Agent of Byzantium

I: Etos Kosmou 6814

The steppe country north of the Danube made Basil Argyros think of the sea. Broad, green, and rolling, it ran eastward seemingly forever, all the way to the land of Serinda, from which, almost eight hundred years before, the great RomanEmperor Justinian had stolen the secret of silk. The steppe was like the sea in another way. It offered an ideal highway for invaders. Over the centuries, wave after wave of nomads had dashed against the frontiers of the Roman Empire: Huns and Avars, Bulgars and Magyars, Pechenegs and Cumans, and now the Jurchen. Sometimes the frontier defense would not hold, and the barbarians would wash over it, even threatening to storm into Constantinople, the imperial capital.

With a deliberate effort of will, Argyros drew back from the extended nautical metaphor into which he had fallen. What with the motion of his horse beneath him, it was threatening to make the scout commander seasick.

He turned to his companion, a blond youngster from Thessalonike named Demetrios after the city’s patron saint. “Nothing so far. Let’s ride on a little farther.”

Demetrios made a face. “Only if you say so, sir. I don’t think the devils are anywhere around. Couldn’t we just head back to camp? I could use a skin of wine.” Demetrios fit three of the military author Maurice’s four criteria for a scout: he was handsome, healthy, and alert. He was not, however, markedly sober.

Argyros, for his part, did not quite pass the first part of Maurice’s test. For one thing, his eyebrows grew in a single black bar across his forehead. For another, his eyes were strangely mournful, the eyes of a sorrowing saint in an icon or of a man who has seen too much too soon. Yet he was only in his late twenties, hardly older than Demetrios.

He said, “We’ll go on another half mile. Then, if we still haven’t found anything, we’ll call it a day and turn around.”

“Yes, sir,” Demetrios said resignedly.

They rode on, the tall grass brushing at their ankles and sometimes rising to tickle their horses’ bellies. Argyros felt naked in his long goat’s-hair tunic. He wished he had not had to leave his mail shirt behind; the Jurchen were ferociously good archers. But the jingle of the links might have given him away, and in any case the weight of the iron would have slowed his mount.

He and Demetrios splashed across a small stream. There were hoofprints in the mud on the far bank: not the tracks of the iron-shod horses the Romans rode, but those made by the shoeless hooves of steppe ponies.

“Looks like about half a dozen stopped here,” Demetrios said. His head swiveled as though he expected all the Jurchen in creation to burst out from behind a bush and ride straight for him.

“Probably their own scouting party,” Argyros judged. “The main body of them can’t be far behind.”

“Let’s go back,” Demetrious said nervously. He took his bow out of its case, reached over his shoulder for an arrow to set to the string.

“Now I won’t argue with you,” Argyros said. “We’ve found what we came for.” The two Roman scouts wheeled their mounts and trotted back the way they had come.

The army’s hypostrategos—lieutenant-general—was a small, hawk-faced man named Andreas Hermoniakos. He grunted as he listened to Argyros’s report. He looked sour, but then he always did; his stomach pained him. “Fair enough,” he said when the scout commander was through. “A good trouncing should teach these chicken-thieves to keep to their own side of the river. Dismissed.”

Argyros saluted and left the lieutenant-general’s tent. A few minutes later, a series of trumpet calls rang out, summoning the army to alert. As smoothly as if it were a drill, men donned mail shirts and plumed helmets; saw to bows and lances, swords and daggers; and took their places for their general’s address and for prayer before going into battle.

As was true of so many soldiers, and especially officers, in the Roman army, John Tekmanios was Armenian by blood, though he spoke the Latin-flavored Greek of the army without eastern accent. From long experience, he knew the proper tone to take when speaking to his troops:

“Well, lads,” he said, “we’ve beaten these buggers before, on our side of the Danube. Now all that’s left is finishing the job over here, to give the barbarians a lesson they’ll remember awhile. And we can do it, too, sure as there’s hair on my chin.” That drew a laugh and a cheer. His magnificent curly whiskers reached halfway down the front of his gilded coat of mail.

He went on, “The Emperor’s counting on us to drive these damned nomads away from the frontier. Once we’ve done it, I know we’ll get the reward we deserve for it; Nikephoros, God bless him, is no niggard. He came up from the ranks, you know; he remembers what the soldier’s life is like.”

Having made that point, Tekmanios used it to lead to another: “Once the battle’s won, like I said, you’ll get what’s coming to you. Don’t stop to strip the Jurchen corpses or plunder their camp. You might get yourselves and your mates killed and miss out on spending your bonus money.”

Again, he got the tension-relieving laugh he was looking for. He finished, “Don’t forget—fight hard and obey your officers. Now join me in prayer that God will watch over us today.”

A black-robed priest, his hair drawn back in a bun, joined the general on the portable rostrum. He crossed himself, a gesture Tekmanios and the whole army followed. “Kyrie eleison,” the priest cried, and the soldiers echoed him: “Lord, have mercy!”

They chanted the prayer over and over. It led naturally to the hymn of the Trisagion—the Thrice-holy—sung each morning on arising and each evening after dinner: “Holy God, holy mighty one, holy undying one, have mercy on us!”

After the Trisagion usually came the Latin cry of “Nobiscum Deus!” —God with us. Tekmanios’s priest, though, had imagination. Instead of ending the prayer service so abruptly, he led the army in a hymn composed by that great author of religious poetry, St. Mouamet.

“There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His son,” Argyros sang with the rest. St. Mouamet was a favorite of his, and after Paul probably the most zealous convert the church had ever known. Born a pagan in an Arabian desert town, he came to Christianity while trading in Syria and never went home again. He dedicated his life to Christ, producing hymn after impassioned hymn, and rose rapidly in the church hierarchy. He ended his days as archbishop of New Carthage in distant Ispania. Canonized not long after his death, he was, not surprisingly, venerated as the patron saint of changes. Once the service was done, the army formed up, each of the three divisions behind the large, bright banner of its commanding merarch. The moirarchs or regimental commanders had smaller flags, while the banners of the tagmata—companies—were mere streamers. The tagmata were of varying size, from two hundred to four hundred men, to keep the enemy from getting an accurate estimate of the army’s size by simply counting banners. A small reserve force stayed behind to protect the camp and the baggage train. The horses kicked up clods of earth and a thick cloud of dust. Argyros was glad to be a scout, well away from the choking stuff. The men in the second battle line would hardly be able to breathe after an hour on the move.

The scouts rode ahead, looking for the dust plume that would betray the Jurchen army, just as their own was being revealed to the enemy. Argyros chewed a handful of boiled barley meal and ate a strip of tough smoked beef. He swigged water from his canteen. From the way Demetrios grinned and smacked his lips when he drank in turn, Argyros suspected that his flask, contrary to orders, held wine. He scowled. Combat was too important a business to undertake drunk.

To give credit where due, the wine did not affect Demetrios’s alertness. He was the first to spot the gray-brown smudge against the sky in the northeast. “There!” he shouted, pointing. When several of his comrades were sure they saw it too, a scout raced back to give the word to Tekmanios. The rest of the party advanced for a closer look at the Jurchen. All the nomad tribes were masters at spreading out their troops to seem more numerous than they really were. Given over to disorder, they did not fight by divisions and regiments as did civilized folk like the Romans or Persians, but mustered by tribes and clans, forming their battle lines only at the last minute. They also loved to set ambushes, which made careful scouting even more important.

The terrain sloped very gently upward. Squinting ahead to lengthen his sight as much as he could, Argyros spied a group of plainsmen at the top of a low rise: undoubtedly the Roman scouts’ opposite numbers. “Let’s take them out,” he said. “The high ground there will let us see their forces instead of them being able to watch us.”

