Videssos Cycle, Volume 1

by Harry Turtledove

  But Balsamon grew more animated as his talk progressed and ended strongly. ‘A man’s only guide is his conscience—it is his shield when he does well and a blade to wound him if he falters. Now take up the shield of right and turn back evil’s sword—bow not to wickedness’ will, and that sword can never harm you!”

  As his listeners applauded his words and calls of “Well said!” came from throughout the Temple, above them rose the massed voices of the choir in a triumphant hymn to Phos, and with them the bell players whose music had intrigued Scaurus before. Now he was sitting at an angle that let him watch them work, and his fascination with them was enough to wipe away a good part of the letdown at Balsamon’s pedestrian address.

  The twoscore players stood behind a long, padded table. Each had before him some half dozen polished bells of various sizes and tones. Along with their robes, the players wore kidskin gloves to avoid smudging the bright bell metal. They followed the direction of their bellmaster with marvelous speed and dexterity, changing and chiming their bells in perfect unison. It was, Marcus found, as entrancing to watch as to hear.

  The bellmaster was a show in himself. A dapper little man, he led his charges with slightly exaggerated, theatrical gestures, his body swaying to the hymn he was conducting. His face wore a look of exaltation, and his eyes never opened. It was several minutes before Scaurus realized he was blind; he hardly seemed to need to see, for his ears told him more than most men’s eyes ever would.

  If the music of the bells impressed the unmusical tribune, it delighted Helvis, who said, “I’ve heard the Temple’s bell players praised many times, but never had the chance to listen to them before. They were another reason I wanted to be here tonight.” She looked at Marcus quizzically. “If I’d known you liked them, I would have used them as an argument for coming.”

  He had to smile. “Probably just as well you didn’t.” He found it hard to imagine being persuaded to go anywhere by the promise of music. Still, there was no doubt the bell players added spice to what otherwise would have been an unsatisfying evening.

  The Emperor ordered criers through the streets to warn the people of Videssos to spend the following day at home. The major thoroughfares were packed tight with soldiers in full kit, with nervous horses and braying donkeys, wagons carrying the warriors’ families and personal goods, other wagons driven by sutlers, and still others loaded with every imaginable sort of military hardware. Tempers shortened more quickly than the long files of men, animals, and wains inching toward the quays where ships and boats waited to take them over the Cattle-Crossing to the Empire’s westlands.

  The Romans, as part of Mavrikios’ Imperial Guard, had little waiting before they crossed. Everything went smoothly as could be, except for Viridovix. The luckless Celt spent the entire journey—fortunately for him, one of less than half an hour—leaning over the galley’s rail, retching helplessly.

  “Every time I’m on the water it happens to me,” he moaned between spasms. The usual ruddiness had faded from his features, leaving him fishbelly pale.

  “Eat hard-baked bread crumbled in wine,” Gorgidas recommended, “or, if you like, I have a decoction of opium that will help, though it will leave you drowsy for a day.”

  “Eat—” The very word was enough to send the Gaul lurching toward the rail. When he was through he turned back to Gorgidas. Tears of misery stood in his eyes. “I thank your honor for the advice and all, but it’d be too late to do me the good I need. Dry dirt, bless it, under my feet will serve me better than any nostrum ever you made.” He cringed as another wavelet gently lifted the ship’s bow.

  With their small harbors, Videssos’ suburbs on the western shore of the Cattle-Crossing could not hope to handle the avalanche of shipping descending on them. The capital was the Empire’s chief port and, jealous of its status, made sure no other town nearby could siphon business from it.

  Nevertheless, the armada of sharp-beaked slim galleys, merchantmen, fishing boats, barges, and various motley small craft did not have to stand offshore to disembark its host. Videssian ships, like the ones the Romans built, were even at their biggest small and light enough to stand beaching without damage. For several miles up and down the coast, oars drove ships ashore so men and beasts could splash through the surf to land. Sailors and soldiers cursed together as they labored to empty hulls of supplies. That also lightened the beached craft and made them easier to refloat.

