My gonads plunged in despair.
“Simeon?” I said. “Do you mean Simeon Ducas the Tall, or the other one?”
“Were there two? How could you know?”
Cheeks flaming, I improvised, “I have to confess that I am something of a student of the family. Two Simeon Ducases followed the Comneni to this land, Simeon the Tall and a man of shorter stature.”
“Of this I know nothing,” said Markezinis. “I have been taught that my ancestor’s name was Simeon. And his father was Nicephorus, whose palace was close to the church of St. Theodosia, by the Golden Horn. The Venetians burned the palace of Nicephorus when they took the city in 1204. And the father of Nicephorus—” He hesitated, shaking his head slowly and sadly from side to side like an aging buffalo. “I do not remember the name of the father of Nicephorus. I have forgotten the name of the father of Nicephorus. Was it Leo? Michael? Basil? I forget. My head is full of wine.”
“It does not matter that much,” I said. With the ancestry traced into Constantinople, there would be no further difficulties.
“Romanos? John? Isaac? It is right here, inside my head, but there are so many names — so many names—”
Still muttering names, he fell asleep at the table.
A dark-eyed daughter showed me to a drafty bedroom. I could have shunted instead, having learned all here that I had come to know; but it seemed civil to spend the night under my multi-great-grandfather’s roof, rather than vanishing like a thief. I stripped, snuffed the candle, got into bed.
In the darkness a soft-bodied wench joined me under the blankets.
Her breasts nicely filled my hands and her fragrance was sweetly musky. I couldn’t see her, but I assumed she must be one of the Markezinis’ three daughters, coming to show how hospitable the family could be.
My palm slid down her smoothly rounded belly to its base, and when I reached the junction of her thighs, her legs opened to me, and I found her ready for love.
I felt obscurely disappointed at the thought that Markezinis’ daughters would give themselves so freely to strangers — even a noble stranger claiming to be a cousin. After all, these were my ancestors. Was my line of descent muddied by the sperm of casual wayfarers?
That thought led logically to the really troublesome one, which was, if this girl is really my great-great-multi-great-grandmother, what am I doing in bed with her? To hell with sleeping with strangers — should she sleep with descendants? When I began this quest at Metaxas’ prodding, it wasn’t really with the intent of committing transtemporal incest — but yet here I was doing it, it seemed.
Guilt blossomed in me and I became so nervous that it made me momentarily impotent.
But my bedmate slithered down to my waist and restored my virility with busy lips. A fine old Byzantine trick, I thought, and, rigid again, I slipped into her and pronged her with gusto. I soothed my conscience by telling myself that the chances were two out of three that this girl was merely my great-great-multi-great- aunt, in which case the incest must surely be far less serious. So far as blood-lines went, the connection between myself and any sixteenth-century aunt must be exceedingly cloudy.
My conscience let me alone after that, and the girl and I gasped our way to completion. And then she rose, and went from the room, and as she passed the window a sliver of moonlight illuminated her white buttocks and her pale thighs and her long blonde hair, and I realized what I should have known all along, which is that the Markezinis girls would not come like Eskimo wenches to sleep with guests, but that someone had thoughtfully sent in a slave-girl for my amusement. So much for the prickings of conscience. Absolved even of the most tenuous incest, I slept soundly.
In the morning, over a breakfast of cold lamb and rice, Gregory Markezinis said, “Word reaches me that the Spaniards have found a new world beyond the Ocean Sea. Do you think there’s truth in it?”
This was the year A.D. 1556.
I said, “Beyond all doubt it’s true. I saw the proof in Spain, at the court of King Charles. It’s a world of gold and jade and spices — of red-skinned men—”
“Red-skinned men? Oh, no, cousin Ducas, no, no, I can never believe that!” Markezinis roared in delight, and summoned his daughters. “The new world of the Spaniards — its men have red skins! Cousin Ducas tells us so!”
“Well, copper-colored, really,” I murmured, but Markezinis scarcely heard.
“Red skins! Red skins! And no heads, but eyes and mouths in their chests! And men with a single leg, which they raise above their heads at midday to shield themselves from the sun! Yes! Yes! Oh, wonderful new world! Cousin, you amuse me!”
I told him I was glad to bring him such pleasure. I thanked him for his gracious hospitality, and chastely embraced each of his daughters, and prepared to take my leave. And suddenly it struck me that if my ancestors’ name had been Markezinis from the fourteenth century through the twentieth, then none of these girls could possibly be ancestral to me. My priggish pangs of conscience had been pointless, except insofar as they taught me where my inhabitions lay. “Do you have sons?” I asked my host.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “six sons!”
“May your line increase and prosper,” I said, and departed, and rode my donkey a dozen kilometers out into the countryside, and tethered it to an olive tree, and shunted down the line.
31.
At the end of my layoff I reported for duty, and set out for the first time solo as a Time Courier.
I had six people to take on the one-week tour. They didn’t know it was my first solo. Protopopolos didn’t see any point in telling them, and I agreed. But I didn’t feel as though it were my first solo. I was full of Metaxian chutzpah. I emanated charisma. I feared nothing except fear itself.
At the preliminary meeting I told my six the rules of time-touring in crisp, staccato phrases. I invoked the dread menace of the Time Patrol as I warned against changing the past either carelessly or by design. I explained how they could best keep out of trouble. Then I handed out timers and set them.
“Here we go,” I said. “Up the line.”
Charisma. Chutzpah.
Jud Elliott, Time Courier, on his own!
Up the line!
“We have arrived,” I said, “in 1659B.P., better known to you as the year 400. I’ve picked it as a typical early Byzantine time. The ruling emperor is Arcadius. You remember from now-time Istanbul that Haghia Sophia should be back there, and the mosque of Sultan Ahmed should be there. Well, of course, Sultan Ahmed and his mosque are currently a dozen centuries in the future, and the church behind us is the original Haghia Sophia, constructed forty years ago when the city was still very young. Four years from now it’ll burn down during a rebellion caused by the exiling of Bishop John Chrysostomos by Emperor Arcadius after he had criticized Arcadius’ wife Eudoxia. Let’s go inside. You see that the walls are of stone but the roof is wooden—”
My six tourists included a real-estate developer from Ohio, his wife, their gawky daughter and her husband, plus a Sicilian shrink and his bowlegged temporary wife: a typical assortment of prosperous citizens. They didn’t know a nave from a narthex, but I gave them a good look at the church, and then marched them through Arcadius’ Constantinople to set the background for what they’d see later. After two hours of this I jumped down the line to 408 to watch the baptism of little Theodosius again.
I caught sight of myself on the far side of the street, standing close to Capistrano. I didn’t wave. My other self did not appear to see me. I wondered if this present self of mine had been standing here that other time, when I was here with Capistrano. The intricacies of the Cumulative Paradox oppressed me. I banished them from mind.