The artisan nodded. “Six of them, three on either side.”
“Basil, what are these madmen playing at? They won’t talk to me,” Mirrane said indignantly. “They aren’t following what we talked about at all. All they’ve done is dig holes in the ground and put jars of your strong wine in them. What good will that—” Mirrane stopped in the middle of her sentence. Her sharp brown eyes flashed from Argyros to the wagon and back again. “Or is that yperoinos in them? Back in Daras, you had some trick of Ahriman—”
Argyros would have said “Satan’s trick,” but he understood her well enough. He might have known she would make the connection. His respect for her wits, already high, rose another notch. He said, “Well, without that army behind us, we do have to modify things a bit.”
“The good god Ormazd knows that’s true.” Suddenly, startlingly, she grinned at the magistrianos. “You won’t need to worry about my running off any longer, dear Basil. I wouldn’t miss seeing this for worlds.” So I can bring news of it back to the King of Kings, Argyros added silently.
He said, “Let’s hope there’s something interesting for you to see.” He knew she was clever enough to add her own unspoken commentary: if not, nothing else matters, because we’ll be dead.
He told off the half-dozen men who had done the digging, sent them back to the holes they had made. He detailed two more to keep Mirrane under guard. Regardless of what she said, he took no chances where she was concerned. Eustathios Rhangabe, of course, stayed with his wagon.
That left—Argyros counted on his fingers—fifteen men. He wished for four times as many. Wishing failed to produce them. “Double quivers,” the magistrianos told the men he did have. Each of them carried, then, eighty arrows. If every shaft killed, they could hardly slay one of five Kirghiz.
How long would the nomads take to get thoroughly drunk? Certainly not as long as any of them expected. Argyros gauged the sun in the sky. He could not afford to wait for nightfall. He did not think he would have to.
Corippus had spent even more time in the imperial army than Argyros. Their eyes met; they both judged the moment ripe. Argyros raised his right hand. His comrades clucked to their horses, trotted north once more behind him.
They rode in silence, alert for Kirghiz scouts. Argyros used the far-seer from horseback, though it made him vaguely seasick to do so. He saw no one. His confidence rose, a little. If the nomads were too busy soaking up their unexpected loot to bother with scouts, so much the better.
The horsemen topped a low rise. Corippus barked sudden harsh laughter. “Look at them!” he exclaimed, pointing. “They’re like a swarm of bees round a honeypot.”
The comparison was apt. The Kirghiz were milling in a great disorderly knot around the abandoned wagons and packhorses. Pulling out the far-seer again, Argyros saw jars going from hand to hand. He watched one nomad, wearing a foolish expression, slide off his horse. Another reached down to snatch away the jug the fellow was holding.
“They’re as ripe as ever they will be,” the magistrianos said. “Let’s go kick the honeypot over—and hope we don’t get stung.”
Some of the Kirghiz must have seen Argyros and his followers approach, yet they took no alarm. Argyros could hardly blame their leaders for that. No sane attackers would approach a foe so grotesquely outnumbering them, any more than a mouse would blithely leap into the fox’s jaws.
The magistrianos drew up his tiny battle line not far inside archery range. He raised his arm, then dropped it. Along with his men, he snatched up an arrow, drew his bow back to his ear and released it, grabbed for the next shaft.
They had all shot three or four times before the racket from the Kirghiz began to change timbre. Some of the nomads cried out in pain; others pointed and yelled at the suicidal maniacs harassing them, just as a man will point and shout at the mosquito that has just bitten his leg and buzzed off.
A few nomads began to shoot back, those who happened to be facing the right way, who were not too tightly pressed by their fellows, and who were sober enough to remember how to use their bows. Argyros and his comrades methodically emptied their quivers into the tight-packed mass. Those who knew fragments of the Kirghiz speech shouted insults at the nomads. They were not out to strike and skulk away; they wanted to be noticed.
When the outer ranks of nomads moved away from the wagons, the magistrianos’s little force retreated a corresponding distance, but kept plying the Kirghiz with arrows. More and more nomads came after them.
