Departures

PILLAR OF CLOUD, PILLAR OF FIRE

I’ve written seven stories that feature the exploits of Basil Argyros, a fourteenth-century Byzantine official in a world where Muhammad was monk rather than prophet (see also “Departures” and “Islands in the Sea” in this volume). Six of those stories appear together in the collection Agent of Byzantium (New York: Congdon amp; Weed, 1987). This is the seventh. Chronologically, it fits between the second and third chapters of Agent of Byzantium. Like the others in the series, however, it is intended to stand by itself as well.

Basil Argyros’ shadow was only a small black puddle on the deck timbers under his feet. The sun stood almost at the zenith, higher in the sky than he had ever known it. He used the palm of his hand to shield his eyes from its fierce glare as he peered southward past the ship’s bowsprit. The blue waters of the Middle Sea stretched unbroken before him.

He turned to a sailor hurrying past. “Did the captain not say we’d likely spot land today?”

The sailor, a lean, sun-toasted man who wore only loincloth and sandals, gave a wry chuckle. “Likely’s not certain, sir, and today’s not done.” His Greek had a strong, hissing Egyptian accent. He was heading home.

Argyros wanted to ask another question, but the fellow had not paused to wait for it. He had work to keep him busy; aboard ship, passengers had little better to do than stand around, talk, and gamble-Argyros was up a couple of gold nomismata for the trip. Even so, he had been bored more often than not.

He remembered a time when he would have relished the chance to spend a week or so just thinking. Those were the days before his wife and infant son had died in the smallpox epidemic at Constantinople two years ago. Now when his mind was idle, it kept drifting back to them. He peered south again, hoping the pretense of purpose would hold memory at bay. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Today it didn’t, not very well.

Still, getting away from the imperial capital helped give distance to his sorrow. That was why he had volunteered to go to Alexandria. His fellow magistrianoi looked at him as if they thought he was mad. Likely they did. Anything that had to do with Egypt meant trouble.

Right now, though, Argyros relished trouble, the more, the better. A troubled present would keep him too occupied to think back to his anguished past. He could-

A shout from the port rail snapped him out of his reverie. “The pharos!” cried a passenger, obviously another man with time on his hands. “I see the stub of the pharos!” His arm stabbed out.

Argyros hurried to join him, looking in the direction he was pointing. Sure enough, he saw a white tower thrusting itself up past the smooth sea horizon. The magistrianos shook his head in chagrin. “I would have spied it before if I’d looked southeast instead of due south,” he said.

The man beside him laughed. “This must be your first trip across the open ocean, if you think we can sail straight to where we’re going. I count us lucky to have come so close. We won’t have to put in at some village to ask where we are, and risk being pirated.”

“If the pharos were fully rebuilt, its beacon fire and the smoke from it could be spied a day’s sail away,” Argyros said. “ ‘And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.’ ‘‘

He and the other man both crossed themselves at the Biblical quotation. So did the sailor with whom Argyros had spoken before. He said, “Sirs, captains have been petitioning emperors to get the pharos rebuilt since the earthquake knocked it down a lifetime ago. They’re only now getting around to it.” He spat over the rail to show what he thought of the workings of the Roman Empire’s bureaucracy.

Argyros, who was part of that bureaucracy, understood and sympathized with the sailor’s feelings. Magistrianoi-secret investigators, agents, sometimes spies-could not grow hidebound, not if they wanted to live to grow old. But officials with lawbooks had governed the empire from Constantinople for almost a thousand years. No wonder they often moved slow as flowing pitch. The wonder, sometimes, was that they moved at all.

The man who had first seen the pharos said, “Seems to me the blasted Egyptians are more to blame for all the delays than his Majesty Nikephoros.” He turned to Argyros for support. “Don’t you think so, sir?”

“I know little of such things,” the magistrianos said mildly. He shifted to Latin, a tongue still used in the empire’s western provinces but hardly ever heard in Egypt. “Do you understand this speech?”

“A little. Why?” the passenger asked. The sailor, not following, shook his head.

“Because I can use it to remind you it might not be wise to revile Egyptians when the crew of this ship is nothing else but.”

The man blinked, then gave a startled nod. If the sailor had been offended, he got no chance to do anything about it. Just then, the captain shouted for him to help shift the lines to the foresail as the ship swung toward Alexandria. “As well we’re west of the city” Argyros observed. “The run into the merchantmen’s harbor will be easier than if we had to sail around the island of Pharos.”

“So it will.” The other passenger nodded. Then he paused, took a long look at the magistrianos. “For someone who says he knows little of Alexandria, you’re well informed.”

Argyros shrugged, annoyed with himself for slipping. It might not matter now, but could prove disastrous if he did it at the wrong time. He did know more of Alexandria than he had let on-he knew as much as anyone could who had never come there before. Research seemed a more profitable way to spend his time than mourning.

He even knew why the pharos was being restored so slowly despite Nikephoros’ interest in having it shine once more. That was why he had come. Knowing what to do about the problem was something else again. No one in Alexandria seemed to. That, too, was why he’d been sent.

The ship glided into the harbor of Eunostos-Happy Return. The island of Pharos (from which the famous lighthouse drew its name) shielded the harbor from storms out of the north, while the Heptastadion, the seven-furlong causeway from the mainland to Pharos, divided it from the Great Harbor to the east. The Great Harbor was reserved for warships.

The Heptastadion was not quite what Argyros had expected. He’d not thought to ask much about it, and the ancient authors who had written of it termed it an embankment. So it had been, in their time. But centuries of accumulating silt had made it into an isthmus almost a quarter mile wide. Houses and shops and manufactories stood alongside the elevated roadway to the island. The magistrianos’ frown drew his heavy eyebrows-eyebrow, really, for the hair grew together above his nose-down over his deep-set eyes. He wondered what else he would find that was not in the books.

Ships and boats of all types and sizes filled the harbor of Eunostos: tubby square-rigged merchantmen like the one on which Argyros traveled, fishing boats with short-luffed lugsails that let them sail closer to the wind, many-oared tugs. Two of those strode spiderlike across the water to Argyros’ vessel as it neared the harbor’s granite quays.

“Brail up your sail, there!” a man called from one of them. The sailors rushed to obey. The tugs, their bows padded with great coils of rope, chivied the ship into place against one of the quays. Sailors threw lines to waiting dockmen, who made the merchantman fast to the dock. Argyros slung his duffel over his shoulder, belted on his sword, and climbed the gangplank. As he stepped onto the quay, one of the line handlers pointed to the blade and said. “You want to be careful whipping that out, friend. This here’s a big city-you get caught using a sword in a brawl and the prefect’s men’ll chop off your thumbs to make sure you don’t do it twice.”

The magistrianos looked down his long, thin nose. “I live in Constantinople-not just a city but the city.”

Only in Alexandria would anyone have disagreed with that. But the dockman just grunted and said, “Newcomer.” He gave the word a feminine ending, so Argyros knew it meant Constantinople and not himself. Before Constantine had turned sleepy Byzantium into the New Rome, Alexandria had been the premier city of the Roman east. Its citizens, plainly, still remembered… and resented.

The magistrianos carried his gear down the quay and into the city. He thought about walking along the Heptastadion to take a close look at the troubled pharos right away, but decided to settle in first. The weight of the duffel bag, which seemed to grow heavier at every step he took, played a large part in his decision.

He found a room not far from where the Heptastadion joined the mainland; the cross-topped domes of the nearby church of St. Athanasios gave him a landmark that would be visible from a good part of Alexandria. Though the town’s streets made an orderly grid, Argyros was glad for any extra help he could get in finding his way around.

By the time he had unpacked, the sun was setting in crimson splendor above the Gate of the Moon to the west. Making headway with Alexandrian officials, he had been warned, was an all-day undertaking; no point in trying to start just as night was falling. He bought a loaf of bread, some onions, and a cup of wine at the tavern next to his lodgings, then went back, hung the gauzy mosquito-netting he had rented over his bed, and went to sleep.

He dreamed of Helen, Helen as she was before the smallpox had robbed her of first her beauty and then her life. He dreamed of her laughing blue eyes, of the way her lips felt on his, of her sliding a robe from her white shoulders, of her intimate caress-He woke then. He always woke then. The sweat that bathed him did not spring from the weather; the north wind kept Alexandria pleasant in summer. He stared into the darkness, wishing the dream would either leave him or, just once, go on a few seconds more.

He had not touched a woman since Helen died. In the first months of mourning, he thought long and hard about abandoning the secular world for the peace of the monastery. The thought went through him still, now and again. But what sort of monk would he make when, as the dreams so clearly showed, fleshly pleasures yet held such power in his mind?

Slowly, slowly, he drifted back toward sleep. Maybe he would be lucky-or unlucky-enough to find the dream again.

In Constantinople, a letter with the seal and signature of George Lakhanodrakon would instantly have opened doors and loosened tongues for Argyros: the Master of Offices was one of the chief ministers of the Basileus of the Romans. Argyros was too junior a magistrianos to know the leader of the corps at all well, but who could tell that-who would risk angering George Lakhanodrakon? — from the letter?

