Agent of Byzantium

IV: Etos Kosmou 6824

With a grunt of displeasure, Pavlo sat down at his desk to draft his monthly report. The tour-march of the border fortress of Pertuis inked his pen, sent it scraping over the parchment: “Events of the month of May, 1315—”

He looked at the year he had carelessly written, swore, and scratched it out. Bad enough he had to compose in Latin. Both men who would read his report—his immediate superior Kosmas the kleisouriarch of the Pyrenees, and Arkadios the strategos of Ispania—came from Constantinople. Greek-speakers themselves, they would sneer at his lack of culture. Despite still being one of the two official tongues of the Roman Empire, Latin had far less prestige than Greek. Using the northern style of dating on an official document, though, might get him marked down as subversive, even if it was also popular in Ispania—and Italia too, come to that. He substituted the imperial year, reckoned from the creation of the world rather than the Incarnation: “—May, 6823, the thirteenth indiction.”

He settled down to writing. Most of the report was routine: soldiers and horses out sick, deaths (only two—a good month), new recruits, supplies expended, traders traveling down through the pass of Pertuis into the Empire, tolls collected, traders going up into the Franco-Saxon kingdoms, and on and on. The description of the garrison’s drills was also something to get past in a hurry, except for one part. There he checked his own records, which he kept meticulously: “Liquid fire expended in exercises, two and five-sevenths tuns. Stock remaining on hand”—he flicked beads on his countingboard —”ninety-four and two-sevenths tuns. Seals of wholly expended tuns enclosed herewith.”

He did not know what went into what the barbarians called “Greek fire”; nor did he want to. It was shipped straight from the imperial arsenal at Constantinople.

He did know that he had best start looking for a good place to hide if he could not account for every drop he used. What happened to officials who let the northerners get their hands on the stuff did not bear thinking about.

His pen ran dry. He inked it again and wrote, “One siphon was damaged during fire exercises. Our smith feels he can repair it.” Pavlo hoped so; Kosmas would take weeks to send him another of the long bronze tubes through which the liquid fire was discharged.

The tourmarch scratched his head. What else needed reporting? “The Franco-Saxons have lately shown a good deal of interest in the woods just north of the fortress. The forest being on their side of the frontier, I have only been able to send a rider to make inquiry. They say they are after a nest of robbers; their count declined the help I offered.”

Pavlo wondered if he should say more, then decided not to. Even if the barbarians had sent a lot of men into the woods, they were still comfortably out of arrow range. And they were such bunglers that they might need a couple of companies for a one-platoon job.

The tourmarch folded the parchment into an envelope, lit a red beeswax candle at the lamp he always kept burning to have a fire handy, and let several drops splatter onto the report. When he had enough, he pushed his signet ring into the soft, hot wax.

Shouting for a courier, he came from the gloomy keep into the bright sunshine of the courtyard. Something hissed through the air and landed with a surprisingly gentle thud twenty paces in front of him: a wicker-wrapped earthenware pot, a little bigger than his head. A wisp of smoke floated up from the top. At the same time as the sentry on the watchtower cried “Catapult!” another one thunked down in the courtyard.

“To the walls! They’re coming!” the sentry screamed. Troopers snatched up bows, spears, and helmets and dashed for the stairs to the rampart.

Pavlo cursed in good earnest and tore his report in half. He should have been more alert—the Franco-Saxons had been brewing mischief after all, though what they hoped to accomplish with a bombardment of crockery was beyond him.

Suddenly the very air seemed torn apart. Pavlo thought a thunderbolt had struck the fort—but the sky was clear and blue. Something hot and jagged whined past his face. A cloud of thick gray smoke shot upward.

The tourmarch looked around dazedly. Two men were down, shrieking; a third, who had been closest to the pot, was hardly more than a crimson smear on the ground. The cataclysmic noise had frozen the rest of the soldiers in their tracks.

Outside, Pavlo heard the drumroll of hoofbeats, the whoops and war cries of the barbarians, horse and foot. His stunned wits started working again. “Go on! Move!” he roared to his men. Discipline told. They began to obey.

Then another blast came, and a few seconds later another. Almost deafened, Pavlo could barely hear the wails and moans of the wounded. Smoke filled the courtyard; its acrid brimstone reek made the tourmarch cough and choke.

“The northerners have called devils from hell!” someone yelled.

The sentry’s voice went high and shrill. “Heaven protect us, you’re right! I can see them capering there, just at the edge of the forest, all in red, with horns and tails!”

“Shut up!” Pavlo bellowed furiously, to no avail. Half the garrison was screaming in terror now. Against devils, no discipline could hold.

And devils or no, those cursed catapults kept firing from the woods. A wrapped crock landed almost at the tourmarch’s feet. Too late, his mind made an intuitive leap. “It’s not demons!” he cried to whoever would listen. “It’s whatever’s in these—”

The explosion flung him against the wall of the keep like a broken doll. A few minutes later, a bigger one smashed the gates of Pertuis. The Franco-Saxons stormed in.

The beamy merchantman sailed slowly toward the Ispanic coast. “Won’t be long now, sir,” the captain promised.

“The Virgin be praised,” exclaimed his passenger, a tall, thin, dark man with a neatly trimmed beard, bladelike nose, and oddly mournful eyes. “I’ve spent more than a month at sea, traveling from Constantinople.”

“So you said, so you said.” It meant nothing to the captain; he spent most of his life on the water. He went on, “Aye, now we’ve weathered that little island back there (Scombraria they call it—name means

‘mackerel fishery,’ y’know), we’re home free. Island’s not just for fishing, either—shields the New Carthage harbor from storms.”

“Of course,” the traveler said politely, though he had trouble following the man’s guttural African dialect of Latin. He went back to the deckhouse to reclaim his duffel bag and wait for the vessel to anchor. He had been aboard ship so long that the plain beneath his feet seemed to roll and pitch as he made the short walk to New Carthage, which sat on a hill. A bored guard asked his name and business. The fellow’s lisping Ispanic accent did not trouble him; it was not much different from the flavor his own Greek gave the Empire’s other tongue.

He answered, “I’m Basil Argyros, a trader in garum out of the city.”

“You’ve come a long way for fermented fish sauce,” the guard said, chuckling. Argyros shrugged. “New Carthage’s garum is famous around the Inner Sea. Would you be so kind as to tell me the way to the residence of the strategos? I’ll need to discuss quantities, prices, and shipping arrangements with him.”

The guardsman looked at his comrades, said nothing. Sighing, Argyros dug a handful of copper forty-follis pieces from his pouch and distributed them. After pocketing his share of the money, the soldier gave directions, adding, “You know, Arkadios isn’t there. He’s up north someplace, campaigning against the barbarians.”

“Not doing too bloody well, either,” one of the other guardsmen muttered. Argyros pretended not to hear that, but filed the information away. He sauntered into New Carthage. The city was large and well laid out, but of rather somber appearance because of the gray local stone from which it was built.

The gate guard’s directions proved easy to follow. The strategos’s headquarters was just up the main street from New Carthage’s most splendid building, a church dedicated to the town’s patron saint, who had been its bishop during the reign of the first Herakleios, seven centuries before.

“St. Mouamet, watch over me,” Argyros murmured, crossing himself as he walked by the shrine, which was a smaller copy of the great church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. He found Mouamet one of the most inspiring saints on the calendar. “There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His Son,” Argyros chanted softly.

It took a bribe of half a gold nomisma and an hour’s wait to get Argyros admitted to the presence of Isaac Kabasilas, Arkadios’s chief deputy. Kabasilas, a large, comfortable man with a large, comfortable belly, said, “Well, what can I do for you, fellow? Something about fish sauce, my secretary said. He’s really quite able to handle that sort of thing himself, you know.”

“I would hope so. However”—Argyros glanced round—”as we are alone, I can tell you that I don’t care whether all the garum in New Carthage turns to honey tomorrow.” He produced a letter and handed it to Kabasilas.

The official broke the gold seal. His jaw dropped as he read. “You’re one of the Emperor’s magistrianoi!” The condescension was gone from his voice, and the comfort from his manner.

