“Here, you, who are you and where do you think you’re going?” someone barked at him. He turned slowly, found himself facing a stocky, craggy-faced monk of about fifty, with hard, cold eyes.
“Your Brother Marco told me to go help look after the horses,” he answered, as innocently as he could. He could tell at once that this was no fellow to trifle with.
“Hmm! A likely tale,” the other said. “You come along with me.”
He marched Argyros back to the fowlkeeper, and scowled when Brother Marco confirmed the magistrianos’s story, quavering, “It’s just as he said, Karloman.” He seemed more than a little intimidated by Argyros’s captor.
With poor grace, Karloman apologized to the magistrianos. “Get on with you, then, and no snooping about.” Feeling the monk’s eyes burning into his back, Argyros hurried past the laundry without so much as a sideways glance.
The stablemaster was a mine of gossip; Argyros learned every small scandal that had amused St. Gall in the past year. He did not, however, find out any of what he was after, and ended the day annoyed and frustrated, a condition that persisted for most of the next week. When his break came at last, it was, oddly enough, Karloman who gave it to him.
The magistrianos had been dreaming of roast goat and onions soused with garum, of smooth white wine from Palestine and the famous red of Cyprus, said to come from vines planted by Odysseus before he sailed for Troy. Waking up to rye bread and beer was disheartening.
Then any thoughts of breakfast, however mixed, vanished from his head, for one of his companions lay groaning in bed, staring fearfully at a fast-rising boil near his armpit. Men crowded away from him and each other. The terror of plague was never far away. Someone went pelting off for the healer. Argyros soon heard two men approaching the hospice at a run. He recognized Karloman’s gruff voice at once. “Which one is he?” the monk demanded; his tonsure was gleaming with sweat. Before the man who had fetched him could answer, he went on, “No need to tell me—that one grizzling over there, am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
The healer strode up to the terrified man. “Let’s see it, Ewald,” he said with rough joviality, but his patient was too frightened to raise his arm and have his fears confirmed.
“Grab him, you, you, and you,” Karloman ordered, pointing. Argyros was the second “you.” Along with a newly arrived pilgrim and the cadaverous man who had known about sulfur, he seized Ewald so the fellow could not wriggle. Karloman jerked the man’s arm up.
The healer studied the eruption for a moment, then gave a shout of relieved laughter. “It’s nothing but a common carbuncle, Ewald, you fool. I expect you’ll die in the stocks yet, just as you deserve.”
“It hurts,” Ewald whined.
Karloman snorted. “Of course it hurts. Stay there; I’ll bring you an ointment to smear on it.” He stomped out of the hospice, returning a few minutes later with a steaming bowl full of what looked like honey but had a very different odor.
Ewald sniffed suspiciously. “What stinks?”
“You mean, besides you?” Karloman grunted. “This is half sulfur and half borax, mixed in hot olive oil. It’ll draw the matter out of your boil. Ai! Grab him again, you all!” Ewald tried to bolt, but the men the healer had drafted were too strong for him. Karloman dipped a rag in the bowl, slathered his medicine on the pilgrim’s carbuncle.
Ewald let out a pitiful wail. “It burns. I can feel it eating the skin off me!” He squirmed like a worm on a hook.
“Oh, twaddle,” Karloman said. As Argyros had already seen, he did not have much kindness in him, despite being a healer. He laughed again, this time unpleasantly. “Now if you’d run across another, ah, potion, I dreamed up a while ago, one sulfur to four saltpeter and a charcoal, why that might have just taken the whole arm.”
Ewald, horrified, nearly writhed out of Argyros’s grasp.
Karloman wheeled furiously. “What’s the matter with you, merchant? Hold him tight, God curse you.”
“Sorry.”
Karloman was only making a rough joke to frighten the man a little. He could not have expected anyone there to take its full meaning, not even Argyros—his suspicion of the magistrianos had been based on general principles. But he had given the game away, and Argyros forgot what he was supposed to be doing and almost let Ewald get loose.
After Ewald was finally medicated to Karloman’s satisfaction, Argyros waited until the crowd had dispersed, then gathered his gear and slipped away for the stables. He had just finished saddling his horse when the stablemaster stuck his head in the door. “I thought I heard someone here,” he said in a shocked voice. “You must not ride out now, not before Sunday prayers.”
Argyros blinked. In the excitement over Ewald, he had forgotten it was Sunday. He walked to the church with the monk. After what God had granted him this morning, He deserved thanks. No lesser shrine could impress a man who had prayed in Hagia Sophia, but the church of St. Gall was not to be sneered at. Its proportions were noble, the colonnades that separated the two aisles from the nave fairly good work. Altars stood by every second column, all the way up to the transept. The monks had the nave to themselves; laymen worshipped in the aisles, with wooden screens separating them from the clerics. Karloman and Villem the porter stood just on the other side of the screen from Argyros. Villem nodded pleasantly. “God with you, Petro,” he whispered.
“And with you,” the magistrianos replied.
The healer did not waste time on small talk.
The Mass began. Argyros had been in the west long enough to follow the Latin version with ease and to make the proper responses. But he was so full of excitement over his discovery that he did not notice he Mass automatically omitting the filioque clause whenever it came up in the liturgy. He also did not see Karloman’s eves widen when the monk caught his first omission, or narrow as he left out the offending word time after time. “A heretic!” Karloman cried in outrage, pointing at Argyros. The magistrianos’s blood ran cold. “He rejects the filioque!”
And then the healer must have remembered Argyros’s unwonted curiosity about the monastery laundry and his own inadvertent revelation of that morning. He clapped a hand to his forehead. “A spy!” he shouted.
The choir went on for a few ragged notes, then fell silent. There was a confused, half-angry murmur from clerics and laymen alike. Karloman’s bellow cut through it: “Seize him!”
But Argyros had already whirled and was twisting past gaping pilgrims and beggars. He cursed himself for the carelessness that had thrown him into danger at the moment of his success. The consumptive pauper grabbed at his wrist as he dashed by. He struck the man a blow that stretched him out groaning on the floor.
Two monks stood in the doorway that led out of the church’s western porch. They were staring at each other, not sure what was going on. “I’ll get help!” Argyros shouted, which held one of them in place. The other had quicker wits. He sprang out to bar the way. He was slight, though, and in his late middle years. He went down like the beggar when Argyros lowered a shoulder and bowled him over. The magistrianos ran out into the sunlight. He sprinted south past the tower of St. Gabriel for the stables. Having lodged in other monasteries modeled after St. Gall served him in good stead: he was more familiar with the layout of the place than he could have become in the few days since his arrival. The sounds of pursuit rose behind him. Fortunately, nearly the entire monastic community had been in church. There was no one to answer shouts for help. Long legs flying, Argyros was some yards ahead of everyone as he reached the stable building.
Gasping thanks to the Mother of God for letting him get his horse saddled, he sprang onto the animal. By the time he spurred out the stable door, he had his sword unshipped.