Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (31 page)

That thought loosed another. The position the Romans had just made was so strong it did not really need twenty men to hold it. He could leave ten behind and push closer yet to the sea. It would be safe enough, he thought. This part of the city, unlike the turbulent portion he’d gone through before, seemed to be a no man’s land of sorts. Most of the property owners had already fled, and, after the storm of looting passed by, neither the men of the city nor those of the Duchy were making much use of these ways to reach each other.

Taking heart in that observation, Marcus divided his small force in two. “I know just the place for you,” Grasulf told him. He led the Romans to a crossroads between four mansions, each of them with strong outwalls at the edge of the street. The sea was very close now; along with its constant boom against the seawall, the tribune could hear individual waves slap-slapping against ships and pilings in the harbor of Kontoskalion.

The city was still troubled. New smokes rose into the noonday sky, and from afar came the sound of fighting. Scaurus wondered if the mob was battling Namdaleni, the Videssian army, or itself. He also wondered how long and how much it would take before Nephon Khoumnos—or, by rights, the Emperor himself—decided to teach the city’s explosive populace a lesson it would remember.

In this momentary backwater it was easy to forget such things. The Romans stood to arms for the first couple of hours at their post, but when nothing more frightening came by than a stray dog and a ragpicker with a great bag of scraps slung over his back, the tribune did not see anything amiss in letting them relax a bit. While three men took turns on alert, the others sat in the narrow shade of the southern wall. They shared food and wine with Grasulf. The Namdalener puckered his lips at their drink’s bite, though to Scaurus it was still too sweet.

Shadows were beginning to lengthen when the distant commotion elsewhere in Videssos grew suddenly louder. It did not take Marcus long to decide the new outbreak was due east of his position—and, from its swelling volume, heading west at an uncomfortable clip.

His men climbed to their feet at his command, grumbling over leaving their shadows for the sunshine’s heat. As any good soldiers would, they quickly checked their gear, making sure their short swords were free in their scabbards and their shield straps were not so frayed as to give in action.

Videssos’ twisting, narrow streets distorted sound in odd ways. The mob’s roar grew ever closer, but until it was all but on him Scaurus did not think he was standing in its path. He was ready to rush his men to another Roman party’s aid when the first rioters turned the corner less than a hundred yards away and spotted his little detachment blocking their path.

They stopped in confusion. Unlike the monk a few days before, they knew the warriors in front of them were not Namdaleni and had to decide whether they were foes.

Taking advantage of their indecision, Marcus took a few steps forward. “Go back to your homes!” he shouted. “We will not harm you if you leave in peace!” He knew how colossal the bluff was, but with any luck the mob would not.

For a heady second he thought he had them. A couple of men at the head of the throng, plump middle-class types who looked badly out of place among the rioters, turned as if to retreat. But then a fellow behind them, a greasy little weasel of a man, recognized Grasulf for what he was. “An islander!” he yelled shrilly. “They’re trying to keep him from us!” The rioters rushed forward in a ragged battle line, brandishing a motley collection of makeshift or stolen weapons.

“Oh, bugger,” one of the legionaries beside Marcus muttered as he drew his sword. The tribune had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. More and more Videssians kept rounding that cursed corner. The Romans were professional soldiers, true, but as a professional Scaurus knew enough to mislike odds of seven or eight to one against him.

“To me, to me!” he shouted, wondering how many Romans he could draw to his aid and whether they would come too late and be swallowed up band after band by the mob.

Grasulf touched his arm. “Bring my sword home, if you can,” he said. And with a wild cry the Namdalener charged forward against the mob. His blade swung in two glittering arcs; a pair of heads bounced
from rioters’ shoulders to the ground. Had his success gone on, he might have singlehandedly cowed his foes. But the same little sneakthief who had first spied him now darted up to plunge his dagger through the Namdalener’s mail shirt and into his back. Grasulf fell; howling in triumph as they trampled his corpse, the mob stormed into the Romans.

The legionaries were well trained and heavily armed. They wore chain mail and greaves and carried their metal-faced semicylindrical shields. But their foes had such weight of numbers pushing them on that the Roman line, which by the nature of things could only be three men deep here, cracked almost at once. Then the fighting turned into a series of savage combats, in each of which one or two Romans were pitted against far too many opponents.