“Only you know that, and I’d sooner keep it so.”

“Of course,” Kabasilas said nervously. In theory, he outranked his visitor, but he knew what theory was worth. Wetting his lips, he asked, “What do you need from me?”

“If you tell me how the Franco-Saxons have taken eight fortresses and three cities in the last year, I’ll take the next ship out.”

“Four cities,” Kabasilas said unhappily. “Farrago fell three weeks ago. In the field we match the northerners, but no walls can keep them out. The traders who escaped from Farrago rave of sorcery ripping the gates open.” He crossed himself.

So did Argyros, but he persisted, remarking, “Sorcery is something heard of more often than met.”

“Not this time,” Kabasilas said. “It’s all of a piece with what’s happened at other places we’ve lost. The Franco-Saxons must be in league with Satan. As if what they’ve done to us isn’t enough, honest men have seen the devils they’ve summoned—great red fiends, from the stories.”

The magistrianos frowned. Of course he believed in demons; after all, the Bible spoke of them. But he had never come across one in action, or expected to. Like most educated citizens of the Empire, he drew a firm distinction between the Outer Learning (most of it drawn from the pagan Greeks), which concerned this world, and the Inner Learning of Christian theology. It was disconcerting to find the line between them blurred.

“I think I’d better talk to these traders out of Tarrago myself,” he said. “Where are they staying?”

loan’s inn was a cheerfully ramshackle place that catered to merchants. The wine was good, the prices low to one used to those of Constantinople. In his guise as a buyer of fish sauce, Argyros sat in the taproom, listening to the gossip and spicing it now and them with the latest scandal from the capital. He did not have to prompt to bring the talk around to Tarrago. The merchants who had got out of the city spoke of little else. But they did not tell him as much as he wanted; Kabasilas’s summary had been depressingly accurate. The attack had taken place at night, which only made things worse. He learned the most from a tin merchant from Angleland and his niece, who was an apothecary at a nunnery near Londin. Their lodgings in Tarrago had been close to the gate by the cathedral, through which the Franco-Saxons had entered. But even their account was vague: a roar, a cloud of vile smoke that seemed to cover half the city, and the crash of the locked gates going down to admit the enemy.

“We rode like madmen and got out by the northwest gate, the one next to the forum,” said the merchant, a ruddy-cheeked fellow named Wighard, “and spent the night in the graveyard half a mile west. The Franco-Saxons were too busy looting the town to go poking through old bones.”

“Oh, tell him the whole story, uncle,” his niece Hilda said impatiently. She was a small, intense woman in her mid-twenties, with the startling gray eyes and fair coloring of the northern peoples: no wonder the Emperor Maurice had called the Franks, Lombards, and other Germans “the blond tribes” in his military manual.

She turned to Argyros. “A squad did come out to look the necropolis over, but when they got close, uncle Wighard rose up and shouted ‘Boo!’ They ran harder than we had.”

Wighard said sheepishly, “What with their consorting with demons and all, I figured they’d be even more afraid of ‘em than I am!”

The magistrianos laughed and ordered more wine for the three of them. In Constantinople he had met only a handful of men from distant Angleland (he thought of it as Britannia), and their steadiness and ready wit had fascinated him. These two seemed cut from the same cloth. It was only right for Britannia to be reunited to the Empire one day, as over the centuries Italia, Africa, Ispania, and part of the southern coast of Gaul had been. Somehow, though, Argyros was glad it would not be any year soon.

Having found no real answers in New Carthage, Argyros bought a horse and rode north to see at firsthand what the Franco-Saxons were up to.

Arkadios’s forces still held the line of the Eberu, but the magistrianos had no trouble slipping across the river. He did not worry about being in enemy-held territory. The blond tribes were savage in battle, but careless about every other aspect of warfare, including patrols. They had been so even in Maurice’s time, before the days of Herakleios.

But they had something going for them, he thought as he rode past captured Tarrago. “Or what am I doing here?” he asked his horse. Unlike Balaam’s ass, it did not answer. Argyros did not do any poking about at Tarrago; there were Franco-Saxons on the walls (none looking particularly demonic). He had expected troops there, the town having fallen so recently. But he was surprised and dismayed to find Barcilo also garrisoned, though it had been lost the autumn before. The barbarians looked to be coming to stay.

Empurias was another three days’ ride up the Roman coastal highway—and proved full of soldiers too. Argyros frowned again, not sure whether to strike inland or stay on the road the first Caesar’s legionaries had tramped. The highway promised to be quicker. He pressed ahead.

He rode past fields of fennel toward the Pyrenees, which loomed tall before him. Then the mountains were all around him as the road swung inland to take advantage of the pass of Pertuis. He met a band of Franco-Saxon armored horsemen clattering south into Ispania. Seeing only a lone traveler with nothing worth stealing, they let him by.

Not far from the fortress of Pertuis lay a victory monument set up by Pompey before the Incarnation. Seeing it stiffened Argyros’s resolve. No less than the ancient general, he had the tradition of Rome to uphold.

The late afternoon sun threw long, mournful shadows. The Franco-Saxons had not repaired Pertuis after they took it; apparently they planned to fix the new border farther south. Argyros dismounted and led his horse through the yawning gateway into the courtyard. Better to spend the night there than in the open, he thought; the walls would hide his campsite from bandits.

The courtyard was full of rank grass. Argyros hobbled his horse and let it graze while he got a small fire going. He stretched till his joints creaked, then, taking bread, olive oil, and a skin of sour wine from his saddlebags, sat down by the fire for supper.

Something sharp dug into the seat of his pants (flowing robes were all very well in Constantinople, but not for serious travel). He raised up on one cheek and removed the offending object. He had expected a rock, but it was a potsherd, a triangle with the longest side about as long as his middle finger—a flat piece from the bottom of a pot.

He was about to throw it away when he noticed the potter’s mark stamped into the clay: a cross flanked by the letters S and G. “St. Gall!” he said and looked at the shard with a new and lively interest. For one thing, the monastery of St. Gall lay in the Alps, far to the northeast of Pertuis. It was no great pottery center; why was one of its products so far from home? For another, Franco-Saxon monasteries interested Argyros professionally. Such learning as the barbarians had was confined to their clerics. And St. Gall was their chief monastic center, from which abbeys had spread all through the Franco-Saxon kingdoms. The magistrianos tugged at his beard. St. Gall might well be involved in whatever mischief they had concocted.

His examination of the potsherd made him certain he was on to something, even if he was not sure what. One side of the shard was blackened, as if by fire. Yet that was the side that had been face-down; a pillbug was still clinging to it. It could not have been charred during the sack of Pertuis. Argyros reproached himself for not making a thorough examination of the fortress when he rode up. Too dark now, he thought. The morning would have to do. He took out his bedroll, spread it on the ground, prayed, and slept.

He woke with the sun. After wolfing down more bread and oil, he walked around the overgrown courtyard, scuffing through the grass to see if he could find more bits of pottery. After a while, he did. They were all of the same yellow-brown clay as the first, and all scorched on one side.

He could still make out traces of a big scorch mark near the base of one wall of the keep. He scrabbled through the matted grass there and was rewarded with several more tiny shards. One, he thought, bore part of the S of St. Gall’s mark. He grunted in satisfaction.

He also found a couple of fragments at the gateway, but learned less than he wanted there. The gates themselves were gone; the Franco-Saxons had burned their timbers.

He saw motion out of the corner of his eye: two horsemen approaching. He ducked back into the courtyard, clapped a helmet on his head, strung his bow, and slung a quiver of arrows over his shoulder. Having armed himself, he returned to the gateway and cautiously peered out. One of the oncoming riders waved as he drew close enough to recognize Argyros. “You’ll not find much garum here,” Wighard called. After a few seconds, Argyros saw that the tin merchant’s companion was Hilda. Her gilt hair was tucked up under a broad-brimmed hat, and she rode astride like a man, but tunic and trousers could not disguise her small size or womanly figure.

