Debt of Ages (12 page)

As they walked on through the urban throng, the only certain indication that they were getting anywhere was the series of squares onto which Middle Street unexpectedly opened—the Forum of Arcadius, the Forum Bovi, the Amastrianum, the Forum of Theodosius, and finally the oval Forum of Constantine, with its red porphyry column topped by a colossal statue of the city's founder.

"Constantine was in pretty good shape," Tiraena observed, eyeing the statue's classically perfect body.

"Actually," Artorius explained, "It's a statue of the god Apollo, with the head knocked off and replaced by Constantine's—badly, as you can see. He was vain as the devil. I imagine nobody ever dared to tell him that the locals call the statue 'old dirty neck.' "

Tiraena sputtered with laughter, which Sarnac was glad to see. It was the first sign that she was thawing where Artorius was concerned. She'd never been precisely hostile toward the former High King since regaining her memories . . . just cool and distant. Artorius might not even have noticed—he'd certainly given no indication of noticing—but Sarnac knew how utterly unlike her it was. He wondered what her problem was, but there had never been just the right opportunity to ask her—and there still wasn't. Instead, he addressed Artorius.

"What did the Christians have to say about this statue? I mean, isn't it sort of, uh, blasphemous?"

"Where their imperial patron was concerned," Artorius deadpanned, "the Christians were prone to uncharacteristic tolerance."

Then they were out of the forum, and soon the massive bulk of the Hippodrome loomed up ahead and to their right. Beyond it, Sarnac knew, the Sacred Palace sprawled in all its labyrinthine profusion of buildings, courtyards and gardens down to the Sea of Marmara. A little further and they emerged into the Augustaeum, the colonnaded public square bounded on the southwest by the main entrance to the Sacred Palace, over which floated the sleeve-like blood-red dragon standard that Artorius the Restorer had brought from Britain. At right angles to the palace, and appropriately dwarfed by it, was the Senate house. To the northeast was the church of Saint Sophia—impressive enough, but nothing like the transcendent edifice Justinian would raise in its place in the other reality.

Already, under the porticoes and around the central statue of Constantine's mother Helena, the Augustaeum was filling with lawyers, officials, and everyone who wanted to meet someone. A figure detached itself from the crowd and started toward them.

"Koreel!" Tiraena exclaimed, at the sight of the familiar face.

"Ventidius," Tylar corrected. "Remember, cover names! He's still using the same one he did when he was your fiance. It's safe enough, as he's quite a distance from Britain and unlikely to meet anyone who'll want an explanation of the alternate Ventidius's abrupt disappearance twenty-two years ago."

"You haven't changed," Sarnac told Koreel after the greetings were completed. "Of course, I only met you once."

"Yes, I remember: the night Tiraena and I departed for Britain." He had arranged for her a position in the household of Artorius' consort, where he himself was established as a merchant and distant cousin of Tylar/Tertullian. "But now," he said to Tylar, "we'd better get to my house. You'll want to eat and rest, and later we can discuss plans for getting you into the Sacred Palace."

They left the Augustaeum and moved northward through a maze of narrow streets toward the Phosphorion Harbor on the Golden Horn. Sarnac quickened his pace and got alongside Tylar. "Get us into the palace?" he queried. "What are you and Koreel up to, Tylar? Is this the 'groundwork' you've been so mysterious about?"

"Precisely! We're going to meet none other than the Restorer himself. You see, we need to secure his cooperation."

"You're going to ask for his cooperation in undoing his own life's work? That ought to go over like a turd in a punchbowl, Tylar."

"Granted, I wouldn't expect him to listen to me. But we have one with us who may very well be able to persuade him."

Sarnac stole a backward glance. Within his hood, Artorius' face was unreadable.

The house of Koreel/Ventidius was typical of the dwellings of the moderately well-off: a wooden two-storied structure with balconies like the one Sarnac now stood on in the late afternoon. The house blocked his view of the sunset, but he could see to the east, where the hill that had been the acropolis of the old Greek city-state of Byzantion rose above the maze of roofs. By leaning over the railing, he could glimpse the hills beyond Pera to the north, on the other side of the Golden Horn. Directly below him was one of the narrow alleys that he couldn't bring himself to call streets, thronging with people as usual.

