An Emperor for the Legion (Videssos Cycle)

by Harry Turtledove

“They don’t know what’s happening any more than we do,.” Gaius Philippus said in disgust as he listened to the umpteenth contradictory tale, all of them told with passionate conviction. “You might as well shut your ears.”

  That was not quite true. On one thing, at least, all rumors came together—though the rest of Videssos had slipped from their hands, the Sphrantzai still held the palace quarter. Unlike much of what he heard, that made sense to Scaurus. Many buildings in the palace complex were fortresses in their own right, perfect refuges for a faction beaten elsewhere.

  It also decided Scaurus’ course of action. The Silver Gate opened onto Middle Street, the capital’s main thoroughfare, which ran directly to the palaces with but a single dogleg. The tribune told the buccinators, “Blow double-time!” Above the blare of horns he shouted, “Come on, boys! We’ve waited long enough for this!” The legionaries raised a cheer and quickstepped down the slate-paved street at a pace that soon left most of the rowdies gasping far behind them.

  The tribune remembered the Romans’ parade along Middle Street the day they first came to the capital. Then it had been slow march, with a herald in front of them crying, “Make way for the valiant Romans, brave defenders of the Empire!” The street had cleared like magic. Today pedestrians got no more warning than the clatter of iron-spiked sandals on the flagstones and, if Phos was with them, a shouted “Gangway!” After that it was their own lookout, and more than one was flung aside or simply run down and trampled.

  Just as they had on that first day, the sidewalks filled to watch the troops go by; to Videssos’ fickle, jaded populace, even civil war could become entertainment. Farmers and tradesmen, monks and students, whores and thieves, fat merchants and sore-covered beggars, all came rushing out to see what the new spectacle might be. Some cheered, some called down curses on the Sphrantzai, but most just stood and stared, delighted the morning had brought them this diversion.

  Marcus saw an elderly woman point at the legionaries, heard her screech, “It’s the Gamblers, come to sack Videssos!” She used city slang for the Namdaleni; even in the language of insult, theology came into play.

  Curse the ignorant harridan, thought Scaurus. The crowds had just left off being a mob; they could become one again in an instant. But the leader of the street toughs, a thick-shouldered bear of a man named Arsaber, was still jogging along beside the legionaries and came to their rescue now. “Shut it, you scrawny old bitch!” he bellowed. “These here ain’t Gamblers, they’re our friends the Ronams, so don’t you give ’em any trouble, hear?”

  He turned back to the tribune, grinning a rotten-toothed grin. “You Ronams, you’re all right. I remember during the riots last summer, you put things down without enjoying it too much.” He spoke of riots and the quelling thereof with the expert knowledge someone else might show on wine.

  Thanks to a bungling herald’s slip at the imperial reception just after the Romans came to Videssos, much of the city still mispronounced their name. Marcus did not think the moment ripe for correcting Arsaber, though. “Well, thanks,” he said.

  The plaza of Stavrakios, the coppersmiths’ district—already full of the sound of hammering—the plaza of the Ox, the red-granite imperial office building that doubled as archives and jail, and a double handful of Phos’ temples, large and small, all flashed quickly by as the legionaries stormed toward the palaces.

  Then Middle Street opened out into the plaza of Palamas, the greatest forum in the city. Scaurus flicked a glance at the Milestone, a column of the same red granite as the imperial offices. There must have been a score of heads mounted on pikes at its base, like so many gruesome fruit. Nearly all were fresh, but terror had not been enough to keep the Sphrantzai on the throne.

  The plaza market stalls were open, but Thorisin Gavras’ blockade had cut deeply into their trade. Bakers, oil sellers, butchers, and wine merchants had little to sell, and that rationed and supervised by government inspectors. Ironically, it was commerce in luxuries that flourished under the siege. Jewels and precious metals, rare drugs, amulets, silks and brocades found customers galore. These were the things that could always be exchanged for food, so long as there was food.

  The eruption of more than a thousand armed men into the plaza of Palamas sent the rich merchants flying for their lives, stuffing their goods into pockets or pouches and kicking over their stalls in their panic to be gone. “Will you look at the loot getting away,” Viridovix said wistfully.

