Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  Dekanos’ eyes went wide. “They might. They just might. And since they weren’t party to the agreements with the other guilds, we wouldn’t even have to pay them extra.”

  The magistrianos had thought about that too, in the third of an hour it took him to get to the prefect’s palace. He would enjoy revenge for Miysis’s insolence. Still, he said, “No, I think not. The contrast between those who do work on the pharos and have extra silver to jingle in their pouches and those who do not and have none—”

  “A distinct point,” Dekanos said. “Very well, let it be as you say. Some wealthy men will scream when their houses stand a while half-built—”

  “The Emperor of the Romans is screaming now, because his pharos has stood too long half-built.”

  “A distinct point,” Dekanos repeated. He shouted for scribes.

  Not even a journeyman carpenter was working at Khesphmois’s shop when Argyros pushed his way through the curtain of beads. Only a servant lounged in the open courtyard. As far as the magistrianos could see, the fellow’s main job was to make sure no one came in and made off with the partly made or partly repaired furniture there.

  The servant scrambled to his feet when Argyros came in. He bowed, said something in Coptic. The magistrianos spread his hands. “What you want?” the servant asked in broken Greek.

  “Is your master at home?” Argyros asked, speaking slowly and clearly—and also loudly. “I wish to pay my respects to him.”

  “Him not here,” the servant said after Argyros had repeated himself a couple of times. “Him, everyone at—how you say?—pharos. Work there all time. You want, you come sabbath day after prayers. Maybe here then.”

  “I won’t be here then,” Argyros said. “My ship sails for Constantinople day after tomorrow.”

  He saw the servant had not understood him and, sighing, began casting about in his mind for simpler words. He was just starting over when he heard a familiar voice from the living quarters behind the shop: “Is that you, Basil Argyros of Constantinople?”

  “Yes, Zois, it is.”

  She came out a moment later. “It’s good to see you again. Would you care for some wine and fruit?” Nodding, the magistrianos stepped toward her. The servant started to come too. Zois stopped him with a couple of sentences of crackling Coptic. To Argyros, she explained, “I told Nekhebu that Khesphmois wants him out here keeping an eye on the furniture, not inside keeping an eye on me. I can take care of myself; the furniture can’t.”

  “I’m sure you can, my lady.” Argyros let her lead him into the chamber where they had talked before.

  This time, she brought out the wine and dates herself. “Lukra had her brat last week, and she’s still down with a touch of fever,” she said. “I expect she will get over it.” Her voice was enigmatic; Argyros could not tell whether she wanted the serving-girl to recover.

  He said, “I came to thank Khesphmois for all he did to help end the anakhoresis. Since I’m lucky enough to see you, let me thank you also, for helping to turn him in that direction. I’m grateful.”

  She sipped her wine, nibbled daintily on a candied date, the pink tip of her tongue flicking out for a moment as it toyed with the fruit. “Did I hear you say you were leaving Alexandria day after tomorrow?”

  “Yes. It’s time for me to go. The pharos is a-building again, and so I have no need to stay any longer.”

  “Ah,” she said, which might have meant anything or nothing. After a pause that stretched, she went on, “In that case, you can thank me properly.”

  “Properly?” Somehow, Argyros thought, Zois’s eyes suddenly seemed twice as large as they had just before. She leaned back in her chair. He admired the fine curve of her neck. Then he was kneeling beside that chair, bending to kiss the smooth, warm flesh of her throat. Even if he was wrong, said the calculating part of him that never quite slept, Khesphmois had already returned to the pharos.…

  But he was not wrong. Zois’s breath sighed out; her hands clasped the back of his head. “The bedroom?” Argyros whispered some time later.

  “No. Lukra’s chamber is next to it, and she might overhear.” For all her sighs, Zois still seemed very much in control of herself. “We will have to manage here.”

  The room had neither couch nor, of course, bed, but not all postures require them. Manage they did, with Zois on her knees and using her chair to support the upper part of her body. She was almost as exciting as Argyros had imagined; in this imperfect world, he thought before all thought fled, one could hardly hope for more.

