Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  And Hilda, for all her credulity about demons, was skilled at her chosen craft. When Argyros’s back tightened up after long days in the saddle, she concocted a lotion from oil and various plants she searched out near their campsite: wild cucumber, centaury, fleawort, a couple of kinds of mint, and licorice root. Well rubbed in, it eased him remarkably.

  The lotion’s success and the praises he showered on her for it broke the slight wall of reserve that had existed between them. He began to treat her as he would a well-born imperial lady of similar attractiveness, casually flirting, quoting the poets, and praising her with the fulsomeness of a practiced courtier.

  Wighard found it all very funny, chuckling at each new sally. And Argyros took Hilda’s blushes and lowered eyes to mean what they would have from a woman of Constantinople: an invitation to continue.

  He had stayed celibate for nearly two years after Helen’s death and even thought of retreating into a monastery, but, as sorrow eased over time, the demands of his body showed that was not the proper course for him. He was inalterably of the world, and had to make the best of it.

  One morning while Wighard was out checking his traps, Hilda came back to camp from a nearby stream where she had just bathed. Her clothes molded themselves magnificently to her still-damp body. Catching his breath, the magistrianos murmured the famous tag from the Iliad.

  It meant nothing to Hilda, who knew no Greek. Argyros translated: “‘Small blame to the Trojans and strong-graved Achaeans for suffering for a long time over such a woman.’ Homer was speaking of Helen, of course, but then he was not lucky enough to have met you.”

  She flushed and stopped in confusion. Argyros had been on the road long enough to cloud his usually keen judgment. He strode forward and started to draw her into his arms.

  She kicked him in the shin, or tried to, for he slid his leg aside with the unconscious ease of a veteran warrior. She sprang away, fumbling for the small knife at her belt. Her eyes blazed as she spat out, “Did you take me for one of your loose Roman baggages, who lies down with a man at a whim?”

  Since the answer to that was at least “maybe” if not “yes,” the magistrianos prudently evaded a direct reply. Instead he apologized with as smooth a tongue as he had formerly used to compliment Hilda. All the while he was thinking that the strict morality that Tacitus had mentioned in the early Germans was still depressingly alive among their descendants.

  Tacitus had also spoken of German women as sharing armed combat with their men. Seeing Hilda standing at the ready with her dagger, Argyros decided he believed that too. His ardor quite cooled, he went about the business of breaking camp in thoughtful silence.

  That afternoon, when Hilda had gone off into the bushes by the side of the road for a few minutes, Wighard leaned toward Argyros and said quietly, “As well for you that you stopped when you did.” He touched his bow.

  “I daresay,” Argyros agreed with a raised eyebrow: evidently the famed Germanic chastity had more backing it up than mere moral force. “Still,” the magistrianos added a moment later, “we could do worse than resting in a town tonight.”

  Wighard nodded, clapped him on the shoulder. “Aye, why not? Go off and get yourself a lively wench. You’ll be better for it, and we’ll all have less to worry about.”

  A practical people, these Anglelanders, Argyros thought.

  En route to St. Gall were several daughter monasteries patterned after the original foundation. The travelers lodged at more than one, both because they offered safe, comfortable shelter and to get to know them: they were all as like as so many peas in a pod. And why not? The pattern was a splendid success. A space only 480 by 640 feet formed a self-contained community for 270 men. Argyros did not agree with the doctrines espoused within St. Gall and the other western abbeys, but he could only admire the genius of the architects who had laid them out.

  He passed himself off as a trader of amber with the pagan Lithuanians, calling himself Petro of Narbomart. The port on the Inner Sea was in the hands of the Franco-Saxons; he did not want to be known for an imperial. Yet Narbomart’s Latin dialect was close to that of Ispania, and easy for him to mimic. He could never have pretended to hail from northern Gallia. He could hardly follow that braying, nasal dialect, let alone hope to imitate it.

