Agent of Byzantium

VII: Etos Kosmou 6829

The man next to Basil Argyros in Priskos’s tavern near the church of St. Mary Hodegetria took a long pull at his cup, then doubled up in a terrible coughing fit, spraying a good part of his drink over the magistrianos. “Kyrie eleison!” the fellow gasped: “Lord, have mercy! My throat’s on fire!” He kept on choking and wheezing.

Argyros’s eyebrows went up in alarm. “Innkeeper! You, Priskos!” he called. “Fetch me water and an emetic, and quickly! I think this man is poisoned.” He pounded the fellow on the back.

“Sir, I doubt that very much,” replied Priskos, a handsome young man with a red-streaked black beard. He hurried over nonetheless, responding to the sharp command in Argyros’s voice, a vestige of his tenure as an officer in the imperial army before he came to Constantinople.

“Just look at him,” Argyros said, dabbing without much luck at the wet spots on his tunic. But he sounded doubtful; the man’s spasms were subsiding. Not only that; several of the men in the tavern, regulars by the look of them, wore broad grins, and one was laughing out loud.

“Sorry there, pal,” the coughing man said to Argyros. “It’s just I never had a drink like that in all my born days. Here, let my buy you one, so you can see for yourself.” He tossed a silver coin to the taverner. Argyros’s eyebrow rose again; that was a two-miliaresion piece, a twelfth of a gold nomisma, and a very stiff price for a drink.

“My thanks,” the magistrianos said, and repeated himself when the drink was in front of him. He eyed it suspiciously. It looked like watered wine. He smelled it. It had a faint fruity smell, not nearly so strong as wine’s. He picked up the cup. The regulars were grinning again. He drank. Mindful of what had happened to the chap next to him, he took a small sip. The stuff tasted rather like wine, more like wine than anything else, he thought. When he swallowed, though, it was as the man had said—he thought he’d poured flames down his gullet. Tears filled his eyes. Careful as usual of his dignity, he kept his visible reaction to a couple of small coughs. Everyone else in the place looked disappointed.

“That’s—quite something,” he said at last; anyone who knew him well would have guessed from his restrained reaction how impressed he was. He took another drink. This time he was better prepared. His eyes watered again, but he swallowed without choking. He asked the innkeeper, “What do you call this drink? And where do you get it? I’ve never had anything like it.”

“Just what I said,” the fellow next to him declared. “Why, I—” He was off on a story Argyros did not want to listen to. Anything new and interesting Argyros wanted to hear about; his fellow drinker’s tale was neither.

Luckily, Priskos was proud of his new stock in trade, and eager to talk about it. “I call it yperoinos, sir.” Superwine was a good name for the stuff, Argyros thought. At his nod, the innkeeper went on, “We make it in the back room of the tavern here. You see I’m an honest man—I don’t tell you it comes from India or Britain.”

A good thing too, Argyros said, but only to himself: I’d know you were lying. No customs men were better at their job or kept more meticulous records than the ones at the imperial capital. If anything as remarkable as this dragon’s brew had entered Constantinople, word would have spread fast. The magistrianos drank some more. Warmth spread from his middle.

He finished the cup and held it out for a refill. “And one for my friend here,” he added a moment later, pointing to the man who had inadvertently introduced him to the potent new drink. He fumbled in his beltpouch for the right coins. They seemed to keep dodging his fingers. By trial and error, he found out how big a draught of superwine he could swallow without choking. The tip of his nose began to turn numb. Usually that was a sign he was getting drunk, but that could hardly be possible, not when he was just finishing his second cup. He could drink all night in a tavern and still handle himself well. Indignant at himself and at his nose, he waved to the innkeeper again. He had not gone far into the third cup when he realized how tight he was. By then it was too late. He prided himself on being a moderate man, but the superwine had snuck up on him. The more he drank, too, the easier the stuff was to drink. Feeling most expansive, he ordered a fresh round for everyone in the place, the taverner included. Cheers rang out. He had never, he thought, drunk with such a splendid lot of fellows.

He fell asleep with a finger’s width of drink still in the bottom of his cup. Anthimos stuck his head into Argyros’s office. “His illustriousness is here to see you,” the secretary declared, and seemed to take mordant pleasure at his boss’s groan. Mordant pleasure, Argyros sometimes thought, was the only kind Anthimos really enjoyed.

George Lakhanodrakon came in while the magistrianos was still pulling himself together. “A fine morning to you, Basil,” the Master of Offices said cheerfully; only the slightest eastern accent flavored his Greek. Then he got a good look at Argyros and at once went from superior to concerned friend. “Good heavens, man! Are you well?”

“I feel exactly like death,” Argyros replied. He spoke quietly, but his voice hurt his ears; his eyes were vein-tracked and found the sun oppressively bright. His mouth tasted as if the sewers had drained through it and, judging by the state of his digestion, maybe they had. He said, “I slept in a tavern last night.”

Lakanodrakon’s jaw fell. “You did what?”

“I know what you’re thinking.” Argyros shook his head and wished he hadn’t. “Aii! I haven’t had a hangover like this since—” He paused, trying to recall the last time he’d hurt himself so badly. The memory brought sudden sharp pain, though it was a dozen years old now: not since he drank with Riario the Italian doctor after his wife and infant son died of smallpox. He forced his mind away from that. “Do you want to hear something truly absurd? I had only four cups.”

Concern returned to the Master of Offices’s face. “And you’re in this state? You ought to see a physician.”

“No, no,” Argyros said impatiently. “The innkeeper told me it was something new and strong.” His eyes went to the icon on the wall, an image of the patron saint of changes. “By St. Mouamet, he wasn’t wrong, either.” He dipped his head and crossed himself, showing respect for the image of the saint. Lakhanodrakon was eyeing the image, too. He was a pious man, but one who also turned his piety to practical ends. “Just as they were in Mouamet’s time, the Persians are stirring again.”

That was plenty to alarm Argyros, decrepit though he felt. “Troops on the move?” he demanded. The Roman Empire and Persia, Christ and Ormazd, were ancient rivals, dueling every generation, it seemed, for mastery in the near east. Few wars were waged on the scale of the one that had forced Mouamet to Constantinople, but any attack would lay provinces waste.

“Nothing quite so bad, praise God,” Lakhanodrakon answered, following Argyros’s thought perfectly.

“There’s trouble in the Caucasus, though.”

“When isn’t there?” Argyros replied and drew a cynical chuckle from the Master of Offices. Precisely because all-out war between them could be so ruinous, Rome and Persia often dueled for advantage on the fringes of their empires, intriguing among the client kings of the mountains between the Black and Caspian seas and the tribal chieftains of the Arabian peninsula. “What have you heard now?” the magistrianos asked.

“It’s Alania,” Lakhanodrakon said; Argyros abruptly realized this was what the Master of Offices had come to see him about. He wished Lakhanodrakon had named a different principality. Alania really mattered to both Rome and Persia, because the most important passes from the Caucasus up into the steppe were there. A prince of Alania who went bad could let the nomads in and channel them toward one empire or the other.

The magistrianos asked, “Is Prince Goarios thinking of going over to sun-worship, then?”

“God may know what Goar is thinking, but I doubt if anyone else does, Goar himself included.”

Lakhanodrakon betrayed his eastern origin by leaving the Greek suffix off the prince’s name. After a moment, the Master of Offices went on, “Truth to tell, I have very little information of any sort coming out of Alania, less than I should. I thought I would send you to find out how things are there.”

“Alania, eh? I’ve never been in the Caucasus,” Argyros murmured. He glanced again at the image of St. Mouamet. His life, it seemed, was about to see one more change.

That thought led to another, as yet only half-formed. “I suppose I’ll go in as a merchant.”

“Whatever you like, of course, Basil.” George Lakhanodrakon valued results more than methods, which made him a good man to work for.

Still thinking out loud, Argyros mused, “I ought to have something new and interesting to sell too, to get me noticed at Goarios’s court.” The magistrianos rubbed his temples; it was hard to make his wits work, with his head pounding the way it was. He snapped his fingers. “I have it! What better than this popskull drink that has me cringing at my own shadow?”

“Is it really as vicious as that?” Lakhanodrakon waved the question aside. “Never mind. I think you have a good idea there, Basil. Nothing would make Goar happier than a new-way to get drunk, unless you could figure out how to bottle a woman’s cleft.”

“If I knew that one, I’d be too rich to work here.” But Argyros, headache or no, focused too quickly and thoroughly on the problem he had been set to leave much room for jokes. “Superwine ought to be a good way to pry answers out of people too; they’re drunk before they know it—I certainly was, anyhow. The more anyone wants to talk or sing or carry on, the more I’ll learn.”

“Yes, of course. I knew in my heart you were the proper man to whom to give this task, Basil. Now my head also sees why that’s so.” It was Lakhanodrakon’s turn to glance again at the icon of St. Mouamet.

“When something new comes up, you know what it’s good for.”

“Thank you, sir.” Argyros knew the Master of Offices was thinking of such things as hellpowder and the archetypes. He did not believe Lakhanodrakon knew of his role in showing that a dose of cow pox could prevent smallpox. He claimed no credit there; losing his family was too high a price for glory. As he had so often before, he shoved that thought down and returned to the business at hand. “I’m off to Priskos’s wineshop, then.”

“Excellent, excellent.” Lakhanodrakon hesitated, added, “Bring back a bottle for me, will you?”

Argyros rode east down the Mese from the Praitorion to the imperial palaces. There he picked up a squad of excubitores, reasoning that Priskos might need persuading to part with the secret of his new drink. Having a few large, muscular persuaders along seemed a good idea. For their part, the imperial bodyguards had trouble believing the assignment that had fallen into their laps.

“You’re taking us to a tavern, sir? On duty?” one trooper said, scrambling to his feet as if afraid Argyros might change his mind. “I thought I’d get orders like that in heaven, but no place else.”

The magistrianos led his little band north through the Augusteion. The morning sun turned the light-brown sandstone exterior of Hagia Sophia to gold. Still, that exterior was plain when compared to the glories within.

The church of St. Mary Hodegetria lay a few furlongs east and north of Hagia Sophia. It was close by the seawall; as he approached, Argyros heard the waves of the Sea of Marmara slap against stone. None of Constantinople was more than a couple of miles from the sea, so that sound pervaded the city, but here it was foreground rather than background.

Argyros had to use the church as a base from which to cast about a bit to find Priskos’s tavern. It was not one of his usual pothouses; he’d stopped in more or less by accident while on his way back to the Praitorion from the seawall gate of St. Barbara. He got no help finding the place from the locals, who had a tendency to disappear as soon as they spotted the gilded shields and long spears the excubitores carried.

The magistrianos spotted an apothecary’s shop and grunted in satisfaction—Priskos’s was only a couple of doors down. Argyros turned to the excubitores. “Follow me in. I’ll stand you all to a couple of drinks. Back me if you need to, but St. Andreas help you if you break the place apart for the sport of it.”

The soldiers loudly promised good behavior. Knowing the breed, Argyros also knew how little promises meant. He hoped for the best and hoped Priskos would cooperate.

The taverner was sweeping the floor when Argyros came in. So early in the day, only a couple of customers were in the place, nodding over winecups. Looking up from his work, Priskos recognized the magistrianos. “Good morning to you, sir,” he said, smiling. “How are you tod—” He stopped abruptly, the smile freezing on his face, as the excubitores tramped in and plunked themselves down at a pair of tables.

“Fetch my friends a jar of good Cypriot, if you’d be so kind,” Argyros said. To remove any possible misunderstanding, he handed Priskos a tremissis, a thin gold coin worth a third of a nomisma. “I expect this will even pay for two jars, since they’ll likely empty the first.”

“I think it should,” Priskos said dryly; for a man still in his twenties, he did not show much of what he was thinking. He brought the jar and eight cups on a large tray; while he was serving the excubitores, one of his other customers took the opportunity to sidle out the door.

Once the soldiers were attended to, Priskos turned back to Argyros. “And now, sir, what can I do for your” His tone was wary, no longer professionally jolly.

Argyros gave his name and title. Priskos looked warier yet; no one, no matter how innocent, wanted a magistrianos prying into his affairs. Argyros said, “I’d be grateful if you showed me how you make your yperoinos.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” Try as he would, the innkeeper could no longer keep frustrated rage from his voice. “Just when I begin to work my trade up to where I can feed my family and me with it, somebody with a fancy rank comes to steal it from me.”

