Swords of the Legion (Videssos)

by Harry Turtledove

  A rugged warrior, he cut at the Greek again, but his stroke had no strength behind it. Bright blood bubbled from his nose. A stream of it poured out of his mouth as he tried to gulp air. His curved shamshir dropped from his hand. His eyes rolled up in his head; he slumped over his horse’s neck.

  “Bravely done, oh, bravely!” Goudeles was shouting, all but cutting off Gorgidas’ ear as he waved his saber about. The physician stared at the scarlet smear on his own sword point. The legionaries were right, it seemed: there was no time for fear, or even thought. The body simply reacted—and a man was dead.

  He leaned to one side and vomited onto the blood-spattered grass.

  The sour stuff was still stinging his nose when another plainsman, grimly intent on battling out of the Arshaum trap, stormed at him, scimitar smashing down in an arc of death. Though the nausea had filled his eyes with tears, the Greek brought up his shield to ward off the blow. He felt the light wood framework splinter and hurled the ruined target away. The second Khamorth had no more idea how to defend himself against the stabbing stroke than had the other, but Gorgidas’ thrust was not as true. The nomad reeled away, clutching a shoulder wound.

  The second time, the Greek discovered, he felt only anger that his opponent had escaped. That disturbed him worse than his earlier revulsion.

  Close combat ran all along the battle line as arrows were exhausted. The fight, which had begun with the two sides facing north and south, wheeled to east and west as the right wing of each overlapped the other’s left and made it give ground. If the Arshaum had gained any advantage, it was tenuous. Varatesh’s outlaws, though they were rulers now, still fought with the renegade fury of men who had nothing to lose. The clans forced into alliance with them were less ferocious, but the sight of the white-robed figure on his charger behind them reminded them that retreat held more terrors than standing fast.

  Viridovix cut another swordsman from the saddle, then found himself facing a Khamorth who carried a light lance in place of shamshir or bow. It was his turn to be out-reached; he did not care for it. Luckily the press was heavy; the lancer had no chance to charge and build momentum. He jabbed at Viridovix’ face. The Gaul ducked, seized the shaft below the head, and dragged the Khamorth toward him.

  His first stroke with his potent Gallic sword hewed through the lance. Its owner, who was tugging against him with all his strength, almost flew over his horse’s tail when the shaft broke and the opposing pressure disappeared. His arms flailed wildly for balance. Viridovix slashed again. The Khamorth screamed briefly, half his face sheared away.

  Batbaian was wreaking a revenge to dwarf the Celt’s. He had slewed his fur cap around so one earflap hid his empty socket and he looked no different from any other Khamorth. He would strike, snakelike, and be gone before a victim knew to whom he had fallen. When three Arshaum assailed him, not recognizing him either, he lifted the cap for a moment. They drew back, knowing what that dreadful scar meant.

  Arigh’s chest was splashed with blood—not his own. “Ha, we begin to drive them!” he shouted excitedly. Varatesh’s left was falling back, a retreat that was no feint. Here and there Khamorth pulled out of line and rode north for their lives. Others stubbornly battled on, but could not hold against the greater flexibility of their foes and the fury of the band that fought beneath the standard of Bogoraz’ coat.

  Then an Arshaum pitched forward with a black-feathered shaft driven clean through him. Another fell, and another; a horse crashed to the ground, an arrow in its right leg. Two more animals tumbled over it, spilling their riders. One nomad rolled free; the other was crushed beneath his pony’s barrel.

  Far behind the Khamorth line, Avshar plied his bow with deadly virtuosity. He had kept his quiver filled against the chance of disaster, and when it threatened he turned it back. He outranged even the nomads; his accuracy was fearsome. As its leaders died, the Arshaum advance staggered and began to ebb, like a wave running down a beach.

  “That is the wizard?” Arghun said. The khagan’s legs were weak, but there was nothing wrong with his arm; more than one Khamorth had fallen to his sword. As he spoke, another Arshaum lurched in the saddle, clutching at an arrow in his belly. His scrabbling hands went limp; he slid to the ground.

  “That is Avshar,” Gorgidas said. With a mixture of dread, hate, and an awe he loathed himself for feeling; he looked across the lines at the wizard-prince who had chosen himself as Videssos’ nemesis. The tall, white-robed figure did not deign to notice him. One by one his deadly shafts went out, as if fired by some murderous machine.