Nocking arrows, the scouts kicked their horses into a trot. The Jurchen saw them coming and rode out to defend their position, leaving behind a few men to keep observing the Roman army. The nomads rode smaller horses than their foes. Most of them wore armor of boiled leather instead of the heavier chain mail the Romans favored. Curved swords swung at their sides, but they had more confidence in their horn-reinforced bows.

A Jurchen rose in his stirrups (which were short, plainsman-style) and shot at the Roman scouts. The arrow fell short, vanishing into the tall steppe grass. “Hold up!” Argyros called to his men. “Their bows outrange ours, so we can’t possibly hit them from this far away.”

“I’m stronger than any damned scrawny Jurchen!” Demetrios shouted back as he let fly. All he accomplished was to waste an arrow.

A horse screamed as a shaft pierced its flank. The beast ran wild, carrying the scout who rode it out of the fight. A moment later a Jurchen clutched at his throat and pitched from the saddle. The Romans raised a cheer at the lucky shot.

An arrow flashed past Argyros’s ear with a malignant, wasp-like buzz. He heard someone grunt in pain close by. From the inspired cursing that followed, he did not think the wound serious. Along with the rest of the scouts, he shot as fast as he could. Forty arrows made a heavy quiver, but they were spent so fast in combat.

The Jurchen also filled the air with hissing death. Men and horses fell on both sides. The Romans bored in, knowing their mounts and armor would give them the edge in a hand-to-hand fight. Argyros expected the plainsmen to break and run like a lump of quicksilver smashed with the fist. Instead they drew their sabers, standing fast to protect the little group that still stood on the rise. One of those nomads—an older man, his hair almost white—was holding a long tube to his face; its other end pointed toward the main Roman force. Argyros would have crossed himself had he not held his sword in his right hand. It looked as though some Jurchen wizard had invented a spell for projecting the evil eye.

Then he had no attention to spare for the wizard, if that was what he was. A nomad in a sheepskin coat and fox-fur hat was slashing at his face. He turned the stroke awkwardly, cut down at the Jurchen. The plainsman leaned away. He grinned at his narrow escape, teeth white in a swarthy face made darker still by grease and dirt.

They traded blows for a minute or so, neither able to hurt the other. Then out of the corner of his eye Argyros saw a tall lance bearing seven oxtails coming over the rise: the standard of the Jurchen army.

“Break off!” he shouted to the rest of the scouts. “Break off, before they’re all on top of us!”

Unlike the Franco-Saxons of northern Gallia and Germany, the Romans did not make war for the sake of glory. They felt no shame in pulling back in the face of superior force. Their opponents, who had been hard-pressed, were glad enough to let them go.

Argyros looked around to make sure all his surviving men had disengaged. “Demetrios, you fool, come back!” he screamed. The scout from Thessalonike had succeeded in breaking through the picket line of Jurchen and, perhaps buoyed by the grape into thinking himself invincible, was charging single-handed at the little group of nomads that included the man with the tube.

His folly got what folly usually gets. He never came within fifty yards of the Jurchen; their arrows killed him and his mount in quick succession.

There was nothing Argyros could do to avenge him, not with the whole nomad army coming up. He led the scouts off to another small rise, though not one with as good a view of the upcoming battlefield as the one the Jurchen held. He sent one of his men to report the situation to Tekmanios and another to bring back more arrows. He hoped the fellow would return before the plainsmen took too great an interest in his little band.

Whenever he got the chance, he kept an eye on the Jurchen scouting party, which was now a good mile away. Riders went back and forth in a steady stream. Squint though he would, he could not quite make out the nomad with the tube. He frowned. He had never seen anything like that before, which automatically made it an object of suspicion.

The scouts cheered. Argyros’s head whipped around. The Roman army was coming into sight. Seen from the side, as the scouts did, Tekmanios’s plan was plain. He had a couple of tagmata on the right wing riding slightly ahead of the rest, concealing a strong force behind them that would dart out to outflank the Jurchen once the two armies were engaged. From the nomads’ angle of view, the outflankers should have been invisible.

But they were not. Maneuvering without the neat evolutions of the Roman cavalry, but with great rapidity, the Jurchen shifted horsemen to the left side of their line. “They’ve spotted the screen!” Argyros exclaimed in dismay. “Gregory, off to Tekmanios, fast as your horse will take you!”

The scout galloped away, but battle was joined before he reached the general. The Roman outflankers never got a chance to deploy; they came under such heavy attack that both they and a detachment of troops from the second line had all they could do to keep the Jurchen from flanking them. Nothing if not resourceful, Tekmanios tried to extend the left end of his line to overlap the nomads’ right. The Jurchen khan, though, might have been reading his mind. The attempt was countered before it had fairly begun. It was not that the nomads outnumbered the Roman forces; they did not. But they seemed to be spotting every move as fast as Tekmanios made it.

The scout returned with the arrows. “I’m just as glad to be here,” he said, tossing bundles of shafts from his saddlebags. “They’re too fornicating smart for us today.”

A horn call sounded over the din of battle: the order to retreat. Withdrawal was always risky; it turned with such ease to panic and rout. Against the nomads it was doubly dangerous. Unlike the Romans and Persians, the plainsmen, more mobile than their foes, liked to press pursuit to the limit in the hope of breaking the opposing army.

Even if he had been beaten, though, Tekmanios knew his business. In a retreat it mattered less for the Jurchen to be able to anticipate his movements; they were obvious anyway. His goal was simply to keep his forces in some kind of order as they fell back to their camp. And they, recognizing holding together as their best hope, obeyed his orders more strictly than they would have in victory. With the Jurchen between them and their countrymen, the Roman scouts swung wide of the running fight. Away from landmarks familiar to him, Argyros steered by the sun. He was surprised to notice how low in the west it had sunk. At last he spotted a line of willows growing along a riverbank. They were also visible from camp. “Upstream,” he said, pointing.

The scouts were the first troops to reach the camp: not surprising, for they did not have to fight their way back. The men of the tagmata guarding the baggage train crowded around them, firing anxious questions. They cried out in alarm when Argyros and his comrades gave them the bad news. Then, as they were trained to do, they hitched their oxen to the wagons and moved the wains into place behind the camp ditch to serve as a barricade against arrows.

That work, in which the scouts lent a hand, was not finished when the Roman army, still harassed by the Jurchen, drew near. Several oxen were shot and had to be killed with axes before their rampaging upset the wagons to which they were yoked.

Tagma by tagma, the Roman cavalry entered the campsite by way of the four gaps in the ditch. The companies that held off the nomads while their comrades reached safety scattered caltrops behind them to discourage pursuit to the gates. Then they too went inside, just as the sun finally set. That night and the next three days were among the most unpleasant times Argyros had ever spent. The moans of the wounded and the howls and shouts of the Jurchen made sleep impossible, and little showers of randomly aimed arrows kept falling into the camp until dawn.

As soon as it was light, the nomads tried to rush the Roman position. Concentrated archery drove them back. They drew out of range and settled down to besiege the encampment. Andreas Hermoniakos helped lift the Romans’ spirits. He went from one tagma to the next, saying, “Good luck to them. We’re camped by the water, and we have a week’s worth of food in the wagons. What will the Jurchen be eating before long?”

The question was rhetorical, but someone shouted, “Lice.” The filthiness of the nomads was proverbial. The lieutenant-general chuckled grimly. “Their bugs won’t feed even the Jurchen more than a couple of days. Eventually they’ll have to go back to their flocks.” So it proved, though the plainsmen persisted a day longer than Hermoniakos had guessed.

After scouting parties confirmed that the nomads really had withdrawn, Tekmanios convened an officers’ council in his tent to discuss the Romans’ next move. “It galls me to think of going back to the Danube with my tail between my legs, but the Jurchen—may Constantinople’s patron St. Andreas cover their khan with carbuncles—might have been standing with their ears to my mouth as I gave my orders. One more battle like that and we won’t have an army left to take back to the Danube.”

