Up The Line

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.”