The Thousand Cities ttot-3

by Harry Turtledove

  He wished Maniakes hadn't overthrown the Makuraner champion. That had to have left his own men glum and the Videssians elated. But when you were fighting for your life, weren't you too busy to worry about what had happened a while ago? Abivard hoped so.

  When arrows and javelins failed to make the Makuraners break and run, the Videssians drew swords and rode straight into the line Abivard had established. They slashed down at their enemies on foot; some of them tried to use their javelins as the Makuraner heavy horse used lances.

  The Makuraners fought back hard not only against Maniakes' men but also against the horses they rode. Those poor beasts were not armored like the ones atop which Tzikas' men sat; they were easy to slash and club and shoot. Their blood splashed on the ground with that of their riders; their screams rose to the sky with those of wounded men on both sides.

  Abivard rushed reserves to a dangerously thin point in the line. He had tremendous pride in his troops. This was not a duty they'd expected to have a year before. They were standing up to the Videssians like veterans. Some of them were veterans now; by the end of the battle they'd all be veterans.

  «Don't let them through!» Abivard shouted. «Stand your ground!»

  Rather to Abivard's surprise, they stood their ground and kept standing it. Maniakes did have more men with him than he'd brought the year before, but Tzikas' cavalry regiment neutralized a good part of his increased numbers. The rest were not enough to force a breakthrough in Abivard's line.

  The stalemate left Abivard tempted to attack in turn, allowing openings to develop in his position in the hope of trapping a lot of Videssians. He had little trouble fighting down the temptation. He found it too easy to imagine himself on the other side of the battlefield, looking for an opportunity. If Maniakes spotted one, he'd take full advantage of it. Abivard knew that Most important, then, was not giving the Avtokrator the chance.

  As fights had a way of doing, this one seemed to go on forever. Had the sun not shown him it was but midafternoon, Abivard would have guessed the battle had lasted three or four days. Then, little by little, Videssian pressure eased. Instead of attacking. Maniakes' men broke contact and rode back toward the north, back the way they had come. Tzikas' men made as if to pursue– the foot soldiers could hardly do so against cavalry—but a shower of arrows and a fierce countercharge said the Videssians remained in good order. The pursuit quickly stalled.

  «By the God, we threw them back,» Turan said in tones of wonder.

  «By the God, so we did.» Abivard knew he sounded as surprised as his lieutenant. He couldn't help that. He was surprised.

  Maybe his soldiers were surprised, and maybe they weren't. Surprised or not, they knew what they'd accomplished. Above and through the moans of the wounded and the shriller shrieks of hurt horses rose a buzz that swelled to a great cheer. The cheer had but one word: «Abivard!»

  «Why are they shouting my name?» he demanded of Turan. «They're the ones who did it»

  His lieutenant looked at him. «Sometimes, lord, you can be too modest.»

  The soldiers evidently thought so. They swarmed around Abivard, still calling his name. Then they tried to pull him down from his horse, as if he were a Videssian to be overcome. Turan's expression warned him he had better yield to the inevitable. He let his feet slide out of the stirrups. As Turan leaned over and grabbed hold of his horse's reins, he let himself slide down into the mass of celebrating soldiers.

  They did not let him fall. Instead, they bore him up so he rode above them on a stormy, choppy sea of hands. He waved and shouted praise the foot soldiers didn't hear because they were all shouting and because they were passing him back and forth so everyone could carry him and have a go at dropping him.

  At last he did slip down through the sea of hands. His feet touched solid ground. «Enough!» he cried; being upright somehow put fresh authority in his voice. Still shouting his praises, the soldiers decided to let him keep standing on his own.

  «Command us, lord!» they shouted. A man standing near Abivard asked, «Will we go after the Videssians tomorrow?» Somewhere in the fighting a sword had lopped off the fleshy bottom part of his left ear; blood dried black streaked that side of his face. He didn't seem to notice.

  Abivard suffered a timely coughing fit. When he did answer, he said, «We have to see what they do. The trouble is, we can't move as fast as they do, so we have to figure out where they're going and get there first.»

  «You'll do that, lord!» the soldier missing half an ear exclaimed. «You've done it already, lots of times.»

