Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (42 page)

“No! Phos have mercy, no!” Doukitzes shrieked, twisting free of his captors to fall at Mavrikios’ feet. He seized the Emperor’s knees and
kissed the hem of his robe, babbling, “I’ll never do it again! By Phos I swear it! Never, never! Mercy, my lord, I beg, mercy!”

The luckless thief’s tentmates looked at the Emperor in horror—they’d wanted their light-fingered comrade chastised, yes, but not mutilated.

Marcus was equally appalled at Gavras’ Draconian judgment. In theory, thievery in the Roman army could be punished by death, but hardly over the trifling sum at issue here. He stood up from the mapcase through which he’d been searching. “Your Majesty, is this justice?” he asked through Doukitzes’ wails.

Save only the prisoner, everyone in the imperial tent—Mavrikios, the Haloga guards, the Videssian soldiers, and the Emperor’s ubiquitous servants—turned to stare at the Roman, amazed anyone would dare call the sovereign to account.

The Emperor was chilly as the eternal snow topping the peaks of Vaspurakan. “Captain of mercenaries, you forgot yourself. You have our leave to go.” Never before had Mavrikios used the imperial “we” to the tribune; it was a manifest note of warning.

But Scaurus’ ways were those of a land that knew no king, nor was he trained from birth to accept any one man as the embodiment of authority and law. Still, he was glad to hear the steadiness in his voice as he replied, “No, sir. I recall myself better than you. In your worry over great affairs, you are letting rancor get the better of you in small ones. To take a man’s hand for a few coppers is not justice.”

The tent grew very still. The imperial servitors flinched away from Scaurus, as if not wanting to be contaminated by his blasphemous practice of speaking the truth as he saw it. The Halogai might have been carved from wood; the Videssian common soldiers, even Doukitzes, faded from the tribune’s perception as he waited to see if Mavrikios would doom him too.

The Emperor slowly said, “Do you know what I could do to you for your insolence?”

“No worse than Avshar could, I’m sure.”

A chamberlain gasped, somewhere to Scaurus’ left. He did not turn his head, keeping his attention only on the Emperor. Gavras was studying him as intently. Without removing his eyes from the tribune, Mavrikios
said to the Halogai, “Take this grizzling fool”—He stirred Doukitzes with his foot—“outside and give him five lashes, well laid on, then let his mates take him back.”

Doukitzes scuttled across the floor to Marcus. “Thank you, great lord, oh thank you!” He offered no resistance as the Halogai led him away.

“Does that satisfy you, then?” Mavrikios asked.

“Yes, your Majesty, completely.”

“First man I’ve ever seen go happy to a whipping,” the Emperor remarked, raising an ironic eyebrow. He was still watching Scaurus closely. “It wasn’t just pride, then, was it, that made you refuse me the proskynesis back in Videssos all those months ago?”

“Pride?” That had never occurred to the Roman. “No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so, even then,” Mavrikios said with something like respect. “If I had, you’d’ve regretted it soon enough.” He laughed mirthlessly.

“Now get out of here,” he went on, “before I decide I should have you killed after all.” Scaurus left quickly, only half-sure he was joking.

“You were very brave, and even more foolish,” Helvis said that night. Lazy after love, they lay side by side in her tent, his hand still curled over her breast. Her heartbeat filled his palm.

“Was I? I didn’t really think about being either at the time. It didn’t seem right, though, to have all Mavrikios’ wrath come down on that poor wretch. His worst fault wasn’t stealing a few pennies, it was being in the Emperor’s way at the wrong time.”

“His anger could have condemned you as easily as that worthless Videssian.” Helvis sounded thoroughly afraid. She might come from a folk freer than the Empire’s, Marcus thought, but she took the Avtokrator’s absolute power as much for granted as any of Videssos’ citizens.

Her fear, though, did not spring from any such abstract reason, but a far more basic concern. Her hand took his, guided it down the smooth softness of her belly. “You were a featherbrain,” she said. “Would you want your child to grow up fatherless?”

