The Thousand Cities ttot-3

by Harry Turtledove

  «My compliments, Excellency,» Abivard said. «Compared to what I've seen elsewhere, your warriors deserve to be recruited into the personal guard of the King of Kings.»

  «You are generous beyond my deserts, lord,» Tovorg answered, cutting roast mutton with the dagger he wore on his belt. «I try only to do my duty to the realm.»

  «Too many people are thinking of themselves first and only then of the realm,» Abivard said. «To them—note that I name no names—whatever is easiest is best.»

  «You need name no names,» the city governor of Harpar said, a fierce gleam kindling in his eyes. «You come from Mashiz, and I know by which route. Other towns between the rivers are worse than those you have seen.»

  «You do so ease my mind,» Abivard said, to which Tovorg responded with a grin that showed his long white teeth.

  He said, «This was of course my first concern, lord.» Then he grew more serious. «How many peasants shall I rout out once you have moved on, and how much of the canal system do you think we'll have to destroy?»

  «I hope it doesn't come to that, but get ready to rout out as many as you can. Destroying canals will hurt the cropland but not your ability to move grain to the storehouses—is that right?»

  «There it might even help,» Tovorg said. «We mostly ship by water in these parts, so spreading water over the land won't hurt us much. What we eat next year is another question, though.»

  «Next year may have to look out for itself,» Abivard answered.

  «If Maniakes gets here, he'll wreck the canals as best he can instead of just opening them here and there to flood the land on either side of the banks. He'll burn the crops he doesn't flood, and he'll burn Harpar, too, if he can get over the walls or through them.»

  «As we did in the Videssian westlands?» Tovorg shrugged. «The idea, then, is to make sure he doesn't come so far, eh?»

  «Yes,» Abivard said, wondering as he spoke where he would find the wherewithal to stop Maniakes. Harpar's garrison was a start but no more. And they were infantry. Positioning them so they could block Maniakes' progress would be as hard as he'd warned Sharbaraz.

  «I will do everything I can to work with you,» Tovorg said. «If the peasants grumble—if they try to do anything more than grumble—I will suppress them. The realm as a whole comes first»

  «The realm comes first,» Abivard repeated. «You are a man of whom Makuran can be proud.» Tovorg hadn't asked about rewards. He hadn't made excuses. He'd just found out what needed doing and promised to do it. If things turned out well afterward, he undoubtedly hoped he would be remembered. And why not? A man was always entitled to hope.

  Abivard hoped he would find more city governors like Tovorg.

  «There!» A mounted scout pointed to a smoke cloud. «D'you see, lord?»

  «Yes, I see it,» Abivard answered. «But so what? There are always clouds of smoke on the horizon in the Thousand Cities. More smoke here than I ever remember seeing before.»

  That wasn't strictly true. He'd seen thicker, blacker smoke rising from Videssian cities when his troops had captured and torched them. But that smoke had lasted only until whatever was burnable inside those cities had burned itself out. Between the Tutub and the Tib smoke was a feet of life, rising from all the Thousand Cities as their inhabitants baked bread, cooked food, fired pots, smelted iron, and did all the countless other things requiring flame and fuel. One more patch of it struck Abivard as nothing out of the ordinary.

  But the scout spoke with assurance: «There lies the camp of the Videssians, lord. No more than four or five farsangs from us.»

  «I've heard prospects that delighted me more,» Abivard said. The scout showed white teeth in a grin of sympathetic understanding.

  Abivard had known for some time the direction from which Maniakes was coming. Had the refugees fleeing before the Videssian Avtokrator been mute, their presence alone would have warned him of Maniakes' impending arrival, as a shift in the wind foretells a storm. But the refugees were anything but mute. They were in fact voluble and volubly insistent that Abivard throw back the invader.

  «Easy to insist,» Abivard muttered. «Telling me how to do it is harder.»

