“What if it is?” Gaius Philippus muttered, plainly sorry he’d said anything at all.
“Well, why didn’t you court her, then?” the tribune burst out, but Gaius Philippus was doing no more talking. The veteran set his jaw and stared straight ahead as he marched, enduring Viridovix’ teasing without snapping back. After a while the Celt grew bored of his unrewarding fun and went off to talk about swordplay with Minucius.
Studying Gaius Philippus’ grim expression, Marcus came to his own conclusions. Strange that a man who was utterly fearless in battle, and who took fornication and rape as part of the warrior’s trade, should be scared witless of paying suit to a woman for whom he felt something more than lust.
Thorisin Gavras’ army hurried northeast toward the shore of the Videssian Sea. Gavras hoped to commandeer shipping and swoop down on Ortaias in the capital before the usurper could make ready to meet him. But at each port his troops approached, shipmasters hurried their vessels out to sea and sent them fleeing to bring young Sphrantzes word of his coming.
The third time that happened, at a fishing village called Tavas, Thorisin’s short temper neared the snapping point. “For two coppers I’d sack the place,” he snarled, pacing up and down like a caged tiger, watching a bulky merchantman’s brightly dyed sails recede into sea mist as it drove north out of the Bay of Rhyax before turning east for the long run to Videssos.
He spat in disgust. “Bah! What’s left here? Half a dozen fishing boats. Phos willing, I could put a good dozen men in each.”
“You ought to pillage these faithless traders and peasants. Teach them to fear you,” Komitta Rhangawe said, walking beside him. The fierce expression on her lean, aristocratic features made her resemble a hunting hawk, beautiful but deadly.
Alarmed at the bloodthirsty advice Gavras’ lady gave, Scaurus said hastily, “Perhaps it’s as well the merchant got away; Ortaias must be forewarned by now in any case. If the fleet in the city stands with him, he’d smash anything you could scrape together here.”
Komitta Rhangavve glared at even this indirect disagreement, but Thorisin sighed, a heavy, frustrated sound. “You’re probably right. If I could have brought it off at Prakana, though, four days ago—” He sighed again. “What was that thing poor Khoumnos used to say? ‘If ifs and buts were candied nuts, then everyone would be fat.’ ” Nephon Khoumnos, though, was half a year dead, struck down by Avshar’s sorcery at the battle before Maragha.
Neither Gavras nor Marcus found that a pleasant thought to dwell on. Returning rather more directly to rebutting Komitta, the tribune said, “At least the people hereabouts are for you, whatever the shipmasters do.”
The Emperor’s smile was still sour. “Of course they are—we’ve come far enough east that folk have had a good taste of Ortaias’ taxmen; aye, and of his money, too, though they’d break teeth if they tried to bite it.” Sphrantzes’ wretched coinage was a standing joke in his opponent’s army. As for his revenue agents, Scaurus had yet to see one. They ran from Thorisin even faster than the navarchs did.
Five days later came an envoy of Ortaias’ who did not flee. Accompanied by a guard force of ten horsemen, he rode deliberately up to Thorisin’s camp at evening. One of the troopers bore a white-painted shield on a spearstaff: a sign of truce.
“What can the henhearted wretch have to say to me?” Thorisin snapped, but let the emissary’s party approach.
The soldiers with Sphrantzes’ agents were nonentities—the hard shell of a nut, good only for protecting the kernel within. The envoy himself was something else again. Marcus recognized him as one of Vardanes Sphrantzes’ henchmen, but could not recall his name.
Thorisin had no such difficulty. “Ah, Pikridios, how good to see you,” he said, but there was venom in his voice.
Pikridios Goudeles affected not to notice. The bureaucrat dismounted with a sigh of relief. He’d sat his horse badly; from the look of his hands, the reins would have hurt them. They were soft and white, their only callus on the right middle fìnger. A pen-pusher right enough, Scaurus thought, feeling the aptness of the Videssian soldiery’s contemptuous term for the Empire’s civil servants.
Yet for all his un warlike look, the small, dapper Goudeles was a man to be reckoned with. His dark eyes gleamed with ironic intelligence, and the quality of his nerve was adequately attested by his very presence in the rival Emperor’s camp.
