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.

“We are here talking together,” Khesphmois pointed out. “That is something new.”

The master carpenter, Argyros knew, was to some degree an ally, if only because this meeting set his prestige on the line. The magistrianos had trouble caring. Memories of the way he had abandoned his self-imposed celibacy kept crowding in on him. The act itself shamed him less than the thoughtless way he had yielded to his animal urges.

Hergeus had said something to him while he was woolgathering. Frowning, he pulled himself back to the matter at hand. “I’m sorry, sir, I missed that.”

“Seeing things we can’t again, eh?” But the concrete-pourer was smiling still, in a way that invited everyone to share his amusement. “Well, I just want to know how you can make the risk of death and maiming worth the niggardly wages we got for work on the pharos.”

“We pay as well as anyone else,” Dekanos snapped, nettled.

“But I can make chairs and cabinets without the fear of turning into a red splash on the ground if I sneeze at the wrong time,” Khesphmois said.

“Would higher pay bring you back to the pharos?” Argyros asked.

The three guild representatives looked at one another. Then they all looked at Mouamet Dekanos. “Out of the question,” he said. “The precedent that would set is pernicious.”

“It’s not just the silver, anyhow,” Miysis said. “My lads would sooner do other work, and that’s all there is to it. We’re tired of using guild fees to pay for funerals. We had as many in the work on the pharos as in a couple of generations before.”

“Enough silver might tempt some concrete-spreaders back,” Hergeus said. “The young ones, the bolder ones, the ones with families to worry over. The ones up to their chins in debt, too, I suppose.”

“Aye, some of us, too, I would say,” Khesphmois agreed. “Enough silver.”

“Yes, and let us grant your first demand here and what would come of it?” Dekanos said. “You’d make another and another till you’d hold out for a nomisma every hour on the hour. Who could afford to pay you then?”

Hergeus chuckled. “It’s a problem I’d like to have.”

“It’s not one the powerful men of the city would like to have,” Dekanos retorted. That brought things down to basics, Argyros thought. Naturally Dekanos worried first about Alexandria’s upper classes; they were the men he had to keep happy. Even the Augustal prefect needed to worry about what they thought, though his responsibility was to the Emperor. If they turned against him, what could he accomplish?

That was also true of the guilds, however, at least this time, although Dekanos seemed unwilling to recognize it. Argyros did not care one way or the other. All he wanted to see was the pharos getting taller again. He said, “I think we can keep the problem of precedent from getting out of hand if we establish a special rate of pay for the specific task of rebuilding the lighthouse. Then we will not have to worry about it again unless the earth trembles again, which God prevent.”

“I don’t care what we get paid,” Miysis said. “So long as we have any other work at all, we won’t go near the cursed pharos. Money’s no good to a dead man. And I’d like to see you make it go up without us stonecutters.”

Argyros felt like kicking the stubborn guildsman under the table. “Purely for the sake of discussion,” he said to Khesphmois and Hergeus, “how much of a boost in pay would it take to bring your comrades out once more?”

The two locals spoke together in rapid Coptic. Khesphmois switched to Greek: “Twice as much, and not a single copper follis less.”