Swords of the Legion (Videssos)

by Harry Turtledove

  “We Romans train for it from the minute we join the legions,” he answered. No doubt he was tired; his face was red and wet, his voice hoarse. But he was ready for more, managing a worn grin as he went on, “We call ourselves ‘mules,’ you know, for all the marching we do in full kit. And by now, all these Vaspurakaners and imperials have been with us long enough to keep up.”

  “If I had to bet, I’d say Yavlak will lead his horsemen to where we were early this afternoon.”

  “I hope he stays away. But if not, let’s hope you’re right.” Minucius looked around, as he did every minute or so. “No, you idiot!” he bellowed at a Khatrisher. “Water your damned horses downstream from camp, not up! The fornicating Arandos is muddy enough already, without them stirring up more muck for us to drink.”

  Despite being the only woman in camp, Nevrat shared a tent with her husband unconcerned and would have worried no more had she been among the legionaries without him. It was not just that she was as handy with weapons as most men. After all the dangers she had shared with the Romans, none of them would have annoyed her, any more than he would a sister.

  The next day, she saw a few Yezda. The nomads fled at the sight of the legionaries and looked back over their shoulders in disbelief at seeing troops loyal to Videssos pushing through country they had come to think of as theirs. Never were they in numbers enough to offer combat.

  Later that afternoon, a Khatrisher rear guard came galloping up to warn that a real force of nomads was approaching from behind the Romans. Minucius gave Nevrat a Roman salute, holding his clenched fist out at arm’s length in front of him. She waved her hat in reply.

  Horns brayed. “Form lines to the rear!” Minucius shouted. With the smoothness of endless drill, the legionaries performed the maneuver.

  “Where do you want us?” Laon Pakhymer asked.

  “Out front, to foul up their archery.” Minucius studied the ground. “And put a few squads over there, in that little copse. The gods willing, the Yezda will be too busy with us to study it much. If your men pop out at the right time, they’ll count for a lot more than their numbers.” Pakhymer nodded and bawled orders in the lisping Khatrisher dialect.

  As soon as he was finished, Senpat called, “Shall we ride with you?”

  “I’d sooner your lady asked that,” Pakhymer said, and waited for Nevrat’s snort before continuing, “but aye, come ahead. Another couple of good bows won’t do us any harm.”

  “You have a care, mistress,” one of the horsemen said as Nevrat passed him. “Get in trouble, and we’ll all try and save you—and we might mess ourselves up to do it.” He spoke with the half-joking tone Khatrishers often used, but Nevrat knew he meant what he said.

  She was warmed and irritated at the same time. “I thank you,” she said “I expect I’ll manage.” The Khatrisher nodded and waved.

  The Yezda were not far behind the scout who brought news of them. Already Nevrat saw them emerging from the dust their ponies kicked up and heard the thunder of the horses’ hooves.

  “You’ve done this before, lads,” Pakhymer told his men, calm as if he were discussing carting home a sack of beans. “Pick your targets while you’re shooting and help your mates when the sabers come out.”

  A horse’s skull on a pole—Yavlak’s emblem-advanced. Closer, closer … Nevrat drew her bow back to her ear, let fly. The string lashed across the leather bracer on her wrist. She did not wait to see if her arrow hit; she was reaching for another while the first was still descending.

  Here a horse stumbled, there another shrieked like a woman in labor when it was struck. Men were shouting, too, both from wounds and to terrify their foes. Icy fear shot through Nevrat when she saw blood on her husband’s face. “A graze,” Senpat reassured her when she cried out. “I’ll let my beard get a little fuller to hide the scar, if it bothers you.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.” In itself, that kind of minor wound was nothing. But it reminded Nevrat how easy it was to find worse, and how little anyone could do to evade the death flying through the air.

  The arrow duel, though, did not last as long as in the usual nomad engagement. Yavlak seemed intent on forcing the issue. His riders bulled through the Khatrishers, who, outnumbered, were forced aside. Nevrat understood why when she yeard Yavlak yelling toward the Roman standards: “With muds and snows you us once beat! Not we gets revenge!”

  Senpat’s face wore a grim smile. “Does he really think so? He hasn’t brought near enough men, looks like to me.”

