Arsakios’s monks were very much in evidence on his short walk down the Mese. During the day, they scattered through the city to preach the dogmas of iconoclasm to whoever would listen. The magistrianos passed no fewer than three, each with a good-sized crowd around him.
“Do you want to be Monophysites?” the first monk shouted to his audience.
“No!” “Of course not!” “Never!” “Dig up the Monophysites’ bones!”
“Do you want to be Nestorians?”
The same cries of rejection came from the crowd.
“Then cast aside the pernicious, lying images you wrongly reverence!”
Some of his listeners gave back catcalls and hisses, but most looked thoughtful. A couple of hundred yards down the street, another Egyptian was preaching the same message in almost identical words. It was Argyros’s turn for thought, mostly about the organization that implied. He suspected Mirrane’s hand there; she had been extremely efficient in her placard campaign at Daras. The clergy of Constantinople far outnumbered Arsakios’s determined band, but they were not prepared for such disciplined assault on their beliefs. By the time they realized the danger, it might be too late. Full of such gloomy musings, the magistrianos climbed the stairs to his office. To his surprise, his dour secretary greeted him with enthusiasm. “How now, Anthimos?” he asked, bemused.
“If you’re really back at it, maybe I’ll be able to catch up on my own work for a change,” his secretary said.
“Ah.” That, sadly, was a reason altogether in accord with Anthimos’s nature. Still, the warmth of the secretary’s first response left Argyros more effusive than he usually would have been. I le gossiped on about the proceedings of the ecumenical council; Anthimos, a typical Constantinopolitan, listened avidly. His long, narrow face froze in disapproving lines as the magistrianos described the battalion of monks harassing their opponents by night and advancing their own cause by day. “They’ll pay for their impudence in the next world,” he predicted with grim relish.
“That’s as may be,” Argyros said, “but they’re a damnable nuisance in this one. What happens if the council ends up deciding the icons are proper and the city mob tears Hagia Sophia down around its ears because they’ve all decided the images are traps of Satan to drag them down to hell?”
Anthimos clucked distressfully. “Our own priests and monks should settle these upstart Egyptians.”
“So they should, but will they? Most especially, will they in time, before the city gets convinced inconoclasm is right?” Argyros explained his pessimistic reasoning as he had walked from the great church.
“But there are many more clerics native to Constantinople than the Alexandrian has brought,” Anthimos protested. ‘They should be able to vanquish them in debate by sheer weight of numbers, if in no other way.”
“But too many keep silent.” Argyros paused. “Sheer weight of numbers,” he echoed. His voice was dreamy, his eyes far away.
“Sir?” Anthimos said nervously, after the magistrianos had stayed absolutely still for three solid minutes. If Argyros heard, he gave no sign.
Another little while went by before he stirred. When at last he did, it was into a blur of activity that made his secretary jump in alarm. “What are you loafing there for?” Argyros snapped unfairly. “Get me ten thousand sheets of papyrus—get it out of storage, beg it, or borrow it from anyone who has it, but get it. No—go to Lakhanodrakon first; get a letter of authorization from him. That way you won’t have arguments. When you’ve brought the papyrus back, round up fifty men. Try to get them from all parts of the city. Tell them to come here tomorrow morning; tell them it’s three miliaresia for every man. The prospect of silverpieces should get their attention. Do you have all that?”
“No,” Anthimos said; he found the magistrianos worse as King Stork than King Log. “But it’s to do with those damned clay lumps of yours, isn’t it?”
“With the archetypes, yes,” Argyros said impatiently. “By the Virgin, we’ll see who shouts down whom!
Now, here’s what I told you—” Only slightly slower than in his outburst of a moment before, he repeated his orders to Anthimos, ticking off points one by one on his fingers. This time, his secretary scrawled shorthand notes, his pen racing to keep up with Argyros’s thought.
“Better make it a hundred men,” the magistrianos said. “Some won’t show up. And on your way to the Master of Offices, stop at the shop of Stavrakios the potter and send him to me.”
“I’ll do whatever you say, as long as you don’t set me to spelling words backward and upside down,” Anthimos declared.
“I won’t, I promise,” the magistrianos said. He was still burning with urgency. “Go on! Go on!”
Anthimos had hardly slammed the door behind him before Argyros was setting a square metal frame on an iron pan and painting the surface of the pan with glue. On shelves beside his desk he kept jars of clay archetypes.
Images again, he thought. If the Egyptian monks had abhorred them before, they would really hate them soon.
He was still composing the text of his message when someone tapped on the door. “Come in,” he called, and Stavrakios did. He was surprised the potter had got there so fast; Anthimos must have headed for his shop on the dead run.
“What can I do for you today, sir?” Stavrakios asked. He was a stocky man of about Argyros’s age, with open, intelligent features and the hands of an artist: large, long-fingered, delicate. Those hands, and the native wit guiding them, made him the perfect man to produce the molds that in turn shaped the archetypes in clay.
“I want a set of archetypes five times the usual size of our letters,” the magistrianos said, hastily adding, “I don’t mean I want the blocks five times as tall. I want them the same height as the rest. I just want the letters five times as big, so people can read them at a distance.”
“I understand,” Stavrakios said at once. He tugged his beard in thought. “You won’t be able to get much of a message on your sheet with letters that size.”
“I realize that,” Argyros said, nodding in respect for the potter’s quick thinking. “I just need one line, to draw people’s attention. The rest of the page will be made from regular archetypes.”
“Ah. That’s all right, then.” Stavrakios considered. “If you’ll tell me the one line, I can make it as a single unit. That will be faster than doing the mold for each new archetype by itself. From what your secretary said, or what I understood of it through his panting, you’ll want this as fast as I can make it.”
Argyros nodded and told Stavrakios what he needed. The potter, a pious man, crossed himself. “Well, of course He did. Is there anything more? No? Then I’m off. I’ll bring you the line directly it’s done.”
“That’s splendid, Stavrakios,” the magistrianos said gratefully. The potter left. Argyros went back to composing, setting letters in the frame one by one. Every so often he would spot an error or come up with a better idea and have to pull a few archetypes—once, a whole line—out of the glue, which was starting to get tacky.
A commotion on the stairs gave him an excuse to stop. He stepped out of his office and was almost run down by a stream of workmen carrying boxes. “Where do you want these, pal?” the one in front asked.
“In there,” he said weakly, pointing. He had worked with papyrus in lots of a few hundred sheets at a time. He had never thought about how much room ten thousand sheets would require. They ended up taking over his office. When Anthimos got back, Argyros congratulated him on a job well done and sent him out again for more ink.