Agent of Byzantium

II: Etos Kosmou 6816

Basil Argyros felt trapped behind the mounds of papyrus on his desk. Not for the first time, he wondered if becoming a magistrianos had been wise. When he had been an officer of scouts in the Roman army, the post seemed wonderful, dashing, exotic. Argyros had thought his new job would be similar to the old, only on an Empirewide scale. He had not realized how little time agents spent in the field and how much sifting minutiae. The imperial bureaucracy was thirteen centuries old. There were a lot of minutiae to sift.

He sighed and went back to the report he was drafting, which dealt with the foiling of some Franco-Saxon merchants’ efforts to smuggle purple-dyed cloth out of Constantinople. The petty princes and dukes of Germany and northern Gallia—the southern coast, of course, belonged to the Empire—would pay almost anything to deck themselves in the fabric reserved for the Roman Emperor. But even though Argyros had detected the try at escaping with contraband, he had had nothing to do with actually arresting the barbarians. All he had done was spot a discrepancy in a silk-dyer’s accounts, which hardly gave him the action he craved.

He sighed again. At last the report was through. A good thing, too: advancing twilight was making it hard to see to write. He signed the report and dated it: “Done in the year of the world 6816, the sixth indiction, on July 16, the feast-day of St.—”

He paused in annoyance, stuck his head out the door of his office, and asked a passing clerk, “Whose feast-day is it today?”

“St. Mouamet’s.”

“Thanks.” Argyros scowled at his own stupidity. He should never have forgotten that, not when Mouamet was one of his favorite saints on the calendar.

Argyros’s sour mood evaporated as he walked down the stairs of the Fraitorion, the imperial office building in which he worked. After all, here he was on the Alese, the main street of Constantinople, the most splendid city in the world. Had he not joined the magistrianoi, likely he never would have set foot in the imperial capital.

A procession of black-robed priests came down the Mese from the west, heading toward the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia. Some priests carried upraised candles, others wooden crosses, while one bore the image of a saint. Argyros piously crossed himself as he heard the hymn they were chanting:

“There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His son.”

He smiled. If all else failed, that hymn would have reminded him whose day this was. Though Mouamet was almost seven centuries dead, his religious verse still had the power to move any good Christian. The magistrianos stood watching until the procession had passed, then went up the Mese in the direction from which it had come. His own home was in the central part of the city, between the church of the Holy Apostles and the aqueduct of Valens.

He quickened his steps. His wife Helen would be waiting for him, and so would their baby son Sergios. His long, usually somber face softened as he thought of the boy. Sergios was getting old enough to know who he was when he came home at night and to greet him with a large, toothless smile. Argyros shook his head in amazement at how swiftly time passed. A couple of months ago, the baby had been only a wailing lump. Now he was starting to be a person.

Helen and Sergios alone should have sufficed to reconcile Argyros to being a magistrianos. Had he not come to Constantinople, he never would have met her, and their son would not have been born. That was disturbing even to think about.

He turned north off the Mese, picking his way through the maze of smaller lanes. Thanks to sound planning and strict laws, even those were cobbled and a dozen feet wide, nothing like the cramped, muddy back alleys of the Balkan town where Argyros had grown up. Even balconies could not come closer than ten feet to the opposite wall, and had to be at least fifteen feet above the ground, to let light and air through.

As darkness descended, shops and taverns began closing, spilling out their patrons. The whole world came to do business in Constantinople. On the streets were Persians in felt skullcaps, the ancient rivals of the Roman Empire; beaky Arabs, men of Mouamet’s blood, wearing flowing robes; flat-faced, long-unwashed nomads from the northern steppe; blond, blustering, trousered Germans. Men from every part of the Roman Empire mingled with the foreigners: stocky, heavily bearded Armenians; swarthy Egyptians, some with shaven heads; broad-faced Sklavenoi from the lands near the Danube; Carthaginians; Italians; even a few Ispanians staring about in amazement at the wonders of the city. Then there were the Constantinopolitans themselves. To Argyros, who had lived in the capital for only a couple of years, the locals seemed much like the black-capped little sparrows with whom they share it. They were bustling, cheeky, always on the lookout for the main chance, everlastingly curious, and quick to lose interest in anything no longer new. Of a steadier, more sober nature himself, he found them endlessly fascinating and altogether unreliable.

He also found them exasperating, for they were self-centered to the point of being blind to others.

That was literally true: he watched scores of people walk past the man in the gutter as if he did not exist. He might have understood had the fellow been a derelict, but he was not. He was clean and well groomed, his brocaded robe of good quality. He did not look as though he had been overcome by drink. Muttering under his breath, the magistrianos bent to see what he could do for the man. Perhaps he was an epileptic and would soon come back to his senses. Many people still had a superstitious fear of epilepsy, though Hippokrates had shown more than four centuries before the Incarnation that it was a disease like any other.

Argyros reached down to feel the fellow’s forehead. He jerked his hand away as if he had touched a flame. And so, almost, he had; the man burned with fever. Peering closer, the magistrianos saw a red rash on his face and hands.

“Mother of God, help me!” he whispered. He rubbed his right hand over and over again on his robe and would have paid many gold nomismata not to have touched the man’s skin.

“You!” he called to a passerby whose clothes and, even more, whose manner proclaimed him to be a native. “Are you from this part of the city?”

The man set his hands on his hips. “What if I am? What’s it to you?”

“Quick as you can, fetch the medical officer.” Each district had one, to see to the drainage system and watch out for contagious disease. “I think this man has smallpox.”

“Maybe you were wrong,” Helen Agryra said later that night. “Or even if you were right, maybe there will be only the one case.”

“I pray you’re right,” Argyros said. As he had many times before, he wondered how his wife managed to look on the bright side of things. He sometimes thought it was because she had eight or nine fewer years than his own thirty. But he had been no great optimist in his early twenties. He had to admit to himself that her nature simply was sunnier than his.

They contrasted physically as well as emotionally. Argyros was tall and lean, with the angular features and dark, mournful eyes of an icon. The top of Helen’s head barely reached his shoulder. While her hair was dark, her fair complexion, high, wide cheekbones, and blue eyes spoke of Sklavenic ancestors. Sergios, Argyros thought, was a lucky little boy: he looked like his mother. Helen went on, “I don’t understand how it could be smallpox, Basil. There hasn’t been an outbreak in the city since my father was a boy.”

“Which will not keep God from sending another one if He decides our sins warrant it.”

She crossed herself. “Kyrie eleison,” she exclaimed: “Lord, have mercy!”

“Lord have mercy, indeed,” he agreed. In crowded Constantinople, smallpox could spread like wildfire. Except for the plague, it was the most frightful illness the Empire knew. And whole centuries went by without the plague, but every generation, it seemed, saw a smallpox epidemic, sometimes mild, sometimes savage.

Helen had a knack for pulling Argyros away from such gloomy reflections. “Neither of us can change God’s will,” she said with brisk practicality, “so we may as well have supper.”

Supper was bread with olive oil for dipping a stew of tuna and leeks, and white raisins for dessert.

“Delicious,” Argyros said, and meant it, though he was still not used to eating fish so often. In his upcountry hometown, the meat in the stew would have been goat or lamb. But fish was much cheaper here by the sea, and though he made more as a junior magistrianos than he had in the army, he had not had to rent a house or support a family in those days . . . and Helen was talking about hiring a maidservant.

Fish, then.

After she cleared away the dishes, Helen nursed Sergios in a beechwood rocking chair she had bought after he was born. While she was nursing, she would talk only about small, pleasant things. That was one of the few rules she imposed on her husband; she firmly maintained that breaking it made her give less milk. The way Sergios has squalled hungrily the couple of times he tried to nurse after Argyros, full of his own affairs, ignored the rule made him keep to it thereafter.

