Videssos Cycle, Volume 1

by Harry Turtledove

  “No, I think not.”

  “There are times, outlander, when you try my patience,” the Emperor said dangerously. Scaurus met his eye, hiding the twinge of fear he felt. Much of the position he had built for himself in Videssos was based on not letting the sheer weight of imperial authority coerce him. That, for a man of republican Rome, was easy. Facing an angry Thorisin Gavras was something else again.

  Gavras made a dissatisfied sound deep in his throat. “Kabasilas!” he called, and the chamberlain was at his elbow as the last syllable of his name still echoed in the high-ceilinged throne room. Marcus expected some sonorous formula of dismissal, but that was not Thorisin’s way. He jerked his head toward his niece and the tribune and left Kabasilas to put such formality in the gesture as he might.

  The steward did his best, but his bows and flourishes seemed all the more artificial next to the Emperor’s unvarnished rudeness. The other court functionaries craned their necks at Scaurus and Alypia as he led them away, wondering how much favor they had lost. That would be as it was, Marcus thought. He laughed at himself—a piece of fatalism worthy of the Halogai.

  When they came out to the Grand Gates once more, Alypia stopped to talk a few minutes longer with the Roman sentries there, then departed for the imperial residence. Scaurus went up to his offices to dictate a letter to Baanes Onomagoulos; Pandhelis’ script was far more legible than his own. That accomplished, he basked in a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction as he started back to the barracks.

  It did not last long. Viridovix was coming toward him, a jar of wine in his hand and an anticipatory grin on his face. The Gaul threw him a cheery wave and ducked into a small doorway in the other wing of the Grand Courtroom.

  Maybe I should have drowned him, Marcus thought angrily. Had Viridovix no idea what he was playing at? There was no more caution in him than guile in Taron Leimmokheir. What would he do next, ask Thorisin for the loan of a bedroom? The tribune warned himself not to suggest that—Viridovix might take him up on it.

  With the Celt gone, Scaurus was surprised to see Arigh at the barracks. The Arshaum was talking to Gorgidas again while the Greek took notes. Gorgidas was asking, “Who sees to your sick, then?”

  The question seemed to bore Arigh, who scratched beneath his tunic of sueded leather. At last he said indifferently, “The shamans drive out evil spirits, of course, and for smaller ills the old women know of herbs, I suppose. Ask me of war, where I can talk of what I know.” He slapped the curved sword that hung at his side.

  Quintus Glabrio came in; he smiled and waved to Gorgidas without interrupting the physician’s jottings. Instead he said to Marcus, “I’m glad to see you here, sir. A couple of my men have a running quarrel I can’t seem to get to the bottom of. Maybe they’ll heed you.”

  “I doubt that, if you can’t solve it,” the tribune said, but he went with Glabrio anyhow. The legionaries stood stiff-faced as he warned them not to let their dislike for each other affect their soldiering. They nodded at the correct times. Scaurus was not deceived; anything the able junior centurion could not cure over the course of time would not yield to his brief intercession. The men were on formal notice now, so perhaps something was accomplished.

  Arigh had gone when he returned. Gorgidas was working up his notes, rubbing out a word here, a phrase there with the blunt end of his stylus, then reversing it to put his changes on the wax. “Viridovix will think you’re trying to steal his friend away,” the tribune said.

  “What do I care what that long-shanked Gaul thinks?” Gorgidas asked, but could not quite keep amusement from his voice. Sometimes Viridovix made his friends want to wring his neck, but they remained his friends in spite of it. Less pleased, the doctor went on, “At least I can learn what the plainsman has to teach me.”

  There was no mistaking his bitterness. Marcus knew he was still seeing Nepos and other healer-priests, still trying to master their arts, and still falling short. No wonder he was putting more energy into his history these days. Medicine could not be satisfying to him right now.

  Scaurus yawned, cozily warm under the thick wool blanket. Helvis’ steady breathing beside him said she had already dropped off; so did her arm flung carelessly across his chest. Malric was asleep on her other side, while Dosti’s breath came raspy from his crib. The baby was getting over a minor fever; Marcus drowsily hoped he would not catch it.

