Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  Someone close by let out a loud sneeze.

  “Your health,” Argyros said politely.

  Entering the nave of Hagia Sophia was an experience overwhelming enough to make the magistrianos forget for a while that smallpox was running free in the city. No man could enter the great church and remain unmoved. When Justinian rebuilt it after the Nika riots, he had chosen the two best architects he could find and let them draw on the resource of the whole Empire. The result deserved his boast when the magnificent structure was complete: “O Solomon, I have vanquished you!”

  Polished marbles of green, red, yellow, polychrome, drawn from the Bosporos, Greece, Egypt, Isauria; gleaming lamps—gold, silver, brass; a forest of columns with intricately carven acanthus capitals; four semidomes, each full of mosaic-work ornament: all led the eye up to the central dome that was the grandest triumph of Justinian’s brilliant builders.

  Supported on pendentives, it reached 180 feet above the floor. Forty-two windows pierced its base; the rays of sunlight shining through them left the dome eerily insubstantial, as if it were floating in space above the church rather than a part of it. The ever-shifting light glittered off the gold mosaic tesserae in the dome and off the cross of Christ at the apex.

  Had that dome not existed, the great church’s sanctuary would have sufficed to seize the eye. The iconostasis in front of the altar was of gold-plated silver, with images upon it of Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles. The holy table itself was pure gold, encrusted with precious stones. So were the candelabra, the thuribles, and the eucharistic vessels: ewers, chalices, patens, spoons, basins. Red curtains with cloth-of-gold figures of Christ and Sts. Peter and Paul flanked the altar.

  As always, the divine liturgy took Argyros out of himself, made him feel no longer a man alone in the world but part of the great Christian community, past, present, and future. The liturgy was ancient, ascribed to St. John Chrysostrom, the theologian and scholar who had been patriarch of Constantinople less than a century after Constantine refounded the city.

  The service was celebrated with splendor appropriate to its surroundings. The slow dignity of the prayers, the rich silks of the priests’ dalmatics and chasubles, the sweet incense emanating from the thuribles, the choruses of perfectly trained men and boys that sang the hymns—all added together to convey to both spirit and senses the glory of God.

  Prayers for the dead appeared twice in the service, after the reading of the Gospel and in the prayer for the church before communion. That was customary; it stressed the bond between the living and the dead and the close relationship between this world and the next. In this time of pestilence, though, the prayers were specially poignant.

  Argyros shook his head in sorrow when at last the priest sang St. Symeon’s song of leavetaking, removed his vestments, and brought the service to an end. Hagia Sophia seemed to bring the world to come so close to this one. Returning to simple mundanity was never easy afterward.

  Helen, as she usually did, looked at things from a different perspective. “Thank you for taking me, Basil,” she said as they were walking home. “I needed to be reminded how God still watches over us.”

  She was without the dogged curiosity Argyros brought to his faith, but he often thought her belief the purer. She accepted where he, by nature and training, always looked to question. The longer the smallpox epidemic went on, the more he saw good people dying along with the bad, the more he began to wonder why God was not watching more closely.

  His mind still shied from the notion. Undoubtedly God had His reasons. When He wanted Basil to learn them, Basil would.

  “That was delicious, dear,” Argyros said, putting aside his plate of garlicky lamb stew with real regret.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Helen said. “Would you like some more?” She offered him her own plate.

  “You’ve hardly touched it,” he said in surprise. “You’ll have to do better than that. I remember my mother and my older sister back in Serrhes saying they were hungry all the time while they were nursing.”

  “I have been too, till now,” Helen said, a little defensively. “I just haven’t felt much like eating, the last couple of days.”

  “Do you think you’re pregnant again?” Argyros asked, remembering how nauseated she had been when she was first carrying Sergios.

  But she shook her head. “This is different; more like I’m tired all the time.” She laughed. “I don’t know why I should be. You’ve helped a lot around the house, and I’ve hardly been out since we prayed at the great church a couple of weeks ago.”

