Legion of Videssos

by Harry Turtledove

  They rounded a headland and saw the bonfire blazing on the beach less than a mile away. Marcus’ pulse leaped. There were horses round that fire, and others walking free not far away, grazing on whatever shore plants they could find. Senpat whooped. “Gallop!” he shouted, and spurred his horse forward. The others followed.

  Jouncing up and down, his eyes tearing from the wind of his passage, Scaurus had all he could do to hold his seat. The legionary Florus could not, and went rolling in the sand while his horse thundered away. Vorenus jeered as he rode by the helpless trooper, then almost joined him when his packhorse stumbled.

  Because the Romans had to give all their attention to their horsemanship, Nevrat Sviodo was first to spot the warship lying offshore. Its broad, square sail was tightly furled in the stiff breeze; small triangular topsail and foresail held it steady in the water. Its sides and decking were painted sea green, to make it as near invisible as could be.

  The color reminded Marcus of Drax’ tokens. He knew with sudden sick certainty that this was no imperial craft, but one of the Namdalener corsairs hunting in Videssian waters.

  A moment after Nevrat cried out, the tribune spied the longboat rowing out to meet its parent vessel. He saw the wind catch a woman’s hair and blow it in black waves round her face. A smaller shape sat to either side of her. She was looking toward the beach and pointed back at the oncoming legionaries. She called out something at the same time; though he could not hear the words, Scaurus knew that sweet contralto. The rowers picked up their stroke.

  The boat was hardly two hundred yards from shore. Fitting an arrow to his bow, Senpat Sviodo rode out till his horse was belly-deep in the sea. He drew the shaft to his ear, let fly. Marcus muttered a prayer, and did not know himself whether or not he asked for Senpat’s aim to be true.

  He saw the arrow splash a few feet to one side of the longboat. The rowers pulled like men possessed. Senpat nocked another shaft, then swore vilely as his bowstring snapped when he drew it back. Nevrat rushed forward to hand him her bow, but it was a lighter one that did not quite have the other’s range. Senpat fired; the arrow fell far short of its mark. He shot again, to prove to himself the first had been no fluke, then shook his head and gave Nevrat back her bow. Knowing they were safe, the oarsmen eased up.

  Scaurus’ cheeks were wet. He thought the rain had started again, then realized he was weeping. Mortified, he tried to stop and could not. He stared at the sand at his feet, his eyes stinging.

  Once the longboat and its occupants were recovered, the islanders unreefed their mainsail. It seized the breeze like a live thing. When the tribune raised his head again, there was a white wake under the ship’s bow. The steersmen at the stern leaned hard against their twin steering oars. The corsair heeled sharply away from land, driving east with the wind at its beam. No one on deck looked back.

  Afterward, Marcus remembered little of the next two days; perhaps mercifully, grief, loss, and betrayal left them blurred. He must have returned the horses, both stolen and appropriated, for he was afoot when he entered the capital’s chief suburb on the western shore of the Cattle-Crossing, the town the Videssians simply called “Across.”

  What stuck in his mind most, oddly, should have been least likely to remain. Senpat and Nevrat, trying to free him from his black desperation, bought a huge amphora of wine and, carrying it together, hauled it up the stairs to the cubicle he had rented over a perfumer’s shop. “Here,” Senpat said, producing a mug. “Drink.” His brisk tenor permitted no argument.

  Scaurus drank. Normally moderate, this night he welcomed oblivion. He poured the wine down at a pace that would have left Styppes gasping. Though they did not match him cup for cup, his Vaspurakaner friends soon sat slack-jointed on the floor of the bare little room, arms round each other’s shoulders and foolish smiles on their faces. Yet he could not reach the stupor he sought; his mind still burned with terrible clarity.

  The wine did loose deep-seated memories he had thought buried forever. As the returning rain pattered on the slates of the roof and slid through shutter slats to form a puddle by his bed, he paced up and down declaiming great stretches of the Medea of Euripides, a play he had learned when studying Greek and hardly thought of since.

  When he first read the Medea, his sympathies were with the heroine of the play, as its author intended. Now, though, he had committed Jason’s hubris—maybe the worst a man can fall into, taking a woman lightly—and found himself in Jason’s role. He found, too, as was often the case in Euripides’ work, that misery was meted out equally to both sides.

  Senpat and Nevrat listened to the Greek verses in mixed admiration and bewilderment. “That is poetry, truly,” Senpat said, responding to sound and meter with a musician’s ear, “but in what tongue? Not the one you Romans use among yourselves, I’m sure.” While he and his wife knew only a little Latin, they could recognize it when they heard it.

  The tribune did not answer; instead he took another long pull at the wine, still trying to blot out the reflections that would not cease. The cup shook in his hand. He spilled sticky purple wine on his leg, but never noticed. Even Medea, he thought, had not seduced Jason before she worked her murders and fled in her dragon-drawn chariot.

