«The world is a very strange place,» he said. He went back into the hall. If the eunuch had moved while he had been talking with his sister, it could not have been by more than the breadth of a hair. With a cold, hard nod the fellow led him back through the maze of corridors to the chambers where he and his family were confined.
The guards outside the chamber opened his door. The beautiful eunuch, who had said not a word while guiding him to his private Prison, disappeared with silent steps. The door closed behind Abivard, and everything was just as it had been before Denak had summoned him.
When Sharbaraz King of Kings did not call him, Abivard grew furious at his sister. Rationally, he knew that was not only pointless but stupid. Denak might plead for him, as she had been pleading for him, but that did not mean that Sharbaraz would have to hear. By everything Abivard knew of the King of Kings, he was very good at not hearing.
Winter dragged on. The children at first grew restive at being cooped up in a small place like so many doves in a cote, then resigned themselves to it. That worried Abivard more than anything else he'd seen since Sharbaraz had ordered him to Mashiz. Over and over he asked the guards who kept him and his family from leaving their rooms and the servants who fed them and removed the slop jars and brought fuel what was going on in Vaspurakan and Videssos. He rarely got answers, and the ones he did get formed no coherent pattern. Some people claimed there was fighting; others, that peace prevailed.
«Why don't they just say they don't know?» he demanded of Roshnani after yet another rumor—that Maniakes had slain himself in despair—reached his ears.
«You're asking a lot if you expect people to admit how ignorant they are,» she answered. She had adapted to captivity better than he had. She worked on embroidery with thread borrowed from the servants and seemed to take so much pleasure from it that Abivard was more than once tempted to get her to teach him the stitches.
«I admit how ignorant I am here,» he said. «Otherwise I wouldn't ask so many questions.»
Roshnani loosened the hoop that held a circle of linen taut while she worked on it. She shook her head. «You don't understand. The only reason you're ignorant is that you're shut up here. You can't know what you want to find out. Too many people don't want to find out anything and just repeat what they happen to hear without thinking about it.»
He thought about that, then slowly nodded. «You're probably right,» he admitted. «It doesn't make this easier to bear, though.» In the end he did learn to embroider and concentrated his fury in producing the most hideous dragon he could imagine. He was glad he had only the rudiments of the craft, for if he could have matched Roshnani's skill, he would have given the dragon Sharbaraz' face.
Some of his imaginings along those lines disturbed him. In his mind he formed a picture of his army swarming out of Vaspurakan to rescue him that felt so real, he was shocked and disappointed when no one came battering down the door. As it had a way of doing, hope outran reality.
Among themselves, the servants began to talk of rain rather than snow. Abivard noted that he wasn't feeding the braziers as much charcoal as he had been or sleeping under such great piles of rugs and furs and blankets. Spring was coming. He, on the other hand, had nowhere to go, nothing to do.
«Ask Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, if he will free my family and let them go back to Vek Rud domain,» he told a guard—and whoever might be listening. «If he wants to punish me, that is his privilege, but they have done nothing to deserve his anger.»
Sharbaraz' privilege, though, was whatever he chose to make it. If the message got to him, he took no notice of it.
As one dreary day dragged into the next, Abivard began to understand Tzikas better. Unlike the Videssian renegade, he had done nothing to make his sovereign nervous about his loyalty—so he still believed, at any rate. But Sharbaraz had gotten nervous anyhow, and the results—
«How am I supposed to command another Makuraner army after this?» he whispered to Roshnani in the darkness after their children—and, with luck, any lurking listeners—had gone to bed.
«What would you do, husband of mind, if you got another command?» she asked, even more softly than he had spoken. «Would you go over to the Videssians to pay back the King of Kings for what he's done?»
She had been thinking about Tzikas, too, then. Abivard shook his head. «No. I am loyal to Makuran. I would be loyal to Sharbaraz, if he would let me. But even if I had no grievance against him before, I do now. How could he let me lead troops without being afraid that I would try to take the vengeance I deserve?»
