The Stolen Throne tot-1

by Harry Turtledove

  Then, from the north, a new cry rang out along the canal's western bank: "Sarbaraz!" Abivard whooped gleefully. Even if the Videssians couldn't pronounce the sh sound, they were not only good soldiers but subtle planners. The elder Maniakes had predicted Smerdis' soldiers would be so busy fighting the warriors they saw that they would pay no attention to anything else. Some of his engineers had taken advantage of the cover offered by the hillock the Videssian general had mentioned to run one more floating bridge across the canal. A large force of Videssian mounted archers proceeded to cross with no opposition whatever.

  They shot up Smerdis' unarmored foot soldiers, then, crying "Sarbaraz!" once more, they charged them, swinging sabers and thrusting with light spears. They weren't quite so deadly as Makuraner lancers would have been, but they were more than enough to rout the dismounted archers, who were useful when they could ply a foe with arrows without being directly assailed in return, but whose clubs and knives offered next to no defense in close quarters.

  Smerdis' heavy cavalry had to break off the fight at the bridgeheads to swing back against the Videssians and keep themselves from being surrounded and altogether destroyed. But that let Abivard and his men reach the west bank of the canal, just as the flight of the bowmen let the Videssian engineers finish more bridges so more of Sharbaraz's lancers could cross.

  The officer who led the Videssian flanking force had a nice sense of what was essential. He let the archers run and concentrated on Smerdis' horsemen. His own troopers were more heavily armed than nonnoble Makuraner warriors, though they didn't wear iron from head to toe and their horses bore only quilted cloth protection. They could hurt Smerdis' men if those men didn't assail them with everything they had, and could stand up well enough against an all-out charge to ensure that Smerdis' lancers couldn't smash through them and escape from Sharbaraz's men.

  Smerdis' lancers were quick to realize that. They began throwing down their long spears and swords. Some cried, "Mercy!" Others shouted Sharbaraz's name. Some fought on. Most of those went down, but a few managed to break away and run.

  The Videssian commander-it was the younger Maniakes, Abivard remembered-was not content with victory, but sent his own horsemen after Smerdis' fleeing lancers. They brought down quite a few more before returning to their comrades.

  "A cheer for the Maniakai, father and son," Abivard shouted. "The one planned the victory, the other made it real." The Makuraners he had led yelled themselves hoarse. Any of them who happened to be near Videssians pounded their allies on the back, bawled in their ears, and offered them wine from the skins they wore on their belts. For that moment, at least, the ancient enemies could not have been closer friends.

  Abivard rode toward the younger Maniakes. "Well done," he said. "You're younger than I am; I envy you your cool head."

  The younger man smiled. He had a small cut on his left cheek and a dent and a sparkling line on the bar nasal of his helmet; without the nasal, he would have taken a bad wound. He said, "You did well yourself, eminent sir; if you hadn't pressed them so hard, they might have punched through us and got away in a body."

  "That's what I was trying to stop, all right," Abivard said, nodding.

  "There'll be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in Mashiz when word of this fight gets back to Smerdis Pimp of Pimps."

  "Good," the younger Maniakes said, grinning. "That was the idea, after all. And there'll be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the land of the Thousand Cities, too. We used those unmounted archers hard, and anyone with an eye in his head to see with can figure out that we would have used them harder if we hadn't had more important things to do. The folk hereabouts may want to think twice before they back Smerdis over Sar-Sharbaraz." He pumped his fist in the air in triumph at correctly pronouncing the Makuraner sound.

  "We beat those archers once and fought them again, but it didn't make the Thousand Cities change their mind," Abivard said. "Maybe this time it will, though. I hope so."

  "This fight happened in the middle of the Land of the Thousand Cities, not off in the southern desert," the younger Maniakes said. "And Smerdis' army looks to have broken up, to boot. Every man who gets away alive will go home, and every man who gets home will spread the tale of how we smashed Smerdis' general. That can't do Smerdis' cause any good."

  "So it can't." Abivard eyed the Videssian commander's son with new respect.

  "Not just a fighter, eh? You like to think about the way things work, too; I can see that."