  Twice, to Abivard's way of thinking, didn't constitute lots of times. But the garrison troops were cheering again and shouting for him to lead them wherever they were supposed to go. Since he'd been trying to figure out how to bring about exactly that effect, he didn't contradict the wounded man. Instead he said, «Maniakes wants Mashiz. Mashiz is what he's wanted all along. Are we going to let him have it?»

  «No!» the soldiers yelled in one great voice.

  «Then tomorrow we'll move south and cut him off from his goal,» Abivard said. The soldiers shouted louder than ever. If he'd told them to march on Mashiz instead of defending it, he thought they would have done just that

  He shoved the idea down into some deep part of his mind where he wouldn't have to think about it. That wasn't hard. The aftermath of battle had given him plenty to think about. They'd fought, the Videssians had retreated, and now his men were going to retreat, too. He wondered if there had ever been a battlefield before where both sides had abandoned it as soon as they could.

  The secretary was a plump, fastidious little man named Gyanarspar. More than a bit nervously, he held out a sheet of parchment to Abivard. «This is the latest the regimental commander Tzikas has ordered me to write, lord,» he said.

  Abivard quickly read through the letter Tzikas had addressed to Sharbaraz King of Kings. It was about what he might have thought Tzikas would say but not what he'd hoped. The Videssian renegade accused him of cowardice for not going after Maniakes' army in the aftermath of the battle by the Tib and suggested that a different leader—coyly unnamed—might have done more.

  «Thank you, Gyanarspar,» Abivard said. «Draft something innocuous to take the place of this tripe and send it on its way to the King of Kings.»

  «Of course, lord—as we have been doing.» The secretary bowed and hurried out of Abivard's tent.

  Behind him Abivard kicked at the dirt. Tzikas made a fine combat soldier. If only he'd been content with that! But no, not Tzikas. Whether in Videssos or in Makuran, he wanted to go straight to the top, and to get there he'd give whoever was ahead of him a good boot in the crotch.

  Well, his spiteful bile wasn't going to get to Sharbaraz. Abivard had taken care of that. The silver arkets he lavished on Gyanarspar were money well spent as far as he was concerned. The King of Kings hadn't tried joggling his elbow nearly so much or nearly so hard since Abivard had started making sure the scurrilous things Tzikas said never reached his ear.

  Gyanarspar, the God bless him, didn't aspire to reach the top of anything. Some silver on top of his regular pay sufficed to keep him sweet. Abivard suddenly frowned. How was he to know whether Tzikas was also bribing the secretary to let his letters go out as he wrote them? Gyanarspar might think it clever to collect silver from both sides at once.

  «If he does, he'll find he's made a mistake,» Abivard told the wool wall of the tent. If Sharbaraz all at once started sending him more letters full of caustic complaint, Gyanarspar would have some serious explaining to do.

  At the moment, though, Abivard had more things to worry about than the hypothetical treachery of Tzikas' secretary. Maniakes' presence in the land of the Thousand Cities was anything but hypothetical. The Avtokrator hadn't tried circling around Abivard's forces and striking straight for Mashiz, as had been Abivard's greatest worry. Instead, Maniakes had gone back to his tactics of the summer before and was wandering through the land between the Tutub and the Tib, destroying everyt
hing he could.

  Abivard kicked at the dirt yet again. He couldn't chase Maniakes over the floodplain any more than he could have pursued him after the battle by the Tib. He didn't know what he was supposed to do. Was he to travel back to Nashvar and have the contentious local wizards break the banks of the canals again? He was less convinced than he had been the year before that that would accomplish everything he wanted. He also knew Sharbaraz would not thank him for any diminution in revenue from the land of the Thousand Cities. And two years of flooding in a row were liable to put the peasants in an impossible predicament. They weren't highest on his list of worries, but they were there.

  Sitting there and doing nothing did not appeal to him, either. He might be protecting Mashiz where he was, but that didn't do the rest of the realm any good. While he kept Maniakes from fairing on the capital with fire and sword, the Avtokrator visited them upon other cities instead. Sharbaraz' realm was being diminished, not increasing, while that happened.