  “Whatever sort of sorcerer he is, he is no mean man of his hands,” Arghun said with a face like iron, watching another of his men cough blood and die. “He will break us if he holds to it much longer; we cannot stand up under such archery.”

  For Viridovix and Batbaian, no awe mingled with their hate at the sight of Avshar; it burned hot and clean. With one accord, they spurred their ponies forward, ready to cut their way through all the Khamorth who stood between them and the sorcerer. But the Arshaum did not press the charge with them, and Varatesh’s men took fresh courage from the mighty power at their back. Gaul and plainsman killed and killed again, but could not force a breakthrough by themselves.

  Them Avshar seemed to recognize, for he bowed contemptuously in the saddle and gave a mocking wave as he slung his bow over an armored shoulder and rode from that part of the field.

  Far away on his army’s right wing, Varatesh shook his head for the hundredth time, trying to keep the blood welling from the cut on his forehead from running into his eyes. He was exhausted, snatching panting breaths on his pony, which was wounded, too. His hand trembled from his weariness; the shamshir he grasped felt heavy as lead.

  And this Irnek in front of him was a very devil. Beaten at the outset when his men were outflanked, he had somehow regrouped, steadied his line, and fought back with a savagery that chilled even the longtime outlaw. One lesson Varatesh had learned: never to trust an Arshaum retreat, no matter how panic-stricken it seemed. That mistake had cost him the slash over his eye and nearly his life with it.

  But it was past noon, and Irnek was not retreating any more. His riders pressed foward, probing for weaknesses and making the most of whatever they found. Lacking their enemies’ discipline, the Khamorth in retreat only opened themselves to greater danger. They wavered; a few more pushes would crack them.

  Varatesh bawled for a messenger, despising himself as he did so. He had thought to win this battle without help from Avshar, to free himself once and for all from the wizard’s domination. Now he was on the point of losing. Having had a taste of life as Royal Khagan, he would not go back to outlawry, the best fate he could expect from failure.

  The words gagged him, but he brought them out: “Ride to Avshar and tell him to let it begin.”

  * * *

  Arghun shouted for a courier. A young Arshaum appeared at his side, face gray-brown with dust save for streaks washed clean by sweat. The khagan said, “We stand at the balance. Ride back to Tolui and tell him to let it begin.”

  The nomad hurried away.

  “Get yourself gone, you lumpish clot,” Avshar snarled. “If I waited for Varatesh’s leave for my sorceries, his cause would have foundered long before this. Go on, begone, I say.” The quailing Khamorth wheeled his pony and fled.

  The wizard-prince forgot him before he was out of sight. The conjuration over which he labored sucked up his attention like a sponge. If the barbarian had broken into his spell-casting half an hour from now, his life would not have been enough to answer for the interruption.

  Avshar drew a fat viper from a saddlebag. The snake thrashed wildly, trying to strike, but his grip behind its head was sure and inescapable. His mailed fingers tightened; bone crunched dully. He threw the broken-backed serpent, still alive, onto the small fire that smoked in front of him. The flames leaped up to engulf it.

  He began a preliminary incantation, chanting in an archaic tongue and moving his hands
through precise passes. Even so early in the spell, a mistake could mean disaster. He intended no mistakes.

  Clouds passed across the sun. With the edges of his perception, he felt another power—a tiny one, next to his—making magic. When his chant was done, he allowed himself the luxury of laughter. A rain summons, was it? If his foes thought him so lacking in imagination as to repeat the walls of fire he had loosed against Targitaus’ riders, all the better. He had nothing so trivial in mind.

  As a temple went up brick by brick, so with one spell upon another was his sorcery built. He laughed again, liking the comparison. But despite his grim amusement, he did not let himself be tempted out of methodical precision for the sake of speed. Even for a wizard of his might, summoning demons was not undertaken lightly. Calling and then controlling them taxed him to the utmost; if his will slipped once, they would turn and rend him in an eyeblink of time.

