One glance and Mulreany has no doubt that the version of the capital that has arrived on this trip is the twelfth-century one. The two golden-domed towers of black basalt that Basil III erected to mark the twentieth anniversary of his accession are visible high above the Forum on either side of the pink marble Tower of Nicholas IX, but there’s no sign of the gigantic hexagonal Cathedral of All the Gods that Basil’s nephew and successor, Simeon II, will eventually build on what is presently the site of the camel market. So Mulreany can date the manifestation of the Empire that he is looking at now very precisely to the period between 1150 and 1185. Which is good news, not only because that was one of the richest periods of the Empire’s long history, making today’s trading possibilities especially promising, but also because the Empire of the time of Basil III turns up here more often than that of any other era, and Mulreany knows his way around Basil’s capital almost like a native. Considering the risks involved, he prefers to be in familiar territory when he’s doing business over there.
The usual enormous crowd is lined up along the interface, gawking goggle-eyed at the medieval city across the way. “You’d think the dopey bastards had never seen the Empire get here before,” Mulreany mutters, as he and Anderson clamber out of the limo and head for the police barricade. The usual murmuring goes up from the onlookers at the sight of them in their working clothes. Mulreany, as the front man in this enterprise, has outfitted himself elegantly in a tight-sleeved, close-fitting knee-length tunic of green silk piped with scarlet brocade, turquoise hose, and soft leather boots in the Persian style. On his head he wears a stiff and lofty pyramid-shaped hat of Turkish design, on his left hip a long curving dagger in an elaborately chased silver sheath. Anderson, as befits his lesser status, is more simply garbed in an old-fashioned flowing tunic of pale muslin, baggy blue trousers, and sandals; his headgear is a white bonnet tied by a red ribbon. These are the clothes of a merchant of late imperial times and his amanuensis, nothing unusual over there, but pretty gaudy stuff to see on a Chicago street, and they draw plenty of attention.
Duplessis, Schmidt, and Kulikowski wait by the barricade, gabbing with a couple of the cops. Schmidt has a short woolen tunic on, like the porter he is supposed to be; he is toting the trading merchandise, two bulging burlap bags. Neither Duplessis nor Kulikowski is in costume. They won’t be going across. They’re antiquities dealers; what they do is peddle the goodies that Mulreany and his two assistants bring back from their ventures into the Empire. They don’t ever put their own necks on the line over there.
Duplessis is fidgeting around, the way he always does, looking at his watch every ten seconds or so. “About time you got here, Mike,” he tells Mulreany. “The clock is ticking-ticking-ticking.”
“Ticking so fast the Empire showed up a day and a half early, didn’t it?” Mulreany says sourly. “You screwed up the calculation a little, eh?”
“Christ, man! It’s never all that precise and you know it. We’ve got a lot of complicated factors to take into account. The equinoctial precession—the whole sidereal element—the problem of topological displacement—listen, Mike, I do my best. It gets here every six months, give or take a couple of days, that’s all we can figure. There’s no way I can tell you to the split second when it’s going to—”
“What about the calculation of when it leaves again? Suppose you miss that one by a factor of a couple of days too?”
“No,” Duplessis says. “No chance. The math’s perfectly clear: this is a two-day visitation. Look, stop worrying, Mike. You sneak across, you do your business, you come back late tomorrow afternoon. You’re just grouchy because you don’t like getting up this early.”
“And you ought to start moving,” Kulikowski tells him. “Waxman and Gross went across an hour ago. There’s Davidson about to cross over down by Roosevelt, and here comes McNeill.”
Mulreany nods. Competitors, yes, moving in on all sides. The Empire’s already been in for a couple of hours; most of the licensed crossers are probably there by now. But what the hell: there’s plenty for everybody. “You got the coins?” he asks.
