Legion of Videssos

by Harry Turtledove

  “Join us!” the islander shouted back, his accent nearly as thick as that of Utprand, who was surely dead by now. “Why t’row your lives away for not’ing? Up Namdalen and away wit’ old Videssos! The future belongs to us!”

  The legionaries answered that for themselves, an overwhelming roar of rejection. “Up Namdalen with a hoe handle!” “It’d be us you turned treacher on next!” That one hit home; if the Romans sometimes got on better with the men of the Duchy than they did with the imperials, it was for the islanders’ plain speech and straightforwardness. Utprand, although ruthless as a wolf, had been an utterly honest man, while Drax outdid the Videssians in double-dealing. Gaius Philippus’ jeer spoke for many: “Why should we give you what you’re not men enough to take?”

  A slow flush of anger ran up the Namdalener’s face. He lowered the upraised shield, settled his helm’s bar nasal more firmly on his short nose. “On your heads be it,” he said. The islanders surged forward once more.

  Their second charge, though, was not half so fierce as the first had been. That puzzled Scaurus, but after a moment he understood. All Drax’ knights needed to do here was to keep the legionaries in play. As long as they could not go to the aid of Zigabenos’ Videssians in the center, that was enough.

  Laon Pakhymer saw that, too, and with bantam courage flung his Khatrishers at the solid Namdalener ranks. The light horsemen’s spirit was equal to anything, but man for man, horse for horse, they were grossly overmatched in close combat. “Gutty little bastards, aren’t they?” Gaius Philippus said with nothing but respect in his voice. He watched the doomed attack; there was nothing else he could do.

  At last flesh and blood could take no more. The Khatrishers broke, riding wildly in all directions, for the time being wrecked as a fighting force. Pakhymer galloped after them, still shouting and trying to bring them back for one more charge, but they would not heed him.

  His flank cover ruined, Marcus drew his line back and to the left, anchoring the end of it to a small stand of fig trees. The Namdaleni did not hinder the maneuver; it drew him further from the center. He knew that and hated it, but he could do Zigabenos no good by being surrounded and destroyed, either.

  In any case, the Videssian general was being driven leftward, too, pressed from the front by Drax’ men and from the right by the Namdaleni who had been his own. But Zigabenos, as Scaurus knew, was resourceful; though his position could hardly have been worse, he still had a stratagem left to try.

  The battlefield din shrieked in Scaurus’ ears. When a great roar swallowed it as a whale might gulp a spratling, he thought for a terrible second that he had been struck a mortal blow and was hearing the sound of death. But the noise was real; troopers on both sides clapped hands to their heads and spun about, looking for its source. Then the tip of shadow touched the tribune, and terror with it.

  Long as the Amphitheater, thick as the city’s Middle Street was wide, the dragon soared over the battle on batwings vast enough to shade a village. It roared again, a sound like the end of the world; red-yellow as molten gold, flame licked from the fanged cavern of its mouth. Its eyes, big as shields, wise as time, black as hell, contemptuously scanned the quarreling worms below.

  But there are no dragons, Marcus’ mind yammered. In his disbelief he must have spoken aloud, for Gaius Philippus jerked his head upward. “Then what do you call that?”

  Men shouted and ducked and tried to hide; horses, plunging and rearing, did their best to bolt. Riders jounced on their bucketing mounts and were thrown by the score. Though the Videssians were no more able to defend than the Namdaleni to attack, the pressure which vised them eased.

  The dragon sideslipped in the air, sun glinting on silver scales. The great wings beat, once and then again, like the heavy breathing of a god. The beast stooped on the Namdaleni. Fire shot from its mouth now, making the incendiary the imperials brewed seem no more than embers. The islanders scattered before it, clawing at one another in their effort to escape.

  Suddenly, incongruously, Gaius Philippus’ sweat-streaked face creased in a grin. “Are you daft, man?” Scaurus yelled, waiting for the beast to turn and burn him, too.

  “Not a bit of it,” the senior centurion answered. “Where’s the wind of its passage?” He was right, the tribune realized; those wings, when they worked, should have stirred a gale, but the air was calm and still, even the early morning breeze gone.

