Videssos Cycle, Volume 1

by Harry Turtledove

  He swore, first in Videssian for Taso Vones’ benefit, then in Latin to relieve his own feelings. “I see you understand me now,” Vones said.

  “This is nothing more than settling up a bet,” Scaurus protested. Taso Vones lifted an eloquent eyebrow. No other comment was needed. The Roman knew how easy it was to judge a man by the company he kept. Caesar himself, in his younger days, had fallen into danger through his association with Marius’ defeated faction.

  Besides, there was no denying he did like the Namdaleni. They had a workmanlike approach to life, one rather like the Romans’. They did not show the Videssians’ touchy pride and deviousness, nor yet the dour fatalism of the Halogai. The men of the Duchy did the best with what they had, an attitude that marched well with the tribune’s Stoic background. There are other reasons, too, he whispered deep inside himself.

  He remarked, “It’s rather too late to worry about it now, wouldn’t you say?” Then he asked, “Why bother warning me? We hardly know each other.”

  Vones laughed out loud; like the patriarch Balsamon’s, his laugh had real merriment in it. He said, “I’ve held my post in the city eight years now and I’m scarcely the oldest hand here—Gawtruz has been an ambassador for twice that long and more. I know everyone, and everyone knows me. We know the games we play, the tricks we try, the bargains we drive—and most of us, I think, are bloody bored. I know I am, sometimes.

  “You, though, you and your Ronams”—He watched Marcus flinch,—“are a new pair of dice in the box, and loaded dice at that. It’s whether you throw ones or sixes that remains to be seen.” He scratched his fuzzy-bearded chin. “Which reminds me, we probably should be wandering back. Soteric won’t talk about hook-nosed hounds forever, I promise you that.”

  When the tribune pressed him to explain himself, he refused, saying, “You’ll see soon enough, I suspect.” He headed toward the courtyard, leaving Scaurus the choice of staying behind by himself or following. He followed.

  Taso Vones grunted in satisfaction when they rounded the last corner. “A little early,” he said, “but not bad. Too early is better than too late, else we’d not find room at the games we favor—not for stakes we can afford, at any rate.” Gold and silver clinked as he dug in his pouch for coins.

  As he stared at the scene before him, Marcus wondered about his earlier analysis of Namdalener character. Were they fond of gambling because they believed in Phos’ Wager, or had their theologians concocted the Wager because they were gamblers born? At the moment, he would have bet on the latter—and likely found an islander to cover his stake.

  Most of the tables and benches had disappeared. In their places were circles chalked on the ground for dice-throwing, wheels of fortune, boards for tossing darts, others for hurling knives, a wide cleared space with a metal basin set in its center for throwing the dregs from winecups—as he expected, Scaurus saw Gorgidas there; the Greek was a dab hand at kottabos—and other games of skill or chance the tribune did not immediately recognize.

  He rummaged in his own pouch to see what money he had. It was about as he had thought—some bronze pieces of irregular size and weight, some rather better silver, and half a dozen goldpieces, each about the size of his thumbnail. The older, more worn coins were fine gold, but the newer ones were made pale by an admixture of silver or blushed red with copper. With its revenues falling, the government, as governments will, had resorted to cheapening the currency. All its gold coinage, of whatever age, was nominally of equal value, but in the markets and shops the old pieces took a man further.

  Videssian rules at dice, he had learned during the long winter at Imbros, were different from those at Rome. They used two dice here, not three, and Venus—a triple six, the best throw in the game he knew—would only have brought a hoot of derision even with a third dice allowed. A pair of ones—“Phos’ little suns,” they called them—was the local goal. You kept the dice until you threw their opposite—“the demons,” a double six—in which case you lost. There were side bets on which you would roll first, how many throws you would keep the dice, and anything else an ingenious gambler could find to bet on.

  The first time the dice came his way, Scaurus threw the suns three times before the demons turned up to send the little bone cubes on to the Namdalener at his left. That gave him a bigger stake to play with, one he promptly lost in his next turn with the bones—on his very first cast, twin sixes stared balefully up at him.