Sometimes the restriction irritated him. Now he was just as glad of it. He told Helen about one of his fellow magistrianoi whose wife had twins a couple of weeks younger than Sergios and who did not look as though he slept at all anymore. She gave him the neighborhood gossip, either gleaned from the view from the balcony or traded with other women among the market stalls.

Sergios fell asleep while she rocked him. She carried him to his crib. He would probably stay asleep until somewhere close to sunrise. Argyros sighed in relief as he thought of that. If had been only a few weeks since the baby woke two or three times every night, crying for his mother’s breast. She might have been reading his thoughts. Her eyes answered his. “Shall we go to bed?” she asked, adding mischievously, “But not, I think, to sleep.”

“No, not to sleep,” Argyros said. His fingers undid the clasps of her blouse, which she had fastened again after feeding Sergios. The urgency with which he took her made her gasp in surprise (for he was usually more restrained), but not in displeasure.

Spent afterward, she slept almost at once, her legs and rump pressed warmly against him. He lay awake himself. His thoughts lit now here, now there, until he realized why he had been so importunate: that helped hold worry away for a while.

He grimaced in the darkness. That was not fair to Helen, or flattering to his own motivations. It did not help him rest, either.

The magistrianos went to and from the Praitorion fearfully for the next few days, dreading what he might see on the way. He distrusted the way everything remained utterly ordinary, and feared it to be a cruel deception—though it was cruel only to him, for he had seen the stricken man, while the city remained unaware of its danger. But after a while he began to believe Helen had been right or that the fervent prayers the two of them had sent up were being answered.

He held to that belief as long as he could, even after fewer magistrianoi and other functionaries began coming to work each day. Life was chancy at the best of times, and any illness dangerous: doctors could do so little against sickness. Prayer offered more hope than nostrums. But when one missing man after another was reported down with a fever, Argyros’s alarm returned. And the day he found out the first of them had broken out in pustules, he decided the Praitorion could do without him for a while. He was not afraid anyone would accuse him of shirking. Already half the people rich enough to own second homes outside the city were moving out to them “for the sake of fresh air.”

The rumble of leaving carts full of household goods went on day and night. Most Constantinopolitans, of course, could not afford to flee. Nevertheless, the streets grew empty. People who did stir abroad looked at each other warily. Smallpox might have been God’s curse, but everyone knew only too well it could be caught from a sick man.

The price of grain fluctuated wildly. One day almost all the mills in the city would be open and almost all of them empty. Then, for no reason any man could find, only a handful would operate, with people lined up around the block to buy.

Argyros felt he was taking his life in his hands whenever he went out to buy food. Helen wanted to share the burden with him, but he said no so sternly he got his way. “How would I feed Sergios if something happened to your” he demanded. “I’m not built for the role, you know.”

“How would I feed him if you get sick and can’t feed me?” she replied, but she did not press the point.

‘He thought of danger to her baby was enough to make her listen to him.He did not tell her he would have acted the same way if the smallpox had come the year before, when they were still childless. Any risk he could spare her he would.

Only churches stayed crowded while the smallpox was loose in the city. Priests and layfolk alike petitioned the Lord to return His favor to the people and end the epidemic. People also rushed to the liturgy for more personal divine reasons: to pray for the health of their loved ones—and for their own. When Helen wanted to pray at the great church of Hagia Sophia, Argyros could not refuse her, nor did he make any great effort to. A trip to church, he reasoned, was different from a shopping expedition. God might be angry at Constantinople, but surely he would not smite them in His own house. Carrying Sergios in her arms, Helen went out into the city for the first time in several weeks. She exclaimed at how still the streets were: “It’s as if this were some country town, not the city!” Her voice echoed off houses.

“It’s quieter here,” Argyros said, remembering Serrhes. “True, the towns have only a handful of people next to Constantinople, but they’re also much smaller, so they can seem crowded.”

They walked east along the Alese toward the great church, whose dome dominated the city skyline. The stalls of the horse market in the forum known as the Amastrianum were empty; no one had any beasts out to sell. A quarter-mile farther down the street, a few lonely sheep bleated in their pens in the forum of Theodosios. The farmers who had brought them to market stood around scratching their heads, wondering where their customers had gone.

“Poor souls,” Helen said with her ready compassion. “They must not have heard aught’s amiss.”

“I’m surprised the gate guards didn’t warn them,” Argyros said, but on second thought he was not surprised at all. The guards at a minor gate, say the gate of Selymbria or that of Rhegion, might well have decamped, leaving the portal standing wide for rustics to saunter straight into the city. The magistrianos shouted across the square to the farmers. At the dread word smallpox, they crossed themselves in alarm and began rounding up their animals. “I wish we were coming home from church instead of on our way there,” Argyros said. “A sheep could feed us for days.”

“We would have got a good price, too,” Helen sighed. “Ah, well. I hope their owners get home safe.”

Only in the Augusteion, the square on which Hagia Sophia fronted, were there signs Constantinople was not a ghost town. Even there, the booksellers’ cubicles and perfumers’ stalls were all closed. But some food shops were operating, to serve the people who came to the great church to pray. Argyros smelted breaded squid frying in olive oil and garlic. His stomach rumbled hungrily. He had to force himself to walk past the smoking charcoal braziers.

People filled the great church’s colonnaded atrium. Argyros waved to a clerk he had not seen for several days. Other such meetings were going on all over the atrium. Many folk felt as he did, that going to church was the one safe outing they could make.

Keeping a protective arm around Helen, he led her into the exonarthex, the hallway between the atrium and the church proper. I le bent to kiss her and Sergios, saying, “I’ll meet you right here after the services.”

“All right,” she said, and turned away to head for the stairs up to the women’s gallery: as in any other church, men and women worshiped separately.

Someone close by let out a loud sneeze.

“Your health,” Argyros said politely.

Entering the nave of Hagia Sophia was an experience overwhelming enough to make the magistrianos forget for a while that smallpox was running free in the city. No man could enter the great church and remain unmoved. When Justinian rebuilt it after the Nika riots, he had chosen the two best architects he could find and let them draw on the resource of the whole Empire. The result deserved his boast when the magnificent structure was complete: “O Solomon, I have vanquished you!”

Polished marbles of green, red, yellow, polychrome, drawn from the Bosporos, Greece, Egypt, Isauria; gleaming lamps—gold, silver, brass; a forest of columns with intricately carven acanthus capitals; four semidomes, each full of mosaic-work ornament: all led the eye up to the central dome that was the grandest triumph of Justinian’s brilliant builders.

Supported on pendentives, it reached 180 feet above the floor. Forty-two windows pierced its base; the rays of sunlight shining through them left the dome eerily insubstantial, as if it were floating in space above the church rather than a part of it. The ever-shifting light glittered off the gold mosaic tesserae in the dome and off the cross of Christ at the apex.

Had that dome not existed, the great church’s sanctuary would have sufficed to seize the eve. The iconostasis in front of the altar was of gold-plated silver, with images upon it of Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles. The holy table itself was pure gold, encrusted with precious stones. So were the candelabra, the thuribles, and the eucharistic vessels: ewers, chalices, patens, spoons, basins. Red curtains with cloth-of-gold figures of Christ and Sts. Peter and Paul flanked the altar. As always, the divine liturgy took Argyros out of himself, made him feel no longer a man alone in the world but part of the great Christian community, past, present, and future. The liturgy was ancient, ascribed to St. John Chrysostrom, the theologian and scholar who had been patriarch of Constantinople less than a century after Constantine refounded the city.