  “Shut up,” Gaius Philippus growled. “Don’t give the lads more ideas than they have already.” His vine-stave staff of office thwacked down on the corseleted shoulder of a legionary who had started to stray. “Come on, Paterculus—the fight’s this way! Besides, you bonehead, the pickings’ll be better yet in the palaces.” That prediction was plenty to keep the men in line—the troopers who heard him fairly purred in anticipation.

  They thundered past the great oval of the Amphitheater, the southern flank of Palamas’ plaza. Then they were into the quarter of the palaces, its elegant buildings set off from one another by artfully placed gardens and groves and wide stretches of close-trimmed emerald lawn.

  A Roman swore and dropped his scutum to clutch at his right shoulder with his left hand. High overhead, an archer in a cypress tree whooped and nocked another shaft. His triumph was short-lived. Zeprin the Red’s great two-handed axe was made for hewing heads, not timber, but the muscular Haloga proved no mean woodsman. The axe bit, jerked free, bit again. Chips flew at every stroke. The cypress swayed, tottered, fell; the sniper’s scream of terror cut off abruptly as he was crushed beneath the trunk.

  “The gardeners will be angry at me,” Zeprin said. A longtime veteran of the Imperial Guard, he thought of the palace complex as his home and mourned the damage he had done it. For the dead enemy he showed no remorse.

  “Dinna fash yoursel’, Haloga dear,” Viridovix told him dryly. “They’ll be after having other things on their minds.”

  He waved ahead—a barricade of logs, broken benches, and levered-up paving flags scarred the smooth expanse of lawn. There were helmeted soldiers behind it and bodies in front—the high-water mark, it seemed, of the mob’s attack on the palaces.

  The makeshift works might have been strong enough to hold off rioters, but Scaurus’ troops were another matter—and a second look told him the defenders were not many. “Battle line!” he ordered. His men shook themselves out into place, their hobnailed caligae ripping the smooth turf. His eyes caught Gaius Philippus’; they nodded together. “Charge!” the tribune shouted, and the Romans rolled down on the barricade.

  A few arrows snapped toward them, but only a few. With cries of “Gavras!” and “Thorisin!” they hit the waist-high rampart and started scrambling over. Some of the warriors on the other side stayed to fight with saber and spear, but most, seeing themselves hopelessly outnumbered, turned to flee.

  “Don’t follow too close! Let ’em run!” Gaius Philippus roared out—in Latin, so the enemy could not understand. “They’ll show us where their mates are lurking!”

  The command tested Roman obedience to the utmost, for their foes used not only “The Sphrantzai!” and “Ortaias!” as war cries, but also “Rhavas!” It was all the senior centurion could do to hold his men in check. The battle-heat was on them, fanned hotter by lust for vengeance.

  But Gaius Philippus’ levelheaded order proved its worth. The enemy fell back, not on the barracks where Scaurus had expected them to make their stand, but through the ceremonial buildings of the palace complex and past the Hall of the Nineteen Couches to the Grand Courtroom itself, after Phos’ High Temple the most splendid edifice in all Videssos.

  The Hall of the Nineteen Couches had walls of green-shot marble and gilded bronze double doors that would have done credit to a keep. It was useless as a strongpoint, though, for a dozen low, wide windows made it impossible to hold against assault.

  Marcus wished the same was true of the Grand Courtroom. It was a small compound in its own right, with o
utsweeping wings of offices making three sides of a square. Archers stood on the domed roof of the courtroom proper; others, looking for targets, peered through windows in the wings. Those windows were few, small, and high—the architect who designed the thickset building of golden sandstone had made sure it could double as a citadel.

  “Zeprin!” Scaurus shouted, and the Haloga appeared before him, axe at port arms. The tribune said, “Since you’ve already turned logger, hack me down a couple of tall straight ones for rams.”

  “Rams against the Grand Gates?” Zeprin the Red sounded horrified.

  “I know they’re treasures,” Marcus said with what patience he could. “But do you think those whoresons’ll come out by themselves?”

  After a moment the Haloga sighed and shrugged. “Aye, there are times when it’s what must be done, not what should be.” His thick muscles bunched under his mail shirt; he attacked the stately pines with a ferocity that told something of his dismay. The Romans were at the foot-and-a-half thick trunks as fast as they fell, chopping branches away and then tugging the trimmed logs up.

