Swords of the Legion (Videssos)

by Harry Turtledove

  But when he dismounted to offer such sympathy as he could, Gorgidas blazed at him: “He’s not dead, you bloody witless muttonhead. It’s worse; the Yezda have him.”

  Having seen the grisly warning in the army’s path, Viridovix knew what he meant. “No help for it but that we get him back, is there now?”

  “How?” Gorgidas demanded, waving his hand toward the retreating Yezda. As was their habit, they were breaking up and fleeing every which way. “He could be anywhere.” Clenching his fists in despair, the physician turned on Viridovix. “And what is this talk of ‘we’? Why should you care what happens to my catamite?” He flung the word out defiantly, as if he would sooner hear it in his own mouth than the Gaul’s.

  Viridovix stood silent for a moment. “Why me? For one thing, I wouldna gi’ over a dead dog to the Yezda for prisoner. If your twisty Greek mind must have its reasons, there’s one. For another, your friend,” he emphasized, turning his back on the hateful word, and on his own thoughts of a few minutes before, “is a braw chap, and after deserving a better fate. And for a third,” he finished quietly, “didn’t I no hear you tried to chase north over Pardraya all alone, the time Varatesh took me?”

  “You shame me,” Gorgidas said, hanging his head. Memory of Rakio’s remarks when the Yrmido had saved him came scalding back.

  “Och, I didna aim to,” Viridovix said. “If kicking the fool arse o’ you would ha’ worked the trick, it’s that I’d have done, and enjoyed it the more, too.”

  “Go howl!” The physician could not help laughing. “You fox of a barbarian, no doubt you have the rescue planned already.”

  “That I don’t. Your honor has made the name for being the canny one. Me, I’d sooner brawl nor think—easier and less wearing, both.”

  “Liar,” Gorgidas said. But his wits, once the Gaul had dragged him unwilling from despondency, were working again. He said briskly, “We’ll need to see Arigh for soldiers, then, and Tolui, too, I think. What better than magic for tracking someone?”

  To their surprise and anger, Arigh turned them down flat when they asked him for a squad. None of their arguments would change his mind. “You’ve chosen a madman’s errand,” he declared, “and one I do not expect you to come back from. Kill yourselves if you must, but I will not order any man to follow you.”

  “Is that the way a friend acts?” Viridovix cried.

  “It is how a chief acts,” the Arshaum returned steadily. “What sort of herdsman would I be if I sought a lost sheep by sending twenty more to meet the wolves? I have all my force to think of, and that is more important than any one person. Besides, if the Erzrumi is lucky he is dead by now.” He turned away to discuss the evening’s campsite with two of his commanders of a hundred.

  That what he said had a great deal of truth in it did not help. Gorgidas was coldly furious as he went looking for Tolui. He found the shaman and learned that Arigh had preceded him. When he put his request to Tolui, the nomad shook his head, saying, “I am ordered not to accompany you.”

  “Och, and what’s a wee order, now?” Viridovix said airily. “They’re all very well when you’d be doing what they tell you with or without, but a bit of a bother otherwise.”

  Tolui raised an eyebrow. “My head answers for this one.” Seeing Gorgidas about to explode, he stopped him with an upraised hand. “Softly, softly. I may be able to help you yet. Do you have anything of your comrade’s with you?”

  From his left wrist the physician drew off a silver bracelet stamped with the images of the Four Prophets. “Handsome work,” Tolui remarked. He reached behind him, took the staring devil-mask of his office from his saddlebag, and lowered it over his head. “Aid me, spirits!” he called softly, his voice remote and disembodied. “Travel the path between the possession and the man and show the way so the journey may be made in this world as well as in your country.”

  He cocked his head as if listening. With an annoyed toss of his head, he got out his fringed oval summoning drum. “Aid me, aid me!” he called again, more sharply, and tapped the drumhead in an intricate rhythm. Gorgidas and Viridovix started when an angry voice spoke from nowhere. Tolui laid his command on the spirit, or tried to, for it roared in protest. With drum and voice he brought it to obedience and flung out his hands to send it forth.

  “They have your view of orders,” he said to Viridovix.

