Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  “I know you’ve lost your wits mooning over that Persian doxy,” Corippus retorted, a shot close enough to the mark that Argyros felt his face grow hot. He was glad they were in the dimly lit cellar, so his lieutenant could not see him flush. But Corippus, after grumbling a little more, went on, “However much it galls me, I have to say the wench is likely right. There’d not be so many stinking Kirghiz on the streets if they weren’t in league with Goarios, and she’d’ve long since nailed us if she didn’t think they meant to do Persia harm along with the Empire.”

  Argyros had reached exactly the same conclusions. He said so, adding, “I’ll be hanged if I can tell how you’d know how many Kirghiz are in Dariel. You hardly ever come up out of here, even to breathe.”

  Corippus chuckled dryly. “Something to that, but someone has to keep the superwine cooking faster than Goarios and his cronies guzzle it down. Besides which, I don’t need to go out much to know the nomads are thick as fleas. The stench gives ’em away.”

  “Something to that,” the magistrianos echoed. Strong smells came with cities, especially ones like Dariel, which had only a nodding acquaintance with Roman ideas of plumbing and sanitation. Still, the Kirghiz did add their own notes, primarily horse and rancid butter, to the symphony of stinks.

  Corippus said, “Any which way, I’m happier to be down here than upstairs with you and Eustathios Rhangabe. Worst thing can happen to me here is getting burned alive. If Eustathios buggers something up, I’ll be scattered over too much landscape too fast to have time to get mad at him.”

  That was a truth Argyros did his best to ignore. He said, “The innkeeper thinks Rhangabe’s some new sort of heretic who isn’t allowed to eat except with wooden tools. I don’t know whether he wants to burn him or convert.”

  “He’d better convert,” Corippus snorted. He and Argyros both laughed, briefly and self-consciously. They knew what would happen if Eustathios Rhangabe struck a spark at the wrong time.

  The magistrianos went upstairs to the room the man from the arsenal at Constantinople was using. He knocked—gently, so as not to disturb Rhangabe. He heard a bowl being set on a table inside the room. Only then did Rhangabe come to the door and undo the latch.

  As always, he reminded Argyros of a clerk, but a clerk with the work-battered hands of an artisan. “Hello, Argyros,” he said. “It goes well, though that thief of a druggist has raised his price for sulfur again.”

  “So Corippus told me.”

  Rhangabe grunted. He was not a man much given to conversation. He went back to the table where he had been busy. He had shoved it close to the room’s single small window, to give himself the best possible light—no lamps, not here.

  Along with the bowl (in which a wooden spoon was thrust), a stout rolling pin lay on the table. Judging its position, Rhangabe had been working on the middle of the three piles there, grinding it from lumps to fine powder. The pile to the left was black, that middle one (the biggest) a dirty gray-white, and the one on the right bright yellow.

  Argyros was perfectly willing to admit that Eustathios Rhangabe knew much more about hellpowder than he did these days. Rhangabe had headed the men at the arsenal who concocted the deadly incendiary liquid called Greek fire (the magistrianos did not know, or want to know, what went into that). When something even more destructive came along, he was the natural one to look to to ferret out its secrets. That he had not blown himself up in the process testified to his skill.

  He took the spoon out of the bowl, measured a little saltpeter from the middle pile into a balance, grunted again, and scooped part of the load back onto the table. Satisfied at last, he tipped the balance pan into the bowl, vigorously stirred the contents, squinted, wetted a finger to stick in it so he would taste the mixture, and at last nodded in reluctant approval.

  He picked up a funnel (also of wood) and put it in the mouth of a pottery jug. He lifted the bowl, carefully poured the newly mixed hellpowder into the jug. When it was full, he plugged it with an unusual cork he took from a bag that lay next to his bed: the cork had been bored through, and a twist of oily rag forced through the little opening.

  Only when Rhangabe was quite finished did he seem to remember Argyros was still in the room. He jerked a thumb at the jars that lined the wall. “That’s forty-seven I’ve made for you since we got here, not counting the ones we fetched from the city. All in all, we have plenty to blow a hole in Goarios’s palace you could throw an elephant through, if that’s what you want.”

