Videssos Cycle, Volume 1

by Harry Turtledove

  “Good!” Gaius Philippus said emphatically. He had commanded the Roman party ordered to guard a sealed temple and used the privilege of his rank to break the seals and go inside. He came bursting out through the door an instant later, face pale beneath his deep tan and sweat beading on his forehead. “The sooner such filth is cleaned from the world, the better for all in it—aye, including the poor damned whoresons who follow him.”

  Marcus did not think he had heard his senior centurion ever speak thus of a foe. War was Gaius Philippus’ trade, as carpentry might be another man’s, and he accorded his opponents the respect their skills merited. Curious, the tribune wondered aloud, “What was it you saw in that temple?”

  Gaius Philippus’ face froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. Through clenched teeth he said, “If it please you, sir, never ask me that again. The gods willing, I may forget before I die.”

  The imperial army reached Soli a joyless force. What they found there did nothing to raise their spirits. The new town, wall-less in the fashion of so many Videssian cities, had snuggled against the Rhamnos River’s turbid yellow waters, the better to lure trade. Old Soli on the hills above, a garrison against Makuran for hundreds of years, was all but deserted … until the Yezda came.

  Then the new city fell in fire and death—sacked repeatedly, in fact, over the years, until nothing was left to loot. And Old Soli, far down the road to extinction, had a modest rebirth as survivors from the riverbank town patched its dilapidated walls and began to repair the tumbledown buildings from which their six-times-great-grandsires had sprung.

  Heedless of the omens his men might draw, Mavrikios made camp amidst the ruins of the dead city by the Rhamnos. An army the size of his needed more water than Old Soli’s wells and cisterns could provide, and the river was the logical place to get it. It made perfect military sense, but also made the soldiers edgy.

  “Sure and there’s bound to be angry ghosts about,” Viridovix said, “all crying out for revenge on them that slew ’em. There!” he exclaimed. “Do you hear the keening of them?” Sure enough, a series of mournful cries came from the darkness outside the Roman camp.

  “That’s an owl, you great booby,” Gaius Philippus said.

  “Och, aye, it sounds like an owl.” But the Gaul was anything but convinced.

  Marcus shifted uneasily in his seat by the fire. He told himself he did not believe in ghosts and was able to convince the front part of his mind that he spoke the truth. Deeper down, he was not so sure. And if there were ghosts, they would surely live in such a place as this.

  Most of the buildings of murdered Soli had perished either at the hands of the Yezda or through time’s decay, but here and there a tower or a jagged section of some well-made building still stood, deeper blacknesses against the night sky. It was from these the owls’ plaintive notes and the whirring call of the nightjar emanated—if that was what the noises were. No one seemed anxious to investigate, nor was the tribune inclined to ask for volunteers.

  As if the place was not eerie enough, a thin mist crept up from the Rhamnos as the night wore on, half shrouding the imperial camp. Now it was Gaius Philippus’ turn to fret. “I don’t like this a bit,” he declared as the fog swallowed one watchfire after another. “Belike it’s some sending of Avshar’s, to veil his attack till it’s on us.” He peered out into the rolling mist, trying to penetrate it by will alone. Inevitably he failed, which only increased his unease.

  But Marcus had grown up in Mediolanum, hard by the Padus River’s tributary the Olonna. He had to shake his head. “Mist often rises from a river at night—it’s nothing to worry over.”

  “Quite so,” Gorgidas agreed. “Nature has provided that particles go up into the air from oceans and streams. This fog is but the forerunner of a cloud. When the vapor rises to meet opposite emanations coming down from the ether which holds the stars, it will condense into a true cloud.”

  The Epicurean account of cloud formation did nothing to reassure the centurion. Viridovix tried to tease him back to good humor. “You didna trouble yoursel’ when you saw the very land steam or ever we came to Garsavra. Of course,” he added cunningly, “a good deal further from the Yezda we were then.”

  Not even the imputation of cowardice could get much response from Gaius Philippus. He shook his head, muttering, “It’s this bloody place, that’s all; even without fogs it’s like camping in a tomb. We couldn’t leave too soon to suit me.”