  He could count on the fingers of both hands the invocations he had performed in all the centuries since he first recognized the dominance of Skotos in the world. There had been the dagger-imprisoned spirit which should have drunk the accursed Scaurus’ soul, but somehow failed; and a few decades before that a conjuring which did not fail at all—the fiend that slew Varahran, the last King of Kings of Makuran, in his bed and opened his land to the Yezda. Before that, it had been more than a hundred years.

  His reverie vanished as the gathered power of the demon swarm he was raising heaved against his control. He restrained them harshly, sent them torment for daring to set themselves against him. Their howls of anguish rang in his mind. When he had punished them enough, he resumed the slow, careful business of preparing them for release—on his terms.

  This time his laughter was full of expectant waiting. As demons went, each member of the swarm was small and weak. So is a single bee or wasp. Several hundred, all enraged together, are something else again. The Arshaum would go down as if scythed.

  Avshar would have rubbed his hands together at the prospect, had they not been full of a certain powder. He cast it into the fire. The flames flared in blue, malignant violence. Fell voices cried out from the heart of the blaze, roaring, demanding. He quieted them, soothed them. “Soon,” he said. “Soon.”

  A faint, halfhearted squib of thunder rumbled overhead—like a windy man with too many beans in him, the wizard-prince thought scornfully. Rain pattered down, a few drops here and there. The pulsing fire ignored them. It was no longer consuming wood and brush, but the force of the wizard’s spirit. He felt strength drain from him, but what he had left would suffice.

  He raised his hands above his head in a sinuous pass and began the hypnotically rhythmic canticle that would guide the first of the swarm to do his bidding. A shape began to flicker, deep within the leaping blue flames. It turned this way and that, blindly, until it chanced to face him. It bowed low then, recognizing its master.

  Avshar dipped his head in acknowledgment, but warned in a voice like rime-covered stone, “See to it thou remembrest, aye, and thy brethren with thee.”

  The demon cringed.

  * * *

  Varatesh hardly heard the mutter of thunder in the distance; he was beating down an Arshaum’s stubborn guard and finally cutting the man from the saddle. Nor had he thought much about the dark scudding clouds suddenly filling the sky—doubtless some side-effect of Avshar’s wizardry. He had not made any deep inquiries into that. He did not want to know.

  A raindrop splashed on his cheek, another on the palm of his left hand. The thunder came again, louder. He felt a light touch on the back of his neck and brushed at it automatically. His hand closed around something small and soft. It wriggled against his fingers.

  He opened his hand. A tiny tree frog, green mottled with brown, sat frozen on his palm, its golden eyes wide with fear, the sac under its throat swelling and deflating at each quick breath.

  Varatesh shouted in horrified disgust and threw the little creature as far as he could, then wiped his hands frantically on his buckskin trousers. With their cold slimy skins and thin, peeping voices, frogs housed the spirits of the dead, according to Khamorth legend. Even hearing them was bad luck; to touch one was infinitely worse, a sign he would soon die himself.

  Shaken, he tried to put the evil omen out of his thoughts and concentrate on the fighting again. Then another froglet dropped from the sky, to tangle itself in the long hair of his pony’s mane. Its pale legs thrashed and kicked. Yet another landed on Varatesh’s knee. It hopped away before he could bring down his fist and smash it. There was another phantom touch at the side of his neck; a little frog with clinging toepads skittered wildly across his face, too fast for him to kill it. He spat and blinked, over and over. His stomach churned.

  Varatesh was almost thrown from his horse when the rider on his right, who was swatting at himself like a madman, lost control of his mount and sideswiped him. “Careful, you slubberer!” he cried. The other did not seem to hear him. Still smashing away at frogs, he rode ahead with no thought for his own safety and quickly fell, easy meat for a grinning Arshaum’s saber.

  Too late, Varatesh understood the clouds above the field were no part of Avshar’s sorcery. Frogs fell from them in streams, in torrents, in a deluge, and as they fell, chaos spread through the Khamorth ranks. Some men fled, screaming in terror. Others, like the luckless fellow who had collided with the outlaw chief, were too unstrung by the frogs’ dreadful prophecy to think of their own safety—and thus helped fulfill it. And the hard cases who put aside panic and omens alike were too few to hold back the Arshaum, who stormed forward as they saw their foes in confusion.

