Departures (21 page)

“Well, what if I do?” Dekanos was still scowling. “For that matter,” he went on angrily, “how will you be able to gather all these fractious guild leaders together and make them and their guild members abide by anything they might agree to? For all you know, they will say one thing to ease the pressure on them and then turn around and do just the opposite.”

When the official shifted the basis of the argument, Argyros knew he had his man. “If they did that, would they not have gone beyond the bounds even of what you Alexandrians tolerate in an
anakhoresis
?” he asked. “You could then use whatever force you had to with less fear of bringing the whole city to the point of insurrection.”

“Perhaps.” Dekanos pursed his lips. “Perhaps.”

“As for gathering the leaders of the guilds,” the magistrianos said persuasively, “leave that to me. I wouldn’t think of formally involving you with speaking to them until everything on the other side was in readiness.”

“Certainly not,” Dekanos said, mollified by Argyros’ apparent concern for proper procedure. “Hmm. Yes, I suppose you can go forward, then, provided you do it on those terms and provided you stress our unique clemency in treating with the artisans in this one special case.”

“Of course,” the magistrianos said, although he had no intention of stressing anything of the sort. He bowed his way out of Dekanos’ office and did not grin until his back was to the Alexandrian. Grinning still, he headed for Khesphmois’ shop in the district of Rhakotis.

He did not see the master carpenter when he walked through the beaded curtain. Only one of the journeymen was there, luckily one who spoke some Greek. The fellow said, “He not back till tomorrow. He helping build—how you say?—grandstand for parade. Busy all night, he say.” The man chuckled. “He terrible mad about that. I there, too, but have this cabinet to repair for rich man. He want it now, no matter what. Rich men like that.”

“Yes,” Argyros said, though he knew nothing of being rich from personal experience. He hesitated, then asked, “What does the parade celebrate?”

“Feast day for St. Arsenios.”

“Oh.” Argyros wondered what the saint, a man who had withdrawn from the world to live out his life as a monk in the Egyptian desert, would think of having his memory celebrated with a large, noisy parade. He shrugged. That was the Alexandrians’ problem. Khesphmois was his. “I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon, then. I do need to see your master.” He turned to go, thinking that as long as he was in this part of the city, Teus might direct him to some other master carpenters.

“Can I do anything to help you, man from Constantinople?”

Argyros had just put his hand in the entranceway to thrust aside the strings of beads. Now he jerked it back. Small spheres of glass and painted clay clicked off one another. “Truly I don’t know, my lady,” he said. His unspoken thought was, That depends on how much influence you have on your husband.

Zois might have picked it out of the air. “I know you did not come all this way simply to see
me
,” she said, her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth lifting slightly in a cynical smile. Eve might have worn that smile, Argyros thought, when God came to talk business with Adam, and later given Adam his comeuppance for the visit. He put aside his blasphemous maunderings; Zois was going on, “Still, perhaps we could discuss it over a cup of wine.”

The magistrianos’ eyes flicked to the journeyman carpenter, but the fellow did not look up from the work he had resumed. And no wonder: with her husband absent, Zois had not presumed to come out alone to speak with Argyros. A servant girl stood behind him, a pretty little thing who could not have been more than fifteen and who was, the magistrianos saw, about eight months pregnant.

He considered. “Thank you,” he said at last. “Maybe we could.”

“This way,” Zois said, then spoke in Coptic to the servant girl, who dipped her head and hurried off. “Don’t let fear of Lukra’s spying on us worry you,” Zois told the magistrianos as she led him back toward the rooms where she and Khesphmois lived. “She has no Greek. My husband
did not take her on for that.” She smiled her ancient smile again.

Like the shop, the home behind it was of mud brick. The rooms were small and rather dark. The furniture was splendid, though, which surprised Argyros until he remembered Khesphmois’ trade.

Lukra came back a few minutes later with wine, dates candied in honey, and sheets of flat, chewy unleavened bread. Zois waited for the girl to pour the wine, then spoke again in Coptic. Lukra disappeared. “She will not be back,” Zois said, nodding to herself. She raised her cup to the magistrianos. “Health to you.”

