Agent of Byzantium

VI: Etos Kosmou 6826

Had he not decided to pray at the church of St. Mouamet, Basil Argyros would never have got caught in the riot.

The church was in a poor part of Constantinople, not far from the Theodosian harbor on the Sea of Marmara. It held only about twenty people. As a magistrianos, Argyros could have chosen a more splendid holy place. He had prayed in Hagia Sophia often enough.

But St. Mouamet was one of Argyros’s favorites. He had a fine church in distant New Carthage much grander than the little shrine dedicated to him here in the capital. Argyros had seen it a couple of years ago, when he was in Ispania to ferret out the secret of the Franco-Saxons’ hellpowder. Come to think of it, he had also prayed to St. Mouamet before he set out for Syria last year to see what mischief the Persians were stirring up in the border fortress of Daras. He wondered idly if this visit to Mouamet’s church portended another voyage.

He picked his way through the winding alleys of the harbor district toward the Mese. Once or twice toughs eyed him speculatively, but decided it wiser to leave him alone. He might wear a gold ring on one finger, but he also slung a smallsword on his belt. Moreover, he was a tall, solidly built man, still strong though close to forty.

Unlike the back alleys, the Mese was paved with blocks of stone; Argyros scraped mud from his sandals. Colonnades on either side of the street supported roofs that gave shelter from sun and rain. When it had been showery the night before, as was true now, they also dripped. Argyros walked in the middle of the street, dodging mules, small carts, and heavily laden porters. The Mese widened out into the Forum of Arkadios. The other squares in the city were named for great Emperors: Augustus, Constantine, Theodosios. Theodosios’s halfwit son, Argyros thought, hardly belonged in such exalted company.

A crowd had gathered at the base of the tall column in the center of the square. Once a statue of Arkadios had topped the pillar, but an earthquake had sent it crashing down about a hundred years after Mouamet’s time. Only a colossal hand and forearm survived, set up next to the column. Standing balanced on two man-sized fingertips, a monk was haranguing the crowd. The fellow was scrawny, swarthy, and not very clean. He wore a ragged black robe and let his hair grow long, so that it fell in a tangled mat past his shoulders. A fanatical light burned in his eyes as he shouted out his message, whatever it was.

His Greek, Argyros noticed as he approached, had a strong Egyptian accent. That sent the first trickle of alarm through the magistrianos. Egyptians were volatile and still reckoned themselves a folk apart despite having been part of the Roman Empire since before the Incarnation. As if to emphasize their separateness, many still clung to the Monophysite heresy; even those nominally orthodox had strange notions about the relationship between Christ’s human and divine natures. The monk came to his peroration just as Argyros reached the back edge of the crowd. “And so,” he cried, “you can see how these icons are a desecration and an abomination, a snare of Satan to deceive us into circumscribing the uncircumscribable.” He drew an image of Christ from within his robe, held it over his head so his audience could see what it was, then dashed it with all his strength against the column beside him.

Cheers rang out; so did shouts of “Blasphemy!” Someone flung a large melon at the monk. He ducked, only to be caught in the side of the head by a stone. He toppled to the ground. The stone-thrower’s triumphant bellow turned to a howl of pain and fury when someone punched him in the face. Crying, “Down with the icons!” several young men dashed for the first church they could find, hot to match action to word. An old woman hit one of them over the head with her basket of figs, then kicked him as he sprawled on the cobbles.

The Egyptian monk was on his feet again, laying about him with a stick. Argyros heard it thud into someone’s ribs. Then his interest in the broil abruptly went from professional to personal. Without bothering to find out which side he was on, a fat man ran up and kicked him in the shin. His yelp was reflexive. So was his counterpunch. The fat man reeled away, a hand clapped to his bleeding nose. But he had friends. One of them seized Argyros’s arms from behind. Another hit him in the stomach. Before they could do him worse damage, a ferret-faced man neatly bludgeoned the rioter who had hit the magistrianos. He fell with a groan.

Argyros stomped on the foot of the man behind him. As his sandals had hobnails, the fellow shrieked and let go. By the time the magistrianos whirled around, his smallsword drawn, the rioter was retreating at a limping run.

“Thanks,” Argyros said to the chap who was so handy with a cudgel.

That worthy was on his knees next to the man he had felled, busily rifling his beltpouch. He looked up for a moment, grinning. “Don’t mention it. Down with the icons!”

Like most educated Constantinopolitans, Argyros fancied himself a theologian, but it had never occurred to him to wonder if religious images were wrong. They were simply there: the iconostasis in front of the altar, the mosaics and paintings on the walls and ceilings of churches. At the moment, however, he lacked the leisure to meditate on their propriety.

As riots have a way of doing, this one was rapidly outgrowing the incident that had spawned it. Already several merchants’ stalls had been overturned and looted, and another went over with a crash as Argyros watched. A woman ran past him with her arms full of cheap seashell jewelry. A man struggled to drag away a chair and was set upon and robbed in his turn before he had got it thirty feet. The magistrianos sniffed fearfully for smoke; a maniac with a torch or the burning oil from a broken lamp could set half the city ablaze.

Through the shouts and screams that filled the square, through the sound of splintering boards, Argyros heard a deep, rhythmic tramping coming down the Mese from the east, getting closer fast. Nor was he the only one. “The excubitores!” The warning cry came from three throats at once. A company of the imperial bodyguards burst into the square. A barrage of rocks, vegetables, and crockery greeted them. They ducked behind their brightly painted shields, each of which was inscribed with the labarum—?—Christ’s monogram. One excubitor went down. The rest surged forward, swinging long hardwood clubs.

The rioters stood no chance against their grimly disciplined efficiency. Here and there a man, or even two and three together, would stand and fight. They got broken heads for their trouble. The excubitores rolled across the Forum of Arkadios like a wave traveling up a beach. Argyros fled with most of the rest of the people in the square. Approaching an excubitor and explaining that he too was an imperial official struck him as an exercise in futility—and a good way to get hurt. As it happened, he got hurt anyway. The alley down which he and several other people ran proved blocked by a mulecart that did not have room to turn around. A squad of excubitores came pounding after. The magistrianos’s cry of protest and fear was drowned by everyone else’s, and by the triumphant shouts of the guardsmen. He felt a burst of pain. His vision flared white, then plunged into darkness. It was nearly sunset when he groaned and rolled over. His fingers went to the knot of anguish at the back of his head. They came away sticky with blood. He groaned again, managed to sit up, and, on the second try, staggered to his feet.

As he shakily walked back toward the Forum of Arkadios, he discovered someone had stolen his smallsword and slit his purse. Maybe, he thought, pleased with his deductive powers, it was the same ruffian who had sapped the man in the plaza and then robbed him. And maybe it wasn’t. Trying to decide which only made his headache worse.

The Forum of Arkadios, usually crowded, was empty now except for a couple of dozen excubitores.

“On your way, you,” one of them grow led at Argyros. He did his best to hurry. There were excubitores on the Mese down toward the Forum of the Ox, and more in that square. Constantinople was buttoned up tight, trying to keep trouble from breaking free again. Another soldier approached the magistrianos. “Move along, fellow. Where are you supposed to be?”

“Mother of God!” Argyros exclaimed. “I’m supposed to dine with the Master of Offices tonight!” The engagement had been beaten out of his memory.

Seeing his bedraggled state, the excubitor set hands on hips and laughed. “Sure you are, pal, and I’m playing dice with the Emperor tomorrow.”

Waving vaguely to the trooper, Argyros hurried down the Mese toward George Lakhanodrakon’s residence. The Master of Offices lived in a fashionable quarter in the eastern part of the city, not far from the great church of Hagia Sophia and the imperial palaces.

The magistrianos hurried through the Forum of Theodosios and that of Constantine, with its tall porphyry column and its waterclock. He passed the Praitorion, the government building where he worked when he was in Constantinople. Darkness was falling as he lurched into the Augusteion, the main square of the city, which was flanked by Hagia Sophia, the palace district, and the hippodrome. Dinner was set for sunset. He was going to be late.

George Lakhanodrakon’s doorman, a Syrian named Zacharias, knew Argyros well. He exclaimed in polite horror as the magistrianos came up. “By the Thrice-Holy One, sir! What happened?”

“Why? What’s wrong?” Argyros said indignantly. “I know I’m not quite on time, and I’m sorry, but—”

The doorman was gaping at him. “On time? Sir, your face, your clothes—”

“Huh?” His wits muddled by the blow he had taken, the magistrianos had been so intent on getting to Lakhanodrakon’s house that he had not even thought about his appearance. Now he looked down at himself. His tunic was torn, filthy, and bloodstained. A swipe of his hand across his face brought away more dirt and dried blood.

“Sir, you’d better come with me.” Calling for other servants to help him, Zacharias took Argyros’s arm and half led, half carried him through the doorway. Like the houses of most wealthy men, Lakhanodrakon’s was built in a square pattern around a court, with blank, marble-faced walls fronting the street. On a fine, mild evening like this one, the dinner party would be held in the court, amid the fountains and trees.

Argyros did not get that far. Lakhanodrakon’s servants took him to a guestroom and laid him on a couch. One ran for a physician while others washed his face and the ugly wound on the back of his head. They fetched him wine, stripped him of his tunic, and dressed him in one belonging to the Master of Offices.

