With the Jurchen between them and their countrymen, the Roman scouts swung wide of the running fight. Away from landmarks familiar to him, Argyros steered by the sun. He was surprised to notice how low in the west it had sunk. At last he spotted a line of willows growing along a riverbank. They were also visible from camp. “Upstream,” he said, pointing.
The scouts were the first troops to reach the camp: not surprising, for they did not have to fight their way back. The men of the tagmata guarding the baggage train crowded around them, firing anxious questions. They cried out in alarm when Argyros and his comrades gave them the bad news. Then, as they were trained to do, they hitched their oxen to the wagons and moved the wains into place behind the camp ditch to serve as a barricade against arrows.
That work, in which the scouts lent a hand, was not finished when the Roman army, still harassed by the Jurchen, drew near. Several oxen were shot and had to be killed with axes before their rampaging upset the wagons to which they were yoked.
Tagma by tagma, the Roman cavalry entered the campsite by way of the four gaps in the ditch. The companies that held off the nomads while their comrades reached safety scattered caltrops behind them to discourage pursuit to the gates. Then they too went inside, just as the sun finally set.
That night and the next three days were among the most unpleasant times Argyros had ever spent. The moans of the wounded and the howls and shouts of the Jurchen made sleep impossible, and little showers of randomly aimed arrows kept falling into the camp until dawn.
As soon as it was light, the nomads tried to rush the Roman position. Concentrated archery drove them back. They drew out of range and settled down to besiege the encampment.
Andreas Hermoniakos helped lift the Romans’ spirits. He went from one tagma to the next, saying, “Good luck to them. We’re camped by the water, and we have a week’s worth of food in the wagons. What will the Jurchen be eating before long?”
The question was rhetorical, but someone shouted, “Lice.” The filthiness of the nomads was proverbial.
The lieutenant-general chuckled grimly. “Their bugs won’t feed even the Jurchen more than a couple of days. Eventually they’ll have to go back to their flocks.” So it proved, though the plainsmen persisted a day longer than Hermoniakos had guessed.
After scouting parties confirmed that the nomads really had withdrawn, Tekmanios convened an officers’ council in his tent to discuss the Romans’ next move. “It galls me to think of going back to the Danube with my tail between my legs, but the Jurchen—may Constantinople’s patron St. Andreas cover their khan with carbuncles—might have been standing with their ears to my mouth as I gave my orders. One more battle like that and we won’t have an army left to take back to the Danube.”
“They shouldn’t have been able to read our plan that well,” Constantine Doukas grumbled. He had commanded the right meros, the one whose screening force and flankers the nomads had discovered. “They would have had to be right on top of us to see anything amiss. The devil must have been telling the khan what we were up to.”
Hermoniakos looked down his long, straight nose at the grousing merarch. “Some people blame the devil to keep from owning up to their shortcomings.”
Doukas reddened with anger. Argyros normally would have sided with the lieutenant-general. Now, though, he stuck up his hand and waited to be recognized; he was very junior in this gathering. Eventually Tekmanios’s attention wandered down to the far end of the table. “What is it, Basil?”
“The devil is more often spoken of than seen, but this once I think his excellency Lord Doukas may be right,” Argyros said. That earned a hard look from Hermoniakos, who had been well disposed toward him until now. Sighing, he plunged ahead with the story of the tube he had seen in the hands of the white-haired Jurchen. “I thought at the time it had to do with the evil eye,” he finished.
“That’s nonsense,” one of the regimental commanders said. “After our prayers before the battle and the blessing of the priest, how could any foul heathen charm harm us? God would not permit it.”
“God ordains what He wills, not what we will,” Tekmanios reproved. “We are all of us sinners; perhaps our prayers and purifications were not enough to atone for our wickedness.” He crossed himself, his officers imitating the gesture.
“Still, this is a potent spell,” Doukas said. The commanders around him nodded. Trained in Aristotelean reasoning, he reached a logical conclusion: “If we do not find out what it is and how it works, the barbarians will use it against the Roman Empire again.”