“Your Majesty,” he said to Thorisin, and went to one knee, his head bowed—not a proskynesis, but the next thing to it.
Some of Gavras’ soldiers cheered to see their lord so acclaimed by his foe’s ambassador. Others growled because the acclamation was incomplete. Thorisin himself seemed taken aback. “Get up, get up,” he said impatiently. Goudeles rose, brushing dust from the knee of his elegant riding breeches.
He made no move to speak further. The silence stretched. At last, conceding the point to him, Thorisin broke it: “Well, what now? Are you here to turn your worthless coat? What price do you want for it?”
Beneath the thin fringe of mustache, so like Vardanes’, Scaurus noticed—perhaps irrelevantly, perhaps not—Goudeles’ lip gave a delicate curl, as if to say he had noticed the insult but did not quite care to acknowledge it. “My lord Sevastokrator, I am merely here to help resolve the unfortunate misunderstanding between yourself and his Imperial Majesty the Avtokrator Ortaias Sphrantzes.”
Every trooper who heard that shouted in outrage; hands tightened on sword hilts, reached for spears and bows. “String the little bastard up!” someone yelled. “Maybe after he’s hung a while he’ll know who the real Emperor is!” Three or four men sprang forward. Goudeles’ self-control wavered; he shot an appealing glance at Thorisin Gavras.
Thorisin waved his soldiers back. They withdrew slowly, stiffly, like dogs whistled off a kill they think theirs by right. “What’s going on?” Gaius Philippus whispered to Marcus. “If this rogue won’t own Gavras as Emperor, by rights he’s fair game.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” the tribune answered. With Gavras’ hot temper, Scaurus had expected him to deal roughly with Goudeles, ambassador or no—in civil war such niceties of usage were easy enough to cast aside. It was lucky Komitta was not in earshot of all mis, he thought; she would already be heating pincers.
Yet Thorisin’s manner remained mild. Though a warrior by choice, he had known his share of intrigue as well, and his years at his brother’s right hand in the capital made him alert to subtleties less experienced men could miss. Voice still calm, he asked Goudeles, “So you do not reckon me rightful Avtokrator, eh?”
“Regrettably, I do not, my lord,” Goudeles said, half-bowing, “nor does my principal.” His glance at Thorisin was wary; they were fencing as surely as if they had sabers to hand.
“Just a damned rebel, am I?”
Goudeles spread his soft hands, gave a fastidious shrug.
“Then by Skotos’ dung-splattered beard,” Thorisin pounced, “why does your bloody principal—” He made the word an oath. “—still style me Sevastokrator? Is that his bribe to me, keeping a title he’ll make sure is empty? Tell your precious Sphrantzes I am not so cheaply bought.”
The envoy from the capital looked artfully pained at Gavras’ crudity. “You fail to understand, my lord. Why should you not remain Sevastokrator? The title was yours during your deeply mourned brother’s reign, and you are still close kin to the imperial house.”
Thorisin stared at him as if he had started speaking some obscure foreign tongue. “Are you witstruck, man? The Sphrantzai are no kin of mine—I share no blood with jackals.”
Once again, the insult failed to make an impression on Goudeles. He said, “Then your Majesty has not yet heard the joyous news? How slowly it travels in these outlying districts!”
“What are you yapping of?” Gavras demanded, but his voice was suddenly tense.
His quarry vulnerable at last, Goudeles thrust home with suave precision. “Surely the Avtokrator will pay you all respect due a father-in-law,
putting you in the late Emperor’s place. Why, it must be more than a month now since his daughter Alypia and my lord Ortaias were united in wedlock.”
Thorisin went white. Voice thick with rage, he choked out, “Flee now, while you still have breath in you!” And Goudeles and his guardsmen, with no ceremony whatever, leaped on their horses and rode for their lives.
Gaius Philippus took a characteristically pungent view of the marriage. “It’ll do Ortaias less good than he thinks,” he said. “If he’s the same kind of lover as he is a general, he’ll have to take a book to bed to know what to do with her.”
Remembering the military tome constantly under Sphrantzes’ arm, Scaurus had to smile. But alone in his tent with Helvis and the sleeping Malric later that evening, he burst out, “It was a filthy thing to do. As good as rape, joining Alypia to the house her father hated.”