The service was celebrated with splendor appropriate to its surroundings. The slow dignity of the prayers, the rich silks of the priests’ dalmatics and chasubles, the sweet incense emanating from the thuribles, the choruses of perfectly trained men and boys that sang the hymns—all added together to convey to both spirit and senses the glory of God.

Prayers for the dead appeared twice in the service, after the reading of the Gospel and in the prayer for the church before communion. That was customary; it stressed the bond between the living and the dead and the close relationship between this world and the next. In this time of pestilence, though, the prayers were specially poignant.

Argyros shook his head in sorrow when at last the priest sang St. Symeon’s song of leavetaking, removed his vestments, and brought the service to an end. Hagia Sophia seemed to bring the world to come so close to this one. Returning to simple mundanity was never easy afterward. Helen, as she usually did, looked at things from a different perspective. “Thank you for taking me, Basil,” she said as they were walking home. “I needed to be reminded how God still watches over us.”

She was without the dogged curiosity Argyros brought to his faith, but he often thought her belief the purer. She accepted where he, by nature and training, always looked to question. The longer the smallpox epidemic went on, the more he saw good people dying along with the bad, the more he began to wonder why God was not watching more closely.

His mind still shied from the notion. Undoubtedly God had His reasons. When He wanted Basil to learn them, Basil would.

“That was delicious, dear,” Argyros said, putting aside his plate of garlicky lamb stew with real regret.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Helen said. “Would you like some more?” She offered him her own plate.

“You’ve hardly touched it,” he said in surprise. “You’ll have to do better than that. I remember my mother and my older sister back in Serrhes saying they were hungry all the time while they were nursing.”

“I have been too, till now,” Helen said, a little defensively. “I just haven’t felt much like eating, the last couple of days.”

“Do you think you’re pregnant again?” Argyros asked, remembering how nauseated she had been when she was first earning Sergios.

But she shook her head. “This is different; more like I’m tired all the time.” She laughed. “I don’t know why I should be. You’ve helped a lot around the house, and I’ve hardly been out since we prayed at the great church a couple of weeks ago.”

She stood to pick up the dishes and take them back to the kitchen, where she would set them to soak. She paused to undo the top two clasps of her tunic. “I think the heat lately has helped take away my appetite,” she said, fanning herself with her hand.

Argyros’s thick eyebrows shot up. Summer in Constantinople was hot and sticky, but the latest bad heat wave had broken three days before. He rose from the table, went around, and kissed her on the forehead.

She smiled. “What was that for?”

“For you, of course,” he answered easily, returning her smile. He would not show her the twinge of fear he felt, but it was there. Under his lips, her skin had been warm and dry. She slept restlessly during the night and was a long time falling back to sleep after she got up to feed Sergios. So was Argyros, but for a different reason.

Helen woke in the morning with a headache. “Would you go out and pick me some willow twigs?” she asked; the bitter sap in them was soothing.

Argyros did as she requested. Along with its splendid buildings, (Constantinople boasted several large parks, one not far from the church of the Holy Apostles. Many Constantinopolitans, city dwellers for generations, would not have known a willow tree from a rosebush. The magistrianos, from his childhood in a small Balkan town and also as a veteran of lift-in the field, had no trouble finding what he sought. He used his dagger to slice off a handful of the youngest, tenderest shoots, then hurried back to his home. He gasped in dismay: though the day was warmer than the previous couple had been, Helen huddled under every blanket in the house. He could hear her teeth chattering across the room. “So cold, Basil, so cold,” she whispered, but when he put his hand to her head he found her burning hot.

“Mother of God, help me, help us,” he exclaimed. He knelt beside her, sponged her brow, made her chew on the twigs. Their juice also fought fever, though how much it could do against such raging heat he did not know.

When he had made her as comfortable as he could, he rushed out again, to the home of the district medical officer. That worthy was a small, delicate-featured man named Arethas Saronites. He looked tired unto death. When the magistrianos stammered out that his wife was sick, Saronites only brushed back a lock of his light brown hair from his eyes and said, “You’re Argyros, from the street of the pillowmakers, aren’t you?”

At Basil’s nod, the medical officer said, “God grant her healing,” and made an addition to the long list on his desk. I le looked up, surprised to find the magistrianos still there. “Will there be anything more?”

“A doctor, damn you!”

“One will be sent you.”

“Now,” Argyros said in a voice like iron. Of its own volition, his hand slipped toward his knife. Neither the tone nor the motion affected Saronites. “My dear sir, one in ten in the city is ill, maybe one in five. We do not have the physicians to treat them all at once.”

Deaf to his words, Argyros glanced into the hallway. “You had better desist, or Thomas there w ill put an arrow through your brisket,” Saronites warned.

The archer had his bow drawn and aimed. “You are not the first,” Saronites said kindly. “How can I blame you for trying to help your loved one? You will get your physician in your proper turn, I promise you.”

Shamed and beaten, Argyros gave a brusque nod and left. When he got home, Helen was sitting in the parlor, nursing Sergios. “Have a care, darling, or he may catch your sickness,” the magistrianos said. I le refused to say “smallpox”—if he did not name it, he could still hope it was not there. Except for two spots of hectic color high on her cheeks, Helen was very pale. Her eyes glittered feverishly. But she was not shivering anymore, and she answered him steadily: “I know, Basil, but he can starve too, and my breasts have milk in them. Do you think I could get a wetnurse to come into this house while I’m ill?”

Argyros bit his lip. No woman would risk herself thus, and he knew it. Nor could he condemn them for that, just as Saronites had not grown angry when he tried to take more than his due to Helen. “Cow’s milk?” he suggested at last.

Helen frowned. “It gives babies a flux of the bowels,” she said. After a moment, though, she muttered, half to herself, “Well, that’s a smaller chance to take.” Her voice firmed. “Yes, go get some. But how will you feed it to him? They take so little, sucking at rags soaked in milk.”

Argyros knew she w as right about that. He plucked at his beard. His time as a scouts officer had got him used to improvising, to using things to fit his needs, no matter what they were intended for. And unlike the routineers who staffed most of the Roman bureaucracy, he had to stay mentally alert to do his job. So—

He snapped his fingers. “I have it! I’ll use an enema syringe. By squeezing the sheep’s bladder, I can make as much milk as Sergios wants flow through the reed into his mouth.”

Sick as she was, Helen burst out laughing. “The very thing! What a clever husband I have. Oh—buy a new one.”

“Yes, I suppose I should, shouldn’t I?” Argyros smiled for the first time that day. As he went out again, he felt a small stir of hope.

Constantinople’s dairies were small, because there was not much room for grazing in the city. For the same reason, most of the dairies were at the edge of parks so the cattle could crop the grass there. The magistrianos hurried to the park where he had cut off the willow shoots that morning. He waited impatiently while the dairyman squeezed out a jug of milk. “You have a sick child?” the man asked.

“No—his mother.”

“Christ grant she get well, then, for her sake and the lad’s.” The dairyman and Argyros crossed themselves. The former went on, “Terrible, the smallpox. Me, I spend most of my time praying it’ll stay away from my family.”

“So did I,” the magistrianos said bleakly.

“Aye, and many besides you. I’ve more praying to do, though, for my wife Irene’s given me three sons and five daughters.” The dairyman bobbed his head. “I’m Peter Skleros, by the way.”

Argyros gave his own name, then said, “Eight children! And all well?”

“Aye, even little Peter, my youngest. He’s only three, and just starting to help get the dung out of the barn. Poor little fellow got a blister last week and had us all with our hearts in our throats, but it was only the cowpox.”