He was beginning to feel human, in a sorrowful way, when Lakhanodrakon himself hurried into the room, concern on his strong, fleshy features. “St. Andreas preserve us!” he burst out, swearing by Constantinople’s patron. “Don’t tell me the ruffians waylaid you this afternoon, Basil!”

“Well, actually, no, your illustriousness,” Argyros said ruefully. “As a matter of fact, it was an excubitor.”

He added, “I think he hit me with Arkadios’s column.” Despite the wine, his head was still splitting.

“You stay here until the doctor has had a look at you,” Lakhanodrakon commanded. “Then if you’d sooner go home, I’ll have Zacharias send for a linkbearer for you. Or if you’re well enough to join us outside, of course we’ll be delighted to have you.”

“Thank you, sir; you’re very kind.”

The physician arrived a few minutes later; anyone summoned to the Master of Offices’ residence hurried. The man shaved the back of Argyros’s scalp, applied an ointment that smelled of pitch and stung ferociously, and bandaged his head with a long strip of linen. Then he held a lamp to the magistrianos’s face and peered into each of his eyes in turn.

“! don’t believe there is a concussion,” he said at last. “Your pupils are both the same size.” He gave Argyros a small jar. “This will reduce the pain; it has poppy juice in it. Drink half now, the rest in the morning.” Businesslike to the end, he waved aside Argyros’s thanks and departed as quickly as he had come.

The magistrianos would have recognized the odd scent and flavor of the poppy without the doctor’s explanation. They brought back grim memories of the time when his infant son died of smallpox. As he forced himself to, he shoved the memories aside.

Though he still felt slow and stupid, he went out to the courtyard. Having come this far, he was not about to miss the dinner party, no matter what Lakhanodrakon said.

The Master of Offices’ other guests, naturally, swarmed around him and made much of him, when he would rather have taken his quiet place on a couch and drunk more wine. Not everyone knew what had touched off the riot. There was a thoughtful silence after Argyros told them. Then the imperial grandees began arguing the propriety of images among themselves.

Normally, the magistrianos would have played a vigorous part in the debate. Now, though, he was content merely to seize the opportunity to recline. Servants offered him fried squid, tuna cooked with leeks, roast kid in a sauce of fermented fish. He turned everything down. The smell of food made him queasy.

He slapped at a mosquito; the torches and lanterns that made Lakhanodrakon’s courtyard bright as day drew swarms of them. He wondered why the Master of Offices had so many lights set out. Half the number, he thought, would have been plenty.

Then a servant passed among the guests, handing each one a papyrus folio. Argyros caught Lakhanodrakon’s eye. “You didn’t tell me you would be reading your poetry tonight,” he called.

“I was not sure I would finish the fourth book of my Italiad in time for this evening,” the Master of Offices said. “I’m distributing book three here, to bring everyone up to date in the story. Thanks to you,” he went on, bowing politely, “the company is already familiar with books one and two.” If this was a printed version of book three—and Argyros saw it was—it seemed Lakhanodrakon had taken the clay archetypes to heart after all.

Along with his fellow guests, the magistrianos skimmed through the folio. Lakhanodrakon had tried lines on him, and he had even contributed a suggestion or two himself, so he knew the poem fairly well.

“Now that you’ve been refreshed as to the background, my friends, I shall commence,” the Master of Offices declared. To read, he held his manuscript at arm’s length; he was growing more farsighted year by year.

Some of the verses were quite good, and Lakhanodrakon read well. His faint Armenian accent suited the martial tale he was telling. The magistrianos wished he could pay closer attention. The poppy juice and the lingering effects of the blow combined to make him feel detached, almost floating above his couch. . . .

A polite patter of applause woke him. He guiltily joined in, hoping no one had seen him doze off. The dinner party began to break up. When he went over to the Master of Offices to say his good-byes, Lakhanodrakon would not listen to them. “You spend the night here, Basil. You’re in no shape to go home alone.”

“Thank you, sir,” the magistrianos said, though he wished Lakhanodrakon had not been so insistent. It only made him certain his boss had noticed him asleep.

Argyros’s secretary unceremoniously dumped a handful of rolled-up papyri on his desk. “Thank you, Anthimos,” the magistrianos said.

Anthimos grunted. He always reminded Argyros of a mournful crane. Capable but without enthusiasm or real talent, he would never be anything more than a secretary, and knew it. When he returned to his own work, Argyros forgot about him the moment his back was turned.

The magistrianos read rapidly over the interrogation reports taken from the men and women the excubitores had captured during the riot. They showed him little he had not learned from his own brief encounter. The rabble-rousing monk’s name, he found out, was Sasopis, which confirmed the fellow’s Egyptian origin. Accounts of just what he had preached varied, depending on how each witness felt about icons.

Sasopis himself had escaped. As would any Constantinopolitan official, Argyros thought that a shame. Ever since the Nika uprising, its specter haunted the city. Anyone who thought to bring back such chaos deserved whatever he got.

For the next couple of weeks, the city stayed calm. The magistrianos accepted that with gratitude but no great trust, as he might have welcomed one of the last fine days before the autumn storms began. He used the respite to try to track down Sasopis, but to no avail. The miserable monk might have vanished off the face of the earth, though that, Argyros thought sourly, was too much to hope for. When the trouble broke out again, Sasopis had nothing to do with it. Yet still it sprang from Egypt: as the plague had in Justinian’s day, strife came now via grain ship from Alexandria. Sailors went off to wench and drink and roister, and took with them the exciting tales of the turmoil they had left behind. Up and down the Nile, it seemed, men were at each other’s throats over the question of the icons. Argyros could imagine what happened next, in some dock-side tavern or brothel lounge. Someone would have said scornfully, “What foolishness! My grandfather venerated images, and that’s enough for me.” And someone else would have answered, “Because your grandfather burns in hell, do you want to join him?” That would have been plenty to bring out the knives.

The second round of rioting was not confined to the Forum of Arkadios, and took the excubitores, the scholae, and the other palace regiments four days to put down. Several churches had their icons defaced with whitewash or scraped from the walls, while one was put to the torch. Luckily, it stood alone in a little park, and the fire did not spread.

The day after peace—more a peace of exhaustion than anything else—returned to the city, word came of disorders in Antioch, the third city of the Empire.

George Lakhanodrakon summoned Argyros that afternoon. The magistrianos was shocked to see how worn he looked; although Master of Offices was not a military post, Lakhanodrakon was a member of the Emperor’s Consistory and had had to attend privy council meetings day and night. He also oversaw the civil servants who prepared orders and recorded testimony, all of whom had been overworked in the emergency.

“You should rest, sir,” Argyros said.

“So I should,” Lakhanodrakon agreed. “I should also exercise until I lose this belly of mine, should learn better Latin to go with my Greek, and should do a great many other things I have no time for.”

No doubt one of the things he had no time for was well-meaning but useless suggestions. The magistrianos flushed, expecting a dressing-down.

But his superior surprised him, asking, out of the blue it seemed, “Basil, where do you stand on this fight over the images?”

“For them, I suppose,” Argyros said after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m no Jew, to say an icon is a graven image. And since it was a breaker of images (is ‘iconoclast’ a word?) who started the troubles here, I can’t look kindly on their cause—all the more so because I had my head split in the brawl.”

“I happen to agree with you,” Lakhanodrakon said. “I respect the tradition of the church, and icons have been a part of it for many, many years. Still, you’ll find honest men who think we’re wrong. In Consistory the other day, the Count of the excubitores called icons a pagan holdover and said that was reason enough to suppress them.”

“It must have made quelling the riot interesting, if you couldn’t decide which faction to put down,” Argyros said dryly.

The Master of Offices rolled his eyes. “Joke all you like, but it’s nothing to laugh at. Both sides can’t be right: either it’s proper to give reverence to icons, or it’s not. The Emperor and the patriarch have to lay down the proper doctrine for the people to follow. We can’t have icons destroyed here and hallowed there. One Empire, one faith.”

“Of course,” Argyros nodded. “Since there can be only one true creed, everyone should follow it.” In theory, as Lakhanodrakon had said, the whole Empire worshiped as Constantinople decreed. In fact, heresy persisted in Egypt, in Syria, in the western provinces reconquered from their German kings—Italia, Ispania, Africa, Narbonese Gallia. Only fitting to root it out wherever it sprang up.

“You have a good knowledge of the inner learning, Basil,” Lakhanodrakon said. “If you were going to justify the use of images in worship, how would you go about it?”

The magistrianos considered. As George Lakhanodrakon had said, he knew his theology; only in the barbarous lands of northwest Europe was such wisdom reserved for priests. He said, “Of course the argument that an icon is a graven image falls to the ground as soon as it is made. The Pauline dispensation frees us from the rigor of the Jewish law. I would say the chief value of images is to remind us of the holy ones they represent—Christ, the Virgin, or a saint. When we look at an icon, we contemplate the figure behind the portrait. Also, icons teach the truths of the faith to those who cannot read Scripture.”

The Master of Offices had been jotting down notes. “That last is a good point; I don’t recall it coming up in any of the council meetings I’ve attended. I’ll pass it on to the patriarch. Have no fear, I’ll mention whose suggestion it was.”

“You’re very kind, your illustriousness,” Argyros said, and meant it. Most imperial officers would have appropriated both the idea and the credit that went with it. Then the import of what Lakhanodrakon had said hit him. “The patriarch is collecting arguments in favor of icons?”

“Sharp as usual, aren’t you?” The Master of Offices was smiling. “Yes, so he is, to be ready in case of need. One of the options raised for putting an end to this quarrel over images is for the Emperor to convene an ecumenical council.”