It worked in Alexandria, too, but only after a fashion and only in conjunction with some out-and-out bribery. Two weeks, everything Argyros had won on board ship, and three nomismata more disappeared before a secretary showed him into the office of Mouamet Dekanos, deputy to the Augustal prefect who governed Egypt for the Basileus.

Dekanos, a slight, dark man with large circles under his eyes, read quickly through the letter Argyros presented to him: ‘“Render this my trusted servant the same assistance you would me, for he has my full confidence,’ “ the administrator finished. He shoved the pile of papyri on his desk to one side, making a clear space in which he set the document from the capital. “I’ll be glad to help you, uh, Argyros. Your business I can hope to finish one day, which is more than I can say for this mess here.” He scowled at the papyri he had just moved.

“Illustrious sir?” Argyros said. Dekanos was important enough for him to make sure he sounded polite.

“This mess here,” the prefect’s deputy repeated with a sour sort of pride, “goes all the way back to the days of my name saint.”

“Of Saint Mouamet?” Argyros felt his jaw drop. “But it’s- what? — seven hundred years now since he converted to Christianity.”

“So it is,” Dekanos agreed. “So it is. If you know that, I suppose you know of the Persian invasion that sent him fleeing from his monastery to Constantinople.”

The magistrianos nodded. Born a pagan Arab, Mouamet had found Christ on a trading run into Syria, and ended his life as an archbishop in distant Ispania. He had also found a gift for hymnography; his canticles in praise of God and Christ were still sung all through the Empire. After such a remarkable and holy life, no wonder he had quickly been recognized as a saint.

Dekanos resumed, “That was the worst the Persians have ever hit the empire. They even ruled here in Alexandria for fifteen years, and ruled by their own laws. A good many bequests were granted whose validity was open to challenge when Roman rule returned. This mess here”-he liked to repeat himself, Argyros noticed- “is Pcheris vs. Sarapion. It’s one of those challenges.”

“But it’s-what? — seven hundred years!” Now it was Argyros’ turn to say the same thing over again, this time in astonished protest.

“So?” Dekanos rolled his eyes. “Egyptian families are usually enormous; they don’t die out, worse luck. And they love to go to law-it’s more fun than the hippodrome, and with better odds, too. And any judgment can be endlessly appealed: The scribe misspelled this word, they’ll say, or used an accusative instead of a genitive, which obviously changes the meaning of the latest decree. Obviously.” Argyros had never heard it used as a swearword before. “And so-”

Living in an empire that had endured thirteen centuries since the Incarnation, and was mighty long before that, the magistrianos had always thought of continuity as something to be striven for. Now, for the first time, he saw its dark side; some timely chaos should long since have swept Pcheris vs. Sarapion into oblivion. No wonder Mouamet Dekanos had pouches under his eyes.

With an effort Argyros dragged his thoughts back to the matter at hand. “As you have read, sir, the Emperor, may Christ preserve him, would be pleased if the rebuilding of your great pharos here proceeded at a more rapid pace. Through the Master of Offices, he has sent me from Constantinople to try to move the process along in any way I can.”

The Augustal prefect governed Alexandria and Egypt from what had been the palace of the Ptolemies before Rome acquired the province. The promontory stood on Lokhias Point, which jutted into the sea from the eastern part of the city. By luck, the window in Dekanos’ chamber faced northwest, toward the half-finished tower of stone that would-or might-one day become the restored lighthouse. At more than half a mile, the workers there would have seemed tiny as ants from the office, but there were none to see. Argyros’ nod and wave said that more plainly than words.

Dekanos frowned. “My dear sir, we have been petitioning Constantinople for leave to rebuild the pharos since the earthquake toppled it, only to be ignored by several emperors in succession. Only eight years have gone by since at last we were granted permission to go to work.” Argyros would not have said only, but Argyros did not have Pcheris vs. Sarapion and its ilk to deal with, either. “We’ve not done badly since.”

“No indeed, not on the whole,” Argyros said with what seemed to be agreement. “Still, his Imperial Majesty is disappointed that progress has been so slow these past two years. Surely in a land so populous as this, he feels, adequate supplies of labor are available for the completion of any such task.”

“Oh, aye, we have any number of convicted felons to grub rock in the quarries, and any number of strong-backed brainless oafs to haul it to the pharos.” Dekanos kept his voice under tight control-he was as wary of Argyros as the other way round-but his choice of words showed his anger. “Skilled workers, though, stone-carvers and concrete-spreaders and carpenters for scaffolding and all the rest, are not so easy to come by. We’ve had trouble with them.” He looked as if the admission pained him.

It puzzled the magistrianos. “But why? Surely they must obey an imperial order to provide then services.”

“My dear sir, I can see you do not know Alexandria.” Dekanos’ chuckle held scant amusement. “The guilds-”

“Constantinople also has guilds,” Argyros interrupted. He still felt confused. “Every city in the empire has its craftsmen’s associations.”

“No doubt, no doubt. But does Constantinople have anakhoresis?”

“ ‘Withdrawal’?” the magistrianos echoed. Now he was frankly floundering. “I’m sorry, but I don’t follow you.”

“The word means more than just ‘withdrawal’ in Egypt, I fear. The peasants in the farming villages along the Nile have always had the custom of simply running away-withdrawing- from their homes when taxes get too heavy or the flood fails. Usually they come back as things improve, though they may turn to banditry if the hard times last.”

“Peasants do that all over the empire, all over the world.” Argyros shrugged. “How is Egypt any different?”

“Because here, anakhoresis goes a good deal further than that. If, say, a man is executed and the locals feel the sentence was unjust, whole villagefuls of them may withdraw in protest. And if”-Dekanos was ahead of the magistrianos’ objection- “we try to punish the ringleaders or force the villagers back to their places, we’re apt to just incite an even bigger anakhoresis. A couple of times the whole Nile valley has been paralyzed, from the Delta all the way down to the First Cataract.”

Argyros understood the horror that came into the Alexandrian’s voice at the prospect. In Constantinople, officials feared riots the same way, because one once had grown till it had almost cast Justinian the Great from his throne. Every province, the magistrianos supposed, had special problems to give its rulers sleepless nights.

All the same, something did not add up here. “The peasants are not restless now, though, or you would not have said you had plenty of unskilled labor available,” Argyros said slowly.

“Very good,” Dekanos said, plainly pleased the magistrianos had stayed with him. “You are right, sir. Very good. But here in Alexandria, you see, the guilds have also learned to play the game of anakhoresis. Let something not go to their liking, and they walk away from their jobs.”

“And that-”

“-is what has happened with the pharos, yes.” “May the Virgin preserve us all.” Argyros felt his head begin to ache.

“There’s more.” Mouamet Dekanos seemed to take morbid pleasure in going on with his bad news. “As I say, this is Alexandria; we’ve dealt with guild anakhoreseis before-or with one guild’s withdrawing, anyway. But all the guilds pulled out of working on the pharos at the same time, and none will go back till they all agree they’re happy. And this is Alexandria, where no one wants to agree with anyone about anything.”

“Well,” the magistrianos said, doing his best to hold on to reason, “they must all have been happy once upon a time or no work ever would have been done. What made them want to, uh, withdraw in the first place?”

“Good question,” Dekanos said. “I wish I had a good answer for you.”

“So do I.”

Most of the letters on the signs above shops in Alexandria’s western district looked Greek, but most of the words they spelled out were nonsense to Argyros. He knew no Coptic; as well as confusing his eyes, the purring, hissing speech filled his ears, for the quarter known as Rhakotis had for centuries been the haunt of native Egyptians.

The locals eyed him suspiciously. His inches and relatively light skin said he was not one of them. But those same inches and the sword on his belt warned he was no one to trifle with. Hard looks were as far as the natives went.

He stopped into a cobbler’s shop that advertised itself not only in Coptic but in intelligible if badly spelled Greek. As he’d hoped, the man inside had a smattering of that language. “Can you tell me how to find the street where the carpenters work?” the magistrianos asked. He jingled coins in his hand.

The cobbler did not hold out an open palm, though. “Why you want to know?” he growled.

“The leaders of their guild will have shops there, surely. I need to speak with them,” Argyros said. The fellow, he noticed, had not denied knowing; he did not want to get his wind up. When the cobbler still said nothing, Argyros gave a mild prod. “If I intended anything more, would I not come with a squadron of soldiers who know exactly where the guildsmen work?”

The cobbler grinned at that. His teeth were very white against his dark brown skin. “Suppose you might,” he admitted. He gave directions, so quickly that Argyros made him slow down and repeat them several times. Alexandria’s grid of streets helped strangers find their way around, but only so much.

