Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  “Very good,” Dekanos said, plainly pleased the magistrianos had stayed with him. “You are right, sir. Very good. But here in Alexandria, you see, the guilds have also learned to play the game of anakhoresis. Let something not go to their liking, and they walk away from their jobs.”

  “And that—”

  “—is what has happened with the pharos, yes.”

  “May the Virgin preserve us all.” Argyros felt his head begin to ache.

  “There’s more.” Mouamet Dekanos seemed to take morbid pleasure in going on with his bad news. “As I say, this is Alexandria; we’ve dealt with guild anakhoreseis before—or with one guild’s withdrawing, anyway. But all the guilds pulled out of working on the pharos at the same time, and none will go back till they all agree they’re happy. And this is Alexandria, where no one wants to agree with anyone about anything.”

  “Well,” the magistrianos said, doing his best to hold on to reason, “they must all have been happy once upon a time, or no work ever would have been done. What made them want to, uh, withdraw in the first place?”

  “Good question,” Dekanos said. “I wish I had a good answer for you.”

  “So do I.”

  Most of the letters on the signs above shops in Alexandria’s western district looked Greek, but most of the words they spelled out were nonsense to Argyros. He knew no Coptic; as well as confusing his eyes, the purring, hissing speech filled his ears, for the quarter known as Rhakotis had for centuries been the haunt of native Egyptians.

  The locals eyed him suspiciously. His inches and relatively light skin said he was not one of them. But those same inches and the sword on his belt warned he was no one to trifle with. Hard looks were as far as the natives went.

  He stopped into a cobbler’s shop that advertised itself not only in Coptic but in intelligible if badly spelled Greek. As he’d hoped, the man inside had a smattering of that language. “Can you tell me how to find the street where the carpenters work?” the magistrianos asked. He jingled coins in his hand.

  The cobbler did not hold out an open palm, though. “Why you want to know?” he growled.

  “The leaders of their guild will have shops there, surely. I need to speak with them,” Argyros said. The fellow, he noticed, had not denied knowing; he did not want to get his wind up. When the cobbler still said nothing, Argyros gave a mild prod: “If I intended anything more, would I not come with a squadron of soldiers who know exactly where the guildsmen work?”

  The cobbler grinned at that. His teeth were very white against his dark brown skin. “Suppose you might,” he admitted. He gave directions, so quickly that Argyros made him slow down and repeat them several times. Alexandria’s grid of streets helped strangers find their way around, but only so much.

  The magistrianos had a good ear for instructions. After only a couple of wrong turns, he found himself on a street loud with the pounding of hammers and fragrant from sawdust. Again he looked for a shop with a bilingual sign. When he found one, he stepped in and waited for the carpenter to look up from the chair he was repairing. The carpenter said something in Coptic, then, after a second look at Argyros, tried Greek: “What can I do for you today, sir?”

  “You can start by telling me why the carpenters’ guild has withdrawn from work on the pharos.”

  The carpenter’s face, which had been open and interested a moment before, froze. “That’s not for me to say, sir,” he answered slowly. “You need to talk to one of the chiefs.”

  “Excellent,” Argyros said, making the man blink. “Suppose you take me to one.”

  Outmaneuvered, the carpenter set down his mallet. He turned his head, shouted. After a few seconds, a stripling who looked just like him came out of a back room. A rapid colloquy in Coptic followed. The carpenter turned back to Argyros. “My son will watch the shop while we are gone. Come.”

  He sounded resentful, and kept looking back at the mallet on the floor. Then he saw the magistrianos’s hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Shaking his head, he led Argyros out into the street.

  Argyros glanced up at the sign again. “Your name is Teus?” he asked. The carpenter nodded. “And who is the man to whom you’re taking me?”

  “He is called Khesphmois,” Teus said. He kept his mouth shut the rest of the way to Khesphmois’s shop.

  KHESPHMOIS—MASTER CARPENTER, the sign above the establishment declared in Greek and, Argyros supposed, Coptic. The look of the place did not contradict the sign’s claim. It was three times the size of Teus’s shop, and on a busier corner to boot. People bustled in and out, and the racket of several men working carried out to the street.