Argyros whistled, soft and low. “They’re taking it as seriously as that, then?” Ecumenical councils were watersheds in the history of the church; in the thousand years since Constantine the Great, only nine had been called. Groups that refused to accept their decrees passed into heresy: notably the Nestorians of Syria, with their undue emphasis on Christ’s humanity; and the Monophysites, strong in Egypt and all through the Roman east, when the council of Chalcedon would not accept the way they overstressed His divinity.

“I think the Emperor was going to wait and see if things blew over,” Lakhanodrakon said, “until last night. That was when the grand logothete called the city prefect a filthy pagan-minded heretic and broke a crystal decanter over his head.”

“Oh, my,” the magistrianos said, blinking.

“Yes. Officially, of course, the prefect fell down a flight of stairs, and don’t forget it—the saints have mercy on you if you go around telling the other tale. But it was about then that Nikephoros decided a council might not be out of place.”

“When will the order summoning the bishops go out?” Argyros asked.

“Soon, I think. It’s late July now—or has August started yet? In any case, fall will be starting by the time prelates in places like Carthage and Rome and Ispania receive the call. By then it will be too late for them to travel—no ships will be sailing till spring. I imagine the synod will be held then.”

“Good. We’ll have some time to prepare a solid theological case.”

“Among other preparations,” the Master of Offices said with a grin. Ecumenical councils were as much exercises in practical politics as they were religious disputes. Most of the time, they ran as the Emperors who called them wanted them to. NikephorosIII was a thorough ruler; he would have no intention of letting this one go wrong.

Lakhanodrakon went on, “Write me a statement giving your views on the icons; let me have it sometime in the next couple of weeks. I’ll convey it to the patriarch, as I said. Don’t expect any immediate acknowledgment, though—it won’t be the only document he’s getting, I’m sure.”

“I daresay.” Everyone in the city who fancied himself a theologian—which meant, for all practical purposes, everyone in the city who could write—would be sending impassioned missives to the patriarchal residence attached to Hagia Sophia. Most of them, as was the way of such things, would end up in braziers or have their ink scraped off so they could be reused. Lakhanodrakon made a gesture of dismissal, saying, “I’ll look forward to seeing that commentary of yours.” Argyros bowed his way out, then hotfooted it over to the library in Hagia Sophia: best to start taking notes before half the tomes he needed disappeared.

The magistrianos submitted his long memorandum on the icons to George Lakhanodrakon. He was proud of the document, which he had thickly studded with quotations from such venerable authorities as St. John Chrysostom, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Sophronios of Jerusalem, St. Athanasios of Alexandria, and the church historian Eusebios, who had been at the very first ecumenical council, the one Constantine had convened at Nikaia.

While he worked and afterward, reports of strife over the images kept coming into Constantinople. A riot convulsed Ephesos, with half the town burnt. Several monasteries were sacked outside of Tarsos when the monks refused to yield up their icons. The Jewish quarter of Neaplis in Italia was plundered because the Neaplitans blamed the Jews, who rejected images for their own reasons, for stirring up iconoclasm in the first place.

It was almost a relief when the stormy season set in and news grew harder to acquire. One of the last grain ships from Alexandria brought word that Arsakios, the patriarch of that city, had convened a local synod there to try to settle the issue for his ecclesiastical province. No one on the big merchantman knew how the synod had come out; it had still been going on when they sailed. Argyros wondered how much the gathering could accomplish. The patriarchate of Alexandria leaned over backward to avoid antagonizing the Monophysites, who were probably a majority in Egypt, and the Monophysites had always opposed images. As their name implied, they felt Christ had but one nature, the divine, after the Incarnation, with His humanity entirely subsumed. And since God by definition was uncircumscribable, the Monophysites rejected all attempts to portray Christ. Come to think of it, the magistrianos remembered, that was the line the Egyptian monk Sasopis had taken. Despite Argyros’s best efforts, the devil seemed to have vanished into thin air. Probably, the magistrianos thought gloomily, he was halfway across the Empire by now, spreading trouble as he wandered from town to town.

As winter wore on, Argyros forgot about Sasopis. The Master of Offices shared responsibility with the patriarch for lodging the bishops during the upcoming council, for one of his duties was seeing to embassies that came to Constantinople. George Lakhanodrakon passed the job on to Argyros, who went through the city checking on available cells in monasteries and on grander quarters for the more important or more luxury-minded prelates.

“After all this running about, the council itself will be a relief,” he told the Master of Offices one cold February day.

“That’s as it should be,” Lakhanodrakon replied calmly. “Let the country bumpkins from Sicily or Rome see the proper way to do things. If everything is planned well in advance, it will go properly when the crucial moment comes and there’s no more time for planning.”

“You’re not the one getting blisters,” Argyros muttered, too low for his boss to hear. But that was unfair, and he knew it. Lakhanodrakon was doing enough work for two men, each half his age. The first bishops began arriving in mid-April, a bit earlier than the Master of Offices had expected. Thanks to his elaborate preparations, though, they were housed without difficulty. There were representatives from all five patriachates: that of Constantinople, of course, and Antioch, Jerusalem, Rome, and Alexandria. The Alexandrian contingent, led by Arsakios himself, was the last sizable one to reach the imperial capital. The Egyptians virtually took over the monastery of Stoudios, in the southwestern part of the city. They behaved as if it were a citadel under siege, not a place of worship and contemplation. Muscular monks armed with very stout walking sticks constantly patrolled the grounds, glowering at passersby.

“Egyptians!” Lakhanodrakon snorted when that was reported to him. “They always act as though they think it would pollute them to have anything to do with anyone else.”

“Yes, sir,” Argyros said, but inside he wondered. He had watched Arsakios disembarking from his ship. The patriarch of Alexandria had been friendly enough then, distributing blessings and coppers among the longshoremen and other dock laborers at the Theodosian harbor. The grin on his foxily handsome face, in fact, had been enough to rouse the magistrianos’s ever-ready suspicions. But diligent checking had turned up nothing more incriminating than the fact that Arsakios had brought a woman with him. If only the priests who held to their vows of celibacy were allowed to take part in the ecumenical council, Argyros thought, Nikephoros could hold it in St. Mouamet’s little church, not Hagia Sophia. Nevertheless, he filed the information away. No telling when a hint of scandal might come in handy.

The Emperor and his courtiers gathered in the Augusteion to greet the assembled prelates before they went into the great church and called the council to order. Argyros stood in the first rank of the magistrianoi, behind George Lakhanodrakon, whose position of honor was at the left hand of Nikephoros Ill’s seat.

NikephorosIII , Autocrat and Emperor of the Romans, rose from his portable throne and bowed to the hundreds of clerics in the square. They in their turn performed the proskynesis before him, going down to their knees and then their bellies as they prostrated themselves. Sunlight flashed from cloth-of-gold and pearls, shimmered off watered silks, was drunk by plain black wool.

After the bishops, priests, and monks had acknowledged the Emperor’s sovereignty as vicegerent of God on earth, most of Nikephoros’s courtiers went back to their duties. Several magistrianoi, however, Argyros among them, accompanied Lakhanodrakon as they followed Nikephoros into Hagia Sophia. The churchmen came after them.

The atrium of the great church was magnificent enough, with its forest of marble columns, their acanthus capitals bound with gilded brass. Then the clerics passed through the exonarthex into the nave, and Argyros heard gasps. He smiled to himself. Throughout the Empire, churches were modeled after Hagia Sophia. The models and their prototype, however, were not identical.

For one thing, Hagia Sophia was huge. Counting the side aisles, the open space under the dome was about eighty yards square; that dome itself reached sixty yards above the floor. With forty-two windows all around the base admitting bright beams of light, the golden mosaic and cross in the dome seemed to float above the rest of the church, as if, as Prokopios had written, it were suspended on a chain from the sky.

Justinian had lavished the wealth of the entire Empire on the church. Rare marble and other stone faced the columns and walls: white-veined black from the Bosporos, two shades of green from Hellas, porphyry out of Egypt, yellow marble from Libya, red and white marble from Isauria, multicolored stone from Phrygia. All the lamps were silver.

Before the altar, itself of solid gold, stood the iconstasis with its images of Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles. Another portrait of Christ ornamented the crimson altar curtain; He was flanked by Paul and Mary. It hurt Argyros to think of destroying such beauty, but he heard some of the bishops hiss when they saw the icons and other divine images.

The Emperor ascended the pulpit. His courtiers stayed inconspicuously in one of the side aisles, while the churchmen gathered in the central worship area.

NikephorosIII waited for silence. He was the one man recognizable to everyone in the empire, for his features appeared on every coin, gold, silver, or copper. He was between Argyros and Lakhanodrakon in age and, like the Master of Offices, had the heavy features and strong nose associated with Armenian blood.

“Dissension, friends, is the worst enemy our holy church knows,” Nikephoros declared. His words echoed in the church; he was a soldier-Emperor, used to pitching his voice to carry on the field. He went on, “When this controversy over images came to our notice, we ached in our soul; it is unbecoming for religious men to be in discord, as you are properly men of peace. Thus we have summoned you together for this council. Examine the reasons behind your turmoil, and with the help of the Holy Spirit seek an end to it, and to the evil designs of Satan, who through envy creates the disturbances among you. Hear now the words of Constantinople’s holy patriarch Eutropios, who shall convey to you the thoughts that have occurred to us concerning the propriety of icons.”