  The refugees had tried that, too. They'd bombarded him with plans and suggestions till he had tired of talking with them. They were convinced that they had the answers. If he'd had as many horsemen as there were people in all the Thousand Cities put together, the suggestions—or some of them—might have been good ones. Had he even had the mobile force he'd left behind in Vaspurakan, he might have been able to do something with a few of the half-bright schemes. As things were—

  «As things are,» he said to no one in particular, «I'll be lucky if I don't get overrun and wiped out.» Then he called to Turan. The officer who had commanded his escort on the road from Vaspurakan down to Mashiz was now his lieutenant general, for he'd found no man from the garrison forces of the Thousand Cities whom he liked better for the role. He pointed to the smoke from Maniakes' camp, then asked, «What do you make of our chances against the Videssians?»

  «With what we've got here?» Turan shook his head. «Not good. I hear the Videssians are better than they used to be, and even if they weren't, it wouldn't much matter. If they hit us a solid blow, we'll shatter. By any reasonable way of looking at things, we don't stand a chance.»

  «Exactly what I was thinking,» Abivard said, «almost word for word. If we can't do anything reasonable to keep Maniakes from rolling over us, we'll just have to try something unreasonable.»

  «Lord?» Turan stared in blank incomprehension. Abivard took that as a good sign. If his own lieutenant couldn't figure out what he had in mind, maybe Maniakes wouldn't be able to, either.

  The night was cool only by comparison to the day that had just ended. Crickets chirped, sawing away like viol players who knew no tunes and had only one string. Somewhere off in the distance a fox yipped. Rather closer, the horses from Maniakes' army snorted and occasionally whickered on the picket lines where they were tied.

  Stars blazed down from the velvety black dome of the sky. Abivard wished the moon were riding with them. Had he been able to see his way here, he wouldn't have fallen down nearly so often. But had the moon been in the sky, Videssian sentries might well have seen him and his comrades, and that would have been disastrous.

  He tapped Turan—he hoped it was Turan—on the shoulder. «Get going. You know what to do.»

  «Aye, lord.» The whisper came back in the voice of his lieutenant. That took one weight off his mind, leaving no more than ninety or a hundred.

  Turan and the band he led slipped away. To Abivard they seemed to be making an appalling amount of noise. The Videssians not far away—not far away at all—appeared to notice nothing, though. Maybe the crickets were drowning out Turan's racket. Or maybe, Abivard thought, you're wound as tight as a youth going into his first battle, and every little noise is loud in your ears.

  Had he had better officers, he wouldn't have been out here himself, nor would Turan. But if you couldn't trust someone else to do the job properly, you had to take care of it for yourself. Had Abivard been younger and less experienced, he would have found crouching there in the bushes exciting. How often did a commanding general get to lead his own raiding party? How many times does a commanding general want to lead his own raiding party? he wondered, and came up with no good answer.

  He hunkered down, listening to the crickets, smelling the manure—much of it from the farmers themselves—in the fields.

  Waiting came hard, as it always did. He was beginning to think Turan had somehow gone astray when a great commotion broke out among the Videssians' tethered horses. Some of the animals whinnied in excitement as the lines holding them were cut; others screamed in pain and panic when swords slashed their sides. Turan and his men ran up and down the line, doing as much harm in as short a time as they could.

  Mingled with the cries of the horses were those of the sentries guarding them. Some of those cries were cut off abruptly as Tura
n's followers cut down the Videssians. But some sentries survived and fought and helped raise the alarm for their fellows in the tents off to the side of the horse lines.

  The watch fires burning around those tents showed men bursting forth from them, helms jammed hastily onto heads, sword blades glittering. «Now!» Abivard shouted. The warriors who had stayed behind with him started shooting arrows into the midst of the Videssians. At night and at long range they could hardly aim, but with enough arrows and enough targets, some were bound to strike home. Screams said that some did.

  Abivard plucked arrow after arrow from his bow case, shooting as fast as he could. This was a different sort of warfare from the one to which he was accustomed. Normally he hunted with the bow but in battle charged with the lance. Using archery against men felt strange.

  Strange or not, he saw Videssians topple and fall. Hurting one's foe was what war was all about, so he stopped worrying about how he was doing it. He also saw more Videssians, urged on by cursing officers, trot out toward him and his men.