  «I can keep Maniakes from breaking past me and driving into Mashiz,» Abivard said to Roshnani that night. «I think I can do that, at any rate. But keep him from tearing up the land of the Thousand Cities? How? If I venture out against him, he will break around me, and then I'll have to chase his dust back to the capital.»

  For a moment he was tempted to do just that. If Maniakes put paid to Sharbaraz, the King of Kings wouldn't be able to harass him anymore. Rationally, he knew that wasn't a good enough reason to let the realm fall into the Void, but he was tempted to be irrational.

  Roshnani said, «If you can't beat the Videssians with what you have here, can you get what you need to beat them somewhere else?»

  «I'm going to have to try to do that, I think,» Abivard replied. If his principal wife saw the same possible answer to his question that he saw himself, the chance that answer was right went up a good deal. He went on, «I'm going to send a letter to Romezan, asking him to move the field force out of Videssos and Vaspurakan and to bring it back here so we can drive Maniakes away. I hate to do that—I know it's what Maniakes wants me to do—but I don't see that I have any choice.»

  «I think you're right.» Roshnani hesitated, then asked the question that had to be asked: «What will Sharbaraz think, though?»

  Abivard grimaced. «I'll have to find out, won't I? I don't intend to ask him for permission to recall Romezan; I'm going to do that on my own. But I will write him and let him know what I've done.

  If he wants to badly enough, he can countermand my order. I know just what I'll do if he does that.»

  «What?» Roshnani asked.

  «I'll lay down my command and go back to Vek Rud domain, by the God,» Abivard declared. «If the King of Kings isn't satisfied with the way I defend him, let him choose someone who does satisfy him: Tzikas, maybe, or Yeliif. I'll go back to the Northwest and live out my days as a rustic dihqan. No matter how far Maniakes goes into Makuran, he'll never, ever reach the Vek Rud River.»

  He waited with some anxiety to see how Roshnani would take that. To his surprise and relief, she shoved aside the plates off which they'd eaten supper so she could lean over on the carpet they shared and give him a kiss. «Good for you!» she exclaimed. «I wish you would have done that years ago, when we were in the Videssian westlands and he kept carping because you couldn't cross to attack Videssos the city.»

  «I felt as bad about that as he did,» Abivard said. «But it's only gotten worse since then. Sooner or later everyone has a breaking point, and I've found mine.»

  «Good,» Roshnani said again. «It would be fine to get back to the Northwest, wouldn't it? And even finer to get out from under a master who's abused you too long.»

  «He'd still be my sovereign,» Abivard said. But that wasn't what Roshnani had meant, and he knew it. He wondered how well his resolve would hold up if Sharbaraz put it to the test.

  The letters went out the next day. Abivard thought about delaying the one to Sharbaraz, to present the King of Kings with troop movements too far along for him to prevent when he learned of them. In the end Abivard decided not to take that chance. It would give Yeliif and everyone else at court who was not well inclined toward him a chance to say he was secretly gathering forces for a move of his own against Mashiz. If Sharbaraz thought that and tried to recall him, it might force him to move against Mashiz, which he did not want to do. As far as he was concerned, beating Videssos was more important. «All I want,» he murmured, «is to ride my horse into the High Temple in Videssos the city and to see the expression on the patriarch's face when I do.»

  When he'd spent a couple of years in Across, staring over the Cattle Crossing at the Videssian capital, that dream had seemed almost within his grasp. Now here he was with his back against the Tib, doing his best to keep Maniakes Avtokrator from storming Mashiz. War was a business full of reversals, but going from the capital of the Empire of Videssos to that of Makuran in the space of a couple of years felt more like an upheaval.

  «Ships,» he said, turning the word into a vile curse. Had he had some, he would long since have ridden in triumph into Videssos the city. Had Makuran had any, Maniakes would not have been able to leap the length of the Videssian westlands and bring the war home to the land of the Thousand Cities. And after a moment's reflection, he found yet another reason to regret Makuran's lack of a navy: «If I had a ship, I could put Tzikas on it and order it sunk.»

  That bit of whimsy kept him happy for an hour, until Gyanarspar came into his tent with a parchment in his hand and a worried expression on his face. «Lord, you need to see this and decide what to do with it,» he said.