  She stood to pick up the dishes and take them back to the kitchen, where she would set them to soak. She paused to undo the top two clasps of her tunic. “I think the heat lately has helped take away my appetite,” she said, fanning herself with her hand.

  Argyros’s thick eyebrows shot up. Summer in Constantinople was hot and sticky, but the latest bad heat wave had broken three days before. He rose from the table, went around, and kissed her on the forehead.

  She smiled. “What was that for?”

  “For you, of course,” he answered easily, returning her smile. He would not show her the twinge of fear he felt, but it was there. Under his lips, her skin had been warm and dry.

  She slept restlessly during the night and was a long time falling back to sleep after she got up to feed Sergios. So was Argyros, but for a different reason.

  Helen woke in the morning with a headache. “Would you go out and pick me some willow twigs?” she asked; the bitter sap in them was soothing.

  Argyros did as she requested. Along with its splendid buildings, Constantinople boasted several large parks, one not far from the church of the Holy Apostles. Many Constantinopolitans, city dwellers for generations, would not have known a willow tree from a rosebush. The magistrianos, from his childhood in a small Balkan town and also as a veteran of life in the field, had no trouble finding what he sought. He used his dagger to slice off a handful of the youngest, tenderest shoots, then hurried back to his home.

  He gasped in dismay: though the day was warmer than the previous couple had been, Helen huddled under every blanket in the house. He could hear her teeth chattering across the room. “So cold, Basil, so cold,” she whispered, but when he put his hand to her head he found her burning hot.

  “Mother of God, help me, help us,” he exclaimed. He knelt beside her, sponged her brow, made her chew on the twigs. Their juice also fought fever, though how much it could do against such raging heat he did not know.

  When he had made her as comfortable as he could, he rushed out again, to the home of the district medical officer. That worthy was a small, delicate-featured man named Arethas Saronites. He looked tired unto death. When the magistrianos stammered out that his wife was sick, Saronites only brushed back a lock of his light brown hair from his eyes and said, “You’re Argyros, from the street of the pillowmakers, aren’t you?”

  At Basil’s nod, the medical officer said, “God grant her healing,” and made an addition to the long list on his desk. He looked up, surprised to find the magistrianos still there. “Will there be anything more?”

  “A doctor, damn you!”

  “One will be sent you.”

  “Now,” Argyros said in a voice like iron. Of its own volition, his hand slipped toward his knife.

  Neither the tone nor the motion affected Saronites. “My dear sir, one in ten in the city is ill, maybe one in five. We do not have the physicians to treat them all at once.”

  Deaf to his words, Argyros glanced into the hallway. “You had better desist, or Thomas there will put an arrow through your brisket,” Saronites warned.

  The archer had his bow drawn and aimed.

  “You are not the first,” Saronites said kindly. “How can I blame you for trying to help your loved one? You will get your physician in your proper turn, I promise you.”

  Shamed and beaten, Argyros gave a brusque nod and left. When he got home, Helen was sitting in the parlor, nursing Sergi
os. “Have a care, darling, or he may catch your sickness,” the magistrianos said. He refused to say “smallpox”—if he did not name it, he could still hope it was not there.

  Except for two spots of hectic color high on her cheeks, Helen was very pale. Her eyes glittered feverishly. But she was not shivering any more, and she answered him steadily: “I know, Basil, but he can starve too, and my breasts have milk in them. Do you think I could get a wetnurse to come into this house while I’m ill?”

  Argyros bit his lip. No woman would risk herself thus, and he knew it. Nor could he condemn them for that, just as Saronites had not grown angry when he tried to take more than his due to Helen. “Cow’s milk?” he suggested at last.

  Helen frowned. “It gives babies a flux of the bowels,” she said. After a moment, though, she muttered, half to herself, “Well, that’s a smaller chance to take.” Her voice firmed. “Yes, go get some. But how will you feed it to him? They take so little, sucking at rags soaked in milk.”

