Up the Line

by Robert Silverberg

  I told how the Crusaders agreed to this stiff price, planning to cheat the blind old Doge.

  I told how the blind old Doge, once he had the Crusaders hung up in Venice, gripped them by the throats until they paid him every mark due him.

  I told how the venerable monster seized control of the Crusade and set off in command of the fleet on Easter Monday, 1203—heading not for the Holy Land but for Constantinople.

  “Byzantium,” I said, “is Venice’s great maritime rival. Dandolo doesn’t care warm spit for Jerusalem, but wants very badly to get control of Constantinople.”

  I explicated the dynastic situation. The Comnenus dynasty had come to a bad end. When Manuel II died in 1180, his successor was his young son Alexius II, who shortly was murdered by his father’s amoral cousin, Andronicus. The elegantly depraved Andronicus was himself destroyed in a particularly ghastly way by an enraged mob, after he had ruled harshly for a few years, and in 1185 there came to the throne Isaac Angelus, an elderly and bumbling grandson of Alexius I, by the female line. Isaac ruled for ten haphazard years, until he was dethroned, blinded, and imprisoned by his brother, who became Emperor Alexius III.

  “Alexius III still rules,” I said, “and Isaac Angelus is still in prison. But Isaac’s son, also Alexius, has escaped and is in Venice. He has promised Dandolo huge sums of money if Dandolo will restore his father to the throne. And so Dandolo is coming to Constantinople to overthrow Alexius III and make Isaac into an imperial puppet.”

  They didn’t follow the intricacy of it. I didn’t care. They’d figure it out as they saw things taking place.

  I showed them the Fourth Crusade arriving at Constantinople at the end of June, 1203. I let them see Dandolo directing the capture of Scutari, Constantinople’s suburb on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. I pointed out how the entrance to the port of Constantinople was guarded by a great tower and twenty Byzantine galleys, and blocked by a huge iron chain. I called their attention to the scene in which Venetian sailors boarded and took the Byzantine galleys while one of Dandolo’s ships, equipped with monstrous steel shears, cut through the chain and opened the Golden Horn to the invaders. I allowed them to watch the superhuman Dandolo, ninety years old, lead the attackers over the ramparts of Constantinople. “Never before,” I said, “have invaders broken into this city.”

  From a distance, part of a cheering mob, we watched Dandolo bring Isaac Angelus forth from his dungeon and name him Emperor of Byzantium, with his son crowned as co-emperor, by the style of Alexius IV.

  “Alexius IV,” I said, “now invites the Crusaders to spend the winter in Constantinople at his expense, preparing for their attack on the Holy Land. It is a rash offer. It dooms him.”

  We shunted down the line to the spring of 1204.

  “Alexius IV,” I said, “has discovered that housing thousands of Crusaders is bankrupting Byzantium. He tells Dandolo that he is out of money and will no longer underwrite their expenses. A furious dispute begins. While it proceeds, a fire starts in the city. No one knows who caused it, but Alexius suspects the Venetians. He sets seven decrepit ships on fire and lets them drift into the Venetian fleet. Look.”

  We saw the fire. We saw the Venetians using boat-hooks to drag the blazing hulks away from their own ships. We saw sudden revolution break out in Constantinople, the Byzantines denouncing Alexius IV as the tool of Venice, and putting him to death. “Old Isaac Angelus dies a few days later,” I said. “The Byzantines find the son-in-law of the expelled Emperor Alexius III, and put him on the throne as Alexius V. This son-in-law is a member of the famous Ducas family. Dandolo has lost both his puppet emperors, and he is furious. The Venetians and the Crusaders decide now to conquer Constantinople and rule it themselves.”

  Once again I took a pack of tourists through scenes of battle as, on April 8, the struggle began. Fire, slaughter, rape, Alexius V in flight, the invaders plundering the city. April 13, in Haghia Sophia: Crusaders demolish the choir stalls with their twelve columns of silver, and pull apart the altar, and seize forty chalices and scores of silver candelabra. They take the Gospel, and the Crosses, and the altar cloth, and forty incense burners of pure gold. Boniface of Montferrat, the leader of the Crusade, seizes the imperial palace. Dandolo takes the four great bronze horses that the Emperor Constantine had brought from Egypt 900 years before; he will carry them to Venice and place them over the entrance to St. Mark’s Cathedral, where they still are. The priests of the Crusaders scurry after relics: two chunks of the True Cross, the head of the Holy Lance, the nails that had held Christ on the Cross, and many similar objects, long revered by the Byzantines.

