The Thousand Cities ttot-3

by Harry Turtledove

  «So it is, for which I thank you,» Abivard answered with a bow. He could not resist adding, «And done well, in spite of its not being done as you first had in mind.»

  That got him a glare; he would have been disappointed if it hadn't Utpanisht held up a bony, trembling hand. «Speak not against Glathpilesh, lord,» he said in a voice like wind whispering through dry, dry straw. «He served Makuran nobly this day.»

  «So he did,» Abivard admitted. «So did all of you. Sharbaraz King of Kings owes you a debt of gratitude.»

  Glathpilesh spit out a bone that might have choked him had he swallowed it. «What he owes us and what we'll get from him are liable to be two different things,» he said. His shrug made his flabby jowls wobble. «Such is life: what you get is always less than you deserve.»

  Such a breathtakingly sardonic view of life would have annoyed Abivard most of the time. Now he said only, «Regardless of what Sharbaraz does, I shall reward all six of you as you deserve.»

  «You are generous, lord,» Utpanisht said in that dry, quavering voice.

  «Just deserts, eh?' Glathpilesh said with his mouth full. He studied Abivard with eyes that, while not very friendly, were disconcertingly keen. «And will Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase—» He made a mockery of the honorific formula."—reward you as you deserve?»

  Abivard felt his face heat. «That is as the King of Kings wishes. I have no say in the matter.»

  «Evidently not,» Glathpilesh said scornfully.

  «I am sorry,» Abivard told him, «but your wit is too pointed for me today. I'd better go and find the best way to take advantage of what your flood has done to the Videssians. If we had a great fleet of light boats… but I might as well wish for the moon while I'm at it.»

  «Use well the chance you have,» Utpanisht told him, almost as if prophesying. «Its like may be long in coming.»

  «That I know,» Abivard said. «I did not do all I could with our journey by canal. The God will think less of me if I let this chance slip, too. But—» He grimaced. «—it will not be so easy as I thought when I asked you to flood the canals for me.»

  «When is anything ever as easy as you think it will be?» Glathpilesh demanded. He pointed to the tray of songbirds, which was empty now. «There. You see? As I said, you never get all you want.»

  «Getting all I want is the least of my worries,» Abivard answered. «Getting all I need is another question altogether.»

  Glathpilesh eyed him with sudden fresh interest and respect «For one not a mage—and for one not old—to know the difference between those two is less than common. Even for mages, need shades into want so that we must ever be on our guard against disasters spawned from greed.»

  To judge from the empty tray in front of him, Glathpilesh was intimately acquainted with greed, perhaps more intimately acquainted than he realized—no one needed to devour so many songbirds, but he'd certainly wanted them. The only disaster to which such gluttony could lead, though, Abivard thought, was choking to death on a bone, or perhaps getting so wide that you couldn't fit through a door.

  Utpanisht said, «May the God grant you find a way to use our magic as you had hoped and drive the Videssians and their false god from the land of the Thousand Cities.»

  «May it be as you say,» Abivard agreed. He was less sure it would be that way now than he had been when he had decided to use the flood as a weapon against Maniakes. But no matter what else happened, the Videssians would not be able to move around on the plain between the Tutub and the Tib as freely as they had been doing. That would reduce the amount of damage they could inflict.

  «It had better be as Utpanisht says,» Glathpilesh said. «Otherwise a lot of time and effort will have gone for nothing.»

  «A lot of time,» Abivard echoed. The wizards, as far as he was concerned, had wasted a good deal of it all by themselves. They, no doubt, would vehemently disagree with that characterization and would claim they had spent time wisely. But whether wasted or spent, time had passed—quite a bit of it. «Not much time is left for this campaigning season. We've held Maniakes away from Mashiz for the year, anyhow.»

  That was exactly what Sharbaraz King of Kings had sent him out to do. Sharbaraz had expected he'd do it by beating the Videssians, but making them shift their path, making them fight even if he couldn't win, and then using water as a weapon seemed to work as well.

  «As harvest nears, the Videssians will leave our land, not so?» Utpanisht said. «They are men; they must harvest like other men.»