  She gasped with him at the end, but he was still coming back to himself when she turned to look over her shoulder at him and say, “Pull up your breeches.” As he did so, she swiftly repaired her own dishevelment. Then she waved him back to his own chair, remarking, “Khesphmois must not know what we’ve done. I do, which is what matters.”

  “So you were only using me to pay back Khesphmois?” he asked, more than a trifle nettled. Here he had thought he was desired for his sake, but instead found himself merely an instrument to Zois. This, he realized uncomfortably, had to be how a seduced woman felt.

  Zois’s reply reinforced his discomfort: “We all use one another, do we not?” She softened that a moment later, adding with a smile, “I will say I enjoyed this use more than some—more than most, even.”

  Something, that, but not enough. How many was most? Argyros did not want to know. He got to his feet. “I’d best head back to my lodging,” he said. “I still have some packing to do.”

  “For a ship that sails in two days?” Zois’ smile was knowing. “Go, then, if you think you must. As I said, though, I did enjoy it. And I will give Khesphmois your thanks—I’d not be so rude as to forget that.”

  “I’m so glad,” Argyros muttered. Zois giggled at his ostentatiously held aplomb, which only made him cling to it more tightly. The bow he gave her was as punctilious as if he’d offered it to the Master of Offices’ wife. She giggled again. He left, hastily.

  On the way back to his room—he really had no better place to go—he reflected on the changes he had made since coming to Alexandria. From celibate to fornicator to adulterer, all in the space of a few weeks, he thought, filled with self-reproach. Then he remembered that he would eagerly have become an adulterer before, had he thought Zois willing. Now he knew just how willing she was, and found something other than delight in the knowledge.

  Yet he also knew how sweet her body was, and the whore’s as well. Having fallen from celibacy, he doubted he would ever be able to return to it. As well, then, that he had not let grief drive him into a monastery. His instinct there had been right: he was much too involved with the things of this world to renounce it for the next until he drew his last breath. Best to acknowledge that fully, and live with the consequences as best he could.

  Thinking that, he let himself take some pride in his success here. One day before too many more years had passed, Alexandria’s beacon would shine again, saving countless sailors as time went by. Had he not come to help set things right, that might have been long delayed, or accomplished only through bloodshed. And preventing such strife might earn him credit in heaven, to set in the balance against the weight of his sins.

  He could hope, anyway.

  “Argyros! Wait!”

  The magistrianos set his duffel on the planking of the dock, turned to find out who was shouting at him. He was surprised to see Mouamet Dekanos hurrying up the quay toward him. “I thought you’d be just as glad to have me go far away,” he said as the Alexandrian bureaucrat came near.

  Dekanos smiled thinly. “I understand what you mean. Still, the pharos is going up, and I did have something to do with that. Besides which, I stay here, while you are going far away. My contribution will be remembered.” He checked to make sure no one was listening, lowered his voice. “I will make sure it is remembered.”

  “I daresay you will,” Argyros chuckled. He understood Dekanos’ logic perfectly well. What he did not understand was why the official
was carrying a duffelbag larger and fuller than his own. He pointed to it. “What have you there?”

  “I was most impressed with your ability to bring together two sides, neither of which was truly interested in finding a solution to their dispute until you intervened,” Dekanos said obliquely.

  Argyros gave a polite bow. “You’re very kind, illustrious sir. Still—”

  “You don’t think I answered you,” Dekanos finished for him.

  “No.”

  “Ah, but I did, for, you see, I’ve brought you another longstanding dispute which neither side seems interested in solving. What I have here, illustrious sir, is Pcheris vs. Sarapion—all of it.” With a sigh of relief, he set his burden down. It was heavier than Argyros’s sack; through his sandals, the magistrianos felt the dock timbers briefly quiver at its weight.

  “You’re sure that’s all?” he asked, intending irony.

  The attempt failed. “I do think so,” Dekanos answered seriously. “If not, the documents you have should refer back to any that happen to be missing.”

