“Well, yes,” Gorgidas answered seriously. “Their account of the first Yezda incursion into Erzerum, for example—confound it, what are you smirking about?”
“Me?” The Celt aimed for a look of wide-eyed innocence, an expression which did not suit his face. He gave up and chortled out loud. “Sure and it’s nae history alone you’re finding with the Yrmido, else you’d not be sleeping like a dead corp and wearing that fool grin the times you’re awake.”
“What fool grin?” Viridovix’ parody made the Greek wince. He threw his hands in the air. “If you already know the answer, why ask the question?”
“Begging your pardon I am,” Viridovix said quickly, seeing the alarm that always came to Gorgidas when his preference for men was mentioned by someone who did not share it. “All I meant by it was that it’s strange for fair, seeing a sour omadhaun like your honor so cheery and all.”
“Go howl!” From long habit, the physician searched Viridovix for the sort of killing scorn the Yrmido met from all their neighbors. He did not find it, so he relaxed; it was not as though the Gaul had just discovered the way his habits ran.
Viridovix slapped him on the back, staggering him a little. On his face was honest curiosity. “Might you be telling me now, how do you find it after a year with women?”
“After a year my way, how would you find a wench?”
The Gaul whistled. “I hadna thought of it so. I’d marry her on the spot, beshrew me if I didn’t.”
“I’m in no danger of that,” Gorgidas said, and they both laughed. There was more than one kind of truth in his words, though, the physician thought. Rakio would never come close to filling the place Quintus Glabrio had in his heart.
True, the Yrmido, like most of his countrymen, was brave to a fault, and he had the gift of laughter. But he was hopelessly provincial. Despite his travels in Videssos, he cared for nothing beyond his own valley, while for Gorgidas the whole world seemed none too big. And where Glabrio and Gorgidas had shared a common heritage, Rakio’s strange syntax was the least reminder of how different his background was from the Greek’s. Finally, the Yrmido openly scoffed at fidelity. “Faithfulness for women is,” he had said to Gorgidas. “Men should enjoy themselves.”
Enjoying himself the physician was. Let it last as long as it would; for now it was good enough.
With their speed, the Arshaum expected to swarm over the river Moush and into Yezd before its defenders were ready to receive them. There again, they reckoned without Avshar. The wizard-prince, still ahead of his enemies, had given his followers warning. The boat-bridges leading north into Erzerum had been withdrawn. Squadrons of nomad horse patrolled the Moush’s southern bank. Better-drilled troops, men of Makuraner blood, guarded the river’s ford with catapults.
Against the advice of all the Erzrumi commanders, Arigh tried to force one of the river-crossings in the face of the Yezda artillery and was repulsed. The stonethrowers reached across the Moush, which even his nomads’ bows could not. And the catapults shot more than stones. Jugs of incendiary mix crashed among he Arshaum, splashing fire all about. Horses and men screamed; there was nearly a panic before the plainsmen drew back out of range.
Arigh shouldered the blame manfully, saying, “I should have listened. They know more of this fighting with engines than I do.” He scratched at the pink, shiny scars on his cheek. “From now on I will stay with what we do best. Let the Yezda have to figure out how to meet me.”
“That is a wise general speaking,” said Lankinos Skylitzes, and the Arshaum’s eyes lit.
He proved as good as his word, taking advantage of the plainsmen’s mobility and skill at making do. Under cover of night he sent a hundred Arshaum over the widest part of the Moush, swimming with their horses and carrying arms and armor in leather sacks tied to the beasts’ tails. As soon as they were across and starting to remount, the rest of their countrymen followed.
By sheer bad luck, a single Yezda spied the forerunners just as they were coming out of the river. He raised the alarm and managed to escape in the darkness. The Yezda were steppemen themselves; they reacted quickly. The fight that blew up was no less fierce for being fought half-blind. The Arshaum struggled to expand their perimeter, while their opponents battled to crush them and regain control of the riverbank before the bulk of the army could cross.
Viridovix stripped naked and splashed into the Moush just after the advance force. Some of the Arshaum hooted at him. “What good will a sword do, when you can’t see what to hit?” someone called.
“As much good as a bow,” he retorted, “or are your darts after having eyes of their own?”
