An Emperor for the Legion (Videssos Cycle)

by Harry Turtledove

No taunt, no insult could have moved the Videssian admiral from his chosen course, but hard reality did. If he sank the fishing boat ahead, Gavras would surely come alongside and board—and with so many soldiers crammed into his ship, that fight could have but one outcome. “Hard to port,” Leimmokheir cried, and his ship heeled on its side as it twisted free from danger.

  Thorisin and his men yelled derision after him: “Coward! Traitor!”

  “No traitor I!” That was Leimmokheir’s rough bass. “I said I would fight you if I met you again.”

  “You thought that would be never, you and your hired murderers!”

  Wind and quickly growing distance swept away the admiral’s reply. Thorisin shook his fist at the retreating galley and sent after it a volley of curses that Leimmokheir never heard.

  Marcus waved his thanks to the Emperor. “So it was you I rescued, was it?” Gavras shouted. “See, I must trust you after all—or maybe I didn’t know who was in your boat!” The tribune wished Thorisin had not added that gibing postscript; all too likely it held a touch of truth.

  “Shoaling, we are,” one of the sailors warned, and grabbed the fishing boat’s rail. Gorgidas and Nepos both had the wisdom to do the same. A moment later timbers groaned as the boat ran hard aground. Marcus and Gaius Philippus fell in a swearing heap; Viridovix, still leaning over the side, almost went overboard.

  “This salt water’ll play merry hell with my armor,” Gaius Philippus said mournfully as he splashed ashore. Marcus followed, carrying his sword above his head to keep it safe from rust.

  A wave knocked Viridovix off his feet. He emerged from the sea looking like a drowned cat, his mustaches and long red locks plastered wetly across his face. But a grin flashed behind that hair. “It’s one man jolly well out of a boat I am!” he cried. As soon as he got above the tideline, he carefully dried his blade in the white sand. He was careless in some things, but never with his weapons.

  The whole fringe of beach was full of small units from Thorisin Gavras’ army, all trying to form up into larger ones. A full maniple of Romans came marching toward the tribune from the captured Videssian bireme a quarter of a mile down the beach; Quintus Glabrio was their head.

  “I thought you were done for when that whoreson came up on you,” Marcus said, returning the junior centurion’s salute. “ ‘Well done’ doesn’t say enough.”

  As usual, Glabrio shrugged the praise aside. “If he hadn’t made a mistake, it wouldn’t have turned out so well.”

  Gavras’ ship went aground next to the boat that had carried Scaurus and his companions. “Hurry, there!” the Emperor exhorted his men as they came up onto the land. “Form a perimeter! If the Sphrantzai have the wit to make a sally against us, we’ll wish we were on the other shore again. Hurry!” he repeated.

  He co-opted Glabrio’s maniple as part of his guard force. Scaurus gave it to him without demur; he had been taking constant nervous glances at Videssos’ frowning walls and great gates, wondering if the capital’s masters would contest their rival’s landing.

  But rather than vomiting forth armed men, the city’s gates were slamming shut to hold the newcomers out. The thunder of their closing was audible where Gavras’ men stood. “Pen-pushers! Seal-stampers!” Thorisin said with contempt. “Ortaias and his snake of an uncle must think to win their war huddling behind the city’s walls, hoping I’ll grow bored and go away, or that their next assassination scheme won’t miscarry, or suchlike foolishness. There can’t be a real soldier among ’em, no one to tell them walls don’t win sieges, not by themselves. That takes wit and gut both. The young Sphrantzes has neither, Phos knows; Vardanes I’ll give credit for shrewdness, aye, but the only guts to him are the ones bulging over his belt.”

  Scaurus nodded at Gavras’ assessment of his imperial foes, though he suspected there might be more to Vardanes Sphrantzes than Thorisin thought. But even after it was plain there would be no sally from Videssos, the tribune’s eye kept drifting back to that double wall of dour brown stone. How much wit, he asked himself, would it take to keep men out, fighting from works like those?

  He must have spoken his thoughts aloud, for Gaius Philippus commented soberly, “Close, but not quite on the mark. The real question is, how much wit will it take to get in?”

