Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (41 page)

The nomads Yezd was funneling into the Empire were perfectly at home in such a desert. Trained to the harsh school of the steppe, they lived with ease where the Videssian army would have starved without the supplies it carried. More and more of them shadowed the imperial forces. When they thought the odds were in their favor they would nip in to raid, then vanish once more like smoke in a breeze.

Their forays grew bolder as time passed. About midway between Amorion and Soli, one band of about fifty broke through the army’s screen of Khamorth outriders and dashed across the front of the marching column, spraying arrows into it as they rode.

Marcus saw the cloud of dust come rolling out of the west, but did not think much of it. Maybe, he thought, the scouts had spotted a good-sized Yezda party and were sending messengers back for aid.

Gaius Philippus disagreed. “There’s too many there for that.” His face went suddenly grim. “I don’t think those are our men at all.”

“What? Don’t be absurd. They’d have to have—” Whatever argument the tribune was about to make died unspoken when one of the legionaries cried in pain and alarm as an arrow pierced his arm. The range was ungodly long, but quickly closed as the nomads, riding their light horses for all they were worth, zipped past the column’s head, emptying their quivers as fast as they could. At their heels was a troop of Khamorth in imperial service.

“All maniples halt!” Gaius Philippus’ battlefield roar rang out. “Shields up!” The Romans unslung their
scuta
and raised them to cover their faces.

There was nothing else they could do; the Yezda were racing by, far out of
pilum-range
. Adiatun and his slingers let fly with a few hasty bullets, but they fell short. What the Khamorth had thought all along, then, was true—the nomads’ bows easily outranged any weapons the Romans had. Scaurus filed the fact for future worry.

The raiders broke up into groups of four and five and scattered in all directions. They had done nothing that could be called damage, but had managed to throw an army a thousand times their number into confusion.

Videssos’ mercenary cavalry were still after the Yezda. More and more raced up to join the chase. Marcus was hard-pressed to tell friend from foe. In the swirling dust ahead, the nomads who fought under Yezd’s banner looked little different from the Empire’s hirelings. Perhaps the Khamorth themselves had the same problem, for not a handful of Yezda were brought down before the rest made good their escape.

The officers’ meeting the Emperor called that night was not happy. The raiders’ bravado stung Mavrikios, who was further infuriated by its going all but unpunished. “Phos’ suns!” the Emperor burst out. “Half a day’s march wasted on account of a few scraggly, unwashed barbarians! You, sirrah!” he barked at Ortaias Sphrantzes.

“Your Majesty?”

“What was that twaddle you were spouting? Something about the only people to catch nomads are other nomads?” The Emperor waited ominously, but Sphrantzes, with better sense than Scaurus had thought he owned—or was it simply terror?—kept silent.

Prudent though it was, his silence did not save him. “Those were your bloody nomads the Yezda rode through, boy. If they do it again, you can forget your precious left wing—you’ll be back at the rear, in charge of horsedung pickup.” When angry, Mavrikios was plainly Thorisin’s brother. The Sevastokrator himself was saying no more than Ortaias Sphrantzes, but from his grin he was enjoying every bit of Mavrikios’ tirade.

When the Emperor was through, Ortaias rose, bowed jerkily, and, muttering, “I’ll certainly try to do better,” made an undignified exit from the imperial tent.

His departure only partly pacified Mavrikios. He rounded on Sphrantzes’ nominal subordinate Nephon Khoumnos: “You’ll be right there with him, you know. I put the two of you together so your way of doing things would rub off on him, not the other way around.”

“Anything can go wrong once,” Khoumnos said stolidly. As was his style, he shouldered the blame without complaint. “They burst out of a wash and caught us napping. If it happens again, I deserve to be shoveling horseballs, by Phos.”

“We’ll leave it at that, then,” the Emperor nodded, somewhat mollified.

Khoumnos was as good as his word, too; his cavalry pickets foiled ambush after ambush the rest of the way to Soli. The march slowed nonetheless. Skirmishes with the invaders were constant now, skirmishes that in a lesser campaign would have been reckoned full-scale battles. Time after time the army had to push the Yezda aside before it could press on.

