Videssos Cycle, Volume 1

by Harry Turtledove

  The boy who asked that last question was a beautiful child of about twelve; flushed with the first dreams of manhood, he looked ready, nay, eager to run off with the army. “Don’t you believe it for a minute, son,” Gaius Philippus said, speaking with an earnestness Marcus had rarely heard him use. “Soldiering’s a trade like any other, a bit dirtier than most, maybe. Go at it for the glory and you’ll die too damned young.”

  The boy stared in disbelief, as if hearing one of the monks curse Phos. His face crumpled. Tears come hard at twelve, and scald when they fall.

  “Why are you after doing that to the lad?” Viridovix demanded. “Sure and there’s no harm in feeding his dreams a mite.”

  “Isn’t there?” The centurion’s voice was like a slamming door. “My younger brother thought that way. He’s thirty years dead now.” He looked stonily at the Celt, daring him to take it further. Viridovix reddened and kept still.

  Despite the peregrinations of the day before, Scaurus learned Amorion was only about four days’ march southeast. Aptos’ adults pointed the way, though no one seemed eager to lead the Romans there. Still, as one plump fellow declared with the optimism of rustics everywhere, “You can’t miss it.”

  “Maybe not, but watch us try,” Gaius Philippus muttered to himself. Marcus was inclined to agree with him. All too often a landmark was a landmark because a local saw it every day of his life. To a stranger, it was just another tree or hill or barn.

  Worse, the rain returned at dawn the next day, not with the vicious onslaught it had shown before, but a steady downpour riding the seawind south. The road to Amorion, in bad shape already, soon became next to impossible. Wagons and traveling cars bogged down, axle-deep in greasy mud. Straining to push forward nonetheless, two horses in quick succession snapped legbones and had to be destroyed. The soldiers worked with their beasts to move the wains on, but progress was minute. The four days’ journey promised in Aptos seemed a cruel mockery.

  “I feel like a drowned cat,” Gorgidas complained. Dapper by choice, the Greek was sadly disheveled now. His hair, its curl killed by hours of rain, splashed down onto his forehead and kept wandering into his eyes; his soaked mantle clung to him, more like a parasite than a garment. He was spattered with muck.

  In short, he looked no different from any of his companions in wretchedness. Viridovix said so, loudly and profanely, perhaps hoping to jar him out of his misery and into a good soul-stirring fight. There was more subtlety to the Gaul than met the eye; Scaurus recalled his using that ploy before and succeeding.

  But today the doctor would not rise to the bait. He squelched away in glum silence, a person from a sunny land hard-pressed to deal with foul weather. Viridovix, to whom rain was an everyday likelihood, was better prepared to cope with it.

  The storm closed down visibility and pattered insistently off every horizontal surface. Thus the Romans, intent on their own concerns, were not aware of the newcomers until they loomed out of the watery curtain ahead.

  Marcus’ sword was in his hand before he consciously wished it there. His men bristled like angry dogs, leaping back from their labors and likewise reaching for weapons. Gaius Philippus’ chest swelled as he gulped the air he’d need to shout them into battle formation.

  Before the centurion could give the order, Senpat Sviodo cried out in his own language and splashed forward to clasp the hand of the leading horseman ahead. “Bagratouni!” he exclaimed.

  With the naming of that name, the fear fell from Scaurus’ eyes, and he saw the newly come riders as they were: not a Yezda horde bursting out of the mist, but a battered squadron of Vaspurakaners, as much refugees as the Romans.

  Gagik Bagratouni almost jerked his hand from Sviodo’s in startlement. Like Marcus, the nakharar had seen what he thought he would see and was about to cry his men forward in a last doomed, desperate charge. Eyes wide, he, too, reconsidered. “It is the Romans, our friends!” he shouted to his forlorn command. Weary, beaten faces answered with uncertain smiles, as if remembering a word long unused.

  As the tribune moved up to greet Bagratouni, he was shocked to see how the nakharar had shrunken in on himself since the battle before Maragha. His skin was looser over the strong bones of his face; dark circles puffed below his eyes. His nose seemed an old man’s beak, not the symbol of strength it had been.