  One Sunday he attended Mass at a monastery church with Wighard and Hilda, but succeeded only in making her angry at him again just when she was starting to act politely toward him once more. The issue, naturally, was theological. During the liturgy, Argyros stood mute whenever the word filioque came up: the doctrine of the imperial church was that the Holy Spirit proceeded from God the Father alone, not from the Father and the Son.

  Most citizens of the Empire did the same when traveling in those lands outside the control of Constantinople. It salved their consciences and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, passed unnoticed by their fellow celebrants.

  Not here, though. As they were riding away, Hilda said bitterly, “I might have known you would go flaunting your heresy.”

  “My heresay?” the magistrianos shot back. “The fourth Council of Constantinople condemned the doctrine of the dual procession of the Holy Spirit as heterodox four hundred years ago.”

  “I don’t recognize that council as ecumenical,” she replied. None of the northern Christians did. When Herakleios’s grandson Constans II reconquered Italia from the Lombards, he had installed his own bishop of Rome. The incumbent, of whose doctrines Constans disapproved, fled to the Franks, and the Franco-Saxon kingdoms and Britannia still followed that shadowy line of popes (so, clandestinely, did some folk in Ispania, Italia, and even Illyricum).

  Hilda lifted her chin in challenge. “Convince me by reasoning, if at all.”

  “Since you reject orthodoxy, suppose you convince me,” Argyros said.

  Wighard rolled his eyes and took out a wineskin. He had no concerns other than those of this world. Intricate religious argument, though, was meat and drink to the magistrianos.

  And to Hilda, it proved. “Very well, then,” she said: “The Holy Spirit, being of the Trinity, is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. Since They both possess the Spirit, He must proceed from Them both. The Father has the Son; the Son, the Father; and, since the Father is the principle of the Godhead—one might even say, the essence of the Godhead—the Holy Spirit must proceed from the Father and the Son, completely from each Person.”

  “Whew!” Argyros looked at her in startled admiration. She argued as acutely as an archbishop.

  Wighard chuckled, a little blearily. He might not have cared about the dispute, but he was beaming with pride for his niece. “What do you say to that? Bright girl, eh?”

  “Very.” Argyros turned back to Hilda, giving her all his attention now, as if she were an underestimated swordsman who had almost run him through.

  He remained intellectually unpunctured, however, and counterattacked: “You’re clever, but your doctrine destroys the unity of the Godhead.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Oh, but it does. If proceeding from the Son is the same as proceeding from the Father, it has no point. But if the two processions are different, the fact that procession from the Son is necessary implies that procession from the Father alone is insufficient—and thus that the Father is imperfect, surely a blasphemy. Also, ascribing procession to the Son as well as to the Father implies that the Father and Son share this attribute. If the Holy Spirit lacks it, then Son and Holy Spirit cannot be consubstantial, as the Persons of the Trinity must. But if the Spirit doesn’t lack it, then what do we have? Why, the Spirit proceeding from the Spirit, which is absurd.”

  It was Hilda’s turn to regard Argyros with caution. “That’s not the definition of faith your precious Council gave.”

  “The Council was ecumenical, and tried to satisfy everyone,” he answered, “even if it did fail with you. I accept its dogma, but as far as my reasons go, I have to please only myself.”

  “For someone not in holy orders, you’r
e a keen theologian.”

  “After the hippodrome, theology has always been Constantinople’s favorite sport,” the magistrianos said. “Nine hundred years ago, St. Gregory of Nyssa complained that if you asked someone how much bread cost, he told you that the Father was greater than the Son, and the Son subordinate to Him; and if you asked if your bath was ready, the answer came that the Son was created from nothing. Of course there are no more Arians to uphold those views any longer, but—”

  “—the principle still holds,” Hilda finished for him. “So I see. Still, how do you get around the fact that—”

  Argyros went back to the argument, but with only half his attention. The rest was still chewing on Hilda’s left-handed praise for his skill at dogmatics. In the Empire, knowledge belonged to those with the ability to understand, both the Outer and the Inner Learning. Whether one was layman or cleric did not matter.