“And once we do,” Tekmanios said, “we can bring it to the priest for exorcism. Once he knows the nature of the magic, he will be better able to counteract it.”
The general and all the officers looked expectantly toward Argyros. He realized what they wanted of him and wished he had had the sense to keep his mouth shut. If Tekmanios had it in mind for him to kill himself, why not just hand him a knife?
“Cowardly wretch!” Andreas Hermoniakos exploded when Argyros came to him the next morning. “If you disobey your general’s orders, it will be the worse for you.”
“No, sir,” the scout commander said, speaking steadily in spite of the heads that turned to listen. “It will be the worse for me to follow them. To do so would be no less than suicide, which is a mortal sin. Better to suffer my lord Tekmanios’s anger awhile in this world than the pangs of hell for eternity in the next.”
“You think so, eh? We’ll see about that.” Argyros had never realized what a nasty sneer the lieutenant-general had. “If you won’t do your duty, by the saints, you don’t deserve your rank. We’ll find another leader for that troop of yours and let you find out how you like serving him as his lowest-ranking private soldier.”
Argyros saluted with wooden precision. Hermoniakos glared at him for close to a minute, his hands curling into fists. “Get out of my sight,” he said at last. “It’s only because I remember you were once a good soldier that I don’t put stripes on your worthless back.”
Argyros saluted again, walked away. Soldiers stepped aside as he went past. Some stared after him; others looked away. One spat in his footprint.
The line of horses was only a couple of minutes away from the lieutenant-general’s tent, but somehow, in the mysterious way news has of traveling through armies, word of Argyros’s fall got there before him. The horseboys gaped at him as they might have at the corpse of a man blasted by lightning. Ignoring that, he mounted his horse without a word and rode to the tent of Justin of Tarsos, until a few minutes ago his aide and now, presumably, his commander.
Justin turned red when he saw Argyros coming, and redder still to receive his salute. “What are your orders for me, sir?” Argyros asked tonelessly.
“Well, sir, uh, Basil, uh, soldier, why don’t you take Tribonian’s place in the eastern three-man patrol? His wound still pains him too much for him to sit a horse.”
“Yes, sir,” Argyros said, his voice still dead. He wheeled his horse and rode out to the eastern gate of the camp, where the other two scouts would be waiting for him.
Having made up the patrol roster, he knew who they would be: Bardanes Philippikos and Alexander the Arab. Justin had been kind to him; both were steady, competent men, though Alexander did have a ferocious temper when he thought himself wronged.
It was plain Argyros’s presence made them nervous. Bardanes’s hand twitched in the beginning of a salute before he jerked it down to his side. And Alexander asked, “Where to, sir?”
“You don’t call me ‘sir’; I call you ‘sir.’ And you tell me where to go.”
“I’ve wanted to do that for weeks,” Bardanes said. But he spoke without malice, using the feeble joke to try to get rid of the tension he felt. To meet him halfway, Argyros managed the first smile since his demotion.
Still, it was the quietest patrol on which he had ever gone, at least at first. Bardanes and Alexander were too wary of him to direct many words his way, and his being there kept
them from talking between themselves about what they most wanted to: his fall.
Bardanes, the more forward of the two, finally grasped the nettle. The camp had long vanished behind them; there was no evidence of the Jurchen. The three horsemen could not have been more alone. And so Argyros was not surprised when Bardanes asked, “Begging your pardon, but what was it you fell out with the lieutenant-general over?”
“I made a mistake at the officers’ meeting,” Argyros replied. He tried to leave it at that, but Bardanes and Alexander were waiting expectantly, so he went on, “I showed Hermoniakos to be in the wrong for taking Constantine Doukas to task. After that, I suppose all I would have had to do was blink at the wrong time and Hermoniakos would have come down on me.”
“That is the way of things when you mix in the quarrel of men above your station,” Alexander said with Arab fatalism. “Whether the bear beats the lion or the lion the bear, the rabbit always loses.”