Eutropios began his statement, which Nikephoros and his officials intended as the point of departure for the council. Argyros was pleased to hear two or three phrases from his own little treatise in the patriarch’s oration.

The clerics gave Eutropios varying amounts of attention. Many of those from the lands close to Constantinople—from the Balkans or western Asia Minor—were already familiar with his arguments. The western bishops, those under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, could be expected to follow-along. Ever since ConstansII had installed his own candidate on the Roman patriarchal throne to replace the pope who fled over the Alps to the Franks, Rome remained subservient to Constantinople. The clerics about whom Argyros worried came from the three eastern patriarchates. Even aside from the heretical tendencies in their sees, the prelates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem still looked on Constantinople as an upstart town a thousand years after its founding. The magistrianos stiffened. “Look there,” he hissed to George Lakhanodrakon, pointing into the delegation of Arsakios of Alexandria. “That’s Sasopis! The skinny fellow there, next to the bishop in the green robe.”

“Do the best you can to keep an eye on him,” the Master of Offices said. “It wouldn’t do to drag him out of the opening session of the council in chains.”

“No,” Argyros admitted reluctantly. “But what’s he doing with Arsakios? Alexandria’s already had its synod on icons.” He stopped. “What did that synod decide?”

“I don’t recall hearing,” Lakhanodrakon said. He ran his hands over his bald pate, adding in a worried tone, “We’re about to find out, I think.”

Indeed, Eutropios was running down: “Just as Christ’s two natures are linked by a single will, may everyone be joined in concord at the close of our discussions here.”

The amen resounded through the great church. Before its echoes had died away, Arsakios stepped forward, his hand upraised. “May I add a few words to your brilliant discussion of the issues, your holiness?”

“Er, yes, go ahead,” Eutropios said nervously. Like everyone else, he knew the patriarch of Alexandria was a better theologian than he. Emperors tended to pick the prelates with whom they worked most closely for pliability rather than brains.

“Thank you.” Arsakios bowed with exquisite politeness. Despite a vanishing trace of Egyptian accent in his Greek, his smooth tenor was an instrument he played masterfully. “Your address covered many of the points I wished to make, thus enabling me to achieve the virtue of brevity.” Stifled cheers rose here and there; Arsakios ignored them.

He went on, “I am not quite certain, for example, your holiness, of your conception of the relationship between this present dispute over images and previous disagreements over how Christ’s humanity and divinity coexist.”

“I do not see that there is a relationship,” Eutropios said cautiously. Argyros frowned; he did not see it either.

But Arsakios raised an eyebrow in feigned disbelief. “But is not an icon of our Lord a statement of christology in and of itself?”

‘The man’s mad,” Lakhanodrakon whispered to Argyros at the same time as Eutropios demanded, “In what way?” of Arsakios.

And the patriarch of Alexandria, smiling, sank the barb: “Let me state it in the form of questions: What does an image of Christ portray? If it depicts His human nature alone, is this not separating His humanity from His divinity, as the heretic Nestorians do? But if it portrays His divinity, does it not attempt both to circumscribe what may not be circumscribed and to subordinate His humanity altogether, in a Monophysite fashion? In either case, then, the validity of the use of images comes into question, does it not? So, at least, decided the synod held in my city this past fall.” With another elegant bow, he gave the floor back to his brother of Constantinople.

Eutropios gaped at him in dismay. NikephorosIII scowled from his high seat, but he could do little, autocrat though he was. The Egyptian’s attack on the icons had been perfectly-respectful and raised an important question Eutropios’s opening statement had left untouched.

The prelates from the three eastern patriarchates also realized that. They crowded round Arsakios, showering him with congratulations. Eutropios was no great theologian, but he did have some political sense. “I declare this first session of the council adjourned!” he cried. His own supporters left quickly and quietly. The Emperor stalked off toward the private passageway that led back to the palaces. No sooner had he disappeared than the clerics still crowding the floor of Hagia Sophia raised an exultant shout: “We’ve won! We’ve won!”

“Arrogant devils, aren’t they?” Lakhanodrakon said indignantly.

“Hmm?” A glimpse of motion behind the screen of the second-story women’s gallery had distracted Argyros. For a moment he saw a pair of dark, avid eyes peering down through the filigree work at the churchmen below. He wondered to whom they belonged. The Emperor’s wife and mistress were both blue-eyed blondes; Nikephoros had a weakness for fair women. In any case, neither Martina nor Zoe was devout. The magistrianos scratched his head. He had the nagging feeling that barely seen face was familiar.

Shrugging, he gave it up and accompanied the Master of Offices out of the great church. The Augusteion was crowded with people wondering how the first day of the council had gone. Some of Arsakios’s monks harangued the Constantinopolitans: “Anathema to the worship of lifeless wood and paint!

Destruction to idolatry!”

When an iconophile took violent exception to the anathemas hurled at him, a monk ducked under his wild swing and hit him in the pit of the stomach with his staff. The evasion and counter showed soldierly skill. Truly Arsakios had come ready for anything.

“His imperial majesty is not going to be pleased at the prospect of a council out of control,” the Master of Offices said.

“No,” Argyros agreed, “but what if the Alexandrians are right?” His head was still spinning from the subtlety of their argument: to justify the use of images now, somehow the Emperor’s theologians would have to steer between the Scylla of Monophysitism and the Charybdis of the Nestorian heresy. Lakhanodrakon looked at him reproachfully. “Not you, too?”

“The Holy Spirit will guide the assembled fathers to the truth,” the magistrianos said confidently. Being a veteran of years of bureaucratic infighting, he added, “Of course, we may have to help things along a bit.”

The summons to return to Hagia Sophia, or rather to the residence of the patriarch, which was attached to it, woke Argyros in the middle of the night. “What is it?” he asked, yawning in the face of the messenger.

“A gathering of scholars seeking to refute Arsakios,” the man replied. I le was one of Lakhanodrakon’s servants. “I am to tell you that your earlier exposition was clever enough to make Eutropios hope you can help find a way out of our present difficulty.”

Eutropios was an amiable nonentity who barely knew Argyros existed. Like the fellow standing in front of the magistrianos, the order came from the Master of Offices. That made it no less flattering. Rubbing his eyes once more, Argyros dressed quickly and followed the messenger, who had a linkbearer waiting outside.

“Careful here,” the magistrianos warned, steering them around a pothole in the street in front of the house of his neighbor Theognostos, who was a senior member of the bakers’ guild.

“That should be filled in,” Lakhanodrakon’s servant said. “I almost fell into it a few minutes ago.”

On the way to the great church, they passed the hostel where the archbishop of Thessalonike was staying. The archbishop supported the use of icons. A couple of dozen of Arsakios’s monks stood in the street, ringing cowbells and chanting, “Bugger the images! Bugger the images!” A few more, their throats tired from such work, sat around a bonfire, passing a jar of wine from one to the next.

“They’ll make no friends that way,” Lakhanodrakon’s man observed.

“No, but they may wear down their foes,” Argyros said.

The monks’ chant broke off as someone hurled a chamberpot at them from a second-story window. The ones befouled shouted curses that made their previous vulgar chant sound genteel by comparison.

“Go on ahead,” Argyros told his companions. “I’ll catch you up soon.” They stared at him as if he were a madman, but went after a little argument, the linkbearer gladly, the servant with misgivings. He yielded only when Argyros pulled rank.

Whistling, the magistrianos strode up to the men by the bonfire and said cheerily, “Down with the icons!

How about a swallow of wine for a thirsty man?”

One of the monks rose, none too steadily, and handed him the jug. “Down with the filthy icons it is,” he said. Showing decayed teeth, he opened his mouth in a tremendous yawn.

“Wearing work, going to the council of the day and harassing the damned iconodule in there by night,” Argyros said.

The monk yawned again. “Ah, well, we’re just little fellows out here. Arsakios and his bishops are sleeping sound, but we’re caterwauling for all the head picture-lovers tonight, and we’ll serenade ‘em again tomorrow, and the next day, and as long as it takes to bring home the truth.”

“A clever man, Arsakios, to come up with such a scheme,” the magistrianos said.

“Here, give me a slug of that,” the monk said. His throat worked. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his black robe, then chuckled. “Aye, Arsakios’ll sleep sound tonight, with that doxy of his to warm his bedding.”

“Doxy?” Argyros prodded.

The monk made curving motions with his hands. “Can’t fault his holiness’s taste, that’s certain. If you’re going to sin, it may as well be sweet, says I. I don’t think she’s an Egyptian wench, from her accent, though he’s had her since last summer, the lucky dog.”

That was mildly interesting. “What’s her name?” the magistrianos asked.

“I forget,” the monk said. “She’s no interest in the likes of me, I can tell you that, not that she doesn’t have Arsakios wrapped around her finger.” Finger was not quite what he said. Pausing to hiccup, he went on, “She’s no fool herself, though; I give her that. In fact, someone told me this night’s vigil was her plan.”

“You don’t say.” A formidable female indeed, Argyros thought. He rose from his squat, stretched, and said, “I must be off. Keep this stinking image-worshiper wide-eyed till dawn, and thanks for the wine.”

“Always happy to help an honest pious man.” The monk smacked himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. More to himself than to Argyros, he exclaimed, “Mirrane, that’s what the hussy calls herself.”

