Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle)

by Turtledove, Harry

  The tribune would have sworn Balsamon winked at him as he walked past. He doubted himself a second later; with every step the patriarch took toward his throne, he assumed a heavier mantling of distinction. He did not contradict the figure he cut in private, but there was more to him than his private self.

  He sank into the patriarchal throne with a silent sigh. Marcus had to remind himself that Balsamon was not a young man. The patriarch’s mind and spirit were so vital it was hard to remember his body might not always answer.

  Balsamon pushed himself up out of the throne in less than a minute; the packed Temple had remained on its feet for him. He raised his hands to the mighty image of his god on high and, joined by his entire congregation, intoned the prayer Marcus had first heard from the lips of Neilos Tzimiskes northeast of Imbros, though of course he had not understood it then: “We bless thee, Phos, Lord with the right and good mind, by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.”

  Through the murmured Amens that followed, Scaurus heard Soteric firmly add, “On this we stake our very souls.” Glares flashed at the Namdalener from throughout the Temple, but he stared back in defiance—that the men of the Empire chose to leave their creed incomplete was no reason for him to do likewise.

  Balsamon lowered his arms; the worshippers took their seats once more, though necks still turned to catch sight of the bold heretic in their midst. Marcus expected the patriarch, no matter how forbearant his personal beliefs were, to take some public notice of Soteric’s audacity.

  And so, indeed, he did, but hardly in the way the Roman had looked for. Balsamon looked to the Namdalener almost in gratitude. “ ‘On this we stake our very souls,’ ” he repeated quietly. His eyes darted this way and that, taking the measure of those who had stared hardest at Soteric. “He’s right, you know. We do.”

  The patriarch tapped gently on the top of his throne’s ivory back; his smile was ironic. “No, I am not speaking heresy. In its most literal sense, the Namdalener’s addition to our creed is true. We have all staked our souls on the notion that, in the end, good shall triumph over evil. Were that not so, we would be as one with the Yezda, and this Temple would not be a place of quiet worship, but a charnel house where blood would flow as does our wine and, instead of incense, the stinking smoke of scorched flesh would rise to heaven.”

  He looked about him, defying anyone to deny his words. Some of his listeners shifted in their seats, but no one spoke. “I know what you are thinking but will not say,” the patriarch continued: “ ‘That’s not what the cursed barbarian means by it!’ ” He brought his voice down to a gruff baritone, a parody of half the Videssian officers in the audience.

  “And you’re right.” His tones were his own again. “But the question still remains: When we and the men of the Duchy quarrel at theology, when we damn each other and fling anathemas across the sea like stones, who gains? The Phos we all revere? Or does Skotos, down there in his frozen hell, laugh to see his enemies at strife with one another?

  “The saddest part of the disagreement between us is that our beliefs are no further apart than two women in the streets. For is it not true that, while orthodoxy is indeed my doxy, heterodoxy is no more than my neighbor’s doxy?” Balsamon’s listeners gaped in horror or awestruck admiration, each according to his own temperament.

  The patriarch became serious once more. “I do not hold to the Wager of Phos, as do the islanders—you all know that, even those who like me none too well. I find the notion childish and crude. But by our standards, the Namdaleni are childish and crude. Is it any wonder they have a doctrine to fit their character? Merely because I think them mistaken, must I find them guilty of unpardonable crimes?”

  His voice was pleading as he looked from one face to the next. The noise of the crowd outside the Temple had died away; Marcus could hear a great-voiced priest reading the patriarch’s words to the multitude.

  Balsamon resumed, “If the men of the Duchy have their faith founded on true piety—and that, no reasonable man could doubt—and if they grant us our customs in our own land, what cause have we to worry? Would you argue with your brother while a thief was at the door, especially if he’d come to help hold that thief at bay? Skotos is welcome to the man who’d answer yes.

  “Nor are we Videssians without blame in this senseless squabble over the nature of our god. Our centuries of culture have given us, I fear, conceit to match our brilliance. We are splendid logic-choppers and fault-finders when we think we need to criticize our neighbors, but oh! how we bawl like branded calves when they dare return the favor.

