The magistrianos looked at Lakhanodrakon in puzzlement after reading the first few lines. “But this is just the same as the other—” His voice trailed away, and his eyes snapped back to the parchment. He picked up the other sheet Lakhanodrakon had given him, held one in each hand. His jaw fell.
“You see it, then,” the Master of Offices said. “Good. You are as quick as I thought you were.”
“Thank you,” Argyros said abstractedly. He was still staring at the two pieces of parchment. They both said the same thing—exactly the same. It was not as if a scribe had copied out a message twice. Each line on both sheets had exactly the same words on it, written exactly the same size. The same word was misspelled in the third line of each sheet. A couple of lines later, the same incorrect verb form appeared in each, then an identical dative after the preposition where a genitive belonged. Near the end, the letter pi at the beginning of a word was half effaced on both handbills. They even shared the identical small smear of ink between two words.
The magistrianos put one sheet over the other, walked to the window. He held the parchments up to the sun and worked them until the left edges of the two messages were precisely aligned. Any differences would have been instantly apparent. There were none.
“Mother of God, help me!” Argyros exclaimed.
“May She protect the entire Empire,” George Lakhanodrakon said soberly. “Not just these two, but hundreds of such sheets, have appeared in Daras, nailed to every wall big enough to hold one, it seems. They may well provoke the uprisings they seek—you know how touchy the east always is.”
Argyros knew. Despite having been a part of the Roman Empire since before Christ’s Incarnation, Syria and Mesopotamia were very different from its other regions. Latin was all but unknown there, and even Greek, the Empire’s dominant tongue, was spoken only by a minority in the towns. Most people used Syriac or Arabic, as their ancestors had before them. Heresy flourished there as nowhere else. And farther east lay Persia, the Empire’s eternal rival. The two great powers had been struggling for 1,400 years, each dreaming of vanquishing the other for good. The Persians always fostered unrest in the eastern provinces of the Empire. Worshipers of the sun and fire themselves, they gave Nestorians refuge and stirred up religious strife to occupy the Romans with internal troubles. But never on such a scale as this—
“How are they doing it?” Argyros said, as much to himself as to the Master of Offices.
“That is what I charge you with: to find out,” Lakhanodrakon said. “Your success in ferreting out the secret of the Franco-Saxons’ hellpowder last year made me think of you the moment those”—he jerked a thumb at the parchments Argyros was still holding—”came to my attention.”
“You flatter me, your illustriousness.”
“No, I need you,” the Master of Offices said. Harsh lines of worry ran from his jutting nose to the corners of his mouth. “I tell you, I fear this worse than the hellpowder. That was only a threat against our borders; we have dealt with such before, a hundred times. But this could be a blow in the heart.”
Argyros frowned. “Surely you exaggerate, sir.”
“Do I? I’ve lain awake at night imagining the chaos these sheets could create. Suppose one said one thing, one another? They could fan faction against faction, heretic against orthodox—”
His wave encompassed all of Constantinople. “Suppose a Persian agent smuggled even a donkeyload of these accursed things into the city! Men from even corner of the world live here—Jews, Egyptians, Armenians, Sklavenoi from the lands by the Ister, Franco-Saxons. Set them at each other’s throats, and it could be the Nika riots come again!”
“You’ve seen further than I have,” Argyros admitted, shivering. It had been eight hundred years since Constantinople’s mob, shoutingNika
—Triumph!—had almost toppled Justinian the Great from the Roman throne, but that was the standard against which all later urban uprisings were measured.
“Perhaps further than the Persians, too, or they would not waste their time at the frontier,” Lakhanodrakon said. “But they will not stay blind long, I fear. Beware of them, Basil. They are no rude barbarians to be befooled like the Franco-Saxons; they are as old in deceit as we.”
“I shall remember,” the magistrianos promised. He picked up the parchments Lakhanodrakon had given him and tucked them away. “The rest of this pile of trash I shall cheerfully consign to Anthimos. I’ll leave for Daras in a day or two. As you know, I’m a widower; I have no great arrangements to make. But I would like to light a candle at a church dedicated to St. Nicholas before I go.”
“A good choice,” the Master of Offices said.
“Yes—who better than the patron saint of thieves?”
“I’ve tried everything I can think of,” the garrison commandant of Daras said, slamming a fist down on his desk in frustration. “Every incoming traveler has his baggage searched, and I keep patrols on the streets day and night. Yet the damned handbills keep showing up.”
“I can’t fault what you’ve done, Leontios,” Argyros said, and the soldier leaned back in his chair with a sigh of relief. He was a big, burly man, almost as tall as Argyros and thicker through the shoulders, but there was no question who dominated the conversation. Magistnanoi could make or break even the leader of an outpost as important as Daras.
“More wine?” Leontios extended a pitcher.
“Er—no thanks,” Argyros said, he hoped politely. The wine, like much of what was drunk in Mesopotamia, was made from dates. He found it sickeningly sweet. But he would have to work with Leontios and did not want to hurt his feelings, so he held out his hand, remarking, “That’s a handsome jug you have there. May I see it?”
“Oh, d’you like it? Seems ordinary enough to me.”
“Hardly that. I’m not used to seeing reliefwork on pottery, and the depiction of our Lord driving the moneychangers from the Temple is well done, I think.”
“If it pleases you so, take it and welcome,” Leontios said at once, afraid to antagonize the magistrianos in even a small way. “I’m sure you’ve seen much better, though, coming from the city.”
“There’s nothing to match it in Constantinople. The potters there decorate with glazes and drawings, not reliefs.”
“Fancy that, us ahead of the capital!” Leontios said. He saw that Argyros did not want the winejug, and put it down. “The style’s been all the rage in these parts—both sides of the border, come to that—the last five or ten years. I got this piece from old Abraham last summer. He’s a damned Nestorian, but he does good work. His shop is only a block or so away, if you think you might find something you’d fancy.”
“Perhaps I’ll look him up.” Argyros stood, fanned himself with his broad-brimmed hat of woven straw. It did not help much. “Is the heat always so bad?”
The garrison commandant rolled his eyes. “My dear sir, this is only June—not even summer yet. If you’re still in Daras in six weeks, you’ll find out what heat is.”
“Do you know that in the Franco-Saxon mountain country it sometimes snows in September? Last year that seemed the most hideous thing I could imagine. Now it strikes me as delightful.”
Leontios ran a hairy, sweaty forearm across his face. “It strikes me as impossible. I wish you luck on this madness, more than I’ve had myself. If I can help in any way, you have only to ask.”
“My thanks,” Argyros said and left. The commandant’s office had been very warm, shielded though it was by thick walls from the worst Daras could do. The noonday heat outside was unbelievable, stupefying. The sun blazed down mercilessly from the blue enamel bowl of the sky. The magistrianos squinted against the glare. He wished he could strip off his boots, trousers, and tunic (even if that was gauzy linen) and go naked under his hat. Some of the locals did, walking about in a loincloth and sandals. More, though, covered their heads with white cotton cloths and swaddled themselves in great flowing robes, as if they were so many ambulatory tents. The strange clothes only accented Argyros’s feeling of being in an alien land. The houses and other buildings, save for the most splendid, were of whitewashed mud brick, not stone or timber. And the signs that advertised dyeshops or jewelers, taverns and baths, were apt to be in three languages: angular Greek, the tight curlicues of Syriac, and the wild, snakelike script Arabic used. If any was missing, it was usually the Greek.