“Wait until morning, and I will show you.”
“Why wait? Show me now, if you can.”
“Patience, patience. The spirit I am thinking of is a spirit of fire, and sleeps through the night. The sun will wake it.”
“We will see,” Argyros said. He went back to his own tent and spent much of the night in prayer. If God had cast demons from men into the Gadarene swine, surely He would have no trouble banishing a heathen shaman’s fire-spirit.
After breakfasting on goat’s milk, cheese, and sun-dried meat, the Roman tracked down Orda. “Ah, yes,” Orda said. I le pulled up some dried grass and set it in the middle of a patch of barren ground. The nomads were always careful of fire, which could spread over the plains with devastating speed. More than Orda’s talk of the night before, that caution made Argyros thoughtful. The shaman thought he could do what he had claimed.
Nevertheless, Argyros kept up his bold front. “I see no spirits. Perhaps they are still sleeping,” he said, echoing Klijah’s gibe to the false priests of Baal.
Orda did not rise to the bait. “The spirit dwells in here,” he said. From one of his many pockets he drew out a disk of clear crystal—no, it was not quite a disk, being much thinner at the edges than in the center. It was about half as wide as the callused palm of the shaman’s hand.
The Roman expected an invocation, but all Orda did was to stoop and hold the piece of crystal a few digits in front of the dry grass, in a line between it and the sun. “If it is supposed to be a fire spirit, aren’t you going to touch the crystal to the tinder?” Argyros asked.
“I don’t need to,” the shaman answered. Blinking, the Roman came around for a better look; this was like no sorcery he had ever heard of. When his shadow fell on the crystal, Orda said sharply, “Stand aside! I told you last night, the spirit needs the sun to live.”
Argyros moved over a pace. He saw a brilliant point of light at the base of a yellow, withered blade of grass. “Is that what you call your spirit? It seems a trifling thing to—”
He never finished the sentence. A thin thread of smoke was rising from the grass, which had begun to char where the point of light rested. A moment later, the clump burst into flames. The Roman sprang away in alarm. “By the Virgin and her Son!” he gasped. Triumph on his face, Orda methodically stamped out the little fire.
Argyros felt about to burst with questions. Before lie could ask any of them, a shouted order drew him away from the shaman. A nomad used many gestures and a few words of Greek to set him repairing bird nets made of rawhide strips. By the time the plainsman was finished telling him what to do, Orda had gone off to talk with someone else.
As he worked, the Roman tried to puzzle out why his prayers had failed. The only answer he could find was that he was too great a sinner for God to listen to him. That gave him very cold comfort indeed. It was evening before he finally got another chance to talk with the shaman. Even after most of a day, he was shaken by what he had seen, and gulped down great swigs of kumiss before he nerved himself to ask Orda, “How did you find that that spirit lived in the crystal?”
“I was grinding it into a pendant for one of Tossuc’s wives,” Orda answered. Argyros had not met any Jurchen women; the khan’s raiding party had left them behind with a few men and most of their herds, for the sake of moving faster. The shaman went on, “I saw the little spot of light the fire spirit makes. Then I did not know its habits. I put the bright spot on my finger and burned it. The spirit was merciful, though; it did not consume me altogether.”
“And you still claim to believe in one God?” Argyros shook his head in disbelief.
‘There are spirits in all things,” Orda said, adding pointedly, “as you have seen. But the one God is above them. He gives good and evil to the world. That is enough; he does not need prayers or ceremonies. What do words matter? He sees into a man’s heart.”
The Roman’s eyes widened. That was a subtler argument than he had expected from a nomad. He took another long pull at the skin of kumiss—the more one had, the better the stuff tasted—and decided to change the subject. “I know why you use that fig—figure of speech,” he said accusingly, punctuating his words with a hiccup.
“And why is that?” The shaman was smiling again, in faint contempt. He had matched Argyros drink for drink and was no more than pleasantly drunk, while the Roman was acting more and more fuddled.
“Because you are like Argos Panoptes in the legend.” After a moment, Argyros realized he was going to have to explain who Argos Panoptes was; Orda, after all, had not enjoyed the benefits of a classical education.
“Argos had eyes all over his body, so he could see every which way at the same time. You must have learned some of the magic that made him as he was.” He told how he had led the Roman forces who had tried to attack Orda and the Jurchen scouting party on their little rise during the battle. “Wherever you pointed that tube, you seemed to know just what the Romans were going to do. It must have been a spell for reading the officers’ minds.”
The shaman grinned, in high good humor now. “Your first guess was better. I do have these eyes of Argos you were talking about.” His sibilant accent made the name end with a menacing hiss. Argyros started to cross himself, but checked the gesture before it was well begun. Even without Orda’s remarks, the church vessels Tossuc had stolen showed how little use the Jurchen had for Christianity. And no wonder—the Empire used religious submission as a tool for gaining political control. Now that he was living with the nomads, the Roman did not want to antagonize them. But he felt a chill of fear all the same. He had always thought of Argos as a character from pagan legend, and from ancient pagan legend at that. To conceive of him as real, and as still existing thirteen centuries after the Incarnation, rocked the foundations of Argyros’s world.
Shivering, the Roman said, “Let me have the kumiss again, Orda.” But when the Jurchen shaman passed him the skin, he almost dropped it.
“Aiee! Careful! Don’t spill it,” the shaman exclaimed as Argyros fumbled. “Here, give it back to me. I won’t waste it, I promise.”
“Sorry.” The Roman still seemed to be having trouble getting control of the leather sack. Finally, shaking his head in embarrassment, he handed it to Orda. The shaman tilted it up and emptied it, noisily smacking his lips.
“Tastes odd,” he remarked, a slight frown appearing on his face.
“I didn’t notice anything,” Argyros said.
“What do you know about kumiss?” Orda snorted.
They talked on for a little while. The shaman started to yawn, checked himself, then did throw his mouth open till his jaw creaked. Even in the flickering lamplight, his pupils shrank almost to pinholes. He yawned again. As his eyelids fluttered, he glared at Argyros in drowsy suspicion. “Did you—?” His chin fell forward onto his chest. He let out a soft snore as he slumped to the carpet. The Roman sat motionless for several minutes, until he was certain Orda would not rouse. He rather liked the shaman and hoped he had not given him enough poppy juice to stop his breathing. No—Orda’s chest continued to rise and fall, though slowly.
When Argyros saw the nomad was deeply drugged, he got to his feet. He moved with much more sureness than he had shown a few minutes before. He knew he had to hurry. As shaman, Orda gave the Jurchen—and their horses—such doctoring as they had. A plainsman might come to his tent at any hour of the night.
Several wicker chests against the far wall of the tent held the shaman’s possessions. Argyros began pawing through them. He appropriated a dagger, which he tucked under his tunic, and a bowcase and a couple of extra bowstrings. As soon as he was done with a chest, he stuffed Orda’s belongings back into it; that way a visitor might, with the Virgin’s aid, merely reckon the shaman too drunk asleep to be wakened.