He went into the next room and consulted Plastiras and Herschel. They must have vouched for me. Protopopolos, returning, whispered in my ear, “August 17, 1105. Say hello for me.”
I thanked him and got on my way.
Metaxas lived in the suburbs, outside the walls of Constantinople. Land was cheap out there in the early twelfth century, thanks to such disturbances as the invasion of the marauding Patzinak barbarians in 1090 and the arrival of the disorderly rabble of Crusaders six years later. The settlers outside the walls had suffered badly then. Many fine estates had gone on the market. Metaxas had bought in 1095, when the landowners were still in shock over their injuries at the hands of the Patzinaks and were starting to worry about the next set of invaders.
He had one advantage denied to the sellers: he had already looked down the line and seen how stable things would be in the years just ahead, under Alexius I Comnenus. He knew that the countryside in which his villa was set would be spared from harm all during the twelfth century.
I crossed into Old Istanbul and cabbed out to the ruins of the city wall, and beyond it for about five kilometers. Naturally, this wasn’t any suburban countryside in now-time, but just a gray sprawling extension of the modern city.
When I figured I was the proper distance out of town, I thumbed the plate and dismissed my cab. Then I took up a position on the sidewalk, checking things out for my jump. Some kids saw me in my Byzantine costume and came over to watch, knowing that I must be going to go back in time. They called gaily to me in Turkish, maybe asking me to take them along.
One angelically grimy little boy said in recognizable French, “I hope they cut your head off.”
Children are so sweetly frank, aren’t they? And so charmingly hostile, in all eras.
I set my timer, gestured obscenely at my well-wisher, and went up the line.
The gray buildings vanished. The November bleakness gave way to the sunny glow of August. The air I breathed was suddenly fresh and fragrant. I stood beside a broad cobbled road running between two green meadows. A modest chariot drawn by two horses came clopping up and halted before me.
A lean young man in simple country clothes leaned out and said, “Sir, Metaxas has sent me to fetch you to him.”
“But — he wasn’t expecting—”
I shut up fast, before I said something out of line. Obviously Metaxas was expecting me. Had I hit the Paradox of Discontinuity, somehow?
Shrugging, I climbed up into the chariot.
As we rode into the west, my driver nodded to the acres of grapevines to the left of the road and the groves of fig trees to the right. “All this,” he said proudly, “belongs to Metaxas. Have you ever been here before?”
“No, never,” I said.
“He is a great man, my master. He is a friend to the poor and an ally to the mighty. Everyone respects him. Emperor Alexius himself was here last month.”
I felt queasy about that. Bad enough that Metaxas had carved out a now-time identity for himself ten centuries up the line; what would the Time Patrol say about his hobnobbing with emperors? Giving advice, no doubt; altering the future by his foreknowledge of events; cementing himself into the historical matrix of this era as a valued adviser to royalty! Could anyone match him for gall?
Figs and grapes gave way to fields of wheat. “This, too, belongs to Metaxas,” said the driver.
I had pictured Metaxas living in some comfortable little villa on a hectare or two of land, with a garden in front and perhaps a vegetable plot in the rear. I hadn’t realized that he was a major landowner on such a scale.
We passed grazing cattle, and a mill worked by plodding oxen, and a pond no doubt well stocked with fish, and then we came to a double row of cypress trees that guarded a side road branching from the main highway, and took that road, and a splendid villa appeared, and at its entrance waited Metaxas, garbed in raiment suitable for the companion of an emperor.
“Jud!” he cried, and we embraced. “My friend! My brother! Jud, they tell me about the tour you led! Magnificent! Your tourists, they never stopped praising you?”
“Who told you?”
“Kolettis and Pappas. They’re here. Come in, come in, come in! Wine for my guest! A change of robes for him! Come in, Jud, come in!”
35.
The villa was classical in style, atrium-and-peristyle, with a huge central courtyard, colonnaded walkways, mosaic floors, frescoed walls, a great apsed reception room, a pond in the courtyard, a library bulging with scrolls, a dining room whose round gold-inlaid ivory table could have seated three dozen, a statuary hall, and a marble bathroom. Metaxas’ slaves hustled me toward the bathroom, and Metaxas called out that he’d see me later.
I got the royal treatment.
Three dark-haired slave wenches — Persians, Metaxas said later — ministered to me in the bath. All they wore were loinstrings, and in a moment I was wearing less than that, for in a giggling jiggle of breasts they stripped me and went to work buffing and soaping me until I gleamed. Steam bath, hot bath, cold bath — my pores got the full workout. When I emerged they dried me most detailedly and robed me in the most elegant tunic I ever expect to wear. Then they vanished, with a saucy wigwag of bare bottoms as they disappeared through some subterranean passageway. A middle-aged butler appeared and conveyed me to the atrium, where Metaxas awaited me with beakers of wine.
“You like it?” he asked.
“I feel I’m in a dream.”
“You are. And I’m the dreamer. You saw the farms? Wheat, olives, cattle, figs, everything. I own. My tenants farm. Each year I acquire new land on the profits of last year’s work.”
“It’s incredible,” I said. “And what’s even more incredible is that you get away with it.”
“I have earned my invulnerability,” said Metaxas simply. “The Time Patrol knows I must not be persecuted.”
“They realize you’re here?”
“I believe they do,” he said. “They stay away, though. I take care to make no significant changes in the fabric of history. I’m no villain. I’m merely self-indulgent.”
“But you are changing history just by being here! Some other landowner must have held these lands in the real 1105.”
“This is the real 1105.”
“I mean the original, before Benchley Effect visitors began coming here. You’ve interpolated yourself into the landowner rolls, and — my God, the chariot driver spoke of you as Metaxas! Is that the name you use here?”
“Themistoklis Metaxas. Why not? It is a good Greek name.”
“Yes, but — look, it must be in all the documents, the tax records, everything! You’ve certainly changed the Byzantine archives that have come down to us, putting yourself in where you weren’t in before. What—”
“There is no danger,” Metaxas said. “So long as I take no life and create no life here, so long as I cause no one to change a previously decided course of action, all is well. You know, making a real alteration in the time flow is a difficult thing. You have to do something big, like killing a monarch. Simply being here, I introduce tiny changes, but they are damped out by ten centuries of time, and no real change results down the line. Do you follow?”
I shrugged. “Just tell me one thing, at least. How did you know I was coming?”
Laughing, he said, “I looked two days down the line and you were here. Therefore I checked for your time of arrival and arranged to have Nicholas meet you. It saved you a long walk, yes?”
Of course. I just hadn’t been thinking four-dimensionally. It stood to reason that Metaxas would habitually scan his immediate future here, so he’d never be the victim of some unpleasant surprise in this sometimes unpredictable era.