Up The Line

33.

I don’t think I was quite the equal of Metaxas as a Courier, but I gave my people a respectable view of Byzantium. I did a damned good job, especially for a first try.

We shunted through all the highlights and some of the lowlights. I showed them the baptism of Constantine the Pisser; the smashing of the icons under Leo III; the invasion by the Bulgars in 813; the trees of gilded bronze in the Magnaura Hall of Theophilus; the debaucheries of Michael the Drunkard; the arrival of the First Crusade in 1096 and 1097; the much more disastrous arrival of the Fourth Crusade in 1204; the reconquest of Constantinople by the Byzantines in 1261, and the coronation of Michael VIII; in short, all that counted.

My people loved it. Like most time-tourists, they particularly loved the riots, insurrections, rebellions, sieges, massacres, invasions, and fires.

“When do you show us the Turks come bustin’ in?” the Ohio real-estate-man kept asking. “I want to see those god-dam Turks wreck the place!”

“We’re moving toward it,” I told him.

First I gave them a look at Byzantium in the sunset years, under the dynasty of the Palaeologi. “Most of the empire is gone,” I said, as we dropped down the line into 1275. “The Byzantines think and build on a small scale now. Intimacy is the key word. This is the little Church of St. Mary of the Mongols, built for a bastard daughter of Michael VIII who for a short while was married to a Mongol khan. See the charm? The simplicity?”

We glided on down the line to 1330 to look in on the Church of Our Savior in Chora. The tourists had already seen it down the line in Istanbul under its Turkish name, Kariye Camii; now they saw it in its pre-mosquified condition, with all its stunning mosaics intact and new. “See, there,” I said. “There’s the Mary who married the Mongol. She’s still there down the line. And this — the early life and miracles of Christ — that one’s gone from our time, but you can see how superb it was here.”

The Sicilian shrink holographed the whole church; he was carrying a palm camera that the Time Service regards as permissible, since nobody up the line is likely to notice it or comprehend its function. His bowlegged tempie waddled around oohing at everything. The Ohio people looked bored, as I knew they would. No matter. I’d give them culture if I had to shove it up them.

“When do we see the Turks?” the Ohioans asked restlessly.

We skipped lithely over the Black Death years of 1347 and 1348. “I can’t take you there,” I said, when the protests came. “You’ve got to sign up for a special plague tour if you want to see any of the great epidemics.”

Mr. Ohio’s son-in-law grumbled, “We’ve had all our vaccinations.”

“But five billion people down the line in now-time are unprotected,” I explained. “You might pick up some contamination and bring it back with you, and start a world-wide epidemic. And then we’d have to edit your whole time-trip out of the flow of history to keep the disaster from happening. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

Bafflement.

“Look, I’d take you there if I could,” I said. “But I can’t. It’s the law. Nobody can enter a plague era except under special supervision, which I’m not licensed to give.”

I brought them down in 1385 and showed them the withering of Constantinople, a shrunken population within the great walls, whole districts deserted, churches falling into ruins. The Turks were devouring the surrounding countryside. I took my people up on the walls back of the Blachernae quarter and showed them the horsemen of the Turkish sultan prowling in the countryside beyond the city limits. My Ohio friend shook his fist at them. “Barbarian bastards!” he cried. “Scum of the earth!”

Down the line to 1398 we came. I showed them Anadolu Hisari, Sultan Beyazit’s fortress on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. A summer haze made it a trifle hard to see, so we shunted a few months into autumn and looked again. Surreptitiously we passed around a little pair of field glasses. Two elderly Byzantine monks appeared, saw the field glasses before I could get hold of them and hide them, and wanted to know what we were looking through.

“It helps the eyes,” I said, and we got out of there fast.

In the summer of 1422 we watched Sultan Murat II’s army bashing at the city walls. About 20,000 Turks had burned the villages and fields around Constantinople, massacred the inhabitants, uprooted the vines and olive trees, and now we saw them trying to get into the city. They moved siege machines up to the walls, went to work with battering rams, giant catapults, all the heavy artillery of the time. I got my people right up close to the battle line to see the fun.

