The guardsman looked at his comrades, said nothing. Sighing, Argyros dug a handful of copper forty-follis pieces from his pouch and distributed them. After pocketing his share of the money, the soldier gave directions, adding, “You know, Arkadios isn’t there. He’s up north someplace, campaigning against the barbarians.”
“Not doing too bloody well, either,” one of the other guardsmen muttered. Argyros pretended not to hear that, but filed the information away. He sauntered into New Carthage. The city was large and well laid out, but of rather somber appearance because of the gray local stone from which it was built.
The gate guard’s directions proved easy to follow. The strategos’s headquarters was just up the main street from New Carthage’s most splendid building, a church dedicated to the town’s patron saint, who had been its bishop during the reign of the first Herakleios, seven centuries before.
“St. Mouamet, watch over me,” Argyros murmured, crossing himself as he walked by the shrine, which was a smaller copy of the great church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. He found Mouamet one of the most inspiring saints on the calendar. “There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His Son,” Argyros chanted softly.
It took a bribe of half a gold nomisma and an hour’s wait to get Argyros admitted to the presence of Isaac Kabasilas, Arkadios’s chief deputy. Kabasilas, a large, comfortable man with a large, comfortable belly, said, “Well, what can I do for you, fellow? Something about fish sauce, my secretary said. He’s really quite able to handle that sort of thing himself, you know.”
“I would hope so. However”—Argyros glanced round—”as we are alone, I can tell you that I don’t care whether all the garum in New Carthage turns to honey tomorrow.” He produced a letter and handed it to Kabasilas.
The official broke the gold seal. His jaw dropped as he read. “You’re one of the Emperor’s magistrianoi!” The condescension was gone from his voice, and the comfort from his manner.
“Only you know that, and I’d sooner keep it so.”
“Of course,” Kabasilas said nervously. In theory, he outranked his visitor, but he knew what theory was worth. Wetting his lips, he asked, “What do you need from me?”
“If you tell me how the Franco-Saxons have taken eight fortresses and three cities in the last year, I’ll take the next ship out.”
“Four cities,” Kabasilas said unhappily. “Farrago fell three weeks ago. In the field we match the northerners, but no walls can keep them out. The traders who escaped from Farrago rave of sorcery ripping the gates open.” He crossed himself.
So did Argyros, but he persisted, remarking, “Sorcery is something heard of more often than met.”
“Not this time,” Kabasilas said. “It’s all of a piece with what’s happened at other places we’ve lost. The Franco-Saxons must be in league with Satan. As if what they’ve done to us isn’t enough, honest men have seen the devils they’ve summoned—great red fiends, from the stories.”
The magistrianos frowned. Of course he believed in demons; after all, the Bible spoke of them. But he had never come across one in action, or expected to. Like most educated citizens of the Empire, he drew a firm distinction between the Outer Learning (most of it drawn from the pagan Greeks), which concerned this world, and the Inner Learning of Christian theology. It was disconcerting to find the line between them blurred.
“I think I’d better talk to these traders out of Tarrago myself,” he said. “Where are they staying?”
loan’s inn was a cheerfully ramshackle place that catered to merchants. The wine was good, the prices low to one used to those of Constantinople. In his guise as a buyer of fish sauce, Argyros sat in the taproom, listening to the gossip and spicing it now and them with the latest scandal from the capital. He did not have to prompt to bring the talk around to Tarrago. The merchants who had got out of the city spoke of little else. But they did not tell him as much as he wanted; Kabasilas’s summary had been depressingly accurate. The attack had taken place at night, which only made things worse. He learned the most from a tin merchant from Angleland and his niece, who was an apothecary at a nunnery near Londin. Their lodgings in Tarrago had been close to the gate by the cathedral, through which the Franco-Saxons had entered. But even their account was vague: a roar, a cloud of vile smoke that seemed to cover half the city, and the crash of the locked gates going down to admit the enemy.
“We rode like madmen and got out by the northwest gate, the one next to the forum,” said the merchant, a ruddy-cheeked fellow named Wighard, “and spent the night in the graveyard half a mile west. The Franco-Saxons were too busy looting the town to go poking through old bones.”
“Oh, tell him the whole story, uncle,” his niece Hilda said impatiently. She was a small, intense woman in her mid-twenties, with the startling gray eyes and fair coloring of the northern peoples: no wonder the Emperor Maurice had called the Franks, Lombards, and other Germans “the blond tribes” in his military manual.
She turned to Argyros. “A squad did come out to look the necropolis over, but when they got close, uncle Wighard rose up and shouted ‘Boo!’ They ran harder than we had.”
Wighard said sheepishly, “What with their consorting with demons and all, I figured they’d be even more afraid of ‘em than I am!”
The magistrianos laughed and ordered more wine for the three of them. In Constantinople he had met only a handful of men from distant Angleland (he thought of it as Britannia), and their steadiness and ready wit had fascinated him. These two seemed cut from the same cloth. It was only right for Britannia to be reunited to the Empire one day, as over the centuries Italia, Africa, Ispania, and part of the southern coast of Gaul had been. Somehow, though, Argyros was glad it would not be any year soon.
Having found no real answers in New Carthage, Argyros bought a horse and rode north to see at firsthand what the Franco-Saxons were up to.
Arkadios’s forces still held the line of the Eberu, but the magistrianos had no trouble slipping across the river. He did not worry about being in enemy-held territory. The blond tribes were savage in battle, but careless about every other aspect of warfare, including patrols. They had been so even in Maurice’s time, before the days of Herakleios.
But they had something going for them, he thought as he rode past captured Tarrago. “Or what am I doing here?” he asked his horse. Unlike Balaam’s ass, it did not answer. Argyros did not do any poking about at Tarrago; there were Franco-Saxons on the walls (none looking particularly demonic). He had expected troops there, the town having fallen so recently. But he was surprised and dismayed to find Barcilo also garrisoned, though it had been lost the autumn before. The barbarians looked to be coming to stay.
Empurias was another three days’ ride up the Roman coastal highway—and proved full of soldiers too. Argyros frowned again, not sure whether to strike inland or stay on the road the first Caesar’s legionaries had tramped. The highway promised to be quicker. He pressed ahead.
He rode past fields of fennel toward the Pyrenees, which loomed tall before him. Then the mountains were all around him as the road swung inland to take advantage of the pass of Pertuis. He met a band of Franco-Saxon armored horsemen clattering south into Ispania. Seeing only a lone traveler with nothing worth stealing, they let him by.
Not far from the fortress of Pertuis lay a victory monument set up by Pompey before the Incarnation. Seeing it stiffened Argyros’s resolve. No less than the ancient general, he had the tradition of Rome to uphold.