«He has to trust you,» Roshnani said. «In the end I think he will. Did not your wizard see you fighting in the land of the Thousand Cities?»
«Bogorz? Yes, he did. But was he looking into the past or the future? I didn't know then, and I don't know now.»
Bogorz had seen another image, too: Videssians and ships, soldiers disembarking at an unknown place at an equally unknown time. How much that had to do with the rest of his vision, Abivard could not begin to guess. If the wizard had shown him a piece of the future, it was a useless one.
Roshnani sighed. «Not knowing is hard,» she agreed. «The way we're treated here, for instance: by itself, it wouldn't be bad. But since we don't know what will come at the end of it, how can we help but worry?»
«How indeed?» Abivard said. He hadn't told her that Sharbaraz had wanted to take his head—and worse. What point to that? he'd asked himself. Had the King of Kings chosen to do it, Roshnani could not have stopped him, and if he hadn't, Abivard would have made her fret without need. He seldom held things back from her but kept that one to himself without the slightest trace of guilt.
She snuggled against him. Though the night was not so chilly as the nights had been, he was glad of her warmth. He wondered if they would still be in this chamber when nights, no less than days, were sweaty torments and skin did nothing but stick to skin. If they were meant to be, they would, he decided. He could do nothing about it one way or the other. Presently he gave up and fell asleep.
The door to the chamber opened. Abivard's children stared. It wasn't the usual time. Abivard stared, too. He'd been shut up so long, he found a change of routine dangerous in and of itself.
Into the room came the beautiful eunuch who had conducted him to Denak. «Come with me,» he said in his beautiful, sexless voice.
«Are you taking me to see my sister again?» Abivard asked, climbing to his feet. «Come with me,» the eunuch repeated, as if it were none of Abivard's business where he was going till he got there, and perhaps not then, either.
Having no choice, Abivard went with him. As he walked out the door, he reflected that things could hardly be worse. He'd thought that before, too, every now and then. Sometimes he'd been wrong, which was something he would rather not have remembered.
He quickly realized that the eunuch was not leading him down the same halls he had traveled to visit Denak. He asked again where they were going, but only stony silence answered him. Though the eunuch said not a word, hatred bubbled up from him like steam from a boiling pot. Abivard wondered if that was hatred for him in particular or for any man lucky enough to have a beard and all parts complete and in good working order.
Several times they passed other people in the hall: some servants, some nobles. Abivard was tempted to ask them if they knew where he was going and what would happen to him when he got there. The only thing holding him back was a certainty that one way or another the eunuch would pay him back for his temerity.
He hadn't been in the palace for years before the summons had come that had led him to become much more intimately acquainted with one small part of it than he'd ever wanted to be. All the same, the corridors through which he was traveling began to look familiar.
«Are we going to—?» he asked, and then stopped with the question incomplete. The way the eunuch's back stiffened told him plainer than words that he'd get no answer. This once, though, it mattered less t
han it might have under other circumstances. Sooner or later, regardless of what the eunuch told him, he would know.
Without warning, the hallway turned and opened out into a huge chamber whose roof was supported by rows of columns. Those columns and the long expanse of carpet running straight ahead from the entrance guided the eye to the great throne at the far end of the room. «Advance and be recognized,» the eunuch told Abivard. «I presume you still recall the observances.»
By his tone, he presumed no such thing. Abivard confined himself to one tight nod. «I remember,» he said, and advanced down the carpet toward the throne where Sharbaraz King of Kings sat waiting.
Nobles standing in the shadows stared at him as he strode forward. The walls of the throne room looked different from the way he remembered them. He could not turn his head—not without violating court ritual—but flicked his eyes to the right and the left. Yes, those wall hangings were definitely new. They showed Makuraner triumphs over the armies of Videssos, triumphs where he had commanded the armies of the King of Kings. The irony smote him like a club.
The eunuch stepped aside when the carpet ended. Abivard strode out onto the polished stone beyond the woven wool and prostrated himself before Sharbaraz. He wondered how many thousands of men and women had gone down on their bellies before the King of Kings in the long years since the palace had been built. Enough, certainly, to give a special polish to the patch of stone where their foreheads touched.
