He waited tensely. Many soldiers would not have bothered with such trivia. But the Roman bureaucratic tradition was strong, even in the army, and there was a chance—Leontios’s relieved grin told him he had won the gamble. “I have them,” the garrison commander said. “I warn you, though, not all are in Greek. Do you read Arabic?”
“Not a word of it. But surely some bright young clerk in the eparch’s chancery will. I shall go there now; when you gather your troopers’ reports, please be so good as to send them after me.”
“With pleasure.” Leontios cocked an eyebrow at the magistrianos. “If I dared say no, I suppose you’d set upon me, as you did on those two hoodlums yesterday.”
“Oh, that.” Argyros had almost forgotten the incident. Doubting he would hear anything worthwhile, he asked, “What did you learn from the one your men took?”
“Ravings, I’m certain—what’s the point of torturing a man who’s just been kicked in the crotch? He keeps babbling of a woman who paid him and his partner to assault you. He’s been drinking poppy juice, if you ask me. Anyone out to hire killers would pick a better pair than those sorry sods, don’t you think?”
“I’d hope so,” Argyros said, but the news disturbed him. The woman, he felt sure, was Mirrane, but he could not see the game she was playing. Had the attack been a setup to make him grateful to her? If so, why was the hired tough still around to speak of it? “Perhaps I’ll have a word with the fellow myself, after I’m done at the eparch’s.”
“Feel free. Meanwhile, I’ll hunt up those notes and get them over there for you.”
The chief map in the eparch’s office was several feet square, an updated papyrus facsimile of the master map of Daras inscribed on a bronze tablet in the imperial chancery at Constantinople. At Argyros’s request, the eparch—a plump, fussy little man named Mammianos—provided him with a small copy on a single sheet of parchment.
As the magistrianos had predicted, several of Mammianos’s secretaries were fluent in Arabic. “One has to have them here, sir,” the eparch said, “if one is to transact the business necessary to the fisc.” He assigned Argyros a clerk named Harun, which the magistrianos guessed to be a corruption of the perfectly good Biblical name Aaron.
After that there was nothing to do but wait for Leontios’s messenger, who arrived an hour or so later with an armload of papyri, parchments, and ostraca. He dumped them in front of Argyros and departed. The magistrianos sorted out the notes in Greek, which he could handle himself. “ ‘In front of the shop of Peter son of Damian, on the Street of the Tailors,’ “he read. “Where’s that, Harun?” The clerk pointed with a stylus. Argyros made a mark on his map.
It was nearly sunset when the last dot went into its proper place. “Many thanks,” Argyros said. He gave a nomisma to the secretary, who had proven a model of patience and competence, and waved off his stammered protests. “Go on, take it—you’ve earned it. I couldn’t have done any of this without you. Mammianos is well served.”
Leontios was on the point of going home when the magistrianos came back to his headquarters. “I’d about given up on you. What did you find? That the handbills are thickest in the parts of town where the most Nestorians live?”
“That’s just what I expected,” Argyros said, admiring the officer’s quick wits. “But it isn’t so. Here; see for yourself. Each dot shows where a parchment was found.”
“The damn things are everywhere!” Leontios grunted after a quick look at the map.
“Not quite.” Argyros bent over the parchment and pointed. “See, here’s a patch where there aren’t any.”
“Isn’t that big square building the barracks here? No wonder the filthy rabble-rousers stayed away. They’re bastards, but they’re not fools, worse luck.”
“So it is. Odd, though, wouldn’t you say, that your strong-point is on the edge of the empty area instead of at the center? And what of this other blank stretch?”
“Over in the west? Ah, but look, there’s the church of St. Bartholomew in it. The priests would be as likely to raise the alarm as my soldiers. Likelier, maybe; not all my men are orthodox.”
“But again,” Argyros pointed out, “the church is at the edge of the clear space, not in the middle. And look, here is the Great Church, in the very center of town, with a handbill nailed to one of its gates. The agitators aren’t afraid of priests, it seems.”
“So it does,” Leontios said reluctantly. “What then?”
“I wish I knew. What puzzles me most, though, is this third empty area, close to the northern wall. From what Mammianos’s clerk said, it’s a solidly Nestorian district, and yet there are no parchments up in it.”
“Where is that? Let me see. Aye, the fellow’s right; that’s the worst part of town, probably because of the stink. Dyers and butchers and gluemakers and tanners and such work there. To say nothing of thieves, that is—the one who went for you hailed from that section.”
“Oh yes, him. He almost slipped my mind again. As I said, I’d like to ask him a few questions of my own.”
Leontios looked embarrassed. “There’s a harsher judge than you questioning him now, I’m afraid. He died a couple of hours ago.”
“Died? How?” Argyros exclaimed.
“From what the gaoler says, pain in the belly, and I don’t mean on account of your foot. If I had to guess, I’d think the fish sauce went over; you know how hard it is to keep in this climate.”
“I suppose so,” the magistrianos said, but the ruffian’s death struck him as altogether too pat. He stared down at the map on Leontios’s desk, trying by sheer force of will to extract meaning from the cryptic pattern there. It refused to yield. Grumbling in annoyance, he rolled up the map and walked back to Shahin’s tavern. A copper twenty-follis piece bought the services of a torchboy to light his way through the black maze of nighttime Daras.
The taproom was jammed when he got to the inn, and for good reason: Mirrane was already dancing. Her eyes lit up when she saw him standing against the back wall drinking a mug of wine (real grape wine, and correspondingly expensive) and chewing on unleavened pocketbread stuffed with lentils, mutton, and onions.
Later that night she said petulantly, “If your things were not still in your room, I would have thought you’d gone away and left me. Are your precious cisterns so much more interesting than I am?”
“Hardly,” he said, caressing her. She purred and snuggled closer. “I find you fascinating.” That was true, but he hoped she did not realize in how many senses of the word he meant it. The magistrianos visited the northern part of the city on the following day. He noted that his shadow was back. He doubted the fellow was enjoying himself much, or learning much either. All of Argyros’s actions were perfectly consistent with what he would have done had he been a genuine cistern inspector. The second of Daras’s two major water storage areas was easy to examine, for Justinian’s engineer Chryses had diverted the Cordes River to flow between the town’s outworks and its main wall, thereby also serving as a moat and offering extra protection against attack. To check the level of the water, all Argyros had to do was climb to the top of the wall and look down over the battlements. Not much of Daras’s masonry still dated from Justinian’s time. The city had fallen to the Persians in the reign of his successor, and again less than half a century later when the madman Phokas almost brought the Empire to ruin, and two or three more times in the years since. Once or twice it had had to stand Roman siege while in Persian hands. Just the same, the ancient fortifications had been designed well, and all later military architects used them as their model.
The wall, then, was of stone, about forty feet high and ten thick. Arrow-slits and a runway halfway up gave defenders a second level from which to fire at foes outside. The slits, though, were not wide enough for Argyros to stick his head through, and in any case he wanted the view from the top of the wall, so he climbed the whole long stairway. The man following him loitered at the base and bought some hot chickpeas.