The archaeologist's hands are shaking as she describes her dream.
"I'm in a palace," she says. "Marble columns, mosaics on the walls showing saints with gold halos. I can smell roses, white roses, even though it's winter. And there's smoke." She pauses, fingers worrying the edge of her notebook. "So much smoke."
I lean forward despite myself. White roses in November. Smoke in the women's quarters. My chest tightens with hope I've learned not to trust. But hope is an addiction, and I've been using for 391 years.
"What else?" I keep my voice gentle, curious. Not desperate. Never desperate, even though I can feel my pulse in my throat.
Elif looks up at me with dark eyes flecked with amber, and I know before she finishes that this isn't Theodora. Those eyes are wrong, too round, too open, without that particular tilt at the corners I'd recognize in any face, across any span of centuries.
But I ask anyway. I always ask.
"Do you remember a fire? In November 1043, in the women's quarters of the Great Palace?"
She blinks. Confusion clouds her face, and I watch hope die the same death it's died a thousand times before. Quick. Familiar. Painful in its predictability.
"No," Elif says slowly. "In my dream, I'm walking through gardens. Just... walking. The roses are blooming, and I'm happy. Peaceful." She sets down her notebook, giving me her full attention. "How did you know about the palace? Are you a Byzantine historian too? My dissertation advisor didn't mention collaborating with anyone from..." She tilts her head. "Where did you say you were from?"
"Rome," I say. The truth is more complicated, but Rome is close enough to a lie I can sustain without thinking. I flew in yesterday morning, a flight too expensive and too urgent for a man who claims to be writing a novel about Byzantine daily life, but she hasn't pressed me on that. "I'm researching for a book. Focused on daily life in the palace rather than politics or war. I read about your dreams on a forum your sister posted to. The details were remarkably vivid. I thought you might be willing to consult."
She believes me because people always believe plausible lies more readily than impossible truths.
We're sitting in a makeshift shelter at the archaeological site near the old Hippodrome, where Elif and her team have been excavating what they believe are servant quarters from the Middle Byzantine period. Probably eleventh century, she told me when I first approached an hour ago, though the stratigraphy is complicated by later Ottoman construction.
I hadn't needed her to tell me the date. I know these stones. I've walked these streets when they were crowded with merchants and pilgrims and the polyglot chaos of an empire that thought it would last forever. I watched them burn during the Fourth Crusade. I watched them fall to the Ottomans. I've watched them crumble into the tourist attraction they are now, where college students dig carefully with brushes and screens while I pretend not to remember when this was my home.
The February sun is weak today, filtering through plastic tarps that protect the dig site. Istanbul sprawls around us, indifferent to history. Car horns, call to prayer from a nearby mosque, the diesel rumble of buses. The modern city's heartbeat drowning out the whispers of the dead.
"That's actually not a bad angle," Elif says, warming to the topic with the particular energy of a graduate student who has been thinking about something for years and rarely finds an audience outside her department. "Most novels about Byzantium focus on emperors and generals. The daily life angle could be interesting. How people actually lived, not just how they died in wars or coups."
"Exactly." I manage a smile. I flex my right hand under the table. I've been doing that since yesterday, testing it, the way you test a door that doesn't fit its frame properly. The fingers move correctly, but there's a stiffness in the cold that doesn't feel entirely mine, as though I'm still learning the knuckles.