  A couple of weeks before, the magistrianos would have seized the chance. Hearing Mirrane had made him wonder, though, and made him watch the fortress to check what she said. He was certain now she had not misled him. Goarios might still rule Alania, but the Kirghiz ruled Goarios. The comings and goings of their leaders were one sign; another was the growing numbers of nomads on Dariel’s streets.

  By themselves, those might merely have bespoken alliance, but other indications said otherwise. The Kirghiz nobles treated Goarios’s guards and courtiers with growing contempt, so much so that Tskhinvali, arrogant himself, complained out loud to Argyros of their presumptuousness. In the markets, the men from the steppe treated traders like servants.

  That sort of thing could go on only so long. The Alans were themselves a proud people, while their Georgian subjects remembered every slight and carried on feuds among themselves that lasted for generations. Dariel did not have the feel of a place about to become a world-conqueror’s capital. It seemed, Argyros thought, more like one of Eustathios Rhangabe’s jugs of hellpowder a few seconds before someone lit the rag stuffed in the cork.

  The magistrianos wished he could see Mirrane again, partly because he wanted to get a better feel for what was happening in the palace and partly just because he wanted to see her. He avoided thinking about which desire was more important to him. In any case, he could not casually make an appointment with the king’s mistress. She had to arrange to come to him.

  He thought from time to time about changing that, about letting Goarios get hold of her note to him. Each time he held off. Doing that was dangerous and, worse, irrevocable. Moreover, with endless chances she had not betrayed him. Yet he fretted every day at how little he really knew of what was going on.

  As things turned out, he found out with no help from Mirrane. He had broken a bronze buckle on one of his sandals and was in the market dickering, mostly by signs, with a Georgian coppersmith for a replacement. Another local had set out several trays of knives in the adjoining stall.

  Half a dozen Kirghiz rode by. One leaned down from the saddle with the effortless ease the nomads displayed on horseback, plucked a fine blade from a tray, and stuck it in his belt. His companions snickered.

  The knifesmith shouted angrily and ran after the Kirghiz. The thief, amused at his fury, waited for him to catch up, then gave his beard a hard yank. The nomads laughed louder. Then the one who had taken the knife bellowed in pain—the knifesmith had bitten his hand, hard enough to draw blood.

  The nomad lashed out with a booted foot. The knifesmith reeled away, clutching his belly and gasping for breath. All the Kirghiz rode on; now they were chuckling at their comrade.

  Had the Georgian knifesmith been made of less stern stuff, the incident would have been over. But the local staggered back to his stall. “Kirghiz!” he shouted as he snatched up a blade. The nomads looked back. The Georgian had known exactly what weapon he was grabbing. He threw the knife. It went into the thief’s chest. The nomad looked astonished, then slowly slid from the saddle.

  The rest of the Kirghiz stared for a moment, first at their friend and then at the knifesmith. Quickly but quite deliberately, one of the nomads strung his bow, pulled out an arrow, and shot the Georgian in the face. The man gave a great bass shriek of anguish that made heads jerk round all over the market square. He ran a few steps, his hands clutching the shaft sunk in his cheek, then fell. His feet drummed in the dirt.

  Argyros looked around to exchange a horrified glance with the c
oppersmith, but that worthy had disappeared. He was, the magistrianos decided, no fool. The locals in the square were surging toward the Kirghiz, as the sea will surge when driven by an angry wind. Argyros heard a harsh cry somewhere as a nomad on foot was mobbed. All the mounted ones near him had their bows out now.

  He slipped away before any of the Kirghiz chanced to look in his direction. He had not got half a block out of the square when the noise behind him doubled and doubled again. He went from a walk to a trot. He had been caught in a street riot once before, in Constantinople. Once was plenty.

  The tumult had not yet reached the inn where Argyros and his men were staying. All the same, Corippus was prowling around the courtyard, wary as a wolf that has taken a scent it mislikes. “How bad?” he asked when the magistrianos told him what had happened.

  “With all the nomads in town? Bad,” Argyros replied. “The Georgians hate ’em, the Alans hate ’em, and they hate everyone. I’d say we have to look to ourselves—Goarios’s men will be too busy guarding the king and his nobles to pay attention to much else.”