  He gauged their numbers—many more than he had. «Back, back, back!» he yelled. Most of the soldiers he had with him were men from the city garrisons, not Turan's troopers. They saw nothing shameful about retreat. Very much the reverse; he heard a couple of them grumbling that he'd waited too long to order it.

  They ran back toward the rest. Most of them wore only tunics, so Abivard in their midst felt himself surrounded by ghosts. When they'd gotten across the biggest canal between Maniakes' camp and their own, some of them attacked its eastern bank with a mattock. Water poured out onto the fields.

  The Makuraners raised a cheer when Abivard and his little band returned after losing only a couple of men. «That was better than a flea bite,» he declared. «We've nipped their finger like an ill-mannered lapdog, perhaps. The God willing, we'll do worse when next we meet.» His men cheered again more loudly.

  «The God willing,» Roshnani said when he'd returned to the wagon giddy with triumph and date wine, «you won't feel compelled to lead another raid like that any time soon.» Abivard did not argue with her.

  Abivard hoped Maniakes would be angry enough at the lapdog nip he'd given him to lunge straight ahead without worrying about the consequences. A couple of years before Maniakes would have been likely to do just that; he'd had a way of leaping before he looked. And if he was heading straight for Mashiz, as Sharbaraz had thought—as Sharbaraz had feared—Abivard's army lay directly across his path. That hadn't been easy to arrange, since it involved maneuvering infantry against cavalry.

  But to Abivard's dismay, Maniakes did not try to bull his way straight to Mashiz. Instead, he moved north toward the Mylasa Sea, up into the very heart of the land of the Thousand Cities.

  «We have to follow him,» Abivard said when a scout brought the unwelcome news that the Avtokrator had broken camp. «If he gets around us, our army might as well fall into the Void for all the help it will be to the realm.»

  As soon as he put his army on the road, he made another unpleasant discovery. Up till that time his forces had been impeding Maniakes' movements by destroying canals. Now, suddenly, the boot was on the other foot. The floods that spilled out over the fields and gardens of the lands between the rivers meant that he had to move slowly in pursuit of the Videssians.

  While his men were struggling with water and mud, a great pillar of smoke rose into the sky ahead of him. «That's not a camp,» Abivard said grimly. «That's not the ordinary smoke from city, either. It's the pyre of a town that's been sacked and burned.»

  So indeed it proved to be. Just as the sack was beginning, Maniakes had gathered up a couple of servants of the God and sent them back to Abivard with a message. «He said this to us with his own lips and in our tongue so we could not misunderstand,» one of the men said. «We were to tell you this is repayment for what Videssos has suffered at the hands of Makuran. We were also to tell you this was only the first coin of the stack.»

  «Were you?» Abivard said.

  The servants of the God nodded together. Abivard's pedagogue had given him a nodding acquaintance with logic and rhetoric and other strange Videssian notions. Years of living inside the Empire and dealing with its people had taught him more. Not so the servants of the God, who didn't know what to do with a rhetorical question.

  Sighing, Abivard said, «If that's how Maniakes intends to fight this war, it will be very ugly indeed.»

  «He said you would say that very thing, lord,» one of the servants of the God said, scratching himself through his dirty yellow robe. «He said to tell you, if you did, that to Videssos it was already ugly and that we of Makuran needed to be reminded wars aren't always fought on the other man's soil.»

  Abivard sighed again. «Did he tell you anything else?»

  «He did, lord,» the other holy man answered. «He said he would leave the Thousand Cities if the armies of the King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, leave Videssos and Vaspurakan.»

  «Did he?» Abivard said, and then said no more. He had no idea whether Maniakes meant that as a serious proposal or merely as a ploy to irk him. Irked he was. He had no intention of sending Sharbaraz the Avtokrator's offer. The King of Kings was inflamed enough without it. The servants of the God waited to hear what he would say. He realized he would have to respond. «If we can destroy Maniakes here, he'll be in no position to propose anything.»

  Destroying Maniakes, though, was beginning to look as hard to Abivard as stopping the Makuraners formerly had to have looked to the Videssian Emperor.

