With a deliberate effort of will, Argyros drew back from the extended nautical metaphor into which he had fallen. What with the motion of his horse beneath him, it was threatening to make the scout commander seasick.
He turned to his companion, a blond youngster from Thessalonike named Demetrios after the city’s patron saint. “Nothing so far. Let’s ride on a little farther.”
Demetrios made a face. “Only if you say so, sir. I don’t think the devils are anywhere around. Couldn’t we just head back to camp? I could use a skin of wine.” Demetrios fit three of the military author Maurice’s four criteria for a scout: he was handsome, healthy, and alert. He was not, however, markedly sober.
Argyros, for his part, did not quite pass the first part of Maurice’s test. For one thing, his eyebrows grew in a single black bar across his forehead. For another, his eyes were strangely mournful, the eyes of a sorrowing saint in an icon or of a man who has seen too much too soon. Yet he was only in his late twenties, hardly older than Demetrios.
He said, “We’ll go on another half mile. Then, if we still haven’t found anything, we’ll call it a day and turn around.”
“Yes, sir,” Demetrios said resignedly.
They rode on, the tall grass brushing at their ankles and sometimes rising to tickle their horses’ bellies. Argyros felt naked in his long goat’s-hair tunic. He wished he had not had to leave his mail shirt behind; the Jurchen were ferociously good archers. But the jingle of the links might have given him away, and in any case the weight of the iron would have slowed his mount.
He and Demetrios splashed across a small stream. There were hoofprints in the mud on the far bank: not the tracks of the iron-shod horses the Romans rode, but those made by the shoeless hooves of steppe ponies.
“Looks like about half a dozen stopped here,” Demetrios said. His head swiveled as though he expected all the Jurchen in creation to burst out from behind a bush and ride straight for him.
“Probably their own scouting party,” Argyros judged. “The main body of them can’t be far behind.”
“Let’s go back,” Demetrious said nervously. He took his bow out of its case, reached over his shoulder for an arrow to set to the string.
“Now I won’t argue with you,” Argyros said. “We’ve found what we came for.” The two Roman scouts wheeled their mounts and trotted back the way they had come.
The army’s hypostrategos—lieutenant-general—was a small, hawk-faced man named Andreas Hermoniakos. He grunted as he listened to Argyros’s report. He looked sour, but then he always did; his stomach pained him. “Fair enough,” he said when the scout commander was through. “A good trouncing should teach these chicken-thieves to keep to their own side of the river. Dismissed.”
Argyros saluted and left the lieutenant-general’s tent. A few minutes later, a series of trumpet calls rang out, summoning the army to alert. As smoothly as if it were a drill, men donned mail shirts and plumed helmets; saw to bows and lances, swords and daggers; and took their places for their general’s address and for prayer before going into battle.
As was true of so many soldiers, and especially officers, in the Roman army, John Tekmanios was Armenian by blood, though he spoke the Latin-flavored Greek of the army without eastern accent. From long experience, he knew the proper tone to take when speaking to his troops:
“Well, lads,” he said, “we’ve beaten these buggers before, on our side of the Danube. Now all that’s left is finishing the job over here, to give the barbarians a lesson they’ll remember awhile. And we can do it, too, sure as there’s hair on my chin.” That drew a laugh and a cheer. His magnificent curly whiskers reached halfway down the front of his gilded coat of mail.
He went on, “The Emperor’s counting on us to drive these damned nomads away from the frontier. Once we’ve done it, I know we’ll get the reward we deserve for it; Nikephoros, God bless him, is no niggard. He came up from the ranks, you know; he remembers what the soldier’s life is like.”
Having made that point, Tekmanios used it to lead to another: “Once the battle’s won, like I said, you’ll get what’s coming to you. Don’t stop to strip the Jurchen corpses or plunder their camp. You might get yourselves and your mates killed and miss out on spending your bonus money.”
Again, he got the tension-relieving laugh he was looking for. He finished, “Don’t forget—fight hard and obey your officers. Now join me in prayer that God will watch over us today.”
A black-robed priest, his hair drawn back in a bun, joined the general on the portable rostrum. He crossed himself, a gesture Tekmanios and the whole army followed. “Kyrie eleison,” the priest cried, and the soldiers echoed him: “Lord, have mercy!”
They chanted the prayer over and over. It led naturally to the hymn of the Trisagion—the Thrice-holy—sung each morning on arising and each evening after dinner: “Holy God, holy mighty one, holy undying one, have mercy on us!”
After the Trisagion usually came the Latin cry of “Nobiscum Deus!” —God with us. Tekmanios’s priest, though, had imagination. Instead of ending the prayer service so abruptly, he led the army in a hymn composed by that great author of religious poetry, St. Mouamet.
“There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His son,” Argyros sang with the rest. St. Mouamet was a favorite of his, and after Paul probably the most zealous convert the church had ever known. Born a pagan in an Arabian desert town, he came to Christianity while trading in Syria and never went home again. He dedicated his life to Christ, producing hymn after impassioned hymn, and rose rapidly in the church hierarchy. He ended his days as archbishop of New Carthage in distant Ispania. Canonized not long after his death, he was, not surprisingly, venerated as the patron saint of changes. Once the service was done, the army formed up, each of the three divisions behind the large, bright banner of its commanding merarch. The moirarchs or regimental commanders had smaller flags, while the banners of the tagmata—companies—were mere streamers. The tagmata were of varying size, from two hundred to four hundred men, to keep the enemy from getting an accurate estimate of the army’s size by simply counting banners. A small reserve force stayed behind to protect the camp and the baggage train. The horses kicked up clods of earth and a thick cloud of dust. Argyros was glad to be a scout, well away from the choking stuff. The men in the second battle line would hardly be able to breathe after an hour on the move.
The scouts rode ahead, looking for the dust plume that would betray the Jurchen army, just as their own was being revealed to the enemy. Argyros chewed a handful of boiled barley meal and ate a strip of tough smoked beef. He swigged water from his canteen. From the way Demetrios grinned and smacked his lips when he drank in turn, Argyros suspected that his flask, contrary to orders, held wine. He scowled. Combat was too important a business to undertake drunk.
To give credit where due, the wine did not affect Demetrios’s alertness. He was the first to spot the gray-brown smudge against the sky in the northeast. “There!” he shouted, pointing. When several of his comrades were sure they saw it too, a scout raced back to give the word to Tekmanios. The rest of the party advanced for a closer look at the Jurchen. All the nomad tribes were masters at spreading out their troops to seem more numerous than they really were. Given over to disorder, they did not fight by divisions and regiments as did civilized folk like the Romans or Persians, but mustered by tribes and clans, forming their battle lines only at the last minute. They also loved to set ambushes, which made careful scouting even more important.