Videssos Cycle, Volume 1

by Harry Turtledove

  He blinked there in the gloom; a thoughtful reply to his question was the last thing he had expected. The Namdaleni used their wager to justify right conduct in a world where they saw good and evil balanced. Though they were not sure Phos would triumph in the end, they staked their souls on acting as if his victory was certain. The comparison, Marcus had to admit, was apt.

  And yet it did not bring Helvis closer to him, but only served to make plain their differences. She reached for her god in explanation as automatically as for a towel to dry her hands.

  Then his nagging thoughts fell silent, for they were moving together again, her arms tightening round his back. Her breath warm in his ear, she whispered, “Too many never know the good at all, darling; be thankful we have it when we do.”

  For once he could not disagree. His lips came down on hers.

  Once he had used the cover of fog to bring his soldiers’ households over the Cattle-Crossing, Thorisin Gavras unleashed his newfound navy against the city’s fleet. He hoped the sailors in the capital would follow those from the Key into rebellion against the Sphrantzai. Several captains did abandon the seal-stampers’ cause for Gavras, bringing ships and crews with them.

  But Taron Leimmokheir, more by his example and known integrity than any overt persuasion, held the bulk of the city’s fleet to Ortaias and his uncle. The sea fight quickly grew more bitter than the stagnant siege before Videssos. Raid and counterraid saw galleys sunk and burned; pallid, bloated corpses would drift ashore days later, reminders that the naval war had horrors to match any the land could show.

  The leader of the Key’s fleets was a surprisingly young man, handsome and very much aware of it. Like most of the Videssian nobles Scaurus had come to know, this Elissaios Bouraphos was a touchy customer. “I thought we sailed to help you,” he growled to Thorisin Gavras at an early morning officers’ conference, “not to do all your bloody fighting for you.” He ran his hands through hair that was beginning to thin at the temples, a habitual gesture; Marcus wondered if he was checking the day’s losses.

  “Well, what would you have me do?” Thorisin snapped back. “Storm the walls in a grand assault? I could spend five times the men I have on that, and well you know it. But with your ships aprowl, the seal-stampers can’t bring a pound of olives or a dram of wine into Videssos. They’ll get hungry in there by and by.”

  “So they will,” Elissaios agreed sardonically. “But the Yezda will be fat, for they’ll have eaten up the westlands while you sit here on your arse.”

  Silence fell round the table; Bouraphos had said aloud what everyone there thought in somber moments. In the civil war the Sphrantzai and Gavras both mustered what men they could round the capital, leaving the provinces to fend for themselves. Time enough to pick up the pieces after the victory was won … if any pieces were left.

  “By Phos, he’s right,” Baanes Onomagoulos said to Thorisin. As was true of a good many of Gavras’ officers, he had wide holdings in the westlands. “If I hear the wolves are outside Garsavra, Skotos strike me dead if I don’t take my lads home to protect it.”

  The Emperor slowly rose to his feet. His eyes blazed, but his temper was under the rein of his will; each word he spoke might have been cut from steel. “Baanes, pull one man out of line without my leave and you will be struck dead, but not by Skotos. I’ll do it myself, I vow. You gave me your oath and your proskynesis—you cannot take them back at a whim. Do you hear me, Baanes?”

  Onomagoulos locked eyes with him; Thorisin stared back inflexibly. It was the marshal’s eyes that broke away, flicking down the table to measure his support. “Aye, I hear you, Thorisin. Whatever you say, of course.”

  “Good. We’ll speak no more about it, then,” Gavras answered evenly, and went on with the business of the council.

  “He’s going to let him get away with that?” Gaius Philippus whispered incredulously to Marcus.

  “It’s just Onomagoulos’ way of talking,” the tribune whispered back, but he, too, was troubled. Baanes still had the habit of treating Thorisin Gavras as a boy; Scaurus wondered what it would take to make him lose that image of the Emperor in his mind.

  Such nebulous concerns were swept away when the Romans returned to camp. Quintus Glabrio met them outside the palisade. “What’s gone wrong?” Marcus asked at once, reading the junior centurion’s tight-set features.

  “I—you—” Glabrio started twice without being able to go forward; he could not control his voice as he did his face. He made a violent gesture of frustration and disgust, then spun on his heel and walked off, leaving his superiors to follow if they would.