  From the scenes of plunder we jumped to mid-May.

  “A new Emperor of Byzantium is to be elected,” I said. “He will not be a Byzantine. He will be a westerner, a Frank, a Latin. The conquerors choose Count Baldwin of Flanders. We can see his coronation procession.”

  We waited outside Haghia Sophia. Within, Baldwin of Flanders is donning a mantle covered with jewels and embroidered with eagle figures; he is handed a scepter and a golden orb; he kneels before the altar and is anointed; he is crowned; he mounts the throne.

  “Here he comes,” I said.

  On a white horse, clad in glittering clothes that blaze as if on fire, Emperor Baldwin of Byzantium rides forth from the cathedral to the palace. Unwillingly, sullenly, the people of Byzantium pay homage to their alien master.

  “Most of the Byzantine nobility has fled,” I told my tourists, who were yearning for more battles, more fires. “The aristocracy has scattered to Asia Minor, to Albania, to Bulgaria, to Greece. For fifty-seven years the Latins will rule here, though Emperor Baldwin’s reign will be brief. In ten months he will lead an army against Byzantine rebels and will be captured by them, never to return.”

  Chrystal Haggins said, “When do the Crusaders go to Jerusalem?”

  “Not these. They never bother to go. Some of them stay here, ruling pieces of the former Byzantine Empire. The rest go home stuffed with Byzantine loot.”

  “How fascinating,” said Mrs. Haggins.

  We went to our lodgings. A terrible weariness had me in its grip. I had done my job; I had shown them the Latin conquest of Byzantium, as advertised in the brochures. Suddenly I couldn’t stand their faces any longer. We dined, and they went to sleep, or at least to bed. I stood a while, listening to the passionate groans of Miss Pistil and the eager snorts of Bilbo Gostaman, listening to the protests of Palmyra as Conrad Sauerabend sneakily stroked her thighs in the dark, and then I choked back tears of fury and surrendered to my temptations, and touched my timer, and shunted up the line. To 1105. To Pulcheria Ducas.

  45.

  Metaxas, as always, was glad to help.

  “It’ll take a few days,” he said. “Communications are slow here. Messengers going back and forth.”

  “Should I wait here?”

  “Why bother?” Metaxas asked. “You’ve got a timer. Jump down three days, and maybe by then everything will be arranged.”

  I jumped down the three days. Metaxas said, “Everything is arranged.”

  He had managed to get me invited to a soiree at the Ducas palace. Just about everyone of importance would be there, from Emperor Alexius Comnenus down. As my cover identity, I was to claim that I was Metaxas’ cousin from the provinces, from Epirus. “Speak with a backwoods accent,” Metaxas instructed me. “Dribble wine on your chin and make noises when you chew. Your name will be—ah—Nicetas Hyrtacenus.”

  I shook my head. “Too fancy. It isn’t me.”

  “Well, then, George Hyrtacenus?”

  “George Markezinis,” I said.

  “It sounds too twentieth century.”

  “To them it’ll sound provincial,” I said, and as George Markezinis I went to the Ducas soiree.

  Outside the gleaming marble walls of the Ducas palace I saw two dozen Varangian guards stationed. The presence of these yellow-bearded Norse barbarians, the core of the imperial bodyguard, told me that Alexius was already
within. We entered. Metaxas had brought his fair and wanton ancestress Eudocia to the party.

  Within, a dazzling scene. Musicians. Slaves. Tables heaped with food. Wine. Gorgeously dressed men and women. Superb mosaic floors; tapestried walls, heavy with cloth of gold. The tinkle of sophisticated laughter; the shimmer of female flesh beneath nearly transparent silks.

  I saw Pulcheria at once.

  Pulcheria saw me.