The excubitores started to get up from their seats. Argyros waved them down. “You misunderstand. What stock of yours I buy, I will pay for,” he told Priskos. “If you use some process only you know (as I daresay you do, for I’ve had nothing like your superwine, and I’ve traveled from Ispania to Mesopotamia), the fisc will pay, and pay well, I promise. Can’t you see, man, what a boon such a strong drink could be to those in my service?”

“Pay, you say? How much?” Priskos still sounded scornful, but calculation had returned to this eyes. “By St. Andreas, sir, I’d not sell my secret to another taverner for a copper follis less than two pounds of gold.”

“A hundred forty-four nomismata, eh? You’d only get so much once or twice, I think; after that, people who wanted to learn would be able to pit those who knew against one another and lower the price. Still—” Argyros paused and asked, “Do you read and write?”

Priskos nodded.

“Good. Fetch me a pen and a scrap of parchment, aye, and a candle too, for wax.” When Argyros had the implements, he scrawled a few lines, then held the candle over the bottom of the parchment until several drops of wax fell. He thrust the signet ring he wore on his right index finger into the little puddle.

“Here. It’s no imperial chrysobull with a golden seal, but the staff at the offices of the Count of the Sacred Largesses, in whose charge the mint is, should accept it. Ask especially for Philip Kantakouzenos; he will recognize my hand.”

The taverner’s lips moved as he worked his way through the document. Argyros knew when he got to the key phrase, for he stopped reading. “Four pounds of gold!” he exclaimed. He studied the magistrianos with narrowed eyes. “You swear this is no fraud to deceive me?”

“By the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, by the Virgin, by St. Andreas who watches over the city, by St. Mouamet whom I have come to recognize as my own patron, I swear it. May they damn me to hell if I lie,” Argyros said solemnly. He crossed himself. So did Priskos and a couple of the excubitores. The innkeeper tugged at his beard for a moment, then tucked the document inside his tunic. “I’m your man. You deal fairly with me, and I will with you.” He held out his hand. Argyros shook it. “Good enough. Maybe you’ll fetch these good fellows that second jar of Cypriot, then, and show me what there is to see.”

Priskos set the wine before the soldiers, then went to a door at the back of the taproom. It had, Argyros saw, a stouter lock than the one that let out to the street. Priskos took a key from his belt. The lock clicked open. “Right this way, sir.”

Argyros felt his head start to swim as he stepped in. A small fire burned in a stone hearth sunk in the center of the floor. Above it hung a cauldron that, by the smell, was full of hot wine. The combination of heat and wine fumes was overpowering.

Over and around the cauldron was a copper contraption, a large cone of thin metal. The hearth’s high walls shielded most of it from direct exposure to the fire. The bottom of the cone had a lip that curved inward and lay in a basin of water shaped to match it.

Priskos put out the fire. “I would have had to do that soon anyway,” he told Argyros. He stuck his finger in the basin and nodded to himself. “The cooling bath is getting too warm.” He undid a plug; water from the basin ran into a groove in the floor and out under a door that led, Argyros supposed, to the alley behind the tavern. The innkeeper put the plug back, lifted a bucket, and poured fresh and presumably cool water into the basin till it was full again. The water level was just below the edge of the inner lip.

“I hope you’ll explain all this,” Argyros said.

“Yes, yes, of course.” Priskos splashed water on the copper cone till it was cool enough to touch. Then he picked it up. That inner lip also had a cork. He held a cup under it, pulled it out. An almost clear liquid flowed into the cup. “Taste,” he invited.

Argyros did. The way the stuff heated the inside of his mouth told him it was superwine. Priskos said, “I got the idea from my brother Theodore, who makes medicines.”

“Is he the one with the apothecary’s store a few doors down?”

“You saw it, eh? Yes, that’s him. One of the things he does is boil down honey to make it thicker and stronger.” Priskos paused. Argyros nodded; he knew druggists did that sort of thing. The innkeeper went on, “I thought what worked with honey might do the same with wine.”

The magistrianos waved at the curious equipment. “So why all this folderol?”

“Because it turned out I was wrong, sir, dead wrong. The more I boiled wine, the less kick whatever was left in the pot had. I was boiling out what makes wine strong, not—what word do I want?—concentrating it, you might say.”

Argyros ran his hands through his neat, graying beard. He thought for a moment, then said slowly, “What you’re doing here, then, is getting back what you were boiling away, is that right?”

The taverner eyed him with respect. “That’s just it, sir, just it exactly. Have you ever seen how, when you blow your warm breath on a cold window, the glass will steam over?” Again he waited for Argyros to nod before resuming, “That’s what I do here. The wine fumes steam on the cool copper, and I collect them as they run down.”

“No wonder you charge so much,” the magistrianos observed. “You have the fuel for the fire to think about, and the work of tending this thing, and I don’t suppose one jug of wine yields anything like a jug’s worth of yperoinos.”

“Not even close,” Priskos agreed. “It’s more like ten to one. Besides the fumes that get away, if you boil the stuff too long, you see, then it starts weakening again. You have to be careful of that. One way to up your yield a little is to keep sprinkling cold water on the outside of the cone. But you have to keep doing that, though, or pay someone to. I don’t pay anyone—he’d just sell the secret out from under me.”

“You sound as though you have all the answers.” Argyros rubbed his chin again. “How long have you been playing around with this scheme, if I may ask?”

“I guess it’s about five years now, if you count a couple of years fooling about with things that turned out not to work,” the taverner answered after a moment’s thought. “Once I figured out what I had to do, though, I spent a lot of time building up my stock; I wanted to make yperoinos a regular part of my business, not just a passing thing I’d brew up now and again. I still have hundreds of jars down in the cellar.”

“Well, God be praised!” Argyros exclaimed. He was normally a taciturn, even a dour man, but that was better news than he had dared hope for. “What do you charge for each jar?”

“Two nomismata,” Priskos said. “You have to remember, it’s not like Cypriot. Two jars would have your bully boys out there asleep under their tables, not just happy.”

“I’m quite aware of that, I assure you.” Remembering how he had felt the day before made the magistrianos shudder. But the strength of the stuff was the reason he wanted it. “I’ll give you three a jar, on top of what I’ve already paid you, if I can buy out every jar you have.”

“Yes, on two conditions,” Priskos said at once.

Argyros liked the way the younger man made up his mind. “Name them.”

“First, I have to get my gold from the Count of the Sacred Largesses. Second, let me keep half a dozen jars for myself and my friends. Out of so many, that won’t matter to you.”

“Yes to the first, of course. As for the second, keep three. You’ll be able to afford to make more later.”

“I will at that, won’t I? All right, I’d say we have ourselves a bargain.” Priskos stuck out his hand. Argyros clasped it.

The caravan wound through the mountains towards the town of Dariel, the capital, such as it was, of the kingdom of the Alans. Even in late summer, snow topped some of the high peaks of the Caucasus. The mountains were as grand as the Alps, which till this journey had been the most magnificent range Basil Argyros knew.

“Good to be in big city, eh?” said one of the caravan guards, a local man wearing a knee-length coat of thick leather reinforced with bone scales and carrying a small, round, rivet-studded shield. His Greek was vile; Argyros was sure he had never been more than a couple of valleys away from the farm or village where he had been born. No one who had traveled would have called Dariel a big city. In many ways, the magistrianos thought as the caravan approached the walls of the town, the Caucasus were the rubbish-heap of history. Dariel was a case in point. The Romans had built the fortress centuries ago, to keep the nomads from coming down off the steppe. When the Empire was weak, the Georgians manned it themselves, at times supported by Persian gold. The Alans, the present rulers hereabouts, had been nomads themselves once. A crushing defeat on the steppe, though, sent them fleeing into the mountains. Though they played Rome and Persia off against each other, they were as interested as either in guarding the pass that lay so near Dariel.

They had been, at any rate, until Goarios. Neither the Emperor nor the King of Kings could count on what Goarios would do. Trouble was, the king of the Alans was as lucky as he was erratic. All that did was make him twice the nuisance he would have been otherwise.

The gate guards had been dealing with the merchants in the caravan one by one. When they reached Argyros and his string of packhorses, he had to abandon his musings. “What you sell?” an underofficer asked in bad Persian. Both imperial tongues, like money from both realms, passed current all through the Caucasus, more so than any of the dozens of difficult, obscure local languages. For his part, Argyros spoke better Persian than the Alan trooper. “Wine, fine wine from Constantinople,” he replied. He waved at the jugs strapped to the horses’ back.

“Wine, is it?” White teeth peeked through the tangled forest of the underofficer’s beard. “Give me taste, to see how fine it is.”

The magistrianos spread his hands in sorrow. “Noble sir, I regret it may not be,” he said, using the flowery phrases that come so readily to Persian. “I intend to offer this vintage to no less a person than your mighty king himself, and would not have his pleasure diminished.” Seeing the guard scowl, he added, “Here is a silver drachm. May it take away your thirst.”

The gate guard’s grin reappeared as he stuffed the Persian coin into his pouch. He waved Argyros forward into Dariel.

One of the magistrianos’s comrades, a gray-eyed man named Corippus, came up and murmured, “A good thing he didn’t check the jars.” He spoke the guttural north African dialect of Latin, which no one in the Caucasus would be likely to understand; even Argyros had trouble following it. Since he could not use it himself, he contented himself with saying, “Yes.” All the jars looked like winejars, but not all of them held wine, or even superwine. In the same way, the couple of dozen men who had accompanied the magistrianos from Constantinople looked like merchants, which did not mean they were.

The horses moved slowly through Dariel’s narrow, winding streets. Small boys stared and pointed and called out, as small boys will anywhere. Some of them were touts for inns. After some haggling, Argyros went with one. From the way the lad described it, his master Supsa’s place was what God had used as a pattern for making heaven.

The magistrianos carefully did not ask which god the boy meant. Dariel held both Christian churches with domes in the conical Caucasian style and fire-temples sacred to the good god Ormazd whom the Persian prophet Zoroaster praised. Churches and fire-temples alike were thick-walled, fortress-like structures; most had armed guards patrolling their grounds. Nowhere but in this region that both empires coveted did their faiths have such evenly balanced followings; nowhere else was there such strife between them. Goarios was a Christian (or at least had been, the last time Argyros heard), but it would not do to count on that too far.

Native Georgians and their Alan overlords were both on the streets, usually giving one another wide berths. Language and dress distinguished them. Not even Satan, Argyros thought, could learn Georgian, but the Alan tongue was a distant cousin of Persian. And while the natives mostly wore calf-length robes of wool or linen, some Alans still clung to the leather and furs their ancestors had worn on the steppe. They also let their hair grow long, in greasy locks.

Some real nomads, slant-eyed Kirghiz, were also in the market square. They stared about nervously, as if misliking to be so hemmed in. Their fine weapons and gold saddle-trappings marked them as important men in their tribe. Argyros almost wished he had not spotted them. They gave him one more thing to worry about, and he had plenty already.

Supsa’s inn proved more than adequate. The stableman knew his business, and the cellar was big enough to store the winejars. Argyros, who from long experience discounted nine-tenths of what he heard from touts, was pleased enough. He did his best not to show it, dickering long and hard with Supsa. If he had more money than a run-of-the-mill merchant, that was his business and nobody else’s. The mound of pillows he found in his chamber made a strange but surprisingly comfortable bed. The next morning, fruit candied in honey was not what the magistrianos was used to eating for breakfast, but not bad, either. He licked his fingers as he walked toward Goarios’s palace, a bleak stone pile that seemed more citadel than seat of government.

One of Goarios’s stewards greeted him with a superciliousness the grand chamberlain of the Roman Emperor would have envied. “His highness,” the steward insisted, “favors local wines, and so would have scant interest in sampling your stock.”

Argyros recognized a bribery ploy when he heard one. He did not mind paying his way into Goarios’s presence; he was not, after all, operating with his own money. But he did want to take this fellow’s toploftiness down a peg. He had brought along a jar of yperoinos. “Perhaps you would care to see that its quality meets your master’s standards,” he suggested, patting the jar.

“Well, perhaps, as a favor for your politeness,” the chamberlain said grudgingly. At his command, a lesser servant fetched him a cup. Argyros worked the cork free, poured him a good tot, and watched, gravely silent, as his eyes crossed and face turned red when he drank it down at a gulp. The steward came back gamely, though. “I may have been in error,” he said, extending the cup again. “Pray give me another portion, to let me be sure.”

