My father and I had our first inkling of this at breakfast, when a servant, looking apprehensive (and rightly so!), reported to us that Herakleios and Tiberius were neither in their bedchambers nor, so far as anyone could tell, anywhere within the great palace. The eunuch said, "Perhaps they have withdrawn to a monastery, there to pursue a contemplative life."

"I don't believe it," I said loudly. "They're plotting against me."

"I don't believe it, either," my father said; he knew what spirit his brothers had in them: one all too much like his own. He dipped the bread he was eating in fine olive oil, then took a sip of wine. "I don't think we'll have to wait long to find out, one way or the other."

He soon proved right. A great many ferries pass back and forth between Sykai and the Queen of Cities, and this day those entering Constantinople were filled with soldiers from the Anatolian military districts. Some of them brandished swords, not knowing or not caring that the penalty for rioting with swords was the amputation of their thumbs. Their cry was the same as that Leo's had been: "We believe in a Trinity: let us crown the three"- by which they meant my father and both my uncles.

Had they been a true army, they could have launched civil war within the walls of the God-guarded and imperial city that had repelled all foreign foes. But they were not an army, and Herakleios and Tiberius, who had never commanded soldiers (their function in the Empire having been purely ceremonial), could not make them one. They were only a mob. When my father heard reports that they were robbing shops and sacking taverns, he smiled from ear to ear.

I did not understand. "This makes them worse, not better!" I cried. "Not only are they traitors, they are criminals, too."