  “Was any man ever worse used by woman?” he cried.

  He expected no answer to that shout of despair, but Nevrat stirred in her husband’s arms. “As for man by woman, I could not say,” she said, looking up at him, “but turn it round, if you will, and look at Alypia Gavra.”

  Marcus stopped, staring, in mid-stride. He hurled the half-empty wine cup against a wall, abruptly ashamed of his self-pity. The ordeal Mavrikios Gavras’ daughter had endured outshone his as the sun did the moon. After Ortaias Sphrantzes’ cowardice cost her father his life at Maragha, Ortaias—whom flight had saved—claimed the throne when he made his way back to the capital; the Sphrantzai, the bureaucratic family supreme, had produced Emperors before. And to cement his claim, Alypia, whose house opposed everything his stood for, had been forced into marriage with him.

  But Ortaias Sphrantzes, a foolish, trivial young man with more bombast than sense, was only a pawn in the hands of his uncle Vardanes. And Vardanes, whose malignance was neither mediocre nor trivial, had coveted Alypia for years. Dispossessing his feckless nephew of her, he kept her as slave to his lusts throughout Ortaias’ brief, unhappy reign. When the Sphrantzai fell, Scaurus had seen her thus and seen her spirit unbroken despite the submission forced from her body.

  Turning his back on the spattered wall, he knelt clumsily beside Nevrat Sviodo and touched her hand in gratitude. When he tried to speak his thanks, his throat clogged and he wept instead, but it was a clean weeping, with the beginning of healing in it. Then at last the wine reached him; he did not hear Nevrat and her husband when they rose and tiptoed from the room.

  * * *

  It was cold in the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, and the tribune felt very much alone as he made his report to Thorisin Gavras. The Sviodos had crossed with him to the capital, and Styppes—for whatever his company was worth—but Marcus had sent his Romans back to Gaius Philippus at Garsavra. Without the Namdaleni to guard, there was no point keeping them; Gaius Philippus could use them, and in Garsavra they did not risk the Avtokrator’s wrath.

  He told the truth, as much of it, at least, as had happened outside his tent. Thorisin was silent when he finished, studying him stony-faced over steepled fingers. When I first met him, Marcus thought, he would have worn his feelings on his sleeve. But he was learning the emperor’s art of never revealing too much; his eyes were perfectly opaque.

  Then the imperial façade cracked across and showed the man behind it. “Damn you, Scaurus,” he said heavily, the words ripped from him one by one, “why must I always love you and hate you at the same bloody time?”

  The officers who sat in council with him stirred. The Roman did not know many of them well, nor they him. They were most of them younger men, come to prominence under the Emperor’s eye this p
ast campaigning season while the tribune was far away in the westlands; so many of the marshals who had served with Scaurus under Mavrikios Gavras were dead or in disgrace as rebels—or both.

  “Your Highness, you cannot credit this tale, can you?” protested one of the new men, a cavalry officer named Provhos Mourtzouphlos. The disbelief on his handsome, whiskery face—like several other soldiers round the council table, he imitated Thorisin’s carelessness about hair and beard—was manifest. Heads bobbed in agreement with him.

  “I can,” the Emperor replied. He kept on examining Scaurus, as if wondering whether the tribune had left something out. “I haven’t said I do, yet.”

  “Well, you ought to,” Taron Leimmokheir told him abruptly. His, at least, was a familiar face and voice; as always, the drungarios of the fleet’s raspy bass, used to roaring out commands at sea, sounded too big for any enclosed space, even one the size of the Hall of the Nineteen Couches. Smiling at Marcus, he went on, “Anyone with the courage to come back to you after such misfortunes deserves honor, not blame. And what if the fornicating Gamblers got away in the end? There’s no New Namdalen over the Cattle-Crossing, and for that you have only the outlander here to thank.”

  Mourtzouphlos sent an aristocrat’s sneer toward the gray-bearded admiral, who had risen from the ranks by dint of courage, strength, and—rare among Videssians—unswerving, outspoken honesty. The cavalryman said, “No wonder Leimmokheir speaks up for the foreigner. He owes him enough.”

  “So I do, and proud to own it, by Phos,” the drungarios said.

  The Emperor, though, frowned, remembering how Leimmokheir had sworn loyalty to Ortaias before he knew Thorisin had survived Maragha—and how, with his stubborn loyalty, he refused to go back on that oath. He also remembered the assassination attempt he had blamed on the admiral, and the months Leimmokheir had spent in prison until Scaurus proved him guiltless—and touched off Baanes Onomagoulos’ revolt by showing him to be the man behind the plot.