Sharbaraz let him stay prostrate longer than he should have. At last, he said, «Rise.»
«I obey, Majesty,» Abivard said, getting to his feet. Now he was permitted to look upon the august personage of the King of Kings. His first thought was, He's gone fat and soft. Sharbaraz had been a lion of a warrior when he and Abivard had campaigned together against Smerdis the usurper. He seemed to have put on a good many more pounds than the intervening time should have made possible.
«We are not well pleased with you, Abivard son of Godarz,» he declared. Even his voice sounded higher and more querulous than it had. His face was pale, as if he never saw the sun. Abivard knew he was pale, too, but he'd been imprisoned; Sharbaraz had no such excuse. Though Abivard hadn't seen himself in a mirror any time lately, he would have bet he didn't carry those dark, pouchy circles under his eyes.
He strangled the scorn welling up in him. No matter how Sharbaraz looked, he remained King of Kings. Whatever he decreed, that would be Abivard's fate. Walk soft, Abivard reminded himself. Walk soft. «I grieve to have displeased you, Majesty,» he said. «I never intended to do that.»
«We are displeased,» Sharbaraz said, as if passing sentence. Perhaps he was doing just that; several of the courtiers let out soft sighs. Abivard wondered if the execution would be performed in the throne room for their edification. The King of Kings went on, «We trusted you to obey our commands pertaining to Vaspurakan, as we expect to be obeyed in all things.»
In the old days as a rebel against Smerdis he hadn't been so free with the royal we. Hearing it from a man with whose humanity and fallibility he was all too intimately acquainted irked Abivard. With a sudden burst of insight he realized that Sharbaraz was trying to overawe him precisely because they had once been intimates: to subsume the remembered man in the present King of Kings. As such ploys often did, it had an effect opposite to the one Sharbaraz had intended.
Abivard said, «I pray your pardon, Majesty. I served Makuran as best I could.»
«The affair appears otherwise to us,» the King of Kings replied. «In disobeying our orders, you damaged the realm and brought both it and us into disrepute.»
«I pray your pardon,» Abivard repeated. He might have known—indeed, he had known—Sharbaraz would say that. Disobedience was a failure no ruler could tolerate, and as he and Roshnani had agreed, being right was in a way worse than being wrong.
But Sharbaraz said, «In our judgment you have now been punished enough for your transgressions. We have summoned you hither to inform you that Makuran once more has need of your services.»
«Majesty?» Abivard had been half expecting—more than half expecting—the King of Kings to order him sent to the headsman or the torturers. If he'd frightened Sharbaraz, he could expect no better fate. Now, though, with courtiers murmuring approval in the background, the King of Kings had… pardoned him? «What do you need of me, Majesty?» Whatever it was, it couldn't be much worse than going off to meet the chopper.
«We begin to see why you had such difficulties in bringing Videssos the city under the lion of Makuran,» Sharbaraz answered. It wasn't an apology—not quite—but it was closer to one than Abivard had ever heard from the King of Kings, who went on, not altogether comfortably, «We also see that Maniakes Avtokrator exemplifies in his person the wicked deviousness our lore so often attributes to the men of Videssos.»
«In what way, Majesty?» Abivard asked in lieu of screaming, By the God, what's he gone and done now? He made himself keep his voice low and calm as he twisted the knife just a little. «As you will remember, I had not had much chance to learn what passes outside Mashiz.» He hadn't had much chance to learn what passed outside the chamber in which Sharbaraz had locked him away, but the King of Kings already knew that.
Sharbaraz said, «Our one weakness is in ships. We have come to realize how serious a weakness it is.» Abivard had realized that the instant he had seen how Videssian dromons kept his army from getting over the Cattle Crossing; he was glad Sharbaraz had been given a similar revelation, no matter how long delayed it was. The King of Kings went on. «Taking a sizable fleet, Maniakes has sailed with it to Lyssaion in the Videssian westlands and there disembarked an expeditionary force.»