Argyros yelled the most bloodcurdling curses he knew, then turned his horse and roweled it with his spurs. This flight was not like the one when he had abandoned the yperoinos wagons; the nomads were pursuing in earnest now.
One of his men shrieked as an arrow sprouted from his shoulder. The magistrianos knew others would also perish, either because some arrows had to hit with so many in the air or because some nomads had faster horses than some of his men. With the thunder of thousands of hooves behind him, he hoped some of his men had faster horses than the Kirghiz. Were the chase longer than the mile and a half or so that lay between Argyros’s men and Eustathios Rhangabe’s wagon, he knew none of his people would be likely to survive.
He glanced ahead and to the right. Yes, there behind a bush was one of the men who had come from Constantinople. Unless one knew where to look for him, he was almost invisible. Only the stragglers of the Kirghiz, who were pursuing with scant regard for order, would come near the fellow.
Argyros had to keep his attention on more immediate concerns. He did not see his countryman thrust a lighted candle at an oil-soaked rag, and noticed only peripherally when the fellow leaped up and dashed for another hole not far away.
What happened moments after that was difficult to ignore, even for one as single-mindedly focused on flight as the magistrianos. The hellpowder in the buried jars ignited, and, with a roar louder and deeper than thunder, the ground heaved itself up. Earth, stones, and shrubs vomited from the newly dug crater.
Argyros’s horse tried to rear. He roughly fought it down. He and the rest of the men from the Roman Empire had encountered hellpowder before and knew what the frightful noise was. Even as the thought raced through Argyros’s mind, another charge of the stuff went off, far over on the Kirghiz left. It should have been simultaneous with the one on the right, and was in fact close enough for Argyros to let out a pleased grunt.
The nomads, taken by surprise as much as their mounts, naturally shied away from the blasts. That bunched them more closely together and made it harder for them to keep up their headlong pursuit. Still, they were bold men, not easily cowed by the unknown. They kept after their quarry.
Another pair of blasts crashed forth, almost at the same instant, as the Romans dashed past the second prepared set of charges. These were nearer each other and nearer the path than the first ones had been. Argyros felt the booming reports with his whole body, not merely through his ears. Again he had to force his mount to obey his will.
He swung around in the saddle to look back at the Kirghiz. They were packed still more tightly now, wanted nothing to do with the eruptions to either side. He saw two horses collide. Both went down with their riders, and others, unable to stop, tumbled over them. Now the magistrianos’s men were lengthening their lead over the nomads, except for the frontrunners out ahead of the pack. He grabbed an arrow, tried a Parthian shot at one of those. He missed, swore, and concentrated again on riding.
The Romans manning the third set of charges had their timing down to a science. They waited until their countrymen were past before touching off their stores of hellpowder. This last pair was so close to the path that dirt showered down on Argyros. His mount bolted forward as if he had spurred it. The nomads’ ponies, on the other hand, balked at the sudden cataclysmic noise in front of them.
The last wagon appeared ahead. Eustathios Rhangabe dove out of it, then sprinted for the shelter of the rocky outcrop where, Argyros presumed, the last two Romans were holding Mirrane. The magistrianos h
oped Rhangabe had accurately gauged the length of candle he had left burning atop one of the jars in the wagon. On second thought, hope did not seen enough. Jolts from Argyros’s galloping horse made his prayer breathless, but it was no less sincere for that.
Around the wagon, invitingly set out, were open jars of yperoinos. None of the Romans paid any attention to them. The Kirghiz whooped with delight when they spied the familiar jars. Most of them tugged on the reins to halt their horses. Drinking was easier and more enjoyable work than chasing crazy bandits who shot back.
Several Roman riders were already diving behind the rocks where Rhangabe had found shelter; more dismounted and ran for them as Argyros drew up. He sprang from his horse. An arrow buried itself in the ground, a palm’s breadth from his foot. Not all the nomads, worse luck, were pausing to refresh themselves.
The magistrianos peered over a boulder. He lofted a shot over the last few Romans at the pursuing Kirghiz. His fingers told him only three shafts were left in his quiver. He reached for one. If something had gone wrong with that wagon, saving them would not matter.
