Agent of Byzantium

V: Etos Kosmou 6825

The knock on the door was tentative, the sort any secretary learns to make when he is not sure his superior wishes to be disturbed. But to Basil Argyros the interruption came as a relief. “Come in,” he called, shoving papyrus scrolls and sheets of parchment to one side of his desk. The magistrianos had been daydreaming anyhow, looking out from his office in the Praitorion toward the great brown stucco mass of the church of Hagia Sophia and, beyond it, softened by haze, the Asian coast across the Propontis from Constantinople.

The case he had been trying to ignore was an Egyptian land dispute, which meant it would not be settled in his lifetime no matter what he did, or probably for fifty years after that, either. The insane litigiousness of the Egyptians had angered the Emperor Julian almost a thousand years before. They had only grown worse since, Argyros thought. As a good Christian, he condemned Julian the Apostate to hell; as an official of the Roman Empire, he was convinced that dealing with Egyptians gave a foretaste of it. And so he greeted his secretary with an effusiveness alien to his usually self-contained nature: “Good day, Anthimos! What can I do for you on this fine spring morning?”

Anthimos, a lean, stooped man whose fingers were always black with ink, eyed the magistrianos suspiciously; he wanted people to be as orderly and predictable as the numbers in his ledgers. At last he shrugged and said, “The Master of Offices is here to see you, sir.”

“What?” Argyros’s thick black eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Show him in, of course.”

The solid portliness of George Lakhanodrakon seemed all the more imposing next to Anthimos, who fluttered about nervously until Argyros dismissed him. The magistrianos bowed low to Lakhanodrakon, waved him to a chair, offered wine. “Always a pleasure to see you, your illustriousness. What brings you here today? Not this wretched mess, I hope.”

Lakhanodrakon rose, walked over to pick up one of the documents Argyros so described. He held it at arm’s length; he was about fifty, a dozen or so years older than the magistrianos, and his sight was beginning to lengthen. He read for a moment. His strong, rather heavy features showed his distaste.

“Pcheris vs. Sarapion, is it? I didn’t know you were stuck with such drivel. No, it’s nothing to do with that, I promise.”

“Then you’re doubly welcome, sir,” Argyros said sincerely. “I’ve been praying to St. Mouamet for a new assignment.”

“The patron of changes, eh?” Lakhanodrakon chuckled. The amusement fell from the Master of Offices’ face. “Your prayers are about to be granted. Tell me what you make of this.” He fumbled in the silk pouch that hung from his gold belt of rank, produced a rolled-up parchment, and handed it to Argyros. The magistrianos slid off the ribbon that bound the parchment, skimmed through it. “It’s bad Greek,” he remarked.

“Keep going.”

“Of course, sir.” W7hen he was done, Argyros said, “I take it this came from one of the cities in the east, from Mesopotamia or perhaps Syria?”

“Mesopotamia—from Daras, to be exact.”

The magistrianos nodded. “Yes, it has all the marks of a Persian piece: a polemic against the orthodox faith and an invitation to the Nestorians and hard-core Monophysites and other heretics to abandon their allegiance to the Empire and go over to the King of Kings. Preferably, I suppose, bringing the fortress of Daras with them.”

“No doubt,” Lakhanodrakon agreed dryly.

“Forgive me, sir,” Argyros said, “but I’ve seen a great many sheets of this sort. Why bring this particular one to my attention?”

Instead of answering directly, the Master of Offices took another parchment from his beltpouch. “When you have examined this sheet, I trust you will understand—as well as I do, at any rate, which is not a great deal.”

The magistrianos looked at Lakhanodrakon in puzzlement after reading the first few lines. “But this is just the same as the other—” His voice trailed away, and his eyes snapped back to the parchment. He picked up the other sheet Lakhanodrakon had given him, held one in each hand. His jaw fell.

“You see it, then,” the Master of Offices said. “Good. You are as quick as I thought you were.”

“Thank you,” Argyros said abstractedly. He was still staring at the two pieces of parchment. They both said the same thing—exactly the same. It was not as if a scribe had copied out a message twice. Each line on both sheets had exactly the same words on it, written exactly the same size. The same word was misspelled in the third line of each sheet. A couple of lines later, the same incorrect verb form appeared in each, then an identical dative after the preposition where a genitive belonged. Near the end, the letter pi at the beginning of a word was half effaced on both handbills. They even shared the identical small smear of ink between two words.

The magistrianos put one sheet over the other, walked to the window. He held the parchments up to the sun and worked them until the left edges of the two messages were precisely aligned. Any differences would have been instantly apparent. There were none.

“Mother of God, help me!” Argyros exclaimed.

“May She protect the entire Empire,” George Lakhanodrakon said soberly. “Not just these two, but hundreds of such sheets, have appeared in Daras, nailed to every wall big enough to hold one, it seems. They may well provoke the uprisings they seek—you know how touchy the east always is.”

