An Emperor for the Legion (24 page)

Casualties were similarly light. Viridovix had accounted for half the enemy dead in his one brief flurry, a feat Marcus was sure he would not hear the last of for weeks to come. Of the Romans, it seemed no one had been killed, which gladdened the tribune’s heart. Every legionary lost was one less link to the world he would never know again, one more man who shared his memories gone forever.

The worst-hurt man was Apokavkos. Gorgidas bent over him, easing his helmet off and palpating the left side of his head with skilled, gentle fingers. Apokavkos tried to speak, but produced only a confused, stammering sound.

Scaurus was alarmed at that, but the Greek doctor grunted in satisfaction, recognizing the symptom. “The blow he took threw his brain into commotion, as well it might,” he told the tribune, “and so he’s lost his voice for a time, but I think he’ll recover. His skull is not broken, and he has full use of his limbs—don’t you, Phostis?”

The Videssian moved them all to prove it. He tried to talk again, failed once more, and shook his head in annoyance, a motion immediately followed by a wince. “Head hurts,” he scrawled in the dust.

“So you can write, can you? How interesting,” Gorgidas said, ignoring what was written. For a moment he looked at Apokavkos more as a specimen than a man, but caught himself with an embarrassed chuckle. “I’ll give you a draft of wine mixed with poppy juice. You’ll sleep the day around, and when you wake the worst of your headache should be gone. You ought to have your voice back by then, too.”

“Thanks,” Apokavkos wrote. As with his last message, he used Videssian; while he spoke Latin, he could not write it. He climbed painfully to his feet and followed Gorgidas to his tent for the promised medicine.

“It’s a good thing Drax’s Namdaleni and the regular Videssian troops in the city didn’t follow Rhavas’ cutthroats out on sally,” Marcus said to Gaius Philippus later that night. “They could have set things back as badly as you said, and we can’t afford it with things in the westlands as they are.”

The centurion carefully gnawed the last meat from a roasted chicken thigh, then tossed the bone into the fire. “Why should they follow Rhavas?” he said. “You know the Namdaleni, aye, and the imperials, too. Think they have any more stomach for his gang of roughs than we do? Probably hoping
we’d kill the lot of ’em. There wouldn’t be many a tear shed in there if we had, I’d bet.”

Marcus stopped to consider that and decided Gaius Philippus was probably right. The men on the other side were most of them soldiers like any others and no doubt despised bandits the same way all regular troops did. It was their leaders who chose such instruments, not the rank and file. “The Sphrantzai,” he said, the word sliding slimily off his tongue. Gaius Philippus nodded, understanding him perfectly.

The morning Thorisin Gavras had chosen for his assault dawned gray and foggy—not the porridge-thick blinding fog that had masked the arrival of the ships from the Key, but still a mist that cut visibility to less than a hundred paces. “Well, not
all
my prayers were wasted,” Gaius Philippus said, drawing faint smiles from the legionaries who heard him. For the most part they went about their business grim-faced, knowing what was ahead of them.

“A big part of what we can do out there will depend on your men and the covering fire they can give us,” Marcus was saying to Laon Pakhymer. The Khatrisher had brought his archers back from their foraging duties to join in the effort against the capital.

“I know,” Pakhymer said. “Our quivers are full, and we’ve been driving the fletchers crazy with all the shafts we’ve asked for.” He looked around, eyeing the murky weather with distaste. “We can’t hit what we can’t see, though, you know.”

“Of course,” Scaurus said, suddenly less glad of the fog than he had been. “But if you keep the top of the wall well-swept, it won’t matter that your bowmen aren’t aiming at anyone in particular.”

“Of course,” Pakhymer echoed ironically, and the tribune felt himself flush—a fine thing, him lecturing the Khatrisher on the tricks of the archer’s trade, when Pakhymer had undoubtedly had a bow in his hand since the age of three. He changed the subject in some haste.

The voice of a trumpet rang out, high and thin in the early morning stillness. Marcus recognized the imperial fanfare, the signal for the attack. Much of his apprehension disappeared. No more waiting now. The event, whatever it held, was here.

The trumpet’s last note was still in the air when the buccinator’s horns blasted into life. The Romans, shouting,
“Gavras!” at the top of their lungs, rushed for the Silver Gate and the postern gate through which Rhavas’ sally party had come. More legionaries flung hurdles, bundles of sticks, and spadesful of earth into the ditch that warded Videssos, trying to widen the front on which they could bring their arms to bear.

