Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (72 page)

Gavras’ army readied itself for the attack. Stone- and arrow-throwers moved forward, ready to give covering fire for the assault on the walls.
Every archer’s quiver was filled, to the same purpose. Inside sheds covered with green hides, rams swung on their chains.

“Very impressive,” Gorgidas murmured, watching the bustle of military preparation. “And inside, I suppose, they’re heating up their oil to give us the warm reception we deserve.”

“Absit omen,”
Marcus said, but it was only too likely. Too much of the readying process was visible from the walls to leave Videssos’ defenders in much doubt over what was about to happen, despite the army’s best efforts at secrecy.

“If there was a commander in there with his wits about him and an ounce more guts than he needs to turn beans into wind, he’d sally now and set us back a week,” Gaius Philippus said. He watched soldiers marching four abreast on the capital’s battlements, insect-small in the distance.

Scaurus said, “I don’t think it’s likely. The pen-pushers inside must have their generals under their thumbs, or they’d’ve hit us long before this. Ortaias may play at being a warrior, but Vardanes’ way of ruling is by taxes and tricks, not steel. He distrusts soldiers too much to turn them loose, I think.”

“I hope you’re right,” the senior centurion said. Marcus noticed him doubling patrols and sentry postings all the same. He did not change the dispositions; watchfulness was seldom wasted.

The Romans, then, were not surprised when at twilight a raiding party came storming from a sally port all but hidden by one of the outer wall’s towers. The marauders carried flaming brands, as well as swords and bows, and flung them at any pieces of matériel they saw. Flames clung and spread, unnaturally bright; the Videssians were skilled incendiary-makers.

Shouts of “Ortaias!” and “The Sphrantzai!” flew with the raiders’ missiles. So did the sentries’ cries of alarm, their answering yells of “Gavras!” and the first shrieks of the wounded. Another war cry was in the air, too, one that made Scaurus, who normally faced battle without delight, jam his helmet down over his ears and rush to the fight: “Rhavas!” the marauders cheered, “Rhavas!”

Many of the attackers stopped short at the earthen breastwork that sealed the city Videssos from Videssos the Empire. These skirmished
with the Roman pickets there, threw their torches and shot fire arrows, then fell back when they saw the defense ready for them. They fought, indeed, much like the bandits Outis Rhavas was said to lead: a brave onset, but no staying power.

One determined band, though, came scrambling over the chest-high rampart to trade swordstrokes with the Romans beyond and hack at their siege engines with axes, crowbars, and mauls. At their head was a tall, strongly built man who had to be Rhavas himself. With a cry of, “Stand and fight, murderer!” Marcus rushed at him.

To the tribune’s disappointment, his foe wore a bascinet with its visor down; he wanted to see this man’s eyes as he killed him. Whatever else he was, Rhavas was no coward. He loped toward Scaurus, his longsword held high. The two blades met with a ring of steel. Marcus felt the jolt clear to his shoulder. The druids’ marks on his Gallic sword flared golden. They were hotter and brighter than he had seen them since his duel with Avshar the wizard-prince just after he came to the capital. His lips tightened—so Rhavas bore an enchanted blade, did he? It would do him no good.

But the fighting separated them after another inconclusive passage. Before the tribune could come to grips with Rhavas once more, Phostis Apokavkos attacked Ortaias’ captain. In his fury to avenge Doukitzes, all the careful swordplay the legionaries had drilled into him was forgotten. He slashed and chopped with his
gladius
, a blade far too short for such work. Rhavas toyed with him like a cat with a baby squirrel, all the while laughing cruel and cold.

At length he tired of his sport and decided to make an end. His sword hurtled toward Apokavkos’ helm. But the stroke was not quite true; Phostis reeled away, hand clapped to his head, but that head still rode his shoulders. With a bellow of fury, Rhavas leaped after him.

Gaius Philippus stepped deliberately into his path. “Stand aside, little man,” Rhavas hissed, “or it will be the worse for you.” Behind the senior centurion, Apokavkos was down on his knees, blood running from one ear. Gaius Philippus planted his feet to await the onslaught. He spat over the edge of his shield.

A storm of blows rained down on him, furious as the fall cloudbursts in the westland plateaus. The Roman, though, was wiser by years of hard
fighting than Phostis Apokavkos and did not try to match Rhavas stroke for stroke. He stood on the defensive, his own sword flicking out in counterattack only when the thrusts brought no danger to himself.