  “Honh!” The Celt waited with Gorgidas for the spirit’s return. Watching the Greek’s set features, all the more revealing in their effort to conceal, he knew what pictures his friend was imagining. He had his own set, and it was not hard to substitute Rakio’s face for Seirem’s.

  Tolui repeated that odd, listening pose, then grunted in satisfaction and handed the bracelet back to Gorgidas. Accepting it, the physician was puzzled until he noticed the faint bluish glow crowning the head of the leftmost prophet. Answering the unspoken question, the shaman said, “There is your guide. As the direction of your search changes, the light will shift from figure to figure, from west to north to east to south; it will grow brighter as you near your goal.”

  He waved aside thanks. Gorgidas and Viridovix hurried away; the sun was low in the west, and the army slowing as it prepared to camp. Somewhere the Yezda would be doing the same, Gorgidas thought—if they had not made a special stop already.

  As they rode away, someone shouted behind them. Viridovix swore—was Arigh going to stop them after all? He lay his sword across his knees. “If himself wants to make a shindy of it, I’ll oblige him, indeed and I will.”

  Their pursuer, however, was no Arshaum, but one of the Yrmido, a quiet, solid man named Mynto. “I with come,” he said in broken Vaspurakaner, of which the Greek and Celt had picked up a handful of words. He was leading a fully saddled spare horse. “For Rakio.”

  Viridovix smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “What a pair o’ cullions the two of us make! We’d have had the poor wight riding pillion, and belike wrecking our horses for fair.”

  Gorgidas was marshaling what Vaspurakaner he knew. “Big danger,” he said to Mynto. “Why you come?”

  The Yrmido looked at him. “Same reason you do.”

  The answer was one the physician might have been as glad not to have, but there could be no arguing Mynto’s right to join them. “Come, then,” the physician said. Viridovix managed to swallow a grin before the Greek turned his way.

  The peaks of Dilbat hid the sun. The day’s vicious heat subsided a little. Night in the land of the Hundred Cities had a beauty missing from the flat, monotonous river plain by day. The sky was a great swatch of blue-black velvet, with the stars’ diamonds tossed carelessly across it.

  The horsemen, though, had little chance to enjoy the loveliness. Swarms of mosquitoes rose, humming venomously, from the fields and the edges of the irrigation channels to make the journey a misery. The riders slapped and cursed, slapped and cursed. Their mounts’ tails switched back and forth as they did their best to whisk the bugs away. Gorgidas was reminded of the fight between Herakles and the Hydra; for every insect he mashed, two more took its place.

  The mosquitoes particularly tormented Viridovix, whose face in the starlight was puffed and blotchy. “Dogmeat I’ll be before long,” he said sadly, waving his arms in a futile effort to frighten the biters away.

  Thanks to a swollen bite over one eye, Gorgidas had to squint to see the bracelet that was steering them. “North,” he said after a bit, as the blue radiance began to shift, and then, a little later, “More west again.” He had no doubt the glow was stronger than it had been when they set out.

  As well as they could, the three of them tried to decide what they would do when they found Rakio. More than language hindered them; much depended on how many enemies held the Yrmido and what they would be doing to him when the rescuers arrived. Viridovix made the key point: “We maun be quick. Any long fight and we’re for it, and no mistake.”

  They skirted one Yezda camp without being spotted; the bracelet was still guiding them nort
hwest. Soon after, a squadron of Yezda rode past them only a couple of hundred yards away. No challenges rang out; the squad leader must have taken them for countrymen. “No moon—good,” Mynto whispered.

  “Bloody good,” Gorgidas said explosively once the Yezda were out of earshot.

  He was hiding the bracelet in his sleeve to conceal its brightness when he and his companions passed the mound that marked yet another abandoned city. As they came round it they saw several fires ahead and men moving in front of them. When the physician checked the bracelet, its glow almost dazzled him. “That must be it.”

  “Yes.” Mynto pointed. He was farsighted; they had to draw closer before the unmoving figure by one of the fires meant anything to the Greek. He caught his breath sharply. No wonder the man did not move—he was tied to a stake.

  “Ready for sport, are they, the omadhauns?” Viridovix said. “We’ll give them summat o’ sport.”

