Legion of Videssos
Page 14
When Skylitzes offered a sympathetic handclasp, the Greek did not take his hand. Instead he said, “Keep drilling me on my swordplay, will you?” The officer nodded.
Gorgidas’ thoughts were full of irony as he scrambled onto his horse. He had left Videssos for the plains to change from doctor to historian. Change he was finding aplenty, but hardly what he had wanted. Things long excluded from his life were forcing their way in: women, weapons—but precious little history yet. It might have been funny, had he been without greater concerns.
The rain poured down from an indifferent sky.
V
THE RETREAT FARED BETTER THAN MARCUS HAD DARED hope. With victory in their hands, the Namdaleni were more eager to chase small bands of fugitives than to tackle a good-sized detachment still under arms. A couple of companies of horsemen made tentative runs at the legionaries, but went off in search of easier prey when they failed to dissolve in panic flight.
“Cowards get what they deserve,” Nevrat Sviodo remarked as she passed the body of a Videssian speared in the back. Scorn filled her voice. She had fought side by side with her husband. Her quiver was almost empty, her saber had blood on it, and her forehead was cut and bruised from a thrown stone, luckily only a glancing blow.
“Aye, that’s the reward for running higgledy-piggledy,” Gaius Philippus agreed. The senior centurion was not downcast in defeat; he had seen it before. “There’s ways to lose as well as ways to win. By the Sucro, now, my mates did well even though we lost, and at Turia, too. If the old woman hadn’t shown up, we’d have given the boy a good drubbing and sent him back to Rome.” He smiled at the memory.
“The old woman? The boy?” Nevrat looked at him in confusion.
“Never mind, lass; it was a long time ago, back where the lot of us came from. These Videssians aren’t the only ones with civil wars, and I chose the wrong side in one.”
“So you were with Sertorius, then?” Marcus said. He knew the senior centurion had been of Marius’ party. After Sulla beat the last of the Marians in Italy, Quintus Sertorius refused to yield Spain to the winners. Winning the Spanish natives to his side, he fought on guerilla-style for eight years, until one of his own subordinates murdered him.
“So I was. What of it?” Gaius Philippus challenged. His loyalty, once given, died hard.
“Not a thing,” the tribune said. “He must have been a fine soldier, to face up to Pompey the Great.”
“ ‘The Great?’ ” Gaius Philippus spat in the dusty roadway. “Compared to what? As I said, if Metellus hadn’t saved his bacon at Turia, he’d be running yet—if he could. We wounded him there, you know.”
“I hadn’t realized that. I was still in my teens then.”
“Yes, I suppose you would have been. I was a little younger than you are now, I think.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. Most of the hair on his scarred forearm was silver. “Time wins the war, no matter what becomes of the battles.”
The sun was still high in the west when the legionaries came into sight of their camp again. There were dead horses and riders outside, and a squad of Namdaleni studying the palisade at a respectful distance. They trotted off when they recognized the newcomers.
Minucius met Scaurus at one of the entrances to the via principalis. The young underofficer’s salute was as much a gesture of relief as of respect. “Good to see you, sir,” he managed.
“And you,” Marcus said. He raised his voice so everyone could hear: “Half an hour! Knock down the tents, find your women and tots, and then we travel. Anyone slow can make his excuses to the islanders—we won’t be here to listen to them.”
“I knew it went wrong,” Minucius was saying. “First the plainsmen running, and then the Videssians, with Drax’ men on their heels. Did Utprand turn traitor, then?”
“No, but his men did. He’s dead.”
“So that was the way of it,” Minucius growled. His large hands folded into fists. “I thought I knew some of the good-for-naughts who tried coming over the stakes. You saw the welcome we gave ’em—they went off to have a go at something less lively, like the imperials’ camp over past the trees.” He hesitated; uncertainty seemed out of place on his rugged features. “I hope we did right, sir. There was, ah, some as wanted us to open up and join ’em.”
