Agent of Byzantium Read online

  “As I said, you did a fine job of ferreting out the Jurchen secret. It just so happens that George Lakhanodrakon is a cousin of my wife’s.”

  “The Master of Offices, sir?” The Master of Offices was one of the most powerful officials in the Roman Empire, one of the few with the right to report directly to the Emperor himself.

  “Yes. Among his other duties, he commands the corps of magistrianoi. How would you like to be the one to take your precious tube down to Constantinople, along with a letter urging your admission to their ranks?”

  For a moment, all Argyros heard was “Constantinople.” That was enough. Along with every other citizen of the Empire, he had heard stories of its wonders and riches for his entire life. Now to see them for himself!

  Then the rest of what Tekmanios had said sank in. Magistrianoi were elite imperial agents, investigators, sometimes spies. They served under the personal supervision of the Master of Offices, the only man between them and the Emperor, the vicegerent of God on earth. Argyros had dreamed of such a post for himself, but only dreamed.

  “Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” he said.

  “I thought that might please you,” Tekmanios said with a smile. “It’s your doing more than mine, you know; you’ve earned the chance. Now it’s up to you to make the most of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Argyros said again, slightly deflated.

  The general’s smile grew wider. “Take a couple of more days to get your strength back. Then I’ll send you and your tube back to the Danube, with a good strong resupply party along to keep you in one piece. You can get a riverboat there and sail down to Tomi on the Euxine Sea, then take a real ship on to the city. That will be faster and safer than going overland.”

  The grin looked out of place on Argyros’s usually somber features, but he could not help wearing it as he bowed his way out of Tekmanios’s tent. Once outside, he looked up into the heavens to give thanks to God for his good fortune.

  The pale, mottled moon, near first quarter, caught his eye. He wondered what it might look like through the eyes of Argos. Tonight, if he remembered, he would have to find out. Who could say? It might be interesting.

  II

  Etos Kosmou 6816

  Basil Argyros felt trapped behind the mounds of papyrus on his desk.

  Not for the first time, he wondered if becoming a magistrianos had been wise. When he had been an officer of scouts in the Roman army, the post seemed wonderful, dashing, exotic.

  Argyros had thought his new job would be similar to the old, only on an Empirewide scale. He had not realized how little time agents spent in the field and how much sifting minutiae. The imperial bureaucracy was thirteen centuries old. There were a lot of minutiae to sift.

  He sighed and went back to the report he was drafting, which dealt with the foiling of some Franco-Saxon merchants’ efforts to smuggle purple-dyed cloth out of Constantinople. The petty princes and dukes of Germany and northern Gallia—the southern coast, of course, belonged to the Empire—would pay almost anything to deck themselves in the fabric reserved for the Roman Emperor.

  But even though Argyros had detected the try at escaping with contraband, he had had nothing to do with actually arresting the barbarians. All he had done was spot a discrepancy in a silk-dyer’s accounts, which hardly gave him the action he craved.

  He sighed again. At last the report was through. A good thing, too: advancing twilight was making it hard to see to write. He signed the report and dated it: “Done in the year of the world 6816, the sixth indiction, on July 16, the feast-day of St.—”

  He paused in annoyance, stuck his head out the door of his office, and asked a passing clerk, “Whose feast-day is it today?”

  “St. Mouamet’s.”

  “Thanks.” Argyros scowled at his own stupidity. He should never have forgotten that, not when Mouamet was one of his favorite saints on the calendar.

  Argyros’s sour mood evaporated as he walked down the stairs of the Praitorion, the imperial office building in which he worked. After all, here he was on the Mese, the main street of Constantinople, the most splendid city in the world. Had he not joined the magistrianoi, likely he never would have set foot in the imperial capital.

  A procession of black-robed priests came down the Mese from the west, heading toward the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia. Some priests carried upraised candles, others wooden crosses, while one bore the image of a saint. Argyros piously crossed himself as he heard the hymn they were chanting: “There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His son.”