The magistrianos had a good ear for instructions. After only a couple of wrong turns, he found himself on a street loud with the pounding of hammers and fragrant from sawdust. Again he looked for a shop with a bilingual sign. When he found one, he stepped in and waited for the carpenter to look up from the chair he was repairing. The carpenter said something in Coptic, and then, after a second look at Argyros, tried Greek: “What can I do for you today, sir?”

“You can start by telling me why the carpenters’ guild has withdrawn from work on the pharos.”

The carpenter’s face, which had been open and interested a moment before, froze. “That’s not for me to say, sir,” he answered slowly. “You need to talk to one of the chiefs.”

“Excellent,” Argyros said, making the man blink.”Suppose you take me to one.”

Outmaneuvered, the carpenter set down his mallet. He turned his head and shouted. After a few seconds a stripling who looked just like him came out of a back room. A rapid colloquy in Coptic followed. The carpenter turned back to Argyros. “My son will watch the shop while we are gone. Come.”

He sounded resentful, and kept looking back at the mallet on the floor. Then he saw the magistrianos’ hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Shaking his head, he led Argyros out into the street.

Argyros glanced up at the sign again. “Your name is Teus?” he asked. The carpenter nodded.”And who is the man to whom you’re taking me?”

“He is called Khesphmois,” Teus said. He kept his mouth shut the rest of the way to Khesphmois’ shop.

KHESPHMOIS-MASTER CARPENTER, the sign above the establishment declared in Greek and, Argyros supposed, Coptic. The look of the place did not contradict the sign’s claim. It was three times the size of Teus’ shop, and on a busier comer to boot. People bustled in and out, and the racket of several men working carried out to the street.

Teus led Argyros through the beaded entrance curtain that did something, at least, to keep flies outside. A carpenter looked up from the dowel he was filing, smiled and nodded at Teus. The fellow did not seem to be Khesphmois himself, for Teus’ sentence had the master carpenter’s name in it and sounded like a question.

The other man’s reply had to mean something like “I’ll bring him.” He got up and hurried off. When he came back from behind a pile of boards a moment later, he had with him another man, one with only a few more years than Argyros’ thirty or so. The magistrianos was expecting a graybeard, but this vigorous fellow had to be Khesphmois.

So he was. Teus bowed to him, at the same time dropping a hand to his own knee, an Egyptian greeting Argyros had already seen a dozen times in the streets of Rhakotis. When Khesphmois had returned the salute, Teus spoke for a couple of minutes in Coptic, pointing at the magistrianos as he did so.

Khesphmois’ round, clean-shaven face went surprisingly stem as Teus drew to a close. Like Teus-like all the carpenters in the shop-he wore only sandals and a white linen skirt that reached from his waist to just above his knees, but he also clothed himself in dignity. In good Greek, he asked Argyros, “Who are you, a stranger, to question the long-established right of our guild to withdraw from a labor we have found onerous past any hope of toleration?”

“I am Basil Argyros, magistrianos in the service of his imperial majesty, the Basileus Nikephoros III, from Constantinople,” Argyros replied. Khesphmois’ shop went suddenly quiet as everyone within earshot stopped work to stare. Into that sudden silence, the magistrianos went on. “I might add that in Constantinople guilds have no right of anakhoresis, long-established or otherwise. Seeking as he does to restore what is an ornament to your city and its commerce, the Emperor does not look with favor on your refusal to cooperate in that work. He has sent me here”-a slight exaggeration but, one that would not be wasted on the carpenters-”to do what I can to move it forward once more.”

The carpenters spoke to-before long, yelled at-one another in Coptic. Argyros wished he could follow what they were saying. Whatever it was, it got hotter by the second. Finally Khesphmois, who had been less noisy than most, raised his hand in an almost imperial gesture of command. Quiet slowly returned.

The master carpenter told Argyros, “This is not Constantinople, sir, and you would do well to remember it. So would the Emperor. You may tell him so, if you have his ear.” Khesphmois spoke in dry tones, seemingly used to officials who boasted of their lofty connections. Argyros felt his ears grow hot. Khesphmois continued. “Perhaps you should pick another guild to try to frighten. The carpenters stand firm.” Teus and those of Khesphmois’ men who knew Greek snarled agreement.

“You misunderstand me-” Argyros began to protest.

“And you misunderstand us,” Khesphmois broke in. “Now go, or it will be the worst for you. Get out!” Just because he hadn’t shouted before, Argyros had judged that he did not care to. That was a mistake.

The magistrianos kept his hand away from his sword this time. Too many men had too many potential weapons close by. “The prefect will hear of your intransigence,” he warned. “He may try to root it out by force.”

“He has known of it for a long time,” Khesphmois retorted. “And if he uses force, there will be anakhoresis by every guild in Alexandria. We will stop the city. He knows that, too. So-” He jerked a thumb toward the curtain of beads.

Furious and frustrated, Argyros turned to go. He was reaching out to shove the beads aside when someone behind him called, “Wait!” He spun around, startled. It was a woman’s voice.

“Zois,” Khesphmois said, naming her and at the same time letting the magistrianos know from the mixture of patience and annoyance in his voice that she was his wife. He had used that same tone with Helen, and she with him, many times. As always, sorrow stabbed him when he thought of her.

“Don’t ‘Zois’ me,” the woman snapped; her Greek was as good as her husband’s. “You are making a mistake if you turn this man from Constantinople into an enemy.”

“I don’t think so,” Khesphmois said, also in Greek. Maybe only a couple of his men spoke it, Argyros thought, and he wanted to keep the family spat as private as he could. He was sure that was a forlorn hope, but grateful because it let him follow the talk.

“I know you don’t. That’s why I came out,” Zois said. She was a few years younger than her husband, slim where he would soon be portly, and quite short. Her high cheekbones were the best feature of her swarthy face, those and her eyes, which were very large and dark. Her chin was delicate, but the wide mouth above it was at the moment thin and firmly set.

The magistrianos waited for Khesphmois to send his wife away for interfering in men’s business. As he would learn, though, Egyptians were easier about such things than was usual at Constantinople. And even in the capital, men who exercised all the control over wives legally theirs were most of them unhappily wed.

“Can you afford to be wrong?” Zois demanded. Her hand went to the silk collar of her blue linen tunic. Only someone well off could have afforded the ornament. “If you are wrong, we will lose everything, and not just us but all the carpenters and all the other guilds. If someone comes all the way from Constantinople to see to this business, he will not just up and leave.”

“Your lady wife”- Argyros gave her his best bow- “is right. I am not especially wise, but I am especially stubborn. I should also tell you I am not a good man to sink in a canal, in case the thought crossed your mind. Magistrianoi look after their own.”

“No,” Khesphmois said absently; that he was still more intent on arguing with Zois made Argyros believe him. To her, his hands on hips in irritation, the master carpenter went on, “What would you have me do, then? Call off the anakhoresis now?”

“Of course not,” she answered at once. “But why not show him the reasons for it? He is from far away; what can he know of how things are here in Alexandria? When he sees, when he hears, maybe he will have the influence in the capital to make the prefect and his henchmen easier on us. What have you to lose by trying?”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Khesphmois mocked. “Maybe I will run into a crocodile and spend the next hundred years basking on a sandbank, too, but I don’t lose any sleep over it.” Still, for his wife’s last question he had no good answer, and so, scowling, he growled to Argyros, “Come along, then, if you must. I’ll take you to the pharos, and we’ll find out if you have eyes in your head to see with.”

Teus and a couple of other carpenters started to protest, but Khesphmois shouted them down in a Coptic that sounded pungent. “Thank you,” the magistrianos said to him, and got only another scowl for an answer. The magistrianos turned to Zois and bowed again. “And thank you, my lady.” He spoke as formally as if to a Constantinopolitan noblewoman, as much in the hope of vexing Khesphmois as for any other reason.

He was surprised when Zois dipped her head in the same elegant acknowledgment one of those noblewomen might have used. He had a moment to notice how gracefully her neck curved. Then Khesphmois repeated, “Come along, you.” Without waiting to see whether Argyros would follow, the master carpenter stamped out into the street.

The magistrianos hurried after him. “Good-bye,” Zois called. “Good-bye, the both of you.” That nearly brought Argyros up short, not so much because she was polite enough to include him but because she had used the dual number, the special-and most archaic-grammatical form reserved for pairs.

Even coming from his imagined noblewoman, the dual would have sounded pretentious. Hearing it from an Egyptian carpenter’s wife was strange indeed. Argyros wondered where she could have learned it. Thinking back, he decided that was the first time she became an individual for him.

At the time, though, the thought was gone in an eyeblink, because he had to hustle along to catch up with Khesphmois. The master carpenter was short and stocky but moved with a grim determination that Argyros, even with his longer legs, was hard-pressed to match.

He tried several times to make small talk. Khesphmois answered only in grunts. The one thing Argyros really wanted to say-”Your wife is an interesting woman”-he could not, not to a man he had known less than an hour and one who was no friend of his. He soon walked on in silence, which seemed to suit Khesphmois well enough.