  “Illusion!” he cried. “It’s magicked up!” Battle magic was a touchy thing; most wizardries melted in the heat of combat. Indeed, because that was so, generals often ignored sorcery in their plans. Zigabenos, holding back until the last moment, made the most of it from sheer surprise.

  But what one wizard could accomplish, another could undo. Even as the dragon dove toward the islanders’ ranks, it began to fade. Its roar grew distant, its shadow faint, its flame transparent. It would not vanish, but a ghost held no terror for man or beast. Now and again it firmed somewhat as the Videssian magicians tried ever more desperate spells to maintain the seeming, but their Namdalener counterparts vitiated each one in turn.

  The men of the Duchy re-formed with a trained speed and discipline Marcus had to admire, though it meant ruin for his side. “Namdalen! Namdalen!” Their shout once more dominated the field. And now they fought with greater ferocity than before, as if to make amends for their momentary panic.

  The snub-nosed wing commander bawled an order. His horsemen struck forward—not at the legionaries this time, but at the join between their maniples and the Videssian regiment to the right. The move was full of deadly cunning; coordination between units of the polyglot imperial army was never what it should be. Romans and Videssians each hesitated a few seconds too long, and got no chance to repair their mistake. Voices deep-throated in triumph, the Namdaleni swarmed into the gap they had forced.

  “Form square!” Marcus ordered. The buccinators echoed him. He bit his lip in anger and dismay. Too late, too late, the islanders were already round his flank.

  The Namdalener officer, though, had a feel for the essential. He swung his knights in against the Videssian center, already hard-pressed from right and front. Surrounded on three sides, the imperials shattered. Zigabenos and a forlorn rear guard fought on, but most of the Videssians had no thought beyond saving themselves. The men of the Duchy pounded after them, cutting them down from behind.

  Compared to breaking the Videssians, the legionaries were a secondary objective. They formed their hollow square with only token interference from the islanders. “Blow ‘retreat,’ ” Scaurus ordered the buccinators. The bitter call rang out.

  “Back to camp?” Gaius Philippus asked.

  “Do you think we can do any good here?”

  The senior centurion’s eyes measured the battlefield. “No, it’s buggered right and proper.” As if to underscore his words, a fresh burst of shouting from the right had Zigabenos’ name in it. Dead or captured, Marcus thought dully. The Videssian general’s standard had fallen some time before, the Empire’s sky blue and golden sun trampled in the dust … and the Empire with it, all too likely.

  IV

  VARATESH AND HIS FIVE FOLLOWERS RODE SOUTH LIKE WINDBLOWN leaves, their gray cloaks swirling around them. Their talk was an endless botheration to him, a string of thieveries, rapes, murders, and tortures, all proudly recounted and embellished. He had done worse than any of them, but he did not brag of it. It made him ashamed. Forfeit the company of good men, he thought for the thousandth time, and what you have left is offal—harden yourself to it. He could not.

  He had killed his twin brother at seventeen, in a quarrel over a serving girl. No one ever believed Kodoman drew knife on him first, though it was so. Kinslayer his clan named him and punished him accordingly. They did not kill him, for he was the khagan’s son, but cast him out, driving him naked from their tents onto the steppe.

  In its way that, too, was a death sentence; the spirit went out of ostracized men, so they perished from aloneness as much as from hung
er, cold, or wild beasts. But the injustice of it was a flame burning in young Varatesh’s breast, a flame to sustain him where a lesser man would have yielded to malignant fate and died. He came back to steal a horse; he had to, he told himself, to survive. The guard was about his size; a swift blow from behind, and he had clothes as well. Of course he only stunned the man; he was sure of that, though the fellow had not moved by the time he rode away.

  Bad luck somehow followed him after that. More than once he was on the point of being adopted into a new clan when word of his past caught him up and he was spurned once more. The insult of it rankled still; who were those arrogant chieftains, to presume to judge him on such rumors? One way or another, the insults were avenged. Before long, no khagan in his right mind would have invited Varatesh to join him and his. As his past grew blacker, so did his future; he could not wade to acceptance through blood.