  «The land of the Thousand Cities grows enough for them to stay here and live off the countryside if they want to,» Abivard said, «or it did before the flood, at any rate. But if they do stay here, who will bring in the harvests back in their homeland? Their women will go hungry; their children will starve. Can Maniakes make them go on while that happens? I doubt it.»

  «And I as well,» Utpanisht said. «I raised the question to be certain you were aware of it»

  «Oh, I'm aware of it,» Abivard answered. «Now we have to find out whether Maniakes is—and whether he cares.»

  With the countryside flooded around them, the Videssians no longer rampaged through the land of the Thousand Cities. Not even their skill at engineering let them do that. Instead, they stayed near the upper reaches of one of the Tutub's tributaries, from which they could either resume the assault they had carried on through the summer or withdraw back into the westlands of their own empire.

  Abivard tried to force them to the latter course, marching out and joining up with Turan's force before moving—sometimes single file along causeways that were the only routes through drowned farmlands—against the Videssians. He sent a letter off to Romezan up in Vaspurakan, asking him to use the cavalry of the field force to attack Maniakes once he got back into Videssos. The garrisons holding the towns in the Videssian westlands weren't much better equipped for mobile warfare than were those that had held down the Thousand Cities.

  Word came from out of Videssian-held territory that Maniakes' wife, Lysia—who was also his first cousin—not only was with the Avtokrator but had just been delivered of a baby boy. «There—do you see?» Roshnani said when Abivard passed the news to her. «You're not the only one who takes his wife on campaign.»

  «Maniakes is only a Videssian bound for the Void,» Abivard replied, not without irony. «What he does has no bearing on the way a proper Makuraner noblewoman should behave.»

  Roshnani stuck out her tongue at him. Then she grew serious once more. «What's she like—Lysia, I mean?»

  «I don't know,» Abivard admitted «He may take her on campaigns with him, but I've never met her.» He paused thoughtfully. «He must think the world of her. For the Videssians, marrying your cousin is as shocking as letting noblewomen out in public is for us.»

  «I wonder if that's part of the reason he's brought her along,» Roshnani mused. «Having her with him might be safer than leaving her back in Videssos the city while he's gone.»

  «It could be so,» Abivard said. «If you really want to know, we can ask Tzikas. He professed to be horrified about Maniakes' incest—that's what he called it—when he came over to us. The only problem is, Tzikas would profess anything if he saw as much as one chance in a hundred that he might get something he wants by doing it.»

  «If I thought you were wrong, I would tell you,» Roshnani said. She thought for a moment, then shook her head. «If finding out about Lysia means asking Tzikas, I'd rather not know.»

  Abivard gave the Videssian renegade such praise as he could: «He hasn't done anything to me since he came here from Vaspurakan.»

  Roshnani tempered even that: «Anything you know of, you mean. But you didn't know everything he was doing to you before, either.»

  «I'm not saying you're wrong, either, mind you, but I am learning,» Abivard answered. «Tzikas doesn't know it, but slipping a few arkets to his orderlies means I read everything he writes before it goes into a courier's message tube.»

  Ros
hnani kissed him with great enthusiasm. «You are learning,» she said.

  «I should be clever more often,» Abivard said. That made her laugh and as he'd hoped, kiss him again.

  The closer his army drew to Maniakes' force, the more Abivard worried about what he'd do if the Videssians chose battle instead of retreat. Tzikas' regiment of veteran cavalry stiffened the men he already had, and half of those garrison soldiers had fought well even if they had lost in the end. He was still leery of the prospect of battle and suddenly understood why the Videssians had been so hesitant about fighting his army after losing to it a few times. Now he felt the pinch of that sandal on his foot.

  In the fields the peasants of the Thousand Cities worked stolidly away at repairing the damage from the breaches in the canals he'd had the wizards make. He wanted to shout at them, try to make them see that in so doing they were also helping to turn Maniakes loose on their land once more. He kept quiet. From long, often unhappy experience, he knew a peasant's horizon seldom reached farther than the crop he was raising. There was some justification for that way of thinking, too: if the crop didn't get raised nothing else mattered, not to the peasant who stood to starve.