  “Oh, very well,” Argyros said, laughing, “I’ll take it on. As you say, after the pharos, something this small should be easy. The winds won’t favor my ship as much on the way back to Constantinople; God willing, I should be to the bottom of your case by the time I’m there. It will make the voyage less boring.”

  “Thank you.” Dekanos wrung the magistrianos’s hand. “Thank you.” The Alexandrian official bowed several times before taking his leave.

  Argyros shrugged quizzically as he watched him go. In his days in the imperial army, he’d sometimes received less effusive thanks for saving a man’s life. He shrugged again as he carried the two sacks onto the ship. He opened the one full of legal documents.

  Long before the pharos of Alexandria slipped below the southern horizon, he suspected Mouamet Dekanos had done him no favor. Long before he reached Constantinople again, he was sure of it.

  IV

  Etos Kosmou 6824

  With a grunt of displeasure, Pavlo sat down at his desk to draft his monthly report. The tourmarch of the border fortress of Pertuis inked his pen, sent it scraping over the parchment: “Events of the month of May, 1315—”

  He looked at the year he had carelessly written, swore, and scratched it out. Bad enough he had to compose in Latin. Both men who would read his report—his immediate superior Kosmas the kleisouriarch of the Pyrenees, and Arkadios the strategos of Ispania—came from Constantinople. Greek-speakers themselves, they would sneer at his lack of culture. Despite still being one of the two official tongues of the Roman Empire, Latin had far less prestige than Greek.

  Using the northern style of dating on an official document, though, might get him marked down as subversive, even if it was also popular in Ispania—and Italia too, come to that. He substituted the imperial year, reckoned from the creation of the world rather than the Incarnation: “—May, 6823, the thirteenth indiction.”

  He settled down to writing. Most of the report was routine: soldiers and horses out sick, deaths (only two—a good month), new recruits, supplies expended, traders traveling down through the pass of Pertuis into the Empire, tolls collected, traders going up into the Franco-Saxon kingdoms, and on and on.

  The description of the garrison’s drills was also something to get past in a hurry, except for one part. There he checked his own records, which he kept meticulously: “Liquid fire expended in exercises, two and five-sevenths tuns. Stock remaining on hand”—he flicked beads on his countingboard—“ninety-four and two-sevenths tuns. Seals of wholly expended tuns enclosed herewith.”

  He did not know what went into what the barbarians called “Greek fire”; nor did he want to. It was shipped straight from the imperial arsenal at Constantinople.

  He did know that he had best start looking for a good place to hide if he could not account for every drop he used. What happened to officials who let the northerners get their hands on the stuff did not bear thinking about.

  His pen ran dry. He inked it again and wrote, “One siphon was damaged during fire exercises. Our smith feels he can repair it.” Pavlo hoped so; Kosmas would take weeks to send him another of the long bronze tubes through which the liquid fire was discharged.

  The tourmarch scratched his head. What else needed reporting? “The Franco-Saxons have lately shown a good deal of interest in the woods just north of the fortress. The forest being on their side of the frontier, I have only been able to send a rider to make inquiry. They say they are after a nest of robbers; their count declined the help I offered.”

  Pavlo wondered if he should say more, then decided not to. Even if the barbarians had sent a lot of men into the woods, they were still comfortably out of arrow range. And they were such bunglers that they might need a couple of companies for a one-platoon job.

  The tourmarch folded the parchment into an envelope, lit a red beeswax candle at the lamp he always kept burning to have a fire handy, and let several drops splatter onto the report. When he had enough, he pushed his signet ring into the soft, hot wax.

  Shouting for a courier, he came from the gloomy keep into the bright sunshine of the courtyard.

  Something hissed through the air and landed with a surprisingly gentle thud twenty paces in front of him: a wicker-wrapped earthenware pot, a little bigger than his head. A wisp of smoke floated up from the top. At the same time as the sentry on the watchtower cried “Catapult!” another one thunked down in the courtyard.

  “To the walls! They’re coming!” the sentry screamed. Troopers snatched up bows, spears, and helmets and dashed for the stairs to the rampart.