  Up on its mound the city of Khurrembar still smoked. Videssian siege engines had knocked a breach in its mud-brick wall, allowing Maniakes' troopers in to sack it. One of these days the survivors would rebuild. When they did, so much new rubble would lie underfoot that the hill of Khurrembar would rise higher yet above the floodplain.

  Surveying the devastation of what had been a prosperous city, Abivard said, «We must have more cavalry or Maniakes won't leave one town between the Tutub and the Tib intact.»

  «You speak nothing but the truth, lord,» Turan answered, «but where will we come by horsemen? The garrisons hereabouts are all infantry. Easy enough to gather together a great lump of them, but once you have it, what do you do with it? By the time you move it here, the Videssians have already ridden there.»

  «I'd even take Tzikas' regiment now,» Abivard said, a telling measure of his distress.

  «Can we pry those men out of Vaspurakan?» Turan asked. «As you say, they'd come in handy now, whoever leads them.»

  «Can we pry them loose?» Abivard plucked at his beard. He hadn't meant it seriously, but now Turan was forcing him to think of it that way. «The King of Kings was willing—even eager—to give them to me at the start of the campaign. I still despise Tzikas, but I could use his men. Perhaps I'll write to Sharbaraz—and to Mikhran marzban, too. The worst they can tell me is no, and how can hearing that make me worse off?»

  «Well said, lord,» Turan said. «If you don't mind my telling you so, those letters shouldn't wait.»

  «I'll write them today,» Abivard promised. «The next interesting question is, Will Tzikas want to come to the Thousand Cities when I call him? Finding out should be interesting. So should finding out how reliable he proves if he gets here. One more thing to worry about.» Turan corrected him: «Two more.» Abivard laughed and bowed. «You are a model of precision before which I can only yield.» His amusement vanished as quickly as it had appeared. «Now, to keep from having to yield to Maniakes' men—»

  «Yield to them?» Turan said. «We can't keep up with them, which is, if you ask me, a worse problem than that. The Videssians, may they fall into the Void, move over the land of the Thousand Cities far faster than we can.»

  «Over the land of the Thousand Cities—» Abivard suddenly leaned forward and kissed Turan on the cheek, as if to suggest his lieutenant were of higher rank than he. Turan stared till he began to explain.

  Abivard laughed out loud. The rafts that no
w transported his part of the army up a branch of the Tib had carried beans and lentils down to the town where he'd commandeered them. With the current of the river, though, and with little square sails raised, they made a fair clip—certainly as fast as horses went if they alternated walk and trot as they usually did.

  «Behold our fleet!» he said, waving to encompass the awkward vessels with which he hoped to steal a march on Maniakes. «We can't match the Videssians dromon for dromon on the sea, but let's see them match us raft for raft here on the rivers of the Thousand Cities.»

  «No.» Roshnani sounded serious. «Let's not see them match us.»

  «You're right,» Abivard admitted. «Like a lot of tricks, this one, I think, is good for only one use. We need to turn it into a victory.»

  The flat, boring countryside flowed by on either bank of the river. Peasants laboring in the fields that the canals from the stream watered looked up and stared as the soldiers rafted north, then went back to their weeding. Off to the east another one of the Thousand Cities went up in smoke. Abivard hoped Maniakes would spend a good long while there and sack it thoroughly. That would keep him too busy to send scouts to the river to spy this makeshift flotilla. With luck, it would also let Abivard get well ahead of him.

  Abivard also hoped Maniakes would continue to take the part of the army still trudging along behind him—now commanded by Turan—for the whole. If all went perfectly, Abivard would smash the Avtokrator between his hammer and Turan's anvil. If all went well, Abivard's part of the army would be able to meet the Videssians on advantageous terms. If all went not so well, something else would happen. The gamble, though, struck Abivard as worthwhile.

  One advantage of the rafts that he hadn't thought of was that they kept moving through the night. The rafters took down the sails but used poles to keep their unwieldy craft away from the banks and from shallow places in the stream. They seemed so intimately acquainted with the river, they hardly needed to see it to know where they were and where the next troublesome stretch lay.