The master carpenter might also have been impervious to heat, no mean asset in Alexandria. He tramped along the raised road that still marked the path of the original, narrow Heptastadion, then east on the southern coast of the island of Pharos to the base of the lighthouse there.

The pharos, even in its present half-rebuilt state, grew more awe-inspiring with every step Argyros took toward it. He had long thought no building could be grander than Constantinople’s great church of Hagia Sophia, but the sheer vertical upthrust of the pharos had a brusque magnificence of its own. Already it was taller than the top of Hagia Sophia’s central dome, and would reach twice that height if it ever was finished.

Khesphmois craned his neck at the towering pillar, too. “It only goes to show,” he said, “that Alexandria breeds real men.”

Argyros snorted, suspecting locals had been using that joke on newcomers for all the sixteen centuries since Sostratos first erected (coming up with that word made the magistrianos snort all over again) the phallos. Pharos, he corrected himself sternly, ordering his mind to stop playing tricks with words. Suddenly he felt every day of his two years of celibacy.

His mental order proved easier to carry out than he had expected. As he and Khesphmois approached the lighthouse, he began to take more notice of the line of men marching in front of it. Some of them carried placards. Argyros frowned, puzzled. “Are they mendicant monks?” he asked the master carpenter. “They are not in monastic garb.”

Khesphmois threw back his head and laughed. “Hardly. Come with me yet a little farther, and you will see.”

Shrugging, the magistrianos obeyed. He saw that not all the men by the pharos were marching, after all. The ones who were just standing around looked like a squad of light infantry-they had no body armor, but wore helmets and carried shields and spears. They also looked monumentally bored. One trooper, in fact, was fast asleep, leaning back against the lighthouse’s lowest course of stonework.

The marchers seemed hardly more excited than the soldiers; Argyros was certain they were doing something they had done many times before. Then he drew close enough to read their placards, and doubted in rapid succession his conclusions and his eyesight.

THIS LABOR IS TOO DANGEROUS FOR ANY MAN TO CARRY OUT, one sign said, PALTRY PAY FOR DEADLY WORK, another shrieked, CARPENTERS AND CONCRETE-SPREADERS WITHDRAW TOGETHER, shouted a third. Others were in Coptic, but the magistrianos had no doubt they were equally inflammatory.

“Why don’t the soldiers drive them away?” he demanded of Khesphmois. “Why are they here, if not for that? Have the guilds bribed the commander of the watch to let this sedition go on?” He was shocked to the core. Such an insolent display at Constantinople-or any other town he knew- would instantly have landed the marchers in prison.

“At least your questions are to the point,” the master carpenter said. “A good thing, since you have so many of them.”

“May your answers match my questions, then.” Argyros felt brief pride at his sardonic response; he did not want Khesphmois to know just how disturbed he was.

“Very well,” Khesphmois said. “The soldiers are here mostly to see that the marchers do no pilfering. And no, we have not bribed the watch commander, though I must say we tried. But Cyril is an honest man, worse luck for us.”

By then, the magistrianos suspected that trying to hide his shock was a losing battle. Anywhere else in the Empire, if artisans refused to work-in itself unlikely-soldiers would simply force them to return. But Mouamet Dekanos struck Argyros as being bright enough to try that if he thought it would work. That meant, Argyros concluded unhappily, that Khesphmois and the other guild leaders really could immobilize Alexandria if these weird privileges of theirs were tampered with.

“Egypt,” Argyros muttered. Nowhere else in the Empire would such nonsense as Pcheris vs. Sarapion have dragged on for seven hundred years, either. The magistrianos gathered himself and turned back to Khesphmois. “Why,” he asked carefully, “have all you workers chosen to withdraw?”

The master carpenter looked at him with something like respect. “Do you know, you are the first official who ever bothered to ask that. The prefect and his staff just told us to go back to work, the way they do during a usual anakhoresis. Any other time we would, eventually. But not now. Not here. So they have waited, not daring to set soldiers on us and not knowing what else to do, and we have stayed away and nothing has got done.”

That sounded appallingly likely to Argyros. If a contested inheritance could stay contested for seven centuries, what were a couple of years here or there in putting a pharos back together? Delay would be a way of life for the local bureaucrats, here even more than in most of the Empire. Well, one of the things magistrianoi were for was shaking up officials too set in their ways.

“I’m asking,” the magistrianos said. “Why haven’t you gone back to work?”

“By Saint Cyril, I’ll show you,” Khesphmois exclaimed. “Follow me, if you’ve the stomach-and the head-for it.”

He walked past the sign-carriers, waving to a couple from the carpenters’ guild. The watchmen only nodded at him; by now, Argyros supposed, they must know him as well as their own officers. The magistrianos, who was on their side, got more hard looks than the master carpenter.

Khesphmois walked into the pharos. Argyros followed still. Their footsteps echoed in the gloom within. Khesphmois hurried over to the spiral stair just inside the doorway and started up.

The stairway was almost as dark as the chamber that led to it, though window openings set at intervals into the thick wall gave enough light for the magistrianos to see where he was putting his feet. The idea of stumbling and rolling down so long a stairway made his sweat turn cold.

By the time he reached the top even of the truncated pharos, Argyros had sweat in plenty. Ahead of him, Khesphmois still seemed fresh. The magistrianos muttered to himself as he panted up the last few steps. His time behind a desk in Constantinople was making him soft.

Alexandria’s usual northerly breeze helped cool him while he got his breath back. He turned his back to the breeze and peered across the Great Harbor at the city. The view was superb. He even towered high above the ancient obelisks- “Cleopatra’s Needles,” the locals called them, but they were older than that-not far from the Heptastadion’s southern root.

He had no idea how long he might have stood there staring, but Khesphmois’ dry cough recalled him to himself. “I didn’t bring you up here to sightsee,” the master carpenter said. “Look straight down.”

A long stride and a short one brought the magistrianos to the edge of the stone block on which he stood. No fence or rail separated him from a couple of hundred feet of empty space. He cautiously peered over the edge; only the discipline he had acquired in the Roman army kept him from going to his knees or belly first. Far, far below, the marchers and watchmen looked as tiny as insects. Argyros was anything but sorry to step back. “A long way down,” he observed, stating the obvious.

Khesphmois had been watching him closely. “You’re a cool one,” he said, not sounding happy to admit it. “But how would you like to be working up here instead of just standing?”

“I wouldn’t,” the magistrianos admitted at once. “But then, it’s not my proper trade.”

“Working this high is no one’s proper trade,” Khesphmois said. “If you take a wrong step, if someone bumps you by accident, if a piece of scaffolding breaks while you’re on it, even if you make a bad stroke with your hammer, over you go and nothing’s left of you but a red smear on the rocks. There are plenty of them down below, and there would have been many more if we hadn’t staged the anakhoresis.”

“Some, certainly,” Argyros nodded. “Some trades are dangerous: the mines, the army, and, plainly, working at heights like this. But why do you say many?”

“The pharos is square in section thus far, yes?” Khesphmois said.

The magistrianos nodded again.

“Well, the next part is to be octagonal and narrower-a tiny bit narrower,” the master carpenter went on. “What would you expect to happen to the carpenters who will have to face inward with almost no room at all to put their feet while they try to set up scaffolds, or to the stonecutters who try to climb onto the scaffolding to trim and polish the out-sides of the blocks, or to the concrete-spreaders who take away the excess that squeezes out from between the courses of blocks?”

“The risks are worse now, you’re telling me,” Argyros said slowly.

“That’s just what I’m telling you.”

“How do we make them less, then?” the magistrianos asked. “Enough less, I mean, to get the various guilds to come back to work? Alexandria and the whole Empire need this pharos restored.”

“And Alexandria and the whole empire care not a moldy fig how many workers die restoring it,” Khesphmois said bitterly. “Now you’ve seen the problem, man from Constantinople. What do you aim to do about it?”

“Right now, I don’t know,” Argyros said. “I truly do not. I work no miracles, though this is a column any pillar-sitting saint might envy.”

Khesphmois grunted. “You’re honest, at any rate. You-” He stopped; the magistrianos had raised a hand.

“I wasn’t finished. One way or another I will find you an answer. I swear it by God, the Virgin, and St. Mouamet, who as patron of changes will be apt to hear my oath.”

“So he will.” Khesphmois crossed himself; Argyros copied the gesture. The master carpenter went on, “Whether the Augustal prefect and his staff pay you any heed, though, is something else again.” Without waiting for an answer, he started down the stairway. After a final long look at the panorama of the city, Argyros followed.

That afternoon, back on the mainland once more, he peered out toward the half-erected pharos. Thinking of it like that reminded him of the bawdy pun he had unwittingly made earlier in the day. And thinking of that pun made him come half-erect.

He scowled and clenched his fists, trying to force his body back under the control of his will. His body, as bodies do, resisted. Oh, you’d make a fine monk, he told himself angrily, a wonderful monk; they’d canonize you after you died, under the name St. Basil Priapos. This was a fine way to remember Helen.

