He walked past the sign-carriers, waving to a couple from the carpenters’ guild. The watchmen only nodded at him; by now, Argyros supposed, they must know him as well as their own officers. The magistrianos, who was on their side, got more hard looks than the master carpenter.
Khesphmois walked into the pharos. Argyros followed still. Their footsteps echoed in the gloom within. Khesphmois hurried over to the spiral stair just inside the doorway, started up.
The stairway was almost as dark as the chamber that led to it, though window openings set at intervals into the thick wall gave enough light for the magistrianos to see where he was putting his feet. The idea of stumbling and rolling down so long a stairway made his sweat turn cold.
By the time he reached the top even of the truncated pharos, Argyros had sweat in plenty. Ahead of him, Khesphmois still seemed fresh. The magistrianos muttered to himself as he panted up the last few steps. His time behind a desk in Constantinople was making him soft.
Alexandria’s usual northerly breeze helped cool him while he got his breath back. He turned his back to the breeze, peered across the Great Harbor at the city. The view was superb. He even towered high above the ancient obelisks—“Cleopatra’s Needles,” the locals called them, but they were older than that—not far from the Heptastadion’s southern root.
He had no idea how long he might have stood there staring, but Khesphmois’ dry cough recalled him to himself. “I didn’t bring you up here to sightsee,” the master carpenter said. “Look straight down.”
A long stride and a short one brought the magistrianos to the edge of the stone block on which he stood. No fence or rail separated him from a couple of hundred feet of empty space. He cautiously peered over the edge; only the discipline he had acquired in the Roman army kept him from going to his knees or belly first. Far, far below, the marchers and watchmen looked tiny as insects. Argyros was anything but sorry to step back. “A long way down,” he observed, stating the obvious.
Khesphmois had been watching him closely. “You’re a cool one,” he said, not sounding happy to admit it. “But how would you like to be working up here instead of just standing?”
“I wouldn’t,” the magistrianos admitted at once. “But then, it’s not my proper trade.”
“Working this high is no one’s proper trade,” Khesphmois said. “If you take a wrong step, if someone bumps you by accident, if a piece of scaffolding breaks while you’re on it, even if you make a bad stroke with your hammer, over you go and nothing’s left of you but a red smear on the rocks. There are plenty of them down below, and there would have been many more if we hadn’t staged the anakhoresis.”
“Some, certainly,” Argyros nodded. “Some trades are dangerous: the mines, the army, and, plainly, working at heights like this. But why do you say many?”
“The pharos is square in section thus far, yes?” Khesphmois said.
The magistrianos nodded again.
“Well, the next part is to be octagonal, and narrower—a tiny bit narrower,” the master carpenter went on. “What would you expect to happen to the carpenters who will have to face inward with almost no room at all to put their feet while they try to set up scaffolds, or to the stonecutters who try to climb onto the scaffolding to trim and polish the outsides of the blocks, or the concrete-spreaders who take away the excess that squeezes out from between the courses of blocks?”
“The risks are worse now, you’re telling me,” Argyros said slowly.
“That’s just what I’m telling you.”
“How do we make them less, then?” the magistrianos asked. “Enough less, I mean, to get the various guilds to come back to work? Alexandria and the whole Empire need this pharos restored.”
“And Alexandria and the whole Empire care not a moldy fig how many workers die restoring it,” Khesphmois said bitterly. “Now you’ve seen the problem, man from Constantinople. What do you aim to do about it?”
“Right now, I don’t know,” Argyros said. “I truly do not. I work no miracles, though this is a column any pillar-sitting saint might envy.”
Khesphmois grunted. “You’re honest, at any rate. You—” He stopped; the magistrianos had raised a hand.
“I wasn’t finished. One way or another, I will find you an answer. I swear it by God, the Virgin, and St. Mouamet, who as patron of changes will be apt to hear my oath.”
