Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (49 page)

“Maybe not, but you ride like devils loosed. Put me on a horse and I’d break my backside, or more likely my neck.” The feeble jest aside, Marcus looked approvingly at the Khatrisher. It had taken a cool head to see ahead till nightfall in the chaos of the afternoon.

It was as well the Yezda did not press an attack while the camp was building. The Romans, dazed with fatigue, moved like sleepwalkers. They dug and lifted with slow, dogged persistence, knowing sleep would claim them if they halted for an instant. The stragglers who had joined them helped as best they could, hampered not only by exhaustion but also by inexperience at this sort of work.

Most of the non-Romans were merely faces to Scaurus as he walked
through the camp, but some he knew. He was surprised to see Doukitzes busily fixing stakes atop the earthen breastwork the legionaries had thrown up. He would not have thought the skinny little Videssian whose hand he’d saved likely to last twenty minutes on the battlefield. Yet here he was, hale and whole, with countless tall strapping men no more than stiffening corpses … Tzimiskes, Adiatun, Mouzalon, how many more? Spying Marcus, Doukitzes waved shyly before returning to his task.

Zeprin the Red was here too. The burly Haloga was not working; he sat in the dust with his head in his hands, a picture of misery. Scaurus stooped beside him. Zeprin caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and looked up to see who had come to disturb his wretchedness. “Ah, it’s you, Roman,” he said, his voice a dull parody of his usual bull roar. A great bruise purpled his left temple and cheekbone.

“Are you in much pain?” the tribune asked. “I’ll send our physician to see to you.”

The northerner shook his head. “I need no leech, unless he know the trick of cutting out a wounded recall. Mavrikios lies dead, and me not there to ward him.” He covered his face once more.

“Surely you cannot blame yourself for that, when it had to be the Emperor himself who sent you from him?”

“Sent me from him, aye,” Zeprin echoed bitterly. “Sent me to stiffen the left after Khoumnos fell, the gods save a spot by their hearthfire for him. But the fighting was good along the way, and I was ever fonder of handstrokes than the bloodless business of orders. Mavrikios used to twit me for it. And so I was slower than I should have been, and Ortaias the bold”—He made the name a curse—“kept charge.”

Anger roughened his voice, an anger cold and black as the storm-clouds of his wintry home. “I knew he was a dolt, but took him not for coward. When the horseturd fled, I wasn’t yet nearby to stem the rout before it passed all checking. Had I paid more heed to my duty and less to the feel of my axe in my hands, it might be the Yezda who were skulking fugitives this night.”

Marcus could only nod and listen; there was enough truth in Zeprin’s self-blame to make consolation hard. With bleak quickness, the Haloga finished his tale: “I was fighting my way back to the Emperor when I got this.” He touched his swollen face. “Next I knew, I was staggering along
with one arm draped over your little doctor’s shoulder.” The tribune did not recall noticing Gorgidas supporting the massive northerner, but then the Greek would not have been easy to see under Zeprin’s bulk.

“Not even a warrior’s death could I give Mavrikios,” the Haloga mourned.

At that, Scaurus’ patience ran out. “Too many died today,” he snapped. “The gods—yours, mine, the Empire’s, I don’t much care which—be thanked some of us are left alive to save what we can.”

“Aye, there will be a reckoning,” Zeprin said grimly, “and I know where it must start.” The chill promise in his eyes would have set Ortaias Sphrantzes running again, were he there to see it.

The Roman camp was not so far from the battlefield as to leave behind the moans of the wounded. So many lay hurt that the sound of their suffering traveled far. No single voice stood out, nor single nation; at any moment, the listeners could not tell if the anguish they heard came from the throat of a Videssian grandee slowly bleeding to death or a Yezda writhing around an arrow in his belly.

“There’s a lesson for us all, not that we have the wit to heed it,” Gorgidas remarked as he snatched a moment’s rest before moving on to the next wounded man.

“And what might that be?” Viridovix asked with a mock-patient sigh.