“Some, eh?” the tribune said, seeing through Minucius’ clumsy directions. “I’ll tend to that; don’t you worry about it.” He slapped the underofficer on the back. “You did well, Sextus. Go on, get Erene and your children. I want some distance between us and Drax before he decides to make his lads stop plundering and finish us off.”
Drax might do that at any time, Marcus thought as Minucius hurried away—perhaps this moment, perhaps not until morning. Had the tribune been leading the Namdaleni, he would have attacked the legionaries at once. But Drax had been a mercenary far longer than Scaurus: with booty in front of his men, he might not dare pull them away. Might, might, might … Marcus wished the Namdalener count were less opaque.
The camp bubbled and seethed like limestone splashed with vinegar. Soldiers and their kin shouted each other’s names over and over, wandering here and there as they searched for one another. “Lackwits,” Gaius Philippus muttered. “If the silly hens’d stay by their men’s tents they’d get found easy enough.”
“Those whose men are still here to find them,” Marcus said, and the senior centurion had to nod. As fights went, this one had not cost the legionaries overmuch; the center of the imperial army had borne the brunt. Still, men were down who would never rise again; too many, too many. How long would it be before there were no Romans left?
In the camp’s central forum, Styppes was doing his best to hold off that evil day. Scaurus gave credit where due; the healer-priest’s fat face was dead pale from the strain of his labor. He hurried from one moaning, wounded soldier to the next, never pausing long enough to heal a man completely, but giving him a chance at life before going on to another bleeding trooper. He gulped wine in the moments between patients, but, seeing his work, Marcus did not care.
Helvis stood by the tribune’s tent. They shared a quick hug, then Scaurus began uprooting tent pegs. Malric gave what he thought was help until Marcus growled at him to get out of the way. His hands automatically went through the motions of folding the tent for travel.
“Even after we’ve won, you have no use for us?” Helvis asked.
“Look around you,” Scaurus suggested. “This is the only ‘we’ I know; it’s far past time you understood that.”
Outside the camp a Namdalener yelled something. Marcus could not tell what it was through the din, but the island drawl was unmistakable. “The only ‘we’?” Helvis said dangerously. “What would you do if that was Soteric out there?”
Marcus squeezed air from between layers of the collapsed tent, tied the tent cord around it. He thought of his brother-in-law’s work of the day. “Right now I believe I’d kill him.”
Whatever answer she had started to make froze on her lips. The tribune went on wearily, “There are no chains on you, dear, but if you come with me you’d best see the folk here inside as ‘we.’ Come or not, as you please. I haven’t the time to argue.”
He thought for a long moment the brutality of that was more than she would bear. But Dosti squirmed in her arms; she comforted him, at first absently, then with real attention. She looked at him, at Scaurus, while the palm of her left hand lightly touched her belly. “I’ll come with you,” she said at last.
Marcus only grunted. He was wrestling the folded tent into his pack. As with a snake swallowing a rabbit, the engulfing looked impossible but was accomplished even so. Somehow his little wooden chest fit, too. The chair and table would have to stay behind—no time to load them on a mule. He swung the pack onto his shoulders; Romans were their own best mules.
Helvis wore an odd, wistful look. He impatiently started to turn away, but her words spun him back: “There are times, dear, when you make me think so much of Hemond.”
“By the Wager, it’s not for how you act!” Remembering, she smiled, her eyes soft. “When he wanted something of me, he’d laugh and joke and poke me in the ribs, jolly me along.” She cocked a rueful eyebrow at him. “Where you set things out like a butcher slapping a hunk of meat on the table, and if I don’t like it, to the ice with me.”
Marcus felt his ears grow hot. “Where’s the likeness, then?”
“You knew Hemond. He’d have his way, come fire or flood—and so will you. And so do you, again.” She sighed. “I’m ready.”
The legionaries traveled in a hollow square, with their families and the wounded in the center. The Namdaleni dogged their tracks, as Marcus had known they would. Without cavalry of his own, he could do nothing about it. He counted himself lucky only to be watched. From the noise coming out of the captured Videssian camp, Drax was treating most of his men to a good round of plundering.
