Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (71 page)

An awkward footfall ahead, a muttered curse. As the woman approached, Marcus reflected there was scant need to ask her why she was walking through the night. Her slit skirt swung open with every step she took, giving glimpses of her white thighs.

Unlike the soldiers, she saw the tribune almost as soon as he knew she was there. She came boldly up to him. She was slim and dark and smelled of stale scent, wine, and sweat.

Her smile, half-seen in the darkness, was professionally inviting. “You’re a tall one,” she said, looking Marcus up and down. Her speech held the rhythm of the capital, quick and sharp, almost staccato. “Do you want to come with me? I’ll make that scowl up and go, I promise.” Scaurus had not known he was frowning. He smoothed his features as best he could.

The lacing of her blouse was undone; he could see her small breasts. He felt a tightness in his chest, as if he were trying to breathe deep in a too-tight cuirass. “Yes, I’ll go with you,” he said. “Is it far?”

“No, not very. Show me your money,” she said, all business now.

That brought him up short. Save for the mantle he was naked, even his sandals left behind. But as he started to spread his hands regretfully, a glint of silver on his right index finger made him pause. He pulled the ring free, held it out to her. “Will this do?”

She hefted it, held it close to her face, then smiled again and reached for him with knowing fingers.

As she promised, her small tent was close by. Shrugging off his cloak, Scaurus wondered if she was what he sought. He doubted it, but lay down beside her nonetheless.

“W
HAT
? R
ESAINA FALLEN TO THE
Y
EZDA
?” G
AIUS
P
HILIPPUS WAS SAYING
to Viridovix, astonishment in his voice. “Where did you hear that?”

“One o’ the sailor lads it was told me, last night over knucklebones. Aye, it’s certain sure, he says. What with their moving around so much and all, those sailors get the news or ever anyone else does.”

“Yes, and it’s always bad,” Marcus said, spooning up a mouthful of his morning porridge. “Kybistra in the far south gone a couple of weeks ago, and now this.” Resaina’s loss was a heavier blow. The town was perhaps two days’ march south of the Bay of Rhyax, well east of Amorion. If it had truly fallen, the Yezda were getting past the roadblock the latter city represented, in Zemarkhos’ fanatic hands though it was.

And while the westlands were falling town by town to the invaders, the siege of Videssos dragged on. There were men beginning to slip over the wall at night now, and others escaping in small boats. They brought tales of tightened belts inside the city, of increasingly harsh and capricious rule.

Whatever the shortcomings of the regime of the Sphrantzai, though, the capital’s double walls and tall towers were always manned, its defenders ready to fight.

“All Thorisin’s choices are bad,” the tribune brooded. “He can’t go back over the Cattle-Crossing to fight the Yezda without turning Ortaias and Vardanes loose behind him, but if he doesn’t, he won’t have much of an empire left even if we win here.”

Gaius Philippus said, “What we need is to win here, and quickly. But that means storming the walls, and I shake in my shoes every time I think of trying.”

“Och, such a pair for the glooms I never have seen,” Viridovix said.
“We canna go, we canna stay, and we canna be fighting either. Wellaway, we might as well the lot of us get drunk if nothing better’s to be done.”

“I’ve heard ideas I liked less,” Gaius Philippus chuckled.

The Celt’s casual dismissal of logic annoyed Marcus. Giving Viridovix an ironic dip of his head, he asked him, “What do you see left to us, now that you’ve disposed of all our choices?”

“I haven’t done that at all, Roman dear,” the Gaul retorted, his green eyes twinkling, “for you’ve left treachery out of the bargain, the which Gavras’ll never do. Too honest by half, y’are.”

“Hmp,” Scaurus grunted—no denying Viridovix had a point. But he did not much care for the label the Celt gave him: “too credulous,” it seemed to mean. Moreover, he did not feel he deserved it. He had not repeated that angry night with the whore, nor wanted to; even while she clawed his back, he knew she was not the answer to his troubles with Helvis. If anything, those had since grown worse. There were times when his guarded silence hung between them like a muffling cloak.

He was glad to have his unpleasant reverie broken by a tall Videssian he recognized as one of Gavras’ messengers. He took a last pull of thin, sour beer; Videssian wine was too cloying for him to stomach in the early morning. To business, then. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

The soldier bowed as he would to any superior, but Scaurus caught his slightly raised eyebrow, his delicately curled lip—to aristocratic Videssians, beer was a peasant drink. “There will be an officers’ conclave in his Majesty’s quarters, to commence midway through the second hour.”