  Shouts and applause came from the circle round the kottabos basin. Marcus looked up from his own play for a moment, to find it was just as he’d thought; with that deadly wristflick of his, Gorgidas was making the basin ring like a bell, flicking in the lees from farther and farther away. If he didn’t get too drunk to stand, he’d own half the Namdaleni before the night was through.

  Scaurus’ own luck was mixed; he would win a little before dropping it again, get behind and make it up. His area of attention shrank to the chalked circle before him—the money in it, the dice spinning through, the men’s hands reaching in to pick up the cubes, gather in their winnings, or lay new bets.

  Then, suddenly, the hand that took the dice was not masculine at all, but a smooth, slim-wristed lady’s hand with painted nails and an emerald ring on the forefinger. Startled, Marcus looked up to see Komitta Rhangavve, with Thorisin Gavras beside her. The Sevastokrator wore ordinary trousers and tunic and could have been in the game an hour ago, for all Scaurus had noticed.

  Komitta slightly misinterpreted his surprise. Smiling prettily at him, she said, “I know it’s against custom, but I so love to play myself. Do you mind?” Her tone warned that he had better not.

  That he really did not care made it easier. “Certainly not, my lady.” On the other hand, even if he had minded, he could scarcely say so, not to the Sevastokrator’s woman.

  She won twice in quick succession, letting her stake ride each time. When her third series of rolls ended by wiping her out, she angrily hurled the dice away and cursed with unladylike fluency. The gamblers snickered. Someone found a new pair of dice and from that moment she was an accepted member of the circle.

  With his landed wealth, Thorisin could easily have run the other dicers from the game by betting more than they could afford to cover. Remembering his hundred goldpiece bet with Vardanes Sphrantzes, Marcus knew the Sevastokrator was not averse to playing for high stakes. But, matched against men of limited means, he was content to risk now a goldpiece, now two, or sometimes a handful of silver. He took his wins and losses as seriously as if he were playing for provinces—whatever he did, he liked to do well. He was a canny gambler, too; before long, a good-sized pile of gold and silver lay before him.

  “Did you get that at swordpoint, or are they losing on purpose to curry favor with you?” someone asked the Sevastokrator, and Marcus was amazed to see Mavrikios Gavras standing over his brother. The Emperor was no more regally dressed than the Sevastokrator and attended only by a pair of Haloga bodyguards.

  “You don’t know skill when you see it,” Thorisin retorted. “Hah!” He raked in another stake as the Namdalener across from him rolled the demons.

  “Move over and let your elder show you how it’s done. I’ve been listening to accountants since this morning and I’ve had a gutful of, ‘I’m most sorry, your Imperial Majesty, but I cannot advise that at the present time.’ Bah! Sometimes I think court ceremonial is a slow poison the bureaucrats invented to bore usurpers to death so they can sneak back into power themselves.” He grinned at Marcus. “My daughter insists it’s otherwise, but I don’t believe her anymore.”

  With a murmured, “Thank you, sweetheart,” he took a cup from a passing girl. The lass whirled in surprise as she realized whom she’d served. Mavrikios might not trust the Namdaleni where his Empire was concerned, Scaurus thought, but he certainly had no fears for his own person among them.

  The Gavrai, naturally, were on opposite sides of every bet. As he’d been doing most of the evening, Thorisin won several times in a row after hi
s brother sat down. “Go back to your pen-pushers and leave dicing to people who understand it,” he said. “You’ll get a fart from a dead man before you collect a copper from me.”

  Mavrikios snorted. “Even a blind hog stumbles across an acorn now and then. There we go!” he exclaimed. Marcus had just thrown suns, and Thorisin had bet against him. The Emperor turned to his brother, palm out. With a shrug, Thorisin passed the stake to him.

  Marcus soon decided these were two men who should not gamble against each other. Both were such intense competitors that they took losing personally, and the good humor in their banter quickly disappeared. They were tight-lipped with concentration on the dice; their bets against each other were far greater than any others round the circle. Thorisin’s earlier winnings vanished. When Mavrikios rolled the suns yet another time, his brother had to reach into his pouch to pay.

  Mavrikios stared at the coins he produced. “What’s this?” he said, flinging half of them to the ground. “You’d pay me with money from Yezd?”

