Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  Leontios greeted him cordially when, having had enough playacting, he went over to the garrison commander’s headquarters. “Any progress?”

  “Not really,” Argyros said. “I have more new questions than answers. First, are you sure your men have Daras sealed off from getting these handbills from outside?”

  “I told you so yesterday. Oh, I’ll not deny they’d take the gold to let some things through, but not that poison. We’ve lived through too many religious riots to want more.”

  “Fair enough. Next question: where can I find the best map of the city?”

  Leontios tugged at his beard as he thought. “That would be in the eparch’s office, not here. He collects the headtax and the hearthtax, so he has to keep track of every property in the city. My own charts are years out of date—the main streets don’t change much, and they’re mainly what I’m concerned with as a military man.”

  “No blame on you,” Argyros assured him. “Now—third one pays for all. Do you keep note of where in Daras your troopers have pulled down the parchments?”

  He waited tensely. Many soldiers would not have bothered with such trivia. But the Roman bureaucratic tradition was strong, even in the army, and there was a chance—Leontios’s relieved grin told him he had won the gamble. “I have them,” the garrison commander said. “I warn you, though, not all are in Greek. Do you read Arabic?”

  “Not a word of it. But surely some bright young clerk in the eparch’s chancery will. I shall go there now; when you gather your troopers’ reports, please be so good as to send them after me.”

  “With pleasure.” Leontios cocked an eyebrow at the magistrianos. “If I dared say no, I suppose you’d set upon me, as you did on those two hoodlums yesterday.”

  “Oh, that.” Argyros had almost forgotten the incident. Doubting he would hear anything worthwhile, he asked, “What did you learn from the one your men took?”

  “Ravings, I’m certain—what’s the point of torturing a man who’s just been kicked in the crotch? He keeps babbling of a woman who paid him and his partner to assault you. He’s been drinking poppy juice, if you ask me. Anyone out to hire killers would pick a better pair than those sorry sods, don’t you think?”

  “I’d hope so,” Argyros said, but the news disturbed him. The woman, he felt sure, was Mirrane, but he could not see the game she was playing. Had the attack been a setup to make him grateful to her? If so, why was the hired tough still around to speak of it? “Perhaps I’ll have a word with the fellow myself, after I’m done at the eparch’s.”

  “Feel free. Meanwhile, I’ll hunt up those notes and get them over there for you.”

  The chief map in the eparch’s office was several feet square, an updated papyrus facsimile of the master map of Daras inscribed on a bronze tablet in the imperial chancery at Constantinople. At Argyros’s request, the eparch—a plump, fussy little man named Mammianos—provided him with a small copy on a single sheet of parchment.

  As the magistrianos had predicted, several of Mammianos’s secretaries were fluent in Arabic. “One has to have them here, sir,” the eparch said, “if one is to transact the business necessary to the fisc.” He assigned Argyros a clerk named Harun, which the magistrianos guessed to be a corruption of the perfectly good Biblical name Aaron.

  After that there was nothing to do but wait for Leontios’s messenger, who arrived an hour or so later with an armload of papyri, parchments, and ostraca. He dumped them in front of Argyros and departed.

  The magistrianos sorted out the notes in Greek, which he could handle himself. “‘In front of the shop of Peter son of Damian, on the Street of the Tailors,’” he read. “Where’s that, Harun?” The clerk pointed with a stylus. Argyros made a mark on his map.

  It was nearly sunset when the last dot went into its proper place. “Many thanks,” Argyros said. He gave a nomisma to the secretary, who had proven a model of patience and competence, and waved off his stammered protests. “Go on, take it—you’ve earned it. I couldn’t have done any of this without you. Mammianos is well served.”

  Leontios was on the point of going home when the magistrianos came back to his headquarters. “I’d about given up on you. What did you find? That the handbills are thickest in the parts of town where the most Nestorians live?”