  Argyros knew she was right about that. He plucked at his beard. His time as a scouts officer had got him used to improvising, to using things to fit his needs, no matter what they were intended for. And unlike the routineers who staffed most of the Roman bureaucracy, he had to stay mentally alert to do his job. So—

  He snapped his fingers. “I have it! I’ll use an enema syringe. By squeezing the sheep’s bladder, I can make as much milk as Sergios wants flow through the reed into his mouth.”

  Sick as she was, Helen burst out laughing. “The very thing! What a clever husband I have. Oh—buy a new one.”

  “Yes, I suppose I should, shouldn’t I?” Argyros smiled for the first time that day. As he went out again, he felt a small stir of hope.

  Constantinople’s dairies were small, because there was not much room for grazing in the city. For the same reason, most of the dairies were at the edge of parks so the cattle could crop the grass there. The magistrianos hurried to the park where he had cut off the willow shoots that morning.

  He waited impatiently while the dairyman squeezed out a jug of milk. “You have a sick child?” the man asked.

  “No—his mother.”

  “Christ grant she get well, then, for her sake and the lad’s.” The dairyman and Argyros crossed themselves. The former went on, “Terrible, the smallpox. Me, I spend most of my time praying it’ll stay away from my family.”

  “So did I,” the magistrianos said bleakly.

  “Aye, and many besides you. I’ve more praying to do, though, for my wife Irene’s given me three sons and five daughters.” The dairyman bobbed his head. “I’m Peter Skleros, by the way.”

  Argyros gave his own name, then said, “Eight children! And all well?”

  “Aye, even little Peter, my youngest. He’s only three, and just starting to help get the dung out of the barn. Poor little fellow got a blister last week and had us all with our hearts in our throats, but it was only the cowpox.”

  “What’s that? I never heard of it,” Argyros said.

  “You’d have to be a dairyman or a farmer to know it. Mostly the cows catch it—you’d guess that from the name, wouldn’t you?” he chuckled, “—but sometimes them as keep ’em get it too. I had it myself, years ago. But that’s not here nor there—we’re all well, and if God wants to let us stay so, why, I’ll keep on thanking Him and praising His name. And I’ll add a prayer or two for your family while I’m about it.”

  “I thank you. May God hear yours more than He has mine.”

  “You pray for yourself, sir, too,” Skleros said. “I can see by looking that you’ve not had the smallpox. It’d go hard if it came on you along with the rest.”

  “Yes, it would.” The magistrianos shook his head; he had not thought about that. He made himself put the worry aside. Short of fleeing his wife and child, he could not lessen the chance he would take the disease. He clapped the lid on the jar of milk, tucked it under his arm, and headed home.

  “I hope I see you again,” the dairyman called after him.

  “So do I,” Argyros said.

  But when he got home, he forgot about Sergios and what his son needed, though the baby lay howling in his cradle. Helen must have set him down before she tried to return to her own bed, but she had not made it there. Argyros found her sprawled senseless on the floor. When he touched her, he swore and prayed at the same time: her fever was back, worse than before.

  She was a dead weight in his arms as he picked her up; absently, he wondered why unconscious people seemed so much heavier to carry.

  She half-roused when he set her on the bed. “Go away,” she muttered. “Go away.”

  “Hush.” He did leave her for a moment, to soak a rag in a ewer of water. On the way back, he blew on it to make it cool, then set it on her forehead. She sighed and seemed to lose touch with the world again. He sat beside her, took her limp hand in his.

  So passed the day. Argyros stayed by his wife, sponging her face and limbs with moist cloths and holding her still when the fever made her thrash about. She came partly to herself several times and kept urging him to get out. She would not listen to him when he told her no, but repeated her demand over and over.

  Finally she revived enough to ask him. “Why won’t you go?”

  “Because I love you,” he said. A smile lingered on her lips when she lapsed back into stupor. He had said that dozens of times while she was unconscious; it warmed him that she’d finally understood.

  He left the bedroom only when Sergios cried. He was clumsy cleaning the baby—Helen had done most of that—but he managed. Before he gave Sergios the milk-filled syringe, he smeared the tip of the tube with honey. The old midwife’s trick made the baby suck lustily, though he did make a face at the unfamiliar taste of his food.