Argyros knew. Despite having been a part of the Roman Empire since before Christ’s Incarnation, Syria and Mesopotamia were very different from its other regions. Latin was all but unknown there, and even Greek, the Empire’s dominant tongue, was spoken only by a minority in the towns. Most people used Syriac or Arabic, as their ancestors had before them. Heresy flourished there as nowhere else. And farther east lay Persia, the Empire’s eternal rival. The two great powers had been struggling for 1,400 years, each dreaming of vanquishing the other for good. The Persians always fostered unrest in the eastern provinces of the Empire. Worshipers of the sun and fire themselves, they gave Nestorians refuge and stirred up religious strife to occupy the Romans with internal troubles. But never on such a scale as this—

“How are they doing it?” Argyros said, as much to himself as to the Master of Offices.

“That is what I charge you with: to find out,” Lakhanodrakon said. “Your success in ferreting out the secret of the Franco-Saxons’ hellpowder last year made me think of you the moment those”—he jerked a thumb at the parchments Argyros was still holding—”came to my attention.”

“You flatter me, your illustriousness.”

“No, I need you,” the Master of Offices said. Harsh lines of worry ran from his jutting nose to the corners of his mouth. “I tell you, I fear this worse than the hellpowder. That was only a threat against our borders; we have dealt with such before, a hundred times. But this could be a blow in the heart.”

Argyros frowned. “Surely you exaggerate, sir.”

“Do I? I’ve lain awake at night imagining the chaos these sheets could create. Suppose one said one thing, one another? They could fan faction against faction, heretic against orthodox—”

His wave encompassed all of Constantinople. “Suppose a Persian agent smuggled even a donkeyload of these accursed things into the city! Men from even corner of the world live here—Jews, Egyptians, Armenians, Sklavenoi from the lands by the Ister, Franco-Saxons. Set them at each other’s throats, and it could be the Nika riots come again!”

“You’ve seen further than I have,” Argyros admitted, shivering. It had been eight hundred years since Constantinople’s mob, shoutingNika

—Triumph!—had almost toppled Justinian the Great from the Roman throne, but that was the standard against which all later urban uprisings were measured.

“Perhaps further than the Persians, too, or they would not waste their time at the frontier,” Lakhanodrakon said. “But they will not stay blind long, I fear. Beware of them, Basil. They are no rude barbarians to be befooled like the Franco-Saxons; they are as old in deceit as we.”

“I shall remember,” the magistrianos promised. He picked up the parchments Lakhanodrakon had given him and tucked them away. “The rest of this pile of trash I shall cheerfully consign to Anthimos. I’ll leave for Daras in a day or two. As you know, I’m a widower; I have no great arrangements to make. But I would like to light a candle at a church dedicated to St. Nicholas before I go.”

“A good choice,” the Master of Offices said.

“Yes—who better than the patron saint of thieves?”

“I’ve tried everything I can think of,” the garrison commandant of Daras said, slamming a fist down on his desk in frustration. “Every incoming traveler has his baggage searched, and I keep patrols on the streets day and night. Yet the damned handbills keep showing up.”

“I can’t fault what you’ve done, Leontios,” Argyros said, and the soldier leaned back in his chair with a sigh of relief. He was a big, burly man, almost as tall as Argyros and thicker through the shoulders, but there was no question who dominated the conversation. Magistnanoi could make or break even the leader of an outpost as important as Daras.

“More wine?” Leontios extended a pitcher.

“Er—no thanks,” Argyros said, he hoped politely. The wine, like much of what was drunk in Mesopotamia, was made from dates. He found it sickeningly sweet. But he would have to work with Leontios and did not want to hurt his feelings, so he held out his hand, remarking, “That’s a handsome jug you have there. May I see it?”

“Oh, d’you like it? Seems ordinary enough to me.”

“Hardly that. I’m not used to seeing reliefwork on pottery, and the depiction of our Lord driving the moneychangers from the Temple is well done, I think.”

“If it pleases you so, take it and welcome,” Leontios said at once, afraid to antagonize the magistrianos in even a small way. “I’m sure you’ve seen much better, though, coming from the city.”

“There’s nothing to match it in Constantinople. The potters there decorate with glazes and drawings, not reliefs.”

“Fancy that, us ahead of the capital!” Leontios said. He saw that Argyros did not want the winejug, and put it down. “The style’s been all the rage in these parts—both sides of the border, come to that—the last five or ten years. I got this piece from old Abraham last summer. He’s a damned Nestorian, but he does good work. His shop is only a block or so away, if you think you might find something you’d fancy.”

“Perhaps I’ll look him up.” Argyros stood, fanned himself with his broad-brimmed hat of woven straw. It did not help much. “Is the heat always so bad?”

The garrison commandant rolled his eyes. “My dear sir, this is only June—not even summer yet. If you’re still in Daras in six weeks, you’ll find out what heat is.”