  Fury banished fright from Varatesh. He roared foul oaths, trying to rally his unmanned followers. “Stand!” he shouted. “Stand, you stoneless spunkless sheep-hearted cravens!” But they would not stand. Neither his words nor his savage sword work stemmed the growing rout. By ones and twos, by groups, by whole bands, his army streamed away north, back toward their familiar pastures, and he with them.

  Viridovix howled his glee as the frogs rained down and the nomads began to waver. “Look at the little puddocks, will you now, falling from the skies!” he chortled. Several fell on him. He felt very kindly toward them and let them stay; they were safer than they would be under the horses’ pounding hooves.

  He rode close to Gorgidas and slapped the Greek on the back so hard that he whirled round, sword in hand, thinking himself attacked. “Sure and you’re a genius, you and your puddocks!” the Gaul cried. “D’you see the whoresons flapping about like hens wi’ the heads off ’em, not knowing whether to shit or go blind? They’re addled for fair!”

  “So it would seem,” Gorgidas agreed, watching two Khamorth gallop full tilt into each other. He picked a frog off his cheek. It sprang away as he was trying to set it on top of his fur cap. “Tolui and the rest of the shamans are doing splendidly, aren’t they?”

  Viridovix clapped a hand to his forehead. “Is that all you’ll say?” he said disgustedly. “You might as well be a dead corp, for all the relish you take from life. Where’s the brag? Where’s the boast? Where would Tolui and the whole lot o’ he-witches be, outen your scheme to play with?”

  “Oh, go howl!” Gorgidas said, but a grin stretched itself across his spare features as he watched the Khamorth lines dissolve under the froggy cloudburst like men of salt caught in the rain. “Brekekekex!” he shouted in delight. “Brekekekex! Koax! Koax!”

  Viridovix looked at him strangely. “Is that what a frog’s after saying in your Greek? Gi’ me a good Celtic puddock any day, who’ll croak his croak and ha’ done.”

  The physician had no chance to come up with a sharp answer. Three Khamorth were riding at him and the Gaul, stout-spirited warriors sacrificing themselves to buy time for their comrades’ escape. He recognized Rodak son of Papak. The onetime envoy spurred toward him, still shouting, “Varatesh!” Gorgidas had no chance to use his thrusting attack. It was all he could do to save himself from Rodak’s whirlwind assault. He yelped as the K
hamorth’s saber scored a bleeding line down his arm.

  Then Rodak’s head leaped from his shoulders. As every muscle in the spouting corpse convulsed, Batbaian pushed on to the next outlaw and hewed away half his hand. With a shriek, the Khamorth jammed it under his other arm to try to stem the bleeding. He spun his horse round and rode for his life. Batbaian galloped to Viridovix’ aid against the third. After his mutilation and the slaughter of his clan, mere frogs held no terror for him.

  Viridovix killed his man before Batbaian reached him. The young Khamorth stared at the standards in Varatesh’s army. They were in disarray, some moving in one direction, some in another, others shaking as if their bearers were taken by an ague.

  “I know those clans,” he said. “They cannot all be corrupt—the Lynxes, the Four Rivers clan, the Spotted Goats, the Kestrels.…” He spurred forward toward the Khamorth, crying, “To me! To me! Rise now against Varatesh and his filthy bandits! The Wolves!” he shouted, and followed it with the howling war cry of his clan.

  A chill ran up Viridovix’ spine. Only Batbaian could raise that shout now. No, there was another—had not Targitaus and he shared blood in brotherhood? He threw back his own head and howled, took up the cry himself. “The Wolves! Are you hearing me, you dung-eating mudsouls? The Wolves!” He pounded after Batbaian. Even in their confusion, heads whipped round among the Khamorth to listen.

  A flood of fleeing Khamorth came up from the south, Arshaum riding in pursuit. “Irnek’s turned them!” Arigh said. “He’s rolling them up!”

  “Aye!” said his father. “If we strike now, we can bag the lot of them.” Arghun seized the lance that carried Bogoraz’ coat from the standard bearer. He leveled it at the milling Khamorth, who were losing any semblance of order as the new wave of fugitives crashed through bands still fighting. “At them!” he cried. Hard on the heels of Batbaian and Viridovix, the Gray Horse Arshaum charged.