“What’s that? I never heard of it,” Argyros said.

“You’d have to be a dairyman or a farmer to know it. Mostly the cows catch it—you’d guess that from the name, wouldn’t you?” he chuckled,”—but sometimes them as keep ‘em get it too. I had it myself, years ago. But that’s not here nor there—we’re all well, and if God wants to let us stay so, why, I’ll keep on thanking Him and praising His name. And I’ll add a prayer or two for your family while I’m about it.”

“I thank you. May God hear yours more than He has mine.”

“You pray for yourself, sir, too,” Skleros said. “I can see by looking that you’ve not had the smallpox. It’d go hard if it came on you along with the rest.”

“Yes, it would.” The magistrianos shook his head; he had not thought about that. I le made himself put the worry aside. Short of fleeing his wife and child, he could not lessen the chance he would take the disease. He clapped the lid on the jar of milk, tucked it under his arm, and headed home.

“I hope I see you again,” the dairyman called after him.

“So do I,” Argyros said.

But when he got home, he forgot about Sergios and what his son needed, though the baby lay howling in his cradle. Helen must have set him down before she tried to return to her own bed, but she had not made it there. Argyros found her sprawled senseless on the floor. When he touched her, he swore and prayed at the same time: her fever was back, worse than before.

She was a dead weight in his arms as he picked her up; absently, he wondered why unconscious people seemed so much heavier to carry.

She half-roused when he set her on the bed. “Go away,” she muttered, “Go away.”

“Hush.” He did leave her for a moment, to soak a rag in a ewer of water. On the way back, he blew on it to make it cool, then set it on her forehead. She sighed and seemed to lose touch with the world again. He sat beside her, took her limp hand in his.

So passed the day. Argyros stayed by his wife, sponging her face and limbs with moist cloths and holding her still when the fever made her thrash about. She came partly to herself several times and kept urging him to get out. She would not listen to him when he told her no, but repeated her demand over and over.

Finally she revived enough to ask him, “Why won’t you go?”

“Because I love you,” he said. A smile lingered on her lips when she lapsed back into stupor. He had said that dozens of times while she was unconscious; it warmed him that she’d finally understood. He left the bedroom only when Sergios cried. He was clumsy cleaning the baby—Helen had done most of that—but he managed. Before he gave Sergios the milk-filled syringe, he smeared the tip of the tube with honey. The old midwife’s trick made the baby suck lustily, though he did make a face at the unfamiliar taste of his food.

Near dusk, he cooked some thin barley gruel to feed Helen. As an afterthought, he stirred some honey into that, too: Helen was hardly thinking more clearly than Sergios. She ate about half of what he’d made, less than he thought she needed, but better, he supposed, than nothing. The thin waning crescent moon was rising in the east when exhaustion clubbed Argyros into sleep. A few minutes later, Sergios’s howling woke him. He stumbled out to take care of his son and heard the first cockcrow just as the baby was nodding off.

His eyes were full of grit; he could feel himself walking in slow motion, as if the air had turned thick. Perhaps because he was so tired, the idea of going to Helen’s family for someone to help struck him with the force he imagined Christianity had hit St. Mouamet. He took along the empty jar that had held milk. While one of Helen’s younger brothers or sisters came to watch over her and the baby, he would go back to Skleros’s dairy and refill it; or he would send them to get the milk if they feared entering a disease-filled home.

Helen’s father was a notary named Alexios Moskhos. As always, several dogs started barking when Argyros knocked on his door; on holidays, Moskhos liked to go into the countryside and hunt rabbits. The magistrianos waited for his father-in-law to come cursing and laughing through the pack to let him in. He heard Moskhos approach, but the door did not open. Instead, Moskhos cautiously called through it, “Who’s there? What do you want?”

“It’s Basil. I need help—Helen’s sick.” He explained what he needed. There was a long silence. Then Argyros listened in disbelief as his father-in-law said, “You’d better go, Basil. I’ll pray for you, but no more than that. No one here’s been ill, and no one’s going to be if I have anything to do with it. I’ll not hazard all of mine against one already poxed.”

“Let me hear your wife say that,” the magistrianos exclaimed.

“It’s for her I do this.”

“Why, you gutless, worthless—” Indignation choked Argyros. He hammered on the door with his fist.

“Let me in!”

“I’ll count three,” Moskhos said coldly. “Then I set the hounds on you. One—two—”

The magistrianos left, cursing; he could tell his father-in-law would do what he’d said. What made it somehow worse was that Argyros understood. I le wondered what he would have done had Helen been well and Moskhos come to him for aid.

He was honest enough to admit he did not know.

Peter Skleros’s mouth turned down when Argyros came to buy more milk. “I was hoping your lady might just have, oh, eaten something spoiled that made her ill,” he said as he led the magistrianos into his barn. “But that’s not so, is it?”

“I’m afraid not. I wish it were.”

“And I,” the dairyman said. As he had said, his little son, also named Peter, was helping to clean the barn. He took the boy by the arm and brought him up to the magistrianos. “I wish it could have been like this.” There were three pock-marks, close together, on little Peter’s wrist. They looked like smallpox marks, but no smallpox victim escaped with so few.

“This is your cowpox, eh?”

“Yes.” He patted the boy on the bottom. “Run along, son; the gentleman is done with you now.” To Argyros: “Here, I’ll get your milk.” He pulled a stool up beside a cow.

“Your family is still well?”

“Yes, praise the Lord, the Virgin, and all the saints. Good of you to think to ask, sir, with your own troubles on your mind.” He handed the magistrianos the jar of milk, waved away payment. “Really, it’s not enough to bother over. You take it, and keep your boy strong till your wife is better.”

Against the dairyman’s insistence, Argyros could only accept as gracefully as possible. He compared Skleros’s behavior to that of Helen’s father and could only shake his head. Like combat, the epidemic brought out the best and the worst in people.

When he got home, it was as if he had not left. Helen’s fever still raged. Sometimes she knew him, but more often she was lost in a world of mostly unpleasant dreams. He tried to keep her cool, but the burning heat of her forehead dried his compresses almost as fast as he put them on. Sergios drank the cow’s milk. His father hoped he was taking enough. As with Helen, he supposed anything was better than nothing.

The next morning, Helen felt a little better. She was lucid more often, and did not seem as hot. By contrast, Sergios was fussy. As Helen had predicted, his insides resented the new food he was getting. I le spent a lot of time crying, his legs drawn up to his belly against gas pains. Argyros thought he felt warm, but would not have sworn to it.

A knock on the door that afternoon made the magistrianos jump. I le got up from beside Helen and hurried to the entrance hall. “There’s sickness here,” he called, expecting whoever it was to beat a hasty retreat.

Instead, to his amazement, rumbling laughter answered him. “I’d not be here if there weren’t,” said the man outside; his Greek had a strong Italic Latin flavor. “I’m a doctor, or so they tell me.”

In his relief, Argyros had to try three times before he could work the latch and throw the door wide. The man who brushed past him was a vigorous sixty, stocky and broad-shouldered. His big nose had been well broken sometime in the distant past; he wore his graying beard high on his cheeks to cover as many old pockmarks as he could, but it did not hide them all.

He barked laughter when he saw Argyros looking at him.

“Oh, I was pretty enough once,” he said, “but when you get as old as I am, it doesn’t matter worth a damn anymore any-way. Now tell me who’s got it and where they are.” He set hands on hips and waited.

“This way, ah—” The magistrianos paused, flustered both by the doctor’s blunt manner and because he did not know the man’s name.