“In pain, all men are brothers. Would there were an easier way to make them so.” He glared at the Celt, daring him to argue. Viridovix was the first to look away; he stretched, scratched his leg, and changed the subject.

Scaurus found sleep at last, a restless sleep full of nasty dreams. No sooner had he closed his eyes, it seemed, than a legionary was shaking him awake. “Begging your pardon, sir,” the soldier said, “but you’re needed at the palisade.”

“What? Why?” the tribune mumbled, rubbing at sticky eyes and wishing the Roman would go away and let him rest.

The answer he got banished sleep as rudely as a bucket of cold water. “Avshar would have speech with you, sir.”

“What?” Without his willing it, Marcus’ hand was tight round his swordhilt. “All right. I’ll come.” He threw on full armor as quickly as he could—no telling what trickery Yezd’s wizard-prince might intend. Then, blade naked in his hand, he followed the legionary through the fitfully slumbering camp.

Two Khatrisher sentries peered out into the darkness beyond the watchfires’ reach. Each carried a nocked arrow in his bow. “He rode in like a guest invited to a garden party, your honor, he did, and asked for you by name,” one of them told Scaurus. With the usual bantam courage of his folk, he was more indignant over Avshar’s unwelcome arrival than awed by the sorcerer’s power.

Not so his comrade, who said, “We fired, sir, the both of us, several times. He was so close we could not have missed, but none of our shafts would bite.” His eyes were wide with fear.

“We drove the whoreson back out of range, though,” the first Khatrisher said stoutly.

The druids’ marks graven into Marcus’ Gallic blade glowed yellow, not fiercely as they had when Avshar tried spells against him, but still warning of sorcery. Fearless as a tiger toying with mice, the wizard-prince emerged from the darkness that was his own, sitting statue-still atop his great sable horse. “Worms! You could not drive a maggot across a turd!”

The bolder-tongued Khatrisher barked an oath and drew back his bow to shoot. Scaurus checked him, saying, “You’d waste your dart again, I think—he has a protecting glamour wrapped round himself.”

“Astutely reasoned, prince of insects,” Avshar said, granting the tribune a scornful dip of his head. “But this is a poor welcome you grant me, when I have but come to give back something of yours I found on the field today.”

Even if Marcus had not already known the quality of the enemy he faced, the sly, evil humor lurking in that cruel voice would have told him the wizard’s gift was one to delight the giver, not him who received it. Yet he had no choice but to play Avshar’s game out to the end. “What price do you put on it?” he asked.

“Price. None at all. As I said, it is yours. Take it, and welcome.” The wizard-prince reached down to something hanging by his right boot,
tossed it underhanded toward the tribune. It was still in the air when he wheeled his stallion and rode away.

Marcus and his companions skipped aside, afraid of some last treachery. But the wizard’s gift landed harmlessly inside the palisade, rolling until it came to rest at the tribune’s feet. Then Avshar’s jest was clear in all its horror, for staring sightlessly up at Scaurus, its features stiffened into a grimace of agony, was Mavrikios Gavras’ head.

The sentries did shoot after the wizard-prince then, blindly, hopelessly. His fell laugh floated back to tell them how little their arrows were worth.

With his gift for scenting trouble, Gaius Philippus hurried up to the rampart. He wore only military kilt and helmet, and carried his
gladius
naked in his hand. He almost stumbled over Avshar’s gift; his face hardened as he recognized it for what it was. “How did it come here?” was all he said.

Marcus told him, or tried to. The thread of the story kept breaking whenever he looked down into the dead Emperor’s eyes.

The senior centurion heard him out, then growled, “Let the damned wizard have his boast. It’ll cost him in the end, you wait and see. This”—He gave Mavrikios a last Roman salute—“doesn’t show us anything we didn’t already know. Instead of wasting time with it, Avshar could have been finishing Thorisin. But he let him get away—and with a decent part of army, too, once they start pulling themselves together.”

Scaurus nodded, heartened. Gaius Philippus had the right of it. As long as Thorisin Gavras survived, Videssos had a leader—and after this disaster, the Empire would need all the troops it could find.