  But for all the senior centurion’s wholehearted desire to be gone, the imperial army did not set forth at once. Scouts spying out the ways through Vaspurakan reported that the land west of Soli was a desolation stripped bare of almost every living thing.

  Senpat Sviodo and his wife were among the riders who went into Vaspurakan. “There will be a reckoning for this, if it takes a thousand years,” he said. What he had seen in his birthland had burned some of his youth away forever. The cold fury in his voice and on his face seemed better suited to a man of twice his years.

  “Our poor people survive only in the mountain forests and in a few fastnesses,” Nevrat said. She sounded weary beyond belief; her eyes were full of sorrow too bitter for tears. “The meadows, the farmlands—nothing moves there but Yezda and other beasts.”

  “I had hoped to bring a band of princes back with me, to fight under the Emperor’s banner against the invaders,” Senpat continued, “but no one was left to bring.” His hands shook in impotent fury.

  Marcus studied the harsh lines newly etched on either side of Senpat’s mouth. The jolly youngster he’d met a few short days before would be a long time reappearing, and the tribune was not sure he cared for this grim almost-stranger who had taken his place. Nevrat clasped her husband’s hands in her own, trying to draw the pain from him, but he sat staring straight ahead, only the vision of his ravaged homeland before him.

  In such territory the army could not hope to live off the land; it would have to carry its own provisions through the wasteland. Mavrikios gave orders for grain to be brought up the Rhamnos from the coastal plain to the north, and then had to wait with his men until the boats arrived.

  The onerous delay in such dismal surroundings strained the Emperor’s disposition to the breaking point. He had been short-tempered since the handful of Yezda raiders disrupted the army’s march. Now, stymied again, frustration ate at him when each day failed to see the coming of the needed supplies. Men walked warily around him, fearful lest his pent-up rage lash out against them.

  The abcess burst on the fifth day at Soli. Scaurus happened to be close by. He wanted to borrow a map of Vaspurakan from the collection Mavrikios kept in his tent, the better to follow Senpat Sviodo’s description of the land through which they would be passing if the supply ships ever came.

  Two Halogai of the Imperial Guard pushed through the tentflaps, dragging a scrawny Videssian soldier between them. Three more Videssians nervously followed the northerners.

  “What’s this?” the Emperor demanded.

  One of the guardemen answered, “This worthless piece of offal has been filching coppers from his mates.” He shook his prisoner hard enough to make the teeth snap in his head.

  “Has he now?” The Emperor looked up at the Videssian soldiers behind the Halogai. “You three are witnesses, I suppose?”

  “Your Majesty, sir?” said one of them. All three had been gaping at the luxurious interior of the tent, its soft bed and cleverly designed light furnishings—Mavrikios was of less spartan taste than Thorisin.

  “Witnesses, are you?” the Emperor repeated. By his tone, his patience was very short.

  Between them, they got the story out. The prisoner, whose name was Doukitzes, had been caught emptying a coin pouch when his three fellows unexpectedly returned to the tent the four of them shared. “We thought a few stripes would make him keep his fingers off what don’t belong to him,” one of the soldiers said, “and these fellows,” he pointed to the Halogai, “happened to be coming by, so—”

  “Stripes
?” Gavras interrupted. He gestured contemptuously. “A thief forgets stripes before they’re done healing. We’ll give him something he’ll remember the rest of his days.” He turned back to the Halogai and snapped, “Take his hand off at the wrist.”

  “No! Phos have mercy, no!” Doukitzes shrieked, twisting free of his captors to fall at Mavrikios’ feet. He seized the Emperor’s knees and kissed the hem of his robe, babbling, “I’ll never do it again! By Phos I swear it! Never, never! Mercy, my lord, I beg, mercy!”

  The luckless thief’s tentmates looked at the Emperor in horror—they’d wanted their light-fingered comrade chastised, yes, but not mutilated.

  Marcus was equally appalled at Gavras’ Draconian judgment. In theory, thievery in the Roman army could be punished by death, but hardly over the trifling sum at issue here. He stood up from the mapcase through which he’d been searching. “Your Majesty, is this justice?” he asked through Doukitzes’ wails.

  Save only the prisoner, everyone in the imperial tent—Mavrikios, the Haloga guards, the Videssian soldiers, and the Emperor’s ubiquitous servants—turned to stare at the Roman, amazed anyone would dare call the sovereign to account.