  Worst of all, the almost tangible power and presence once his had slipped from his shoulders, leaving him more naked than a mere loss of clothes ever could have.

  He dismounted stiffly; his second-in-command, Mesrop Anhoghin, was there to steady him. From the look of mute misery the lanky, thick-bearded aide wore, Scaurus grew sure his imagination was not tricking him. “Greetings,” Anhoghin said—thereby, Marcus knew, exhausting most of his Videssian.

  “Greetings,” the Roman nodded. Senpat came to his side, ready to interpret for him. But Scaurus spoke directly to Gagik Bagratouni, who used the imperial tongue fluently, albeit with heavy accent. He asked, “Are the Yezda between here and Amorion too thick to stop us pushing on?”

  “Amorion?” the nakharar repeated dully. “How do you know we to Amorion have been?”

  “For one thing, by the direction you came from. For another, well—” Scaurus waved at the ragged group before him. Most of Gagik Bagratouni’s men were Vaspurakaners driven from their native land by the Yezda who settled in or near Amorion with their women. They had left those women behind when they took the Emperor’s service, but some were here now, looking as worn and beaten as the men they rode with.

  Some were here now … but where was Bagratouni’s wife, the fat, easygoing lady Marcus had met in the nakharar’s fortresslike home? “Gagik,” he asked, alarm leaping in him, “is Zabel—?” He stopped, not knowing how he should continue.

  “Zabel?” It might have been a stranger’s name, the way Bagratouni said it. “Zabel is dead,” he said slowly, and then began to weep, his shoulders shaking helplessly, his tears washed away by the uncaring rain.

  The sight of the stalwart noble broken and despairing was somehow more terrible than most of the concrete setbacks the Romans had encountered. “Take care of him, can’t you?” Scaurus whispered to Gorgidas.

  The compassion in the doctor’s eyes was replaced by a spark of exasperation. “You always want me to work miracles, not medicine.” But he was already moving toward Bagratouni, murmuring, “Come with me, sir. I’ll give you something that will let you sleep.” In Greek he told Scaurus, “I’ll give him something to knock him out for two days straight. That may help a little.”

  The nakharar let himself be led away, indifferent to what fate held for him. Marcus, who could not afford indifference, began questioning the rest of the Vaspurakaners through Senpat Sviodo to learn what had happened to them to bring their leader to such a state.

  The answer was the one he’d feared. He knew Bagratouni’s men had got free of the fatal field before Maragha; their furious despair at Videssos’ failure to free their homeland helped them beat back the Yezda time and again. The younger men and bachelors scattered to Vaspurakan’s mountains to carry on the fight; the rest bypassed Khliat and marched straight for their families in Amorion.

  After the rigors of the battlefield and a forced march through western Videssos’ ravaged countryside, what they found there was the cruelest irony of all. Videssians had fought at their side against the nomads, but in Amorion other Videssians, using the Vaspurakaners’ heterodoxy as their pretext, turned on them more viciously than ever the Yezda had.

  With sickening certainty, the tribune knew what was coming next: Zemarkhos had headed the pogrom. Marcus remembered the lean cleric’s burning, fanatical gaze, his automatic hatred of anyone who did not conform precisely to his conception of how his god should be revered. And he remembered how he himself had stopped Gagik Bagratouni just short of doing away with Zemarkhos when the priest taunted the Vaspurakaners by naming his dog for Vaspur, the prince they claimed as their first ancestor. And the result of his magnanimity? A cry of “De
ath to the heretics!” and revenge exacted from the absent warriors’ defenseless kin.

  The mob’s fury blazed so high it even dared stand against Bagratouni’s men on their return. In street fighting, ferocity carried almost as much weight as discipline, and the Vaspurakaners were already worn down to shadows of themselves. It was all they could do to rescue their surviving loved ones; for most, that rescue came far too late.

  Mesrop Anhoghin, his face expressionless, gave the story out flatly, pausing every few seconds to let Senpat translate. Finally that impassivity was more than Scaurus could bear. He was drowning in shame and guilt. “How can you stand to look at me, much less speak this way?” he said, covering his face with his hands. “Were it not for me, none of this might have happened!”

