Anticipation, page 24
I read until I finished the entire chronicle, looking for an answer. I read the story of the prince I had served, of the battle I had fought, and of the companions I had lost in my first life, centuries ago. Several times I heard the director open the door behind me, then close it softly again. Finally, I reached the last page.
As much as I found, as much I wrote of this Chronicle of the Morea.
—Demetrios Asanes, Mystras, In this year of our Lord, 1310
And for a moment in that little room I felt, though I had only paper and ink to keep me company, that I was not alone after all.
chapter twenty-two
ELIAS SARANTOPOULOS
Spring 1436
Mystras
I had no inkling during my third childhood that there might be anything unusual about me, other than the way I’d been found. My mother, after struggling for years to bear a child, had, on a walk near the kastron’s high walls, heard the sound of a baby crying. She found me, naked and squalling in a glade of trees, where a shrine to the Profitis Ilias had once stood. “The prophet sent you to assuage our loneliness,” my mother told me, once I was old enough. My father, who ran a silk manufacturing business and tended more toward the practical than spiritual, smiled indulgently. The version he told was more mundane: a family too poor to raise me had left me to be found and cared for. In any case, when my mother chose my name to be Elias after the prophet, my father did not disagree.
My old memories stayed hidden. Looking back, I believe it was because there was no one left to remind me. My third life began almost a century and a half after my last had ended; everyone I had ever loved was long gone. And we had a new enemy to worry about: the Turks. Even though I was a child, I understood enough of my parents’ hushed conversations to know that outside Mystras, enemy Turkish forces were gathering. But I was also young enough to think that we, in our mountaintop walled city of Mystras, were perfectly safe.
When I turned six, the looming threat of the Turks abruptly became real. At our evening meal, my father held his knife poised over the aphraton, ready to cut a piece of his favorite dish of fluffy hearth-baked chicken and egg whites topped with honey. A bowl of boiled grape hyacinth bulbs sat on the table, cooked with olive oil and fish sauce, drizzled with vinegar. My mother and father were drinking pear wine. The evening air was soft and warm, blowing through the open shutters that led to our balcony overlooking the Evrotas valley. My linen tunic was new, and the wool embroidery around the neck made me itch.
When the heralds came with news of messengers arriving from the Imperial City, we climbed the hill to the despot’s palace. That was when my perspective shifted to see the wide, alarming world.
Turkish forces—the messengers said—under Sultan Murad had surrounded Constantinople, now under siege. My mother squeezed my hand so hard my fingers went numb. “They will come for us next,” she said under her breath.
She was right. The following year the Turks destroyed the Hexamillion, the great wall separating the Peloponnese from mainland Greece. Crowded into the plaza again, we listened to the news as the sultan’s troops advanced south, destroying everything in their path. General Turakhan Bey, Murad’s commander, was said to leave the blood of his enemies on the blade of his curved kilij sword and smear it on his bread at dinner. The Turks butchered half their enemies and made slaves of the rest. My boyhood nightmares alternated between the two fates.
The Turks came as far as Mystras’s lower town, stopping just outside the walls. I looked out at the army spread across the Vale of Sparta, a dark stain against the green, smoke rising from their camps.
Thanks to God and the masons who made our walls strong, a few days later Bey gave up and retired with his troops. We were able to breathe again. But when my father took me out riding afterward, the devastation was evident. Towns and fields were burned, villages looted, hundreds of soldiers and civilians left dying or dead. We were an island in a sea of destruction. We celebrated when the Turks retreated from the Peloponnese, and the siege of Constantinople lifted, but it was a muted relief.
My mother told me that Constantinople had been saved by the love of the Theotokos, the Holy Mother of God. Witnesses reported that soldiers saw a woman walking the ramparts of the city, haloed in divine light. The grateful citizens of Constantinople shouted hymns to the Virgin. The following day, the besieging army departed. My mother gave me an amulet to wear: an image of the Virgin carved into amethyst. I hoped the Theotokos would protect us, too, in our time of need.
