Swords of the Legion (Videssos)

by Harry Turtledove

  “Och, will you hear the filthy man, now?” Viridovix said. He shook his fist at the Yezda. “Come down here and be doing that, you blackhearted omadhaun!”

  “Make me,” the officer repeated, still laughing. He gestured to the squad of archers beside him. They drew their double-curved bows back to their ears. The sun glinted off iron chisel-points; to Gorgidas every shaft seemed aimed straight at him. The Yezda said, “This parley is over. Pull back, or I will fire on you. Fight or not, just as you please.”

  To give the warning teeth, one of the nomads put an arrow in the dirt a couple of feet in front of Arigh’s pony. He sat motionless, staring up at the Yezda, daring them to shoot. After a full minute, he nodded to his party and made a deliberate turn to show the town garrison his back. He and his comrades slowly rode off.

  The moment they left the shade of the wall, the blasting heat of the river-plain summer hit them once more with its full power. Viridovix wore an ugly hat of woven straw to protect his fair skin from the sun, but he was red and peeling even so. The sweat that streamed down his face stung like vinegar. Armor was a chafing torment no amount of bathing could ease.

  Arigh cursed in a low monotone until they were well away from the city, not wanting to give the Yezda officer the satisfaction of knowing his anger. The drawn-up lines of his army, banners moving sluggishly in the sweltering air, made a brave show. But without the siege train they did not have, assaulting a walled town with ready defenders would cost more than they could afford to lose.

  “May the wind spirits blow that dog’s ghost so far it never finds its way home to be reborn,” Arigh burst out at last, bringing his fist down on his thigh in frustration. “It galls me past words not to watch him drown in his own blood for his insolence, crying defiance at me with his stinking couple of hundred men.”

  “The trouble is, he knows what he’s about,” Pikridios Goudeles said. “We haven’t the ladders to go at the walls of this miserable, overgrown village, whatever its name is—”

  “Erekh,” Skylitzes put in.

  “A fitting noise for a nauseating town. In any case, we don’t have the ladders and we can’t do much of a job making them because the only trees in this bake-oven of a country are date palms, with worthless wood. To say nothing of the fact that if we sit down in front of a city instead of staying on the move, all the Yezda garrisons hereabouts will converge on us instead of each one being pinned down to protect its own base.”

  “Are you a general now?” Arigh snarled, but he could not argue against the pen-pusher’s logic. “This will cost us,” he said darkly. When he drew closer to his assembled soldiers, he waved to the southwest and yelled, “We ride on!”

  He gave the order first in the Arshaum speech for his own men, then in Videssian so Narbas Kios could translate it into Vaspurakaner for the Erzrumi. The mountaineers’ ranks stirred; it would have taken a deaf man to miss their resentful mutters. Some of the Erzrumi were not muttering. Part of the Mzeshi contingent shouted their fury at the Arshaum chief and at those of their own leaders content to remain with the plainsmen.

  One of their officers advanced on Arigh. Dark face suffused with rage, he roared something at the Arshaum in his own strange language, then brought himself under enough control to remember his Vaspurakaner. His accent was atrocious; Narbas Kios frowned, trying to be sure he understood. At last he said, “He calls you a man of little spirit.” From the savage scowl on the Mzeshi’s face, Gorgidas was sure Narbas was shading the translation. The trooper went on, “He says he came to fight, and you run away. He came for loot, and has won a few brass trinkets his own smiths would be ashamed of. He says he was tricked, and he is going home.”

  “Wait,” Arigh said through the Videssian soldier. He went through Goudeles’ arguments all but unchanged, and added, “We are still unbeaten, and Mashiz still lies ahead. That has been our goal all along; stay and help us win it.”

  The Mzeshi frowned in concentration. Gorgidas thought he was considering what Arigh had said, but then he loudly broke wind. His face cleared.

  “Not the most eloquent reply, but one of unmistakable meaning,” Goudeles remarked with diplomatic aplomb.

  Smirking triumphantly, the officer trotted back to his followers and harangued them for a few minutes. They shouted their agreement, brandishing lances and swords. Their harness and chain mail jingled as they pulled away from their countrymen and started back to their mountain home. Several individual horsemen peeled away from the remaining men of Mzeh to join them.