  He smiled. If all else failed, that hymn would have reminded him whose day this was. Though Mouamet was almost seven centuries dead, his religious verse still had the power to move any good Christian.

  The magistrianos stood watching until the procession had passed, then went up the Mese in the direction from which it had come. His own home was in the central part of the city, between the church of the Holy Apostles and the aqueduct of Valens.

  He quickened his steps. His wife Helen would be waiting for him, and so would their baby son Sergios. His long, usually somber face softened as he thought of the boy. Sergios was getting old enough to know who he was when he came home at night and to greet him with a large, toothless smile. Argyros shook his head in amazement at how swiftly time passed. A couple of months ago, the baby had been only a wailing lump. Now he was starting to be a person.

  Helen and Sergios alone should have sufficed to reconcile Argyros to being a magistrianos. Had he not come to Constantinople, he never would have met her, and their son would not have been born. That was disturbing even to think about.

  He turned north off the Mese, picking his way through the maze of smaller lanes. Thanks to sound planning and strict laws, even those were cobbled and a dozen feet wide, nothing like the cramped, muddy back alleys of the Balkan town where Argyros had grown up. Even balconies could not come closer than ten feet to the opposite wall, and had to be at least fifteen feet above the ground, to let light and air through.

  As darkness descended, shops and taverns began closing, spilling out their patrons. The whole world came to do business in Constantinople. On the streets were Persians in felt skullcaps, the ancient rivals of the Roman Empire; beaky Arabs, men of Mouamet’s blood, wearing flowing robes; flat-faced, long-unwashed nomads from the northern steppe; blond, blustering, trousered Germans. Men from every part of the Roman Empire mingled with the foreigners: stocky, heavily bearded Armenians; swarthy Egyptians, some with shaven heads; broad-faced Sklavenoi from the lands near the Danube; Carthaginians; Italians; even a few Ispanians staring about in amazement at the wonders of the city.

  Then there were the Constantinopolitans themselves. To Argyros, who had lived in the capital for only a couple of years, the locals seemed much like the black-capped little sparrows with whom they shared it. They were bustling, cheeky, always on the lookout for the main chance, everlastingly curious, and quick to lose interest in anything no longer new. Of a steadier, more sober nature himself, he found them endlessly fascinating and altogether unreliable.

  He also found them exasperating, for they were self-centered to the point of being blind to others. That was literally true: he watched scores of people walk past the man in the gutter as if he did not exist. He might have understood had the fellow been a derelict, but he was not. He was clean and well groomed, his brocaded robe of good quality. He did not look as though he had been overcome by drink.

  Muttering under his breath, the magistrianos bent to see what he could do for the man. Perhaps he was an epileptic and would soon come back to his senses. Many people still had a superstitious fear of epilepsy, though Hippokrates had shown more than four centuries before the Incarnation that it was a disease like any other.

  Argyros reached down to feel the fellow’s forehead. He jerked his hand away as if he had touched a flame. And so, almost, he had; the man burned with fever. Peering closer, the magistrianos saw a red rash on his face and hands.

  “Mother of God, he
lp me!” he whispered. He rubbed his right hand over and over again on his robe, and would have paid many gold nomismata not to have touched the man’s skin.

  “You!” he called to a passerby whose clothes and, even more, whose manner proclaimed him to be a native. “Are you from this part of the city?”

  The man set his hands on his hips. “What if I am? What’s it to you?”

  “Quick as you can, fetch the medical officer.” Every district had one, to see to the drainage system and watch out for contagious disease. “I think this man has smallpox.”

  “Maybe you were wrong,” Helen Agryra said later that night. “Or even if you were right, maybe there will be only the one case.”

  “I pray you’re right,” Argyros said. As he had many times before, he wondered how his wife managed to look on the bright side of things. He sometimes thought it was because she had eight or nine fewer years than his own thirty. But he had been no great optimist in his early twenties. He had to admit to himself that her nature simply was sunnier than his.

