Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  People were trickling into the Augusteion, gathering in front of the atrium of Hagia Sophia. The palace guards outside the great church looked at the growing crowd with suspicion. Here and there a guardsman hefted a spear or loosened a sword in a scabbard, readying himself for trouble.

  Men and women began shouting down the Egyptian monks in the Augusteion, then raised a chant of their own: “Dig up the iconoclasts’ bones! Dig up the iconoclasts’ bones!” At that old Constantinopolitan riot call, all the guardsmen looked to their weapons. But the swelling crowd showed no inclination to attack. Instead, they stood and shouted, the noise rising like the tide. Argyros wondered how Arsakios, inside Hagia Sophia, enjoyed this new din.

  He saw one of the monks who had accompanied the patriarch of Alexandria tear a sheet from the front of a building, hurl it to the ground, and step on it in execration. A moment later the monk was on the ground himself, taking a drubbing from several Constantinopolitans. They were shouting, “Blasphemer! Atheist!” as they pummeled him.

  That night it was Arsakios who got no sleep. A throng of people ringed the monastery of Stoudios, where the Alexandrian delegation was staying. Their racket kept half the city up. It bothered Argyros not at all. He reveled in his first full night of sleep since the ecumenical council had begun.

  In the morning, the Augusteion was packed even tighter than it had been the day before. The magistrianos was glad he had dressed in his most resplendent robe; the fancy outfit made people press back to let him by as he made his way toward Hagia Sophia … except for one young woman who clasped his hand, saying, “Bless me, your reverence!”

  “First time I’ve ever been mistaken for an archbishop,” he remarked to George Lakhanodrakon once he was inside the great church.

  “I daresay,” the Master of Offices chuckled. “You’ve been a busy lad with the archetypes, haven’t you? You used so much papyrus, you’ll make half the government grind to a halt.”

  Privately, the magistrianos could think of worse things. All he said, though, was, “I thought the situation demanded it.”

  “I suppose so.” Lakhanodrakon shook his head in wonder. “What a curious thing: little sheets of papyrus rallying a people to a cause.”

  “Lots of little sheets of papyrus,” the magistrianos pointed out. “Daras showed how words could stir a town close to rebellion. I thought they might work as well for the Empire’s unity as against it, and on a larger scale than anything the Persians tried. With a new idea as powerful as the archetypes, discovering all the things they can do is as important as finding out about them in the first place.”

  “That’s true.” Lakhanodrakon was not sure he liked the notion. Then, remembering an ancient precedent, he brightened. “Caesar did something of this sort, did he not, posting a daily bulletin of events in the Forum of Rome for the people to read?”

  “Yes, I—” Argyros broke off when an altarboy came trotting up and asked which of the gentlemen was Basil Argyros. “I am,” the magistrianos said.

  “Here, then, sir,” the altarboy said, handing him a note. “The lady told me to give this to you.”

  Lakhanodrakon raised an eyebrow. “The lady?”

  Argyros was reading. “It’s not signed,” he said, but he had no trouble figuring out who the lady was. The note read: “If you care to, meet me this afternoon in front of the shop of Joshua Samuel’s son in the coppersmiths’ quarter. Come alone. Be sure that if you are not alone, you will not see me. By the supreme god of light Ormazd I swear I shall also be alone; may I be damned to Ahriman’s hell if I lie.”

  “An old acquaintance,” he told the Master of Offices while he thought it over. He was certain he would not be able to ambush Mirrane; if she said she could escape a trap, she could. He knew her skill from Daras. What he did not know was how much trust to put in her oath. There was no stronger one a follower of Zoroaster—as most Persians were—could swear. But many so-called Christians would cheerfully invoke Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whenever it was to their advantage.

  “I need to get away this afternoon,” he said, making his decision. Lakhanodrakon nodded, smirking; no doubt he thought Argyros had made an assignation. Recalling Miranne’s other talents, the magistrianos half-wished it were so.

  The district of the coppersmiths lay not far from the Augusteion, but it might have been a world away. Here, as nowhere else in the city, Argyros’s handbills earned only a passing glance. Most of the metalworkers were Jews; Christian doctrinal disputes concerned them only if likely to lead to persecution.

