Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (8 page)

He gave Marcus no chance to reply, going on to describe the more subtle religious aberration which had arisen on the island Duchy of Namdalen in the past couple of centuries. Namdalen had escaped domination
by the Khamorth, but fell instead, much later, to pirates from the Haloga country, who envied and aped the Videssian style of life even as they wrested away Videssian land.

“The fools were seeking a compromise between our views and the noxious notions which prevail in the east. They refuse to accept Phos’ triumph as a certainty, yet maintain all men should act as if they felt it assured. This, a theology? Call it, rather, hypocrisy in religious garb!”

It followed with a certain grim logic that, as any error in belief gave strength to Skotos, those who deviated from the true faith—whatever that happened to be in any given area—could and should be brought into line, by force if necessary. Accustomed to the general tolerance and indeed disregard for various creeds he had known in Rome, Marcus found the notion of a militant religion disturbing.

Having covered the main variants of his own faith, Apsimar spoke briefly and slightingly of others the Videssians knew. Of the beliefs of the Khamorth nomads still on the plains of Pardraya, the less said the better—they followed shamans and were little more than demon-worshippers. And their cousins who lived in Yezd were worse yet; Skotos was reverenced openly there, with horrid rites.

All in all, the Halogai were probably the best of the heathen. Even if incorrect, their beliefs inclined them to the side of Phos by fostering courage and justice. “Those they have in abundance,” Apsimar allowed, “but at the cost of the light of the spirit, which comes only to those who follow Phos.”

The barrage of strange names, places, and ideas left Marcus’ head spinning. To get time to regain his balance, he asked Apsimar, “Do you have a map, so I may see where all these people you mention live?”

“Of course,” the priest said. As with his theological discussion, he gave Scaurus more than the tribune had bargained for. Apsimar gestured toward one of the crowded bookshelves. Like a called puppy, a volume wriggled out from between its neighbors and floated through the air until it landed gently on his desk. He bent over it to find the page he wanted.

The tribune needed those few seconds to try to pull his face straight. Never in Mediolanum, never in Rome, never in Gaul, he knew, would he
have seen anything to match that casual flick of the hand and what came after it. Its very effortlessness impressed him in a way even the healing magic had not.

To Apsimar it was nothing. He turned the book toward Marcus. “We are here,” he said, pointing. Putting his face close to the map, the tribune made out the word “Imbros” beside a dot.

“My apologies,” Apsimar said courteously. “Reading by candlelight can be difficult.” He murmured a prayer, held his left hand over the map, and pearly light sprang from it, illuminating the parchment as well as a cloudy day.

This time, Scaurus had all he could do not to flee. No wonder, his mind gibbered, eyestrain did not trouble Apsimar. The priest was his own reading lamp.

As the first shock of amazement and fear faded, a deeper one sank into the tribune’s bones. The map was very detailed: better, by the looks of it, than the few Marcus had seen in Rome. And the lands it showed were utterly unfamiliar. Where was Italy? No matter how crude the map, the shape of the boot was unmistakable. He could not find it, or any of the other countries he knew.

Seeing the curious outlines of the Empire of Videssos and its neighbors, reading the strange names of the seas—the Sailors’ Sea, the Northern Sea, the almost landlocked Videssian Sea, and the rest—drove home to the tribune what he had feared since the two swords swept him and his legionaries here, had suspected since Apsimar’s first sorcery. This was a different world from Rome’s, one from which he could never go back.

His good-byes to the priest were subdued. Once out in the street, he made for a tavern. He needed a cup of wine, or several, to steady his nerves. The grape worked a soothing magic of its own. And even with magic, he told himself, men were still men. An able one might go far.

He took another pull at the mug. Presently he remembered the business Apsimar had interrupted. He wondered whether he could still find the bright-eyed girl in the green gown. He laughed a little. Men were still men, he thought.

On his way out of the tavern, he wondered for a moment how venery counted in the strife between Phos and Skotos. He decided he did not care and closed the tavern door behind him.