“Lions and bears,” Bardanes snorted. “A damn shame, if you ask me.”
“No one did,” Argyros said.
“I know,” Bardanes said cheerfully. “Another damn shame they didn’t break some other officers I could name instead of you. There’s more than one I owe plenty to, and I’d enjoy getting some of my own back. You, though—well, shit, you’re a hard-nosed bastard, aye, but I can’t deny you’re fair.”
“Thank you for that much, anyhow.”
“Don’t mention it. It’s as much as we can hope for from an officer, and more than we usually get. You’ll find out.”
They gradually drew near another tree-lined creek, a good spot for a band of Jurchen to be lying in ambush. Bardanes and Alexander both unconsciously looked in Argyros’s direction; old habits died hard.
“Let’s split up,” he said, accepting that in their eyes he still held rank. It warmed him for what he was about to do, but only a little. “You two head down to the south end of the stand. Remember to stay out of arrow range. I’ll go north. We’ll all ford the stream and meet on the other side.”
The other two scouts nodded and took their horses downstream. Neither looked back at Argyros; their attention was on the trees and whatever might be lurking among them. As he had told them he would, he rode north. He splashed over to the eastern side of the stream. But he did not turn back to meet the other Romans. Instead he kept heading northeast at a fast trot.
He could imagine the consternation Alexander and Bardanes would feel when they came to the rendezvous point and found he was not there. The first thing they would do, no doubt, would be to race back to the western bank of the creek to see if he had been waylaid.
When they discovered he had not, they would follow his tracks. They would have to. He wondered what they would do when they saw the direction he was taking. He did not think they would follow him. He was riding straight toward the Jurchen.
Even if they did, it would not matter. By then he would have a lead of half an hour and several miles: plenty of time and distance to confuse his trail. In the end, his erstwhile companions would have only one choice—to go back to John Tekmanios and report he had deserted.
Which was only fair, because that was exactly what he intended to do.
The biggest worry, of course, was that the first Jurchen he met would shoot him on sight. But when he came riding up openly, one hand on the reins and the other high in the air, the nomad horseman was bemused enough to decide that taking him into camp would be more interesting than using him for target practice. He was not, however, bemused enough to keep from relieving Argyros of his bow, sword, and dagger. The Roman had expected that and did not resist.
The tents of the plainsmen sprawled in disorderly fashion over three times the ground the Roman camp occupied, although Argyros thought the Jurchen fewer in number. The black tents themselves were familiar: large, round, and made of felt. The Romans had borrowed the design from the plainsmen centuries ago.
Men walked here and there, clumping about in their heavy boots. The nomads spent so much time on horseback that they were awkward on the ground, almost like so many birds. They stopped to eye Argyros as the scout brought him in. He was getting tired of people staring at him.
The Khan’s tent was bigger than the rest. The oxtail standard was stuck in the ground in front of it. Argyros’s captor shouted something in the musical Jurchen tongue, of which the Roman knew nothing except a couple of foul phrases. The tent flap drew back, and two men came out.
One was plainly the khan; he carried the same aura of authority Tekmanios bore. He was a small, stocky man in his mid-forties, narrow-eyed and broad-faced like most of the nomads, but with a nose with surprising arch to it. A scar seamed his right cheek. His beard was sparse; he let the few hairs on his upper lip grow long and straggle down over his mouth, which was thin and straight as a sword cut.
He listened to the Jurchen who had first encountered Argyros, then turned to the Roman. “I am Tossuc. You will tell me the truth.” His Greek was harsh but understandable.
Argyros dipped his head. “I will tell you the truth, O mighty khan.”
Tossuc made an impatient gesture over the front of his tunic. The garment was of maroon velvet, but of the same cut as the furs and leathers the rest of the Jurchen wore: open from top to bottom, fastened with three ties on the right and one on the left. The khan said, “I need to hear no Roman flattery. Speak to me as to any man, but if you lie I will kill you.”
