Then it was just a matter of waiting for Stavrakios. It was late afternoon when the potter came in, carrying a bundle wrapped in several thicknesses of cloth. “Fresh from the kiln and still hot,” he said, walking crab-fashion between the mountains of boxes to hand his prize to the magistrianos.
“Let me undo the swaddling clothes here,” Argyros said. Thanks to the potter’s warning, he left cloth between the new-fired clay and his fingers. “Oh yes, very fine. People should be able to read that a block away. I’d say you’ve earned yourself a nomisma, Stavrakios.”
“For this little thing? You’re crazy,” the potter said, but he made the coin disappear. The magistrianos set the big line of text in the space he had reserved for it at the top of the frame. He took a flat board and laid it over his composition to force all the letters down to exactly the same level. When he was satisfied, he inked a paintbrush and ran it over the letters, gently pressed a sheet of papyrus down on them. After reading the result, he used a tweezer to pluck out a couple of improper letters and insert replacements. Then he lit a brazier. Once it was hot, he put the frame and tray on a rack above it to dry the glue and lock the letters in their places.
He used the cloths Stavrakios had brought to remove the tray and frame from the brazier and to protect his desktop from the hot metal. As soon as they were cool, he inked the letters, imprinted a piece of parchment, set it to one side, plied the inky brush again.
Ink, press, set aside; ink, press, set aside. His world narrowed to the brush, the tray and frame full of letters, the box of papyrus from which he was pulling sheets. When he emptied a box, he would fill it with imprinted papyri and go on to the next one. That was the only break in the routine consuming him. After some eternal time, he realized it was too dark to see the letters in front of him. He also realized he was cramped and hungry. He went out and bought a chunk of bread, some goat’s-milk cheese, and a cup of wine from a little eatery near the Praitorion. Then, sighing, he went back to his office, lit a lamp, and got back to work.
A half-moon rose in the southeast over Hagia Sophia, so it had to be close to midnight. The magistrianos was a bit more than halfway done. He labored on, steady as a water-wheel, only pausing to yawn. He had not had much sleep the night before, and it did not look as though he would get much tonight. Darkness still ruled the city when he finally finished, but by the stars he could see through the window it would not last long. He filled the last box with papyri and set it to one side. Then he sat down to rest, just for a moment.
Anthimos’s voice woke him: “Sir?”
He roused with a start, crying, “Nails! St. Andreas preserve us, I forgot nails!”
His secretary held up a jingling leather sack. “I have them. There are more downstairs, along with the men I hired, or as many of them as showed up. They can use stones or bricks for hammers.”
“Excellent, excellent.” When Argyros rose, his abused shoulders gave twin creaks of protest. He followed his secretary out to the Mese, where a crowd of men waited. Most of them were raggedly dressed. “First things first,” the magistrianos said, fighting back a yawn. “Let’s have some of you come up with me and haul some boxes down here.”
A dozen men went upstairs with him. “First time I been in this part o’ the building,” one said. Several more chuckled: along with its offices, the Praitorion also served as a prison. Once the papyri were downstairs, the magistrianos distributed them among the men Anthimos had assembled, then gave his instructions: “Post these in prominent spots—at street corners, on tavern doors if you like. But don’t go in the taverns—not till you’re done.”
That got a laugh, as he had expected. He went on, “I’ll give you one miliaresion now, and two more when you’re done. And don’t think you can chuck your share of the work down the nearest privy and get paid for doing nothing, either. Someone will have an eye on you all the time, sure as I’m a magistrianos.” He was lying through his teeth, but the men looked fearful, and one or two of them disappointed. As secret agents, magistrianoi had a reputation for owning all sorts of unpleasant—possibly unnatural—abilities.
His gang of men trooped off; before long, he heard the first sounds of pounding. This time he could not hold back his yawn. He said, “Anthimos, pay them as they come back. I can’t stay awake any longer. I’m going back to my office to sleep; I don’t think I’d make it home. Wake me in the early afternoon, would you?”
“Whatever you say,” Anthimos agreed dolefully.
Argyros thought he could have slept in the fiery furnace prepared for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. By the time Anthimos shook him awake, his office was a fair approximation of it, with Constantinople’s summer mugginess only making things worse. The magistrianos wiped sweat from his face with his sleeve.
“Like Satan,” he told Anthimos, “I am going up and down in the city, to see how my work has turned out.”
He had walked only twenty paces when he saw his first poster. Only the headline was visible above the crowd of people in front of it. Argyros was pleased at how far away he could read that message:
CHRIST died for you.
The rest of the sheet was a boiled-down version of the argument that came from the gathering at the patriarchal residence: that once God became man too, His humanity was portrayable, and that to say otherwise was to deny the truth of the Incarnation. The broadside concluded: “Impious men have come to Constantinople to reject the images and to try to force their will on the ecumenical council the Emperor has convened. Don’t let them succeed. “
There was a continual low mutter around the poster. Not everyone in Constantinople, of course, could read, but close to half the men and a good fraction of the women did know how. Those who were literate passed the text on to their letterless friends and spouses.
“I don’t know,” a man said, scratching himself. “I don’t want to be one of those accursed Nestorians the Egyptian monks go on about.”
“Do you want to go to hell?” someone else demanded. “Without Christ, what are we but Satan’s meat?”
The people close by him nodded agreement.
“I don’t know,” the first man said again. “I have Christ in my heart. Why do I need an icon, if having one makes me a heretic?”
“You’re a heretic now, for talking that way!” a woman screeched and threw an apple at him. That seemed to be the signal for several people to advance on the would-be iconoclast. He fled. Argyros smiled to himself and kept walking down the Mese. He heard one of Arsakios’s monks preaching to a crowd, but now the cleric had to shout against hecklers and continually backtrack to try to defend what he was saying.
People were trickling into the Augusteion, gathering in front of the atrium of Hagia Sophia. The palace guards outside the great church looked at the growing crowd with suspicion. Here and there a guardsman hefted a spear or loosened a sword in a scabbard, readying himself for trouble. Men and women began shouting down the Egyptian monks in the Augusteion, then raised a chant of their own: “Dig up the iconoclasts’ bones! Dig up the iconoclasts’ bones!” At that old Constantinopolitan riot call, all the guardsmen looked to their weapons. But the swelling crowd showed no inclination to attack. Instead, they stood and shouted, the noise rising like the tide. Argyros wondered how Arsakios, inside Hagia Sophia, enjoyed this new din.
He saw one of the monks who had accompanied the patriarch of Alexandria tear a sheet from the front of a building, hurl it to the ground, and step on it in execration. A moment later the monk was on the ground himself, taking a drubbing from several Constantinopolitans. They were shouting, “Blasphemer!