Anticipation, page 31
Plethon was dead, Bessarion was in Rome, and my wife was nearly silent, our child a memory. No prophet spoke in my head, no seer waited in the Pantanassa to deliver cryptic messages meant for me. I had no one to talk to besides myself.
* * *
The Turks’ entrance to Mystras was a quiet event; we folded like a pennant in dying wind. There was no cannon fire, no conflagration. Siege engines did not park outside the walls; blood did not run in the streets. We did not resist. I watched as the great gate swung open to let Despot Demetrios pass outside the walls to visit the sultan in his tent. I wondered what it must be like for the despot, sitting face-to-face with his conqueror, a man less than half his age who ruled territories ten times as great. The next time the gates opened, it was to let the Turks in.
It is one thing to be born into an occupied land, as I had been in the days of Prince Villehardouin. It is entirely another to, during the course of your lifetime, have your home become one. Demetrios handed over Mystras’s keys. The Palaiologos flag came down, the double-headed eagle folding its wings, and the red banners of the Ottomans rose in their place. Plaques in Arabic replaced our icons, and the divine liturgy went silent. Within a few days, Theodora was called back from Monemvasia, their daughter Helena was handed over to the sultan, and the despot and his wife left Mystras, stripped of their robes. The town’s residents were left to face the new regime.
Through the wall, I heard my mother weeping all night. The next morning Mystras’s boys lined up in the plaza outside the palace to submit to the devşirme, as the eldest child of each family was taken to join the sultan’s troops. I watched families sobbing openly or tight-lipped with restrained despair. That morning was the only time in my lives when I’ve been relieved not to have a child. But I knew loss, too. The next day the sultan chose women for his harem, and one of them was my wife, Zoe.
GUARIN LUSIGNAN
May 1460
Mystras
Guarin woke in the field, where the glare of the light patterns filtering through the mulberry trees made his head pound. He put a hand to the throbbing spot on the back of his skull and it came away streaked with blood. Guarin managed to stand and stagger out of the field to the edge of town, limping slowly along the least populated streets, trying to stay out of sight. He emerged into the market outside the gates, where the stalls hummed with many languages and he could find a merchant to provide passage home, but the smell of rotting fish overwhelmed him until he bent over, vomiting into a vendor’s bucket.
The bucket belonged to an arms seller from the Vlora, in Albania. The trader’s daughter, who had plump but surprisingly strong arms, helped Guarin up, gave him fresh water and a cloth, and, draping his arm over her broad shoulders, walked him into the shade of her father’s tent. There, with his wound cleaned, Guarin found rest, lodging, and a plan for passage home.
The Albanian’s daughter, encouraged by his handful of coins and his promise of more, showed him more than therapeutic interest. She did not know he had a wife, and he did not enlighten her. Her father was equally interested in the apparently wealthy stranger who had vomited on their property but otherwise seemed an excellent catch. Guarin also found, in the form of the trader’s brooding eldest son, a man who would do anything for money—even kill.
ELIAS SARANTOPOULOS
Late May 1460
Mystras
Zoe’s absence gnawed at me like a cancer: a constant, deep pain. She had always been quiet, and after the loss of our child even more so, a ghostlike presence wandering the rooms at night. But her disappearance still opened up a chasm of loss. Every day after she was taken to the sultan’s harem, I woke up before dawn, looking into the dark in which the accumulated losses of my three lives wove like hallucinations. I heard nothing of her after she left, and I could not imagine what her life had become.
The only distraction from that despair was misery on a different front: three weeks after Despot Demetrios left Mystras, Scholarios publicly burned the Laws. He preserved only the table of contents and the hymns as a reminder of the depravity of the text, and the wisdom of his consigning it to the flames. Scholarios also issued a patriarchal order to destroy any other existing copies of the manuscript on pain of excommunication.
Now that the Turks ruled us, Plethon’s words mattered more than ever. Stripped of the solace of married life, I threw myself into that cause even more fervently. Plethon had called us to grow our Greek beards, to revive our lost gods, and to celebrate a philosophy that illuminated the nature of the divine. Plethon’s last work was the final culmination of that Greek paean, and now we bowed our heads to the sultan. Meanwhile, in secret, I kept possibly the only copy of the Laws left in the world. I’d failed to save Mystras from the Turks; but I intended to succeed in keeping the manuscript safe. Unfortunately, that meant defying Scholarios, the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church.
I had to get the book out of Mystras, whose walls were surrounded by Turkish troops and whose gates were guarded by sentries. If I could get the manuscript to Bessarion, I knew he would protect it. He continued to support Plethon’s teachings, had dedicated his life to preservation of Greek texts, and was the only man alive who could disagree with Scholarios and get away with it. The Laws had to get all the way to Rome.
* * *
When the Turks first surrounded the city, the market outside Mystras’s gates went quiet, its stalls shuttered. Once it became clear that the Turks’ arrival would not lead to bloodshed, it reopened; in fact, business was booming. The narrow walkways between stalls bustled with merchants from all over the world, but now there were new customers: thousands of Turks eager to enjoy the benefits of their new conquest.
