There were, however, other ways. Argyros reached into his belt pouch and took out a pair of long-snouted pincers, rather like the ones physicians used to clamp bleeding blood vessels. His set, though, instead of having flat inner surfaces, was curved within.
He slipped them into the bolthole. After some jiggling, he felt them slide down past the top of the pin. When he tightened them, it was easy to lift the bolt out of its socket. The magistrianos left the door ajar to let a little light into the shop and give him the chance to find a lamp. He worked flint and steel until he got the wick going, then closed the door after him. The shuttered windows would keep the lamp’s pale illumination from showing on the street out front. He prowled about the inside of the cramped little shop. At first everything seemed quite ordinary. Here were two kilns, their fires out for the evening but still warm to the touch. A foot-powered wheel stood between them. There lay great lumps of refined clay and jugs of water next to them to soften them. Abraham had molds in the shape of a hand, a fish, a bunch of grapes, and other things, as well as a set of what looked like sculptors’ tools to create the reliefwork popular in Daras. Pots that were ready to sell filled shelves in the front of the store.
After a snarl of frustration, Argyros began to use his head. If anything here was not as it should be, it would be connected with the parchments Yesuyab had sent Abraham. Where were they? The magistrianos held the lamp high. He made a disgusted noise deep in his throat. He had walked right past them—they were stacked by a table just to the left of the back door.
Excitement flared in the magistrianos as he saw the gluepots sitting on top of the table. Beside them were a couple of smaller vessels that proved full of ink, along with the square iron plate the smith had given to Abraham. A low iron frame had been put in place around it. The only other thing on the table was a large paintbrush.
The frustration returned. Here were parchment and ink, right enough, but Argyros could not see how the rest of the strange array contributed to making handbills. It would take a score of scribes to turn out as many as Abraham had parchments, and in that case they would be far from identical with one another. There were four shelves over the table, each with a dozen small clay jars on it (except for the topmost, which had thirteen). Only because they were close to the parchments and glue, Argyros lifted down one of them. He turned it around in his hand and almost dropped it—on the side turned to the wall was written a large majuscule delta: ?. He tore the stopper off, held the lamp over it, and peered in. At first he saw nothing that looked like a delta. The jar held a number of small rectangular blocks of clay, each about as long as the last joint of his middle finger but not nearly so thick. He picked one up. Sure enough, there was a raised letter at one end. It was still black with ink. He lifted out another clay pot. It also had a delta on it. So did the next and the next.
No wonder Abraham was involved in the plot, Argyros thought. The potter was used to creating reliefwork of all kinds; letters would come as no challenge to him. And Leontios had said he was a Nestorian. He had reason to be hostile to Constantinople, which forced religious unity to go with the political unity it brought.
Whistling tunelessly, the magistrianos put the jar back and chose another one from a couple of shelves higher up. This one was identified by a minuscule beta: ß. Like the first, it was filled with those little blocks of fired clay. Argyros took one out, confidently expected to find a beta on one end of it. And so, in a way, he did, but reversed.
He thought a few uncharitable thoughts about the wits of anyone incompetent enough to make his letters backward. Certain it was a mistake, he removed several more clay blocks from the jar. They were all the same and all reversed.
He frowned. That was going to a lot of effort to perpetuate an error. He poured all but one of the little clay lumps back into their jar, turned the last one over and over as he thought. He held it so close to his face that he had to look at it crosseyed. It was still backward.
He squeezed it between his thumb and index finger, as if trying to wring the answer from it by brute force. Naturally, and annoyingly, such treatment harmed the clay block not at all. It was harder on him.
There was a square indentation in the meaty pad of his thumb from the base of the block. And on his forefinger—
He stared at the perfect, un-reversed beta pressed into his flesh. “Of course!” he exclaimed, startled into speaking aloud. “It’s like a signet ring, where everything has to be done backward to show up the right way in the wax.” The delta, he thought, had misled him because it was symmetrical. He dipped the backward beta into an inkpot, stamped it down on the tabletop, and grinned to see the letter appear right-side-to. He stamped it again and again. Each impression, inevitably, was just like all the rest. “This is how it’s done, all right,” he breathed.
He discovered that the jars on the top two shelves contained minuscule letters (they were arranged in alphabetical order, to make finding each one easy), while their counterparts on the lower shelves all held majuscules. The extra jar on the highest board proved to have slightly smaller blocks of clay without any characters on them. They puzzled Argyros until he realized they had to be used to mark the spaces between words—because they were lower than their fellows, the ink that got on them would not appear on the parchment.
Like a child with a new toy, he decided to spell out his own name. One by one, he selected the letters that went into it and set them on the iron plate, leaning them against the edge of the iron frame for security. Even so, they kept falling over. And that, he decided, was probably what the glue was for: spread over the surface of the plate, it would hold the blocks in place. He inked the brush, painted the tops of the letters, then pressed a sheet of parchment over them. The result made him burst into startled laughter. There on the parchment, rather raggedly aligned, were the nonsense words.
He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, muttering “Idiot!” under his breath. He quickly rearranged the clay blocks; naturally, if the letters themselves were backward, their order had to be that way too, in order to appear correctly on the sheet. He felt like cheering when the second try rewarded him with a smeary Basil Argyros .
He wondered what to compose next. Almost without conscious thought, the first words of the Gospel according to John came into his mind: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
A letter at a time, the evangelist’s famous sentence took shape. Argyros suddenly stopped, halfway through, as the magnitude of what he was doing began to sink in. The Persians, with their petty subversion in Daras, were only pikers, and George Lakhanodrakon’s fear of the same at Constantinople seemed just as trivial.
Of course John had been speaking of the divine Logos, Christ Himself, but his words rang with eerie aptness. These simple little blocks of clay could spell anything and make as many copies of it as one wanted. What power was more godlike than that?
The magistrianos was so struck with awe that he did not pay any attention to the approaching footfalls in the alley behind Abraham’s shop. But the soft cry of alarm one of the newcomers raised on seeing the bar down from the door tore Argyros from his reverie. He cursed himself for his stupidity—the only reason all this dangerous paraphernalia was so openly displayed had to be that the Persians were going to reproduce another handbill tonight.
There were three stout iron hooks-and-eyes screwed into the inside of the door panels and the doorframe. Abraham, evidently, was the sort of man who tied double knots in his sandal straps—and in his sandals, Argyros would have done the same. The potter’s caution was the only thing that saved him. He had just hooked the last closure when someone large heaved an ungentle shoulder against the door. It groaned but held.