Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (38 page)

Lest the next gibe have a less fortunate outcome, the tribune made
haste to introduce some of his leading men to the Vaspurakaners. Then he asked, “How is it you are in Videssos’ service?”

Senpat Sviodo told his story as they traveled west; it was not much different from what Scaurus had expected. The young man was of a noble house—his fine horse, his elegant pandoura, and the silver Nevrat wore had already made the tribune sure he was no common soldier.

“Being a noble in Vaspurakan these past few years was not an unmixed blessing,” he said. “When the Yezda came sweeping through, our peasants could flee, having little to lose by taking shelter here inside the Empire. But my family’s estates had rich fields, wealth besides from a small copper mine, and a keep as strong as any. We chose to fight to hold them.”

“And well, too,” Nevrat added. “More than once we drove the raiders off our lands licking their wounds.” Her slim hand touched the hilt of her saber in a way that told Marcus she meant “we” in the most literal sense.

“So we did,” Senpat agreed with a smile. But that smile faded as he thought of the grinding fight he had waged—and lost. “We never drove them far enough, though, or hard enough. Season by season, year by year, they wore us down. We couldn’t farm, we couldn’t mine, we couldn’t go more than a bowshot from the keep without being attacked. Two years ago a Videssian regiment passed by our holding chasing Yezda, and Senpat Sviodo, prince of Vaspurakan, became Senpat Sviodo, imperial scout. There are worse fates.” He shrugged.

He tugged at the rope by which he led his packhorse. When the beast came forward, he plucked the pandoura from its back and struck a fiery chord. “Worse fates indeed!” he shouted, half singing. “Wolves of the west, beware! I come to take back what is mine!” Nevrat hugged him tightly, her face shining with pride.

The Romans thought well of his display of spirit, but it had a special purport for Gorgidas. Familiar with the strife-torn politics of Greek cities, he said, “That one and his wife will do well. It’s so very easy for an exile to leave hope behind along with his home. The ones who somehow bring it with them are a special breed.”

As the army halted for the night, Senpat Sviodo and his wife, like so many before them in the Empire of Videssos, walked up to observe with
unfeigned admiration as the Romans created their camp. “What a good notion!” he exclaimed. “With fieldworks like these, it would be easy to stand off attackers.”

“That’s the idea behind them,” Scaurus agreed, watching his men toss the dry, reddish-brown plateau soil up from the ditch they were digging to form the camp’s breastwork. “You’ll have officer’s status among us, so your tent will be one of those in front of mine, along the
via principalis
—” At Senpat’s blank expression, he realized he’d used the Latin name and hastily translated: “The main road, I should say.”

“Well enough, then,” the Vaspurakaner said. Lifting the three-peaked cap from his head, he used a tunic sleeve to wipe caked sweat and dust from his forehead. “I could use a good night’s sleep—my behind isn’t sorry to be out of the saddle.”

“Yours?” Nevrat said. “At least you had a saddle to be out of—I’ve been astride a horse’s bumpy backbone all day, and my stern is petrified.” She gave her husband a look full of meaning. “I hope you don’t plan on being out of the saddle the whole night long.”

“Dear, there are saddles, and then there are saddles,” Senpat grinned. His arm slid round her waist; she nestled happily against him.

Seeing their longing for each other, Scaurus muttered a Latin curse—Videssian was too new in his mouth for comfortable swearing. Until that moment he had forgotten the rule he’d imposed against women in the camp. If it stood for his own men, he could hardly break it for these newcomers. As gently as he could, he explained his edict to the Vaspurakaners.

They listened in disbelief, too amazed to be really angry. Finally Senpat said, “Watching your soldiers building this camp convinced me you were men of no common discipline. But to enforce that kind of order and have it obeyed—” He shook his head. “If your Romans are fools enough to put up with it, that’s their affair and yours. But I’m damned if we will. Come on, love,” he said to Nevrat. And their tent went up, not within the Roman stockade, but just outside it, for they preferred each other’s company to the safety of trench, earthwork, and palisade. Alone inside his tent later that evening, Marcus decided he could not blame them.

His own sleep came slowly. It occurred to him that Phostis Apokavkos might well be able to tell him much more than he already knew
about the strong-willed folk who came out of Vaspurakan. Apokavkos was from the far west and presumably had dealt with Vaspurakaners before.