The standard technique for doing this is to masquerade as holy pilgrims. Pilgrims can go anywhere, even into the front lines. I distributed crosses and icons, taught everybody how to look devout, and led them forward, chanting and intoning. There was no hope of getting them to chant genuine Byzantine hymns, of course, and so I told them to chant anything they liked, just making sure it sounded somber and pious. The Ohio people did The Star Spangled Banner over and over, and the shrink and his friend sang arias from Verdi and Puccini. The Byzantine defenders paused in their work to wave to us. We waved back and made the sign of the Cross.

“What if we get killed?” asked the son-in-law.

“No chance of it. Not permanently, anyway. If a stray shot gets you, I’ll summon the Time Patrol, and they’ll pull you out of here five minutes ago.”

The son-in-law looked puzzled.

“Celeste Aida, forma divina—”

“…so proudly we hailed—”

The Byzantines fought like hell to keep the Turks out. They dumped Greek fire and boiling oil on them, hacked off every head that peered over the wall, withstood the fury of the artillery. Nevertheless it seemed certain that the city would fall by sunset. The evening shadows gathered.

“Watch this,” I said.

Flames burst forth at several points along the wall. The Turks were burning their own siege machines and pulling back!

“Why?” I was asked. “Another hour and they’ll have the city.”

“Byzantine historians,” I said, “later wrote that a miracle had taken place. The Virgin Mary had appeared, clad in a violet mantle, dazzlingly bright, and had walked along the walls. The Turks, in terror, withdrew.”

“Where?” the son-in-law demanded. “I didn’t see any miracle! I didn’t see any Virgin Mary!”

“Maybe we ought to go back half an hour and look again,” said his wife vaguely.

I explained that the Virgin Mary had not in fact been seen on the battlements; rather, messengers had brought word to Sultan Murad of an uprising against him in Asia Minor, and, fearing he might be cut off and besieged in Constantinople if he succeeded in taking it, the sultan had halted operations at once to deal with the rebels in the east. The Ohioans looked disappointed. I think they genuinely had wanted to see the Virgin Mary. “We saw her on last year’s trip,” the son-in-law muttered.

“That was different,” said his wife. “That was the real one, not a miracle!”

I adjusted timers and we shunted down the line.

Dawn, April 5, 1453. We waited for sunrise on the ram-part of Byzantium. “The city is isolated now,” I said. “Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror has built the fortress of Rumeli Hisari up along the European side of the Bosphorus. The Turks are moving in. Come, look, listen to this.”

Sunrise broke. We peered over the top of the wall. A deafening shout went up. “Across the Golden Horn are the tents of the Turks — 200,000 of them. In the Bosphorus are 493 Turkish ships. There are 8,000 Byzantine defenders, 15 ships. No help has come from Christian Europe for Christian Byzantium, except 700 Genoese soldiers and sailors under the command of Giovanni Giustiniani.” I lingered on the name of Byzantium’s last bulwark, stressing the rich echoes of the past: “Giustiniani… Justinian—” No one noticed. “Byzantium is to be thrown to the wolves,” I went on. “Listen to the Turks roar!”

The famous Byzantine chain-boom was stretched across the Golden Horn and anchored at each bank: great rounded logs joined by iron hooks, designed to close the harbor to invaders. It had failed once before, in 1204; now it was stronger.

We jumped down the line to April 9, and watched the Turks creep closer to the walls. We skipped to April 12, and saw the great Turkish cannon, the Royal One, go into action. A turncoat Christian named Urban of Hungary had built it for the Turks; 100 pair of oxen had dragged it to the city; its barrel, three feet across, fired 1,500-pound granite projectiles. We saw a burst of flame, a puff of smoke, and then a monstrous ball of stone rise sleepily, slowly, and slam with earthshaking force against the wall, sending up a cloud of dust. The thud jarred the whole city; the explosion lingered in our ears. “They can fire the Royal One only seven times a day,” I said. “It takes a while to load it. And now see this.” We shunted forward by a week. The invaders were clustered about the giant cannon, readying it to fire. They touched it off; it exploded with a frightful blare of flame, sending huge chunks of its barrel slewing through the Turks. Bodies lay everywhere. The Byzantines cheered from the walls. “Among the dead,” I said, “is Urban of Hungary. But soon the Turks will build a new cannon.”