In his place at the legionaries’ fore, Marcus had three men slam into him at once. One was dead as he hit, the tribune’s sword twisting in his guts to make sure of the kill. But his momentum and that of his two living comrades bowled Scaurus to the ground. He pulled his shield over him and saved himself from the worst of the trampling as the mob passed over him, but it was only luck that no one aimed anything more deadly at him than a glancing blow from a club.

Striking out desperately in all directions with his sword, he managed to scramble to his feet after less than a minute on the cobblestones, to find himself alone in the midst of the mob. He slashed his way toward a wall that would cover his back. To judge from the noise and the flow of the action, the other Romans yet on their feet were doing the same.

A Videssian armed with a short hunting spear lunged at the tribune. His thrust was wide; its impetus propelled him into the Roman’s shield. Marcus shoved as hard as he could. Taken off balance, the rioter stumbled backwards to trip up another of his fellows. Scaurus’ sword made them both pay for the one’s clumsiness.

Not all the rioters, luckily, were staying to fight the Romans. Some kept pressing west, in the hopes of finding Namdaleni to slaughter. Before long, only the mob’s tail was still assailing the tribune. As the pressure against him eased, he began to hope he would live.

Through the din of fighting he heard the shouts and clatter of more Romans charging to the aid of the beleaguered squad. The rioters, without the discipline of real warriors, could not stand against their rush.
Marcus started to call out to his men, but at that moment a stone rang off the side of his helmet, filling his head with a shower of silver sparks. As he staggered, his sword slipped from his hand. A rioter bent, snatched it up, and fled; newly armed or not, he had seen enough combat for this day.

Panic’s chill wind blew through Marcus’ brain. Had it been an ordinary Roman shortsword, he would have been glad enough to let the thief keep his booty. But this was the blade whose magic had brought him to this very world, the blade that stood against Avshar and all his sorceries, the blade that lent him strength. He threw his shield aside, drew his long-unused dagger, and gave chase.

He thanked his gods the fighting had almost passed him by. His hurled
scutum
decked one Videssian, a slash on his arm sent another reeling back. Then Scaurus was free of the crush and pounding after the sword-thief.

His pulse thudded in his ears as he ran; he would gladly have foregone the weight of his armor and his heavy boots. But his long strides were still closing the gap. The man bouncing along ahead of him was a short, fat fellow who seemed too prosperous to need to riot. Hearing himself pursued, he looked back over his shoulder and almost ran full tilt into a wall. He saved himself at the last instant and scurried down an alleyway, Marcus ten yards behind.

Strain as he would, the tribune could get no closer. Nor could his quarry shake free, though his zigzagging dash through backstreets and by-roads lost Scaurus in Videssos’ maze.

The thief’s knowledge of the city’s ways was no more perfect than Marcus’. He darted halfway down an alley without realizing it was blind. Before he could mend his error, the tribune came panting up to cork the entrance.

Wiping the sweat from his face, the rotund thief brought his stolen sword up to the guard position. The awkward set of his feet and his tentative passes with the blade said he was no swordsman. Scaurus approached with caution anyhow. His opponent, after all, had three times his length of blade, clumsy or not.

He took another pace forward, saying, “I don’t want to have to fight you. Lay my sword down and you can go, for all of me.”

Scaurus never learned whether the other thought he spoke from cowardice and was thus emboldened, or whether he simply was afraid to be weaponless before the Roman. He leaped at Marcus, swinging the tribune’s sword with a stroke that confirmed his ineptness. But even as Marcus’ mind realized he was facing a tyro, his body responded with the motions long hours on the practice field had drilled into it. He ducked under the amateurish slash and stepped forward to drive his knife into his foe’s belly.

The plump thief’s mouth shaped a voiceless “Oh.” He dropped the Roman’s blade to clutch his wound with both hands. His eyes went wide, then suddenly showed only white as he sagged to the ground.