  VI

  TRUMPETS BLARED A FANFARE, THEN SKIRLED INTO A MARCH beat. Twelve parasols, the imperial number, popped open as one, bright flowers of red, blue, gold, and green silk. Thorisin Gavras’ army, formed in a great long column, lifted weapons in salute of their overlord. A herald, a barrel-chested stentor of a man, roared out, “Forward—ho!” and, with the usual Videssian love of ostentatious ceremony, the column stamped into motion. It slowly paraded from south to north just out of missile range from the imperial capital’s walls, a fierce spectacle intended to give the city’s defenders second thoughts on their choice of masters.

  “Behold Thorisin Gavras, his Imperial Majesty, rightful Avtokrator of the Videssians!” the herald bellowed from his place between Thorisin and his parasol bearers. The Emperor’s bay stallion, his accustomed mount, was still on the other side of the Cattle-Crossing. He rode a black, its coat curried to dark luster.

  Gavras waved to the city, doffing his helmet to let Sphrantzes’ troops on the wall see his face. For the occasion he wore a golden circlet around the businesslike conical helm; his boots were a splash of blood against the horse’s jet-black hide. Otherwise he was garbed as a common soldier—it was to soldiers he would appeal, and in any case he had no patience with the jewel-encrusted, gold-stitched vestments that were an Avtokrator’s proper garb.

  There were warriors aplenty to watch his progress before the city. They lined the lower, outer wall; the greatest numbers, as was natural, defended the gates. Except for gate house forces, the massive inner wall, fifty feet tall or even a bit more, was not so heavily garrisoned.

  “Why serve pen-pushers?” the herald cried to the troops inside Videssos. “They’d sooner see you serfs than soldiers.” That, Marcus knew, was only the truth. Bureaucratic Emperors had held sway in Videssos for most of the past half-century and, to break the power of their rivals, the provincial nobles, the pen-pushers systematically dismantled the native Videssian army and replaced it with mercenaries.

  But that process was far-gone now, and the force defending Ortaias Sphrantzes and his uncle was itself largely made up of hired troops. They hooted and jeered at Gavras, crying, “All your people are serfs! That’s why they need real men to fight for ’em!” The regiment of Namdaleni started its shout of “Drax! Drax! The great count Drax!” to drown out Gavras’ herald’s words.

  One mercenary, a man with strong lungs and a practical turn of mind, shouted, “Why should we choose you over the Sphrantzai? They’ll pay us and keep us on, and you’d send us home poor!” Thorisin’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a humorless smile; his distrust of mercenaries was too well known, even though his own army was more than half hired troops.

  Forgetting his herald, he yelled back, “Why prop up a worthless turntail rascal? For fierce Ortaias cost us everything in front of Maragha by running away like a frightened mouse, him and his talk of being ‘ashamed to suffer not suffering.’ Bah!”

  On the last few words Thorisin’s voice climbed to a squeaky tenor mockery of his foe’s; he wickedly quoted young Sphrantzes’ speech to his men just before the disastrous battle. His own soldiers were mostly survivors of that fight; they added their shouts to Gavras’ derision: “Aye, give him to us, the coward!” “Send him to the amphitheater—he’d ride rings round your jockeys!” “You’d best be brave, you on the walls, if you have to fight after one of his speeches!” And Gaius Philippus, loud in Marcus’ ear: “Give him over—we’ll show him more than’s in his book, I promise!”

  The torrent of scorn that poured from Gavras’ army seemed to have an effect on Ortaias’ soldiers. They were men like any others, and sensitive to their fellow professionals’ taunts. When the army’s abuse died away, there was thoughtful
silence up on Videssos’ walls.

  But one of Sphrantzes’ captains, a huge warrior who towered over his troops, roared out harsh, contemptuous laughter. “You ran, too, Gavras,” he bellowed, “after your brother lost his head! How are you better than the lord we serve?”

  Thorisin went red and then white. He dug spurs into his horse until it screamed and reared. “Attack!” he snouted. “Kill me that slime-tongued whore’s get!” A few men took tentative steps toward the wall; most never moved from their places in column. Realistic with the stark good sense of men who risk their lives for pay, they knew such an impromptu assault on the city’s works could only end in massacre.

  While Gavras wrestled his stallion to stillness, Marcus hurried forward to try to calm the Emperor. Baanes Onomagoulos was already at his side, holding the horse’s bridle and talking softly but urgently to the furious Gavras. Between them they brought his rage under control, but it did not abate for turning cold. He ground out, “The scum will pay for that, I vow.” He shook his fist at the captain on the wall, who gave back a gesture herdsmen used when they talked of breeding stock.