It took all the magistrianos’s training to hold his face and walk steady. Mirrane had come unpleasantly close to killing him in Daras; despite her sex, she was a top agent of Persia. And Argyros could also well understand how she had gained Arsakios’s favor.

Argyros’s fists clenched as he hurried toward Hagia Sophia. The Persians loved to stir up religious dissension in the Roman Empire: if the Romans battled among themselves, it could only profit their rival. And Mirrane had been playing that very game in Daras, rousing the local heretics against the orthodox faith.

Now, though, she was embarking on a far more dangerous course. This quarrel over images threatened to tear all the eastern provinces away and to set faction against faction through the rest of the Empire. The magistrianos cursed. Exposing the furor over iconoclasm as a Persian plot would not help. Arsakios, whether inspired by Satan or more likely by Mirrane, had raised a real, thorny theological point, and no doubt had more in his arsenal. The only way to bring back religious peace would be to show he was in error. That made the conclave in the patriarchal residence all the more vital. There were no shouting monks in the square of the Augusteion. Their din had disturbed not only the patriarch but also the Emperor, and the imperial guards had driven them off. Things inside the patriarch’s apartments were quite hectic enough without them. The distinguished theologians and scholars there were going at one another like a kettle of crabs.

“You idiot!” an archbishop with a long white beard shouted at an abbot. “St. Basil clearly states that—”

“Don’t tell me, show me!” the abbot interrupted. “I wouldn’t take your word the sun was shining without looking outside. Show me the text!”

“Someone’s filched the codex!” the archbishop howled in frustration. The abbot laughed and snapped his fingers in the other man’s face. Just then, someone pulled someone else’s hair, and abbot and archbishop alike rushed to separate the two combatants, both of whom were close to seventy. Eutropios, who was supposed to be presiding over the gathering, looked as though he wanted to hide. Argyros unobtrusively made his way to an empty chair and spent the next several minutes listening, as if he were trying to pick up gossip at a waterfront tavern. As sometimes unfortunately happens with brilliant men, the meeting had got sidetracked. Here someone was declaring that the writings of the church fathers obviously sanctioned images; there somebody else announced that images were not consubstantial with their prototypes. It was all fascinating, and probably true, and none of it, sadly, the least bit relevant. Intellectually the magistrianos did not belong in such company, and knew it. But he did have a feel for what was important. To the man next to him, he said, “God became man in the person of Jesus Christ.”

“Amen,” the man said. He wore the pearl-ornamented robes of an archbishop. “And God made the world in seven days. What of it?” The nightlong wrangling had left him cranky. The magistrianos felt himself flush. He was groping after a concept and could not pin it down. Maybe talk would help, even if it did make the archbishop take him for a simpleton. He went on, “In the Incarnation, the Word—the divine Logos—took flesh.”

“And the immaterial became material,” the archbishop echoed. “There, you see, whoever you are, I can spout platitudes too.”

Argyros refused to let himself be baited. Without meaning to, the archbishop had helped him clarify his thoughts. He said, “Before the Incarnation, God was only immaterial; it would have been blasphemous to try to depict Him. That, no doubt, is why the Old Testament forbade graven images.”

“Yes, and the foolish Jews still keep to that law, waiting for the Messiah and not knowing He has already come,” the archbishop said. He did not sound so scornful now, only contemptuous of the ignorant, stubborn Hebrews.

“But for us Christians—” Argyros began.

Excitement flamed on the archbishop’s face. He broke in, “Yes, by all the saints! For us Christians, since God has appeared among us and become a part of history, we can portray His human form!”

“To say otherwise would be to deny the validity of the Incarnation.”

“It would! It would!” The archbishop shot from his chair as if he had sat on a pin. His shout filled the room: “I have it!” Almost word for word, he bellowed out the chain of thought Argyros had developed. There was silence for half a minute when he was through. Then the prelates and savants crowded round the archbishop, slapping his back and showering him with congratulations. Eutropios kissed him on both cheeks. The patriarch was fairly babbling in his relief; he had been quivering at the prospect of having to report failure to Nikephoros.

“Wine!” he shouted to a servant. “Wine for everyone!” Under his breath, Argyros heard him mutter, “Saved from Kherson!” The monastery at Kherson, on the peninsula that jutted into the Black Sea from the north, was the bleakest place of exile in the Empire. Argyros had been to the godforsaken town in his younger days. No wonder poor Eutropios was nervous, he thought.

The magistrianos slipped out of the patriarchal residence while the celebration was just getting started. He did his best to fight down his anger at the archbishop’s stealing his ideas. No way to claim them back now. Even if he did stand well with the Master of Offices, that meant little to the ecclesiastics he had left. Perhaps it was just as well, he thought. Arsakios and the other iconoclasts would be more likely to take seriously a proposal put forward by a churchman than one that came from an official of the imperial government.

The racket under the archbishop of Thessalonike’s window was still going on. The miserable archbishop undoubtedly wished he was back conducting services at the church of St. Demetrios in his hometown. Argyros went a couple of blocks out of his way, not wanting anything further to do with the vociferous Egyptian monks.

The magistrianos heard a low whistle from the direction of the hostel. A woman’s voice, low and throaty, said, “There he is.” Her Greek had a Persian flavor.

“Mirrane?” he called.

“Indeed, Basil. Did I not say, back in Daras, we would meet again?” Then, to her companions, she issued a sharp command: “Get him!”

The slap of their bare feet said they were Arsakios’s monks. They came dashing down the narrow street toward Argyros. Some held torches to light their way, while others brandished clubs. “Heretic!” they shouted. “Worshiper of lifeless wood and pigments!”

Argyros turned and fled. A Franco-Saxon might have taken pride in a glorious fight against overwhelming odds; he was a sensible Roman, and saw no point in enduring a beating he did not have to. A proverb survived from pagan days: “Even Herakles can’t fight two.”

As he ran, he wondered how Mirrane had known he was coming. She must have stopped by to see how her chanters were doing and talked with the one of whom he had been asking questions. If he had come back the same way he had gone, he would have fallen into her hands. As it was, she had a gift for putting him in difficult spots.

It had been worse in Daras, though. Now he was on the streets of his own city. He knew them; his pursuers did not. If they were going to catch him, they would have to work at it. I le darted through an alleyway that stank of rotten fish, turned sharply left and then right. He paused to catch his breath. Behind him he heard the monks arguing in Greek and hissing Coptic. “Split up! We’ll find him!” one of them shouted.

Moving more quietly now, the magistrianos came to the mouth of a blind alley. He picked up half a brick and flung it at the wall that blocked the way, perhaps twenty paces down. It hit with a resounding crash.

“Mother of God, what was that?” a woman cried from a second-story bedroom. Several dogs yapped frantically.

“There he is!”

The shout came from three directions at once, but none of the monks sounded close. Argyros hurried down a lane that ended about three minutes’ walk from his home.

At the first cross street, he almost bumped into a monk. It was hard to say which was the more surprised. But the monk had only Mirrane’s description of him. That led to a fatal second of doubt. Argyros hit him in the face, then stamped on his unshod foot. As the monk started to crumple, the magistrianos kicked him in the pit of the stomach, which not only put him out of the fight but also kept him too busy trying to breathe to be able to cry out. The whole encounter lasted only a few heartbeats. Argyros turned onto his own street. He walked along jauntily, pleased at having escaped Mirrane’s trap. She had been someone to fear in Daras, he thought, but here at the heart of the Empire all the advantage was on his side.

Thus filled with himself, he did not see the dark-cloaked figure come out of a shadowed doorway and glide after him. Nor, thinking back on it, did he really hear anything, but at the last moment he sensed the rush of air from behind. He threw himself to one side, far enough to keep the knife that should have slipped between his ribs from doing more than taking a small, hot bite out of his left arm. He stumbled away, groping for his dagger. His foe pursued. Starlight glittered coldly off the assassin’s blade. Argyros’s own knife came free. He dropped into a crouch, his arms outspread, and began slowly circling to his right.

Seeing he knew what he was about, his attacker went into a like posture. They moved warily, each seeking an opening. The assassin leaped forward, stabbing up from below, underarm style. The magistrianos knocked his knife hand aside with his own left forearm, stepped in close, and thrust himself. His blow was similarly parried. Both men sprang back, resumed their circling dance. Argyros’s eyes flicked to one side. He was in front of his neighbor Theognostos’s house. He took a few cautious steps backward, dragging his heel to feel at the hard-packed ground under his feet. Then he staggered and, with a groan, went to one knee.

Laughing—the first sound he had made in the whole encounter—the assassin rushed toward him, knife upraised for the easy kill. His right foot came down in the same hole the magistrianos had walked around earlier in the evening. His arms flailed as he strove for balance. Argyros lunged forward under his faltering stroke and buried his dagger in his foe’s belly.

The iron scent of blood and the death-stench of suddenly loosed bowels filled the street.

“Sneaky—bastard,” the assassin wheezed. His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell. Argyros approached him with caution, wondering if he was hoarding his last strength for a try at vengeance. But his assailant was truly dead, as the magistrianos found by feeling for a pulse at his ankle. He turned the man onto his back. This was no monk from Alexandria, but a Constantinopolitan street tough. Argyros knew the breed, with their half-shaven heads and puff-sleeved tunics pulled tight at the wrists by drawstrings.