  Teus led Argyros through the beaded entrance-curtain that did something, at least, to keep flies outside. A carpenter looked up from the dowel he was filing, smiled and nodded at Teus. The fellow did not seem to be Khesphmois himself, for Teus’s sentence had the master carpenter’s name in it and sounded like a question.

  The other man’s reply had to mean something like, “I’ll bring him.” He got up, hurried off. When he came back from behind a pile of boards a moment later, he had with him another man, one with only a few more years than Argyros’s thirty or so. The magistrianos was expecting a graybeard, but this vigorous fellow had to be Khesphmois.

  So he was. Teus bowed to him, at the same time dropping a hand to his own knee, an Egyptian greeting Argyros had already seen a dozen times in the streets of Rhakotis. When Khesphmois had returned the salute, Teus spoke for a couple of minutes in Coptic, pointing at the magistrianos as he did so.

  Khesphmois’ round, clean-shaven face went surprisingly stern as Teus drew to a close. Like Teus—like all the carpenters in the shop—he wore only sandals and a white linen skirt that reached from his waist to just above his knees, but he also clothed himself in dignity. In good Greek, he asked Argyros. “Who are you, a stranger, to question the long-established right of our guild to withdraw from a labor we have found onerous past any hope of toleration?”

  “I am Basil Argyros, magistrianos in the service of his imperial majesty, the Basileus Nikephoros III, from Constantinople,” Argyros replied. Khesphmois’ shop went suddenly quiet as everyone within earshot stopped work to stare. Into that sudden silence, the magistrianos went on, “I might add that in Constantinople, guilds have no right of anakhoresis, long-established or otherwise. Seeking as he does to restore what is an ornament to your city and its commerce, the Emperor does not look with favor on your refusal to cooperate in that work. He has sent me here”—a slight exaggeration, but one that would not be wasted on the carpenters—“to do what I can to move it forward once more.”

  The carpenters spoke to—before long, yelled at—one another in Coptic. Argyros wished he could follow what they were saying. Whatever it was, it got hotter by the second. Finally Khesphmois, who had been less noisy than most, raised his hand in an almost imperial gesture of command. Quiet slowly returned.

  The master carpenter told Argyros, “This is not Constantinople, sir, and you would do well to remember it. So would the Emperor. You may tell him so, if you have his ear.” Khesphmois spoke in dry tones, seeming used to officials who boasted of their lofty connections. Argyros felt his ears grow hot. Khesphmois continued, “Perhaps you should pick another guild to try to frighten. The carpenters stand firm.” Teus and those of Khesphmois’s men who knew Greek snarled agreement.

  “You misunderstand me—” Argyros began to protest.

  “And you misunderstand us,” Khesphmois broke in. “Now go, or it will be the worst for you. Get out!” Just because he hadn’t shouted before, Argyros had judged that he did not care to. That was a mistake.

  The magistrianos kept his hand away from his sword this time. Too many men had too many potential weapons close by. “The prefect will hear of your intransigence,” he warned. “He may try to root it out by force.”

  “He has known of it for a long time,” Khesphmois retorted. “And if he uses force, there will be anakhoresis by every guild in Alexandria.
We will stop the city. He knows that too. So—” He jerked a thumb toward the curtain of beads.

  Furious and frustrated, Argyros turned to go. He was reaching out to shove the beads aside when someone behind him called, “Wait!” He spun round, startled. It was a woman’s voice.

  “Zois,” Khesphmois said, naming her and at the same time letting the magistrianos know from the mixture of patience and annoyance in his voice that she was his wife. He had used that same tone with Helen, and she with him, many times. As always, sorrow stabbed him when he thought of her.

  “Don’t ‘Zois’ me,” the woman snapped; her Greek was as good as her husband’s. “You are making a mistake if you turn this man from Constantinople into an enemy.”

  “I don’t think so,” Khesphmois said, also in Greek. Maybe only a couple of his men spoke it, Argyros thought, and he wanted to keep the family spat as private as he could. He was sure that was a forlorn hope, but grateful because it let him follow the talk.

