Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  Goarios continued, “Still and all, we have learned much from the Romans and from the Persians. Of all the folk under the sun”—here he glanced at Mirrane, who fondly smiled back his way (if Goarios had embraced the creed of Ormazd, Argyros was doubly sure now it was because he had first embraced an eloquent advocate for it)—“they are strongest, and also cleverest. That is no accident; the two qualities go hand in hand.”

  The king paused. His courtiers applauded. The Kirghiz nobles, those still conscious, looked monumentally bored. Argyros sympathized with them. If Goarios had a point, he was doing his best to avoid it.

  Or so the magistrianos thought, until the king suddenly adopted the royal we and declared, “Though our realm is small at present, we do not see ourself as less in wit than either the Emperor or the King of Kings.” Both those rulers, Argyros thought tartly, had the sense not to go around boasting how smart they were.

  Nevertheless, Goarios’s words did have a certain logic, if a twisted one: “Being so astute ourself, it follows naturally that power will accrue to us on account of our sagacity and on account of our ability to see the advantages of policies heretofore untried. As a result, one day soon, perhaps, the rich and famous in the capitals of the empires will have cause to envy us as we now envy them.”

  The courtiers applauded again. They seemed to know what their king was talking about—but then, Argyros thought, the poor devils had likely listened to this speech or something like it a good many times before. He had heard Goarios was a cruel man; now he was getting proof of it.

  A couple of Kirghiz envoys also cheered the king of the Alans—or maybe the fact that he was done. The rest of the nomads had slumped into sodden slumber. Speaking of envy, Argyros envied them that.

  Goarios was plainly convinced his address marked the high point of the evening, for no singers, dancers, or acrobats appeared afterward to entertain his guests. Instead, the king waved to the doorway, showing that the festivities were over.

  The banquet did not break up at once. As in Constantinople, the custom was for departing guests to thank their host for his kindness. Argyros joined the procession, sighing inwardly. He wished he could somehow get into Goarios’s good graces without having anything to do with the king.

  Still, Goarios greeted him effusively. “We are in your debt. You and your yperoinos have helped make this evening unique.”

  He used Greek, so as not to leave the name of the new drink dangling alone and strange in an otherwise Persian sentence. One of the Kirghiz understood the Roman Empire’s chief tongue and even spoke it after a fashion. Before Argyros could respond to the king, the nomad poked him in the ribs. “You this drink make, eh? Is good. Where you from?”

  “Constantinople,” the magistrianos replied. The Kirghiz’s prodding finger distracted him from Goarios, whom etiquette demanded he should have answered.

  “Ah, the city.” The nomad was too drunk to care about etiquette, if he ever had. He poked Goarios in turn. “You, I, maybe one fine day we see Constantinople soon, eh?”

  “Who would not wish such a thing?” Goarios’s voice was smooth, but his eyes flickered.

  Argyros bowed to the king. “To serve you is my privilege, your majesty.” He turned to Mirrane. “And your lady as well.” Maybe his directness could startle something out of her, though he knew what a forlorn hope that was.

  Sure enough, her equanimity remained absolute. With dignity a queen might have envied, she extended a slim hand to the magistrianos. He resented being made to dance to her tune, yet saw no choice but to take it. She said, “My master speaks for me, of course.”

  The magistrianos murmured a polite phrase and bowed his way out of the king’s presence. Outside the castle, he hired a torchboy to light his way back to the inn. The boy, a Georgian lad, could follow Persian if it was spoken slowly and eked out with gestures. “Stop a moment. Hold your torch up,” Argyros told him as soon as buildings hid them from Goarios’s castle.

  The boy obeyed. Argyros unrolled the tiny scrap of parchment Mirrane had pressed into his palm. He had to hold it close to his face to make out her message in the dim, flickering light. “Meet me alone tomorrow by the vegetable market, or I will tell Goarios who you are,” he read.

  Nothing subtle or oblique there, he thought as he put the parchment in his beltpouch. That did not mean she would not get what she wanted. She generally did.

