Laodicea

Laodicea on the Lycus is the most self-sufficient city in Asia. It mints its own coin, breeds the dense black wool the whole province wants, and trains physicians whose eye-salve is famous as far as Rome. Whatever the city has ever needed, it has provided from its own resources. It says so, often.

Markos is twenty-four, a clerk in a small banking office at the lower end of the wool-correspondence trade. He has no patron, no reserves, and a careful man's habit of keeping exact account of what everything costs.

Then a traveller comes up the valley road on an ordinary piece of business, and says one thing in passing that is not business at all. Markos writes it in the margin of the ledger and marks over it, as he marks over everything.

That evening, alone, he does not mark over it again.

Alexandros grades the season's first black wool before breakfast, knows its weight and its price in the same instant, and corrects his clerk's errors without raising his voice. He is a banker of Laodicea and a genuinely good man — generous, competent, liked. His family has a phrase, worn smooth with use, for how it has always met whatever came: from our own resources.

The assembly meets in a fine house under hanging bronze lamps that give the room rather more light than it needs. At home, his wife tends a single small lamp no one but herself has any reason to see.

Then a young freedman from the processing yards walks in, and cannot afford the gift the assembly has quietly come to expect. He is given food, and a coin, and directions to a cheaper gathering.

He does not leave.