  “I know you don’t. That’s why I came out,” Zois said. She was a few years younger than her husband, slim where he would soon be portly, and quite short. Her high cheekbones were the best feature of her swarthy face, those and her eyes, which were very large and dark. Her chin was delicate, but the wide mouth above it was at the moment thin and firmly set.

  The magistrianos waited for Khesphmois to send his wife away for interfering in men’s business. As he would learn, though, Egyptians were easier about such things than was usual at Constantinople. And even in the capital, men who exercised over their wives all the control legally theirs were most of them unhappily wed.

  “Can you afford to be wrong?” Zois demanded. Her hand went to the silk collar of her blue linen tunic. Only someone well off could have afforded the ornament. “If you are wrong, we will lose everything, and not just us but all the carpenters and all the other guilds. If someone comes all the way from Constantinople to see to this business, he will not just up and leave.”

  “Your lady wife”—Argyros gave her his best bow—“is right. I am not especially wise, but I am especially stubborn. I should also tell you I am not a good man to sink in a canal, in case the thought crossed your mind. Magistrianoi look after their own.”

  “No,” Khesphmois said absently; that he was still more intent on arguing with Zois made Argyros believe him. To her, his hands on hips in irritation, the master carpenter went on, “What would you have me do, then? Call off the anakhoresis now?”

  “Of course not,” she answered at once. “But why not show him the reasons for it? He is from far away; what can he know of how things are here in Alexandria? When he sees, when he hears, maybe he will have the influence in the capital to make the prefect and his henchmen easier on us. What have you to lose by trying?”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Khesphmois mocked. “Maybe I will turn into a crocodile and spend the next hundred years basking on a sandbank, too, but I don’t lose any sleep over it.” Still, for his wife’s last question he had no good answer, and so, scowling, he growled to Argyros, “Come along then, if you must. I’ll take you to the pharos, and we’ll find out if you have eyes in your head to see with.”

  Teus and a couple of other carpenters started to protest, but Khesphmois shouted them down in Coptic that sounded pungent. “Thank you,” the magistrianos said to him, and got only another scowl for an answer. The magistrianos turned to Zois, bowed again. “And thank you, my lady.” He spoke as formally as if to a Constantinopolitan noblewoman, as much in the hope of vexing Khesphmois as for any other reason.

  He was surprised when Zois dipped her head in the same elegant acknowledgment one of those noblewomen might have used. He had a moment to notice how gracefully her neck curved. Then Khesphmois repeated, “Come along, you.” Without waiting to see whether Argyros would follow, the master carpenter stamped out into the street.

  The magistrianos hurried after him. “Goodbye,” Zois called. “Goodbye, the both of you.” That nearly brought Argyros up short, not so much because she was polite to include him but because she used the dual number, the special—and most archaic—grammatical form reserved for pairs.

  Even coming from his imagined noblewoman, the dual would have sounded pretentious. Hearing it from an Egyptian carpenter’s wife was strange indeed. Argyros wondered where she could have learned it. Thinking back, he decided that was the first time she became an individual for him.

  At the time, though, the thought was gone in an eye-blink, because he had to hustle along to catch up with Khesphmois. The master carpenter was short and stocky, but moved with a grim determination that Argyros, even with his longer legs, was hard-pressed to match.

  He tried several times to make small talk. Khesphmois answered only in grunts. The one thing Argyros really wanted to say—“Your wife is an interesting woman”—he could not, not to a man he had known less than an hour and who was no friend of his. He soon walked on in silence, which seemed to suit Khesphmois well enough.

  The master carpenter might also have been impervious to heat, no mean asset in Alexandria. He tramped along the raised road that still marked the path of the original, narrow Heptastadion, then east on the southern coast of the island of Pharos to the base of the lighthouse there.

  The pharos, even in its present half-rebuilt state, grew more awe-inspiring with every step Argyros took toward it. He had long thought no building could be grander than Constantinople’s great church of Hagia Sophia, but the sheer vertical upthrust of the pharos had a brusque magnificence of its own. Already it was taller than the top of Hagia Sophia’s central dome, and would reach twice that height if ever finished.

