Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  After a snarl of frustration, Argyros began to use his head. If anything here was not as it should be, it would be connected with the parchments Yesuyab had sent Abraham. Where were they? The magistrianos held the lamp high. He made a disgusted noise deep in his throat. He had walked right past them—they were stacked by a table just to the left of the back door.

  Excitement flared in the magistrianos as he saw the gluepots sitting on top of the table. Beside them were a couple of smaller vessels that proved full of ink, along with the square iron plate the smith had given to Abraham. A low iron frame had been put in place around it. The only other thing on the table was a large paintbrush.

  The frustration returned. Here were parchment and ink, right enough, but Argyros could not see how the rest of the strange array contributed to making handbills. It would take a score of scribes to turn out as many as Abraham had parchments, and in that case they would be far from identical with one another.

  There were four shelves over the table, each with a dozen small clay jars on it (except for the topmost, which had thirteen). Only because they were close to the parchments and glue, Argyros lifted down one of them. He turned it around in his hand and almost dropped it—on the side turned to the wall was written a large majuscule delta: Δ. He tore the stopper off, held the lamp over it, and peered in.

  At first he saw nothing that looked like a delta. The jar held a number of small rectangular blocks of clay, each about as long as the last joint of his middle finger but not nearly so thick. He picked one up. Sure enough, there was a raised letter at one end. It was still black with ink. He lifted out another clay block. It also had a delta on it. So did the next and the next.

  No wonder Abraham was involved in the plot, Argyros thought. The potter was used to creating reliefwork of all kinds; letters would come as no challenge to him. And Leontios had said he was a Nestorian. He had reason to be hostile to Constantinople, which forced religious unity to go with the political unity it brought.

  Whistling tunelessly, the magistrianos put the jar back and chose another one from a couple of shelves higher up. This one was identified by a minuscule beta: β. Like the first, it was filled with those little blocks of fired clay. Argyros took one out, confidently expected to find a beta on one end of it. And so, in a way, he did, but reversed: .

  He thought a few uncharitable thoughts about the wits of anyone incompetent enough to make his letters backward. Certain it was a mistake, he removed several more clay blocks from the jar. They were all the same and all reversed.

  He frowned. That was going to a lot of effort to perpetuate an error. He poured all but one of the little clay lumps back into their jar, turned the last one over and over as he thought. He held it so close to his face that he had to look at it cross-eyed. It was still backward.

  He squeezed it between his thumb and index finger, as if trying to wring the answer from it by brute force. Naturally, and annoyingly, such treatment harmed the clay block not at all. It was harder on him. There was a square indentation in the meaty pad of his thumb from the base of the block. And on his forefinger—

  He stared at the perfect, unreversed beta pressed into his flesh. “Of course!” he exclaimed, startled into speaking aloud. “It’s like a signet ring, where everything has to be done backward to show up the right way in the wax.” The delta, he thought, had misled him because it was symmetrical.

  He dipped the backward beta into an inkpot, stamped it down on the tabletop, and grinned to see the letter appear right-side-to. He stamped it again and again. Each impression, inevitably, was just like all the rest. “This is how it’s done, all right,” he breathed.

  He discovered that the jars on the top two shelves contained minuscule letters (they were arranged in alphabetical order, to make finding each one easy), while their counterparts on the lower shelves all held majuscules. The extra jar on the highest board proved to have slightly smaller blocks of clay without any characters on them. They puzzled Argyros until he realized they had to be used to mark the spaces between words—because they were lower than their fellows, the ink that got on them would not appear on the parchment.

  Like a child with a new toy, he decided to spell out his own name. One by one, he selected the letters that went into it and set them on the iron plate, leaning them against the edge of the iron frame for security. Even so, they kept falling over. And that, he decided, was probably what the glue was for: spread over the surface of the plate, it would hold the blocks in place.

  He inked the brush, painted the tops of the letters, then pressed a sheet of parchment over them. The result made him burst into startled laughter. There on the parchment, rather raggedly aligned, were the nonsense words .