The country through which it passed grew ever more barren, devastated. Save for the Videssian host and its foes, the land was nearly uninhabited, its farmers and hersdmen either dead or fled. The only substantial remaining population was in walled towns. There were not many of these after the long years of peace, nor were all of them unscathed. Where field and farm could not be worked, towns withered on the vine.

The army passed more than one empty shell of what had been a city but now housed only carrion birds—or, worse, Yezda who based themselves in abandoned buildings and fought like cornered rats when attacked.

Here as elsewhere, the invaders reserved their worst savagery for Phos’ temples. Their other barbarities paled next to the fiendish ingenuity they devoted to such desecrations. Not all altars were so lucky as to be hacked to kindling; the bloody rites and sacrifices celebrated on others made mere desecration seem nothing more than a childish prank. As seasoned a veteran as Nephon Khoumnos puked up his supper after emerging from one ravaged shrine. Where before the Emperor had encouraged his troops to view their enemies’ handiwork, now he began ordering the polluted fanes sealed so as not to dishearten them further.

“Such foulness points to Avshar, sure as a lodestone draws nails,” Gorgidas said. “We must be getting near him.”

“Good!” Gaius Philippus said emphatically. He had commanded the Roman party ordered to guard a sealed temple and used the privilege of his rank to break the seals and go inside. He came bursting out through the door an instant later, face pale beneath his deep tan and sweat beading on his forehead. “The sooner such filth is cleaned from the world, the better for all in it—aye, including the poor damned whoresons who follow him.”

Marcus did not think he had heard his senior centurion ever speak thus of a foe. War was Gaius Philippus’ trade, as carpentry might be another man’s, and he accorded his opponents the respect their skills merited. Curious, the tribune wondered aloud, “What was it you saw in that temple?”

Gaius Philippus’ face froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. Through clenched teeth he said, “If it please you, sir, never ask me that again. The gods willing, I may forget before I die.”

The imperial army reached Soli a joyless force. What they found there did nothing to raise their spirits. The new town, wall-less in the fashion of so many Videssian cities, had snuggled against the Rhamnos River’s turbid yellow waters, the better to lure trade. Old Soli on the hills above, a garrison against Makuran for hundreds of years, was all but deserted … until the Yezda came.

Then the new city fell in fire and death—sacked repeatedly, in fact, over the years, until nothing was left to loot. And Old Soli, far down the road to extinction, had a modest rebirth as survivors from the riverbank town patched its dilapidated walls and began to repair the tumbledown buildings from which their six-times-great-grandsires had sprung.

Heedless of the omens his men might draw, Mavrikios made camp amidst the ruins of the dead city by the Rhamnos. An army the size of his needed more water than Old Soli’s wells and cisterns could provide, and the river was the logical place to get it. It made perfect military sense, but also made the soldiers edgy.

“Sure and there’s bound to be angry ghosts about,” Viridovix said, “all crying out for revenge on them that slew ’em. There!” he exclaimed. “Do you hear the keening of them?” Sure enough, a series of mournful cries came from the darkness outside the Roman camp.

“That’s an owl, you great booby,” Gaius Philippus said.

“Och, aye, it
sounds
like an owl.” But the Gaul was anything but convinced.

Marcus shifted uneasily in his seat by the fire. He told himself he did not believe in ghosts and was able to convince the front part of his mind that he spoke the truth. Deeper down, he was not so sure. And if there were ghosts, they would surely live in such a place as this.

Most of the buildings of murdered Soli had perished either at the hands of the Yezda or through time’s decay, but here and there a tower or a jagged section of some well-made building still stood, deeper blacknesses against the night sky. It was from these the owls’ plaintive notes and the whirring call of the nightjar emanated—if that was what the noises were. No one seemed anxious to investigate, nor was the tribune inclined to ask for volunteers.

As if the place was not eerie enough, a thin mist crept up from the Rhamnos as the night wore on, half shrouding the imperial camp. Now it was Gaius Philippus’ turn to fret. “I don’t like this a bit,” he declared as the fog swallowed one watchfire after another. “Belike it’s some sending of Avshar’s, to veil his attack till it’s on us.” He peered out into the rolling mist, trying to penetrate it by will alone. Inevitably he failed, which only increased his unease.