“I’m Gian Riario, if you’re wondering,” the doctor said. “Joannes Rhiarios, if you’d rather have the Greek like most people here.” As the original language or Rome, Latin was still co-official with Greek but had less prestige than the tongue of the richer, more anciently civilized eastern half of the Empire.

“I speak Latin,” Argyros said mildly. “If you’d rather use it—” Riario shook his head, gestured impatiently. The magistrianos went on, “Before you go farther, I have to tell you I fear it’s the smallpox.”

“You waiting to see if I run?” Riario said and laughed again. Me ran his fingers over his pocked forehead. “I’ve had it already, and I’ll not catch it again. You can only get it once, no matter what the old wives say. Either it kills you, or it leaves you alone afterward.”

“Is that really true?”

“It’s true, or else I’d’ve been dead five hundred times this past month. Come on, who’s sick here?

Wife? Brats? Not your mistress, or you’d be keeping her somewhere else.”

“My wife,” the magistrianos said, refusing to be drawn; he recognized that Riario’s abrasiveness had no malice behind it. “My baby son is well so far, thank God.”

“Aye, it’s very bad in babes. Well, take me to your woman, then “—Riario yawned till his jaw creaked—”for I’ve more stops after this one.” For the first time, Argyros noticed the dark pouches under the physician’s eyes. The man was close to working himself to death. The magistrianos led Riario back to the bedroom, saying as they went in, “I think Helen is better today than she has been for the last couple of days.” Indeed, his wife had her wits about her and managed a smile for Argyros and for the doctor when he was introduced.

Riario at the bedside was nothing like Riario with someone who did not need him. He felt Helen’s forehead, murmured, “Oh, very good,” and reached for her wrist to take her pulse. “Very good,” he repeated, his eyes on her face.

She smiled again, then made an apologetic gesture and scratched at her cheek. The doctor did not seem to notice. “You’ll be up and about before long,” he said. “Now I’m just going to check to see that your baby’s doing well too. Does he look like you, or is he homely like his father?”

She giggled.

Riario snorted. “You come with me, sirrah, and leave your lady at peace,” he said to Argyros. When they were in the hall, out of earshot of the bedroom, he let out the sigh he had been holding back. The magistrianos seized his arm. “She’s better, not so?” he demanded, remembering barely in time to keep his voice down.

“It often seems that way,” Riario said, “just before the pocks come. You saw that rash she was picking at on her face? That’s how it begins.”

Argyros heard him as though from very far away. Young, bright Helen’s cheery face pitted and slagged with scars like this old doctor’s? It was not that he could not love her afterward. He knew he could; he cherished her for much more than the outward seeming of her body. But he feared she could not love herself disfigured, and her sorrow would take the summer from his year. Riario might have read his mind. “Don’t fret over her looks,” he said bluntly. “Fret over whether she lives. The pocks are the crisis of the disease. If they begin to scab over and heal, she’s won. Otherwise—”

“Is there nothing you can do?” The magistrianos knew he was pleading and did not care.

“If there were, don’t you think I’d’ve done it for myself?” Riario’s laugh was harsh. “I hate smallpox, and even more I hate being helpless against it. If it’s God’s curse as they say, why, I curse God back for it.”

Argyros crossed himself at the blasphemy, but the physician answered with a two-fingered obscene gesture Italians often used. Riario grated, “If you’d watched as many men—aye, and women like your wife, and babes like your babe—as I have die in pain, and all you could do was close their eyes when they’d gone, you’d understand. When God smote Egypt, Pharaoh got off lucky, for He didn’t send him smallpox.”

I le shook his head and seemed to come back to himself. “Show me your son, as long as I’m here.” The bitter edge returned for a moment: “Not that I’ll be able to do any good if he does have it.”

But Riario’s interest revived when he saw the jar of milk and the syringe by Sergios’s cradle. “What have we here?” he asked. Argyros explained. The doctor rubbed his chin and nodded. “Clever. A trick I’ll have to remember.”

He picked up the baby, felt Sergios’s forehead with his hand and then, as if not sure what it told him, with his lips. “A touch of something there, maybe,” he said at last, “but who know s what? These little ones take all sorts of fevers. If it’s bad, you’ll find out soon enough.”

Again, he was gentle with his patient, cuddling Sergios and making him smile before he put him down. To Argyros he said, “I’m sorry I can’t offer more hope. No doubt you’d rather have a doctor who tells you sweet-sounding lies.”

“No, I prefer an honest man,” the magistrianos said, which startled Riario but also seemed to satisfy him. The physician gave a jerky nod and headed for the street. “Another mission of mercy,” he said, rolling his eyes to show-how much mercy he expected to bring. “Good fortune to you, Argyros; I’ll call again in a few days, or when I have the chance.” He nodded again and was gone. Over the next week, Argyros learned why Riario hated smallpox so much. He watched helplessly as the disease’s characteristic rash spread over Helen’s face, arms, legs, and even onto her belly and back. At first the marks were red and raised. They must have itched ferociously, for Helen scratched them till they bled. Her fever was back full force and left her wits wandering. Argyros finally had to use rags to tie her hands to the bedposts to keep her from clawing herself in her delirium.

In the moments when her w its partly cleared, she wept all the time, moaning, “I’ll be ugly, Basil, ugly. How will you be able to want me anymore?” Nothing he said could get through to her to convince her she was wrong. That wounded him almost as much as being there hour by hour, day by day, watching the ravages of the disease grow ever worse. Sometimes he wondered if he was going mad. Sometimes he wished he could.

Most agonizing for him was how little he could do even to make her comfortable. He sponged off her sores several times a day. The coolness might have helped her fever a little, but none of the ointments of grease and honey and other less easily named ingredients that he bought did the least thing to help her itching.

Argyros could not make her eat much, and the days of fever wasted her. She grew very thin. The only times he left the house were his daily trips to buy milk for Sergios. The baby was growing as used to his makeshift feedings with the syringe as he had been to his mother’s breast. That saddened Argyros too, although he was relieved his son’s fever had grown no worse. He got to know Peter Skleros and his large family well: they were the only healthy people he was seeing. Once or twice he caught himself resenting them for escaping the smallpox and immediately felt ashamed for his meanness.

I le could not help being glad to get out of the house, though, and it was only natural that sometimes he invented small delays to keep from going straight back with his milk. He would help Skleros’s children keep the dairy buildings clean, lead the cows to and from their grazing at the park. Once he even did his own milking.

“Here, Sergios,” he said with foolish pride when he gave the boy some of that jar. “Your father drew this with his own hands. Doesn’t it taste especially good?”

Sergios was not impressed.

Helen got worse. The red patches on her skin turned to blisters, tilled at first with a clear liquid and then with pus. When they broke, as they sometimes did in her thrashing, the smell was foul. She would not eat at all after that, and drank only a little water. She had no more control over her bodily functions than Sergios had.

Her breathing grew harsh and labored. Along with the pox, her skin began to look bruised. Though she was still delirious, she moved less and less. All these signs terrified Argyros, who ran to the church of the Holy Apostles for a priest to give her the last rites.

Though that church was second only to Hagia Sophia, it had but few ecclesiastics to serve it. Some were dead; others fled. Only one would go back to his house with him when he told them Helen had smallpox. He cursed the rest for cowards. The priest, whose name was Ioasaph, set a hand on his arm. “They are no more than men, my son. Do not ask for what is beyond their strength.”

“I low do you dare come, then?”

loasaph shrugged; his thick brown beard bounced on his chest, “God will do with me as He wills. Whether I stay or come, I am in His hands.”

The magistrianos wondered what Riario would say to that.

Then all such small thoughts crumbled to ashes within him, for when he and the priest returned to his home they found Helen dead. loasaph prayed over her body, then turned to Argyros. “She is at peace at last and out of pain.”