“They shouldn’t have been able to read our plan that well,” Constantine Doukas grumbled. He had commanded the right meros, the one whose screening force and flankers the nomads had discovered.

“They would have had to be right on top of us to see anything amiss. The devil must have been telling the khan what we were up to.”

Hermoniakos looked down his long, straight nose at the grousing merarch. “Some people blame the devil to keep from owning up to their shortcomings.”

Doukas reddened with anger. Argyros normally would have sided with the lieutenant-general. Now, though, he stuck up his hand and waited to be recognized; he was very junior in this gathering. Eventually Tekmanios’s attention wandered down to the far end of the table. “What is it, Basil?”

“The devil is more often spoken of than seen, but this once I think his excellency Lord Doukas may be right,” Argyros said. That earned a hard look from Hermoniakos, who had been well disposed toward him until now. Sighing, he plunged ahead with the story of the tube he had seen in the hands of the white-haired Jurchen. “I thought at the time it had to do with the evil eye,” he finished.

“That’s nonsense,” one of the regimental commanders said. “After our prayers before the battle and the blessing of the priest, how could any foul heathen charm harm us? God would not permit it.”

“God ordains what He wills, not what we will,” Tekmanios reproved. “We are all of us sinners; perhaps our prayers and purifications were not enough to atone for our wickedness.” He crossed himself, his officers imitating the gesture.

“Still, this is a potent spell,” Doukas said. The commanders around him nodded. Trained in Aristotelean reasoning, he reached a logical conclusion: “If we do not find out what it is and how it works, the barbarians will use it against the Roman Empire again.”

“And once we do,” Tekmanios said, “we can bring it to the priest for exorcism. Once he knows the nature of the magic, he will be better able to counteract it.”

The general and all the officers looked expectantly toward Argyros. He realized what they wanted of him and wished he had had the sense to keep his mouth shut. If Tekmanios had it in mind for him to kill himself, why not just hand him a knife?

“Cowardly wretch!” Andreas Hermoniakos exploded when Argyros came to him the next morning. “If you disobey your general’s orders, it will be the worse for you.”

“No, sir,” the scout commander said, speaking steadily in spite of the heads that turned to listen. “It will be the worse for me to follow them. To do so would be no less than suicide, which is a mortal sin. Better to suffer my lord Tekmanios’s anger awhile in this world than the pangs of hell for eternity in the next.”

“You think so, eh? We’ll see about that.” Argyros had never realized what a nasty sneer the lieutenant-general had. “If you won’t do your duty, by the saints, you don’t deserve your rank. We’ll find another leader for that troop of yours and let you find out how you like serving him as his lowest-ranking private soldier.”

Argyros saluted with wooden precision. Hermoniakos glared at him for close to a minute, his hands curling into fists. “Get out of my sight,” he said at last. “It’s only because I remember you were once a good soldier that I don’t put stripes on your worthless back.”

Argyros saluted again, walked away. Soldiers stepped aside as he went past. Some stared after him; others looked away. One spat in his footprint.

The line of horses was only a couple of minutes away from the lieutenant-general’s tent, but somehow, in the mysterious way news has of traveling through armies, word of Argyros’s fall got there before him. The horseboys gaped at him as they might have at the corpse of a man blasted by lightning. Ignoring that, he mounted his horse without a word and rode to the tent of Justin of Tarsos, until a few minutes ago his aide and now, presumably, his commander, Justin turned red when he saw Argyros coming, and redder still to receive his salute. “What are your orders for me, sir?” Argyros asked tonelessly.

“Well, sir, uh, Basil, uh, soldier, why don’t you take Tribonian’s place in the eastern three-man patrol?

His wound still pains him too much for him to sit a horse.”

“Yes, sir,” Argyros said, his voice still dead. He wheeled his horse and rode out to the eastern gate of the camp, where the other two scouts would be waiting for him.

Having made up the patrol roster, he knew who they would be: Bardanes Philippikos and Alexander the Arab. Justin had been kind to him; both were steady, competent men, though Alexander did have a ferocious temper when he thought himself wronged.

It was plain Argyros’s presence made them nervous. Bardanes’s hand twitched in the beginning of a salute before he jerked it down to his side. And Alexander asked, “Where to, sir?”

“You don’t call me ‘sir’; I call you ‘sir.’ And you tell me where to go.”

“I’ve wanted to do that for weeks,” Bardanes said. But he spoke without malice, using the feeble joke to try to get rid of the tension he felt. To meet him halfway, Argyros managed the first smile since his demotion.

Still, it was the quietest patrol on which he had ever gone, at least at first. Bardanes and Alexander were too wary of him to direct many words his way, and his being there kept them from talking between themselves about what they most wanted to: his fall.

Bardanes, the more forward of the two, finally grasped the nettle. The camp had long vanished behind them; there was no evidence of the Jurchen. The three horsemen could not have been more alone. And so Argyros was not surprised when Bardanes asked, “Begging your pardon, but what was it you fell out with the lieutenant-general over?”

“I made a mistake at the officers’ meeting,” Argyros replied. He tried to leave it at that, but Bardanes and Alexander were waiting expectantly, so he went on, “I showed Hermoniakos to be in the wrong for taking Constantine Doukas to task. After that, I suppose all I would have had to do was blink at the wrong time and Hermoniakos would have come down on me.”

“That is the way of things when you mix in the quarrel of men above your station,” Alexander said with Arab fatalism. “Whether the bear beats the lion or the lion the bear, the rabbit always loses.”

“Lions and bears,” Bardanes snorted. “A damn shame, if you ask me.”

“No one did,” Argyros said.

“I know,” Bardanes said cheerfully. “Another damn shame they didn’t break some other officers I could name instead of you. There’s more than one I owe plenty to, and I’d enjoy getting some of my own back. You, though—well, shit, you’re a hard-nosed bastard, aye, but I can’t deny you’re fair.”

“Thank you for that much, anyhow.”

“Don’t mention it. It’s as much as we can hope for from an officer, and more than we usually get. You’ll find out.”

They gradually drew near another tree-lined creek, a good spot for a band of Jurchen to be lying in ambush. Bardanes and Alexander both unconsciously looked in Argyros’s direction; old habits died hard.

“Let’s split up,” he said, accepting that in their eyes he still held rank. It warmed him for what he was about to do, but only a little. “You two head down to the south end of the stand. Remember to stay out of arrow range. I’ll go north. We’ll all ford the stream and meet on the other side.”

The other two scouts nodded and took their horses downstream. Neither looked back at Argyros; their attention was on the trees and whatever might be lurking among them. As he had told them he would, he rode north. He splashed over to the eastern side of the stream. But he did not turn back to meet the other Romans. Instead he kept heading northeast at a fast trot.

He could imagine the consternation Alexander and Bardanes would feel when they came to the rendezvous point and found he was not there. The first thing they would do, no doubt, would be to race back to the western bank of the creek to see if he had been waylaid.

When they discovered he had not, they would follow his tracks. They would have to. He wondered what they would do when they saw the direction he was taking. He did not think they would follow him. He was riding straight toward the Jurchen.

Even if they did, it would not matter. By then he would have a lead of half an hour and several miles: plenty of time and distance to confuse his trail. In the end, his erstwhile companions would have only one choice—to go back to John Tekmanios and report he had deserted.

Which was only fair, because that was exactly what he intended to do. The biggest worry, of course, was that the first Jurchen he met would shoot him on sight. But when he came riding up openly, one hand on the reins and the other high in the air, the nomad horseman was bemused enough to decide that taking him into camp would be more interesting than using him for target practice. He was not, however, bemused enough to keep from relieving Argyros of his bow, sword, and dagger. The Roman had expected that and did not resist.