  But an itchy something in the back of his mind kept him from following them into slumber. He rehashed the day’s events, trying to track it down. Was it his failure to gain Taron Leimmokheir’s release? Close, he thought, but not on the mark. He had not expected to win that one.

  Why close, then? He heard Alypia Gavra’s voice once more as she talked with the legionaries outside the Grand Courtroom. Whatever else she knew about their ways, he realized, she was perfectly familiar with the proper use of Roman names.

  He was a long time sleeping.

  XII

  THE TRIBUNE SNEEZED. GAIUS PHILIPPUS LOOKED AT HIM IN DISGUST. “Aren’t you through with that bloody thing yet?”

  “It hangs on and on,” Marcus said dolefully, wiping his nose. His eyes were watery, too, and his head seemed three times its proper size. “What is it, two weeks now?”

  “At least. That’s what you get for having your brat.” Revoltingly healthy himself, Gaius Philippus spooned up his breakfast porridge, took a great gulp of wine. “That’s good!” He patted his belly. Scaurus had scant appetite, which was as well, for his sense of taste had disappeared.

  Viridovix strode into the barracks, splendid in his cape of crimson skins. He helped himself to peppery lamb sausage, porridge, and wine, then sank into a chair by the tribune and senior centurion. “The top o’ the day t’ye!” he said, lifting his mug in salute.

  “And to you,” Marcus returned. He looked the Celt up and down. “Why such finery so early in the morning?”

  “Early in the morning it may be for some, Scaurus dear, but I’m thinking of it as night’s end. And a rare fine night it was, too.” He winked at the two Romans.

  “Mmph,” Marcus said, as noncommittal a noise as he could muster. Normally he enjoyed Viridovix in a bragging mood, but since the Gaul had taken up with Komitta Rhangavve the less he heard the better. Nor did Gaius Philippus’ incurious expression offer Viridovix any encouragement; the senior centurion, Marcus was sure, was jealous of the Celt, but would sooner have been racked than admit it.

  Irrepressible as always, Viridovix needed scant prompting. After a long, noisy pull at his wine, he remarked, “Would your honor believe it, the wench had the brass to tell me to put all my other lassies to one side and have her only. Not ask, mind you, but tell! And me sharing her with himself without so much as a peep. The cheek of it all!” He bit into the sausage, made a face at its spiciness, and drank again.

  “Sharing who with whom?” Gaius Philippus asked, confused by pronouns.

  “Never mind,” Marcus said quickly. The fewer people who knew of Viridovix’ trysting, the longer word of it would take to get back to Thorisin Gavras. Even Viridovix saw that, for he suddenly looked sly. But his report of what Komitta had said worried the tribune enough to make him ask, “What did you tell the lady?”

  “What any Celtic noble and gentleman would, of course: to go futter the moon. No colleen bespeaks me so.”

  “Oh, no.” Scaurus wanted to hold his aching head in his hands. With Komitta’s savage temper and great sense of her own rank, it was a wonder Viridovix was here to tell the tale. In fact—“What did she say to that?”

  “Och, she carried on somewhat, sure and she did, but I horned it out of her.” Viridovix stretched complacently. The tribune looked at him in awe. If that was true, the Gaul was a mighty lanceman indeed.

  Viridovix routed a piece of gristle out from between his teeth with a fingernail, then belched. “Still and all,” he said, “if ye maun play the tomcat of evenings, then the day’s the time for lying up. A bit o’ sleep’d be welcome now, so by your leaves—” He ros
e, finished his wine, and walked out, whistling cheerily.

  “Enough of your ‘never minds,’ ” Gaius Philippus said as soon as the Celt was gone. “You don’t go fish-belly color over trifles. What’s toward?”

  So Marcus, his hand forced, told him and had the remote pleasure of watching his jaw drop to his chest. “Almighty Jove,” the senior centurion said at last. “The lad doesn’t think small, does he now?”

  He thought another minute, then added, “He’s welcome to her, too, for my silver. I’d sooner strop my tool on a sword blade than go near that one. All in all, it’s safer.” The tribune winced at the image, but slowly nodded; down deep inside he felt the same way.