The magistrianos emerged from cover, but did not set down his bow. “You don’t have many ingots with you, either,” he said.

“Left ‘em behind when we got out of Tarrago, if you must know,” Wighard said. He was smiling. Argyros studied him. “I don’t believe you care.”

“Believe what you like,” the Anglelander said calmly. He glanced toward the ruined fortress of Pertuis.

“Looks like a fair place to stop for lunch.”

The sun was less than halfway up the sky. Argyros raised an eyebrow, but kept silent.

‘Hilda stirred in the saddle. She remarked, “Back in Constantinople, his imperial majesty Nikephoros must be displeased at the way the Franco-Saxons have violated his borders.”

“I daresay he is,” the magistrianos agreed politely. In fact, he knew the Emperor was furious. The Master of Offices had made that quite clear.

“Well, so is our good king Oswy,” Wighard said, seeming to come to a decision. “And well he might be, for they’ve used their foul sorcery on us as well as against you Romans.”

“Have they?” Argyros said, pricking up his ears.

“Indeed they have. Their cursed pirates have sunk or taken more than a score of good Anglelander ships in the Sleeve this past year.” That was the name the Anglelanders gave to the strait between Britannia and the Franco-Saxon lands. Wighard continued angrily, “No king will brook such an outrage for long, nor should he, even if the devil is behind it.”

“You sound very sure of that,” the magistrianos said.

“Of course I am. We always sailed rings round the lousy lubbers before. What else but black magic could give ‘em the edge now? King Oswy, God bless him, is certain of it, I can tell you.”

“And so,” Argyros said, making the connection, “you plan on inspecting the stronghold here to see if you can find out how it’s being done.”

Wighard reddened. Hilda, though, looked the magistrianos in the eye. “Just as you’ve been doing,” she challenged. “We’re well met, I think.”

She was, Argyros thought, altogether too astute. He shrugged and nodded. “We do seem to have a common interest, at any rate.”

“So you are one of the Emperor’s thegns, then?” Wighard said. Guessing at the strange Germanic word, the magistrianos nodded again. Wighard was also nodding, half to himself. “I thought it might be so, when I saw you here. Are we allies, then, in tracking down the Franco-Saxons’ wizardry?”

Argyros hesitated. If he could solve the puzzle, he was not at all sure he wanted to share the answer with another nation of barbarians. On the other hand, the Anglelanders and Franco-Saxons were enemies or one another . . . and Wighard and Hilda might come up with a solution where he could not. That would be very bad. “We have a common interest,” he repeated.

“If we do,” Hilda said, lightly stressing the first word, “suppose you tell us what you’ve found here.”

A hardheaded young woman, despite her exotic good looks, Argyros thought. In her position, he would have asked the same thing. Saying, “Fair enough,” he took the two Anglelanders around the fortress. Wighard sucked in his breath sharply when the magistrianos pointed out the scorched wall of the keep.

“The sign of the hellfire, you say?” he grunted, touching a silver chain around his neck. Argyros guessed he wore a crucifix or some relic under his tunic.

“Perhaps so, but I’d be more inclined to believe it came from St. Gall,” the magistrianos said. He dug the broken piece of pottery from his belt pouch and explained how he had found it and what he thought it meant.

He thought that would knock the Anglelanders’ maunderings about demons over the head, but it did not. To Wighard, in fact, the connection even made sense. “Who better to call up demons than monks?” he asked. “If anybody could control the fiends, they would be the ones.”

Argyros blinked; that had not occurred to him. He felt his picture of the world losing a little solidity. Who knew what evil the monks of St. Gall might work? They were heretics, after all, and capable of anything.

“Suppose it is deviltry,” he said at last. “What will you do then?”

“Me? I expect I’ll be frightened enough to piss my pants,” Wighard said, shivering. “All I’m for is getting Hilda to wherever the answers lie and keeping her safe afterward. Once she learns the summoning spells, Angleland will be able to use them too.”

The magistrianos had to admit that had a certain logic to it. Dealing as they did with drugs and potions, apothecaries like Hilda were the next thing to magicians. And who would suspect a slip of a girl of being a spy? He hadn’t himself.

Covering his stab of jealousy, he said, “To St. Gall, then?” The Anglelanders nodded. He went off to saddle his horse, resigning himself to weeks and probably months in the company of barbarians. The journey was as wearing as he had expected: up the ancient Via Domitia across Franco-Saxon territory to Araus, the northwesternmost town in the reclaimed Roman province of Narbonese Gaul; then by boat north on the Rhodan to Vienne, and east along another one-time legionary highway to Agosta; from there by a lesser road, good only in summer, through the Pennine Alps; and then northeast to Tune and, after it, to St. Gall itself.

Long as the trip was, though, his companions made it fascinating in a way he had not expected. He sometimes found them so strange as almost to be from another world. The northerners he had known in Constantinople had been touched by Roman customs, and most did their best to ape them. Hilda and Wighard had none of that veneer.

They had not even come to Araus, for instance, when black, roiling, anvil-topped clouds blew toward them, whipped by a harsh wind from the Inner Sea. “Storm coming,” Argyros said.

“Aye,” Wighard said, hauling a rain cape out of his kit, “those’re Thor’s whiskers, right enough. I reckon the Thunderer’ll be busy tonight.”

The magistrianos had only gaped at him, too startled for speech. In the Empire, peasants in the countryside still clung to the vestiges of their old pagan cults, in spite of priests’ fuming. But Wighard was one of King Oswy’s personal retainers, a man of higher rank in his country than Argyros held in Constantinople. Yet he plainly took Thor as seriously as he did Christ and the saints. But then, to the Anglelanders there were no sharp dividing lines between everyday reality, rank superstition, and faith. Still uncomfortable with the notion of demons loose in the world, Argyros had scoffed at the idea while the travelers sat around a fire one evening, waiting for a couple of hares to finish roasting.

Wighard’s counterargument was of the “well, everyone knows” sort. Hilda, however, had what was by Anglelander standards a good education, and undertook a more reasoned reply. When she cited the Gadarene swine, Argyros conceded the point, but asked, “Is that truly meaningful today? I don’t expect another flood to wash us away in the fashion of Noah’s, or the sun to stand still in the sky as it did for Joshua.”

“Maybe not,” she said, “but evil spirits are known much later than in scriptural times. What of the nun who forgot to cross herself in the monastery garden and so swallowed a demon along with her lettuce?”

“That’s a new one on me,” the magistrianos said, hiding a smile. “Where did you learn it?”

“It’s in the writings of Pope Gregory the Great,” Hilda answered proudly.

“Oh.” Argyros thought of the jest about Pompey: great as compared to what? Gregory had been pope some time after the reign of Justinian, and the heretical northerners still made much of his thunderings about the ecclesiastical privileges that were rightfully the see of Rome’s. In imperial eyes he was chiefly remarkable for having spent some years in Constantinople without bothering to learn Greek, and for fawning on the repulsive tyrant Phokas after he overthrew the emperor Maurice and murdered him and his five sons.

Yet despite the Anglelanders’ rudeness of manner, the magistrianos came to value their company. Wighard might not have known his letters, but he had no trouble reading tracks. The snares he rigged from vines and branches rarely went empty, and he always knew what fish were likely to be in a stream. And Hilda, for all her credulity about demons, was skilled at her chosen craft. When Argyros’s back tightened up after long days in the saddle, she concocted a lotion from oil and various plants she searched out near their campsite: wild cucumber, centaury, fleawort, a couple of kinds of mint, and licorice root. Well rubbed in, it eased him remarkably.

The lotion’s success and the praises he showered on her for it broke the slight wall of reserve that had existed between them. He began to treat her as he would a well-born imperial lady of similar attractiveness, casually flirting, quoting the poets, and praising her with the fulsomeness of a practiced courtier.

