good," he said, and seemed to mean it; he was a good and pious Christian, as concerned with the world to come as with our own. But he had other things on his mind. "I shall review those acts… eventually."
Still full of myself and what I had done while he was gone, I demanded, "Why not now?"
"Because we were beaten, and beaten badly," he answered, getting all the poison out in one sentence.
I gaped, speechless. Despite the grim, pain-filled expression he bore, the last thing in all the world I had imagined was that my father, who had turned back the followers of the false prophet and had received envoys not only from them but from all the lesser kinds of the inhabited world, could have gone down to defeat at the hands of a band of ragged barbarians.