  They made plans in low mutters, then almost had to scrap them at once when a sentry called a challenge from out of the darkness. “Not so much noise, there,” Viridovix hissed at the Yezda in the Khamorth speech they shared, doing his best to imitate the fellow’s accent. “We’ve a message for your captain from the khagan himself. Come fetch it, an you would; there’s more stops for us after the one here.”

  The sentry rode forward, not especially suspicious. He was only a few feet away when he exclaimed, “You’re no—” His voice cut off abruptly as Mynto hurled half a brick at his face. He went over his horse’s tail.

  They waited tensely to see whether the noise would disturb the Yezda in the camp. When it was clear the enemy had not noticed, Viridovix said, “Here’s how we’ll try it, then,” and shifted into his lame Vaspurakaner, eked out with gestures, so Mynto could follow.

  “That place is mine,” Gorgidas protested when the Gaul came to his own role.

  “No,” Viridovix said firmly. “Mynto has his chain-mail coat, and I this whopping great blade and all the practice using it. Each to the task he’s suited for, or the lot of us perish, and Rakio, too. Is it aye or nay?”

  “Yes, damn you.” Having lived his life by logic and reason, the physician wished he could forget them.

  “You’ll get in a lick or two, that you will,” Viridovix promised as they moved in. They kept their horses to a walk, advancing as quietly as they could. The Yezda around the fires went about their business. One walked up to Rakio and slapped him across the face with the casual cruelty so common among them. Several others laughed and applauded.

  Gorgidas could hear them plainly. With his comrades, he was less than fifty yards from the campfires before one of the Yezda turned his head their way—close enough for them to see his eyes go big and round and his mouth drop open in astonishment.

  “Now!” Viridovix bellowed, snatching the reins of the spare horse from Mynto. Spurring their beasts, they stormed forward.

  They were at a full gallop when they crashed down on the startled Yezda, shouting at the top of their lungs. In the first panic-filled moments, they must have seemed an army. The Yezda scattered before them. Men screamed as lance pierced or pounding hooves trampled. One soldier dove into a fire to escape a swing of Viridovix’ sword and dashed out the other side with his coat ablaze.

  Gorgidas swerved sharply toward the ponies tethered beside the camp. Viridovix had been right; already a couple of Yezda were there, clambering onto their horses. He cut them down, then rode through the rearing snorting animals, cutting lines and slashing at the horses themselves. He screeched and flapped his arms, doing everything he could to madden the beasts and make them useless to their masters.

  Cries of fright turned to rage as the Yezda realized how few their attackers were. But Mynto in their midst was working a fearful slaughter, alone or not. His charger’s iron-shod feet cracked ribs and split skulls; his spear killed until the clutch of a dying warrior wrenched it from his grasp. Then he pulled his saber free and, bending low in the saddle, slashed savagely at a pair of Yezda rushing toward him. One spun and fell, the other reeled away with a hand clapped to his slit nose.

  In the chaos Viridovix made straight for Rakio. He sprang down from his horse beside the Yrmido. The Yezda had not really begun to enjoy themselves with their prisoner. He was bruised and battered, one eye swollen shut, a trickle of blood starting from the corner of his mouth where the last slap had landed. His mail shirt, of course, had gone for booty. His undertunic, ripped open to the waist, showed that his captors had tested their daggers’ edges on his flesh.

  But he was conscious, alert, and not begging to die. “Sorry your evening to disrupt,” he said, moving his wrists so Viridovix could get at his bonds more easily. The Celt sliced through them and stooped to free his ankles. As he did so, a sword bit into Rakio’s post just above his head. He half rose, bringing his dagger up in the underhanded killing stroke of a man who knows steel. A Yezda shrieked, briefly.

  Rakio staggered once the thongs that bound his feet were cut. When Viridovix steadied him, he turned his head and kissed the Gaul square on the mouth. “I am in your debt,” he said.

  Sure his face was redder than his hair, Viridovix managed to grunt, “Can ye ride?”

  “It is ride or die,” the Yrmido said.

  Viridovix helped him onto the horse Mynto had brought and set his feet in the stirrups. Hands still too numb to hold the reins, Rakio clasped them round the horse’s neck.