  Scaurus and Gaius Philippus exchanged mystified glances. Glabrio was as cool as they came; neither of them had seen him anything but quietly capable—until now.

  He led them south past the camp, down along the earthwork the legionaries had thrown up to besiege Videssos. A knot of men had gathered at one of the sentry posts. As he came closer, Scaurus saw they all bore the same expression of mixed horror and rage that welled up through Quintus Glabrio’s impassive mask.

  The knot unraveled at the tribune’s approach; the legionaries seemed glad of any excuse to get away. That left two men shielding what lay there, Gorgidas and Phostis Apokavkos.

  “Are you sure you want to see this, Scaurus?” Gorgidas asked, turning to the tribune. His face was pale, though as legionary physician he had seen more pain and death than a dozen troopers rolled together.

  “Stand aside,” Marcus said harshly. The Greek and Apokavkos moved back to show him Doukitzes’ corpse. He moaned. He could not stop himself. Was it for this, he thought, that I rescued the little sneak thief from Mavrikios’ wrath? For this? The body there before him mutely answered yes.

  Splayed now in death, Doukitzes was even smaller than Scaurus remembered. He seemed more a doll cast aside by some vicious child than a man. But where would any child, no matter how vicious, have gained the horrendous skill for the deliberate, obscene mutilations that stole any semblance of dignity, of humanity, from the huddled corpse?

  A pace behind him, he heard Gaius Philippus suck in a long, whistling breath of air. He did not notice his own hands clenching to fists until his nails bit into his palms.

  “He must have died quickly,” Gorgidas said, showing the tribune the neat slash that ran from under the little man’s left ear to the center of his throat. A couple of purple-bellied flies buzzed indignantly away from his pointing finger. “He couldn’t have been alive for the rest of—that. The whole camp—Asklepios, the whole city—would have heard him, and no one knew a thing until his relief came out and found him.”

  “A mercy for him, aye,” Gaius Philippus grunted. “The only one he got, from the look of it.”

  “The Sphrantzai have Yezda fighting for them,” Marcus said at last, groping for some sort of explanation. “This could be their work—they kill foully to terrify their enemies.” But even as he spoke he doubted his own words. The Yezda were barbarians; they killed and tortured with savage gusto. The surgical precision of this butchery matched anything of theirs for brutality, but was far beyond it in cruel, cold malice.

  Phostis Apokavkos said, “The Yezda had nothing to do with it, curse ’em. Almost wish they had—I’d come nearer understandin’ then.” The adopted Roman spoke Latin with the twang of Videssos’ westlands; the accent only emphasized his grief. Though he shaved his face like his mates among the legionaries, he was still a Videssian in his heart of hearts. He and Doukitzes, two imperials making their way among the Romans, had been fast friends since the chaos after Maragha.

  “You talk as if you know this wasn’t sport for the nomads,” Gaius Philippus said, “but at your folk’s worst I can’t imagine any of them doing it.”

  “For which I give you thanks,” Apokavkos said, rubbing his long chin. More often than not he insisted on styling himself a Roman, but this once he accepted the Videssian label. “Don’t have to imagine it, though—it’s true. See here.” He pointed to the dead man’s forehea
d.

  To Scaurus the wounds incised there had been just another sample of the hideous virtuosity Doukitzes’ killer had displayed. He looked again; this time his mind’s eye stripped away the black dried blood and grasped the pattern the knife had cut. It was a word, or rather a Videssian name: Rhavas.

  “Sure and the son of a sow’s a natural-born turnip-head to be after doing such a thing,” Viridovix said that evening by the Roman campfire. “He must ken we’ll not be forgetting soon.” He was eating lightly, bread and a few grapes; his stomach, always sensitive save in the heat of battle, had heaved itself up at the sight of Doukitzes’ pathetic corpse.

  “Aye,” Gaius Philippus agreed, his square, hairy hands closing as if round an invisible neck. “And a fool twice in the bargain, for he’s cooped up there in the city where getting away won’t be so easy.”

  “One more reason to take it,” Marcus said. He held out his apricot-glazed wine cup for a refill. Still shaken by what he had seen, he drank deep to dull the memory.