  They contrasted physically as well as emotionally. Argyros was tall and lean, with the angular features and dark, mournful eyes of an icon. The top of Helen’s head barely reached his shoulder. While her hair was dark, her fair complexion, high, wide cheekbones, and blue eyes spoke of Sklavenic ancestors.

  Sergios, Argyros thought, was a lucky little boy: he looked like his mother.

  Helen went on, “I don’t understand how it could be smallpox, Basil. There hasn’t been an outbreak in the city since my father was a boy.”

  “Which will not keep God from sending another one if He decides our sins warrant it.”

  She crossed herself. “Kyrie eleison,” she exclaimed: “Lord, have mercy!”

  “Lord have mercy, indeed,” he agreed. In crowded Constantinople, smallpox could spread like wildfire. Except for the plague, it was the most frightful illness the Empire knew. And whole centuries went by without the plague, but every generation, it seemed, saw a smallpox epidemic, sometimes mild, sometimes savage.

  Helen had a knack for pulling Argyros away from such gloomy reflections. “Neither of us can change God’s will,” she said with brisk practicality, “so we may as well have supper.”

  Supper was bread with olive oil for dipping, a stew of tuna and leeks, and white raisins for dessert. “Delicious,” Argyros said, and meant it, though he was still not used to eating fish so often. In his upcountry hometown, the meat in the stew would have been goat or lamb. But fish was much cheaper here by the sea and, though he made more as a junior magistrianos than he had in the army, he had not had to rent a house or support a family in those days … and Helen was talking about hiring a maidservant.

  Fish, then.

  After she cleared away the dishes, Helen nursed Sergios in a beechwood rocking chair she had bought after he was born. While she was nursing, she would talk only about small, pleasant things. That was one of the few rules she imposed on her husband; she firmly maintained that breaking it made her give less milk. The way Sergios had squalled hungrily the couple of times he tried to nurse after Argyros, full of his own affairs, ignored the rule made him keep to it thereafter.

  Sometimes the restriction irritated him. Now he was just as glad of it. He told Helen about one of his fellow magistrianoi whose wife had twins a couple of weeks younger than Sergios and who did not look as though he slept at all any more. She gave him the neighborhood gossip, either gleaned from the view from the balcony or traded with other women among the market stalls.

  Sergios fell asleep while she rocked him. She carried him to his crib. He would probably stay asleep until somewhere close to sunrise. Argyros sighed in relief as he thought of that. It had been only a few weeks since the baby woke two or three times every night, crying for his mother’s breast.

  She might have been reading his thoughts. Her eyes answered his. “Shall we go to bed?” she asked, adding mischievously, “But not, I think, to sleep.”

  “No, not to sleep,” Argyros said. His fingers undid the clasps of her blouse, which she had fastened again after feeding Sergios. The urgency with which he took her made her gasp in surprise (for he was usually more restrained), but not in displeasure.

  Spent afterward, she slept almost at once, her legs and rump pressed warmly against him. He lay awake himself. His thoughts lit now here, now there, until he realized why he had been so importunate: that helped hold worry away for a while.

  He grimaced in the darkness. That was not fair to Helen, or flattering to his own motivations.

  It did not help him rest, either.

  The magistrianos went to and from the Praitorion fearfully for the next few days, dreading what he might see on the way. He distrusted the way everything remained utterly ordinary, and feared it to be a cruel deception—though it was cruel only to him, for he had seen the stricken man, while the city remained unaware of its danger. But after a while he began to believe Helen had been right or that the fervent prayers the two of them had sent up were being answered.

  He held to that belief as long as he could, even after fewer magistrianoi and other functionaries began coming to work each day. Life was chancy at the best of times, and any illness dangerous: doctors could do so little against sickness. Prayer offered more hope than nostrums.