When his pony clambered up onto the southern bank of the Moush, he let go of its neck and armed himself with frantic haste. Not long ago he would have gone to a fight sooner than to a woman, most times, but that was gone forever. Yet the Yezda ahead were obstacles between him and Avshar. For that he would kill them if he could.
He could hear them shouting ahead as he mounted his pony and spurred toward the fighting. He understood their cries, or most of them; the dialect they spoke was not that far removed from the Khamorth tongue of Pardraya.
A rider appeared ahead of him, indistinct in the starlight. “Can you bespeak me, now?” he called in the speech he had learned in Targitaus’ tent.
“Aye,” the other horseman said, reining in. “Who are you?”
“No friend,” Viridovix said, and slashed out. The Yezda fell with a groan.
An arrow snarled past the Gaul’s ear. He cursed; it had come from behind him. “Have a care there, ye muck-brained slubberers!” he roared, this time in the Arshaum language. The cry in the alien tongue drew another Yezda to him. They fenced half by guess. Viridovix took a cut on his left arm and another above his knee before a double handful of Arshaum came galloping up and the Yezda fled.
His mates were beginning to give ground all along the line. The company that had happened to be close by was big enough to face Arigh’s first wave, but more and more Arshaum were emerging, dripping, from the Moush and going into action. It was not the nomad way to fight a stand-up battle against superior numbers. The Yezda scattered, saving themselves but yielding the position.
It was too dark for signal flags. The naccara drum boomed. Arigh’s messengers rode orders up and down the line: “Hurry west for the ford!” Picking their way over unfamiliar ground, the Arshaum obeyed. Their Erzrumi allies paced them on the far side of the Moush. The heavily armored mountaineers could not cross the river as easily as the plainsmen; it was up to the Arshaum to win them safe passage.
Viridovix hoped they would take the guards at the ford by surprise, but they did not. A ring of bonfires made the space round the enemy camp bright as day. Catapult crews stood to their weapons; darts, stones, and jars of incendiary were piled high by the engines. Cavalry in ordered rows waited for the Arshaum. The firelight gleamed from their corselets and lances. No irregulars these, but seasoned troops of the same sort Videssos produced, Makuraner contingents fighting for their land’s new masters.
Arigh’s white grin was all there was to see of him. “This will be easy—only a couple hundred of them. We can flatten them before they get reinforced.” He confidently began deploying his men.
As he was sending messengers here and there, a single figure from the enemy lines rode out past the bonfires toward the Arshaum. He loomed against the flames, tremendous and proud. Viridovix’ heart gave a painful leap; he was sure that huge silhouette had to belong to Avshar. Then the horseman turned his head and the Gaul saw his strong profile. A mere man, he thought, disappointed; the wizard-prince’s mantlings would have hidden his face.
The rider came closer, brandishing his spear. He shouted something, first in a language Viridovix did not understand but took to be Makuraner, then in the tongue of Vaspurakan, finally in the Yezda dialect. The Celt could follow him there: “Ho, you dogs! Does any among you dare match himself against me? I am Gusnaph, called with good reason the Feeder of Ravens, and fou
rteen men I have struck down in the duel. Who among you will join them?”
He rode back and forth, arrogant in his might, crying his challenge again and again. The Arshaum murmured among themselves as those who understood translated for the rest. No one seemed eager to answer Gusnaph. Aboard his great horse, armored head to foot, he might as well have been a tower of iron. He laughed scornfully and made as if to return to his own lines.
Viridovix whooped and dug his heels into his pony’s flanks. “Come back, you idiot!” he heard Skylitzes yell. “He has a lance to your sword!” The Gaul did not stop. Even with a won battle, he had leaped to fight Scaurus; had he not, the fleeting thought went by, he would still be in Gaul. But he had not hesitated then and did not now. An enemy leader slain was worth a hundred lesser men.
Gusnaph turned, swung up his lance in salute, then lowered it and thundered at the Celt. He grew bigger with terrifying quickness. The spear was fixed unerringly on Viridovix’ chest, no matter which way he swerved.
At the last instant the Gaul feinted again, and again Gusnaph met the move—too well. The lancepoint darted past the Celt’s shoulder as their horses slammed together in collision.
