Departures

by Harry Turtledove

  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, seemingly 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’ 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 around, 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 all the control over wives 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 run 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 a Coptic that sounded pungent. “Thank you,” the magistrianos said to him, and got only another scowl for an answer. The magistrianos turned to Zois and 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. “Good-bye,” Zois called. “Good-bye, the both of you.” That nearly brought Argyros up short, not so much because she was polite enough to include him but because she had 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 eyeblink, 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 one 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 it ever was 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 Khesphmois 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 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 immobilize 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 and 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 Saint Cyril, I’ll show you,” Khesphmois exclaimed. “Follow me, if you’ve the stomach-and the head-for it.”

  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 and 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 and 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 as 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 out-sides of the blocks, or to 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 her 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.”