The tribune’s mind went to the morning, to getting free of the field of Maragha. The legionaries’ discipline would surely pay again, as it had this afternoon; overwhelming triumph left the Yezda almost as disordered as defeat did their foes. Now he had the Khatrisher horse, too, so he could hope to meet the nomads on their own terms. One way or another, he told himself, he would manage.

He stared a challenge in the direction Avshar had gone, said quietly, “No, the game’s not over yet. Far from it.”

A
SCOUTING COLUMN OF THREE COHORTS OF
R
OMAN LEGIONARIES
, led by military tribune Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and senior centurion Gaius Philippus, was returning to Julius Caesar’s main army when they were ambushed by Gauls. To prevent mass slaughter, the Gallic commander Viridovix offered single combat, and Marcus accepted. Both men bore druids’ swords, that of Marcus being battle spoil. When the blades crossed, a dome of light sprang up around them. Suddenly the Romans and Viridovix were in an unfamiliar world with strange stars.

They soon discovered they were in the war-torn Empire of Videssos, a land where priests of the god Phos could work real magic. They were hired as a mercenary unit by the Empire and spent the winter in the provincial town of Imbros, learning the language and customs.

When spring came, they marched to Videssos the city, capital of the Empire. There Marcus met the soldier-Emperor Mavrikios Gavras, his brother Thorisin, and the prime minister, Vardanes Sphrantzes, a bureaucrat whose enmity Marcus incurred. At a banquet in the Romans’ honor, Marcus met Mavrikios’ daughter Alypia and accidentally spilled wine on the wizard Avshar, envoy of Yezd, Videssos’ western enemy. Avshar demanded a duel. When the wizard tried to cheat with sorcery, Marcus’ druid sword neutralized the spell, and Marcus won.

Avshar tried for revenge with an enchanted dagger in the hands of a nomad under his spell. The Videssian priest Nepos was horrified at the use of evil magic. Avshar forfeited the protection granted envoys.

Marcus was sent to arrest Avshar, accompanied by Hemond and a squad of Namdaleni, mercenaries from the island nation of Namdalen. But Avshar had fled, leaving a sorcerous trap that killed Hemond. Marcus was given Hemond’s sword to take to his widow, Helvis.

Avshar’s offenses served as justification for Videssos to declare war
on Yezd, which had been raiding deep into the western part of the Empire. Troops—native and mercenary—flooded into the capital as Videssos prepared for war. Tension rose between Videssians and the growing number of Namdaleni because of differences in their worship of Phos. To the religiously liberal Romans, the differences were minor, but each side considered the other heretics. The Videssian patriarch Balsamon preached a sermon of toleration, which eased the tension for the moment.

But fanatic Videssian monks stirred up trouble again. Rioting broke out, and Marcus was sent with a force of Romans to help quell it. Going into a dark courtyard to break up a rape, he discovered that the intended victim was Helvis. Caught up in the moment, they made love. And after the riots subsided, she and her son joined him in the Romans’ barracks. Other Romans had already found partners.

At last the unwieldy army moved west against Yezd, accompanied by women and dependents. Marcus was pleased to learn Helvis was pregnant, but shocked to discover Ortaias Sphrantzes commanded the army’s left wing; he was only slightly mollified on finding the young man was a figurehead, hostage for Vardanes Sphrantzes’ good behavior.

More troops joined the army in the westlands, including those of Baanes Onomagoulos and Gagik Bagratouni, a noble driven from his home in mountainous Vaspurakan by Yezda. Two other Vaspurakaners, Senpat Sviodo and his wife Nevrat, were acting as guides for the Romans. All Vaspurakaners were hated as heretics by a local priest, Zemarkhos, Zemarkhos cursed Bagratouni, who threw him and his dog into a sack, then beat the sack. Fearing a pogrom, Marcus interceded for him.

The Yezda began hit-and-run raids against the imperial army as it moved closer to Yezd. Then an advance force of Onomagoulos’ troops was pinned down near the town of Maragha. Leaving the army’s dependents behind at Khliat, the Emperor moved forward to rescue them.