  The officer’s cynical challenge gave spirit back to his comrades. They whooped at his obscene reply to Thorisin’s fist and sent catcalls after Gavras as his military procession moved north.

  As Scaurus returned to his place, he asked Baanes Onomagoulos, “Do you know that captain of Sphrantzes’? The bastard has his wits about him.”

  “So he does, worse luck for us. They were wavering up there until he opened his mouth.” Onomagoulos shaded his eyes, peered at the wall. “Nay, I can’t be sure, his helm is closed. But from the size of him, and that cursed wit, I’d guess he’s the one calls himself Outis Rhavas. If it’s him, he leads a real crew of cutthroats, they say. He’s a new man, and I don’t know much about him.”

  Marcus found that strange. By his name, Outis Rhavas was a Videssian, and the tribune thought Baanes, a fighting man of thirty years’ experience, should be familiar with the Empire’s leading soldiers. Still, he reminded himself, chaos was abroad in Videssos these days, and perhaps this Rhavas was a bandit chief doing his best to prosper in it.

  Even as you are, he told himself, and shook his head, disliking the comparison.

  Ortaias and his uncle seemed willing to stand siege, and Thorisin, after failing in his appeal at the city’s walls, saw no choice but to undertake it. His men went to work building an earthen rampart to seal off the neck of Videssos’ peninsula.

  Some troops were almost useless for the task. Laon Pakhymer’s Khatrishers dug and carried merrily for a couple of days, then grew bored and tired of the entire process. “Can’t say I blame them,” Pakhymer pointedly told Thorisin when the Emperor tried to order them back to their labor. “We came to fight the Yezda, not in your civil war. We can always go home again, you know—truth is, I miss my wife.”

  Gavras fumed, but he could hardly coerce the Khatrishers without starting a brand new civil war in his own army. Not wanting to lose the horsemen, he sent them out foraging with his Khamorth irregulars—he had not even tried to acquaint the nomads with the use of shovel and mattock.

  Rather to his surprise, Marcus found he, too, missed Helvis, their storms notwithstanding. He was growing used to the idea that those would come from time to time, the inevitable result of attraction between two strong people, neither much disposed to change to suit the other’s ways. Between them, though, they had much that was good, Malric and Dosti not least. The tribune had come late to fatherhood and found it more satisfying than anything else he had set his hand to.

  In the first days of the siege of Videssos, he had scant time for loneliness. Unlike Pakhymer’s troops, his Romans were men highly skilled in siege warfare. Spades and picks were part of their regular marching gear, and they erected field fortifications every night when they made camp.

  Thorisin Gavras and Baanes Onomagoulos rode up to inspect the work. The Emperor wore a dissatisfied look, having just come from the amateurish barricade some of Onomagoulos’ men were slowly throwing up. As ever since his wounding, Onomagoulos’ face was set and tight, though less so now than Scaurus had sometimes seen him. Sitting a horse pained him less than the rocking hobble that was the ruin of his once-quick step.

  Gavras’ expression cleared as he surveyed the broad ditch and stake-topped earthwork the legionaries already had nearly done. The Romans held the southernmost half-mile of Thorisin’s siege line. “Now here’s something more like it,” the Emperor said, more to Onomagoulos than Marcus. “A good deal better than your lads have turned out, Baanes.”

  “It looks well, yes,” the older noble said shortly, not caring for the criticism. “What of it? Outlanders have some few skills: the Khamorth with the bow, the lance to the Namdaleni, and these fellows with their moles’ tricks. A useful talent now, I grant.”

  He spoke offhandedly, not caring if the tribune heard, his unconscious assumption of superiority proof against embarrassment. Nettled, Marcus opened his mouth to make some hot reply. Before the words passed his lips, he remembered himself in a Roman tent in Gaul, listening to one of Caesar’s legates saying, “Now, gentlemen, we all know the Celts are headstrong and rash. If we hold the high ground, we can surely lure them into charging uphill.…”

  His mouth twisted into a brief, wry grin—so this was how it felt, to be reckoned a barbarian. Helvis was right again, it seemed.