But he remembered her all too vividly, remembered the touch of her lips and the surge of her body against his. He caught himself wondering how Zois would be. That thought made him angrier than ever. Not only was it shameful lust, it betrayed the memory of his dead wife. He still wondered, though.

When he dreamed that night, as always he woke too soon.

“My dear sir, surely you are joking!” Mouamet Dekanos’ eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “You want me to sit down and dicker with these, these laborers? Think of the ghastly precedent it would set! Ghastly!”

“I’ve thought of it,” Argyros admitted. “I don’t like it. I don’t like seeing the pharos still half-built, either. Nor does the Emperor. That problem is immediate. The precedent will just have to take care of itself.”

Dekanos stared at him as if he had just proposed converting the whole population of the Roman Empire to Persian sun worship by force. “Precedent, my dear sir, is part of the glue that holds the Empire together,” he said stiffly.

“So it is,” the magistrianos said. “The grain shipments from Alexandria to Constantinople are another part, and the Emperor has lost patience with having ships on their way back here go astray without need. In this case, he reckons that of greater importance than precedent.”

“So you say,” Dekanos retorted. “So you say.”

“Would you like me to meet with the Augustal prefect and ask his opinion of your attitude?”

The Alexandrian functionary’s face went dark with anger. “You’re bluffing.”

“Try me.” As a matter of fact, Argyros was. In an argument with someone from the distant, resented capital, he was sure the prefect would back his own aide. Had he been an intimate of the Master of Offices instead of merely one of his magistrianoi, though, not even the Augustal prefect could have afforded to ignore him. And George Lakhanodrakon’s letter made him seem to be one. He rose, took out the parchment and unrolled it, and flourished it in Dekanos’ face. “You do recall this, I hope.”

“Well, what if I do?” Dekanos was still scowling. “For that matter,” he went on angrily, “how will you be able to gather all these fractious guild leaders together and make them and their guild members abide by anything they might agree to? For all you know, they will say one thing to ease the pressure on them and then turn around and do just the opposite.”

When the official shifted the basis of the argument, Argyros knew he had his man. “If they did that, would they not have gone beyond the bounds even of what you Alexandrians tolerate in an anakhoresis!” he asked. “You could then use whatever force you had to with less fear of bringing the whole city to the point of insurrection.”

“Perhaps.” Dekanos pursed his lips. “Perhaps.”

“As for gathering the leaders of the guilds,” the magistrianos said persuasively, “leave that to me. I wouldn’t think of formally involving you with speaking to them until everything on the other side was in readiness.”

“Certainly not,” Dekanos said, mollified by Argyros’ apparent concern for proper procedure. “Hmm. Yes, I suppose you can go forward, then, provided you do it on those terms and provided you stress our unique clemency in treating with the artisans in this one special case.”

“Of course,” the magistrianos said, although he had no intention of stressing anything of the sort. He bowed his way out of Dekanos’ office and did not grin until his back was to the Alexandrian. Grinning still, he headed for Khesphmois’ shop in the district of Rhakotis.

He did not see the master carpenter when he walked through the beaded curtain. Only one of the journeymen was there, luckily one who spoke some Greek. The fellow said, “He not back till tomorrow. He helping build-how you say? — grandstand for parade. Busy all night, he say.” The man chuckled. “He terrible mad about that. I there, too, but have this cabinet to repair for rich man. He want it now, no matter what. Rich men like that.”

“Yes,” Argyros said, though he knew nothing of being rich from personal experience. He hesitated, then asked, “What does the parade celebrate?”

“Feast day for St. Arsenios.”

“Oh.” Argyros wondered what the saint, a man who had withdrawn from the world to live out his life as a monk in the Egyptian desert, would think of having his memory celebrated with a large, noisy parade. He shrugged. That was the Alexandrians’ problem. Khesphmois was his. “I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon, then. I do need to see your master.” He turned to go, thinking that as long as he was in this part of the city, Teus might direct him to some other master carpenters.

“Can I do anything to help you, man from Constantinople?”

Argyros had just put his hand in the entranceway to thrust aside the strings of beads. Now he jerked it back. Small spheres of glass and painted clay clicked off one another. “Truly I don’t know, my lady,” he said. His unspoken thought was, That depends on how much influence you have on your husband.

Zois might have picked it out of the air. “I know you did not come all this way simply to see me,” she said, her eyebrows and the comers of her mouth lifting slightly in a cynical smile. Eve might have worn that smile, Argyros thought, when God came to talk business with Adam, and later given Adam his comeuppance for the visit. He put aside his blasphemous maunderings; Zois was going on, “Still, perhaps we could discuss it over a cup of wine.”

The magistrianos’ eyes flicked to the journeyman carpenter, but the fellow did not look up from the work he had resumed. And no wonder: with her husband absent, Zois had not presumed to come out alone to speak with Argyros. A servant girl stood behind him, a pretty little thing who could not have been more than fifteen and who was, the magistrianos saw, about eight months pregnant.

He considered. “Thank you,” he said at last. “Maybe we could.”

“This way,” Zois said, then spoke in Coptic to the servant girl, who dipped her head and hurried off. “Don’t let fear of Lukra’s spying on us worry you,” Zois told the magistrianos as she led him back toward the rooms where she and Khesphmois lived. “She has no Greek. My husband did not take her on for that.” She smiled her ancient smile again.

Like the shop, the home behind it was of mud brick. The rooms were small and rather dark. The furniture was splendid, though, which surprised Argyros until he remembered Khesphmois’ trade.

Lukra came back a few minutes later with wine, dates candied in honey, and sheets of flat, chewy unleavened bread. Zois waited for the girl to pour the wine, then spoke again in Coptic. Lukra disappeared. “She will not be back,” Zois said, nodding to herself. She raised her cup to the magistrianos. “Health to you.”

“Health to you,” he echoed, drinking. The vintage was not one he knew, which meant it was most likely a local one not reckoned fine enough to export. It was not bad, though, and had a tartness that cut through the cloyingly sweet taste of the dates.

Zois ate, then wiped her hands and patted at her mouth with a square of embroidered linen. “Now,” she said when she was through, “what do you need from Khesphmois?”

“His cooperation in getting the other leaders of the carpenters’ guild and the men who head the rest of the guilds that have withdrawn from work on the pharos to talk with the Augustal prefect’s deputy so they can agree on a way to get construction started again.”

Her eyes, already large, seemed to grow further as she widened them in surprise. “You can arrange this?”

“If the guildsmen will play their part, yes. I already have agreement from the prefect’s deputy. The pharos is too important not only to Alexandria but to all the Empire to be delayed by this anakhoresis.”

“I agree,” Zois said at once. “I warned Khesphmois from the outset that the guilds were facing too dangerous a foe in the city government, because it could crush them if their stubbornness pushed it to the point of wanting to. I will help with anything that has a hope of ending the anakhoresis peacefully.”

“Thank you.” Argyros did not tell her the Augustal prefect and his staff were as frightened of the guilds’ power as she was of the government’s. Having both sides wary was probably a good idea. He went on, “Do you think you can sway your husband to your point of view?”

“I suspect so. Khesphmois is more likely to insist on having his own way on matters where there is no risk to him.” The magistrianos thought that was only sensible, and true of anyone. Then Zois went on. “Take Lukra, for instance. Khesphmois did.” Bitterness welled forth in her voice.

“Did he?” Argyros’ interest, among other things, rose. So that was why she was seeing him alone, he thought: for the sake of revenge on her husband. That was sinful. So was the act of adultery itself. At the moment, the magistrianos did not care. Relief would have been easy to buy at any time since Helen died. Despite his body’s urgings, he had held back.

This, though… Zois was attractive in an exotic way, clever enough for him to hope to enjoy her mind as well as her body. And she might be his for as long as he was in Alexandria, long enough, perhaps, for something more than desire-or her anger at Khesphmois-to bind them together. It would not be what he had known with his wife, but it could be better than the emptiness that had ruled his life these past years.

He got up and took a step toward Zois’ chair. Then he noticed she had not stopped talking while lust had filled his head. She was saying, “But for all his faults, he is not a bad man at bottom, you know. I would not see him hurt in any way, and he would be, he and many others, if the anakhoresis were put down by force.”

“Yes, that’s likely so,” the magistrianos agreed woodenly. He sat back down.

Zois sighed. “If God had not willed that I be barren, I am sure Khesphmois would have left Lukra alone. And when the child is born, he and I will rear it as if it were our own.” Her laugh was shaky. “Here I am going on about my own life, when you came to talk of weighty affairs. I do apologize.”

“Think nothing of it, my lady.” Now the magistrianos’ voice sounded as it should. So that was why she was seeing him alone, he thought again, but this time with a different reason behind the that: Unburdening herself to a sympathetic stranger had to be easier than talking with a neighbor or friend here. A stranger would not be likely to gossip.

Argyros laughed at himself. Before he married Helen, he had never imagined himself irresistible to women. Thinking Zois had found him so was bracing. It made him proud. He knew what pride went before. Even as he had that thought, he felt himself falling.