  Questions led Argyros to the shop Mirrane had named. Passersby eyed his fine robes with curiosity. A crone limped past, her gray hair ragged, a wine-colored birthmark disfiguring one cheek. The magistrianos waited impatiently, wondering if Mirrane had lured him here so she could work some mischief elsewhere unimpeded.

  “Have I changed so much then, Basil?”

  He whirled at the unexpected sound of that smooth, familiar contralto. The crone was leaning against a wall, saucily grinning his way. The sparkling brown eyes might have belonged to the woman he had known, but—

  She laughed, seeing his stricken expression. Three of her teeth were black. She tapped one of them with a grimy forefinger. “It washes off, even this. I’ve not aged thirty years overnight, I assure you, for which the god of light be praised.”

  “A good disguise,” he said, giving credit where it was due and hoping his relief did not show. Beauty was too rare in the world to be wasted. That, he thought, was why he had instinctively rejected iconoclasm, all theological considerations aside. But Mirrane was too dangerous to let even remembered beauty lull him. “What sort of murderous scheme do you have planned for today, since your last two went awry?”

  “None, now, I’m sorry to say,” she smiled. “What would be the point? The council is already going the wrong way. Arsakios will squirm and fuss and fight through both the Old and New Testaments of your Bible, but he will lose the fight, whether or not he knows it; the Emperor and most of the church are against him. The only real hope was to raise the city mob against the icons, and that seems to have failed.… Was it your idea, spreading those handbills far and wide?”

  “Yes.”

  Mirrane sighed. “I thought as much. Such a pity you escaped my monks and the knifeman. I thought you might have lost your wariness, once the first attack failed.”

  “The second one almost did catch me napping,” he admitted. He explained how he had beaten the hired killer; Mirrane grimaced in chagrin. He said, “I’m sure you would have got free of any trap I set in Ctesiphon or Ecbatana; operating on home ground is always an advantage.”

  It was odd, talking so with a professional from the other side. Argyros had worked many times against agents of the Persian Empire, and Mirrane against the Romans, but despite their masters’ agelong rivalry, their posts gave them more in common than either had with fellow citizens.

  Mirrane must have been thinking along the same lines. She said, “A shame we could not act together once, instead of against each other.”

  He nodded, but said, “Not likely, I fear.”

  “One never knows. The nomads on the northern plains are stirring, and they threaten the Roman Empire as much as Persia. Against them, we could share a common goal.”

  “Maybe,” Argyros said for politeness’s sake, though he did not believe it. He changed the subject. “What will you do now that you no longer need your liaison with Arsakios?”

  “Him I’ll not be sorry to leave,” she said with a curl of her lip. “You were much more enjoyable, those couple of times in Daras.” She chuckled as the flush mounted under his swarthy skin. She returned to his question: “I suppose I’ll travel back to Persia, to see where the Grand Wazir will send me next: maybe into the Caucasus, to turn a client-king toward Ormazd and away from Christ.”

  “I think not,” Argyros said, and leaped at her. The two of them were alone, he was certain. He was bigger, stronger, and quicker than Mirrane, and she was too great a th
reat to the Empire to let her leave Constantinople.

  She made no move to flee. For an instant, in fact, she pressed herself against him as he seized her, and he felt the ripe body her old dirty clothes concealed. Her lips brushed his cheek; he heard her laugh softly in his ear.

  Then she was fighting like a wildcat and crying, “Help! Help! This Christian seeks to ravish me!”

  Men came boiling out of shops all along the street. They converged on the struggling couple, some brandishing makeshift bludgeons, others armed only with their fists. They tore Argyros away from Mirrane, shouting, “Leave her alone!” “You gentile dog, you think because you have money you can take any woman who pleases you?” “See how you like this!”

  “Let go of me!” Argyros yelled, struggling against the angry coppersmiths. “I am a—” Somebody hit him in the pit of the stomach, leaving him unable to speak. Fighting on instinct alone, he grabbed a man and pulled the fellow down on top of him to protect him from the Jews’ punches and kicks.

