Up The Line

32.

That night as my tired tourists slept, I slipped away from them to carry out some private research.

This was strictly against regulations. A Courier is supposed to remain with the clients at all times, in case an emergency occurs. The clients, after all, don’t know how to operate their timers, so only the Courier can help them make a quick escape from trouble.

Despite this I jumped six centuries down the line, while my tourists slept, and I visited the era of my prosperous ancestor Nicephorus Ducas.

Which took chutzpah, of course, considering that this was my first solo trip. But actually I wasn’t running any serious risks.

The safe way to carry out such side trips, as Metaxas had explained to me, is to set your timer carefully and make sure that your net absence from your tourists is one minute or less. I was departing from December 27, 537, at 2345 hours. I could go up or down the line from there and spend hours, days, weeks, or months elsewhere. When I had finished with my business, all I had to do was set my timer to bring me back to December 27, 537, at 2346 hours. From the point of view of my sleeping tourists I’d have been gone only sixty seconds.

Of course, it wouldn’t be proper to land at 2344 hours on the return trip, which is to say to come back a minute before I had left. There would then be two of me in the same room, which produces the Paradox of Duplication, a sub-species of the Cumulative Paradox, and is certain to bring a reprimand or worse if the Time Patrol hears of it. No: precise coordination is necessary.

Another problem is the difficulty of making an exact point-to-point shunt. The inn where my group was lodged in 537 would almost certainly no longer exist by 1175, the year of my immediate destination. I couldn’t blindly shunt forward from the room, because I might find myself materializing in some awkward place later constructed on the site — a dungeon, say.

The only safe way would be to go out in the street and shunt from there, both coming and going. This, though, requires you to be away from your tourists more than sixty seconds, just figuring the time necessary to go downstairs, find a safe and quiet place for your shunt, etc. And if a Time Patrolman comes along on a routine checkup and recognizes you in the street and asks you why the hell you aren’t with the clients, you’re in trouble.

Nevertheless I shunted down the line and got away with it.

I hadn’t been in 1175 before. It was probably the last really good year Byzantium had.

It seemed to me that an atmosphere of gathering trouble hung over Constantinople. Even the clouds looked ominous. The air had the tang of impending calamity.

Subjective garbage. Being able to move freely along the line distorts your perspective and colors your interpretation. I knew what lay ahead for these people; they didn’t. Byzantium in 1175 was cocky and optimistic; I was imagining all the omens.

Manuel I Comnenus was on the throne, a good man, coming to the end of a long, brilliant career. Disaster was closing in on him. The Comnenus emperors had spent the whole twelfth century recapturing Asia Minor from the Turks, who had grabbed it the century before. I knew that one year down the line, in 1176, Manuel was going to lose his entire Asian empire in a single day, at the battle of Myriocephalon. After that it would be downhill all the way for Byzantium. But Manuel didn’t know that yet. Nobody here did. Except me.

I headed up toward the Golden Horn. The upper end of town was the most important in this period; the center of things had shifted from the Haghia Sophia/Hippodrome/ Augusteum section to the Blachernae quarter, in the northernmost corner of the city at the angle where the city walls met. Here, for some reason, Emperor Alexius I had moved the court at the end of the eleventh century, abandoning the jumbled old Great Palace. Now his grandson Manuel reigned here in splendor, and the big feudal families had built new palaces nearby, all along the Golden Horn.

One of the finest of these marble edifices belonged to Nicephorus Ducas, my many-times-removed-great-grandfather.

I spent half the morning prowling around the palace grounds, getting drunk on the magnificence of it all. Toward midday the palace gate opened and I saw Nicephorus himself emerge in his chariot for his noontime drive: a stately figure with a long, ornately braided black beard and elaborate gold-trimmed robes. On his breast he wore a pendant cross, gilded and studded with huge jewels; his fingers glistened with rings. A crowd had gathered to watch the noble Nicephorus leave his palace.

Gracefully he scattered coins to the multitude as he rode forth. I caught one: a thin, shabby bezant of Alexius I, nicked and filed at the edges. The Comnenus family had debased the currency badly. Still, it’s no small thing to be able to toss even debased gold coins to a mob of miscellaneous onlookers.

I have that worn and oily-looking bezant to this day. I think of it as my inheritance from my Byzantine multi-great-grandfather.

Nicephorus’ chariot vanished in the direction of the imperial palace. A filthy old man standing beside me sighed, crossed himself many times, and murmured, “May the Savior bless the blessed Nicephorus! Such a wonderful person!”