  Our eyes met, as they had met in the shop of sweets and spices, and she recognized me, and smiled enigmatically, and again the current surged between us. In a later era she would have fluttered her fan at me. Here, she withdrew her jeweled gloves and slapped them lightly across her left wrist. Some token of encouragement? She wore a golden circlet on her high, smooth forehead. Her lips were rouged.

  “That’s her husband to her left,” Metaxas whispered. “Come. I’ll introduce you.”

  I stared at Leo Ducas, my great-great-great-multi-great-grandfather, and my pride in having so distinguished an ancestor was tinged by the envy I felt for this man, who each night caressed the breasts of Pulcheria.

  He was, I knew from my genealogical studies, thirty-five years old, twice the age of his wife. A tall man, graying at the temples, with unByzantine blue eyes, a neatly clipped little beard, a high-bridged, narrow nose, and thin, tightly compressed lips, he seemed austere, remote, unutterably dignified. I suspected that he might be boringly noble. He did make an impressive sight, and there was no austerity about his tunic of fine cut, nor about his jewelry, his rings and pendants and pins.

  Leo presided over the gathering in serene style, befitting a man who was one of the premier nobles of the realm, and who headed his branch of the great house of Ducas. Of course, Leo’s house was empty, and perhaps that accounted for the faint trace of despair that I imagined I saw on his handsome face. As Metaxas and I approached him, I picked up a stray exchange of conversation from two court ladies to my left:

  “…no children, and such a pity, when all of Leo’s brothers have so many. And he the eldest!”

  “Pulcheria’s still young, though. She looks as if she’ll be a good breeder.”

  “If she ever gets started. Why, she’s close to eighteen!”

  I wanted to reassure Leo, to tell him that his seed would descend even unto the twenty-first century, to let him know that in only a year’s time Pulcheria would give him a son, Nicetas, and then Simeon, John, Alexander, and more, and that Nicetas would sire six children, among them the princely Nicephorus whom I had seen seventy years down the line, and the son of Nicephorus would follow an exiled leader into Albania, and then, and then, and then—

  Metaxas said, “Your grace, this is my mother’s sister’s third son, George Markezinis, of Epirus, now a guest at my villa during the harvest season.”

  “You’ve come a long way,” said Leo Ducas. “Have you been to Constantinople before?”

  “Never,” I said. “A wonderful city! The churches! The palaces! The bathhouses! The food, the wine, the clothes! The women, the beautiful women!”

  Pulcheria glowed. She gave me that sidewise smile of hers again, on the side away from her husband. I knew she was mine. The sweet fragrance of her drifted toward me. I began to ache and throb.

  Leo said, “You know the emperor, of course?”

  With a grand sweep of his arm he indicated Alexius, holding court at the far end of the room. I had seen him before: a short, stocky man of clearly imperial bearing. A circle of lords and ladies surrounded him. He seemed gracious, sophisticated, relaxed in manner, the true heir to the Caesars, the defender of civilization in these dark times. At Leo’s insistence I was presented to him. He greeted me warmly, crying out that the cousin of Metaxas was as dear to him as Metaxas himself. We talked for a while, the emperor and I; I was nervous, but I carried myself well, and Leo Ducas said, finally, “You speak with emperors as though you’ve known a dozen of them, young man.”

  I smiled. I did not say that I had several times glimpsed Justinian, that I had attended the baptisms of Theodosius II, Constantine V, the yet unborn Manuel Comnenus, and many more, that I had knelt in Haghia Sophia not far from Constantine XI on Byzantium’s last night, that I had watched Leo the Isaurian direct the iconoclasms. I did not say that I was one of the many pluggers of the hungry hole of the Empress Theodora, five centuries previously. I looked shy and said, “Thank you, your grace.”

  46.

  Byzantine parties consisted of music, a dance of slavegirls, some dining, and a great deal of wine. The night wore on; the candles burned low; the assembled notables grew tipsy. In the gathering darkness I mingled easily with members of the famed families, meeting men and women named Comnenus, Phocas, Skleros, Dalassenes, Diogenes, Botaniates, Tzimisces and Ducas. I made courtly conversation and impressed myself with my glibness. I watched arrangements for adultery being made subtly, but not subtly enough, behind the backs of drunken husbands. I bade goodnight to Emperor Alexius and received an invitation to visit him at Blachernae, just up the road. I fended off Metaxas’ Eudocia, who had had too much to drink and wanted a quick balling in a back room. (She finally selected one Basil Diogenes, who must have been seventy years old.) I answered, evasively, a great many questions about my “cousin” Metaxas, whom everybody knew, but whose origins were a mystery to all. And then, three hours after my arrival, I found that I was at last speaking with Pulcheria.