The tents of the plainsmen sprawled in disorderly fashion over three times the ground the Roman camp occupied, although Argyros thought the Jurchen fewer in number. The black tents themselves were familiar: large, round, and made of felt. The Romans had borrowed the design from the plainsmen centuries ago.

Men walked here and there, clumping about in their heavy boots. The nomads spent so much time on horseback that they were awkward on the ground, almost like so many birds. They stopped to eye Argyros as the scout brought him in. He was getting tired of people staring at him. The khan’s tent was bigger than the rest. The oxtail standard was stuck in the ground in front of it. Argyros’s captor shouted something in the musical Jurchen tongue, of which the Roman knew nothing except a couple of foul phrases. The tent flap drew back, and two men came out. One was plainly the khan; he carried the same aura of authority Tekmanios bore. He was a small, stocky man in his mid-forties, narrow-eyed and broad-faced like most of the nomads, but with a nose with surprising arch to it. A scar seamed his right cheek. His beard was sparse; he let the few hairs on his upper lip grow long and straggle down over his mouth, which was thin and straight as a sword cut. He listened to the Jurchen who had first encountered Argyros, then turned to the Roman. “I am Tossuc. You will tell me the truth.” His Greek was harsh but understandable.

Argyros dipped his head. “I will tell you the truth, O mighty khan.”

Tossuc made an impatient gesture over the front of his tunic. The garment was of maroon velvet, but of the same cut as the furs and leathers the rest of the Jurchen wore: open from top to bottom, fastened with three ties on the right and one on the left. The khan said, “I need to hear no Roman flattery. Speak to me as to any man, but if you lie I will kill you.”‘

“Then he will not speak to you as to any other man,” chuckled the Jurchen who had accompanied the khan out of his tent. His Greek was better than Tossuc’s. He was white-haired and, rare among the nomads, plump. His face somehow lacked the hardness that marked most of his people. The Roman thought he was the man who had had the tube that caused his present predicament, but had not come close enough during the fighting to be sure.

Seeing Argyros’s gaze shift to him, the plainsman chuckled again and said, “Do not place hope in me, Roman. Only you can save yourself here; I cannot do it for you. I am but the shaman of the clan, not the khan.”

“You also talk too much, Orda,” Tossuc broke in, which seemed to amuse Orda mightily. The khan gave his attention back to Argyros. “Why should I not tie you between horses and rip you apart for a spy?”

Ice walked up Argyros’s back. Tossuc was not joking; the Roman thought him incapable of joking as his shaman had. The ex-commander of scouts said, “I am no spy. Would a spy be fool enough to ride straight to your camp and offer himself up to you?”

“Who knows what a Roman spy would be fool enough to do? If you are no spy, why are you here?

Quick, now; waste no time making up falsehoods.”

“I have no falsehoods to make up,” Argyros replied. “I am—I was—an officer of scouts; some of your men will have seen me and can tell you it is so. I told the Roman lieutenant-general he was wrong in a council and showed him it was true. As reward, he took away my rank. What was I to do?”

“Kill him,” Tossuc said at once.

“No, because then the other Romans would kill me too. But how can I serve the Empire after that? If I join you, I can gain revenge for the slight many times, not just once.”

The khan rubbed his chin, considering. Orda touched his sleeve, spoke in the nomad tongue. He nodded, short and sharp. The shaman said, “Will you swear by your Christian God that you speak the truth?”

“Yes,” Argyros said. He crossed himself. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, by the Virgin and all the saints, I swear I have left the Romans after my quarrel with Andreas Hermoniakos, the lieutenant-general.”

Orda heard him out, then said to Tossuc, “His truth is not certain, khan, but it is likely. Most of these Christians are too afraid of this hell of theirs to swear such an oath wantonly.”

“Fools,” Tossuc grunted. “Me, I fear nothing, in this world or the next.” It was not meant as a boast; had it been, Argyros would have paid no attention to it. Spoken as a simple statement of fact, though, it commanded belief—and the Roman knew only too well he was not without fear himself, for the khan inspired it in him.

“Maybe it is as you say,” Tossuc said at last. “If it is, you will not mind telling all you know of the Roman army.” He bowed with a mocking irony more sophisticated than anything Argyros had thought to find in a nomad, waved for the Roman to precede him into his tent.

“Do not step on the threshold,” Orda warned. “If you do, you will be put to death for the sin. Also, as long as you are among us, do not piss inside a tent, or touch a fire with a knife, or break a bone with another bone, or pour milk or any other food out on the ground. All these things offend the spirits, and only your blood will wash away the offense.”

“I understand,” Argyros said. He had heard of some of the Jurchen customs, just as the plainsmen knew something of Christianity. A couple, though, were new to him. He wondered nervously if Orda had left anything out.

The Roman had never been in the tent of a nomad chief; its richness surprised him. He recognized some of the displayed wealth as booty from the raid across the Danube: church vessels of gold and silver, hangings of cloth-of-gold and rich purple, bags of pepper and cinnamon and scarlet dye. But some of the riches the Jurchen had produced for themselves. The thick wool carpets, embroidered with stylized animals or geometric shapes, would have sold for many nomismata in the markets at Constantinople. So would Tossuc’s gold-inlaid helmet and his gem-encrusted sword, scabbard, and bowcase. And the cushions, stuffed with wool and straw, were covered in silk. Except for a looted chair, there was no wooden furniture. The life of the Jurchen was too mobile for them to burden themselves with large, bulky possessions.

Tossuc and Orda sat cross-legged with a limberness that Argyros, years younger than either, could not match. The khan began firing questions at him: how big was the Roman army? How many horses did it have? How many men were in the first meros? In the second? The third? What supplies did the baggage wagons carry?

On and on the interrogation went. After each of Argyros’s replies, Tossuc would glance toward Orda. The Roman could not read the shaman’s flat, impassive face. He knew he was not lying; he hoped Orda did too.

Apparently he did, for at last Tossuc fell silent. The khan reached over his shoulder for a jar of wine, another bit of plunder from the Empire. He drank, belched, and passed the jar to Orda. The shaman took a pull, then belched even louder than Tossuc had. He offered Argyros the wine. The Roman drank in turn, saw both nomads intently watching him. The belch he managed was paltry next to theirs, but enough to satisfy them. They smiled and slapped his back. Tentatively, at least, he was accepted. After riding with the Jurchen for a couple of weeks, Argyros found himself coming to admire the nomads he had fought. It was no wonder, he thought, that they raided the Roman frontier districts whenever they saw the chance. Living as they did on the yield of their herds alone, never stopping to plant a crop or settle down, they provided themselves with food and shelter but no more. Luxuries had to come from their sedentary neighbors, whether through trade or by force.

The Roman came to see why the plainsmen judged wasting food a capital crime. The Jurchen ate anything they came across: horsemeat, wolves, wildcats, rats all went into the stewpot. Along with other imperial troopers, he had called them louse-eaters, but he did not think of it as anything but a vile name until he saw it happen. It sickened him but also made him understand the harsh life that made the nomads the soldiers they were.

For, man for man, they were the finest warriors Argyros had ever met. He had known that for years; now he saw why it was so. They took to the bow at the age of two or three and began riding at the same time. And herding and hunting and struggling to get enough to eat merely to stay alive hardened them in a way no civilized man could match.

He was glad he was a good enough archer and horseman not to disgrace himself among them, though he knew he was not equal to their best. And his skill at wrestling and with the dagger won him genuine respect from the Jurchen, who had less occasion than the Romans to need the tricks of fighting at close quarters. After he had thrown a couple of plainsmen who challenged him to find out what he was made of, the rest treated him pretty much as one of themselves. Even so, he never lost the feeling of being a dog among wolves.