The old man’s nose had been lopped off at the base. He had also lost his left hand. The kindly Byzantines of this latter-day era had made mutilation the penalty for many minor crimes. A step forward; the Code of Justinian called for death in such cases. Better to lose eye or tongue or nose than life.

“Twenty years I spent in the service of Nicephorus Ducas!” the old man went on. “The finest years of my life, they were.”

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

He held forth the stump of his arm. “They caught me stealing books. I was a scribe, and I hungered to keep some of the books I copied. Nicephorus has so many! He would not have missed five or six! But they caught me and I lost my hand and also my employment, ten years ago.”

“And your nose?”

“In that very harsh winter six years back I stole a barrel of fish. I am a very poor thief, always getting caught.”

“How do you support yourself?”

He smiled. “By public charity. And by begging. Can you spare a silver nomisma for an unhappy old man?”

I inspected the coins I carried. By ill luck all my silver pieces were early ones, of the fifth and sixth centuries, long out of circulation; if the old man tried to pass one, he’d be arrested on charges of robbing some aristocratic collector, and probably would lose his other hand. So I pressed a fine gold bezant of the early eleventh century into his palm. He stared at it in amazement. “I am yours, noble sir!” he cried. “I am wholly yours!

“Come with me to the nearest tavern, then, and answer a few questions,” I said.

“Gladly! Gladly!”

I bought us wine and pumped him on the Ducas genealogy. It was hard for me to look at his mutilated face, and so as we talked I kept my eyes trained on his shoulder; but he seemed accustomed to that. He had all the information I was seeking, for one of his duties while in the service of the Ducases had been to copy out the family records.

Nicephorus, he said, was then forty-five years old, having been born in 1130. The wife of Nicephorus was the former Zoe Catacalon, and they had seven children: Simeon, John, Leo, Basil, Helena, Theodosia, and Zoe. Nicephorus was the eldest son of Nicetas Ducas, born in 1106; the wife of Nicetas was the former Irene Cerularius, whom he had married in 1129. Nicetas and Irene had had five other children: Michael, Isaac, John, Romanos, and Anna. Nicetas’ father had been Leo Ducas, born in 1070; Leo had married the former Pulcheria Botaniates, in 1100, and their children, other than Nicetas, included Simeon, John, Alexander—

The recitation went on and on, carrying the Ducases back through the generations of Byzantium, into the tenth century, the ninth, the eighth, names growing cloudy now, gaps appearing in the record, the old man frowning, fumbling, apologizing for scanty data. I tried a couple of times to stop him, but he would not be stopped, until finally he sputtered out with a Tiberius Ducas of the seventh century whose existence, he said, was possibly apocryphal.

“This, you understand, is merely the lineage of Nicephorus Ducas,” he said. “The imperial family is a distinct branch, which I can trace back for you through the Comneni to Emperor Constantine X and his ancestors, who—”

Those Ducases didn’t interest me, even though they were distantly related to me in some way. If I wanted to know the lineage of the imperial Ducases, I could find it in Gibbon. I cared only for my own humbler branch of the family, the collateral offshoot from the imperial line. Thanks to this hideous outcast scribe I was able to secure the path of those Ducases through three Byzantine centuries, down to Nicephorus. And I already knew the rest of the line, from Nicephorus’s son Simeon of Albania to Simeon’s several-times-grandson Manuel Ducas of Argyrokastro, whose eldest daughter married Nicholas Markezinis, and through the Markezinis line until a Markezinis daughter married a Passilidis son and produced my estimable grandfather Konstantin, whose daughter Diana wed Judson Daniel Elliott II and brought forth into the world my own ultimate self.

“For your trouble,” I said, and gave the filthy scribe another gold piece, and fled from the tavern while he still was muttering dazed thanks.

I knew Metaxas would be proud of me. A little jealous, even — for in short order I had put together a lengthier family tree than his own. His went back to the tenth century, mine (a little shakily) to the seventh. Of course, he had an annotated list of hundreds of ancestors, and I knew details of only a few dozen, but he had started years ahead of me.

I set my timer carefully and shunted back to December 27, 537. The street was dark and silent. I hurried into the inn. Less than three minutes had elapsed since my departure, even though I had spent eight hours down the line in 1175. My tourists slept soundly. All was well.

I was pleased with myself. By candlelight I sketched the details of the Ducas line on a scrap of old vellum. I wasn’t really planning to do anything with the genealogy. I wasn’t looking for ancestors to kill, like Capistrano, or ancestors to seduce, like Metaxas. I just wanted to gloat a little over the fact that my ancestors were Ducases. Some people don’t have ancestors at all.