  At last he managed to suck in a long, delicious lungful of air. “Stop, you fools!” he shouted from beneath his unwilling shield. “I am a magistrianos of the Emperor, making an arrest!”

  The mention of his rank was enough to freeze his attackers for a moment. “It was no rape,” he went on into the sudden silence. “The woman is an agent of Persia, and not even a Jew. Bring her here, and I will prove it to you. And if you help me find her, I will forget your assault on me—you were deceived.”

  With a grunt, Argyros got to his feet and helped up the smith who had covered him. The man was holding his ribs and groaning; he had taken a worse beating than the magistrianos. The rest of the coppersmiths scattered, some dashing this way, some that.

  By then, though, Mirrane had disappeared.

  The shafts of sunlight streaming through the windows that pierced the base of Hagia Sophia’s great dome were paler than they had been when the ecumenical council convened two months before. High summer was past and fall approaching; if the assembled clerics were to return to their churches this year, they would have to sail soon, before the stormy season set in.

  With the rest of the court, Basil Argyros stood in the aisle, listening to the patriarch Eutropios read out the acts of the council. “Anyone who declares henceforth that an icon is a graven image, let him be anathema,” the patriarch intoned.

  “Let him be anathema,” the ecclesiastics echoed.

  “Anyone who declares henceforth that to paint an image or give reverence to an image is either Nestorian or Monophysite, let him be anathema,” Eutropios said.

  “Let him be anathema,” the clerics agreed. Argyros glanced toward Arsakios of Alexandria, who joined in the anathema with poor grace. Only that “henceforth” preserved his orthodoxy. If it had not been conceded, however, he might have led his men into schism and more strife.

  “Anyone who declares henceforth that our incarnate Lord Jesus Christ may not be depicted, let him be anathema.”

  “Let him be anathema.”

  “Anyone who declares henceforth that—” The anathemas rolled on and on. When they were finally through, Eutropios bowed his head and went on, “With the aid and intercession of the Holy Spirit, we have determined and do proclaim these the true and correct doctrines of our holy orthodox church. Anathema to any man who dares contradict them.”

  “Amen,” said everyone in the church, prelates and courtiers together. The Emperor Nikephoros rose from his high seat, bowed to the clerics, and left the church.

  “This council now is ended,” Eutropios said, and let out an inconspicuous sigh of relief. As he left the pulpit, ecclesiastics began hurrying away; sailors would not put to sea in stormy weather even for archbishops.

  The courtiers followed more slowly. “Once again, error is driven from the church,” George Lakhanodrakon said, rubbing his large, knobby-knuckled hands in satisfaction.

  “Is it?” Argyros asked with some bitterness. The Master of Offices turned to look at him sharply. He went on, “How can we have the gall to claim the Holy Spirit descended to inspire the ecumenical council? It was a Persian scheme that threw fuel on the controversy in the first place, and pamphleteering that helped swing it back toward the way the Emperor wanted it to go. Not much room for divine intervention in any of that.”

  “Wasn’t it you who said we’d have to help the Holy Spirit along?” Lakhanodrakon reminded him. “God works through men; that is why He created them, to unfold His scheme for the world.” He patted the magistrianos on the shoulder. “You were also the one who pointed out that God had to become a man to save mankind.”

  Both men crossed themselves. “Yes, but that was a miracle,” Argyros persisted.

  “Must all your miracles be showy?” the Master of Offices asked. “St. Athanasios and St. Cyril of Alexandria, if you read their writings, show themselves to be arrogant men, hungry for power. Yet the doctrines they fought for we still hold today, though the one has been dead almost a thousand years and the other close to nine hundred. Is that not something of a miracle?”

  “Put that way, I suppose it is. And yet—”

  “I know,” Lakhanodrakon sighed. “Examined closely, any human institution is sadly imperfect; with your job, you know that better than most. Should you be shocked it’s also true of the church? If you still hanker for miracles, I’ll give you one: in Egypt, Palestine, and Anatolia; in Thrace and the lands by the Danube; in Italia and Carthage and Ispania, churchmen will be going home from this council all bearing the same doctrines to pass them on in their sees, and all over the Empire townsmen who will never see Constantinople, farmers who could never even imagine Constantinople, will hear the same teachings and follow them, and so will their sons and grandsons after them. If that is not a miracle, what is it?”

