He was not, however, a man to be overawed for long. “Why is it such a privilege, eh?”
“Fetch me a parchment, pen and ink, and some sealing wax.” At the caravan master’s order, one of his men brought them. The bureaucrat wrote a few quick lines. “Now, have you fire?” he asked.
“Would I be without it?” Several of Tahmasp’s men carried fire-safes, to keep hot coals alive while they traveled. One of them upended his over a pile of tinder. When a small blaze sprang up, Goudeles lit the red wax’ wick and let several drops fall at the foot of his parchment. He jammed his seal ring into the wax while it was still soft and handed Tahmasp the finished document.
The caravaneer squatted by the little fire. His lips moved as he read. Suddenly a grin replaced the scowl he had been wearing since the Romans and Goudeles entered his encampment. He turned to his followers and shouted, “Exemption from imperial tolls for the next three years!”
The guardsmen and merchants burst into cheers. Tahmasp enfolded Goudeles in a beefy embrace and bussed him on both cheeks. “Little man, we have a deal!”
“How delightful.” The pen-pusher disentangled himself as fast as he could.
While Marcus was waving to the Arshaum that agreement had been struck, Tahmasp dug an elbow into Goudeles’ ribs. Goudeles yelped. The caravaneer said craftily, “You know, it’s likely I could beat the tolls anyway. Even your damned inspectors can’t be everywhere.”
“I daresay.” Goudeles held out his hand. “Shall I take the document back, then? The penalty for smuggling is, of course, confiscation of all illegal goods and a branding for the criminals involved.”
Tahmasp hastily made the parchment disappear. “No, no, no need of that. It is, as I said, a bargain.”
The rest of the Videssian party, Arigh, and a few of his commanders rode up to fraternize with the caravan master and his aides; bargain or no bargain, Tahmasp was nervous about letting too many of his new-found allies near his goods. He was politic enough, however, to send several skins of wine out to the plainsmen—enough to make them happy without turning them rowdy.
Having been drinking naught but water for some time, Scaurus enjoyed the wine all the more. He was in the middle of his second cup when he exclaimed, “I almost forgot!” He went over to Tahmasp, who was simultaneously asking quetions of Viridovix—whose red hair fascinated him—and answering them from Gorgidas, who wanted to know everything there was to know about all the strange places the caravaneer had seen in his travels. Tahmasp chuckled when the tribune delivered Shenuta’s message.
“So he thinks my dice are crooked, does he? He’s wrong; I’d never do such a thing,” the burly trader declared righteously. Then he winked. “But I’m surprised the old sand shark has a robe to call his own if he’s still using the pair he had that night. Those were loaded, all right—the wrong way!”
His booming laughter filled the desert night.
XI
“THIS IS ALL MOST IRREGULAR,” EVTYKHIOS KORYKOS SAID. The hypasteos of Serrhes had said that several times already. Irregular or not, it was plainly too much for him. Nothing ever happened in Serrhes, a small city at the junction of the desert and the imperial westlands’ central plateau. Even the Yezda passed it by; their invasion routes ran further north. All the convulsions in Videssian affairs had left it untouched and nearly forgotten.
That suited Korykos, whose chief aim was to vegetate along with his town. He stared resentfully at the rough-looking strangers who packed his office. “Irregular,” he repeated. “This document grants an unprecedented exemption, and I am not certain I possess the authority to countersign it.”
“You tripe-faced idiot!” Tahmasp roared. “No one gives a frike whether you countersign it or not. Just obey it and go back to gathering dust.”
“Though his phrasing is crude, the good caravan master has captured the essence of the matter. The authority in question here is my own,” Goudeles said smoothly. He confused the hypasteos more than any of the others. He looked like a barbarian, but spoke like the great noble he claimed to be.
“I also approve,” Marcus put in. He bothered Korykos almost as much as Goudeles did. His speech and appearance both proclaimed him an outlander, but if he was to be believed, he was not only a general but also Goudeles’ superior in the imperial chancery. And he knew so much more than Korykos about doings at the capital that there was no way to make him out a liar.
