Up The Line

26.

We stayed around for a couple of days to watch the early phases of the riots. The New Year’s Games were about to begin, and the Blues and Greens were growing more unruly. Their roughnecking was verging on anarchy; no one was safe in the streets after dark. Justinian worriedly ordered the factions to halt their maraudings, and various ringleaders were arrested. Seven were condemned to death, four by decapitation because they were caught carrying weapons, three by hanging on grounds of conspiracy.

Metaxas took us to see the performance. One of the Blues survived his first hanging when the rope broke under his weight. The imperial guards put him up there again, and again the gallows couldn’t finish him, though the rope left fiery marks on his throat. So they put him aside for a while and strung up a Green, and bungled that job twice too; they were about to put the battered victims through a third hanging apiece when some outraged monks came boiling out of their monastery, grabbed the men in the midst of the confusion, and spirited them across the Golden Horn by rowboat to sanctuary in some church. Metaxas, who had seen all this before, cackled wildly at the fun. It seemed to me that his face peered at me from a thousand places in the crowd that had turned out for the executions.

Then the racing season began at the Hippodrome, and we went as guests of Metaxas’ friendly gang of Blues. We had plenty of company; 100,000 Byzantines were in the stands. The tiers of marble seats were crowded far past capacity, but space had been saved for us.

I hunted for myself in the stands, knowing that I sat somewhere else here with Capistrano and that tour; but in the crush I couldn’t catch a glimpse of myself. I saw plenty of Metaxas, though.

The blonde Princetonian gasped when we got to our seats. “Look there!” she said. “The things from Istanbul!” Down the center of the arena was a row of familiar monuments, marking the boundary between the outward and inward courses of the track. The serpent column from Delphi, brought here by Constantine, was there, and the great obelisk of Thutmose III, stolen out of Egypt by the first Theodosius. The blonde remembered them from Istanbul down the line, where they still stand, though the Hippodrome itself is gone.

“But where’s the third one?” she asked.

Metaxas said softly, “The other obelisk has not yet been erected. Best not to talk about it.”

It was the third day of the races — the fatal day. An ugly mood gripped this arena where emperors had been made and unmade. Yesterday and the day before, I knew, there had been nasty outcries when Justinian appeared in the imperial box; the crowd had yelled to him to free the imprisoned ringleaders of the factions, but he had ignored the shouts and let the races proceed. Today, January 13, Constantinople would erupt. Time-tourists love catastrophes; this would be a good one. I knew. I had seen it already.

Below, officials were completing the preliminary rituals. Imperial guards, standards flying, paraded grandly. Those leaders of the Blues and Greens who were not in jail exchanged chilly ceremonial greetings. Now the mob stirred, and Justinian entered his box, a man of middle height, rather plump, with a round, florid face. Empress Theodora followed. She wore clinging, diaphanous silks, and she had rouged her nipples; they blazed through the fabric like beacons.

Justinian mounted the steps of his box. The cries began: “Free them! Let them out!” Serenely he lifted a fold of his purple robe and blessed the audience with the sign of the Cross, three times, once toward the center block of seats, then to the right, then to the left. The uproar grew. He threw a white kerchief down. Let the games begin! Theodora stretched and yawned and pulled up her robe to study the contours of her thighs. The stable doors burst open. Out came the first four chariots.

They were quadrigas, four-horse vehicles; the audience forgot about politics as, wheel to wheel, the chariots went into action. Metaxas said pleasantly, “Theodora has been to bed with each of the drivers. I wonder which one is her favorite.” The empress looked profoundly bored. I had been surprised to find her here, the last time: I had thought that empresses were barred from the Hippodrome. As indeed they were, but Theodora made her own rules.

The charioteers hustled down to the spina, the row of monuments, and came round and back up the course. A race ran seven rounds; seven ostrich eggs were set out on a stand, and as each round was completed one egg was removed. We watched two races. Then Metaxas said, “Let us shunt forward by one hour and get to the climax of this.” Only Metaxas would pull a bit like that: we adjusted all the timers and shunted, en masse, in casual disregard of the rules for public jumping. When we reappeared in the Hippodrome, the sixth race was about to begin.

“Now starts the trouble,” said Metaxas happily.

The race was run. But as the victor came forth to receive his crown, a booming voice bellowed from out of a group of Blues, “Long live the Greens and Blues!”