  “That’s just what I expected,” Argyros said, admiring the officer’s quick wits. “But it isn’t so. Here; see for yourself. Each dot shows where a parchment was found.”

  “The damn things are everywhere!” Leontios grunted after a quick look at the map.

  “Not quite.” Argyros bent over the parchment and pointed. “See, here’s a patch where there aren’t any.”

  “Isn’t that big square building the barracks here? No wonder the filthy rabble-rousers stayed away. They’re bastards, but they’re not fools, worse luck.”

  “So it is. Odd, though, wouldn’t you say, that your strongpoint is on the edge of the empty area instead of at the center? And what of this other blank stretch?”

  “Over in the west? Ah, but look, there’s the church of St. Bartholomew in it. The priests would be as likely to raise the alarm as my soldiers. Likelier, maybe; not all my men are orthodox.”

  “But again,” Argyros pointed out, “the church is at the edge of the clear space, not in the middle. And look, here is the Great Church, in the very center of town, with a handbill nailed to one of its gates. The agitators aren’t afraid of priests, it seems.”

  “So it does,” Leontios said reluctantly. “What then?”

  “I wish I knew. What puzzles me most, though, is this third empty area, close to the northern wall. From what Mammianos’s clerk said, it’s a solidly Nestorian district, and yet there are no parchments up in it.”

  “Where is that? Let me see. Aye, the fellow’s right; that’s the worst part of town, probably because of the stink. Dyers and butchers and gluemakers and tanners and such work there. To say nothing of thieves, that is—the one who went for you hailed from that section.”

  “Oh yes, him. He almost slipped my mind again. As I said, I’d like to ask him a few questions of my own.”

  Leontios looked embarrassed. “There’s a harsher judge than you questioning him now, I’m afraid. He died a couple of hours ago.”

  “Died? How?” Argyros exclaimed.

  “From what the gaoler says, pain in the belly, and I don’t mean on account of your foot. If I had to guess, I’d think the fish sauce went over; you know how hard it is to keep in this climate.”

  “I suppose so,” the magistrianos said, but the ruffian’s death struck him as altogether too pat. He stared down at the map on Leontios’s desk, trying by sheer force of will to extract meaning from the cryptic pattern there. It refused to yield. Grumbling in annoyance, he rolled up the map and walked back to Shahin’s tavern. A copper twenty-follis piece bought the services of a torchboy to light his way through the black maze of nighttime Daras.

  The taproom was jammed when he got to the inn, and for good reason: Mirrane was already dancing. Her eyes lit up when she saw him standing against the back wall drinking a mug of wine (real grape wine, and correspondingly expensive) and chewing on unleavened pocketbread stuffed with lentils, mutton, and onions.

  Later that night she said petulantly, “If your things were not still in your room, I would have thought you’d gone away and left me. Are your precious cisterns so much more interesting than I am?”

  “Hardly,” he said, caressing her. She purred and snuggled closer. “I find you fascinating.” That was true, but he hoped she did not realize in how many senses of the word he meant it.

  The magistrianos visited the northern part of the city on the following day. He noted that his shadow was back. He noted the fellow wasn’t enjoying himself much, or learning much either. All of Argyros’s actions were perfectly consistent with what he would have done had he been a genuine cistern inspector.

  The second of Daras’s two major water storage areas was easy to examine, for Justinian�
�s engineer Chryses had diverted the Cordes River to flow between the town’s outworks and its main wall, thereby also serving as a moat and offering extra protection against attack. To check the level of the water, all Argyros had to do was climb to the top of the wall and look down over the battlements.

  Not much of Daras’s masonry still dated from Justinian’s time. The city had fallen to the Persians in the reign of his successor, and again less than half a century later when the madman Phokas almost brought the Empire to ruin, and two or three more times in the years since. Once or twice it had had to stand Roman siege while in Persian hands. Just the same, the ancient fortifications had been designed well, and all later military architects used them as their model.

