Departures (18 page)

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.”