He added, “I think he hit me with Arkadios’s column.” Despite the wine, his head was still splitting.
“You stay here until the doctor has had a look at you,” Lakhanodrakon commanded. “Then if you’d sooner go home, I’ll have Zacharias send for a linkbearer for you. Or if you’re well enough to join us outside, of course we’ll be delighted to have you.”
“Thank you, sir; you’re very kind.”
The physician arrived a few minutes later; anyone summoned to the Master of Offices’ residence hurried. The man shaved the back of Argyros’s scalp, applied an ointment that smelled of pitch and stung ferociously, and bandaged his head with a long strip of linen. Then he held a lamp to the magistrianos’s face and peered into each of his eyes in turn.
“! don’t believe there is a concussion,” he said at last. “Your pupils are both the same size.” He gave Argyros a small jar. “This will reduce the pain; it has poppy juice in it. Drink half now, the rest in the morning.” Businesslike to the end, he waved aside Argyros’s thanks and departed as quickly as he had come.
The magistrianos would have recognized the odd scent and flavor of the poppy without the doctor’s explanation. They brought back grim memories of the time when his infant son died of smallpox. As he forced himself to, he shoved the memories aside.
Though he still felt slow and stupid, he went out to the courtyard. Having come this far, he was not about to miss the dinner party, no matter what Lakhanodrakon said.
The Master of Offices’ other guests, naturally, swarmed around him and made much of him, when he would rather have taken his quiet place on a couch and drunk more wine. Not everyone knew what had touched off the riot. There was a thoughtful silence after Argyros told them. Then the imperial grandees began arguing the propriety of images among themselves.
Normally, the magistrianos would have played a vigorous part in the debate. Now, though, he was content merely to seize the opportunity to recline. Servants offered him fried squid, tuna cooked with leeks, roast kid in a sauce of fermented fish. He turned everything down. The smell of food made him queasy.
He slapped at a mosquito; the torches and lanterns that made Lakhanodrakon’s courtyard bright as day drew swarms of them. He wondered why the Master of Offices had so many lights set out. Half the number, he thought, would have been plenty.
Then a servant passed among the guests, handing each one a papyrus folio. Argyros caught Lakhanodrakon’s eye. “You didn’t tell me you would be reading your poetry tonight,” he called.
“I was not sure I would finish the fourth book of my Italiad in time for this evening,” the Master of Offices said. “I’m distributing book three here, to bring everyone up to date in the story. Thanks to you,” he went on, bowing politely, “the company is already familiar with books one and two.” If this was a printed version of book three—and Argyros saw it was—it seemed Lakhanodrakon had taken the clay archetypes to heart after all.
Along with his fellow guests, the magistrianos skimmed through the folio. Lakhanodrakon had tried lines on him, and he had even contributed a suggestion or two himself, so he knew the poem fairly well.
“Now that you’ve been refreshed as to the background, my friends, I shall commence,” the Master of Offices declared. To read, he held his manuscript at arm’s length; he was growing more farsighted year by year.
Some of the verses were quite good, and Lakhanodrakon read well. His faint Armenian accent suited the martial tale he was telling. The magistrianos wished he could pay closer attention. The poppy juice and the lingering effects of the blow combined to make him feel detached, almost floating above his couch. . . .
A polite patter of applause woke him. He guiltily joined in, hoping no one had seen him doze off. The dinner party began to break up. When he went over to the Master of Offices to say his good-byes, Lakhanodrakon would not listen to them. “You spend the night here, Basil. You’re in no shape to go home alone.”
“Thank you, sir,” the magistrianos said, though he wished Lakhanodrakon had not been so insistent. It only made him certain his boss had noticed him asleep.
Argyros’s secretary unceremoniously dumped a handful of rolled-up papyri on his desk. “Thank you, Anthimos,” the magistrianos said.
Anthimos grunted. He always reminded Argyros of a mournful crane. Capable but without enthusiasm or real talent, he would never be anything more than a secretary, and knew it. When he returned to his own work, Argyros forgot about him the moment his back was turned.
The magistrianos read rapidly over the interrogation reports taken from the men and women the excubitores had captured during the riot. They showed him little he had not learned from his own brief encounter. The rabble-rousing monk’s name, he found out, was Sasopis, which confirmed the fellow’s Egyptian origin. Accounts of just what he had preached varied, depending on how each witness felt about icons.
Sasopis himself had escaped. As would any Constantinopolitan official, Argyros thought that a shame. Ever since the Nika uprising, its specter haunted the city. Anyone who thought to bring back such chaos deserved whatever he got.
For the next couple of weeks, the city stayed calm. The magistrianos accepted that with gratitude but no great trust, as he might have welcomed one of the last fine days before the autumn storms began. He used the respite to try to track down Sasopis, but to no avail. The miserable monk might have vanished off the face of the earth, though that, Argyros thought sourly, was too much to hope for. When the trouble broke out again, Sasopis had nothing to do with it. Yet still it sprang from Egypt: as the plague had in Justinian’s day, strife came now via grain ship from Alexandria. Sailors went off to wench and drink and roister, and took with them the exciting tales of the turmoil they had left behind. Up and down the Nile, it seemed, men were at each other’s throats over the question of the icons. Argyros could imagine what happened next, in some dock-side tavern or brothel lounge. Someone would have said scornfully, “What foolishness! My grandfather venerated images, and that’s enough for me.” And someone else would have answered, “Because your grandfather burns in hell, do you want to join him?” That would have been plenty to bring out the knives.
The second round of rioting was not confined to the Forum of Arkadios, and took the excubitores, the scholae, and the other palace regiments four days to put down. Several churches had their icons defaced with whitewash or scraped from the walls, while one was put to the torch. Luckily, it stood alone in a little park, and the fire did not spread.
The day after peace—more a peace of exhaustion than anything else—returned to the city, word came of disorders in Antioch, the third city of the Empire.
George Lakhanodrakon summoned Argyros that afternoon. The magistrianos was shocked to see how worn he looked; although Master of Offices was not a military post, Lakhanodrakon was a member of the Emperor’s Consistory and had had to attend privy council meetings day and night. He also oversaw the civil servants who prepared orders and recorded testimony, all of whom had been overworked in the emergency.
“You should rest, sir,” Argyros said.
“So I should,” Lakhanodrakon agreed. “I should also exercise until I lose this belly of mine, should learn better Latin to go with my Greek, and should do a great many other things I have no time for.”
No doubt one of the things he had no time for was well-meaning but useless suggestions. The magistrianos flushed, expecting a dressing-down.
But his superior surprised him, asking, out of the blue it seemed, “Basil, where do you stand on this fight over the images?”