That work, in which the scouts lent a hand, was not finished when the Roman army, still harassed by the Jurchen, drew near. Several oxen were shot and had to be killed with axes before their rampaging upset the wagons to which they were yoked.
Tagma by tagma, the Roman cavalry entered the campsite by way of the four gaps in the ditch. The companies that held off the nomads while their comrades reached safety scattered caltrops behind them to discourage pursuit to the gates. Then they too went inside, just as the sun finally set. That night and the next three days were among the most unpleasant times Argyros had ever spent. The moans of the wounded and the howls and shouts of the Jurchen made sleep impossible, and little showers of randomly aimed arrows kept falling into the camp until dawn.
As soon as it was light, the nomads tried to rush the Roman position. Concentrated archery drove them back. They drew out of range and settled down to besiege the encampment. Andreas Hermoniakos helped lift the Romans’ spirits. He went from one tagma to the next, saying, “Good luck to them. We’re camped by the water, and we have a week’s worth of food in the wagons. What will the Jurchen be eating before long?”
The question was rhetorical, but someone shouted, “Lice.” The filthiness of the nomads was proverbial. The lieutenant-general chuckled grimly. “Their bugs won’t feed even the Jurchen more than a couple of days. Eventually they’ll have to go back to their flocks.” So it proved, though the plainsmen persisted a day longer than Hermoniakos had guessed.
After scouting parties confirmed that the nomads really had withdrawn, Tekmanios convened an officers’ council in his tent to discuss the Romans’ next move. “It galls me to think of going back to the Danube with my tail between my legs, but the Jurchen—may Constantinople’s patron St. Andreas cover their khan with carbuncles—might have been standing with their ears to my mouth as I gave my orders. One more battle like that and we won’t have an army left to take back to the Danube.”
“They shouldn’t have been able to read our plan that well,” Constantine Doukas grumbled. He had commanded the right meros, the one whose screening force and flankers the nomads had discovered.
“They would have had to be right on top of us to see anything amiss. The devil must have been telling the khan what we were up to.”
Hermoniakos looked down his long, straight nose at the grousing merarch. “Some people blame the devil to keep from owning up to their shortcomings.”
Doukas reddened with anger. Argyros normally would have sided with the lieutenant-general. Now, though, he stuck up his hand and waited to be recognized; he was very junior in this gathering. Eventually Tekmanios’s attention wandered down to the far end of the table. “What is it, Basil?”
“The devil is more often spoken of than seen, but this once I think his excellency Lord Doukas may be right,” Argyros said. That earned a hard look from Hermoniakos, who had been well disposed toward him until now. Sighing, he plunged ahead with the story of the tube he had seen in the hands of the white-haired Jurchen. “I thought at the time it had to do with the evil eye,” he finished.
“That’s nonsense,” one of the regimental commanders said. “After our prayers before the battle and the blessing of the priest, how could any foul heathen charm harm us? God would not permit it.”
“God ordains what He wills, not what we will,” Tekmanios reproved. “We are all of us sinners; perhaps our prayers and purifications were not enough to atone for our wickedness.” He crossed himself, his officers imitating the gesture.
“Still, this is a potent spell,” Doukas said. The commanders around him nodded. Trained in Aristotelean reasoning, he reached a logical conclusion: “If we do not find out what it is and how it works, the barbarians will use it against the Roman Empire again.”
“And once we do,” Tekmanios said, “we can bring it to the priest for exorcism. Once he knows the nature of the magic, he will be better able to counteract it.”
The general and all the officers looked expectantly toward Argyros. He realized what they wanted of him and wished he had had the sense to keep his mouth shut. If Tekmanios had it in mind for him to kill himself, why not just hand him a knife?
“Cowardly wretch!” Andreas Hermoniakos exploded when Argyros came to him the next morning. “If you disobey your general’s orders, it will be the worse for you.”
“No, sir,” the scout commander said, speaking steadily in spite of the heads that turned to listen. “It will be the worse for me to follow them. To do so would be no less than suicide, which is a mortal sin. Better to suffer my lord Tekmanios’s anger awhile in this world than the pangs of hell for eternity in the next.”
“You think so, eh? We’ll see about that.” Argyros had never realized what a nasty sneer the lieutenant-general had. “If you won’t do your duty, by the saints, you don’t deserve your rank. We’ll find another leader for that troop of yours and let you find out how you like serving him as his lowest-ranking private soldier.”
Argyros saluted with wooden precision. Hermoniakos glared at him for close to a minute, his hands curling into fists. “Get out of my sight,” he said at last. “It’s only because I remember you were once a good soldier that I don’t put stripes on your worthless back.”
Argyros saluted again, walked away. Soldiers stepped aside as he went past. Some stared after him; others looked away. One spat in his footprint.
The line of horses was only a couple of minutes away from the lieutenant-general’s tent, but somehow, in the mysterious way news has of traveling through armies, word of Argyros’s fall got there before him. The horseboys gaped at him as they might have at the corpse of a man blasted by lightning. Ignoring that, he mounted his horse without a word and rode to the tent of Justin of Tarsos, until a few minutes ago his aide and now, presumably, his commander, Justin turned red when he saw Argyros coming, and redder still to receive his salute. “What are your orders for me, sir?” Argyros asked tonelessly.
“Well, sir, uh, Basil, uh, soldier, why don’t you take Tribonian’s place in the eastern three-man patrol?
His wound still pains him too much for him to sit a horse.”
“Yes, sir,” Argyros said, his voice still dead. He wheeled his horse and rode out to the eastern gate of the camp, where the other two scouts would be waiting for him.
Having made up the patrol roster, he knew who they would be: Bardanes Philippikos and Alexander the Arab. Justin had been kind to him; both were steady, competent men, though Alexander did have a ferocious temper when he thought himself wronged.
It was plain Argyros’s presence made them nervous. Bardanes’s hand twitched in the beginning of a salute before he jerked it down to his side. And Alexander asked, “Where to, sir?”
“You don’t call me ‘sir’; I call you ‘sir.’ And you tell me where to go.”
“I’ve wanted to do that for weeks,” Bardanes said. But he spoke without malice, using the feeble joke to try to get rid of the tension he felt. To meet him halfway, Argyros managed the first smile since his demotion.
Still, it was the quietest patrol on which he had ever gone, at least at first. Bardanes and Alexander were too wary of him to direct many words his way, and his being there kept them from talking between themselves about what they most wanted to: his fall.
Bardanes, the more forward of the two, finally grasped the nettle. The camp had long vanished behind them; there was no evidence of the Jurchen. The three horsemen could not have been more alone. And so Argyros was not surprised when Bardanes asked, “Begging your pardon, but what was it you fell out with the lieutenant-general over?”