  But Abivard saw farther. If Maniakes got loose to rampage over the land between the Tutub and the Tib once more, these particular peasants might escape, but others, probably more, would suffer.

  He found himself glancing at the sun more often than usual. Like anyone else, he looked to the sky to find out what time it was. Nowadays, though, he paid more attention to where in the sky the sun was rising and setting. The sooner autumn came, the happier he would be. Maniakes would have to withdraw to his own land men… wouldn't he?

  If he did intend to withdraw, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he sent out horsemen to harass Abivard's soldiers and slow their already creeping advance even further. With Abivard's reluctant blessing, Tzikas led his cavalry regiment in a counterattack that sent the Videssians back in retreat.

  When the renegade tried to push farther still, he barely escaped an ambush Maniakes' troopers set for him. On hearing that, Abivard didn't know whether to be glad or sorry. Seeing Tzikas fall into the hands of the Avtokrator he'd tried to slay by sorcery would have been the perfect revenge on him even if Abivard had decided not to hand him over to Maniakes.

  «Why can't you?» Turan asked when Abivard grumbled about that «I wish you would have after he came down here, no matter what he said about his regiment.» He paused thoughtfully. «The cursed Videssian's not a coward in battle, whatever else you want to say about him. Arrange for him to meet about a regiment's worth of Videssians with maybe half a troop of his own at his back. That'll settle him once and for all.»

  Abivard pondered the idea. It brought a good deal of temptation with it. In the end, though, and rather to his own surprise, he shook his head. «It's what he would do to me were our places reversed.»

  «All the more reason to do it to him first,» Turan said.

  «Thank you, but no. If you have to become a villain to beat a villain, the God will drop you into the Void along with him.»

  «You're too tenderhearted for your own good,» Turan said. «Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, would have done it without blinking an eye, and he wouldn't have needed me to suggest it to him, either.»

  That was both true and false. Sharbaraz, these days, could be as ruthless as any man ever born when it came to protecting his throne… yet he had not put Abivard out of the way when he had had the chance. Maybe that meant a spark of humanity did still lurk within the kingly facade he'd been building over the past decade and more.

  Turan looked sly. «If you want to keep your hands clean, lord, I expect I could arrange something or other. You don't even have to ask. I'll take care of it.»

  Abivard shook his head again, this time in annoyance. If Turan had quietly arranged for Tzikas' untimely demise without telling him about it, that would have been between his lieutenant and the God. But for Turan to do that after Abivard had said he didn't want it done was a different matter. What would have been good service would have turned into villainy.

  «You've got more scruples than a druggist,» Turan grumbled as he walked off, as disappointed with Abivard as Abivard was with him.

  The next day Tzikas returned to camp to give Abivard the details of his skirmish with the Videssians. «The enemy, at least, thought I was a man of Makuran,» he said pointedly. « 'There's that cavalry general of theirs, curse him to the ice,' they said. A good many of them have fallen into the Void now, eternal oblivion their fate.»

  He said all the right things. He'd let his beard grow out so that it made his face seem more rectangular, less pinched in at the jaw and chin. He wore a Makuraner caftan. And he still was, to Abivard, a foreigner, a Videssian, and so not to be trusted because of who he was, let alone because of his letters to Sharbaraz King of Kings.

  But he'd done decent service here. Abivard acknowledged that, saying, «I'm glad you beat them back. Knowing a cavalry regiment is here and able to do its job will make Maniakes think twice about getting pushy so late in the year.»

  «Yes,» Tzikas said. «Your magic helped there, too, even if not quite so much as you'd hoped.» His lips twisted in a grimace no Makuraner could have matched, an expression of self-reproach that was quintessentially Videssian: he was berating himself for being less underhanded than he would have wanted. «Had the magic I essayed worked even half so well, I, not Maniakes, would be Avtokrator now.»

  «And I might be trying to figure out how to drive you from me land of the Thousand Cities,» Abivard answered. His gaze sharpened. Here was a chance to get a look at the way Tzikas' mind worked. «Or would you have tried such a bold thrust if you had the Videssian throne under your fundament?»

