Videssos Cycle, Volume 1

by Harry Turtledove

  “In pain, all men are brothers. Would there were an easier way to make them so.” He glared at the Celt, daring him to argue. Viridovix was the first to look away; he stretched, scratched his leg, and changed the subject.

  Scaurus found sleep at last, a restless sleep full of nasty dreams. No sooner had he closed his eyes, it seemed, than a legionary was shaking him awake. “Begging your pardon, sir,” the soldier said, “but you’re needed at the palisade.”

  “What? Why?” the tribune mumbled, rubbing at sticky eyes and wishing the Roman would go away and let him rest.

  The answer he got banished sleep as rudely as a bucket of cold water. “Avshar would have speech with you, sir.”

  “What?” Without his willing it, Marcus’ hand was tight round his swordhilt. “All right. I’ll come.” He threw on full armor as quickly as he could—no telling what trickery Yezd’s wizard-prince might intend. Then, blade naked in his hand, he followed the legionary through the fitfully slumbering camp.

  Two Khatrisher sentries peered out into the darkness beyond the watchfires’ reach. Each carried a nocked arrow in his bow. “He rode in like a guest invited to a garden party, your honor, he did, and asked for you by name,” one of them told Scaurus. With the usual bantam courage of his folk, he was more indignant over Avshar’s unwelcome arrival than awed by the sorcerer’s power.

  Not so his comrade, who said, “We fired, sir, the both of us, several times. He was so close we could not have missed, but none of our shafts would bite.” His eyes were wide with fear.

  “We drove the whoreson back out of range, though,” the first Khatrisher said stoutly.

  The druids’ marks graven into Marcus’ Gallic blade glowed yellow, not fiercely as they had when Avshar tried spells against him, but still warning of sorcery. Fearless as a tiger toying with mice, the wizard-prince emerged from the darkness that was his own, sitting statue-still atop his great sable horse. “Worms! You could not drive a maggot across a turd!”

  The bolder-tongued Khatrisher barked an oath and drew back his bow to shoot. Scaurus checked him, saying, “You’d waste your dart again, I think—he has a protecting glamour wrapped round himself.”

  “Astutely reasoned, prince of insects,” Avshar said, granting the tribune a scornful dip of his head. “But this is a poor welcome you grant me, when I have but come to give back something of yours I found on the field today.”

  Even if Marcus had not already known the quality of the enemy he faced, the sly, evil humor lurking in that cruel voice would have told him the wizard’s gift was one to delight the giver, not him who received it. Yet he had no choice but to play Avshar’s game out to the end. “What price do you put on it?” he asked.

  “Price. None at all. As I said, it is yours. Take it, and welcome.” The wizard-prince reached down to something hanging by his right boot, tossed it underhanded toward the tribune. It was still in the air when he wheeled his stallion and rode away.

  Marcus and his companions skipped aside, afraid of some last treachery. But the wizard’s gift landed harmlessly inside the palisade, rolling until it came to rest at the tribune’s feet. Then Avshar’s jest was clear in all its horror, for staring sightlessly up at Scaurus, its features stiffened into a grimace of agony, was Mavrikios Gavras’ head.

  The sentries did shoot after the wizard-prince then, blindly, hopelessly. His fell laugh floated back to tell them how little their arrows were worth.

  With his gift for scenting trouble, Gaius Philippus hurried up to the rampart. He wore only military kilt and helmet, and carried his gladius naked in his hand. He almost stumbled over Avshar’s gift; his face hardened as he recognized it for what it was. “How did it come here?” was all he said.

  Marcus told him, or tried to. The thread of the story kept breaking whenever he looked down into the dead Emperor’s eyes.

  The senior centurion heard him out, then growled, “Let the damned wizard have his boast. It’ll cost him in the end, you wait and see. This”—He gave Mavrikios a last Roman salute—“doesn’t show us anything we didn’t already know. Instead of wasting time with it, Avshar could have been finishing Thorisin. But he let him get away—and with a decent part of army, too, once they start pulling themselves together.”

  Scaurus nodded, heartened. Gaius Philippus had the right of it. As long as Thorisin Gavras survived, Videssos had a leader—and after this disaster, the Empire would need all the troops it could find.