  The Emperor was chilly as the eternal snow topping the peaks of Vaspurakan. “Captain of mercenaries, you forgot yourself. You have our leave to go.” Never before had Mavrikios used the imperial “we” to the tribune; it was a manifest note of warning.

  But Scaurus’ ways were those of a land that knew no king, nor was he trained from birth to accept any one man as the embodiment of authority and law. Still, he was glad to hear the steadiness in his voice as he replied, “No, sir. I recall myself better than you. In your worry over great affairs, you are letting rancor get the better of you in small ones. To take a man’s hand for a few coppers is not justice.”

  The tent grew very still. The imperial servitors flinched away from Scaurus, as if not wanting to be contaminated by his blasphemous practice of speaking the truth as he saw it. The Halogai might have been carved from wood; the Videssian common soldiers, even Doukitzes, faded from the tribune’s perception as he waited to see if Mavrikios would doom him too.

  The Emperor slowly said, “Do you know what I could do to you for your insolence?”

  “No worse than Avshar could, I’m sure.”

  A chamberlain gasped, somewhere to Scaurus’ left. He did not turn his head, keeping his attention only on the Emperor. Gavras was studying him as intently. Without removing his eyes from the tribune, Mavrikios said to the Halogai, “Take this grizzling fool”—He stirred Doukitzes with his foot—“outside and give him five lashes, well laid on, then let his mates take him back.”

  Doukitzes scuttled across the floor to Marcus. “Thank you, great lord, oh thank you!” He offered no resistance as the Halogai led him away.

  “Does that satisfy you, then?” Mavrikios asked.

  “Yes, your Majesty, completely.”

  “First man I’ve ever seen go happy to a whipping,” the Emperor remarked, raising an ironic eyebrow. He was still watching Scaurus closely. “It wasn’t just pride, then, was it, that made you refuse me the proskynesis back in Videssos all those months ago?”

  “Pride?” That had never occurred to the Roman. “No, sir.”

  “I didn’t think so, even then,” Mavrikios said with something like respect. “If I had, you’d’ve regretted it soon enough.” He laughed mirthlessly.

  “Now get out of here,” he went on, “before I decide I should have you killed after all.” Scaurus left quickly, only half-sure he was joking.

  “You were very brave, and even more foolish,” Helvis said that night. Lazy after love, they lay side by side in her tent, his hand still curled over her breast. Her heartbeat filled his palm.

  “Was I? I didn’t really think about being either at the time. It didn’t seem right, though, to have all Mavrikios’ wrath come down on that poor wretch. His worst fault wasn’t stealing a few pennies, it was being in the Emperor’s way at the wrong time.”

  “His anger could have condemned you as easily as that worthless Videssian.” Helvis sounded thoroughly afraid. She might come from a folk freer than the Empire’s, Marcus thought, but she took the Avtokrator’s absolute power as much for granted as any of Videssos’ citizens.

  Her fear, though, did not spring from any such abstract reason, but a far more basic concern. Her hand took his, guided it down the smooth softness of her belly. “You were a featherbrain,” she said. “Would you want your child to grow up fatherless?”

  “My …?” The tribune sat up on the soft sleeping-mat, looked down at Helvis, who still held his hand against her. She smiled up at him. “You’re sure?” he asked foolishly.

  Her warm rich laughter filled the small tent. “Of course I am, simpleton. There is a way of knowing such things, you know.” She sat up, too, and kissed him.

  He returned the embrace eagerly, not from the lust but sheer gladness. Then something struck him funny. “How could I know this morning that I might be making my child an orphan, when I didn’t know there was a child?”

  Helvis poked him in the ribs. “Don’t you go chopping logic with me, like some priest. I knew, and that’s enough.”

  And so perhaps it was. Good omens had been scarce lately, but what could be better before a battle than the creation of new life?

  The next morning, the patrols Mavrikios sent riding north finally met the supply barges toiling their way upstream. The squat, ugly vessels reached Soli late that afternoon. Their journey had not been easy; marauding Yezda along both banks of the Rhamnos had made it impossible to use horses to tow the boats, and their arrows made life hellish for the barges’ rowers.