  Viridovix was so eager to reach land that he vaulted over the rail before the ship was quite aground and came down with a splash neck-deep in the sea. Cursing in Gaulish, he floundered onto the beach, where he lay at full length just beyond the reach of the waves. He hugged the golden sand as he would a lover. Less miserable and thus more patient, the Romans followed him.

  The imperial galley came ashore not far from where they were disembarking. First out of it were Mavrikios’ ever-present Haloga guardsmen. Like the Romans, they left their vessel by scrambling down rope ladders and nets cast over the side. Then, watchful as always, they hurried to take up positions to ward off any sudden treachery.

  For an Emperor, however, even one who set as little store in ceremony as Mavrikios Gavras, clambering down a rope would not do. As soon as his guards were in place, a gangplank of gilded wood was laid from ship to beach. But when the Emperor was about to step onto the sand, his booted foot came down on the hem of his long purple robe. He tripped and went to all fours on the beach.

  Romans, Halogai, and Videssian seamen alike stared in consternation. What omen could be worse for a campaign than to have its leader fall before it began? Someone made a sign to avert evil.

  But Mavrikios was equal to the occasion. Rising to his knees, he held aloft two fistsful of sand and said loudly, “Videssos, I have tight hold of you!” He got to his feet and went about his business as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  And, after a moment or two, so did the men who had witnessed the mishap. The Emperor’s quick wits had succeeded in turning a bad omen into a good one. Discussing it that evening, Gaius Philippus gave Mavrikios his ultimate accolade. “Caesar,” he declared, “couldn’t have done it better.”

  Like a multitude of little streams running together to form a great river, the Videssian army gathered itself on the western shore of the Cattle-Crossing. The transfer from the capital had been far easier than Marcus had expected. There were, it seemed, some advantages after all to the minute organization that was such a part of life in the Empire.

  That organization showed its virtue again as the march to Garsavra began. Scaurus doubted if Rome could have kept so huge a host fed without its pillaging the countryside and gave his men stern orders against foraging. But plundering for supplies never came close to being necessary. No Yezda had yet come so far east, and the local officials had no trouble providing the army and its hangers-on with markets adequate for their needs. Grain came by oxcart and rivercraft, along with herds of cattle and sheep for meat.

  Hunters added to the meat bag with deer and wild boar. In the case of the latter, there were times when Scaurus was not sure the pig was truly wild. Videssian hogs shared with their boarish cousins a lean, rangy build, a strip of bristly hair down their backs, and a savage disposition. Stealing one of them could give a hunting party as lively a time as going after a wild boar. The tribune enjoyed gnawing the fat-rich, savory meat from its bones too much to worry over its source for long.

  The first leg of the march from the city was a time of shaking down, a time for troops too long in soft billets to begin to remember how they earned their pay. For all the drills and mock fights Gaius Philippus had put the Romans through, they were not quite the same hard-bitten, hungry band who had fought in Gaul. Their belts had gone out a notch or two and, most of all, they were not used to a full day’s march, even one at the slow pace of the army they accompanied.

  At the end of each of the first few days out of the capital, the legionaries were glad to collapse and try to rub some life back into their ach
ing calves and thighs. Gorgidas and the other medics were busy treating blisters, laying on a thick ointment of lard mixed with resin and covering the sores with bandages of soft, fluffy wool well sprinkled with oil and wine. The troopers cursed the medicine’s astringent bite, but it served them well until their feet began to harden once more.

  Marcus had expected all that sort of thing and was not put out when it happened. He had not really anticipated, however, how resentful his Romans would be when called on to create a regular legionary camp every night. Throwing up daily earthworks did not appeal to them after their comfortable months in the permanent barracks of Videssos.