  Near dusk, he cooked some thin barley gruel to feed Helen. As an afterthought, he stirred some honey into that, too: Helen was hardly thinking more clearly than Sergios. She ate about half of what he’d made, less than he’d thought she needed, but better, he supposed, than nothing.

  The thin waning crescent moon was rising in the east when exhaustion clubbed Argyros into sleep. A few minutes later, Sergios’s howling woke him. He stumbled out to take care of his son and heard the first cockcrow just as the baby was nodding off.

  His eyes were full of grit; he could feel himself walking in slow motion, as if the air had turned thick. Perhaps because he was so tired, the idea of going to Helen’s family for someone to help struck him with the force he imagined Christianity had hit St. Mouamet. He took along the empty jar that had held milk. While one of Helen’s younger brothers or sisters came to watch over her and the baby, he would go back to Skleros’s dairy and refill it; or he would send them to get the milk if they feared entering a disease-filled home.

  Helen’s father was a notary named Alexios Moskhos. As always, several dogs started barking when Argyros knocked on his door; on holidays, Moskhos liked to go into the countryside and hunt rabbits. The magistrianos waited for his father-in-law to come cursing and laughing through the pack to let him in.

  He heard Moskhos approach, but the door did not open. Instead, Moskhos cautiously called through it, “Who’s there? What do you want?”

  “It’s Basil. I need help—Helen’s sick.” He explained what he needed.

  There was a long silence. Then Argyros listened in disbelief as his father-in-law said, “You’d better go, Basil. I’ll pray for you, but no more than that. No one here’s been ill, and no one’s going to be if I have anything to do with it. I’ll not hazard all of mine against one already poxed.”

  “Let me hear your wife say that,” the magistrianos exclaimed.

  “It’s for her I do this.”

  “Why, you gutless, worthless—” Indignation choked Argyros. He hammered on the door with his fist. “Let me in!”

  “I’ll count three,” Moskhos said coldly. “Then I set the hounds on you. One—two—”

  The magistrianos left, cursing; he could tell his father-in-l
aw would do what he’d said. What made it somehow worse was that Argyros understood. He wondered what he would have done had Helen been well and Moskhos come to him for aid.

  He was honest enough to admit he did not know.

  Peter Skleros’s mouth turned down when Argyros came to buy more milk. “I was hoping your lady might just have, oh, eaten something spoiled that made her ill,” he said as he led the magistrianos into his barn. “But that’s not so, is it?”

  “I’m afraid not. I wish it were.”

  “And I,” the dairyman said. As he had said, his little son, also named Peter, was helping to clean the barn. He took the boy by the arm and brought him up to the magistrianos. “I wish it could have been like this.” There were three pockmarks, close together, on little Peter’s wrist. They looked like smallpox marks, but no smallpox escaped with so few.

  “This is your cowpox, eh?”

  “Yes.” He patted the boy on the bottom. “Run along, son; the gentleman is done with you now.” To Argyros: “Here, I’ll get your milk.” He pulled a stool up beside a cow.

  “Your family is still well?”

  “Yes, praise the Lord, the Virgin, and all the saints. Good of you to think to ask, sir, with your own troubles on your mind.” He handed the magistrianos the jar of milk, waved away payment. “Really, it’s not enough to bother over. You take it, and keep your boy strong till your wife is better.”

  Against the dairyman’s insistence, Argyros could only accept as gracefully as possible. He compared Skleros’s behavior to that of Helen’s father and could only shake his head. Like combat, the epidemic brought out the best and the worst in people.

  When he got home, it was as if he had not left. Helen’s fever still raged. Sometimes she knew him, but more often she was lost in a world of mostly unpleasant dreams. He tried to keep her cool, but the burning heat of her forehead dried his compresses almost as fast as he put them on.

  Sergios drank the cow’s milk. His father hoped he was taking enough. As with Helen, he supposed anything was better than nothing.