  “The worst of it, sir, is what you said this morning,” Quintus Glabrio said to Gaius Philippus, “though not quite the way you meant it. Doukitzes wasn’t nomad’s sport. To mutilate him so after he was dead—there’s purpose in it, right enough, but may the gods spare me from too fine an understanding of such purposes.” He put the heels of his hands to his eyes, as though they had betrayed him by looking on Doukitzes.

  Scaurus drank again, stuck out his cup for yet another dollop of the sweet, syrupy Videssian wine. His companions matched him draught for draught, but their drinking brought no cheer. One by one they sought their beds, hoping sleep would prove a better anodyne than wine.

  The tribune thrust the tent flap open, came out through it still arranging his mantle about him. He let his feet take him where they would; one path was good as the next, so long as it led away from the tent. Phos’ Wager, or any other, could be lost as well as won.

  Sentries gave Scaurus the clenched-fist Roman salute as he walked out the camp’s north gate and into the darkness. He returned it absently, wishing no one at all had to see him; save for a few men coming and going to the latrines, the camp was quiet, its fires no more than embers.

  Every legionary sentry post was double-manned now, both in camp and along Thorisin’s besieging earthwork. The tribune saw torches glowing all the way down to the sea. Tonight, he knew, no man would sleep at his station.

  The night was clear and cool, almost chilly. The moon had long since set behind Videssos’ walls, leaving the sky to the distant stars. Glancing up at their still-strange patterns, Scaurus wondered if the Videssians used them to reckon destinies. It seemed a notion that would fit their beliefs, but he could not recall hearing of it in the Empire. Nepos would know.

  The thought was gone almost as soon as it appeared, drowned in a fresh wave of resentment. The tribune wandered on, still going north; before long he was past the Roman section of line and coming up on the Namdalener camp. He gave that a wide berth, too, not much wanting to see any of the islanders right now.

  He heard shouting in the distance ahead, a woman’s voice. After a moment he recognized it as Komitta Rhangavve’s. About now Thorisin was probably wishing she was back on the western side of the Cattle-Crossing. Scaurus let out a sour chuckle. It was a feeling he fully understood.

  His laugh had startled someone nearby. He heard a sharp intake of breath, then a half-question, half-challenge: “Who is it?”

  Another woman’s voice, lower than Komitta’s and more familiar, too, with a guttural trace of accent. Marcus peered into the night. “Nevrat? Is that you?”

  “Who—?” she said again, but then, “Scaurus, yes?”

  “Aye.” The tribune briefly warmed to hear her. She and her husband no longer camped with the legionaries, having joined several of Senpat Sviodo’s cousins among the Vaspurakaners who marched with Gavras. Marcus missed them both, Senpat for his blithe brashness, his wife for her clear thinking and courage, and the two of them together as a model of what a happy couple could be.

  She walked slowly toward him, minding each step in the dark. As usual, she dressed mannishly in tunic and trousers; a swordbelt girded her waist. Her shining hair, blacker than the night, fell curling past her shoulders.

  “What are you doing out and about?” Scaurus asked.

  “Why not?” she retorted. “I feel like a cat prowling through the darkness, looking for who knows what. And the night is very beautiful, don’t you think?”

  “Eh? I suppose it is,” he answered; whatever beauties it held were lost on him.

  “Are you all right?” she asked suddenly, lifting a hand to touch his shoulder.

  He thought about it a moment. “No, not really,” he said at last.

  “Can I do anything?”

  Crisp and direct as ever, he thought; Nevrat was not one to ask such a question unless she meant it to be taken seriously. Here, though, there could be only one answer. “Thank you, lady, no. This doesn’t have that sort of cure, I fear.”

  He was afraid she would press him further, but she only nodded and said, “I hope you solve it soon, then.” Her grip on his arm tightened for a second, then she was gone into the night.

  Marcus kept walking, still without much goal. He was well among Gavras’ Videssian contingents now. A couple of troopers passed within twenty feet of him, unaware of his presence. One was saying, “—and when his father asked him why he was crying, he said, ‘This morning the baker came and ate the baby!’ ”

  They both laughed loudly; they sounded a little drunk. Without the rest of the joke, the punchline was so much gibberish to Scaurus. Somehow that seemed to march very well with everything else that had happened that day.