“Do you know that in the Franco-Saxon mountain country it sometimes snows in September? Last year that seemed the most hideous thing I could imagine. Now it strikes me as delightful.”

Leontios ran a hairy, sweaty forearm across his face. “It strikes me as impossible. I wish you luck on this madness, more than I’ve had myself. If I can help in any way, you have only to ask.”

“My thanks,” Argyros said and left. The commandant’s office had been very warm, shielded though it was by thick walls from the worst Daras could do. The noonday heat outside was unbelievable, stupefying. The sun blazed down mercilessly from the blue enamel bowl of the sky. The magistrianos squinted against the glare. He wished he could strip off his boots, trousers, and tunic (even if that was gauzy linen) and go naked under his hat. Some of the locals did, walking about in a loincloth and sandals. More, though, covered their heads with white cotton cloths and swaddled themselves in great flowing robes, as if they were so many ambulatory tents. The strange clothes only accented Argyros’s feeling of being in an alien land. The houses and other buildings, save for the most splendid, were of whitewashed mud brick, not stone or timber. And the signs that advertised dyeshops or jewelers, taverns and baths, were apt to be in three languages: angular Greek, the tight curlicues of Syriac, and the wild, snakelike script Arabic used. If any was missing, it was usually the Greek.

A couple of men talking in the street moved on when they saw the magistrianos approaching. They might not know him for an agent, but even without his speaking, his outfit and his face—tanned but not very swarthy—branded him as one loyal to Constantinople and not to be trusted. He scowled. Such recognition was only going to make his job harder.

The shop across the street had to be the one Leontios had mentioned. There were dishes and jugs and cups in the window, and the Greek line of the signboard above them read FINE POTTERY BY ABRAAM: Greek, of course, could not show the sound of rough breathing in the middle of a word. Abraam or Abraham stood in the doorway, crying his wares in guttural Syriac. Argyros watched as a smith came over from the foundry next door to bring him a flat, square iron plate. The two men eyed the magistrianos with the same distrust the street idlers had shown. He was getting used to that suspicious stare in Daras. He returned it imperturbably.

The smith, an enormous fellow baked brown as his leather apron by the sun, spat in the dirt roadway and ambled toward his own place of business, still glowering Argyros’s way. Abraham the potter turned his back on the magistrianos with deliberate rudeness and went back into the darkness of his shop. Argyros saw him put the iron plate under a counter and talk briefly with a woman back there; whether wife, customer, or what he did not know.

Operating out of Leontios’s barracks would have made him altogether too conspicuous, so he went looking for an inn. He did not notice when the woman emerged from the pottery and hurried after him. The first taverner he tried spoke only Arabic and catered to nomads out of the desert. As Argyros had but a few phrases of Arabic himself, he decided to try somewhere else. Two men were waiting for him when he came outside to retrieve his horse. Something in their stance told him their breed at once: street toughs. He walked past them without a sideways glance, hoping his size would make them choose another victim.

But one grabbed at his arm. “Where you go to, you damned swaggering Melkite?” he grinned, showing bad teeth. He used the eastern heretics’ insulting name for one loyal to the dogmas of Constantinople: it meant “king’s man.”

“None of your concern,” Argyros snapped, shaking off the man’s hand and springing back. With a curse, the ruffian leaped at him, followed by his companion. The magistrianos kicked the first one where it did the most good. Two against one left no time for chivalry. The fellow went down with a wail, clutching at himself and spewing his guts out in the dust.

The other tough had a short bludgeon. Argyros threw up his left arm just in time to keep his head from being broken. He bared his teeth as pain shot through him from elbow to fingertips. His right hand darted to the knife at his belt. “Come on,” he panted. “Even odds now.”

The local was no coward. He waded in, swung again. Argyros ducked and slashed, coming up from below. The point of his dagger ripped through his enemy’s sleeve. He felt the blade slice into flesh. The tough hissed. He was not through, though; he was ready for more fight. Then a woman behind Argyros screamed something in Arabic. The magistrianos did not understand, but his opponent did. He whirled and fled. Argyros chased him, but he knew Daras’s twisting alleyways as an outsider could not, and escaped.

Breathing hard and rubbing his arm, the magistrianos walked back to his horse. He saw what the woman’s shout must have meant, for a squad of Leontios’s soldiers had gathered round the good-for-naught he had leveled. They were prodding the wretch up, none too gently, with the butts of their spears.

Someone who had watched the brawl pointed at Argyros, which drew the squad-leader’s attention.

“You ruin this fellow here?” he demanded.

“Frankly, yes. I was set on for no reason and without warning. He had it coming.” Anger made him careless with his words.

The squad-leader set his hands on his hips. “Talk like you’re the Emperor, don’t you? Anyone else see this little scramble?” He glanced at the swelling crowd.

Argyros’s heart sank. He did not want to go back to Leontios and waste time on explanations, but he was sure the witnesses would side with a man of Daras rather than an obvious stranger. Unexpectedly, though, a woman spoke up for him: “It’s as the tall man says. They attacked him first.”