  The tribune’s mind went to the morning, to getting free of the field of Maragha. The legionaries’ discipline would surely pay again, as it had this afternoon; overwhelming triumph left the Yezda almost as disordered as defeat did their foes. Now he had the Khatrisher horse, too, so he could hope to meet the nomads on their own terms. One way or another, he told himself, he would manage.

  He stared a challenge in the direction Avshar had gone, said quietly, “No, the game’s not over yet. Far from it.”

  To Judy-Lynn del Rey,

  for calling to let me know they sold

  WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE:

  A SCOUTING COLUMN OF THREE COHORTS OF ROMAN LEGIONARIES, led by military tribune Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and senior centurion Gaius Philippus, was returning to Julius Caesar’s main army when they were ambushed by Gauls. To prevent mass slaughter, the Gallic commander Viridovix offered single combat, and Marcus accepted. Both men bore druids’ swords, that of Marcus being battle spoil. When the blades crossed, a dome of light sprang up around them. Suddenly the Romans and Viridovix were in an unfamiliar world with strange stars.

  They soon discovered they were in the war-torn Empire of Videssos, a land where priests of the god Phos could work real magic. They were hired as a mercenary unit by the Empire and spent the winter in the provincial town of Imbros, learning the language and customs.

  When spring came, they marched to Videssos the city, capital of the Empire. There Marcus met the soldier-Emperor Mavrikios Gavras, his brother Thorisin, and the prime minister, Vardanes Sphrantzes, a bureaucrat whose enmity Marcus incurred. At a banquet in the Romans’ honor, Marcus met Mavrikios’ daughter Alypia and accidentally spilled wine on the wizard Avshar, envoy of Yezd, Videssos’ western enemy. Avshar demanded a duel. When the wizard tried to cheat with sorcery, Marcus’ druid sword neutralized the spell, and Marcus won.

  Avshar tried for revenge with an enchanted dagger in the hands of a nomad under his spell. The Videssian priest Nepos was horrified at the use of evil magic. Avshar forfeited the protection granted envoys.

  Marcus was sent to arrest Avshar, accompanied by Hemond and a squad of Namdaleni, mercenaries from the island nation of Namdalen. But Avshar had fled, leaving a sorcerous trap that killed Hemond. Marcus was given Hemond’s sword to take to his widow, Helvis.

  Avshar’s offenses served as justification for Videssos to declare war on Yezd, which had been raiding deep into the western part of the Empire. Troops—native and mercenary—flooded into the capital as Videssos prepared for war. Tension rose between Videssians and the growing number of Namdaleni because of differences in their worship of Phos. To the religiously liberal Romans, the differences were minor, but each side considered the other heretics. The Videssian patriarch Balsamon preached a sermon of toleration, which eased the tension for the moment.

  But fanatic Videssian monks stirred up trouble again. Rioting broke out, and Marcus was sent with a force of Romans to help quell it. Going into a dark courtyard to break up a rape, he discovered that the intended victim was Helvis. Caught up in the moment, they made love. And after the riots subsided, she and her son joined him in the Romans’ barracks. Other Romans had already found partners.

  At last the unwieldy army moved west against Yezd, accompanied by women and dependents. Marcus was pleased to learn Helvis was pregnant, but shocked to discover Ortaias Sphrantzes commanded the army’s left wing; he was only slightly mollified on finding the young man was a figurehead, hostage for Vardanes Sphrantzes’ good behavior.

  More troops joined the
army in the westlands, including those of Baanes Onomagoulos and Gagik Bagratouni, a noble driven from his home in mountainous Vaspurakan by Yezda. Two other Vaspurakaners, Senpat Sviodo and his wife Nevrat, were acting as guides for the Romans. All Vaspurakaners were hated as heretics by a local priest, Zemarkhos, Zemarkhos cursed Bagratouni, who threw him and his dog into a sack, then beat the sack. Fearing a pogrom, Marcus interceded for him.

  The Yezda began hit-and-run raids against the imperial army as it moved closer to Yezd. Then an advance force of Onomagoulos’ troops was pinned down near the town of Maragha. Leaving the army’s dependents behind at Khliat, the Emperor moved forward to rescue them.

  In a great battle, Avshar commanded the Yezda. By sorcery, he slew the officer who truly commanded the imperial army’s left wing. Ortaias Sphrantzes, suddenly thrust into real command, panicked and fled.

