“Thank you.” Dekanos wrung the magistrianos’s hand. “Thank you.” The Alexandrian official bowed several times before taking his leave.
Argyros shrugged quizzically as he watched him go. In his days in the imperial army, he’d sometimes received less effusive thanks for saving a man’s life. He shrugged again as he carried the two sacks onto the ship. He opened the one full of legal documents.
Long before the pharos of Alexandria slipped below the southern horizon, he suspected Mouamet Dekanos had done him no favor. Long before he reached Constantinople again, he was sure of it.
IV: Etos Kosmou 6824
With a grunt of displeasure, Pavlo sat down at his desk to draft his monthly report. The tour-march of the border fortress of Pertuis inked his pen, sent it scraping over the parchment: “Events of the month of May, 1315—”
He looked at the year he had carelessly written, swore, and scratched it out. Bad enough he had to compose in Latin. Both men who would read his report—his immediate superior Kosmas the kleisouriarch of the Pyrenees, and Arkadios the strategos of Ispania—came from Constantinople. Greek-speakers themselves, they would sneer at his lack of culture. Despite still being one of the two official tongues of the Roman Empire, Latin had far less prestige than Greek. Using the northern style of dating on an official document, though, might get him marked down as subversive, even if it was also popular in Ispania—and Italia too, come to that. He substituted the imperial year, reckoned from the creation of the world rather than the Incarnation: “—May, 6823, the thirteenth indiction.”
He settled down to writing. Most of the report was routine: soldiers and horses out sick, deaths (only two—a good month), new recruits, supplies expended, traders traveling down through the pass of Pertuis into the Empire, tolls collected, traders going up into the Franco-Saxon kingdoms, and on and on. The description of the garrison’s drills was also something to get past in a hurry, except for one part. There he checked his own records, which he kept meticulously: “Liquid fire expended in exercises, two and five-sevenths tuns. Stock remaining on hand”—he flicked beads on his countingboard —”ninety-four and two-sevenths tuns. Seals of wholly expended tuns enclosed herewith.”
He did not know what went into what the barbarians called “Greek fire”; nor did he want to. It was shipped straight from the imperial arsenal at Constantinople.
He did know that he had best start looking for a good place to hide if he could not account for every drop he used. What happened to officials who let the northerners get their hands on the stuff did not bear thinking about.
His pen ran dry. He inked it again and wrote, “One siphon was damaged during fire exercises. Our smith feels he can repair it.” Pavlo hoped so; Kosmas would take weeks to send him another of the long bronze tubes through which the liquid fire was discharged.
The tourmarch scratched his head. What else needed reporting? “The Franco-Saxons have lately shown a good deal of interest in the woods just north of the fortress. The forest being on their side of the frontier, I have only been able to send a rider to make inquiry. They say they are after a nest of robbers; their count declined the help I offered.”
Pavlo wondered if he should say more, then decided not to. Even if the barbarians had sent a lot of men into the woods, they were still comfortably out of arrow range. And they were such bunglers that they might need a couple of companies for a one-platoon job.
The tourmarch folded the parchment into an envelope, lit a red beeswax candle at the lamp he always kept burning to have a fire handy, and let several drops splatter onto the report. When he had enough, he pushed his signet ring into the soft, hot wax.
Shouting for a courier, he came from the gloomy keep into the bright sunshine of the courtyard. Something hissed through the air and landed with a surprisingly gentle thud twenty paces in front of him: a wicker-wrapped earthenware pot, a little bigger than his head. A wisp of smoke floated up from the top. At the same time as the sentry on the watchtower cried “Catapult!” another one thunked down in the courtyard.
“To the walls! They’re coming!” the sentry screamed. Troopers snatched up bows, spears, and helmets and dashed for the stairs to the rampart.
Pavlo cursed in good earnest and tore his report in half. He should have been more alert—the Franco-Saxons had been brewing mischief after all, though what they hoped to accomplish with a bombardment of crockery was beyond him.
Suddenly the very air seemed torn apart. Pavlo thought a thunderbolt had struck the fort—but the sky was clear and blue. Something hot and jagged whined past his face. A cloud of thick gray smoke shot upward.
The tourmarch looked around dazedly. Two men were down, shrieking; a third, who had been closest to the pot, was hardly more than a crimson smear on the ground. The cataclysmic noise had frozen the rest of the soldiers in their tracks.
Outside, Pavlo heard the drumroll of hoofbeats, the whoops and war cries of the barbarians, horse and foot. His stunned wits started working again. “Go on! Move!” he roared to his men. Discipline told. They began to obey.
Then another blast came, and a few seconds later another. Almost deafened, Pavlo could barely hear the wails and moans of the wounded. Smoke filled the courtyard; its acrid brimstone reek made the tourmarch cough and choke.
“The northerners have called devils from hell!” someone yelled.
The sentry’s voice went high and shrill. “Heaven protect us, you’re right! I can see them capering there, just at the edge of the forest, all in red, with horns and tails!”
“Shut up!” Pavlo bellowed furiously, to no avail. Half the garrison was screaming in terror now. Against devils, no discipline could hold.
And devils or no, those cursed catapults kept firing from the woods. A wrapped crock landed almost at the tourmarch’s feet. Too late, his mind made an intuitive leap. “It’s not demons!” he cried to whoever would listen. “It’s whatever’s in these—”
The explosion flung him against the wall of the keep like a broken doll. A few minutes later, a bigger one smashed the gates of Pertuis. The Franco-Saxons stormed in.
The beamy merchantman sailed slowly toward the Ispanic coast. “Won’t be long now, sir,” the captain promised.
“The Virgin be praised,” exclaimed his passenger, a tall, thin, dark man with a neatly trimmed beard, bladelike nose, and oddly mournful eyes. “I’ve spent more than a month at sea, traveling from Constantinople.”
“So you said, so you said.” It meant nothing to the captain; he spent most of his life on the water. He went on, “Aye, now we’ve weathered that little island back there (Scombraria they call it—name means
‘mackerel fishery,’ y’know), we’re home free. Island’s not just for fishing, either—shields the New Carthage harbor from storms.”
“Of course,” the traveler said politely, though he had trouble following the man’s guttural African dialect of Latin. He went back to the deckhouse to reclaim his duffel bag and wait for the vessel to anchor. He had been aboard ship so long that the plain beneath his feet seemed to roll and pitch as he made the short walk to New Carthage, which sat on a hill. A bored guard asked his name and business. The fellow’s lisping Ispanic accent did not trouble him; it was not much different from the flavor his own Greek gave the Empire’s other tongue.
He answered, “I’m Basil Argyros, a trader in garum out of the city.”
“You’ve come a long way for fermented fish sauce,” the guard said, chuckling. Argyros shrugged. “New Carthage’s garum is famous around the Inner Sea. Would you be so kind as to tell me the way to the residence of the strategos? I’ll need to discuss quantities, prices, and shipping arrangements with him.”