When I figured I was the proper distance out of town, I thumbed the plate and dismissed my cab. Then I took up a position on the sidewalk, checking things out for my jump. Some kids saw me in my Byzantine costume and came over to watch, knowing that I must be going to go back in time. They called gaily to me in Turkish, maybe asking me to take them along.

One angelically grimy little boy said in recognizable French, “I hope they cut your head off.”

Children are so sweetly frank, aren’t they? And so charmingly hostile, in all eras.

I set my timer, gestured obscenely at my well-wisher, and went up the line.

The gray buildings vanished. The November bleakness gave way to the sunny glow of August. The air I breathed was suddenly fresh and fragrant. I stood beside a broad cobbled road running between two green meadows. A modest chariot drawn by two horses came clopping up and halted before me.

A lean young man in simple country clothes leaned out and said, “Sir, Metaxas has sent me to fetch you to him.”

“But — he wasn’t expecting—”

I shut up fast, before I said something out of line. Obviously Metaxas was expecting me. Had I hit the Paradox of Discontinuity, somehow?

Shrugging, I climbed up into the chariot.

As we rode into the west, my driver nodded to the acres of grapevines to the left of the road and the groves of fig trees to the right. “All this,” he said proudly, “belongs to Metaxas. Have you ever been here before?”

“No, never,” I said.

“He is a great man, my master. He is a friend to the poor and an ally to the mighty. Everyone respects him. Emperor Alexius himself was here last month.”

I felt queasy about that. Bad enough that Metaxas had carved out a now-time identity for himself ten centuries up the line; what would the Time Patrol say about his hobnobbing with emperors? Giving advice, no doubt; altering the future by his foreknowledge of events; cementing himself into the historical matrix of this era as a valued adviser to royalty! Could anyone match him for gall?

Figs and grapes gave way to fields of wheat. “This, too, belongs to Metaxas,” said the driver.

I had pictured Metaxas living in some comfortable little villa on a hectare or two of land, with a garden in front and perhaps a vegetable plot in the rear. I hadn’t realized that he was a major landowner on such a scale.

We passed grazing cattle, and a mill worked by plodding oxen, and a pond no doubt well stocked with fish, and then we came to a double row of cypress trees that guarded a side road branching from the main highway, and took that road, and a splendid villa appeared, and at its entrance waited Metaxas, garbed in raiment suitable for the companion of an emperor.

“Jud!” he cried, and we embraced. “My friend! My brother! Jud, they tell me about the tour you led! Magnificent! Your tourists, they never stopped praising you?”

“Who told you?”

“Kolettis and Pappas. They’re here. Come in, come in, come in! Wine for my guest! A change of robes for him! Come in, Jud, come in!”

The villa was classical in style, atrium-and-peristyle, with a huge central courtyard, colonnaded walkways, mosaic floors, frescoed walls, a great apsed reception room, a pond in the courtyard, a library bulging with scrolls, a dining room whose round gold-inlaid ivory table could have seated three dozen, a statuary hall, and a marble bathroom. Metaxas’ slaves hustled me toward the bathroom, and Metaxas called out that he’d see me later.

I got the royal treatment.

Three dark-haired slave wenches — Persians, Metaxas said later — ministered to me in the bath. All they wore were loinstrings, and in a moment I was wearing less than that, for in a giggling jiggle of breasts they stripped me and went to work buffing and soaping me until I gleamed. Steam bath, hot bath, cold bath — my pores got the full workout. When I emerged they dried me most detailedly and robed me in the most elegant tunic I ever expect to wear. Then they vanished, with a saucy wigwag of bare bottoms as they disappeared through some subterranean passageway. A middle-aged butler appeared and conveyed me to the atrium, where Metaxas awaited me with beakers of wine.

“You like it?” he asked.

“I feel I’m in a dream.”

“You are. And I’m the dreamer. You saw the farms? Wheat, olives, cattle, figs, everything. I own. My tenants farm. Each year I acquire new land on the profits of last year’s work.”

“It’s incredible,” I said. “And what’s even more incredible is that you get away with it.”

“I have earned my invulnerability,” said Metaxas simply. “The Time Patrol knows I must not be persecuted.”

“They realize you’re here?”

“I believe they do,” he said. “They stay away, though. I take care to make no significant changes in the fabric of history. I’m no villain. I’m merely self-indulgent.”

“But you are changing history just by being here! Some other landowner must have held these lands in the real 1105.”

“This is the real 1105.”

“I mean the original, before Benchley Effect visitors began coming here. You’ve interpolated yourself into the landowner rolls, and — my God, the chariot driver spoke of you as Metaxas! Is that the name you use here?”

“Themistoklis Metaxas. Why not? It is a good Greek name.”

“Yes, but — look, it must be in all the documents, the tax records, everything! You’ve certainly changed the Byzantine archives that have come down to us, putting yourself in where you weren’t in before. What—”

“There is no danger,” Metaxas said. “So long as I take no life and create no life here, so long as I cause no one to change a previously decided course of action, all is well. You know, making a real alteration in the time flow is a difficult thing. You have to do something big, like killing a monarch. Simply being here, I introduce tiny changes, but they are damped out by ten centuries of time, and no real change results down the line. Do you follow?”

I shrugged. “Just tell me one thing, at least. How did you know I was coming?”

Laughing, he said, “I looked two days down the line and you were here. Therefore I checked for your time of arrival and arranged to have Nicholas meet you. It saved you a long walk, yes?”

Of course. I just hadn’t been thinking four-dimensionally. It stood to reason that Metaxas would habitually scan his immediate future here, so he’d never be the victim of some unpleasant surprise in this sometimes unpredictable era.

“Come,” Metaxas said. “Join the others.”

They were lounging on divans by the courtyard pool, nibbling bits of roasted meat that slavegirls in diaphanous robes popped into their mouths. Two of my fellow Couriers were there, Kolettis and Pappas, both enjoying layoffs. Pappas, of the drooping mustache, managed to look sad even while pinching a firm Persian buttock, but Kolettis, plump and boisterous, was in high form, singing and laughing. A third man, whom I didn’t know, was peering at the fish in the pool. Though dressed in twelfth-century robes, he had a face that was instantly recognizable as modern, I thought. And I was right.

“This is Scholar Magistrate Paul Speer,” said Metaxas to me in English. “A visiting academic. Meet Time Courier Jud Elliott, Dr. Speer.”

We touched hands formally. Speer was about fifty, somewhat desiccated, a pale little man with an angular face and quick, nervous eyes. “Pleased,” he said.

“And this,” said Metaxas, “is Eudocia.”

I had noticed her the instant I entered the courtyard, of course. She was a slim, auburn-haired girl, fair-skinned but with dark eyes, nineteen or twenty years old. She was heavily laden with jewelry, and so obviously was not just one of the slavegirls; yet her costume was daring by Byzantine standards, consisting only of a light double winding of translucent silk. As the fabric pulled taut against her, it displayed small high breasts, boyish buttocks, a shallow navel, even a hint of the triangular tuft at her loins. I prefer my women dark of hair and complexion and voluptuous of figure, but even so this Eudocia was enormously attractive to me. She seemed tense, coiled, full of pent-up fury and fervor.