The king paused. His courtiers applauded. The Kirghiz nobles, those still conscious, looked monumentally bored. Argyros sympathized with them. If Goarios had a point, he was doing his best to avoid it.
Or so the magistrianos thought, until the king suddenly adopted the royal we and declared, “Though our realm is small at present, we do not see ourself as less in wit than either the Emperor or the King of Kings.” Both those rulers, Argyros thought tartly, had the sense not to go around boasting how smart they were.
Nevertheless, Goarios’s words did have a certain logic, if a twisted one: “Being so astute ourself, it follows naturally that power will accrue to us on account of our sagacity and on account of our ability to see the advantages of policies heretofore untried. As a result, one day soon, perhaps, the rich and famous in the capitals of the empires w ill have cause to envy us as we now envy them.”
The courtiers applauded again. They seemed to know what their king was talking about—but then, Argyros thought, the poor devils had likely listened to this speech or something like it a good many times before. He had heard Goarios was a cruel man; now he was getting proof of it. A couple of Kirghiz envoys also cheered the king of the Alans—or maybe the fact that he was done. The rest of the nomads had slumped into sodden slumber. Speaking of envy, Argyros envied them that. Goarios was plainly convinced his address marked the high point of the evening, for no singers, dancers, or acrobats appeared afterward to entertain his guests. Instead, the king waved to the doorway, showing that the festivities were over.
The banquet did not break up at once. As in Constantinople, the custom was for departing guests to thank their host for his kindness. Argyros joined the procession, sighing inwardly. He wished he could somehow get into Goarios’s good graces without having anything to do with the king. Still, Goarios greeted him effusively. “We are in your debt. You and your yperoinos have helped make this evening unique.”
He used Greek, so as not to leave the name of the new-drink dangling alone and strange in an otherwise Persian sentence. One of the Kirghiz understood the Roman Empire’s chief tongue and even spoke it after a fashion. Before Argyros could respond to the king, the nomad poked him in the ribs. “You this drink make, eh? Is good. Where you from?”
“Constantinople,” the magistrianos replied. The Kirghiz’s prodding finger distracted him from Goarios, whom etiquette demanded he should have answered.
“Ah, the city.” The nomad was too drunk to care about etiquette, if he ever had. He poked Goarios in turn. “You, I, maybe one fine day we see Constantinople soon, eh?”
“Who would not wish such a thing?” Goarios’s voice was smooth, but his eyes flickered. Argyros bowed to the king. “To serve you is my privilege, your majesty.” He turned to Mirrane. “And your lady as well.” Maybe his directness could startle something out of her, though he knew what a forlorn hope that was.
Sure enough, her equanimity remained absolute. With dignity a queen might have envied, she extended a slim hand to the magistrianos. He resented being made to dance to her tune, yet saw no choice but to take it. She said, “My master speaks for me, of course.”
The magistrianos murmured a polite phrase and bowed his way out of the king’s presence. Outside the castle, he hired a torchboy to light his way back to the inn. The boy, a Georgian lad, could follow Persian if it was spoken slowly and eked out with gestures. “Stop a moment. Hold your torch up,” Argyros told him as soon as buildings hid them from Goarios’s castle.
The boy obeyed. Argyros unrolled the tiny scrap of parchment Mirrane had pressed into his palm. He had to hold it close to his face to make out her message in the dim, flickering light. “Meet me alone tomorrow by the vegetable market, or I will tell Goarios who you are,” he read. Nothing subtle or oblique there, he thought as he put the parchment in his beltpouch. That did not mean she would not get what she wanted. She generally did.
“You’re going to meet with her?” Corippus, when he heard Argyros’s news the next morning, was openly incredulous. “What will the rest of us do once she’s dealt with you? You can’t tell me she has your good health foremost in her mind.”
“I doubt that,” Argyros admitted. He tried to sound judicious, and not like a man merely stating the obvious. He did bolster his case by adding, “If she wanted to bring me down, she could have done it simply last night, instead of going through this rigmarole. By the look of things, she has Goarios wrapped around her finger.”
Corippus grunted. “This is folly, I tell you.”
“Being exposed to Goarios is worse folly. One thing I know of Mirrane: she does not threaten idly.”
Corippus made a noise deep in his throat. He remained anything but convinced. Argyros, however, headed the team from Constantinople, so the north African could only grumble. The magistrianos tried to tease him out of his gloom. He waved round the cellar of Supsa’s inn, pointing at the three yperoinos -cookers Corippus and his team had going. “You worry too much, my friend. Even if something does happen to me, the lot of you can go into superwine for true, and likely end up rich men here.”
Corippus fell back into his harsh native dialect. “In this God-forsaken lump of a town? Who’d want to?”
He had a point, Argyros thought. Nevertheless, the magistrianos turned a benign eye on Dariel as he made his way to the vegetable market. That was partly because, if he got through this confrontation with Mirrane, he would have a hold on her to counter the advantage she now held on him—he did not think, at any rate, that Goarios would be pleased to learn his paramour was arranging a secret rendezvous with another man. More important, though, was the prospect of matching wits with the best Persia had. Mirrane was that, as Argyros had found more than once to his discomfiture. To one used to the bounty of Constantinople, Dariel’s vegetable market was a small, mean place. The city prefect’s inspectors would have condemned half the produce on display. Argyros bought a handful of raisins and waited for Mirrane to come into the little square.
He was not sure what to expect. When with Goarios, she had dressed as a great lady, with brocaded robe and with bracelets and necklace of gleaming gold. He had also seen her, though, in a dancer’s filmy garb, and once when she was artfully disguised as an old woman. Just recognizing her would constitute a victory of sorts.
He was almost disappointed to spot her at once. She wore a plain white linen dress, something that suited a moderately prosperous tradesman’s wife, but she wore it like a queen. Copper wire held her hair in place; apart from that, she was bare of jewelry. Seeing Argyros, she waved and walked toward him, as if greeting an old friend.
“You have another new toy, do you, Basil?” Her voice held a lilting, teasing tone, of the sort a cat would use to address a bird it held between its paws. “What better way to swing a man toward you than dealing with him drunk, the more so if he’s had so little he doesn’t know he is?”
If anyone would realize why he had brought the yperoinos, it was she. He answered, “I’m not trying to turn a whole city on its ear, the way your handbills did in Daras.”
“You turned the tables neatly enough on me in Constantinople.” She shook her head in chagrin, put her hand on his arm.
He pulled free. “Enough empty compliments,” he said harshly. “Unfold your scheme, whatever it is, and have done, so I can start working out where the traps lie.”
“Be careful what you say to me,” she warned, smiling still. “Ormazd the good god knows how backward Alania is, but Goarios’s torturer, I think, would have no trouble earning his keep in Ctesiphon. In some things, he accepts only the finest.”