  “Goarios’s men will be hiding under their beds, more likely,” Corippus snorted. His cold eyes raked the wall that surrounded the courtyard. He made a disgusted noise deep in his throat. “Too low, too shabby. How are we supposed to hold this place?” He shouted to a couple of stableboys, cursed them when they began to protest. They helped him close and bar the gates.

  Supsa the innkeeper came rushing out at the noise of the gate panels squealing on their hinges. “What you doing?” he cried in bad Greek.

  “He is trying to save you from being killed,” Argyros snapped; the officer’s rasp he put in his voice straightened Supsa up as if it had been a cup of icy water dashed in his face. The magistrianos added, “There’s rioting in the market square, and it’s spreading.”

  Supsa needed only a moment to take that in. “I have heavier bar in back,” he said. “I show you where.”

  As soon as the stouter bar was in place, Argyros called all of his crew except Eustathios Rhangabe out of the inn. Like Corippus, the rest of the men were top combat troops. Some were imperial guards, others, like their leader, ex-soldiers who had joined the corps of magistrianoi. Every one was deadly with bow, spear, and sword.

  “Fetch benches,” Corippus ordered Supsa, “so they can see over the top of the wall to shoot.” This time the taverner and his staff obeyed without question. Other traders came rushing out, clutching whatever weapons they had. Corippus put them on the wall too. “Who knows how well they’ll do?” he grunted to Argyros. “The more bodies the better, though.”

  That got put to the test in minutes. Even while everyone in the courtyard had been working to turn it into a fortress, the noise of strife outside came closer and closer. The white-faced stableboys were just dragging a last bench against the wall when the mob came baying round the corner.

  Supsa clambered onto a bench, stood on tiptoe so the rioters could recognize him. He shouted something in his native Georgian, presumably to the effect that he was just another local and so they should leave him alone.

  Stones, bricks, and clods of horsedung whizzed past him. One caught him in the shoulder and sent him spinning to the ground. Argyros, less optimistic, had already ducked behind the wall. He peered over it again a moment later. A dozen rioters had hold of a thick wooden beam; the others, after much yelling, cleared a path so they could charge for the gate.

  “Shoot!” the magistrianos cried at the same time as Corippus, in his excitement forgetting where he was, bellowed the identical word in Latin. Even without command, everyone knew what to do. Argyros’s men pumped arrows into the mob with a speed and accuracy that left the genuine merchants gasping. Screams rose. The improvised ram never got within twenty feet of its intended target. The men who had carried it were down, moaning or motionless. The rest of the rioters suddenly discovered urgent business elsewhere.

  “Mobs,” Corippus said scornfully. “The bravest bastards in the world, till somebody fights back.” Argyros was nodding grateful agreement when shouts of alarm came from the rear of the inn. Men leaped down from their benches and rushed to help the few beleaguered fellows there. “No, damn you, not everyone!” Corippus howled. “The same bloody thing’ll happen here if we all go haring off like so many idiots!”

  That plain good sense stopped several defenders in their tracks. By then, though, Argyros was already dashing round the inn toward the stables and other outbuildings. The rioters had found or stolen a ladder; more dropped down over the wall every minute.

  Bowstrings thrummed. One of the invaders fell, screaming, while two more cursed. Others ran forward. They waved knives and clubs. But for all their ferocity, they were only townsmen, untrained in fighting. Even the merchants who ran with Argyros had better gear and knew more of what they were about. His own men went through their foes like a dose of salts.

  Part of that, he suspected, was what helped some women get through childbirth so much better than others: knowing and understanding the process would hurt and carrying on regardless. He saw a rioter who took a minor knife wound in his forearm forget everything else to gawk at it. The fellow never saw the bludgeon that stretched him senseless in the dirt.

  An instant later, the magistrianos got the chance to test his theory. A club thudded into his ribs. He gasped, but managed to spin away from the rioter’s next wild swing. After that, drilled reflex took over. He stepped in, knocked away the club—it looked to be a table leg—with his left hand, thrust his dagger into the man’s belly. The Georgian might never have heard of defense, and it was too late for him to learn it now.