“You are a kind man,” Zois said. “As I told you, I will do my best to make sure my husband lends his influence to meeting with the prefect’s men and trying to end the anakhoresis. And now, would you care for another date?” She held out the platter to him.

“No, thank you.” When the magistrianos got up this time, he did not approach the master carpenter’s wife. “I’m glad I can count on you, but now I do have other business to attend to.” He let her show him out.

As the beads clicked behind him, he wondered what the other business was. For the life of him, he could not think of any. Maybe escaping his own embarrassment counted.

He walked north to the street of Kanopos, Alexandria’s main east-west thoroughfare, the one on which Saint Athanasios’ church fronted. With nothing better to do, he thought he would imitate many of the locals and lie down in his room during the midday heat.

Someone plucked at the sleeve of his tunic. He whirled, one hand dropping to the hilt of his sword-like any large city, Alexandria was full of light-fingered rogues. But this was no rogue-it was a girl two or three years older than Zois’ maidservant. Under the paint on her face, she might have been pretty were she less thin. “Go to bed with me?” she said. Argyros would bet it was most of the Greek she knew. No, she had a bit more, a price: “Twenty folleis.”

A big copper coin for an embrace… The magistrianos had rejected such advances before without having to think twice. Now, his blood already heated from what he had thought-no, hoped, he admitted to himself-he heard himself say, “Where?”

The girl’s face lit up. She was pretty, he saw, at least when she smiled. She led him to a tiny chamber that opened onto an alley a couple of blocks from the street of Kanopos. With the door shut, the cubicle was hot, stuffy, and nearly night-dark. Argyros knew the much-used straw pallet would have bugs, but the girl was pulling her shift off over her head, lying down and waiting for him to join her. He did.

Afterward, he saw her scorn even in the gloom. After so long without a woman, he had spent himself almost at once. But that long denial was not to be relieved with a single round. “You pay twice,” she warned, but then she was moving with him, urging him on. Harlots had their wiles, he knew, but he thought he pleased her the second time. He knew he pleased himself.

He knew he pleased her when he gave her a silver miliaresion, much more than she had asked of him. Maybe, for a while, she would be a little less scrawny.

His conscience troubled him as he finished the interrupted walk to his room. Such a sordid way to end his mourning for his wife: a skinny whore in a squalid crib. But he had not stopped mourning Helen, nor would he ever. He had only proved what he already knew-that wish as he might, he was not fit by nature for the single life.

And knowing that, would it have been better, he asked himself, to have returned to the sensual world with an act of adultery as well as one of fornication? He thought of Zois, of how attractive he had found her, and was not sure of the answer.

With an expression of barely concealed dislike, Mouamet Dekanos watched the guildsmen file into the meeting chamber. Argyros, who was sitting at one side of the table (he had left Dekanos the head) gave him credit for trying to conceal it.

The guildsmen were not even trying. They glowered impartially at both men waiting for them. They also frankly gaped at the magnificence of the hall in which they were received. Even in their finest clothes, they looked out of place, or rather looked like what they were-workmen in a palace.

“Illustrious sirs,” Khesphmois said, nervously dipping his head to Argyros and Dekanos. As he slid into a chair, he went on. “These men with me are Hergeus son of Thotsytmis of the concrete spreaders’ guild, and Miysis son of Seias of the guild of stonecutters.”

“Yes, thank you, Khesphmois,” Dekanos said. “Of course, I have had dealings with all you gentlemen”-he spit out the word as if it tasted bad-”before, but your comrades will be new to Argyros. He is here all the way from Constantinople itself to help us settle our differences.”

“Illustrious sir,” Hergeus and Miysis murmured as they took their seats. Like the other Alexandrians Argyros had met, they made a good show of looking unimpressed at the mention of the capital.

Miysis, the magistrianos thought, carried it off better. The stonecutters’ leader was a squat, powerful man in his mid-fifties. His nose had been broken and a scar seamed one weathered cheek, but the eyes in that bruiser’s face were disconcertingly keen. After sizing Argyros up, he turned to Dekanos and demanded, “How’s he going to do that, illustrious sir, when we already know what’s going on and can’t see any way out?” Though his voice was a raspy growl, he did not speak bad Greek.

“I will leave that to the magistrianos to explain for himself,” Dekanos answered.

“Thank you,” Argyros said, ignoring the tone that made Dekanos’ reply mean, I haven’t the slightest idea. “Sometimes, gentlemen, ignorance is an advantage. Both sides in this anakhoresis, I would say, have clung so long and stubbornly to their own views that they have forgotten others are possible. Perhaps I will be able to show you all something new yet acceptable to everyone.”

“Pah,” was all Miysis said to that. Hergeus added, “Perhaps I’ll swim the length of the Nile tomorrow, too, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

His grin made the words sting less than they would have otherwise. Like Khesphmois, he was young to be a guild leader, but there the resemblance between them ended. Hergeus was tall for an Egyptian, and as skinny as the trollop Argyros had bedded a few days before.

“We are here talking together,” Khesphmois pointed out. “That is something new.”

The master carpenter, Argyros knew, was to some degree an ally, if only because this meeting set his prestige on the line. The magistrianos had trouble caring. Memories of the way he had abandoned his self-imposed celibacy kept crowding in on him. The act itself shamed him less than the thoughtless way he had yielded to his animal urges.

Hergeus had said something to him while he was woolgathering. Frowning, he pulled himself back to the matter at hand. “I’m sorry, sir, I missed that.”

“Seeing things we can’t again, eh?” But the concrete-pourer was smiling still, in a way that invited everyone to share his amusement. “Well, I just want to know how you can make the risk of death and maiming worth the niggardly wages we got for work on the pharos.”

“We pay as well as anyone else,” Dekanos snapped, nettled.

“But I can make chairs and cabinets without the fear of turning into a red splash on the ground if I sneeze at the wrong time,” Khesphmois said.

“Would higher pay bring you back to the pharos?” Argyros asked.

The three guild representatives looked at one another. Then they all looked at Mouamet Dekanos. “Out of the question,” he said. “The precedent that would set is pernicious.”

“It’s not just the silver, anyhow,” Miysis said. “My lads would sooner do other work, and that’s all there is to it. We’re tired of using guild fees to pay for funerals. We had as many in the work on the pharos as in a couple of generations before.”

“Enough silver might tempt some concrete-spreaders back,” Hergeus said. “The young ones, the bolder ones, the ones with families to worry over. The ones up to their chins in debt, too, I suppose.”

“Aye, some of us, too, I would say,” Khesphmois agreed. “Enough silver.”

“Yes, and let us grant your first demand here and what would come of it?” Dekanos said. “You’d make another and another till you’d hold out for a nomisma every hour on the hour. Who could afford to pay you then?”

Hergeus chuckled. “It’s a problem I’d like to have.”

“It’s not one the powerful men of the city would like to have,” Dekanos retorted. That brought things down to basics, Argyros thought. Naturally Dekanos worried first about Alexandria’s upper classes; they were the men he had to keep happy. Even the Augustal prefect needed to worry about what they thought, though his responsibility was to the Emperor. If they turned against him, what could he accomplish?

That was also true of the guilds, however, at least this time, although Dekanos seemed unwilling to recognize it. Argyros did not care one way or the other. All he wanted to see was the pharos getting taller again. He said, “I think we can keep the problem of precedent from getting out of hand if we establish a special rate of pay for the specific task of rebuilding the lighthouse. Then we will not have to worry about it again unless the earth trembles again, which God prevent.”

“I don’t care what we get paid,” Miysis said. “So long as we have any other work at all, we won’t go near the cursed pharos. Money’s no good to a dead man. And I’d like to see you make it go up without us stonecutters.”

Argyros felt like kicking the stubborn guildsman under the table. “Purely for the sake of discussion,” he said to Khesphmois and Hergeus, “how much of a boost in pay would it take to bring your comrades out once more?”

The two locals spoke together in rapid Coptic. Khesphmois switched to Greek: “Twice as much, and not a single copper follis less.”

Dekanos clapped a hand to his forehead, cried, “You made a mistake, Argyros! You summoned men from the thieves’ guild to meet with me.” To the guildsmen he said, “If you hope to gain anything from this meeting, you must show reason. I might, perhaps, under the special circumstances the magistrianos described, seek authorization for a raise of, ah, say, one part in twelve, but surely could not gain approval for any more than that.”

“One part in twelve is no raise at all. Look at the wealth around you!” Khesphmois exclaimed, waving his hand at the chamber in which they sat. Far from being overawed, the master carpenter was clever enough to use that splendor as a weapon for his cause. Argyros was impressed; Dekanos was plainly discomfited.

“You are willing, then, illustrious sir, to raise our pay?” Hergeus asked.

“As I said, under these special circumstances-” Dekanos began.

