We saw the fire. We saw the Venetians using boat-hooks to drag the blazing hulks away from their own ships. We saw sudden revolution break out in Constantinople, the Byzantines denouncing Alexius IV as the tool of Venice, and putting him to death. “Old Isaac Angelus dies a few days later,” I said. “The Byzantines find the son-in-law of the expelled Emperor Alexius III, and put him on the throne as Alexius V. This son-in-law is a member of the famous Ducas family. Dandolo has lost both his puppet emperors, and he is furious. The Venetians and the Crusaders decide now to conquer Constantinople and rule it themselves.”
Once again I took a pack of tourists through scenes of battle as, on April 8, the struggle began. Fire, slaughter, rape, Alexius V in flight, the invaders plundering the city. April 13, in Haghia Sophia: Crusaders demolish the choir stalls with their twelve columns of silver, and pull apart the altar, and seize forty chalices and scores of silver candelabra. They take the Gospel, and the Crosses, and the altar cloth, and forty incense burners of pure gold. Boniface of Montferrat, the leader of the Crusade, seizes the imperial palace. Dandolo takes the four great bronze horses that the Emperor Constantine had brought from Egypt 900 years before; he will carry them to Venice and place them over the entrance to St. Mark’s Cathedral, where they still are. The priests of the Crusaders scurry after relics: two chunks of the True Cross, the head of the Holy Lance, the nails that had held Christ on the Cross, and many similar objects, long revered by the Byzantines.
From the scenes of plunder we jumped to mid-May.
“A new Emperor of Byzantium is to be elected,” I said. “He will not be a Byzantine. He will be a westerner, a Frank, a Latin. The conquerors choose Count Baldwin of Flanders. We can see his coronation procession.”
We waited outside Haghia Sophia. Within, Baldwin of Flanders is donning a mantle covered with jewels and embroidered with eagle figures; he is handed a scepter and a golden orb; he kneels before the altar and is anointed; he is crowned; he mounts the throne.
“Here he comes,” I said.
On a white horse, clad in glittering clothes that blaze as if on fire, Emperor Baldwin of Byzantium rides forth from the cathedral to the palace. Unwillingly, sullenly, the people of Byzantium pay homage to their alien master.
“Most of the Byzantine nobility has fled,” I told my tourists, who were yearning for more battles, more fires. “The aristocracy has scattered to Asia Minor, to Albania, to Bulgaria, to Greece. For fifty-seven years the Latins will rule here, though Emperor Baldwin’s reign will be brief. In ten months he will lead an army against Byzantine rebels and will be captured by them, never to return.”
Chrystal Haggins said, “When do the Crusaders go to Jerusalem?”
“Not these. They never bother to go. Some of them stay here, ruling pieces of the former Byzantine Empire. The rest go home stuffed with Byzantine loot.”
“How fascinating,” said Mrs. Haggins.
We went to our lodgings. A terrible weariness had me in its grip. I had done my job; I had shown them the Latin conquest of Byzantium, as advertised in the brochures. Suddenly I couldn’t stand their faces any longer. We dined, and they went to sleep, or at least to bed. I stood a while, listening to the passionate groans of Miss Pistil and the eager snorts of Bilbo Gostaman, listening to the protests of Palmyra as Conrad Sauerabend sneakily stroked her thighs in the dark, and then I choked back tears of fury and surrendered to my temptations, and touched my timer, and shunted up the line. To 1105. To Pulcheria Ducas.
45.
Metaxas, as always, was glad to help.
“It’ll take a few days,” he said. “Communications are slow here. Messengers going back and forth.”
“Should I wait here?”
“Why bother?” Metaxas asked. “You’ve got a timer. Jump down three days, and maybe by then everything will be arranged.”
I jumped down the three days. Metaxas said, “Everything is arranged.”
He had managed to get me invited to a soiree at the Ducas palace. Just about everyone of importance would be there, from Emperor Alexius Comnenus down. As my cover identity, I was to claim that I was Metaxas’ cousin from the provinces, from Epirus. “Speak with a backwoods accent,” Metaxas instructed me. “Dribble wine on your chin and make noises when you chew. Your name will be — ah — Nicetas Hyrtacenus.”
I shook my head. “Too fancy. It isn’t me.”
“Well, then, George Hyrtacenus?”
“George Markezinis,” I said.
“It sounds too twentieth century.”
“To them it’ll sound provincial,” I said, and as George Markezinis I went to the Ducas soiree.
Outside the gleaming marble walls of the Ducas palace I saw two dozen Varangian guards stationed. The presence of these yellow-bearded Norse barbarians, the core of the imperial bodyguard, told me that Alexius was already within. We entered. Metaxas had brought his fair and wanton ancestress Eudocia to the party.
Within, a dazzling scene. Musicians. Slaves. Tables heaped with food. Wine. Gorgeously dressed men and women. Superb mosaic floors; tapestried walls, heavy with cloth of gold. The tinkle of sophisticated laughter; the shimmer of female flesh beneath nearly transparent silks.
I saw Pulcheria at once.
Pulcheria saw me.
Our eyes met, as they had met in the shop of sweets and spices, and she recognized me, and smiled enigmatically, and again the current surged between us. In a later era she would have fluttered her fan at me. Here, she withdrew her jeweled gloves and slapped them lightly across her left wrist. Some token of encouragement? She wore a golden circlet on her high, smooth forehead. Her lips were rouged.
“That’s her husband to her left,” Metaxas whispered. “Come. I’ll introduce you.”
I stared at Leo Ducas, my great-great-great-multi-great-grandfather, and my pride in having so distinguished an ancestor was tinged by the envy I felt for this man, who each night caressed the breasts of Pulcheria.
He was, I knew from my genealogical studies, thirty-five years old, twice the age of his wife. A tall man, graying at the temples, with unByzantine blue eyes, a neatly clipped little beard, a high-bridged, narrow nose, and thin, tightly compressed lips, he seemed austere, remote, unutterably dignified. I suspected that he might be boringly noble. He did make an impressive sight, and there was no austerity about his tunic of fine cut, nor about his jewelry, his rings and pendants and pins.
Leo presided over the gathering in serene style, befitting a man who was one of the premier nobles of the realm, and who headed his branch of the great house of Ducas. Of course, Leo’s house was empty, and perhaps that accounted for the faint trace of despair that I imagined I saw on his handsome face. As Metaxas and I approached him, I picked up a stray exchange of conversation from two court ladies to my left:
“…no children, and such a pity, when all of Leo’s brothers have so many. And he the eldest!”
“Pulcheria’s still young, though. She looks as if she’ll be a good breeder.”
“If she ever gets started. Why, she’s close to eighteen!”
I wanted to reassure Leo, to tell him that his seed would descend even unto the twenty-first century, to let him know that in only a year’s time Pulcheria would give him a son, Nicetas, and then Simeon, John, Alexander, and more, and that Nicetas would sire six children, among them the princely Nicephorus whom I had seen seventy years down the line, and the son of Nicephorus would follow an exiled leader into Albania, and then, and then, and then—