  Nevrat never heard him. She was hotly embroiled with a Yezda whose arms seemed as long as an ape’s. She could parry his sword strokes, but her counters did not reach him.

  Then the fellow suddenly grinned and moved in to fight at closer quarters. Nevrat recognized the new light in his eyes. It was not battle fury, but simple lust; he had realized he was facing a woman. His tongue flicked over his lips in slow, deliberate obscenity.

  But he was no great swordsman, not when Nevrat could get at him at last. Her saber bit between his neck and shoulder. He howled a curse as he reeled away. Nevrat never knew whether her blow finished him—battle was often like that. She had to throw up her sword just in time to turn another nomad’s slash and lost track of the first.

  The heat of combat lessened, at least for the Khatrishers. Yavlak flung his horsemen at the legionaries. Senpat clapped a hand to his forehead in disbelief. “He’s an idiot,” he shouted. “He thinks they’ll break and run.”

  “Probably the only foot soldiers he’s faced since Maragha are herders with bows and axes trying to keep his men from running off their sheep.” Nevrat’s hand clamped down hard on her sword hilt in delighted anticipation of the shock the nomad chief was about to get.

  Watching from the flank, she saw at once that Senpat had been right; Yavlak did not have enough men to take on the legionaries. He tried, regardless. Shouting and brandishing their swords, the Yezda spurred toward the waiting lines of shields. If they could force a breach, numbers would not matter.

  The horns cried out, echoing Minucius’ dropped arm. With a single great cry that cut cleanly through the random yells of their foes, the Romans cast their heavy javelins at the Yezda. An instant later, another wave of spears flew. The legionaries drew their stubby thrusting swords and surged forward, peering over the tops of their semicylindrical scuta.

  The first ranks of the Yezda were in hideous confusion. The volleys of pila had blunted the momentum of their charge, emptying saddles and felling horses. Yet they could not turn tail and flee, the usual nomad tactic when pressed, because their comrades behind them were still trying to push up and get in the fight. The result was a few minutes of slaughter.

  Watching the legionaries swarm over the Yezda, Nevrat thought of ants. Usually the Romans operated at a disadvantage in numbers and gave better than they got. With an edge, they were terrifying. A hamstrung horse screamed. Even before it fell, two soldiers beset its rider, one from either side. He did not last long. Another Roman turned a nomad’s slash with the edge of his big, heavy shield, then used its weight to push the Yezda off balance. Another legionary stabbed him in the back; boiled leather could not keep out steel.

  The Yezda could not even seek to outflank their opponents. The Arandos anchored the Romans’ right wing, while Pakhymer’s Khatrishers covered the left. And at close quarters, even mounted the nomads were no match for the disciplined, armored veterans Minucius led. Remembering ravaged fields and burned keeps in Vaspurakan, Nevrat found only fierce delight in their predicament.

  But an army of infantry cannot wreck horsemen unless they stay to fight. The Yezda the legionary advance had not caught began pulling away, first by ones and twos, then in larger groups. Then the concealed Khatrisher squadron came galloping out of ambush, emptying their quivers as fast as they could into the Yezda flank. Retreat turned to rout.

  “Ride over to Minucius,” Pakhymer bawled in Nevrat’s ear. She started; she had not noticed him come up. “Find out how far he wants us to c
hase the buggers.”

  The Roman’s answer came promptly: “Only far enough to be sure they’re in no shape to re-form. I want to get moving again. This mess has cost us close to half a day.”

  “Not much else, though.” Hardly any of the men on the ground were legionaries.

  The young man inside Minucius peeped out for a moment from behind the stern commander’s mask. “It did work well, didn’t it? Yavlak got what anyone too eager gets.” His eyes flicked to Bagratouni’s men, who were grimly making certain all the downed Yezda were corpses.

  “On my way back to Pakhymer, shall I stop and thank Gagik for you, for not breaking ranks in his own eagerness to get at the nomads?”

  “Thank him for obeying orders?” Minucius’ astonishment was perfectly real. “By the gods, no! He does what he does because I command it, not as a favor to me.”

  “He’s right,” Senpat said in their tent that night when Nevrat told him of the exchange. They were lying side by side on the bedroll, too tired after the fight for anything more, but too keyed up to sleep.

