I brooded over it for an hour. Finally I came to a sane if not romantic conclusion: this is none of my business, I decided, and I’d better call in the Time Patrol. Reluctantly I touched the alarm stud on my timer, the signal which is supposed to summon a Patrolman at once.
Instantly a Patrolman materialized. Dave Van Dam, the belching blond boor I had met on my first day in Istanbul.
“So?” he said.
“Timecrime suicide,” I told him. “Capistrano just murdered his great-grandmother and jumped back to now-time.”
“Son of a goddam bitch. Why do we have to put up with these unstable motherfuckers?”
I didn’t bother to tell him that his choice of obscenity was inappropriate. I said, “He also left a party of tourists marooned here. That’s why I called you in.”
Van Dam spat elaborately. “Son of a goddam bitch,” he said again. “Okay, I’m with it.” He timed out of my room.
I was sick with grief over the stupid waste of a valuable life. I thought of Capistrano’s charm, his grace, his sensitivity, all squandered because in a drunken moment of misery he had to timecrime himself. I didn’t weep, but I felt like kicking furniture around, and I did. The noise woke up Miss Pistil, who gasped and murmured, “Are we being attacked?”
“You are,” I said, and to ease my rage and anguish I dropped down on her bed and rammed myself into her. She was a little startled, but began to cooperate once she realized what was up. I came in half a minute and left her, throbbing, to be finished off by Bilbo Gostaman. Still in a black mood, I awakened the innkeeper and demanded his best wine, and drank myself into a foggy stupor.
Much later I learned that my dramatics had all been pointless. That slippery bastard Capistrano had had a change of heart at the last minute. Instead of shunting to 2059 and obliterating himself, he clung to his Transit Displacement invulnerability and stayed up the line in 1600, marrying a Turkish pasha’s daughter and fathering three kids on her. The Time Patrol didn’t succeed in tracing him until 1607, at which point they picked him up for multiple timecrime, hoisted him down to 2060, and sentenced him to obliteration. So he got his exit anyway, but not in a very heroic way. The Patrol also had to unmurder Capistrano’s great-grandmother, unmarry him from the pasha’s daughter in 1600, and uncreate those three kids, as well as find and rescue his stranded tourists, so all in all he was a great deal of trouble for everybody. “If a man wants to commit suicide,” said Dave Van Dam, “why in hell can’t he just drink carniphage in nowtime and make it easier on the rest of us?” I had to agree. It was the only time in my life when the Time Patrol and I saw things the same way.
44.
The mess over Capistrano and the general unsavoriness of this batch of tourists combined to push me into abysses of gloom.
I moved grimly along from epoch to epoch, but my heart wasn’t in it. And by the time, midway through the second week, that we reached 1204, I knew I was going to do something disastrous.
Doggedly I delivered the usual orientation lecture.
“The old spirit of the Crusaders is reviving,” I said, scowling at Bilbo, who was fondling Miss Pistil again, and scowling at Sauerabend, who was visibly dreaming of Palmyra Gostaman’s meager breasts. “Jerusalem, which the Crusaders conquered a century ago, has been recaptured by the Saracens, but various Crusader dynasties still control most of the Mediterranean coast of the Holy Land. The Arabs now are feuding among themselves, and since 1199, Pope Innocent III has been calling for a new Crusade.”
I explained how various barons answered the Pope’s call.
I told how the Crusaders were unwilling to make the traditional land journey across all of Europe and down through Asia Minor into Syria. I told how they preferred to go by sea, landing at one of the Palestinian ports.
I discussed how in 1202 they applied to Venice, Europe’s leading naval power of the time, for transportation.
I described the terms by which the ancient and crafty Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice agreed to provide ships.
“Dandolo,” I said, “contracted to transport 4,500 knights with their horses, 9,000 squires, and 20,000 infantrymen, along with nine months’ provisions. He offered to throw in fifty armed galleys to escort the convoy. For these services he asked 85,000 silver marks, or about $20,000,000 in our money. Plus half of all the territory or treasure that the Crusaders won in battle.”
I told how the Crusaders agreed to this stiff price, planning to cheat the blind old Doge.
I told how the blind old Doge, once he had the Crusaders hung up in Venice, gripped them by the throats until they paid him every mark due him.
I told how the venerable monster seized control of the Crusade and set off in command of the fleet on Easter Monday, 1203 — heading not for the Holy Land but for Constantinople.
“Byzantium,” I said, “is Venice’s great maritime rival. Dandolo doesn’t care warm spit for Jerusalem, but wants very badly to get control of Constantinople.”
I explicated the dynastic situation. The Comnenus dynasty had come to a bad end. When Manuel II died in 1180, his successor was his young son Alexius II, who shortly was murdered by his father’s amoral cousin, Andronicus. The elegantly depraved Andronicus was himself destroyed in a particularly ghastly way by an enraged mob, after he had ruled harshly for a few years, and in 1185 there came to the throne Isaac Angelus, an elderly and bumbling grandson of Alexius I, by the female line. Isaac ruled for ten haphazard years, until he was dethroned, blinded, and imprisoned by his brother, who became Emperor Alexius III.
“Alexius III still rules,” I said, “and Isaac Angelus is still in prison. But Isaac’s son, also Alexius, has escaped and is in Venice. He has promised Dandolo huge sums of money if Dandolo will restore his father to the throne. And so Dandolo is coming to Constantinople to overthrow Alexius III and make Isaac into an imperial puppet.”
They didn’t follow the intricacy of it. I didn’t care. They’d figure it out as they saw things taking place.
I showed them the Fourth Crusade arriving at Constantinople at the end of June, 1203. I let them see Dandolo directing the capture of Scutari, Constantinople’s suburb on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. I pointed out how the entrance to the port of Constantinople was guarded by a great tower and twenty Byzantine galleys, and blocked by a huge iron chain. I called their attention to the scene in which Venetian sailors boarded and took the Byzantine galleys while one of Dandolo’s ships, equipped with monstrous steel shears, cut through the chain and opened the Golden Horn to the invaders. I allowed them to watch the superhuman Dandolo, ninety years old, lead the attackers over the ramparts of Constantinople. “Never before,” I said, “have invaders broken into this city.”
From a distance, part of a cheering mob, we watched Dandolo bring Isaac Angelus forth from his dungeon and name him Emperor of Byzantium, with his son crowned as co-emperor, by the style of Alexius IV.
“Alexius IV,” I said, “now invites the Crusaders to spend the winter in Constantinople at his expense, preparing for their attack on the Holy Land. It is a rash offer. It dooms him.”
We shunted down the line to the spring of 1204.
“Alexius IV,” I said, “has discovered that housing thousands of Crusaders is bankrupting Byzantium. He tells Dandolo that he is out of money and will no longer underwrite their expenses. A furious dispute begins. While it proceeds, a fire starts in the city. No one knows who caused it, but Alexius suspects the Venetians. He sets seven decrepit ships on fire and lets them drift into the Venetian fleet. Look.”