“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 turn 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 Coptic that sounded pungent. “Thank you,” the magistrianos said to him, and got only another scowl for an answer. The magistrianos turned to Zois, 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. “Goodbye,” Zois called. “Goodbye, the both of you.” That nearly brought Argyros up short, not so much because she was polite to include him but because she 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 eye-blink, 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 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 ever 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 plenty 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 raise 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, 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?”