Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (68 page)

On the last few words Thorisin’s voice climbed to a squeaky tenor mockery of his foe’s; he wickedly quoted young Sphrantzes’ speech to his men just before the disastrous battle. His own soldiers were mostly survivors of that fight; they added their shouts to Gavras’ derision: “Aye, give him to us, the coward!” “Send him to the amphitheater—he’d ride rings round your jockeys!” “You’d best be brave, you on the walls, if you have to fight after one of his speeches!” And Gaius Philippus, loud in Marcus’ ear: “Give him over—we’ll show him more than’s in his book, I promise!”

The torrent of scorn that poured from Gavras’ army seemed to have an effect on Ortaias’ soldiers. They were men like any others, and sensitive to their fellow professionals’ taunts. When the army’s abuse died away, there was thoughtful silence up on Videssos’ walls.

But one of Sphrantzes’ captains, a huge warrior who towered over his troops, roared out harsh, contemptuous laughter. “You ran, too, Gavras,” he bellowed, “after your brother lost his head! How are you better than the lord we serve?”

Thorisin went red and then white. He dug spurs into his horse until it screamed and reared. “Attack!” he snouted. “Kill me that slime-tongued whore’s get!” A few men took tentative steps toward the wall; most never moved from their places in column. Realistic with the stark good sense of men who risk their lives for pay, they knew such an impromptu assault on the city’s works could only end in massacre.

While Gavras wrestled his stallion to stillness, Marcus hurried forward to try to calm the Emperor. Baanes Onomagoulos was already at his side, holding the horse’s bridle and talking softly but urgently to the furious Gavras. Between them they brought his rage under control, but it did not abate for turning cold. He ground out, “The scum will pay for that, I vow.” He shook his fist at the captain on the wall, who gave back a gesture herdsmen used when they talked of breeding stock.

The officer’s cynical challenge gave spirit back to his comrades. They whooped at his obscene reply to Thorisin’s fist and sent catcalls after Gavras as his military procession moved north.

As Scaurus returned to his place, he asked Baanes Onomagoulos, “Do you know that captain of Sphrantzes’? The bastard has his wits about him.”

“So he does, worse luck for us. They were wavering up there until he opened his mouth.” Onomagoulos shaded his eyes, peered at the wall. “Nay, I can’t be sure, his helm is closed. But from the size of him, and that cursed wit, I’d guess he’s the one calls himself Outis Rhavas. If it’s him, he leads a real crew of cutthroats, they say. He’s a new man, and I don’t know much about him.”

Marcus found that strange. By his name, Outis Rhavas was a Videssian, and the tribune thought Baanes, a fighting man of thirty years’ experience, should be familiar with the Empire’s leading soldiers. Still, he reminded himself, chaos was abroad in Videssos these days, and perhaps this Rhavas was a bandit chief doing his best to prosper in it.

Even as you are, he told himself, and shook his head, disliking the comparison.

Ortaias and his uncle seemed willing to stand siege, and Thorisin, after failing in his appeal at the city’s walls, saw no choice but to undertake it.
His men went to work building an earthen rampart to seal off the neck of Videssos’ peninsula.

Some troops were almost useless for the task. Laon Pakhymer’s Khatrishers dug and carried merrily for a couple of days, then grew bored and tired of the entire process. “Can’t say I blame them,” Pakhymer pointedly told Thorisin when the Emperor tried to order them back to their labor. “We came to fight the Yezda, not in your civil war. We can always go home again, you know—truth is, I miss my wife.”

Gavras fumed, but he could hardly coerce the Khatrishers without starting a brand new civil war in his own army. Not wanting to lose the horsemen, he sent them out foraging with his Khamorth irregulars—he had not even tried to acquaint the nomads with the use of shovel and mattock.

Rather to his surprise, Marcus found he, too, missed Helvis, their storms notwithstanding. He was growing used to the idea that those would come from time to time, the inevitable result of attraction between two strong people, neither much disposed to change to suit the other’s ways. Between them, though, they had much that was good, Malric and Dosti not least. The tribune had come late to fatherhood and found it more satisfying than anything else he had set his hand to.

In the first days of the siege of Videssos, he had scant time for loneliness. Unlike Pakhymer’s troops, his Romans were men highly skilled in siege warfare. Spades and picks were part of their regular marching gear, and they erected field fortifications every night when they made camp.

