An Emperor for the Legion (Videssos Cycle)

by Harry Turtledove

  The Emperor bridled at that tone, which he had heard from Onomagoulos for too many years. But he still tried for patience as he answered, “Baanes, I have given Garsavra twenty-five hundred men, at least. Along with the retainers you muster on your estates, surely enough warriors are there to hold back the Yezda till spring. They don’t fly over the snow themselves, you know; they slog through it like anyone else. When spring comes I intend to hit them hard, and I won’t piddle away my striking force a squad here and a company there until I have nothing left.”

  Onomagoulos stuck out his chin; his pointed beard jutted toward Gavras. “The men are needed, I tell you. Will you not listen to plain sense?”

  No one at the table wanted to meet Thorisin’s eye while he was being hectored so, but all gazes slid his way regardless. He said only, “You may not have them,” but there was iron in his voice.

  Everyone heard the warning except Onomagoulos, whose angry frustration made him exclaim, “Your brother would have given them to me.”

  Marcus wanted to disappear; had Baanes searched for a year, he could not have found a worse thing to say. Thorisin’s jealousy of the friendship between Mavrikios and Onomagoulos was painfully obvious. Imperial dignity forgotten, Gavras leaned forward, bellowing, “He’d have given you the back of his hand for your insolence, you toplofty runt!”

  “Unweaned pup, your eyes aren’t open to see the world in front of your face!” Baanes was not yelling at the Avtokrator of the Videssians, but at his comrade’s tag-along little brother.

  “Clod from a dungheap! You think your precious estates are worth more than the whole Empire!”

  “I changed your diapers, puling moppet!” They shouted insults and curses at each other for a good minute, oblivious to anyone else’s presence. Finally Onomagoulos rose once more, crying, “There’s one more man Garsavra will have, by Phos! I won’t stay in the same city with you—the stench of you curdles my nose!”

  “It’s big enough,” Thorisin retorted. “Good riddance; Videssos is well shut of you.”

  By now, Scaurus thought, I should be used to the sight of people stalking out of Thorisin’s councils. Baanes Onomagoulos’ stalk was in fact a limp, but the effect remained the same. As he reached the polished bronze doors of the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, he turned round for a final scowl at the Emperor, who replied with an obscene gesture. Onomagoulos spat on the floor, as Videssians did before wine and food to show their rejection of Skotos. He hobbled out into the snow.

  “Where were we?” the Emperor said.

  * * *

  Marcus expected Baanes to be restored to Thorisin’s good graces; the Emperor’s temper ran high at flood but quickly ebbed. Onomagoulos’ anger, though, was of a more lasting sort. Two days after the stormy council he kept the promise he’d made there, sailing over the Cattle-Crossing and setting out for Garsavra.

  “I mislike this,” the tribune said when he heard the news. “He’s flying in the face of the Emperor’s authority.” Though he was in the Roman barracks, he looked round before he spoke and then was low-voiced—the price of living in the Empire, he thought discontentedly.

  “You’re right, I fear,” Gaius Philippus said. “If I were Gavras, I’d haul him back in chains.”

  “The two of you make no sense,” Viridovix complained. “It was the Gavras who gave him leave to go—or ordered him, more like.”

  “Ordered him to drop dead, perhaps,” Gorgidas said, “but not to go off and fight his own private war.” He lifted an ironic eyebrow at the Gaul. “When will you learn words can say one thing and mean another?”

  “Och, you think you’re such a tricksy Greek. This I’ll tell you, though—if it was my home in danger, I’d go see to it, and be damned to any who tried to stop me, himself included.” The Gaul folded his arms across his chest, as if daring the doctor to disagree.

  It was Gaius Philippus, though, who snorted at him. “Likely you would, and maybe lose your home and all your neighbors’ in the bargain. Think of yourself first and your mates last and that’s what happens. Why else do you think Caesar’s been able to fight one clan of Celts at a time?”

  Viridovix gnawed at his drooping mustache; the senior centurion’s gibe was to the point. But he replied, “Twon’t matter a bit in the end. Divided or no, we’ll be whipping the lot of you back home with your tails tucked into their grooves.”