An instant later, from the seats of the Greens, came the answering cry: “Long live the Blues and Greens!”

“The factions are uniting against Justinian,” Metaxas said, quietly, schoolmasterishly. The chaos that was engulfing the stadium didn’t ruffle him.

“Long live the Greens and Blues!”

“Long live the Blues and Greens!”

“Long live the Greens and Blues!”

“Victory!”

“Victory!”

“Victory!”

And the one word, “Victory!” became a mighty cry from thousands of throats. “Nika! Nika! Victory!”

Theodora laughed. Justinian, scowling, conferred with officers of his imperial guard. Greens and Blues marched from the Hippodrome, followed by a happy, screaming mob bent on destruction. We hung back, keeping a judicious distance; I caught sight of other equally cautious little groups of spectators, and knew they were no Byzantines.

Torches flared in the streets. The imperial prison was aflame. The prisoners were free, the jailers were burning. Justinian’s own guard, afraid to interfere, looked on soberly. The rioters piled faggots against the gate of the Great Palace, across the plaza from the Hippodrome. Soon the palace was on fire. Theodosius’ Haghia Sophia was aflame; bearded priests, waving precious icons, appeared on its blazing roof and toppled back into the inferno. The senate house caught fire. It was a glorious orgy of destruction. Whenever snarling rioters approached us, we adjusted timers and shunted down the line, taking care to jump no more than ten or fifteen minutes at a hop, so that we wouldn’t reappear right inside some fire that hadn’t been set when we shunted.

“Nika! Nika!”

Constantinople’s sky was black with oily smoke, and flames danced on the horizon. Metaxas, his wedge-shaped face smudged and sooty, his eyes glinting with excitement, seemed constantly on the verge of breaking away from us and going to join the destroyers.

“The firemen themselves are looting,” he called to us. “And look — the Blues burn the houses of the Greens, and the Greens burn the houses of the Blues!”

A tremendous exodus was under way, as terrified citizens streamed toward the docks and begged the boatmen to ferry them to the Asian side. Unharmed, invulnerable, we moved through the holocaust, witnessing the walls of the old Haghia Sophia collapse, watching flames sweep the Great Palace, observing the behavior of the looters and the arsonists and the rapists who paused in fire-spattered alleys to pump some screaming silk-clad noblewoman full of proletarian jissom.

Metaxas skillfully edited the riots for us; he had timed everything dozens of visits ago, and he knew exactly which highlights to hit.

“Now we shunt forward six hours and forty minutes.” he said.

“Now we jump three hours and eight minutes.”

“Now we jump an hour and a half.”

“Now we jump two days.”

We saw everything that mattered. With the city still aflame, Justinian sent bishops and priests forth bearing sacred relics, a piece of the True Cross, the rod of Moses, the horn of Abraham’s ram, the bones of martyrs; the frightened clerics paraded bravely about, asking for a miracle, but no miracles came, only cascades of brickbats and stones. A general led forty guardsmen out to protect the holy men. “That is the famous Belisarius,” said Metaxas. Messages came from the emperor, announcing the deposing of unpopular officials; but churches were sacked, the imperial library given the torch, the baths of Zeuxippus were destroyed.

On January 18, Justinian was bold enough to appear publicly in the Hippodrome to call for peace. He was hissed down by the Greens and fled as stone-throwing began. We saw a worthless prince named Hypatius proclaimed as emperor by the rebels in the Square of Constantine; we saw General Belisarius march through the smoldering city in defense of Justinian; we saw the butchery of the insurgents.

We saw everything. I understood why Metaxas was the most coveted of Couriers. Capistrano had done his best to give his people an exciting show, but he had wasted too much time in the early phases. Metaxas, leaping brilliantly over hours and days, unveiled the entire catastrophe for us, and brought us at last to the morning when order was restored and a shaken Justinian rode through the charred ruins of Constantinople. By a red dawn we saw the clouds of ash still dancing in the air. Justinian studied the blackened hull of Haghia Sophia, and we studied Justinian.

Metaxas said, “He is planning the new cathedral. He will make it the greatest shrine since Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Come: we have seen enough destruction. Now let us see the birth of beauty. Down the line, all of you! Five years and ten months down the line, and behold Haghia Sophia!”