  His cry was in Videssian, but Anhoghin could understand the anguish in his voice without an interpreter. He stumped forward to look the tribune in the face; tall for a Vaspurakaner, his eyes were almost level with Scaurus’. “We are Phos’ firstborn,” he said through Senpat Sviodo. “It is only just that he tests us more harshly than ordinary men.”

  “That is no answer!” the tribune moaned. Without strong religious beliefs of his own, he could not comprehend the strength they lent others.

  Anhoghin seemed to sense that. He said, “Perhaps it is not, for you. Think of this, then: when you asked my lord to spare Zemarkhos, it was not from love, but to keep him from being a martyr and a rallying cry for zealots. You did not—you could not—force him to spare the swine. That he did himself, for reasons he found good, no matter where they came from. And who knows? Things might have been worse the other way.”

  It was not forgiveness Anhoghin offered; it was better, for he said none was needed. Scaurus stood silent for a long, grateful moment, ankle-deep in doughy mud, suddenly not minding the raindrops splashing against his face. “Thank you,” he whispered at last.

  Fury blazed in him that the Vaspurakaners, sober, decent folk who asked no more from the world than that it leave them at peace, could find it neither in their conquered homeland nor in the refuge-place round Amorion. About the first he could do nothing; that had proved beyond all the Empire’s power.

  As for the other … The wolfish eagerness in his own voice surprised him as he asked Anhoghin, “Shall we avenge you?” The heat of the moment swept away weeks of careful calculation.

  Senpat Sviodo instantly shouted, “Aye!” The headstrong young Vaspurakaner could be counted on to press for any plan that called for action.

  But when he translated for Mesrop Anhoghin, Bagratouni’s aide shook his head. “What purpose would it serve? Those of us who could escape have, and the dead care not for vengeance. This land has war enough without stirring up more; the Yezda would laugh to see us fight among ourselves.”

  Scaurus opened his mouth to protest, slowly closed it again. Were the occasion different, he might have laughed to hear arguments he had so long upheld come back at him from another. But Anhoghin, standing there in the muck with rain dripping through his matted beard and only exhaustion and defeat in his eyes, was not an object of mirth.

  The tribune’s shoulders slumped inside his mail shirt. “Damn you for being right,” he said tiredly, and saw disappointment flower on Sviodo’s mobile features. “If the way forward is closed, we’d best go back to Aptos.” Turning to give the necessary orders, he felt old for the first time in his life.

  III

  THE HILL TOWN NORTHWEST OF AMORION WAS NOT A BAD CHOICE FOR winter quarters; Scaurus soon saw the truth of that. Where the Romans would have had to storm Amorion, Aptos welcomed them. Not a Yezda had been seen in its secluded valley, but the cold wind of rumor said they were about—a friendly garrison was suddenly desirable.

  More than rumor told the townsfolk of the disaster the Empire had met. The local noble, a minor magnate named Skyros Phorkos, had levied a platoon of farmers to fight the Yezda with Mavrikios. None had yet returned; only now were friends and kin beginning to realize none ever would.

  Phorkos’ son and heir was a boy of eleven; the noble’s widow Nerse had picked up the authority he left behind. A woman of stern beauty, she viewed the world with coldly realistic eyes. When the Romans and their comrades struggled back into Aptos, she received them like a ruling princess, to the edification of the few townsmen who braved the rain to watch.

  The dinner to which she invited Scaurus and his officers was equally formal. If the Romans noticed the large number of guards protecting Phorkos’ estate, they made no mention of it—no more than did Nerse, at the double squad of legionaries escorting the tribune’s party thither.

  Perhaps as a result of those shared silences, the dinner—a roast goat cooked with onions and cloves, boiled beans and cabbage, fresh-baked bread with wild honey, and candied fruits—went smoothly enough. Wine flowed freely, though Marcus, noticing his hostess’ moderation—and recalling too well the morning after his last carouse—did not drink deep.

  When her servants had taken the last scrap-laden platter from the dining hall, Nerse grew businesslike. “We are glad you are here,” she said abruptly. “We will be gladder yet when we see you intend to treat us as a flock to be protected, not as victims to be despoiled.”

