Legion of Videssos

by Harry Turtledove

  She laughed at him. “Times I’ve said that to you, you sulked for days. See how it feels to be mouse instead of cat, sir? But I want you, and I’ll have you.”

  He stroked her hair, damp now with sweat as well as rain. So was his own. “There is a difference, though. If I can’t, I can’t.”

  “There are ways,” she said, and used one. It took a while, but he discovered she was right. Amazement gave way to delight. Drowned in her flesh, he sank into as profound a sleep as he had ever known.

  Helvis waited for what seemed an endless time, listening to Scaurus’ slow, steady breathing and the beat of the rain on the tent. He did not stir when she moved away from him and got to her feet; her mouth twisted in vexation as his seed dribbled down her thigh. She was glad he had not been able to see her face.

  She dressed quickly, pinning her heavy cloak closed over her shift. She found the wineskin with her fingers and slipped it into a deep pocket. Then she felt the ground until she came upon his sword belt.

  The broad-bladed dagger slid free of its sheath with a tiny scrape of metal against metal. It was heavier in her hand than she had expected. She looked down at the sleeping tribune, hardly more than a deeper shadow in the darkness. Her grip tightened on the hilt.… She bit her lip till she tasted blood, shook her head violently. She could not. The knife went with the wineskin.

  Malric whimpered as she picked him up, but did not wake. Dosti made no complaint at all, snoring and breathing wine fumes into her face. She held both of them under her outspread cloak so the raindrops would not wake them when she went outside, and thanked Phos that Marcus had pitched his tent just to one side of the horse barn. She did not think she could carry Malric far.

  She wished she were not pregnant. It made her slow-moving and clumsy, and what would be necessary would be all the more dangerous.

  The chilly rain beat against her face as she shouldered the tent flap open and stepped out into the night. She did not look back at Marcus, but around to take her bearings. There was the barn, with the sentry in front of it. She wondered who he was.

  Most of the legionaries’ tents were behind her; she could see lamplight under a couple of flaps. Snatches of pandoura music came sweet through the storm, Senpat Sviodo whiling away the time. Closer by she heard Titus Pullo laugh at a joke Vorenus told. Relief seeped through her; it would have been impossibly difficult with either of them on guard. They were too alert by half. All these Romans, she knew too well, were fine soldiers, but the ex-rivals surpassed the rest.

  She wondered how long the watchman had been on duty. Was his turn just starting or almost done? She could not gauge the time, not with moon and stars swaddled in clouds. Gamble, then—her lips thinned in a humorless smile as she realized the Videssians’ scornful nickname for her people, like most caricatures, fit somewhat.

  And Marcus did not believe at all.

  She squashed carefully through the mud, as if toward the latrines dug behind the horsebarn. If anyone was there, she could still withdraw in safety—and leave her brother and the other Namdaleni to the judgment of the Avtokrator of the Videssians. It did not bear thinking of.

  No one squatted over the noisome slit trenches. She breathed a prayer of thanks to Phos for his protection; confidence soared in her. As soon as the barn’s wall screened her from the view of the Roman sentry, she stepped under the shelter of its broad, overhanging eaves. She dug her face into the hollow of her shoulder, wiping the rain from her eyes. Then she stooped and set her sleeping children in the small dry space by the gray stone wall.

  “Back soon, my dears,” she breathed, though the wine in them meant they did not hear. The sight of Dosti tore at her. She felt whore and deceiver both, to have used his father so. But blood, faith, and folk were ties older and stronger than two and a half years of what was sometimes love with Scaurus.

  She straightened, found the tribune’s knife, and held it concealed in the flowing sleeve of her cloak. Her heart pounded, her breath came short and fast, not in the passion she had counterfeited but from fear. Recognizing it helped steady her. She turned the corner of the barn and came up to the man on guard.

  She was sure she would have no chance of sneaking up on him—she had never seen a Roman sentry woolgathering on watch. So she came openly, splashing and complaining in a loud voice about the dreadful weather.

  “Who—?” the Roman said, tensing as he peered through the rain and dark. “Oh, it’s you.” He relaxed, gave a rueful chuckle. “Aye, it’s hideous, isn’t it? And to think I was chuckleheaded enough to volunteer to stand out in it. Here, come under the eaves; it’s a little drier, though not much, not with this cursed north wind.”