The squad-leader was as taken aback as the magistrianos. Seizing the initiative, Argyros took him aside and pressed a gold nomisma into his palm, along with some silver to keep his men happy. The trooper pocketed the bribe in a businesslike fashion. “Haul that scum out of here,” he commanded, and his squad dragged the captive off; two men still had to support him. Onlookers began to drift away. Argyros looked around to see if he could spot the woman who had come to his aid. She had been well back in the crowd, and he had not got a glimpse of her face. But he had no doubts, for she waited in the shadow of a building across the street instead of leaving with the rest of the spectators. Above a short veil filmy enough to be no more than token concealment, she looked saucily toward him.

“My thanks,” the magistrianos said, walking over to her. Something beside mere gratitude put warmth in his voice. From tightly curled black hair to gilded sandals beneath henna-soled feet, she was a strikingly attractive woman. Her dark eyes were bright and lively, her mouth, half seen, full-lipped and inviting. The fitted ankle-length robe she wore displayed her figure to the best advantage; even in the shadow in which she stood, the red, gold, and green sequins at her bodice sparkled with each breath she took. She said, “It would be wrong for so brave—and so mighty—a man to find himself in trouble he does not deserve.” Her Greek had a slight throaty accent. That and her costume told Argyros she was of Persian origin. The border between the two empires went back and forth so often that such things were common on both sides.

“Thanks again,” Argyros said; and then, not wanting the conversation to end as abruptly as that, he asked, “Would you happen to know of a decent inn?”

She burst out laughing. “It just so happens that I dance at the hostel of Shahin Bahram’s son. It’s clean enough, and the food is good, if you don’t mind eating Persian fare.” When Argyros shook his head, she said, “Come on, then; I’ll take you there. Bringing you in will make me money, too. I’m Mirrane, by the way.”

The magistrianos gave his own name, but said that he had come from Constantinople as inspector of Daras’s waterworks. The famous system of cisterns and drains and the dam across the nearby Cordes River added greatly to the strength of the town’s fortifications.

“An important man,” she murmured, moving closer to him. “Do you think your horse can carry two?”

“For a little way, certainly.” He helped her mount in front of him; her waist was supple under his hands. When the horse started forward, she leaned back against him and did not try to pull away. It made for an enjoyable ride.

Shahin’s tavern was in the western part of Daras, not far from the church of the Apostle Bartholomew that Justinian had built when he renovated the town’s works. Shahin folded Argyros into a bearhug and called him his lord, his master, his owner—none of which prevented a sharp haggle when it came to the price of a room.

At last Mirrane spoke in Persian: “Don’t drive him away.” Argyros had a hard time holding his face straight: no use letting the girl know he was fluent in her language, though he did not think there was anything more to this than her not wanting to lose her finder’s fee. Shahin became more reasonable. As was his custom when starting an investigation, the magistrianos wandered into the taproom to drink a little wine and soak up the local gossip. Shahin’s place was good for that; it featured a mixed clientele, and talk came fast and furious in the three tongues of the imperial east and Persian as well. There was more chatter about doings in Ctesiphon, the Persian capital, than over what was happening in Constantinople.

Naturally enough, the handbills were also a prominent subject, but not in a way that helped Argyros. The townsfolk seemed much less upset about them than George Lakhanodrakon or Leontios had been. One man, well in his cups, said with a shrug, “They’re looking to break our nerve. I’ll fret when I see a Persian army outside the walls, and not until.”

The magistrianos tried to prompt him: “Don’t you think the Nestorians might invite—” Several people shushed him, and he had to subside, for four musicians emerged from a back room to take their seats on low stools by the fireplace. One carried two vase-shaped drums and had a tambourine strapped to his calf, another brought a pair of flutes, the third a long trumpet, and the last a short-necked lute played with a bow, something Argyros had not seen at Constantinople.

At a nod from the lutanist, they began to play. The drummer’s beat was more intricate than Argyros was used to, the tune lively but at the same time somehow languorous. Again he was conscious of traditions older than the Roman Empire that lived on in the east.

Then Mirrane glided into the taproom, and the magistrianos worried about traditions no more. She wore only her veil and a few jeweled ornaments that sparkled in the torchlight; her smooth skin gleamed with oil. When she moved among the tables, it was as if she sought out a particular man to slay with lust. Sinuous as a serpent, she slid away from every arm that reached out to take hold of her.

“With a dance like that,” Argyros whispered to the man at the table next to his, “why does she bother with the veil?”

The fellow was shocked enough to tear his burning gaze away from Mirrane. “It were a gross indecency for a woman to show her face in public!”

“Oh.”