Both men were thrown. They landed heavily. Viridovix scrambled to his feet. He was faster than Gusnaph, whose armor weighed him down. His lance lay under his thrashing horse. He reached for a weapon at his belt—a shortsword, a mace, a dagger; Viridovix never knew which. The Gaul sprang forward. Gusnaph was still on one knee when his sword crashed down. The Makuraner champion fell in the dirt.
Following the custom of his own nation, Viridovix bent, chopped, and raised Gusnaph’s dripping head for the rest of the enemy to see. He let out a banshee wail of triumph. There was an awful stillness on the other side of the fires.
With the resilience of the nomad breed, Viridovix’ pony was on its feet and seemed unhurt, though Gusnaph’s charger was screaming enough to make the Celt think it had broken a leg. The steppe animal shied from the smell of blood when he approached it with his trophy.
He set the head down. “I’ve no gate to nail it to, any road,” he said to himself. The pony side-stepped nervously, but let him mount. He waved his sword to the Arshaum, who were erupting in a cloudburst of cheers. “Is it summat else you’re waiting for, then?” he shouted.
The plainsmen advanced at the trot. Their foes hardly waited for the first arrows to come arcing out of the night, but fled, abandoning their tents, the catapults, and the ford. The first hint of morning twilight was turning the sky pale when Arigh stood on the bank of the Moush and waved to the Erzrumi to cross.
They came over band by band, the water at the ford lapping at their horses’ flanks. Gorgidas crossed with the Sworn Fellowship, just behind Rakio. In his boiled leather, armed only with a gladius, he felt badly out of place among the armored Yrmido, but he had discovered Platon was right. He would do anything before he let his lover think him afraid.
The Yezda managed a counterattack at dawn, nomad archers fighting in the familiar style of the plains. But as they had only faced the Arshaum during the night, the Erzrumi took them by surprise. They shouted in dismay as the plainsmen’s line opened out and the big mountain horses crashed down on them.
With the Yrmido, Gorgidas was at the point of the wedge. There were a few seconds of desperate confusion as the Sworn Fellowship and the rest of the Erzrumi speared Yezda out of the saddle and overbore their light mounts. Some fell on their side, too; an Yrmido just in front of the physician flew from his horse, his face bloodily pulped by a morningstar. His partner, tears steaming down his cheeks, killed the nomad who had slain him.
The Greek slashed at a Yezda. He thought he missed. It did not much matter. The advance rolled ahead.
Gashvili shouted something in Vaspurakaner to Khilleu. The lord of Gunib had a dent in his gilded helmet, but was undismayed. Khilleu, grinning, gave back an obscene gesture. “What was that?” Gorgidas asked Rakio, who was tying up a cut on the back of his hand.
“Says Gashvili, ‘You damned fairies can fight.’ ”
“He’s right,” the Greek said with a burst of pride.
“Why not?” To Rakio, war came as naturally as breathing. He touched spurs to his horse, driving against the Yezda. Gorgidas’ steppe pony snorted in affront when he spurred it, but followed.
Then, quite suddenly, the enemy was reeling away, each man fleeing to save himself, with no thought of holding together as a fighting force. The Arshaum and Erzrumi cheered each other till they were hoarse. The way clear before them, they pushed into Yezd.
VII
GAIUS PHILIPPUS SLAPPED AT A HORSEFLY BUZZING ROUND the head of the bony gray nag he was riding. It droned away. He growled, “I’m amazed this arse-busting chunk of buzzards’ bait has enough life in it to draw flies. Get up, you mangy old crock! Make it to Amorion by sundown and you can rest.”
He jerked on the reins. The gray gave him a reproachful look and came out of its amble for a few paces’ worth of shambling trot. It blew until its skinny sides heaved, as if the exertion were too much for it. As soon as it thought it had satisfied him, it fell back into a walk. “Miserable gluepot,” he said, chuckling in spite of himself.
“It’s an old soldier, sure enough,” Marcus said. “Be thankful it’s not better—it didn’t tempt the Yezda into trying to steal it.”
“I should hope not!” Gaius Philippus said, taking perverse pride in his decrepit mount. “Remember that one whoreson who looked us over a couple of days ago? He fell off his pony laughing.”
“As well for us,” the tribune answered. “He was probably a scout for a whole band of them.”
