Agent of Byzantium Read online

  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 plainsman 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 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. He 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, the 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 Elijah’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 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 a
nd her Son!” he gasped. Triumph on his face, Orda methodically stamped out the little fire.

  Argyros felt about to burst with questions. Before he 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.”

  “Sony.” 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 oth
ers.

  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?