  But when one missing man after another was reported down with a fever, Argyros’s alarm returned. And the day he found out the first of them had broken out in pustules, he decided the Praitorion could do without him for a while. He was not afraid anyone would accuse him of shirking. Already half the people rich enough to own second homes outside the city were moving out to them “for the sake of fresh air.” The rumble of leaving carts full of household goods went on day and night.

  Most Constantinopolitans, of course, could not afford to flee. Nevertheless, the streets grew empty. People who did stir abroad looked at each other warily. Smallpox might have been God’s curse, but everyone knew only too well it could be caught from a sick man.

  The price of grain fluctuated wildly. One day almost all the mills in the city would be open and almost all of them empty. Then, for no reason any man could find, only a handful would operate, with people lined up around the block to buy.

  Argyros felt he was taking his life in his hands whenever he went out to buy food. Helen wanted to share the burden with him, but he said no so sternly he got his way. “How would I feed Sergios if something happened to you?” he demanded. “I’m not built for the role, you know.”

  “How would I feed him if you get sick and can’t feed me?” she replied, but she did not press the point. The thought of danger to her baby was enough to make her listen to him.

  He did not tell her he would have acted the same way if the smallpox had come the year before, when they were still childless. Any risk he could spare her, he would.

  Only churches stayed crowded while the smallpox was loose in the city. Priests and layfolk alike petitioned the Lord to return His favor to the people and end the epidemic. People also rushed to the liturgy for more personal divine reasons: to pray for the health of their loved ones—and for their own.

  When Helen wanted to pray at the great church of Hagia Sophia, Argyros could not refuse her, nor did he make any great effort to. A trip to church, he reasoned, was different from a shopping expedition. God might be angry at Constantinople, but surely he would not smite them in His own house.

  Carrying Sergios in her arms, Helen went out into the city for the first time in several weeks. She exclaimed at how still the streets were: “It’s as if this were some country town, not the city!” Her voice echoed off houses.

  “It’s quieter here,” Argyros said, remembering Serrhes. “True, the towns have only a handful of people next to Constantinople, but they’re also much smaller, so they can seem crowded.”

  They walked east along the Mese toward the great church, whose dome dominated the city skyline. The stalls of the horse market in the forum known as the Amastrianum were empty; no one had
any beasts out to sell. A quarter-mile farther down the street, a few lonely sheep bleated in their pens in the forum of Theodosios. The farmers who had brought them to market stood around scratching their heads, wondering where their customers had gone.

  “Poor souls,” Helen said with her ready compassion. “They must not have heard aught’s amiss.”

  “I’m surprised the gate guards didn’t warn them,” Argyros said, but on second thought he was not surprised at all. The guards at a minor gate, say the gate of Selymbria or that of Rhegion, might well have decamped, leaving the portal standing wide for rustics to saunter straight into the city.

  The magistrianos shouted across the square to the farmers. At the dread word smallpox, they crossed themselves in alarm and began rounding up their animals. “I wish we were coming home from church instead of on our way there,” Argyros said. “A sheep could feed us for days.”

  “We would have got a good price, too.” Helen sighed. “Ah, well. I hope their owners get home safe.”

  Only in the Augusteion, the square on which Hagia Sophia fronted, were there signs Constantinople was not a ghost town. Even there, the booksellers’ cubicles and perfumers’ stalls were all closed. But some food shops were operating, to serve the people who came to the great church to pray. Argyros smelled breaded squid frying in olive oil and garlic. His stomach rumbled hungrily. He had to force himself to walk past the smoking charcoal braziers.

  People filled the great church’s colonnaded atrium. Argyros waved to a clerk he had not seen for several days. Other such meetings were going on all over the atrium. Many folk felt as he did, that going to church was the one safe outing they could make.

  Keeping a protective arm around Helen, he led her into the exonarthex, the hallway between the atrium and the church proper. He bent to kiss her and Sergios, saying, “I’ll meet you right here after the services.”

  “All right,” she said, and turned away to head for the stairs up to the women’s gallery: as in any other church, men and women worshiped separately.