  “Thank you, Blaesus.”

  “What can I do for you, my lady?” the junior centurion asked, an open, friendly man with no suspicion in him. He knew Helvis was a Namdalener, in the same way he knew Senpat Sviodo was a Vaspurakaner or Styppes a Videssian. It meant little to him—as well find danger in Scaurus himself as in his woman.

  “I have some sweetmeats here Marcus thought you might like,” she said, stepping closer. Her hands, Blaesus saw, were sensibly hidden against the cold and wet in her mantle’s broad sleeves. He felt his face flush with gladness. Truly the tribune was an officer in ten thousand, to think of sharing tidbits with a sentry.

  The knife was in the Roman’s neck before he saw it glitter. He tried to scream, but blood gushed into his mouth, tasting of iron and salt. He knew a moment’s chagrin—he should have been more careful. Scaurus had spoken to him about that before.

  The thought was dizzy, distant as he fought in vain to breathe through the fire and flood in his throat. His knees gave way. He fell face-down in the muck.

  A legionary stuck his head into Marcus’ tent and shouted, “Sir!”

  “Hmm? Wuzzat?” The tribune rolled over, grunted at the contact between the cold sleeping mat and his backside.

  The trooper—it was Lucius Vorenus, he realized—blasted sleep from him. “Blaesus is murdered, sir, and the islanders fled!”

  “What? Ordure!” Scaurus sprang to his feet, groping for clothes. Suddenly wakened with such news, it took him a few seconds to notice that Dosti and Malric had not begun to howl, that Helvis was not beside him. At the jakes, he thought.

  But his sword belt hefted wrongly when he seized it. His fingers found the empty sheath. “Murdered?” he barked tensely at Vorenus. “How?”

  The legionary’s voice was grim. “Stabbed through the throat like a pig, sir.”

  “No,” Scaurus whispered, half prayer, half moan, finding a horrid pattern in the night’s events. Bare-chested and barefoot, he burst past Vorenus and ran for the horse barn. The trooper splashed after him, making heavier going through the mud in his mail shirt and caligae. “Is Helvis back of the barn with the children?” Marcus flung over his shoulder.

  “At the latrines? I don’t think so, sir. Why?” Vorenus said, puzzled and panting.

  “Because they’re not in my tent either,” the tribune grated, tasting the cup of desperation and betrayal, “and my dagger is missing.”

  Vorenus’ jaw shut with an audible click.

  Still looking surprised, Blaesus’ corpse leaned against the wall of the barn, by the opened door. Vorenus said, “When I came to relieve him, I thought he’d been taken ill until I shifted him and spied—that.” A second mouth gaped in the junior centurion’s neck. The trooper went on, “The door was shut when I got here, I suppose so anyone looking from camp would see nought amiss. But there’s not a Namdalener in there now, or a horse either.”

  “There wouldn’t be,” Scaurus agreed. “Do Nevrat and Senpat still have theirs?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I came to you first, and their tent’s some way from yours.”

  “Go find out; if they do, we’ll need them. Rouse the camp, send out searchers—” Not that they’ll find anyone, he jeered to himself, not with them afoot and the islanders mounted and with the gods knew how long a start. But maybe by some miracle
Helvis was nearby after all, wondering what the commotion was about. He winced at the unlikelihood. As Vorenus started to dash away, the tribune added, “And fetch me Styppes.”

  Vorenus saluted and was gone. Marcus looked down at Blaesus’ body, saw both his scabbards gaping wide as his throat. A gladius and a couple of daggers for the Namdaleni, then, he thought—not much. His mind, numbed by disbelief, chewed doggedly on trivia to keep from working at the empty tent a hundred feet away. The real pain would come soon enough.

  Vorenus’ yells tumbled the legionaries from their tents in alarm. Scaurus heard him switch from sonorous Latin to Videssian. Nevrat Sviodo’s clear contralto pierced the rain: “Yes, we have them.” The islanders had not risked entering the camp; Marcus doubted he would have himself.

  A black shadow stumped toward the horse barn—Styppes, from its angry forward lean and its width. As he drew near, the tribune heard him muttering to himself. The healer-priest grunted in surprise when he saw Scaurus half-naked by the doorway. “If you called me to cure your chest fever,” he said with heavy sarcasm, “I cannot until you catch it. But you will.”

