"In fact"- he warmed to his theme-"just what the devil have Herakleios and Tiberius done? When you look at it, boys, they haven't done a damn thing. For years now, they've sat around the palaces drinking fancy wine and pinching pretty girls on the bottom. It's nice work if you can get it, aye, but does it set you up to be the Emperor? Not on your life.

"Christ crucified, lads," Theodore went on, "Constantine's son has already done more than either one of those worthless brothers, and he's only twelve years old. Here, Prince, you tell them about it. You don't need me."

I did not yet have a man's height. Myakes set his shield on the ground and motioned for me to stand on it. When I had done so, he and a couple of other stalwart excubitores lifted the shield, with me on it, so the soldiers from the Anatolian military districts could see me. And when they did see me so upraised, the silence they gave me was deeper than any Theodore of Koloneia had got. This, of course, was not merely for who I was but for who I might become: being raised on a shield is, or can be, the first step in the coronation of an Emperor.

I glanced down at Myakes, thanking him with my eyes for his quick wits. He winked at me again. In that moment, whatever nervousness I might have felt addressing a plaza full of unruly warriors, all of them angry at my father and therefore at me, vanished. I said, "Soldiers of Romania, who guided the two hundred eighty-nine bishops to the true doctrine of Christ's two energies and two wills? Was it my uncles? No- it was my father and I. Thanks to us, there is once more peace in the church all through the inhabited world."

Most of the soldiers cheered at this, but a few let out hisses and catcalls. By their looks and accents, most of them were Armenians, whose church, being both heretical and in the iron grip of the followers of the false prophet, has to this day, almost thirty years after the time of which I write, failed to ratify the sixth holy and ecumenical synod.