  “All right, at ’em!” Gaius Philippus said. The men at the rams clumsily swung their heavy burdens toward the Grand Gates. Shieldmen leaped out on either side of them to cover them from arrow-fire. The makeshift batterers, of course, had no mantlets; Marcus hoped the enemy trapped inside the Grand Courtroom had not had time to bring anything more lethal than bowmen up to the roof.

  The ram crews lumbered forward, warded by their comrades’ upraised scuta. The Grand Gates groaned at the impact, as if in pain. The logs jolted from the Romans’ hands. Men tumbled, writhing as they fell to keep from being crushed. They scrambled to their feet, lifted the rams once more, and drew back for another blow.

  More legionaries fanned out to deal with the few dozen men who had fled to the Grand Courtroom too late to take shelter inside. Soon only Romans stood erect in the courtyard. Not one of Rhavas’ men had asked for quarter—in that, at least, they perfectly understood the temper of their foes.

  Out of the corner of his eye Marcus noticed the upper stories of the nearby Hall of Ambassadors. They were crowded with faces watching the fighting. The tribune had several friends among the foreign envoys. He hoped they were safe. This, he thought, was a closer view of Videssos’ government in action than they were likely to want.

  Rhavas’ archers were hitting back. One sharpshooter high on the courtroom dome scored again and again. Then he crumpled, sliding down over the orange-red tiles to fall like so many limp rags to the greenery far below.

  The range and upward angle had made him a nearly impossible mark. “Well shot!” Marcus cried, looking round to find out who had picked off the bowman. He saw Viridovix pounding a skinny, swarthy man on the back: Arigh Arghun’s son, the envoy of the Arshaum to Videssos’ court. His nomadic people dwelt on the steppe west of the Khamorth, and he carried a plainsman’s short, horn-reinforced bow. Bitter experience against the Yezda had taught Scaurus how marvelously long and flat those bows shot; the dead sharpshooter was but another proof.

  “Isn’t he the finest little fellow now?” Viridovix crowed, gleefully thumping Arigh again. The big ruddy Celt and slight, flat-faced, black-haired nomad made a strange pair, but they had often roistered together when the Romans were stationed in the city. Each owned a fierce, uncomplicated view of life that appealed to the other, the more so in the wordly-wise capital.

  The tribune’s brief musing was snapped by a scream within the Grand Courtroom, a woman’s shriek of mortal anguish that sent the hairs on his arms and at the nape of his neck bristling upright. Hardened though they were, the Romans and their foes both stood frozen in horror for a moment before returning to their business of murdering one another.

  Marcus’ first thought after his wits began to work again was that Alypia Gavra might well be in the besieged courtroom. If that scream had been hers—“Harder, damn you!” he shouted to the men at the rams and shoved sword in scabbard so he could take hold of a log.

  The ram crews needed no urging; the cry had put fresh spirit in them as well. They rushed forward. The Grand Gates tolled like a sub-bass bell. Scaurus fell, scraping elbows and knees and feeling the wind half knocked from him, almost as if he had run full-tilt into the gates himself.

  He leaped to his feet and ran back to the log, never noticing the fist-sized stone that smashed into the grass where he had sprawled. Then it was back and forward again, and yet again. The rough bark drew blood from even the most callused hands.

  Twice as tall as a man, the burnished gates were leaning drunkenly back against the bar that held them upright. Quintus Glabrio’s clear voice rang out, “Once more! This one pays for all.” The rams crashed home. With the desperate sound a great plank makes on breaking, the bar gave way. The Grand Gates flew open, as if kicked. Cheering, the Romans surged forward.

  A fierce volley met them, but Scaurus, expecting such, had put shieldmen in front of the ram crews to hold off the arrows. Then it was savage fighting at the breached gate. The small opening kept the Romans from bringing their full numbers into play, and Rhavas’ bandits fought with the reckless fury of men who knew themselves trapped. Even so, the legionaries were better armed and better trained; step by bitter step they pushed their foes back from the entrance and into the courtroom.