  Reminded of the rain and cold, Marcus began to shiver; he had not noticed them. As baldly as he could, he told Styppes what had happened. Save for what had passed inside his tent, he held back nothing, knowing it would have been useless. He finished, “You know something of magic—can you learn where they fled? We may catch them yet. They cannot travel quickly, not with a pregnant woman.”

  “That heretic slut—” Styppes growled. He got no further; Scaurus knocked him down.

  The priest slowly got to his feet, dripping and filthy. Marcus expected him to storm off in fury. Instead he groveled, saying, “Your pardon, master!” The tribune blinked, but he had not seen the murder in his own eyes. Styppes went on, “I know a spell of searching, but whether it will work I cannot say—that skill is not mine. Would you set a silversmith at an anvil and have him beat out swords?”

  “Try it.”

  “I will need something belonging to one of the fugitives.”

  “I’ll bring it to your tent,” the tribune told him. “Wait for me there.” He went back to his own at a gluey trot. Something belonging to one of the fugitives would be easy to get there.

  Mounted and armed, Senpat and Nevrat Sviodo loomed over him. “What do you want of us?” Senpat asked, his voice carefully neutral. Surely the whole camp knew by now, and waited to see what Marcus would do.

  “Take half a dozen men with you, ride back to the last big farm, and commandeer however many horses they have,” he said. “We’re going after them, and when I dogged Ortaias Sphrantzes after Maragha I learned it’s no use chasing riders on foot.”

  The young Vaspurakaner nodded and started to ride away, shouting for Romans to join him. Nevrat leaned down from her saddle, close enough for Scaurus to read the compassion on her face. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “The fault is partly mine. Had I not found this place, you would have gone on as you had been doing, and none of this would have happened.”

  He shook his head. “As well blame the pompous little man who built the barn. I set the guard as I did, and I—” He could not go on.

  Nevrat understood, as she often seemed to. She said, “Do not blame her too much. She did not act out of wickedness, or, I think, from hatred of you.”

  “I know,” the tribune said bleakly. “That makes it harder to bear, not easier.” He shook free of the comforting hand Nevrat held out. She stared after him for a long moment, then rode to join her husband.

  Back at his tent, Marcus threw his tribune’s cape over his wet shoulders. Helvis’ traveling chest was where she had left it, off to one side of the sleeping mat. He flipped up the latch and fumbled in the chest. Near the top, under an embroidered tunic, he came across a small, flat square of wood—the icon he had given her a few months before. His eyes squeezed shut in pain; he pounded a fist down onto his thigh. As if to give himself a further twist of the knife, he picked up the image and carried it to Styppes.

  “A good choice,” the healer priest said, taking it from him. “Phos’ holiness aids any spell cast in a good cause, and the holy Nestorios, as you know, has a special affinity for the Namdaleni.”

  “Just get on with it.” Scaurus’ voice was harsh.

  “Remember, I have not tried this in many years,” Styppes warned. The ritual seemed not much different from one Nepos had used to seek a lost tax-document for the tribune at the capital. After prostrating himself before the icon, Styppes held it over his head in his right hand. He began chanting in the same ancient dialect of Videssian Phos’ liturgy used. His left hand made swift passes over a cup of wine, in which floated a long sliver of pale wood. One end of the sliver had been dipped in blue paint that matched his priestly robes.

  His chant ended not with a strong word of command, as Nepos’ had, but imploringly; his hand opened in supplication over the cup. “Bless the Lord of the great and good mind!” Styppes breathed, for the chip of wood was swinging like a nail drawn toward a lodestone. “Southeast,” the healer-priest said, studying the blue-tipped end.

  “Toward the coast, then,” Marcus said, almost to himself. Then, to Styppes once more, “You’ll ride with us, priest, and cast your spell every couple of hours, to keep us on the trail.”

  Styppes looked daggers at him, but did not dare say no.

  The pursuit party rode out near dawn, mounted on a strange assortment of animals: a couple of real saddle horses beside Senpat’s and Nevrat’s; half a dozen packhorses, two of which were really too old for this kind of work; and three brawny, great-hoofed plow horses. “A miserable lot,” Senpat said to Marcus, “but I had to scour four farms round to get ’em. Most folk use oxen or donkeys.”