“Give us supplies and some fresh horses and send us on our way to Gavras at Videssos,” Arigh said. Normally he would have scared Korykos witless. Dealing with him now was something of a relief—he did not pretend he was anything but what he seemed.
He also gave the hypasteos a chance to vent his suspicions and a moment of petty triumph. “The Avtokrator is not at Videssos,” Korykos said primly. “Why are allegedly high imperial officials ignorant of such a fact?”
He did not enjoy the discomfiture he created. “Well, where is he, you worthless cretin?” Gaius Philippus barked, leaning over Korykos’ desk as if about to tear the answer from him by force. Arigh was right beside him. If Thorisin had gone east against the Namdaleni, the Arshaum’s hopes were ruined. This time Goudeles did not try to hold them back. He was leaning forward himself, his right hand on the hilt of his sword, an unconscious measure of how much he had changed in the past year.
“Why, at Amorion, of course,” Korykos got out through white lips.
“Impossible!” Scaurus, Gaius Philippus, and Tahmasp said it together. The trader’s caravan had left the place one step ahead of the Yezda.
“Oh, is it?” Korykos fumbled through the parchments on his desk. Serrhes being as slow as it was, there weren’t many of them. Marcus recognized the sunburst of the imperial seal as the hypasteos finally found the document he was after. Holding it at arm’s length, he read: “ ‘ … and so it is required that you send a contingent numbering one third of the garrison of your city to join ourself and our armies at Amorion. No excuse will be tolerated for failure to obey this our command.’ ” He looked up. “I sent off the nine men, as ordered.”
“Wonderful,” Gaius Philippus said. “I’m sure the Yezda thank you for the snack.” Korykos blinked, wondering what he meant. The veteran sighed and gave it up.
“That definitely is Gavras—no mistaking the blunt, ugly style,” Goudeles said. Skylitzes made a noise at the back of his throat, but let the bureaucrat’s sneer slide.
“What’s he doing in Amorion?” Marcus persisted. Aside from the Yezda, the town had been Zemarkhos’, and not under imperial control at all.
The tribune had not intended the question for Korykos, but it seemed to push the harassed official over the edge. “I neither know, nor care!” he shrilled. “Go find out and leave me a peace!” With one of the spasms of energy weak men show, he grapped the toll exemption from a startled Tahmasp, scrawled his signature in large letters under Goudeles’, and threw the document in the caravaneer’s face. “Go on, get out, before I call the guards on you!”
Tahmasp tapped his forehead. “All eighteen you have left, eh?” Marcus said in his politest tones. Arigh sputtered laughter, adding, “Bring ’em on! The roomful of us’ll clean ’em out, the three that aren’t hiding already.”
“Get out! Get out!” Korykos purpled with impotent fury. Skylitzes stiffened to attention and threw him an ironic salute. The hypasteos was still blustering when his unwelcome guests filed out, but Marcus did not miss the relief on his face as they left.
“Troglodytes!” Gorgidas exclaimed a couple of days out of Serrhes. Instead of raising houses from the soft gray stone of the area, the locals carved their homes, even their temples to Phos, into the living rock. The Greek scribbled observations whenever he passed through a village: “Because even its users do not view the technique as natural, they imitate more usual styles of construction as closely as they can. Thus one sees brickwork, shutters, lintels, even balustrades, all executed in relief to fool the eye into thinking them actually present.”
The
people of the rock villages reacted to the arrival of the Arshaum much as had those of Serrhes. Most slammed their doors tight and, Marcus was sure, piled their heaviest furniture behind them. The adventurous few came out to the town marketplaces to trade with Tahmasp’s merchants.
The caravan master was unhappy at how slow business was. “What good does it do me to be tax-free if no one is buying?”
“What good would it do you to be rich when the Yezda swoop down on you?” Marcus retorted.
“I can’t say you’re wrong,” Tahmasp admitted, “but I’d like it better if it didn’t look so much like they already had.”
His complaint held justice. As the Arshaum traveled east toward Amorion, to the eye they might have been just one more nomadic band drifting into Videssos in the wake of the imperial defenses’ collapse after Maragha. At a distance, even the Yezda took them for countrymen. Small parties of horsemen passed them several times without a second glance. And to the Videssians, they seemed as frightful as the rest of the nomads. Even Goudeles’ formidable eloquence was not always enough to win the locals’ confidence.
