Around the wagon, invitingly set out, were open jars of yperoinos. None of the Romans paid any attention to them. The Kirghiz whooped with delight when they spied the familiar jars. Most of them tugged on the reins to halt their horses. Drinking was easier and more enjoyable work than chasing crazy bandits who shot back.
Several Roman riders were already diving behind the rocks where Rhangabe had found shelter; more dismounted and ran for them as Argyros drew up. He sprang from his horse. An arrow buried itself in the ground, a palm’s breadth from his foot. Not all the nomads, worse luck, were pausing to refresh themselves.
The magistrianos peered over a boulder. He lofted a shot over the last few Romans at the pursuing Kirghiz. His fingers told him only three shafts were left in his quiver. He reached for one. If something had gone wrong with that wagon, saving them would not matter.
“How much longer?” Mirrane shouted at him.
“Why ask me?” he yelled back, irrationally annoyed. “Rhangabe lit the candle—why don’t you ask—”
He was never sure afterward whether he said “him” or not. He had thought the blasts from a couple of jars of hellpowder loud and terrifying; this sound put him in mind of the roar that would accompany the end of the world. The earth shook beneath his feet. He threw himself face-down, his eyes in the dust and his hands clapped to his ears. He felt no shame at that; the rest of the Romans were doing exactly the same thing.
He was, though, the leader of this crew. Pride quickly-forced him to his feet—he did not want his men to see him groveling in the dirt. He brushed at his tunic as he started to scramble over the rocks to find out what the blast had done.
Two others, he noticed, were already up and looking. One was Eustathios Rhangabe. Argyros did not mind that; if anyone could take hellpowder in stride, it would be a man who had dealt with the stuff for years. The other, however, was Mirrane.
He had only an instant in which to feel irked. Then she threw herself into his arms and delivered a kiss that rocked him almost as much as the hellpowder had. Her lips touched his ear. That was not a caress; he could feel them moving in speech. He shook his head. For the moment, at least, he was deaf. He was sorry when Mirrane pulled her face away from his, but she did not draw back far, only enough to let him see her mouth as she spoke. “It worked!” she was yelling over and over. “It worked!”
That brought him back to himself. “Let me see,” he said, mouthing the words in the same exaggerated style she had used: her hearing could be in no better shape than his. He peered over the piled rocks behind which he had huddled. “Mother of God, have mercy!” he whispered. Of itself, his hand leapt from his forehead to his breast as it shaped the sign of the cross. He had been a soldier; he knew only too well that war was not the clean-cut affair of drama and glory the epic poets made it out to be. All the same, he was not prepared for the spectacle the lifting veils of acrid smoke were presenting to him.
The titanic blast had not slain all the Kirghiz, or even come close. A large majority of the nomads were riding north. From the desperate haste with which they used spurs and whips on their ponies, Argyros did not think they would pause this side of the pass. Observing what they were fleeing from, the magistrianos could not blame them.
In adapting the plan the Ephthalites had used against the King of Kings, Argyros knew he needed to force the Kirghiz to group more tightly than usuaclass="underline" thus the hellpowder charges that funneled them toward the wagon. Now he saw how appallingly well he had succeeded.
Close by the crater where the wagon had stood, few fragments were recognizable as surely being from man or horse. Freakishly, however, one of the jars of superwine that helped lure the nomads to disaster remained unbroken, though it, like much of the landscape there, was splashed with red. Argyros had anticipated that central blast zone and hoped it—and the noise that went with its creation—would be enough to intimidate the Kirghiz. He had not thought about what would lie beyond there, about what would happen when fragments of the wagon and fragments of the jars that had held the hellpowder were propelled violently outward after it ignited.
The results, especially when seen upside down in the surreal closeness the far-seer brought, reminded him of nothing so much as hell in a hot-tempered monk’s sermon. Scythed-down men and horses, variously mutilated, writhed and bled and soundlessly screamed. That silence, somehow, was worst of all; it began to lift as the minutes went by and Argyros’s hearing slowly returned. Yet despite the horror, the magistrianos also understood Mirrane’s delight at the scene before them. Never had a double handful of men not only vanquished but destroyed an enemy army; the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylai was as nothing beside this.
One by one, the rest of Argyros’s crew nerved themselves to see what they had wrought. Most reacted with the same mixture of awe, horror, and pride the magistrianos felt. Others tried to emulate Eustathios Rhangabe’s dispassionate stare; the artisan reacted to the grisly spectacle before him as if it were the final step in some complex and difficult geometic proof, a demonstration already grasped in the abstract. For his part, Corippus looked as though he only regretted the carnage had not been greater. “Some of them will be a long time dying,” he shouted Argyros’s way, sounding delighted at the prospect. His eyes, for once, did not seem cold. He was savage as any Kirghiz, Argyros thought; the chief difference between him and them was in choice of masters. He made a deadly dangerous foe; the magistrianos was glad they were on the same side.
That thought brought his mind back to the woman next to him. Mirrane might have been able to see into his head. She said, “And now that they are done with, what do you plan to do about me?” She no longer sounded full of nothing but glee, and Argyros did not think that was solely concern for her own fate. She had been examining the results of the blast for several minutes now, and a long look at those was enough to sober anyone less grim of spirit than Corippus.
The magistrianos stayed silent so long that Mirrane glanced over to see it he’d heard. Her mouth tightened when she realized he had. She said, “If you intend to kill me, kill me cleanly—don’t give me to your men for their sport. Were we reversed, captor and captive, I would do as much for you.”
Somehow, she managed one syllable of a laugh. “I hate to have to bellow to beg, but my ears ring so, I can’t help it.”
“Yes, I believe you might give me a clean death,” Argyros said musingly, though the ferocity of the King of King’s torturers was a bugbear that frightened children all through the Empire. The magistrianos paused again; he had been thinking about what to do with Mirrane since they left Dariel, without coming up with any sure answer. Now, under her eyes, he had to. At last he said, as much to himself as to her, “I think I am going to bring you back to Constantinople.”
“As you will.” Mirrane fought to hold her voice toneless, but beneath her swarthiness her face grew pale; the ingenuity of the Emperor’s torturers was a bugbear that frightened children all through Persia.
“I think you misunderstand me.” Like Mirrane, Argyros found it odd to be carrying on this conversation near the top of his lungs, but had little choice. Spreading his hands, he went on, “If you had your henchmen here instead of the other way around, would you let me go back to my capital?”
“No,” Mirrane answered at once; she was a professional.