All the way there, his mind kept worrying at the problem she posed, as the tongue will worry at a bit of food caught between the teeth until one wishes he would go mad. Equally stubborn in refusing to leave his thoughts was the feel of her soft lips. That annoyed him, so he prodded at his feelings with characteristic stubborn honesty until he began to make sense of them.
In the years since his wife and son died, he’d never thought seriously about taking another woman into his life. That came partly from the longing he still felt for Helen. More sprang from his unwillingness to inflict on any woman the lonely life a magistrianos’s wife would have to lead, especially the wife of a magistrianos who drew difficult cases. In the past five years he had been to Ispania and the Franco-Saxon kingdoms, to Daras, and now he was here in the Caucasus. Each of those missions was a matter of months, the first close to a year. It was not fair to any woman to make her turn Penelope to his Odysseus.
With Mirrane, though, that objection fell to the ground. She was at least as able as he to care for herself in the field. And if—if!—she spoke the truth about how she reckoned their brief joining in Daras, he pleased her well enough, at least in that regard. There was, he remembered, far more to love than what went on in bed, but that had its place too.
He started laughing at himself. Mirrane was also a Persian—enemy by assumption, in almost Euclidean logic. She worshiped Ormazd. She was sleeping with Goarios and keeping his nights lively when the two of them were not asleep. The only reason she was in the Caucasus at all was to seduce the king of the Alans away from the Roman Empire, in the most literal sense of the word. Not only that; if—if!—she spoke the truth, both Constantinople and Ctesiphon faced deadly danger from Goarios’s machinations. When all those thoughts were done, the thought of her remained. That worried him more than anything. Corippus scowled at the magistrianos. “That accursed potter has raised his price again. And so has the plague-taken apothecary.”
“Pay them both,” Argyros told him. “Yell and scream and fume as if you were being bankrupted or castrated or whatever suits your fancy. That’s in keeping with our part here. But pay them. You know what we need.”
“I know you’ve lost your wits mooning over that Persian doxy,” Corippus retorted, a shot close enough to the mark that Argyros felt his face grow hot. He was glad they were in the dimly lit cellar, so his lieutenant could not see him flush. But Corippus, after grumbling a little more, went on, “However much it galls me, I have to say the wench is likely right. There’d not be so many stinking Kirghiz on the streets if they weren’t in league with Goarios, and she’d’ve long since nailed us if she didn’t think they meant to do Persia harm along with the Empire.”
Argyros had reached exactly the same conclusions. He said so, adding, “I’ll be hanged if I can tell how you’d know how-many Kirghiz are in Dariel. You hardly ever come up out of here, even to breathe.”
Corippus chuckled dryly. “Something to that, but someone has to keep the superwine cooking faster than Goarios and his cronies guzzle it down. Besides which, I don’t need to go out much to know the nomads are thick as fleas. The stench gives ‘em away.”
“Something to that,” the magistrianos echoed. Strong smells came with cities, especially ones like Dariel, which had only a nodding acquaintance with Roman ideas of plumbing and sanitation. Still, the Kirghiz did add their own notes, primarily horse and rancid butter, to the symphony of stinks. Corippus said, “Any which way, I’m happier to be down here than upstairs with you and Eustathios Rhangabe. Worst thing can happen to me here is getting burned alive. If Eustathios buggers something up, I’ll be scattered over too much landscape too fast to have time to get mad at him.”
That was a truth Argyros did his best to ignore. He said, “The innkeeper thinks Rhangabe’s some new sort of heretic who isn’t allowed to eat except with wooden tools. I don’t know whether he wants to burn him or convert.”
“He’d better convert,” Corippus snorted. He and Argyros both laughed, briefly and self-consciously. They knew what would happen if Kustathios Rhangabe struck a spark at the wrong time. The magistrianos went upstairs to the room the man from the arsenal at Constantinople was using. He knocked—gently, so as not to disturb Rhangabe. He heard a bowl being set on a table inside the room. Only then did Rhangabe come to the door and undo the latch.
As always, he reminded Argyros of a clerk, but a clerk with the work-battered hands of an artisan.
“Hello, Argyros,” he said. “It goes well, though that thief of a druggist has raised his price for sulfur again.”
“So Corippus told me.”
Rhangabe grunted. He was not a man much given to conversation. He went back to the table where he had been busy. He had shoved it close to the room’s single small window, to give himself the best possible light—no lamps, not here.
Along with the bowl (in which a wooden spoon was thrust), a stout rolling pin lay on the table. Judging its position, Rhangabe had been working on the middle of the three piles there, grinding it from lumps to fine powder. The pile to the left was black, that middle one (the biggest) a dirty gray-white, and the one on the right bright yellow.
Argyros was perfectly willing to admit that Kustathios Rhangabe knew much more about hellpowder than he did these days. Rhangabe had headed the man at the arsenal who concocted the deadly incendiary liquid called Greek fire (the magistrianos did not know, or want to know, w hat went into that). When something even more destructive came along, he was the natural one to look to to ferret out its secrets. That he had not blown himself up in the process testified to his skill. He took the spoon out of the bowl, measured a little saltpeter from the middle pile into a balance, grunted again, and scooped part of the load back onto the table. Satisfied at last, he tipped the balance pan into the bowl, vigorously stirred the contents, squinted, wetted a finger to stick in it so he would taste the mixture, and at last nodded in reluctant approval.
He picked up a funnel (also of wood) and put it in the mouth of a pottery jug. He lifted the bowl, carefully poured the newly mixed hellpowder into the jug. When it was full, he plugged it with an unusual cork he took from a bag that lay next to his bed: the cork had been bored through, and a twist of oily rag forced through the little opening.
Only when Rhangabe was quite finished did he seem to remember Argyros was still in the room. He jerked a thumb at the jars that lined the wall. “That’s forty-seven I’ve made for you since we got here, not counting the ones we fetched from the city. All in all, we have plenty to blow a hole in Goarios’s palace you could throw an elephant through, if that’s what you want.”
A couple of weeks before, the magistrianos would have seized the chance. Hearing Mirrane had made him wonder, though, and made him watch the fortress to check what she said. He was certain now she had not misled him. Goarios might still rule Alania, but the Kirghiz ruled Goarios. The comings and goings of their leaders were one sign; another was the growing numbers of nomads on Dariel’s streets. By themselves, those might merely have bespoken alliance, but other indications said otherwise. The Kirghiz nobles treated Goarios’s guards and courtiers with growing contempt, so much so that Tskhinvali, arrogant himself, complained out loud to Argyros of their presumptuousness. In the markets, the men from the steppe treated traders like servants.
That sort of thing could go on only so long. The Alans were themselves a proud people, while their Georgian subjects remembered every slight and carried on feuds among themselves that lasted for generations. Dariel did not have the feel of a place about to become a world-conqueror’s capital. It seemed, Argyros thought, more like one of Eustathios Rhangabe’s jugs of hellpowder a few seconds before someone lit the rag stuffed in the cork.