Videssian stragglers attached themselves to Scaurus’ band by ones and twos, some afoot, others on horseback. He let them join; some were still soldiers, and any mounted troops could be useful, as scouts if nothing more.
One of them brought word of Zigabenos’ fate: captured by the Namdaleni. One more piece of bad news among the many—Marcus was dismayed but not surprised. It was also something he had expected to hear, whether true or not. He asked the imperial, “How do you know that’s so?”
“Well, I ought to. I seen it,” the trooper answered; his upcountry accent made Scaurus think of Phostis Apokavkos. He glared at the tribune, as spikily indignant as any Videssian at having his word questioned. “They drug him off his horse; Skotos’ hell, if he hadn’t been wounded, they never would a-done it. He gave ’em all the fight they wanted and some besides. The plague take all Namdaleni anyways.”
“You saw him taken and did nought to stay it?” Zeprin the Red rumbled ominously. The burly Haloga, long an imperial guard, still carried in his heart the shame of not dying with the regiment of his countrymen who vainly defended Mavrikios at Maragha. It was no fault of his own; the Emperor had sent him away to take command of the imperial left wing. He blamed himself regardless. Now, axe in hand, he glowered at the bedraggled Videssian before him. “What sort of soldier do you call yourself?”
The trooper hawked and spat. “A live one,” he retorted, “which is a sight better than the other kind.” He stared back with deliberate insolence.
Zeprin’s always florid complexion darkened to the color of blood. He roared out something in his own tongue that sounded like red-hot iron screaming as it was quenched. Before either Marcus or the Videssian could move, his axe jerked up, then smashed down through the man’s helmet, splitting his skull almost to the teeth. He toppled, jerking, dead before the blow was through.
The Haloga tugged his axe free. “Craven carrion,” he growled, cleaning the weapon on a clump of purslane. “A man who will not stand by his lord deserves no better.”
“We might have learned something more from him,” Marcus said, but that was all. If legionaries broke and ran in large numbers, they could be decimated: one in ten chosen at random for execution to requite their cowardice. Before he took service, the tribune had reckoned the punishment hideous in its barbarity; now he thought of it without revulsion. The change shamed him. War fouled everyone it touched.
The Arandos was a fat brown stream, several hundred yards across. Bridges spanned it, but Drax’ men held their watchtowers. Perhaps they could be forced, but that would take time, time the legionaries did not have. Had Drax not had so many bands of fugitives to hunt down, he would have overrun them already instead of giving them these three days of grace. The Namdalener was like a dog surrounded by so many bones he did not know which one to take up and gnaw. Scaurus, on the other hand, felt like a hare with the nets closing in.
Hoping against hope, he sent out Videssians to ask the peasants if they knew of a ford, reasoning that they would be more inclined to talk to their countrymen than to aliens like the Romans. He almost shouted when Apokavkos brought back a big-eared codger who came straight to the point: “What’s it worth to ye?”
Another twanger, the tribune thought. He answered, “Ten goldpieces—on the other side of the river.”
“You on a cross if you’re lying,” Gaius Philippus added. The local scratched his head at that—the Videssians did not practice crucifixion. But the threat in the senior centurion’s voice could not be missed. Still, the farmer nodded agreement.
He led the legionaries east along the Arandos until they were well out of sight of any bridge. Then he slowed, squinting across the river for some landmark he did not name. At last he grunted. “There y’are,” he said, pointing.
“Where?” To Scaurus, the stretch of water looked no different from any other part of the Arandos.
“Nail the lying bastard up,” Gaius Philippus said, but in Latin. Not understanding him, the farmer pulled the knee-length tunic that was his only garment over his head and, naked, stepped into the river.
He was promptly in up to his outsized ears, and Marcus thought seriously of what to do with him. The peasant, though, seemed unabashed. He turned around, grinning a wet grin. “Spring flood’s not as near done as I’d’a liked, but come ahead. It don’t get no deeper.”
Holding his sword over his head, the tribune followed. His inches were an advantage; the water reached his chin, but no higher. Two and three at a time, the legionaries followed. “No more’n that,” their guide warned. “The track ain’t what you call wide.” He splashed forward, now bearing a few paces left, now a few right, now pausing as if to feel about with his toes.