  As he fought his way past the Grand Gates, Marcus felt the dismay Zeprin the Red had known when the tribune ordered rams brought to bear against them. The high reliefs on them were exquisite, a wordless chronicle of the Emperor Stavrakios’ conquest of Agder in the far northeast eleven hundred years before. Here the imperial troops led back prisoners, the bowed heads of the captive women agonizing portraits of despair. A little higher, engineers carved a road along the side of a cliff so the army could advance; a pack mule’s hoof skittered on the edge of disaster. At the join of the gates Stavrakios led a counterattack against the Halogai. And over all stood the Miracle of Phos, when hot sun in midwinter melted a frozen river and trapped the barbarians without retreat. The Videssian god appeared in brooding majesty above his chosen folk.

  But Agder was lost to the Empire these last eight long centuries, and now, the reliefs that showed its overthrow themselves met war. The rams had flattened mountains and crushed faces with impartial brutality. A tiny twisted bronze ear was trampled in the grass at the tribune’s feet. Nothing can come into being without change, he told himself, but the maxim did little to console him.

  He shouldered past one of Rhavas’ bravoes, thrust home under the arm where his mail shirt was weak. The man groaned and twisted away, enlarging his own wound. As he fell, Scaurus tore his small round shield from him to replace the scutum left outside the courtroom.

  Marcus’ eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the relative gloom within. He had expected to face Outis Rhavas at the entrance—had Ortaias Sphrantzes’ foul captain fled? No, there he was, by a seething iron cauldron in the very center of the porphyry floor; the rude log fire kindled on that perfect surface was a desecration in itself. A knot of men around him jostled one another, each trying to dip a surcoat sleeve into whatever mixture bubbled in the kettle.

  By it sprawled a gutted corpse, naked, female. The druids’ stamps on Marcus’ blade flared into light, but he did not need them to warn him of magic.

  The fight was not the well-planned, carefully orchestrated engagement in which Gaius Philippus could take pride. The Romans perforce broke ranks to battle through the Grand Gates; inside the courtroom it was a vicious sprawl of fighting, one on one, three against two, up and down the broad center aisle and around the tall columns of light-drinking basalt. A hanging of cloth of gold and scarlet silk came tumbling down to enfold a handful of warriors in its precious web.

  Marcus fought his way toward Rhavas. He moved cautiously; his hobnailed caligae would not bite on the glass-smooth flooring, and he felt as if he were walking on ice.

  When one of Rhavas’ men stumbled against him, they both fell heavily. They grappled, so closely loc
ked together Scaurus could smell his enemy’s fear. He could not stab with his sword; it was too long. He smashed the pommel into the brigand’s face until the clutching arms around him relaxed their grip.

  The tribune staggered to his feet. There were shouts outside—more of Thorisin’s men reaching the palace complex at last through Videssos’ maze of streets. Scaurus had no time for them. Outis Rhavas loomed over him, a tower of enameled steel from closed helm to mailed boots.

  Most Videssians fought by choice from horseback and thus preferred sabers. But as he had in the brush at the rampart, Rhavas swung a heavy longsword. His giant frame made it a wickedly effective weapon; even the tall Scaurus gave away inches of reach.

  “A pity you scrape your face bare,” Rhavas hissed, his voice full of venom. “It ruins the pleasure of shaving your corpse.”

  The tribune did not answer; he knew the taunt was only meant to enrage and distract him. Their blades rang together. As Marcus had already found, Outis Rhavas was as skilled as he was strong. Stroke by stroke, he drove the Roman back; it was all Scaurus could do to parry the storm of blows. After the protection of his lost scutum, the small shield he carried seemed no more useful than a lady’s powder puff.

  But for all their fell captain’s might, Rhavas’ band was falling back around him. They fought as bandits do, furiously but without order. Though the legionaries’ maniples were in disarray, long training had drilled into them the notion that they were parts of a greater whole. Like a constricting snake’s coils, they pressed constantly, never yielding an advantage once gained.

  Thus when Rhavas threatened Marcus, he was alone, while Viridovix and half a dozen Romans leaped to the tribune’s defense. Balked of his prey, Rhavas cursed horribly. But he gave ground, falling back until he was one of the last defenders of the cauldron that still boiled and steamed in the center of the courtroom.

  Even through woodsmoke, Marcus caught its contents’ sick-sweet carrion reek, but a score of Rhavas’ soldiers had already wet their sleeves in the liquid. And not soldiers alone; the sleeve that went into the pot now was purple satin shot through with thread of silver and gold.