Up The Line

30.

Grandfather Passilidis had saved me a great deal of trouble. He had lopped almost eight centuries off what I was already starting to think of as my quest.

I jumped down the line to now-time, did some research in the Time Service headquarters at Athens, and had myself outfitted as a Byzantine noble of the late twelfth century, with a sumptuous silk tunic, black cloak, and white bonnet. Then I podded up north to Albania, getting off at the town of Gjinokaster. In the old days this town was known as Argyrokastro, in the district of Epirus.

From Gjinokaster I went up the line to the year 1205.

The peasant folk of Argyrokastro were awed by my princely garb. I told them I was seeking the court of Michael Angelus Comnenus, and they told me the way and sold me a donkey to help me get there. I found Michael and the rest of the exiled Byzantines holding a chariot race in an improvised Hippodrome at the foot of a range of jagged hills. Quietly I affiliated myself with the crowd.

“I’m looking for Ducas,” I told a harmless-looking old man who was passing around some wine.

“Ducas? Which one?”

“Are there many here? I bear a message from Constantinople for a Ducas, but they did not tell me there was more than one.”

The old man laughed. “Just before me,” he said, “I see Nicephorus Ducas, John Ducas, Leo Ducas, George Ducas, Nicephorus Ducas the Younger, Michael Ducas, Simeon Ducas, and Dimitrios Ducas. I am unable to find at the moment Eftimios Ducas, Leontios Ducas, Simeon Ducas the Tall, Constantine Ducas, and — let me think — Andronicus Ducas. Which member of the family, pray, do you seek?”

I thanked him and moved down the line.

In sixteenth century Gjinokaster I asked about the Markezinis family. My Byzantine garb earned me some strange glances, but the Byzantine gold pieces I carried got me all the information I needed. One bezant and I was given the location of the Markezinis estate. Two bezants more and I had an introduction to the foreman of the Markezinis vineyard. Five bezants — a steep price — and I found myself nibbling grapes in the guest-hall of Gregory Markezinis, the head of the clan. He was a distinguished man of middle years with a flowing gray beard and burning eyes; he was stern but hospitable. As we talked, his daughters moved serenely about us, refilling our cups, bringing more grapes, cold legs of lamb, mounds of rice. There were three girls, possibly thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen years old. I took good care not to look too closely at them, knowing the jealous temperament of mountain chieftains.

They were beauties: olive skin, dark eyes, high breasts, full lips. They might have been sisters of my radiant grandmother Katina Passilidis. My mother Diana, I believe, looked this way in girlhood. The family genes are powerful ones.

Unless I happened to be climbing on the wrong branch of the tree, one of these girls was my great-great-multi-great-grandmother. And Gregory Markezinis was my great-great-great-multi-great-grandfather.

I introduced myself as a wealthy young Cypriote of Byzantine descent who was traveling the world in search of pleasure and adventure. Gregory, whose Greek was slightly contaminated by Albanian words (did his serfs speak Gheg or Tosk? I forget) had evidently never met a Cypriote before, since he accepted my accent as authentic. “Where have you been?” he asked.

Oh, I said, Syria and Libya and Egypt, and Rome and Paris and Lisbon, and to London to attend the coronation of Henry VIII, and Prague, and Vienna. And now I was working my way eastward again, into the Turkish domain, determined despite all risks to visit the graves of my ancestors in Constantinople.

He raised an eyebrow at the mention of ancestors. Energetically hacking off a slice of lamb with his dagger, he said, “Was your family a high one in the old days?”

“I am of the Ducas line.”

“Ducas?”

“Ducas,” I said blandly.

“I am of the Ducas line as well.”

“Indeed!”

“Beyond doubt!”

“A Ducas in Epirus!” I cried. “How did it happen?”

“We came here with the Comneni, after the Latin pigs took Constantinople.”

“Indeed!”

“Beyond doubt!”

He called for more wine, the best in the house. When his daughters appeared, he did a little dance, crying, “A kinsman! A kinsman! The stranger is a kinsman! Give him proper greeting!”

I found myself engulfed in Markezinis daughters, over-whelmed by taut youthful breasts and sweet musky bodies. Chastely I embraced them, as a long-lost cousin would.

Over thick, elderly wine we talked genealogy. I went first, picking a Ducas at random — Theodoros — and claiming that he had escaped to Cyprus after the debacle in Constantinople in 1204, to found my line. Markezinis had no way of disproving that, and in fact he accepted it at face value. I unreeled a long list of Ducas forebears up the line between myself and distant Theodoros, using customary Byzantine names. When I concluded I said, “And you, Gregory?”

Using his knife to scratch family trees into the table top at some of the difficult points, Markezinis traced his line back to a Nicholas Markezinis of the late fourteenth century who had married the eldest daughter of Manuel Ducas of Argyrokastro, that Ducas having had only daughters and therefore bringing his immediate line to an end. From Manuel, then, Markezinis took things back in a leisurely way to the expulsion of the Byzantines from Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. The particular Ducas of his direct line who had fled to Albania was, he said, Simeon.