“The gods help us if the damned islanders come on us,” Gaius Philippus said, looking back nervously. He stepped into a deep place and vanished, to emerge a moment later, spluttering and choking. “Ordure,” he growled.
Marcus was glad for the Romans’ training, which included swimming as an essential part. Even when they stumbled off the narrow ford, they were able to save themselves; luckily the Arandos’ current was not strong. Only one man was lost, a Vaspurakaner who sank and drowned before he could be rescued. The mountaineers, alas, were no swimmers; their streams were tiny trickles in summer, torrents spring and fall, and frozen solid when winter came.
When the tribune squelched up onto the south bank of the river, the Videssian peasant greeted him with outstretched palm. Scaurus eyed him meditatively as he fumbled in his wet belt-pouch. “How do I know you’ll not sell the secret of the ford to the first Namdaleni who ride by?”
If he expected some guilty start, he was disappointed. With mercenary candor, the fellow answered, “I’d do it, excepting they wouldn’t buy. Why would they? They hold the bridges.” His regret was perfectly genuine.
“Listen to the man!” Senpat Sviodo exclaimed. He was checking to make sure his pandoura had taken no harm during the crossing. “Is it any wonder these Videssians are ever at strife with themselves?”
“Probably not.” Marcus paid his guide, who examined each coin carefully, biting a couple of them to see if they were real soft gold.
“Not bad,” the farmer remarked. “I could’ve broken a tooth on that one of Ortaias’ you gave me, but it’s only the one.” In lieu of anywhere else to carry them, he popped the coins into his mouth; his left cheek sagged under their weight. “Much obliged to you, I’m sure,” he said blurrily.
“Likewise,” Scaurus answered. Children were squealing and splashing each other as their mothers and the legionaries carried them across the stream. Some of the women got carried, too: the very short ones, and those whom pregnancy had made awkward. Helvis, tall and strong, made the passage on her own. She brought Dosti herself; a trooper carried Malric. Her linen blouse and long, heavy wool skirt clung to her magnificently as she came out of the wat
er.
With regret, the tribune pulled his eyes away and looked down along the riverbank to where several of Gagik Bagratouni’s men were sitting glumly, mourning their drowned comrade. The sight made him ask the peasant, “Why not drive a row of stakes into the riverbed so the ford would be safe?”
“And let everyone know where it’s at?” The local shook his head in amazement. “Thank ye, nay.”
“What do you use it for that’s so secret?” Marcus asked, but when he saw the Videssian’s hand come out he said hastily, “Never mind. I don’t want to know enough to pay for it.”
“Thought not.” The farmer waited until the last legionaries were done with the ford, then waded back into the Arandos. When he got to the north bank he discovered someone had made off with his tunic. Peering across the river, Marcus waited for an angry outburst. There was none. Mother-naked, the Videssian disappeared into the brush that crowded close to the stream.
“Why should he care?” Senpat said. He bulged his own cheek out comically. “He’s still ahead nine goldpieces and change, even without the old rag.”
There were Namdaleni on the far side of the Arandos. The legionaries were two days south of the river when they came headlong onto a pair of the islanders, sitting their mounts with the easy arrogance of men who feel themselves lords of all they survey. That arrogance vanished like smoke in the wind when they came out from behind a stand of scrubby oaks and spied Scaurus’ column. He saw them exchange horrified glances. Then they were riding madly across a wheat field, spurring their heavy horses like racing steeds as they dashed toward the river.
For a moment Marcus rocked back on his heels, as startled by the encounter as the men of the Duchy. Then he remembered he, too, had horsemen, a good score of Zigabenos’ men. “After them!” he shouted.
The Videssians moved hesitantly at first, as if fighting had not occurred to them. The foot soldiers’ cheers, though, put fresh heart in them, as did the sight of the Namdaleni in full flight. The islanders were a bare hundred yards ahead of their pursuers when they disappeared over a low rise.