At the gate, two Turkish derbendjis stopped me. They wore white turbans and ankle-length blue jackets with a row of bronze buttons to the hip. Below the last button, the jackets flared out over pantaloons. One guard lowered his spear to block my exit; the other drew a curved dagger.
“Orda dur,” the dagger-holder said incomprehensibly. The other derbendji shoved the butt of his spear into my stomach.
Once I stopped retching, I managed to say one of the Turkish words I knew. “Markete?” I pointed toward the stalls. Another outpouring of Turkish ensued, but at least it wasn’t accompanied by violence. I tried again. “Ipek tüccari.” I pointed to my own chest, indicating that I was the silk manufacturer.
The guards looked at me suspiciously, but I’d come prepared. I retrieved the bolt of silk I’d strapped across my back. The spear went up, the dagger went down, and I went into the press of the market, heart pounding. Wrapped inside one of the bolts was my copy of Plethon’s manuscript. My next task was to find a messenger.
I squeezed past stalls stacked with jars of honey and jugs of wine, bins of aromatic spices that reminded me of my last life in Sicily, and piles of fresh local oregano and thyme. I had a destination in mind: the dyers’ tents, where I knew a man I could trust. The dye merchant, a Genoese trader named Alfano, greeted me with enthusiasm and a rapid-fire sales pitch.
“So delighted to see my best customer!” I knew there were many equally good and likely better customers. “Today I have dyes of exceptional excellence. There is Turkey red, for our friends here.” He gesticulated with a sideways grin at the soldiers guarding the gate. “I have a new shipment of dyer’s rocket, which I assure you will produce yellow of long-lasting brightness. Perhaps you are more inclined to green? I have managed to perfect a Genista tinctoria of incomparable purity.” When I didn’t answer, he tried again. “If blue is what you are after, I have indikon today, all the way from India, but that will come quite dear.”
I raised my hand to stop him. “Can we go inside?” Realizing this particular visit might be unusual, he raised the flap of his tent. I followed him in.
I told him what I needed. Yes, he could take a package to Rome. Yes, he knew the Via di Porta San Sebastiano. Yes, he knew of Cardinal Bessarion; who did not? And he could keep a secret, especially for money. I gave him the bolt of silk, with instructions not to unwrap it. I left feeling strangely light.
I walked back slowly, taking the path through the armory tents, where polished shields and sharpened swords hung, catching the light. Activity buzzed around me—merchants and shoppers, traders and Turkish soldiers. I’d done what I could, and soon the Laws would be on their way to safety. At a sudden movement to my left, I turned as a man appeared from between two stalls, his lower face covered with a cloth. In disjointed sequence, I saw him, then his arm, then the sword held high in his hand. At the same moment, Guarin Lusignan appeared behind him, his head wrapped in a gruesome bandage.
“Stop him!” Guarin’s shout made my would-be assassin hesitate—not long, but just long enough. I grabbed a weapon from the closest display—the swing of the blade familiar from my soldier life—and met the masked assassin’s neck. Guarin, his face pale under his bandage, caught my eye, then melted into the crowd, leaving me with the bleeding corpse of the man who had intended to kill me.
While I stood stunned, my two Turkish acquaintances from the gates came sprinting in my direction, their blue jackets flying behind them.
“He’s killed a man—” That much Turkish I understood before spear and dagger found their mark in me—and then I was lying on the ground in a widening pool of red. My blood, I managed to think. I heard the walls of Mystras keening, calling my name, and after that, nothing.
CARDINAL BASILIOS BESSARION
July 1460
Rome
Bessarion almost turned the messenger away. But when the man insisted that he had been given explicit instructions from a silk manufacturer in Mystras, Bessarion led him to a private room.
The sender, the messenger said, had been very specific that the delivery go straight to Cardinal Bessarion himself. Yes, he knew that was irregular, but he was a man to follow instructions to the letter, and no one but Bessarion could be trusted to receive it.
Once the messenger had completed his task, Bessarion shut himself into the library where Guarin Lusignan had once come searching. Every room in the house now overflowed with books that arrived faster than the carpenter could build shelves for them.
Bessarion unwrapped the silk carefully. Dyed a cardinal’s red, the message was not lost on him. In the center was a carefully bound manuscript, and when he read the first pages he gasped. He had not known a copy of Plethon’s Nomoi had survived Scholarios’s decree. The writing spidered in the distinctive hand that made him feel Plethon was standing at his side, lecturing as he had in life.
The accompanying letter was brief—
To you I entrust these words, as I could to no other.
Yours in eternal friendship, which I know you understand,
E.S., Mystras
“You knew I would keep it safe,” Bessarion said quietly, bringing the pages to his lips.
LAURENS LUSIGNAN
1480
Istanbul
Laurens’s father died struggling to breathe. By the end, Guarin Lusignan could no longer eat solid food, not even the soft bread he had come to love after the Turks changed the city’s name. Laurens’s mother ground Guarin’s food into a soft paste so he could swallow, but soon even that became impossible. On Laurens’s twenty-second birthday, he lost his father: raving mad, thin as a skeleton, and gasping for breath.