Wighard found it all very funny, chuckling at each new sally. And Argyros took Hilda’s blushes and lowered eyes to mean what they would have from a woman of Constantinople: an invitation to continue. He had stayed celibate for nearly two years after Helen’s death and even thought of retreating into a monastery, but, as sorrow eased over time, the demands of his body showed that was not the proper course for him. He was inalterably of the world, and had to make the best of it. One morning while Wighard was out checking his traps, Hilda came back to camp from a nearby stream where she had just bathed. Her clothes molded themselves magnificently to her still-damp body. Catching his breath, the magistrianos murmured the famous tag from the Iliad. It meant nothing to Hilda, who knew no Greek. Argyros translated: “ ‘Small blame to the Trojans and strong-greaved Achaeans for suffering for a long time over such a woman.’ Homer was speaking of Helen, of course, but then he was not lucky enough to have met you.”

She flushed and stopped in confusion. Argyros had been on the road long enough to cloud his usually keen judgment. He strode forward and started to draw her into his arms. She kicked him in the shin, or tried to, for he slid his leg aside with the unconscious ease of a veteran warrior. She sprang away, fumbling for the small knife at her belt. Her eyes blazed as she spat out, “Did you take me for one of your loose Roman baggages, who lies down with a man at a whim?”

Since the answer to that was at least “maybe” if not “yes,” the magistrianos prudently evaded a direct reply. Instead he apologized with as smooth a tongue as he had formerly used to compliment Hilda. All the while he was thinking that the strict morality that Tacitus had mentioned in the early Germans was still depressingly alive among their descendants.

Tacitus had also spoken of German women as sharing armed combat with their men. Seeing Hilda standing at the ready with her dagger, Argyros decided he believed that too. His ardor quite cooled, he went about the business of breaking camp in thoughtful silence.

That afternoon, when Hilda had gone off into the bushes by the side of the road for a few minutes, Wighard leaned toward Argyros and said quietly, “As well for you that you stopped when you did.” He touched his bow.

“I daresay,” Argyros agreed with a raised eyebrow: evidently the famed Germanic chastity had more backing it up than mere moral force. “Still,” the magistrianos added a moment later, “we could do worse than resting in a town tonight.”

Wighard nodded, clapped him on the shoulder. “Aye, why not? Go off and get yourself a lively wench. You’ll be better for it, and we’ll all have less to worry about.”

A practical people, these Anglelanders, Argyros thought.

En route to St. Gall were several daughter monasteries patterned after the original foundation. The travelers lodged at more than one, both because they offered safe, comfortable shelter and to get to know them: they were all as like as so many peas in a pod. And why not? The pattern was a splendid success. A space only 480 by 640 feet formed a self-contained community for 270 men. Argyros did not agree with the doctrines espoused within St. Gall and the other western abbeys, but he could only admire the genius of the architects who had laid them out.

He passed himself off as a trader of amber with the pagan Lithuanians, calling himself Petro of Narbomart. The port on the Inner Sea was in the hands of the Franco-Saxons; he did not want to be known for an imperial. Yet Narbomart’s Latin dialect was close to that of Ispania, and easy for him to mimic. He could never have pretended to hail from northern Gallia. He could hardly follow that braying, nasal dialect, let alone hope to imitate it.

One Sunday he attended Mass at a monastery church with Wighard and Hilda, but succeeded only in making her angry at him again just when she was starting to act politely toward him once more. The issue, naturally, was theological. During the liturgy, Argyros stood mute whenever the word filioque came up: the doctrine of the imperial church was that the Holy Spirit proceeded from God the Father alone, not from the Father and the Son.

Most citizens of the Empire did the same when traveling in those lands outside the control of Constantinople. It salved their consciences and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, passed unnoticed by their fellow celebrants.

Not here, though. As they were riding away, Hilda said bitterly, “I might have known you would go flaunting your heresy.”

“My heresy?” the magistrianos shot back. “The fourth Council of Constantinople condemned the doctrine of the dual procession of the Holy Spirit as heterodox four hundred years ago.”

“I don’t recognize that council as ecumenical,” she replied. None of the northern Christians did. When Herakleios’s grandson ConstansII reconquered Italia from the Lombards, he had installed his own bishop of Rome. The incumbent, of whose doctrines Constans disapproved, fled to the Franks, and the Franco-Saxon kingdoms and Britannia still followed that shadowy line of popes (so, clandestinely, did some folk in Ispania, Italia, and even Illyricum).

Hilda lifted her chin in challenge. “Convince me by reasoning, if at all.”

“Since you reject orthodoxy, suppose you convince me,” Argyros said. Wighard rolled his eyes and took out a wineskin. He had no concerns other than those of this world. Intricate religious argument, though, was meat and drink to the magistrianos. And to Hilda, it proved. “Very well, then,” she said: “The Holy Spirit, being of the Trinity, is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. Since They both possess the Spirit, He must proceed from Them both. The Father has the Son; the Son, the Father; and, since the Father is the principle of the Godhead—one might even say, the essence of the Godhead—the Holy Spirit must proceed from the Father and the Son, completely from each Person.”

“Whew!” Argyros looked at her in startled admiration. She argued as acutely as an archbishop. Wighard chuckled, a little blearily. He might not have cared about the dispute, but he was beaming with pride for his niece. “What do you say to that? Bright girl, eh?”

“Very.” Argyros turned back to Hilda, giving her all his attention now, as if she were an underestimated swordsman who had almost run him through.

He remained intellectually unpunctured, however, and counterattacked: “You’re clever, but your doctrine destroys the unity of the Godhead.”

“Nonsense!”

“Oh, but it does. If proceeding from the Son is the same as proceeding from the Father, it has no point. But if the two processions are different, the fact that procession from the Son is necessary implies that procession from the Father alone is insufficient—and thus that the Father is imperfect, surely a blasphemy. Also, ascribing procession to the Son as well as to the Father implies that the Father and Son share this attribute. If the Holy Spirit lacks it, then Son and Holy Spirit cannot be consubstantial, as the Persons of the Trinity must. But if the Spirit does not lack it, then what do we have? Why, the Spirit proceeding from the Spirit, which is absurd.”

It was Hilda’s turn to regard Argyros with caution. “That’s not the definition of faith your precious Council gave.”

“The Council was ecumenical, and tried to satisfy everyone,” he answered, “even if it did fail with you. I accept its dogma, but as far as my reasons go, I have to please only myself.”

“For someone not in holy orders, you’re a keen theologian.”

“After the hippodrome, theology has always been Constantinople’s favorite sport,” the magistrianos said. “Nine hundred years ago, St. Gregory of Nyssa complained that if you asked someone how much bread cost, he told you that the Father was greater than the Son, and the Son subordinate to Him; and if you asked if your bath was ready, the answer came that the Son was created from nothing. Of course there are no more Arians to uphold those views any longer, but—”

“—the principle still holds,” Hilda finished for him. “So I see. Still, how do you get around the fact that—”

Argyros went back to the argument, but with only half his attention. The rest was still chewing on Hilda’s left-handed praise for his skill at dogmatics. In the Empire, knowledge belonged to those with the ability to understand, both the Outer and the Inner Learning. Whether one was layman or cleric did not matter. The northerners, he thought, lost a great deal by keeping learning so limited. Here was Wighard, a fine man and far from stupid, but half heathen and quivering at the notion of facing a demon. And even Hilda, though educated in religious matters, had none of the history, law, mathematics, or philosophy that gave perspective and produced a truly rounded individual.

He sighed. The Anglelanders were all he had to work with. Despite their weaknesses, they would have to do.

It was just past high summer, but the air of the pass through the Pennine Alps had a chill to it and was so thin that a man or a horse started panting after the least exertion. As they started the last leg of the journey to St. Gall, the three travelers hammered out their plans.

Every mile closer to the monastery made Wighard less and less eager actually to set foot inside it. He kept making dark mutters about the forces of evil lurking there and what they would likely do to anyone coming to sniff them out. When Argyros, exasperated, suggested that he stay outside and help when the time came for escape, he eagerly agreed and at once grew more cheerful; it was as if a great weight was off his shoulders.