  «Do I?» If Abivard felt any enthusiasm for the proposition, he concealed it even from himself. But he held out his hand, and Gyanarspar put the parchment into it. He read Tzikas' latest missive to the King of Kings with incredulity that grew from one sentence to the next. «By the God!» he exclaimed when he was through. «About the only thing he doesn't accuse me of is buggering the sheep in the flock of the King of Kings.»

  «Aye, lord,» Gyanarspar said unhappily.

  After a bit of reflection Abivard said, «I think I know what brought this on. Before, his letters to Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, got action—action against me. This year, though, the letters haven't been getting through to Sharbaraz. Tzikas must think that they have—and that the King of Kings is ignoring them. And so he decided to come up with something a little stronger.» He held his nose. This letter, as far as he was concerned, was strong in the sense of stale fish.

  «What shall we do about it, lord?» Gyanarspar asked. «Make it disappear, by all means,» Abivard said. «Now, if we could only make Tzikas disappear, too.»

  Gyanarspar bowed and left. Abivard plucked at his beard. Maybe he could sink Tzikas even without a ship. He hadn't wanted to before, when the idea had been proposed to him. Now– Now he sent a servant to summon Turan.

  When his lieutenant stepped into the tent, he greeted him with, «How would you like to help make the eminent Tzikas a hero of Makuran?»

  Turan was not the swiftest man in the world, but he was a long way from the slowest. After a couple of heartbeats of blank surprise his eyes lit up. «I'd love to, lord. What have you got in mind?»

  «That scheme you had a while ago still strikes me as better than most: finding a way to send him out with a troop of horsemen against a Videssian regiment. When it's over, I'll be very embarrassed I used such poor military judgment.»

  Turan's predatory smile said all that needed saying there. But then the officer asked, «What changed your mind, lord? When I suggested this before, you wouldn't hear me. Now you like the idea.»

  «Let's just say Tzikas has been making a little too free with his opinions,» Abivard answered, at which Turan nodded in grim amusement. Abivard turned practical: «We'll need to set this up with the Videssians. When we need to, we can get a message to them, isn't that right?»

  «Aye, lord, it is,» Turan said. «If we want to exchange captives, th
ings like that, we can get them to hear us.» He smiled again. «For the chance of getting their hands on Tzikas, after what he tried to do to Maniakes, I think they'll hear us, as a matter of fact.»

  «Good,» Abivard said. «So do I. Oh, yes, very good indeed. You will know and I will know and our messenger will know, and a few Videssians, too.»

  «I don't think they'd give us away, lord,» Turan said. «If things were a little different, they might, but I think they hate Tzikas worse than you do. If they can get their hands on him, they'll keep quiet about hows and whys.»

  «I think so, too,» Abivard said. «But there is one other person I'd want to know before the end.»

  «Who's that?» Turan sounded worried. «The more people who know about a plot like this, the better the chance it'll go wrong.»

  « 'Before the end,' I said,» Abivard replied. «Don't you think it would be fitting if Tzikas figured out how he'd ended up in his predicament?»

  Turan smiled.

  After swinging away from the Tib to rampage through the floodplain, Maniakes' army turned back toward the west, as if deciding it would attack Mashiz after all. Abivard spread his own force out along the river to make sure the Videssians could not force a crossing without his knowing about it.

  He spread his cavalry particularly wide, sending the horsemen out not only to scout against the Videssians but also to nip at them with raids. Tzikas was like a whirlwind, now here, now there, always striking stinging blows against the countrymen he'd abandoned

  «He can fight,» Abivard said grudgingly one evening after the Videssian had come in with a couple of dozen of Maniakes' men as prisoners. «I wonder if I really should—»

  Roshnani interrupted him, her voice very firm: «Of course you should. Yes, he can fight. Think of all the other delightful things he can do, too.»

  His resolve thus stiffened, Abivard went on setting up the trap that would give Tzikas back to the Videssians. Turan had been right: once his messenger met Maniakes', the Avtokrator proved eager for the chance to get his hands on the man who had nearly toppled him from his throne.