“Why so offended?” Helvis asked. She was very bulky now, uncomfortable, and often irritable. With a woman’s bitter realism, she went on, “Are we ever anything but pawns in the game of power? Beyond the politics of it, why should you care?”
“The politics are bad enough.” The marriage, forced or not, could only rob Thorisin Gavras of support and gain it for Ortaias and his uncle. Helvis was right, though: Marcus’ anger was more personal than for his cause. “From the little I knew of her, I rather liked her,” he confessed.
“What has that to do with the price of fish?” Helvis demanded. “Since the day you came to Videssos, you’ve known the contest you were in; aye, and played it well, I’ll not deny. But it’s not one with much room for things as small as likes.”
Scaurus winced at that harsh picture of his career in his adopted homeland. In Videssos, scheming was natural as drawing breath. No one who hoped to advance could escape it altogether.
But Alypia Gavra, he thought, should not fall victim to it merely by accident of birth. Behind the schooled reserve with which she met the world, the tribune had felt a gentleness this unconsented marriage would mar forever. The image of her brought miserable and defenseless to Ortaias’ bed made cold fury flash behind his eyes.
And how, he asked himself, am I going to say that to Helvis without lighting a suspicion in her better left unkindled? Not seeing any way, he kept his mouth shut.
Sentries’ shouts woke Scaurus at earliest dawn. Stumbling to his feet, he threw on a heavy wool mantle and hurried out to see what the trouble was. Gaius Philippus was at the rampart before him, sword in hand, wearing only helmet and sandals.
Marcus followed the veteran’s pointing finger. There was motion at the edge of sight in the east, visible at all only because silhouetted against the paling sky. “I give you two guesses,” the senior centurion said.
“You can have the first one back—I know an army when I see it. Shows how sincere Goudeles’ talk of Thorisin being an honored father-in-law was, doesn’t it?”
“As if we needed showing. Well, let’s be at it.” The veteran’s bellow made up for the cornets and trumpets of the still-sleeping buccinators. “Up, you weedy, worthless good-for-nothings, up! There’s work to do today!”
Romans tumbled from their tents, pulling on corselets and tightening straps as they rushed to their places. Campfires banked during the night were fed to new life to light the running soldiers’ paths.
Marcus and Gaius Philippus looked at each other and, in looking, realized they were hardly clad for battle. Gaius Philippus cursed. They dashed for their tents.
When the tribune emerged a couple of minutes later, he led his troops out to deploy in front of their fortified camp. Pakhymer’s light cavalry screened their lines. The Khatrishers’ winter-long association with the Romans made them as quick to be ready as the legionaries. The rest of Thorisin Gavras’ forces were slower in emerging.
There was no time to plan elaborate strategies. Thorisin rode up on his highbred bay, grunted approval at the Romans’ quiet steadiness. “You’ll be on the right,” he said. “Stay firm, and we’ll smash them against you.”
“Good enough,” Marcus nodded. Less mobile than the mounted contingents of standard Videssian warfare, his infantry usually got a holding role. As Gavras’ cavalry came into line, the tribune swung Pakhymer over to his own right to guard against outflanking moves from the foe.
“A rare lovely day it is for a shindy, isn’t it now?” Viridovix said. His mail shirt was painted in squares of black and gold, imitating the checkered pattern of a Gallic tunic. A seven-spoked wheel crested his bronze helm. His sword, a twin to Scaurus’, was still in its scabbard; his hand held nothing more menacing than a chunk of hard, dry bread. He took a healthy bite.
The tribune envied him his calm. The thought of food repelled him before combat, though afterwards he was always ravenous. It was a beautiful morning, still a bit crisp with night’s chill. Squinting into the bright sunrise, Scaurus said, “Their general knows his business, whoever he is. An early morning fight puts the sun in our faces.”
“Aye, so it does, doesn’t it? What a rare sneaky thing to think of,” the Celt said admiringly.
Ortaias’ army was less than half a mile away now, coming on at a purposeful trot. It looked no larger than the one backing Thorisin, Marcus saw with relief. He wondered what part of the total force of the Sphrantzai it contained.
It was cavalry, as the tribune had known it would be. He felt the hoofbeats like approaching thunder.