  «No, not I,» Tzikas said at once. «I would have held on to what I had, strengthened that, and then begun to wrest back what was mine. I would have had no need to hurry, for I could have held out in Videssos the city forever, so long as my fleet kept you from crossing over from the westlands. Once my plans were ripe, I'd have struck and struck hard.»

  Abivard nodded. It was a sensible, conservative plan. That mirrored the way Tzikas had opposed Makuran back in the days when he'd been the best of the Videssian generals in the westlands—and the one who had paid the most attention to fighting the invaders and the least to the endless rounds of civil war engulfing the Empire after Genesios had murdered his way to the Videssian throne. Only in treachery, it seemed, was Tzikas less than conservative, although by Videssian standards, even that might not have been so.

  «But Maniakes has thrown us back on our heels,» Abivard argued. «Would your scheme have done so much so soon?»

  «Probably not,» Tzikas said. «But it would have risked less. Maniakes, whining pup that he is, has a way of overreaching that will bring him down in the end—you mark my words.»

  «I always mark your words, eminent sir,» Abivard answered. Tzikas scowled at his use of the Videssian title. Abivard didn't care. He also didn't think Tzikas was right. Maniakes, unlike a lot of generals, kept getting better at what he did.

  «By the God,» Tzikas replied, again reminding Abivard that he had bound himself to Makuran for better or for worse—or until he sees a chance for some new treachery, Abivard thought– «we should push straight at Maniakes with everything we have and force him out of the land of the Thousand Cities.»

  «I'd love to,» Abivard said. «The only problem with the plan is that everything we have hasn't been enough to force him out of the Thousand Cities.»

  Tzikas didn't answer, not with words. He simply donned another of those characteristically Videssian expressions, this one saying that, had he been in charge of things, they would have gone better.

  Before Abivard could get angry at that, he realized there was another problem with the scheme the Videssian renegade had proposed. Like Tzikas' plan for fighting Makuran had he been Avtokrator, this one lacked imagination; it showed no sense of where the enemy'
s real weakness lay.

  Slowly Abivard said, «Suppose we do force Maniakes away from the Tutub. What happens next? Where does he go?»

  «He falls back into the westlands. Where else can he go?» Tzikas said. «Then, I suppose, he makes for the coast, whether north or south I couldn't begin to guess. And then he sails away, and Makuran is rid of him till the spring campaigning season, by which time, the God willing, we shall be better prepared to face him here in the land of the Thousand Cities than we were this year.»

  «My guess is he'll go south,» Abivard said. «To reach the coast of the Videssian Sea, he'd have to skirt Vaspurakan, where we have a force that should be coming out to hunt him anyhow, and he controls none of the ports along that coast. But he's taken Lyssaion, which means he has a gateway out on the coast of the Sailors' Sea.»

  «Clearly reasoned,» Tzikas agreed. From a Videssian that was no small praise. «Yes, I suppose he likely will escape to the south, and we shall be rid of him—and we shall not miss him one bit.»

  «Do you play the Videssian board game?» Abivard asked, continuing, «I was never very good at it, but I liked it because it leaves nothing to chance but rests everything on the skill of the players.»

  «Yes, I play it,» Tzikas answered. By the predatory look that came into his eyes, he played well. «Perhaps you would honor me with a game one day.»

  «As I say, you'd mop the floor with me,» Abivard said, reflecting that Tzikas would no doubt enjoy mopping the floor with him, too. «But that's not the point. The point is, you can hurt the fellow playing the other side, sometimes hurt him a lot, just by putting one of your pieces between his piece and where it's trying to go.»

  «And so?» Tzikas said, right at the edge of rudeness. But then his manner changed. «I begin to see, lord, what may be in your mind.»

  «Good,» Abivard told him, less sardonically than he'd intended. «If we can set an army on his road down to Lyssaion, that will cause him all manner of grief. And unless I misremember, delaying him on the road to Lyssaion really matters at this season of the year.»