  “My friends, my brothers, my children, if we stretch out our arms in charity, even so little charity as would hardly damage the soul of a tax-collector—” No matter how solemn the moment, Balsamon would have his joke, and the sudden, startled laughter from outside when the reader reached it showed it had struck its intended audience. “—surely we can overlook disagreements and build goodwill. The seeds are there—were it otherwise, why would the men of Namdalen sail from overseas to aid us against our foe? They deserve our grateful thanks, not tumult readied against them.”

  The patriarch looked about one last time, begging, willing his listeners to reach for something bigger than themselves. There was a moment of stony silence before the applause began. And when at last it came, it was not the torrent Balsamon—and Scaurus—would have wished for. Here a man clapped, there another, off to one side several more. Some looked sour even as they applauded, honoring the patriarch but at best tolerating the message for the sake of the man.

  Mavrikios was not one of those. He had risen and pushed aside the ornamental grill work, loudly acclaiming Balsamon. At his side, also clapping, was his daughter Alypia. Thorisin Gavras was nowhere to be seen.

  Marcus found a moment to worry over the Sevastokrator’s absence. He could not recall seeing the two Gavrai together since their unfortunate meeting at dice. One more thing to plague the Emperor, he thought. It was a dreadful time for Mavrikios to be at odds with his peppery brother.

  And not even the Emperor’s open approval could make the notables in the High Temple warm to Balsamon’s sermon. The same confused, halfhearted applause came from the larger audience outside. Marcus remembered what Gorgidas had said; even the patriarch had trouble turning the city from the direction it had chosen.

  He did win some measure of success. When Soteric emerged from the High Temple, no one snarled at him. Indeed, a couple of people seemed to have taken Balsamon’s words to heart, for they shouted “Death to the Yezda!” at the mercenary. Soteric grinned savagely and waved his sword in the air, which won him a few real cheers.

  Such lukewarm victory left him dissatisfied. He turned to Scaurus, grumbling, “I thought that when the patriarch spoke, everyone leaped to do as he said. And by what right does he call the men of the Duchy children? One fine day, we’ll show him the sort of children we are.”

  Marcus soothed his ruffled feathers. Having expected no improvement in the situation, the tribune was pleased with whatever he got.

  Back at the Roman barracks that night, Scaurus did some hard thinking about Soteric. Helvis’ brother could be alarming. He was, if anything, more headstrong than Thorisin Gavras—and that was saying something. Worse, he lacked the Sevastokrator’s easy charm. Soteric was always in deadly earnest. Yet there was no denying his courage, his energy, his military skill, or even his wit. The tribune sighed. People were as they were, not as he wished they’d be, and it was stupid—especially for someone who thought himself a Stoic—to expect them to be different.

  Nevertheless, he recalled the adage he’d mentally applied to Soteric when the islander proposed seizing Videssos in despite of the whole imperial army. He sought Gorgidas. “Who was it,” he asked the Greek, “who said, ‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad’? Sophokles?”

  “Merciful Zeus, no!” Gorgidas exclaimed. “That could only be Euripides, though I forget the play. Wh
en Sophokles speaks of human nature, he’s so noble you wish his words were true. Where Euripides finds truth, you wish he hadn’t.”

  The tribune wondered whose play he’d watched that afternoon.

  IX

  THE FELLOW-FEELING BALSAMON LABORED SO VALIANTLY TO create crumbled, as things would have it, under the fury of an outraged section of his own clergy—the monks. All too few had Nepos’ compassion or learning; most were arrogant in their bigotry. From their monasteries they swarmed forth like angry bees to denounce their patriarch’s call for calm and to rouse Videssos once more to hatred.

  Marcus was leading a couple of Roman maniples back from the practice field when he found his way blocked by a large crowd avidly taking in one such monk’s harangue. The monastic, a tall thin man with a pocked face and fiery eyes, stood on an upended crate in front of a cheese merchant’s shop and screamed out his hatred of heresy to everyone who would listen.

