One Sunday he attended Mass at a monastery church with Wighard and Hilda, but succeeded only in making her angry at him again just when she was starting to act politely toward him once more. The issue, naturally, was theological. During the liturgy, Argyros stood mute whenever the word filioque came up: the doctrine of the imperial church was that the Holy Spirit proceeded from God the Father alone, not from the Father and the Son.
Most citizens of the Empire did the same when traveling in those lands outside the control of Constantinople. It salved their consciences and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, passed unnoticed by their fellow celebrants.
Not here, though. As they were riding away, Hilda said bitterly, “I might have known you would go flaunting your heresy.”
“My heresy?” the magistrianos shot back. “The fourth Council of Constantinople condemned the doctrine of the dual procession of the Holy Spirit as heterodox four hundred years ago.”
“I don’t recognize that council as ecumenical,” she replied. None of the northern Christians did. When Herakleios’s grandson ConstansII reconquered Italia from the Lombards, he had installed his own bishop of Rome. The incumbent, of whose doctrines Constans disapproved, fled to the Franks, and the Franco-Saxon kingdoms and Britannia still followed that shadowy line of popes (so, clandestinely, did some folk in Ispania, Italia, and even Illyricum).
Hilda lifted her chin in challenge. “Convince me by reasoning, if at all.”
“Since you reject orthodoxy, suppose you convince me,” Argyros said. Wighard rolled his eyes and took out a wineskin. He had no concerns other than those of this world. Intricate religious argument, though, was meat and drink to the magistrianos. And to Hilda, it proved. “Very well, then,” she said: “The Holy Spirit, being of the Trinity, is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. Since They both possess the Spirit, He must proceed from Them both. The Father has the Son; the Son, the Father; and, since the Father is the principle of the Godhead—one might even say, the essence of the Godhead—the Holy Spirit must proceed from the Father and the Son, completely from each Person.”
“Whew!” Argyros looked at her in startled admiration. She argued as acutely as an archbishop. Wighard chuckled, a little blearily. He might not have cared about the dispute, but he was beaming with pride for his niece. “What do you say to that? Bright girl, eh?”
“Very.” Argyros turned back to Hilda, giving her all his attention now, as if she were an underestimated swordsman who had almost run him through.
He remained intellectually unpunctured, however, and counterattacked: “You’re clever, but your doctrine destroys the unity of the Godhead.”
“Nonsense!”
“Oh, but it does. If proceeding from the Son is the same as proceeding from the Father, it has no point. But if the two processions are different, the fact that procession from the Son is necessary implies that procession from the Father alone is insufficient—and thus that the Father is imperfect, surely a blasphemy. Also, ascribing procession to the Son as well as to the Father implies that the Father and Son share this attribute. If the Holy Spirit lacks it, then Son and Holy Spirit cannot be consubstantial, as the Persons of the Trinity must. But if the Spirit does not lack it, then what do we have? Why, the Spirit proceeding from the Spirit, which is absurd.”
It was Hilda’s turn to regard Argyros with caution. “That’s not the definition of faith your precious Council gave.”
“The Council was ecumenical, and tried to satisfy everyone,” he answered, “even if it did fail with you. I accept its dogma, but as far as my reasons go, I have to please only myself.”
“For someone not in holy orders, you’re a keen theologian.”
“After the hippodrome, theology has always been Constantinople’s favorite sport,” the magistrianos said. “Nine hundred years ago, St. Gregory of Nyssa complained that if you asked someone how much bread cost, he told you that the Father was greater than the Son, and the Son subordinate to Him; and if you asked if your bath was ready, the answer came that the Son was created from nothing. Of course there are no more Arians to uphold those views any longer, but—”
“—the principle still holds,” Hilda finished for him. “So I see. Still, how do you get around the fact that—”
Argyros went back to the argument, but with only half his attention. The rest was still chewing on Hilda’s left-handed praise for his skill at dogmatics. In the Empire, knowledge belonged to those with the ability to understand, both the Outer and the Inner Learning. Whether one was layman or cleric did not matter. The northerners, he thought, lost a great deal by keeping learning so limited. Here was Wighard, a fine man and far from stupid, but half heathen and quivering at the notion of facing a demon. And even Hilda, though educated in religious matters, had none of the history, law, mathematics, or philosophy that gave perspective and produced a truly rounded individual.
He sighed. The Anglelanders were all he had to work with. Despite their weaknesses, they would have to do.
It was just past high summer, but the air of the pass through the Pennine Alps had a chill to it and was so thin that a man or a horse started panting after the least exertion. As they started the last leg of the journey to St. Gall, the three travelers hammered out their plans.
Every mile closer to the monastery made Wighard less and less eager actually to set foot inside it. He kept making dark mutters about the forces of evil lurking there and what they would likely do to anyone coming to sniff them out. When Argyros, exasperated, suggested that he stay outside and help when the time came for escape, he eagerly agreed and at once grew more cheerful; it was as if a great weight was off his shoulders.
Secure in her own faith, Hilda had no qualms about entering St. Gall. Her task would stay what it had been before she fell in with Argyros: to search through the monastery’s library, ostensibly to look for new medicines to bring back to Londin, in fact after clues to the Franco-Saxons’ tame hellfire. That worried the magistrianos—suppose she found the secret and kept it to herself? All he could think of to keep that from happening was to make himself such an obviously valuable ally that the idea would never occur to her.
He had every intention of going into the monastery himself. He could not hope to compete with Hilda when it came to pawing through old manuscripts. He could not even read some of the western book hands. But as a magistrianos he had other talents, interrogation among them. The Franco-Saxons liked to boast; no telling what some unobtrusive probing might bring out.
And then all their plans unraveled in Turic, a lakeside town a couple of days’ ride west of St. Gall. It was raining when they came in, a downpour that turned the dung-filled streets to a muddy stinking quagmire. Argyros thought longingly of Constantinople’s flagstones and cobbles—and of its sewers. Hilda and Wighard seemed to notice nothing amiss.
All three of them were looking for an inn when Hilda’s horse slipped on a patch of slime and fell heavily. She had no chance to kick free. The beast came down on her. Argyros heard the dull snap of cracking bone, followed an instant later by her stifled shriek.
When the horse, which was unhurt, tried to scramble to its feet again, Hilda’s next cry was anything but stifled. Argyros and Wighard leaped down into the mud together. Wighard grabbed the horse’s head and held it while the magistrianos freed Hilda’s right leg—the one that was on top—from the stirrup. He shifted position, then nodded to Wighard. “All right—let him up, but slowly, mind.”