And we happy time-tourists picked our way over the dead and the dying and marched on, for our Courier wished us to drink this experience to the deepest.
We saw the bonfired bodies of the dead blackening and splitting open.
We saw other heaps of the unburied left in fields to rot.
We saw ghouls searching cadavers for items of value.
We saw a plague-smitten man fall upon a half-conscious plague-smitten woman in the streets, and part her thighs for one last desperate act of lust.
We saw priests on horseback fleeing from parishioners begging for Heaven’s mercy.
We entered an unguarded palace to watch terrified surgeons letting blood from some dying duke.
We saw another procession of strange black-clad beings cross our street at an angle, their faces hidden behind mirrorlike plates, and we shivered at the grotesque sight of these nightmare marchers, these demons without faces, and we realized only slowly that we had intersected some other party of tourists.
Riley was ready with cool statistics. “The mortality rate of the Black Death,” he announced, “was anywhere from one-eighth to two-thirds of the population in a given area. In Europe it is estimated that twenty-five per cent of the entire population perished; worldwide, the mortality was about thirty-three per cent. That is to say, a similar plague today would take the lives of more than two billion people.”
We watched a woman emerge from a thatched house and, one by one, arrange the bodies of five children in the street so that they might be taken away by the department of sanitation.
Riley said, “The aristocracy was annihilated, causing great shifts in patterns of inheritance. There were permanent cultural effects as a result of the wholesale death of painters of a single school, of poets, of learned monks. The psychological impact was long-lasting; for generations it was thought that the mid-fourteenth century had done something to earn the wrath of God, and a return of His wrath was momentarily expected.”
We formed the audience for a mass funeral at which two young and frightened priests muttered words over a hundred blotched and swollen corpses, tolled their little bells, sprinkled holy water, and signaled to the sextons to start the bonfire.
“Not until the early sixteenth century,” said Riley, “will the population reach its pre-1348 level.”
It was impossible for me to tell how the others were affected by these horrors, since we all were hidden in our suits. Probably most of my companions were fascinated and thrilled. I’m told that it’s customary for a dedicated plague aficionado to take all four Black Death tours in succession, starting in the Crimea; many have gone through the set five or six times. My own reaction was one of diminishing shock. You accommodate to monstrous horror. I think that by the tenth time through I’d have been as cool and dispassionate as Courier Riley, that brimming fount of statistics.
At the end of our journey through hell we made our way to Westminster. On the pavement outside the palace, Time Service personnel had painted a red circle five meters in diameter. This was our jumping point. We gathered close in the middle. I helped Riley make the timer adjustments — on this tour, the timers are mounted on the outside of the suits. He gave the signal and we shunted.
A couple of plague victims, shambling past the palace, were witnesses to our departure. I doubt that it troubled them much. In a time when all the world is perishing, who can get excited over the sight of ten black demons vanishing?
41.
We emerged under a shimmering dome, yielded up our polluted suits, and came forth purged and purified and ennobled by what we had seen. But images of Pulcheria still obsessed me. Restless, tormented, I fought with temptation.
Go back to 1105? Let Metaxas insinuate me into the Ducas household? Bed Pulcheria and ease my yearnings?
No. No. No. No.
Fight temptation. Sublimate. Fuck an empress instead.
I hurried back to Istanbul and shunted up the line to 537. I went over to Haghia Sophia to look for Metaxas at the dedication ceremony.
Metaxas was there, in many parts of the throng. I spotted at least ten of him. (I also saw two Jud Elliotts, and I wasn’t half trying.) On my first two approaches, though, I ran into the Paradox of Discontinuity; neither Metaxas knew me. One shook me off with a scowl of irritation, and the other simply said, “Whoever you are, we haven’t met yet. Beat it.” On the third try I found a Metaxas who recognized me, and we arranged to meet that evening at the inn where he was lodging his tour. He was staying down the line in 610 to show his people the coronation of Emperor Heraclius.
“Well?” he said. “What’s your now-time basis, anyway?”
“Early December, 2059.”
“I’m ahead of you,” said Metaxas. “I’m out of the middle of February, 2060. We’re discontinuous.”
That scared me. This man knew two and a half months of my future. Etiquette required him to keep his knowledge to himself; it was quite possible that I would be/had been killed in January, 2060, and that this Metaxas knew all the details, but he couldn’t drop a hint of that to this me. Still, the gap frightened me.
He saw it. “Do you want to go back and find a different one?” he asked.
“No. That’s all right. I think we can manage.”
His face was a frozen mask. He played by the rules; neither by inflection nor expression was he going to react to anything I said in a way that might reveal my own future to me.
“You once said you’d help me get into Empress Theodora.”
“I remember that, yes.”
“I turned you down then. Now I’d like to try her.”
“No problem,” said Metaxas. “Let’s jump up to 535. Justinian will be preoccupied with building Haghia Sophia. Theodora’s available.”
“How easily?”
“Nothing to it,” he said.
We shunted. On a cool spring day in 535 I went with Metaxas to the Great Palace, where he sought and found a plump, eunuchoid individual named Anastasius and had a long, animated discussion with him. Evidently Anastasus was chief procurer to the empress this year, and had he responsibility of finding her anywhere from one to ten young men a night. The conversation was carried on in low muttered tones, punctuated by angry outbursts, but from what I could hear of it I gathered that Anastasius was offering me an hour with Theodora, and that Metaxas was holding out for a whole night. I felt edgy about that. Virile I am, yes, but would I be able to entertain one of history’s most celebrated nymphomaniacs from darkness to dawn? I signaled to Metaxas to accept something less grandiose, but he persisted, and in the end Anastasius agreed to let me have four hours with the empress.
“If he qualifies,” the plump one said.
The test for qualification was administered by a ferocious little wench named Photia, one of the imperial ladies in waiting. Anastasius complacently watched us in action; Metaxas at least had the good taste to leave the room. Watching, I guess, was how Anastasius got his kickies.
Photia was black-haired, thin-lipped, busty, voracious. Have you ever seen a starfish devour an oyster? No? Well, imagine it, anyway. Photia was a starfish of sex. The suction was fantastic. I stayed with her, wrestled her into submission, pronged her off to ecstasy. And — I suppose — I passed my test with something to spare, because Anastasius gave me his seal of approval and set up my assignation with Theodora. Four hours.
I thanked Metaxas and he left, jumping down to his tour in 610.