The first protection the capital’s gates had was a chest-high work not much different from the one Gavras’ men had thrown up, save that it was faced with stone. The few pickets manning it were quickly killed or captured; the Sphrantzai were not about to throw open the gates to rescue them, not with the enemy close behind.

High over the Silver Gate stood icons of Phos, reminders that Videssos was his holy city. They were being rudely treated now; buzzing over the Romans’ heads like a swarm of angry gnats came the arrow barrage the Khatrishers were laying down, along with the more intermittent crack of dart-casting engines and the thump of the stone-throwers’ hurling arms smacking into their rests.

“Reload there! Come on, wind ’em tight!” an artilleryman screamed to his crew—the perfect Videssian incarnation, Marcus thought, of Gaius Philippus. The senior centurion was crying the legionaries on, ordering the rams forward to pound at the Silver Gate’s ironbound portals. The slope-sided sheds, covered with hides to foil fire, hot oil, and sand, ponderously advanced.

Looking up at the crenelated battlements over the gates, Scaurus felt a surge of hope. Much against his expectations, the missiles had briefly managed to drive the defenders from their posts. The rams took their positions unhindered. The passageway behind the gates echoed their first
booms
like a great drum.

Gaius Philippus wore a wolfish grin. “The timbers may last forever,” he said, “but the hinges can only take so much.”
Boom-boom, boom-boom
went the rams.

But the Khatrishers could only keep up their murderous fire so long; arms tired, bowstrings weakened, and arrows began to run short. Soldiers appeared on the walls again. One of Bagratouni’s Vaspurakaners shrieked as bubbling oil found its way through the joints of his armor to roast the flesh beneath. Another defender was about to tip his cauldron of sizzling fat down on the Romans when a Khatrisher shaft caught him in
the face. He staggered backward, spilling the blazing load among his comrades. The Romans below cheered to hear their cries of pain and fear.

Stones and missiles shot from the towers of the inner wall were now beginning to fall on the legionaries. There were not enough Khatrishers, nor could they shoot far enough, to silence the snipers and catapults atop those towers.

Loud even through the din of fighting, the cry of “Ladders! Ladders!” came from the north. Scaurus stole a glance that way, saw men climbing for their lives and knowing they would lose them if the enemy tipped those ladders into space before they reached the top. The legionaries carried no scaling ladders—too risky by half, was the tribune’s cold-blooded appraisal.

The rams still pounded away. A chain with a hook on the end snaked down to catch at one of the heads as it drove forward, but the Romans, alert for such tricks, knocked it aside. The huge iron clasps joining gate to wall creaked and groaned at every stroke; the thick oak portals began to bend inwards.

“Sure and we have ’em now!” Viridovix cried. His eyes blazed with excitement. He waved his sword at the Videssians on the walls, hot to come to grips with them at last. This fighting at long range and the duel of ram and catapult were a poor substitute for the hand-to-hand combat he craved.

Marcus was less eager, but still felt his confidence rising. Ortaias’ men were not putting up a strong defense. By rights, he thought, the Romans should never have been able to get their rams near the Silver Gate, let alone be on the point of battering it down. He wondered how many men Elissaios Bouraphos’ ships were drawing off to ward the sea wall. There were times when navies had their uses.

The fight at the sally port was not going so well for the legionaries. A sharp dogleg in the wall protected it from engines and let the troops inside fire at the attackers’ flanks. As casualties mounted, Scaurus pulled most of his soldiers back, leaving behind a couple of squads to keep the besieged Videssians from using the postern gate against them.

One last stroke of the rams, working in unison now, thudded into the battered timbers of the Silver Gate. They sagged back like tired old men. The Romans surged past the rams’ protecting mantlets, shouting that the city was taken.

It was not. The passage between inner and outer portals was itself walled and roofed, and a stout portcullis barred the way. From behind it, archers poured death into the legionaries at point-blank range.

Brave as always, Laon Pakhymer’s Khatrishers ran up to return their fire. In their light armor they suffered for it, Ortaias’ bowmen on the walls taking a heavy toll. Watching his men fall, Pakhymer remained expressionless, but his pock-marks stood shadowy on a face gone pale. He sent his countrymen forward nonetheless.