Like the Romans, Videssos split day and night into twelve hours each, reckoned from sunrise and sunset. The tribune glanced at the sky; the sun was hardly yet well risen. “Plenty of time to make ready,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“Would your honor care for a wee drop of ale?” Viridovix asked the messenger, offering the little keg that held it. Marcus saw the beginnings of a grin lurking under his flame-red mustaches.

“Thank you, no,” Thorisin’s man replied, his face and voice now altogether expressionless. “I have others to inform.” And with another bow he was gone, in almost unseemly haste.

As soon as he was out of sight, Gaius Philippus swatted Viridovix on
the back. “ ‘Thank you, no,’ ” mimicking the Videssian. Centurion and Celt broke up together, forgetting to snarl at each other.

“And would
your
honor care for a wee drop?” Viridovix asked him.

“Me? Gods, no! I hate the stuff.”

“I’d best not waste it, then,” Viridovix said, and swigged from the cask.

It was easy to divide the commanders in Thorisin’s tent into two sets: those who knew of Resaina’s fall, and the rest. A current of expectancy ran through the first group, though no one was sure what to look for. By contrast, the ignorant ones mostly wandered in late, as to any other meeting where nothing much was going to happen.

For a time it seemed they were going to be proved right. The first order of business was a fuzz-bearded Videssian lieutenant hauled in between a pair of burly guards. The youngster looked scared and a little sick.

“Well, what have we here?” Thorisin said impatiently, drumming his fingers on the table in front of him. He had more urgent things on his mind than whatever trouble this stripling had found for himself.

“Your Highness—” the lieutenant quavered, but Gavras silenced him with a look, turned his eyes questioningly to the senior guardsman.

“Sir, the prisoner, one Pastillas Monotes, last evening did most wickedly and profanely revile your Majesty in the hearing of his troops.” The soldier’s voice was an emotionless, memorized drone as he recited the charge against the luckless Monotes.

The Videssian officers at the table grew still, and Thorisin Gavras alert. To the Namdaleni, to the Khamorth, to the Romans, a free tongue was taken for granted, but this was the Empire, an ancient land steeped in ceremonial regard for the imperial person. Not even an Emperor so unconventional as Thorisin, perhaps, could take lèse-majesté lightly without forfeiting his respect among his own people. Marcus felt sympathy for the frightened young man before him, but knew he dared not interfere in this matter.

“In what way did this Monotes revile me?” the Emperor asked. His voice, too, took on the formal tone of a court.

“Sir,” the guard repeated, still from memory, “the prisoner did state that, in failing to do more than blockade the city of Videssos, you were a spineless cur, a eunuch-hearted blockhead, and a man with a lion’s roar but the hindquarters of a titmouse. Those were the prisoner’s words, sir. In mitigation, sir,” he went on, and humanity came into his voice at last, “the prisoner had consumed an excess of liquors.”

Thorisin cocked his head quizzically at Monotes, who seemed to be doing his best to sink through the floor. “Like animals, don’t you?” he remarked. Scaurus’ hopes rose; the Emperor’s comment was hardly one to precede a routine condemnation. Honest curiosity in his voice, Gavras asked, “Boy, did you really say all those things about me?”

“Yes, your Highness,” the lieutenant whispered miserably, his face pale as undyed silk. He took a deep breath, then blurted, “I likely would’ve come up with worse, sir, if I’d had more wine.”

“Disgraceful,” Baanes Onomagoulos muttered, but Thorisin was grinning openly and coughing in his efforts not to snicker. After a moment he gave up and laughed out loud.

“Take him away,” he said to the guards. “Run the wine-fumes out of him, and he’ll do just fine. Titmouse, indeed!” he snorted, wiping his eyes. “Go on, get out,” he said to Monotes, who was trying to splutter thanks, “or I’ll make you wish I was one.”

Monotes almost fell as the guards let him go; he scurried for the tent flap and was gone. Gavras’ brief good humor disappeared with him. “Where is everyone?” he growled. Actually, only a few seats were still unfilled.

When the last Khamorth chieftain sauntered in, Thorisin glared him into his chair. The nomad was unperturbed—no farmer’s anger could reach him, not even a king’s.