  But no, not altogether; catching the sour flicker on his face, Thorisin said quickly, “One day Baanes will choke, shoving that boot of his down his throat.”

  Scaurus shrugged. Thorisin’s apology felt genuine, but at the same time the Emperor was using him to score a point off the powerful lord at his side. Nothing in this land ever wore but one face, the tribune thought with a moment’s touch of despair.

  He brought himself back to the business at hand. “We’re properly dug in,” he said, “from here to the sea.” He waved to the walls of Videssos the city, their shadow in the late afternoon sun reaching almost to where he stood. “Next to that, though, all we’ve done is no more than a five-year-old playing at sand castles along the beach.”

  “True enough,” Gavras said. “It matters not so much, though. They may have their castles, but they can’t eat ’em, by Phos.”

  “As long as they rule the sea, they don’t have to,” Marcus said, letting his chief fret loose. “They can laugh at us while they ship in supplies. Ships are the key to cracking the city, and we don’t have them.”

  “The key, aye,” Thorisin murmured, his eyes far away. Scaurus realized after a few seconds that the Emperor was not lost in contemplation. He was looking southeast into the Sailors’ Sea, at the island lying on the misty edge of vision from Videssos. With abrupt quickening of interest, the Roman recalled the Videssian name for that island: it was called the Key.

  But when he asked Gavras what was in his mind, the Emperor only said, “My plans are still foggy.” He smiled, as if at some private joke. Onomagoulos, Marcus saw, had no more idea of what his overlord meant than did the tribune. Somehow, that reassured him.

  By coincidence, that night was one of the misty ones common on the coast even in high summer, moon and stars swallowed up by the thick gray blanket rolling off the sea at sunset. Videssos’ towers and crenelated walls disappeared as if they had never been. Torch-carrying sentries moved in hazy haloes of light; the taste of the ocean came with every indrawn breath.

  Viridovix prowled along the earthwork, torch in his left hand and drawn sword in his right. “Sure and they can’t be failing to take a whack at us in this porridge, can they?” he demanded when he ran into Scaurus and Gaius Philippus. “If that were me all shut up in there, I’d give the tails of the omadhauns outside a yank they’d remember awhile.”

  “So would I,” Gaius Philippus said. His ideas of warfare rarely marched with the Gaul’s, but this was such a time. He took the fog almost as a personal affront; it changed war from a game of skill, a professional’s game, into one where any cabbag
ehead could make himself a genius with an hour’s luck.

  Marcus, though, saw what the centurion in his nervousness and the aggressive Celt missed: it was as foggy inside the city as out. “I’d bet Ortaias’ marshals are pacing the walls themselves,” he said, “waiting to hear scaling ladders shoved against them.”

  Viridovix blinked, then laughed. “Aye, belike that’s the way of it,” he said. “Two farmers, the each of ’em staying up of nights to watch his own henhouse for fear the other raid it. A sleepless, thankless job they both think it, too, and me along with ’em.”

  “It may be so,” Gaius Philippus conceded. “The Sphrantzai haven’t the imagination for anything risky. But what of Gavras? This should be a night to suit him—he’s a gambler born.”

  “There you have me,” Scaurus said. “When the fog came down, I expected something lively would happen, but it seems I was wrong.” He recounted the afternoon’s conversation to the Roman and the Celt.

  “There’s deviltry somewhere, right enough,” Gaius Philippus said. He yawned. “Whatever it is, it’ll have to get along without me until morning. I’m turning in.” His torch held waist-high so he could see the ground ahead, he headed for his tent; the Roman camp itself was set near the sea on the flat stretch of land that had been the Videssian army’s exercise ground.

  Scaurus followed him to bed a few minutes later and, to his annoyance, had trouble falling asleep. The gods knew it was peaceful almost to a fault without Dosti waking up several times a night. But the tribune missed Helvis warm on the sleeping-mat beside him. It was hardly fair, he thought as he turned restlessly: not so long ago he’d found it hard to sleep with a woman in his bed, and now as hard without one.

  At the officers’ conference the next morning Thorisin Gavras seemed pleased with himself, though Marcus had no idea why; as far as the Roman knew, nothing had changed since yesterday.

  “He probably found himself a bouncy girl who’d say yes and not much more,” was Soteric’s guess after the meeting broke up. “Compared to poison-tongued Komitta, that’d be pleasure enough.”