  Arigh had his impassivity back as they began to grow small against the sky. “I wonder who the next ones to give up will be,” he said. Already a good third of the Erzrumi had abandoned the campaign and turned back.

  Viridovix blew a long, glum breath through his mustaches. “And it all started out so simple, too,” he said. Fanning out as they crossed the Tutub, the Arshaum had fallen on three or four towns before startled defenders realized an enemy was loose among the Hundred Cities. It was as easy as riding through open gates; there was next to no fighting and, in spite of Mzeshi complaints, they came away with their horses festooned with booty.

  But it had not stayed easy long. Not only were the cities shut up against attack, Yezda raiders began the hit-and-run warfare they shared with the Arshaum. Two scouts were ambushed here, a forager there. The Yezda lost men, too, but they had the resources of a country to draw on. Arigh did not.

  He gave his commands to the naccara drummer, who boomed them out for the whole army to hear. It shifted into traveling order, with what was left of the Erzrumi heavy cavalry in a long column in the center, flanked and screened by the Arshaum.

  Gorgidas rode with Rakio, near the front of the Erzrumi formation. Most of the Sworn Fellowship was hurrying back to the Yrmido country; Khilleu did not relish giving up the campaign, but he did not dare leave his land unprotected when his unfriendly neighbors were going home. A fair number of “orphans” and a handful of pairs, mostly older men, stayed on.

  The physician flattered himself that Rakio was still with the army for his sake. Certainly the Yrmido found no delight in the journey itself. “What strange country this is,” he said. He pointed. “What is that little hill, out of the flat plain rising? Several of them I have seen here.”

  Gorgidas followed his pointing finger. It was truly not much of a hill, perhaps not even as tall as the walls around Videssos, but in the dead-flat river plain it stood out like a mountain, springing up so abruptly he did not think it could be natural.

  Having no idea how it came about, he poised tablet and stylus before he called out the question to whoever might hear it. Skylitzes was not far away, talking with Vakhtang of Gunib. He raised his head. “It’s the funeral marker for a dead town,” he told the Greek. “You’ve seen how they build with mud brick hereabouts. They have to; it’s all there is in this country. No stone here to speak of, Phos knows. The stuff is flimsy, and the people don’t care for work any more than they do anywhere else. When a house or a tavern falls down, they rebuild on top of the rubble. Do it enough times, and there’s your hillock. That should be plain to anyone, I’d think.”

  Gorgidas scowled at the officer’s patronizing tone. Skylitzes let out one of his rare, short laughs. “See how it feels to get a lecture instead of giving one,” he said. Ears burning, Gorgidas quickly stowed his tablet.

  Rakio did not notice his lover’s discomfiture; he was still complaining about the countryside. “It looks like it leprosy has. What parts are in crop seem rich enough, but there are so many patches of desert, ugly and useless both.”

  Overhearing him, Skylitzes said, “Those are new; blame the Yezda for them. They made them by—”

  “Destroying the local irrigation works,” Gorgidas interrupted. He was not about to have his self-esteem tweaked twice running. “Without the Tutub and the Tib, this whole land would be waste. It only grows where their waters reach. But the Yezda are nomads—what do they care about crops? Their herds can live on thorns and thistles,
and if they starve away the farmers here, so much the better for them.”

  “Just what I would have said,” Skylitzes said, adding, “but at twice the length.”

  “What are you arguing about?” Vakhtang demanded in the plains speech. When Skylitzes had translated, the Erzrumi advised Gorgidas, “Pay no attention to him. I have not known him long, but I see he bites every word to test it before he lets it out.”

  “Better that way than the flood of drivel Goudeles spouts,” the officer said, not missing the chance to score off the man who was a political rival back in Videssos.

  Vakhtang, though, favored the bureaucrat’s more florid style of oratory. “Meaning can disappear with not enough words as well as from too many.”

  They hashed it back and forth the rest of the day as they rode through farmland and desert. It made for a good argument; there were points on both sides, but it was not important enough for anyone to take very seriously.

  With empty fields all around, Gorgidas forgot he was at war. Rakio, though, knew at a glance what that emptiness meant. “They hide from us,” he said. “Peasants always do. In a week come, and the fields will be full of farmers.”