  Banned from the clans by no fault of his own—for so he always saw it—Varatesh, ever bold, formed his own. The plains had always known outlaws—scattered skulkers, often starving, distrusting each other and afraid of their betters. Varatesh gave them a standard to rally to, a blank black banner that openly proclaimed them for what they were. At last he was the chief he should have been, with a growing host behind him—and he hated them, almost to a man. Better, he thought sometimes, if Kodoman’s dagger had found his heart.

  Such thoughts availed him nothing. He reined in to consult the talisman he carried. As always, the crystal sphere was transparent when he first put it in his hands, but at his touch it began to swirl with orange mist. Soon all its depths were suffused with orange—save for one patch, which remained stubbornly clear. He rotated the sphere; however he turned it, the clear area stayed just east of south, as if drawn by some sorcerous lodestone. And it was larger than it had been yesterday.

  “We gain,” he told his companions. They nodded, smiling like so many wolves.

  In fact, Avshar had explained to him, it was not magic that kept the entire crystal from coloring, but the absence of magic. “There is a traveler on the plains who carries a blade proof against my spells,” the wizard-prince had said. “We’ve met before, he and I. If you would, I’d have you take him for me and fetch him here to your tents, where I can pry his secrets from him at leisure.”

  A cold, greedy hunger was in the white-robed giant’s voice, but Varatesh did not hear it. For Avshar he bore admiration and regard not far from love. The sorcerer was outcast, too, driven, he said, far from Videssos in some political convulsion. That alone would have been enough to make a bond between them. But Avshar also used the renegade chieftain’s son with exactly the sort of respectful deference Varatesh felt should have been his by right. He rarely received it from his followers, most of whom were ruffians long before they became outlaws. To have the wizard—a mighty one, as he had proved in many more ways than a bit of crystal—freely grant it eased Varatesh’s suspicions as nothing else could have. His quality was recognized at last, and by one himself of high estate, even if an outlander.

  That had given Varatesh pause, the first few days after Avshar appeared before his tent. The wizard used the steppe tongue like a true Khamorth, not some lisping imperial … and no one saw his face. He always wore either a visored helm or mantling so thick only the faintest hint of eyes could be made out. But he was not blind; far from it.

  After a very short while, though, doubts somehow disappeared, and both Avshar’s curious arrival—why had the sentries not reported a traveler?—and personal habits came to be nothing more than matters for idle speculation.

  Perhaps he has hideous scars, Varatesh thought compassionately. One day he will see I esteem him for himself, not the fleshly mask he wears.

  With a nomad’s patience, the plainsman was willing to wait. For now he would help his friend in the task he had been set; it never occurred to him to wonder how Avshar had come to set him tasks. He booted his horse forward.

  “No, damn it, I want nothing to do with that miserable piece of pointed iron in my kit,” Gorgidas growled at camping time, as he had every day since they left the village. Every day saw him more irritable, too; his face itched and felt rough as a rasp as his beard started growing in. And, to his mortification, it seemed to be mostly white, though his hair was still dark but for a thin dusting of silver at the temples. He wished he had his razor back.

  “Listen to the silly man, now!” Viridovix exclaimed to everyone who would listen—the friendly feud between Celt and Greek entertained the whole party. “When you were with the legion, with its thousands of men and all, the lot of ’em could look after you. The now, though, it’s but this wee few of us. We have to watch out for our own selves and maybe canna be sparing the time for one puir doit too proud to learn swordplay.”

  “Oh, go howl. I’ve managed to come this far in my life without the knack for killing people, and I don’t care to pick it up now. I’m too old to learn such tricks anyway.” He looked resentfully at the Gaul, who was his own age, near enough, but whose sweeping mustachios were still bright red.

  “Too old, is it? Sure and you’re a day younger than you’ll be tomorrow.” Viridovix waited to see if that shot would hit, but the physician merely set his chin. The Celt switched to Latin so only Gorgidas would understand: “Forbye, if you’re not too old to start bedding women, now, sure and the sword shouldna come too hard.”

  The day was warm, but ice leaped up the Greek’s spine. “What mean you?” he said sharply.

  “Softly, softly,” Viridovix said, seeing his alarm. “Naught with harm in it for you. But sith you’ve tried the one new thing, why not the other?”

  Gorgidas sat unmoving, staring past the Gaul. Viridovix left him to himself for most of a minute, then asked with an impudent grin, “Tell me now, how is it by comparison?”

