Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  Eutropios gaped at him in dismay. Nikephoros III scowled from his high seat, but he could do little, autocrat though he was. The Egyptian’s attack on the icons had been perfectly respectful and raised an important question Eutropios’s opening statement had left untouched.

  The prelates from the three eastern patriarchates also realized that. They crowded round Arsakios, showering him with congratulations. Eutropios was no great theologian, but he did have some political sense. “I declare this first session of the council adjourned!” he cried.

  His own supporters left quickly and quietly. The Emperor stalked off toward the private passageway that led back to the palaces. No sooner had he disappeared than the clerics still crowding the floor of Hagia Sophia raised an exultant shout: “We’ve won! We’ve won!”

  “Arrogant devils, aren’t they?” Lakhanodrakon said indignantly.

  “Hmm?” A glimpse of motion behind the screen of the second-story women’s gallery had distracted Argyros. For a moment he saw a pair of dark, avid eyes peering down through the filigreework at the churchmen below. He wondered to whom they belonged. The Emperor’s wife and mistress were both blue-eyed blondes; Nikephoros had a weakness for fair women. In any case, neither Martina nor Zoe was devout. The magistrianos scratched his head. He had the nagging feeling that barely seen face was familiar.

  Shrugging, he gave it up and accompanied the Master of Offices out of the great church. The Augusteion was crowded with people wondering how the first day of the council had gone. Some of Arsakios’s monks harangued the Constantinopolitans: “Anathema to the worship of lifeless wood and paint! Destruction to idolatry!”

  When an iconophile took violent exception to the anathemas hurled at him, a monk ducked under his wild swing and hit him in the pit of the stomach with his staff. The evasion and counter showed soldierly skill. Truly Arsakios had come ready for anything.

  “His imperial majesty is not going to be pleased at the prospect of a council out of control,” the Master of Offices said.

  “No,” Argyros agreed, “but what if the Alexandrians are right?” His head was still spinning from the subtlety of their argument: to justify the use of images now, somehow the Emperor’s theologians would have to steer between the Scylla of Monophysitism and the Charybdis of the Nestorian heresy.

  Lakhanodrakon looked at him reproachfully. “Not you, too?”

  “The Holy Spirit will guide the assembled fathers to the truth,” the magistrianos said confidently. Being a veteran of years of bureaucratic infighting, he added, “Of course, we may have to help things along a bit.”

  The summons to return to Hagia Sophia, or rather to the residence of the patriarch, which was attached to it, woke Argyros in the middle of the night. “What is it?” he asked, yawning in the face of the messenger.

  “A gathering of scholars seeking to refute Arsakios,” the man replied. He was one of Lakhanodrakon’s servants. “I am to tell you that your earlier exposition was clever enough to make Eutropios hope you can help find a way out of our present difficulty.”

  Eutropios was an amiable nonentity who barely knew Argyros existed. Like the fellow standing in front of the magistrianos, the order came from the Master of Offices. That made it no less flattering. Rubbing his eyes once more, Argyros dressed quickly and followed the messenger, who had a linkbearer waiting outside.

  “Careful here,” the magistrianos warned, steering them around a pothole in the street in front of the house of his neighbor Theognostos, who was a senior member of the bakers’ guild.

  “That should be filled in,” Lakhanodrakon’s servant said. “I almost fell into it a few minutes ago.”

  On the way to the great church, they passed the hostel where the archbishop of Thessalonike was staying. The archbishop supported the use of icons. A couple of dozen of Arsakios’s monks stood in the street, ringing cowbells and chanting, “Bugger the images! Bugger the images!” A few more, their throats tired from such work, sat around a bonfire, passing a jar of wine from one to the next.

  “They’ll make no friends that way,” Lakhanodrakon’s man observed.

  “No, but they may wear down their foes,” Argyros said.

  The monks’ chant broke off as someone hurled a chamberpot at them from a second-story window. The ones befouled shouted curses that made their previous vulgar chant sound genteel by comparison.