“Yes,” Argyros said dully. He was surprised he did not feel more. It was like a sword cut: the damage was done, but the pain would come later.

loasaph said, “You must understand, this is God’s will. She has gained eternal life, against which this world and its suffering are but a moment.”

“Yes,” Argyros said again, but he could not share the priest’s calm confidence. Having been with Helen all the while, he found he could not see why heaven had to be purchased with a week of hell. After a while, loasaph left. Argyros hardly noticed. I le sat staring at Helen’s body. Even in death she had no repose, but lay contorted.

He did not know how long he stayed by the bed they had shared. Sergios’s cries finally roused him. He changed and fed the baby. He had joked with Helen about that, back in another lifetime. Remembering their laughter reached him as the brute fact of death could not. He set down his son and buried his face in his hands. The tears came then, and for a long time would not go. At last, moving stiffly as one ofHephaistos’s bronze men in the Iliad, he made himself go do what he had to. Arethas Saronites’s sympathy sounded forced; the medical officer had said the same words too many times these past weeks. So too with his final advice: “Go home and wait for the burial party. It will come soon.”

Two shaven-headed convicts bore Helen away to one of the large, newly dug graves outside the city. An overseer with a bow stood by. If the convicts lived through the epidemic, they would go free. Had it not been for Sergios, the magistrianos would have given way to despair. The baby was far too little to understand his mother was dead; he only knew he needed someone to take care of him. He did not give Argyros much time to dwell on his own grief.

Argyros thought once more about getting the boy a wet-nurse. Before, he had balked because he did not think one would come into a house of sickness. Now he did not want to expose Sergios to more outsiders than he had to. The baby was all he had left to remember his wife by. He did not count her family. After he sent the message telling them she was dead, he intended never to have anything to do with them again.

When the knock on the door came, he thought it was his father-in-law, come to try to make amends. His hand was on his knife hilt as he went to the front of the house. But instead of Alexios Moskhos, Gian Riario stood waiting.

The doctor’s shoulders sagged when he read Argyros’s face. “Oh, damnation,” he said. “She was young and strong, and if she pulled through the crisis I thought I’d be able to help her.

These are the hard ones to lose.”

“What do you know about that?” the magistrianos lashed out at him.

“Do you think I was never married?” The question, and the raw hurt behind it, brought Argyros up short. After a moment, Riario went on, “Your baby is still well, I hope?”

“Yes.”

“Something, anyway. I wasn’t so lucky,” the doctor murmured, more to himself than to Argyros. He grew brisk again: “Listen—if you so much as mislike the way he breaks wind, call me. I live on the street of the church of St. Symeon, six doors up from the church. Do you write? Yes? Good—you can leave a note on my door if I’m not there, and I probably won’t be. Even if he farts funny, do you understand?”

“I do—and thank you.”

Riario snorted, very much his cynical self again. “You’d thank me more if I really had a hope of doing something.”

“You try.”

“Well, maybe so. As I told you, the smallpox has done everything to me it can. I’m not afraid of it anymore.” He laughed harshly. “Futile, aye, but not afraid.”

The magistrianos was afraid: he and Sergios were still vulnerable. After Riario left, he went back and fed the baby. Every syringe of milk his son gulped down felt like a triumph—what could show health better than a strong appetite?

Sergios was cranky the next day, but not enough to worry his father, in spite of Riario’s words. Argyros went on with the melancholy tasks that sprang from Helen’s death. He was packing her belongings in sacks and boxes to take them to St. Symeon’s church, where the deacons could distribute them to the needy.

Then the baby started crying again, and Argyros’s head came up without his having to think about it. He knew the difference between fussy cries and those that meant something was really wrong. He hurried into Sergios’s room, expecting that one of the fibulae he had used to fasten the baby’s linen had come undone and was poking his son, or some similar minor catastrophe.

But nothing was obviously wrong. Sergios was not even wet. The crying stopped; Sergios seemed listless. Shrugging, Argyros bent to lift him out of the cradle and cuddle him. He almost dropped him—the baby’s skin felt much too warm.

Icy fear shot up Argyros’s back. As if to deny the reality of what his fingers told him, he filled the syringe bladder with milk and offered it to his son. Sergios gave a couple of halfhearted sucks, then spit up the little he had eaten. Argyros wrapped him in a blanket and dashed for Riario’s house. By good luck, the doctor was there. His eyes narrowed when he saw the baby. “Fever?” he asked sharply.

Argyros nodded, unable to make himself say yes out loud.

“It could be any of a myriad things,” the doctor said. He cocked an eyebrow. “They do fall sick of other illnesses than smallpox, you know.”

“Yes, and also from that. I low will you know if it is?”

“The rash, of course, if it appears.” Argyros was certain four days of waiting would drive him mad. That must have been plain on his face, for Riario went on, “It acts faster in infants than with adults. If no eruptions show up by tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, you’ve probably escaped.”

I le disappeared into the back of the house and returned with a small stoppered vial. “Here’s poppy juice from Egypt. It will help the little fellow sleep, and that will do some good. I’ll be by tomorrow morning to look at him again.” He clapped the magistrianos on the back. “Even if it is smallpox, not everyone dies of it.”

“No,” Argyros agreed. He could not help remembering, though, what Riario had said before about smallpox and infants. He put that thought down by brute force as he carried Sergios home. He gave his son a dose of the poppy juice and waited until the baby had fallen into a heavy, drugged sleep. He sniffed at what was left of the jar of milk he had bought the day before. His nose wrinkled: it was sour. As soon as he was sure Sergios would not wake, he hurried to Skleros’s dairy. The dairyman’s wife greeted him at the door and exclaimed over his grim visage. Maria Sklerina’s plump features went pale when, flat-voiced, he told her Sergios was sick.

“Mother of God, not your little son too, after your wife!” she said, crossing herself. “I thank the Lord every day for sparing Peter and me and our eight, and he and I both added you to our prayers. Who can say why God does as He does?”

“Not I,” Argyros replied. He scratched absently at the back of his hand, which itched. Maria said, “Here, give me your jug and let me fill it for you. I know you won’t want to spend a moment more than you have to away from him. They’re dear, aren’t they, even when they’re so small you know loving them is such a gamble?” Her eyes grew sad. “We lost two babies ourselves, my husband and I, and mourned them almost as much as if they’d been grown. And we’re luckier than most families we know.”

“Indeed you are,” Argyros said; his own parents had raised only three children out of seven births. He was glad not to have to make any more conversation as he followed her out to the barn. She rinsed the jar and drew fresh milk from a cow that looked amazingly bored with the whole process. As her husband had before, she refused to take his money. He felt the sting of tears as he thanked her; any small kindness touched him deeply.

Still mostly asleep, Sergios ate a little and did not throw it up. That gave Argyros enough hope to seek his own bed. His rest, though, was fitful, and Riario’s knock not long after dawn came as a relief. He sprang up to let the doctor in.

But Riario had no good news to give him. He hissed in dismay when the magistrianos led him into Sergios’s room. “The first eruptions already,” he grunted, and Argyros saw-he was right. Raised red patches were beginning to cover the baby’s face, just as they had Helen’s. But with Helen, they had taken four days after the onset of the fever to appear. This was only the next day for Sergios.

“Is that bad?” Argyros asked, already afraid he knew the answer.

“Yes,” the doctor said baldly: he was not one to mince words. “The faster the disease goes through its course, the worse the prognosis.”

“What can I do to help him?

There must be something!”

The magistrianos kept running the nails of one hand over the hack of the other. He was not even aware he was doing it.

