I had seen the gleaming palaces of the Ducas family. I had watched forty proud Ducases march clad in cloth of gold through the streets of Constantinople, to celebrate the rise of their cousin Constantine to the imperial throne. If Passilidis was a Ducas, I was a Ducas.
“Of course,” he said, “the family was very large, and I believe we were of a minor branch. Still, it is something to take pride in, descent from such a family.”
“It certainly is. Could you give me the names of any of your Byzantine ancestors, maybe? The first names?”
I must have sounded as though I planned to look them up the next time I was in Byzantium. Which I did, but Passilidis wasn’t supposed to suspect that, because time-travel hadn’t been invented yet.
He frowned and said, “Do you need this for the article you are writing?”
“No, not really. I’m just curious.”
“You seem to know more than a little about Byzantium.” It worried him that an American barbarian would recognize the name of a famous Byzantine family.
I said, “Just casual knowledge. I studied it in school.”
“Sadly, I can give you no names. This information has not come down to us. But perhaps some day, when I have retired from politics, I will search the old records—”
My grandmother poured us more wine, and I stole a quick, guilty peek at her full, swaying breasts. My mother climbed on my knee and made little trilling noises. My grandfather shook his head and said, “It is very surprising, the way you resemble me. Can I take your photograph?”
I wondered if it went against Time Patrol regulations. I decided that it probably did. But also I saw no polite way to refuse such a trifling request.
My grandmother produced a camera. Passilidis and I stood side by side and she took a picture of us for him, and then one for me. She pulled them from the camera when they were developed and we studied them intently.
“Like brothers,” she said over and over. “Like brothers!”
I destroyed my print as soon as I was out of the apartment. But I suppose that somewhere in my mother’s papers there is an old and faded flattie photograph showing her father as a young man, standing beside a somewhat younger man who looks very much like him, and whom my mother probably assumed was some forgotten uncle of hers. Perhaps the photograph still exists. I’d be afraid to look.
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.