The Snake Stone

32

For the time it takes to say a mass. Yashim sat down. The book was written-assembled was a better word-by a Dr. Stephanitzes, late physician-in-ordinary to the Greek army of independence. It had been recently published in Athens, the capital of independent Greece. The paper was cheap; the gold-blocked title on the cover was blurred around the edges.

Yashim had never come across such a book before-a wild flinging together of prophecy, prejudice, false premise, and circular argument. It preached a story that began with the collapse of Byzantine power in 1453 and wound its way, over hundreds of pages and many false starts and irrelevant asides, to its eventual restoration under its last emperor, miraculously reborn.

Yashim discovered the oracles of an ancient patriarch, Tarasios, and of Leo the Wise; the prognostications of Methodios of Patara; the curiously prophetic epitaph on the tomb of Constantine the Great, who had founded the city fifteen hundred years before; all of them twisted and sugared up by the visions of one Agathangelos, who foresaw the city liberated by a great phalanx of blond northern giants, while the Turks themselves were to be chased away beyond the Red Apple Tree.

This, then, was the Great Idea. A farrago of blasphemies and wishful thinking-but heady stuff, Yashim had to admit. Like sticking your nose through the gateway to the Spice Bazaar. If you were a Greek, and you wanted to believe, then here was the sacred text, without a doubt.