Goarios’s great hall was narrow, dark, and drafty. Petitioners worked their way forward toward the king’s high seat. The magistrianos waited patiently, using the time in which he occasionally lurched ahead to examine the others in the hall who sought the king’s favor.

He did not like what he saw. For one thing, the Kirghiz nobles he had spied in the market were there. For another, while one Christian priest, plainly a local, waited to make a request of Goarios, a whole delegation of Ormazd’s clerics in their flame-colored robes sat a few paces ahead of the magistrianos. He could hear them talking among themselves. Their Persian was too pure to have been learned in the Caucasus.

As he drew closer, Argyros also studied the king of the Alans. Goarios was close to his own age, younger than he had thought. His face was long, rather pale, with harsh lines on either side of his mouth that disappeared into his thick beard. His eyes were black and shiny; he had somehow the air of a man who saw things no one else did. Whether those things were actually there, Argyros was not sure. Goarios spent some time with the Kirghiz, even more with the Persian priests. The rumbles of Argyros’s stomach were reminding him it was time for the noon meal when at last the steward presented him to the king. He stooped to one knee and bowed his head; only before the Emperor of the Romans or the Persian King of Kings would he have performed a full prostration, going down on his belly. The steward addressed Goarios in Georgian. The king made brief answer in the same tongue, then spoke to Argyros in Persian: “You have, Tskhinvali here tells me, a remarkable new potation, one I might enjoy. Is this so?”

“Your majesty, it is,” the magistrianos answered in the same tongue. He handed the jar to the steward to pass on to Goarios. “Please take this as my gift, to acquaint you with the product.”

Those opaque eyes surveyed Argyros. “I thank you. You must have great confidence, to be so generous.” Goarios still used Persian. Argyros had heard he knew Greek, and suspected he was the victim of a subtle insult. He showed no annoyance, but waited silently while the king, as his steward had before him, had a cup brought. Unlike Tskhinvali, Goarios drank from silver. The king drank. His eyes widened slightly, and he rumbled deep in his throat, but he tolerated his first draught better than anyone else Argyros had seen. “By the sun!” Goarios exclaimed, a strange oath if he still followed Christ. He drank again, licked his lips. Suddenly he switched languages: he did speak Greek. “This is something new and different. How-many jars have you to sell, and at what price?”

“I have several hundred jars, your majesty.” Argyros also shifted to Greek. “They cannot, I fear, come cheap: not only is the preparation slow and difficult, but I have incurred no small expense in traveling to you. My masters back in Constantinople would flay me for accepting less than twenty nomismata the jar.”

He expected dickering to begin then, or Goarios to dismiss him to bargain with Tskhinvali or some other palace dignitary. He would have been satisfied to get half his first asking price. But the king of the Alans simply said, “Accepted.”

Disciplined though he was, Argyros could not help blurting, “Your majesty?” The first confused thought in his mind was that his might be the only government-financed expedition in the history of the Empire to turn a profit. He had never heard of any others; he was certain of that. Goarios took another pull. “Agreed, I said. Rarity and quality are worth paying for, in wine or women or—” He let his voice trail away, but his eyes lit, as if for an instant his inner vision grew sharp and clear. The moment passed; the king returned his attention to Argyros. “I have a banquet planned this evening—I am pleased to bid you join me. Perhaps to further the pleasure of all those present, you will consent to bring with you ten jars of your brew.”

“Certainly, your majesty.” Argyros had hoped the super-wine would make him popular at court, but had not expected to succeed so soon. He regretted having to stay in character. Any failure, though, might be noticed, so he said, “Your majesty, ah—” He made what he hoped was a discreet pause.

“You will be paid on your arrival, I assure you,” Goarios said dryly. He added, “If you have found a companion, you may bring her to the feast. We do not restrict our women to their own quarters, as the tiresome custom is in Constantinople.”

“You are most generous, your majesty.” Argyros bowed his way out. The audience had gone better than he dared wish. He wondered why he was still nervous.

For the banquet, the magistrianos dug out the best robe he had brought. He had several finer ones back in Constantinople, including a really splendid one of thick sea-green samite heavily brocaded with silk thread. For a merchant of moderate means, though, that would have been too much. Plain maroon wool fit the part better.

The reputation of the yperoinos must have preceded it; eager hands helped Argyros remove the jars from the pack-horses. Too eager—”Come back, you!” he shouted at one servitor. “Your king bade me bring ten jars. If my head goes up on the wall for cheating him, I know whose will be there beside it.”

That was plenty to stop the fellow in his tracks, the magistrianos noted: Goarios’s men feared their king, then.

Horns, flutes, and drums played in the banquet hall. The music was brisk, but in the wailing minor key the Persians and other easterners favored. Argyros had heard it many times but never acquired the taste for it.

The servants had not yet set out the tables for the feast. Guests and their ladies stood and chatted, holding winecups. When the chief usher announced Argyros’s name and the other servants carried the jars of superwine into the hall, King Goarios clapped his hands above his head three times. Silence fell at once.

“Here we have the purveyor of a new and potent pleasure,” the king declared, “than which what praise could be higher?” He spoke Persian. By now, Argyros had decided he meant no mockery by it; more courtiers used Persian than Greek here. Goarios beckoned the magistrianos toward him. “Come and receive your promised payment.”

Argyros pushed his way through the crowded hall. He had no trouble keeping the king in sight; they were both taller than most of the people in the hall. Behind him, he heard the first exclamations of amazement as the guests began sampling the yperoinos.

“Two hundred nomismata,” Goarios said when he drew near, and tossed him a leather purse over the heads of the last couple of men between them.

“I thank your majesty,” Argyros said, bowing low when he and Goarios were at last face to face.

“A trifle,” the king said with a languid wave.

A woman stood by his side. Argyros had not got a good look at her before, for the crown of her head was not far above Goarios’s shoulders. Her hair fell in thick black waves to her shoulders. She had bold, swarthy features and flashing dark eyes that glittered with amusement as she smiled saucily at the magistrianos.

“Mirrane, this is Argyros, the wine merchant of whom I told you,” Goarios said. Recognizing her, the magistrianos felt ice form round his heart. He waited woodenly for her to denounce him. She turned her mocking gaze his way again. “I’ve heard of him,” she said, speaking Greek with the throaty accent of her native tongue. “He is, ah, famous for his new products he purveys.” Her attention returned to Goarios. “For what marvel did you reward him so highly?”

“A vintage squeezed, I think, from the thunderstorm,” the king of the Alans replied. “You must try some, my dear.” His hand slid around Mirrane’s waist. She snuggled against him. Together they walked slowly toward the table where Goarios’s servants had set out the y peroinos. Argyros stared after them. He was too self-possessed to show his bafflement by scratching his head, but that was what he felt like doing. It Mirrane had become Goarios’s concubine, she had to have influence over him. Of that the magistrianos had no doubt. Mirrane, Argyros was certain, could influence a marble statue, as long as it was a male one.

Why, then, was she letting him stay free? The only answer that occurred to Argyros was so she could ruin him at a time that better suited her purpose. Yet that made no sense either. Mirrane was skilled enough at intrigue to see that, the longer a foe stayed active, the more dangerous he became. She was not one to waste so perfect a chance to destroy him.

He shrugged imperceptibly. If she was making that kind of mistake, he would do his best to take advantage of it.

After a while, servants began fetching in tables and chairs. Goarios, Mirrane still beside him, took his seat at the head table. That was the signal for the king’s guests to sit down too. Soon all were in their places but the group of Kirghiz, who would not move away from the superwine. One of them was already almost unconscious; two of his comrades had to hold him up. Stewards of ever higher rank came over to remonstrate with the nomads. At last, grudgingly, they went up to sit across the table from Goarios.

Back in the kitchens, Argyros thought, the cooks must have been tearing their hair, waiting for the dinner to start. They quickly made up for lost time. Grunting under the weight, servants hauled in platters on which rested roast kids, lambs, and geese. Others brought tubs of peas and onions, while the sweet smell of the new-baked loaves that also made their appearance filled the hall. What was left of the superwine seemed reserved for Goarios’s table, but jars from the sweet Caucasian vintages in the Alan king’s cellars kept those less privileged happy. Argyros drank sparingly. He kept his eyes on Mirrane, again wondering what game she was playing.

None of his tablemates—minor Alan nobles, most of them, along with a few townsmen rich enough for Goarios to find them worth cultivating—found his staring obtrusive. Desirable though she was, the magistrianos did not think they were watching Mirrane. The Kirghiz were busy making a spectacle of themselves.

Argyros knew the privation steppe nomads endured, and knew how, to make up for it, they could gorge themselves when they got the chance. Reading of the huge feasts Homer described, he sometimes thought the heroes of the Trojan War had the same talent. Maybe the Alans’ ancestors did too, when they were a steppe people, but this generation had lost it. They gaped in astonished wonder as the Kirghiz ate and ate and ate.

The nomads drank too, swilling down yperoinos as if it were the fermented mare’s milk of the plains. The one who had been wobbling before the banquet slid quietly out of his chair and under the table. Another soon followed him. The rest grew boisterous instead. They slammed fists down on the table to emphasize whatever points they thought they were making, shouted louder and louder, and howled songs in their own language. Argyros understood a few words of it; not many other people in the hall did. It sounded dreadful.

Servants cleared away platters, except, after a snarled warning, the ones in front of the Kirghiz. Goarios stood up, held his hands above his head. Silence descended. Eventually the Kirghiz noticed they were roaring in a void. They too subsided, and waited for the king to speak.

“Thank you, my friends, for sharing my bounty tonight,” Goarios said in Persian. He paused for a moment to let those who did not know the tongue have his words interpreted, then resumed: “I know this would not seem like much in the way of riches to one used to the glories of Constantinople or Ctesiphon, but in our own small way we try. “

‘Thistime, being safely inconspicuous, Argyros did scratch his head. Modesty and self-deprecation were not what he had come to expect from the king of the Alans.

Goarios continued, “Still and all, we have learned much from the Romans and from the Persians. Of all the folk under the sun”—here he glanced at Mirrane, who fondly smiled back his way (if Goarios had embraced the creed of Ormazd, Argyros was doubly sure now it was because he had first embraced an eloquent advocate for it)—”they are strongest, and also cleverest. That is no accident; the two qualities go hand in hand.”

The king paused. His courtiers applauded. The Kirghiz nobles, those still conscious, looked monumentally bored. Argyros sympathized with them. If Goarios had a point, he was doing his best to avoid it.

Or so the magistrianos thought, until the king suddenly adopted the royal we and declared, “Though our realm is small at present, we do not see ourself as less in wit than either the Emperor or the King of Kings.” Both those rulers, Argyros thought tartly, had the sense not to go around boasting how smart they were.

Nevertheless, Goarios’s words did have a certain logic, if a twisted one: “Being so astute ourself, it follows naturally that power will accrue to us on account of our sagacity and on account of our ability to see the advantages of policies heretofore untried. As a result, one day soon, perhaps, the rich and famous in the capitals of the empires w ill have cause to envy us as we now envy them.”

The courtiers applauded again. They seemed to know what their king was talking about—but then, Argyros thought, the poor devils had likely listened to this speech or something like it a good many times before. He had heard Goarios was a cruel man; now he was getting proof of it. A couple of Kirghiz envoys also cheered the king of the Alans—or maybe the fact that he was done. The rest of the nomads had slumped into sodden slumber. Speaking of envy, Argyros envied them that. Goarios was plainly convinced his address marked the high point of the evening, for no singers, dancers, or acrobats appeared afterward to entertain his guests. Instead, the king waved to the doorway, showing that the festivities were over.

The banquet did not break up at once. As in Constantinople, the custom was for departing guests to thank their host for his kindness. Argyros joined the procession, sighing inwardly. He wished he could somehow get into Goarios’s good graces without having anything to do with the king. Still, Goarios greeted him effusively. “We are in your debt. You and your yperoinos have helped make this evening unique.”

He used Greek, so as not to leave the name of the new-drink dangling alone and strange in an otherwise Persian sentence. One of the Kirghiz understood the Roman Empire’s chief tongue and even spoke it after a fashion. Before Argyros could respond to the king, the nomad poked him in the ribs. “You this drink make, eh? Is good. Where you from?”

“Constantinople,” the magistrianos replied. The Kirghiz’s prodding finger distracted him from Goarios, whom etiquette demanded he should have answered.