Thorisin Gavras and Baanes Onomagoulos rode up to inspect the work. The Emperor wore a dissatisfied look, having just come from the amateurish barricade some of Onomagoulos’ men were slowly throwing up. As ever since his wounding, Onomagoulos’ face was set and tight, though less so now than Scaurus had sometimes seen him. Sitting a horse pained him less than the rocking hobble that was the ruin of his once-quick step.

Gavras’ expression cleared as he surveyed the broad ditch and stake-topped earthwork the legionaries already had nearly done. The Romans held the southernmost half-mile of Thorisin’s siege line. “Now here’s something more like it,” the Emperor said, more to Onomagoulos than Marcus. “A good deal better than your lads have turned out, Baanes.”

“It looks well, yes,” the older noble said shortly, not caring for the criticism. “What of it? Outlanders have some few skills: the Khamorth with the bow, the lance to the Namdaleni, and these fellows with their moles’ tricks. A useful talent now, I grant.”

He spoke offhandedly, not caring if the tribune heard, his unconscious assumption of superiority proof against embarrassment. Nettled, Marcus opened his mouth to make some hot reply. Before the words passed his lips, he remembered himself in a Roman tent in Gaul, listening to one of Caesar’s legates saying, “Now, gentlemen, we all know the Celts are headstrong and rash. If we hold the high ground, we can surely lure them into charging uphill.…”

His mouth twisted into a brief, wry grin—so this was how it felt, to be reckoned a barbarian. Helvis was right again, it seemed.

But no, not altogether; catching the sour flicker on his face, Thorisin said quickly, “One day Baanes will choke, shoving that boot of his down his throat.”

Scaurus shrugged. Thorisin’s apology felt genuine, but at the same time the Emperor was using him to score a point off the powerful lord at his side. Nothing in this land ever wore but one face, the tribune thought with a moment’s touch of despair.

He brought himself back to the business at hand. “We’re properly dug in,” he said, “from here to the sea.” He waved to the walls of Videssos the city, their shadow in the late afternoon sun reaching almost to where he stood. “Next to that, though, all we’ve done is no more than a five-year-old playing at sand castles along the beach.”

“True enough,” Gavras said. “It matters not so much, though. They may have their castles, but they can’t eat ’em, by Phos.”

“As long as they rule the sea, they don’t have to,” Marcus said, letting his chief fret loose. “They can laugh at us while they ship in supplies. Ships are the key to cracking the city, and we don’t have them.”

“The key, aye,” Thorisin murmured, his eyes far away. Scaurus realized after a few seconds that the Emperor was not lost in contemplation. He was looking southeast into the Sailors’ Sea, at the island lying on the misty edge of vision from Videssos. With abrupt quickening of interest, the Roman recalled the Videssian name for that island: it was called the Key.

But when he asked Gavras what was in his mind, the Emperor only said, “My plans are still foggy.” He smiled, as if at some private joke. Onomagoulos, Marcus saw, had no more idea of what his overlord meant than did the tribune. Somehow, that reassured him.

By coincidence, that night was one of the misty ones common on the coast even in high summer, moon and stars swallowed up by the thick gray blanket rolling off the sea at sunset. Videssos’ towers and crenelated walls disappeared as if they had never been. Torch-carrying sentries moved in hazy haloes of light; the taste of the ocean came with every indrawn breath.

Viridovix prowled along the earthwork, torch in his left hand and drawn sword in his right. “Sure and they can’t be failing to take a whack at us in this porridge, can they?” he demanded when he ran into Scaurus and Gaius Philippus. “If that were me all shut up in there, I’d give the tails of the omadhauns outside a yank they’d remember awhile.”

“So would I,” Gaius Philippus said. His ideas of warfare rarely marched with the Gaul’s, but this was such a time. He took the fog almost as a personal affront; it changed war from a game of skill, a professional’s game, into one where any cabbagehead could make himself a genius with an hour’s luck.

Marcus, though, saw what the centurion in his nervousness and the aggressive Celt missed: it was as foggy inside the city as out. “I’d bet Ortaias’ marshals are pacing the walls themselves,” he said, “waiting to hear scaling ladders shoved against them.”

Viridovix blinked, then laughed. “Aye, belike that’s the way of it,” he said. “Two farmers, the each of ’em staying up of nights to watch his own henhouse for fear the other raid it. A sleepless, thankless job they both think it, too, and me along with ’em.”