Secure in her own faith, Hilda had no qualms about entering St. Gall. Her task would stay what it had been before she fell in with Argyros: to search through the monastery’s library, ostensibly to look for new medicines to bring back to Londin, in fact after clues to the Franco-Saxons’ tame hellfire. That worried the magistrianos—suppose she found the secret and kept it to herself? All he could think of to keep that from happening was to make himself such an obviously valuable ally that the idea would never occur to her.

He had every intention of going into the monastery himself. He could not hope to compete with Hilda when it came to pawing through old manuscripts. He could not even read some of the western book hands. But as a magistrianos he had other talents, interrogation among them. The Franco-Saxons liked to boast; no telling what some unobtrusive probing might bring out.

And then all their plans unraveled in Turic, a lakeside town a couple of days’ ride west of St. Gall. It was raining when they came in, a downpour that turned the dung-filled streets to a muddy stinking quagmire. Argyros thought longingly of Constantinople’s flagstones and cobbles—and of its sewers. Hilda and Wighard seemed to notice nothing amiss.

All three of them were looking for an inn when Hilda’s horse slipped on a patch of slime and fell heavily. She had no chance to kick free. The beast came down on her. Argyros heard the dull snap of cracking bone, followed an instant later by her stifled shriek.

When the horse, which was unhurt, tried to scramble to its feet again, Hilda’s next cry was anything but stifled. Argyros and Wighard leaped down into the mud together. Wighard grabbed the horse’s head and held it while the magistrianos freed Hilda’s right leg—the one that was on top—from the stirrup. He shifted position, then nodded to Wighard. “All right—let him up, but slowly, mind.”

“Aye.” As the horse rose, Argyros cut the left stirrup-leather with his knife. Hilda sat up, clutching at her leg. Beneath splattered muck, her face was gray. She had bitten her lip in pain; there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth.

“Stay as still as you can,” Argyros ordered, using his dagger to slit her trouserleg. He saw with relief that no bone was poking through the flesh; in this filth such a wound would surely have rotted. But her calf was swelling as he watched, and he had heard the break himself.

“Bad?” Wighard asked. Argyros told him in a few words. The Anglelander nodded. “Let’s get her under a roof, then. I’ve set a few bones in my time.” To Hilda he said, “I’m sorry, chick; we’re going to have to move you. It’ll hurt.”

“It hurts already,” she got out.

“I know, lass, I know.” Wighard turned to Argyros. “We’ve nothing for a proper splint. I’ll tie her legs together, and we’ll carry her. Lucky she’s short; we can keep her feet from dragging on the ground.”

“Nothing better to do,” the magistrianos agreed. Hilda gasped as they lifted her. Argyros could see her clamping her mouth shut against a scream. “Brave girl,” he said; she was taking it like a soldier. She managed the ghost of a smile. “See, I have my arm around you after all, though maybe not the way you wanted.”

Leading their horses, they started slowly down the street. By good fortune, there was a hostel close by. Its proprietress was a plump widow named Gerda. She clucked at their draggled state, but Argyros’s good Roman gold softened her remarkably. A nomisma went much further among the Franco-Saxons than in the Empire.

They eased Hilda down onto a table. Wighard produced a small leather bag full of sand and sapped her behind the ear. She sagged into unconsciousness. As he had said, her uncle knew how to treat injuries like hers. He skillfully aligned the fracture and splinted her leg between boards padded with rags. “She’ll heal straight, I think,” he said at last. “Maybe not even a limp.”

“Good,” Argyros said, and meant it. He honestly liked Hilda, even if she would not give him her body. But there was also still the mission to consider. He looked Wighard in the face. “We need to talk, you and I.”

In the end all three of them hashed it out in one of the pair of upstairs rooms they rented. Hilda lay on a straw pallet; Wighard and Argyros drew rickety stools up next to her.

“Do not think ill of me, I beg you,” the magistrianos said, “but I plan to push on to St. Gall. If I wait for you to mend, Hilda, snow will close off the southern passes and lock me away from the Empire till spring.”

“Quite right,” she said. Her voice was blurry; she had drunk two winejars down to dull the fire in her leg. But her wits still worked clearly. “Uncle, you must go with him.”

“And leave you here alone? Are you daft, girl?”

“This Gerda likes money,” Hilda shrugged. “She’ll care for me if we pay her well, I think, and I can make myself useful to her, doing accounts and such. No sense your staying here because of me.”

“And what will I tell your father when he asks how I watched over you?”

“What will you tell King Oswy when he asks why Angleland has lost another dozen ships, or two, or three?” she retorted. “Winter will not wait for you any more than for Basil. I can be getting better while you and he go on; maybe when you get back I’ll be able to travel again. And it’s more likely you’ll succeed working together than separately.”

The Anglelander made a sour face. “Let me nose around town tomorrow,” he said grudgingly. “If this innkeeper wench has a decent name for herself, then maybe ...”

On investigation, Gerda proved acceptable as caretaker for an invalid; her nickname in Turic was

“Mother.” “Yes, she likes her silver up front, does the Mother,” said a miller who sold her flour, “but she’d not harm a flea.”

“That I know,” Argyros said, scratching. But no hostel in which he’d ever stayed, in the Empire or out, had been free of bugs.

Despite testimonials, Wighard was still fretting when he and the magistrianos rode east past the cathedral honoring Turic’s three famous martyrs, Felix, Regula, and their servant Exuperantius. But he rode; Hilda’s invocation of King Oswy’s name might have been a spell in and of itself.

“Necessity is the master of us all,” Argyros consoled his companion as they clattered over the old Roman fortified bridge to the left bank of the Lindimat. “What would you be doing for her had you stayed, past fetching porridge and helping her use the chamberpot?”

“Nothing, I suppose, but I mislike it all the same.” Wighard’s eyes went to the foothills ahead, their flanks dusky green with thick forests of fir and pine. Bare gray granite, some peaks snow-tipped even now, loomed in the distance. The Anglelander shivered. “I’d not like passing a winter here, though.”

“Nor I,” Argyros said. Unspoken went the other thing that bound the two of them together: their common desire for the Franco-Saxons’ secret. Without Hilda, Wighard would be hard-pressed to ferret it out for himself, so he depended heavily on Argyros. For his part, the magistrianos knew that if he could solve the mystery and get out of St. Gall with it, the Anglelander’s less intellectual talents would make escape more likely.

Late the next afternoon, Wighard pulled off the road into a patch of woods less than a mile short of the monastery. “Here I stay,” he declared. “If you’re bold enough to stick your head in the bear’s mouth, why, go on and good luck to you. As for me, I give you ten days. After that I go back to Turic and see to Hilda.”

Argyros clasped his hand. “You’ll not be caught, or starve?”

“An old poacher like me? Never. I’d twenty times sooner brave the forest than chase after demons the way you are.” He paused and eyed the magistrianos anxiously. “We still share, not so? Should you find the spell and I help you get away with it, we share?”

“If there’s a spell to find, you’ll have it from me,” Argyros declared, though his tongue was more certain than his heart.

He clucked his horse forward. Behind him, Wighard muttered, “I’d better,” and followed that half-threat with low-voiced prayers—or were they heathen charms?

A brown-robed monk standing sentry on the wall hailed the magistrianos. That robe and the man’s tonsure and shaven face reminded Argyros he was in a foreign land. The monks he knew wore black and kept their beards and hair.

He shouted back, once more calling himself Petro the amber trader. “You’re faring all the way to Lithuania?” the monk said. “A long journey, that. May it be profitable for you.”

“My thanks,” Argyros replied, and asked if he might rest a few days at St. Gall. Receiving permission, he dismounted and led his horse into the monastery.

A large guesthouse for nobles and other prominent guests stood to the left of the entrance road; to the right were a smaller house for their servants and a building that lodged the monastery’s shepherds and sheep. All were of timber, in the northern style, with steeply pitched roofs to shed snow during the fierce mountain winters.

The entranceway led to the western porch of the monastery church, where, Argyros knew, all visitors were received. The porch lay between two watchtowers, one dedicated to St. Michael, the other to St. Gabriel. The church itself was a basilica, long and rectangular. Most churches in the Empire were built to the more modern cruciform pattern, but the timber-roofed stone building had an archaic grandeur; Argyros felt transported back to the early days of Christianity.

