Videssos Cycle, Volume 1

by Harry Turtledove

  Close by, Zeprin the Red raised his long-hafted Haloga war axe high above his helmet, to bring it crashing down on a horse’s head. Brains flew, pink-gray. The horse foundered like a ship striking a jagged rock. Pinned under it, its Namdalener rider screamed with a broken ankle, but not for long. A second stroke of the great axe silenced him for good.

  An unhorsed mercenary slashed at Scaurus, who took the blow on his shield. His scutum was bigger and heavier than the horseman’s lighter shield. Marcus shoved out with it. The man of the Duchy stumbled backwards, tripped on a corpse’s upthrust foot. A legionary drove a stabbing-sword into his throat.

  Though the Namdalener charge was checked, they still fought with the skill and fierceness Marcus had come to know. Foul-mouthed Lucilius stood staring at his broken sword, the hard steel snapped across by a cunning lance stroke. “Well, fetch me a whole one!” he shouted, but before anybody could, a man of the Duchy rode him down.

  “By all the gods, why aren’t these bastards on our side? They’re too bloody much work to fight,” Gaius Philippus panted. There was a great dent in the right side of his helmet, and blood flowed down his face from a cut over one eye. The tide of battle swept them apart before Scaurus could answer.

  A Namdalener stabbed down at someone writhing on the ground before him. He missed, swore, and brought his blade back for another stroke. So intent was he on his kill that he never noticed Marcus until the tribune’s Gallic longsword drank his life.

  Marcus pulled the would-be victim up, then stared in disbelief. “Grace,” said Nevrat Sviodo, and kissed him full on the mouth. The shock was as great as if he’d taken a wound. Slim saber in hand, she slipped back into battle, leaving him gaping after her.

  “Watch your left, sir!” someone cried. The tribune jerked up his shield in reflex response. A lancehead glanced off it; the Namdalener swept by without time for another blow. Marcus shook himself—surprise had almost cost him his neck.

  With a banshee whoop, Viridovix leaped up behind a mounted mercenary and dragged him from his horse. He jerked up the luckless man’s chin, drew sword across his throat like a bow over a viol’s strings. Blood fountained. The Gaul shouted in triumph, sawed through windpipe and backbone. He lifted the dripping head and hurled it into the close-packed ranks of the Namdaleni, who cried out in horror as they recoiled from the grisly trophy.

  The count Drax was not altogether sorry to see retreat begin. These foot soldiers of Thorisin’s, whoever they were, fought like no foot he had met. They bent but would not break, rushing men from quiet spots along the line to meet threats so cleverly that no new points of weakness appeared. Quite professional, he thought with reluctant admiration.

  From his left wing, the Khatrishers were spraying his bogged-down men with arrows and then darting away, just as he had hoped his hireling nomads would to Thorisin Gavras’ heavy horse. But his clans of plainsmen were squeezed between his own men and the oncoming enemy. Soon they would break and run—to stand against this kind of punishment was not in them.

  With a wry smile, Drax of Namdalen realized it was not in him, either. When Gavras’ cavalry broke through the nomads and stormed into his stalled knights, the result would be unpleasant. And in the end, a mercenary captain’s loyalty was to himself, not to his paymaster. Without men, he would have nothing to sell.

  He reined in, tried to wheel his horse among his tight-packed countrymen. “Break off,” he shouted, “and back to our camp! Keep your order, by the Wager!”

  Marcus heard the count’s shout to his men but was not sure he understood it; among themselves, the Namdaleni used a broad patois quite different from the Videssian spoken in the Empire. Yet he soon realized what Drax must have ordered, for pressure eased all along the line as the men of the Duchy broke off combat. It was skillfully done; the Namdaleni knew their business and left the legionaries few openings for mischief.

  The tribune did not pursue them far. In part he was ruled by the same concern that governed Drax: not to spend his men unwisely. Moreover, the notion of infantry chasing horsemen did not appeal. If the Namdaleni spun round and counterattacked, they could cut off and destroy big chunks of his small force. In loose order the Romans would be horribly vulnerable to the tough mounted lancers.

  Gavras’ cavalry and the Khatrishers followed Sphrantzes’ men for a mile or two, harassing their retreat, trying to turn it to rout. But when the Romans were not added in, the Namdaleni and their nomad outriders probably outnumbered the forces opposed to them. They withdrew in good order.