My gonads plunged in despair.

“Simeon?” I said. “Do you mean Simeon Ducas the Tall, or the other one?”

“Were there two? How could you know?”

Cheeks flaming, I improvised, “I have to confess that I am something of a student of the family. Two Simeon Ducases followed the Comneni to this land, Simeon the Tall and a man of shorter stature.”

“Of this I know nothing,” said Markezinis. “I have been taught that my ancestor’s name was Simeon. And his father was Nicephorus, whose palace was close to the church of St. Theodosia, by the Golden Horn. The Venetians burned the palace of Nicephorus when they took the city in 1204. And the father of Nicephorus—” He hesitated, shaking his head slowly and sadly from side to side like an aging buffalo. “I do not remember the name of the father of Nicephorus. I have forgotten the name of the father of Nicephorus. Was it Leo? Michael? Basil? I forget. My head is full of wine.”

“It does not matter that much,” I said. With the ancestry traced into Constantinople, there would be no further difficulties.

“Romanos? John? Isaac? It is right here, inside my head, but there are so many names — so many names—”

Still muttering names, he fell asleep at the table.

A dark-eyed daughter showed me to a drafty bedroom. I could have shunted instead, having learned all here that I had come to know; but it seemed civil to spend the night under my multi-great-grandfather’s roof, rather than vanishing like a thief. I stripped, snuffed the candle, got into bed.

In the darkness a soft-bodied wench joined me under the blankets.

Her breasts nicely filled my hands and her fragrance was sweetly musky. I couldn’t see her, but I assumed she must be one of the Markezinis’ three daughters, coming to show how hospitable the family could be.

My palm slid down her smoothly rounded belly to its base, and when I reached the junction of her thighs, her legs opened to me, and I found her ready for love.

I felt obscurely disappointed at the thought that Markezinis’ daughters would give themselves so freely to strangers — even a noble stranger claiming to be a cousin. After all, these were my ancestors. Was my line of descent muddied by the sperm of casual wayfarers?

That thought led logically to the really troublesome one, which was, if this girl is really my great-great-multi-great-grandmother, what am I doing in bed with her? To hell with sleeping with strangers — should she sleep with descendants? When I began this quest at Metaxas’ prodding, it wasn’t really with the intent of committing transtemporal incest — but yet here I was doing it, it seemed.

Guilt blossomed in me and I became so nervous that it made me momentarily impotent.

But my bedmate slithered down to my waist and restored my virility with busy lips. A fine old Byzantine trick, I thought, and, rigid again, I slipped into her and pronged her with gusto. I soothed my conscience by telling myself that the chances were two out of three that this girl was merely my great-great-multi-great- aunt, in which case the incest must surely be far less serious. So far as blood-lines went, the connection between myself and any sixteenth-century aunt must be exceedingly cloudy.

My conscience let me alone after that, and the girl and I gasped our way to completion. And then she rose, and went from the room, and as she passed the window a sliver of moonlight illuminated her white buttocks and her pale thighs and her long blonde hair, and I realized what I should have known all along, which is that the Markezinis girls would not come like Eskimo wenches to sleep with guests, but that someone had thoughtfully sent in a slave-girl for my amusement. So much for the prickings of conscience. Absolved even of the most tenuous incest, I slept soundly.

In the morning, over a breakfast of cold lamb and rice, Gregory Markezinis said, “Word reaches me that the Spaniards have found a new world beyond the Ocean Sea. Do you think there’s truth in it?”

This was the year A.D. 1556.

I said, “Beyond all doubt it’s true. I saw the proof in Spain, at the court of King Charles. It’s a world of gold and jade and spices — of red-skinned men—”

“Red-skinned men? Oh, no, cousin Ducas, no, no, I can never believe that!” Markezinis roared in delight, and summoned his daughters. “The new world of the Spaniards — its men have red skins! Cousin Ducas tells us so!”

“Well, copper-colored, really,” I murmured, but Markezinis scarcely heard.

“Red skins! Red skins! And no heads, but eyes and mouths in their chests! And men with a single leg, which they raise above their heads at midday to shield themselves from the sun! Yes! Yes! Oh, wonderful new world! Cousin, you amuse me!”

I told him I was glad to bring him such pleasure. I thanked him for his gracious hospitality, and chastely embraced each of his daughters, and prepared to take my leave. And suddenly it struck me that if my ancestors’ name had been Markezinis from the fourteenth century through the twentieth, then none of these girls could possibly be ancestral to me. My priggish pangs of conscience had been pointless, except insofar as they taught me where my inhabitions lay. “Do you have sons?” I asked my host.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “six sons!”

“May your line increase and prosper,” I said, and departed, and rode my donkey a dozen kilometers out into the countryside, and tethered it to an olive tree, and shunted down the line.