“Health to you,” he echoed, drinking. The vintage was not one he knew, which meant it was most likely a local one not reckoned fine enough to export. It was not bad, though, and had a tartness that cut through the cloyingly sweet taste of the dates.

Zois ate, then wiped her hands and patted at her mouth with a square of embroidered linen. “Now,” she said when she was through, “what do you need from Khesphmois?”

“His cooperation in getting the other leaders of the carpenters’ guild and the men who head the rest of the guilds that have withdrawn from work on the pharos to talk with the Augustal prefect’s deputy so they can agree on a way to get construction started again.”

Her eyes, already large, seemed to grow further as she widened them in surprise. “You can arrange this?”

“If the guildsmen will play their part, yes. I already have agreement from the prefect’s deputy. The pharos is too important not only to Alexandria but to all the Empire to be delayed by this
anakhoresis.
”

“I agree,” Zois said at once. “I warned Khesphmois from the outset that the guilds were facing too dangerous a foe in the city government, because it could crush them if their stubbornness pushed it to the point of wanting to. I will help with anything that has a hope of ending the
anakhoresis
peacefully.”

“Thank you.” Argyros did not tell her the Augustal prefect and his staff were as frightened of the guilds’ power as she was of the government’s. Having both sides wary was probably a good idea. He went on, “Do you think you can sway your husband to your point of view?”

“I suspect so. Khesphmois is more likely to insist on
having his own way on matters where there is no risk to him.” The magistrianos thought that was only sensible, and true of anyone. Then Zois went on. “Take Lukra, for instance. Khesphmois did.” Bitterness welled forth in her voice.

“
Did
he?” Argyros’ interest, among other things, rose. So
that
was why she was seeing him alone, he thought: for the sake of revenge on her husband. That was sinful. So was the act of adultery itself. At the moment, the magistrianos did not care. Relief would have been easy to buy at any time since Helen died. Despite his body’s urgings, he had held back.

This, though … Zois was attractive in an exotic way, clever enough for him to hope to enjoy her mind as well as her body. And she might be his for as long as he was in Alexandria, long enough, perhaps, for something more than desire—or her anger at Khesphmois—to bind them together. It would not be what he had known with his wife, but it could be better than the emptiness that had ruled his life these past years.

He got up and took a step toward Zois’ chair. Then he noticed she had not stopped talking while lust had filled his head. She was saying, “But for all his faults, he is not a bad man at bottom, you know. I would not see him hurt in any way, and he would be, he and many others, if the
anakhoresis
were put down by force.”

“Yes, that’s likely so,” the magistrianos agreed woodenly. He sat back down.

Zois sighed. “If God had not willed that I be barren, I am sure Khesphmois would have left Lukra alone. And when the child is born, he and I will rear it as if it were our own.” Her laugh was shaky. “Here I am going on about my own life, when you came to talk of weighty affairs. I do apologize.”

“Think nothing of it, my lady.” Now the magistrianos’ voice sounded as it should. So
that
was why she was seeing him alone, he thought again, but this time with a different reason behind the
that
: Unburdening herself to a sympathetic stranger had to be easier than talking with a neighbor or friend here. A stranger would not be likely to gossip.

Argyros laughed at himself. Before he married Helen, he had never imagined himself irresistible to women. Thinking Zois had found him so was bracing. It made him proud. He
knew what pride went before. Even as he had that thought, he felt himself falling.

“You are a kind man,” Zois said. “As I told you, I will do my best to make sure my husband lends his influence to meeting with the prefect’s men and trying to end the
anakhoresis
. And now, would you care for another date?” She held out the platter to him.

“No, thank you.” When the magistrianos got up this time, he did not approach the master carpenter’s wife. “I’m glad I can count on you, but now I do have other business to attend to.” He let her show him out.

As the beads clicked behind him, he wondered what the other business was. For the life of him, he could not think of any. Maybe escaping his own embarrassment counted.

He walked north to the street of Kanopos, Alexandria’s main east-west thoroughfare, the one on which Saint Athanasios’ church fronted. With nothing better to do, he thought he would imitate many of the locals and lie down in his room during the midday heat.