  The northerners, he thought, lost a great deal by keeping learning so limited. Here was Wighard, a fine man and far from stupid, but half heathen and quivering at the notion of facing a demon. And even Hilda, though educated in religious matters, had none of the history, law, mathematics, or philosophy that gave perspective and produced a truly rounded individual.

  He sighed. The Anglelanders were all he had to work with. Despite their weaknesses, they would have to do.

  It was just past high summer, but the air of the pass through the Pennine Alps had a chill to it and was so thin that a man or a horse started panting after the least exertion. As they started the last leg of the journey to St. Gall, the three travelers hammered out their plans.

  Every mile closer to the monastery made Wighard less and less eager actually to set foot inside it. He kept making dark mutters about the forces of evil lurking there and what they would likely do to anyone coming to sniff them out. When Argyros, exasperated, suggested that he stay outside and help when the time came for escape, he eagerly agreed and at once grew more cheerful; it was as if a great weight was off his shoulders.

  Secure in her own faith, Hilda had no qualms about entering St. Gall. Her task would stay what it had been before she fell in with Argyros: to search through the monastery’s library, ostensibly to look for new medicines to bring back to Londin, in fact after clues to the Franco-Saxons’ tame hellfire.

  That worried the magistrianos—suppose she found the secret and kept it to herself? All he could think of to keep that from happening was to make himself such an obviously valuable ally that the idea would never occur to her.

  He had every intention of going into the monastery himself. He could not hope to compete with Hilda when it came to pawing through old manuscripts. He could not even read some of the western book hands. But as a magistrianos he had other talents, interrogation among them. The Franco-Saxons liked to boast; no telling what some unobtrusive probing might bring out.

  And then their plans unraveled in Turic, a lakeside town a couple of days’ ride west of St. Gall. It was raining when they came in, a downpour that turned the dung-filled streets to a muddy stinking quagmire. Argyros thought longingly of Constantinople’s flagstones and cobbles—and of its sewers. Hilda and Wighard seemed to notice nothing amiss.

  All three of them were looking for an inn when Hilda’s horse slipped on a patch of slime and fell heavily. She had no chance to kick free. The beast came down on her. Argyros heard the dull snap of cracking bone, followed an instant later by her stifled shriek.

  When the horse, which was unhurt, tried to scramble to its feet again, Hilda’s next cry was anything but stifled. Argyros and Wighard leaped down into the mud together. Wighard grabbed the horse’s head and held it while the magistrianos freed Hilda’s right leg—the one that was on top—from the stirrup. He shifted position, then nodded to Wighard. “All right—let him up, but slowly, mind.”

  “Aye.” As the horse rose, Argyros cut the left stirrup-leather with his knife. Hilda sat up, clutching at her leg. Beneath splattered muck, her face was gray. She had bitten her lip in pain; there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth.

  “Stay as still as you can,” Argyros ordered, using his dagger to slit her trouserleg. He saw with relief that no bone was poking through the flesh; in this filth such a wound would surely have rotted. But her calf was swelling as he watched, and he had heard the break himself.

  “Bad?” Wighard asked. Argyros told him in a few words. The Anglelander nodded. “Let’s get her under a roof, then. I’ve set a few bones in my time.” To Hilda he said, “I’m sorry, chick; we’re going to have to move you. It’ll hurt.”

  “It hurts already,” she got out.

  “I know, lass, I know.” Wighard turned to Argyros. “We’ve nothing for a proper splint. I’ll tie her legs together, and we’ll carry her. Lucky she’s short; we can keep her feet from dragging on the ground.”

  “Nothing better to do,” the magistrianos agreed. Hilda gasped as they lifted her. Argyros could see her clamping her mouth shut against a scream. “Brave girl,” he said she was taking it like a soldier.

  She managed the ghost of a smile. “See, I have my arm around you after all, though maybe not the way you wanted.”

  Leading their horses, they started slowly down the street. By good fortune, there was a hostel close by. Its proprietress was a plump widow named Gerda. She clucked at their draggled state, but Argyros’s good Roman gold softened her remarkably. A nomisma went much further among the Franco-Saxons than in the Empire.