But Marcus had grown up in Mediolanum, hard by the Padus River’s tributary the Olonna. He had to shake his head. “Mist often rises from a river at night—it’s nothing to worry over.”

“Quite so,” Gorgidas agreed. “Nature has provided that particles go up into the air from oceans and streams. This fog is but the forerunner of a cloud. When the vapor rises to meet opposite emanations coming down from the ether which holds the stars, it will condense into a true cloud.”

The Epicurean account of cloud formation did nothing to reassure the centurion. Viridovix tried to tease him back to good humor. “You
didna trouble yoursel’ when you saw the very land steam or ever we came to Garsavra. Of course,” he added cunningly, “a good deal further from the Yezda we were then.”

Not even the imputation of cowardice could get much response from Gaius Philippus. He shook his head, muttering, “It’s this bloody place, that’s all; even without fogs it’s like camping in a tomb. We couldn’t leave too soon to suit me.”

But for all the senior centurion’s wholehearted desire to be gone, the imperial army did not set forth at once. Scouts spying out the ways through Vaspurakan reported that the land west of Soli was a desolation stripped bare of almost every living thing.

Senpat Sviodo and his wife were among the riders who went into Vaspurakan. “There will be a reckoning for this, if it takes a thousand years,” he said. What he had seen in his birthland had burned some of his youth away forever. The cold fury in his voice and on his face seemed better suited to a man of twice his years.

“Our poor people survive only in the mountain forests and in a few fastnesses,” Nevrat said. She sounded weary beyond belief; her eyes were full of sorrow too bitter for tears. “The meadows, the farmlands—nothing moves there but Yezda and other beasts.”

“I had hoped to bring a band of princes back with me, to fight under the Emperor’s banner against the invaders,” Senpat continued, “but no one was left to bring.” His hands shook in impotent fury.

Marcus studied the harsh lines newly etched on either side of Senpat’s mouth. The jolly youngster he’d met a few short days before would be a long time reappearing, and the tribune was not sure he cared for this grim almost-stranger who had taken his place. Nevrat clasped her husband’s hands in her own, trying to draw the pain from him, but he sat staring straight ahead, only the vision of his ravaged homeland before him.

In such territory the army could not hope to live off the land; it would have to carry its own provisions through the wasteland. Mavrikios gave orders for grain to be brought up the Rhamnos from the coastal plain to the north, and then had to wait with his men until the boats arrived.

The onerous delay in such dismal surroundings strained the Emperor’s
disposition to the breaking point. He had been short-tempered since the handful of Yezda raiders disrupted the army’s march. Now, stymied again, frustration ate at him when each day failed to see the coming of the needed supplies. Men walked warily around him, fearful lest his pent-up rage lash out against them.

The abcess burst on the fifth day at Soli. Scaurus happened to be close by. He wanted to borrow a map of Vaspurakan from the collection Mavrikios kept in his tent, the better to follow Senpat Sviodo’s description of the land through which they would be passing if the supply ships ever came.

Two Halogai of the Imperial Guard pushed through the tentflaps, dragging a scrawny Videssian soldier between them. Three more Videssians nervously followed the northerners.

“What’s this?” the Emperor demanded.

One of the guardemen answered, “This worthless piece of offal has been filching coppers from his mates.” He shook his prisoner hard enough to make the teeth snap in his head.

“Has he now?” The Emperor looked up at the Videssian soldiers behind the Halogai. “You three are witnesses, I suppose?”

“Your Majesty, sir?” said one of them. All three had been gaping at the luxurious interior of the tent, its soft bed and cleverly designed light furnishings—Mavrikios was of less spartan taste than Thorisin.

“Witnesses, are you?” the Emperor repeated. By his tone, his patience was very short.

Between them, they got the story out. The prisoner, whose name was Doukitzes, had been caught emptying a coin pouch when his three fellows unexpectedly returned to the tent the four of them shared. “We thought a few stripes would make him keep his fingers off what don’t belong to him,” one of the soldiers said, “and these fellows,” he pointed to the Halogai, “happened to be coming by, so—”

“Stripes?” Gavras interrupted. He gestured contemptuously. “A thief forgets stripes before they’re done healing. We’ll give him something he’ll remember the rest of his days.” He turned back to the Halogai and snapped, “Take his hand off at the wrist.”