Someone plucked at the sleeve of his tunic. He whirled, one hand dropping to the hilt of his sword—like any large city, Alexandria was full of light-fingered rogues. But this was no rogue—it was a girl two or three years older than Zois’ maidservant. Under the paint on her face, she might have been pretty were she less thin. “Go to bed with me?” she said. Argyros would bet it was most of the Greek she knew. No, she had a bit more, a price: “Twenty folleis.”

A big copper coin for an embrace … The magistrianos had rejected such advances before without having to think twice. Now, his blood already heated from what he had thought—no, hoped, he admitted to himself—he heard himself say, “Where?”

The girl’s face lit up. She
was
pretty, he saw, at least when she smiled. She led him to a tiny chamber that opened onto an alley a couple of blocks from the street of Kanopos. With the door shut, the cubicle was hot, stuffy, and nearly night-dark. Argyros knew the much-used straw pallet would have bugs, but the girl was pulling her shift off over her head, lying down and waiting for him to join her. He did.

Afterward, he saw her scorn even in the gloom. After so long without a woman, he had spent himself almost at once. But that long denial was not to be relieved with a single round. “You pay twice,” she warned, but then she was
moving with him, urging him on. Harlots had their wiles, he knew, but he thought he pleased her the second time. He knew he pleased himself.

He knew he pleased her when he gave her a silver miliaresion, much more than she had asked of him. Maybe, for a while, she would be a little less scrawny.

His conscience troubled him as he finished the interrupted walk to his room. Such a sordid way to end his mourning for his wife: a skinny whore in a squalid crib. But he had not stopped mourning Helen, nor would he ever. He had only proved what he already knew—that wish as he might, he was not fit by nature for the single life.

And knowing that, would it have been better, he asked himself, to have returned to the sensual world with an act of adultery as well as one of fornication? He thought of Zois, of how attractive he had found her, and was not sure of the answer.

With an expression of barely concealed dislike, Mouamet Dekanos watched the guildsmen file into the meeting chamber. Argyros, who was sitting at one side of the table (he had left Dekanos the head) gave him credit for trying to conceal it.

The guildsmen were not even trying. They glowered impartially at both men waiting for them. They also frankly gaped at the magnificence of the hall in which they were received. Even in their finest clothes, they looked out of place, or rather looked like what they were—workmen in a palace.

“Illustrious sirs,” Khesphmois said, nervously dipping his head to Argyros and Dekanos. As he slid into a chair, he went on. “These men with me are Hergeus son of Thotsytmis of the concrete spreaders’ guild, and Miysis son of Seias of the guild of stonecutters.”

“Yes, thank you, Khesphmois,” Dekanos said. “Of course, I have had dealings with all you gentlemen”—he spit out the word as if it tasted bad—“before, but your comrades will be new to Argyros. He is here all the way from Constantinople itself to help us settle our differences.”

“Illustrious sir,” Hergeus and Miysis murmured as they took their seats. Like the other Alexandrians Argyros had met, they made a good show of looking unimpressed at the mention of the capital.

Miysis, the magistrianos thought, carried it off better. The stonecutters’ leader was a squat, powerful man in his mid-fifties. His nose had been broken and a scar seamed one weathered cheek, but the eyes in that bruiser’s face were disconcertingly keen. After sizing Argyros up, he turned to Dekanos and demanded, “How’s he going to do that, illustrious sir, when we already know what’s going on and can’t see any way out?” Though his voice was a raspy growl, he did not speak bad Greek.

“I will leave that to the magistrianos to explain for himself,” Dekanos answered.

“Thank you,” Argyros said, ignoring the tone that made Dekanos’ reply mean,
I haven’t the slightest idea
. “Sometimes, gentlemen, ignorance is an advantage. Both sides in this
anakhoresis
, I would say, have clung so long and stubbornly to their own views that they have forgotten others are possible. Perhaps I will be able to show you all something new yet acceptable to everyone.”

“Pah,” was all Miysis said to that. Hergeus added, “Perhaps I’ll swim the length of the Nile tomorrow, too, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

His grin made the words sting less than they would have otherwise. Like Khesphmois, he was young to be a guild leader, but there the resemblance between them ended. Hergeus was tall for an Egyptian, and as skinny as the trollop Argyros had bedded a few days before.