  “Not a chance,” Gaius Philippus said, and the old dispute began again. Ever since the Romans came to Videssos, he and Viridovix had been arguing over who would win the fighting in Gaul. They both took the question seriously, although—or perhaps because—they could never answer it.

  Not much caring to listen, Marcus left for his desk in the pen-pushers’ wing of the Grand Courtroom. The problems there were new ones, but they did not seem to have solutions more definite than his friends’ debating topic.

  Pandhelis fetched him ledgers and reports in an unending stream. They further confused issues about as often as they settled them. Videssian bureaucrats, with their rhetorical training, took pride in making their meaning as obscure as possible. Trying to thread his way through a thicket of allusions he barely understood, Scaurus wondered why he had ever wanted a political career.

  He slept at his desk that night, stupefied by a pile of assessment documents written in a hand so tiny as to defy the eye. The legionaries were already at the practice field when he got back to the barracks. He walked down Middle Street to join them, breakfasting on a hard, square rye-flour roll dipped in honey, that he bought in the plaza of Palamas.

  It was another chilly day, with little flurries of snow blowing through the streets. When the tribune came up to a bathhouse with an imposing façade of golden sandstone and white marble, his enthusiasm for practice abruptly disappeared. He wrestled his conscience to the mat and went in. Falling asleep to the press of work, he told himself, was enough to make anyone feel grimy.

  The bathhouse’s owner took his copper at the door with a broad smile, waving him forward into the undressing chamber. He gave another copper to the boy there to make sure his clothes would not be stolen while he was bathing, then shed his sheepskin coat, tunic, and trousers with a sigh of relief.

  The sounds of the bath drew him on. As was true at Rome, Videssian baths were as much social places as ones devoted to cleanliness. Hawkers of sausages, wine, and pastries were crying their wares; so was the hair-remover, for those men who affected such fastidiousness. He fell silent for a moment, then Scaurus heard his client yelp as he began to pluck an armpit.

  Usually the tribune, with Stoic abstemiousness, limited himself to a cold bath, but after coming in out of the snow that was intolerable. He sweated for a while in the steam bath, baking the winter out. Then the cold plunge seemed attractive rather than self-tormenting. He climbed out of the pool when the icy water began to bite, stretching himself on the tiles to relax for a few minutes before going on to soak in the pleasantly warm pool beyond.

  “Scrape you off, sir?” asked a youth with a curved strigil in his hand.

  “Thank you, yes,” the tribune said; he’d brought along a little money for small luxuries like this, as it was next to impossible for a bather to scrape all of himself. He sighed at the pleasant roughness of the strigil sliding back and forth over his flesh.

  Around him plump middle-aged men puffed as they exercised with weights. Masseurs pummeled grunting victims, now clapping hands down on their shoulders, now cupping them to produce an almost drumlike beat. Three young men played the Videssian game called trigon, throwing a ball unexpectedly from one to the next. They feinted and shouted; whenever one dropped the ball the other two would cry out as he lost a point. Off in a corner, a handful of more sedentary types diced the morning away.

  There was a tremendous splash as someone leaped into the warm pool in the hall beyond, followed closely by cries of annoyance from the nearby people whom he’d drenched. The splasher came up not a whit dismayed. After blowing the water out of his mouth and nose, he start
ed to sing in a resonant baritone.

  “Everyone thinks he sounds wonderful in the baths,” the youth with the strigil said, cocking his head critically. He fancied himself a connoiseur of bathhouse music. “He’s not bad, I must say, for all his funny accent.”

  “No, he isn’t,” Marcus agreed, though his ear was so poor he could hardly tell good singing from bad. But only one man in Videssos owned that brogue. Tipping the youth a final copper, he got up and went in to say hello to Viridovix.

  The Celt was facing the entranceway and broke off his tune in mid-note when he saw the tribune. “If it’s not himself, come to wash the ink off him!” he cried. “And a good deal of himself there is to wash, too!”

  Scaurus looked down. He’d felt his middle thickening from days in a chair without exercise, but hadn’t realized the result was so plain to see. Annoyed, he ran three steps forward and dove into the warm water a good deal more neatly than Viridovix had. It was a shallow dive; the pool was no more than chest-deep.