“Can’t hardly trust nobody these days,” one grizzled village elder said when finally coaxed out of his home, a building whose fresh stonework showed an eye for defense. He hawked and spat. He spat very well, being without front teeth in his upper jaw. He went on, “We would have had trouble ourselves last year, but for dumb luck.”
“How’s that?” Tahmasp asked. He seemed a bit less morose than he had; the villagers were coming out to buy, once they saw nothing had happened to their leader. Women exclaimed over lengths of cloth dyed Makuraner-style in colorful stripes and argued with merchants about the quality of their bay leaves while their husbands fingered the edges of daggers and tried to get the most in exchange for debased goldpieces.
The old man spat again. “We was holding a wedding feast—my granddaughter’s, in fact. Next morning when we go out to tend our herds, what do we find? Tracks to show a Yezda war party had come right close to the edge of town, then turned round and rode like Skotos was after ’em. Must’ve been the singing and dancing and carrying on fooled ’em into thinking we had soldiers here, and they lit out.”
“A genuine use for marriage,” Goudeles murmured, “something I had not previously believed possible.” Having met the bureaucrat’s wife, a rawboned harridan who only stopped talking to sleep, Marcus knew what prompted the remark.
The elder took it for a joke and laughed till he had to hug his skinny sides. “Hee, hee! Tell that to my missus, I will. I’ll sleep in the barn for a week, but worth it, gentlemen, worth it.”
“Be thankful you’re after having one to rail at ye, now,” Viridovix said, which perplexed the Videssian but failed to dampen his mirth, leaving both of them dissatisfied with the exchange.
The journey across the plateau country put all of Tahmasp’s gifts on display. He always knew which stream bed would be dry and which had water in it, which band of herdsmen would sell or trade a few head of cattle and which run them deep into the badlands at first sight of strangers.
He also had a knack for knowing which routes would have Yezda on them and which would be clear. The Arshaum only had to fight once, and then briefly. A band of Yezda collided with Arigh’s vanguard and skirmished until the rest of the plainsmen came up to help their comrades, at which point their foes abruptly lost interest in the encounter and withdrew.
Along with his other talents, the swashbuckling caravaneer was soon fluently profane in the Arshaum tongue. His huge voice and swaggering manner made the plainsmen smile, but before long they were obeying him as readily as they did Arigh, who shook his head in bemused respect. “This once I wish I could write like you do,” he remarked to Gorgidas one day. “I’d take notes, I really would.”
For all Tahmasp’s skills, though, there was no escaping the fact the invaders were loose in the westlands. Broken bridges, the burned-out shell of a noble’s estate, unplanted cropland all told the same story. And once the Arshaum traversed a battlefield where, by the wreckage still lying about, both sides had been Yezda.
As was his way, Gorgidas looked for larger meanings in what he saw. “That field shows Videssos’ hope,” he said when they camped for the evening. “It is the nature of evil to divide against itself, and that is its greatest weakness. Think of how Wulghash and Avshar fell out with each other instead of working together against their common enemy.”
“Well said!” Lankinos Skylitzes exclaimed. “At the last great test, Phos will surely triumph.”
“I didn’t say that,” Gorgidas answered tartly. Skylitzes’ generalizations were not the sort he was after.
Gaius Philippus irritated both the Greek and the Videssian by objecting. “I wouldn’t lump Avshar and Wulghash together. You ask me, they’re different.”
“How, when they both seek to destroy the Empire?” Skylitzes said.
“So did the Namdaleni last year—and would again if they saw the chance. Wulghash, from what I saw of him, is more like that—an enemy, aye, but not wicked for wickedness’ sake, if you take my meaning. Avshar, now …” The senior centurion paused, shaking his head. “Avshar is something else again.”
No one argued that.
Marcus said, “I think there’s something wrong with your whole scheme, Gorgidas, not just with the detail of how evil Wulghash is—though I read him the same way Gaius does.”