At that thought he slipped out of the bantering mood. The journey inland from Nakoleia was much worse that he had expected. The port was still in Videssian hands, but its hinterland swarmed with Yezda, who swooped down on farmers whenever they tried to work their fields. If the Empire had not kept the city supplied by sea, it could not have survived.
Most of the villages on the dirt track that led south were deserted, or nearly so. Even a couple of towns that had kept their ancient walls through the centuries of imperial peace now stood empty. The Yezda made growing or harvesting crops impossible, and so the towns, though safe from nomad siege, withered. He wondered how many had died when they were forced to open their gates, and how many managed to get away.
It occurred to him that the devastation the nomads were inflicting on the westlands had happened on a vastly greater scale long before, when the Khamorth swarmed off the edge of the steppe into Videssos’ eastern provinces. He shook his head. No wonder those lands had fallen into the heresy of reckoning Skotos’ power equal to that of Phos; evil incarnate must have seemed loose in the world.
A squad of horsemen came round a bend in the road, trotting briskly north. Their leader swung up an arm in warning when he caught sight of the Romans, then brought it down halfway as he recognized they were not Yezda. He rode up to inspect them. Scaurus saw that he had helmet, shortsword, and bow, but no body armor. His men were similarly equipped and mounted on a motley set of animals. The tribune had met their like on the road the day before—Zemarkhos’ men.
The squad leader drew the sun-sign over his heart. Marcus and Gaius Philippus quickly imitated him; it would have been dangerous not to. “Phos with you,” the Videssian said. He was in his late twenties, tall, stringy, scarred like a veteran, with disconcertingly sharp eyes.
“And with you,” the tribune returned.
A tiny test had been passed; the Videssian’s head moved a couple of inches up and down. He asked, “Well, strangers, what are you doing in the dominions of the Defender of the Faithful?” Having heard Zemarkhos’ self-chosen title from the riders he had come across yesterday, Marcus did not blink at it.
“We’re for the holy Moikheios’ panegyris at Amorion,” he said, giving the cover story he and Gaius Philippus had worked out aboard the Seafoam. “Maybe we can sign on as caravan guards with one of the merchants there.”
Th
e squad leader said, “That could be.” He studied the tribune. “By your tongue and hair, you are no Videssian, but you do not look like a Vaspurakaner. Are you one of the Namdalener heretics?”
For once Marcus was glad of his blondness; though it marked him as a foreigner, it also showed he was not of the sort Zemarkhos’ men killed on sight. He recited Phos’ creed in the version the Empire used; the Namdaleni appended “On this we stake our very souls” to it, an addition which raised the hackles of Videssian theologians. Gaius Philippus followed his lead. He went through the creed haltingly, but got it right.
The horsemen relaxed and took their hands away from their weapons. “Orthodox enough,” their chief said, “and no one will take it ill if you hold to that usage. Still, you’ll find that many, out of respect for our lord Zemarkhos, add ‘We also bless the Defender of thy true faith,’ after ‘decided in our favor.’ As I say, it is optional, but it may make them think the better of you in Amorion.”
“ ‘We also bless the Defender of thy true faith,’ ” Scaurus and Gaius Philippus repeated, as if memorizing the clause. Zemarkhos, it seemed, had a perfectly secular love of self-aggrandizement, no matter how he phrased it. The tribune kept his face blank. “Thanks for the tip,” he said.
“It’s nothing,” the Videssian answered. “Outlanders who come to the true belief of their own accord deserve to be honored. Good luck in town—we’re off to watch for Yezda thieves and raiders.”
“And filthy Vaspurakaners, too,” one of his men added. “Some of the stinking bastards are still skulking around, for all we can do to root ’em out.”
“That’s not so bad,” said another. “They make better sport than bustards, or even foxes. I caught three last winter.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as he might of any other game. Scaurus’ twinge of regret at his hyprocrisy over the creed disappeared.
The squad leader touched a forefinger to the rim of his helmet, nodded to the Romans, and started to lead his troops away. Gaius Philippus, who had been mostly silent till then, called after him. He paused. The senior centurion said, “I was through these parts a few years ago and made some good friends at a town called Aptos. Have the Yezda got it, or Zemarkhos?”
Swords of the Legion (Videssos) Page 20
