Stacey is a native of the Syrian provinces, but she had lived in the City for a very long time and feels a certain pride. “The City never fell,” she told the patrolman. “Not until the Franks came.” But she had been in Paris by then, another city that became great in its time. Technically, she had been a Frank herself.
Nagkmur spins about in his chair and cries, “You! You are saboteur! What you do? Why?”
The anger in his visage is alloyed with grief beyond measure and Stacey very nearly reaches out to comfort him. “No,” she tells him. “I only lived my life, tried to survive, tried to escape notice.”
“City in chaos after…” He checks his own database. “… after emperor flee. Riots in street. ‘Nika! Nika! Nika!’ No one ever repair. Later, faction opens gates to revenge on other faction.”
“No.” Stacey shakes her head in bewilderment. “The emperor quashed the factions. General Belisarius slaughtered them in the Hippodrome.” A horrid, frightening time that had been and “Macedonia” knew only what rumors had drifted with the smoke and fleeing men.
Nagkmur’s eyes widened. “He not flee? Emperor not flee City?”
Stacey shook her head. “He started to. But the story was that his empress talked him out of it. ‘Purple makes a splendid shroud,’ she said.”
“What empress? This…” Another check. “… Yáshì dīngní not marry. Wait! Old emperor’s nephew. I meet him!”
“You mean Justinian. Yes, I sent you to him. He was Justin’s Master of Soldiers and ran the spy service. He succeeded his uncle a few years after you left.” Stacey thinks about that a bit, then remembers. “That’s right… He married Theodora the actress.”
“Actress? Emperor marry prostitute?”
“Strange as it seems, it was true love. You must remember Theodora. You patronized her while you stayed in the City.”
“That woman?” He said this as if surprised to discover that she had a name. “But prince wants only to enter her jade gates!”
“Maybe at first—and she had some damn fine gates—but they fell in love after.”
“But I bring her with me when meet this Justinian. I introduce them. If this woman give Justinian courage, then it was I who…” He chokes and cannot finish the sentence. “Billions,” he whispers. “It was I?” He looks up and into Stacey’s face.
“Whoever think woman have such effect?”
Stacey cannot help but laugh in the face of his overwhelming grief.
There is a reception held annually at the Apkallu League near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia at which the “Scions of Apkal” drink toasts to a home they have never known. Never forget is the League’s motto, and a common valediction among its membership, but operationally, in the face of the ordinary burdens of daily life, it is little more than a formality. It is more important not to forget the groceries you were to pick up on the way home.
The League is a handsome building, done up in the manner of the late nineteenth century, with Egyptian columns and a grand staircase on its façade. The brass medallions adorning its doors feature on the left an aquiline profile, said to represent the Apkallu Indians, and on the right door a fish, said to represent wisdom. The interior is decked with rich draperies and padded furniture. It is a very Philadelphia kind of building: snug and comfortable in a way that Boston and New York never quite manage. Engravings on the walls portray the usual Philadelphian themes of independence, fox hunting, and cricket. Club room conversations center on the exigencies of work, the dismal prospects of the Eagles, and the intransigence of the younger generation. Fraternal organizations having long since evolved into philanthropic ones, the League also sponsors medical research into birth defects at Einstein Medical Center.
Only on Landing Day do the Scions bring out certain accouterments otherwise kept in a storeroom in the sub-basement, hang decorations that might strike non-members as a bit outré, and recite formulas in a language little-heard in the America of the third millennium. But that is only once a year to celebrate their ancestors’ arrival in the New World, and what club does not have its quaint rituals?
There is a reason for everything and Lt. Col. Bruno Zendahl’s reason for stopping over at the League is that he is travelling from Cheyenne Mountain to the Pentagon, and it is customary for Scions of Apkallu to touch base at a lodge on such trips. He has called from the airport to confirm reservations for dinner and a room for the night. The restaurant is open to such of the public as can afford private dining in Rittenhouse clubs; but the rooms are members-only. He hands his travel bag, headgear, and overcoat to Robert, the concierge, and is striding with great anticipation toward the dining room, when Juliet Endicott, the lodge-keeper, intercepts him in the Grand Hallway and hits him with a hammer.
Metaphorically speaking. “They’re waiting for you down below,” she whispers and waves him toward the private elevator in the rear of the building.
The implied summons startles the colonel. “My dinner…?” he suggests.
“I’ll have Guiscard send something. Anything in particular?”
In other words, immediately. He sighs. “I was looking forward to his Pork Chop Elena.”
Endicott uses her elevator pass-key to activate access to the lower levels and makes sure he knows the way to the council room. She gives him a brass key of the old style and assures him that his dinner will be delivered. Then the doors enclose him.
Zendahl brushes the sleeves on his uniform jacket. He can think of nothing in the public news, nor even in the private news of which he is cognizant, that might merit a summons. Maybe they only want him to plan the annual banquet, but he does not think so.
He exits the elevator onto a dimly lit, never-completed subway platform for the Southwest Spur. This was intended to link Thirtieth Street Station to the Broad Street line at Lombard-South, shaking hands along the way with the terminus for the old Locust Street subway. (There was once to have been a Loop, like Chicago’s, but only Locust Street and Ridge Avenue were ever built.) He faces what would have been the northbound track, where a faded sign reading Rittenhouse dangles from overhead beams. The southbound platform was never built, so only barren stone looms in the shadows on the farther side. The tunnel dips into darkness at both ends of the station and somewhere in the black depths water plunks into a pool. Everything smells dank and sounds hollow.
Zendahl follows the platform to a door labeled “Authorized Personnel Only” and uses the brass key to enter. Inside, a young woman sits behind a desk reading a magazine. She looks up and nods to him. “Colonel Zendahl? May I see your identification?”
The skin on her face and arms is covered with fine iridescent scales and her head reminds one irresistibly of hawks, as if she had been pressed like putty into a mold for raptors. Her eyes seem too large for her head. Zendahl smiles politely when they touch hands in the exchange of ID cards. Her scales are dry and smooth. Most Apkallu are indistinguishable in appearance from the aborigines, but even after ten thousand years of genetic engineering, the co-opted genes sometimes revert and hint at the ancestral body-plan.