A monk emerged from the semicircular atrium of the church. He greeted the magistrianos with the sign of the cross, which Argyros returned. “Christ’s blessing upon you,” the monk said. “I am Villem, the porter. Tell me your name and station, so I may know where to lodge you.”

Argyros repeated the story he had given the sentry. Villem rubbed his chin. “What shall we do with you?” he said with a thin chuckle. “You are neither noble nor pilgrim nor pauper. Would you mind the pilgrims’ hospice?” He waved southeast. “It’s just on the other side of the passageway to St. Gabriel’s tower.”

“Whatever you suggest. I’m grateful for the charity.”

Villem bowed. “As best I can follow you, you’re well spoken.” Latin was plainly not his birth-speech; he had a harsh Saxon accent. He shouted back into the atrium, “Get out here, Michel, you lazy good-for-nothing! See to the gentleman’s horse.”

“Coming, Brother Villem!” Michel was a freckled-faced novice with curly red hair and a look of barely suppressed mischief. Under Villem’s glowering supervision, though, he greeted Argyros politely and took the horse’s reins from the magistrianos.

“This way, sir, if you please.” He led Argyros south, past the tower of St. Gabriel and kitchen and brewery for the hospice on his left and the lodgings for sheep and shepherds and goats and goatherds on his right.

Several monks were busy overturning the dungheaps in both animal pens and going through the compacted dung at the bottom of each heap. Trying not to breathe, Argyros looked a question at Michel. The novice guffawed. ‘They’re after the breath of the Holy Spirit,” he said. Seeing Argyros did not understand, he explained: “Saltpeter.”

“ ‘The breath of the Holy Spirit,’ eh?” the magistrianos said. He also smiled. Monks were men too, and saltpeter was said to quench lust. “A breeze that keeps the brothers cooled?”

“Huh?” Michel stared, then laughed again. “That too, of course.” He shouted the joke to one of the monks working at the midden. The monk gave back a rude gesture.

The stableman and his assistant were obviously capable, so Argyros left them his horse and let Michel take him back around the corner of the stable to the hospice. “They’ll feed you after vespers, when they light the hearth,” he said. The magistrianos nodded agreeably. Michel gave a half-shy bob of his head and hurried away.

An eight-bed dormitory lay on either side of the hospice’s main hall. The interior walls were only waist-high, to let heat from the hearth reach the sleeping-rooms. Argyros tossed his saddlebags on an empty bed, then thought better of it and put them on the floor. He stretched out on the bed himself. Several men were already in the hospice, some on their way to religious shrines and the rest beggars. About half spoke one Latin dialect or another. Argyros made idle conversation with them. Fortunately, none was from Narbomart to give him away: he did not know his pretended hometown well. As dusk descended, he listened to the monks chanting the vespers service in the basilica. A few minutes later, as Michel had said, two came in to light the central fireplace. One bore a torch, the other a bucket of rags soaked in pitch. That perplexed the magistrianos until he noticed the hearth was full of charcoal, not wood; charcoal fires were always hard to start. But then he was puzzled all over again. None of the monasteries modeled after St. Gall had used charcoal, though they tolerated few discrepancies from one to the next.

The fire finally took light. The monks looked at each other, pleased with themselves. “Coals from the fire of the Father,” intoned the one who had carried the rags—not in prayer, Argyros judged, but as a comment he was used to making. Nodding, the other monk went around the hall lighting tapers. A charcoal fire burned hotter than wood, but gave off no more light than glowing embers. Novices brought in a tray of large loaves, one for each man in the hospice, and several crocks of beer. The bread was coarse and dark. It was half wheat flour and half rye, the latter a grain Argyros had not known before this journey and one he did not much care for. He did not think highly of beer, either. A lifetime of drinking wine made it seem weak and bitter by comparison. As he ate, the magistrianos paid desultory attention to the chatter around him. Had it not been for his theological arguments with Hilda, he might not have noticed, but these monks of St. Gall had a curious way of relating homely things to the Persons of the Trinity. His eyes narrowed in thought. Eastern or western, monks had a taste for allegory—and if St. Gall was what he suspected, what better subject for allegory than its fearsome secret?

Emptying his mug, he turned to the man beside him on the long bench, a tall thin fellow with the pinched cheeks and racking cough of a consumptive. He glanced around. No clerics were anywhere close. “So,” he said casually, “if charcoal’s the Father and saltpeter the Holy Spirit, what’s the Son?”

He had all he could do to keep from shouting when the fellow promptly answered, “Must be that yellow stuff—what do you call it?—sulfur, that’s it. The healer burned some t’other day to try and clear my lungs. Didn’t help much, far as I could see—just made a stink. But old Karloman called it the Son’s own kindling.” The beggar let out a bubbling laugh; a fleck of spittle at the corner of his mouth was tinged with pink. He said, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, eh? Funny I never thought of that myself.”

“Crazy sort of Trinity,” Argyros agreed. Wits racing, he did not hear when the man said something else to him. Maurice was right, he reflected; these blond barbarians still knew nothing of security. Why, the Empire had kept the makeup of its liquid fire a mystery for centuries, but St. Gall’s secret was out after hardly more than a year. Charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter—there could be no other ingredients, or the monks would not have drawn the analogy with the three Persons of the Godhead. No demons, either, the magistrianos thought with relief.

It also occurred to him that here was a trinity where the spirit might indeed proceed from both the other two elements, for he was certain that charcoal and sulfur by themselves were harmless. In a sense, then, Hilda had been right—not, of course, that the products of this world were truly relevant to theology and its perfection.

He was on the point of springing from his seat and running for his horse when he realized he had not yet won the whole battle. He still needed to know what proportion of the constituents went into the mix. One part of wine in five of water was safe for two-year-olds, but five of wine to one of water would put a grown man under the table in short order. He dared not assume it was different here. He would have to stay a while longer.

Pilgrims, so long as they left with reasonable quickness, did not have to work for their meals; paupers did. Argyros worked before he was asked to. He spent a dreary half-day cleaning the monastery henhouse and goosepen before the fowlkeeper found out he was good with horses and sent him to the stables.

He walked west, the monastery granary on his left hand and on his right a square wooden building whose ripe aroma proclaimed it to be the monks’ privy. Just beyond it was a similar but slightly smaller structure. A couple of monks crossed his path, carrying wicker baskets full of robes, tunics and bed linens.

They went into the building next to the privy: the laundry, Argyros realized. His head snapped around to follow them—what would red cloth be doing in a monastery’s washing? He was sure he had spied some, nearly buried though it was under drabber shades. He remembered the tales of scarlet devils who touched off the Franco-Saxon hellfire and grinned to himself. A perfect disguise, he thought, and one that ought to settle Wighard for good.

The monks came out, their baskets empty. Argyros ambled lazily toward the laundry, wanting to get a better look at the devil-suits, if that was what they were.

“Here, you, who are you and where do you think you’re going?” someone barked at him. He turned slowly, found himself facing a stocky, craggy-faced monk of about fifty, with hard, cold eyes.

“Your Brother Marco told me to go help look after the horses,” he answered, as innocently as he could. He could tell at once that this was no fellow to trifle with.

“Hmm! A likely tale,” the other said. “You come along with me.”

He marched Argyros back to the fowlkeeper, and scowled when Brother Marco confirmed the magistrianos’s story, quavering, “It’s just as he said, Karloman.” He seemed more than a little intimidated by Argyros’s captor.

With poor grace, Karloman apologized to the magistrianos. “Get on with you, then, and no snooping about.” Feeling the monk’s eyes burning into his back, Argyros hurried past the laundry without so much as a sideways glance.

The stablemaster was a mine of gossip; Argyros learned every small scandal that had amused St. Gall in the past year. He did not, however, find out any of what he was after, and ended the day annoyed and frustrated, a condition that persisted for most of the next week. When his break came at last, it was, oddly enough, Karloman who gave it to him.