“How much longer?” Mirrane shouted at him.
“Why ask me?” he yelled back, irrationally annoyed. “Rhangabe lit the candle—why don’t you ask—”
He was never sure afterward whether he said “him” or not, He had thought the blasts from a couple of jars of hellpowder loud and terrifying; this sound put him in mind of the roar that would accompany the end of the world. The earth shook beneath his feet. He threw himself facedown, his eyes in the dust and his hands clapped to his ears. He felt no shame at that; the rest of the Romans were doing exactly the same thing.
He was, though, the leader of this crew. Pride quickly forced him to his feet—he did not want his men to see him groveling in the dirt. He brushed at his tunic as he started to scramble over the rocks to find out what the blast had done.
Two others, he noticed, were already up and looking. One was Eustathios Rhangabe. Argyros did not mind that; if anyone could take hellpowder in stride, it would be a man who had dealt with the stuff for years. The other, however, was Mirrane.
He had only an instant in which to feel irked. Then she threw herself into his arms and delivered a kiss that rocked him almost as much as the hellpowder had. Her lips touched his ear. That was not a caress; he could feel them moving in speech. He shook his head. For the moment, at least, he was deaf. He was sorry when Mirrane pulled her face away from his, but she did not draw back far, only enough to let him see her mouth as she spoke. “It worked!” she was yelling over and over. “It worked!”
That brought him back to himself. “Let me see,” he said, mouthing the words in the same exaggerated style she had used: her hearing could be in no better shape than his.
He peered over the piled rocks behind which he had huddled. “Mother of God, have mercy!” he whispered. Of itself, his hand leapt from his forehead to his breast as it shaped the sign of the cross.
He had been a soldier; he knew only too well that war was not the clean-cut affair of drama and glory the epic poets made it out to be. All the same, he was not prepared for the spectacle the lifting veils of acrid smoke were presenting to him.
The titanic blast had not slain all the Kirghiz, or even come close. A large majority of the nomads were riding north. From the desperate haste with which they used spurs and whips on their ponies, Argyros did not think they would pause this side of the pass. Observing what they were fleeing from, the magistrianos could not blame them.
In adapting the plan the Ephthalites had used against the King of Kings, Argyros knew he needed to force the Kirghiz to group more tightly than usual: thus the hellpowder charges that funneled them toward the wagon. Now he saw how appallingly well he had succeeded.
Close by the crater where the wagon had stood, few fragments were recognizable as surely being from man or horse. Freakishly, however, one of the jars of superwine that helped lure the nomads to disaster remained unbroken, though it, like much of the landscape there, was splashed with red.
Argyros had anticipated that central blast zone and hoped it—and the noise that went with its creation—would be enough to intimidate the Kirghiz. He had not thought about what would lie beyond there, about what would happen when fragments of the wagon and fragments of the jars that had held the hellpowder were propelled violently outward after it ignited.
The results, especially when seen upside down in the surreal closeness the far-seer brought, reminded him of nothing so much as hell in a hot-tempered monk’s sermon. Scythed-down men and horses, variously mutilated, writhed and bled and soundlessly screamed. That silence, somehow, was worst of all; it began to lift as the minutes went by and Argyros’s hearing slowly returned.
Yet despite the horror, the magistrianos also understood Mirrane’s delight at the scene before them. Never had a double handful of men not only vanquished but destroyed an enemy army; the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylai was as nothing beside this.
One by one, the rest of Argyros’s crew nerved themselves to see what they had wrought. Most reacted with the same mixture of awe, horror, and pride the magistrianos felt. Others tried to emulate Eustathios Rhangabe’s dispassionate stare; the artisan reacted to the grisly spectacle before him as if it were the final step in some complex and difficult geometric proof, a demonstration already grasped in the abstract.
For his part, Corippus looked as though he only regretted the carnage had not been greater. “Some of them will be a long time dying,” he shouted Argyros’s way, sounding delighted at the prospect. His eyes, for once, did not seem cold. He was savage as any Kirghiz, Argyros thought; the chief difference between him and them was in choice of masters. He made a deadly dangerous foe; the magistrianos was glad they were on the same side.