  “Whoever tampers with the canons of the faith sells—no, gives!—his soul to the ice below! It is Phos’ own holy words the foul foreigners pervert with their talk of wagers. They seek to seduce us from the way of truth into Skotos’ frigid embrace, and our great patriarch—” In his rage, he fairly spat the word “—abets them and helps the demon spread his couch.

  “For I tell you, my friends, there is, there can be, no compromise with evil. Corrupters of the faith lead others to the doom they have chosen for themselves, as surely as one rotten pear will spoil the cask. Balsamon prates of toleration—will he next tolerate a temple to Skotos?” The monk made “tolerate” into an obscenity.

  His voice grew shriller yet. “If the eastern barbarians will not confess the truth of our faith, drive them from the city, I say! They are as much to be feared as the Yezda—more, for they wear virtue’s mask to hide their misbelief!”

  The audience he had built up shouted its agreement. Fists waved in the air; there were cries of “Dirty barbarians!” and “The pox take Namdalen!”

  “We may be having to break their heads to get through, if himself pushes the fire up any more,” Viridovix said to Marcus.

  “If we do, we’ll set the whole city ablaze,” the tribune answered. But he could see his men loosening swords in their scabbards and taking a firmer grip on the staves they were carrying in lieu of spears.

  Just then the monk looked over the heads of the throng before him and caught sight of the Romans’ unfamiliar gear. He probably would not have recognized a true Namdalener had he seen one, but in his passion any foreigner would serve. He stretched out a long bony finger at the legionaries, crying, “See! It is the men of the Duchy, come to cut me down before my truth can spread!”

  “No, indeed!” Marcus shouted as the crowd whirled to face the Romans. Behind him he heard Gaius Philippus warning, “Whether the mob does or not, I’ll have the head of the first man who moves without orders!”

  “What then?” the monk asked Scaurus suspiciously. The crowd was spreading out and edging forward, readying itself for a rush.

  “Can’t you tell by looking? We’re the surveying party for that temple to Skotos you were talking about—do you know where it’s supposed to go?”

  The monk’s eyes bulged like a freshly boated bream’s. The members of the would-be mob stopped where they stood, gawping at the Roman’s insolence. Scaurus watched them closely—would they see the joke or try to tear the Romans to pieces for blasphemy?

  First one, then another, then three more in the crowd burst into guffaws. In an instant the whole fickle gathering was shrieking with laughter and running forward, not to attack the legionaries, but to praise their leader’s wit. Suddenly deserted by his audience, the monk, with a last malice-filled glance at Scaurus, clambered down from his makeshift podium and disappeared—to spread his hatred elsewhere, Marcus was sure.

  That, though, left his former throng discontented. The monastic had entertained them, and they expected the same from Scaurus. The silence stretched embarrassingly; with the tribune’s one quip gone, his mind seemed blank.

  Viridovix filled the breach in magnificent style, bursting into a borderer’s song about fighting the cattle-thieves from Yezd. Only Marcus’ thorough lack of interest in music had kept him from noticing what a fine voice Viridovix owned. Even his Gallic accent brought song to his speech. Someone in the crowd had a set of pipes; the Celt, the Videssians, and those Romans who knew the tune’s words sang it through at the top of their lungs.

  When it was done, one of the city men began another ditty, a ribald drinking song everyone in the crowd seemed to know. More legionaries could sing along with this one; Marcus himself had spent enough time in taverns to learn the chorus: “The wine gets drunk, but you get drunker!”

  After two or three more songs it seemed as if the Romans and Videssians had been friends forever. They mingled easily, swapping names and stories. Marcus had no trouble continuing back to the barracks. A couple of dozen Videssians walked most of the way with the legionaries; every few blocks someone would think of a new song, and they would stop to sing it.

  Once inside their hall at last, four of Scaurus’ men discovered their belt pouches had been slit. But even Gaius Philippus, who under most conditions would have gone charging back into the city after the thieves, took the loss philosophically. “It’s a small enough price to pay for dousing a riot,” he said.

  “Small enough for you, maybe,” one of the robbed legionaries muttered, but so softly the centurion could not tell which. He snorted and gave them all an impartial glare.