The magistrianos had been dreaming of roast goat and onions soused with garum, of smooth white wine from Palestine and the famous red of Cyprus, said to come from vines planted by Odysseus before he sailed for Troy. Waking up to rye bread and beer was disheartening.

Then any thoughts of breakfast, however mixed, vanished from his head, for one of his companions lay groaning in bed, staring fearfully at a fast-rising boil near his armpit. Men crowded away from him and each other. The terror of plague was never far away. Someone went pelting off for the healer. Argyros soon heard two men approaching the hospice at a run. He recognized Karloman’s gruff voice at once. “Which one is he?” the monk demanded; his tonsure was gleaming with sweat. Before the man who had fetched him could answer, he went on, “No need to tell me—that one grizzling over there, am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

The healer strode up to the terrified man. “Let’s see it, Ewald,” he said with rough joviality, but his patient was too frightened to raise his arm and have his fears confirmed.

“Grab him, you, you, and you,” Karloman ordered, pointing. Argyros was the second “you.” Along with a newly arrived pilgrim and the cadaverous man who had known about sulfur, he seized Ewald so the fellow could not wriggle. Karloman jerked the man’s arm up.

The healer studied the eruption for a moment, then gave a shout of relieved laughter. “It’s nothing but a common carbuncle, Ewald, you fool. I expect you’ll die in the stocks yet, just as you deserve.”

“It hurts,” Ewald whined.

Karloman snorted. “Of course it hurts. Stay there; I’ll bring you an ointment to smear on it.” He stomped out of the hospice, returning a few minutes later with a steaming bowl full of what looked like honey but had a very different odor.

Ewald sniffed suspiciously. “What stinks?”

“You mean, besides you?” Karloman grunted. “This is half sulfur and half borax, mixed in hot olive oil. It’ll draw the matter out of your boil. Ai! Grab him again, you all!” Ewald tried to bolt, but the men the healer had drafted were too strong for him. Karloman dipped a rag in the bowl, slathered his medicine on the pilgrim’s carbuncle.

Ewald let out a pitiful wail. “It burns. I can feel it eating the skin off me!” He squirmed like a worm on a hook.

“Oh, twaddle,” Karloman said. As Argyros had already seen, he did not have much kindness in him, despite being a healer. He laughed again, this time unpleasantly. “Now if you’d run across another, ah, potion, I dreamed up a while ago, one sulfur to four saltpeter and a charcoal, why that might have just taken the whole arm.”

Ewald, horrified, nearly writhed out of Argyros’s grasp.

Karloman wheeled furiously. “What’s the matter with you, merchant? Hold him tight, God curse you.”

“Sorry.”

Karloman was only making a rough joke to frighten the man a little. He could not have expected anyone there to take its full meaning, not even Argyros—his suspicion of the magistrianos had been based on general principles. But he had given the game away, and Argyros forgot what he was supposed to be doing and almost let Ewald get loose.

After Ewald was finally medicated to Karloman’s satisfaction, Argyros waited until the crowd had dispersed, then gathered his gear and slipped away for the stables. He had just finished saddling his horse when the stablemaster stuck his head in the door. “I thought I heard someone here,” he said in a shocked voice. “You must not ride out now, not before Sunday prayers.”

Argyros blinked. In the excitement over Ewald, he had forgotten it was Sunday. He walked to the church with the monk. After what God had granted him this morning, He deserved thanks. No lesser shrine could impress a man who had prayed in Hagia Sophia, but the church of St. Gall was not to be sneered at. Its proportions were noble, the colonnades that separated the two aisles from the nave fairly good work. Altars stood by every second column, all the way up to the transept. The monks had the nave to themselves; laymen worshipped in the aisles, with wooden screens separating them from the clerics. Karloman and Villem the porter stood just on the other side of the screen from Argyros. Villem nodded pleasantly. “God with you, Petro,” he whispered.

“And with you,” the magistrianos replied.

The healer did not waste time on small talk.

The Mass began. Argyros had been in the west long enough to follow the Latin version with ease and to make the proper responses. But he was so full of excitement over his discovery that he did not notice he Mass automatically omitting the filioque clause whenever it came up in the liturgy. He also did not see Karloman’s eves widen when the monk caught his first omission, or narrow as he left out the offending word time after time. “A heretic!” Karloman cried in outrage, pointing at Argyros. The magistrianos’s blood ran cold. “He rejects the filioque!”

And then the healer must have remembered Argyros’s unwonted curiosity about the monastery laundry and his own inadvertent revelation of that morning. He clapped a hand to his forehead. “A spy!” he shouted.

The choir went on for a few ragged notes, then fell silent. There was a confused, half-angry murmur from clerics and laymen alike. Karloman’s bellow cut through it: “Seize him!”

But Argyros had already whirled and was twisting past gaping pilgrims and beggars. He cursed himself for the carelessness that had thrown him into danger at the moment of his success. The consumptive pauper grabbed at his wrist as he dashed by. He struck the man a blow that stretched him out groaning on the floor.

Two monks stood in the doorway that led out of the church’s western porch. They were staring at each other, not sure what was going on. “I’ll get help!” Argyros shouted, which held one of them in place. The other had quicker wits. He sprang out to bar the way. He was slight, though, and in his late middle years. He went down like the beggar when Argyros lowered a shoulder and bowled him over. The magistrianos ran out into the sunlight. He sprinted south past the tower of St. Gabriel for the stables. Having lodged in other monasteries modeled after St. Gall served him in good stead: he was more familiar with the layout of the place than he could have become in the few days since his arrival. The sounds of pursuit rose behind him. Fortunately, nearly the entire monastic community had been in church. There was no one to answer shouts for help. Long legs flying, Argyros was some yards ahead of everyone as he reached the stable building.

Gasping thanks to the Mother of God for letting him get his horse saddled, he sprang onto the animal. By the time he spurred out the stable door, he had his sword unshipped.

His pursuers were very close, but fell back in dismay at the sight of the gleaming blade. Almost all: Karloman, brave as well as clever, leaped forward to lay hold of the horse’s reins. Argyros slashed, felt the sword bite flesh. Karloman fell. Argyros roweled his horse into a gallop, rode down another overly intrepid monk, and dashed for the monastery gate.

Karloman was not dead; Argyros heard him shouting, “Never mind me, you fools. After him!” At the healer’s bawled orders, monks ran to get weapons, saddle horses, turn loose the monastery hounds. That command alarmed the magistrianos, but it was the last one he heard. Urging his mount ahead for all it was worth, he thundered through the open gates and down the road.

His horse’s muscles surged against his thighs; the wind of its headlong gallop tore tears from his eyes. St. Gall’s fields of wheat, rye, and barley blurred by on either side. Someone in one of the watchtowers sounded a horn. Argyros had no trouble guessing what the call meant.

To escape the all-seeing eye up there, he made for the woods, where he hoped Wighard was still waiting. A glance over his shoulder showed there was still no mounted pursuit. He let his panting horse slow from its sprint to a fast trot. If it broke down, he was done for. He slowed again at the edge of the woods to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the gloom. Silent as a shadow, Wighard stepped into the roadway. “Fine ruction you stirred up back there,” the Anglelander observed. “D’you have the spell, man?”

“The answer, yes.”

“Then we’d best not wait around, eh?” Wighard said, mounting and digging his heels into his horse’s flanks. The magistrianos followed.

As soon as the road made a sharp bend, the Anglelander rigged a trip-rope. He grinned at Argyros.

“They’ll be coming hell for leather after you. With luck, this’ll take out two or three and make the rest thoughtful.”

“Splendid,” Argyros said. He took a packet of finely ground pepper from his saddlebag and scattered it behind them. “The dogs will need distracting, too.”

“Aye, so they will,” Wighard agreed. “Best take no chances with ‘em.” After he and Argyros had ridden on for a few paces, he dug out an old rag and tossed it into a clump of brambles by the side of the road. Seeing Argyros’s quizzical look, he explained, “Soaked in the piss of a bitch in heat.”