Mirrane’s eyes flashed as she recognized the magistrianos, and he knew she had chosen him for her victim. Laughing, she waved to the musicians; the tune grew faster and more urgent. It would have taken a man of stone, which Argyros assuredly was not, to remain unstirred as she whirled in front of him. The oil on her skin was scented with musk; under it he caught the perfume of herself. The music rose to a fiery crescendo. With a shout, Mirrane flung herself down on the seat by Argyros, cast her arms around his neck. With her warm length pressed against him, he hardly heard the storm of applause that filled the inn.

And later, when she went upstairs with him, he ignored with equal aplomb the jealous catcalls that followed them. Knowing what was important at any given moment, he told himself, was a virtue. He woke the next morning feeling considerably rumpled but otherwise as well as he ever had in his life. The soft straw pallet was narrow for two; Mirrane’s leg sprawled over his calf. He moved slowly and carefully, but woke her anyway as he got out of bed. “Sorry.”

She smiled lazily up at him. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I’m glad of that.” He politely turned his back to use the chamberpot, then splashed water on his face and rinsed his mouth from a ewer that stood next to the bed. He ran his fingers through his hair and beard, shook his head in mock dismay at the snarls he found. “You’d think the dogs dragged me in, the way I must look.”

“Do you always worry so much?” she asked, rising and stretching luxuriously.

“As a matter of fact, yes.” He went over to his saddlebags, which he had not yet unpacked, in search of a comb. Several jingling trinkets and her veil were draped over the leather sacks. She took them back from him while he rummaged.

He lifted out three or four small, tightly stoppered pots with bits of rag protruding from holes drilled through their corks. “What on earth are those?” Mirrane asked; they were not the sort of thing travelers usually carried.

Argyros thought fast. “They’re filled with clay,” he said. “I filter water from the cisterns through them; from the amount and type of sediment left behind, I can judge how pure the water is.”

“Ah,” she nodded, not revealing much interest in anything so mundane as the tools of his alleged trade. All the same, he was relieved when he finally found his bone comb and stowed the pots away. They were filled, not with clay, but with the Franco-Saxon compound of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter the armorers of Constantinople had dubbed hellpowder. Argyros had no intention of advertising its existence without dire need.

He combed out his tangled whiskers. “That’s—ouch—better.” When he was done dressing, he said, “I know what I do seems dull, but Daras may need all the water it can find to hold out against a Persian attack if these parchments I’ve heard about stir up the rebellion they’re after.”

Mirrane’s costume made a simple shrug worth looking at. “I’ve heard of them too, but there haven’t been many here about Shahin’s place.” She hesitated. “Are you thinking we may be disloyal because we’re of Persian blood? Shahin’s grandfather converted to Christianity—orthodox, not Nestorian—and he worships every week at Bartholomew’s church.”

He believed her. There was no point in lying about something of that sort; it was too easy to check. “I wasn’t thinking any such thing,” he said. “I’d rather not get stuck in a siege, though, especially in a city that may run dry. And,” he added a moment later, “it would be sinful to risk you.”

Since he had used the story he did, he thought it wise actually to examine some of Daras’s waterworks. One major cistern stood close to the church of the Apostle Bartholomew. He poked at the brickwork as if to check its soundness, then climbed the stairs to the top of the great tank and peered into it to see what the water level was.

One of the faces he noticed while he was puttering about seemed familiar. After a while he realized that the hawk-faced fellow lounging against a wall and munching a pomegranate was the flute player at Shahin’s tavern. The man was gone by the time he got down from the cistern, which left Argyros uncertain whether his presence was coincidental or the magistrianos’s cover had satisfied him. 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 head-tax and the hearth-tax, 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 strong-point 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 doubted the fellow was 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 chickpeas.

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 Uaras 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. “W7ell, 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 standard 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.

After a snarl of frustration, Argyros began to use his head. If anything here was not as it should be, it would be connected with the parchments Yesuyab had sent Abraham. Where were they? The magistrianos held the lamp high. He made a disgusted noise deep in his throat. He had walked right past them—they were stacked by a table just to the left of the back door.

Excitement flared in the magistrianos as he saw the gluepots sitting on top of the table. Beside them were a couple of smaller vessels that proved full of ink, along with the square iron plate the smith had given to Abraham. A low iron frame had been put in place around it. The only other thing on the table was a large paintbrush.

The frustration returned. Here were parchment and ink, right enough, but Argyros could not see how the rest of the strange array contributed to making handbills. It would take a score of scribes to turn out as many as Abraham had parchments, and in that case they would be far from identical with one another. There were four shelves over the table, each with a dozen small clay jars on it (except for the topmost, which had thirteen). Only because they were close to the parchments and glue, Argyros lifted down one of them. He turned it around in his hand and almost dropped it—on the side turned to the wall was written a large majuscule delta: ?. He tore the stopper off, held the lamp over it, and peered in. At first he saw nothing that looked like a delta. The jar held a number of small rectangular blocks of clay, each about as long as the last joint of his middle finger but not nearly so thick. He picked one up. Sure enough, there was a raised letter at one end. It was still black with ink. He lifted out another clay pot. It also had a delta on it. So did the next and the next.