  “No doubt you’re right,” the Greek sighed. It saddened him to think that to the locals he was only another invader.

  “Yezda!” The peasant was short, stooped, and naked, with great staring eyes. He pointed to an artificial mound on the southern horizon, larger and better-preserved than the one Rakio had noticed a couple of days before. He rapidly opened and closed his hands several times to show that they were numerous.

  Arigh frowned. “Our scouts saw nothing there this morning.” He glanced at the native, who repeated his gestures. “I wish you spoke a language some one of us could follow.” But the farmer had only the guttural tongue of the Hundred Cities, reduced to a patois by centuries of subjection to Makuran and the Yezda.

  He smiled ingratiatingly at the Arshaum chief, pantomiming riders going up to tether their horses in the ruins. He pointed to the sun, waved it through the sky backwards. “This was yesterday?” Arigh asked. The local shrugged, not understanding. “Worth another look,” Arigh decided. He ordered a halt and sent a squad of riders out to examine the hillock.

  It was nearly twilight when they came back. “Nothing around there,” their leader told Arigh angrily. “No tracks, no horseturds, no signs of fire, nothing.”

  The peasant read the scout’s voice and fell to his knees in the dirt in front of Arigh. He was shaking with fear, but kept stubbornly pointing south. “What’s he sniveling about?” Gorgidas asked, walking up after seeing to his pony.

  “He claims there are soldiers up on that hillock there, but he lies,” the Arshaum answered. “He’s cost us hours with his nonsense; I ought to cut off his ears for him for that.” He gestured so the native would understand. The local cringed and went flat on his belly, wailing out something in his own language.

  Gorgidas scratched his head. “Why would he put himself in danger to lie to you? He has no reason to love the Yezda; see how well he lives under them.” Every rib of the farmer’s body was plainly visible beneath his dirty skin. “Maybe he’s just trying to do you a favor.” The Greek wanted to believe that; he did not like being put on the same level as the Yezda.

  “Where are the warriors, then?” Arigh demanded, putting his hands on his hips. “If you tell me my scouts are going blind, you might as well cut your own throat now.”

  “Blind? Hardly—we’d be dead ten times over if they were. But still …” He eyed the peasant, who had given up moaning and was gazing at him in mute appeal. The physician’s trained glance caught the faint cloudiness of an early cataract in the man’s left eye. His mind made a sudden leap. “Not blind—but blinded? Magic could hide soldiers better than rubble or brush.”

  “That is a thought,” Arigh admitted. “If I’d taken this lout—” He stirred the peasant with his foot; the fellow groaned and covered his face, expecting to die the next instant. “—more seriously, I’d have sent a shaman to smell the place out.” He became the brisk commander once more. “All right, you’ve made your point. Get Tolui and round up a company of men, then go find out what’s going on.”

  “Me?” the Greek said in dismay.

  “You. This is your idea. Ride it or fall off. Otherwise I have no choice but to think Manure-foot here a spy, don’t I?”

  Arigh, Gorgidas thought, was getting uncomfortably good at making people do what he wanted. “A concealment spell?” Tolui said when the doctor found the shaman eating curded mares’ milk. “You could well be right. That’s not battle magic; whoever cast it could not mind if it fell apart as soon as his men burst from ambush.”

  He drew his tunic over his head and undid the drawstring of his trousers with a sigh. “In this weather the mask is a torment, and the robe is of thick suede. Ah, well, better by night than by day.”

  “Round up a company,” Arigh had said, but Gorgidas had no authority over the nomads, who did not fancy taking orders from an outsider. Tolui’s presence finally helped the Greek persuade a captain of a hundred to lead out his command. “A hunt for a ghost stag, is it?” the officer said sourly. He was a broken-nosed man named Karaton, whose high voice ruined the air of sullen ferocity he tried to assume.

  His men grumbled as they wolfed down their food and resaddled their horses. Karaton worked off his annoyance by swearing at Gorgidas when the physician was the last one ready. Still, it was not quite dark when they rode for the mound that had once been a city.

  Rakio caught up with them halfway there. He gave Gorgidas a reproachful look as he trotted up beside him. “If you go to fight, why not me tell?”