  They eased Hilda down onto a table. Wighard produced a small leather bag full of sand and sapped her behind the ear. She sagged into unconsciousness. As he had said, her uncle knew how to treat injuries like hers. He skillfully aligned the fracture and splinted her leg between boards padded with rags. “She’ll heal straight, I think,” he said at last. “Maybe not even a limp.”

  “Good,” Argos said, and meant it. He honestly liked Hilda, even if she would not give him her body. But there was also still the mission to consider. He looked Wighard in the face. “We need to talk, you and I.”

  In the end all three of them hashed it out in one of the pair of upstairs rooms they rented. Hilda lay on a straw pallet; Wighard and Argyros drew rickety stools up next to her.

  “Do not think ill of me, I beg you,” the magistrianos said, “but I plan to push on to St. Gall. If I wait for you to mend, Hilda, snow will close off the southern passes and lock me away from the Empire till spring.”

  “Quite right,” she said. Her voice was blurry; she had drunk two winejars down to dull the fire in her leg. But her wits still worked clearly. “Uncle, you must go with him.”

  “And leave you here alone? Are you daft, girl?”

  “This Gerda likes money,” Hilda shrugged. “She’ll care for me if we pay her well, I think, and I can make myself useful to her, doing accounts and such. No sense your staying here because of me.”

  “And what will I tell your father when he asks how I watched over you?”

  “What will you tell King Oswy when he asks why Angleland has lost another dozen ships, or two, or three?” she retorted. “Winter will not wait for you any more than for Basil. I can be getting better while you and he go on; maybe when you get back I’ll be able to travel again. And it’s more likely you’ll succeed working together than separately.”

  The Anglelander made a sour face. “Let me nose around town tomorrow,” he said grudgingly. “If this innkeeper wench has a decent name for herself, then maybe …”

  On investigation, Gerda proved acceptable as caretaker for an invalid; her nickname in Turic was “Mother.” “Yes, she likes her silver up front, does the Mother,” said a miller who sold her flour, “but she’d not harm a flea.”

  “That I know,” Argyros said, scratching. But no hostel in which he’d ever stayed, in the Empire or out, had been free of bugs.

  Despite testimonials, Wighard was still fretting when he and the magistrianos rode east past the cathedral honoring Turic’s three famous martyrs, Felix, Regula, and their servant Ex
uperantius. But he rode; Hilda’s invocation of King Oswy’s name might have been a spell in and of itself.

  “Necessity is the master of us all,” Argyros consoled his companion as they clattered over the old Roman fortified bridge to the left bank of the Lindimat. “What would you be doing for her had you stayed, past fetching porridge and helping her use the chamberpot?”

  “Nothing, I suppose, but I mislike it all the same.” Wighard’s eyes went to the foothills ahead, their flanks dusky green with thick forests of fir and pine. Bare gray granite, some peaks snow-tipped even now, loomed in the distance. The Anglelander shivered. “I’d not like passing a winter here, though.”

  “Nor I,” Argyros said. Unspoken went the other thing that bound the two of them together: their common desire for the Franco-Saxons’ secret. Without Hilda, Wighard would be hard-pressed to ferret it out for himself, so he depended heavily on Argyros. For his part, the magistrianos knew that if he could solve the mystery and get out of St. Gall with it, the Anglelander’s less intellectual talents would make escape more likely.

  Late the next afternoon, Wighard pulled off the road into a patch of woods less than a mile short of the monastery. “Here I stay,” he declared. “If you’re bold enough to stick your head in the bear’s mouth, why, go on and good luck to you. As for me, I give you ten days. After that I go back to Turic and see to Hilda.”

  Argyros clasped his hand. “You’ll not be caught, or starve?”

  “An old poacher like me? Never. I’d twenty times sooner brave the forest than chase after demons the way you are.” He paused and eyed the magistrianos anxiously. “We still share, not so? Should you find the spell and I help you get away with it, we share?”

  “If there’s a spell to find, you’ll have it from me,” Argyros declared, though his tongue was more certain than his heart.