That alienation was only strengthened by the fact that he could speak with only the few nomads who knew Greek. The Jurchen speech was nothing like the tongues he had already learned: along with his native language, he could also speak a couple of Latin dialects and a smattering of Persian. He tried to pick it up, but the going was slow.

To make matters worse, Tossuc had little time for him. Planning each day’s journey and keeping peace among his people—who quickly turned quarrelsome when they drank-—kept the khan as busy as any Roman provincial governor. And so Argyros found himself seeking out the company of Orda the shaman more and more often. Not only did he speak better Greek than any of the other plainsmen; his mind also ranged further than theirs from the flocks and the chase.

Constantinople, the great capital from which Roman Emperors had ruled for almost a thousand years, was endlessly fascinating to the shaman. “Is it really true,” he would ask, “that the city is almost a day’s ride across, with walls that reach the clouds and buildings with golden ceilings? I’ve heard tribesmen who visited the city as envoys to the imperial court speak of these and many other wonders.”

“No city could be that big,” Argyros replied, sounding more certain then he was. He was from Serrhes, a town in the province of Strymon in the Balkans, and had never seen Constantinople. He went on, “And why would anyone build walls so high the defenders could not see their foes down on the ground?”

“Ah, now that makes sense.” Orda nodded in satisfaction. “You have on your shoulders a head. Now what of the golden ceilings?”

“It could be so,” Argyros admitted. Who knew what riches could accumulate in a town unsacked for a millenium?

“Well, I will not tell Tossuc,” Orda laughed. “It would only inflame his greed. Here, have some kumiss and tell me more of the city.” All through the Empire, even here on the plains beyond its border, Constantinople was the city.

Argyros took the skin of fermented mare’s milk from the shaman. Drinking it, he could understand why Tossuc so relished wine. But it did make a man’s middle glow pleasantly. The nomads loved to drink, perhaps because they had so few other amusements. Even the Roman, whose habits were more moderate, found himself waking up with a headache as often as not.

One evening he drank enough to poke a finger at Orda and declare, “You are a good man in your way, but eternal hellfire will be your fate unless you accept God and the true faith.”

To his surprise, the shaman laughed until he had to hold his belly. “Forgive me,” he said when he could speak again. “You are not the first to come to us from the Romans; sooner or later, everyone speaks as you just did. I believe in God.”

“You worship idols!” Argyros exclaimed. He pointed toward the felt images of a man on either side of the doorway into Orda’s tent and to the felt udders hanging below them. “You offer these lifeless, useless things the first meat and milk from every meal you take.”

“Of course I do,” Orda said. “The men protect the men of the clan; the udders are the guardians of our cattle.”

“Only the one God—-Father, Son, and I Holy Spirit, united in the Trinity—gives true protection.”

“I believe in one God,” the shaman said imperturbably.

“How can you say that?” Argyros cried. “I have seen you invoke spirits and take omens in all manner of ways.”

“There are spirits in everything,” Orda declared. When Argyros shook his head, the shaman chuckled.

“Wait until morning, and I will show you.”

“Why wait? Show me now, if you can.”

“Patience, patience. The spirit I am thinking of is a spirit of fire, and sleeps through the night. The sun will wake it.”

“We will see,” Argyros said. He went back to his own tent and spent much of the night in prayer. If God had cast demons from men into the Gadarene swine, surely He would have no trouble banishing a heathen shaman’s fire-spirit.

After breakfasting on goat’s milk, cheese, and sun-dried meat, the Roman tracked down Orda. “Ah, yes,” Orda said. I le pulled up some dried grass and set it in the middle of a patch of barren ground. The nomads were always careful of fire, which could spread over the plains with devastating speed. More than Orda’s talk of the night before, that caution made Argyros thoughtful. The shaman thought he could do what he had claimed.

Nevertheless, Argyros kept up his bold front. “I see no spirits. Perhaps they are still sleeping,” he said, echoing Klijah’s gibe to the false priests of Baal.

Orda did not rise to the bait. “The spirit dwells in here,” he said. From one of his many pockets he drew out a disk of clear crystal—no, it was not quite a disk, being much thinner at the edges than in the center. It was about half as wide as the callused palm of the shaman’s hand.

The Roman expected an invocation, but all Orda did was to stoop and hold the piece of crystal a few digits in front of the dry grass, in a line between it and the sun. “If it is supposed to be a fire spirit, aren’t you going to touch the crystal to the tinder?” Argyros asked.

“I don’t need to,” the shaman answered. Blinking, the Roman came around for a better look; this was like no sorcery he had ever heard of. When his shadow fell on the crystal, Orda said sharply, “Stand aside! I told you last night, the spirit needs the sun to live.”

Argyros moved over a pace. He saw a brilliant point of light at the base of a yellow, withered blade of grass. “Is that what you call your spirit? It seems a trifling thing to—”

He never finished the sentence. A thin thread of smoke was rising from the grass, which had begun to char where the point of light rested. A moment later, the clump burst into flames. The Roman sprang away in alarm. “By the Virgin and her Son!” he gasped. Triumph on his face, Orda methodically stamped out the little fire.

Argyros felt about to burst with questions. Before lie could ask any of them, a shouted order drew him away from the shaman. A nomad used many gestures and a few words of Greek to set him repairing bird nets made of rawhide strips. By the time the plainsman was finished telling him what to do, Orda had gone off to talk with someone else.

As he worked, the Roman tried to puzzle out why his prayers had failed. The only answer he could find was that he was too great a sinner for God to listen to him. That gave him very cold comfort indeed. It was evening before he finally got another chance to talk with the shaman. Even after most of a day, he was shaken by what he had seen, and gulped down great swigs of kumiss before he nerved himself to ask Orda, “How did you find that that spirit lived in the crystal?”

“I was grinding it into a pendant for one of Tossuc’s wives,” Orda answered. Argyros had not met any Jurchen women; the khan’s raiding party had left them behind with a few men and most of their herds, for the sake of moving faster. The shaman went on, “I saw the little spot of light the fire spirit makes. Then I did not know its habits. I put the bright spot on my finger and burned it. The spirit was merciful, though; it did not consume me altogether.”

“And you still claim to believe in one God?” Argyros shook his head in disbelief.

‘There are spirits in all things,” Orda said, adding pointedly, “as you have seen. But the one God is above them. He gives good and evil to the world. That is enough; he does not need prayers or ceremonies. What do words matter? He sees into a man’s heart.”

The Roman’s eyes widened. That was a subtler argument than he had expected from a nomad. He took another long pull at the skin of kumiss—the more one had, the better the stuff tasted—and decided to change the subject. “I know why you use that fig—figure of speech,” he said accusingly, punctuating his words with a hiccup.

“And why is that?” The shaman was smiling again, in faint contempt. He had matched Argyros drink for drink and was no more than pleasantly drunk, while the Roman was acting more and more fuddled.

“Because you are like Argos Panoptes in the legend.” After a moment, Argyros realized he was going to have to explain who Argos Panoptes was; Orda, after all, had not enjoyed the benefits of a classical education.

“Argos had eyes all over his body, so he could see every which way at the same time. You must have learned some of the magic that made him as he was.” He told how he had led the Roman forces who had tried to attack Orda and the Jurchen scouting party on their little rise during the battle. “Wherever you pointed that tube, you seemed to know just what the Romans were going to do. It must have been a spell for reading the officers’ minds.”

The shaman grinned, in high good humor now. “Your first guess was better. I do have these eyes of Argos you were talking about.” His sibilant accent made the name end with a menacing hiss. Argyros started to cross himself, but checked the gesture before it was well begun. Even without Orda’s remarks, the church vessels Tossuc had stolen showed how little use the Jurchen had for Christianity. And no wonder—the Empire used religious submission as a tool for gaining political control. Now that he was living with the nomads, the Roman did not want to antagonize them. But he felt a chill of fear all the same. He had always thought of Argos as a character from pagan legend, and from ancient pagan legend at that. To conceive of him as real, and as still existing thirteen centuries after the Incarnation, rocked the foundations of Argyros’s world.

