“Surely,” Bouraphos said. Then he whimpered, so convincingly that everyone at the table burst into laughter. Even Addaios Vourtzes’ mouth twitched. Marcus revised his estimate of the admiral, which had not included a sense of humor.
Utprand Dagober’s son spoke up for the first time, and the somber warning in his voice snuffed out the mirth. “You can wrangle all you like over who pays w’at. W’at needs to be settled is who pays me.”
“Rest easy,” Thorisin said. “I don’t see your lads on the streets begging for pennies.”
“No,” Utprand said, “nor will you.” That was not warning, but unmistakable threat. The great count Drax looked pained at his countryman’s plain speaking, but Utprand ignored him. They did not care much for each other; Scaurus suspected the Namdaleni were not immune to the disease of faction.
Gavras, for his part, was one to appreciate frankness. “You’ll have your money, outlander,” he said. Seeing Addaios Vourtzes purse his lips to protest, he turned to the logothete. “Let me guess,” he said sourly. “You haven’t got it.”
“Essentially, that is correct. As I have attempted to indicate, the precise situation is outlined—”
The Emperor cut him off as brusquely as he had Ortaias Sphrantzes in the Amphitheater. “Can you bring in enough to keep everyone happy till spring?”
Faced with a problem whose answer was not to his precious accounts scroll, Vourtzes grew cautious. His lips moved silently as he reckoned to himself. “That is dependent upon a variety of factors not subject to my ministry’s control: the condition of roads, quality of harvest, ability of agents to penetrate areas subject to disturbances …” From the way the bureaucrat avoided it, Marcus began to think the word “Yezda” made him break out in hives.
“There’s something he’s leaving out,” Baanes Onomagoulos said, “and that’s the likelihood the damned seal-stampers are pocketing one goldpiece in three for their own schemes. Oh, yes, they show us this pile of turds.” He pointed contemptuously at Vourtzes’ assessment document, “But who can make heads or tails of it? That’s how they’ve kept their power, because no one who hasn’t grown up in their way of cheating knows he’s swindled until it’s too late for him to do anything about it.”
Vourtzes sputtered denials, but Thorisin gave him a long, measuring stare. Even Alypia Gavra nodded, however reluctantly; she might despise Onomagoulos, but she did not make the mistake of thinking him a fool.
“What’s needed then,” Marcus said, “is someone to watch over these functionaries, to make sure they’re doing what they say they are.”
“Brilliant—you should join the Academy,” Elissaios Bouraphos said sardonically. “Who’s to do it, though? Who can, among the men to be trusted? We’re the lot of us soldiers. What do we know about the clerks’ tricks the pen-pushers use? I keep more records than most of us, I’d bet, having to keep track of ships’ stores and such, but I’d founder in a week in the chancery, to say nothing of being bored out of my wits.”
“You’re right,” the Emperor said. “None of us has the knowledge for the job, worse luck, for it’s one that needs doing.” His voice grew musing; his eyes, speculation in them, swung toward the tribune. “Or is that so indeed? When you came to Videssos from your other world, Scaurus, do I remember your saying you had held some sort of civil post as well as commanding your troops?”
“Yes, that’s so; I was one of the praetors at Mediolanum.” Marcus realized that meant nothing to Gavras, and explained, “I held one of the magistracies in my home town, responsible for hearing suits, publishing edicts, and collecting tribute to send on to Rome, our capital.”
“So you know something of this sharpers’ business, then?” Thorisin pressed.
“Something, yes.”
The Emperor looked from one of his officers to the next. Their smirks said more plainly than words that they were thinking along with him. Few things are more pleasant than seeing someone else handed a task one would hate to do oneself. Thorisin turned to Scaurus again. “I’d say you just talked your way into a job.” And to Vourtzes he added, “Ha, pen-pusher, what do you think of that? Try your number-juggling now and see what it gets you!”
“Whatever pleases your Imperial Majesty, of course,” the logothete murmured, but he did not sound pleased.
Scaurus said quickly, “It’s not something I’ll put full time into; I have to pay heed to my men.”