The day after the will was read, the elderly notary handed him a letter and a vielle in a dusty case. Laurens had not known his father played—there was much, it turned out, he did not know about his father.
“Your late father asked that I hold these for you until after his demise,” the notary said with ponderous self-importance. Laurens did not open the letter until that night, after his mother slept. The paper was yellowed and fragile, the ink faded. But the power of seeing his father’s handwriting made him weep in a way he had not been able to at his father’s grave. It had been so long since Guarin could speak lucidly—or even speak at all—that the letter felt more real than his own father had at the end.
June 1460
My dearest Laurens:
Today I almost had a man killed. This is not how I wish to be remembered by my son, whom I love more than anyone in the world. I wish I could forget. But though my memory has begun to fail me, my actions remain preternaturally clear. I recall how much I paid to have it done. I recall the hands of the man I paid to do my bidding—I looked at them because I could not bear to meet his gaze. I remember where the assassin found his target, in the press of the market outside Mystras. Worst—I remember the face of my intended victim.
I knew him, Laurens. I remember that his eyes were dark. I remember the way his brown hair curled over his forehead. I remember that his voice was quiet and measured, and that he was slow to anger.
This is a man I could have called friend, had we not been born in different lands with centuries of animosity between them, had he not been the student of my teacher’s enemy, and, most of all, had he not held the key to our family’s salvation. Fate makes enemies out of those who could be friends. But I did not kill him. Instead, in the end, I tried to save his life. But others took it from him.
I hope your memories of me are not sullied by these revelations, and that you will understand and forgive. I am about to tell you what I believe to be the truth, and it will change you. I sought to help you, Laurens, and your children, and your children’s children. In doing so, I considered destroying another life, with the belief that one life spent was worth many lives saved.
I beseeched God to provide a sign that my soul at least might emerge pure in the end, though my body was possessed by demons. And I prayed to God to give you the strength to make your own decisions. Either to succeed where I did not, or to resist the impulse to do ill in the name of good. Your life and the lives of your descendants hang in the balance. So do their souls.
Laurens, here is what I have learned about a man called Elias and a city called Mystras, and the secrets they hold. Keep this letter and show it to your children so that they may show it to their children in turn. Perhaps this way we will find an answer to our family’s tragedy. I hope the knowledge serves you better than it did me.
Laurens continued to read until he reached the end. Understanding was worse than ignorance had been.
chapter thirty
ELIAS OROLOGAS
July 2015
Mystras
The modern Lusignan, despite his academic title and his veneer of cordiality, has begun to pursue me like a hyena who smells carrion on the wind. I am not carrion, not yet. But hyenas are live hunters, too—they kill by tearing off chunks of flesh as they run alongside their doomed prey, aiming for a major artery so their quarry will bleed to death.
Lusignan began with pleasant notes left at the museum. Then came the increasingly frequent calls—even to the museum director’s private line—and finally, my own home telephone. I did not answer, nor did I return any messages. I am not in the habit of chatting with my stalker, particularly not one descended from a generation of enemies who have wished me dead. I imagine him now as a mangy predator-cat, becoming hungrier and hungrier, more desperate for a catch. And I am his prey. I have been pursued for centuries—the feeling is familiar. So, it is not the pursuit that makes me despair, it is that I believe he found me through Helen.
* * *
I keep remembering the moment when Helen suddenly saw me as a puzzle, rather than a person. I know that look. I have seen it in the eyes of my enemies for hundreds of years. They believe I am the solution to their problem, and whether they are right or not, they will stop at nothing in pursuit.
She is not my enemy. But to see that calculating look on her face, as she realized how useful I might be… was unbearable. Afterward, she was clearly sorry. But it was too late. I will have to forget her: the way she talks too fast when she is nervous, how her freckles stand out, gold against the flush of her cheeks. I will have to forget her breathless run up Mystras hill to find me. I will have to forget the apricots, and the sound of birdsong in the cloister of the Agios Demetrios where she gave me water and I managed to give her comfort. I will have to forget Alexander. But I fear I won’t be able to.
Last year, a guest inadvertently left a book of poetry in the Mystras Inn. Panos, knowing my poetic leanings, offered it to me. I kept the book on my bed table long enough that I almost forgot it was there. One night, when the racket of the nightingales outside my window kept me awake, I picked up the book. Elizabeth Bishop, the flyleaf said. I opened the book to a page at random and read. “One Art” was the title of the poem.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master…
I read it seven times. I think of that poem every day.
I have had so much practice, it should not be hard to lose again. But still, it is. Every time.
HELEN ADLER
July 2015
Mystras
I hadn’t finished the funding proposal, and it kept nagging at me. Almost three weeks into our trip, the return date to New York was looming. I never like the end of vacation, but this particular end was especially unappealing.
One morning Alexander (unusually) slept later than I did; I took that as a message to get some work done. When I went back to the application forms, I remembered why I’d stopped: the study of the genetic determinants of disease in human populations wasn’t what I specialized in, though I knew people who did. I should let them take this on, rather than getting myself wrapped up in finding local HD families in Greece. Particularly one family that included a Eurocentric supremacist and another that included a man I had nearly fallen in love with.