Sarnac had confidently expected some vague similarities of overall outline to his world's Istanbul that would confer a comforting familiarity on this city. His expectations had been dashed—if anything, his disorientation was worse than it would have been if he had never had them. He should have approached fifth-century Constantinople as he would have approached contemporary Ctesiphon or Ch'ang-an, which it might as well have been for all he recognized of it.

He heard a rustle behind him. "Hi, Philogius," he greeted with a smile. Tiraena snorted at the name Tylar had decreed for the tall teenaged boy that was her current cover identity—a nephew of "Ventidius" and distant cousin of "Tertullian." All were members of the rather mysterious merchant family of remote Indian origin that was the time travellers' device for explaining their ethnically-unidentifiable looks. It was more than sufficient in the hayseed West, and should work even in this cosmopolitan city. Artorius was a business associate from Gaul, and Sarnac and Andreas were bodyguards.

"At least
I'm
not semi-barbarian hired muscle, Bedwyr," she gibed as she settled in beside him on the balcony and looked around. "Taking in the view?"

"Yeah. I was just thinking how little good my knowledge of this city in our time is doing me. You've never been here, of course. I was, in the dim mists of my youth." (Another more-or-less ladylike snort.) "It'll be called Istanbul then."

"Somebody conquers it?"

"Yes—in our reality. But there's a lot of diverging history between
that
city and this one. I've got a list of questions I want to ask Artorius. You know, if he lived in our time and didn't go into politics or the Fleet, he'd be a natural as a tour guide!"

Her face instantly lost some of its mobility. "Yes. Artorius." There was a couple of heartbeats' worth of silence. Then she turned. "The sun's setting. We'd better get inside."

"Hold on a minute. We need to talk about this. You never knew Artorius before—never even
met
him, just saw him once. And he couldn't have done anything to piss you off then, he was too busy dying. But it's pretty obvious you've got a problem where he's concerned."

"I've never . . ." She stopped abruptly and her mouth snapped shut, cutting off any pointless denials. After a moment's stiffness in which she seemed to collect her thoughts, she relaxed and even gave a crooked smile. "The truth is, I find myself liking him more than I expected to."

"Huh?" Sarnac shook his head. "How could anybody
not
like him?"

"You've got a different perspective. You and he were comrades-in-arms of a sort. And I don't think you can separate him in your mind from the legendary figure he became in our timeline. The culture you grew up in made that figure its personification of nobility and greatness and human aspiration. To meet the living original of that figure and find he's as affable as
this
character . . . Well, I can see how it must be an irresistible combination."

"It's not just that," Sarnac insisted. "Even in his own time, when he was just another warlord and didn't carry any mythic clout, people could feel his personal magnetism. It was so strong that it left a permanent imprint on legend."

"Yes . . . with a little unwitting help from you and a lot of very witting help from Tylar. But, yes, I know what you mean. And what he—in his alternate version—has done in this timeline speaks for itself about his abilities."

"So," Sarnac asked, perplexed to the point of exasperation, "what's the problem?"

"You were never in Britain," she answered obliquely. "You never met Gwenhwyvaer."

"Uh," he began cautiously, "whatever you may have heard from her, you've got to discount it for bitterness."

"Oh, no! She wasn't bitter about him. In fact, she was still very much in love with him. Yes, she had other men, in the lonely years after he drifted away from her. And that fixed
her
role in legend, with the help of Ambrosius Aurelianus, who was a prick on wheels." Her years on Earth had done wonders for her vocabulary, Sarnac thought, not for the first time.

"No," she continued, "the problem wasn't hers. It was mine." She gazed moodily out over the darkening city, and Sarnac didn't interrupt her thoughts. "Sexual equality has been taken for granted on Raehan for a lot longer than it has on Earth. Or it
will
! Or . . . something." Her smile was like the sun through a rift in clouds. "Give me a good, swift kick the first time you hear Tylar-like noises about tenses! But you know what I mean. And . . ." Abruptly, the clouds were back. "I don't think you ever fully understood what a shock fifth-century Earth was for me. If, like you, I'd at least had a clear idea that things had once been that way, I might have been able to use the dry historical facts as emotional antibodies. But the whole thing hit me without warning. And Gwenhwyvaer focused it for me. So I suppose this faceless figure of Artorius, who'd apparently lost interest in her when she failed to produce an heir for him—naturally it was the woman's 'failure'—became, for me, the symbol of everything I didn't like about this milieu."

