you’re absolutely certain this time you’re in Constantinople. The familiar silhouette of the Hagia Sophia benevolently looms over the city which is a bit smaller and darker than you remember it. phrases like “train terminal” and “machine parts factory” drift through your mind without attaching themselves to any meaning in particular It is a clear, moonless night. Candles and lamps twinkle amidst the hulking shapes of buildings. Above, a billion stars twinkle in reply. Is that light circling low over the horizon a new planet, or a torch borne by a party of legionaries patrolling the top of the Theodosian walls? a jagged scar delineating the city’s perimeter, the great wall of china inverted but still sending pretty much the same message
There’s a deafening explosion. dynamite? nitroglycerin? The city trembles. You choke on a fine dusting of paster loosed from your ceiling as you rise from your seat and fumble around in the darkness. There’s an eerie orange glow illuminating your room, the familiar shapes of your furniture made foreign in this alien light.
You turn back to the window you’d been serenely gazing out moments before. A warehouse down by the waterfront— the personal property of the empress, you’d always assumed— is ablaze. You’ve seen fires before, but nothing like this. It’s spreading very quickly– to adjacent buildings, to ships docked nearby, the water of the Sea of Marmara.
The water?
You can’t see anything but grey. Grey ruins, grey rubble, grey ash. The streets are grey. The people are grey. The water is grey. Broken glass, melted into bizarre shapes, is everywhere, glittering in light from the grey sun straining through the grey smoke in the grey air.
And then, a spot of color— a woman in purple and gold, soft and portly but with something unmistakably shrewd in her eyes or perhaps simply cruel for she is an empress of rome and no woman reigns innocently. what a strange thing for a loyal roman to think, you think., sifting through the wreckage, while the grey-faced Norsemen guarding her look on in horror.
“Where is it? Where is it?“ The formula she seeks is nowhere to be found. Nothing left here but ashes and bone.
You can’t sleep. Tick, tick, tick. You give up on it and decide to stroll out onto the Balcony and take in the cool night air. Your eye drifts unconsciously to the empty space where the Theodosian Walls once enclosed Constantinople, before you notice a pillar of smoke over the waterfront.
Following the smoke to its source, you find not a warehouse full of Greek Fire starting the Great Fire of 1124, but the red and black funnels of the RMS de Mowbray, pulling into the Golden Horn on its regular passenger and mail service between here and London.
You catch yourself feeling slightly disappointed you’re not witnessing history in the making.