That thought brought his mind back to the woman next to him. Mirrane might have been able to see into his head. She said, “And now that they are done with, what do you plan to do about me?” She no longer sounded full of nothing but glee, and Argyros did not think that was solely concern for her own fate. She had been examining the results of the blast for several minutes now, and a long look at those was enough to sober anyone less grim of spirit than Corippus.
The magistrianos stayed silent so long that Mirrane glanced over to see if he’d heard. Her mouth tightened when she realized he had. She said, “If you intend to kill me, kill me cleanly—don’t give me to your men for their sport. Were we reversed, captor and captive, I would do as much for you.” Somehow, she managed one syllable of a laugh. “I hate to have to bellow to beg, but my ears ring so, I can’t help it.”
“Yes, I believe you might give me a clean death,” Argyros said musingly, though the ferocity of the King of King’s torturers was a bugbear that frightened children all through the Empire. The magistrianos paused again; he had been thinking about what to do with Mirrane since they left Dariel, without coming up with any sure answer. Now, under her eyes, he had to. At last he said, as much to himself as to her, “I think I am going to bring you back to Constantinople.”
“As you will.” Mirrane fought to hold her voice toneless, but beneath her swarthiness her face grew pale; the ingenuity of the Emperor’s torturers was a bugbear that frightened children all through Persia.
“I think you misunderstand me.” Like Mirrane, Argyros found it odd to be carrying on this conversation near the top of his lungs, but had little choice. Spreading his hands, he went on, “If you had your henchmen here instead of the other way around, would you let me go back to my capital?”
“No,” Mirrane answered at once; she was a professional.
The magistrianos had looked for no other reply from her. “You see my problem, then.” She nodded, again promptly—as he had said once, in many ways the two of them spoke the same language, though he used Greek and she Persian. That reflection was part of what prompted him to continue, “I hadn’t planned to put you in the gaol in the bowels of the Praitorion, or to send you to the Kynegion”—the amphitheat
er in northeastern Constantinople where the imperial headsmen plied their trade. “I meant that you should come back to the city with me.”
“Did you?” Mirrane lifted an eyebrow in the elegant Persian irony that could make even a sophisticated Roman less than self-assured. “Of course you know I will say yes to that: if I slept with you for the sake of duty in Daras, I suppose I can again, if need be. But why do you think you can make me stay in Constantinople? I escaped you there once, remember, on the spur of the moment. Do you imagine I could not do it again, given time to prepare?”
Argyros frowned; here, perhaps, was more professionalism than he wanted to find. He said, “Come or not, sleep with me or not, as you care to, not for any duty. As for leaving Constantinople, I daresay you are right—there are always ways and means. I can hope, though, you will not want to use them.”
Mirrane looked at him in amusement. “If that is a confession of wild, passionate, undying love, I must own I’ve heard them better done.”
“No doubt,” Argyros said steadily. “The Master of Offices writes poetry; I fear I haven’t the gift.”
“Battle epics.” Mirrane gave a scornful sniff.
The magistrianos supposed he should have not been surprised she knew what sort of poetry George Lakhanodrakon composed; the Romans kept such dossiers on high Persian officials. But he admired the way she brought it out pat.
He shook his head. This was no time to be bedeviled with side issues. He said, “I doubt you could pry a confession of wild, passionate, undying love from me with barbed whips or hot irons. To mean them fully, I fear one has to be half my age and innocent enough to think the world is always a sunny place. I’m sorry I can’t oblige. I will say, though, I’ve found no woman but you since my wife died with whom I care to spend time out of bed as well as in. Will that do?”
It was Mirrane’s turn to hesitate. When she did speak, she sounded as if she were thinking out loud, a habit Argyros also had: “You must mean this. You have the power behind you to do as you like with me here; you gain nothing from stringing me along.” She still kept that inward look as she said, “I told you once in Constantinople we were two of a kind—do you remember?”
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