No wonder Abraham was involved in the plot, Argyros thought. The potter was used to creating reliefwork of all kinds; letters would come as no challenge to him. And Leontios had said he was a Nestorian. He had reason to be hostile to Constantinople, which forced religious unity to go with the political unity it brought.

Whistling tunelessly, the magistrianos put the jar back and chose another one from a couple of shelves higher up. This one was identified by a minuscule beta: ß. Like the first, it was filled with those little blocks of fired clay. Argyros took one out, confidently expected to find a beta on one end of it. And so, in a way, he did, but reversed.

He thought a few uncharitable thoughts about the wits of anyone incompetent enough to make his letters backward. Certain it was a mistake, he removed several more clay blocks from the jar. They were all the same and all reversed.

He frowned. That was going to a lot of effort to perpetuate an error. He poured all but one of the little clay lumps back into their jar, turned the last one over and over as he thought. He held it so close to his face that he had to look at it crosseyed. It was still backward.

He squeezed it between his thumb and index finger, as if trying to wring the answer from it by brute force. Naturally, and annoyingly, such treatment harmed the clay block not at all. It was harder on him.

There was a square indentation in the meaty pad of his thumb from the base of the block. And on his forefinger—

He stared at the perfect, un-reversed beta pressed into his flesh. “Of course!” he exclaimed, startled into speaking aloud. “It’s like a signet ring, where everything has to be done backward to show up the right way in the wax.” The delta, he thought, had misled him because it was symmetrical. He dipped the backward beta into an inkpot, stamped it down on the tabletop, and grinned to see the letter appear right-side-to. He stamped it again and again. Each impression, inevitably, was just like all the rest. “This is how it’s done, all right,” he breathed.

He discovered that the jars on the top two shelves contained minuscule letters (they were arranged in alphabetical order, to make finding each one easy), while their counterparts on the lower shelves all held majuscules. The extra jar on the highest board proved to have slightly smaller blocks of clay without any characters on them. They puzzled Argyros until he realized they had to be used to mark the spaces between words—because they were lower than their fellows, the ink that got on them would not appear on the parchment.

Like a child with a new toy, he decided to spell out his own name. One by one, he selected the letters that went into it and set them on the iron plate, leaning them against the edge of the iron frame for security. Even so, they kept falling over. And that, he decided, was probably what the glue was for: spread over the surface of the plate, it would hold the blocks in place. He inked the brush, painted the tops of the letters, then pressed a sheet of parchment over them. The result made him burst into startled laughter. There on the parchment, rather raggedly aligned, were the nonsense words.

He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, muttering “Idiot!” under his breath. He quickly rearranged the clay blocks; naturally, if the letters themselves were backward, their order had to be that way too, in order to appear correctly on the sheet. He felt like cheering when the second try rewarded him with a smeary Basil Argyros .

He wondered what to compose next. Almost without conscious thought, the first words of the Gospel according to John came into his mind: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

A letter at a time, the evangelist’s famous sentence took shape. Argyros suddenly stopped, halfway through, as the magnitude of what he was doing began to sink in. The Persians, with their petty subversion in Daras, were only pikers, and George Lakhanodrakon’s fear of the same at Constantinople seemed just as trivial.

Of course John had been speaking of the divine Logos, Christ Himself, but his words rang with eerie aptness. These simple little blocks of clay could spell anything and make as many copies of it as one wanted. What power was more godlike than that?

The magistrianos was so struck with awe that he did not pay any attention to the approaching footfalls in the alley behind Abraham’s shop. But the soft cry of alarm one of the newcomers raised on seeing the bar down from the door tore Argyros from his reverie. He cursed himself for his stupidity—the only reason all this dangerous paraphernalia was so openly displayed had to be that the Persians were going to reproduce another handbill tonight.

There were three stout iron hooks-and-eyes screwed into the inside of the door panels and the doorframe. Abraham, evidently, was the sort of man who tied double knots in his sandal straps—and in his sandals, Argyros would have done the same. The potter’s caution was the only thing that saved him. He had just hooked the last closure when someone large heaved an ungentle shoulder against the door. It groaned but held.

Familiar, throaty laughter came from the alleyway. “Is that you, dear Basil?” Mirrane called mockingly.

“Where will you run now?”

It was an excellent question. The pottery’s front door was barred on the outside, just as the back had been. So were the stout wooden shutters, which—damn Abraham—had locks on both inside and out. Mirrane let Argyros stew just long enough, then said, “Well it seems we shan’t raise Daras yet. A pity—but then, bagging one of the Emperor’s precious magistrianoi (oh yes, I know who you are!) is not the smallest prize either.”

