Even when the distant leaves were knife-edge sharp, the image was less than perfect. It was still slightly distorted, and everything was edged with blue on one side and red on the other. But Argyros could count individual feathers on a linnet so far away his unaided eye could barely make it out against the leafy background.
He set the tube down, awed. Aristophanes and Seneca had written of using a round glass jar full of water as a magnifying device, but only for things close by it. No ancient sage had ever envisioned so enlarging objects at a distance.
Remembering the classic authors, though, made him think of something else. That water-filled jar would have been thin at the edges and thick in the center, just as were Orda’s crystals. And if that was so, then doing peculiar things to light was a property of such transparent objects and could take place without having a fire spirit trapped at all.
Argyros breathed a long sign of relief. He had been horrified when his prayers did not stop Orda from making fire with the crystal. But if he had been praying for the overthrow of a natural law, even one he did not understand, his failure became perfectly understandable. God worked miracles only at the entreaty of a saint, which the Roman knew he was not. He had been in the field so long that even the Jurchen women, skin-clad, greasy-haired, and stinking of rancid butter, would have looked good to him. He closed the tube and stowed it in a saddlebag. Now all that remained was to take it back to the Roman army. Roman artisans would surely be able to duplicate what the nomad shaman had stumbled across.
“Christ, the Virgin, and all the saints, but I’m an idiot!” Argyros burst out two days later. His horse’s ears twitched at the unexpected noise. He paid no attention, but went on, loudly as before, “If the eyes of Argos will help Tekmanios see his foes at a distance, they’ll do the same for me. And with only the one of me and heaven knows how many plainsmen looking for my trail, I need to see more than Tekmanios ever will.”
He took the tube out of the saddlebag, where it had rested undisturbed since he put it away there by the stream. After a bit, he stopped berating himself for stupidity. The eyes of Argos were something new; how was he to grasp all at once everything they were good for? Old familiar things were much more comfortable to be around. At the moment, though, this new device was more useful than any old one would have been.
He tied his horse to a bush at the base of a low rise, ascended it on foot. At the very top, he went down to his belly to crawl through the grass. Even without an Argos-eye, a man silhouetted against the sky was visible a long way.
But now, he was no longer startled when the world turned upside down as he put the tube to his eye. He scanned in a full circle, pausing wherever he spied motion. Without the tube, he would have fled from a small cloud of dust he spotted to the south. With it, he was able to see it was only cattle, not horsemen, kicking up the dust. He could continue on his present course, riding around the nomads to reach the Roman army before Tekmanios took it back to the settled lands south of the Danube. Tossuc and Orda would guess what he was aiming at, of course. But the steppe was so wide that he did not think the Jurchen could catch him by posting pickets in his path. They would have to stumble across his trail, and that, theou thelontos —God willing—would not happen. It certainly would not, if his prayers had anything to do with it.
Once another four days had gone by, he was confident God had granted his petition. He was farther south than any line the nomads would have set to waylay him. Better still, he had just come upon tracks he recognized as Roman—the horses that had made them were shod.
“Won’t do to get careless now,” he said aloud; he noticed he was talking to himself a good deal, to counteract the silent emptiness of the plains. He quoted Solon’s famous warning to King Kroisos of Lydia: “Count no man happy before he is dead.” And so, to be safe, he used the eyes of Argos again, looking back the way he had come.
The magnifying effect of the tube seemed to send the Jurchen horsemen leaping toward him. Even seen head over heels, the grim intensity with which they rode was terrifying. They had not yet spied him; they were leaning over their horses’ necks to study the ground and stay on his trail. But if they had gained so much ground on him, they would catch sight of him soon—and the last phase of the hunt would begin. He dug his heels into the horse’s flanks, but the most he could extract from it was a tired, slow trot. Only a beast from the plains could have done as much as this one had; a Roman horse would long since have foundered. Even the nomad animals had their limit, though, and his had reached it. He looked back again. This time he could see his pursuers without the tube. And they could see him. Their horses, fresh because they had not ridden the same beast days on end, came galloping forward. It would not be long before they were in arrow range. He might pick off one or two of them, but there were far more than that in their band.
All hope died when he saw another party of horsemen ahead. If the Jurchen were in front of him as well as behind, not even the miracle he did not deserve would let him escape. Those other riders had also spotted him and were rushing his way as quickly as the plainsmen behind: racing to see who would kill him first, he thought as he set an arrow in his stolen bow and got ready to make what fight he could. Because they were approaching instead of pursuing, the riders from ahead drew near first. He drew his bow to shoot at the closest one, but the winking of the sun off chain mail made it hard to reckon the range.
Chain mail . . . For a second, his mind did not grasp the meaning of that. Then he lowered the bow and shouted as loudly as he could, “To me, Romans, to me! A rescue!”
The oncoming horsemen drew up in surprise, then pounded past Argyros toward the Jurchen. He wheeled his weary horse to help them. The two parties exchanged arrows at long range. The nomads, as always, were better archers than the Romans, but they were also outnumbered. They could not press the attack home; a pair of charges were beaten back.
Argyros whooped exultantly as the Jurchen sullenly rode away, shooting Parthian shots over their shoulders in their withdrawal. Then his mount gave a strangled scream and toppled, an arrow through its throat. He had no chance to jump away. The beast fell on him, pinning him with its weight. His head thumped against the ground. The world turned red, then black.
His head ached abominably when he came back to his senses; the rest of him was one great bruise. Most of all, though, he felt relief that he was no longer crushed beneath the dead flesh and bone of his horse. He tried his limbs, one after the other. They all answered to his will. Gritting his teeth, he sat up. Half a dozen Roman scouts were standing around him in a tight circle. He craned his neck back to look up at them—that hurt too. Among the soldiers scowling down were Bardanes, Alexander, and Justin of Tarsos.
“So you find you do not love the barbarians after all,” Alexander said when Argyros’s eyes met his. He smiled. It was a singularly unpleasant smile, the expression a falcon might wear when about to swoop on a field mouse.
“I am afraid, Basil, you cannot undesert,” Justin said. He sounded sorrowful; for a soldier, he was not a cruel man. But there was no yielding in him either. He went on, “Going over to the enemy has only one penalty.”
Bardanes, who was standing by Argyros’s right side, did not say anything. He kicked the returned Roman in the ribs. One of the men behind him—he did not see who—kicked him in the back. Alexander laughed. “You get what you deserve now, for running out on us.” His foot lashed out too. Argyros realized they were going to kick him to death, right there. He rolled into a ball, his arms drawn up to protect his face and head. “Take me to Hermoniakos!” he shouted —actually, the words came out more like a shriek.