“Of course, of course,” the Emperor agreed; Marcus saw Drax, Utprand, and Onomagoulos nodding with him. Thorisin continued, “That lieutenant of yours is a sound man, though, and more than up to handling a lot of the day-to-day things. Give it as much time as you can. I’ll see if I can’t come up with some fancy title for the job and a raise in pay to go with it. You’ll earn the money, I think.”
“Fair enough,” the tribune said. Thorisin’s marshals made sympathetic noises; Marcus accepted their condolences and countered their bad jokes with his own.
In fact, he was not nearly so displeased as one of them would have been. A moderately ambitious man, he had long since realized there were definite limits to how high an outlander infantry commander could rise in Videssos on the strength of his troops alone. And his plans at Rome had been ultimately political, not soldierly; the military tribunate was a step aspiring young men took, but not one to stand on forever.
So he had made his suggestion; if Thorisin Gavras did not act on it, nothing whatever was lost. But he had acted, and now the tribune would see what came of that. Anticipation flowered in him. Regardless of the contempt the soldier-nobles had for the palace bureaucracy, it maintained Videssos no less than they. Nor, as Alypia Gavra had pointed out, was it necessarily the weaker party.
He saw her watching him with an expression of ironic amusement and had the uneasy feeling that all his half-formed, murky plans were quite transparent to her.
“I am extremely sorry, sir,” Pandhelis the secretary was saying to someone outside the office Marcus had taken as his own, “but I have specific instructions that the epoptes is to be disturbed on no account whatever.” As promised, Thorisin had conferred an impressively vague title on the Roman, meaning approximately “inspector.”
“Och, a pox take you and your instructions both.” The door flew open. Viridovix stomped into the little room, Helvis just behind him. Seeing Scaurus, the Gaul clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead. “I’ve seen that face before, indeed and I have. Don’t be telling me, now, the name’ll come back to me in a minute, I’m sure it will.” He wrinkled his brow in mock concentration.
Wringing his hands, Pandhelis said to the tribune, “I’m sorry, sir, they would not listen to me—”
“Never mind. I’m glad to see them.” Marcus threw down his pen with a sigh of relief; a new callus was forming on his right index finger. Shoving tax rolls and reckoning beads to one side of the untidy desk, he looked up at his visitors. “What needs doing?”
“Nothing needs doing. We’re here to collect you,” Helvis said firmly. “It’s Midwinter’s Day, in case you’ve forgotten—time for rejoicing, not chaining yourself up like some slave.”
“But—” Marcus started to protest. Then he rubbed his eyes, red-lined and scratchy from staring at an endless procession of numbers. Enough is enough, he thought, and stood up, stretching till his joints creaked. “All right, I’m your man.”
“I should hope so,” she said, a sudden smoky glow in her blue eyes. “I’ve started wondering if you remembered.”
“Ho-ho!” Viridovix said with a wink. His brawny arm propelled Scaurus out from around the desk, out of the cubicle, and into the corridor, giving the tribune no chance to change his mind. “Come along with you, Roman dear. There’s a party laid on to make even a stodgy spalpeen like you frolic.”
As always, the first breath of frigid outside air made the tribune cough. His own breath sighed out in a great steaming cloud. Whatever one could say against them, the bureaucrats kept their wing of Grand Courtroom offices heated almost summery-warm.
It made the winter outside twice as hard to endure. He shivered in his cloak.
Ice glittered on bare-branched trees; the smooth-rolled lawns that were the palace gardeners’ emerald delight in summer now were patchy and brown. Somewhere high overhead a gull screeched. Most birds were long gone to the warm lands of the unknown south, but the gulls stayed. Scavengers and thieves, they were birds that fit the capital.
“And how’s that bairn of yours?” Viridovix asked as they walked back toward the Roman barracks.
“Dosti? He couldn’t be better,” Marcus answered proudly. “He has four teeth now, two top and two bottom. He likes to use ’em, too—he bit my finger the other day.”
“Your finger?” Helvis said. “Don’t complain of fingers, my dear—high time the boy was weaned.”
“Oww,” Viridovix sympathized.
The big Gaul waved as soon as he was in sight of the barracks; Scaurus saw a Roman wave back from a window. “What sort of ambush are you leading me into?” he asked.
“You’ll see soon enough,” Viridovix said. The moment they walked into the barracks hall, he shouted, “Pay up the goldpiece you owe me, Soteric, for here’s himself in the flesh of him!”