A
FTER A LAST SERIES OF BLIZZARDS THAT TRIED TO BATTER
I
MBROS
flat, winter sullenly left the stage to spring. Just as they had at the outset of fall, the Empire’s roads became morasses. Marcus, anxious for word from the capital, grumbled about the sense of a nation which, to protect its horses’ hooves, made those hooves all but worthless over much of the year.

The trees’ bare branches were beginning to clothe themselves in green when a mud-splattered messenger splashed his way up from the south. As Nephon Khoumnos had predicted and Marcus hoped, he bore in his leather message-pouch an order bidding the Romans come to
the
city, Videssos.

Vourtzes did not pretend to be sorry to see the last of them. Though the Romans had behaved well in Imbros—for mercenary troops, very well—it had not really been the fat governor’s town since they arrived. For the most part they followed his wishes, but he was too used to giving orders to enjoy framing requests.

To Marcus’ surprise, Skapti Modolf’s son came to bid him farewell. The tall Haloga clasped Scaurus’ hand in both his own, after his native custom. Fixing his wintry gaze on the Roman, he said, “We’ll meet again, and in a less pleasant place, I think. It would be better for me if we did not, but we will.”

Wondering what to make of that, the tribune asked him if he’d had news of the coming summer’s campaign.

Skapti snorted at such worry over details. “It will be as it is,” he said, and stalked away toward Imbros. Staring at his back, Marcus wondered if the Halogai were as spiritually blind as Apsimar thought.

The march to Videssos was a pleasant week’s travel through gently rolling country planted in wheat, barley, olives, and grapevines. To Gorgidas the land, the crops, and the enameled blue dome of the sky were aching reminders of his native Greece. He was by turns sullen with homesickness and rhapsodic over the beauty of the scenery.

“Will you not cease your endless havering?” Viridovix asked. “In another month it’ll be too hot for a man to travel by day unless he wants the wits fried out of him. Your grapevine is a fine plant, I’ll not deny, but better in the jug than to look at, if you take my meaning. And as for the olive, if you try to eat him his pit’ll break your teeth. His oil stinks, too, and tastes no better.”

Gorgidas grew so furious working up a reply to this slander that he was his old self for the next several hours. Marcus caught Viridovix grinning behind the irascible doctor’s back. His respect for the Celt’s wits went up a couple of notches.

The road to Videssos came down by the seaside about a day’s journey north of the capital. Villages and towns, some of respectable size, sat athwart the highway at increasingly frequent intervals. After passing through one large town, Gaius Philippus commented, “If these are the suburbs, what must Videssos be like?”

The mental picture Marcus carried of the Empire’s capital was of a city like, but inferior to, Rome. In the afternoon of the eighth day out from Imbros, he was able to compare his vision with the reality, and it was the former which paled in the comparison.

Videssos owned a magnificent site. It occupied a triangle of land jutting out into a strait Tzimiskes called the Cattle-Crossing. The name was scarcely a misnomer, either—the opposite shore was barely a mile away, its suburbs plain to the eye despite sea-haze. The closest of those suburbs, the tribune had learned, was simply called “Across.”

But with Videssos at which to marvel, the strait’s far shore was lucky to get a glance. Surrounded on two sides by water, the capital’s third, landward, boundary was warded by fortifications more nearly invulnerable than any Marcus had imagined, let alone seen.

First came a deep ditch, easily fifty feet wide; behind it stood a crenelated breastwork. Overlooking that was the first wall proper, five times the height of a tall man, with square towers strategically sited every fifty
to a hundred yards. A second wall, almost twice as high and built of even larger stones, paralleled this outwork at a distance of about fifty yards. The main wall’s towers—not all of these were square; some were round, or even octagonal—were placed so that fire from them could cover what little ground those of the outwall missed.

Gaius Philippus stopped dead when he saw those incredible works. “Tell me,” he demanded of Tzimiskes, “has this city ever fallen to a siege?”