"He didn't invent the culture he was born into," Sarnac pointed out. "And, for what it's worth, I think you're talking about a problem that would have existed in any era. Artorius can charm the 'gators out of a swamp, but he's a political animal to the core. Given an objective, he has a kind of focus that excludes a lot of really deep human attachments. People like this—I won't say
men
like this, although most of them for most of history
have
been men, if only for reasons of opportunity—don't tend to have very secure personal relationships, whatever kind of society they live in. So I hope you can accept it as simply being the way he is, and not resent him as a symbol of this age, which would make working with him pretty difficult."

"Oh, I think I can work with him. I just can't stop thinking about Gwenhwyvaer. I wish you could have met her, Bob! What makes their story such a damned shame is that they were really so well-matched. She was a remarkable woman. . . ."

"Actually," came the diffident voice from within the curtained entrance, "you shouldn't speak of her in the past tense. She's very much alive this very evening. Not as young as she once was, of course . . . but who among us is?"

"How long have you been eavesdropping, Tylar?" Tiraena inquired with a glare.

"Oh, not long at all. I'd just come to collect the two of you for a final briefing. We'll be entering the Sacred Palace tonight.

* * *

"I need to be certain," Tylar addressed the group, "that everyone remembers the implanted data concerning this timeline's recent history, especially the circumstances surrounding the Restorer's final break with the Eastern Emperor Zeno."

It was a reasonable question. The synthetic memories were like things actually experienced . . . but that wasn't necessarily the same thing as
remembering
them, unless one was blessed (cursed?) with total recall. Sarnac frowned with concentration.

"Well, there had been a lot of accumulating friction. But wasn't the final straw something to do with a religious dispute . . . the, uh, Declaration of Union?"

"Precisely. In the year 482 of both realities, Zeno promulgated the
Henotikon
, which was really the work of Acacius, Patriarch of Constantinople. And in both realities it caused a religious crisis by compromising with the Monophysite heresy which dominated Zeno's Eastern provinces but which the Council of Chalcedon had anathematized in 451."

"The Mono . . . uh . . . ?"

"Essentially, the Monophysite position is that Christ had only one nature, the divine, after His incarnation. In our reality, Pope Felix III, who took office the following year, excommunicated Acacius for deviating from the doctrine of Christ's dual nature, in which the divine and human components are separate but commingled; and Acacius then excommunicated the Pope. In
this
reality, the Restorer took up the cudgels of orthodoxy and, after becoming sole Augustus later the same year, deposed Acacius as Patriarch."

Tiraena shook her head. "I simply can't believe that anyone would go to war over such insane metaphysical hairsplitting!"

"Oh, you'd be surprised," Artorius said, almost too softly to be heard.

"It
is
hairsplitting," Tylar acknowledged. "But in this era, cultural or ethnic conflicts generally come disguised as abstruse theological disputes. Monophysitism seems to be an early expression of a Near Eastern tendency toward a kind of austere monotheism foreign to the West. In our reality, this impulse will find its ultimate expression in Islam, and Monophysite Christianity will die of terminal irrelevance while the Eastern and Western churches move toward their final break in the eighth-century Iconoclastic controversy—another reflection of the same basic East-West dichotomy."

"In my history," Andreas spoke up, "the Restorer's prestige plus his close relationship with Pope Gaius II—your old friend Sidonius Apollinaris—were sufficient to impose universal orthodoxy, with the Church as an arm of the Empire. The Popes were so delighted at not having to share ecclesiastical primacy with the Patriarchs of Constantinople that they scarcely noticed their total subordination to the Emperors." He smiled disarmingly at the others around the table. "No, I didn't really remember all that until Tylar's people retrieved it from my unconscious."