  Scaurus looked up in the sky, amazed. The sun, which had but moments before—or so it seemed—blazed straight into his face as it rose, was well west of south. Marcus realized he was tired, hungry, dry as the Videssian plateau in summer, and in desperate need of easing himself. A slash on his sword hand he did not remember getting began to throb, the more so when sweat ran down his arm into it. He flexed his fingers. They all moved—no tendon was cut.

  Legionaries were plundering the corpses of their fallen opponents. Others cut the throats of wounded horses, and of those Namdaleni so badly hurt as to be beyond hope of recovery. Foes with lesser injuries got the same rough medical treatment the Romans did—they could be ransomed later and hence were more valuable alive than dead.

  Seriously wounded Romans were carried back into camp on litters for such healing as Gorgidas and Nepos could give. Marcus found the fat priest directing a double handful of women as they cleaned and bandaged wounds. Of Gorgidas there was no sign.

  Surprised at that, Scaurus asked where the Greek doctor was. “Don’t you know?” one of Nepos’ helpers exclaimed, and began to giggle.

  The tribune, worn out as he was, could make no sense of that. He stared foolishly. Nepos said gently, “You’ll find him at your own tent, Scaurus.”

  “What? Why is he—? Oh!” Marcus said. He began to run, though a moment before simply standing on his feet had been almost beyond him.

  In fact Gorgidas was not in the tribune’s tent, but coming back the way Scaurus was going. Dodging the tribune, he said, “Greetings. How went your stupid battle?”

  “We won,” Marcus answered automatically. “But—but—” he sputtered, and ran out of words. For once there were more urgent things than warfare.

  “Rest easy, my friend. You have a son.” His spare features alight, Gorgidas took the tribune’s arm.

  “Is Helvis all right?” Marcus demanded, though the smile on the physician’s face told him nothing could be seriously amiss.

  “As well as could be expected—better, I’d say. One of the easier births I’ve seen, less than half a day. She’s a big-hipped girl, and it was not her first. Yes, she’s fine.”

  “Thank you,” Scaurus said, and would have hurried on, but Gorgidas kept the grip on his arm. The tribune turned round once more. Gorgidas was still smiling, but his eyes were pensive and far away. “I envy you,” he said slowly. “It must be a marvelous feeling.”

  “It is,” Marcus said, startled at the depth of sadness in the doctor’s voice. He wondered if Gorgidas had meant to lay himself so bare, yet at the same time was touched by the physician’s trust. “Thank you,” he said again. Their eyes met in a moment of complete understanding.

  It passed, and Gorgidas was his astringent self once more. “Go on with you,” he said, lightly pushing the tribune forward. “I have enough to do, trying to patch the fools who’d sooner take life than give it.” Shaking his head, he made his way down to the injured men not far away.

  Minucius’ companion Erene was with Helvis, her own daughter, scarcely two months old, asleep in the crook of her arm. The inside of the tribune’s tent smelled of blood, the hot, rusty scent as thick as Scaurus had ever known it on the field. Truly, he thought, women fought battles of their own.

  Perhaps expecting to see Gorgidas again, Erene started when Marcus, still sweating in his armor, pulled open the tentflap. She knew at once why he had come, but had her own concerns as well. “Is Minucius safe?” she asked anxious
ly.

  “Yes, he’s fine,” Marcus answered, unconsciously echoing Gorgidas a few minutes before. “Hardly a scratch—he’s a clever fighter.”

  His voice woke Helvis, who had been dozing. Scaurus stooped beside her, kissed her gently. Erene, her fears at rest, slipped unnoticed from the tent.

  The smile Helvis gave the tribune was a tired one. Her soft brown hair was all awry and still matted with sweat; purple circles were smudged under her eyes. But there was a triumph in them as she lifted the small blanket of soft lambswool and offered it to Scaurus.

  “Yes, let me see him,” Marcus said, carefully taking the light burden from her.

  “ ‘Him’? You’ve already seen Gorgidas,” Helvis accused, but Marcus was not listening. He looked down at the face of his newborn son. “He looks like you,” Helvis said softly.

