Priskos put out the fire. “I would have had to do that soon anyway,” he told Argyros. He stuck his finger in the basin and nodded to himself. “The cooling bath is getting too warm.” He undid a plug; water from the basin ran into a groove in the floor and out under a door that led, Argyros supposed, to the alley behind the tavern. The innkeeper put the plug back, lifted a bucket, and poured fresh and presumably cool water into the basin till it was full again. The water level was just below the edge of the inner lip.
“I hope you’ll explain all this,” Argyros said.
“Yes, yes, of course.” Priskos splashed water on the copper cone till it was cool enough to touch. Then he picked it up. That inner lip also had a cork. He held a cup under it, pulled it out. An almost clear liquid flowed into the cup. “Taste,” he invited.
Argyros did. The way the stuff heated the inside of his mouth told him it was superwine. Priskos said, “I got the idea from my brother Theodore, who makes medicines.”
“Is he the one with the apothecary’s store a few doors down?”
“You saw it, eh? Yes, that’s him. One of the things he does is boil down honey to make it thicker and stronger.” Priskos paused. Argyros nodded; he knew druggists did that sort of thing. The innkeeper went on, “I thought what worked with honey might do the same with wine.”
The magistrianos waved at the curious equipment. “So why all this folderol?”
“Because it turned out I was wrong, sir, dead wrong. The more I boiled wine, the less kick whatever was left in the pot had. I was boiling out what makes wine strong, not—what word do I want?—concentrating it, you might say.”
Argyros ran his hands through his neat, graying beard. He thought for a moment, then said slowly, “What you’re doing here, then, is getting back what you were boiling away, is that right?”
The taverner eyed him with respect. “That’s just it, sir, just it exactly. Have you ever seen how, when you blow your warm breath on a cold window, the glass will steam over?” Again he waited for Argyros to nod before resuming, “That’s what I do here. The wine fumes steam on the cool copper, and I collect them as they run down.”
“No wonder you charge so much,” the magistrianos observed. “You have the fuel for the fire to think about, and the work of tending this thing, and I don’t suppose one jug of wine yields anything like a jug’s worth of yperoinos.”
“Not even close,” Priskos agreed. “It’s more like ten to one. Besides the fumes that get away, if you boil the stuff too long, you see, then it starts weakening again. You have to be careful of that. One way to up your yield a little is to keep sprinkling cold water on the outside of the cone. But you have to keep doing that, though, or pay someone to. I don’t pay anyone—he’d just sell the secret out from under me.”
“You sound as though you have all the answers.” Argyros rubbed his chin again. “How long have you been playing around with this scheme, if I may ask?”
“I guess it’s about five years now, if you count a couple of years fooling about with things that turned out not to work,” the taverner answered after a moment’s thought. “Once I figured out what I had to do, though, I spent a lot of time building up my stock; I wanted to make yperoinos a regular part of my business, not just a passing thing I’d brew up now and again. I still have hundreds of jars down in the cellar.”
“Well, God be praised!” Argyros exclaimed. He was normally a taciturn, even a dour man, but that was better news than he had dared hope for. “What do you charge for each jar?”
“Two nomismata,” Priskos said. “You have to remember, it’s not like Cypriot. Two jars would have your bully boys out there asleep under their tables, not just happy.”
“I’m quite aware of that, I assure you.” Remembering how he had felt the day before made the magistrianos shudder. But the strength of the stuff was the reason he wanted it. “I’ll give you three a jar, on top of what I’ve already paid you, if I can buy out every jar you have.”
“Yes, on two conditions,” Priskos said at once.
Argyros liked the way the younger man made up his mind. “Name them.”
“First, I have to get my gold from the Count of the Sacred Largesses. Second, let me keep half a dozen jars for myself and my friends. Out of so many, that won’t matter to you.”
“Yes to the first, of course. As for the second, keep three. You’ll be able to afford to make more later.”
“I will at that, won’t I? All right, I’d say we have ourselves a bargain.” Priskos stuck out his hand. Argyros clasped it.
The caravan wound through the mountains towards the town of Dariel, the capital, such as it was, of the kingdom of the Alans. Even in late summer, snow topped some of the high peaks of the Caucasus. The mountains were as grand as the Alps, which till this journey had been the most magnificent range Basil Argyros knew.
“Good to be in big city, eh?” said one of the caravan guards, a local man wearing a knee-length coat of thick leather reinforced with bone scales and carrying a small, round, rivet-studded shield. His Greek was vile; Argyros was sure he had never been more than a couple of valleys away from the farm or village where he had been born. No one who had traveled would have called Dariel a big city. In many ways, the magistrianos thought as the caravan approached the walls of the town, the Caucasus were the rubbish-heap of history. Dariel was a case in point. The Romans had built the fortress centuries ago, to keep the nomads from coming down off the steppe. When the Empire was weak, the Georgians manned it themselves, at times supported by Persian gold. The Alans, the present rulers hereabouts, had been nomads themselves once. A crushing defeat on the steppe, though, sent them fleeing into the mountains. Though they played Rome and Persia off against each other, they were as interested as either in guarding the pass that lay so near Dariel.
They had been, at any rate, until Goarios. Neither the Emperor nor the King of Kings could count on what Goarios would do. Trouble was, the king of the Alans was as lucky as he was erratic. All that did was make him twice the nuisance he would have been otherwise.
The gate guards had been dealing with the merchants in the caravan one by one. When they reached Argyros and his string of packhorses, he had to abandon his musings. “What you sell?” an underofficer asked in bad Persian. Both imperial tongues, like money from both realms, passed current all through the Caucasus, more so than any of the dozens of difficult, obscure local languages. For his part, Argyros spoke better Persian than the Alan trooper. “Wine, fine wine from Constantinople,” he replied. He waved at the jugs strapped to the horses’ back.
“Wine, is it?” White teeth peeked through the tangled forest of the underofficer’s beard. “Give me taste, to see how fine it is.”
The magistrianos spread his hands in sorrow. “Noble sir, I regret it may not be,” he said, using the flowery phrases that come so readily to Persian. “I intend to offer this vintage to no less a person than your mighty king himself, and would not have his pleasure diminished.” Seeing the guard scowl, he added, “Here is a silver drachm. May it take away your thirst.”
The gate guard’s grin reappeared as he stuffed the Persian coin into his pouch. He waved Argyros forward into Dariel.
One of the magistrianos’s comrades, a gray-eyed man named Corippus, came up and murmured, “A good thing he didn’t check the jars.” He spoke the guttural north African dialect of Latin, which no one in the Caucasus would be likely to understand; even Argyros had trouble following it. Since he could not use it himself, he contented himself with saying, “Yes.” All the jars looked like winejars, but not all of them held wine, or even superwine. In the same way, the couple of dozen men who had accompanied the magistrianos from Constantinople looked like merchants, which did not mean they were.