  “You’re going to meet with her?” Corippus, when he heard Argyros’s news the next morning, was openly incredulous. “What will the rest of us do once she’s dealt with you? You can’t tell me she has your good health foremost in her mind.”

  “I doubt that,” Argyros admitted. He tried to sound judicious, and not like a man merely stating the obvious. He did bolster his case by adding, “If she wanted to bring me down, she could have done it simply last night, instead of going through this rigmarole. By the look of things, she has Goarios wrapped around her finger.”

  Corippus grunted. “This is folly, I tell you.”

  “Being exposed to Goarios is worse folly. One thing I know of Mirrane: she does not threaten idly.”

  Corippus made a noise deep in his throat. He remained anything but convinced. Argyros, however, headed the team from Constantinople, so the north African could only grumble.

  The magistrianos tried to tease him out of his gloom. He waved round the cellar of Supsa’s inn, pointing at the three yperoinos-cookers Corippus and his team had going. “You worry too much, my friend. Even if something does happen to me, the lot of you can go into superwine for true, and likely end up rich men here.”

  Corippus fell back into his harsh native dialect. “In this God-forsaken lump of a town? Who’d want to?”

  He had a point, Argyros thought. Nevertheless, the magistrianos turned a benign eye on Dariel as he made his way to the vegetable market. That was partly because, if he got through this confrontation with Mirrane, he would have a hold on her to counter the advantage she now held on him—he did not think, at any rate, that Goarios would be pleased to learn his paramour was arranging a secret rendezvous with another man. More important, though, was the prospect of matching wits with the best Persia had. Mirrane was that, as Argyros had found more than once to his discomfiture.

  To one used to the bounty of Constantinople, Dariel’s vegetable market was a small, mean place. The city prefect’s inspectors would have condemned half the produce on display. Argyros bought a handful of raisins and waited for Mirrane to come into the little square.

  He was not sure what to expect. When with Goarios, she had dressed as a great lady, with brocaded robe and with bracelets and necklace of gleaming gold. He had also seen her, though, in a dancer’s filmy garb, and once when she was artfully disguised as an old woman. Just recognizing her would constitute a victory of sorts.

  He was almost disappointed to spot her at once. She wore a plain white linen dress, something that suited a moderately prosperous tradesman’s wife, but she wore it like a queen. Copper wire held her hair in place; apart from that, she was bare of jewelry. Seeing Argyros, she waved and walked toward him, as if greeting an old friend.

  “You have another new toy, do you, Basil?” Her voice held a lilting, teasing tone, of the sort a cat would use to address a bird it held between its paws. “What better way to swing a man toward you than dealing with him drunk, the more so if he’s had so little he doesn’t know he is?”

  If anyone would realize why he had brought the yperoinos, it was she. He answered, “I’m not trying to turn a whole city on its ear, the way your handbills did in Daras.”

  “You turned the tables neatly enough on me in Constantinople.” She shook her head in chagrin, put her hand on his arm.

  He pulled free. “Enough empty compliments,” he said harshly. “Unfold your scheme, whatever it is, and have done, so I can start working out where the traps lie.”

  “Be careful what you say to me,” she warned, smiling still. “Ormazd the good god knows how backward Alania is, but Goario
s’s torturer, I think, would have no trouble earning his keep in Ctesiphon. In some things, he accepts only the finest.”

  “I daresay.”

  “Oh, think what you will,” Mirrane said impatiently. “I serve the King of Kings no less than you your Avtokrator. If my body aids in that service, then it does, and there is no more to be said about it.” She paused a moment. “No, I take that back. I will say, Basil, that Goarios is not one I would have bedded of my own free choice, and that that is not true of you.”

  Ever since those few nights in Daras, Argyros had wondered whether the passion she showed then was real or simply a ploy in an unending struggle between Persia and the Roman Empire. He wondered still; Mirrane might say anything to gain advantage. That mixture of suspicious curiosity and anger roughened his words: “Say whatever you like. Whether or not you care a follis for him, Goarios dances to your tune, in bed and out.”