Something had jingled as the man bonelessly went over. There was a well-filled purse at his belt. The magistrianos tucked it into his own beltpouch and, sighing, went to look for a guardsman. What with explanations, formal statements, and such, Argyros did not see his bed until dawn was beginning to lighten the eastern horizon. The sun streaming through the window-woke him much sooner than he wanted. He splashed cool water on his face, but that did nothing to relieve the gritty feeling in his eyes, the tiredness that made him fumble as he laced up his sandals.

He also had trouble remembering why his pouch was heavier than it should have been. Digging, he found the little leather sack he had taken from his assailant. The nomismata that rolled into his hand were smaller and thicker than the goldpieces minted in Constantinople. Instead of the familiar CONOB mintmark, they bore the legend A?K?, for Alexandria.

The magistrianos nodded, unsurprised. He should have figured Mirrane would have more than one string for her bow.

Woman or not, she knew her business. It was unfortunate, he thought, that part of that business was getting rid of him.

The Emperor attended the second session of the ecumenical council, as he had the first. This time his retinue included fewer courtiers and more imperial guardsmen. Their gilded armor and scarlet capes were hardly less splendid than the costumes of the great prelates whom they faced, impassive, over their painted shields.

The hint of force, however, did nothing to deter Arsakios. He returned to the same respectful attack he had launched against the images the previous day. He even allowed a sardonic grin to flicker on his lips as he reiterated his theological paradox.

But his amusement slipped when Eutropios was quick to reply. The patriarch of Constantinople surreptitiously glanced down at his notes from time to time, but his presentation of the ideas hammered out only the night before was clear and lucid. George Lakhanodrakon paid him the highest compliment: “I didn’t think the old fraud had it in him.”

“Amazing what fear will do,” Argyros agreed.

Yet anyone who had expected the patriarch of Alexandria and his followers to yield tamely to Eutropios’s defense of images and their veneration was wrong. No sooner had Eutropios finished than half a dozen eastern bishops were shouting at each other for the privilege of replying.

“Why should I hear you?” Eutropios thundered from the pulpit as NikephorosIII watched. “By denying the reality of the Incarnation, you deny Christ’s perfect humanity and brand yourself Monophysites!”

“Liar!” “Fool!” “Impious idiot!” “How can base matter depict divine holiness?” Turmoil reigned for several minutes as iconoclasts and iconophiles hurled abuse at one another. The two sides went from there to shaking fists and croziers, and seemed about to repeat on a larger scale the squabbling that had gone on in Eutropios’s apartments.

The Emperor Nikephoros uttered a low-voiced command. His bodyguards advanced two paces, their ironshod boots clattering on the stone floor. Sudden silence fell. The Emperor spoke: “The truth should be sought through contemplation and reason, not in this childish brawling.” He nodded to Eutropios. “Let them all speak, that errors may be demonstrated and those who wander be returned to the proper path.”

The patriarch bowed in obedience to his master. The debate began in more orderly fashion. Argyros listened for a while and was impressed to find that many of the points the opponents of images raised had been anticipated the night before. When an iconoclast bishop from Palestine, for example, claimed that icons were of the same substance as their prototypes, the skinny little man who had thought of that problem used elegant Aristotelean logic to deny their consubstantiality. Biblical quotations and texts taken from the church fathers flew like rain. After a while, Argyros regretfully tore himself away from the argumentation and left for the Praitorion to try to catch up on the work he had neglected for the sake of the council.

Arsakios’s monks were very much in evidence on his short walk down the Mese. During the day, they scattered through the city to preach the dogmas of iconoclasm to whoever would listen. The magistrianos passed no fewer than three, each with a good-sized crowd around him.

“Do you want to be Monophysites?” the first monk shouted to his audience.

“No!” “Of course not!” “Never!” “Dig up the Monophysites’ bones!”

“Do you want to be Nestorians?”

The same cries of rejection came from the crowd.

“Then cast aside the pernicious, lying images you wrongly reverence!”

Some of his listeners gave back catcalls and hisses, but most looked thoughtful. A couple of hundred yards down the street, another Egyptian was preaching the same message in almost identical words. It was Argyros’s turn for thought, mostly about the organization that implied. He suspected Mirrane’s hand there; she had been extremely efficient in her placard campaign at Daras. The clergy of Constantinople far outnumbered Arsakios’s determined band, but they were not prepared for such disciplined assault on their beliefs. By the time they realized the danger, it might be too late. Full of such gloomy musings, the magistrianos climbed the stairs to his office. To his surprise, his dour secretary greeted him with enthusiasm. “How now, Anthimos?” he asked, bemused.

“If you’re really back at it, maybe I’ll be able to catch up on my own work for a change,” his secretary said.

“Ah.” That, sadly, was a reason altogether in accord with Anthimos’s nature. Still, the warmth of the secretary’s first response left Argyros more effusive than he usually would have been. I le gossiped on about the proceedings of the ecumenical council; Anthimos, a typical Constantinopolitan, listened avidly. His long, narrow face froze in disapproving lines as the magistrianos described the battalion of monks harassing their opponents by night and advancing their own cause by day. “They’ll pay for their impudence in the next world,” he predicted with grim relish.

“That’s as may be,” Argyros said, “but they’re a damnable nuisance in this one. What happens if the council ends up deciding the icons are proper and the city mob tears Hagia Sophia down around its ears because they’ve all decided the images are traps of Satan to drag them down to hell?”

Anthimos clucked distressfully. “Our own priests and monks should settle these upstart Egyptians.”

“So they should, but will they? Most especially, will they in time, before the city gets convinced inconoclasm is right?” Argyros explained his pessimistic reasoning as he had walked from the great church.

“But there are many more clerics native to Constantinople than the Alexandrian has brought,” Anthimos protested. ‘They should be able to vanquish them in debate by sheer weight of numbers, if in no other way.”

“But too many keep silent.” Argyros paused. “Sheer weight of numbers,” he echoed. His voice was dreamy, his eyes far away.

“Sir?” Anthimos said nervously, after the magistrianos had stayed absolutely still for three solid minutes. If Argyros heard, he gave no sign.

Another little while went by before he stirred. When at last he did, it was into a blur of activity that made his secretary jump in alarm. “What are you loafing there for?” Argyros snapped unfairly. “Get me ten thousand sheets of papyrus—get it out of storage, beg it, or borrow it from anyone who has it, but get it. No—go to Lakhanodrakon first; get a letter of authorization from him. That way you won’t have arguments. When you’ve brought the papyrus back, round up fifty men. Try to get them from all parts of the city. Tell them to come here tomorrow morning; tell them it’s three miliaresia for every man. The prospect of silverpieces should get their attention. Do you have all that?”

“No,” Anthimos said; he found the magistrianos worse as King Stork than King Log. “But it’s to do with those damned clay lumps of yours, isn’t it?”

“With the archetypes, yes,” Argyros said impatiently. “By the Virgin, we’ll see who shouts down whom!

Now, here’s what I told you—” Only slightly slower than in his outburst of a moment before, he repeated his orders to Anthimos, ticking off points one by one on his fingers. This time, his secretary scrawled shorthand notes, his pen racing to keep up with Argyros’s thought.

“Better make it a hundred men,” the magistrianos said. “Some won’t show up. And on your way to the Master of Offices, stop at the shop of Stavrakios the potter and send him to me.”

“I’ll do whatever you say, as long as you don’t set me to spelling words backward and upside down,” Anthimos declared.

“I won’t, I promise,” the magistrianos said. He was still burning with urgency. “Go on! Go on!”

Anthimos had hardly slammed the door behind him before Argyros was setting a square metal frame on an iron pan and painting the surface of the pan with glue. On shelves beside his desk he kept jars of clay archetypes.

Images again, he thought. If the Egyptian monks had abhorred them before, they would really hate them soon.

He was still composing the text of his message when someone tapped on the door. “Come in,” he called, and Stavrakios did. He was surprised the potter had got there so fast; Anthimos must have headed for his shop on the dead run.

“What can I do for you today, sir?” Stavrakios asked. He was a stocky man of about Argyros’s age, with open, intelligent features and the hands of an artist: large, long-fingered, delicate. Those hands, and the native wit guiding them, made him the perfect man to produce the molds that in turn shaped the archetypes in clay.

“I want a set of archetypes five times the usual size of our letters,” the magistrianos said, hastily adding, “I don’t mean I want the blocks five times as tall. I want them the same height as the rest. I just want the letters five times as big, so people can read them at a distance.”

“I understand,” Stavrakios said at once. He tugged his beard in thought. “You won’t be able to get much of a message on your sheet with letters that size.”

“I realize that,” Argyros said, nodding in respect for the potter’s quick thinking. “I just need one line, to draw people’s attention. The rest of the page will be made from regular archetypes.”

“Ah. That’s all right, then.” Stavrakios considered. “If you’ll tell me the one line, I can make it as a single unit. That will be faster than doing the mold for each new archetype by itself. From what your secretary said, or what I understood of it through his panting, you’ll want this as fast as I can make it.”

Argyros nodded and told Stavrakios what he needed. The potter, a pious man, crossed himself. “Well, of course He did. Is there anything more? No? Then I’m off. I’ll bring you the line directly it’s done.”

“That’s splendid, Stavrakios,” the magistrianos said gratefully. The potter left. Argyros went back to composing, setting letters in the frame one by one. Every so often he would spot an error or come up with a better idea and have to pull a few archetypes—once, a whole line—out of the glue, which was starting to get tacky.

A commotion on the stairs gave him an excuse to stop. He stepped out of his office and was almost run down by a stream of workmen carrying boxes. “Where do you want these, pal?” the one in front asked.