  Gaius Philippus browbeat the troops into obedience the first three nights on march, but an ever more sullen, halfhearted obedience. By the third night he was hoarse, furious, and growing desperate. On the next day a deputation of legionaries came to see Scaurus with their grievances. Had they been shirkers or men of little quality, he would have dealt with the matter summarily, punishing them and not listening for an instant. But among the nine nervous soldiers—one from each maniple—were some of his finest men, including the stalwart Minucius. He decided to hear them out.

  For one thing, they said, none of the other contingents of the imperial army made such a production of their nightly stopping places. They knew they were deep in Videssian territory and altogether safe, and their tents went up in a cheerful, casual disarray wherever their officers happened to feel like pitching them. Worse yet, in a proper Roman camp there was no place for women, and many of the legionaries wanted to spend their nights with the partners they had found in Videssos.

  The tribune could find no sympathy with the first of these points. He said, “What the rest of the army does is its own concern. It’s too simple to go slack when things are easy and then never bother to tighten up again—until it costs you, and then it’s too late. The lot of you are veterans; you know what I’m saying is true.”

  They had to nod. Minucius, his booming voice and open manner subdued by the irregular situation in which he’d put himself, said timidly, “It’s not the work we mind so much, sir. It’s just that well … once camp is made, it’s like a jail, with no escape. My woman’s pregnant, and I worry about her.” His comrades muttered agreement; looking from one of them to another, Marcus saw they were almost all coupled men.

  He understood how they felt. He had slept restlessly the past couple of nights, knowing Helvis was only a few hundred yards away but not wanting to give his troopers a bad example by breaking discipline for his private gratification.

  He thought for a few seconds; less than a third of the Romans had women with them. If a party of about a hundred got leave each night, each soldier could see his lover twice a week or so. The improvement in morale would probably be worth more than the slightly loosened control would cost.

  He gave the legionaries his decision, adding, “Leave will only be granted after all required duties are complete, of course.”

  “Yes, sir! Thank you sir!” they said, grinning in relief that he had not ordered them clapped in irons.

  He knew they must not be allowed to think they could violate the proper chain of command on every whim. He coughed dryly, and watched the grins fade. “The lot of you are fined two weeks’ pay for bringing this up without your officers’ permission,” he said. “See that it doesn’t happen again.”

  They took the fine without a murmur, still afraid he might condemn them to far worse. Under the law of the legions he could confiscate their goods, have them flogged, or give them over to the fustuarium—order them clubbed, beaten, and stoned to death by their fellow soldiers. When he snapped, “Get out!” they fell over themselves scrambling from his tent. In some ways, Roman discipline still held.

  The order duly went out, and the grumbling in the ranks vanished or was transmuted into the ordinary grousing that has existed in every army since time began. “I suppose you had to do it,” Gaius Philippus said, “but I still don’t like it. You may gain in the short run, but over the long haul anything that cuts into discipline is bad.”

  “I thought about that,” Scaurus admitted, “but there’s discipline and discipline. To keep the vital parts, you have to bend the ones that aren’t. The men have to keep thinking of themselves as Romans and want to think that way, or they—and we—are lost. If they decide they’d rather slip off and be peasants in the countryside, what can we do? Where can we find the legions, the generals, the Senate to back up our Roman discipline? Do you think the Videssians give a damn about our ways? I can’t order us to feel like Romans; it has to come from within.”

  Gaius Philippus looked at him like a Videssian suddenly confronted with heresy. The centurion had kept himself—and, to a large measure, the rest of the legionaries, too—going by ignoring, as far as he could, the fact that Rome was gone forever. It rocked his world for Scaurus to speak openly of what he tried not even to think about. Shaking his head, he left the tribune’s tent. A few minutes later Marcus heard him blistering some luckless soldier over a speck of rust on his greave. Scaurus made a wry face. He wished he could work off his own concerns so easily.

  Letting the Romans out of camp at night proved to have one advantage the tribune had not thought of when he decided to allow it. It put them back in the mainstream of army gossip, as much a constant as that of the capital. The women heard everything, true or not, and so did the legionaries while with them. Thus it was that Scaurus learned Ortaias Sphrantzes was still with the army. He found it almost impossible to believe, knowing the mutual loathing the Gavrai and Sphrantzai had for one another, but on his way to see Helvis a night later he proved its accuracy by almost bumping into the spatharios.