“My …?” The tribune sat up on the soft sleeping-mat, looked down
at Helvis, who still held his hand against her. She smiled up at him. “You’re sure?” he asked foolishly.

Her warm rich laughter filled the small tent. “Of course I am, simpleton. There is a way of knowing such things, you know.” She sat up, too, and kissed him.

He returned the embrace eagerly, not from the lust but sheer gladness. Then something struck him funny. “How could I know this morning that I might be making my child an orphan, when I didn’t know there was a child?”

Helvis poked him in the ribs. “Don’t you go chopping logic with me, like some priest. I knew, and that’s enough.”

And so perhaps it was. Good omens had been scarce lately, but what could be better before a battle than the creation of new life?

The next morning, the patrols Mavrikios sent riding north finally met the supply barges toiling their way upstream. The squat, ugly vessels reached Soli late that afternoon. Their journey had not been easy; marauding Yezda along both banks of the Rhamnos had made it impossible to use horses to tow the boats, and their arrows made life hellish for the barges’ rowers.

One had lost so many men it could no longer make headway against the stream and drifted aground in the shallows by the riverbank. The rest of the fleet picked up its surviving crew, but the Yezda gleefully burnt the stricken craft to the waterline.

That night there was no time for worry over haunted surroundings. Men labored till dawn, hurling sacks of grain into hundreds of wagons. When the sun rose, the army rumbled over the great stone bridge spanning the Rhamnos and pushed its way into Vaspurakan.

Marcus soon saw what had moved Senpat Sviodo to such bitter hatred. The Yezda had done their worst in Videssos, but the destruction they wrought there was but the work of a few seasons. Vaspurakan had felt the invaders’ hand far longer and far more heavily; in some frequently ravaged passes, fair-sized second growth was already springing up to shroud the ruins of what, in happier times, were farm and villages.

The raiders had come so often to the princes’ land, they were beginning
to think of it as their proper home. Just as he had outside Imbros, the tribune watched herdsmen drive their flocks up into the mountains at the first sight of the army. But these were not Videssians afoot with their herd dogs; they were nomad archers mounted on shaggy steppe ponies, looking uncomfortably like the Khamorth with the imperial forces.

In Vaspurakan even walled cities were under Yezda control, either stormed or, more often, simply starved into submission. Mavrikios’ host came to the first of these two days out of Soli—a town called Khliat, whose shadow in the afternoon sun ran long down the valley through which the army was traveling.

The Yezda commander refused surrender with a brusque message eerily close to Scaurus’ retort to the Emperor: “If you conquer, you could do me no worse harm than my lords would, should I yield.”

Gavras did not waste time in further negotiations. Using what light remained, he surrounded Khliat, quickly driving the Yezda skirmishers back inside the city’s walls. Once the encirclement was complete, he rode round the town just out of bowshot, deciding where it was most vulnerable to siege engines.

Again the night was furiously busy, this time with soldiers unloading the precut timbers and other specialized gear of the siege train. At the officers’ council that night, the Emperor declared, “Our assault party tomorrow will be made up of Romans and Namdaleni. As the most heavily armed troops we have, they are best suited to forcing their way through breached walls.”

Marcus gulped. Mavrikios’ reasoning was probably sound, but the attacking force’s casualties could well be hideous. The Namdaleni would fill their ranks with new recruits from the Duchy, but where was he to find new Romans?

“May your Majesty it please,” Gagik Bagratouni spoke up, “but I the privilege of leading this assault would beg for my men. It is their homes they are freeing. Their armors may be lighter, but their hearts shall be so too.”

Mavrikios rubbed his chin. “Be it so, then,” he decided. “Spirit has raised more than one victory where it had no right to grow.”

“Well, well, the gods do look out for us after all,” Gaius Philippus whispered behind his hand to Scaurus.

“You’ve been in this wizards’ land so long you’ve taken up mind-reading,” Marcus whispered back. The centurion bared his teeth in a silent chuckle.