“Good of you to join us,” Gavras told him, but sarcasm was as wasted as wrath. The Emperor’s next words, though, seized the attention of everyone up and down the long table. Still taken with Pastillas Monotes’ phrase, he said, “I propose to move my feathered hindquarters against the city’s works at sunrise, two days hence.”

There was a moment’s silence, then a babble louder than any Scaurus had heard from Thorisin’s marshals. Above it rose Soteric’s cry: “Then you are a blockhead and you’ve lost whatever wits you had!”

Utprand Dagober’s son echoed him a second later: “Ya, what brings on t’is madness?” Where Soteric sounded furious, a cold curiosity rode the older Namdalener’s words. He gave Thorisin the same careful attention he would a difficult text in Phos’ scriptures.

“Trust the islanders not to know what’s going on,” Gaius Philippus said to Marcus, the uproar covering his voice. It had faint contempt in it; to a professional, knowledge was worth lives. The Namdaleni, mercenaries by trade, were taken by surprise too often to measure up to the senior centurion’s high standards.

Scaurus understood his lieutenant’s disapproval, but, more sophisticated in the ways of intrigue than the blunt centurion, also understood why the men of the Duchy were sometimes caught short. Not only were they heretics in Videssian eyes, but also subjects of a duke who would fall upon the Empire himself if he thought the time right. No wonder news reached them slowly.

Thorisin Gavras waited till the tumult subsided; Marcus knew he was at his most dangerous when his anger was tightly checked. “Lost my wits, have I?” the Emperor said coldly, measuring Soteric as an eagle might a wolf cub on the ground below.

Soteric’s eyes eventually flinched away from that confrontation, but the tribune still had to admire his brother-in-law’s spirit, if not his sense. “By the Wager, yes,” the Namdalener replied. “How many weeks is it of sitting on our behinds to starve the blackguards out? Now, out of the blue, it’s up sword and at ’em. Idiocy, I call it.”

“Watch your tongue, islander,” Baanes Onomagoulos growled, his dislike for Namdaleni counting for more than his mixed feelings toward Thorisin. Other Videssian officers rumbled agreement.

Had Soteric spoken to Mavrikios Gavras thus in Thorisin’s hearing, the younger of the brothers would have exploded. When thorny speech came his own way, though, Thorisin met it straight on—just as his brother had, Marcus remembered.

“Not ‘out of the blue,’ Dosti’s son,” the Emperor said, and Soteric looked startled to hear his patronymic. Recalling the elder Gavras’ use of his own full name, Scaurus knew Thorisin was borrowing another of Mavrikios’ tricks.

“Listen,” Thorisin went on, and in a few crisp sentences laid out his
plight. He stared into Soteric’s face once more. “So, hero of the age,” he said at last, “what would you have me do?” He sounded very tired and finally out of patience.

The young Namdalener, sensitive to the mockery that made up so much of Videssian wit, bit his lip in anger and embarrassment. The words dragged from him: “Storm the city—if we can.” He did not say—he did not need to say—that no one, Videssian or foreign foe, had taken those walls by assault. Everyone at the table knew that.

Utprand said to Thorisin, “Aye, storm t’city. You say that, and it sounds so easy. But we from t’Duchy, we pay the bill to win your Empire for you, and pay in blood.” Scaurus could not help nodding; a mercenary captain who wasted his troops soon had nothing left to sell.

“To Skotos’ frozen hell with you, then,” Gavras snapped, his temper lost now. “Take your Namdaleni and go home, if you won’t earn your keep. You say you pay in blood? I pay double, outlander—every man jack who falls on either side of this war diminishes me, friend and foe alike, for I am Avtokrator of all Videssos, and all its people are my subjects. Go on, get out—the sight of you sickens me.”

After that tirade Marcus looked to see Utprand stalk from the tent. Indeed, Soteric pushed back his chair and began to rise, but a glance from the older Namdalener stopped him. In Thorisin’s hot words was a truth that had not occurred to him before, and he paused to give it the thought it deserved. “Be it so, then,” he said at last. “Two days hence.” He sketched a salute and was gone, sweeping Soteric along in his wake.

The council broke up swiftly, officers leaving a few at a time, gabbling over what they had heard like so many washerwomen. As Marcus turned sideways to ease through the open tent flap, his eyes happened to meet those of Thorisin, who was still plotting strategy with Bouraphos the admiral. Thorisin’s glance held unmistakable triumph in it. Scaurus suddenly wondered how angry the Emperor had really been and how much he had made the Namdaleni talk themselves into doing just what he had planned for them in the first place.