  He swam over to the Celt. The two of them were strange fish among the olive-skinned, dark-haired Videssians: Marcus dark blond, his face, arms, and lower legs permanently tanned from his time in the field but the rest of him paler; and Viridovix, fair with the pink-white Gallic fairness that refused to take the sun, his burnished copper hair sodden against his head and curling in bright ringlets on his chest and belly and at his groin.

  “Shirking again,” they both said at the same time, and laughed together. Neither was in any hurry to get out. The pool was heated to that perfect temperature where the water does not register against the skin. Marcus thought of the sharp wind outside, then chose not to.

  A small boy, drawn perhaps by the Celt’s strangeness, splashed him from behind. Viridovix spun round, saw his laughing foe. “Do that to me, will you now?” he roared, mock-ferocious, and splashed back. They pelted each other with water until the youngster’s father had to go and take his son, unwilling, from the pool. Viridovix waved to them both as they left. “A fine lad, and a fine time, too,” he said to Scaurus.

  “From the look of you, you had your fine time last night,” the tribune retorted. He had been staring at Viridovix’s back and shoulders when the Gaul turned them during the water fight. They were covered with scratches that surely came from a woman’s nails. One or two of them, Scaurus thought, must have drawn blood; they were still red and angry.

  Viridovix smoothed down his mustaches, fairly dripping smugness. He said a couple of sentences in his own Celtic tongue before dropping back into Latin, which he still preferred to Videssian. “A wildcat she was, all right,” he said, smiling at the memory. “You canna see it under my hair, but she fair bit the ear off me, too, there at the end.”

  He was in so expansive a mood that Marcus asked, “Which one was it?” He was hard pressed to imagine any of the Celt’s three women showing such ferocity. They seemed too docile for it.

  “Och, none o’ them,” Viridovix answered, understanding the question and not put out by it: plainly he felt like boasting. “They’re well enough, I’ll not deny; still, the time comes when so much sweetness starts to pall. The new one, now! She’s slim, so she is, but wild and shameless as a wolf bitch in heat.”

  “Good for you, then,” Scaurus said. Viridovix, he thought, would likely jolly this new wench into joining the rest. He had a gift in such matters.

  “Aye, she’s all I hoped she would be,” the Gaul said happily. “Ever since she gave me her eye, bold as you please down there on the foggy beach, I’ve known she’d not be hard for me to lure under the sheets.”

  “Good for—” the tribune started to repeat, and then stopped in horrified amazement as the full meaning of Viridovix’ words sank in. His head whipped round to see who might be listening before he remembered they had been speaking Latin. One small thing to be grateful for, he thought—probably the only one. “Do you mean to tell me it’s Komitta Rhangawe’s skirt you’re lifting?”

  “Aren’t you the clever one, now? But it’s herself lifts it, I assure you—as greedy a cleft as any I’ve known.”

  “Are you witstruck all of a sudden, man? It’s the Emperor’s mistress you’re diddling, not some tavern drab.”

  “And what o’ that? A Celtic noble is entitled to better than such trollops,” Viridovix said proudly. “Forbye, if Thorisin doesn’t want me diddling his lady, then let him diddle her his own self and not stay up till dead of night kinging it. He’ll get himself no sons that way.”

  “Will you give him a red-headed one, then? If no other way, he’ll know the cuckoo by its feathers.”

  Viridovix chuckled at that, but nothing the Roman said would make him change his mind. He was enjoying himself, and was not a man to think of tomorrow till it came. He started singing again, a bouncy love song. Half a dozen Videssians joined in, filling the chamber with music. Marcus tried to decide whether drowning him now would make things better or worse.

  XI

  “PANDHELIS, WHERE HAVE YOU HIDDEN LAST YEAR’S TAX register for Kybistra?” Scaurus asked. The clerk shuffled through rolls of parchment, spread his hands regretfully. Muttering a curse, Scaurus stood up from his desk and walked down the hall to see if Pikridios Goudeles had the document he needed.

  The dapper bureaucrat looked up from his work as the tribune came in. He and Scaurus had learned wary respect for each other since the latter began overseeing the bureaucrats for Thorisin Gavras. “What peculations have you unearthed now?” Goudeles asked. As always, a current of mockery flowed just below the surface of his words.