Kulikowski hands Mulreany a jingling velvet purse: some walking-around money. He shakes a few of the coins out into his palm. The Emperor Basil’s broad big-nosed face looks up at him from the shiny obverse of a gold nomisma. There are a couple of little silver argentei from the time of Casimir and a few thick, impressive copper sesterces showing the hooded profile of Empress Juliana.
Impatiently Kulikowski says, “What do you think, Mike, I’d give you the wrong ones? Nothing there’s later than Basil III. Nothing earlier than the Peloponnesian Dynasty.” Passing false money, or obsolete money that has been withdrawn from circulation by imperial decree, is a serious mercantile crime over there, punishable by mutilation for the first offense, by death for the second. There are no decrees about passing money of emperors yet to be born, naturally. But that would be stupid as well as dangerous.
“Come on, Mike,” Duplessis says. “Time’s wasting. Go on in.”
“How long did you say can I stay?”
“Like I told you. Almost until sundown tomorrow.”
“That long? You sure?”
“You think it does me any good if you get stranded over there?” Duplessis says. “Trust me. I tell you you’ve got until sundown, you’ve got until sundown. Go on, now. Will you get going, for Christ’s sake?”
There’s no need for Mulreany to show his transit license. The police know all the licensed border-crossers. Only about two dozen people have the right combination of skills—the knowledge of the Empire’s language and customs, the knack of doing business in a medieval country, the willingness to take the risks involved in making the crossing. The risks are big, and crossers don’t always come back. The Empire’s official attitude toward the merchants who come over from Chicago is that they are sorcerers of some kind, and the penalty for sorcery is public beheading, so you have to keep a low profile as you do your business. Then, too, there’s the chance of catching some archaic disease that’s unknown and incurable in the modern era, or simply screwing up your timing and getting stuck over there in the Empire when it pops back to its own period of history. There are other odd little one-in-a-thousand glitch possibilities also. You have to have the intellectual equipment of a college professor plus the gall of a bank robber to make a successful living as a crosser.
The easiest place to enter today, according to Kulikowski, is the corner of Blue Island and Taylor. The imperial city is only about four feet above Chicago street level there, and Kulikowski has brought along a plank that he sets up as a little bridge to carry them up the slight grade. Mulreany leads the way; Anderson follows, and Schmidt brings up the rear, toting the two bags of trade goods. As they pass through the eerie yellow glow of the interface Mulreany glances back at Duplessis and Kulikowski, who are beginning to fade from view. He grins, winks, gives them the upturned thumb. Another couple of steps and Chicago disappears altogether, nothing visible now to the rear except the golden flicker, opaque when seen from this side, that marks the border of the materialization zone. They are in the Empire, now. Halfway across the planet and nine centuries ago in time, waltzing once more into the glittering capital city of the powerful realm that was the great rival of the Byzantines and the Turks for the domination of the medieval world.
Can of corn, he tells himself.
In today, out tomorrow, another ten or twenty million bucks’ worth of highly desirable and readily salable treasures in the bag.
The imperial barge—its back half, anyway—is just on their left as they come up the ramp. Its hull bears the royal crest and part of an inscription testifying to the greatness of the Emperor. Lounging alongside it with their backs to the interface glow are half a dozen rough-looking members of the Bulgarian Guard, the Emperor’s crack private militia. Bad news right at the outset. They give Mulreany and his companions black menacing glances.
“Nasty bastards,” Anderson murmurs. “They going to be d
ifficult, you think?”
“Nah. Just practicing looking tough,” says Mulreany. “We stay cool and we’ll be okay.” Staying cool means telling yourself that you are simply an innocent merchant from a distant land who happens to be here at this unusual time purely by coincidence, and never showing a smidgeon of uneasiness. “But keep close to your gun, all the same.”
“Right.” Anderson slips his hand under his tunic. Both he and Schmidt are armed. Mulreany isn’t. He never is.
