“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. “Tarrago fell three weeks ago. In the field we match the northerners, but no walls can keep them out. The traders who escaped from Tarrago 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?”
Ioan’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 then 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 to see at first hand 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 day’s 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 potters 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 interes
ted 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 facedown; 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 of 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 onetime legionary highway to Agosta; from there by a lesser road, good only in summer, through the Pennine Alps and then northeast to Turic 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 E
mpire, 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.
Agent of Byzantium Page 14