  He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, muttering “Idiot!” under his breath. He quickly rearranged the clay blocks; naturally, if the letters themselves were backward, their order had to be that way too, in order to appear correctly on the sheet. He felt like cheering when the second try rewarded him with a smeary Basil Argyros.

  He wondered what to compose next. Almost without conscious thought, the first words of the Gospel according to John came into his mind: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

  A letter at a time, the evangelist’s famous sentence took shape. Argyros suddenly stopped, halfway through, as the magnitude of what he was doing began to sink in. The Persians, with their petty subversion in Daras, were only pikers, and George Lakhanodrakon’s fear of the same at Constantinople seemed just as trivial.

  Of course John had been speaking of the divine Logos, Christ Himself, but his words rang with eerie aptness. These simple little blocks of clay could spell anything and make as many copies of it as one wanted. What power was more godlike than that?

  The magistrianos was so struck with awe that he did not pay any attention to the approaching footfalls in the alley behind Abraham’s shop. But the soft cry of alarm one of the newcomers raised on seeing the bar down from the door tore Argyros from his reverie. He cursed himself for his stupidity—the only reason all this dangerous paraphernalia was so openly displayed had to be that the Persians were going to reproduce another handbill tonight.

  There were three stout iron hooks-and-eyes screwed into the inside of the door panels and the doorframe. Abraham, evidently, was the sort of man who tied double knots in his sandal straps—and in his sandals, Argyros would have done the same. The potter’s caution was the only thing that saved him. He had just hooked the last closure when someone large heaved an ungentle shoulder against the door. It groaned but held.

  Familiar, throaty laughter came from the alleyway. “Is that you, dear Basil?” Mirrane called mockingly. “Where will you run now?”

  It was an excellent question. The pottery’s front door was barred on the outside, just as the back had been. So were the stout wooden shutters, which—damn Abraham—had locks on both inside and out.

  Mirrane let Argyros stew just long enough, then said, “Well it seems we shan’t raise Daras yet. A pity—but then, bagging one of the Emperor’s precious magistrianoi (oh yes, I know who you are!) is not the smallest prize either.”

  “You’re behind this!” he blurted. He had thought she was merely a pleasant distraction thrown his way by the real plotter—Shahin maybe, or Abraham, or Yesuyab, whom he had never seen.

  She might have been reading his thoughts. Bitterness edged her voice as she answered, “Aye, by the Good God Ormazd, I am! Did you think I lacked the wit or will because I am a woman? You’ll not be the first to pay for that mistake, nor the last.” She shifted from Greek to Persian and spoke to one of her henchmen: “I’ll waste no more time on this Roman. Burn the place down!”

  Someone let out a harsh protest in Arabic.

  “Don’t be a donkey, Abraham,” Mirrane snapped. “The noise of breaking in the door might bring the watch—we’re too close to the barracks to risk it. The King of Kings will pay you more than you would earn from this miserabl
e hovel in the next fifty years. Come on, Bahram, set the torch. The bigger the blaze, the more likely it is to destroy everything we need out of the way, Argyros included.

  “… Isn’t that right, Basil?” she added through the door.

  The magistrianos did not answer, but could not argue with her tactics. A very accomplished young woman indeed, he thought ruefully—and in such unexpected ways. He had no doubt several armed men would be waiting when smoke and flames drove him to try bursting out through the door. He could see Bahram’s torch flame flickering, hot and yellow, under the doorjam.

  But Mirrane, for all her ruthless efficiency, did not know everything. Along with his burglar’s pincers, Argyros had fetched a couple of the tightly corked clay pots he had passed off to her as sediment testers. Stooping, he set them at the base of the back door.

  His lamp was beginning to gutter, but it still held enough oil for his need. He touched the flame to the rags that ran through the stoppers. Those were soaked in fat themselves, and caught at once.

  As soon as the magistrianos saw they were burning, he put down the lamp and dove behind Abraham’s counter. He clapped his hands over his ears.