  Thorisin shrugged once more. “They look like gold to me, and finer than what we mint these days, for that matter.” He scooped them up and tossed them far into the crowd. Glad cries said they were not lost for long. Seeing his brother’s expression, Thorisin said, “If it won’t pay my scot, what good is money to me?” Mavrikios slowly turned a dull red.

  Everyone who saw or heard the exchange between the two brothers did his best to pretend he had not. Nevertheless, the camaraderie the dicing circle had enjoyed was shattered, and Marcus was not sorry to see the game break up a few minutes later. It could only bode ill for Videssos when the Emperor’s brother showed him up in public, and he knew the story would do nothing but grow in the telling.

  Climbing a stairway in the great building that housed the Grand Courtroom—the opposite side of the building from Nephon Khoumnos’ workplace—Marcus wondered how much the story had grown in the past few days. Ahead of him on the stair was the thin clerk who had brought the tribune the invitation to this meeting, and ahead of him was a destination to which Scaurus had never thought to be bidden—the offices of Vardanes Sphrantzes.

  “This way, if you please,” the clerk said, turning to his left as he reached the top of the stairs. He led the Roman past a series of large rooms, through whose open doors Scaurus could see whole maniples of men busy with stylus and waxed tablet, pen, ink, and parchment, and the trays of reckoning beads with which skilled Videssians could calculate magically fast. The tribune was far more at home with the power of the barracks hall, but, watching the bureaucrats at work in this nerve center of Empire, he could not deny that power dwelt here too.

  A pair of stocky nomads from the plains of Pardraya stood sentry at the door the clerk was approaching. Their faces, blank with boredom before, turned alert when they spied him and stormy when they recognized the Roman behind him. Scaurus had neither wanted nor had much to do with the Khamorth since coming to Videssos, but it was plain they felt he had brought disgrace down on them by exposing one of their number as Avshar’s tool.

  From the black looks they were giving him, Marcus got the notion they would have much preferred it if their countryman had succeeded in driving his demon-haunted blade hilt-deep in the Roman.

  “The boss wants to see this?” one of them asked the tribune’s guide, jerking his thumb at Scaurus in a deliberately offensive way. “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” the clerk snapped. “Now stand aside, will you? You’ll win no thanks for interfering in his business.”

  Insolently slow, the Khamorth gave way. As Scaurus stepped past them, one made a ghastly gurgle, like the dying gasp of a man with a slit throat. It was so horribly authentic the tribune whipped his head around before he could stop himself. The plainsman grinned nastily.

  Furious at losing face before the barbarian, Scaurus cranked his defenses to the highest pitch of readiness as he walked into the Sevastos’ office. When the functionary who led him announced his name, he bowed with the same punctiliousness he would have shown the Emperor—not by any act of omission would he give Sphrantzes a moral advantage over him.

  “Come in, come in, you are most welcome,” the Sevastos said. As always, his smooth, deep voice revealed nothing but what he wanted in it; at the moment, a cultured affability.

  Before Marcus could fully focus his suspicions on the Sevastos, the office’s other occupant, a gangling, scraggly-bearded fellow in his early twenties, bounced up from his seat to shake the tribune’s hand. “A brilliant martial display, truly brilliant!” he exclaimed, adding, “I saw you beat the Namdaleni. Had it been crimson-handed war and not mere sport, the ground would have been a thirsty sponge to drink their blood. Brilliant!” he said again.

  “Er—yes, of course,” Scaurus muttered, at a loss to reconcile this unwarlike-seeming youth with his gore-filled talk.

  Vardanes Sphrantzes coughed drily. “One of the reasons I asked you here, my outland friend, was to present you to my nephew, the spatharios Ortaias Sphrantzes. Since your victory over the easterners, he’s done nothing but pester me to arrange the meeting.”

  While spatharios had the literal meaing of “sword-bearer,” it was a catch-all title, often with little more real meaning than “aide.” In young Ortaias’ case, that seemed just as well; he looked as if the effort of toting a sword would be too much for him.