Marcus stooped to recover his sword. He felt no pride in his victory, rather self-disgust at having killed an opponent so little a match for him. He looked reproachfully down at the crumpled corpse at his feet. Why hadn’t the fat fool had enough sense to bar his door and stay behind it, instead of playing at what he knew nothing about?

The tribune thought he could let his ears lead him back to the brawl between his man and the rioters, but retracing his path was not so simple. The winding streets kept leading him away from the direction in which he needed to go, and that direction itself seemed to shift as he moved. The homes he walked by offered few clues to guide him. Their outer walls and hedges were so much alike that only a longtime resident of the neighborhood could have steered by them.

He was passing another not much different from the rest when he heard a scuffle from the far side of the wall. Scuffles today were a copper a handful; worrying about finding his way back to the Romans, Scaurus was on the point of ignoring this one until it was suddenly punctuated by a woman’s scream.

The sound of a blow cut across it. “Quiet, bitch!” a rough male voice roared.

“Let her bleat,” another replied, coldly callous. “Who’s to hear, anyway?”

The wall was too high to see over and too high for a man encumbered by armor to hope to climb. Marcus’ eye flashed to its gate. He ran at it, crashing into it with an iron-clad shoulder. It flew open, sending the tribune stumbling inside onto a wide expanse of close-trimmed grass.

The two men holding a woman pinned to that grass looked up in amazement as their sport was interrupted. One had hold of her bare shoulders; a ripped tunic lay nearby. The other was between her thrashing white legs, hiking her heavy skirt up over her waist.

The second man died as he was scrambling to his feet, Marcus’ blade through his throat. The tribune had a moment’s regret at giving him so easy an end, but then he was facing the dead man’s comrade, who was made of sterner stuff. Though he looked a street ruffian, he carried a shortsword instead of a dagger, and from his first cut Scaurus saw he knew how to use it.

After that first slash failed to fell the Roman, his enemy chose a purely defensive fight and seemed to be looking for a chance to break and run. But when he tried to flee, the woman he had been holding down snaked out a wrist to trip him. Marcus ran the falling man through. Where he had regretted killing the miserable little fellow who ran off with his sword, now he felt nothing but satisfaction at ridding the world of this piece of human offal.

He knelt to wipe his blade on the dead man’s shirt, then turned, saying, “Thank you, lass, the whoreson might have got away if you—” His mouth stayed open, but no more words emerged. The woman sitting up was Helvis.

She was staring at him, too, seeing for the first time who her rescuer was. “Marcus?” she said, as if in doubt. Then, sobbing wildly in reaction to the terror of a moment before, she ran to him. Of themselves, his arms tightened around her. The flesh of her back was very smooth and still cool from the touch of the grass to which she had been forced. She trembled under his hands.

“Thank you, oh, thank you,” she kept repeating, her head pressed against his corseleted shoulder. A moment later she added, “There’s so much metal about you—must you imprison me in an armory?”

Scaurus realized how tightly he was holding her to his armored front. He eased his grip a bit; she did not pull away, but still clung to him as well. “In the name of your Phos, what are you doing here?” the tribune demanded roughly. The stress of the moment made his concern sound angry. “I thought you safely back at your people’s barracks by the palaces.”

It was precisely because of Phos, he learned, that she was not at the Namdalener barracks. She had chosen to celebrate her god’s holiday—was it only yesterday? Marcus wondered; that seemed impossible—by praying not at the temple near the barracks, but at another one here in the southern part of Videssos. It was a shrine popular with the Namdaleni, for it was dedicated to a holy man who had lived and worked on the island of Namdalen, though he was three hundred years dead before the northerners wrested his native land from the Empire.

Helvis continued, “When the riots started and the crowds were screaming, ‘Dig up the Gamblers’ bones!’ I had no hope of getting back to my home through the streets. I knew my countrymen had an encampment by the harbor and decided to make for that. Last night I spent in a deserted house. When I heard the mob screaming down toward the harbor, I thought I should hide again.

“The far gate over there was open,” she said, pointing. She ruefully went on, “I found out why all too soon. Those—” No word sufficed; she shuddered instead “—were ransacking the place, and I was just another lucky bit of loot.”