  The whole wing collapsed. The battle, till then nearly a draw, turned to disaster. Mavrikios fell fighting, and Thorisin’s desperate counter-attack from the right failed, though he did manage to escape with a fair part of the army.

  Roman discipline let the legionaries hold their ranks. They withdrew in good order and encamped for the night. Toward midnight, Avshar taunted them by throwing Mavrikios’ head into their camp. As Gaius Philippus commented, the wizard should have pursued the forces of Thorisin instead.

  The game was not over yet.

  I

  THE ROMANS’ TREK EAST FROM THE DISASTROUS BATTLEFIELD WHERE the Emperor of Videssos lost his life was a journey full of torment. The season was late summer, the land through which they marched sere and burning hot. Mirages shimmered ahead, treacherously promising lakes where a mud puddle would have been a prodigy. Bands of Yezda invaders dogged the fugitives’ tracks, skirmishing occasionally and always alert to pick off stragglers.

  Scaurus still carried Mavrikios Gavras’ severed head, the only sure proof the Emperor was dead. Foreseeing chaos in Videssos after Mavrikios’ fall, he thought it wise to forestall pretenders who might claim the imperial name to aid their climbs to power. It would not be the first time Videssos had known such things.

  “Sorry I am I wasna there when that black spalpeen Avshar flung you himself’s noddle,” Viridovix said to the tribune, his Latin musically flavored by his native Celtic speech. “I had a fine Yezda one to throw back at him.” True to the fierce custom of his folk, the Gaul had taken a slain enemy’s head for a trophy.

  At any other time Marcus would have found that revolting. In defeat’s bitter aftermath, he nodded and said, “I wish you’d been there, too.”

  “Aye, it would have given the whoreson something to think on,” Gaius Philippus chimed in. The senior centurion usually enjoyed quarreling with Viridovix, but their hatred for the wizard-prince of Yezd brought them together now.

  Marcus rubbed his chin, felt rough whiskers scratch under his fingers. Like most of the Romans, he had stayed clean-faced in a bearded land, but lately there had been little time for shaving. He plucked a whisker; it shone golden in the sunlight. Coming as he did from Mediolanum in northern Italy, he had a large proportion of northern blood in his veins. In Caesar’s army in Gaul, he had been teased about looking like a Celt himself. The Videssians often took him for a Haloga; many of those warriors forsook their chilly home for mercenary service in the Empire.

  Gorgidas worked ceaselessly with the wounded, changing dressings, splinting broken bones, and dispensing the few ointments and medicines left in his depleted store. Although hurt himself, the slim, dark Greek doctor disregarded his pain to bring others relief.

  Covered by a screening force of light cavalry from Videssos’ eastern neighbor Khatrish, the legionaries tramped east toward the town of Khliat as fast as their many injuries would allow. Had he led a force in the lands Rome ruled, Scaurus would have moved northwest instead, to join Thorisin Gavras and the right wing of the shattered imperial army. Hard military sense lay there, for the Emperor’s brother—no, the Emperor now, Marcus supposed—had brought his troops away in good order. The fight against the Yezda would center on him.

  But here Marcus was not simply a legionary officer, with a legionary officer’s worries. He was also a mercenary captain. He had to deal with the fact that the legionaries’ women, the families they had made or joined since coming to Videssos, were left behind in the Vaspurakaner city that had been the base for Mavrikios’ ill-fated campaign. The Romans would disobey any order to turn away from Khliat. So, even more, would the hundreds of stragglers who had attached themselves to his troop like drowning men clinging to a spar.

  For that matter, he never thought of giving such an order. His own partner Helvis, carrying his child, had stayed in Khliat, along with her young son from an earlier attachment.

  That was to say, he hoped she had stayed in Khliat. Uncertainty tormented the legionaries as badly as the Yezda did. For all Scaurus knew, the invaders might have stormed Khliat and slain or carried into slavery everyone there. Even if they had not, fugitives would already be arriving with word of the catastrophe that had overtaken the Videssian army.

  In the wake of such news; noncombatants might be fleeing eastward now. That was more dangerous than staying behind Khliat’s walls. Marcus ran through the gloomy possibilities time after time: Helvis dead, Helvis captured by the Yezda, Helvis struggling east with a three-year-old through hostile country … and she was pregnant, too.