  Mirrane’s laugh had an edge to it. “Were that so, I’d not be here talking with you now—you would have been a dead man the instant Tskhinvali called your name. But I need you alive.”

  For the first time, Argyros began to think she might be telling the truth, or some of it. She had no reason not to unmask him if she did fully control the king of the Alans. Trusting her, though, went against every instinct the magistrianos had, and against the evidence as well. “If Goarios is his own man, as you say, why has he turned his back on God’s only begotten Son Jesus Christ and embraced your false Ormazd? Whence comes that, if not from you?”

  “I find my faith as true as you yours,” Mirrane said tartly. “As for Goarios, he is his own man, and his own god as well—the only thing he worships is himself. The words he mouths are whichever ones suit him for the time being. I saw that too late, and that is why I need your help.”

  “Now we come down to it,” Argyros said.

  Mirrane nodded. “Now indeed. What he intends, you see, is opening the Caspian Gates to the Kirghiz and as many other nomad clans as care to join them. His own army will join the nomads; he thinks he will end by ruling them all.” Her sigh was full of unfeigned regret. “And to think that that was what I labored so hard to accomplish, and here I find it worse than useless.”

  Argyros found it appalling: it was George Lakhanodrakon’s worst nightmare, come to life. The magistrianos said, “Why should you not be glad to see the nomads ravage Roman provinces?”

  “I told you once—if that were all, you would be dead. But Goarios and the men from the steppe have bigger plans. They want to invade Persia too. Goarios thinks to play Iskander.” Argyros frowned for a couple of seconds before recognizing the Persian pronunciation of the name Alexander. Many had tried to rule both east and west in the sixteen hundred years since Alexander the Great; no one had succeeded.

  Then again, no one had tried with the backing of the nomads. “You think he may do it, then,” the magistrianos said slowly.

  “He might; he just might,” Miranne answered. “He is a man who believes he can do anything, and those are the ones who are sometimes right.” She hesitated, then added, “He frightens me.”

  That admission startled Argyros, who had never imagined hearing it from Mirrane. All the same, he said, “It’s hard to imagine a conquering army erupting out of the Caucasus. The mountains here are a refuge of defeat, not stepping-stones to triumph.” He spelled out the chain of thought he’d had coming into Dariel.

  Mirrane’s eyes lit. She followed him at once. He knew how clever she was. Her wit rather than her beauty made her truly formidable, though she was twice as dangerous because she had both.

  She said, “This once, though, the Alans have raised up a leader for themselves. He is … strange, but sometimes that makes people follow a man more readily, for they see him as being marked by—well, by whatever god they follow.” Her smile invited Argyros to notice the concession she had made him.

  He did not rise to it. Over the centuries, the agents who served the Roman Empire had learned to gauge when diplomacy would serve and when war was required, when to pay tribute and when instead to incite a tribe’s enemies to distract it from the frontier. If a hero had appeared in Alania, that long experience told Argyros what to do. “Kill him,” the magistrianos said. “The chaos from that should be plenty to keep the Alans safely squabbling among themselves.”

  “I thought of that, or course,” Mirrane said, “but, aside from being fond of staying healthy and intact myself, it’s too late. The Kirghiz control the pass these days, not the Alans.”

  “Oh, damnation.”

  “Yes, the whole damn nation,” Mirrane echoed, her somber voice belying the lighthearted tone of the pun. “Their khan Dayir, I would say, is using Goarios for his own ends as much as Goarios is using him. And where Goarios would be Iskander if he could, Dayir also has one after whom he models his conduct.”

  Argyros thought of the nomad chieftains who had plagued the Roman Empire through the centuries. “Attila,” he said, naming the first and worst of them.

  Mirrane frowned. “Of him I never heard.” The magistrianos was briefly startled, then realized she had no reason to be familiar with all the old tales from what was to her the distant west: Attila had never plundered Persia. But she knew of one who had: “I was thinking of the king of the Ephthalites, who long ago slew Peroz King of Kings by a trick.”