  Pavlo cursed in good earnest and tore his report in half. He should have been more alert—the Franco-Saxons had been brewing mischief after all, though what they hoped to accomplish with a bombardment of crockery was beyond him.

  Suddenly the very air seemed torn apart. Pavlo thought a thunderbolt had struck the fort—but the sky was clear and blue. Something hot and jagged whined past his face. A cloud of thick gray smoke shot upward.

  The tourmarch looked around dazedly. Two men were down, shrieking; a third, who had been closest to the pot, was hardly more than a crimson smear on the ground. The cataclysmic noise had frozen the rest of the soldiers in their tracks.

  Outside, Pavlo heard the drumroll of hoofbeats, the whoops and war cries of the barbarians, horse and foot. His stunned wits started working again. “Go on! Move!” he roared to his men. Discipline told. They began to obey.

  Then another blast came, and a few seconds later another. Almost deafened, Pavlo could barely hear the wails and moans of the wounded. Smoke filled the courtyard; its acrid brimstone reek made the tourmarch cough and choke.

  “The northerners have called devils from hell!” someone yelled.

  The sentry’s voice went high and shrill. “Heaven protect us, you’re right! I can see them capering there, just at the edge of the forest, all in red, with horns and tails!”

  “Shut up!” Pavlo bellowed furiously, to no avail. Half the garrison was screaming in terror now. Against devils, no discipline could hold.

  And devils or no, those cursed catapults kept firing from the woods. A wrapped crock landed almost at the tourmarch’s feet. Too late, his mind made an intuitive leap. “It’s not demons!” he cried to whoever would listen. “It’s whatever’s in these—”

  The explosion flung him against the wall of the keep like a broken doll. A few minutes later, a bigger one smashed the gates of Pertuis. The Franco-Saxons stormed in.

  The beamy merchantman sailed slowly toward the Ispanic coast. “Won’t be long now, sir,” the captain promised.

  “The Virgin be praised,” exclaimed his passenger, a tall, thin, dark man with a neatly trimmed beard, blade-like nose, and oddly mournful eyes. “I’ve spent more than a month at sea, traveling from Constantinople.”

  “So you said, so you said.” It meant nothing to the captain; he spent most of his life on the water. He went on, “Aye, now we’ve w
eathered that little island back there (Scombraria they call it—name means ‘mackerel fishery,’ y’know), we’re home free. Island’s not just for fishing, either—shields the New Carthage harbor from storms.”

  “Of course,” the traveler said politely, though he had trouble following the man’s guttural African dialect of Latin. He went back to the deckhouse to reclaim his duffel bag and wait for the vessel to anchor.

  He had been aboard ship so long that the plain beneath his feet seemed to roll and pitch as he made the short walk to New Carthage, which sat on a hill. A bored guard asked his name and business. The fellow’s lisping Ispanic accent did not trouble him; it was not much different from the flavor his own Greek gave the Empire’s other tongue.

  He answered, “I’m Basil Argyros, a trader in garum out of the city.”

  “You’ve come a long way for fermented fish sauce,” the guard said, chuckling.

  Argyros shrugged. “New Carthage’s garum is famous around the Inner Sea. Would you be so kind as to tell me the way to the residence of the strategos? I’ll need to discuss quantities, prices, and shipping arrangements with him.”

  The guardsman looked at his comrades, said nothing. Sighing, Argyros dug a handful of copper forty-follis pieces from his pouch and distributed them. After pocketing his share of the money, the soldier gave directions, adding, “You know, Arkadios isn’t there. He’s up north someplace, campaigning against the barbarians.”

  “Not doing too bloody well, either,” one of the other guardsmen muttered.

  Argyros pretended not to hear that, but filed the information away. He sauntered into New Carthage. The city was large and well laid out, but of rather somber appearance because of the gray local stone from which it was built.

  The gate guard’s directions proved easy to follow. The strategos’s headquarters was just up the main street from New Carthage’s most splendid building, a church dedicated to the town’s patron saint, who had been its bishop during the reign of the first Herakleios, seven centuries before.