Departures

The magistrianos waited for Khesphmois to send his wife away for interfering in men’s business. As he would learn, though, Egyptians were easier about such things than was usual at Constantinople. And even in the capital, men who exercised all the control over wives legally theirs were most of them unhappily wed.

“Can you afford to be wrong?” Zois demanded. Her hand went to the silk collar of her blue linen tunic. Only someone well off could have afforded the ornament. “If you are wrong, we will lose everything, and not just us but all the carpenters and all the other guilds. If someone comes all the way from Constantinople to see to this business, he will not just up and leave.”

“Your lady wife”- Argyros gave her his best bow- “is right. I am not especially wise, but I am especially stubborn. I should also tell you I am not a good man to sink in a canal, in case the thought crossed your mind. Magistrianoi look after their own.”

“No,” Khesphmois said absently; that he was still more intent on arguing with Zois made Argyros believe him. To her, his hands on hips in irritation, the master carpenter went on, “What would you have me do, then? Call off the anakhoresis now?”

“Of course not,” she answered at once. “But why not show him the reasons for it? He is from far away; what can he know of how things are here in Alexandria? When he sees, when he hears, maybe he will have the influence in the capital to make the prefect and his henchmen easier on us. What have you to lose by trying?”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Khesphmois mocked. “Maybe I will run into a crocodile and spend the next hundred years basking on a sandbank, too, but I don’t lose any sleep over it.” Still, for his wife’s last question he had no good answer, and so, scowling, he growled to Argyros, “Come along, then, if you must. I’ll take you to the pharos, and we’ll find out if you have eyes in your head to see with.”

Teus and a couple of other carpenters started to protest, but Khesphmois shouted them down in a Coptic that sounded pungent. “Thank you,” the magistrianos said to him, and got only another scowl for an answer. The magistrianos turned to Zois and bowed again. “And thank you, my lady.” He spoke as formally as if to a Constantinopolitan noblewoman, as much in the hope of vexing Khesphmois as for any other reason.

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.