“Ah, the city.” The nomad was too drunk to care about etiquette, if he ever had. He poked Goarios in turn. “You, I, maybe one fine day we see Constantinople soon, eh?”

“Who would not wish such a thing?” Goarios’s voice was smooth, but his eyes flickered. Argyros bowed to the king. “To serve you is my privilege, your majesty.” He turned to Mirrane. “And your lady as well.” Maybe his directness could startle something out of her, though he knew what a forlorn hope that was.

Sure enough, her equanimity remained absolute. With dignity a queen might have envied, she extended a slim hand to the magistrianos. He resented being made to dance to her tune, yet saw no choice but to take it. She said, “My master speaks for me, of course.”

The magistrianos murmured a polite phrase and bowed his way out of the king’s presence. Outside the castle, he hired a torchboy to light his way back to the inn. The boy, a Georgian lad, could follow Persian if it was spoken slowly and eked out with gestures. “Stop a moment. Hold your torch up,” Argyros told him as soon as buildings hid them from Goarios’s castle.

The boy obeyed. Argyros unrolled the tiny scrap of parchment Mirrane had pressed into his palm. He had to hold it close to his face to make out her message in the dim, flickering light. “Meet me alone tomorrow by the vegetable market, or I will tell Goarios who you are,” he read. Nothing subtle or oblique there, he thought as he put the parchment in his beltpouch. That did not mean she would not get what she wanted. She generally did.

“You’re going to meet with her?” Corippus, when he heard Argyros’s news the next morning, was openly incredulous. “What will the rest of us do once she’s dealt with you? You can’t tell me she has your good health foremost in her mind.”

“I doubt that,” Argyros admitted. He tried to sound judicious, and not like a man merely stating the obvious. He did bolster his case by adding, “If she wanted to bring me down, she could have done it simply last night, instead of going through this rigmarole. By the look of things, she has Goarios wrapped around her finger.”

Corippus grunted. “This is folly, I tell you.”

“Being exposed to Goarios is worse folly. One thing I know of Mirrane: she does not threaten idly.”

Corippus made a noise deep in his throat. He remained anything but convinced. Argyros, however, headed the team from Constantinople, so the north African could only grumble. The magistrianos tried to tease him out of his gloom. He waved round the cellar of Supsa’s inn, pointing at the three yperoinos -cookers Corippus and his team had going. “You worry too much, my friend. Even if something does happen to me, the lot of you can go into superwine for true, and likely end up rich men here.”

Corippus fell back into his harsh native dialect. “In this God-forsaken lump of a town? Who’d want to?”

He had a point, Argyros thought. Nevertheless, the magistrianos turned a benign eye on Dariel as he made his way to the vegetable market. That was partly because, if he got through this confrontation with Mirrane, he would have a hold on her to counter the advantage she now held on him—he did not think, at any rate, that Goarios would be pleased to learn his paramour was arranging a secret rendezvous with another man. More important, though, was the prospect of matching wits with the best Persia had. Mirrane was that, as Argyros had found more than once to his discomfiture. To one used to the bounty of Constantinople, Dariel’s vegetable market was a small, mean place. The city prefect’s inspectors would have condemned half the produce on display. Argyros bought a handful of raisins and waited for Mirrane to come into the little square.

He was not sure what to expect. When with Goarios, she had dressed as a great lady, with brocaded robe and with bracelets and necklace of gleaming gold. He had also seen her, though, in a dancer’s filmy garb, and once when she was artfully disguised as an old woman. Just recognizing her would constitute a victory of sorts.

He was almost disappointed to spot her at once. She wore a plain white linen dress, something that suited a moderately prosperous tradesman’s wife, but she wore it like a queen. Copper wire held her hair in place; apart from that, she was bare of jewelry. Seeing Argyros, she waved and walked toward him, as if greeting an old friend.

“You have another new toy, do you, Basil?” Her voice held a lilting, teasing tone, of the sort a cat would use to address a bird it held between its paws. “What better way to swing a man toward you than dealing with him drunk, the more so if he’s had so little he doesn’t know he is?”

If anyone would realize why he had brought the yperoinos, it was she. He answered, “I’m not trying to turn a whole city on its ear, the way your handbills did in Daras.”

“You turned the tables neatly enough on me in Constantinople.” She shook her head in chagrin, put her hand on his arm.

He pulled free. “Enough empty compliments,” he said harshly. “Unfold your scheme, whatever it is, and have done, so I can start working out where the traps lie.”

“Be careful what you say to me,” she warned, smiling still. “Ormazd the good god knows how backward Alania is, but Goarios’s torturer, I think, would have no trouble earning his keep in Ctesiphon. In some things, he accepts only the finest.”

“I daresay.”

“Oh, think what you will,” Mirrane said impatiently. “I serve the King of Kings no less than you your Avtokrator. If my body aids in that service, then it does, and there is no more to be said about it.” She paused a moment. “No, I take that back. I will say, Basil, that Goarios is not one I would have bedded of my own free choice, and that that is not true of you.”

Ever since those few nights in Daras, Argyros had wondered whether the passion she showed then was real or simply a ploy in an unending struggle between Persia and the Roman Empire. He wondered still; Mirrane might say anything to gain advantage. That mixture of suspicious curiosity and anger roughened his words: “Say whatever you like. Whether or not you care a follis for him, Goarios dances to your tune, in bed and out.”

Mirrane’s laugh had an edge to it. “Were that so, I’d not be here talking with you now—you would have been a dead man the instant Tskhinvali called your name. But I need you alive.”

For the first time, Argyros began to think she might be telling the truth, or some of it. She had no reason not to unmask him if she did fully control the king of the Alans. Trusting her, though, went against every instinct the magistrianos had, and against the evidence as well. “If Goarios is his own man, as you say, why has he turned his back on God’s only begotten Son Jesus Christ and embraced your false Ormazd?

Whence comes that, if not from you?”

“I find my faith as true as you yours,” Mirrane said tartly.

“As for Goarios, he is his own man, and his own god as well—the only thing he worships is himself. The words he mouths are whichever ones suit him for the time being. I saw that too late, and that is why I need your help.”

“Now we come down to it,” Argyros said.

Mirrane nodded. “Now indeed. What he intends, you see, is opening the Caspian Gates to the Kirghiz and as many other nomad clans as care to join them. His own army will join the nomads; he thinks he will end by ruling them all.” Her sigh was full of unfeigned regret. “And to think that that was what I labored so hard to accomplish, and here I find it worse than useless.”

Argyros found it appalling: it was George Lakhanodrakon’s worst nightmare, come to life. The magistrianos said, “Why should you not be glad to see the nomads ravage Roman provinces?”

“I told you once—if that were all, you would be dead. But Goarios and the men from the steppe have bigger plans. They want to invade Persia too. Goarios thinks to play Iskander.” Argyros frowned for a couple of seconds before recognizing the Persian pronunciation of the name Alexander. Many had tried to rule both east and west in the sixteen hundred years since Alexander the Great; no one had succeeded.

Then again, no one had tried with the backing of the nomads. “You think he may do it, then,” the magistrianos said slowly.

“He might; he just might,” Miranne answered. “He is a man who believes he can do anything, and those are the ones who are sometimes right.” She hesitated, then added, “He frightens me.”

That admission startled Argyros, who had never imagined hearing it from Mirrane. All the same, he said, “It’s hard to imagine a conquering army erupting out of the Caucasus. The mountains here are a refuge of defeat, not stepping-stones to triumph.” He spelled out the chain of thought he’d had coming into Dariel. Mirrane’s eyes lit. She followed him at once. He knew how clever she was. Her wit rather than her beauty made her truly formidable, though she was twice as dangerous because she had both. She said, “This once, though, the Alans have raised up a leader for themselves. He is ... strange, but sometimes that makes people follow a man more readily, for they see him as being marked by—well, by whatever god they follow.” Her smile invited Argyros to notice the concession she had made him. He did not rise to it. Over the centuries, the agents who served the Roman Empire had learned to gauge when diplomacy would serve and when war was required, when to pay tribute, and when instead to incite a tribe’s enemies to distract it from the frontier. If a hero had appeared in Alania, that long experience told Argyros what to do. “Kill him,” the magistrianos said. “The chaos from that should be plenty to keep the Alans safely squabbling among themselves.”

“I thought of that, or course,” Mirrane said, “but, aside from being fond of staying healthy and intact myself, it’s too late. The Kirghiz control the pass these days, not the Alans.”

“Oh, damnation.”

“Yes, the whole damn nation,” Mirrane echoed, her somber voice belying the lighthearted tone of the pun. “Their khan Dayir, I would say, is using Goarios for his own ends as much as Goarios is using him. And where Goarios would be Iskander if he could, Dayir also has one after whom he models his conduct.”

Argyros thought of the nomad chieftains who had plagued the Roman Empire through the centuries.

“Attila,” he said, naming the first and worst of them.

Mirrane frowned. “Of him I never heard.” The magistrianos was briefly startled, then realized she had no reason to be familiar with all the old tales from what was to her the distant west: Attila had never plundered Persia. But she knew of one who had: “I was thinking of the king of the Ephthalites, who long ago slew Peroz King of Kings by a trick.”

Argyros nodded; Prokopios had preserved in Roman memory the story of that disaster. “Enough of ancient history, though,” he said with the same grim pragmatism that had made him urge Mirrane to assassinate Goarios. “We need now to decide how to deal with this Dayir.” Only when he noticed he had said “we” was the magistrianos sure he believed Mirrane.

She accepted that tacit agreement as no less than her due. “So we do. Unfortunately, I see no easy way. I doubt we’d be able to pry him and Goarios apart. Until they’ve succeeded, their interests run in the same direction.”

“And afterward,” Argyros said gloomily, “will be too late to do us much good.”

Mirrane smiled at the understatement. “Ah, Basil, I knew one day Constantinople would get around to sending someone to see what was going wrong in Alania: Goarios will brag, instead of having the wit to let his plans grow in the quiet dark until they are ripe. I’m glad the Master of Offices chose you. We think alike, you and I.”

A hot retort rose to the magistrianos’s lips, but did not get past. Despite the differences between them, there was much truth in what Mirrane said; he was reminded of it every time he spoke with her. Certainly he had more in common with her than with some Constantinopolitan dyeshop owner whose mental horizon reached no further than the next day’s races in the hippodrome. “We use different tongues,” he observed, “but the same language.”

“Well said!” She leaned forward, stood on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his cheek. She giggled. “You keep your beard neater than Goarios—there’s more room on your face. I like it.” Laughing still, she kissed his other cheek, just missing his mouth.

He knew she took care to calculate her effects. He reached for her all the same. The touch of her lips reminded him again of those few days back at Daras.

Sinuous as an eel, she slipped away. “What would be left of you, if you were caught molesting the king’s kept woman?” She abruptly turned serious. “I must get back. Leaving the palace is always a risk, but less so at noon, because Goarios sleeps then, the better to roister at night. But he’ll be rousing soon, and might call for me.”

Argyros could say nothing to that, and knew it. He watched Mirrane glide across the market square; she moved with the grace of a dancer and had once used that role as a cover in Daras. The magistrianos stood rubbing his chin in thought for several minutes after she finally disappeared, then made his own way back to Supsa’s inn.

All the way there, his mind kept worrying at the problem she posed, as the tongue will worry at a bit of food caught between the teeth until one wishes he would go mad. Equally stubborn in refusing to leave his thoughts was the feel of her soft lips. That annoyed him, so he prodded at his feelings with characteristic stubborn honesty until he began to make sense of them.

In the years since his wife and son died, he’d never thought seriously about taking another woman into his life. That came partly from the longing he still felt for Helen. More sprang from his unwillingness to inflict on any woman the lonely life a magistrianos’s wife would have to lead, especially the wife of a magistrianos who drew difficult cases. In the past five years he had been to Ispania and the Franco-Saxon kingdoms, to Daras, and now he was here in the Caucasus. Each of those missions was a matter of months, the first close to a year. It was not fair to any woman to make her turn Penelope to his Odysseus.

With Mirrane, though, that objection fell to the ground. She was at least as able as he to care for herself in the field. And if—if!—she spoke the truth about how she reckoned their brief joining in Daras, he pleased her well enough, at least in that regard. There was, he remembered, far more to love than what went on in bed, but that had its place too.