The concrete-spreaders’ leader cut him off with a wave of the hand. “You said before that you wouldn’t give us any raise at all. If a woman says she won’t and then does after you give her ten nomismata, she’s just as much a whore as if she did it for a follis. The only difference is her price, and that you can dicker over. That’s what we’re down to now, illustrious sir: dickering over the price. And I stand with Khesphmois-one part in twelve is no raise at all.”

Mouamet Dekanos glowered at Hergeus. “Your tongue is altogether too free.” The official glowered at Argyros, too, presumably for putting him in a position where he had to listen to blunt talk from a social inferior. Argyros hardly noticed. Every mention of whores brought his mind back to the girl he had bedded, and seemed calculated only to lacerate his conscience.

Reality returned when Dekanos began drumming his fingers on the table. “Who’s best to declare what a fair raise would be?” the magistrianos said quickly to cover his lapse. “Neither side here trusts the other. Why not let, hmm, the patriarch of Alexandria arbitrate the dispute.”

He had been thinking out loud, nothing more, but the words seemed a happy inspiration the moment they were out of his mouth. He smiled, waiting for Dekanos and the guildsmen to acclaim his Solomonic wisdom.

Instead, they all stared at him. “Er, which patriarch of Alexandria?” Dekanos and Khesphmois asked at the same time, the first time they had been more than physically together since they had sat down at the same table.

“Which patriarch?” The magistrianos scratched his head.

“For politeness’ sake I will assume all three of these gentlemen are of orthodox faith,” Dekanos said, “and also because assuming otherwise would bring down on me one more trouble than I need right now. Surely, however, many of their followers adhere to the dogmas”-he did not, Argyros noticed, say “heresy-”of the Monophysites, and thus would not trust the Orthodox patriarch to be disinterested. And I certainly cannot grant official recognition to the monophysites’, ah, leader.” Dekanos did not say patriarch, either, not in the same breath with monophysites.

Argyros felt his face grow hot. He gave an embarrassed nod. The monophysites-those who believed Christ to have had only one nature, the divine, after the Incarnation-had been strong in Egypt for nine hundred years, ecumenical councils to the contrary notwithstanding. Of course they would have a shadow ecclesiastical organization of their own, and of course Dekanos could not formally treat with it. Doing so would imply that orthodoxy was not the only possible truth. No official of the Roman Empire could ever admit that; Argyros was reluctant to think it even as a condition contrary to fact.

“This is all so much moonshine,” Miysis rumbled. The stonecutter got to his feet and stomped toward the door, adding over his shoulder, “I already said once it’s not the money, and I meant it. My lads’ll find other things to do, thank you very much, illustrious sir.” He walked out.

“Damnation.” Mouamet Dekanos glared after him, then slowly turned back to the other two guild leaders. “Do you gentlemen feel the same way? If you do, you’re welcome to leave now, and we’ll let the city garrison try to return you to obedience.”

“You’d not do that,” Khesphmois exclaimed. “Calling out the soldiers would-”

“-Set all Alexandria aflame,” Dekanos finished for him. “I know. But what good are soldiers if they cannot be used? The Emperor wants this pharos built. If I have to choose between offending the Alexandrian guilds and offending the Basileus of the Romans, I know what my choice will be.”

If he was bluffing, he was a dab hand at hiding it. Argyros would not have cared to find out, and he had far more experience with officials’ ploys than did either Khesphmois or Hergeus. The two guildsmen exchanged appalled glances. They had been confident Dekanos would not try to coerce them back to work. If they were wrong…

“I think we might talk further,” Hergeus said quickly, “especially since your Illustriousness has shown himself willing to move on the matter of wages.”

“Not any too willing.” Having gained an advantage, Dekanos looked ready to hold on to it.

Khesphmois saw that clearly. “If it pleases the illustrious sir,” he suggested, “we would agree to leaving the matter of how large our raise should be in the hands of the magistrianos here. He represents the Emperor, who as you say is eager to have the lighthouse restored. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be talking at all. I expect he’d be fairer than any local man I can think of.”

Argyros wondered if Khesphmois would have said that if he knew how badly the magistrianos had wanted to go to bed with his wife. Still, the master carpenter had a point. “I will make this settlement,” Argyros said, “if all of you swear by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, by the Virgin, and by your great Alexandrian saints Athanasios, Cyril, and Pyrrhos to abide by the terms I set down.” He was pleased with himself for thinking to add the Alexandrian saints to the oath; monophysites revered them along with the orthodox.

“I will swear that oath for myself and on behalf of my guild,” Khesphmois said at once, and did so. When he was through, Hergeus echoed him.

Their eyes swung to Dekanos. He let them stew for a while, then said gruffly, “Oh, very well. Time to have this cursed anakhoresis settled.” He swore the oath.

“Thank you, gentlemen, for your trust in me. I hope I can deserve it,” Argyros said. He was stalling; events had piled up faster than he was quite ready for. After some thought, he went on, “As for the matter of pay, justice, I am sure, lies between the demands of the two sides. Therefore let pay for work on the pharos henceforth be half again the usual rate, for all guilds.”

“Let it be so,” Dekanos said promptly. The nods from Hergeus and Khesphmois were reluctant; the master carpenter’s expression showed him unhappy with the choice he’d made.

Argyros raised a hand. “I am not finished. As we have all agreed, work on the pharos is uncommonly dangerous. Therefore, if a guildsman should die of an accident while doing that work, let the city government of Alexandria rather than his guild pay for his funeral.”

This time Khesphmois and Hergeus quickly agreed, while Mouamet Dekanos sent the magistrianos a sour stare. Argyros bore up under it. Unlike Dekanos, he had looked down from the top of the pharos; he could imagine with gut-wrenching clarity what the results of even the smallest slip would be.

And if a worker did slip, he would bring disaster not just upon himself but also on his family. Argyros thought of the troubles Helen would have had bringing up Sergios as a widow had he rather than his wife and son perished in the smallpox epidemic. He said, “Finally, if a married worker should die of an accident while working on the pharos, let the city government of Alexandria settle on his widow and children (if any) a sum equal to, ah, six months’ pay, for he will have died in service to the city and it is unjust to leave his family destitute on account of that service.”

“No!” Dekanos said. “You go too far, much too far.”

“Remember the oath you swore!” Khesphmois shouted at him, while Hergeus added, “Will you turn a profit on dead men’s blood?”

Argyros sat silent, waiting Dekanos out. Finally the official said, “As I have sworn an oath, I must abide by it. But, sir, I shall also send a letter to the Master of Offices setting forth in detail the manner in which you have overstepped your authority. In detail.”

“My authority, illustrious sir, is to get work started on the pharos once more. When you write to George Lakhanodrakon, do please remember to mention that I have done so.” The magistrianos turned to Khesphmois and Hergeus. “Your guilds will end the anakhoresis on the terms I have set forth?”

“Yes,” they said together. Khesphmois muttered something in Coptic to Hergeus. Then, catching Argyros’ eye, he translated: “I said I’d told him you could be trusted.” The magistrianos dipped his head. Pleased by the compliment, he even forgot for a moment what he’d wanted to do with Zois.

Two weeks later, not another stone had gone into place on the pharos. Argyros stood in front of a half-built church. Miysis, mallet and chisel in hand, stared down at him from the top of a large limestone block. “I told you no before, and I still mean no,” the stonecutter said.

“But why?” Argyros said, craning his neck. “The carpenters and cement-spreaders have agreed to end the anakhoresis, and agreed gladly. Half again regular pay and compensation to widows and orphans is nothing to sneeze at.”

Miysis spat, though not, the magistrianos had to admit, in his direction. “The carpenters and cement-spreaders are fools, if you ask me. What good does pay and a half do a dead man, or even blood money for his family? Me, I’m plenty happy to work a safer job for less money, and my lads think the same. We stay withdrawn.”

As if to show that was his last word on the subject, he started chiseling away at the limestone block again. Chips flew. One landed in Argyros’ hair. He stepped back, thinking dark thoughts. When he walked off, Miysis lifted the mallet in an ironic farewell salute.

The magistrianos, head down, walked north between the Museion’s three exedra and the Sema of Alexander the Great without glancing at either the lecture halls to the left or the marble tomb to the right. Only when he almost bumped into one of the men lined up to see Alexander’s remains in their coffin of glass did he take a couple of grudging steps to one side.

“Miserable muttonhead,” he mumbled, “happy to work his cursed safer job while the pharos goes to perdition.” He stopped dead in his tracks, smacked fist into palm. “Happy, is he? Let’s just see how happy he’ll be!”

Then, instead of glumly walking, Argyros was trotting, sometimes running, toward the Augustal prefect’s palace. He arrived panting and drenched in sweat but triumphant. Mouamet Dekanos raised an eyebrow when the magistrianos burst past lesser functionaries into his office. “What’s all this in aid of?” he asked.

“I know how to end the anakhoresis. At last I know.”

“This I will believe when I see it, and not before I see it,” Dekanos said. “You came close, I grant you that, but how do you propose to move the stonecutters to the pharos if they are content with lesser pay for other work?”