  “Sure and that was quick of you, to stop the shindy or ever it started,” Viridovix said to Scaurus. “Was your honor not afraid it might set the spalpeens off altogether?”

  “Yes,” Marcus admitted, “but I didn’t think we would be much worse off if it did. There wasn’t time to reason with them, or much hope of it, for that matter—not with that madman of a monk egging them on. I thought I had to shock them, or make them laugh—by luck, I managed to do both at once. You helped a bit yourself, you know; you sing very well.”

  “Don’t I, now?” the Celt agreed complacently. “Aye, there’s nothing like a good tune to make a man forget the why of his ire. There’s some fine songs in this Videssian tongue, too. That first one I sang reminds me of a ditty I knew at home—kine-stealing’s almost a game with us, for pride and honor’s sake, and we’re fond of singing over it.

  “Or we were,” he added bleakly. For a rare moment, he let Marcus see the loneliness he usually hid so well.

  Touched, the tribune reached out to clasp his shoulder. “You’re among friends, you know,” he said. It was true—there was not a Roman who had anything but liking for their former foe.

  Viridovix knew that, too. “Aye,” he said, tugging at his long mustaches, “and glad I am of it, but there’s times when it’s scarce enough.” He said something in his own tongue, then shook his head. “Even in my ears the Celtic speech grows strange.”

  The riots against Namdalen began in earnest the next day, incited, as Marcus had feared, by the monks. The day was one sacred to Phos. Processions of worshippers marched through the streets carrying torches and gilded spheres and discs of wood as they hymned their god. As the tribune learned much later, one such parade was wending its way down Videssos’ chief thoroughfare—the locals, with their liking for simple names, called it Middle Street—when it happened to pass a small temple where the Namdaleni were celebrating the holiday with their own rites.

  Seeing a party of islanders enter the schismatic chapel infuriated the monks heading the procession. “Root out the heretics!” they cried. This time no jests or soft words distracted their followers. Phos’ torches torched Phos’ temple; believer slew believer, believing him benighted. And when the Namdaleni sallied forth from their smoke, as brave men would, Videssian blood, too, crimsoned the cobbles of Middle Street.

  The mob, made brave only by numbers, was rabid when a few from among those numbers fell. “Revenge!” they screamed, ignoring their own guilt, and w
ent ravening through the city for Namdaleni to destroy. As riots will, this one quickly grew past its prime purpose. Burning, looting, and rape were sports too delightful to be reserved for the islanders alone; before long, the swelling mob extended their benefits to natives of the city as well. Nevertheless, the men of the Duchy remained chief targets of the rioters’ attention.

  The mob’s distant baying and the black pillars of smoke shooting into the sky brought news of the tumult to the Romans. Scaurus was always thankful the city did not erupt until noon, Phos’ most auspicious hour. The early-rising legionaries had already finished their drill and returned to the palace complex before the storm broke. It could have gone hard for them, trapped in a labyrinth the Videssian rioters knew far better than they.

  At first Scaurus thought the outbreak minor, on the order of the one that had followed his own encounter with Avshar’s necromancy. A few battalions of native soldiers had sufficed to put down that disturbance. The tribune watched the Videssians tramping into action, armed for riot duty with clubs and blunt-headed spears. Within two hours they were streaming back in disarray, dragging dead and wounded behind them. Their smoke-blackened faces showed stunned disbelief. Beyond the palace complex, Videssos was in the hands of the mob.

  Sending inadequate force against the rioters proved worse than sending none. The howling pack, buoyed up by the cheap victory, grew bolder yet. Marcus had gone up onto the roof of the Roman barracks to see what he could of the city and its strife; now he watched knots of ill-armed men pushing through the lush gardens of the palace quarter itself, on the prowl for robbery or murder.

  Still far away but terribly clear, he could hear the mob’s battle cry: “Dig up the bones of the Namdaleni!” The call was a bit of lower-class city slang; when Videssos’ thieves and pimps were displeased with someone, they wished him an unquiet grave. If the Roman needed further telling, that rallying-cry showed him who the rioters were.