  We stood quietly together in an angle of the great hall. Two flickering candles gave us light. She looked flushed, excited, even agitated; her breasts heaved and a line of sweat-beads stippled her upper lip. I had never beheld such beauty before.

  “Look,” she said. “Leo dozes. He loves his wine more than most other things.”

  “He must love beauty,” I said. “He has surrounded himself with so much of it.”

  “Flatterer!”

  “No. I try to speak the truth.”

  “You don’t often succeed,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Markezinis of Epirus, cousin to Metaxas.”

  “That tells me very little. I mean, what are you looking for in Constantinople?”

  I took a deep breath. “To fulfill my destiny, by finding the one whom I am meant to find, the one whom I love.”

  That got through to her. Seventeen-year-old girls are susceptible to that kind of thing, even in Byzantium, where girls mature early and marry at twelve. Call me Heathcliff.

  Pulcheria gasped, crossed her arms chastely over the high mounds of her breasts, and shivered. I think her pupils may have momentarily dilated.

  “It’s impossible,” she said.

  “Nothing’s impossible.”

  “My husband—”

  “Asleep,” I said. “Tonight—under this roof—”

  “No. We can’t.”

  “You’re trying to fight destiny, Pulcheria.”

  “George!”

  “A bond holds us together—a bond stretching across all of time—”

  “Yes, George!”

  Easy, now, great-great-multi-great-grandson, don’t talk too much. It’s cheap timecrime to brag that you’re from the future.

  “This was fated,” I whispered. “It had to be!”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Tonight.”

  “Tonight, yes.”

  “Here.”

  “Here,” said Pulcheria.

  “Soon.”

  “When the guests leave. When Leo is in bed. I’ll have you hidden in a room where it’s safe—I’ll come to you—”

  “You knew this would happen,” I said, “that day when we met in the shop.”

  “Yes. I knew. Instantly. What magic did you work on me?”

  “None, Pulcheria. The magic rules us both. Drawing us together, shaping this moment, spinning the strands of destiny toward our meeting, upsetting the boundaries of time itself—”

  “You speak so strangely, George. So beautifully. You must be a poet!”

  “Perhaps.”

  “In two hours you’ll
be mine.”

  “And you mine,” I said.

  “And for always.”

  I shivered, thinking of the Time Patrol swordlike above me. “For always, Pulcheria.”

  47.

  She spoke to a servant, telling him that the young man from Epirus had had too much to drink, and wished to lie down in one of the guest chambers. I acted appropriately woozy. Metaxas found me and wished me well. Then I made a candlelight pilgrimage through the maze of the Ducas palace and was shown to a simple room somewhere far in the rear. A low bed was the only article of furniture. A rectangular mosaic in the center of the floor was the only decoration. The single narrow window admitted a shaft of moonlight. The servant brought me a washbasin of water, wished me a good night’s rest, and let me alone.

  I waited a billion years.

  Sounds of distant revelry floated to me. Pulcheria did not come.

  It’s all a joke, I thought. A hoax. The young but sophisticated mistress of the house is having some fun with the country cousin. She’ll let me fidget and fret in here alone until morning, and then send a servant to give me breakfast and show me out. Or maybe after a couple of hours she’ll tell one of her slavegirls to come in here and pretend she’s Pulcheria. Or send in a toothless crone, while her guests watch through concealed slots in the wall. Or—

  A thousand times I considered fleeing. Just touch the timer, and shoot up the line to 1204, where Conrad Sauerabend and Palmyra Gostaman and Mr. and Mrs. Haggins and the rest of my tourists lie sleeping and unguarded.

  Clear out? Now? When everything had gone so neatly so far? What would Metaxas say to me when he found out I had lost my nerve?

  I remembered my guru, black Sam, asking me, “If you had a chance to attain your heart’s desire, would you take it?”