“By St. Cyril, I’ll show you,” Khesphmois exclaimed. “Follow me, if you’ve the stomach—and the head— for it.”
He walked past the sign-carriers, waving to a couple from the carpenters’ guild. The watchmen only nodded at him; by now, Argyros supposed, they must know him as well as their own officers. The magistrianos, who was on their side, got more hard looks than the master carpenter. Khesphmois walked into the pharos. Argyros followed still. Their footsteps echoed in the gloom within. Khesphmois hurried over to the spiral stair just inside the doorway, started up. The stairway was almost as dark as the chamber that led to it, though window openings set at intervals into the thick wall gave enough light for the magistrianos to see where he was putting his feet. The idea of stumbling and rolling down so long a stairway made his sweat turn cold. By the time he reached the top even of the truncated pharos, Argyros had sweat in plenty. Ahead of him, Khesphmois still seemed fresh. The magistrianos muttered to himself as he panted up the last few steps. His time behind a desk in Constantinople was making him soft.
Alexandria’s usual northerly breeze helped cool him while he got his breath back. He turned his back to the breeze, peered across the Great Harbor at the city. The view was superb. He even towered high above the ancient obelisks—”Cleopatra’s Needles,” the locals called them, but they were older than that—not far from the Heptastadion’s southern root.
He had no idea how long he might have stood there staring, but Khesphmois’ dry cough recalled him to himself. “I didn’t bring you up here to sightsee,” the master carpenter said. “Look straight down.”
A long stride and a short one brought the magistrianos to the edge of the stone block on which he stood. No fence or rail separated him from a couple of hundred feet of empty space. He cautiously peered over the edge; only the discipline he had acquired in the Roman army kept him from going to his knees or belly first. Far, far below, the marchers and watchmen looked tiny as insects. Argyros was anything but sorry to step back. “A long way down,” he observed, stating the obvious.
Khesphmois had been watching him closely. “You’re a cool one,” he said, not sounding happy to admit it. “But how would you like to be working up here instead of just standing?”
“I wouldn’t,” the magistrianos admitted at once. “But then, it’s not my proper trade.”
“Working this high is no one’s proper trade,” Khesphmois said. “If you take a wrong step, if someone bumps you by accident, if a piece of scaffolding breaks while you’re on it, even if you make a bad stroke with your hammer, over you go and nothing’s left of you but a red smear on the rocks. There are plenty of them down below, and there would have been many more if we hadn’t staged the anakhoresis.”
“Some, certainly,” Argyros nodded. “Some trades are dangerous: the mines, the army, and, plainly, working at heights like this. But why do you say many?”
“The pharos is square in section thus far, yes?” Khesphmois said.
The magistrianos nodded again.
“Well, the next part is to be octagonal, and narrower—a tiny bit narrower,” the master carpenter went on. “What would you expect to happen to the carpenters who will have to face inward with almost no room at all to put their feet while they try to set up scaffolds, or to the stonecutters who try to climb onto die scaffolding to trim and polish the outsides of the blocks, or the concrete-spreaders who take away the excess that squeezes out from between the courses of blocks?”
“The risks are worse now, you’re telling me,” Argyros said slowly.
“That’s just what I’m telling you.”
“How do we make them less, then?” the magistrianos asked. “Enough less, I mean, to get the various guilds to come back to work? Alexandria and the whole Empire need this pharos restored.”
“And Alexandria and the whole Empire care not a moldy fig how many workers die restoring it,” Khesphmois said bitterly. “Now you’ve seen the problem, man from Constantinople. What do you aim to do about it?”
“Right now, I don’t know,” Argyros said. “I truly do not. I work no miracles, though this is a column any pillar-sitting saint might envy.”
Khesphmois grunted. “You’re honest, at any rate. You—” He stopped; the magistrianos had raised a hand.
“I wasn’t finished. One way or another, I will find you an answer. I swear it by God, the Virgin, and St. Mouamet, who as patron of changes will be apt to hear my oath.”
“So he will.” Khesphmois crossed himself; Argyros copied the gesture. The master carpenter went on, “Whether the Augustal prefect and his staff pay you any heed, though, is something else again.” Without waiting for an answer, he started down the stairway. After a final long look at the panorama of the city, Argyros followed.
That afternoon, back on the mainland once more, he peered out toward the half-erected pharos. Thinking of it like that reminded him of the bawdy pun he had unwittingly made earlier in the day. And thinking of that pun made him come half-erect.
He scowled and clenched his fists, trying to force his body back under the control of his will. His body, as bodies do, resisted. Oh, you’d make a fine monk, he told himself angrily, a wonderful monk: they’d canonize you after you died, under the name St. Basil Priapos. This was a fine way to remember Helen. But he remembered her all too vividly, remembered the touch of his lips and the surge of her body against his. He caught himself wondering how Zois would be. That thought made him angrier than ever: not only was it shameful lust, it betrayed the memory of his dead wife. He still wondered, though. When he dreamed that night, as always he woke too soon.
“My dear sir, surely you are joking!” Mouamet Dekanos’ eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “You want me to sit down and dicker with these, these laborers? Think of the ghastly precedent it would set!
Ghastly!”
“I’ve thought of it,” Argyros admitted. “I don’t like it. I don’t like seeing the pharos still half-built, either. Nor does the Emperor. That problem is immediate. The precedent will just have to take care of itself.”
Dekanos stared at him as if he had just proposed converting the whole population of the Roman Empire to Persian sun-worship by force. “Precedent, my dear sir, is part of the glue that holds the Empire together,” he said stiffly.
“So it is,” the magistrianos said. “The grain shipments from Alexandria to Constantinople are another part, and the Emperor has lost patience with having ships on their way back here go astray without need. In this case, he reckons that of greater importance than precedent.”
“So you say,” Dekanos retorted. “So you say.”
“Would you like me to meet with the Augustal prefect and ask his opinion of your attitude?”
The Alexandrian functionary’s face went dark with anger. “You’re bluffing.”
“Try me.” As a matter of fact, Argyros was. In an argument with someone from the distant, resented capital, he was sure the prefect would back his own aide. Still, had he been an intimate of the Master of Offices instead of merely one of his magistrianoi, not even the Augustal prefect could have afforded to ignore him. And George Lakhanodrakon’s letter made him seem to be one. He rose, took out the parchment and unrolled it, flourished it in Dekanos’ face. “You do recall this, I hope?”
“Well, what if I do?” Dekanos was still scowling. “For that matter,” he went on angrily, “how will you be able to gather all these fractious guild leaders together and make them and their guild members abide by anything they might agree to? For all you know, they will say one thing to ease the pressure on them and then turn round and do just the opposite.”