“It may be so,” Gaius Philippus conceded. “The Sphrantzai haven’t the imagination for anything risky. But what of Gavras? This should be a night to suit him—he’s a gambler born.”

“There you have me,” Scaurus said. “When the fog came down, I expected something lively would happen, but it seems I was wrong.” He recounted the afternoon’s conversation to the Roman and the Celt.

“There’s deviltry somewhere, right enough,” Gaius Philippus said. He yawned. “Whatever it is, it’ll have to get along without me until
morning. I’m turning in.” His torch held waist-high so he could see the ground ahead, he headed for his tent; the Roman camp itself was set near the sea on the flat stretch of land that had been the Videssian army’s exercise ground.

Scaurus followed him to bed a few minutes later and, to his annoyance, had trouble falling asleep. The gods knew it was peaceful almost to a fault without Dosti waking up several times a night. But the tribune missed Helvis warm on the sleeping-mat beside him. It was hardly fair, he thought as he turned restlessly: not so long ago he’d found it hard to sleep with a woman in his bed, and now as hard without one.

At the officers’ conference the next morning Thorisin Gavras seemed pleased with himself, though Marcus had no idea why; as far as the Roman knew, nothing had changed since yesterday.

“He probably found himself a bouncy girl who’d say yes and not much more,” was Soteric’s guess after the meeting broke up. “Compared to poison-tongued Komitta, that’d be pleasure enough.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Marcus laughed. “You may well be right.”

Businesslike but slow, the siege proper got under way. A few of the military engineers who had accompanied Mavrikios Gavras’ army still survived to follow his brother. Under their direction, Thorisin’s men felled trees and knocked down a few houses to get timber for the engines and ladders they would presently need. The legionaries proved skilled help for the artisans, as they were used to aiding their own engineer platoons.

Save for the countermarching men visible on the walls, Videssos did its best to ignore the siege. Ships moved freely in and out of her harbors, bringing in supplies and men. Scaurus wanted to grind his teeth every time he saw one.

“Next thing you know, the Sphrantzai will try to stir up a storm behind us and use it to hammer us on the city’s anvil. That’s the way Vardanes thinks, and it’s far from a bad plan,” the tribune said to Gaius Philippus.

The senior centurion, though, was for once an optimist. “Let them try. We’re getting more troops coming over to us than they are.”

That, Marcus had to admit, was probably true. The nobles of Videssos’
eastern dominions were not such great magnates as their counterparts in the westlands, but all the grandees, great or small, hated the bureaucrats who had seized the capital. They flocked to Thorisin’s banner, this one leading seventy retainers, that one forty, the next a hundred and fifty.

“Of course,” Gaius Philippus went on, following Scaurus’ unspoken thought, “how useful such bumpkins will prove in the fighting remains to be seen.”

After four or five clear nights the fog came again, if anything thicker than it had before. Again the tribune wondered whether the besieged Sphrantzai would try to sally under its cover, and doubled the sentries facing the capital.

It must have been near midnight when he heard shouts of alarm coming from the north. “Buccinators!” he shouted. The horns’ bright music ripped through the murk. Cursing as they scrambled from their bedrolls, legionaries poured out of the tents in camp and, still buckling on armor, began to form up.

Hoofbeats pounded toward the camp. “Are all our lads up there asleep? Sure and the spalpeens’re behind himself’s rampart, and it so much trouble to make and all,” Viridovix said.

“How would you know that?” Gaius Philippus said. “You didn’t do a lick of work on it.”

“And why should I, like some hod-toting serf? If you want to work like a kern, ’tis your own affair entirely, but you’ll not see me at it. Give me a real fight, any day.”

“I don’t think those are Ortaias’ men at all,” Quintus Glabrio said suddenly, a statement startling enough to quell the brewing quarrel at once. “There’s no sound of fighting and no more challenges from our sentries, either.”

The young officer was proved right a few minutes later, when a troop of about a hundred of Thorisin Gavras’ best Videssian cavalry rode south past the Roman camp. “Sorry about the start we gave you,” their captain called to Scaurus as he went by. “We almost trampled one of your men
up there in this Phos-cursed gloom.” The tribune believed that; even with torches held high, the horsemen disappeared before they had gone another fifty yards.

“Blow ‘stand down,’ ” Marcus ordered his trumpeters. The legionaries stood for a moment as if suspecting a trick, then, shaking their heads in annoyance, went back to their still-warm blankets.