The adopted Roman was not sleeping either, but throwing knucklebones with a double handful of men from his maniple. “You looking for me, sir?” he asked when he saw Marcus. “Won’t be sorry if you are—I’ve got no luck tonight.”

“If you’re after an excuse to get out of the game, your luck just turned,” the tribune said. He spoke in his own language, and Apokavkos had no trouble understanding him; when the onetime peasant-soldier tried to speak Latin, though, his lisping Videssian accent still made him hard to follow. But he stuck with it doggedly, and his progress was easy to see.

Scaurus took him back to his own tent and asked him, “Tell me what you know of Vaspurakan and its people.” Recalling Apokavkos’ dislike of the Namdaleni for their heterodox beliefs, he made himself ready to discount as prejudiced some of what the other would reply.

“The ‘princes’?” Phostis said. “About their land I can’t tell you that much—where I grew up, it was no more than mountains on the northern horizon. Beastly cold in winter, I’ve heard. They raise good horses there, but everybody knows that.”

Even Scaurus had heard good things about Vaspurakaner horseflesh, and he had the traditional Roman attitude toward the equestrian art—that it was a fine skill, for other people. He was intellectually aware that the use of stirrups made horsemanship a very different thing from the one he knew, but still found it hard to take the idea seriously.

Apokavkos proceeded to surprise him, for he spoke of the Vaspurakaners themselves, not with suspicion, but with genuine and obvious respect. “It’s said three ‘princes’ working together could sell ice to Skotos, and I believe it, for work together they would. I don’t know where they learned it, unless being stuck between countries bigger’n they are taught it to them, but they take care of their own, always. They’ll fight among themselves, aye, but let an outsider meddle in their affairs and they’re tight as trap jaws against him.”

To Marcus that seemed such plain good sense as hardly to be worth comment, but Phostis Apokavkos’ voice was full of wistful admiration.
“You—
we
, I mean—Romans are like that too, but there’s plenty of Videssians who’d hire on Skotos himself, if it meant paying their enemies back one.”

The tribune’s thoughts went to the decayed heads he had seen at the foot of the Milestone in Videssos, generals who rebelled with Yezda backing, both of them. He also thought, uneasily, of Vardanes Sphrantzes. Apokavkos had a point.

Trying to shake the worrisome pictures from his mind, Scaurus decided to tease Phostis a bit, to see what he would do. “How can you speak so well of heretics?” he asked.

“Because they’re good people, religion or no,” Apokavkos said at once. “They aren’t like your precious islanders—begging your pardon, sir—always chipping away at other people’s ideas and changing their own whenever the wind shifts. The ‘princes’ believe what they believe and they don’t care a horseturd whether you do or not. I don’t know,” he went on uncomfortably, “I suppose they’re all damned—but if they are, old Skotos had better watch himself, because enough Vaspurakaners in his hell and they might end up taking it away from him.”

The first raid on the imperial army came two days before it got to Amorion. It was a pinprick, nothing more—a handful of Yezda waylaying a Videssian scout. When he was missed, his comrades searched until they found his body. The Yezda, of course, had plundered it and stolen his horse.

There was a slightly larger encounter the next day, when a small band of Khamorth traded arrows with the Yezda until reinforcements drove the enemy away. Trivial stuff, really, Marcus thought, until he remembered the Emperor promising the journey from Garsavra to Amorion would be as easy as that from the capital to Garsavra. More invaders were loose in the Empire than Mavrikios had thought.

And Amorion, when the army reached it, proved to have suffered badly. Lying on the northern bank of the Ithome, a tributary of the Arandos River, Amorion, like most towns in Videssos’ westlands, had long ago torn down its walls for their building stone. Yezda raiders took full advantage of the city’s helplessness, ravaging its suburbs and penetrating
almost to the river bank in several places. As the army approached, the plundered areas were barren and rubble-strewn, in stark contrast to the fertility the river brought neighboring districts.

The contingent Gagik Bagratouni had gathered to reinforce Mavrikios was not as large as the one under Baanes Onomagoulos, but it was, Marcus soon decided, made up of better men. Most were Vaspurakaners like their commander—dark, curly-haired men with bushy beards, usually heavier of build than the Videssians they lived among. They wore scale-armor; many had helmets of wicker like Senpat Sviodo’s, often ornamented with plaited horns or wings. Almost all of them looked like veterans.