  The wall, then, was of stone, about forty feet high and ten thick. Arrow-slits and a runway halfway up gave defenders a second level from which to fire at foes outside. The slits, though, were not wide enough for Argyros to stick his head through, and in any case he wanted the view from the top of the wall, so he climbed the whole long stairway. The man following him loitered at the base and bought some hot chick-peas.

  The magistrianos was a little jealous; in Daras’s heat, the trudge had made his heart pound. In another way, though, Argyros had the better of it, for he was above the smell. As Leontios had said, northern Daras stank. It reeked of terrified animals and their excrement from the butchers’ shops; of stale, sour urine from the dyers’; of that same vile odor and the sharper tang of tanbark from the tanneries; and of a nameless but unpleasant stench from cauldrons that bubbled behind every gluemaker’s establishment. Added to the usual city stink of overcrowded, unwashed humanity, it made for a savage assault on the nose. The faint breeze that blew off the Cordes carried the scent of manure from the fields outside of town, but was ambrosial by comparison.

  Argyros walked along the track atop the wall, peering down into Daras. It was the broadest view he could gain of the northern district. Searching there street by street would have been fruitless, especially since he was not sure what he was looking for.

  With such gloomy reflections as that, he paced back and forth for a couple of hours. The sentries at the battlements came to ignore him; down below, the musician from Shahin’s inn grew bored and fell asleep sitting against the wall, his headcloth pulled low to shield his face from the sun.

  The magistrianos could not have said what drew his attention to the donkey making its slow way down an alley, its driver beside it. Perhaps it was that the beast carried a couple of pots of glue along with several larger, roughly square packages, and he found it odd for an animal to be bearing burdens for two different shops. He certainly could not think of anything a gluemaker turned out that would go in those neatly wrapped bundles. They were about the size of—

  His boots thumping on stone, he dashed down the steps and past his dozing shadow. Then, careless of the hard looks and angry shouts that he drew, he hurled himself into traffic, shoving past evil-tempered camels that bared their teeth at him and pushing merchants out of the way. As he trotted along, he panted out prayers that he could remember where he had seen that donkey and that he could find the spot now that he was at ground level.

  It was somewhere near the three-story whitewashed building with the narrow windows, of that much he was sure. Just where, though, was another question. And of course the donkey, though it was only ambling, would have gone some distance by the time he got to where he had seen it. Staring wildly down one lanelet after another, Argyros thought of Zeno’s paradox about Achilles and the tortoise and wondered if he would ever catch up.

  There the beast was, about to turn onto Daras’s main north-south avenue, called the Middle Street after Constantinople’s Mese. Imitating Leontios’s gesture of a few days before, Argyros wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and took a minute or two to let his breathing slow. He needed to seem natural.

  A brisk walk let him come up behind the donkey’s driver. “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you speak Greek?”

  The man spread his hands. “Little bit.”

  “Ah, good.” As casually as he could, Argyros asked, “Tell me, are those parchments your donkey is carrying?”

  He was tense as a strung bow. If the answer to that was yes, he half expected to be attacked on the spot. But the driver only nodded. “So they are. What about it.”

  “Er—” For a moment, the magistrianos’s usually facile tongue stumbled. Then he rallied: “May I buy one? I, uh, forgot to write out a receipt for several tenants of mine, and seeing you passing by with your bundles here reminded me of it.”

  How much of the explanation the local understood was not clear, but he knew what the word buy meant. After some brisk bargaining, they settled on half a silver miliaresion as a fair price. The donkey driver undid one of his packages. Again Argyros got ready for action, thinking that the man did not know what he was carrying and that the subversive handbills would now be revealed.

  But the parchment the driver handed him was blank. “Is all right?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes, fine, thank you,” he said, distracted. As if he were an expert testing the quality of the goods, he riffled the corners of the stacked sheets—maybe the first few were blank to conceal the rest. But none had anything on it. He gave up. “You have a very fine stock here. Whatever scribe it’s going to will enjoy writing on it.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The donkey-driver pocketed his coin and tied up the package again. “Is not to any scribe going, though.”