“Then he will not speak to you as to any other man,” chuckled the Jurchen who had accompanied the khan out of his tent. His Greek was better than Tossuc’s. He was white-haired and, rare among the nomads, plump. His face somehow lacked the hardness that marked most of his people. The Roman thought he was the man who had had the tube that caused his present predicament, but had not come close enough during the fighting to be sure.
Seeing Argyros’s gaze shift to him, the plainsman chuckled again and said, “Do not place hope in me, Roman. Only you can save yourself here; I cannot do it for you. I am but the shaman of the clan, not the khan.”
“You also talk too much, Orda,” Tossuc broke in, which seemed to amuse Orda mightily. The khan gave his attention back to Argyros. “Why should I not tie you between horses and rip you apart for a spy?”
Ice walked up Argyros’s back. Tossuc was not joking; the Roman thought him incapable of joking as his shaman had. The ex-commander of scouts said, “I am no spy. Would a spy be fool enough to ride straight to your camp and offer himself up to you?”
“Who knows what a Roman spy would be fool enough to do? If you are no spy, why are you here? Quick, now; waste no time making up falsehoods.”
“I have no falsehoods to make up,” Argyros replied. “I am—I was—an officer of scouts; some of your men will have seen me and can tell you it is so. I told the Roman lieutenant-general he was wrong in a council and showed him it was true. As reward, he took away my rank. What was I to do?”
“Kill him,” Tossuc said at once.
“No, because then the other Romans would kill me too. But how can I serve the Empire after that? If I join you, I can gain revenge for the slight many times, not just once.”
The khan rubbed his chin, considering. Orda touched his sleeve, spoke in the nomad tongue. He nodded, short and sharp. The shaman said, “Will you swear by your Christian God that you speak the truth?”
“Yes,” Argyros said. He crossed himself. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, by the Virgin and all the saints, I swear I have left the Romans after my quarrel with Andreas Hermoniakos, the lieutenant-general.”
Orda heard him out, then said to Tossuc, “His truth is not certain, khan, but it is likely. Most of these Christians are too afraid of this hell of theirs to swear such an oath wantonly.”
“Fools,” Tossuc grunted. “Me, I fear nothing, in this world or the next.” It was not meant as a boast; had it been, Argyros would have paid no attention to it. Spoken as a simple statement of fact, though, it commanded belief—and the Roma
n knew only too well he was not without fear himself, for the khan inspired it in him.
“Maybe it is as you say,” Tossuc said at last. “If it is, you will not mind telling all you know of the Roman army.” He bowed with a mocking irony more sophisticated than anything Argyros had thought to find in a nomad, waved for the Roman to precede him into his tent.
“Do not step on the threshold,” Orda warned. “If you do, you will be put to death for the sin. Also, as long as you are among us, do not piss inside a tent, or touch a fire with a knife, or break a bone with another bone, or pour milk or any other food out on the ground. All these things offend the spirits, and only your blood will wash away the offense.”
“I understand,” Argyros said. He had heard of some of the Jurchen customs, just as the plainsmen knew something of Christianity. A couple, though, were new to him. He wondered nervously if Orda had left anything out.
The Roman had never been in the tent of a nomad chief; its richness surprised him. He recognized some of the displayed wealth as booty from the raid across the Danube: church vessels of gold and silver, hangings of cloth-of-gold and rich purple, bags of pepper and cinnamon and scarlet dye.
But some of the riches the Jurchen had produced for themselves. The thick wool carpets, embroidered with stylized animals or geometric shapes, would have sold for many nomismata in the markets at Constantinople. So would Tossuc’s gold-inlaid helmet and his gem-encrusted sword, scabbard, and bowcase. And the cushions, stuffed with wool and straw, were covered in silk.
Except for a looted chair, there was no wooden furniture. The life of the Jurchen was too mobile for them to burden themselves with large, bulky possessions.
Tossuc and Orda sat cross-legged with a limberness that Argyros, years younger than either, could not match. The khan began firing questions at him: how big was the Roman army? How many horses did it have? How many men were in the first meros? In the second? The third? What supplies did the baggage wagons carry?
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