Rhavas feinted, tried to spring around him. But the senior centurion side-stepped quickly and kept himself between the giant warrior and his prey. Then Marcus was hurrying forward to give him aid, a dozen legionaries close behind. Viridovix, as always an army in himself, stretched two of the skirmishers in the dirt and bore in on Rhavas from another direction.

Still snarling curses, Rhavas had to retreat. He led the rear-guard that held the Romans at bay while the rest of his raiders made their way back over the besieging rampart. He was the last to vault over it and, once on the other side, favored Scaurus with a mocking salute. “There will be other times,” he called, and the grim certainty in his voice sent a thrill of danger down the tribune’s back.

“Shall we give him a chase?” Gaius Philippus asked. The bandit chieftain was standing there in no man’s land, fairly daring the Romans to pursue.

Marcus answered regretfully, “No, I think not. All he wants to do is lure us into range of the engines on the walls.”

“Aye, more lives than the whoreson’s worth,” Gaius Philippus conceded. He flexed his left shoulder, winced and said, “He’s strong as a bear, curse him. A couple of the ones he hit me, I thought he broke my arm. This
scutum
will never be the same again either.” The bronze facing of the shield’s upper rim was all but hacked away, while the thick boards of the frame beneath were chipped and split from the fierceness of Rhavas’ attack.

Water would not douse the fires the raiders had managed to set; they had to be smothered with sand. Half a dozen dart-throwers and one big stone-throwing engine were destroyed, and several others had been wrecked by Rhavas’ axemen and crowbar swingers. Scaurus was surprised the damage was not worse; luckily, the marauders had only had a few minutes to carry out their assault.

Casualties were similarly light. Viridovix had accounted for half the enemy dead in his one brief flurry, a feat Marcus was sure he would not hear the last of for weeks to come. Of the Romans, it seemed no one had
been killed, which gladdened the tribune’s heart. Every legionary lost was one less link to the world he would never know again, one more man who shared his memories gone forever.

The worst-hurt man was Apokavkos. Gorgidas bent over him, easing his helmet off and palpating the left side of his head with skilled, gentle fingers. Apokavkos tried to speak, but produced only a confused, stammering sound.

Scaurus was alarmed at that, but the Greek doctor grunted in satisfaction, recognizing the symptom. “The blow he took threw his brain into commotion, as well it might,” he told the tribune, “and so he’s lost his voice for a time, but I think he’ll recover. His skull is not broken, and he has full use of his limbs—don’t you, Phostis?”

The Videssian moved them all to prove it. He tried to talk again, failed once more, and shook his head in annoyance, a motion immediately followed by a wince. “Head hurts,” he scrawled in the dust.

“So you can write, can you? How interesting,” Gorgidas said, ignoring what was written. For a moment he looked at Apokavkos more as a specimen than a man, but caught himself with an embarrassed chuckle. “I’ll give you a draft of wine mixed with poppy juice. You’ll sleep the day around, and when you wake the worst of your headache should be gone. You ought to have your voice back by then, too.”

“Thanks,” Apokavkos wrote. As with his last message, he used Videssian; while he spoke Latin, he could not write it. He climbed painfully to his feet and followed Gorgidas to his tent for the promised medicine.

“It’s a good thing Drax’s Namdaleni and the regular Videssian troops in the city didn’t follow Rhavas’ cutthroats out on sally,” Marcus said to Gaius Philippus later that night. “They could have set things back as badly as you said, and we can’t afford it with things in the westlands as they are.”

The centurion carefully gnawed the last meat from a roasted chicken thigh, then tossed the bone into the fire. “Why should they follow Rhavas?” he said. “You know the Namdaleni, aye, and the imperials, too. Think they have any more stomach for his gang of roughs than we do? Probably hoping we’d kill the lot of ’em. There wouldn’t be many a tear shed in there if we had, I’d bet.”

Marcus stopped to consider that and decided Gaius Philippus was
probably right. The men on the other side were most of them soldiers like any others and no doubt despised bandits the same way all regular troops did. It was their leaders who chose such instruments, not the rank and file. “The Sphrantzai,” he said, the word sliding slimily off his tongue. Gaius Philippus nodded, understanding him perfectly.