  “The islanders aren’t on racers either,” the tribune answered. The turmoil in the Roman camp had roused the farmer whose beasts were gone, and Scaurus’ ears were still ringing from his howls of outrage. Mixed with the curses, though, was a good deal of description; even with the inevitable exaggeration of his horses’ quality, Marcus doubted they would tempt the Videssian cavalry much.

  The rain died away into fitful showers and finally stopped, though the stiff north wind kept whipping bank after bank of ugly gray-black clouds across the sky. Styppes, who had brought a goodly supply of wine with which to work his magic, nipped at it every so often to stay warm. It did nothing for his horsemanship; he swayed atop his plow horse like a ship on a stormy sea.

  Marcus, taller and heavier than his men, also rode one of the ponderous work animals. Feeling its great muscles surge under him, he reflected that he was at last beginning to react like a Videssian. Styppes’ spell of finding was but another tool to grasp, like a chisel or a saw, not something to make a man gasp in lumpish terror. And for traveling quickly, a horse was better than shank’s mare.

  Other thoughts bubbled just below the surface of his mind. He fought the anguish with his stoic training, reminding himself over and over that nothing befell a man which nature had not already made him fit to bear, that there was no point to being the puppet of any passion, that no soul should forfeit self-control of its own accord. The number of times he had to repeat the maxims marked how little they helped.

  Whenever the legionaries rode past a herdsman or orchard keeper, the tribune asked if he had seen the fugitives. “Aye, ridin’ hard, they was, soon after dawn,” a shepherd said at mid-morning. “They done somethin’?” His weather-narrowed eyes flashed interest from under a wool cap pulled low on his forehead.

  “I’m not out for the exercise,” Scaurus retorted. Even as the herder gave a wry chuckle, he was booting his horse forward.

  “We’re gaining,” Senpat Sviodo said. Marcus nodded.

  “What will you do with Helvis when we catch them?” Nevrat asked him.

  He tightened his jaws until his teeth ached, but did not answer.

  A little later Styppes repeated his spell. The chip of wood moved at once, to point more nearly east than south.
“There is the way,” the healer-priest said, sounding pleased with himself for having made the magic work twice in a row. He took a healthy swig from the wineskin as reward for his success.

  As the coast grew near, the ground firmed under the horses’ hooves, with sand supplanting the lowlands’ thick, black, clinging soil. Terns soared overhead, screeching as they rode with wild breeze. The horses trotted past scrubby beach plums loaded with purple fruit, trampled spiky saltwort and marram grass under their feet.

  The sea, gray and threatening as the sky, leaped frothing up the beach; Scaurus licked his lips and tasted salt. No tracks marred the coarse yellow sand. “Which way now?” he called to Styppes, raising his voice above the booming of the surf.

  “We will see, won’t we?” Styppes said, blinking owlishly. Marcus’ heart sank as he watched the priest’s lurching dismount. The wineskin flapped at his side like a crone’s empty dug. He managed to pour the last few drops into his cup, but a fuddled smile appeared on his face as he tried to remember his magic. He held the icon of the holy Nestorios over his head and gabbled something in the archaic Videssian dialect, but even the tribune heard how he staggered through, fluffing half a dozen times. His passes, too, were slow and fumbling. The sliver of wood in the wine cup remained a mere sliver.

  “You worthless sot,” Scaurus said, too on edge to hold his temper. Muttering something that might have been apology, Styppes tried again, but only succeeded in upsetting the cup. The thirsty sand drank up the wine. The tribune cursed him with the weary rage of hopelessness.

  Titus Pullo gestured southward. “Smoke that way, sir, I think!” Marcus followed his pointing finger. Sure enough, a windblown column was rising into the sky.

  “We should have spied that sooner,” Senpat Sviodo said angrily. “A pox on these clouds; they’re hardly lighter than the smoke themselves.”

  “Come on,” Marcus said, swinging himself back into the saddle. He thumped his heels against the plow horse’s ribs. With a snort of complaint, it broke into a jarring canter. The tribune turned his head at a shout; Styppes was still struggling to climb aboard his horse. “Leave him!” Scaurus said curtly. Sand flying, the pursuit party rode south.