“So we should,” Senpat Sviodo said when Marcus remarked on this. “At least as much as the Empire’s
akritai
, we have stood in Yezd’s way these past years and been Videssos’ shield. Believe me, it was not what we wanted, but being set where Phos chose to place his princes in this world, we had no choice.”

He shrugged, then went on, “My people tell a fable about a little lark who heard the sky was about to fall. She turned on her back with her legs in the air to catch it. ‘Have you become a tree, then?’ all the other animals asked. ‘No,’ she answered, ‘but still I must do all I can.’ So did she, and so do we.”

Just as it had for Onomagoulos, the army arranged itself in review to honor Gagik Bagratouni. As the general rode up on a roan stallion, Scaurus found himself impressed by the man’s sheer physical presence. If Caesar had been a bird of prey, a human expression of Rome’s eagle, Gagik Bagratouni was a lion.

His tawny skin, his mane of coal-black hair, and the thick dark beard that covered his wide, high-cheekboned face almost to the eyes were enough in themselves to create that impression. The steady gaze from those eyes, a hunter’s look, added to the image, as did the thrust of his nose—it was thicker and fleshier than the typical Videssian beak, but no less imperious. He even sat his horse strikingly, as if posing for an equestrian statue or, more likely, conscious that many eyes were on him.

Bagratouni held that impassive seat as he walked his horse past unit after unit. The only acknowledgment the troops got that he was so much as aware of their presence was a flick of his eyes across their ranks, the
slightest dip of his head as he passed by each commander. Mavrikios himself was not nearly so imperial of demeanor, yet it was plain Gagik Bagratouni meant no slight to the Emperor, but was merely acting as he always did.

When he came to the Romans, drawn up next to the Emperor’s Haloga guard, Bagratouni’s thick brows rose—these were men whose like he had not seen. He looked them over appraisingly, studying their equipment, their stance, their faces. Whatever his judgment was, he did not show it. But when he saw Senpat and Nevrat Sviodo standing with the Romans’ officers, his heavy features lit in the first smile Scaurus had seen from him.

He shouted something in his own tongue. His voice was in keeping with the rest of him, a bass roar. Senpat answered in the same speech; though altogether ignorant of it, Marcus heard the name “Sviodo” several times. Gagik Bagratouni cried out again, then jumped down from his horse and folded Senpat Sviodo in a bearhug, kissing him on each cheek. He did the same to Nevrat, with a different kind of gusto.

“Sahak Sviodo’s son!” he said in thickly accented Videssian, switching languages out of courtesy to the Romans around him, “and with such a lovely bride, too! Lucky you are, both of you! Sahak was a great one for pulling Yezd’s beard, yes, and the Emperor’s too, when in our affairs he stuck it. You have the very look of home—I knew him well.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Senpat answered. “He died before my beard sprouted.”

“So I heard, and a great pity it was,” Bagratouni said. “Now you must tell me—who are these strange men you travel with?”

“Have you noticed, Scaurus darling,” Viridovix said, “that every one of these Vaspurakaner omadhauns who sets eyes on you and yours is after calling you funny-looking? Right rude it is, I’m thinking.”

“Likely they saw you first,” Gaius Philippus put in, drawing a glare from Viridovix.

“Enough, you two,” Marcus said. Perhaps luckily, the Gaul and the centurion preferred Latin as a language for bickering, and the Vaspurakaners could not understand them. Scaurus named his men for Bagratouni, introduced some of his officers and, as he had done so often by now, briefly explained how they had come to Videssos.

“That is most marvelous,” Gagik Bagratouni said. “You—all of you”—His expansive gesture took in everyone the tribune had presented to him—“must to my home come this evening for a meal, and more of your tale to tell me. I would have it now, but things are piling up behind me.”

He spoke the truth there; the procession he headed, which was made up of his contingent’s officers and some of the leading officials and citizens of Amorion, had halted in confusion when he dismounted. Its members were variously standing about or sitting on horseback while waiting for him to continue. One of them in particular, a tall harsh-faced priest who had a fierce hound on a lead of stout iron chain, was staring venomously at Bagratouni. The Vaspurakaner affected not to notice, but Scaurus stood near enough to hear him mutter, “Plague take you, Zemarkhos, you shave-pated buzzard.”