  “Of course he’s right.” Nevrat brushed back a wet lock of hair from her cheek—washing the grime and sweat from it was the only pleasure for which she’d had the energy after the legionaries made camp. She went on, “But how did he make Bagratouni see that, after all he’s suffered from the Yezda? What happened back in Garsavra means nothing now—the Romans would never turn on Gagik’s men here, not in the middle of enemy-held country.”

  “I suppose not,” Senpat half agreed, “though I wonder what would happen if Minucius gave the order. I’m glad we don’t have to find out. Still, you’re right; that’s not what held Gagik back.”

  “What, then?”

  “Do you really want to know what I think? I think over the last couple of years, without ever quite knowing it, Bagratouni has gone from being a nakharar to a—what do they call it?—a centurion, that’s right. This Roman discipline digs deep into a man. I’m just glad it hasn’t set its hooks too deep in us.”

  Nevrat thought about that. Imagining Gagik Bagratouni as a clean-shaven Roman made her smile, but she decided her husband had a point. The nakharar had snarled at Minucius, but in the end he obeyed. The Bagratouni she had known of old, affronted so, might well have made the legionary commander carry out his threat.

  After a while, she said, “If the Romans have no hold on us, why are we here by the Arandos instead of back in the capital following the Avtokrator’s orders?”

  Only a snore answered her. She rolled over. A few minutes later she was asleep herself.

  Yavlak had fought the Romans once before they began their drive to the west, but had learned little from his earlier defeat. The nomad chieftains further into the interior of the central plateau knew nothing of the newcomers and were foolish enough to believe they could run them off with whatever forces they scraped together on the spur of the moment.

  A couple of stinging defeats taught them otherwise. Word spread quickly from one clan to the next. After that, the Yezda left them alone. In fact, the nomads fled before them, flocks and all.

  “I found another abandoned camp ahead of us,” Nevrat reported to Minucius at an evening council after her return from a scouting run. “The tracks leading out of it look two or three days old.”

  “Senseless,” the Roman said. Stubble rasped as he rubbed his chin. “If they left us alone, we wouldn’t go after them. You’d think they’d have noticed that by now.”

  “Do you miss them?” Nevrat teased.

  “Not even slightly.” Again she saw the amused youngster through Minucius’ grave shell, but only for a moment. He went on, “I mistrust what I don’t understand, though.”

  “It is the nomads’ way,” Bagratouni said. “When a strong clan comes, the weak ones move aside. They will be fighting among themselves now, over grazing land, and shifting all about in more country than we could hope to march to in a year.” Somber satisfaction at the prospect filled his voice.

  Laon Pakhymer’s eyes lit with mock indignation. “Ha! Are you saying my noble ancestors were forced off the steppe into Khatrish, instead of being the great heroes our minstrels sing of?”

  Bagratouni took him literally. “It could be so, but with the original push hundreds of miles away.”

  “Are we going to push the Yezda into Amorion ahead of us, then?” Minucius said slowly.

  Nevrat and Senpat exchanged glances of consternation; neither had worried about that. Gagik Bagratouni’s big hands curled into fists. “Better, maybe, if we do. Zemarkhos and the Yezda deserve each other. The more they fight, the easier time we have coming after.”

  “Normally I would agree and be grateful,” Minucius said, his face troubled. “But, the gods willing, Scaurus and Gaius Philippus are also in Amorion, or getting close. We came to rescue them, after all, not to throw more calamities down on them.”

  With his gift for pointing out what was so obvious as to be easily overlooked, Pakhymer broke the worried silence that followed. “Well, it’s a bit late to turn back, isn’t it?”

  Nevrat thought about the Khatrisher’s wry comment the next day, when she and her husband spotted the horseman coming up along the Arandos after the legionaries. The two Vaspurakaners had rotated back to rear guard, with some of Pakhymer’s men riding in front of the army.

  Senpat gave a puzzled grunt as he looked back over his shoulder. “Fellow doesn’t sit his horse like a nomad.”

  “So he doesn’t,” Nevrat agreed after a moment’s study. The Yezda, like the Khatrishers and other folk ultimately of Khamorth stock, used very short stirrup leathers and rode with their knees drawn up. The unknown kept his legs down at his horse’s side.