  “Go on ahead,” Argyros told his companions. “I’ll catch you up soon.” They stared at him as if he were a madman, but went after a little argument, the linkbearer gladly, the servant with misgivings. He yielded only when Argyros pulled rank.

  Whistling, the magistrianos strode up to the men by the bonfire and said cheerily, “Down with the icons! How about a swallow of wine for a thirsty man?”

  One of the monks rose, none too steadily, and handed him the jug. “Down with the filthy icons it is,” he said. Showing decayed teeth, he opened his mouth in a tremendous yawn.

  “Wearing work, going to the council of the day and harassing the damned iconodule in there by night,” Argyros said.

  The monk yawned again. “Ah, well, we’re just little fellows out here. Arsakios and his bishops are sleeping sound, but we’re caterwauling for all the head picture-lovers tonight, and we’ll serenade ’em again tomorrow, and the next day, and as long as it takes to bring home the truth.”

  “A clever man, Arsakios, to come up with such a scheme,” the magistrianos said.

  “Here, give me a slug of that,” the monk said. His throat worked. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his black robe, then chuckled. “Aye, Arsakios’ll sleep sound tonight, with that doxy of his to warm his bedding.”

  “Doxy?” Argyros prodded.

  The monk made curving motions with his hands. “Can’t fault his holiness’s taste, that’s certain. If you’re going to sin, it may as well be sweet, says I. I don’t think she’s an Egyptian wench, from her accent, though he’s had her since last summer, the lucky dog.”

  That was mildly interesting. “What’s her name?” the magistrianos asked.

  “I forget,” the monk said. “She’s no interest in the likes of me, I can tell you that, not that she doesn’t have Arsakios wrapped around her finger.” Finger was not quite what he said. Pausing to hiccup, he went on, “She’s no fool herself, though; I give her that. In fact, someone told me this night’s vigil was her plan.”

  “You don’t say.” A formidable female indeed, Argyros thought. He rose from his squat, stretched, and said, “I must be off. Keep this stinking image-worshiper wide-eyed till dawn, and thanks for the wine.”

  “Always happy to help an honest pious man.” The monk smacked himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. More to himself than to Argyros, he exclaimed, “Mirrane, that’s what the hussy calls herself.”

  It took all the magistrianos’s training to hold his face and walk steady. Mirrane had come unpleasantly close to killing him in Daras; despite her sex, she was a top agent of Persia. And Argyros could also well understand how she had gained Arsakios’s favor.

  Argyros’s fists clenched as he hurried toward Hagia Sophia. The Persians loved to stir up religious dissension in the Roman Empire: if the Romans battled among themselves, it could only profit their rival. And Mirrane had been playing that very game in Daras, rousing the local heretics against the orthodox faith.

  Now, though, she was embarking on a far more dangerous course. This quarrel over images threatened to tear all the eastern provinces away and to set faction against faction through the rest of the Empire.

  The magistrianos cursed. Exposing the furor over iconoclasm as a Persian plot would not help. Arsakios, whether inspired by Satan or more likely by Mirrane, had raised a real, thorny theological point, and no doubt had more in his arsenal. The only way to bring back religious peace would be to show he was in error. That made the conclave in the patriarchal residence all the more vital.

  There were no shouting monks in the square of the Augusteion. Their din had disturbed
not only the patriarch but also the Emperor, and the imperial guards had driven them off. Things inside the patriarch’s apartments were quite hectic enough without them. The distinguished theologians and scholars there were going at one another like a kettle of crabs.

  “You idiot!” an archbishop with a long white beard shouted at an abbot. “St. Basil clearly states that—”

  “Don’t tell me, show me!” the abbot interrupted. “I wouldn’t take your word the sun was shining without looking outside. Show me the text!”

  “Someone’s filched the codex!” the archbishop howled in frustration. The abbot laughed and snapped his fingers in the other man’s face. Just then, someone pulled someone else’s hair, and abbot and archbishop alike rushed to separate the two combatants, both of whom were close to seventy. Eutropios, who was supposed to be presiding over the gathering, looked as though he wanted to hide.