  It was not a moment too soon. The hellpowder bombs went off, the explosion of the first touching off the second. The blast was like the end of the world. Shattered bits of pottery flew round the shop, deadly as slingers’ bullets. The double charge of the charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter mix the Franco-Saxons had discovered flung the door off its hinges, hurling it outward at Mirrane and her companions.

  Dagger in hand, Argyros scrambled to his feet. His head was ringing, but at least he knew where the thunderbolt had come from. To Mirrane and her friends in the alleyway, it was a complete and hideous surprise.

  The magistrianos charged through the cloud of thick, brimstone-smelling smoke that hung in the shattered doorway. He discovered one of Mirrane’s henchmen at once, by almost tripping over him. The fellow was down and writhing, his hands clutched around a long splinter of wood driven into his groin. He was no danger and would not last long.

  Several other men went pelting down the alley as fast as they could run. Through half-deafened ears, Argyros heard their shouts of terror: “Devils!” “Demons!” “Mother of God, protect me from Satan!” “It’s Ahriman, come to earth!” That last had to come from a Persian: Ahriman was Ormazd’s wicked foe in their dualist faith.

  One of the nearby shadows moved. Argyros whirled. “A trick I did not know about, it seems,” Mirrane said quietly. Her self-possession was absolute; she might have been talking of the weather. She went on, “The game is yours this time, after all.”

  “And you with it!” he cried, springing toward her.

  “Sorry, no.” As she spoke, she opened the door behind her, stepped through, and slammed it in Argyros’s face. The bar locked it just as he crashed into it. He rebounded, dazed at the impact. Mirrane said, “We’ll meet again, you and I.” He heard her beat a rapid retreat.

  Only then did he think of anything beyond the predicament from which he had just escaped. As Mirrane had said, Abraham’s pottery was only a block from the main barracks of Daras. Already Argyros could hear cries of alarm and then the disciplined pound of a squadron running his way.

  “Here!” he shouted.

  The sqaud-leader came puffing up, torch held high. He gaped at the wrecked doorway to Abraham’s shop. “What’s all this about?”

  “No time to explain,” the magistrianos snapped. He gave the underofficer his rank; the man stiffened to attention. “Have some of your troopers break down that door,” Argyros ordered, pointing to the one through which Mirrane had escaped. He quickly described her, then sent the rest of the squad around the corner to where the front entrance of the house or store or whatever it was let out.

  They returned empty-handed. At Argyros’s urging, Leontios sealed the gates of Daras within the hour, and for the next two days the garrison forces searched the town from top to bottom. They caught Abraham hiding with Yesuyab the tailor, but of Mirrane no sign whatever turned up.

  Argyros was disappointed, but somehow not surprised.

  “Very clever, Basil, your use of the map to ferret out the nest of spies,” George Lakhanodrakon said.

  “Thank you, sir.” Argyros’s office chair creaked as he leaned back in it. “I’m only annoyed it took me as long as it did. I should have seen that the Persians deliberately avoided putting their parchments in certain parts of Daras so as to give Leontios no reason to search in them. But it wasn’t until I found out that Yesuyab’s tanning-works (and the gluemaker’s next to it), Abraham’s pottery, and Shahin’s tavern were all in the exact centers of the empty areas that things began to make sense.”

  “A pretty piece of reasoning, no matter how you reached it.” The Master of Offices hesitated, clearing his throat, and went on, “All the same, I’m not entirely sure the situation you left behind satisfies me.”

  “I’m not certain what else I could have done, your illustriousness,” the magistrianos said politely. “No more inflammatory handbills are appearing in Daras, the town was calm when I left it, and I discovered the means by which the Persians were producing so many copies of the same text.” Excitement put warmth in his voice. “A means, I might add, which could be used to—”

  “Yes, yes,” the Master of Offices interrupted. “I don’t intend to slight you, my boy, not at all. As I said, you did splendidly. But all the same, there is no final resolution of the problem underlying this particular spot of trouble. It could crop up again anywhere in the east, in Kirkesion or Amida or Martyropolis, the more so as the tricksy Persian baggage in charge of the scheme slipped through your net.”