  He was, though, nothing if not an enthusiast. “I was fascinated to see you successfully oppose the Namdaleni on foot,” he said. “In his Art of Generalship Mindes Kalokyres recommends plying them with arrows from afar and strongly implies they are invincible at close quarters. It’s a great pity he is a century in his grave; I should have like to hear his comments on your refutation of his thesis.”

  “That would be interesting, I’m sure, your excellency,” Scaurus agreed, wondering how much of Ortaias’ speech he was understanding. The young noble spoke very quickly; this, coupled with his affected accent and his evident love for long words, made following his meaning a trial for someone with the tribune’s imperfect grasp of Videssian.

  “Kalokyres is our greatest commentator on things military,” Ortaias’ uncle explained courteously. “Do sit down, both of you,” he urged. “Scaurus,”—In Videssian it sounded more like Scavros—“take some wine if you will. It’s a fine vintage, from the western province of Raban, and rather hard to come by in these sorry times.”

  The pale wine poured silkily from its elegant alabaster carafe. Marcus sipped once for politeness’ sake, then a second time with real appreciation; this was more to his liking than any wine he’d yet sampled in Videssos.

  “I thought you would enjoy it,” Vardanes said, drinking with him. “It’s a touch too piquant for me to favor ordinarily, but it is a pleasant change of pace.” Scaurus gave the Sevastos his reluctant admiration. It could hardly have been easy for him to learn the Roman’s taste in wine and then to meet it. The obvious effort Sphrantzes was making to put him at his ease only made him wonder further what the real object of this meeting might be.

  Whatever it was, the Sevastos was in no hurry to get around to it. He spoke with charm and wit of bits of gossip that had crossed his path in the past few days and did not spare his fellow bureaucrats. “There are those,” he remarked, “who think the mark for a thing in a ledger is the thing itself.” Raising his cup to his lips, he went on, “It takes but a taste of the wine to see how foolish they are.”

  The tribune had to agree, but noted how possessively Sphrantzes’ hand curled over the polished surface of the cup.

  The Sevastos’ office was more richly furnished than Mavrikios Gavras’ private chambers, with wall hangings of silk brocade shot through with gold and silver threads and upholstered couches and chairs whose ebony arms were inlaid with ivory and semiprecious stones. Yet the dominant impression was not one of sybaritic decadence, but rather of a man who truly loved his comforts without being ruled by them.

  In Rome Marcus had known men who enjoyed having fish ponds set
in their villas’ gardens, but he had never seen a decoration like the one on Sphrantzes’ desk—a globular tank of clear glass with several small, brightly colored fish darting through waterplants rooted in gravel. In a strange way, it was soothing to watch. The tribune’s eyes kept coming back to it, and Sphrantzes gazed fondly at his little pets in their transparent enclosure.

  He saw Scaurus looking at them. “One of my servants has the duty of catching enough gnats, flies, and suchlike creatures to keep them alive. He’s certain I’ve lost my wits, but I pay him enough that he doesn’t say so.”

  By this time the Roman had decided Sphrantzes’ summons masked nothing more sinister than a social call. He was beginning to muster excuses for leaving when the Sevastos remarked, “I’m glad to see no hard feelings exist between yourselves and the Namdaleni after your recent tussle.”

  “Indeed yes! That is most fortunate!” Ortaias said enthusiastically. “The tenacity of the men of the Duchy is legendary, as is their fortitude. When linked to the specialized infantry skills you Ronams—”

  “Romans,” his uncle corrected him.

  “Your pardon,” Ortaias said, flushing. Thrown off his stride, he finished with the simplest sentence Scaurus had heard from him. “You’ll fight really well for us!”

  “I hope so, your excellence,” Marcus replied. Interested by Vardanes’ mention of the islanders, he decided to stay a bit longer. Maybe the Sevastos would be forthcoming after all.

  “My nephew is right,” the elder Sphrantzes said. “It would be unfortunate if there were a lasting grudge between yourselves and the Namdaleni. They have served us well in the past, and we expect the same of you. There is already too much strife within our army, too much talk of native troops as opposed to mercenaries. Every soldier is a mercenary, but with some, paymaster and king are one and the same.”