  “Keep us supplied with bread and with fodder for our beasts, and we’ll pay for whatever else we take,” Marcus returned. “My troops are no plunderers.”

  Nerse considered. “Less than I hoped for; more than I expected—fair enough. Can you live up to it?”

  “What would my promises mean? The only test will be how we behave; you’ll have to judge that.” Marcus liked the way she put Aptos’ case without pleading. He liked, too, the straightforward way she dealt with him. She did not try to use her femininity as a tool, but treated the Roman as an equal and plainly expected the same from him.

  He waited for the tiny threat that was the sole pressure she could bring to bear: that Aptos’ inhabitants would only cooperate with his men to the extent they were well treated. Instead, she turned the conversation to less important things. Before long she rose, nodded graciously, and escorted her guests to the door.

  Gaius Philippus had been almost silent during the dinner. His presence, like that of Scaurus’ other companions, was more ceremonial than it was necessary. Once outside, though, he paused only to draw his cloak round himself against the rain before declaring, “There is a woman!”

  He spoke so enthusiastically Marcus raised a quizzical eyebrow. He had trouble imagining the senior centurion as anything but a misogynist.

  “Cold as a netted carp she’d be between the sheets, from the look of her,” Viridovix guessed, automatically ready to disagree with the veteran.

  “Not if properly thawed,” Laon Pakhymer demurred. As soldiers will, they argued it all the way back to the soggy Roman camp.

  The tribune was inside it before he realized that Nerse’s threat had in fact been made. It was merely that she had not crudely put it into words, but let him make it himself in his own mind. He wondered if she knew the Videssian board game that, unlike its Roman counterparts, depended only on a player’s skill. If so, he decided, he did not want to play against her.

  Wintering at Aptos, Marcus thought, was like crawling into a hole and then pulling it in after himself. He and his men had been at the center of events since spring; he had hobnobbed with Videssos’ imperial family, sparred with the chief minister of the Empire, made a personal foe of the wizard-prince who led its foes, fought in a great battle that would change Videssos’ course for years to come … and here he was in a country town, wondering if its store of barley meal would hold out until spring. It was deflating, but gave him back a sense of proportion he had been in danger of losing.

  Aptos was lonely enough at the best of times. News of the disaster before Maragha had reached it, aye; the distant kingdoms of Thatagush and Agder would know of that by now. But the Romans brought word of Ortaias Sphrantzes’ assumption of the throne, and Aptos had been equally ignorant of the persecution of the Vaspurakane
rs not five days’ march away.

  The tribune was unwilling to leave some news to chance. He talked with Laon Pakhymer outside his tent one morning not long after rain turned to snow. “I’d like to send a couple of your riders west,” he said.

  “West, eh?” The Khatrisher raised an eyebrow. “Want to find out what’s become of the younger Gavras, do you?”

  “Yes. If all we have is a choice between Yezd and Ortaias, well, suddenly the life of a robber chief looks better than it had.”

  “I know what you mean. I’ll get the lads for you.” Pakhymer clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Hate to send them out with so little hope of making it back, but what can you do?”

  “Making it back from where?” Senpat Sviodo’s breath puffed out in a steaming cloud as he asked the question—he was just done with practice at swords and still breathing hard.

  When Marcus explained, the handsome young Vaspurakaner threw his hands in the air. “This is foolishness! Would you throw birds in a river when you have fish handy? Who better to go to Vaspurakan than a pair of ‘princes’? Nevrat and I will leave within the hour.”

  “The Khatrishers will be able to get in and out faster than you could. They have the nomad way of traveling light,” Marcus said. Beside him, Pakhymer nodded reluctantly.

  But Senpat laughed. “They’ll be able to get killed faster, you mean, likely mistaken for Yezda. Nevrat and I are of the country and will be welcome wherever our people live. We’ve gone in before and come back whole. We can again.”

  He sounded so certain that Scaurus looked a question at Pakhymer. The Khatrisher said, “Let him go, if he wants to so badly. But he should leave Nevrat behind—the woman is too well favored to waste so.”

  “You’re right,” Senpat said, which surprised the tribune until he went on, “I tell her so myself. But she will not have us separated, and who am I to complain of that?” He turned serious. “She can care for herself, you know.”