  “There just seems to be the one of him.” Senpat whistled three notes from a Vaspurakaner hunting song, then set an arrow in his bow. “Cover me—I saw him first.”

  Her chance to argue forestalled by that last, offhand remark, Nevrat trailed her husband at easy bowshot range as he approached the stranger. The two men talked briefly before Senpat waved an all-clear. Her bow still across her lap ready to grab, she came up.

  “He’s not a Yezda, Nevrat.” Senpat’s face bore a faintly bemused expression. “His name is Arsakes Akrounos—he’s an imperial courier.”

  Looking at Akrounos, Nevrat Sviodo was not surprised. He had the air of unimpressive competence the job required. If he was nonplused at finding a woman on patrol, he never let on. All he said was, “I have a dispatch for your leader.”

  “We’ll get you to him,” Nevrat said.

  Like most Videssians, Akrounos liked to hear himself talk. He gossiped on about this and that as he rode west between Nevrat and Senpat. Unlike many of his countrymen, he gave nothing away with his chatter, and Nevrat was sure no detail escaped his eyes as he trotted past the marching lines of legionaries.

  Minucius tramped along at the front of the column. “Is he now?” he said when Senpat explained who and what Akrounos was. He stepped to one side to let the Romans pass him as he eyed the courier with scant liking. “All right, I suppose he can speak his piece.”

  For the first time, Akrounos looked annoyed; he was used to warmer welcomes. He rummaged in a saddlebag and produced a parchment that prominently displayed the imperial sunburst seal. With a flourish, he handed it down to Minucius.

  The Roman handed it back, discomfiting him again. “Suppose you just tell me the gist. Sorry and all that, but I don’t read Videssian very fast.”

  “Surely you can guess—” Akrounos began.

  Minucius cut him off. “Why should I guess, with you here? Say what you have to say or go home.”

  “What?” Now the courier was openly scandalized; no one spoke so to imperial representatives. Mastering himself with a visible effort, he broke the seal on the document he carried. “ ‘His Imperial Majesty Thorisin Gavras, Avtokrator of the Videssians, to Sextus Minucius, commanding my Majesty’s forces at Garsavra: greetings. I regret to learn that you have forgotten your obedience to me and—’
”

  “The gist,” Minucius said. “I haven’t the time to waste on this.”

  Akrounos took a moment to put his thoughts in order; saying things short and clear did not come easy to Videssians. At last he said, “Return your force to Garsavra and in his mercy the Emperor will overlook your brief defection.”

  “I thought as much.” Minucius folded his arms. “No.”

  Again Akrounos hesitated, expecting some further answer. When he saw he would get none, he cried, “Why such ingratitude? Did the Empire not take you in when you were homeless, feed you when you were hungry?”

  The Roman frowned. Nevrat’s respect for Thorisin Gavras’ wits, already high, went up another notch. The argument he had given his courier to cast in Minucius’ face appealed to the legionary’s strong sense of duty.

  But Minucius said, “We follow Scaurus first, not Gavras. And we’ve earned our keep with blood. Besides, your master sent my two commanders off to die alone. Where’s the charity in that, Akrounos?”

  The soldiers marching by growled in agreement with Minucius’ words. A couple of them hefted pila and glowered at Akrounos. Minucius quelled them with a gesture.

  Bagratouni’s contingent replaced a maniple still almost wholly Roman. Akrounos called to the Vaspurakaner, “Do you, too, prefer some outland mercenary as your lord, rather than the Emperor?”

  “Why not?” Bagratouni had been listening to the exchange all the while. “Did not Scaurus take us in when we were homeless, feed us when we were hungry?” His deep-set eyes gleamed as he placed the barb. Akrounos’ face froze. Bagratouni nodded gravely to Minucius and walked on.

  Senpat murmured in Vaspurakaner, “It would take more than Thorisin to keep Gagik from going after Yezda—and after Zemarkhos.”

  “But he doesn’t say that,” Nevrat replied in the same tongue. “He answers as a Roman centurion would—another sign you were right.”

  “I will take your answer back to his Imperial Majesty,” Akrounos was saying to Minucius.

  “Stay with us,” the Roman urged. “You were lucky to come this far once by yourself. Think how slim the odds are of getting back whole.”