Shivering, the Roman said, “Let me have the kumiss again, Orda.” But when the Jurchen shaman passed him the skin, he almost dropped it.

“Aiee! Careful! Don’t spill it,” the shaman exclaimed as Argyros fumbled. “Here, give it back to me. I won’t waste it, I promise.”

“Sorry.” The Roman still seemed to be having trouble getting control of the leather sack. Finally, shaking his head in embarrassment, he handed it to Orda. The shaman tilted it up and emptied it, noisily smacking his lips.

“Tastes odd,” he remarked, a slight frown appearing on his face.

“I didn’t notice anything,” Argyros said.

“What do you know about kumiss?” Orda snorted.

They talked on for a little while. The shaman started to yawn, checked himself, then did throw his mouth open till his jaw creaked. Even in the flickering lamplight, his pupils shrank almost to pinholes. He yawned again. As his eyelids fluttered, he glared at Argyros in drowsy suspicion. “Did you—?” His chin fell forward onto his chest. He let out a soft snore as he slumped to the carpet. The Roman sat motionless for several minutes, until he was certain Orda would not rouse. He rather liked the shaman and hoped he had not given him enough poppy juice to stop his breathing. No—Orda’s chest continued to rise and fall, though slowly.

When Argyros saw the nomad was deeply drugged, he got to his feet. He moved with much more sureness than he had shown a few minutes before. He knew he had to hurry. As shaman, Orda gave the Jurchen—and their horses—such doctoring as they had. A plainsman might come to his tent at any hour of the night.

Several wicker chests against the far wall of the tent held the shaman’s possessions. Argyros began pawing through them. He appropriated a dagger, which he tucked under his tunic, and a bowcase and a couple of extra bowstrings. As soon as he was done with a chest, he stuffed Orda’s belongings back into it; that way a visitor might, with the Virgin’s aid, merely reckon the shaman too drunk asleep to be wakened.

Half of Orda’s gear was for sorcery of one kind or another. Argyros wanted to take much of it with him to examine when he had the chance, but he was too pressed for time and too leery of magic he did not understand.

There! That was the tube he had seen Orda wielding against the Romans. He had thought it made of metal, but it turned out to be black-painted leather over a framework of sticks. Sure enough, there were two Argos-eyes, one at either end, glassily reflecting the light of the lamps back at him. Shuddering, he stuck the tube next to the knife, draped his tunic to hide the bulge as best he could, and sauntered out of the shaman’s tent.

His heart was pounding as he approached the long line of tethered horses. “Who goes?” a sentry called, holding up a torch to see.

Argyros walked toward him, a grin on his face. He held up the bowcase. “Buka on the southern patrol forgot this. Kaidu rode in to sleep and told me to fetch it.” He spoke in a mixture of Greek and the few words of the plains speech that he had.

After several repetitions and a good deal of pantomime, the sentry understood. Argyros was ready to go for his knife if the Jurchen disbelieved him. But the nomads had used him for such menial tasks before, and Buka was not renowned for brains. The watchman laughed nastily. “That stupid son of a goat would forget his head if it weren’t stuck on tight. All right, get moving.”

The Roman did not catch all of that, but he knew he had gained permission. He rode south, as he had said he would. As soon as he was away from the light of the campfires and out of earshot, though, he swung round in a wide circle, riding as fast as he dared through the darkness. Away from the camp stench, the plain smelled sweet and green and growing. Somewhere in the distance, a nightjar gave its sorrowful call.

The waning crescent moon rose after a while, spilling pale light over the steppe. That made it easier for Argyros to travel, but also left him more vulnerable to pursuit. So much depended, he thought as he urged on his rough-coated little mount, on when the Jurchen discovered Orda in his drugged sleep. Every yard of lead he gained would make him harder to catch.

He used every trick he knew to make his trail hard to follow. He splashed along in the shallows of streams, doubled back on his own main track. Once he was lucky enough to come across a stretch of ground where the herds of the Jurchen had passed. He rode through it for a couple of miles: let the nomads enjoy picking out his horse’s hoofprints from thousands of others. Dawn was painting the eastern sky with pink and gold when Argyros began looking for a place of refuge. His horse still seemed fresh enough—the nomads bred tougher beasts than the Romans—but he did not want to break down the only mount he had. Moreover, he was so exhausted himself that he knew he could not stay in the saddle much longer.

He felt like shouting when he saw a line of trees off to his left. That meant a stream—fresh water; with a little luck, fish or crayfish; maybe even fruits and nuts. And, if worse came to worst, he would be able to fight from cover.

He let his horse drink, then tethered it close to the water, where, he hoped, no chance observer would spy it. After setting aside the dagger and tube he had stolen, he lay down close by the animal, intending to get up in a few minutes to forage. His belly was growling like an angry bear. The sun in his eyes woke him. He looked about in confusion; the light was coming from the wrong direction. Then he realized he had slept half the day away. He breathed a prayer of thanks that the nomads had not come upon him unawares.

There were freshwater mussels attached to several stones near the edge of the stream. He smashed them open with a flat rock and gobbled down the sweet orange flesh. That helped his hunger a little. He tried to scoop a fish out of the water with his hands, but he did not have the knack. Some of the trees bore plums—hard, green plums. He sighed. He would have to hunt soon. Now, though, he was more interested in the tube.

He thought for a moment that he had broken it; surely it had been longer than this when he took it from Orda’s tent. Then he saw it was not one tube, but two, the end of the smaller cleverly fitted into the larger. He extended it out to its full length again.

He looked at the eyes of Argos again. In daylight, with time to examine them, they did not so much resemble real eyes. They looked more like the crystal in which Orda had trapped the fire spirit. Argyros had been about to break the tube open to see what was inside, but that thought stopped him. Who knew what sort of demon he might release?

Maybe he could see what the demon was like. Slowly, ready to throw the tube down in an instant, he held the larger end to his face, at the same time murmuring, “Mother of God, have mercy on me!”

The horned, leering face he had feared did not leer out at him. What he saw was even stranger; he had, after all, known about demons since he was a child. But what was he to make of a tiny circle of light, far smaller than the diameter of the tube could have accounted for, appearing in the middle of a field of blackness?

And in the circle—! He snatched the tube away, rubbed at his eyes in disbelief. Repeating his earlier prayer, he cautiously brought the tube up once more. Sure enough, there were the trees on the far bank, but minute, as if seen from an immense distance instead of a couple of hundred feet. And they were—by the Virgin, they were —upside down, their crowns where their roots should be and the stream above them where the sky belonged.

He lowered the tube, sat tugging at his beard in perplexity. For the life of him, he could not see how looking at the world as if it were minuscule and head over heels would help the Jurchen beat the Romans. On the other hand, maybe he did not yet fully understand Orda’s magic. Well, what could he do that he had not done? At first he could not think of anything. Then it occurred to him that he had looked through the big end of the tube both times. What would happen if he tried the small one?

He held it to one eye and closed the other so as not to confuse himself any more than he already was. This time the circle of light in the midst of the blackness was larger. But where before the image in that circle had been perfectly sharp—albeit tiny and topsy-turvy—now it was a confusing, fuzzy jumble of colors and indistinct shapes. Argyros thought of St. Paul seeing through a glass, darkly, although blurrily would have been a better word here.

He took the tube away from his face, rubbed his eyes. Orda had known how to make the accursed thing work; was he too stupid even to follow in a barbarian’s footprints? Maybe so, but he was not ready to admit it.