  Argyros unobtrusively made his way to an empty chair and spent the next several minutes listening, as if he were trying to pick up gossip at a waterfront tavern. As sometimes unfortunately happens with brilliant men, the meeting had got sidetracked. Here someone was declaring that the writings of the church fathers obviously sanctioned images; there somebody else announced that images were not consubstantial with their prototypes. It was all fascinating, and probably true, and none of it, sadly, the least bit relevant.

  Intellectually the magistrianos did not belong in such company, and knew it. But he did have a feel for what was important. To the man next to him, he said, “God became man in the person of Jesus Christ.”

  “Amen,” the man said. He wore the pearl-ornamented robes of an archbishop. “And God made the world in seven days. What of it?” The nightlong wrangling had left him cranky.

  The magistrianos felt himself flush. He was groping after a concept and could not pin it down. Maybe talk would help, even if it did make the archbishop take him for a simpleton. He went on, “In the Incarnation, the Word—the divine Logos—took flesh.”

  “And the immaterial became material,” the archbishop echoed. “There, you see, whoever you are, I can spout platitudes too.”

  Argyros refused to let himself be baited. Without meaning to, the archbishop had helped him clarify his thoughts. He said, “Before the Incarnation, God was only immaterial; it would have been blasphemous to try to depict Him. That, no doubt, is why the Old Testament forbade graven images.”

  “Yes, and the foolish Jews still keep to that law, waiting for the Messiah and not knowing He has already come,” the archbishop said. He did not sound so scornful now, only contemptuous of the ignorant, stubborn Hebrews.

  “But for us Christians—” Argyros began.

  Excitement flamed on the archbishop’s face. He broke in, “Yes, by all the saints! For us Christians, since God has appeared among us and become a part of history, we can portray His human form!”

  “To say otherwise would be to deny the validity of the Incarnation.”

  “It would! It would!” The archbishop shot from his chair as if he had sat on a pin. His shout filled the room: “I have it!” Almost word for word, he bellowed out the chain of thought Argyros had developed.

  There was silence for half a minute when he was through. Then the prelates and savants crowded round the archbishop, slapping his back and showering him with congratulations. Eutropios kissed him on both cheeks. The patriarch was fairly babbling in his relief; he had been quivering at the prospect of having to report failure to Nikephoros.

  “Wine!” he shouted to a servant. “Wine for everyone!” Under his breath, Argyros heard him mutter, “Saved from Kherson!” The monastery at Kherson, on the peninsula that jutted into the Black Sea from the north, was the bleakest place of exile in the Empire. Argyros had been to the godforsaken town in his younger days. No wonder poor Eutropios was nervous, he thought.

  The magistrianos slipped out of the patriarchal residence while the celebration was just getting started. He did his best to fight down his anger at the archbishop’s stealing his ideas. No way to claim them back now. Even if he did stand well with the Master of Offices, that meant little to the ecclesiastics he had left.

  Perhaps it was just as well, he thought. Arsakios and the other iconoclasts would be more likely to take seriously a proposal put forward by a churchman than one that came from an official of the imperial government.

  The racket under the archbishop of Thessalonike’s window was still going on. The miserable archbishop undoubtedly wished he was back conducting services at the church of St. Demetrios in his hometown. Argyros went a couple of blocks out of his way, not wanting anything further to do with the vociferous Egyptian monks.

  The magistrianos heard a low whistle from the direction of the hostel. A woman’s voice, low and throaty, said, “There he is.” Her Greek had a Persian flavor.

  “Mirrane?” he called.

  “Indeed, Basil. Did I not say, back in Daras, we would meet again?” Then, to her companions, she issued a sharp command: “Get him!”

  The slap of their bare feet said they were Arsakios’s monks. They came dashing down the narrow street toward Argyros. Some held torches to light their way, while others brandished clubs. “Heretic!” they shouted. “Worshiper of lifeless wood and pigments!”

