Agent of Byzantium Read online

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

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

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

  He lowered the tube, sat tugging at his beard in perplexity. For the life of him, he could not see how looking at the world as if it were minuscule and head over heels would help the Jurchen beat the Romans. On the other hand, maybe he did not yet fully understand Orda’s magic.

  Well, what could he do that he had not done? At first he could not think of anything. Then it occurred to him that he had looked through the big end of the tube both times. What would happen if he tried the small one?

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

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

  He pointed the tube at the very top of a tall oak across the stream, paid careful attention to what he saw through it. Sure enough, the bottom of the vague image was sky-blue, the top green. No matter which end one looked through, then, the tube inverted its picture of the world.

  How to make that picture clearer? Perhaps, Argyros thought, Orda had a spell for his own eyeballs. In that case he was beaten, so there was no point worrying about it. He asked the same question he had before: what could he try that was new?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Argyros breathed a long sign of relief. He had been horrified when his prayers did not stop Orda from making fire with the crystal. But if he had been praying for the overthrow of a natural law, even one he did not understand, his failure became perfectly understandable. God worked miracles only at the entreaty of a saint, which the Roman knew he was not. He had been in the field so long that even the Jurchen women, skin-clad, greasy-haired, and stinking of rancid butter, would have looked good to him.

  He closed the tube and stowed it in a saddlebag. Now all that remained was to take it back to the Roman army. Roman artisans would surely be able to duplicate what the nomad shaman had stumbled across.

  “Christ, the Virgin, and all the saints, but I’m an idiot!” Argyros burst out two days later.

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

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

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

  But now, he was no longer startled when the world turned upside down as he put the tube to his eye. He scanned in a full circle, pausing wherever he spied motion. Without the tube, he would have fled from a small cloud of dust he spotted to the south. With it, he was able to see it was only cattle, not horsemen, kicking up the dust. He could continue on his present course, riding around the nomads to reach the Roman army before Tekmanios took it back to the settled lands south of the Danube.

  Tossuc and Orda would guess what he was aiming at, of course. But the steppe was so wide that he did not think the Jurchen could catch him by posting pickets in his path. They would have to stumble across his trail, and that, theou thelontos—God willing—would not happen. It certainly would not, if his prayers had anything to do with it.

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

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

  The magnifying effect of the tube seemed to send the Jurchen horsemen leaping toward him. Even seen head over heels, the grim intensity with which they rode was terrifying. They had not yet spied him; they were leaning over their horses’ necks to study the ground and stay on his trail. But if they had gained so much ground on him, they would catch sight of him soon—and the last phase of the hunt would begin.

  He dug his heels into the horse’s flanks, but the most he could extract from it was a tired, slow trot. Only a beast from the plains could have done as much as this one had; a Roman horse would long since have foundered. Even the nomad animals had their limit, though, and his had reached it.

  He looked back again. This time he could s
ee his pursuers without the tube. And they could see him. Their horses, fresh because they had not ridden the same beast days on end, came galloping forward. It would not be long before they were in arrow range. He might pick off one or two of them, but there were far more than that in their band.

  All hope died when he saw another party of horsemen ahead. If the Jurchen were in front of him as well as behind, not even the miracle he did not deserve would let him escape. Those other riders had also spotted him and were rushing his way as quickly as the plainsmen behind: racing to see who would kill him first, he thought as he set an arrow in his stolen bow and got ready to make what fight he could.

  Because they were approaching instead of pursuing, the riders from ahead drew near first. He drew his bow to shoot at the closest one, but the winking of the sun off chain mail made it hard to reckon the range.

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

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

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

  His head ached abominably when he came back to his senses; the rest of him was one great bruise. Most of all, though, he felt relief that he was no longer crushed beneath the dead flesh and bone of his horse. He tried his limbs, one after the other. They all answered to his will. Gritting his teeth, he sat up.

  Half a dozen Roman scouts were standing around him in a tight circle. He craned his neck back to look up at them—that hurt too. Among the soldiers scowling down were Bardanes, Alexander, and Justin of Tarsos.

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

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

  Bardanes, who was standing by Argyros’s right side, did not say anything. He kicked the returned Roman in the ribs. One of the men behind him—he did not see who—kicked him in the back.

  Alexander laughed. “You get what you deserve now, for running out on us.” His foot lashed out too.

  Argyros realized they were going to kick him to death, right there. He rolled into a ball, his arms drawn up to protect his face and head. “Take me to Hermoniakos!” he shouted—actually, the words came out more like a shriek.

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

  “Wait,” Justin said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Answer his excellency,” Justin of Tarsos said. Alexander stepped forward to kick him again, but Hermoniakos halted him with a gesture. Another bucket of water drenched Argyros.

  He managed a sloppy salute, wondering whether his right wrist was broken. “I beg to report—success,” he said thickly. He had a cut lip, but he did not think any of his teeth were missing—his arm had taken the kick intended for his mouth.

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

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

  “Thank you, Basil.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Argyros nodded. He would have decided the same way.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sir?” Argyros said in surprise.

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

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