  Viridovix seized the lead line and vaulted aboard his own pony. With a wild howl of triumph, he dug his spurs into its flanks and slapped its muzzle when it turned to bite. Neighing shrilly, it bolted forward. A Yezda leaped at Rakio to tear him from the saddle, but spied Mynto bearing down at him and thought better of it. A crackle of excited talk ran between the two Sworn Fellows.

  The Gaul’s screech cut through the turmoil as easily as his knife tore flesh. With a skill he had not had till he went to the steppe, Gorgidas used the reins, the pressure of his knees, and a firm voice to steer his pony through the loosed animals that plunged and kicked all around him. He pounded after his comrades.

  By the time he caught up with them, Rakio was in control of his own horse and Viridovix had let the lead line go. He rode close to the Yrmido and reached out to clasp his hand. “As I said I would be, I am here,” he said.

  Eyes shining, Rakio nodded, but winced at the Greek’s touch; his hand was still puffy from trapped blood. “Sorry,” Gorgidas said, the physician’s tone and the lover’s inseparable in his voice. “Are you much hurt?”

  “Not so much as in another hour I would have been,” Rakio said lightly. “All this looks worse than it is.” He reached out himself, carefully, and ruffled the Greek’s hair. “You were brave to come looking for me; I know that you are no warrior born.” Before Gorgidas could say anything to that, he went on, “How did you find me?”

  “Your gift.” Gorgidas lifted his arm to show Rakio the bracelet, its light now vanished. He explained Tolui’s magic.

  “You have a greater one me given,” the Yrmido said. With equestrian ability Gorgidas still could not have matched, he leaned over to embrace the physician.

  “Och, enough o’ your spooning, the twa o’ ye,” Viridivox said, the memory of Rakio’s kiss making him speak more gruffly than he had intended. He was far too set on women for it to have stirred him, but it had not revolted him, either, as he would have expected. He pointed back to the Yezda camp. “Pay attention behind. They’re coming round, I’m thinking. Bad cess for us they’re so quick about it.”

  The confused cries and groans of the wounded were fading in the distance, but Gorgidas could also hear purposeful orders. When he turned his head, he saw the first pursuing riders silhouetted against the campfires. He cursed himself for not doing a better job of scattering their horses.

  Viridovix brought him up short. “Where was the time for it? Nought to be gained worrying now, any road.”

  More familiar with the ground than their quarry, the Yezda closed the gap. An arrow clattere
d against a stone somewhere behind them. It was a wild, wasted shot, but others would come closer before long. Viridovix bit his lips. “The sons o’ pigs’ll be overhauling us, the gods send ’em a bloody flux.”

  “Up the mound, then?” Gorgidas said unhappily. They had agreed the dead city would make a refuge at need, but had hoped they would not have to use it. “We’ll be trapping ourselves there.”

  “I ken, I ken,” the Gaul replied. “But there’s no help for it, unless your honor has a better notion. Sure as sure they’re running us down on the flat. In the ruins we’ll make ’em work to winkle us out, at least, and maybe find a way to get off. It’s a puir chance, I’m thinking, but better than none.”

  Having seen the Yezda caught in a similar position, Gorgidas knew just how slim the chance was, but some of them had indeed escaped. And without cover, he and his comrades could not shake off their pursuers; Viridovix was right about that, too. The physician jerked on the reins, changing his pony’s direction. The others were already making for the artificial mound.

  Shouts from behind said their swerve had been marked. By then they were reining in sharply, slowing their beasts to a walk as they picked their way up the steep, cluttered sides of the mound. Mynto, heaviest in his armor, dismounted and climbed on foot, leading his horse. His companions soon had to follow his example.

  Rakio came up side by side with Viridovix. Fighting through brush and shattered masonry that shifted under his feet at every step, the Celt paid little attention until Rakio nudged him. He turned. Even by starlight, the puzzlement was plain on Rakio’s face. “Why are you here?” he asked, softly so Gorgidas and Mynto could not overhear. “I thought you my enemy were.”

  Once he had untangled that, Viridovix stared at the Yrmido. “And would you be telling me whatever gave ye sic a daft notion, now?”