After the meeting broke up, Soteric fell into step beside the tribune. “How interesting,” he said sardonically, “and how lucky for you, to be chosen to share the butcher’s bill with us. The Emperor is glad of our help, aye, and glad to bleed us white, too.”

“Weren’t you listening? The Vaspurakaners are going in our stead.”

Soteric gestured in disgust. “Only because Bagratouni has more honor than sense. True, we’re spared, but not forgotten, I promise you. Everyone knows what Mavrikios thinks of the men of the Duchy, and you did yourself no good when you stood up to him yesterday. You’ll pay—wait and see.”

“You’ve been talking to your sister again,” Marcus said.

“Helvis? No, I haven’t seen her today.” Soteric eyed the tribune curiously. “By the Wager, man, don’t you know? Every blasted Videssian is buzzing over how you saved twelve men from having their heads chopped off.”

Scaurus exchanged a consternation-filled glance with Gaius Philippus. No matter how much he tried to evade the role, it seemed he was being cast as the Emperor’s opponent. That notwithstanding, though, he thought Soteric was wrong. Mavrikios Gavras might be devious in his dealings with his foes, but there was never any doubt who those foes were.

When he said as much to the Namdalener, Soteric laughed at his naiveté. “Wait and see,” he repeated and, still shaking his head over what he saw as the Roman’s gullibility, went off about his business.

Gaius Philippus gave thoughtful study to the islander’s retreating back. He waited until Soteric was too far away to hear him before delivering his verdict. “That one will always see the worst in things, whether or not it’s there.” Coming from the centurion, a pessimist born, the statement was startling.

Gaius Philippus glanced warily at Scaurus; after all, the man he was dispraising was the brother of the tribune’s woman. Even so, Marcus had to nod. The characterization was too apt to gainsay.

Matching their commander’s defiance, the Yezda inside Khliat roared their war cries at the Videssian army from the city’s walls. The rising sun glinted bloodily off their sabers. It was a brave show, but not one to frighten the professionals in the audience. “This will be easy,” Gaius Philippus said. “There aren’t enough of them by half to give us trouble.”

Events quickly proved him right. The imperial army’s bolt-throwing engines and the strong bows of the Khamorth sent such floods of darts against Khliat’s defenders that the latter could not stop Videssian rams from reaching the wall in three separate places. The ground shook as each stroke did its pulverizing work.

One ram was put out of action for a time when the Yezda managed to tear some skins from its covering shed and dropped red-hot sand on the men who worked it, but new troops rushed forward to take the place of those who fell. The sheds’ green hides were proof against the burning oil and firebrands the nomads flung down on them, and many defenders bold enough to expose themselves in such efforts paid for their courage with their lives.

The wall crumbled before one ram, then, only minutes later, before a second. Yezda on the battlements shrieked in terror and anguish as they slid through crashing stones to the ground below. Others, cleverly stationed behind the masonry the rams were battering, sent withering volleys into the siege engines’ crews.

Then the Vaspurakaners were rushing toward the riven wall, Gagik Bagratouni at their head. Their battlecries held a savage joy, a fierce satisfaction in striking back at the invaders who had worked such ruin on their homeland.

A Yezda wizard, an angular figure in flapping blood-colored robes, clambered onto shattered masonry in one of the breaches to hurl a thunderbolt at the onstorming foe. But Marcus learned what Nepos had meant when he spoke of battle magic’s unreliability. Though lightning glowed from the mage’s fingertips, it flickered and died less than an arm’s length from his body. At his failure, one of his own soldiers sabered him down in disgust.

The fight at the breaches was sharp but short. The Yezda were not natural foot soldiers, nor was there any place for their usual darting cavalry tactics in the defense of a fortified town. More heavily armored than their opponents, the Vaspurakaners hammered their way through the nomads’ resistance and into Khliat.

When he saw the enemy forces heavily committed against the “princes,” Mavrikios gave the order for a general assault. Like a sudden bare-branched forest, ladders leaped upward at Khliat’s walls. Here and there still-resolute defenders sent them toppling over with a crash, but soon the imperial forces gained a lodgement on the wall and began dropping down into the city itself.