Riario sadly shook his head. “Only what you did for your wife. Keep the tot as comfortable as you can. Bathe him in cool water to try to fight the fever. Do your best to see he eats—he needs his strength. Come to me when you need more poppy juice. Pray, if you think it does any good.”

The physician’s callous attitude toward prayer had shocked Argyros the first time he heard it. Now he only nodded. He still believed prayer could help the sick—but only sometimes. Then Riario left, and he was alone with his son, alone to fight the inexorable progress of the smallpox. He had thought nothing could be worse than tending Helen had been. Now he saw he was wrong. It was as if some malign spell had accelerated the disease so he could watch Sergios get worse hour by hour. Nothing he did slowed the illness in the slightest.

The only mercy—a small one—was the poppy juice. It spared the baby the torment of itching Helen had gone through. Sergios hardly knew how, as the day waned and dusk fell, the pus-filled vesicles spread over his body. The end came not long after lamplighting time. The baby gave a small sigh and stopped breathing. For several minutes, his father did not realize he was dead. When he did, he fled the house that had seen his young family begin and end as if it were accursed. To him, it was. For two coppers, he would have put a torch to it, no matter if the blaze set half Constantinople afire. He wandered blindly through the dark lanes and alleys of the city. I le was walking past the church of St. Symeon when he noticed where he was. Later, he saw it was probably not chance that had led his feet thither. He made for Riario’s house. Of all the people he knew in the city, the doctor was most likely to grasp his anguish and, in grasping, help temper it. When a knock sounds in the middle of the night, men commonly come to the door with a lamp in one hand and a cudgel or knife in the other, ready to fend off footpads. Because of his trade, though, Riario was used to such rude summonses. He opened the door at once, still wrapping his blanket around him.

“Yes? What is it?” He held up a taper to see who his caller was.

His face fell when he recognized Argyros. “So soon as this, eh?” he said, and did not wait for a reply.

“You’d better come in. I have some wine that could use drinking.”

Riario filled and lit several lamps in his living room, threw a couple of robes from a chair to the floor, and waved the magistrianos into it. The rest of the room was strewn with clothes, books, and medical oddments. Men who live alone are usually very neat or anything but. The doctor was of the latter group.

“Here.”

He put an earthenware jug in front of Argyros and got one like it for himself. He did not bother with cups.

“Drink,” he said.

Argyros drank. Like a sponge, his grief sucked up the wine and left him all but untouched. He put down the jar. “Why?” he cried, a groan that filled the room.

“Ask God when you come before Him in judgment,” Riario said. “I intend to. He’d best have a good answer, too, or I’ll make Him pay. One day I had a wife I loved, two daughters I couldn’t afford to dowry, and a face I didn’t mind seeing in a mirror. A couple of weeks later . . . But you know about that.”

“Yes, I know about that.” Argyros drank deeply. After a while, he went on, “I wish I had caught it too. Why am I here and untouched, when they’re gone?” He rubbed at the backs of his hands.

“Never wish you had smallpox,” Riario said, most seriously. “Never. Poison yourself if you want, or jump off a building, but never wish that on yourself. Be thankful you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His eyes bored into the magistrianos, seeming to glow in the lamplight. Abashed by the force of that stare, Argyros raised the winejar to his lips again. Riario’s glance shifted. Even after he had been drinking, he missed very little. His eyebrows shot upward. He whispered, “Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Look at your hands, fool!”

Setting down the jug, the magistrianos did. He felt his heart stumble with fear. On his fingers and the backs of his hands were several of the hateful red blotches he had come to know so well. A couple were already turning into blisters.

“It’s impossible!” he burst out. “I’m not sick!”

Riario stood beside him, felt his forehead, took his pulse with sure, careful fingers. “You’re not sick,” he agreed at last. It sounded like an accusation; the doctor was scowling. “Why aren’t you? Those are smallpox sores. Why don’t you have more of them?”

“I don’t know.” Absurdly, Argyros felt guilty.

Riario kept poking and prodding at him, trying to figure out why he was not worse. He could not fathom it himself. He had watched the smallpox lesions disfigure Helen before they killed her, had seen them devour his son, and here he had this harmless handful. If God was giving him his wish, it was a mocking gift.

Then he smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I’m a fool!”

“I’m willing to believe it,” Riario said, “but why do you say so?”

“I don’t think I have smallpox at all.”

“What are those, then?” The doctor jerked his chin at the blisters on Argyros’s hands.

“What did the dairyman call it when his little boy had it? Cowpox, that’s what it was. I milked cows a couple of times, getting milk for Sergios.”

“You’re right, and I’m the one who’s the fool.” Riario shook his head in chagrin. “I’ve seen cowpox often enough, on milkmaids and such scared spitless they had smallpox instead. It’s just that now, with so much of the real sickness everywhere, I naturally thought of it first and didn’t even worry about the other.”

Still grumbling to himself, the doctor left the room. He came back with two jugs. “That calls for more wine.”

“I don’t want to drink to celebrate,” the magistrianos said.

“Then drink to drink, or drink for oblivion, or drink to stay with me, because I intend to. Just drink.”

Riario used a scalpel to cut into the pitch sealing the winejar’s cork, worked it free, raised the jar to his mouth, and tipped his head back.

Argyros followed suit. At last the sweet wine began to reach him. He stared owlishly toward Riario.

“What the devil good are you miserable doctors, if you can’t even cure anybody who falls sick?”

Riario did not get angry. Instead, he buried his head in his hands. “How I wish we could, Give us what credit we deserve, though: we set bones, we tend cuts and burns, sometimes we even do some good with the knife.”

The magistrianos nodded. “Oh, aye, I’ve seen all that in the army. But I’ve also seen campaigns fail before they started because half the men went down with a bloody flux, and no one could do anything about it.”

“Yes, I know; those things happen.” Riario hesitated, then continued slowly, seeming to reveal a long-cherished dream at which he feared Argyros would jeer: “What I really wish is that we could do something about disease before it started.”

Indeed, the magistrianos had all he could do not to burst into derisive laughter. “I low would you do that?”

“How do I know?” Riario said irritably. “I keep thinking of King Mithridates of Pontos—you know, the one who gave Rome such a fight in the time of Sulla and Pompey. He made himself so immune to poisons by taking lots of small doses that when he really needed to kill himself he had to get one of his mercenaries to do it for him.”

“Wonderful,” Argyros said. “Where are you going to get a little dose of a disease? And—”

He stopped, his mouth hanging open. He thought of Paul Skleros, his plump happy wife, and their eight children, all healthy while smallpox raged through Constantinople. He thought of the cow pox marks he had seen on small Paul—and surely the rest of the family would have had that ailment too. He thought of Riario’s own words, of how people coming down with cow pox were afraid they had smallpox.

“By the Virgin and all the saints,” he whispered.

“What?” Riario still sounded as though he regretted bringing his vision out where the magistrianos could see it.

Then, stammering, his tongue thick with wine, Argyros set his own insight before the doctor. When he was done, he waited for Riario to call him an idiot.

He watched Riario’s hands slowly curl into fists. His face took on an expression Argyros did not recognize for a moment. Then he remembered his army days and suddenly riding into a clearing where a wildcat was stalking a squirrel. The cat had borne that same look of hungry concentration.

“To hit back, oh, to hit back,” Riario breathed. “Do you realize the weapon you’ll have put into physicians’ hands if you’re right, Argyros?”

“If I’m right,” the magistrianos repeated. “How could you find out?”

“I know what I’d like to do,” Riario replied at once: “Dab some pus from a smallpox sore into a cut on somebody who’s already had cowpox. If the poor sod didn’t come down with smallpox after that, he never would.”