  Argyros turned and fled. A Franco-Saxon might have taken pride in a glorious fight against overwhelming odds; he was a sensible Roman, and saw no point in enduring a beating he did not have to. A proverb survived from pagan days; “Even Herakles can’t fight two.”

  As he ran, he wondered how Mirrane had known he was coming. She must have stopped by to see how her chanters were doing and talked with the one of whom he had been asking questions. If he had come back the same way he had gone, he would have fallen into her hands. As it was, she had a gift for putting him in difficult spots.

  It had been worse in Daras, though. Now he was on the streets of his own city. He knew them; his pursuers did not. If they were going to catch him, they would have to work at it.

  He darted through an alleyway that stank of rotten fish, turned sharply left and then right. He paused to catch his breath. Behind him he heard the monks arguing in Greek and hissing Coptic. “Split up! We’ll find him!” one of them shouted.

  Moving more quietly now, the magistrianos came to the mouth of a blind alley. He picked up half a brick and flung it at the wall that blocked the way, perhaps twenty paces down. It hit with a resounding crash. “Mother of God, what was that?” a woman cried from a second-story bedroom. Several dogs yapped frantically.

  “There he is!” The shout came from three directions at once, but none of the monks sounded close. Argyros hurried down a lane that ended about three minutes’ walk from his home.

  At the first cross street, he almost bumped into a monk. It was hard to say which was the more surprised. But the monk had only Mirrane’s description of him. That led to a fatal second of doubt. Argyros hit him in the face, then stamped on his unshod foot. As the monk started to crumple, the magistrianos kicked him in the pit of the stomach, which not only put him out of the fight but also kept him too busy trying to breathe to be able to cry out. The whole encounter lasted only a few heartbeats.

  Argyros turned onto his own street. He walked along jauntily, pleased at having escaped Mirrane’s trap. She had been someone to fear in Daras, he thought, but here at the heart of the Empire all the advantage was on his side.

  Thus filled with himself, he did not see the dark-cloaked figure come out of a shadowed doorway and glide after him. Nor, thinking back on it, did he really hear anything, but at the last moment he sensed the rush of air from behind. He threw himself to one side, far enough to keep the knife that should have slipped between his ribs from doing more than taking a small, hot bite out of his left arm.

  He stumbled away, groping for his dagger. His foe pursued. Starlight glittered coldly off the assassin’s blade. Argyros’s own knife came free. He dropped into a crouch, his arms outspread, and began slowly circling to his right.<
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  Seeing he knew what he was about, his attacker went into a like posture. They moved warily, each seeking an opening. The assassin leaped forward, stabbing up from below, underarm style. The magistrianos knocked his knife hand aside with his own left forearm, stepped in close, and thrust himself. His blow was similarly parried. Both men sprang back, resumed their circling dance.

  Argyros’s eyes flicked to one side. He was in front of his neighbor Theognostos’s house. He took a few cautious steps backward, dragging his heel to feel at the hard-packed ground under his feet. Then he staggered and, with a groan, went to one knee.

  Laughing—the first sound he had made in the whole encounter—the assassin rushed toward him, knife upraised for the easy kill. His right foot came down in the same hole the magistrianos had walked around earlier in the evening. His arms flailed as he strove for balance. Argyros lunged forward under his faltering stroke and buried his dagger in his foe’s belly.

  The iron scent of blood and the death-stench of suddenly loosed bowels filled the street. “Sneaky—bastard,” the assassin wheezed. His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell.

  Argyros approached him with caution, wondering if he was hoarding his last strength for a try at vengeance. But his assailant was truly dead, as the magistrianos found by feeling for a pulse at his ankle. He turned the man onto his back. This was no monk from Alexandria, but a Constantinopolitan street tough. Argyros knew the breed, with their half-shaven heads and puff-sleeved tunics pulled tight at the wrists by drawstrings.