Argyros grinned a carnivore grin. “How content will they be with no pay for no work?”

“I don’t follow,” Dekanos said.

“Suppose an edict were to go out in the Augustal prefect’s name, suspending all construction in stone in Alexandria for, say, the next three months? Don’t you think the stonecutters would start to get a trifle hungry by then? Hungry enough, even, to think about going back to work on the pharos?”

Dekanos’ eyes went wide. “They might. They just might. And since they weren’t party to the agreements with the other guilds, we wouldn’t even have to pay them extra.”

The magistrianos had thought about that, too, in the third of an hour it had taken him to get to the prefect’s palace. He would enjoy revenge for Miysis’ insolence. Still, he said, “No, I think not. The contrast between those who do work on the pharos and have extra silver to jingle in their pouches and those who do not and have none-”

“A distinct point,” Dekanos said. “Very well, let it be as you say. Some wealthy men will scream when their houses stand a while half-built-”

“The Emperor of the Romans is screaming now because his pharos has stood too long half-built.”

“A distinct point,” Dekanos repeated. He shouted for scribes.

Not even a journeyman carpenter was working at Khesphmois’ shop when Argyros pushed his way through the curtain of beads. Only a servant lounged in the open courtyard. As far as the magistrianos could see, the fellow’s main job was to make sure no one came in and made off with the partly made or partly repaired furniture there.

The servant scrambled to his feet when Argyros came in. He bowed and said something in Coptic. The magistrianos spread his hands. “What you want?” the servant asked in broken Greek.

“Is your master at home?” Argyros asked, speaking slowly and clearly-and also loudly. “I wish to pay my respects to him.”

“Him not here,” the servant said after Argyros had repeated himself a couple of times. “Him, everyone at-how you say? — pharos. Work there all time. You want, you come sabbath day after prayers. Maybe here then.”

“I won’t be here then,” Argyros said. “My ship sails for Constantinople day after tomorrow.”

He saw the servant had not understood him and, sighing, began casting about in his mind for simpler words. He was just starting over when he heard a familiar voice from the living quarters behind the shop: “Is that you, Basil Argyros of Constantinople?”

“Yes, Zois, it is.”

She came out a moment later. “It’s good to see you again. Would you care for some wine and fruit?” Nodding, the magistrianos stepped toward her. The servant started to come, too. Zois stopped him with a couple of sentences of crackling Coptic. To Argyros, she explained, “I told Nekhebu that Khesphmois wants him out here keeping an eye on the furniture, not inside keeping an eye on me. I can take care of myself; the furniture can’t.”

“I’m sure you can, my lady.” Argyros let her lead him into the chamber where they had talked before.

This time she brought out the wine and dates herself. “Lukra had her brat last week, and she’s still down with a touch of fever,” she said. “I expect she will get over it.” Her voice was enigmatic; Argyros could not tell whether she wanted the serving girl to recover.

He said, “I came to thank Khesphmois for all he did to help end the anakhoresis. Since I’m lucky enough to see you, let me thank you also for helping to turn him in that direction. I’m grateful.”

She sipped her wine, nibbled daintily on a candied date, the pink tip of her tongue flicking out for a moment as it toyed with the fruit. “Did I hear you say you were leaving Alexandria day after tomorrow?”

“Yes. It’s time for me to go. The pharos is a-building again, and so I have no need to stay any longer.”

“Ah,” she said, which might have meant anything or nothing. After a pause that stretched, she went on, “In that case, you can thank me properly.”

“Properly?” Somehow, Argyros thought, Zois’ eyes suddenly seemed twice as large as they had just before. She leaned back in her chair. He admired the fine curve of her neck. Then he was kneeling beside that chair, bending to kiss the smooth, warm flesh of her throat. Even if he was wrong, said the calculating part of him that never quite slept, Khesphmois had already returned to the pharos.

But he was not wrong. Zois’ breath sighed out; her hands clasped the back of his head. “The bedroom?” Argyros whispered sometime later.

“No. Lukra’s chamber is next to it, and she might overhear.” For all her sighs, Zois still seemed very much in control of herself. “We will have to manage here.”

The room had neither couch nor, of course, bed, but not all postures required them. Manage they did, with Zois on her knees and using her chair to support the upper part of her body. She was almost as exciting as Argyros had imagined; in this imperfect world, he thought before all thought fled, one could hardly hope for more.

She gasped with him at the end, but he was still coming back to himself when she turned to look over her shoulder at him and say, “Pull up your breeches.” As he did so, she swiftly repaired her own dishevelment. Then she waved him back to his own chair, remarking, “Khesphmois must not know what we’ve done, I do, which is what matters.”

“So you were only using me to pay back Khesphmois?” he asked, more than a trifle nettled. Here he had thought he was desired for his sake, but instead found himself merely an instrument to Zois. This, he realized uncomfortably, had to be how a seduced woman felt.

Zois’ reply reinforced his discomfort. “We all use one another, do we not?” She softened that a moment later, adding with a smile, “I will say I enjoyed this use more than some-more than most, even.”

Something, that, but not enough. How many was most?

Argyros did not want to know. He got to his feet. “I’d best head back to my lodging,” he said. “I still have some packing to do.”

“For a ship that sails in two days?” Zois’ smile was knowing. “Go, then, if you think you must. As I said, though, I did enjoy it. And I will give Khesphmois your thanks. I’d not be so rude as to forget that.”

“I’m so glad,” Argyros muttered. Zois giggled at his ostentatiously held aplomb, which only made him cling to it more tightly. The bow he gave her was as punctilious as if he’d offered it to the Master of Offices’ wife. She giggled again. He left, hastily.

On the way back to his room-he really had no better place to go-he reflected on the changes he had made since coming to Alexandria. From celibate to fornicator to adulterer, all in the space of a few weeks, he thought, filled with self-reproach. Then he remembered that he would eagerly have become an adulterer before, had he thought Zois willing. Now he knew just how willing she was, and found something other than delight in the knowledge.

Yet he also knew how sweet her body was, and the whore’s as well. Having fallen from celibacy, he doubted he would ever be able to return to it. As well, then, that he had not let grief drive him into a monastery. His instinct there had been right: he was much too involved with the things of this world to renounce it for the next until he drew his last breath. Best to acknowledge that fully, and live with the consequences as best he could.

Thinking that, he let himself take some pride in his success here. One day, before too many more years had passed, Alexandria’s beacon would shine again, saving countless sailors as time went by. Had he not come to help set things right, that might have been long delayed or accomplished only through bloodshed. And preventing such strife might earn him credit in heaven to set in the balance against the weight of his sins.

He could hope, anyway.

“Argyros! Wait!”

The magistrianos set his duffel on the planking of the dock, turned to find out who was shouting at him. He was surprised to see Mouamet Dekanos hurrying up the quay toward him. “I thought you’d be just as glad to have me go far away,” he said as the Alexandrian bureaucrat came near.

Dekanos smiled thinly. “I understand what you mean. Still, the pharos is going up, and I did have something to do with that. Besides which, I stay here, while you are going far away. My contribution will be remembered.” He checked to make sure no one was listening and lowered his voice. “I will make sure it is remembered.”

“I daresay you will.” Argyros chuckled. He understood Dekanos’ logic perfectly well. What he did not understand was why the official was carrying a duffel bag larger and fuller than his own. He pointed to it. “What have you there?”

“I was most impressed with your ability to bring together two sides, neither of which was truly interested in finding a solution to their dispute until you intervened,” Dekanos said obliquely.

Argyros gave a polite bow. “You’re very kind, illustrious sir. Still-”

“You don’t think I answered you,” Dekanos finished for him. “No.”

“Ah, but I did, for, you see, I’ve brought you another long-standing dispute which neither side seems interested in solving. What I have here, illustrious sir, is Pcheris vs. Sarapion-all of it.” With a sigh of relief, he set his burden down. It was heavier than Argyros’ sack; through his sandals, the magistrianos felt the dock timbers briefly quiver at its weight.

“You’re sure that’s all?” he asked, intending irony.

The attempt failed. “I do think so,” Dekanos answered seriously. “If not, the documents you have should refer back to any that happen to be missing.”

“Oh, very well,” Argyros said, laughing, “I’ll take it on. As you say, after the pharos, something this small should be easy. The winds won’t favor my ship as much on the way back to Constantinople; God willing, I should be to the bottom of your case by the time I’m there. It will make the voyage less boring.”

“Thank you.” Dekanos wrung the magistrianos’ hand. “Thank you.” The Alexandrian official bowed several times before taking his leave.

Argyros shrugged quizzically as he watched him go. In his days in the imperial army, he’d sometimes received less effusive thanks for saving a man’s life. He shrugged again as he carried the two sacks onto the ship. He opened the one full of legal documents.

Long before the pharos of Alexandria slipped below the southern horizon, he suspected Mouamet Dekanos had done him no favor. Long before he reached Constantinople again, he was sure of it.