“I thought you would say that. Do it.”

“With whom?” the doctor asked scornfully. “Who’d be madman enough to take a chance like that?”

“I would,” Argyros said.

“Don’t be a jackass, man. If you’re wrong, you take the disease for real, not just in your foolish wishes.”

The magistrianos spread his hands. “Why should I care? My life is in ruins anyhow.”

“That’s the wine talking, and your sorrow.”

“In the morning I’ll be sober and tell you the same thing. As for my sorrow ... if I live to be old as Methusaleh, I’ll never lose it. You should know that.”

Riario flinched, grimaced, reluctantly nodded. All the same, he said, “Go home and go to bed. If you’re fool enough to come back in the morning, well, we’ll talk about it. If not, I can’t blame you; that’s for certain.”

Argyros did not want to go home; the memories of the past weeks were too bitter for him ever to want to live in that house again. In the end, his legs decided the matter. They might as well have been jelly when he tried to rise. His head spun like Scylla’s whirlpool. He slumped back into his chair and passed out.

When he woke, his pounding head made him think he had died and gone to hell. He groaned, and then groaned again at hearing his own voice.

Riario was moving about; listening to him also hurt. The doctor said, “There are two cures for a hangover. One is raw-cabbage, the other a bit more wine. Cabbage always makes me belch. Here.”

Argyros thought his queasy stomach would reject the cup Riario pressed on him, but the wine stayed down. After a while, he began to feel human, in a melancholy way.

Riario’s haggard look and red-tracked eyes said he was suffering too. He picked up a chunk of bread, shuddered, put it down again. “I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”

“I’m half your age, and I was too old years ago.” The magistrianos sat bolt upright and regretted it. “The smallpox!”

Riario regarded him with bleary curiosity. “You still want to go ahead?”

“I said I would, didn’t I? I remember that. It’s one of the last things I do remember.”

“Let me look at you,” Riario said and took the magistrianos’s hands in his own. Argyros looked with him. Clean brown scabs were already forming over the cowpox blisters. The doctor grunted. “Aye, you’re healing from it. Come along, then. If you’re after a nameless grave in the cemetery of Pelagios with the other suicides, I’ll help put you there.”

“If you were so sure that was going to happen, you wouldn’t try this,” Argyros said.

“I suppose not. But then, I wouldn’t try it unless I was certain I’d miss the disease.”

Having had the last word, Riario paced the house, waiting for someone to report a new case of smallpox. He began to grumble; by this time yesterday, he had been wanted in three places at once. But noon was still a long way away when a woman began pounding on the door, crying, “My husband!

Come quick! The pox has seized my husband!”

Argyros and Riario both screwed up their faces at the bright morning sunshine. Lost in her own concern, the woman never noticed. She unquestioningly accepted Argyros as another doctor. The magistrianos’s stomach almost rebelled when he stood by the sick man’s bed. The fellow reminded him too sharply of what he had gone through with Helen and Sergios. Smallpox lesions covered his face and limbs; as yet, they held clear fluid, not pus. “Will he live?” Argyros asked quietly, so the man’s wife, who was sobbing in the next room, would not hear.

“He may well,” Riario answered. “The fever’s not as high as it often is, and his pulse is very strong.”

He eyed the magristrianos. Argyros willed himself to nod.

The doctor pulled a scalpel from his bag; Argyros thought it was the same one he had used to open the wine the night before. He made a small cut in the side of the magistrianos’s right thumb. Argyros nearly jerked his hand away. Holding still to be deliberately injured, he found, was harder in some ways than going into battle.

Humming tunelessly, Riario pierced a couple of the sick man’s blisters with the scalpel. He pressed the liquid from them into the wound he had made on Argvros’s hand and wrapped a bandage around it. He gave the scalpel a thoughtful look. “If this had smallpox poison on it, I suppose I ought to wash it before I use it again.”

He went out a few minutes later to tell the sick man’s wife to do all the things Argyros had done for Helen: bathe him against the fever, keep him quiet—all the palliatives that did no harm, and not much good, either. They did not pretend to cure.

His thumb had begun to throb. It did not matter. If he was right, here was something better than a cure, for anyone who had once had cow pox would never get smallpox at all.

If he was wrong—well, Riario had already spelled out what would happen if he was wrong. One way or the other, he would know soon.

His visits to Riario became a daily ritual. The doctor would examine him, feel to see if he had a fever, check his pulse. Then Riario would growl, “Still alive, I’d say,” give him a cup of wine—a small cup of wine—and send him home again.

The routine gave him something around which his life could coalesce once more. So did his work, to which he returned about a week after Sergios died. The corps of magistrianoi was still badly shorthanded, with some members dead and others mourning loved ones or caring for the sick. The number of things to be done, though, remained the same. Exhaustion was an anodyne hardly less potent than wine.

After three weeks, only a pale scar remained from the cut on Argyros’s thumb. He began to lose patience with Riario’s stock phrase. “Think I’m likely to stay that way?” he asked pointedly.

“Oh, yes, I’ve thought so for some time,” the doctor said. “There is another problem, though: for all we know , you may have been immune to smallpox even before you got the cow-pox. You nursed your wife and son without catching it, you know.”

Argyros stared at him, appalled. lie felt betrayed. “Then what I did was worthless?”

“No, no, no, no. You’re part of a proof, but only part. I’ve done some checking lately. Did you know that it’s not just the Skleroi who escaped smallpox, but almost all the dairy families in the city?”

“No, but that would make sense, wouldn’t it? They’d be the ones most likely to get cowpox first instead.”

“So they would. That’s really what decided me you’d guessed right, whether you yourself were immune or not. By now, I’ve given cowpox to a couple of dozen people and tried to give them smallpox afterward.”

“And?” Argyros wanted to reach over and shake the answer out of Riario. “By the Virgin, tell me this instant how they are!”

The doctor grinned his lopsided grin. “Still alive, I’d say.”

“Then if, say, the city prefect made everyone in Constantinople come forward to get a dose of cowpox, or if babies got it not long after they were born—”

“—None of those people would come down with smallpox later,” Riario finished for the magistrianos.

“That’s my best guess. I’ve already started telling other doctors, too. The word will spread.”

Awe on his face, Argyros crossed himself and bent his head in prayer.

“Here, what’s all this in aid of?” Riario demanded after the magistrianos hat! spent several silent minutes.

“I was apologizing to the Lord for daring to question His will,” Argyros answered humbly. “Now at last I see His purpose in the anguish He sent me and those I love—loved.” Purpose or no, that correction brought sorrow with it. Argyros quickly went on, “Had they not been taken ill, I never would have stumbled across the truth that will save so many more from a like fate.

Truly I am but an instrument of His will.”

“Oh, hogwash,” the doctor said. “What of all the others who got sick and died in the epidemic? If God killed all of them just so two would draw your attention, He strikes me as bloody wasteful.”

“No,” said Argyros. “Consider—were many people not sick, I would have gone to a wetnurse instead of a dairy and never learned of cowpox. But I was afraid to bring a wetnurse into the house, and so I met Paul Skleros and his family.”

“Everyone in Constantinople thinks he’s a theologian,” Riario grumbled. “Pure foolishness, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t,” the magistrianos said shortly. He could not bear to think Helen and Sergios had died in vain, for no purpose at all.

But then he begged Riario’s pardon. He would not have noticed the relationship between cow pox and smallpox with-out the doctor, either. In years to come, physicians would not have to grow so hard-shelled, so cynical, for they would have a true weapon against one deadly scourge of mankind. It might even keep some of them from despairing of God and going; to hell. Argyros did not mention that thought to Riario. He knew what the doctor would say about it.