Despite the political upheaval, I was raised with the security that I, like my silk manufacturing father and his father before him, would follow the same prosperous path. I learned the trade in the factory where workers soaked the cocoons in water, untangled the delicate strands, and spun them into thread. Spending hours walking through the white mulberry groves that covered the hillside behind the factory, I watched the worms eat themselves into a blissful stupor. My father told me how the silkworms find all their sustenance from the leaves. Although they were blind white larvae destined to die for the thread they create, the undiluted focus of their lives moved me. I wondered what I might accomplish with such single-minded devotion.
* * *
In March of 1436, when I celebrated my twentieth birthday, I encountered someone from my past. Like all twenty-year-olds, I thought I knew a great deal already, and like most of them, I was wrong. I’d left a meeting with a Venetian merchant whose ships would bring Mystras damask across the Arabian Sea. The trader was a ponderous man with three chins and no neck. He spoke Greek competently, and called me paidí—youngster. I tolerated his condescension silently; a sale is a sale. I escaped the meeting flushed with irritation and desperate for a walk.
I had found a new place to wander: the new Church of the Pantanassa. Its graceful bell tower rose from the steep hillside where the multidomed church perched, and the quiet sunlit cloister and portico with its colonnade of arches was the perfect place to walk in silence. On this occasion, though, I did not find the solitude I was looking for.
As soon as I crossed the threshold of the monastery, I met a wizened woman with eyes set deep in wrinkles, the corneas milky white. She wore a dark habit that reached to her ankles, but not the headdress of a nun. Bent with age, she was watering the plants that lined the walkway; she held a bucket full of water that sloshed over the rim to pool at her feet.
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She had no teeth, and her tongue was stained dark from chewing cloves. The silence was alive, undulating between us. I moved to help with the bucket, but she grasped it tighter. The water spattered the ground.
When she spoke, her voice sounded like a door moving on a rusty hinge.
You are the one to whom the stones speak.
A tendril of memory began to uncurl in my head. Her words made no sense, but I had heard them before.
Elias, Ilias, Mystras, Myzithras. These are the four: the boy, the prophet, the city, the hill.
I felt cold, even in the sun.
Give me something you hold dear.
I removed the Theotokos amulet and put it in her bony outstretched hand. She fingered it and shook her head.
No use to me.
I took it back carefully, afraid to touch her. “I have nothing else.”
I shall take your blissful ignorance, she whispered, and she reached out and touched my cheek where a faint scar curved from an injury I could not remember. Her hand gave me a jolt, like an errant spark from a fire on bare skin.
The souls of the dead are sent forth into the generation of living things.
I knew the teachings of Plato. This was not a doctrine that most would dare to repeat, certainly not in a church, where transmigration of souls was heresy. She did not wear a cross about her neck. But if not a nun, who was she?
“I have studied Plato,” I said carefully.
She leaned forward. Her eyes were white-blind, and I was afraid.
You know nothing, though you bear the Prophet’s name.
Seek out the teacher who calls himself Plethon.
Follow him, and keep his words safe.
His enemies will be yours.
You are the watcher in the shadows.
The keeper of the word.
The sun disappeared behind a drifting cloud. Everything froze, birds in their arcs, insects in midflight. The old woman dropped the pail; it clattered against the stones. She turned away, leaving me soaked to the knees and shivering from more than cold.
* * *
Not yet ready to return to the hum of our factory’s looms, I went up the three steps into the cool dark of the church. Inside, the walls were covered with frescoes, glowing pink, blue, green, and gold. The Virgin looked down on me, the holy infant on her lap. I wondered whether her gaze held a reprimand, knowing that I had been prepared to give up her icon.
The arch of the sanctuary depicted the ascension of the Virgin; at the center, the luminous archangel tilted his head, haloed with gold. I walked from one scene to the next: the Virgin and infant lying in a cave, the entry into Jerusalem—so real I felt I could walk straight into the city where streets wound through fissured rocks and towers of stone.