  “What? Nonsense.” The baby was red, wrinkled, flat-nosed, and almost bald; he looked scarcely human, let alone like anyone in particular. His wide gray-blue eyes passed across the tribune’s face, then returned and seemed to settle for a moment.

  The baby wiggled. Scaurus, unaccustomed to such things, nearly dropped him. An arm came free of the swaddling blanket; a tiny fist waved in the air. Marcus cautiously extended a finger. The groping hand touched it, closed in a grasp of surprising strength. The tribune marveled at its miniature perfection—palm and wrist, pink-nailed fingers and thumb, all compressed into a space no longer than the first two joints of his middle finger.

  Helvis misunderstood his examination. “He’s complete,” she said; “ten fingers, ten toes, all where they should be.” They laughed together. The noise startled the baby, who began to cry. “Give him to me,” Helvis said, and snuggled him against her. In her more knowing hold, the baby soon quieted.

  “Do we name him as we planned?” she asked.

  “I suppose so,” the tribune sighed, not altogether happy with a bargain they’d made months before. He would have preferred a purely Roman name, with some good Latin praenomen ahead of the Aemilii Scauri’s long-established nomen and cognomen. Helvis had argued, though, and with justice, that such a name slighted her side of their son’s ancestry. Thus they decided the child’s use-name would be Dosti, after her father; when heavier style was needed, he had a sonorous patronymic.

  “Dosti the son of Aemilius Scaurus,” Marcus said, rolling it off his tongue. He suddenly chuckled, looking at his tiny son. Helvis glanced up curiously. “For now,” he explained, “the little fellow’s name is longer than he is.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” she said, but she was smiling still.

  V

  THE EARLY SUMMER SUN STOOD TALL IN THE SKY. THE CITY VIDESSOS, capital and heart of the Empire that bore its name, gleamed under the bright gaze. White stucco and marble, tawny sandstone, brick the color of blood, the myriad golden globes on Phos’ temples—all seemed close enough to reach out and touch, even when seen from the western shore of the strait the Videssians called the Cattle-Crossing.

  But between the army on that western shore and the object of its desire swung an endlessly patrolling line of bronze-beaked warships. Ortaias Sphrantzes might have lost the transmarine suburbs of the capital, but when his forces pulled out they left behind few vessels larger than a fishing smack. Not even Thorisin Gavras’ impetuosity made him eager to risk a crossing in the face of the enemy fleet.

  Balked from advancing further, his frustration grew with his army. He summoned an officers’ council to what had been the local governor’s residence until that bureaucrat fled to Ortaias. An east-facing window of clear glass gave a splendid view of the Cattle-Crossing and Videssos the city beyond. Marcus suspected Gavras had chosen the meeting place as a goad to his generals.

  Baanes Onomagoulos said, “Thorisin, without ships of our own, we’ll stay here till we die of old age, and that’s how it is. We could have ten times the men we do, and they wouldn’t be worth a counterfeit copper to us. We have to get control of the sea.”

  He thumped his stick on the table; his wound had left his right leg shrunken and lame.

  Thorisin glared at him, not so much for what he said but for the patronizing way he said it. Short, lean, and bald, Onomagoulos had a hard, big-nosed face; he had been Mavrikios Gavras’ comrade since they were boys, but had never quite got the idea that the dead Emperor’s little brother was now a man in his own right.

  “I can’t wish ships here,” Thorisin snapped. “The Sphrantzai pay their captains well, if no one else. They know they’re all that’s keeping their heads from going up on the Milestone.”

  Privately, Marcus thought that an exaggeration. Along with Videssos’ proud buildings and elegant gardens, its fortifications—the mightiest the Roman had ever seen—were visible from this seaside house. Even with the Cattle-Crossing somehow overleaped, an assault on that double line of frowning dun walls was enough to daunt any soldier. One problem at a time, he thought.

  “Onomagoulos is right, I t’ink. Wit’out ships, you fail. Why not get dem from the Duchy?” Utprand Dagober’s son entered the debate for the first time, his island accent almost thick enough to pass for that of the Namdaleni’s Haloga cousins. His men were new-come to the seacoast, having marched and fought their way from Phanaskert clear across the Videssian westlands.