“So he will.” Khesphmois crossed himself; Argyros copied the gesture. The master carpenter went on, “Whether the Augustal prefect and his staff pay you any heed, though, is something else again.” Without waiting for an answer, he started down the stairway. After a final long look at the panorama of the city, Argyros followed.
That afternoon, back on the mainland once more, he peered out toward the half-erected pharos. Thinking of it like that reminded him of the bawdy pun he had unwittingly made earlier in the day. And thinking of that pun made him come half-erect.
He scowled and clenched his fists, trying to force his body back under the control of his will. His body, as bodies do, resisted. Oh, you’d make a fine monk, he told himself angrily, a wonderful monk: they’d canonize you after you died, under the name St. Basil Priapos. This was a fine way to remember Helen.
But he remembered her all too vividly, remembered the touch of his lips and the surge of her body against his. He caught himself wondering how Zois would be. That thought made him angrier than ever: not only was it shameful lust, it betrayed the memory of his dead wife. He still wondered, though.
When he dreamed that night, as always he woke too soon.
“My dear sir, surely you are joking!” Mouamet Dekanos’ eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “You want me to sit down and dicker with these, these laborers? Think of the ghastly precedent it would set! Ghastly!”
“I’ve thought of it,” Argyros admitted. “I don’t like it. I don’t like seeing the pharos still half-built, either. Nor does the Emperor. That problem is immediate. The precedent will just have to take care of itself.”
Dekanos stared at him as if he had just proposed converting the whole population of the Roman Empire to Persian sun-worship by force. “Precedent, my dear sir, is part of the glue that holds the Empire together,” he said stiffly.
“So it is,” the magistrianos said. “The grain shipments from Alexandria to Constantinople are another part, and the Emperor has lost patience with having ships on their way back here go astray without need. In this case, he reckons that of greater importance than precedent.”
“So you say,” Dekanos retorted. “So you say.”
“Would you like me to meet with the Augustal prefect and ask his opinion of your attitude?”
The Alexandrian functionary’s face went dark with anger. “You’re bluffing.”
“Try me.” As a matter of fact, Argyros was. In an argument with someone from the distant, resented capital, he was sure the prefect would back his own aide. Still, had he been an intimate of the Master of Offices instead of merely one of his magistrianoi, not even the Augustal prefect could have afforded to ignore him. And George Lakhanodrakon’s letter made him seem to be one. He rose, took out the parchment and unrolled it, flourished it in Dekanos’ face. “You do recall this, I hope?”
“Well, what if I do?” Dekanos was still scowling. “For that matter,” he went on angrily, “how will you be able to gather all these fractious guild leaders together and make them and their guild members abide by anything they might agree to? For all you know, they will say one thing to ease the pressure on them and then turn round and do just the opposite.”
When the official shifted the basis of the argument, Argyros knew he had his man. “If they do that, would they not have gone beyond the bounds even of what you Alexandrians tolerate in an anakhoresis?” he asked. “You could then use whatever force you had to with less fear of bringing the whole city to the point of insurrection.”
“Perhaps.” Dekanos pursed his lips. “Perhaps.”
“As for gathering the leaders of the guilds,” the magistr
ianos said persuasively, “leave that to me. I wouldn’t think of formally involving you with speaking to them until everything on the other side was in readiness.’”
“Certainly not,” Dekanos said, mollified by Argyros’ apparent concern for proper procedure. “Hmm. Yes, I suppose you can go forward, then, provided you do it on those terms and provided you stress our unique clemency in treating with the artisans in this one special case.”
“Of course,” said the magistrianos, who had no intention of stressing anything of the sort. He bowed his way out of Dekanos’ office, and did not grin until his back was to the Alexandrian. Grinning still, he headed for Khesphmois’ shop in the district of Rhakotis.
He did not see the master carpenter when he walked through the beaded curtain. Only one of the journeymen was there, luckily one who spoke some Greek. The fellow said, “He not back till tomorrow. He helping build—how you say?—grandstand for parade. Busy all night, he say.” The man chuckled. “He terrible mad about that. I there too, but have this cabinet to repair for rich man. He want it now, no matter what. Rich men like that.”