That evening the Turks rushed the walls, and we watched, singing America the Beautiful and arias from Otello, as the brave Genoese of Giovanni Giustiniani drove them off. Arrows whistled overhead; a few of the Byzantines fired clumsy, inaccurate rifles.

I did the final siege so brilliantly that I wept at my own virtuosity. I gave my people naval battles, hand-to-hand encounters at the walls, ceremonies of prayer in Haghia Sophia. I showed them the Turks slyly hauling their ships overland on wooden rollers from the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn, in order to get around the famous chain-boom, and I showed them the terror of the Byzantines when dawn on April 23 revealed 72 Turkish warships at anchor inside the harbor, and I showed them the gallant defeat of those ships by the Genoese.

We skipped forward through the days of the siege, watching the walls diminishing but remaining unbreached, watching the fortitude of the defenders grow and the determination of the attackers lessen. On May 28 we went by night to Haghia Sophia, to attend the last Christian service ever to be held there. It seemed that all the city was in the cathedral: Emperor Constantine XI and his court, beggars and thieves, merchants, pimps, Roman Catholics from Genoa and Venice, soldiers and sailors, dukes and prelates, and also a good many disguised visitors from the future, more, perhaps, than all the rest combined. We listened to the bells tolling, and to the melancholy Kyrie, and we dropped to our knees, and many, even some of the time-travelers, wept for Byzantium, and when the service ended the lights were dimmed, veiling the glittering mosaics and frescoes.

And then it was May 29, and we saw a world on its last day.

At two in the morning the Turks rushed St. Romanus Gate. Giustiniani was wounded; the fighting was terrible, and I had to keep my people back from it; the rhythmic “Allah! Allah!” grew until it filled the universe with noise, and the defenders panicked and fled, and the Turks burst into the city.

“All is over,” I said. “Emperor Constantine perishes in battle. Thousands flee the city; thousands take refuge behind the barred doors of Haghia Sophia. Look now: the pillaging, the slaughter!” We jumped frantically, vanishing and reappearing, so that we would not be run down by the horsemen galloping joyously through the streets. Probably we startled a good many Turks, but in all that frenzy the miraculous vanishing of a few pilgrims would attract no excitement. For a climax I swept them into May 30, and we watched Sultan Mehmet ride in triumph into Byzantium, flanked by viziers and pashas and janissaries.

“He halts outside Haghia Sophia,” I whispered. “He scoops up dirt, drops it on his turban; it is his act of contrition before Allah, who has given him such a glorious victory. Now he goes in. It would not be safe for us to follow him there. Inside he finds a Turk hacking up the mosaic floor, which he regards as impious; the sultan will strike the man and forbid him to harm the cathedral, and then he will go to the altar and climb upon it and make his Salaam. Haghia Sophia becomes Ayasofya, the mosque. There is no more Byzantium. Come. Now we go down the line.”

Dazed by what they had seen, my six tourists let me adjust their timers. I sounded the note on my pitchpipe, and down the line we went to 2059.

In the Time Service office afterward, the Ohio real-estate man approached me. He stuck out his thumb in the vulgar way that vulgar people do, when they’re offering a tip. “Son,” he said, “I just want to tell you, that was one hell of a job you did! Come on over with me and let me stick this thumb on the input plate and give you a little bit of appreciation, okay?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We’re not permitted to accept gratuities.”

“Crap on that, son. Suppose you don’t pay any attention, and I just get some stash thumbed into your account, okay? Let’s say you don’t know a thing about it.”

“I can’t prevent a transfer of funds that I don’t know about,” I said.

“Good deal. By damn, when those Turks came into the city, what a show! What a show!”

When I got next month’s account statement I found he had thumbed a cool thousand into my credit. I didn’t report myself to my superiors. I figured I had earned it, rules or not.