He pointed the tube at the very top of a tall oak across the stream, paid careful attention to what he saw through it. Sure enough, the bottom of the vague image was sky-blue, the top green. No matter which end one looked through, then, the tube inverted its picture of the world. How to make that picture clearer? Perhaps, Argyros thought, Orda had a spell for his own eyeballs. In that case he was beaten, so there was no point worrying about it. He asked the same question he had before: what could he try that was new?

He remembered that the tube was really two tubes. The Jurchen shaman had obviously done that on purpose; it would have been easier to build as one. With a growl of decision, Argyros pushed the apparatus as far closed as it would go.

He looked through it again. The image was even worse than it had been before, which Argyros had not thought possible. He refused to let himself grow disheartened. He had changed things, after all. Maybe he had been too forceful with his push. He drew the smaller tube out halfway.

“By the Virgin!” he breathed. The picture was still blurred, but it had cleared enough for him to see branches and leaves on the trees on the far side of the creek—and they looked close enough to reach out and touch. He pushed the tube in a bit, and the image grew less distinct. He drew it out again, to the point where he had had it before, and then a trifle beyond.

Even when the distant leaves were knife-edge sharp, the image was less than perfect. It was still slightly distorted, and everything was edged with blue on one side and red on the other. But Argyros could count individual feathers on a linnet so far away his unaided eye could barely make it out against the leafy background.

He set the tube down, awed. Aristophanes and Seneca had written of using a round glass jar full of water as a magnifying device, but only for things close by it. No ancient sage had ever envisioned so enlarging objects at a distance.

Remembering the classic authors, though, made him think of something else. That water-filled jar would have been thin at the edges and thick in the center, just as were Orda’s crystals. And if that was so, then doing peculiar things to light was a property of such transparent objects and could take place without having a fire spirit trapped at all.

Argyros breathed a long sign of relief. He had been horrified when his prayers did not stop Orda from making fire with the crystal. But if he had been praying for the overthrow of a natural law, even one he did not understand, his failure became perfectly understandable. God worked miracles only at the entreaty of a saint, which the Roman knew he was not. He had been in the field so long that even the Jurchen women, skin-clad, greasy-haired, and stinking of rancid butter, would have looked good to him. He closed the tube and stowed it in a saddlebag. Now all that remained was to take it back to the Roman army. Roman artisans would surely be able to duplicate what the nomad shaman had stumbled across.

“Christ, the Virgin, and all the saints, but I’m an idiot!” Argyros burst out two days later. His horse’s ears twitched at the unexpected noise. He paid no attention, but went on, loudly as before, “If the eyes of Argos will help Tekmanios see his foes at a distance, they’ll do the same for me. And with only the one of me and heaven knows how many plainsmen looking for my trail, I need to see more than Tekmanios ever will.”

He took the tube out of the saddlebag, where it had rested undisturbed since he put it away there by the stream. After a bit, he stopped berating himself for stupidity. The eyes of Argos were something new; how was he to grasp all at once everything they were good for? Old familiar things were much more comfortable to be around. At the moment, though, this new device was more useful than any old one would have been.

He tied his horse to a bush at the base of a low rise, ascended it on foot. At the very top, he went down to his belly to crawl through the grass. Even without an Argos-eye, a man silhouetted against the sky was visible a long way.

But now, he was no longer startled when the world turned upside down as he put the tube to his eye. He scanned in a full circle, pausing wherever he spied motion. Without the tube, he would have fled from a small cloud of dust he spotted to the south. With it, he was able to see it was only cattle, not horsemen, kicking up the dust. He could continue on his present course, riding around the nomads to reach the Roman army before Tekmanios took it back to the settled lands south of the Danube. Tossuc and Orda would guess what he was aiming at, of course. But the steppe was so wide that he did not think the Jurchen could catch him by posting pickets in his path. They would have to stumble across his trail, and that, theou thelontos —God willing—would not happen. It certainly would not, if his prayers had anything to do with it.

Once another four days had gone by, he was confident God had granted his petition. He was farther south than any line the nomads would have set to waylay him. Better still, he had just come upon tracks he recognized as Roman—the horses that had made them were shod.

“Won’t do to get careless now,” he said aloud; he noticed he was talking to himself a good deal, to counteract the silent emptiness of the plains. He quoted Solon’s famous warning to King Kroisos of Lydia: “Count no man happy before he is dead.” And so, to be safe, he used the eyes of Argos again, looking back the way he had come.

The magnifying effect of the tube seemed to send the Jurchen horsemen leaping toward him. Even seen head over heels, the grim intensity with which they rode was terrifying. They had not yet spied him; they were leaning over their horses’ necks to study the ground and stay on his trail. But if they had gained so much ground on him, they would catch sight of him soon—and the last phase of the hunt would begin. He dug his heels into the horse’s flanks, but the most he could extract from it was a tired, slow trot. Only a beast from the plains could have done as much as this one had; a Roman horse would long since have foundered. Even the nomad animals had their limit, though, and his had reached it. He looked back again. This time he could see his pursuers without the tube. And they could see him. Their horses, fresh because they had not ridden the same beast days on end, came galloping forward. It would not be long before they were in arrow range. He might pick off one or two of them, but there were far more than that in their band.

All hope died when he saw another party of horsemen ahead. If the Jurchen were in front of him as well as behind, not even the miracle he did not deserve would let him escape. Those other riders had also spotted him and were rushing his way as quickly as the plainsmen behind: racing to see who would kill him first, he thought as he set an arrow in his stolen bow and got ready to make what fight he could. Because they were approaching instead of pursuing, the riders from ahead drew near first. He drew his bow to shoot at the closest one, but the winking of the sun off chain mail made it hard to reckon the range.

Chain mail . . . For a second, his mind did not grasp the meaning of that. Then he lowered the bow and shouted as loudly as he could, “To me, Romans, to me! A rescue!”

The oncoming horsemen drew up in surprise, then pounded past Argyros toward the Jurchen. He wheeled his weary horse to help them. The two parties exchanged arrows at long range. The nomads, as always, were better archers than the Romans, but they were also outnumbered. They could not press the attack home; a pair of charges were beaten back.

Argyros whooped exultantly as the Jurchen sullenly rode away, shooting Parthian shots over their shoulders in their withdrawal. Then his mount gave a strangled scream and toppled, an arrow through its throat. He had no chance to jump away. The beast fell on him, pinning him with its weight. His head thumped against the ground. The world turned red, then black.

His head ached abominably when he came back to his senses; the rest of him was one great bruise. Most of all, though, he felt relief that he was no longer crushed beneath the dead flesh and bone of his horse. He tried his limbs, one after the other. They all answered to his will. Gritting his teeth, he sat up. Half a dozen Roman scouts were standing around him in a tight circle. He craned his neck back to look up at them—that hurt too. Among the soldiers scowling down were Bardanes, Alexander, and Justin of Tarsos.

“So you find you do not love the barbarians after all,” Alexander said when Argyros’s eyes met his. He smiled. It was a singularly unpleasant smile, the expression a falcon might wear when about to swoop on a field mouse.

“I am afraid, Basil, you cannot undesert,” Justin said. He sounded sorrowful; for a soldier, he was not a cruel man. But there was no yielding in him either. He went on, “Going over to the enemy has only one penalty.”

Bardanes, who was standing by Argyros’s right side, did not say anything. He kicked the returned Roman in the ribs. One of the men behind him—he did not see who—kicked him in the back. Alexander laughed. “You get what you deserve now, for running out on us.” His foot lashed out too. Argyros realized they were going to kick him to death, right there. He rolled into a ball, his arms drawn up to protect his face and head. “Take me to Hermoniakos!” he shouted —actually, the words came out more like a shriek.

“Why should we bother the lieutenant-general, when we can deal with you ourselves?” Alexander said. Argyros yelped as a boot slammed into his thigh.

