“To make you work with me, you mean? Well, of course, dear Basil.” She reached out to stroke his cheek, which warmed and infuriated him at the same time. He hoped that did not show on his face, but suspected it did; Mirrane’s smile was too knowing. But she held mockery from her voice as she continued, “I told you once that the nomads endanger both our states. Besides, you have a weapon we may be able to turn against them.”
“The superwine, you mean?”
“Of course. The more Kirghiz who are drunk, and the drunker they are, the better the chance my plan has.”
Being caught in her web himself, the magistrianos had a certain amount of sympathy for the nomads. There were some thousands of them and only one of her, but he was not sure that evened the odds.
“We’ll load the wagons,” he said resignedly. He did not mention the hellpowder. He had used a little at Daras, but only a little. Mirrane would have trouble imagining how powerful more than half a ton of the stuff could be.
As Argyros set his men to work, Supsa came rushing up. “You leaving?” the innkeeper wailed. “No leave!”
“I fear I have very little choice,” the magistrianos said. He glared at Mirrane. She smiled sweetly, hoping to annoy him further. He stamped away.
It was nearly midnight before the miniature caravan—wagons, packhorses, and all—rumbled out of the courtyard. The men on horseback looked less like traders than they had coming into Dariel. Some of them had worn mail shirts then too, but that was not where the difference lay. It was in their posture, their eyes, the hard set of their mouths. They were no longer pretending to be anything but soldiers. Even drunken rioters took one look and got out of their way.
“A good crew you have,” Mirrane remarked. She was sitting by Argyros, who drove the lead wagon. It was full of yperoinos. In the last wagon of the four came Eustathios Rhangabe—as far as everyone else was concerned, he was welcome to baby the hellpowder along all by himself. If by some disaster that wagon went up, the magistrianos thought, it would take the flank guards and everything else with it, but sometimes the illusion of safety was as important as the thing itself. Argyros’s mouth twisted; that could also be said for the illusion of command. “They’re dancing to your tune now,” he growled. He would have lost his temper altogether had she come back with some clever comment, but she merely nodded. She was, he reminded himself, a professional too. He had worried about whether the gate crew would let them pass (for that matter, he had wondered if there would be a gate crew, or if they had left their posts to join the looting). They were there and alert, but their officer waved Argyros through. “Getting out while the getting’s good, are you?” he said. “Don’t blame you a bit—in your shoes, I’d do the same.”
“Not if you knew where we were going you wouldn’t,” the magistrianos said, once the fellow was out of earshot. Mirrane giggled.
Argyros called a halt a couple of miles outside Dariel. “This is far enough,” he said. “None of the trouble from town will follow us here, and we need rest to be worth anything come morning. We also need to find out just what this scheme is that we’re supposed to be following.” He gave Mirrane a hard look. So did Corippus. “Why?” he asked bluntly. “Now that she doesn’t have Goarios protecting her, why not turn her into dogmeat and go about our business?” Several men grunted agreement. Mirrane stared back, unafraid. She said, “I might point out that, were it not for me, Goarios’s soldiers would have you now.”
“Were it not for you,” Corippus retorted, “Goarios’s soldiers would never have been interested in us in the first place.” Again many of his comrades paused in the business of setting up camp to nod.
“She could have given us to the Alan king any time she chose,” Argyros said. “She didn’t.”
“Till it served her purpose,” Corippus said stubbornly.
“True enough, but are you saying it fails to serve ours too? Do you really want the Kirghiz rampaging through Mesopotamia, or grazing their flocks in Kappadokia from now on? They endanger us as well as Persia. And if you’re so eager to be rid of Mirrane, let us hear your plan for holding the nomads back.”
He hoped the north African would not have one.
When Corippus dropped his eyes, the magistrianos knew he had won that gamble. His subordinate, though, did not yield tamely. He said, “Maybe we could use the yperoinos to get the buggers drunk, and then—” He ran dry, as a water clock will when someone forgets to fill it.
“And then what?” Argyros prodded. “Sneak through their tents slitting throats? There are a few too many of them for that, I’m afraid. If you have no ideas of your own, getting rid of someone who does strikes me as wasteful.”
Corippus saluted with sardonic precision, shook his head, and stalked off to help get a fire started. Mirrane touched Argyros’s arm. In the darkness, her eyes were enormous. “I thank you,” she whispered. “In this trade of ours, one gets used to the notion of dying unexpectedly, but I’d not have cared for what likely would have happened before they finally knocked me over the head.”
Having been a soldier, Argyros knew what she meant. He grunted, embarrassed for a moment at what men could do—and too often did—to women.
“Why did you choose to save me?” Mirrane still kept her voice low, but the newly kindled fire brought an ironic glint to her eye. “Surely not for the sake of the little while we were lovers?” She studied the magistrianos’s face. “Are you blushing?” she asked in delighted disbelief.
“It’s only the red light of the flames,” Argyros said stiffly. “You’ve been saying you know how to stop the Kirghiz. That’s more than anyone else has claimed. You’re worth keeping for that, if nothing else.”
“If nothing else,” she echoed with an upraised eyebrow. “For that polite addition, at least, I am in your debt.”
The magistrianos bit back an angry reply. Mirrane had a gift for making him feel out of his depth, even when, as now, power lay all on his side. No woman since his long-dead wife had drawn him so, but Mirrane’s appeal was very different from Helen’s. With Helen he had felt more at ease, at peace, than with anyone else he had ever known. The air of risk and danger that surrounded Mirrane had little to do with the settings in which he met her; it was part of her essence. Like his first cup of yperoinos, it carried a stronger jolt than he was used to.
To cover his unease, he returned to matters at hand. “So what is this precious plan of yours?” She stayed silent. He said, “For whatever you think it worth, I pledge I won’t slit your throat after you’ve spoken, or harm you in any other way.”
She watched him. “If your hard-eyed friend gave me that promise, I’d know what it was worth. You, though . . . with that long, sad face, you remind me of the saints I’ve seen painted in Christian churches. Should I believe you on account of that? It seems a poor reason.”
“Sad to say, I am no saint.” As if to prove his words, memories of her lips, her skin against his surged in him. Angrily, he fought them down.
Her lazy smile said she was remembering too. But it faded, leaving her thoughtful and bleak. “If I tell you, I must trust you, and your land and mine are enemies. May you fall into the fire in the House of the Lie if you are leading me astray.”
“I will swear by God and His Son, if you like.”
“No, never mind. An oath is only the man behind it, and you suit me well enough without one.” Still she said nothing. Finally Argyros made a questioning noise. She laughed shakily. “The real trouble is, the plan is not very good.”
“Let me hear it.”
“All right. We spoke of it once, in fact, in Goarios’s palace. You said you remembered how the White Huns lured Peroz King of Kings and his army to destruction—how they dug a trench with but a single small opening, then concealed it. They fled through the gap, then fell on his army when it was thrown into confusion by the first ranks charging into the ditch. I had hoped to do something like that to the Kirghiz. They have little discipline at any time, and if they were drunk on your superwine, drunker even than they knew—”