  “Sorry,” the physician muttered. In fact he had not thought of it; he always had to remind himself that his comrades did not share his distaste for combat. Rakio was as eager as Viridovix once had been.

  The hillock was ghostly by moonlight. Atop it Gorgidas could see stretches of wall still untumbled; his mind’s eye summoned up a time when all the brickwork was whole and the streets swarming with perfumed men dressed in long tunics and carrying walking sticks, with veiled women, their figures robed against strangers’ glances. The place would have echoed with jangling music and loud, happy talk. It was silent now. Not even night birds sang.

  Like a good soldier, Karaton automatically sent his men to surround the base of the hill, but his heart was not in it. He waved sarcastically. “Ten thousand hiding up there, at least.”

  “Oh, stop squeaking at me,” Gorgidas snapped, wishing he had never set eyes on the peasant in the first place. He hated looking the fool. In his self-annoyance he did not notice Karaton stiffen with outrage and half draw his saber.

  “Stop, both of you,” Tolui said. “I must have harmony around me if the spirits are to answer my summons.” There was not a word of truth in that, but it gave both men a decent excuse not to quarrel.

  Karaton subsided with a growl. “Why call the spirits, shaman? A child of four could tell you this place is dead as a sheepskin coat.”

  “Then fetch a child of four next time and leave me in peace,” Tolui said. Echoing from behind the devil-mask he wore, his voice carried an otherworldly authority. Karaton touched a finger to his forehead in apology.

  Tolui drew from his saddlebag a flat, murkily transparent slab of some waxy stone, which was transfixed by a thick needle of a different stone. “Chalcedony and emery,” he explained to Gorgidas. “The hardness of the emery lets a man peering through the clear chalcedony pierce most illusions.”

  “Give it to me,” Karaton said impatiently. He squinted up to the top of the mound. “Nothing,” he said—but was there doubt in his voice? Tolui took the seeing-stone back and handed it to Gorgidas. Things at the crown of the hillock seemed to jump when he put it to his eye, but steadied quickly.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “There was a flicker, but …” He offered the stone to Tolui. “See for yourself. The toy is yours, after all; you should be able to use
it best.”

  The shaman lifted the mask from his head and set it on his knee. He raised the stone and gazed through it for more than a minute. Gorgidas felt the backwash of his concentration as he channeled his vision to penetrate semblance and see truth.

  The physician had never thought much about Tolui’s power as a sorcerer. If anything, he assumed the shaman was of no great strength, as he had been second to Onogun until Bogoraz poisoned Arghun’s old wizard because he favored Videssos. Since then Tolui’s magic had always been adequate, but the Greek, not seeing him truly tested, went on reckoning him no more than a hedge-wizard mainly interested in herbs, roots, and petty divinations.

  He abruptly realized he had misjudged the shaman. When Tolui cried, “Wind spirits, come to my aid! Blow away the cobwebs of enchantment before me!” the night seemed to hold its breath.

  A howling rose above the hillock, as of a storm, but no wind buffeted Gorgidas’ face. Then Karaton shouted in amazement while his men drew bows and bared swords. Like a curtain whisked away from in front of a puppet-theater’s stage, the illusion of emptiness at the crest of the hill was swept aside. Half a dozen campfires blazed among the ruins, with warriors sprawled around them at their ease.

  The first arrows were in the air before Karaton could give the order to shoot. A Yezda pitched forward into one of the fires; another screamed as he was hit. A different scream went up, too, this one of fury, as the pair of wizards with the enemy felt their covering glamour snatched away.

  “Up and take them!” Karaton yelled. “Quick, before they get their wits about them and go for weapons and armor!”

  Shouting to demoralize the Yezda further, his men drove their ponies up the steep sides of the hill, then dismounted and scrambled toward the top on foot. Gorgidas and Rakio were with them, grabbing at shrubs or chunks of brick for handholds. Looking up toward the crest, the Greek saw the campfires and running figures of the Yezda shimmer and start to fade as their sorcerers tried to bring down the veil once more. But Tolui was still working against them, and the fear and excitement of their own men and the Arshaum ate at their magic as well. The fires brightened again.