He started laughing at himself. Mirrane was also a Persian—enemy by assumption, in almost Euclidean logic. She worshiped Ormazd. She was sleeping with Goarios and keeping his nights lively when the two of them were not asleep. The only reason she was in the Caucasus at all was to seduce the king of the Alans away from the Roman Empire, in the most literal sense of the word. Not only that; if—if!—she spoke the truth, both Constantinople and Ctesiphon faced deadly danger from Goarios’s machinations. When all those thoughts were done, the thought of her remained. That worried him more than anything. Corippus scowled at the magistrianos. “That accursed potter has raised his price again. And so has the plague-taken apothecary.”

“Pay them both,” Argyros told him. “Yell and scream and fume as if you were being bankrupted or castrated or whatever suits your fancy. That’s in keeping with our part here. But pay them. You know what we need.”

“I know you’ve lost your wits mooning over that Persian doxy,” Corippus retorted, a shot close enough to the mark that Argyros felt his face grow hot. He was glad they were in the dimly lit cellar, so his lieutenant could not see him flush. But Corippus, after grumbling a little more, went on, “However much it galls me, I have to say the wench is likely right. There’d not be so many stinking Kirghiz on the streets if they weren’t in league with Goarios, and she’d’ve long since nailed us if she didn’t think they meant to do Persia harm along with the Empire.”

Argyros had reached exactly the same conclusions. He said so, adding, “I’ll be hanged if I can tell how you’d know how-many Kirghiz are in Dariel. You hardly ever come up out of here, even to breathe.”

Corippus chuckled dryly. “Something to that, but someone has to keep the superwine cooking faster than Goarios and his cronies guzzle it down. Besides which, I don’t need to go out much to know the nomads are thick as fleas. The stench gives ‘em away.”

“Something to that,” the magistrianos echoed. Strong smells came with cities, especially ones like Dariel, which had only a nodding acquaintance with Roman ideas of plumbing and sanitation. Still, the Kirghiz did add their own notes, primarily horse and rancid butter, to the symphony of stinks. Corippus said, “Any which way, I’m happier to be down here than upstairs with you and Eustathios Rhangabe. Worst thing can happen to me here is getting burned alive. If Eustathios buggers something up, I’ll be scattered over too much landscape too fast to have time to get mad at him.”

That was a truth Argyros did his best to ignore. He said, “The innkeeper thinks Rhangabe’s some new sort of heretic who isn’t allowed to eat except with wooden tools. I don’t know whether he wants to burn him or convert.”

“He’d better convert,” Corippus snorted. He and Argyros both laughed, briefly and self-consciously. They knew what would happen if Kustathios Rhangabe struck a spark at the wrong time. The magistrianos went upstairs to the room the man from the arsenal at Constantinople was using. He knocked—gently, so as not to disturb Rhangabe. He heard a bowl being set on a table inside the room. Only then did Rhangabe come to the door and undo the latch.

As always, he reminded Argyros of a clerk, but a clerk with the work-battered hands of an artisan.

“Hello, Argyros,” he said. “It goes well, though that thief of a druggist has raised his price for sulfur again.”

“So Corippus told me.”

Rhangabe grunted. He was not a man much given to conversation. He went back to the table where he had been busy. He had shoved it close to the room’s single small window, to give himself the best possible light—no lamps, not here.

Along with the bowl (in which a wooden spoon was thrust), a stout rolling pin lay on the table. Judging its position, Rhangabe had been working on the middle of the three piles there, grinding it from lumps to fine powder. The pile to the left was black, that middle one (the biggest) a dirty gray-white, and the one on the right bright yellow.

Argyros was perfectly willing to admit that Kustathios Rhangabe knew much more about hellpowder than he did these days. Rhangabe had headed the man at the arsenal who concocted the deadly incendiary liquid called Greek fire (the magistrianos did not know, or want to know, w hat went into that). When something even more destructive came along, he was the natural one to look to to ferret out its secrets. That he had not blown himself up in the process testified to his skill. He took the spoon out of the bowl, measured a little saltpeter from the middle pile into a balance, grunted again, and scooped part of the load back onto the table. Satisfied at last, he tipped the balance pan into the bowl, vigorously stirred the contents, squinted, wetted a finger to stick in it so he would taste the mixture, and at last nodded in reluctant approval.

He picked up a funnel (also of wood) and put it in the mouth of a pottery jug. He lifted the bowl, carefully poured the newly mixed hellpowder into the jug. When it was full, he plugged it with an unusual cork he took from a bag that lay next to his bed: the cork had been bored through, and a twist of oily rag forced through the little opening.

Only when Rhangabe was quite finished did he seem to remember Argyros was still in the room. He jerked a thumb at the jars that lined the wall. “That’s forty-seven I’ve made for you since we got here, not counting the ones we fetched from the city. All in all, we have plenty to blow a hole in Goarios’s palace you could throw an elephant through, if that’s what you want.”

A couple of weeks before, the magistrianos would have seized the chance. Hearing Mirrane had made him wonder, though, and made him watch the fortress to check what she said. He was certain now she had not misled him. Goarios might still rule Alania, but the Kirghiz ruled Goarios. The comings and goings of their leaders were one sign; another was the growing numbers of nomads on Dariel’s streets. By themselves, those might merely have bespoken alliance, but other indications said otherwise. The Kirghiz nobles treated Goarios’s guards and courtiers with growing contempt, so much so that Tskhinvali, arrogant himself, complained out loud to Argyros of their presumptuousness. In the markets, the men from the steppe treated traders like servants.

That sort of thing could go on only so long. The Alans were themselves a proud people, while their Georgian subjects remembered every slight and carried on feuds among themselves that lasted for generations. Dariel did not have the feel of a place about to become a world-conqueror’s capital. It seemed, Argyros thought, more like one of Eustathios Rhangabe’s jugs of hellpowder a few seconds before someone lit the rag stuffed in the cork.

The magistrianos wished he could see Mirrane again. Partly because he wanted to get a better feel for what was happening in the palace, and partly just because he wanted to see her. He avoided thinking about which desire was more important to him. In any case, he could not casually make an appointment with the king’s mistress. She had to arrange to come to him.

He thought from time to time about changing that, about letting Goarios get hold of her note to him. Each time he held off. Doing that was dangerous and, worse, irrevocable. Moreover, with endless chances she had not betrayed him. Yet he fretted every day at how little he really knew of what was going on. As things turned out, he found out with no help from Mirrane. He had broken a bronze buckle on one of his sandals and was in the market dickering, mostly by signs, with a Georgian coppersmith for a replacement. Another local had set out several trays of knives in the adjoining stall. Haifa dozen Kirghiz rode by. One leaned down from the saddle with the effortless ease the nomads displayed on horseback, plucked a fine blade from a tray, and stuck it in his belt. His companions snickered.

The knifesmith shouted angrily and ran after the Kirghiz. The thief, amused at his fury, waited for him to catch up, then gave his beard a hard yank. The nomads laughed louder. Then the one who had taken the knife bellowed in pain—the knifesmith had bitten his hand, hard enough to draw blood. The nomad lashed out with a booted foot. The knifesmith reeled away, clutching his belly and gasping for breath. All the Kirghiz rode on; now they were chuckling at their comrade. Had the Georgian knifesmith been made of less stern stuff, the incident would have been over. But the local staggered back to his stall. “Kirghiz!” he shouted as he snatched up a blade. The nomads looked back. The Georgian had known exactly what weapon he was grabbing. He threw the knife. It went into the thief’s chest. The nomad looked astonished, then slowly slid from the saddle. The rest of the Kirghiz stared for a moment, first at their friend and then at the knifesmith. Quickly but quite deliberately, one of the nomads strung his bow, pulled out an arrow, and shot the Georgian in the face. The man gave a great bass shriek of anguish that made heads jerk round all over the market square. He ran a few steps, his hands clutching the shaft sunk in his cheek, then fell. His feet drummed in the dirt. Argyros looked around to exchange a horrified glance with the coppersmith, but that worthy had disappeared. He was, the magistrianos decided, no fool. The locals in the square were surging toward the Kirghiz, as the sea will surge when driven by an angry wind. Argyros heard a harsh cry somewhere as a nomad on foot was mobbed. All the mounted ones near him had their bows out now. He slipped away before any of the Kirghiz chanced to look in his direction. He had not got half a block out of the square when the noise behind him doubled and doubled again. He went from a walk to a trot. He had been caught in a street riot once before, in Constantinople. Once was plenty. The tumult had not yet reached the inn where Argyros and his men were staying. All the same, Corippus was prowling around the courtyard, wary as a wolf that has taken a scent it mislikes. “How bad?” he asked when the magistrianos told him what had happened.

“With all the nomads in town? Bad,” Argyros replied. “The Georgians hate ‘em, the Alans hate ‘em, and they hate everyone. I’d say we have to look to ourselves—Goarios’s men will be too busy guarding the king and his nobles to pay attention to much else.”

“Goarios’s men will be hiding under their beds, more likely,” Corippus snorted. His cold eyes raked the wall that surrounded the courtyard. He made a disgusted noise deep in his throat. “Too low, too shabby. How are we supposed to hold this place?” He shouted to a couple of stableboys, cursed them when they began to protest. They helped him close and bar the gates.

Supsa the innkeeper came rushing out at the noise of the gate panels squealing on their hinges. “What you doing?” he cried in bad Greek.

“He is trying to save you from being killed,” Argyros snapped; the officer’s rasp he put in his voice straightened Supsa up as if it had been a cup of icy water dashed in his face. The magistrianos added, “There’s rioting in the market square, and it’s spreading.”

Supsa needed only a moment to take that in. “I have heavier bar in back,” he said. “I show you where.”

As soon as the stouter bar was in place, Argyros called all of his crew except Eustathios Rhangabe out of the inn. Like Corippus, the rest of the men were top combat troops. Some were imperial guards, others, like their leader, ex-soldiers who had joined the corps of magistrianoi. Everyone was deadly with bow, spear, and sword.

“Fetch benches,” Corippus ordered Supsa, “so they can see over the top of the wall to shoot.” This time the taverner and his staff obeyed without question. Other traders came rushing out, clutching whatever weapons they had. Corippus put them on the wall too. “Who knows how well they’ll do?” he grunted to Argyros. “The more bodies the better, though.”

That got put to the test in minutes. Even while everyone in the courtyard had been working to turn it into a fortress, the noise of strife outside came closer and closer. The white-faced stableboys were just dragging a last bench against the wall when the mob came baying round the corner. Supsa clambered onto a bench, stood on tiptoe so the rioters could recognize him. He shouted something in his native Georgian, presumably to the effect that he was just another local and so they should leave him alone.

Stones, bricks, and clods of horsedung whizzed past him. One caught him in the shoulder and sent him spinning to the ground. Argyros, less optimistic, had already ducked behind the wall. He peered over it again a moment later. A dozen rioters had hold of a thick wooden beam; the others, after much yelling, cleared a path so they could charge for the gate.

“Shoot!” the magistrianos cried at the same time as Corippus, in his excitement forgetting where he was, bellowed the identical word in Latin. Even without a command, everyone knew what to do. Argyros’s men pumped arrows into the mob with a speed and accuracy that left the genuine merchants gasping. Screams rose. The improvised ram never got within twenty feet of its intended target. The men who had carried it were down, moaning or motionless. The rest of the rioters suddenly discovered urgent business elsewhere.

“Mobs,” Corippus said scornfully. “The bravest bastards in the world, till somebody fights back.”

Argyros was nodding grateful agreement when shouts of alarm came from the rear of the inn. Men leaped down from their benches and rushed to help the few beleaguered fellows there. “No, damn you, not everyone!” Corippus howled. “The same bloody thing’ll happen here if we all go haring off like so many idiots!”

That plain good sense stopped several defenders in their tracks. By then, though, Argyros was already dashing round the inn toward the stables and other outbuildings. The rioters had found or stolen a ladder; more dropped down over the wall every minute.

Bowstrings thrummed. One of the invaders fell, screaming, while two more cursed. Others ran forward. They waved knives and clubs. But for all their ferocity, they were only townsmen, untrained in fighting. Even the merchants who ran with Argyros had better gear and knew more of what they were about. His own men went through their foes like a dose of salts.

Part of that, he suspected, was what helped some women get through childbirth so much better than others: knowing and understanding the process would hurt and carrying on regardless. He saw a rioter who took a minor knife wound in his forearm forget everything else to gawk at it. The fellow never saw the bludgeon that stretched him senseless in the dirt.