  Khesphmois craned his neck at the towering pillar too. “It only goes to show,” he said, “that Alexandria breeds real men.”

  Argyros snorted, suspecting locals had been using that joke on newcomers for all the sixteen centuries since Sostratos first erected (coming up with that word made the magistrianos snort all over again) the phallos. Pharos, he corrected himself sternly, ordering his mind to stop playing tricks with words. Suddenly he felt every day of his two years of celibacy.

  His mental order proved easier to carry out than he had expected. As he and Khesphmois approached the lighthouse, he began to take more notice of the line of men marching in front of it. Some of them carried placards. Argyros frowned, puzzled. “Are they mendicant monks?” he asked the master carpenter. “They are not in monastic garb.”

  Khesphmois threw back his head and laughed. “Hardly. Come with me yet a little farther, and you will see.”

  Shrugging, the magistrianos obeyed. He saw that not all the men by the pharos were marching after all. The ones who were just standing around looked like a squad of light infantry—they had no body armor, but wore helmets and carried shields and spears. They also looked monumentally bored. One trooper, in fact, was fast asleep, leaning back against the lighthouse’s lowest course of stonework.

  The marchers seemed hardly more excited than the soldiers; Argyros was certain they were doing something they had done many times before. Then he drew close enough to read their placards, and doubted in rapid succession his conclusions and his eyesight.

  THIS LABOR IS TOO DANGEROUS FOR ANY MAN TO CARRY OUT, one sign said. PALTRY PAY FOR DEADLY WORK, another shrieked. CARPENTERS AND CONCRETE-SPREADERS WITHDRAW TOGETHER, shouted a third. Others were in Coptic, but the magistrianos had no doubt they were equally inflammatory.

  “Why don’t the soldiers drive them away?” he demanded of Khesphmois. “Why are they here, if not for that? Have the guilds bribed the commander of the watch to let this sedition go on?” He was shocked to the core. Such an insolent display at Constantinople—or any other town he knew—would instantly have landed the marchers in prison.

  “At least your questions are to the point,” the master carpenter said. “A good thing, since you have so many of them.”

  “May your answers match my questions, then.” Argyros felt brief pride at his sardonic response; he did not want Khes
phmois to know just how disturbed he was.

  “Very well,” Khesphmois said. “The soldiers are here mostly to see that the marchers do no pilfering. And no, we have not bribed the watch commander, though I must say we tried. But Cyril is an honest man, worse luck for us.”

  By then, the magistrianos suspected that trying to hide his shock was a losing battle. Anywhere else in the Empire, if artisans refused to work—in itself unlikely—soldiers would simply force them to return. But Mouamet Dekanos struck Argyros as being plenty bright enough to try that if he thought it would work. That meant, Argyros concluded unhappily, that Khesphmois and the other guild leaders really could raise Alexandria if these weird privileges of theirs were tampered with.

  “Egypt,” Argyros muttered. Nowhere else in the Empire would such nonsense as Pcheris vs. Sarapion have dragged on for seven hundred years, either. The magistrianos gathered himself, turned back to Khesphmois. “Why,” he asked carefully, “have all you workers chosen to withdraw?”

  The master carpenter looked at him with something like respect. “Do you know, you are the first official who ever bothered to ask that. The prefect and his staff just told us to go back to work, the way they do during a usual anakhoresis. Any other time we would, eventually. But not now. Not here. So they have waited, not daring to set soldiers on us and not knowing what else to do, and we have stayed away and nothing has got done.”

  That sounded appallingly likely to Argyros. If a contested inheritance could stay contested for seven centuries, what were a couple of years here or there in putting a pharos back together? Delay would be a way of life for the local bureaucrats, here even more than in most of the Empire. Well, one of the things magistrianoi were for was shaking up officials too set in their ways.

  “I’m asking,” the magistrianos said. “Why haven’t you gone back to work?”

  “By St. Cyril, I’ll show you,” Khesphmois exclaimed. “Follow me, if you’ve the stomach—and the head—for it.”