  The younger Maniakes had an impressively luxuriant beard for a man of his few years, a trait that, Abivard had learned, testified to his Vaspurakaner blood. In spite of that beard, which reached up almost to his eyes, Abivard saw him flush. He said, "You are generous to a man who, after all, is more likely to be your enemy than your friend."

  "I hadn't forgotten that," Abivard assured him. "But maybe, just maybe, the help Likinios Avtokrator is giving to Sharbaraz will bring our two realms a long peace. The God knows we both could use it."

  "Phos grant that it be so," the younger Maniakes said. Impulsively, he stuck out his hand. Abivard took it. They squeezed with all their strength and let go, smarting, after a draw.

  "All I truly want to do is get back to my domain in the northwest and make sure the Khamorth haven't ravaged my lands too badly-or punish the plainsmen if they have," Abivard said. "Peace with Videssos will ensure that I can do that."

  "Peace with Makuran will let the Avtokrator Likinios finish punishing the Kubratoi, too," the younger Maniakes said. "A peace both sides can use is more likely to last than any other kind I can think of."

  "Aye." Abivard had agreed before he remembered that Videssian gold had stirred up the Khamorth tribes north of the Degird River against Makuran in the first place. Without that incitement, Peroz King of Kings might never have campaigned against the nomads, which meant Smerdis wouldn't have stolen the throne from Sharbaraz, which meant in turn that Videssos and Makuran wouldn't have joined together against the usurper. Abivard shook his head. Indeed, the more you looked at the world, the more complex it got.

  Something else crossed his mind: the more you looked at the world, the more you could learn. Videssos would never directly threaten his domain; the Empire's reach wasn't long enough. But the Khamorth were causing endless trouble in the northwest of Makuran, and that worked to Videssos' advantage. If Makuran ever needed to put similar pressure on Videssos, who could guess what a subsidy to Kubrat might yield?

  Abivard stuck the idea away in the back of his mind. Neither he nor any Makuraner could use it now. Makuran had to put its own house in order before worrying about upsetting those of its neighbors. But one of these days…

  He glanced toward the younger Maniakes. For all his obvious cleverness, the Videssian officer hadn't noticed Abivard was thinking about enmity rather than friendship. Good, Abivard thought. As he had said, he wouldn't mind a spell of peace, even a long one, with Videssos. But certain debts would remain outstanding no matter how long the peace lasted.

  The younger Maniakes said, "Do you think they'll try to stop us again this side of the Tib?"

  "I doubt it," Abivard answered. "We smashed Smerdis' cavalry, and you were the one who noted that those unmounted bowmen are likelier to make for home than to come back together again. What does that leave?"

  "Not bloody much, eminent sir," the younger Maniakes said cheerfully. "That's how I read things, too, but this isn't my realm, and I wondered if I was overlooking something."

  "If you are, I'm overlooking it, too," Abivard said. "No, as I see it, we have one fight left to win: the one in front of Mashiz." He had thought as much the summer before, too, but Sharbaraz hadn't won that fight.

  After the victory, Sharbaraz's forces and their Videssian allies pushed hard toward the Tib. Smerdis' men broke the banks of canals on their route; the Videssian engineers repaired the damage and the armies kept moving. Smerdis' troops did attempt one stand, along the western bank of a canal wider than the one they had used as
a barrier before the battle. Abivard worried when he saw how strong the enemy's position was. So, loudly, did Sharbaraz.

  The elder Maniakes remained unperturbed. As the sun was setting on the day the army came up against Smerdis' force, he ostentatiously sent a detachment of engineers and a good many of his horse archers north along the east bank of the canal. Inky darkness fell before they had gone a quarter of a farsang.

  When morning came, Smerdis' soldiers were gone.

  "You are a demon, eminent sir," Sharbaraz exclaimed, slapping the Videssian general on the back.

  "We'd hurt 'em once with that trick," the elder Maniakes replied. "They weren't going to give us a chance to do it again." He chuckled wheezily. "So, by threatening that trick, we won with a different one." The army crossed the canal unopposed and resumed its advance.