  One had lost so many men it could no longer make headway against the stream and drifted aground in the shallows by the riverbank. The rest of the fleet picked up its surviving crew, but the Yezda gleefully burnt the stricken craft to the waterline.

  That night there was no time for worry over haunted surroundings. Men labored till dawn, hurling sacks of grain into hundreds of wagons. When the sun rose, the army rumbled over the great stone bridge spanning the Rhamnos and pushed its way into Vaspurakan.

  Marcus soon saw what had moved Senpat Sviodo to such bitter hatred. The Yezda had done their worst in Videssos, but the destruction they wrought there was but the work of a few seasons. Vaspurakan had felt the invaders’ hand far longer and far more heavily; in some frequently ravaged passes, fair-sized second growth was already springing up to shroud the ruins of what, in happier times, were farm and villages.

  The raiders had come so often to the princes’ land, they were beginning to think of it as their proper home. Just as he had outside Imbros, the tribune watched herdsmen drive their flocks up into the mountains at the first sight of the army. But these were not Videssians afoot with their herd dogs; they were nomad archers mounted on shaggy steppe ponies, looking uncomfortably like the Khamorth with the imperial forces.

  In Vaspurakan even walled cities were under Yezda control, either stormed or, more often, simply starved into submission. Mavrikios’ host came to the first of these two days out of Soli—a town called Khliat, whose shadow in the afternoon sun ran long down the valley through which the army was traveling.

  The Yezda commander refused surrender with a brusque message eerily close to Scaurus’ retort to the Emperor: “If you conquer, you could do me no worse harm than my lords would, should I yield.”

  Gavras did not waste time in further negotiations. Using what light remained, he surrounded Khliat, quickly driving the Yezda skirmishers back inside the city’s walls. Once the encirclement was complete, he rode round the town just out of bowshot, deciding where it was most vulnerable to siege engines.

  Again the night was furiously busy, this time with soldiers unloading the precut timbers and other specialized gear of the siege train. At the officers’ council that night, the Emperor declared, “Our assault party tomorrow will be made up of Romans and Namdaleni. As the most heavily armed tro
ops we have, they are best suited to forcing their way through breached walls.”

  Marcus gulped. Mavrikios’ reasoning was probably sound, but the attacking force’s casualties could well be hideous. The Namdaleni would fill their ranks with new recruits from the Duchy, but where was he to find new Romans?

  “May your Majesty it please,” Gagik Bagratouni spoke up, “but I the privilege of leading this assault would beg for my men. It is their homes they are freeing. Their armors may be lighter, but their hearts shall be so too.”

  Mavrikios rubbed his chin. “Be it so, then,” he decided. “Spirit has raised more than one victory where it had no right to grow.”

  “Well, well, the gods do look out for us after all,” Gaius Philippus whispered behind his hand to Scaurus.

  “You’ve been in this wizards’ land so long you’ve taken up mind-reading,” Marcus whispered back. The centurion bared his teeth in a silent chuckle.

  After the meeting broke up, Soteric fell into step beside the tribune. “How interesting,” he said sardonically, “and how lucky for you, to be chosen to share the butcher’s bill with us. The Emperor is glad of our help, aye, and glad to bleed us white, too.”

  “Weren’t you listening? The Vaspurakaners are going in our stead.”

  Soteric gestured in disgust. “Only because Bagratouni has more honor than sense. True, we’re spared, but not forgotten, I promise you. Everyone knows what Mavrikios thinks of the men of the Duchy, and you did yourself no good when you stood up to him yesterday. You’ll pay—wait and see.”

  “You’ve been talking to your sister again,” Marcus said.

  “Helvis? No, I haven’t seen her today.” Soteric eyed the tribune curiously. “By the Wager, man, don’t you know? Every blasted Videssian is buzzing over how you saved twelve men from having their heads chopped off.”

  Scaurus exchanged a consternation-filled glance with Gaius Philippus. No matter how much he tried to evade the role, it seemed he was being cast as the Emperor’s opponent. That notwithstanding, though, he thought Soteric was wrong. Mavrikios Gavras might be devious in his dealings with his foes, but there was never any doubt who those foes were.