“You’re behind this!” he blurted. He had thought she was merely a pleasant distraction thrown his way by the real plotter—Shahin maybe, or Abraham, or Yesuyab, whom he had never seen. She might have been reading his thoughts. Bitterness edged her voice as she answered, “Aye, by the Good God Ormazd, I am! Did you think I lacked the wit or will because I am a woman? You’ll not be the first to pay for that mistake, nor the last.” She shifted from Greek to Persian and spoke to one of her henchmen: “I’ll waste no more time on this Roman. Burn the place down!”

Someone let out a harsh protest in Arabic.

“Don’t be a donkey, Abraham,” Mirrane snapped. “The noise of breaking in the door might bring the watch—we’re too close to the barracks to risk it. The King of Kings will pay you more than you would earn from this miserable hovel in the next fifty years. Come on, Bahram, set the torch. The bigger the blaze, the more likely it is to destroy everything we need out of the way, Argyros included.

“... Isn’t that right, Basil?” she added through the door.

The magistrianos did not answer, but could not argue with her tactics. A very accomplished young woman indeed, he thought ruefully—and in such unexpected ways. He had no doubt several armed men would be waiting when smoke and flames drove him to try bursting out through the door. He could see Bahrain’s torch flame flickering, hot and yellow, under the doorjam.

But Mirrane, for all her ruthless efficiency, did not know everything. Along with his burglar’s pincers, Argyros had fetched a couple of the tightly corked clay pots he had passed off to her as sediment testers. Stooping, he set them at the base of the back door.

His lamp was beginning to gutter, but it still held enough oil for his need. He touched the flame to the rags that ran through the stoppers. Those were soaked in fat themselves, and caught at once. As soon as the magistrianos saw they were burning, he put down the lamp and dove behind Abraham’s counter. He clapped his hands over his ears.

It was not a moment too soon. The hellpowder bombs went off, the explosion of the first touching off the second. The blast was like the end of the world. Shattered bits of pottery flew round the shop, deadly as slingers’ bullets. The double charge of the charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter mix the Franco-Saxons had discovered flung the door off its hinges, hurling it outward at Mirrane and her companions. Dagger in hand, Argyros scrambled to his feet. His head was ringing, but at least he knew where the thunderbolt had come from. To Mirrane and her friends in the alleyway, it was a complete and hideous surprise.

The magistrianos charged through the cloud of thick, brimstone-smelling smoke that hung in the shattered doorway. He discovered one of Mirrane’s henchmen at once, by almost tripping over him. The fellow was down and writhing, his hands clutched around a long splinter of wood driven into his groin. He was no danger and would not last long.

Several other men went pelting down the alley as fast as they could run. Through half-deafened ears, Argyros heard their shouts of terror: “Devils!” “Demons!” “Mother of God, protect me from Satan!” “It’s Ahriman, come to earth!” That last had to come from a Persian: Ahriman was Ormazd’s wicked foe in their dualist faith.

One of the nearby shadows moved. Argyros whirled. “A trick I did not know about, it seems,” Mirrane said quietly. Her self-possession was absolute; she might have been talking of the weather. She went on, “The game is yours this time, after all.”

“And you with it!” he cried, springing toward her.

“Sorry, no.” As she spoke, she opened the door behind her, stepped through, and slammed it in Argyros’s face. The bar locked it just as he crashed into it. He rebounded, dazed at the impact. Mirrane said, “We’ll meet again, you and I.” He heard her beat a rapid retreat. Only then did he think of anything beyond the predicament from which he had just escaped. As Mirrane had said, Abraham’s pottery was only a block from the main barracks of Daras. Already Argyros could hear cries of alarm and then the disciplined pound of a squadron running his way.

“Here!” he shouted.

The squad-leader came puffing up, torch held high. He gaped at the wrecked doorway to Abraham’s shop. “What’s all this about?”

“No time to explain,” the magistrianos snapped. He gave the underofficer his rank; the man stiffened to attention. “Have some of your troopers break down that door,” Argyros ordered, pointing to the one through which Mirrane had escaped. He quickly described her, then sent the rest of the squad around the corner to where the front entrance of the house or store or whatever it was let out. They returned empty-handed. At Argyros’s urging, Leontios sealed the gates of Daras within the hour, and for the next two days the garrison forces searched the town from top to bottom. They caught Abraham hiding with Yesuyab the tailor, but of Mirrane no sign whatever turned up. Argyros was disappointed, but somehow not surprised.

“Very clever, Basil, your use of the map to ferret out the nest of spies,” George Lakhanodrakon said.

“Thank you, sir.” Argyros’s office chair creaked as he leaned back in it. “I’m only annoyed it took me as long as it did. I should have seen that the Persians deliberately avoided putting their parchments in certain parts of Daras so as to give Leontios no reason to search in them. But it wasn’t until I found out that Yesuyab’s tanning-works (and the gluemaker’s next to it), Abraham’s pottery, and Shahin’s tavern were all in the exact centers of the empty areas that things began to make sense.”

“A pretty piece of reasoning, no matter how you reached it.” The Master of Offices hesitated, clearing his throat, and went on, “All the same, I’m not entirely sure the situation you left behind satisfies me.”