The morning Thorisin Gavras had chosen for his assault dawned gray and foggy—not the porridge-thick blinding fog that had masked the arrival of the ships from the Key, but still a mist that cut visibility to less than a hundred paces. “Well, not
all
my prayers were wasted,” Gaius Philippus said, drawing faint smiles from the legionaries who heard him. For the most part they went about their business grim-faced, knowing what was ahead of them.

“A big part of what we can do out there will depend on your men and the covering fire they can give us,” Marcus was saying to Laon Pakhymer. The Khatrisher had brought his archers back from their foraging duties to join in the effort against the capital.

“I know,” Pakhymer said. “Our quivers are full, and we’ve been driving the fletchers crazy with all the shafts we’ve asked for.” He looked around, eyeing the murky weather with distaste. “We can’t hit what we can’t see, though, you know.”

“Of course,” Scaurus said, suddenly less glad of the fog than he had been. “But if you keep the top of the wall well-swept, it won’t matter that your bowmen aren’t aiming at anyone in particular.”

“Of course,” Pakhymer echoed ironically, and the tribune felt himself flush—a fine thing, him lecturing the Khatrisher on the tricks of the archer’s trade, when Pakhymer had undoubtedly had a bow in his hand since the age of three. He changed the subject in some haste.

The voice of a trumpet rang out, high and thin in the early morning stillness. Marcus recognized the imperial fanfare, the signal for the attack. Much of his apprehension disappeared. No more waiting now. The event, whatever it held, was here.

The trumpet’s last note was still in the air when the buccinator’s horns blasted into life. The Romans, shouting, “Gavras!” at the top of their lungs, rushed for the Silver Gate and the postern gate through
which Rhavas’ sally party had come. More legionaries flung hurdles, bundles of sticks, and spadesful of earth into the ditch that warded Videssos, trying to widen the front on which they could bring their arms to bear.

The first protection the capital’s gates had was a chest-high work not much different from the one Gavras’ men had thrown up, save that it was faced with stone. The few pickets manning it were quickly killed or captured; the Sphrantzai were not about to throw open the gates to rescue them, not with the enemy close behind.

High over the Silver Gate stood icons of Phos, reminders that Videssos was his holy city. They were being rudely treated now; buzzing over the Romans’ heads like a swarm of angry gnats came the arrow barrage the Khatrishers were laying down, along with the more intermittent crack of dart-casting engines and the thump of the stone-throwers’ hurling arms smacking into their rests.

“Reload there! Come on, wind ’em tight!” an artilleryman screamed to his crew—the perfect Videssian incarnation, Marcus thought, of Gaius Philippus. The senior centurion was crying the legionaries on, ordering the rams forward to pound at the Silver Gate’s ironbound portals. The slope-sided sheds, covered with hides to foil fire, hot oil, and sand, ponderously advanced.

Looking up at the crenelated battlements over the gates, Scaurus felt a surge of hope. Much against his expectations, the missiles had briefly managed to drive the defenders from their posts. The rams took their positions unhindered. The passageway behind the gates echoed their first
booms
like a great drum.

Gaius Philippus wore a wolfish grin. “The timbers may last forever,” he said, “but the hinges can only take so much.”
Boom-boom, boomboom
went the rams.

But the Khatrishers could only keep up their murderous fire so long; arms tired, bowstrings weakened, and arrows began to run short. Soldiers appeared on the walls again. One of Bagratouni’s Vaspurakaners shrieked as bubbling oil found its way through the joints of his armor to roast the flesh beneath. Another defender was about to tip his cauldron of sizzling fat down on the Romans when a Khatrisher shaft caught him in the face. He staggered backward, spilling the blazing load among his
comrades. The Romans below cheered to hear their cries of pain and fear.

Stones and missiles shot from the towers of the inner wall were now beginning to fall on the legionaries. There were not enough Khatrishers, nor could they shoot far enough, to silence the snipers and catapults atop those towers.

Loud even through the din of fighting, the cry of “Ladders! Ladders!” came from the north. Scaurus stole a glance that way, saw men climbing for their lives and knowing they would lose them if the enemy tipped those ladders into space before they reached the top. The legionaries carried no scaling ladders—too risky by half, was the tribune’s cold-blooded appraisal.

The rams still pounded away. A chain with a hook on the end snaked down to catch at one of the heads as it drove forward, but the Romans, alert for such tricks, knocked it aside. The huge iron clasps joining gate to wall creaked and groaned at every stroke; the thick oak portals began to bend inwards.