The magistrianos burst out laughing. He heard the horn again, faint now in the distance. Thin as the buzz of summer insects came the monks’ cries: “Hurry there!” “Don’t let him get away!”

Too late, Argyros thought—I’ve already done it. He and Wighard rode in companionable silence until they came to an icy stream—a young river, in fact—that eventually ran north into Lake Constant. They splashed along in the shallows against the current for a couple of miles to finish confusing the hounds (they had heard yapping far behind them a while ago, first agonized, then suddenly frantic). When they were sure they were safe, they doubled back across country for Turic. Argyros was already thinking of the trip back to the Empire. It would be easy, save perhaps for the Pennine pass; the idea of a September blizzard made the magistrianos shiver all over. The hostels in the pass bred big dogs to rescue stranded travelers, but they did not save them all.

The magistrianos thought for a moment that the chill against his throat was only a reflection of his reverie. Then he realized it was the edge of Wighard’s dagger. “The spell, man,” the Anglelander said hoarsely.

“How do you summon up the demons?”

“There are no demons,” Argyros said.

The dagger dug in. “You lying kern! I could fair watch you plotting to go your merry way without keeping your promise, but you’ll not get away with that, not alive. Tell me how to raise the devils or I’ll slit your weasand on the spot.”

Getting away with the secret all to himself had always been in the back of Argyros’s mind, but the kiss of steel put an end to that scheme. His voice quivered: “Very well, then, here it is, just as I learned it. ...”

The seasons spin around like wheels. By the Inner Sea, though, the turning is more gentle. Mellow autumn lay on Constantinople a month after snow had come to the Alps. A toy fortress, its walls as high as a man’s knee and three digits thick, stood in the center of a secluded grassy courtyard between two buildings in the palace compound. Argyros and an older, stouter man walked across the lawn to the miniature fortress. The magistrianos carried a small, tightly stoppered winejug in his left hand; a bit of oily rag protruded from a hole drilled through the center of a cork. In his other hand Argyros held a lighted torch. He was careful to keep it well away from the jug.

“I think we are finally ready to demonstrate this for you, your illustriousness,” he said. “The craftsmen at the arsenal say the key to a reliable product is grinding all the ingredients to a fine powder before mixing.”

“Very well, my new Kallinikos, you’ve done splendidly thus far; by all means show me,” George Lakhanodrakon said amiably. The magnitude of the compliment from the Master of Offices made Argyros flush; Kallinikos had invented the Empire’s liquid fire.

The magistrianos set the winejug at a corner inside the model fort’s walls. He stooped to touch the torch to the rag. Watching with interest, Lakhanodrakon asked, “Now what?”

The flame caught. “Now, sir, we retire in haste.” Argyros dropped the torch and loped away. The Master of Offices followed more sedately. Not only was he heavier than the magistrianos; despite descriptions, he had no real sense of what was about to happen.

Argyros turned his head to warn him to make better speed. Too late—at that moment, the flame worked down the rag into the winejug. The explosion made his ears ring. The half-bricks from which the little keep had been built flew apart as if kicked. A tiny fragment of jug or brick stung Argyros’s neck. He yelped and rubbed at the spot.

And George Lakhanodrakon shot by, running as though the blast had hurled him forward. When no further thunderclaps came, the Master of Offices warily turned back to see the results of the experiment. His strong, fleshy Armenian face had gone rather pale.

The corner of the model where Argyros had nestled the winejug was utterly thrown down; the walls that had met there leaned drunkenly. The breeze was thinning the cloud of gray smoke, letting the great shouldering bulk of Hagia Sophia dominate the northern skyline once more. Lakhanodrakon licked dry lips. “It’s like your first woman,” he whispered. “All the telling in the world doesn’t matter a damn.”

Argyros had put the echoing silence within the halls to either side down to the blast having stunned his ears, but it was real, brought on by startled people stopping dead. After a few seconds there were screams and exclamations: “What was that?” “Help me, St. Andreas!”—Constantinople’s patron.

“Earthquake!” “Mother of God, help me!” Faces appeared in a score of windows. A squad of excubitores came dashing around the corner, gaudy in their clinging white leggings, silk surcoats, and golden torcs and belts. Each soldier’s brightly painted shield was blazoned with the sacred labarum:? . Brandishing their spears, they looked wildly in all directions until they recognized Lakhanodrakon. They crowded round him, pelting him with questions.

Argyros admired the way the Master of Offices pulled himself together and calmed the imperial bodyguards without revealing anything of importance. They were scratching their heads as they went back to their post, but they went. One by one, the staring servants and officials in the palace buildings also decided the excitement was over and returned to work.

Eyeing the wrecked model, Lakhanodrakon waited until everyone was out of earshot. Then he said, “You really mean to tell me there’s no witchcraft in that, Basil?”

“None whatsoever,” Argyros said firmly.

“Astonishing to think of such destruction springing from such ordinary stuffs as charcoal, sulfur, and—” Lakhanodrakon snapped his fingers in annoyance. “I always forget the third.”

“Saltpeter,” Argyros supplied, adding, “The monks of St. Gall remember them by associating each with a Person of the Triune Godhead.”

The Master of Offices frowned. “Barbarous heretics. Why would they do that?”

“It does make a certain amount of sense, sir,” Argyros said. “From what the men at the arsenals have told me, the saltpeter gives the explosion its blasting force: thus the monks term it the Holy Spirit’s breath. The charcoal touches off the blast, and so they link it with the Father, the source of all things, while the sulfur catches fire from the kindling of the charcoal and ignites the saltpeter, just as the Son is the Father’s Word through Whom He works.”

“A blasphemous, unholy trinity if ever I heard one,” Lakhanodrakon exclaimed.

“I agree.”

After a few seconds, the Master of Offices said worriedly, “Even knowing how the hellpowder is made may serve us less well than I hoped when I sent you out, for how are we to defend against it? Why, even the walls of the city here, which have never been breached, might fall if enough of this villainous compound were set off beside them.”

“I suppose so,” Argyros said, but he did not believe it. Theodosios Il’s magnificent works had survived nearly nine hundred years and looked good for as many more. The magistrianos pointed out, “Now that we have the secret, with catapults on the walls we can give as good as we get, and the ditch in front of the city will keep enemies from coming up to the wall, and thwart undermining as well.”

“That’s so,” the Master of Offices said, somewhat reassured. He fixed his sharp dark glance on Argyros. “Undermining, you say? I like that. One fine day we may give the Persians a surprise at Nisibis.” The border between the Roman Empire and the successive dynasties ruling Persia had swung through Syria and Mesopotamia since the days of Pompey. Neither side could win the lasting victory both dreamed of.

Argyros said, “The arsenal artificers say that placing the explosive below the works to be attacked may prove even more effective than putting it alongside. They’re thinking of mounting catapults aboard ship, too, as the Franco-Saxons are doing against the Anglelanders, to attack enemies at longer range than we can with fire and siphon.”

“Ah, yes, the Anglelanders,” Lakhanodrakon said. “True, they don’t impinge on us directly, but I confess to misgivings over your cooperation with them. Do you honestly feel such a, er, young folk should be trusted with this potent secret you learned?”

“My lord, I puzzled over that from the lspanic border all the way to St. Gall. One minute I would reckon them only ignorant barbarians; the next they would startle me with their courage or their native lore or even their wits, untrained but keen. I tell you frankly, I was of two minds.”

“How did you decide, then?” the Master of Offices asked.

“When Wighard put a knife to my neck without warning and started growling of demons and spells, I knew they were savages after all. And since he wanted a spell, why, I gave him one. My barber swears it will grow hair; if the Anglelanders can make any military use of that, they’re welcome to it. Wighard believed me; he judged me too frightened to lie. And in any case, how could he know the difference?”

Lakhanodrakon stared, then pounded the magistrianos on the back. “Well done, Basil, and quick thinking, too! That’s one less worry for me.”

He paused, running a hand across his own bald pate. “You must give me your barber’s name.”

“Why, of course, sir,” Argyros said, carefully not smiling. “It would be a pleasure.”