  Argyros nodded; Prokopios had preserved in Roman memory the story of that disaster. “Enough of ancient history, though,” he said with the same grim pragmatism that had made him urge Mirrane to assassinate Goarios. “We need now to decide how to deal with this Dayir.” Only when he noticed he had said “we” was the magistrianos sure he believed Mirrane.

  She accepted that tacit agreement as no less than her due. “So we do. Unfortunately, I see no easy way. I doubt we’d be able to pry him and Goarios apart. Until they’ve succeeded, their interests run in the same direction.”

  “And afterward,” Argyros said gloomily, “will be too late to do us much good.”

  Mirrane smiled at the understatement. “Ah, Basil, I knew one day Constantinople would get around to sending someone to see what was going wrong in Alania: Goarios will brag, instead of having the wit to let his plans grow in the quiet dark until they are ripe. I’m glad the Master of Offices chose you. We think alike, you and I.”

  A hot retort rose to the magistrianos’s lips, but did not get past. Despite the differences between them, there was much truth in what Mirrane said; he was reminded of it every time he spoke with her. Certainly he had more in common with her than with some Costantinopolitan dyeshop owner whose mental horizon reached no further than the next day’s races in the hippodrome. “We use different tongues,” he observed, “but the same language.”

  “Well said!” She leaned forward, stood on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his cheek. She giggled. “You keep your beard neater than Goarios—there’s more room on your face. I like it.” Laughing still, she kissed his other cheek, just missing his mouth.

  He knew she took care to calculate her effects. He reached for her all the same. The touch of her lips reminded him again of those few days back at Daras.

  Sinuous as an eel, she slipped away. “What would be left of you, if you were caught molesting the king’s kept woman?” She abruptly turned serious. “I must get back. Leaving the palace is always a risk, but less so at noon, because Goarios sleeps then, the better to roister at night. But he’ll be rousing soon, and might call for me.”

  Argyros could say nothing to that, and knew it. He watched Mirrane glide across the market square; she moved with the grace of a dancer and had once used that role as a cover in Daras. The magistrianos stood rubbing his chin in thought for several minutes after she finally disappeared, then made his own way back to Supsa’s inn.

  All the way there, his mind kept worrying at the problem she posed, as the tongue will worry at a bit of food caught between the teeth until one wishes he would go mad. Equally stubborn in refusing to leave his thoughts was the feel of her soft lips. That
annoyed him, so he prodded at his feelings with characteristic stubborn honesty until he began to make sense of them.

  In the years since his wife and son died, he’d never thought seriously about taking another woman into his life. That came partly from the longing he still felt for Helen. More sprang from his unwillingness to inflict on any woman the lonely life a magistrianos’s wife would have to lead, especially the wife of a magistrianos who drew difficult cases. In the past five years he had been to Ispania and the Franco-Saxon kingdoms, to Daras, and now he was here in the Caucasus. Each of those missions was a matter of months, the first close to a year. It was not fair to any woman to make her turn Penelope to his Odysseus.

  With Mirrane, though, that objection fell to the ground. She was at least as able as he to care for herself in the field. And if—if!—she spoke the truth about how she reckoned their brief joining in Daras, he pleased her well enough, at least in that regard. There was, he remembered, far more to love than what went on in bed, but that had its place too.

  He started laughing at himself. Mirrane was also a Persian—enemy by assumption, in almost Euclidean logic. She worshiped Ormazd. She was sleeping with Goarios and keeping his nights lively when the two of them were not asleep. The only reason she was in the Caucasus at all was to seduce the king of the Alans away from the Roman Empire, in the most literal sense of the word. Not only that; if—if!—she spoke the truth, both Constantinople and Ctesiphon faced deadly danger from Goarios’s machinations.

  When all those thoughts were done, the thought of her remained. That worried him more than anything.

  Corippus scowled at the magistrianos. “That accursed potter has raised his price again. And so has the plague-taken apothecary.”

  “Pay them both,” Argyros told him. “Yell and scream and fume as if you were being bankrupted or castrated or whatever suits your fancy. That’s in keeping with our part here. But pay them. You know what we need.”