“Go on.” The prospect of a lively argument drew Gordigas more than criticism bothered him.
Scaurus picked his words with care. “It strikes me that faction and mistrust are part of the nature of mankind, not of evil alone. Otherwise how would you explain the strife Videssos has seen the last few years, or for that matter, Rome, before we came here?”
When the Greek hesitated, Skylitzes gave his own people’s answer: “It is Skotos, of course, seducing men toward the wrong.”
That smug “of course” annoyed Gorgidas enough to make him forget for a moment how deeply the Videssians believed in their faith. He snapped, “Utter nonsense. The responsibility for evil lies in every man, not at the hand of some outside force. There would be no evil, unless men made it.”
That Greek confidence in the importance of the individual was something Marcus also took for granted, but it shocked Skylitzes. Viridovix had been sitting quietly by without joining the discussion, but when he saw the imperial officer’s face grow stern he tossed in one of the mordant comments that came easily to his lips these days: “Have a care there, Gordigas dear; can you no see the pile o’ fagots he’s building for you in his mind?”
On the steppe Skylitzes would have managed a sour smile and passed it off. Now he was back in his native land. His expression did not change. The discussion faltered and died. Sometimes, Marcus thought, the imperials were almost as uncomfortable to be around as their enemies—another argument against Gorgidas’ first thesis.
The little spring bubbled out from between two rocks; a streamlet trickled away eastward. “Believe it or not, it’s the rising of the Ithome,” Tahmasp said. “You can follow it straight into Amorion from here.”
“You’re not for town with us, then?” Viridovix asked disappointedly; the flamboyant caravaneer was a man after his own heart. “Where’s the sense in that, to be after coming so far and sheering off at the very end?”
“You’d starve as a merchant,” Tahmasp answered. “No trader in his right mind will hit the same city twice in one year. I’ve kept the bargain I had forced on me; now it’s time to think of my own profit again. A panegyris is coming up in Doxon in about two weeks. If I push, I’ll make it.”
Nothing anyone said would make him change his mind. When Arigh, who admired his resourcefulness, pressed him hard, he said, “Another thing is, I want out from under soldiers. Aye, your plainsmen have treated me better than I thought they would, but there’ll be a big army at Amorion, and I want no part of it. To a trader, soldiers are worse than bandits, because they have the law behind ’em. Why do you think I got
out of Mashiz?” The Arshaum had no reply to that.
Tahmasp pounded Gaius Philippus on the shoulder. “You’re all right.” He turned to Scaurus, saying, “As for you, I’m glad I don’t have to bargain against you—a high mucky-muck and never let on! Well, now that I’m shut of you, I wish you luck. I have the feeling you’ll need it.”
“So do I,” the tribune said.
He did not think Tahmasp even heard him. The caravan master was shouting orders to his guardsmen and the merchants with him. The guards, under the capable direction of Kamytzes and Muzaffar, smoothly took their places. When the merchants dawdled, Tahmasp bellowed, “Last one in line is my present to the Arshaum!” That got them moving. His big shaved head gleaming in the sun, Tahmasp burst into bawdy song as his caravan pulled away from the plainsmen, and never looked back.
“There goes a free man,” Gaius Philippus said, following him with his eyes.
“Maybe so, but how long will he stay that way if Avshar wins? It’s our job to keep him free,” Marcus answered.
“Plenty of worse work, comes to that.”
The Arshaum followed the Ithome east. It swiftly grew greater as one small tributary after another added their waters to it. By the end of their first day of travel, it was a river of respectable size, and the land through which it passed was beginning to seem familiar to the Romans.
“At this rate, we’ll make Amorion in a couple of days,” Scaurus remarked as they camped by the side of the stream.
“Aye, and Gavras bloody well better be glad to see us, too,” Gaius Philippus said. “Seeing as how he’s sitting there, he’ll have a time saying we didn’t get it back for him.”
“I wonder.” Now that their goal was so close, the tribune found himself more and more apprehensive. Had the Avtokrator pledged him only nobility, he would have felt sure of his reward. But there had been more in the bargain than that.… He wondered how Alypia was.
Swords of the Legion (Videssos) Page 35