  “Really?” the magistrianos said, not very interested. “To whom, then?”

  The driver grinned, as if about to tell a funny story he did not think his listener would believe. “To Abraham the potter, of all peoples. He the glue wants, too.”

  “Really?” Argyros’s tone of voice was entirely different this time. “What on earth does he need with a thousand sheets of parchment and enough glue to stick half of Daras down?”

  “For all I know, he crazy,” the man shrugged. “My master Yesuyab, he work on this order the last month. And when he get it ready to go, Musa the gluemaker next door, he tell me he gots for Abraham too, so would I take along? Why not, I say. My donkey strong.”

  “Yes, of course. Well, thank you again.” Argyros let the fellow go, then stood staring after him until a man leading three packhorses yelled at him to get out of the way. He stepped aside, still scratching his head.

  Something else occurred to him. He went back to the chancery. With Harun’s capable help, he soon added two marks to his map of Daras, then a third and, as an afterthought, a fourth. He studied the pattern they made. “Well, well,” he said. “How interesting.”

  Mesopotamian night fell with dramatic suddenness. No sooner was the sun gone from the sky, it seemed, than full darkness came. Last night that had been a nuisance; now Argyros intended to take advantage of it. He had returned to Shahin’s inn during the late afternoon, grumbling of having to go right back to the chancery, probably for hours. He had to stop himself from nodding at his crestfallen shadow, who looked up from a mug of beer in surprise and relief when he arrived.

  The wretch trailed him again, of course, but he really did revisit Mammianos’s headquarters. The scribes and secretaries eyed him curiously as he waited around doing nothing until his tracker grew bored and mooched off, convinced he was there for the evening as he had feared. The staff departed just before sunset, leaving the place to Argyros.

  The magistrianos prowled through the back streets of Daras like a burglar, without any light to give away his presence. He slunk into a doorway when a squad of Leontios’s troopers came tramping by. Soon he might need to call on the garrison commander for aid, but not yet.

  The smithy next to Abraham’s pottery shop made it easy to find, for which Argyros was grateful. As he had thought, the windows were shuttered and the place barred and locked, both front and back. Nothing surprising there—anyone in his right mind would have done the same.

  He considered the lock that held the back door closed: a standa
rd type. A hole had been drilled from top to bottom near one end of the door bar. There was a similar hole bored part of the way into the bottom board of the frame into which the bar slid. Before Abraham had gone home, he had dropped a cylindrical metal pin down through the barhole so that half of it was in the frame and the rest above it, holding the bar in place.

  The top of the metal cylinder was still lower than the level of the upper surface of the bar, so no passerby could hope to pull it out. Abraham, no doubt, had a key with hooks or catches fitted to those of the boltpin to let him draw it out again.

  There were, however, other ways. Argyros reached into his belt pouch and took out a pair of long-snouted pincers, rather like the ones physicians used to clamp bleeding blood vessels. His set, though, instead of having flat inner surfaces, was curved within.

  He slipped them into the bolthole. After some jiggling, he felt them slide down past the top of the pin. When he tightened them, it was easy to lift the bolt out of its socket.

  The magistrianos left the door ajar to let a little light into the shop and give him the chance to find a lamp. He worked flint and steel until he got the wick going, then closed the door after him. The shuttered windows would keep the lamp’s pale illumination from showing on the street out front.

  He prowled about the inside of the cramped little shop. At first everything seemed quite ordinary. Here were two kilns, their fires out for the evening but still warm to the touch. A foot-powered wheel stood between them. There lay great lumps of refined clay and jugs of water next to them to soften them. Abraham had molds in the shape of a hand, a fish, a bunch of grapes, and other things, as well as a set of what looked like sculptors’ tools to create the reliefwork popular in Daras. Pots that were ready to sell filled shelves in the front of the store.