The magistrianos was a little jealous; in Daras’s heat, the trudge had made his heart pound. In another way, though, Argyros had the better of it, for he was above the smell. As Leontios had said, northern Daras stank. It reeked of terrified animals and their excrement from the butchers’ shops; of stale, sour urine from the dyers’; of that same vile odor and the sharper tang of tanbark from the tanneries; and of a nameless but unpleasant stench from cauldrons that bubbled behind every gluemaker’s establishment. Added to the usual city stink of overcrowded, unwashed humanity, it made for a savage assault on the nose. The faint breeze that blew off the Cordes carried the scent of manure from the fields outside of town, but was ambrosial by comparison.
Argyros walked along the track atop the wall, peering down into Daras. It was the broadest view he could gain of the northern district. Searching there street by street would have been fruitless, especially since he was not sure what he was looking for.
With such gloomy reflections as that, he paced back and forth for a couple of hours. The sentries at the battlements came to ignore him; down below, the musician from Shahin’s inn grew bored and fell asleep sitting against the wall, his headcloth pulled low to shield his face from the sun. The magistrianos could not have said what drew his attention to the donkey making its slow way down an alley, its driver beside it. Perhaps it was that the beast carried a couple of pots of glue along with several larger, roughly square packages, and he found it odd for an animal to be bearing burdens for two different shops. He certainly could not think of anything a gluemaker turned out that would go in those neatly wrapped bundles. They were about the size of—
His boots thumping on stone, he dashed down the steps and past his dozing shadow. Then, careless of the hard looks and angry shouts that he drew, he hurled himself into traffic, shoving past evil-tempered camels that bared their teeth at him and pushing merchants out of the way. As he trotted along, he panted out prayers that he could remember where he had seen that donkey and that he could find the spot now that he was at ground level.
It was somewhere near the three-story whitewashed building with the narrow windows, of that much he was sure. Just where, though, was another question. And of course the donkey, though it was only ambling, would have gone some distance by the time he got to where he had seen it. Staring wildly down one lanelet after another, Argyros thought of Zeno’s paradox about Achilles and the tortoise and wondered if he would ever catch up.
There the beast was, about to turn onto Daras’s main north-south avenue, called the Middle Street after Constantinople’s Mese. Imitating Leontios’s gesture of a few days before, Argyros wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and took a minute or two to let his breathing slow. He needed to seem natural. A brisk walk let him come up behind the donkey’s driver. “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you speak Greek?”
The man spread his hands. “Little bit.”
“Ah, good.” As casually as he could, Argyros asked, “Tell me, are those parchments your donkey is carrying?”
He was tense as a strung bow. If the answer to that was yes, he half expected to be attacked on the spot. But the driver only nodded. “So they are. What about it.”
“Er—” For a moment, the magistrianos’s usually facile tongue stumbled. Then he rallied: “May I buy one? I, uh, forgot to write out a receipt for several tenants of mine, and seeing you passing by with your bundles here reminded me of it.”
How much of the explanation the local understood was not clear, but he knew what the word buy meant. After some brisk bargaining, they settled on half a silver miliaresion as a fair price. The donkey driver undid one of his packages. Again Argyros got ready for action, thinking that the man did not know what he was carrying and that the subversive handbills would now be revealed. But the parchment the driver handed him was blank. “Is all right?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes, fine, thank you,” he said, distracted. As if he were an expert testing the quality of the goods, he riffled the corners of the stacked sheets—maybe the first few were blank to conceal the rest. But none had anything on it. He gave up. “You have a very fine stock here. Whatever scribe it’s going to will enjoy writing on it.”
“Thank you, sir.” The donkey-driver pocketed his coin and tied up the package again. “Is not to any scribe going, though.”
“Really?” the magistrianos said, not very interested. “To whom, then?”
The driver grinned, as if about to tell a funny story he did not think his listener would believe. “To Abraham the potter, of all peoples. He the glue wants, too.”
“Really?” Argyros’s tone of voice was entirely different this time. “What on earth does he need with a thousand sheets of parchment and enough glue to stick half of Uaras down?”
“For all I know, he crazy,” the man shrugged. “My master Yesuyab, he work on this order the last month. And when he get it ready to go, Musa the gluemaker next door, he tell me he gots for Abraham too, so would I take along? Why not, I say. My donkey strong.”
“Yes, of course. Well, thank you again.” Argyros let the fellow go, then stood staring after him until a man leading three packhorses yelled at him to get out of the way. He stepped aside, still scratching his head.
Something else occurred to him. He went back to the chancery. With Harun’s capable help, he soon added two marks to his map of Daras, then a third and, as an afterthought, a fourth. He studied the pattern they made. “W7ell, well,” he said. “How interesting.”
Mesopotamian night fell with dramatic suddenness. No sooner was the sun gone from the sky, it seemed, than full darkness came. Last night that had been a nuisance; now Argyros intended to take advantage of it. He had returned to Shahin’s inn during the late afternoon, grumbling of having to go right back to the chancery, probably for hours. He had to stop himself from nodding at his crestfallen shadow, who looked up from a mug of beer in surprise and relief when he arrived. The wretch trailed him again, of course, but he really did revisit Mammianos’s headquarters. The scribes and secretaries eyed him curiously as he waited around doing nothing until his tracker grew bored and mooched off, convinced he was there for the evening as he had feared. The staff departed just before sunset, leaving the place to Argyros.
The magistrianos prowled through the back streets of Daras like a burglar, without any light to give away his presence. He slunk into a doorway when a squad of Leontios’s troopers came tramping by. Soon he might need to call on the garrison commander for aid, but not yet.
The smithy next to Abraham’s pottery shop made it easy to find, for which Argyros was grateful. As he had thought, the windows were shuttered and the place barred and locked, both front and back. Nothing surprising there—anyone in his right mind would have done the same.
He considered the lock that held the back door closed: a standard type. A hole had been drilled from top to bottom near one end of the door bar. There was a similar hole bored part of the way into the bottom board of the frame into which the bar slid. Before Abraham had gone home, he had dropped a cylindrical metal pin down through the barhole so that half of it was in the frame and the rest above it, holding the bar in place.
The top of the metal cylinder was still lower than the level of the upper surface of the bar, so no passerby could hope to pull it out. Abraham, no doubt, had a key with hooks or catches fitted to those of the boltpin to let him draw it out again.