An instant later, the magistrianos got the chance to test his theory. A club thudded into his ribs. He gasped, but managed to spin away from the rioter’s next wild swing. After that, drilled reflex took over. He stepped in, knocked away the club—it looked to be a table leg—with his left hand, thrust his dagger into the man’s belly. The Georgian might never have heard of defense, and it was too late for him to learn it now.

By then, Argyros had come quite close to his real target, the ladder leaning against the rear wall. A man was climbing over the wall. The magistrianos displayed his blood-smeared knife, grinned a ghastly grin.

“Your turn next?” he asked. He had no idea whether the man knew Greek, but the message got through, one way or another. The fellow jumped down—on the far side of the wall. From the curses that followed, he landed on someone. Argyros knocked over the ladder.

The last few rioters inside Supsa’s compound had been pushed back against the wall of the stable. Only traders still fought with them hand to hand. Argyros’s men, professional survivors, shouted for their allies to get out of the way so they could finish the job with arrows.

“A lesson the townsfolk will remember,” the magistrianos told Corippus. He rubbed at his rib cage, which still hurt. \ le knew he would have an enormous bruise come morning. But to his relief, he felt no stabbing pain when he breathed. He’d had broken ribs once before, and knew the difference.

“Bodies strewn here and there will make a mob think twice,” Corippus agreed. “I’m just glad they didn’t try to torch us.”

Ice walked the magistrianos’s spine. He’d forgotten about that. With jar after jar of hellpowder in Suspa’s inn—He crossed himself in horror. “ Mè genoito!”

he exclaimed: “Heaven forbid!”

“I don’t think even a mob would be so stupid,” Corippus said. “Fire’d mean the whole stinking town would go up. Of course,” he added, “you can’t be sure.”

Argyros told his archers to shoot anyone they saw outside with a torch. For the moment, the inn seemed safe enough. Like any other scavengers, the mob preferred prey that did not fight back. Rioters went by—at a respectful distance —carrying their loot. At any other time, Argyros would have wanted to seize them and drag them off to gaol. Now, caught in chaos in a country not his own, all he did was scan the sky to make sure no plumes of smoke rose in it.

“Night before too long,” Corippus observed. ‘That’ll make things tougher.”

“So it will.” The magistrianos laughed self-consciously. In his concern for fire, he had not even noticed the deepening blue above. The din outside was still savage and getting worse. Of itself, his hand bunched into a fist. “What’s Goarios doing to stop this mess?”

“Damn all I can see—probably under the bed with his soldiers.” Contempt filled Corippus’s voice. “I’d say our new-Alexander can’t even conquer his own people, let alone anybody else’s.”

Yet soldiers did appear. Darkness had just settled in when a heavily armed party approached the front gate of Supsa’s inn. Argyros recognized its leader as an officer he had seen several times in the palace. He stayed wary even so—the fellow might be taking advantage of the riot, not trying to quell it. “What do you want?” he shouted in Persian.

The officer’s answer startled him too much to be anything but the truth: “You’re the wine merchant? His majesty has sent us to collect the next consignment of your yperoinos. Here’s the gold for it.” He held up a leather sack.

With a curious sense of unreality, Argyros let him come up the barred gate. The magistrianos counted the nomismata. The proper number were there. Shaking their heads as they went back and forth, Argyros’s men fetched the jars of superwine and handed them to the officer’s troopers over the top of the gate. When he had all of them, the officer saluted Argyros and led his section away. All the magistrianos could think of was Nero, singing to his lyre of the fall of Troy while Rome burned around him. Dariel was not burning, but no thanks to Goarios.

The stout defense Argyros’s band and the real traders had put up gave the rioters a bellyful. They mounted no fresh assaults. The magistrianos found the night almost as nervous as if they had. All around was a devils’ chorus of screams, shouts, and crashes, sometimes close by, sometimes far away. They were more alarming because he could not see what caused them. He kept imagining he smelled more smoke than cooking fires could account for.

“Who’s that?” one of his men called, peering at a shadow moving in the darkness. “Keep away, or I’ll put an arrow through you.”

A woman laughed. “I’ve been threatened with worse than that tonight, hero. Go wake Argyros for me.”

“Who are you to give me orders, trull?” the Roman demanded. “I ought to—”

“It’s all right, Constantine. I know her,” the magistrianos said. He looked out, but saw little. “I’m here, Mirrane. What do you want?”

“Let me inside first. If Goarios learns I’ve come, we’re all done for. We may be anyhow.”

“Are you going to open the gate for her?” Despite Mirrane’s alarming words, Corippus plainly did not like the idea. “No telling who’s lurking there out past our torchlight.”

Argyros nodded. Trusting Mirrane was harder than wanting her. He remembered, though, her supple dancer’s muscles. “Can you climb a rope if we throw one out to you?” he called over the fence. She laughed again, not in the least offended. “Of course I can.” A moment later she proved good as her word, dropping into the courtyard as lightly and quietly as a veteran raider. She was dressed like one, too, in nondescript men’s clothes, with her fine hair pulled up under a felt hat that looked like an inverted flowerpot. Few marauders, however, smelled of attar of roses.

Ignoring the curious glances the men in the courtyard were giving her, she baldly told Argyros, “Goarios knows you were in the marketplace where the riot started this afternoon. In fact, he thinks you’re the person who got it started.”

“Mother of God!” The magistrianos crossed himself. “Why does he think so?”

“You can’t deny you were there—one of my, ah, little birds saw you.” Mirrane sounded very pleased with herself. “As for why he thinks you threw that knife at the Kirghiz, well, I told the little bird to tell him that.” She grinned as if she had done something clever and expected Argyros to see it too. All he saw was disaster.

Those of his men who heard shouted in outrage. “I should have let Constantine shoot you,” he ground out, his voice as icy as Corippus’s eyes.

“Ah, but then you’d never have known, would you, not till too late. Now you—we—still have the chance to get away.”

“I suppose you expect my men to give you an armed escort back to Persia.”

Mirrane paid no attention to the sarcasm. “Not at all, because I’m not planning to go south.” She paused. “You do know, don’t you?”

“Know what?” Argyros’s patience was stretched to the breaking point, but he would sooner have gone under thumbscrews than reveal that to Mirrane.

“That the w hole Kirghiz army is through the Caspian Gates and heading for Dariel.”

“No,” Argyros said woodenly. “I didn’t know that.” With the chaos inside the town, that at first seemed a less immediate trouble than many closer at hand. Then the magistrianos ran Mirrane’s words through his head again. “You’re going to the Kirghiz?”

“To stop them, if I can. And you and yours are coming with me.”

Argyros automatically began to say no, but checked himself before the word was out of his mouth. The pieces of the puzzle were falling together in his mind. “That’s why your man fed Goarios that lying fairy tale!”

“To make you work with me, you mean? Well, of course, dear Basil.” She reached out to stroke his cheek, which warmed and infuriated him at the same time. He hoped that did not show on his face, but suspected it did; Mirrane’s smile was too knowing. But she held mockery from her voice as she continued, “I told you once that the nomads endanger both our states. Besides, you have a weapon we may be able to turn against them.”

“The superwine, you mean?”

“Of course. The more Kirghiz who are drunk, and the drunker they are, the better the chance my plan has.”

Being caught in her web himself, the magistrianos had a certain amount of sympathy for the nomads. There were some thousands of them and only one of her, but he was not sure that evened the odds.

“We’ll load the wagons,” he said resignedly. He did not mention the hellpowder. He had used a little at Daras, but only a little. Mirrane would have trouble imagining how powerful more than half a ton of the stuff could be.

As Argyros set his men to work, Supsa came rushing up. “You leaving?” the innkeeper wailed. “No leave!”

“I fear I have very little choice,” the magistrianos said. He glared at Mirrane. She smiled sweetly, hoping to annoy him further. He stamped away.

It was nearly midnight before the miniature caravan—wagons, packhorses, and all—rumbled out of the courtyard. The men on horseback looked less like traders than they had coming into Dariel. Some of them had worn mail shirts then too, but that was not where the difference lay. It was in their posture, their eyes, the hard set of their mouths. They were no longer pretending to be anything but soldiers. Even drunken rioters took one look and got out of their way.

“A good crew you have,” Mirrane remarked. She was sitting by Argyros, who drove the lead wagon. It was full of yperoinos. In the last wagon of the four came Eustathios Rhangabe—as far as everyone else was concerned, he was welcome to baby the hellpowder along all by himself. If by some disaster that wagon went up, the magistrianos thought, it would take the flank guards and everything else with it, but sometimes the illusion of safety was as important as the thing itself. Argyros’s mouth twisted; that could also be said for the illusion of command. “They’re dancing to your tune now,” he growled. He would have lost his temper altogether had she come back with some clever comment, but she merely nodded. She was, he reminded himself, a professional too. He had worried about whether the gate crew would let them pass (for that matter, he had wondered if there would be a gate crew, or if they had left their posts to join the looting). They were there and alert, but their officer waved Argyros through. “Getting out while the getting’s good, are you?” he said. “Don’t blame you a bit—in your shoes, I’d do the same.”

“Not if you knew where we were going you wouldn’t,” the magistrianos said, once the fellow was out of earshot. Mirrane giggled.

Argyros called a halt a couple of miles outside Dariel. “This is far enough,” he said. “None of the trouble from town will follow us here, and we need rest to be worth anything come morning. We also need to find out just what this scheme is that we’re supposed to be following.” He gave Mirrane a hard look. So did Corippus. “Why?” he asked bluntly. “Now that she doesn’t have Goarios protecting her, why not turn her into dogmeat and go about our business?” Several men grunted agreement. Mirrane stared back, unafraid. She said, “I might point out that, were it not for me, Goarios’s soldiers would have you now.”

“Were it not for you,” Corippus retorted, “Goarios’s soldiers would never have been interested in us in the first place.” Again many of his comrades paused in the business of setting up camp to nod.

“She could have given us to the Alan king any time she chose,” Argyros said. “She didn’t.”

“Till it served her purpose,” Corippus said stubbornly.

“True enough, but are you saying it fails to serve ours too? Do you really want the Kirghiz rampaging through Mesopotamia, or grazing their flocks in Kappadokia from now on? They endanger us as well as Persia. And if you’re so eager to be rid of Mirrane, let us hear your plan for holding the nomads back.”

He hoped the north African would not have one.

When Corippus dropped his eyes, the magistrianos knew he had won that gamble. His subordinate, though, did not yield tamely. He said, “Maybe we could use the yperoinos to get the buggers drunk, and then—” He ran dry, as a water clock will when someone forgets to fill it.

“And then what?” Argyros prodded. “Sneak through their tents slitting throats? There are a few too many of them for that, I’m afraid. If you have no ideas of your own, getting rid of someone who does strikes me as wasteful.”

Corippus saluted with sardonic precision, shook his head, and stalked off to help get a fire started. Mirrane touched Argyros’s arm. In the darkness, her eyes were enormous. “I thank you,” she whispered. “In this trade of ours, one gets used to the notion of dying unexpectedly, but I’d not have cared for what likely would have happened before they finally knocked me over the head.”

Having been a soldier, Argyros knew what she meant. He grunted, embarrassed for a moment at what men could do—and too often did—to women.

“Why did you choose to save me?” Mirrane still kept her voice low, but the newly kindled fire brought an ironic glint to her eye. “Surely not for the sake of the little while we were lovers?” She studied the magistrianos’s face. “Are you blushing?” she asked in delighted disbelief.

“It’s only the red light of the flames,” Argyros said stiffly. “You’ve been saying you know how to stop the Kirghiz. That’s more than anyone else has claimed. You’re worth keeping for that, if nothing else.”

“If nothing else,” she echoed with an upraised eyebrow. “For that polite addition, at least, I am in your debt.”

The magistrianos bit back an angry reply. Mirrane had a gift for making him feel out of his depth, even when, as now, power lay all on his side. No woman since his long-dead wife had drawn him so, but Mirrane’s appeal was very different from Helen’s. With Helen he had felt more at ease, at peace, than with anyone else he had ever known. The air of risk and danger that surrounded Mirrane had little to do with the settings in which he met her; it was part of her essence. Like his first cup of yperoinos, it carried a stronger jolt than he was used to.

To cover his unease, he returned to matters at hand. “So what is this precious plan of yours?” She stayed silent. He said, “For whatever you think it worth, I pledge I won’t slit your throat after you’ve spoken, or harm you in any other way.”