  After that, city governors from the land of the Thousand Cities began trickling in to Sharbaraz's camp, something they had never done the summer before. They prostrated themselves before him, eating dirt to proclaim their loyalty to him as rightful King of Kings. Not yet in a position where he could avenge himself on them for having stayed loyal to Smerdis so long, he accepted them as if they had never backed his rival. But Abivard watched his eyes. He remembered every slight, sure enough.

  Abivard wondered if Smerdis' men would contest the crossing of the Tib. Though the flood season had passed, the river was still wide and swift-flowing. Determined opposition could have made getting across anything but easy. But the west bank was bare of troops when Sharbaraz and his allies reached it. The engineers extended their bridge, one pontoon at a time. The army crossed and moved west again.

  Abivard eyed the approaches to Mashiz with suspicion. Sharbaraz's troops had come to grief there once before, and the army the rightful King of Kings commanded now was smaller than the one he had led the previous summer. One more victory, though, would redeem usurpation and defeat and exile. The Makuraners who had suffered so much for Sharbaraz's cause were grimly determined to achieve that victory.

  The Videssians who had accompanied them and made victory possible had no such personal stake in the war. Abivard wondered how they could fight so well without that kind of stake. He asked the younger Maniakes, with whom he had become more and more friendly after the battle in the land of the Thousand Cities, The Videssian commander's son rolled his eyes. "From what my father says, you've met Likinios Avtokrator. How would you like to go home and explain to him that you hadn't done quite all you could? At first, the prospect didn't seem too daunting. Likinios hadn't struck Abivard as a man who flew into a murderous rage without warning, as some memorable Kings of Kings of Makuran had been in the habit of doing. Then he thought of the Videssian Emperor's coldly calculating mind. Likinios wouldn't kill you because he was angry; he would quietly order you slain because he judged you deserved it. But you would end up just as dead either way.

  "I take your point," he told the younger Maniakes. The Videssian ruler's style might be coldblooded and alien to the Makuraner way of doing things, but it had its own kind of effectiveness.

  Sharbaraz's force advanced through the wreckage of the failed campaign of the year before: skeletons of horses and mules, some with mummified skin still clinging here and there; the burned-out remains of overturned supply wagons; and unburied human bones, as well. The rightful King of Kings surveyed the near ruin of his hopes with an expression thoroughly grim. "Not this time," he declared. "Not this time."

  But taking the capital of the realm would not be easy. Where before Smerdis' men had built a temporary barricade across most of the one wide way into Mashiz, now permanent fortifications protected the city from attack. Getting past them looked like a formidable undertaking.

  "Don't worry about it," the elder Maniakes said when Abivard did just that.

  "We'll manage, never you fear."

  Promises, even from one who had shown he delivered on them, left Abivard cold. When the Videssian engineers began taking wood and ropes and specialized parts of bronze and iron from their wagons and assembling them into large, complicated contraptions, however, he felt oddly reassured. What they did with such things wasn't magic in any true sense of the word, but it struck him as every bit as marvelous as a lot of the things sorcerers achieved.

  "They're very good," Sharbaraz agreed when he said that aloud. "I think the ones who went north over the Degird with my father could have matched them, though. But most of my father's engineers are dead with the rest of his army, and I don't think Smerdis has many of those who are left alive working for him, either. Were things different, the lack could hurt Makuran badly; we'll have to train up a new team of such folk as soon as may be. But for now having engineers, when our foes don't, works for us."

  The timbers the Videssians had used to make the flooring for their pontoon bridges and to corduroy roads through the muck left by flooded canals also proved to be the right size for constructing the frames of the engines they were erecting. At first, Abivard thought that an amazing coincidence. Then he realized it wasn't a coincidence at all. The sophisticated planning inherent in that deeply impressed him.

  The engines went up at the front and on the right of the northern flank-the one on which Smerdis' men had gained success the summer before-well out of range of archers sheltered by the works the usurper had thrown up. Sharbaraz asked, "Will they be enough to let us pass by the fortress without losing so many men as to ruin us?"