  As spring drew on, Scaurus spent less time at tax records. Most of the receipts had come in after the fall harvest, and he was through most of the backlog by the time the days began to grow longer once more. He knew he had done an imperfect job of overseeing the Videssian bureaucracy. It was too large, too complex, and too well entrenched for any one man, let alone an outsider, to control it fully. But he did think he had done some good and kept more revenue flowing into the imperial treasury than it would have got without him.

  He was only too aware of some of his failures. One afternoon Pikridios Goudeles had mortified him by coming into the offices with a massy golden ring set with an enormous emerald. The minister wore it with great ostentation and flashed it at the tribune so openly that Marcus was sure its price came from diverted funds. Indeed, Goudeles hardly bothered to deny it, only smiling a superior smile. Yet try as Scaurus would, he could find no errors in the books.

  Goudeles let him stew for several days, then, still with that condescending air, showed the Roman the sly bit of jugglery he’d used. “For,” he said, “having used it myself, I see no point in letting just anyone slide it past you. That would reflect on my own skill.”

  More or less sincerely, Marcus thanked him and said nothing further about the ring; he had fairly lost this contest of wit with the bureaucrat, just as he had won the one before. They remained not-quite-friends, each with a healthy regard for the other’s competence. As Scaurus came less often to his desk in the Grand Courtroom wing, he sometimes missed the seal-stamper’s dry, delicate wit, his exquisite sense of where to place a dart.

  Before long, only one major item was outstanding on the tribune’s list: the tax roll for Kybistra. Onomagoulos ignored his first request for it; he sent out another, more strongly worded. “That echo will be a long time returning, I think,” Goudeles told him.

  “Eh? Why?” Marcus asked irritably.

  The bureaucrat’s eyebrow could not have lifted by the thickness of a hair, but he contrived to make the Roman feel like a small, stupid child. “Ah, well,” Goudeles murmured, “it was a disorderly time for everyone.”

  Scaurus thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, annoyed with himself for missing what was obvious, once pointed out. Onomagoulos had taken refuge at Kybistra after Maragha; the tribune wondered what part of his accounts would not bear close inspection. Thorisin, he thought, would be interested in that question, too.

  So it proved. The imperial rescript that went out to Garsavra all but crackled off its parchment. By that time Marcus cared less than he had. He was working hard with his troops as they readied themselves for the coming summer campaign. As he sweated on the practice field, he was gratified to see the beginning potbelly he had grown during the winter’s inactivity start to fade away.

  Roman training techniques were enough to melt the fat off anyone. The Videssians, Vaspurakaners, and other locals who had taken service with the legionaries grumbled constantly, as soldiers will over any exercises. Gaius Philippus, naturally, worked them all the harder for their complaints. As for Scaurus, he threw himself into the drills with an enthusiasm he had not felt when he first joined the legions.

  The troops exercised with double-weight weapons of wood, and fought at pells until their arms ached, thrusting now at the dummy posts’ faces, now at their flanks, and again at thigh level. They used heavy wicker shields, too, and practiced advancing and retreating from their imaginary foes.

  “Hard work, this,” Gagik Bagratouni said. The Vaspurakaner nakharar still led his countrymen and had learned to swear in broken Latin as foully as in his hardly more fluent Videssian. “By the time comes real battle, a relief it will be.”

  “That’s the idea,” Gaius Philippus said. Bagratouni groaned and shook his head, sending sweat flying everywhere. He was well into his forties, and the drill came hard for him. He worked at it with the fierce concentration of a man trying to forget past shadows, and his countrymen showed a spirit and discipline that won the Romans’ admiration.

  The only thing that horrified the mountaineers was having to learn to swim. The streams in their homeland were trickles most of the year, floods the rest. Learn they did, but they never came to enjoy the water legionary-style, as a pleasant way to end a day’s exercises.

  The Videssians among the legionaries were not quite at their high pitch. A dozen times a day Marcus would hear some Roman yelling, “The point, damn it, the point! A pox on the bloody edge! It isn’t good for anything anyway!” The imperials always promised to mend their swordplay and always slipped back. Most were ex-cavalrymen, used to the saber’s sweet slash. Thrusting with the short gladius went against their instincts.