  “It might just be good organization,” Argyros said. “Those same peasants and townsmen pay their taxes to the government every year, and so will their sons and grandsons.”

  Lakhanodrakon frowned at his obstinacy, then gave a snort of laughter. He said, “Too damned many of them don’t. And the Holy Spirit doesn’t inspire tax collectors, either; of that I’m woefully certain. They have to do the best they can, the same as you and I and poor Eutropios swimming out of his depth.”

  “The best they can,” Argyros mused. He thought it over. “That’s not so bad, I suppose.” He and the Master of Offices walked down the Mese toward the Praitorion. He wondered what Anthimos would have waiting for him there.

  VII

  Etos Kosmou 6829

  The man next to Basil Argyros in Priskos’s tavern near the church of St. Mary Hodegetria took a long pull at his cup, then doubled up in a terrible coughing fit, spraying a good part of his drink over the magistrianos. “Kyrie eleison!” the fellow gasped: “Lord, have mercy! My throat’s on fire!” He kept on choking and wheezing.

  Argyros’s eyebrows went up in alarm. “Innkeeper! You, Priskos!” he called. “Fetch me water and an emetic, and quickly! I think this man is poisoned.” He pounded the fellow on the back.

  “Sir, I doubt that very much,” replied Priskos, a handsome young man with a red-streaked black beard. He hurried over nonetheless, responding to the sharp command in Argyros’s voice, a vestige of his tenure as an officer in the imperial army before he came to Constantinople.

  “Just look at him,” Argyros said, dabbing without much luck at the wet spots on his tunic. But he sounded doubtful; the man’s spasms were subsiding. Not only that; several of the men in the tavern, regulars by the look of them, wore broad grins, and one was laughing out loud.

  “Sorry there, pal,” the coughing man said to Argyros. “It’s just I never had a drink like that in all my born days. Here, let me buy you one, so you can see for yourself.” He tossed a silver coin to the taverner. Argyros’s eyebrow rose again; that was a two-miliaresion piece, a twelfth of a gold nomisma, and a very stiff price for a drink.

  “My thanks,” the magistrianos said, and repeated himself when the drink was in front
of him. He eyed it suspiciously. It looked like watered wine. He smelled it. It had a faint fruity smell, not nearly so strong as wine’s. He picked up the cup. The regulars were grinning again. He drank.

  Mindful of what had happened to the chap next to him, he took a small sip. The stuff tasted rather like wine, more like wine than anything else, he thought. When he swallowed, though, it was as the man had said—he thought he’d poured flames down his gullet. Tears filled his eyes. Careful as usual of his dignity, he kept his visible reaction to a couple of small coughs. Everyone else in the place looked disappointed.

  “That’s—quite something,” he said at last; anyone who knew him well would have guessed from his restrained reaction how impressed he was. He took another drink. This time he was better prepared. His eyes watered again, but he swallowed without choking. He asked the innkeeper, “What do you call this drink? And where do you get it? I’ve never had anything like it.”

  “Just what I said,” the fellow next to him declared. “Why, I—” He was off on a story Argyros did not want to listen to. Anything new and interesting Argyros wanted to hear about; his fellow drinker’s tale was neither.

  Luckily, Priskos was proud of his new stock in trade, and eager to talk about it. “I call it yperoinos, sir.” Superwine was a good name for the stuff, Argyros thought. At his nod, the innkeeper went on, “We make it in the back room of the tavern here. You see I’m an honest man—I don’t tell you it comes from India or Britain.”

  A good thing too, Argyros said, but only to himself: I’d know you were lying. No customs men were better at their job or kept more meticulous records than the ones at the imperial capital. If anything as remarkable as this dragon’s brew had entered Constantinople, word would have spread fast. The magistrianos drank some more. Warmth spread from his middle.

  He finished the cup and held it out for a refill. “And one for my friend here,” he added a moment later, pointing to the man who had inadvertently introduced him to the potent new drink. He fumbled in his beltpouch for the right coins. They seemed to keep dodging his fingers.