“I’m not certain what else I could have done, your illustriousness,” the magistrianos said politely. “No more inflammatory handbills are appearing in Daras, the town was calm when I left it, and I discovered the means by which the Persians were producing so many copies of the same text.” Excitement put warmth in his voice. “A means, I might add, which could be used to—”

“Yes, yes,” the Master of Offices interrupted. “I don’t intend to slight you, my boy, not at all. As I said, you did splendidly. But all the same, there is no final resolution of the problem underlying this particular spot of trouble. It could crop up again anywhere in the east, in Kirkesion or Amida or Martyropolis, the more so as the tricksy Persian baggage in charge of the scheme slipped through your net.”

“There you speak truly, sir,” Argyros said. Mirrane’s getaway still rankled. Also, it piqued him that the enjoyment she showed in his arms had probably been assumed to lull him. It had seemed very real at the time, more, he thought, than with any woman he had known since Helen. He hoped her parting warning would come true; one way or another, he wanted to test himself against her again. He went on, “In any case, a second outbreak is not likely to be as serious as the first was. Now that we know how the thing is done, the local officials should be able to search out clandestine letterers on their own. And if the government issues them sets of clay archetypes on their own, they can easily counter any lies the Persians try spreading.”

“Issue them archetypes of their own?” Lakhanodrakon spread his hands in something approaching horror. “Don’t you think this is a secret as dangerous as hellpowder? It should be restricted in the same way, and the production of documents written with it limited to the imperial chancery here in the city.”

“I’d like to believe I could convince you that this new way of lettering has more applications than simply the political.”

The Master of Offices’ scowl was like a stormcloud. “My concern is for the safety of the state. You’d need a powerful demonstration to alter my opinion here.”

“I suppose so,” Argyros said with a sigh. He seemed to change the subject: “Will you still be giving another reading next week, sir?”

Lakhanodrakon’s frown vanished. He was composing an epic on ConstansII ’s triumph over the Lombards in Italia, in iambic trimeters modeled after those George of Pisidia had used in his poems celebrating Herakleios’s victories. “Yes, from the third book,” he said. “I hope you’ll be there?”

“I’m looking forward to it. I only wonder how many of your guests will be familiar with what you’ve already written.”

“To some degree, a fair number, I suppose. Many will have been at the earlier readings last year and this past winter, and of course the manuscript will have circulated somewhat. I intend to summarize what’s gone before, anyhow.”

“No need for that.” Argyros opened a desk drawer and handed a pile of thin papyrus codices to Lakhanodrakon.

“What on earth are these?”

“Books one and two of your Italiad, sir,” Argyros said innocently. “I’ve given you thirty-five copies, which I believe will be enough for you to pass one on to everyone who is coming. If not, I still have the letters in their frames. I would be happy to make as many more as you need.”

A couple of days ago Argyros would have sung a different tune. He did not fret about the cost of seven hundred sheets of papyrus. The stuff was cheap in Constantinople, because the government used so much of it. And finding a potter from Mesopotamia who could be made to understand how to make the clay archetypes had not been difficult for one who knew the city as the magistrianos did. But Argyros was still squinting from the unaccustomed effort of putting twenty pages of poetry into frames a letter at a time—backward. Anthimos had helped, some, but he never did get the hang of it, and the magistrianos spent almost as much time fixing his secretary’s mistakes as he did making progress of his own. After a while, he had excused the hapless scribe. And then, halfway through page eighteen, he had run out of omegas and had to rush back to the potter to get more. It was all worth it now, though, watching the astonishment on the Master of Offices’ face turn to delight.

“Thirty-five copies?” Lakhanodrakon whispered in wonder. “Why, saving the Bible and Homer, I don’t know of thirty-five copies of any work here in the capital. Perhaps Thucydides or Plato or St. John Chrysostom—and me. I feel ashamed to join the company you’ve put me in, Basil.”

“It’s a very good poem, sir,” the magistrianos said loyally. “Don’t you see now? With this new lettering, we can make so many copies of all our authors that they’ll never again risk being lost because mice ate the last remaining one three days before it was due to be redone. Not just literature, either—how much better would our armies fare if every officer carried his own copy of Maurice’s Strategikori? And lawyers and churchmen could be sure their texts matched one another, for all would come from the same original. Ship captains would be able to take charts and sailing guides from port to port—”

At last the Master of Offices was beginning to catch some of the younger man’s enthusiasm. “The Virgin protect me, you may be right after all! I can see how this invention could prove a great boon for government. Imperial rescripts would become much easier to produce. And—oh, think of it! We could make endless copies of the same standard forms and send them throughout the Empire. And it might not even be too much labor to have other forms, on which we could keep track of whether the first ones had been properly dispatched. I can fairly see the scheme now, can’t you?”

Argyros could, only too well. He wondered if he would be able to change his boss’s mind back again.