The Namdalener flipped him the coin. “It’s not a bet I’m sorry to lose,” he said. “I thought he was too in love with his inks and parchments to recall how the common folk celebrate.”
“To the crows with you,” Marcus said to the man he counted his brother-in-law, aiming a lazy punch that Soteric dodged.
Viridovix was biting the goldpiece he’d won. “It’s not of the best, but then it’s not of the worst either,” he said philosophically and tucked it into his belt-pouch.
The tribune was not paying much attention to the Celt, looking instead from face to grinning face around him. “This is the crew you’ve gathered to carouse with?” he said to Viridovix. Grinning too, the Celt nodded.
“Then the gods look to Videssos tonight!” Marcus exclaimed, and drew a cheer from everyone.
There was Taso Vones, arm in arm with a buxom Videssian woman several inches taller than he was. Gawtruz of Thatagush stood beside him, working hard on a wineskin. “How about some for the rest of us?” Gaius Philippus said pointedly.
“What’s a skin of wine, among one man?” Gawtruz retorted, and kept drinking. He lowered the skin again a moment later, but only to belch.
Soteric had brought Fayard and Turgot of Sotevag with him. Turgot needed no help from Gawtruz’s wineskin; he was already unsteady on his feet. His companion was a very blond Namdalener girl named Mavia. Scaurus doubted she was out of her teens. In a dark-haired land, her bright tresses gleamed like a goldpiece among old coppers.
Fayard greeted Helvis in the island dialect; her dead husband had been his captain. She smiled and answered in the same speech.
Arigh Arghun’s son was in the middle of telling a dirty story to all three of Viridovix’ lemans. Marcus wondered again how the Celt kept them from catfights. Probably the happy-go-lucky Gaul’s own lack of jealousy, he thought. Viridovix seemed altogether unconcerned when they exploded into laughter at the end of Arigh’s tale.
Quintus Glabrio said something low-voiced to Gorgidas, who smiled and nodded. Next to them, Katakolon Kekaumenos of Agder stirred impatiently. “Are we then assembled?” he asked. “An it be so, let’s to the revels.” His accent was almost as archaic as the sacred liturgy; Agder, though once part of the Empire, had been severed from Videssos’ more quickly changing currents of speech for many years. Kekaumenos himself was a solidly built, saturnine man whose jacket of creamy snow-leopard pelts was worth a small fortune in the capital.
Marcus also thought him something of a prig; as the party trooped out of the barracks hall, he asked Taso Vones, “Who invited the dog in the manger?”
Aesop meant nothing to the Khatrisher, as Scaurus should have known. He sighed. There were times, most often brought on by such trivial things, when he was sure he would never fit this world. He explained himself sans metaphor.
“As a matter of fact, I invited him,” Vones said. The Roman’s embarrassment seemed to amuse him; he shared with Balsamon a fondness for discomfiting people. “I have my reasons. Agder’s a far northern land, you know, and the turn of the sun at midwinter means more to them than to the Videssians or me—they’re always half afraid it won’t come back. When they see it start north again they wassail hard, believe me.”
Videssos might not have feared for the sun’s return, but it celebrated all the same. The two midwinter fests Marcus had seen before were in provincial towns. The captial’s holiday was perhaps less boisterous than their uninhibited rejoicing, but made up for it with more polish. And the city’s sheer size let the tribune imagine himself in the middle of a world bent solely on pleasure.
Winter’s early night was falling fast, but torches and candles everywhere gave plenty of light. Bonfires blazed on many street corners; it was reckoned lucky to jump through them.
Helvis slid free of Marcus’ arm round her waist. She ran for one of the fires, jumped. Her hair flew out around her head like a dark halo; despite the hand she kept by her side, her skirt billowed away from her legs. Someone on the far side of the fire cheered. The tribune’s pulse quickened, too. She came back to him flushed from the run and the cold, her eyes bright. When he put his arm around her again, she pressed his hand tight against the top of her hip.
Nothing escaped Taso Vones’ birdlike gaze. With a smile up at his own lady—whose name, Scaurus learned, was Plakidia Teletze—he said, “Better than crawling through codices, isn’t it?”