  “Your pardon, I beg,” the young Sphrantzes said, stepping out of his way. As he had when Gaius Philippus rated him while he watched the Romans drill, he had a fat volume under his arm. “Yes, it’s Kalokyres on generalship again,” he said. “I have so much to learn and so little time to learn it.”

  The idea of Ortaias Sphrantzes as a general was enough to silence the tribune. He must have raised an eyebrow, though, for Ortaias said, “My only regret, my Roman”—He pronounced the word carefully—“friend, is that I’ll not have your formidable infantry under my command.”

  “Ah? What command is that, my lord?” Marcus asked, thinking Mavrikios might have given the youth a few hundred Khamorth to play with. The answer he got shook him to his toes.

  “I am to lead the left wing,” Sphrantzes replied proudly, “while the Emperor commands the center and his brother the right. We shall make mincemeat of the foe! Mincemeat! Now you must forgive me; I am studying the proper way to maneuver heavy cavalry in the face of the enemy.” And the newly minted field marshal vanished into the warm twilight, paging through his book to the place he needed.

  That night, Helvis complained Scaurus’ mind was somewhere else.

  The next morning the tribune told Gaius Philippus the ghastly news. The senior centurion held his head in his hands. “Congratulations,” he said. “You just ruined my breakfast.”

  “He seems to mean well,” Marcus said, trying to find a bright side to things.

  “So does a doctor treating somebody with the plague. The poor bastard’ll die all the same.”

  “That’s not a good comparison,” Gorgidas protested. “True, the plague is past my power to treat, but at least I’m skilled in my profession. After reading one book of medicine, I wouldn’t have trusted myself to treat a sour stomach.”

  “Neither would anyone else with sense,” Gaius Philippus said. “I thought Mavrikios had too much sense to give the puppy a third of his army.” He pushed his barley porridge aside, saying to the Greek doctor, “Can you fix my sour stomach? The gods know I’ve got one.” Gorgidas grew serious. “Barley after you’re used to wheat will give you distress, or so says Hippokrates.”

  “It never did before,” Gaius Philippus said. “I’m disgusted, that’s all. That bungling twit!”

  The “twit” himself appeare
d later that day, apparently reminded of the Romans’ existence by his encounter with Marcus. Sphrantzes looked dashing as he rode up to the marching legionaries; his horse had the mincing gait of a Videssian thoroughbred. His breastplate and helm were gilded to show his rank, while a deep-blue cape streamed out behind him. The only flaw in his image of martial vigor was the book he still carried clamped under his left arm.

  Sphrantzes reined his horse in to a walking pace at the head of the Roman column. He kept looking back, as if studying it. Gaius Philippus’ hostile curiosity soon got the better of him. He asked, “What can we do for you today, sir?” His tone belied the title of respect he’d granted Sphrantzes.

  “Eh?” Ortaias blinked. “Oh, yes—tell me, if you would, are those the standards under which you fight?” He pointed at the nine tall manipular signa the standard-bearers proudly carried. Each was crowned by an open hand ringed by a wreath, representing faithfulness to duty.

  “So they are. What of it?” Gaius Philippus answered shortly.

  Marcus understood why the subject was a sore one. He explained to Sphrantzes, “We were only a detachment of a larger unit, whose symbol is the eagle. We have no eagle here, and the men miss it dearly.”

  That was an understatement, but no Videssian could hope to understand the feeling each legion had for its eagle, the sacred symbol of its very being. During the winter at Imbros there had been some talk of making a new eagle, but the soldiers’ hearts were not in it. Their aquila was in Gaul and lost to them forever, but they wanted no other. The lesser signa would have to do.

  “Most interesting,” Ortaias said. His concern with the Romans’ standards, however, was for a different reason. “Is your custom always to group like numbers of soldiers under each ensign?”