In the north arm of the church, I stopped to stare at the image painted on the wall. A man was bound in a linen shroud, but he stood upright in an open coffin: Lazarus, with Jesus commanding him to come forth from the dead. Resurrection—all will rise at the Last Judgment, as Jesus once did—was what I had been taught and what I had believed.
Today the crone in the Pantanassa courtyard had shown me another path: The souls of the dead are sent forth into the generation of living things. Reincarnation, not resurrection, the flight of the soul from one body to the next. Belief in the transmigration of souls was Platonic heresy. But for reasons I could not quite understand, today the heresy had the ring of truth.
I shall take your blissful ignorance, the crone had said, touching the scar whose origin I could not recall.
chapter twenty-three
ELIAS SARANTOPOULOS
Summer 1436
Mystras
Nearly everyone had heard of Gemistos Plethon. He’d been a senator in Mystras and was one of the most respected judges in the Despotate of the Morea. He’d resolved one dispute for my father—a trader whose goods were lost at sea demanded compensation for his loss; however, a silk manufacturer is responsible only for the quality of the weave, not for the weather. Plethon favored our cause, and so my father favored him. My mother, though, as usual, had a different perspective. I often wondered what had brought my parents together at all.
“Plethon was expelled from Constantinople as a heretic,” my mother said. “I don’t care if he supports our business interests.”
“He was not expelled,” my father said, patting my mother on the shoulder as one might a child.
“Plethon was a menace to the faith, that’s why he ended up here,” she said. “The emperor’s own religious adviser, Scholarios, sent him out of Constantinople so he wouldn’t make any trouble. And then he gets here and calls himself Plethon, after Plato himself? And thinks he can espouse reincarnation while being a senator?” My mother grunted with disgust. “Let him deprive himself of meat if he thinks he might come back as a rat in his next life. I’ll eat my lamb and aspire to heaven instead.”
My father liked to pretend that nothing was amiss. My mother, on the other hand, expressed all her emotions visibly, and many were negative.
My father smiled indulgently at my mother and stroked her hair. “I love your passion and faith, Theodora,” he said.
“You love my hair,” she replied, pushing his hand away.
* * *
I’d seen Plethon striding across the plaza outside the despot’s palace with his students in tow. He had the white hair and beard of an old man, but I’d never seen an old man walk like that, and I’d never heard him speak. My father’s business schedule and my mother’s distaste had kept me away from the philosopher.
Seek out the teacher who calls himself Plethon.
Follow him, and keep his words safe.
I’d memorized the words.
The day after I’d met the crone in the Pantanassa, I headed up the hill toward the palace. It was warm, and by the time I reached the plaza I was desperate for a drink. I threaded through the crowds of people and livestock to the fountain. A grumpy donkey butted me when I got in his way, and the man holding the donkey’s lead apologized profusely. He had a long, narrow head and large ears that made him look uncannily like his animal.
“Terribly sorry. I’ve already offended you and I haven’t even met you. Are you thirsty? Please accept a drink.” The man took the bucket he’d intended for his donkey and thrust it in my direction. Unfortunately, his sudden movement resulted in half of the water leaving the bucket and splashing me.
His cheeks flushed. “Now I’ve made it worse. You’re all wet. Why does everything always go wrong?” He took the edge of his robe and began to blot me with it unsuccessfully.
“It’s a warm day, don’t concern yourself.” The water was refreshing, though not what I’d intended. I helped myself to a drink from the fountain, avoiding the donkey’s bucket.
“I’ve made an idiot of myself, and I don’t even know your name.”
“My name is Elias Sarantopoulos, and I don’t consider you an idiot.” I couldn’t help smiling.