Quintus Glabrio gave his maniple some last instructions: “When you use your pila, throw at their horses, not the men. They’re bigger targets, less well armored, and if a horse goes down, he takes his rider with him.” As always, the junior centurion’s tone was measured and under firm control.
There was no time for more speechmaking than that; the enemy was very close. In the daybreak glare, it was still hard to see just what manner of men they were. Some had the scrubby look of nomads—Khamorth or even Yezda—while others … lanceheads gleamed briefly crimson as they swung down in a disciplined flurry. Namdaleni, Marcus thought grimly. The Sphrantzai hired the best.
“Drax! Drax! The great count Drax!” shouted the men of the Duchy, using their commander’s name as war cry.
“At them!” Thorisin Gavras yelled, and his own horsemen galloped forward to meet the charge. Bowstrings snapped. A Namdalener tumbled from his saddle, unluckily hit below the eye at long range.
The enemy’s light horse darted in front of the Namdaleni to volley back at Thorisin’s men. But the field was now too tight for their hit-and-run tactics to be used to full effect. More sturdily mounted and more heavily armed, the Videssians and Vaspurakaners who followed Gavras hewed their way through the nomads toward the men of the Duchy who were the opposing army’s core.
The count Drax was new-come from the Duchy. The only foot worth its pay he’d seen was that of the Halogai. Of Romans he knew nothing. He took them for peasant levies Thorisin had scraped up from Phos knew where. Crush them quickly, he decided, and then deal with Gavras’ outnumbered cavalry at leisure. With a wave of his shield to give his men direction, he spurred his mount at the legionaries.
Dry-mouthed, Scaurus waited to receive the charge. The pounding hooves, the rhythmic shouting of the big men rushing toward him like armored boulders, the long lances that all seemed aimed at his chest … he could feel his calves tensing with the involuntary urge to flee. Longs word in hand, his right arm swung up.
Drax frowned in sudden doubt. If these were drafted farmers, why were they not running for their paltry lives?
“Loose!” the tribune shouted. A volley of pila flew forward, and another, and another. Horses screamed, swerved, and fell as they were hit, pitching riders headlong to the ground. Other beasts stumbled over the first ones down. Namdaleni who caught Roman javelins on their shields cursed and threw them away; the soft iron shanks of the pila bent with ease, fouling the shields beyond use.
Still, the legionaries sagged before the slowed charge’s momentum. Trumpets blared, calling squads from the flank to hold the embattled
center. The mounted surge staggered, stalled, turned to melee.
The knight who came at Scaurus was about forty, with a cast in his right eye and a twisted little finger. Near immobile in the press, he jabbed at the tribune with his lance. Marcus parried, ducking under the thrust. His strong blade bit through the wood below the lancehead, which flew spinning. Eyes wide with fear, the Namdalener swung the ruined lance as he might a club. Scaurus ducked again, stepped up and thrust, felt his point pierce chain and flesh. Sphrantzes’ mercenary gave a shriek that ended in a bubbling moan. Scarlet foam on his lips, he slid to the ground.
Close by, Zeprin the Red raised his long-hafted Haloga war axe high above his helmet, to bring it crashing down on a horse’s head. Brains flew, pink-gray. The horse foundered like a ship striking a jagged rock. Pinned under it, its Namdalener rider screamed with a broken ankle, but not for long. A second stroke of the great axe silenced him for good.
An unhorsed mercenary slashed at Scaurus, who took the blow on his shield. His scutum was bigger and heavier than the horseman’s lighter shield. Marcus shoved out with it. The man of the Duchy stumbled backwards, tripped on a corpse’s upthrust foot. A legionary drove a stabbing-sword into his throat.
Though the Namdalener charge was checked, they still fought with the skill and fierceness Marcus had come to know. Foul-mouthed Lucilius stood staring at his broken sword, the hard steel snapped across by a cunning lance stroke. “Well, fetch me a whole one!” he shouted, but before anybody could, a man of the Duchy rode him down.
“By all the gods, why aren’t these bastards on our side? They’re too bloody much work to fight,” Gaius Philippus panted. There was a great dent in the right side of his helmet, and blood flowed down his face from a cut over one eye. The tide of battle swept them apart before Scaurus could answer.
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