He figures they’ll get past the guardsmen okay. The Bulgars are a wild and unpredictable bunch, but Mulreany knows that nobody over here wants to go out of his way to find trouble at a time when the weird golden light in the sky is shining, not even the Bulgars, because when the light appears and everything surrounding the capital disappears from the view of its inhabitants it means that the powers of sorcery are at work again. Events like this have been going on for eight hundred years in this city, and everyone understands by now that during one of the sorcery-times there’s a fair possibility that some stranger you try to hassle may come right back at you and hit you with very mighty mojo indeed. It’s been known to happen.
This is something like Mulreany’s twenty-fifth crossing—he doesn’t keep count, but he doesn’t miss an Empire appearance and he’s been a licensed crosser for about a dozen years—and he knows his way around town as well as anybody in the trade. The big boulevard that runs along the shore parallel to the wharves is the Street of the Eastern Sun, which leads to the Plaza of the Customs-Brokers, from which five long streets radiate into different parts of the city: the Street of Persians, the Street of Turks, the Street of Romans, the Street of Jews, and the Street of Thieves. There are no Jews to be found on the Street of Jews or anywhere else in the capital, not since the Edict of Thyarodes VII, but most of the best metalworkers and jewelers and ivory-carvers have shops in the quadrant between the Street of Jews and the Street of Thieves, so it’s in that section that Mulreany will make his headquarters while he’s here.
Plenty of citizens are milling around in the Plaza of the Customs-Brokers, which is one of the city’s big gathering places. Mulreany hears them chattering in a whole bouillabaisse of languages. Greek is the Empire’s official tongue, but Mulreany can also make out Latin, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, a Slavic dialect, and something that sounds a little like Swedish. Nobody is very upset by what has happened to the city. They’ve all had experience with this sort of thing before, and all of them are aware that it’s just a temporary thing: when the sky turns golden and the capital goes flying off into the land of sorcery, the thing to do is sit tight and wait for everything to get back to normal again, which it eventually will do.
He and Anderson and Schmidt slide smoothly into the crowd, trying to seem inconspicuous without conspicuously seeming to be trying to seem inconspicuous, and leave the plaza on the far side by way of the Street of Jews. There was a decent hotel seven or eight blocks up that way the last time he was here in the reign of Basil III, and though he doesn’t know whether the date of that visit, in Empire time, was five years ago or five years yet to come, he figures there’s a good chance the hotel will be there today. Things don’t change really fast in the medieval world, except when some invading horde comes in and rearranges the real estate, and that isn’t due to happen in this city for another couple of centuries.
The hotel is exactly where he remembers it. It’s not quite in a class with the Drake or the Ritz-Carlton: more like a big barn, in fact, since the ground floor is entirely given over to straw-strewn stables for the horses and camels and donkeys of the guests, and the actual guest rooms are upstairs, a series of small square chambers with stiff clammy mattresses placed right on the stone floors, and tiny windows that have actual glass in them, almost clear enough to see through. Nothing lavish, not even really very comfortable, but the place is reasonably clean, at least, with respectable lavatory facilities on every floor and a relatively insignificant population of bugs and ticks. A pleasant smell of spices from the bazaar next door, ginger and aniseed and nutmeg and cinnamon, maybe a little opium and hashish, too, drifts in and conceals other less savory aromas that might be wandering through the building. The place is okay. It’ll do for one night, anyway.
The innkeeper is a different one from last time, a gap-toothed red-haired Greek with only one eye, who gives Mulreany a leering smirk and says, “In town for the sorcery-trading, are you?”
“The what?” Mulreany asks, all innocence.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know, brother. What do you think that ring of witch-fire is, all around the city? Where do you think the Eastern Sea has gone, and the Genoese Quarter, and Persian Town, and everything else that lies just outside the city walls? It’s sorcery-time here again, my friend!”
“Is it, now?” Mulreany says, making no great show of interest. “I wouldn’t know. My cousins and I are here to deal in pots and pans, and perhaps do a little business in daggers and swords.” He colors his Greek with a broad, braying yokel accent, by way of emphasizing that he’s much too dumb to be a sorcerer.