“In there,” he said weakly, pointing. He had worked with papyrus in lots of a few hundred sheets at a time. He had never thought about how much room ten thousand sheets would require. They ended up taking over his office. When Anthimos got back, Argyros congratulated him on a job well done and sent him out again for more ink.

Then it was just a matter of waiting for Stavrakios. It was late afternoon when the potter came in, carrying a bundle wrapped in several thicknesses of cloth. “Fresh from the kiln and still hot,” he said, walking crab-fashion between the mountains of boxes to hand his prize to the magistrianos.

“Let me undo the swaddling clothes here,” Argyros said. Thanks to the potter’s warning, he left cloth between the new-fired clay and his fingers. “Oh yes, very fine. People should be able to read that a block away. I’d say you’ve earned yourself a nomisma, Stavrakios.”

“For this little thing? You’re crazy,” the potter said, but he made the coin disappear. The magistrianos set the big line of text in the space he had reserved for it at the top of the frame. He took a flat board and laid it over his composition to force all the letters down to exactly the same level. When he was satisfied, he inked a paintbrush and ran it over the letters, gently pressed a sheet of papyrus down on them. After reading the result, he used a tweezer to pluck out a couple of improper letters and insert replacements. Then he lit a brazier. Once it was hot, he put the frame and tray on a rack above it to dry the glue and lock the letters in their places.

He used the cloths Stavrakios had brought to remove the tray and frame from the brazier and to protect his desktop from the hot metal. As soon as they were cool, he inked the letters, imprinted a piece of parchment, set it to one side, plied the inky brush again.

Ink, press, set aside; ink, press, set aside. His world narrowed to the brush, the tray and frame full of letters, the box of papyrus from which he was pulling sheets. When he emptied a box, he would fill it with imprinted papyri and go on to the next one. That was the only break in the routine consuming him. After some eternal time, he realized it was too dark to see the letters in front of him. He also realized he was cramped and hungry. He went out and bought a chunk of bread, some goat’s-milk cheese, and a cup of wine from a little eatery near the Praitorion. Then, sighing, he went back to his office, lit a lamp, and got back to work.

A half-moon rose in the southeast over Hagia Sophia, so it had to be close to midnight. The magistrianos was a bit more than halfway done. He labored on, steady as a water-wheel, only pausing to yawn. He had not had much sleep the night before, and it did not look as though he would get much tonight. Darkness still ruled the city when he finally finished, but by the stars he could see through the window it would not last long. He filled the last box with papyri and set it to one side. Then he sat down to rest, just for a moment.

Anthimos’s voice woke him: “Sir?”

He roused with a start, crying, “Nails! St. Andreas preserve us, I forgot nails!”

His secretary held up a jingling leather sack. “I have them. There are more downstairs, along with the men I hired, or as many of them as showed up. They can use stones or bricks for hammers.”

“Excellent, excellent.” When Argyros rose, his abused shoulders gave twin creaks of protest. He followed his secretary out to the Mese, where a crowd of men waited. Most of them were raggedly dressed. “First things first,” the magistrianos said, fighting back a yawn. “Let’s have some of you come up with me and haul some boxes down here.”

A dozen men went upstairs with him. “First time I been in this part o’ the building,” one said. Several more chuckled: along with its offices, the Praitorion also served as a prison. Once the papyri were downstairs, the magistrianos distributed them among the men Anthimos had assembled, then gave his instructions: “Post these in prominent spots—at street corners, on tavern doors if you like. But don’t go in the taverns—not till you’re done.”

That got a laugh, as he had expected. He went on, “I’ll give you one miliaresion now, and two more when you’re done. And don’t think you can chuck your share of the work down the nearest privy and get paid for doing nothing, either. Someone will have an eye on you all the time, sure as I’m a magistrianos.” He was lying through his teeth, but the men looked fearful, and one or two of them disappointed. As secret agents, magistrianoi had a reputation for owning all sorts of unpleasant—possibly unnatural—abilities.

His gang of men trooped off; before long, he heard the first sounds of pounding. This time he could not hold back his yawn. He said, “Anthimos, pay them as they come back. I can’t stay awake any longer. I’m going back to my office to sleep; I don’t think I’d make it home. Wake me in the early afternoon, would you?”

“Whatever you say,” Anthimos agreed dolefully.

Argyros thought he could have slept in the fiery furnace prepared for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. By the time Anthimos shook him awake, his office was a fair approximation of it, with Constantinople’s summer mugginess only making things worse. The magistrianos wiped sweat from his face with his sleeve.

“Like Satan,” he told Anthimos, “I am going up and down in the city, to see how my work has turned out.”

He had walked only twenty paces when he saw his first poster. Only the headline was visible above the crowd of people in front of it. Argyros was pleased at how far away he could read that message:

CHRIST died for you.

The rest of the sheet was a boiled-down version of the argument that came from the gathering at the patriarchal residence: that once God became man too, His humanity was portrayable, and that to say otherwise was to deny the truth of the Incarnation. The broadside concluded: “Impious men have come to Constantinople to reject the images and to try to force their will on the ecumenical council the Emperor has convened. Don’t let them succeed. “

There was a continual low mutter around the poster. Not everyone in Constantinople, of course, could read, but close to half the men and a good fraction of the women did know how. Those who were literate passed the text on to their letterless friends and spouses.

“I don’t know,” a man said, scratching himself. “I don’t want to be one of those accursed Nestorians the Egyptian monks go on about.”

“Do you want to go to hell?” someone else demanded. “Without Christ, what are we but Satan’s meat?”

The people close by him nodded agreement.

“I don’t know,” the first man said again. “I have Christ in my heart. Why do I need an icon, if having one makes me a heretic?”

“You’re a heretic now, for talking that way!” a woman screeched and threw an apple at him. That seemed to be the signal for several people to advance on the would-be iconoclast. He fled. Argyros smiled to himself and kept walking down the Mese. He heard one of Arsakios’s monks preaching to a crowd, but now the cleric had to shout against hecklers and continually backtrack to try to defend what he was saying.

People were trickling into the Augusteion, gathering in front of the atrium of Hagia Sophia. The palace guards outside the great church looked at the growing crowd with suspicion. Here and there a guardsman hefted a spear or loosened a sword in a scabbard, readying himself for trouble. Men and women began shouting down the Egyptian monks in the Augusteion, then raised a chant of their own: “Dig up the iconoclasts’ bones! Dig up the iconoclasts’ bones!” At that old Constantinopolitan riot call, all the guardsmen looked to their weapons. But the swelling crowd showed no inclination to attack. Instead, they stood and shouted, the noise rising like the tide. Argyros wondered how Arsakios, inside Hagia Sophia, enjoyed this new din.

He saw one of the monks who had accompanied the patriarch of Alexandria tear a sheet from the front of a building, hurl it to the ground, and step on it in execration. A moment later the monk was on the ground himself, taking a drubbing from several Constantinopolitans. They were shouting, “Blasphemer!

Atheist!” as they pummeled him.

That night it was Arsakios who got no sleep. A throng of people ringed the monastery of Stoudios, where the Alexandrian delegation was staying. Their racket kept half the city up. It bothered Argyros not at all. He reveled in his first full night of sleep since the ecumenical council had begun. In the morning, the Augusteion was packed even tighter than it had been the day before. The magistrianos was glad he had dressed in his most resplendent robe; the fancy outfit made people press back to let him by as he made his way toward Hagia Sophia . . . except for one young woman who clasped his hand, saying, “Bless me, your reverence!”

“First time I’ve ever been mistaken for an archbishop,” he remarked to George Lakhanodrakon once he was inside the great church.

“I daresay,” the Master of Offices chuckled. “You’ve been a busy lad with the archetypes, haven’t you?

You used so much papyrus, you’ll make half the government grind to a halt.”

Privately, the magistrianos could think of worse things. All he said, though, was, “I thought the situation demanded it.”

“I suppose so.” Lakhanodrakon shook his head in wonder. “What a curious thing: little sheets of papyrus rallying a people to a cause.”

“Lots of little sheets of papyrus,” the magistrianos pointed out. “Daras showed how words could stir a town close to rebellion. I thought they might work as well for the Empire’s unity as against it, and on a larger scale than anything the Persians tried. With a new idea as powerful as the archetypes, discovering all the things they can do is as important as finding out about them in the first place.”

“That’s true.” Lakhanodrakon was not sure he liked the notion. Then, remembering an ancient precedent, he brightened. “Caesar did something of this sort, did he not, posting a daily bulletin of events in the Forum of Rome for the people to read?”

“Yes, I—” Argyros broke off when an altarboy came trotting up and asked which of the gentlemen was Basil Argyros. “I am,” the magistrianos said.

“Here, then, sir,” the altarboy said, handing him a note. “I he lady told me to give this to you.”

Lakhanodrakon raised an eyebrow. “The lady?”

Argyros was reading. “It’s not signed,” he said, but he had no trouble figuring out who the lady was. The note read: “If you care to, meet me this afternoon in front of the shop of Joshua Samuel’s son in the coppersmiths’ quarter. Come alone. Be sure that if you are not alone, you will not see me. By the supreme god of light Ormazd I swear I shall also be alone; may I be damned to Ahriman’s hell if I lie.”