  The Greek snorted. “Find out for yourself, you barbarian ape.” He had lived under the shadow of the Roman army’s law too long to be easy with others knowing he preferred men to women. In the legions, those who did so faced being beaten to death by their fellow soldiers as punishment on discovery.

  Even the thought of a fustuarium was enough to freeze the smile on his lips. He sat a while, considering; he did not like the idea of being a burden to his companions. Pikridios Goudeles, with more tact than Gorgidas had thought he had, helped solve the dilemma. “Possibly the brave Viridovix,” he said, pronouncing the Celt’s name with care, though Videssians tended to stumble over it, “would instruct us both. I have no skill at swordplay, either.”

  Skylitzes had been tossing a handful of dry sheepdung on the fire. At Goudeles’ words he looked up, his usually dour features showing amazed delight. The spectacle of the plump bureaucrat wielding a blade promised amusement beyond his wildest dreams. He kept silent, afraid a taunt might make Goudeles change his mind.

  Gorgidas unsheathed the gladius Gaius Phillippus had given him, hefted it experimentally. It seemed short and stubby compared to the longsword Viridovix bore; the Romans favored blades no more than two feet long, for they relied on the stab rather than the slashing stroke. The leather-wrapped grip fit Gorgidas’ hand seductively well; he held a tool perfectly designed for its intended use.

  “Heavier than your pens, eh?” Arigh said, stepping toward the fire with the results of his brief hunt: a rabbit, a striped ground squirrel, and a fair-sized tortoise. The Greek nodded, scratching the side of his face for the dozenth time that day. Already his beard was thicker than Arigh’s; the Arshaum, unlike the Khamorth, were not a whiskery folk. As if to compensate, they rarely trimmed the few hairs that did appear, but let them grow in a thin tuft at the point of their chins.

  Goudeles, of course, had brought no sword. He borrowed a saber from one of Agathias Psoes’ troopers, a curved, single-edged blade with a very short back edge, called a shamshir in the Khamorth tongue, a yataghan by Arigh. The Videssian handled it with even more uncertainty than Gorgidas showed; the Greek, at least, had seen combat at first hand.

  But after a flou
rish that almost took off his own ear, Goudeles said grandly to Viridovix, “Impart to us your martial art.”

  “That I will.” As the soldiers gathered round to watch, the Celt set his pupils in the guard position, making sure they carried their left arms well behind them. “Keeping them out o’ harm’s way and balancing you both, you see. If you’ve shields you’ll stand more face-to-face to get full advantage from ’em, but no use complicating things the now.”

  He adjusted them once more and stepped back to survey his handiwork. Then, without warning, he tore his own blade free and leaped at his students with a bloodcurdling shriek. They stumbled away, horrified. The watchers guffawed. “There’s you first pair of lessons together,” Viridovix said, not unkindly. “The one is, never relax around a man with a sword, and t’other, a good loud yell never did you any harm, nor your foe any good.”

  Even as teacher, the Gaul made a relentless opponent. Gorgidas’ arm and shoulder ached from parrying his slashes. So did his ribs; Viridovix had thumped them with the flat of his blade more than once. The contemptuous ease with which he got through infuriated the Greek, as Viridovix had known it would. Where Gorgidas had been all but forced to take sword in hand, he soon worked in grim earnest, panting breaths hissing out between clenched teeth. Once Viridovix had to pirouette neatly to keep from being spitted on his point; the Greek lacked the experience to know how dangerous his thrust was.

  “That poxy Roman blade,” the Gaul said. He was sweating as freely as his pupil. “You kern, you were watching the legionaries and never let on—you almost let the air out of me there.”

  Gorgidas began an apology, but Viridovix slapped him on the back and cut it short. “Nay, ’twas well done.” He whirled on Goudeles. “Now, sirrah, your turn. And at ye!”

  “Oof!” the pen-pusher said as the Celt’s blade spanked his side. He lacked any feel for aggression; whatever strokes he made were purely to defend himself. Within that limitation, though, he showed some promise. His movements were economical, and he had a gift for guessing the direction the next blow was coming from. Lankinos Skylitzes showed disappointment.