But the innkeeper is annoyingly persistent. “Merely let me have one of those metal tubes that bring near what is far off,” he says, with a little wheedling movement of his big shoulders, “and my best rooms are yours for three weeks, and all your meals besides.”
He must mean a spyglass. Binoculars aren’t likely to do him much good. Even more broadly Mulreany says, “Pots, yes, my good brother. Pans, yes. But miraculous metal tubes, I must say ye nay. Such things are not our commodities, brother.”
The lone eye, ice-blue and bloodshot, bores nastily in on him. “Would a knife of many blades be among your commodities, then? A metal box of fire? A flask of the devil’s brandy?”
“I tell you, we be not sorcerers,” says Mulreany stolidly, letting just a bit of annoyance show. He shifts his weight slowly from leg to leg, a ponderous hayseed gesture. “We are but decent simple merchants in search of lodging in return for good coin, and if we cannot find it here, brother, we fain must seek it elsewhere.”
He starts to swing about to leave. The innkeeper hastily backs off from his wheedling, and Mulreany is able to strike a straightforward deal for a night’s lodging, three rooms for a couple of heavy copper sesterces, with tomorrow’s breakfast of rough bread, preserved lamb, and beer thrown in.
Wistfully the innkeeper says, “I was sure at last I had some sorcerers before me, who would favor me with some of the wondrous things that the high dukes possess.”
“You have sorcerers on the brain,” Mulreany tells him, as they start upstairs. “We are but simple folk, with none of the devil’s goods in our bags.”
Does the innkeeper believe him? Who knows? They all covet the illicit stuff the sorcerers bring, but only the very richest can afford it. Skepticism and greed still glitter in that single eye.
Well, Mulreany has told nothing but God’s truth: he is no sorcerer, just a merchant from a far land. But real sorcerers must have been at work here at some time in the past. What else could it have been but black magic, Mulreany figures, that set the city floating in time in the first place? The capital, he knows, has been adrift for most of its lengthy history. He himself, on various crossings, has entered versions of the city as early as that of the reign of Miklos, who was fourth century A.D., and as late as the somber time of Kartouf the Hapless, right at the end, just before the Mongol conquest in 1412. For Chicagoans, the periodic comings and goings of the city are just an interesting novelty, but for these people it must be a real nuisance to find themselves constantly floating around in time and space. Mulreany imagines that one of the imperial wizards must have accidentally put the hex on the place, long ago, some kind of wizardy experiment that misfired and set up a time-travel effect that won’t stop.
“Half past ten,” Mulreany announces. It’s more like noon, actually—the sun’s practically straight overhead, glinting behind the spooky light of the interface effects—but he’ll stay on Chicago time throughout the c
rossing. It’s simpler that way. If Duplessis is right the city is due to disappear back into its own era about eleven o’clock Thursday morning. Mulreany likes a twelve-to-fourteen-hour safety margin, which means heading back into Chicago by seven o’clock or so Wednesday night. “Let’s get to work,” he says.
The first stop is a jeweler’s shop three blocks east of the Street of Jews that belongs to a Turkish family named Suleimanyi. Mulreany has been doing satisfactory business with the Suleimanyis, on and off, for something like a century Empire time, beginning with Mehmet Suleimanyi early in Basil III’s reign and continuing with his grandfather Ahmet, who ran the shop fifty years earlier in the time of the Emperor Polifemas, and then with Mehmet’s son Ali, and with Ali’s grandson, also named Mehmet, during the reign of Simeon II. He does his best to conceal from the various Suleimanyis that he’s been coming to them out of chronological order, but he doubts that they would care anyway. What they care about is the profit they can turn on the highly desirable foreign goods he brings them. It’s a real meeting of common interests, every time.
Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95 Page 37
