“You!” he called to a passerby whose clothes and, even more, whose manner proclaimed him to be a native. “Are you from this part of the city?”
The man set his hands on his hips. “What if I am? What’s it to you?”
“Quick as you can, fetch the medical officer.” Each district had one, to see to the drainage system and watch out for contagious disease. “I think this man has smallpox.”
“Maybe you were wrong,” Helen Agryra said later that night. “Or even if you were right, maybe there will be only the one case.”
“I pray you’re right,” Argyros said. As he had many times before, he wondered how his wife managed to look on the bright side of things. He sometimes thought it was because she had eight or nine fewer years than his own thirty. But he had been no great optimist in his early twenties. He had to admit to himself that her nature simply was sunnier than his.
They contrasted physically as well as emotionally. Argyros was tall and lean, with the angular features and dark, mournful eyes of an icon. The top of Helen’s head barely reached his shoulder. While her hair was dark, her fair complexion, high, wide cheekbones, and blue eyes spoke of Sklavenic ancestors. Sergios, Argyros thought, was a lucky little boy: he looked like his mother. Helen went on, “I don’t understand how it could be smallpox, Basil. There hasn’t been an outbreak in the city since my father was a boy.”
“Which will not keep God from sending another one if He decides our sins warrant it.”
She crossed herself. “Kyrie eleison,” she exclaimed: “Lord, have mercy!”
“Lord have mercy, indeed,” he agreed. In crowded Constantinople, smallpox could spread like wildfire. Except for the plague, it was the most frightful illness the Empire knew. And whole centuries went by without the plague, but every generation, it seemed, saw a smallpox epidemic, sometimes mild, sometimes savage.
Helen had a knack for pulling Argyros away from such gloomy reflections. “Neither of us can change God’s will,” she said with brisk practicality, “so we may as well have supper.”
Supper was bread with olive oil for dipping a stew of tuna and leeks, and white raisins for dessert.
“Delicious,” Argyros said, and meant it, though he was still not used to eating fish so often. In his upcountry hometown, the meat in the stew would have been goat or lamb. But fish was much cheaper here by the sea, and though he made more as a junior magistrianos than he had in the army, he had not had to rent a house or support a family in those days . . . and Helen was talking about hiring a maidservant.
Fish, then.
After she cleared away the dishes, Helen nursed Sergios in a beechwood rocking chair she had bought after he was born. While she was nursing, she would talk only about small, pleasant things. That was one of the few rules she imposed on her husband; she firmly maintained that breaking it made her give less milk. The way Sergios has squalled hungrily the couple of times he tried to nurse after Argyros, full of his own affairs, ignored the rule made him keep to it thereafter.
Sometimes the restriction irritated him. Now he was just as glad of it. He told Helen about one of his fellow magistrianoi whose wife had twins a couple of weeks younger than Sergios and who did not look as though he slept at all anymore. She gave him the neighborhood gossip, either gleaned from the view from the balcony or traded with other women among the market stalls.
Sergios fell asleep while she rocked him. She carried him to his crib. He would probably stay asleep until somewhere close to sunrise. Argyros sighed in relief as he thought of that. If had been only a few weeks since the baby woke two or three times every night, crying for his mother’s breast. She might have been reading his thoughts. Her eyes answered his. “Shall we go to bed?” she asked, adding mischievously, “But not, I think, to sleep.”
“No, not to sleep,” Argyros said. His fingers undid the clasps of her blouse, which she had fastened again after feeding Sergios. The urgency with which he took her made her gasp in surprise (for he was usually more restrained), but not in displeasure.
Spent afterward, she slept almost at once, her legs and rump pressed warmly against him. He lay awake himself. His thoughts lit now here, now there, until he realized why he had been so importunate: that helped hold worry away for a while.
He grimaced in the darkness. That was not fair to Helen, or flattering to his own motivations. It did not help him rest, either.
The magistrianos went to and from the Praitorion fearfully for the next few days, dreading what he might see on the way. He distrusted the way everything remained utterly ordinary, and feared it to be a cruel deception—though it was cruel only to him, for he had seen the stricken man, while the city remained unaware of its danger. But after a while he began to believe Helen had been right or that the fervent prayers the two of them had sent up were being answered.
He held to that belief as long as he could, even after fewer magistrianoi and other functionaries began coming to work each day. Life was chancy at the best of times, and any illness dangerous: doctors could do so little against sickness. Prayer offered more hope than nostrums. But when one missing man after another was reported down with a fever, Argyros’s alarm returned. And the day he found out the first of them had broken out in pustules, he decided the Praitorion could do without him for a while. He was not afraid anyone would accuse him of shirking. Already half the people rich enough to own second homes outside the city were moving out to them “for the sake of fresh air.”
The rumble of leaving carts full of household goods went on day and night. Most Constantinopolitans, of course, could not afford to flee. Nevertheless, the streets grew empty. People who did stir abroad looked at each other warily. Smallpox might have been God’s curse, but everyone knew only too well it could be caught from a sick man.
The price of grain fluctuated wildly. One day almost all the mills in the city would be open and almost all of them empty. Then, for no reason any man could find, only a handful would operate, with people lined up around the block to buy.
Argyros felt he was taking his life in his hands whenever he went out to buy food. Helen wanted to share the burden with him, but he said no so sternly he got his way. “How would I feed Sergios if something happened to your” he demanded. “I’m not built for the role, you know.”
“How would I feed him if you get sick and can’t feed me?” she replied, but she did not press the point.
‘He thought of danger to her baby was enough to make her listen to him.He did not tell her he would have acted the same way if the smallpox had come the year before, when they were still childless. Any risk he could spare her he would.
Only churches stayed crowded while the smallpox was loose in the city. Priests and layfolk alike petitioned the Lord to return His favor to the people and end the epidemic. People also rushed to the liturgy for more personal divine reasons: to pray for the health of their loved ones—and for their own. When Helen wanted to pray at the great church of Hagia Sophia, Argyros could not refuse her, nor did he make any great effort to. A trip to church, he reasoned, was different from a shopping expedition. God might be angry at Constantinople, but surely he would not smite them in His own house. Carrying Sergios in her arms, Helen went out into the city for the first time in several weeks. She exclaimed at how still the streets were: “It’s as if this were some country town, not the city!” Her voice echoed off houses.
“It’s quieter here,” Argyros said, remembering Serrhes. “True, the towns have only a handful of people next to Constantinople, but they’re also much smaller, so they can seem crowded.”
They walked east along the Alese toward the great church, whose dome dominated the city skyline. The stalls of the horse market in the forum known as the Amastrianum were empty; no one had any beasts out to sell. A quarter-mile farther down the street, a few lonely sheep bleated in their pens in the forum of Theodosios. The farmers who had brought them to market stood around scratching their heads, wondering where their customers had gone.