“Yes,” Argyros said, though he knew nothing of being rich from personal experience. He hesitated, then asked, “What does the parade celebrate?”
“Feast-day for St. Arsenios.”
“Oh.” Argyros wondered what the saint, a man who had withdrawn from the world to live out his life as a monk in the Egyptian desert, would think of having his memory celebrated with a large, noisy parade. He shrugged. That was the Alexandrians’ problem. Khesphmois was his. “I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon, then. I do need to see your master.” He turned to go, thinking that as long as he was in this part of the city, Teus might direct him to some other master carpenters.
“Can I do anything to help you, man from Constantinople?”
Argyros had just put his hand in the entranceway to thrust aside the strings of beads. Now he jerked it back. Small spheres of glass and painted clay clicked off one another. “Truly I don’t know, my lady,” he said. His unspoken thought was, that depends on how much influence you have on your husband.
Zois might have picked it out of the air. “I know you did not come all this way simply to see me,” she said, her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth lifting slightly in a cynical smile. Eve might have worn that smile, Argyros thought, when God came to talk business with Adam, and later given Adam his comeuppance for the visit. He put aside his blasphemous maunderings; Zois was going on, “Still, perhaps we could discuss it over a cup of wine.”
The magistrianos’s eyes flicked to the journeyman carpenter, but the fellow did not look up from the work he had resumed. And no wonder: with her husband absent, Zois had not presumed to come out alone to speak with Argyros. A servant girl stood behind her, a pretty little thing who could not have been more than fifteen and who was, the magistrianos saw, about eight months pregnant.
He considered. “Thank you,” he said at last. “Maybe we could.”
“This way,” Zois said, then spoke in Coptic to the servant girl, who dipped her head and hurried off. “Don’t let fear of Lukra’s spying on us worry you,” Zois told the magistrianos as she led him back toward the rooms where she and Khesphmois lived. “She has no Greek. My husband did not take her on for that.” She smiled her ancient smile again.
Like the shop, the home behind it was of mud brick. The rooms were small and rather dark. The furniture was splendid, though, which surprised Argyros until he remembered Khesphmois’ trade.
Lukra came back a few minutes later with wine, dates candied in honey, and sheets of flat, chewy unleavened bread. Zois waited for the girl to pour the wine, spoke again in Coptic. Lukra disappeared. “She will not be back,” Zois said, nodding to herself. She raised her cup to the magistrianos. “Health to you.”
“Health to you,” he echoed, drinking. The vintage was not one he knew, which meant it was most likely a local one not reckoned fine enough to export. It was not bad, though, and had a tartness that cut through the cloyingly sweet taste of the dates.
Zois ate, then wiped her hands and patted at her mouth with a square of embroidered linen. “Now,” she said when she was through, “what do you need from Khesphmois?”
“His cooperation in getting the other leaders of the carpenters’ guild and the men who head the rest of the guilds that have withdrawn from work on the pharos to talk with the Augustal prefect’s deputy so they can agree on a way to get construction started again.”
Her eyes, already large, seemed to grow further as she widened them in surprise. “You can arrange this?”
“If the guildsmen will play their part, yes. I already have agreement from the prefect’s deputy. The pharos is too important not only to Alexandria but to all the Empire to be delayed by this anakhoresis.”
“I agree,” Zois said at once. “I warned Khesphmois from the outset that the guilds were facing too dangerous a foe in the city government, because it could crush them if their stubbornness pushed it to the point of wanting to. I will help with anything that has a hope of ending the anakhoresis peacefully.”
“Thank you.” Argyros did not tell her the Augustal prefect and his staff were as frightened of the guilds’ power as she was of the government’s. Having both sides wary was probably a good idea. He went on, “Do you think you can sway your husband to your point of view?”
“I suspect so. Khesphmois is more likely to insist on having his own way on matters where there is no risk to him.” The magistrianos thought that was only sensible, and true of anyone. Then Zois went on, “Take Lukra, for instance. Khesphmois did.” Bitterness well forth in her voice.