  “There you speak truly, sir,” Argyros said. Mirrane’s getaway still rankled. Also, it piqued him that the enjoyment she showed in his arms had probably been assumed to lull him. It had seemed very real at the time, more, he thought, than with any woman he had known since Helen. He hoped her parting warning would come true; one way or another, he wanted to test himself against her again.

  He went on, “In any case, a second outbreak is not likely to be as serious as the first was. Now that we know how the thing is done, the local officials should be able to search out clandestine letterers on their own. And if the government issues them sets of clay archetypes on their own, they can easily counter any lies the Persians try spreading.”

  “Issue them archetypes of their own?” Lakhanodrakon spread his hands in something approaching horror. “Don’t you think this is a secret as dangerous as hellpowder? It should be restricted in the same way, and the production of documents written with it limited to the imperial chancery here in the city.”

  “I’d like to believe I could convince you that this new way of lettering has more applications than simply the political.”

  The Master of Offices’ scowl was like a stormcloud. “My concern is for the safety of the state. You’d need a powerful demonstration to alter my opinion here.”

  “I suppose so,” Argyros said with a sigh. He seemed to change the subject: “Will you still be giving another reading next week, sir?”

  Lakhanodrakon’s frown vanished. He was composing an epic on Constans II’s triumph over the Lombards in Italia, in iambic trimeters modeled after those George of Pisidia had used in his poems celebrating Herakleios’s victories. “Yes, from the third book,” he said. “I hope you’ll be there?”

  “I’m looking forward to it. I only wonder how many of your guests will be familiar with what you’ve already written.”

  “To some degree, a fair number, I suppose. Many will have been at the earlier readings last year and this past winter, and of course the manuscript will have circulated somewhat. I intend to summarize what’s gone before, anyhow.”

  “No need for that.” Argyros opened a desk drawer and handed a pile of thin papyrus codices to Lakhanodrakon.

  “What on earth are these?”

  “Books one and two of your Italiad, sir,” Argyros said innocentl
y. “I’ve given you thirty-five copies, which I believe will be enough for you to pass one on to everyone who is coming. If not, I still have the letters in their frames. I would be happy to make as many more as you need.”

  A couple of days ago Argyros would have sung a different tune. He did not fret about the cost of seven hundred sheets of papyrus. The stuff was cheap in Constantinople, because the government used so much of it. And finding a potter from Mesopotamia who could be made to understand how to make the clay archetypes had not been difficult for one who knew the city as the magistrianos did.

  But Argyros was still squinting from the unaccustomed effort of putting twenty pages of poetry into frames a letter at a time—backward. Anthimos had helped, some, but he never did get the hang of it, and the magistrianos spent almost as much time fixing his secretary’s mistakes as he did making progress of his own. After a while, he had excused the hapless scribe. And then, halfway through page eighteen, he had run out of omegas and had to rush back to the potter to get more.

  It was all worth it now, though, watching the astonishment on the Master of Offices’ face turn to delight. “Thirty-five copies?” Lakhanodrakon whispered in wonder. “Why, saving the Bible and Homer, I don’t know of thirty-five copies of any work here in the capital. Perhaps Thucydides or Plato or St. John Chrysostom—and me. I feel ashamed to join the company you’ve put me in, Basil.”

  “It’s a very good poem, sir,” the magistrianos said loyally. “Don’t you see now? With this new lettering, we can make so many copies of all our authors that they’ll never again risk being lost because mice ate the last remaining one three days before it was due to be redone. Not just literature, either—how much better would our armies fare if every officer carried his own copy of Maurice’s Strategikon? And lawyers and churchmen could be sure their texts matched one another, for all would come from the same original. Ship captains would be able to take charts and sailing guides from port to port—”