  At last, with a distinct effort of will, he banished the qualms to the back of his mind. Not for the first time, he was grateful for his training in the Stoic school, which taught him to cast aside useless imaginings. He would know soon enough, and that would be the time to act.

  About a day and a half out of Khliat, a scout came riding back to the Roman tribune. “A horseman coming out of the east, sir,” he reported. His staccato Khatrisher accent made him hard for Scaurus to understand—the tribune’s own Videssian was far from perfect.

  Interest flared in him when he realized what the scout was saying. “From the east? A lone rider?”

  The Khatrisher spread his hands. “As far as we could tell. He was nervous and took cover as soon as he spotted us. From what little we saw, he had the seeming of a Vaspurakaner.”

  “No wonder he was leery of you, then. You look too much like Yezda.” The invading nomads had ravaged Vaspurakan over the course of years, until the natives hated the sight of them. The Khatrishers were descended from nomads as well and, despite taking many Videssian ways, still had the look of the plains about them.

  “Bring him in, and unhurt,” Marcus decided. “Anyone fool enough to travel west in the face of everything rolling the other way must have a strong reason. Maybe he bears word from Khliat,” the tribune added, suddenly hopeful in spite of himself.

  The scout gave a cheery wave—the Khatrishers were most of them free spirits—and kicked his pony into motion. Scaurus did not expect him back for some time; for someone in the furs and leather of a plainsman, convincing a Vaspurakaner of his harmlessness would not be easy. The tribune was surprised when the Khatrisher quickly reappeared, along with another rider plainly not of his people.

  The scout’s companion looked familiar, even at a distance. Before the tribune was able to say more than that, Senpat Sviodo cried out in joy and spurred his horse forward to meet the newcomer. “Nevrat!” the Vaspurakaner yelled. “Are you out of your mind, to journey alone through this wolves’ land?”

  His wife parted company from her escort to embrace him. The Khatrisher stared, slack-jawed. In her loose traveling clothes, her curly black hair bound up under a three-peaked Vaspurakaner hat of leather, and with the grime of travel on her, only her beardless cheeks hinted at her sex. She was surely armed like a man. A horseman’s saber hung at her belt, and she carried a bow with an arrow nocked and ready.

  She and Senpat were chattering in their throaty native tongue as they slowly rode back to the marching legionaries. The Khatrisher followed, still shaking his head.

  “Your outrider has a head on
his shoulders,” she said, switching to Videssian as she neared Scaurus. “I took him and his comrades for Yezda, for all their shouts of ‘Friends! Countrymen!’ But when he said, ‘Romans!’ I knew he was no western jackal.”

  “I’m glad you chose to trust him,” Marcus answered. He was fond of the intense, swarthy girl. So were many other Romans; scattered cheers rang out as the men realized who she was. She smiled her pleasure, teeth flashing white. Senpat Sviodo, proud of her exploit and glad beyond measure she had joined him safely, was grinning, too.

  The question Senpat had shouted moments before was still burning in the tribune’s mind. “In the name of your god Phos, Nevrat, why did you leave Khliat?” A horrid thought forced its way forward. “Has it fallen?”

  “It still stood yesterday morning, when I set out,” she answered. The Romans close enough to hear her cheered again, this time with the same relief Scaurus felt. She tempered their delight by continuing, “There’s worse madness inside those walls, though, than any I’ve seen out here.”

  Gaius Philippus nodded, as if hearing what he expected. “They panicked, did they, when news came we’d been beaten?” The veteran sounded resigned; he had seen enough victories and defeats that the aftermaths of both were second nature to him.

  The Romans crowded round Nevrat, calling out the names of their women and asking if they were all right. She told them. “As I said, I left early yesterday. When last I saw them, they were well. Most of you have sensible girls, too; I think they’ll have wit enough to keep from joining the flight.”

  “There’s flight, then?” Scaurus asked with a sinking feeling.

  Nevrat understood his fears and was quick to lay them to rest. “Helvis knows war, Marcus. She told me to tell you she’d stay in Khliat till the first Yezda came over the wall.” The tribune nodded his thanks, not trusting himself to speak. He felt suddenly taller, as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Helvis, he knew, had no such reassurance that he lived.