  “Now there’s a notion,” Thorisin said dryly. Plainly he did not much like it, but Utprand’s forces had swelled his own by a third. It behooved him to walk soft.

  The Namdalener smiled a wintry smile; winter seemed at home in his eyes, the chill blue of the ice his northern ancestors left behind when they took Namdalen from the Empire two hundred years before. Matching Gavras irony for irony, he asked, “You cannot misdoubt our good fait’?”

  “Surely not,” Thorisin replied, and there were chuckles up and down the table. The Duchy of Namdalen had been a thorn in Videssos’ flesh since its stormy birth. Its Haloga conquerors did not stay rude pirates long, but learned much from their more civilized subjects. That learning made their mixed-blooded descendants dangerous, subtle warriors. They fought for the Empire, aye, but they and their paymasters both knew they would seize it if they could.

  “Well, what would you?” Soteric Dosti’s son demanded of Gavras. Helvis’ brother sat at Utprand’s left hand; the young Namdalener had risen fast since the tribune last saw him. He went on, “Would you sooner win this war with our help, or lose without?”

  Scaurus flinched; Soteric always presented choices so as to make yea unpalatable as nay. Save for a proud nose that bespoke partly Videssian ancestry, his features were much like his sister’s, but his wide mouth habitually drew up in a thin, hard line.

  Thorisin looked from him to the tribune and back again. Marcus’ own lips compressed; he knew the Emperor still carried misgivings over the ties of friendship and blood between Romans and Namdaleni. But Gavras’ answer was mild enough: “There still may be other alternatives than those.”

  His gaze swung back to Scaurus. “What say you?” he asked. “Not much, so far.”

  The tribune was glad of a question he could deal with dispassionately. “That ships are needed, no one can doubt. As to how to get them, others here know better than I. We Romans always took more naturally to fighting on land than on the sea. Put me on the other side of the Cattle-Crossing and you’ll hear advice from me in plenty, never fear.”

  Thorisin smiled mirthlessly. “I believe that—the day you don’t speak your mind is the day I begin to suspect you. And I grant you, silence is better than breaking wind by mouth when you’ve nothing useful to say.”

  But, having just disclaimed knowledge of naval warfare, Marcus thought back to his lost homeland’s past. “My people fought wars with a country called Carthage, which at first had a strong fleet where we had none. We used a beached ship of theirs as a model for our own and soon we were challenging them on the sea. Could we not build our own here?”

  The idea had not occurred to Gavras, whose thinking had dealt solely with ships already in existence. He rubbed h
is bearded chin as he thought; Marcus thought the white streaks on either side of his jaw were wider than they had been a year ago. Finally the Emperor asked, “How long did it take your folk to get their navy built?”

  “Sixty days for the first ship, it’s said.”

  “Too long, too long,” Thorisin muttered, as much to himself as to his marshals. “I begrudge every day that passes. Phos alone knows what the Yezda are doing behind us.”

  “Not Phos alone,” Soteric said, but so low Gavras could not hear. Few of the tales that the Namdaleni brought from their journey across Videssos were gladsome. Though they had no love for Thorisin Gavras, they agreed that the sooner he won his civil war—if he could—the better his hope of reclaiming the westlands for Videssos.

  The Emperor refilled his wine cup from a shapely carafe of gilded silver—like the house in which the council sat, a possession of the recently departed governor. Gavras spat on the dark slate floor in rejection of Skotos and all his works, then raised his eyes and hands on high as he prayed to Phos—the same ritual over wine Scaurus had seen his first day in the Empire.

  He realized with some surprise, though, that now he understood the prayer. What Gorgidas had said so long ago was true; little by little, Videssos was setting its mark on him.

  Half an hour’s ride south of the suburb the Videssians simply called “Across,” citrus orchards came down to the sea, leaving only a thin strand of white beach to mark the coastline. Scaurus tethered his borrowed horse to the smooth gray branch of a lemon tree, then cursed softly when in the darkness he scraped his arm on one of the tree’s protecting spines.

  It was nearly midnight on a moonless night; the men dismounting near the Roman were but blacker shadows under Videssos’ strange stars. The light from the great city on the eastern shore of the strait was of more use than their cold gleam, or would have been, had not a war galley’s cruel silhouette blocked most of it from sight.