She watched him. “If your hard-eyed friend gave me that promise, I’d know what it was worth. You, though . . . with that long, sad face, you remind me of the saints I’ve seen painted in Christian churches. Should I believe you on account of that? It seems a poor reason.”

“Sad to say, I am no saint.” As if to prove his words, memories of her lips, her skin against his surged in him. Angrily, he fought them down.

Her lazy smile said she was remembering too. But it faded, leaving her thoughtful and bleak. “If I tell you, I must trust you, and your land and mine are enemies. May you fall into the fire in the House of the Lie if you are leading me astray.”

“I will swear by God and His Son, if you like.”

“No, never mind. An oath is only the man behind it, and you suit me well enough without one.” Still she said nothing. Finally Argyros made a questioning noise. She laughed shakily. “The real trouble is, the plan is not very good.”

“Let me hear it.”

“All right. We spoke of it once, in fact, in Goarios’s palace. You said you remembered how the White Huns lured Peroz King of Kings and his army to destruction—how they dug a trench with but a single small opening, then concealed it. They fled through the gap, then fell on his army when it was thrown into confusion by the first ranks charging into the ditch. I had hoped to do something like that to the Kirghiz. They have little discipline at any time, and if they were drunk on your superwine, drunker even than they knew—”

Argyros nodded. The scheme was daring, ruthless, and could have been practical—all characteristics he had come to associate with Mirrane. “You do see the flaw?” he said, as gently as he could.

“Actually, I saw two,” she replied. “We don’t have enough people to dig the ditch, and we don’t have an army to use to fight even if it should get dug.”

“That, ah, does sum it up,” the magistrianos said.

“I know, I know, I know.” Bitterness as well as firelight shadowed Mirrane’s features. “At the end, I kept telling Goarios he was giving his country away by not keeping a tighter check on the nomads; I was hoping to use the Dariel garrison to do what I had in mind. But he still thinks he’ll ride on the backs of the Kirghiz to glory—or he did, until the riots started. For all I know, he may believe it even now. He’s had less use for me outside the bedchamber since I stopped telling him things he wanted to hear.” She cocked her head, peered at Argyros. “And so here I am, in your hands instead.”

He did not answer. His eyes were hooded, far away.

Mirrane said, “With most men, I would offer at once to go to their tents with them. With you, somehow I don’t think that would help save me.”

It was as if he had not heard her. Then he came far enough out of his brown study to reply, “No, it would be the worst thing you could do.” Her glare brought him fully back to himself. He explained hastily, “My crew would mutiny if they thought I was keeping you for my own pleasure.”

She glanced toward Corippus, shivered. “Very well. I don’t doubt you’re right. What then?”

“I’ll tell you in the morning.” The magistrianos’s wave summoned a couple of his men. “Make sure she does not escape, but don’t harass her either. Her scheme has more merit than I thought.” They saluted and led Mirrane away.

Argyros called Corippus to him and spoke at some length. If defects lurked in the plan slowly taking shape in his mind, the dour north African would find them. Corippus did, too, or thought he did. Argyros had to wake up Eustathios Rhangabe to be sure. Through a yawn wide enough to frighten a lion, Rhangabe suggested changes, ones not so drastic as Corippus had thought necessary. The artisan fell asleep where he sat; Corippus and the magistrianos kept hammering away. At last Corippus threw his hands in the air. “All right!” he growled, almost loud enough to wake Rhangabe. “This is what we came for—we have to try it, I suppose. Who knows? We may even live through it.”

A small wagon train and a good many packhorses plodded north toward the Caspian Gates. The riders who flanked the packhorses seemed bored with what they were doing: a routine trip, their attitude seemed to say, that they had made many times before. If I see Constantinople again, Argyros thought half seriously, I’ll have to do some real acting, maybe the next time someone revives Euripides. A glance up from beneath lowered brows showed the magistrianos Kirghiz scouts. He had been seeing them for some time now, and they his band. He had enough horsemen with him to deter the scouts from approaching by ones and twos. For his part, he wanted to keep pretending he did not know they existed. For as long as he could, he also kept ignoring the dust cloud that lay ahead. When he saw men through it, though, men who wore furs and leathers and rode little steppe ponies, he reined in, drawing the wagon to a halt.

“We’ve just realized that’s the whole bloody Kirghiz army,” he called to his comrades, reminding them of their roles as any good director would. “Now we can be afraid.”

“You’re too late,” someone said. The men from the Empire milled out in counterfeit—Argyros hoped it was counterfeit—panic and confusion. His own part was to leap down from the wagon, cut a packhorse free of the string, then scramble onto the beast and boot it after the mounts his men were riding desperately southward.

The Kirghiz scouts gave chase. A few arrows hissed past. Then one of the nomads toppled from the saddle; Corippus was as dangerous a horse-archer as any plainsman. That helped deter pursuit, but Argyros did not think it would have lasted long in any case. The Kirghiz scouts were only human—they would want to steal their fair share of whatever these crazy merchants had left behind. Argyros looked back over his shoulder—cautiously, as he was not used to riding without stirrups. One of the nomads was bending to examine the broken jars the magistrianos’s horse had been carrying. Some of the contents must still have been cupped in a shard, for the Kirghiz suddenly jumped up and began pointing excitedly at the packhorses and wagons. Argyros did not need to hear him to know what he was shouting. Nomads converged on the abandoned yperoinos like bees on roses. The poor fools who had provided such a magnificent windfall were quickly forgotten. Before long, they were able to stop and look back with no fear of pursuit. Corippus gave the short bark that passed for laughter with him. “After a haul like that, most of those buggers will have all the loot from civilization they ever dreamed of.”

“Something to that,” Argyros admitted. The thought made him sad.

One of his men put hand to forehead to shield his eyes from the sun as he peered toward the Kirghiz. He swore in frustration all the same and turned to Argyros. “Can you get a better view, sir?”

“Let’s see.” At his belt, along with such usual appurtenances as knife, sap, and pouch, Argyros carried a more curious device: a tube fitting tightly into another, with convex glass glittering at both ends. He undid it from the boss on which it hung, raised it to his eye, and pulled the smaller tube partway out of the larger one.

The image he saw was upside down and fringed with false colors, but the Kirghiz seemed to jump almost within arm’s length. The artisans in Constantinople still had trouble making lenses good enough to use—most far-seers belonged to Roman generals, though the savants at the imperial university had seen some things in the heavens that puzzled them and even, it was whispered, shook their faith. Only because Argyros had learned of the far-seer in the first place was he entitled to carry one now. He watched the Kirghiz nobles, some of whom had sampled superwine in Dariel, trying to keep their rank and file away from the wagons. They were too late. Too many ordinary nomads had already tasted the potent brew. The ones who’d had some wanted more; the ones who’d had none wanted some. Even under the best of circumstances, the nomads obeyed orders only when they felt like it. These circumstances were not the best. Argyros smiled in satisfaction.

“They all want their share,” he reported.

“Good,” Corippus said. The rest of the men nodded, but without great enthusiasm. If this part of the plan had failed, it could not have gone forward. The more dangerous portions lay ahead. The Romans rode back toward Dariel. Eustathios Rhangabe was bringing up the last wagon, the one so different from the rest. A couple of outriders were with him; Mirrane’s horse was tethered to one of theirs. Argyros had told them to shoot her if she tried to escape, and warned her of his order. All the same, he was relieved to see her with his men. Orders were rarely a match for the likes of her.

“You have your spots chosen?” the magistrianos asked Rhangabe.

The artisan nodded. “Six of them, three on either side.”

“Basil, what are these madmen playing at? They won’t talk to me,” Mirrane said indignantly. “They aren’t following what we talked about at all. All they’ve done is dig holes in the ground and put jars of your strong wine in them. What good will that—” Mirrane stopped in the middle of her sentence. Her sharp brown eyes flashed from Argyros to the wagon and back again. “Or is that yperoinos in them?

Back in Daras, you had some trick of Ahriman—”

Argyros would have said “Satan’s trick,” but he understood her well enough. He might have known she would make the connection. His respect for her wits, already high, rose another notch. He said, “Well, without that army behind us, we do have to modify things a bit.”

“The good god Ormazd knows that’s true.” Suddenly, startlingly, she grinned at the magistrianos. “You won’t need to worry about my running off any longer, dear Basil. I wouldn’t miss seeing this for worlds.”

So I can bring news of it back to the King of Kings, Argyros added silently. He said, “Let’s hope there’s something interesting for you to see.” He knew she was clever enough to add her own unspoken commentary: if not, nothing else matters, because we’ll be dead. He told off the half-dozen men who had done the digging, sent them back to the holes they had made. He detailed two more to keep Mirrane under guard. Regardless of what she said, he took no chances where she was concerned. Eustathios Rhangabe, of course, stayed with his wagon. That left—Argyros counted on his fingers—fifteen men. He wished for four times as many. Wishing failed to produce them. “Double quivers,” the magistrianos told the men he did have. Each of them carried, then, eighty arrows. If every shaft killed, they could hardly slay one of five Kirghiz. How long would the nomads take to get thoroughly drunk? Certainly not as long as any of them expected. Argyros gauged the sun in the sky. He could not afford to wait for nightfall. He did not think he would have to.

Corippus had spent even more time in the imperial army than Argyros. Their eyes met; they both judged the moment ripe. Argyros raised his right hand. His comrades clucked to their horses, trotted north once more behind him.

They rode in silence, alert for Kirghiz scouts. Argyros used the far-seer from horseback, though it made him vaguely seasick to do so. He saw no one. His confidence rose, a little. If the nomads were too busy soaking up their unexpected loot to bother with scouts, so much the better. The horsemen topped a low rise. Corippus barked sudden harsh laughter. “Look at them!” he exclaimed, pointing. “They’re like a swarm of bees round a honeypot.”

The comparison was apt. The Kirghiz were milling in a great disorderly knot around the abandoned wagons and pack-horses. Pulling out the far-seer again, Argyros saw jars going from hand to hand. He watched one nomad, wearing a foolish expression, slide off his horse. Another reached down to snatch away the jug the fellow was holding.

“They’re as ripe as ever they will be,” the magistrianos said. “Let’s go kick the honeypot over—and hope we don’t get stung.”

Some of the Kirghiz must have seen Argyros and his followers approach, yet they took no alarm. Argyros could hardly blame their leaders for that. No sane attackers would approach a foe so grotesquely outnumbering them, any more than a mouse would blithely leap into the fox’s jaws. The magistrianos drew up his tiny battle line not far inside archery range. He raised his arm, then dropped it. Along with his men, he snatched up an arrow, drew his bow back to his ear and released it, grabbed for the next shaft.

They had all shot three or four times before the racket from the Kirghiz began to change timbre. Some of the nomads cried out in pain; others pointed and yelled at the suicidal maniacs harassing them, just as a man will point and shout at the mosquito that has just bitten his leg and buzzed off. A few nomads began to shoot back, those who happened to be facing the right way, who were not too tightly pressed by their fellows, and who were sober enough to remember how to use their bows. Argyros and his comrades methodically emptied their quivers into the tight-packed mass. Those who knew fragments of the Kirghiz speech shouted insults at the nomads. They were not out to strike and skulk away; they wanted to be noticed.

When the outer ranks of nomads moved away from the wagons, the magistrianos’s little force retreated a corresponding distance, but kept plying the Kirghiz with arrows. More and more nomads came after them.

Argyros yelled the most bloodcurdling curses he knew, then turned his horse and roweled it with his spurs. This flight was not like the one when he had abandoned the yperoinos wagons; the nomads were pursuing in earnest now.

One of his men shrieked as an arrow sprouted from his shoulder. The magistrianos knew others would also perish, either because some arrows had to hit with so many in the air or because some nomads had faster horses than some of his men. With the thunder of thousands of hooves behind him, he hoped some of his men had faster horses than the Kirghiz. Were the chase longer than the mile and a half or so that lay between Argyros’s men and Eustathios Rhangabe’s wagon, he knew none of his people would be likely to survive.

He glanced ahead and to the right. Yes, there behind a bush was one of the men who had come from Constantinople. Unless one knew where to look for him, he was almost invisible. Only the stragglers of the Kirghiz, who were pursuing with scant regard for order, would come near the fellow. Argyros had to keep his attention on more immediate concerns. He did not see his countryman thrust a lighted candle at an oil-soaked rag, and noticed only peripherally when the fellow leaped up and dashed for another hole not far away.

