"Steve White - The Disinherited 03 - Debt of Ages" - читать интересную книгу автора (White Steve)

occasional statue-like figures of white-uniformed Scholarian Guards. It
would be good to have some recompense in exchange for wind and vigor!
But I mustn't complain. At fifty-nine I should be thanking God that I'm
still alive, not whining to Him about the loss of youth.

He reached the top of the marble stairs that led down from the imperial
apartments to the first floor. Here hp paused, and gazed out the wide
windows that gave light to the landing. They gave little light now, for it
was approaching twilight. Sidonius looked out at the terraced gardens
that sloped down to the Sea of Marmara, where lights were winking to life
on passing ships. He liked this view, for the palace itself and the adjacent
hippodrome blocked from sight the teeming hive that was Constantinople.

At one time I dared hope that he'd move the principal Imperial
residence back to Rome, where it was in the great days before the world
began to go wrong, when the first Augustus ruled as Princeps among his
fellow citizens, not as an Asiatic god-emperor inhabiting a world of
ceremony and splendor far above his subjects' cringing heads. But Rome
was always hopeless as a location for the Imperial capital, from the
military standpoint. The logistics were all wrong. And, of course, most of
our wealth and peopleтАФand our most dangerous enemiesтАФare in the
East All of this was as true for Artorius as it had been for Constantine. As
in everything else, he made the only possible choice.

Later, though...

At first Artorius had been a breath of fresh air in this place. But then
the wind had settled, and everything had been as before: the eunuchs, and
the ceremonies and hierarchies they had devised and eternally elaborated
(A substitute for what they've lost? Sidonius wondered); and the clerks
and notaries who did the everyday business of the state with an
inefficiency they defended with a stubbornness fit to shame the Saxons,
for any change could only be to their disadvantage. There's no way the
empire can function without them, Sidonius reflected bleakly. No one else
knows how to play the games they themselves have invented for the
purpose of making themselves indispensable.

He sighed and shook his head. He shouldn't complain about the way
the restored empire was governed. It's like my advancing age, he
reminded himself. Consider the alternative! No, the decisions that had
wedged him and his old friend apart over the last few years had concerned
not the things of Man but those of GodтАж "Sidonius! Your Holiness, I
meant to say!" Sidonius turned and smiled at the man bounding up the
staircase. The clouds lifted from his mind for the moment. It was
impossible to stay depressed around Ecdicius.

"Noblissimus," he greeted, using the proper form of address for the heir
to the Empire.

"Well, now that we've got all that out of the wayтАФ greetings!" Ecdicius