Argyros stared at him, appalled. lie felt betrayed. “Then what I did was worthless?”
“No, no, no, no. You’re part of a proof, but only part. I’ve done some checking lately. Did you know that it’s not just the Skleroi who escaped smallpox, but almost all the dairy families in the city?”
“No, but that would make sense, wouldn’t it? They’d be the ones most likely to get cowpox first instead.”
“So they would. That’s really what decided me you’d guessed right, whether you yourself were immune or not. By now, I’ve given cowpox to a couple of dozen people and tried to give them smallpox afterward.”
“And?” Argyros wanted to reach over and shake the answer out of Riario. “By the Virgin, tell me this instant how they are!”
The doctor grinned his lopsided grin. “Still alive, I’d say.”
“Then if, say, the city prefect made everyone in Constantinople come forward to get a dose of cowpox, or if babies got it not long after they were born—”
“—None of those people would come down with smallpox later,” Riario finished for the magistrianos.
“That’s my best guess. I’ve already started telling other doctors, too. The word will spread.”
Awe on his face, Argyros crossed himself and bent his head in prayer.
“Here, what’s all this in aid of?” Riario demanded after the magistrianos hat! spent several silent minutes.
“I was apologizing to the Lord for daring to question His will,” Argyros answered humbly. “Now at last I see His purpose in the anguish He sent me and those I love—loved.” Purpose or no, that correction brought sorrow with it. Argyros quickly went on, “Had they not been taken ill, I never would have stumbled across the truth that will save so many more from a like fate.
Truly I am but an instrument of His will.”
“Oh, hogwash,” the doctor said. “What of all the others who got sick and died in the epidemic? If God killed all of them just so two would draw your attention, He strikes me as bloody wasteful.”
“No,” said Argyros. “Consider—were many people not sick, I would have gone to a wetnurse instead of a dairy and never learned of cowpox. But I was afraid to bring a wetnurse into the house, and so I met Paul Skleros and his family.”
“Everyone in Constantinople thinks he’s a theologian,” Riario grumbled. “Pure foolishness, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t,” the magistrianos said shortly. He could not bear to think Helen and Sergios had died in vain, for no purpose at all.
But then he begged Riario’s pardon. He would not have noticed the relationship between cow pox and smallpox with-out the doctor, either. In years to come, physicians would not have to grow so hard-shelled, so cynical, for they would have a true weapon against one deadly scourge of mankind. It might even keep some of them from despairing of God and going; to hell. Argyros did not mention that thought to Riario. He knew what the doctor would say about it.
III: Etos Kosmou 6818
Basil Argyros ’s 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 southwards 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, looked 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 spoke 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 round 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 round the island of Pharos.”