What happened moments after that was difficult to ignore, even for one as single-mindedly focused on flight as the magistrianos. The hellpowder in the buried jars ignited, and, with a roar louder and deeper than thunder, the ground heaved itself up. Earth, stones, and shrubs vomited from the newly dug crater. Argyros’s horse tried to rear. He roughly fought it down. He and the rest of the men from the Roman Empire had encountered hellpowder before and knew what the frightful noise was. Even as the thought raced through Argyros’s mind, another charge of the stuff went off, far over on the Kirghiz left. It should have been simultaneous with the one on the right, and was in fact close enough for Argyros to let out a pleased grunt.

The nomads, taken by surprise as much as their mounts, naturally shied away from the blasts. That bunched them more closely together and made it harder for them to keep up their headlong pursuit. Still, they were bold men, not easily cowed by the unknown. They kept after their quarry. Another pair of blasts crashed forth, almost at the same instant, as the Romans dashed past the second prepared set of charges. These were nearer each other and nearer the path than the first ones had been. Argyros felt the booming reports with his whole body, not merely through his ears. Again he had to force his mount to obey his will.

He swung around in the saddle to look back at the Kirghiz. They were packed still more tightly now, wanted nothing to do with the eruptions to either side. He saw two horses collide. Both went down with their riders, and others, unable to stop, tumbled over them. Now the magistrianos’s men were lengthening their lead over the nomads, except for the frontrunners out ahead of the pack. He grabbed an arrow, tried a Parthian shot at one of those. He missed, swore, and concentrated again on riding. The Romans manning the third set of charges had their timing down to a science. They waited until their countrymen were past before touching off their stores of hellpowder. This last pair was so close to the path that dirt showered down on Argyros. His mount bolted forward as if he had spurred it. The nomads’ ponies, on the other hand, balked at the sudden cataclysmic noise in front of them. The last wagon appeared ahead. Eustathios Rhangabe dove out of it, then sprinted for the shelter of the rocky outcrop where, Argyros presumed, the last two Romans were holding Mirrane. The magistrianos hoped Rhangabe had accurately gauged the length of candle he had left burning atop one of the jars in the wagon. On second thought, hope did not seen enough. Jolts from Argyros’s galloping horse made his prayer breathless, but it was no less sincere for that.

Around the wagon, invitingly set out, were open jars of yperoinos. None of the Romans paid any attention to them. The Kirghiz whooped with delight when they spied the familiar jars. Most of them tugged on the reins to halt their horses. Drinking was easier and more enjoyable work than chasing crazy bandits who shot back.

Several Roman riders were already diving behind the rocks where Rhangabe had found shelter; more dismounted and ran for them as Argyros drew up. He sprang from his horse. An arrow buried itself in the ground, a palm’s breadth from his foot. Not all the nomads, worse luck, were pausing to refresh themselves.

The magistrianos peered over a boulder. He lofted a shot over the last few Romans at the pursuing Kirghiz. His fingers told him only three shafts were left in his quiver. He reached for one. If something had gone wrong with that wagon, saving them would not matter.

“How much longer?” Mirrane shouted at him.

“Why ask me?” he yelled back, irrationally annoyed. “Rhangabe lit the candle—why don’t you ask—”

He was never sure afterward whether he said “him” or not. He had thought the blasts from a couple of jars of hellpowder loud and terrifying; this sound put him in mind of the roar that would accompany the end of the world. The earth shook beneath his feet. He threw himself face-down, his eyes in the dust and his hands clapped to his ears. He felt no shame at that; the rest of the Romans were doing exactly the same thing.

He was, though, the leader of this crew. Pride quickly-forced him to his feet—he did not want his men to see him groveling in the dirt. He brushed at his tunic as he started to scramble over the rocks to find out what the blast had done.

Two others, he noticed, were already up and looking. One was Eustathios Rhangabe. Argyros did not mind that; if anyone could take hellpowder in stride, it would be a man who had dealt with the stuff for years. The other, however, was Mirrane.

He had only an instant in which to feel irked. Then she threw herself into his arms and delivered a kiss that rocked him almost as much as the hellpowder had. Her lips touched his ear. That was not a caress; he could feel them moving in speech. He shook his head. For the moment, at least, he was deaf. He was sorry when Mirrane pulled her face away from his, but she did not draw back far, only enough to let him see her mouth as she spoke. “It worked!” she was yelling over and over. “It worked!”

That brought him back to himself. “Let me see,” he said, mouthing the words in the same exaggerated style she had used: her hearing could be in no better shape than his. He peered over the piled rocks behind which he had huddled. “Mother of God, have mercy!” he whispered. Of itself, his hand leapt from his forehead to his breast as it shaped the sign of the cross. He had been a soldier; he knew only too well that war was not the clean-cut affair of drama and glory the epic poets made it out to be. All the same, he was not prepared for the spectacle the lifting veils of acrid smoke were presenting to him.

The titanic blast had not slain all the Kirghiz, or even come close. A large majority of the nomads were riding north. From the desperate haste with which they used spurs and whips on their ponies, Argyros did not think they would pause this side of the pass. Observing what they were fleeing from, the magistrianos could not blame them.

In adapting the plan the Ephthalites had used against the King of Kings, Argyros knew he needed to force the Kirghiz to group more tightly than usual: thus the hellpowder charges that funneled them toward the wagon. Now he saw how appallingly well he had succeeded.

Close by the crater where the wagon had stood, few fragments were recognizable as surely being from man or horse. Freakishly, however, one of the jars of superwine that helped lure the nomads to disaster remained unbroken, though it, like much of the landscape there, was splashed with red. Argyros had anticipated that central blast zone and hoped it—and the noise that went with its creation—would be enough to intimidate the Kirghiz. He had not thought about what would lie beyond there, about what would happen when fragments of the wagon and fragments of the jars that had held the hellpowder were propelled violently outward after it ignited.

The results, especially when seen upside down in the surreal closeness the far-seer brought, reminded him of nothing so much as hell in a hot-tempered monk’s sermon. Scythed-down men and horses, variously mutilated, writhed and bled and soundlessly screamed. That silence, somehow, was worst of all; it began to lift as the minutes went by and Argyros’s hearing slowly returned. Yet despite the horror, the magistrianos also understood Mirrane’s delight at the scene before them. Never had a double handful of men not only vanquished but destroyed an enemy army; the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylai was as nothing beside this.

One by one, the rest of Argyros’s crew nerved themselves to see what they had wrought. Most reacted with the same mixture of awe, horror, and pride the magistrianos felt. Others tried to emulate Eustathios Rhangabe’s dispassionate stare; the artisan reacted to the grisly spectacle before him as if it were the final step in some complex and difficult geometic proof, a demonstration already grasped in the abstract. For his part, Corippus looked as though he only regretted the carnage had not been greater. “Some of them will be a long time dying,” he shouted Argyros’s way, sounding delighted at the prospect. His eyes, for once, did not seem cold. He was savage as any Kirghiz, Argyros thought; the chief difference between him and them was in choice of masters. He made a deadly dangerous foe; the magistrianos was glad they were on the same side.

That thought brought his mind back to the woman next to him. Mirrane might have been able to see into his head. She said, “And now that they are done with, what do you plan to do about me?” She no longer sounded full of nothing but glee, and Argyros did not think that was solely concern for her own fate. She had been examining the results of the blast for several minutes now, and a long look at those was enough to sober anyone less grim of spirit than Corippus.

The magistrianos stayed silent so long that Mirrane glanced over to see it he’d heard. Her mouth tightened when she realized he had. She said, “If you intend to kill me, kill me cleanly—don’t give me to your men for their sport. Were we reversed, captor and captive, I would do as much for you.”

Somehow, she managed one syllable of a laugh. “I hate to have to bellow to beg, but my ears ring so, I can’t help it.”

“Yes, I believe you might give me a clean death,” Argyros said musingly, though the ferocity of the King of King’s torturers was a bugbear that frightened children all through the Empire. The magistrianos paused again; he had been thinking about what to do with Mirrane since they left Dariel, without coming up with any sure answer. Now, under her eyes, he had to. At last he said, as much to himself as to her, “I think I am going to bring you back to Constantinople.”

“As you will.” Mirrane fought to hold her voice toneless, but beneath her swarthiness her face grew pale; the ingenuity of the Emperor’s torturers was a bugbear that frightened children all through Persia.

“I think you misunderstand me.” Like Mirrane, Argyros found it odd to be carrying on this conversation near the top of his lungs, but had little choice. Spreading his hands, he went on, “If you had your henchmen here instead of the other way around, would you let me go back to my capital?”

“No,” Mirrane answered at once; she was a professional.

The magistrianos had looked for no other reply from her. “You see my problem, then.” She nodded, again promptly—as he had said once, in many ways the two of them spoke the same language, though he used Greek and she Persian. That reflection was part of what prompted him to continue, “I hadn’t planned to put you in the gaol in the bowels of the Praitorion, or to send you to the Kynegion”—the amphitheater in northeastern Constantinople where the imperial headsmen plied their trade. “I meant that you should come back to the city with me.”

“Did you?” Mirrane lifted an eyebrow in the elegant Persian irony that could make even a sophisticated Roman less than self-assured. “Of course you know I will say yes to that: if I slept with you for the sake of duty in Daras, I suppose I can again, if need be. But why do you think you can make me stay in Constantinople? I escaped you there once, remember, on the spur of the moment. Do you imagine I could not do it again, given time to prepare?”

Argyros frowned; here, perhaps, was more professionalism than he wanted to find. He said, “Come or not, sleep with me or not, as you care to, not for any duty. As for leaving Constantinople, I daresay you are right—there are always ways and means. I can hope, though, you will not want to use them.”

Mirrane looked at him in amusement. “If that is a confession of wild, passionate, undying love, I must own I’ve heard them better done.”

“No doubt,” Argyros said steadily. “The Master of Offices writes poetry; I fear I haven’t the gift.”

“Battle epics.” Mirrane gave a scornful sniff.

The magistrianos supposed he should have not been surprised she knew what sort of poetry George Lakhanodrakon composed; the Romans kept such dossiers on high Persian officials. But he admired the way she brought it out pat.

He shook his head. This was no time to be bedeviled with side issues. He said, “I doubt you could pry a confession of wild, passionate, undying love from me with barbed whips or hot irons. To mean them fully, I fear one has to be half my age and innocent enough to think the world is always a sunny place. I’m sorry I can’t oblige. I will say, though, I’ve found no woman but you since my wife died with whom I care to spend time out of bed as well as in. Will that do?”

It was Mirrane’s turn to hesitate. When she did speak, she sounded as if she were thinking out loud, a habit Argyros also had: “You must mean this. You have the power behind you to do as you like with me here; you gain nothing from stringing me along.” She still kept that inward look as she said, “I told you once in Constantinople we were two of a kind—do you remember?”

“Yes. Maybe I’ve finally decided to believe you.”

“Have you?” Mirrane’s voice remained reflective, but something subtle changed in it: “I suppose Constantinople has its share of fire-temples.”

She was, the magistrianos thought, a master of the oblique thrust, murmuring in one breath how alike they were and then hammering home a fundamental difference. He said stiffly, “I would never give up hope that you might come to see that the truth lies in Christ.” Seeing her nostrils flare, he made haste to add, “Those who follow the teachings of Zoroaster may worship in the city and the Empire, however, in return for the King of Kings not persecuting the Christians under his control . . . as I am sure you know perfectly well.”

That last little jab won a smile from her. “Fair enough,” she said, “though how you Christians can fail to see that evil is a live force of its own rather than a mere absence of good has always been beyond me.”

Her smile grew wider, more teasing. “I expect we will have time to argue it out.”

He took a moment to find her meaning. When at last he did, his breath caught as he asked, “You’ll come with me, then?”

“Well, why not? Didn’t the two of us—not forgetting your men, of course—just put paid to a threat to both our countries? What better sets the stage for a more, ah, personal alliance?” Now she was wearing an impish grin.

Argyros felt a similar expression stretch his face in unfamiliar ways. He looked again at the blast that had ruined the hopes of the Kirghiz and of Goarios. His eye lit on the miraculously unbroken bottle of yperoinos. Suddenly it seemed a very good omen. He pointed it out to Mirrane. “Shall we pledge ourselves with it?” “Well, why not?” she said.