  When Marcus told him what he wanted, Goudeles grew brisk. “It should be around here someplace,” he said. He went from pigeonhole to pigeonhole, unrolling the first few inches of the scrolls in them to see what they contained. When the search failed to turn up anything, his mobile eyebrows came down in irritation. He shouted for a couple of clerks to look in nearby rooms, but they returned equally unsuccessful. His frown deepened. “Ask the silverfish and the mice,” he suggested.

  “No, you probably trained them to lie for you,” Marcus said. When the Roman first started the job the Emperor had set him, Goudeles tested him with doctored records. The tribune returned them without comment and got what looked to be real cooperation thereafter. He wondered if this was another, subtler snare.

  But Goudeles was rubbing his neatly bearded chin in thought. “That cadaster might not be here at all,” he said slowly. “It might already be stored in the archives building down on Middle Street. It shouldn’t be—it’s too new—but you never can tell. I don’t have it, at any rate.”

  “All right, I’ll try there. If nothing else, I’ll get to stretch my legs. Thanks, Pikridios.” Goudeles gave a languid wave of acknowledgment. A strange character, Scaurus thought, looking and acting the effete seal-stamper almost to the point of self-parody, but with the grit to confront Thorisin Gavras in his own camp for the Sphrantzai. Well, he told himself, only in the comedies is a man all of a piece.

  The brown slate flags of the path from the Grand Courtroom to the forum of Palamas were wet and slippery; most of the snow that had blanketed the palace complex’ lawns was gone. The sun was almost hot in a bright blue sky. The tribune eyed it suspiciously. There had been another of these spells a couple of weeks before, followed close by the worst blizzard of the winter. This one, though, might be spring after all.

  The tribune had a good idea of the reception he would get at the imperial offices that housed the archives—nor was he disappointed. Functionaries herded him from file to musty file until he began to hate the smell of old parchment. There was no sign of the document he sought, or of any less than three years old. Some were much older than that; he turned up one that seemed to speak of Namdalen as still part of the Empire, though fading ink and strange, archaic script made it impossible to be sure.

  When he showed the ancient scroll to the secretary in charge of those files, that worthy said, “You needn’t look as if you’re blaming me. What would you expect to find in
the archives but old papers?” He seemed scandalized that anyone could expect him to produce a recent document.

  “I have been through all three floors of this building,” Scaurus said, fighting to hold his patience. “Is there any other place the scurvy thing might be lurking?”

  “I suppose it might be in the sub-basement,” the secretary answered, his tone saying he was sure it wasn’t. “That’s where the real antiques get stowed, below the prisons.”

  “I may as well try, as long as I’m here.”

  “Take a lamp with you,” the secretary advised, “and keep your sword drawn. The rats down there aren’t often bothered and they can be fierce.”

  “Splendid,” the tribune muttered. It was useful information all the same; though he had known the imperial offices held a jail, he had not been aware there was anything beneath it. He made sure the lamp he chose was full of oil.

  He was glad of the lamp as soon as he started down the stairway to the prison, for even that was below the level of the street and had no light save what came from the torches flickering in their iron brackets every few feet along the walls. The rough-hewn blocks of stone above them were thick with soot that had not been cleaned away for years.

  It was time for the prisoners’ daily meal. A pair of bored guards pushed a squeaking handcart down the central aisle-way. Two more, almost equally bored, covered them with drawn bows as they passed out loaves of coarse, husk-filled bread, small bowls of fish stew that smelled none too fresh, and squat earthen jugs of water. The fare was miserable, but the inmates crowded to the front of their cells to get it. One made a face as he tasted the stew. “You washed your feet in it again, Podopagouros,” he said.

  “Aye, well, they needed it,” the guard answered, unperturbed.

  The tribune had to ask his way down to the sub-basement. He walked past the rows of cells to a small door whose hinges creaked rustily as he opened it. As with many doorways in the imperial offices, an image of the Emperor was set above this one. But Scaurus blinked at the portrait: a roundfaced old man with a short white beard. Who—? He held up his lamp to read the accompanying text: “Phos preserve the Avtokrator Strobilos Sphrantzes.” It had been more than five years now since Strobilos was Emperor.