Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  Something had jingled as the man bonelessly went over. There was a well-filled purse at his belt. The magistrianos tucked it into his own beltpouch and, sighing, went to look for a guardsman.

  What with explanations, formal statements, and such, Argyros did not see his bed until dawn was beginning to lighten the eastern horizon. The sun streaming through the window woke him much sooner than he wanted. He splashed cool water on his face, but that did nothing to relieve the gritty feeling in his eyes, the tiredness that made him fumble as he laced up his sandals.

  He also had trouble remembering why his pouch was heavier than it should have been. Digging, he found the little leather sack he had taken from his assailant. The nomismata that rolled into his hand were smaller and thicker than the goldpieces minted in Constantinople. Instead of the familiar CONOB mintmark, they bore the legend , for Alexandria.

  The magistrianos nodded, unsurprised. He should have figured Mirrane would have more than one string for her bow. Woman or not, she knew her business. It was unfortunate, he thought, that part of that business was getting rid of him.

  The Emperor attended the second session of the ecumenical council, as he had the first. This time his retinue included fewer courtiers and more imperial guardsmen. Their gilded armor and scarlet capes were hardly less splendid than the costumes of the great prelates whom they faced, impassive, over their painted shields.

  The hint of force, however, did nothing to deter Arsakios. He returned to the same respectful attack he had launched against the images the previous day. He even allowed a sardonic grin to flicker on his lips as he reiterated his theological paradox.

  But his amusement slipped when Eutropios was quick to reply. The patriarch of Constantinople surreptitiously glanced down at his notes from time to time, but his presentation of the ideas hammered out only the night before was clear and lucid. George Lakhanodrakon paid him the highest compliment: “I didn’t think the old fraud had it in him.”

  “Amazing what fear will do,” Argyros agreed.

  Yet anyone who had expected the patriarch of Alexandria and his followers to yield tamely to Eutropios’s defense of images and their veneration was wrong. No sooner had Eutropios finished than half a dozen eastern bishops were shouting at each other for the privilege of replying.

  “Why should I hear you?” Eutropios thundered from the pulpit as Nikephoros III watched. “By denying the reality of the Incarnation, you deny Christ’s perfect humanity and brand youself Monophysites!”

  “Liar!” “Fool!” “Impious idiot!” “How can base matter depict divine holiness?” Turmoil reigned for several minutes as iconoclasts and iconophiles hurled abuse at one another. The two sides went from there to shaking fists and croziers, and seemed about to repeat on a larger scale the squabbling that had gone on in Eutropios’s apartments.

  The Emperor Nikephoros uttered a low-voiced command. His bodyguards advanced two paces, their ironshod boots clattering on the stone floor. Sudden silence fell. The Emperor spoke: “The truth should be sought through contemplation and reason, not in this childish brawling.” He nodded to Eutropios. “Let them all speak, that errors may be demonstrated and those who wander be returned to the proper path.”

  The patricarch bowed in obedience to his master. The debate began in more orderly fashion. Argyros listened for a while and was impressed to find that many of the points the opponents of images raised had been anticipated the night before. When an iconoclast bishop from Palestine, for example, claimed that icons were of the same substance as their prototypes, the skinny little man who had thought of that problem used elegant Aristotelean logic to deny their consubstantiality.

  Biblical quotations and texts taken from the church fathers flew like rain. After a while, Argyros regretfully tore himself away from the argumentation and left for the Praitorion to try to catch up on the work he had neglected for the sake of the council.

  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 then 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. He 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.

  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 newfired 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,” Anthi
mos 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.