He was surprised when Zois dipped her head in the same elegant acknowledgment one of those noblewomen might have used. He had a moment to notice how gracefully her neck curved. Then Khesphmois repeated, “Come along, you.” Without waiting to see whether Argyros would follow, the master carpenter stamped out into the street.
The magistrianos hurried after him. “Good-bye,” Zois called. “Good-bye, the both of you.” That nearly brought Argyros up short, not so much because she was polite enough to include him but because she had used the dual number, the special-and most archaic-grammatical form reserved for pairs.
Even coming from his imagined noblewoman, the dual would have sounded pretentious. Hearing it from an Egyptian carpenter’s wife was strange indeed. Argyros wondered where she could have learned it. Thinking back, he decided that was the first time she became an individual for him.
At the time, though, the thought was gone in an eyeblink, because he had to hustle along to catch up with Khesphmois. The master carpenter was short and stocky but moved with a grim determination that Argyros, even with his longer legs, was hard-pressed to match.
He tried several times to make small talk. Khesphmois answered only in grunts. The one thing Argyros really wanted to say-”Your wife is an interesting woman”-he could not, not to a man he had known less than an hour and one who was no friend of his. He soon walked on in silence, which seemed to suit Khesphmois well enough.
The master carpenter might also have been impervious to heat, no mean asset in Alexandria. He tramped along the raised road that still marked the path of the original, narrow Heptastadion, then east on the southern coast of the island of Pharos to the base of the lighthouse there.
The pharos, even in its present half-rebuilt state, grew more awe-inspiring with every step Argyros took toward it. He had long thought no building could be grander than Constantinople’s great church of Hagia Sophia, but the sheer vertical upthrust of the pharos had a brusque magnificence of its own. Already it was taller than the top of Hagia Sophia’s central dome, and would reach twice that height if it ever was finished.
Khesphmois craned his neck at the towering pillar, too. “It only goes to show,” he said, “that Alexandria breeds real men.”
Argyros snorted, suspecting locals had been using that joke on newcomers for all the sixteen centuries since Sostratos first erected (coming up with that word made the magistrianos snort all over again) the phallos. Pharos, he corrected himself sternly, ordering his mind to stop playing tricks with words. Suddenly he felt every day of his two years of celibacy.
His mental order proved easier to carry out than he had expected. As he and Khesphmois approached the lighthouse, he began to take more notice of the line of men marching in front of it. Some of them carried placards. Argyros frowned, puzzled. “Are they mendicant monks?” he asked the master carpenter. “They are not in monastic garb.”
Khesphmois threw back his head and laughed. “Hardly. Come with me yet a little farther, and you will see.”
Shrugging, the magistrianos obeyed. He saw that not all the men by the pharos were marching, after all. The ones who were just standing around looked like a squad of light infantry-they had no body armor, but wore helmets and carried shields and spears. They also looked monumentally bored. One trooper, in fact, was fast asleep, leaning back against the lighthouse’s lowest course of stonework.
The marchers seemed hardly more excited than the soldiers; Argyros was certain they were doing something they had done many times before. Then he drew close enough to read their placards, and doubted in rapid succession his conclusions and his eyesight.
THIS LABOR IS TOO DANGEROUS FOR ANY MAN TO CARRY OUT, one sign said, PALTRY PAY FOR DEADLY WORK, another shrieked, CARPENTERS AND CONCRETE-SPREADERS WITHDRAW TOGETHER, shouted a third. Others were in Coptic, but the magistrianos had no doubt they were equally inflammatory.
“Why don’t the soldiers drive them away?” he demanded of Khesphmois. “Why are they here, if not for that? Have the guilds bribed the commander of the watch to let this sedition go on?” He was shocked to the core. Such an insolent display at Constantinople-or any other town he knew- would instantly have landed the marchers in prison.
“At least your questions are to the point,” the master carpenter said. “A good thing, since you have so many of them.”
“May your answers match my questions, then.” Argyros felt brief pride at his sardonic response; he did not want Khesphmois to know just how disturbed he was.
“Very well,” Khesphmois said. “The soldiers are here mostly to see that the marchers do no pilfering. And no, we have not bribed the watch commander, though I must say we tried. But Cyril is an honest man, worse luck for us.”
By then, the magistrianos suspected that trying to hide his shock was a losing battle. Anywhere else in the Empire, if artisans refused to work-in itself unlikely-soldiers would simply force them to return. But Mouamet Dekanos struck Argyros as being bright enough to try that if he thought it would work. That meant, Argyros concluded unhappily, that Khesphmois and the other guild leaders really could immobilize Alexandria if these weird privileges of theirs were tampered with.
“Egypt,” Argyros muttered. Nowhere else in the Empire would such nonsense as Pcheris vs. Sarapion have dragged on for seven hundred years, either. The magistrianos gathered himself and turned back to Khesphmois. “Why,” he asked carefully, “have all you workers chosen to withdraw?”
The master carpenter looked at him with something like respect. “Do you know, you are the first official who ever bothered to ask that. The prefect and his staff just told us to go back to work, the way they do during a usual anakhoresis. Any other time we would, eventually. But not now. Not here. So they have waited, not daring to set soldiers on us and not knowing what else to do, and we have stayed away and nothing has got done.”
That sounded appallingly likely to Argyros. If a contested inheritance could stay contested for seven centuries, what were a couple of years here or there in putting a pharos back together? Delay would be a way of life for the local bureaucrats, here even more than in most of the Empire. Well, one of the things magistrianoi were for was shaking up officials too set in their ways.
“I’m asking,” the magistrianos said. “Why haven’t you gone back to work?”
“By Saint Cyril, I’ll show you,” Khesphmois exclaimed. “Follow me, if you’ve the stomach-and the head-for it.”
He walked past the sign-carriers, waving to a couple from the carpenters’ guild. The watchmen only nodded at him; by now, Argyros supposed, they must know him as well as their own officers. The magistrianos, who was on their side, got more hard looks than the master carpenter.
Khesphmois walked into the pharos. Argyros followed still. Their footsteps echoed in the gloom within. Khesphmois hurried over to the spiral stair just inside the doorway and started up.
The stairway was almost as dark as the chamber that led to it, though window openings set at intervals into the thick wall gave enough light for the magistrianos to see where he was putting his feet. The idea of stumbling and rolling down so long a stairway made his sweat turn cold.
By the time he reached the top even of the truncated pharos, Argyros had sweat in plenty. Ahead of him, Khesphmois still seemed fresh. The magistrianos muttered to himself as he panted up the last few steps. His time behind a desk in Constantinople was making him soft.
Alexandria’s usual northerly breeze helped cool him while he got his breath back. He turned his back to the breeze and peered across the Great Harbor at the city. The view was superb. He even towered high above the ancient obelisks- “Cleopatra’s Needles,” the locals called them, but they were older than that-not far from the Heptastadion’s southern root.