“An old acquaintance,” he told the Master of Offices while he thought it over. He was certain he would not be able to ambush Mirrane; if she said she could escape a trap, she could. He knew her skill from Daras. What he did not know was how much trust to put in her oath. There was no stronger one a follower of Zoroaster—as most Persians were—could swear. But many so-called Christians would cheerfully invoke Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whenever it was to their advantage.

“I need to get away this afternoon,” he said, making his decision. Lakhanodrakon nodded, smirking; no doubt he thought Argyros had made an assignation. Recalling Mirrane’s other talents, the magistrianos half-wished it were so.

The district of the coppersmiths lay not far from the Augusteion, but it might have been a world away. Here, as nowhere else in the city, Argyros’s handbills earned only a passing glance. Most of the metalworkers were Jews; Christian doctrinal disputes concerned them only if likely to lead to persecution.

Questions led Argyros to the shop Mirrane had named. Passersby eyed his fine robes with curiosity. A crone limped past, her gray hair ragged, a wine-colored birthmark disfiguring one cheek. The magistrianos waited impatiently, wondering if Mirrane had lured him here so she could work some mischief elsewhere unimpeded.

“Have I changed so much then, Basil?”

He whirled at the unexpected sound of that smooth, familiar contralto. The crone was leaning against a wall, saucily grinning his way. The sparkling brown eyes might have belonged to the woman he had known, but—

She laughed, seeing his stricken expression. Three of her teeth were black. She tapped one of them with a grimy forefinger. “It all washes off, even this. I’ve not aged thirty years overnight, I assure you, for which the god of light be praised.”

“A good disguise,” he said, giving credit where it was due and hoping his relief did not show. Beauty was too rare in the world to be wasted. That, he thought, was why he had instinctively rejected iconoclasm, all theological considerations aside. But Mirrane was too dangerous to let even remembered beauty lull him. “What sort of murderous scheme do you have planned for today, since your last two went awry?”

“None, now, I’m sorry to say,” she smiled. “What would be the point? The council is already going the wrong way. Arsakios will squirm and fuss and fight through both the Old and New Testaments of your Bible, but he will lose the fight, whether or not he knows it; the Emperor and most of the church are against him. The only real hope was to raise the city mob against the icons, and that seems to have failed.

. . .Was it your idea, spreading those handbills far and wide?”

“Yes.”

Mirrane sighed. “I thought as much. Such a pity you escaped my monks and the knifeman. I thought you might have lost your wariness, once the first attack failed.”

“The second one almost did catch me napping,” he admitted. He explained how he had beaten the hired killer; Mirrane grimaced in chagrin. He said, “I’m sure you would have got free of any trap I set in Ctesiphon or Ecbatana; operating on home ground is always an advantage.”

It was odd, talking so with a professional from the other side. Argyros had worked many times against agents of the Persian Empire, and Mirrane against the Romans, but despite their masters’ agelong rivalry, their posts gave them more in common than either had with fellow citizens. Mirrane must have been thinking along the same lines. She said, “A shame we could not act together once, instead of against each other.”

He nodded, but said, “Not likely, I fear.”

“One never knows. The nomads on the northern plains are stirring, and they threaten the Roman Empire as much as Persia. Against them, we could share a common goal.”

“Maybe,” Argyros said for politeness’s sake, though he did not believe it. He changed the subject.

“What will you do now that you no longer need your liaison with Arsakios?”

“Him I’ll not be sorry to leave,” she said with a curl of her lip. “You were much more enjoyable, those couple of times in Daras.” She chuckled as the flush mounted under his swarthy skin. She returned to his question: “I suppose I’ll travel back to Persia, to see where the Grand Wazir will send me next: maybe into the Caucasus, to turn a client-king toward Ormazd and away from Christ.”

“I think not,” Argyros said, and leaped at her. The two of them were alone, he was certain. He was bigger, stronger, and quicker than Mirrane, and she was too great a threat to the Empire to let her leave Constantinople.

She made no move to flee. For an instant, in fact, she pressed herself against him as he seized her, and he felt the ripe body her old dirty clothes concealed. Her lips brushed his cheek; he heard her laugh softly in his ear.

Then she was fighting like a wildcat and crying, “Help! Help! This Christian seeks to ravish me!”

Men came boiling out of shops all along the street. They converged on the struggling couple, some brandishing makeshift bludgeons, others armed only with their fists. They tore Argyros away from Mirrane, shouting, “Leave her alone!” “You gentile dog, you think because you have money you can take any woman who pleases your” “See how you like this!”

“Let go of me!” Argyros yelled, struggling against the angry coppersmiths. “I am a—” Somebody hit him in the pit of the stomach, leaving him unable to speak. Fighting on instinct alone, he grabbed a man and pulled the fellow down on top of him to protect him from the Jews’ punches and kicks. At last he managed to suck in a long, delicious lungful of air. “Stop, you fools!” he shouted from beneath his unwilling shield. “I am a magistrianos of the Emperor, making an arrest!”

The mention of his rank was enough to freeze his attackers for a moment. “It was no rape,” he went on into the sudden silence. ‘The woman is an agent of Persia, and not even a Jew. Bring her here, and I will prove it to you. And if you help me find her, I will forget your assault on me—you were deceived.”

With a grunt, Argyros got to his feet and helped up the smith who had covered him. The man was holding his ribs and groaning; he had taken a worse beating than the magistrianos. The rest of the coppersmiths scattered, some dashing this way, some that.

By then, though, Mirrane had disappeared.

The shafts of sunlight streaming through the windows that pierced the base of Hagia Sophia’s great dome were paler than they had been when the ecumenical council convened two months before. High summer was past and fall approaching; if the assembled clerics were to return to their churches this year, they would have to sail soon, before the stormy season set in.

With the rest of the court, Basil Argyros stood in the aisle, listening to the patriarch Eutropios read out the acts of the council. “Anyone who declares henceforth that an icon is a graven image, let him be anathema,” the patriarch intoned.

“Let him be anathema,” the ecclesiastics echoed.

“Anyone who declares henceforth that to paint an image or give reverence to an image is either Nestorian or Monophysite, let him be anathema,” Eutropios said.

“Let him be anathema,” the clerics agreed. Argyros glanced toward Arsakios of Alexandria, who joined in the anathema with poor grace. Only that “henceforth” preserved his orthodoxy. If it had not been conceded, however, he might have led his men into schism and more strife.

“Anyone who declares henceforth that our incarnate Lord Jesus Christ may not be depicted, let him be anathema.”

“Let him be anathema.”

“Anyone who declares henceforth that—” The anathemas rolled on and on. When they were finally through, Eutropios bowed his head and went on, “With the aid and intercession of the Holy Spirit, we have determined and do proclaim these the true and correct doctrines of our holy orthodox church. Anathema to any man who dares contradict them.”

“Amen,” said everyone in the church, prelates and courtiers together. The Emperor Nikephoros rose from his high seat, bowed to the clerics, and left the church.

“This council now is ended,” Eutropios said, and let out an inconspicuous sigh of relief. As he left the pulpit, ecclesiastics began hurrying away; sailors would not put to sea in stormy weather even for archbishops.

The courtiers followed more slowly. “Once again, error is driven from the church,” George Lakhanodrakon said, rubbing his large, knobby-knuckled hands in satisfaction.

“Is it?” Argyros asked with some bitterness. The Master of Offices turned to look at him sharply. He went on, “How can we have the gall to claim the Holy Spirit descended to inspire the ecumenical council? It was a Persian scheme that threw fuel on the controversy in the first place, and pamphleteering that helped swing it back toward the way the Emperor wanted it to go. Not much room for divine intervention in any of that.”

“Wasn’t it you who said we’d have to help the Holy Spirit along?” Lakhanodrakon reminded him. “God works through men; that is why He created them, to unfold His scheme for the world.” He patted the magistrianos on the shoulder. “You were also the one who pointed out that God had to become a man to save mankind.”

Both men crossed themselves. “Yes, but that was a miracle,” Argyros persisted.

“Must all your miracles be showy?” the Master of Offices asked. “St. Athanasios and St. Cyril of Alexandria, if you read their writings, show themselves to be arrogant men, hungry for power. Yet the doctrines they fought for we still hold today, though the one has been dead almost a thousand years and the other close to nine hundred. Is that not something of a miracle?”

“Put that way, I suppose it is. And yet—”

“I know,” Lakhanodrakon sighed. “Examined closely, any human institution is sadly imperfect; with your job, you know that better than most. Should you be shocked it’s also true of the church? If you still hanker for miracles, I’ll give you one: in Egypt, Palestine, and Anatolia; in Thrace and the lands by the Danube; in Italia and Carthage and Ispania, churchmen will be going home from this council all bearing the same doctrines to pass them on in their sees, and all over the Empire townsmen who will never see Constantinople, farmers who could never even imagine Constantinople, will hear the same teachings and follow them, and so will their sons and grandsons after them. If that is not a miracle, what is it?”

“It might just be good organization,” Argyros said. “Those same peasants and townsmen pay their taxes to the government every year, and so will their sons and grandsons.”

Lakhanodrakon frowned at his obstinacy, then gave a snort of laughter. He said, “Too damned many of them don’t. And the Holy Spirit doesn’t inspire tax collectors, either; of that I’m woefully certain. They have to do the best they can, the same as you and I and poor Eutropios swimming out of his depth.”

‘The best they can,” Argyros mused. He thought it over. ‘That’s not so bad, I suppose.” He and the Master of Offices walked down the Mese toward the Praitorion. He wondered what Anthimos would have waiting for him there.