  A man on horseback trotted by, singing softly to himself. Caught up in his song, he, too, failed to notice the tribune.

  An awkward footfall ahead, a muttered curse. As the woman approached, Marcus reflected there was scant need to ask her why she was walking through the night. Her slit skirt swung open with every step she took, giving glimpses of her white thighs.

  Unlike the soldiers, she saw the tribune almost as soon as he knew she was there. She came boldly up to him. She was slim and dark and smelled of stale scent, wine, and sweat.

  Her smile, half-seen in the darkness, was professionally inviting. “You’re a tall one,” she said, looking Marcus up and down. Her speech held the rhythm of the capital, quick and sharp, almost staccato. “Do you want to come with me? I’ll make that scowl up and go, I promise.” Scaurus had not known he was frowning. He smoothed his features as best he could.

  The lacing of her blouse was undone; he could see her small breasts. He felt a tightness in his chest, as if he were trying to breathe deep in a too-tight cuirass. “Yes, I’ll go with you,” he said. “Is it far?”

  “No, not very. Show me your money,” she said, all business now.

  That brought him up short. Save for the mantle he was naked, even his sandals left behind. But as he started to spread his hands regretfully, a glint of silver on his right index finger made him pause. He pulled the ring free, held it out to her. “Will this do?”

  She hefted it, held it close to her face, then smiled again and reached for him with knowing fingers.

  As she promised, her small tent was close by. Shrugging off his cloak, Scaurus wondered if she was what he sought. He doubted it, but lay down beside her nonetheless.

  VII

  “WHAT? RESAINA FALLEN TO THE YEZDA?” GAIUS PHILIPPUS WAS SAYING to Viridovix, astonishment in his voice. “Where did you hear that?”

  “One o’ the sailor lads it was told me, last night over knucklebones. Aye, it’s certain sure, he says. What with their moving around so much and all, those sailors get the news or ever anyone else does.”

  “Yes, and it’s always bad,” Marcus said, spooning up a mouthful of his morning porridge. “Kybistra in the far south gone a couple of weeks ago, and now this.” Resaina’s loss was a heavier blow. The town was perhaps two days’
march south of the Bay of Rhyax, well east of Amorion. If it had truly fallen, the Yezda were getting past the roadblock the latter city represented, in Zemarkhos’ fanatic hands though it was.

  And while the westlands were falling town by town to the invaders, the siege of Videssos dragged on. There were men beginning to slip over the wall at night now, and others escaping in small boats. They brought tales of tightened belts inside the city, of increasingly harsh and capricious rule.

  Whatever the shortcomings of the regime of the Sphrantzai, though, the capital’s double walls and tall towers were always manned, its defenders ready to fight.

  “All Thorisin’s choices are bad,” the tribune brooded. “He can’t go back over the Cattle-Crossing to fight the Yezda without turning Ortaias and Vardanes loose behind him, but if he doesn’t, he won’t have much of an empire left even if we win here.”

  Gaius Philippus said, “What we need is to win here, and quickly. But that means storming the walls, and I shake in my shoes every time I think of trying.”

  “Och, such a pair for the glooms I never have seen,” Viridovix said. “We canna go, we canna stay, and we canna be fighting either. Wellaway, we might as well the lot of us get drunk if nothing better’s to be done.”

  “I’ve heard ideas I liked less,” Gaius Philippus chuckled.

  The Celt’s casual dismissal of logic annoyed Marcus. Giving Viridovix an ironic dip of his head, he asked him, “What do you see left to us, now that you’ve disposed of all our choices?”

  “I haven’t done that at all, Roman dear,” the Gaul retorted, his green eyes twinkling, “for you’ve left treachery out of the bargain, the which Gavras’ll never do. Too honest by half, y’are.”

  “Hmp,” Scaurus grunted—no denying Viridovix had a point. But he did not much care for the label the Celt gave him: “too credulous,” it seemed to mean. Moreover, he did not feel he deserved it. He had not repeated that angry night with the whore, nor wanted to; even while she clawed his back, he knew she was not the answer to his troubles with Helvis. If anything, those had since grown worse. There were times when his guarded silence hung between them like a muffling cloak.