“I should have introduced myself: I am Hieronymous Chrystonimos Charitonymos. You must have come here for some reason other than to be nosed by a donkey and doused with water by a perfect stranger. I’m here quite often, what with the donkey and the fountain and all, though of course, I have other things to do. I’m a scholar, but the stableboy doesn’t seem to get along with this beast. In fact, just last week this little fellow kicked the boy in the kneecap. It swelled the size of a melon, and he can’t walk now.” I stepped backward instinctively.
Charitonymos turned an even darker shade of red. “He won’t hurt you. At least I think he won’t.”
“I’m sure your donkey is very well behaved, and his owner shows abundant kindness.” Poor Charitonymos wanted so desperately to be liked that I couldn’t keep myself from obliging. “In any case, I’m looking for Gemistos Plethon. I know he lectures here in the square.”
Charitonymos began to wring his hands, twisting the donkey’s halter into a tight helix. “You’re looking for Plethon?” He took a long, ragged breath, and then burst into tears. “You could not find a better man.” He wiped his eyes. “Plethon is prudent, courageous, just, and wise. He has extraordinary knowledge of all things human and divine, in counsel and in action, in military and civil affairs, in scientific and practical matters. He has unprecedented mastery of things known in speech, theoretically and in practice, things known by the mind alone, and things known in harmony and diagrams and numbers and the revolution of heavenly bodies. He is the most important figure ever to have appeared on Earth.”
I had not expected a speech. “I am glad to hear that. But why are you crying?”
Charitonymos hung his head. “Plethon has rejected me. I’ve begged him to take me on as a student, but he always refuses. I have implored our Lord to help his servant Plethon see my earnest desire to study and serve. I would do anything to sit at Plethon’s feet.” The tears rolled down his long cheeks.
I was moved by Charitonymos’s earnestness. “Perhaps someday your longing will be satisfied, and Plethon will recognize your devotion and reward it.”
“May God hear your words,” Charitonymos said, pointing across the plaza. “But in the meantime, there he is.”
ELIAS SARANTOPOULOS
Late Summer 1436
Mystras
I continued to learn the silk manufacturing process, and the business of local sales and export. The labor involved in producing silk thread meant nothing could be wasted; we made first-rate silk from the continuous filaments, and koukoulariko, a coarser fabric, from the floss that had to be spun before it could be woven. I supervised the dyeing. We used indigo imported from the East, and red made from insects that bled bright when crushed. Yellow came from onion skins, or for special occasions, imported saffron. Shellfish purple was regulated and worn only by the imperial court in Constantinople.
At the same time, I secretly became one of the phratría, or brotherhood of Plethon’s initiates. It took many rounds of questioning to prove that my intentions were pure and my aptitude sufficient to merit entry. I, like his other students, hung on his every word. I could not bear to tell Charitonymos that I had won the prize he so desperately wanted.
Gemistos Plethon was in his seventies when I met him for the first time, but he overflowed with energy. For public lectures, he paced in the plaza as devoted listeners scurried behind. He was tall and his head rose above the crowd. He was easy to spot, but his stride was hard to match. He had a thick gray beard in the Greek style (he said he wished to be recognized as Greek without having to speak), and a long mustache that flowed into it. He wore his beard proudly but cared for it haphazardly. His body was a vehicle for philosophy; he paid little attention to it. One day Plethon arrived so preoccupied by a philosophical quandary that he did not notice his beard had trapped bread and honey from his morning meal. He also failed to realize that a small yellow butterfly, attracted by the honey, had settled there, too. The phratría were all hopelessly distracted by the fluttering.
The phratría met in Plethon’s house in Mystras and included a monk named Basilios Bessarion who did not fit my preconceived notion of an inward-turning man of God. He’d come from Trebizond along the Black Sea and worked in the diplomatic service of the Emperor of Constantinople, John VIII Palaiologos. Bessarion would have been a formidable teacher in his own right; here he was my fellow student. I felt completely out of my depth. On my first day, we plunged into a philosophical ocean, and I struggled to stay afloat.