More archers shot down at the Romans from the murder-holes above the passageway; unlike the ones at panicked Khliat the summer before, these were manned and deadly.
“Testudo!”
Gaius Philippus shouted, and
scuta
went up over the legionaries’ heads to turn the hurtling darts. But worse than arrows rained down. Boiling water, sputtering oil, and red-hot sand poured through the death-holes, and the interlocked shields could not keep the soldiers beneath them altogether safe. Men cursed and screamed as they were burned.

Still more terrible were the flasks of vitriol the defenders cast down on the legionaries. The very facings of their shields bubbled and smoked, and whenever a drop touched flesh it seared it away to the bone.

Scaurus ground his teeth in an agony of frustration. Having forced the Silver Gate, his men were caught in a cruder trap than if they had failed at once. The rams, protected by their mantlets, were still inching forward and might yet batter down the portcullis, though, as he watched, a man inside the mantlet fell, pierced by an arrow that found its way over his shield.

But after the portcullis lay the second set of gates, stronger even than the ones already fallen. Could he ask his men to claw their way through that gauntlet and have any hope they could fight Ortaias’ still-fresh troops afterward?

With unlimited manpower behind him, he might have tried it. His force, though, was anything but unlimited, and once gone, was gone for good. However much he wanted to aid Thorisin, the mercenary captain’s creed came first: protect your men. Without them you can do nothing to help or hurt.

“Pull back,” he ordered, and signaled the buccinators to blow retreat. It was a command the legionaries were not sorry to obey; they had charged to the attack in high excitement, but they recognized an impossibility when they saw one.

Again the Khatrishers did yeoman duty in covering the Romans, especially the withdrawal of the rams and their heavy shielding mantlets, of necessity a slow, painful business. Laon Pakhymer brushed thanks aside when Marcus tried to give them, saying only, “You did more for us, one day last year.” He was silent for a moment, then said, “Could we beg use of your fractious doctor?”

“Of course,” Scaurus said.

“Then I thank you. That arrow-pulling gadget of his is a clever whatsit, and his hands are soft, for all his sharp tongue.”

“Gorgidas!” Marcus called, and the Greek physician came trotting up, a length of bandage flapping in his left hand.

“What do you want now, Scaurus? If you must put out a fire by throwing bodies on it, at least give me leave to cobble them back together. Don’t waste my time with talk.”

“Tend to the Khatrishers too, would you? The arrow-fire’s hurt them worse than our men because they wear lighter panoplies, and Pakhymer here thinks well of your arrow-drawer.”

“The spoon of Diokles? Aye, it’s a useful tool.” He pulled one from his belt; the smooth bronze was covered with blood. Gorgidas held the instrument up to the two officers. “Can either of you tell whose gore’s been spilled on this—Roman, Khatrisher, or imperial for that matter?” He did not wait for an answer, but went on, “Well, neither can I; I haven’t really stopped to look—nor will I. I’m a busy man, thanks to you two, so kindly let me ply my trade.”

Pakhymer stared at his retreating back. “Did that mean yes?”

“It meant he has been tending them all along. I should have known.”

“There are demons on that man’s trail,” Pakhymer said slowly. His eyes held a certain superstitious awe; he intended his words to be taken literally. “Demons everywhere today,” he murmured, “pulling the Balance down against us.” In Videssian eyes, the Khatrishers were sunk deeper in heresy than even the Namdaleni. Where the men of the Duchy spoke of Phos’ Wager with at least the hope that Phos would at last overcome Skotos, Pakhymer’s people held the struggle between good and evil to be an even one, its ultimate winner impossible to know.

Scaurus was too tired and too full of disappointment to
exercise himself over the fine points of a theology he did not share. With some surprise, he realized the sky was bright and blue—where had the fog gone? His shadow was pointing away from Videssos’ works; the sun was in his eyes as he looked toward them. The assault had lasted most of the day. For all it had accomplished, it might as well not have been made.

Jeers flew from the wall as the Romans retreated, loudest among them the booming, scorn-filled laugh of Outis Rhavas. “Go back to your mothers, little boys,” the bandit chieftain roared, his voice loaded with hateful mirth. “You’ve played where you don’t belong and got a spanking for your trouble. Go home and be good and you won’t get hurt again!”