For a moment, all Argyros heard was “Constantinople.” That was enough. Along with every other citizen of the Empire, he had heard stories of its wonders and riches for his entire life. Now to see them for himself!
Then the rest of what Tekmanios had said sank in. Magistrianoi were elite imperial agents, investigators, sometimes spies. They served under the personal supervision of the Master of Offices, the only man between them and the Emperor, the vicegerent of God on earth. Argyros had dreamed of such a post for himself, but only dreamed.
“Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” he said.
“I thought that might please you,” Tekmanios said with a smile. “It’s your doing more than mine, you know; you’ve earned the chance. Now it’s up to you to make the most of it.”
“Yes, sir,” Argyros said again, slightly deflated.
The general’s smile grew wider. “Take a couple of more days to get your strength back. Then I’ll send you and your tube back to the Danube, with a good strong resupply party along to keep you in one piece. You can get a riverboat there and sail down to Tomi on the Euxine Sea, then take a real ship on to the city. That will be faster and safer than going overland.”
The grin looked out of place on Argyros’s usually somber features, but he could not help wearing it as he bowed his way out of Tekmanios’s tent. Once outside, he looked up into the heavens to give thanks to God for his good fortune.
The pale, mottled moon, near first quarter, caught his eye. He wondered what it might look like through the eyes of Argos. Tonight, if he remembered, he would have to find out. Who could say? It might be interesting.
II: Etos Kosmou 6816
Basil Argyros felt trapped behind the mounds of papyrus on his desk. Not for the first time, he wondered if becoming a magistrianos had been wise. When he had been an officer of scouts in the Roman army, the post seemed wonderful, dashing, exotic. Argyros had thought his new job would be similar to the old, only on an Empirewide scale. He had not realized how little time agents spent in the field and how much sifting minutiae. The imperial bureaucracy was thirteen centuries old. There were a lot of minutiae to sift.
He sighed and went back to the report he was drafting, which dealt with the foiling of some Franco-Saxon merchants’ efforts to smuggle purple-dyed cloth out of Constantinople. The petty princes and dukes of Germany and northern Gallia—the southern coast, of course, belonged to the Empire—would pay almost anything to deck themselves in the fabric reserved for the Roman Emperor. But even though Argyros had detected the try at escaping with contraband, he had had nothing to do with actually arresting the barbarians. All he had done was spot a discrepancy in a silk-dyer’s accounts, which hardly gave him the action he craved.
He sighed again. At last the report was through. A good thing, too: advancing twilight was making it hard to see to write. He signed the report and dated it: “Done in the year of the world 6816, the sixth indiction, on July 16, the feast-day of St.—”
He paused in annoyance, stuck his head out the door of his office, and asked a passing clerk, “Whose feast-day is it today?”
“St. Mouamet’s.”
“Thanks.” Argyros scowled at his own stupidity. He should never have forgotten that, not when Mouamet was one of his favorite saints on the calendar.
Argyros’s sour mood evaporated as he walked down the stairs of the Fraitorion, the imperial office building in which he worked. After all, here he was on the Alese, the main street of Constantinople, the most splendid city in the world. Had he not joined the magistrianoi, likely he never would have set foot in the imperial capital.
A procession of black-robed priests came down the Mese from the west, heading toward the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia. Some priests carried upraised candles, others wooden crosses, while one bore the image of a saint. Argyros piously crossed himself as he heard the hymn they were chanting:
“There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His son.”
He smiled. If all else failed, that hymn would have reminded him whose day this was. Though Mouamet was almost seven centuries dead, his religious verse still had the power to move any good Christian. The magistrianos stood watching until the procession had passed, then went up the Mese in the direction from which it had come. His own home was in the central part of the city, between the church of the Holy Apostles and the aqueduct of Valens.
He quickened his steps. His wife Helen would be waiting for him, and so would their baby son Sergios. His long, usually somber face softened as he thought of the boy. Sergios was getting old enough to know who he was when he came home at night and to greet him with a large, toothless smile. Argyros shook his head in amazement at how swiftly time passed. A couple of months ago, the baby had been only a wailing lump. Now he was starting to be a person.
Helen and Sergios alone should have sufficed to reconcile Argyros to being a magistrianos. Had he not come to Constantinople, he never would have met her, and their son would not have been born. That was disturbing even to think about.
He turned north off the Mese, picking his way through the maze of smaller lanes. Thanks to sound planning and strict laws, even those were cobbled and a dozen feet wide, nothing like the cramped, muddy back alleys of the Balkan town where Argyros had grown up. Even balconies could not come closer than ten feet to the opposite wall, and had to be at least fifteen feet above the ground, to let light and air through.
As darkness descended, shops and taverns began closing, spilling out their patrons. The whole world came to do business in Constantinople. On the streets were Persians in felt skullcaps, the ancient rivals of the Roman Empire; beaky Arabs, men of Mouamet’s blood, wearing flowing robes; flat-faced, long-unwashed nomads from the northern steppe; blond, blustering, trousered Germans. Men from every part of the Roman Empire mingled with the foreigners: stocky, heavily bearded Armenians; swarthy Egyptians, some with shaven heads; broad-faced Sklavenoi from the lands near the Danube; Carthaginians; Italians; even a few Ispanians staring about in amazement at the wonders of the city. Then there were the Constantinopolitans themselves. To Argyros, who had lived in the capital for only a couple of years, the locals seemed much like the black-capped little sparrows with whom they share it. They were bustling, cheeky, always on the lookout for the main chance, everlastingly curious, and quick to lose interest in anything no longer new. Of a steadier, more sober nature himself, he found them endlessly fascinating and altogether unreliable.
He also found them exasperating, for they were self-centered to the point of being blind to others.
That was literally true: he watched scores of people walk past the man in the gutter as if he did not exist. He might have understood had the fellow been a derelict, but he was not. He was clean and well groomed, his brocaded robe of good quality. He did not look as though he had been overcome by drink. Muttering under his breath, the magistrianos bent to see what he could do for the man. Perhaps he was an epileptic and would soon come back to his senses. Many people still had a superstitious fear of epilepsy, though Hippokrates had shown more than four centuries before the Incarnation that it was a disease like any other.
Argyros reached down to feel the fellow’s forehead. He jerked his hand away as if he had touched a flame. And so, almost, he had; the man burned with fever. Peering closer, the magistrianos saw a red rash on his face and hands.
“Mother of God, help me!” he whispered. He rubbed his right hand over and over again on his robe and would have paid many gold nomismata not to have touched the man’s skin.