“Did he?” Argyros’ interest, among other things, rose. So that was why she was seeing him alone, he thought: for the sake of revenge on her husband. That was sinful. So was the act of adultery itself. At the moment, the magistrianos did not care. Relief would have been easy to buy at any time since Helen died. Despite his body’s urgings, he had held back.
This, though … Zois was attractive in an exotic way, clever enough for him to hope to enjoy her mind as well as her body. And she might be his for as long as he was in Alexandria, long enough, perhaps, for something more than desire—or her anger at Khesphmois—to bind them together. It would not be what he had known with his wife, but it could be better than the emptiness that had ruled his life these past years.
He got up, took a step toward Zois’s chair. Then he noticed she had not stopped talking while lust filled his head. She was saying, “But for all his faults, he is not a bad man at bottom, you know. I would not see him hurt in any way, and he would be, he and many others, if the anakhoresis were put down by force.”
“Yes, that’s likely so,” the magistrianos agreed woodenly. He sat back down.
Zois sighed. “If God had not willed that I be barren, I am sure Khesphmois would have left Lukra alone. And when the child is born, he and I will rear it as if it were our own.” Her laugh was shaky. “Here I am going on about my own life, when you came to talk of weighty affairs. I do apologize.”
“Think nothing of it, my lady.” Now the magistrianos’ voice sounded as it should. So that was why she was seeing him alone, he thought again, but this time with a different reason behind the that: unburdening herself to a sympathetic stranger had to be easier than talking with a neighbor or friend here. A stranger would not be likely to gossip.
Argyros laughed at himself. Before he married Helen, he had never imagined himself irresistible to women. Thinking Zois had found him so was bracing. It made him proud. He knew what pride went before. Even as he had that thought, he felt himself falling.
“You are a kind man,” Zois said. “As I told you, I will do my best to make sure my husband lends his influence to meeting with the prefect’s men and trying to end the anakhoresis. And now, would you care for another date?” She held out the platter to him.
“No, thank you.” When the magistrianos got up this time, he did not approach the master carpenter’s wife. “I’
m glad I can count on you, but now I do have other business to attend to.” He let her show him out.
As the beads clicked behind him, he wondered what the other business was. For the life of him, he could not think of any. Maybe escaping his own embarrassment counted.
He walked north to the street of Kanopos, Alexandria’s main east-west thoroughfare, the one on which St. Athanasios’s church fronted. With nothing better to do, he thought he would imitate many of the locals and lie down in his room during the midday heat.
Someone plucked at the sleeve of his tunic. He whirled, one hand dropping to the hilt of his sword—like any large city, Alexandria was full of light-fingered rogues. But this was no rogue—it was a girl two or three years older than Zois’s maidservant. Under the paint on her face, she might have been pretty were she less thin. “Go to bed with me?” she said; Argyros would bet it was most of the Greek she knew. No, she had a bit more, a price: “Twenty folleis.”
A big copper coin for an embrace … The magistrianos had rejected such advances before without having to think twice. Now, his blood already heated from what he had thought—no, hoped, he admitted to himself—he heard himself say, “Where?”
The girl’s face lit up. She was pretty, he saw, at least when she smiled. She led him to a tiny chamber that opened onto an alley a couple of blocks from the street of Kanopos. With the door shut, the cubicle was hot, stuffy, and nearly night-dark. Argyros knew the much-used straw pallet would have bugs, but the girl was pulling her shift off over her head, laying down and waiting for him to join her. He did.
Afterwards, he saw her scorn even in the gloom. After so long without a woman, he had spent himself almost at once. But that long denial was not to be relived with a single round. “You pay twice,” she warned, but then she was moving with him, urging him on. Harlots had their wiles, he knew, but he thought he pleased her the second time. He knew he pleased himself.
He knew he pleased her when he gave her a silver miliaresion, much more than she had asked of him. Maybe, for a while, she would be a little less scrawny.
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