“Wait,” Justin said.

“What for?” Bardanes spoke for the first time, though his foot had been more than eloquent. Neither he nor Alexander could forget that Argyros had ridden away from their patrol, putting them at risk of being thought accessories to his desertion.

“Because I am your commander, and I order it!” Justin snapped. That was not enough; he could read the mutiny building on their faces. He added, “If Argyros wants to see the lieutenant-general so badly, we should let him. Hermoniakos has more ways to make death interesting than boots, and the temper to use them.”

The scouts considered that. Finally Alexander chuckled.

“Aye, that’s so. The hypostrategos is a regular little hornet when he’s angry. All right, we’ll let him do this bastard in. I wonder what he’ll come up with.”

Argyros heard it all as though from very far away. None of it seemed to have any meaning; the only reality was his pain. The additional discomfort of being dragged to his feet and then lashed over a horse’s back like a corpse hardly registered. Mercifully, he never remembered most of the journey back to the Roman camp.

He did recall waking in horror as he jounced along, and exclaiming, “My saddlebags!”

“Shut up,” Alexander growled. “Nothing is yours anymore. We’ve got ‘em along to share out amongst ourselves, if you stole anything from the Jurchen worth the having.” Argyros passed out again; Alexander took his sigh of relief for an anguished grunt.

The next time he roused was when they cut the bonds from his wrists and ankles and he slid to the ground like a sack of barley. Someone threw a pail of water in his face. He groaned and opened his eyes. The world spun more dizzily than it had when he looked through the tube.

“So you asked to come before me, eh?” He picked out Andreas Hermoniakos’s voice before his vision would focus on the lieutenant-general.

“Answer his excellency,” Justin of Tarsos said. Alexander stepped forward to kick him again, but Hermoniakos halted him with a gesture. Another bucket of water drenched Argyros. He managed a sloppy salute, wondering whether his right wrist was broken. “I beg to report—success,” he said thickly. He had a cut lip, but he did not think any of his teeth were missing—his arm had taken the kick intended for his mouth.

To the amazement of the scouts, the lieutenant-general stooped beside him. “Where is it? What is it?” he demanded. In his urgency, his hand clamped on Argyros’s shoulder. Argyros winced. Hermoniakos jerked his hand away. “Your pardon, I pray.”

Argyros ignored that; he was still working his way through the two earlier questions. “The tube—in the saddlebag,” he got out at last.

“Thank you, Basil.”

As Hermoniakos rose, Alexander put into words what his comrades were feeling: “Sir, this is a deserter!”

“So you obviously thought,” the lieutenant-general snapped. “Now fetch a physician at once. Yes, soldier, you!” Alexander fled in something close to terror. Hermoniakos turned on the other men. “The desertion was staged, of course—you had to think it real, so you would say as much if the Jurchen captured you. I never imagined you would be more dangerous to Argyros than the nomads.”

When the lieutenant-general stooped by the saddlebag, a couple of scouts seized the opportunity to sidle away. The rest looked at each other, at the ground, or into the sky—anywhere but at the man who had been first their commander and then their victim.

Several of them exclaimed as Hermoniakos took out the tube: they had seen Orda with it too, in the scouts’ skirmish before the battle against the Jurchen. Justin of Tarsos solved the puzzle fastest. “You sent him out to steal the magic from the plainsmen!”

“Yes,” Hermoniakos said coldly. He turned back to Argyros. “How do I make the spell work?”

“I don’t think it is a spell, sir. Give it to me.” He took the tube with his left hand, set it in the crook of his right elbow—yes, that wrist was broken, no doubt of it. Awkwardly, he drew out the smaller tube what he thought was the proper distance. Bardanes Philippikos made a sign against the evil eye as he raised it to his face.

He made a last small adjustment and offered the tube to Hermoniakos. “Hold it to your eye and point it at that sentry over there, sir.”

The lieutenant-general did as Argyros suggested. “Mother of God!” he said softly. Argyros was not really listening to him. The approaching footsteps of the army physician were a much more welcome sound.

“Well done, well done,” John Tekmanios said a few days later, when Argyros was up to making a formal report to the general.

“Thank you, your lllustriousness,” the scout commander said. He sank gratefully into the folding chair to which Tekmanios waved him; he was still a long way from being steady on his feet. He accepted wine, although he was not used to having a general pour for him.

“I wish there had been two of those tubes for you to take,” Tekmanios said: “one to keep and one to send back to Constantinople for the craftsmen to use as a model to make more.” He paused awhile in thought. Finally he said, “Constantinople it is. I’m pulling back to our side of the river before long. If I got by without your eyes of Argos all these years, I’ll last another month.”

Argyros nodded. He would have decided the same way.

The general was still in that musing, abstracted mood. “I wonder how that barbarian happened to stumble onto the device when no civilized man ever did.”

Argyros shrugged. “He found that one crystal, ground properly, would start a fire. He must have wondered what two together would do, and looked through them when they were in line.”

“I suppose so,” Tekmanios said indifferently. “It’s of no consequence now. We have the tube; it’s up to us to find out all the different things we can do with it. I don’t suppose the first men who got fire from Prometheus—if you believe the myth—knew everything it was good for, either.”

“No, sir,” Argyros agreed. That sort of speculation fascinated him. Christianity looked ahead to a more perfect time, which had to imply that times past had been less so. The concept was hard to grasp. Things had been the same for as long as he could remember, and in his father’s and grandfather’s time as well, from their tales.

Tekmanios had been thinking along a different line. “There also remains the problem of what to do with you.”

“Sir?” Argyros said in surprise.

“Well, I can’t keep you here in the army any longer, that’s plain,” the general said, raising an eyebrow at having to explain the obvious. “Or don’t you think it would be awkward to go back to command men who’ve beaten you half to death?”

“Put that way, yes, sir.” The scouts would be terrified of him. They would also fear his revenge, and might even arrange an accident for him to beat him to the punch. “What then?”

“As I said, you did a fine job of ferreting out the Jurchen secret. It just so happens that George Lakhanodrakon is a cousin of my wife’s.”

“The Master of Offices, sir?” The Master of Offices was one of the most powerful officials in the Roman Empire, one of the few with the right to report directly to the Emperor himself.

“Yes. Among his other duties, he commands the corps of magistrianoi. How would you like to be the one to take your precious tube down to Constantinople, along with a letter urging your admission to their ranks?”

For a moment, all Argyros heard was “Constantinople.” That was enough. Along with every other citizen of the Empire, he had heard stories of its wonders and riches for his entire life. Now to see them for himself!

Then the rest of what Tekmanios had said sank in. Magistrianoi were elite imperial agents, investigators, sometimes spies. They served under the personal supervision of the Master of Offices, the only man between them and the Emperor, the vicegerent of God on earth. Argyros had dreamed of such a post for himself, but only dreamed.

“Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” he said.

“I thought that might please you,” Tekmanios said with a smile. “It’s your doing more than mine, you know; you’ve earned the chance. Now it’s up to you to make the most of it.”

“Yes, sir,” Argyros said again, slightly deflated.

The general’s smile grew wider. “Take a couple of more days to get your strength back. Then I’ll send you and your tube back to the Danube, with a good strong resupply party along to keep you in one piece. You can get a riverboat there and sail down to Tomi on the Euxine Sea, then take a real ship on to the city. That will be faster and safer than going overland.”

The grin looked out of place on Argyros’s usually somber features, but he could not help wearing it as he bowed his way out of Tekmanios’s tent. Once outside, he looked up into the heavens to give thanks to God for his good fortune.

The pale, mottled moon, near first quarter, caught his eye. He wondered what it might look like through the eyes of Argos. Tonight, if he remembered, he would have to find out. Who could say? It might be interesting.