  More patient than most of his fellows, Quintus Glabrio would explain, “No matter how hard you cut, armor and bones both shield your foe’s vitals, but even a poorly delivered stab may kill. Besides, with the stabbing stroke you don’t expose your own body and often you can kill your man before he knows you’ve delivered the stroke.” Having nodded in solemn agreement, the Videssians would do as they were ordered—for a while.

  Then there were those to whom Roman discipline meant nothing at all. Viridovix was as deadly a fighter as Scaurus had seen, but utterly out of place in the orderly lines of the legionaries’ maniples. Even Gaius Philippus acknowledged the hopelessness of making him keep rank. “I’m just glad he’s on our side,” was the senior centurion’s comment.

  Zeprin the Red was another lone wolf. His great axe unsuited him for action among the legionaries’ spears and swords, as did his temperament. Where Viridovix saw battle as high sport, the Haloga looked on it as his cold gods’ testing place. “Their shield-maidens guide upwards the souls of those who fall bravely. With my enemy’s blood I will buy my stairway to heaven,” he rumbled, testing the edge of his double-bitted weapon with his thumb. No one seemed inclined to argue, though to Videssian ears that was pagan superstition of the rankest sort.

  Drax of Namdalen and his captains came out to the practice field several times to watch the Romans work. Their smart drill impressed the great count, who told Scaurus, “By the Wager, I wish that son of a pimp Goudeles had warned me what sort of men you had. I thought my knights would ride right through you so we could roll up Thorisin’s horse like a pair of leggings.” He shook his head ruefully. “Didn’t quite work that way.”

  “You gave us a bad time, too,” the tribune returned the compliment. Drax remained a mystery to him—a skilled warrior, certainly, but a man who showed little of himself to the world outside. Though unfailingly courteous, he had a stiff face a horse trader would envy.

  “He reminds me of Vardanes Sphrantzes with the back of his head shaved,” Gaius Philippus said after the islander left, but that far Marcus would not go. Whatever Drax’s mask concealed, he did not think it was the unmourned Sevastos’ cruelty.

  However much the Namdaleni admired the legionaries, the senior centurion remained dissatisfied. “They’re soft,” he mourned. “They need a couple of days of real marching to get the winter laziness out of ’em once and for all.”

  “Let’s do it, then,” Marcus said, though he felt a twinge of trepidation. If the troopers needed work, what of him?

  “Full kits tomorrow,” he heard Gaius Philippus order, and listened to the chorus of donkey brays that followed. The full Roman pack ran
to more than a third of a man’s weight; along with weapons and iron rations, it included a mess kit, cup, spare clothes in a small wicker hamper, a tent section, palisade stakes or firewood, and either a saw, pick, spade, or sickle for camping and foraging. Small wonder the legionaries called themselves mules.

  Dawn was only a promise when they tramped out of the city, northward bound. The Videssian gate crew shook their heads in sympathy as they watched the soldiers march past. “Make way, there!” Gaius Philippus rasped, and waggoners hastily got their produce-filled wains out of the roadway. Like most of the Empire’s civilians, they distrusted what little they knew about mercenaries and were not anxious to learn more.

  Marcus pulled a round, ruddy apple from one of the wagons. He tossed the driver a small copper coin to pay for it and had to laugh at the disbelief on the man’s face. “Belike their puir spalpeen was after thinking you’d breakfast on him instead of his fruit,” Viridovix said.

  There was less room for good cheer as the day wore along. The military step was something the Romans fell into with unthinking ease, each of them automatically holding his place in his maniple’s formation. The men who had taken service since they came to Videssos did their best to imitate them but, here as in so many small ways, practice told. And because the newcomers were less orderly, they tired quicker.

  Still, almost no one dropped from the line of march, no matter how footsore he became. Blistered toes were nothing to the blistering Gaius Philippus gave fallers-out, nor was any trooper eager to face his fellows’ jeers.

  Phostis Apokavkos, first of all the Videssians to become a legionary, strode along between two Romans, hunching forward a little under the weight of his pack. His long face crinkled into a smile as he flipped Scaurus a salute.

  The tribune returned it. He hardly reckoned Apokavkos a Videssian any more. Like any son of Italy’s, the ex-farmer’s hands were branded with the mark of the legions. When he learned the mark’s significance, Apokavkos had insisted on receiving it, but Scaurus had not asked it of any of the other recruits, nor had they volunteered.