  "Provided we beat the men they have outside the walls, the engines will keep those within too busy to do much to us," the elder Maniakes replied.

  Abivard said, "What about men issuing forth from one of the narrow ways into Mashiz? That flank attack ruined us last year, and we don't have the men to plug all those routes, not if we want to do real fighting, too."

  "The trick of the trade is getting what you want with as little fighting-especially the messy, expensive hand-to-hand you mean-as you can," the Videssian general said. He pointed over to the bank of dart-throwers going up on the northern flank. "Skotos hold my soul in the ice forever if those don't make any charging lancer ever born the most thoughtful man you know."

  "May it be so," Sharbaraz said. "My men are eager for the attack. When will all this hammering and spiking be done?"

  "We'll be through by evening," the elder Maniakes replied. "Smerdis' men could have given us a deal of grief if they'd come sneaking around trying to wreck the engines or burn 'em down, but they didn't. Maybe they didn't think of it, or maybe they just didn't think it'd work." He shook his head to show his opinion of that. "You always try. Every once in a while, you end up surprising yourself with what you can do."

  "I agree," Sharbaraz said. "If I didn't, I never would have fled into Videssos last year."

  If Roshnani hadn't thought of it, you'd never have fled into Videssos, Abivard thought. That brought a surge of pride in his wife. It also brought the realization that Denak had been right all along: women's counsel could be as valuable on campaign as back in the women's quarters of the stronghold.

  Abivard wondered if Sharbaraz had figured that out yet.

  He didn't get long to contemplate the notion. The elder Maniakes said, "True enough, your Majesty, but we're on the point of bringing you back home now."

  * * *

  Dawn brought the promise of a day to steam a man in armor. Abivard was sweating even before he donned the leather-lined shirt of mail and splints, the mail skirt, and the trousers of iron rings. By the time he had affixed his ring-mail veil and aventail and settled his helmet on his head, he felt ready to go into the oven and come forth as cooked meat.

  Perhaps, in spite of everything, Smerdis still had spies in Sharbaraz's camp, or perhaps his officers were just good at piecing together what they saw from the works he had built in front of Mashiz. In any case, his soldiers came forth from their camps behind those works and filled the gaps between their walls and the nearly impassable badlands to either side. No, getting into Mashiz was not going to be the triumphal parade Abivard and Sha
rbaraz had imagined when they set out from Vek Rud stronghold.

  The elder Maniakes took charge of proceedings at the outset. Collaring Abivard, he said, "I want you and your best men in front of the siege engines to protect them."

  "What?" Abivard said indignantly. "You'd ask me and our best lancers to forgo the charge?"

  If the Videssian general noticed his ire, he ignored it. "That's just what I'd ask, for the beginning of the fight, anyhow," he answered. "If we're to win this battle, that's what we need to do. You'll get enough fighting to satisfy the most picky honor later on, I promise you."

  He spoke as if honor were something worth only a couple of coppers. You make war like a merchant, and your son is twice the man you'll ever be, Abivard thought. But he could not insult an ally by saying such things to his face. If he took the question to Sharbaraz… He shook his head. He couldn't do that. If he did, the elder Maniakes would lose prestige, or else he would lose some himself. Either way, the alliance would suffer.

  That left him only one choice. "Very well, eminent sir," he said icily. "I shall rely on your promise."

  The elder Maniakes paid no more attention to ice than he had to indignation.

  "Good, good," he said, as if he had taken Abivard's compliance for granted.

  "Now do get moving, if you'd be so kind. We can't put on our little show until you do."

  Still fuming, Abivard rounded up Zal's regiment of lancers. Zal and many of his riders grumbled when Abivard told them they weren't going to sweep gloriously down on the enemy. He said, "You'll do real fighting later in the day. By the God I swear it." He had to hope he wasn't giving them a false oath.

  Grumbling still, the lancers took their places in front of the siege engines the Videssians had built. Made with muddy timbers, the engines looked like frameworks for houses abandoned after a flood. The engineers loaded heavy stones into some and large, stoppered jars with greasy rags sticking out of the stoppers into others.