“Never to a foreign foe,” the Videssian replied, “though in our own civil wars it’s been taken twice by treachery.”

The great walls did not hide as much of the city as had Imbros’ fortifications, for Videssos, coincidentally like Rome, had seven hills. Marcus could see buildings of wood, brick, and stucco like those in the latter town, but also some splendid structures of granite and multicolored marble. Many of those were surrounded by parks and orchards, making their pale stone shine the brighter. Scores of shining gilded domes topped Phos’ temples throughout the city.

At the harbors, the beamy grainships that fed the capital shared dockspace with rakish galleys and trading vessels from every nation Videssos knew. There and elsewhere in the city, surging tides of people went about their business. Tiny in the distance, to Scaurus they seemed like so many ants, preoccupied with their own affairs and oblivious to the coming of the Romans. It was an intimidating thought. In the midst of such a multitude, how could his handful of men hope to make a difference?

He must have said that out loud. Quintus Glabrio observed, “The Videssians wouldn’t have taken us on if they didn’t think we mattered.” Grateful for Glabrio’s calm good sense, the tribune nodded.

Tzimiskes led the Romans past the first two gates that opened into the city. He explained, “An honor guard will escort us into Videssos from the Silver Gate.”

Marcus had no idea why the Silver Gate was so called. Its immense portals and spiked portcullis were of iron-faced wood; from their scars, they had seen much combat. Over each wall’s entryway hung a triumphant icon of Phos.

“Straighten up there, you shambling muttonheads!” Gaius Philippus
growled to the already orderly legionaries. “This is the big city now, and I won’t have them take us for gawking yokels!”

As Tzimiskes had promised, the guard of honor was waiting, mounted, just inside the main wall. At its head was Nephon Khoumnos, who stepped up smiling to clasp Scaurus’ hand. “Good to see you again,” he said. “The march to your barracks is a couple of miles. I hope you don’t mind us making a parade of it. It’ll give the people something to talk about and get them used to the look of you as well.”

“Fine,” Marcus agreed. He had expected something like this; the Videssians were inordinately fond of pomp and ceremony. His attention was only half on Khoumnos anyhow. The rest was directed to the troops the imperial officer led.

The three contingents of the honor guard seemed more concerned over watching each other than about the Romans. Khoumnos’ personal contingent was a squadron of
akritai
—businesslike Videssians cut in the mold of Tzimiskes or Mouzalon. They wanted to give the Romans their full attention, but kept stealing quick looks to the right and left.

On their left was a band—Marcus rejected any word with a more orderly flavor than that—of nomads from the Pardrayan plains. Dark, stocky men with curly beards, they rode shaggy steppe ponies, wore breastplates of boiled leather and foxskin caps, and carried double-curved bows reinforced with horn. “Foot soldiers!” one said in accented Videssian. He spat to show his contempt. Marcus stared at him until the nomad flushed and jerked his eyes away.

The tribune had a harder time deciding the origin of the escorting party’s last group. They were big, solid men in heavy armor, mounted on horses as large as any Marcus had seen, and armed with stout lances and straight slashing swords. They had something of the look of the Halogai to them, but seemed rather less—what was the word Viridovix had used?—doomful than the northern mercenaries. Besides, about half their number had dark hair. They were the first clean-shaven men Scaurus had seen. The only nation that might have spawned them, he decided at last, was Namdalen. There Haloga overlords mixed blood with their once-Videssian subjects, from whom they had learned much.

Their leader was a rugged warrior of about thirty, whose dark eyes
and tanned skin went oddly with his mane of wheat-colored hair. He swung himself down from his high-cantled saddle to greet the Romans. “You look to have good men here,” he said to Marcus, taking the tribune’s hand between his own in a Haloga-style grip. “I’m Hemond of Metepont, out of the Duchy.” That confirmed Marcus’ guess. Hemond went on, “Once you’re settled in, look me up for a cup of wine. We can tell each other stories of our homes—yours, I hear, is a strange, distant land.”