  By then, Argyros had come quite close to his real target, the ladder leaning against the rear wall. A man was climbing over the wall. The magistrianos displayed his blood-smeared knife, grinned a ghastly grin. “Your turn next?” he asked. He had no idea whether the man knew Greek, but the message got through, one way or another. The fellow jumped down—on the far side of the wall. From the curses that followed, he landed on someone. Argyros knocked over the ladder.

  The last few rioters inside Supsa’s compound had been pushed back against the wall of the stable. Only traders still fought with them hand to hand. Argyros’s men, professional survivors, shouted for their allies to get out of the way so they could finish the job with arrows.

  “A lesson the townsfolk will remember,” the magistrianos told Corippus. He rubbed at his rib cage, which still hurt. He knew he would have an enormous bruise come morning. But to his relief, he felt no stabbing pain when he breathed. He’d had broken ribs once before, and knew the difference.

  “Bodies strewn here and there will make a mob think twice,” Corippus agreed. “I’m just glad they didn’t try to torch us.”

  Ice walked the magistrianos’s spine. He’d forgotten about that. With jar after jar of hellpowder in Suspa’s inn—He crossed himself in horror. “Mè genoîto!” he exclaimed: “Heaven forbid!”

  “I don’t think even a mob would be so stupid,” Corippus said. “Fire’d mean the whole stinking town would go up. Of course,” he added, “you can’t be sure.”

  Argyros told his archers to shoot anyone they saw outside with a torch. For the moment, the inn seemed safe enough. Like any other scavengers, the mob preferred prey that did not fight back. Rioters went by—at a respectful distance—carrying their loot. At any other time, Argyros would have wanted to seize them and drag them off to gaol. Now, caught in chaos in a country not his own, all he did was scan the sky to make sure no plumes of smoke rose in it.

  “Night before too long,” Corippus observed. “That’ll make things tougher.”

  “So it will.” The magistrianos laughed self-consciously. In his concern for fire, he had not even noticed the deepening blue above. The din outside was still savage and getting worse. Of itself, his hand bunched into a fist. “What’s Goarios doing to stop this mess?”

  “Damn all I can see—probably under the bed with his soldiers.” Contempt filled Corippus’s v
oice. “I’d say our new Alexander can’t even conquer his own people, let alone anybody else’s.”

  Yet soldiers did appear. Darkness had just settled in when a heavily armed party approached the front gate of Supsa’s inn. Argyros recognized its leader as an officer he had seen several times in the palace. He stayed wary even so—the fellow might be taking advantage of the riot, not trying to quell it. “What do you want?” he shouted in Persian.

  The officer’s answer startled him too much to be anything but the truth: “You’re the wine merchant? His majesty has sent us to collect the next consignment of your yperoinos. Here’s the gold for it.” He held up a leather sack.

  With a curious sense of unreality, Argyros let him come up the barred gate. The magistrianos counted the nomismata. The proper number were there. Shaking their heads as they went back and forth, Argyros’s men fetched the jars of superwine and handed them to the officer’s troopers over the top of the gate. When he had all of them, the officer saluted Argyros and led his section away.

  All the magistrianos could think of was Nero, singing to his lyre of the fall of Troy while Rome burned around him. Dariel was not burning, but no thanks to Goarios.

  The stout defense Argyros’s band and the real traders had put up gave the rioters a bellyful. They mounted no fresh assaults. The magistrianos found the night almost as nervous as if they had. All around was a devils’ chorus of screams, shouts, and crashes, sometimes close by, sometimes far away. They were more alarming because he could not see what caused them. He kept imagining he smelled more smoke than cooking fires could account for.

  “Who’s that?” one of his men called, peering at a shadow moving in the darkness. “Keep away, or I’ll put an arrow through you.”

  A woman laughed. “I’ve been threatened with worse than that tonight, hero. Go wake Argyros for me.”

  “Who are you to give me orders, trull?” the Roman demanded. “I ought to—”

  “It’s all right, Constantine. I know her,” the magistrianos said. He looked out, but saw little. “I’m here, Mirrane. What do you want?”