«Lyssaion, Majesty?» Abivard frowned, trying to place the town on his mental map of the westlands. At first he had no luck, for he was thinking of the northern coastline, the one on the Videssian Sea and closest to Vaspurakan. Then he said, «Oh, on the southern coast, the one by the Sailor's Sea—the far southwest of the westlands.»
He stiffened. He should have realized that at once—after all, hadn't Bozorg shown him Videssians coming ashore somewhere very like there and then heading up through the mountains? He'd had knowledge of Maniakes' plan for most of a year—and much good that had done him.
«Yes,» Sharbaraz was saying, his words running parallel to Abivard's thoughts. «They landed there, as I told you. And they have been pushing northwest ever since—pushing toward the land of the Thousand Cities.» He paused, then said what was probably the worst thing he could think of: «Pushing toward Mashiz.»
Abivard took that in and blended it with the insight he now had—too late—from Bogorz' scrying. «After Maniakes beat the Kubratoi last year, he was too quiet by half,» he said at last. «I kept expecting him to do something against us, especially when I pulled the field force out of the Videssian westlands to fight in Vaspurakan.» I wouldn't have had to do that but for your order to suppress the worship of Phos—another thing he couldn't tell the King of Kings. «But he never moved. I wondered what he was up to. Now we know.»
«Now we know,» Sharbaraz agreed. «We never took Videssos the city in war, but the Videssians have sacked Mashiz. We do not intend this to happen again.»
Undoubtedly, the King of Kings intended to sound fierce and martial. Undoubtedly, his courtiers would assure him he sounded very fierce and martial, indeed. He's afraid, Abivard realized, and a chill ran through him. He did well enough when the war was far away, but now it's coming here, almost close enough to touch. He's been comfortable too long. He's lost the stomach for that land of fight. He had it once, but it's gone.
Aloud, he repeated, «How may I serve you, Majesty?»
«Take up an army.» Sharbaraz' words were quick and harsh. «Take it up, I say, and rid the realm of the invader. Makuran's honor demands it. The Videssians must be repulsed.» Does Maniakes know he's putting him in fear? Abivard wondered. Or is he striking at our vitals tit for tat, as we have struck at his? Command of the sea lets him pick his spots. «What force ha
ve you for me to use against the imperials, Majesty?» he asked—a highly relevant question. Was Sharbaraz sending him forth in the hope he would be defeated and killed? «Take up the garrisons from as many of the Thousand Cities as suits you,» Sharbaraz answered. «With them to hand, you will far outnumber the foe.»
«Yes, Majesty, but—» Contradicting the King of Kings before the whole court would not improve Abivard's standing here. True, if he took up all the garrisons from the Thousand Cities, he would have far more men in the field than Maniakes did. Being able to do anything useful with them was something else again. Almost all of them were foot soldiers. Simply mustering them would take time. Getting them in front of Maniakes' fast-moving horsemen and bringing him to battle would take not only time but great skill– and even greater luck.
Did Sharbaraz understand that? Studying him, Abivard decided he did. It was one of the reasons he was afraid. He'd sent his best troops, his most mobile troops, into Videssos and Vaspurakan and had left himself little with which to resist a counterthrust he hadn't thought Maniakes would be able to make.
«Using the canals between the Tutub and the Tib will also let you delay the enemy and perhaps turn him back altogether,» Sharbaraz said. «We remember well how the usurper whom we will not name put them to good use against us in the struggle for the throne.»
«That is so, Majesty,» Abivard agreed. It was also the first thing the King of Kings had said that made sense. If he could take up the garrisons from the cities between the rivers and put them to work wrecking canals and flooding the countryside, he might get more use from them than he would if he tried to make them fight the Videssians. It still might not net everything Sharbaraz hoped for; the Videssians were skilled engineers and expert at corduroying roads through unspeakable muck. But it would slow them down, and slowing them was worth doing.
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