“You’d best believe it,” the tribune answered, and tipped Helvis’ chin up for a quick kiss. Her lips were warm and alive against his.
“It’s a public disgrace you’ll make of yourselves,” Viridovix complained. To show how serious he was, he planted good, thorough kisses on all his lady friends. They seemed perfectly content with his gallant impartiality. From long practice, it had almost a polish to it, like a conjuror plucking his ten-thousandth gold ring out of the air.
Waves of laughter came rolling out of the Amphitheater, a sound like a god’s mirth. Videssos’ mime troupes, naturally, were the best the Empire could offer. Eyeing the failing day, Gorgidas said, “It’s probably too dark for them to squeeze in another show. What say we find an eatery now, before the crowd coming out fills them all to overflowing?”
“Always is a good idea, food,” Gawtruz said in the heavy Khamorth-flavored accent he affected most of the time. The envoy from Thatagush slapped his thick belly. His appetite was real, but Scaurus knew the boorishness was an act to lull the unwary. A clever diplomat hid beneath that piggish exterior.
Gorgidas’ good sense got his comrades into an inn a few blocks off the plaza of Palamas while the establishment was still only half full. The proprietor and a serving girl shoved two tables together for them. Before they had finished their first round of wine—Soteric, Fayard, and Katakolon Kekaumenos chose ale—the room was packed. The owner hauled a couple of battered tables from the kitchens out into the street to serve a few more customers, planting fat candles on them to give his guests light. “I wish I’d bought that bigger place,” Marcus heard him say to himself as he bustled back and forth.
Delicious odors wafted out of the kitchen. Scaurus and his friends nibbled on sweetmeats and drank, waiting for their dinner to cook. At last a servingmaid, staggering a little under its weight, fetched a fat, roast goose to the table. Steel flashed in the torchlight as she expertly carved the bird.
The tribune liked most Videssian cooking, and when the eatery’s owner proclaimed goose “our specialty” he had gone along without a qualm. His first bite gave him second thoughts. The goose was smothered in a sauce of cinnamon and sharp cheese, a combination piquant enough to bring tears to his eyes. There were times when the Empire’s sophisticated striving for pleasure through contrasting tastes went beyond what his palate could tolerate.
Gaius Philippus seemed similarly nonplused, but the
rest ate with every sign of enjoyment. Stifling a sigh, the tribune took a handful of shelled almonds from a dish by the half-demolished goose. They were sprinkled with garlic powder. The sigh became a groan; why hadn’t the garlic gone on the meat instead?
“You’re not eating much,” Helvis said.
“No.” Perhaps it was just as well. Being chairbound day in and day out had made him gain weight. And, he thought, raising his cup to his lips, he had more room for wine.
“Here, pretty one, would you care to sit by me?” That was Gaius Philippus, greeting a courtesan in a clinging dress of thin yellow stuffs. He stole a chair from a nearby table; its owner had gotten up to go to the jakes. The fellow’s companions glowered at the senior centurion. He stared them down; long years of command gave him a presence none of the city men could match.
The woman saw that, too. There was real interest on her face as she sat, not just a whore’s counterfeit passion. She helped herself to food and drink. A pretty thing, Marcus thought, and was glad for Gaius Philippus, whose luck in such matters was usually poor.
The shade of yellow she wore reminded the tribune of the diaphanous silk gown Vardanes Sphrantzes had forced on Alypia Gavra, and of her slim body unconcealed beneath it. The thought warmed and annoyed him at the same time. There should have been no room for it with Helvis beside him, her fingers teasing the nape of his neck.
Turgot stretched across the table to reach for the dish of almonds. He popped a handful into his mouth, then tried to curse around them. “Stinking garlic!” he said, washing out the taste with a hefty swig of wine. “Back in the Duchy we wouldn’t foul good food with the stuff.” He drank again, his face losing its soldier’s hardness as he thought of his home.
“Well, I like it,” Mavia said with a flip of her head. Her hair flashed gold-red in the torchlight, almost the color of flame itself. To prove the truth of her words, she ate an almond, then another one. Marcus guessed she’d come to the Empire long ago as a mercenary’s small daughter and learned Videssian tastes as well as the Duchy’s. Turgot, sitting hunched over his wine cup, suddenly seemed sad and tired and old.
Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 Page 64