  Thorisin passed a weary hand in front of his eyes, then scratched his left temple. The dark brown hair there was thinner than it had been when Marcus and the legionaries came to Videssos, and more streaked with gray as well. At last he said, “I think I do believe you, Roman. Not for what Taron here says, though there’s truth in that, too. But I know you have the wit to make a better lie than the yarn you spun, so it’s most likely true. Aye, most likely,” he repeated, half to himself. Then, straightening abruptly on his gilded chair, he finished, “Stay in the city a while; you needn’t hurry back to Garsavra. That lieutenant of yours is plenty able to hold the town when winter slows everyone to a crawl, Yezda and us alike.”

  “As you wish, of course, sir,” Marcus said, saluting. The Emperor was right; if anything, Gaius Philippus was a better tactician than Scaurus. But the order was strange enough to make the tribune ask, “What would you have me do here?”

  The question seemed to catch Thorisin Gavras by surprise. He scratched his head again, thinking. After a few seconds he answered, “For one thing, I want a full report in writing from you, covering what you’ve told me today in more detail. The Namdaleni are demons to fight; anything I can learn from what you did to them will be useful. And, oh yes,” he went on, struck by a happy afterthought, “you can ride herd on the plague-taken pen-pushers as you did last winter.”

  Marcus bowed, but he was somber as he took his seat. Although Thorisin professed believing him, he did not expect he would be trusted to command again any time soon.

  The Emperor had already dismissed him from his mind. He looked round the hall. “Now for the next piece of good news,” he said. He unrolled a square sheet of parchment, elaborately sealed and written in a large, gorgeous hand. Gavras held it as if it gave off a bad smell. “This little missive is from our dear friend Zemarkhos,” he announced sardonically, and began to read aloud.

  Stripped of the fanatic priest’s turgid phrasing, the proclamation declared Amorion and the westlands surrounding that city the rightful principality of Phos on earth and hurled venomous anathemas at Thorisin and Balsamon the patriarch of Videssos. “By which the madman means we’ve no taste for massacring Vaspurakaners,” the emperor growled. He tore the parchment in half, threw it behind him. “What do we do about such tripe?”

  The council threw out a few suggestions, but they were all halfhearted, suicidal, or both. The plain truth was that, since a wide stretch of territory held by the Yezda—whom Zemarkhos hated almost as much as he did heretics within his own faith—separated Amorion from imperial troops, Thorisin could not do much but fume.

  He glared at his advisors for being as unable to get around that as he was himself. “No more brilliant schemes, the lot of you?” he asked at last. Silence answered. He shook his head in disgust. “No? Go on, then. This council is dismissed.”

  Servants swung back the Hall of the Nineteen Couches’ mirror-bright bronze doors. Videssos’ officers trooped out. Marcus wrapped himself in his cape to ward off the icy breeze. At least, he thought, the bureaucrats kept their offices warm.

  Videssian troops occupied two of the four barracks halls the legionaries had used in the palace complex; a company of Halogai, newly come from their cold northern home, was quartered in the third. The last stood empty, but Scaurus had no desire to rattle around in it like a pebble inside a huge Yezda drum. Instead, he took up residence in an empty second-floor room of the bureaucrats’ wing of the compound that held the Grand Courtroom. The seal-stampers greeted him with wary politeness, recalling his meddling in business they considered theirs alone.

  He worked in a desultory way on the report the Emperor had requested, but it seemed stale and flat even as he wrote it. He could not attach any importance to it; in trying to numb himself to the shock of Helvis’ leaving him as she had, he pulled away from the rest of the world as well. He moved in a gray haze that had nothing to do with the weather.

  He did his best to disregard the knock on his door—which he kept closed most of the time—but it went on and on. Sighing, he rose from a low chair by the window and lifted the latch.

  Waiting outside, beringed hands on hips, was a plump, smooth-cheeked man of uncertain age, clad in a robe of saffron silk shot through with green embroidery—one of the eunuchs who served the Videssian Emperors as chamberlains. “Took you long enough,” he sniffed, giving Marcus the smallest bow protocol allowed. He went on, “You are bidden to attend his Imperial Majesty this evening in his private chambers at the beginning of the second hour of the night.” The Videssians, like the Romans, divided day and night into twelve hours each, beginning respectively at dawn and sunset.

  Marcus started; Thorisin had ignored him in the week since the officers’ council. He asked the chamberlain, “Does he expect my account of the western campaign? I’m afraid it’s not quite done.” Only he knew how much an understatement that was.

  The eunuch’s shrug set his puddingy jowls shaking. “I know nothing of such things, only that an attendant will come to lead you thither at the hour I named. And I hope,” he added, putting Scaurus in his place, “you will be prompter in greeting him than you were for me.” He turned his back on the tribune and waddled away.

  The attendant proved to be another eunuch, somewhat less splendidly robed than his predecessor. He started shivering as soon as he stepped from the well-heated wing of the Grand Courtroom into the keen night breeze. Scaurus knew a moment of sympathy. He himself wore trousers, as most Videssians did when not performing some ceremonial function. He did not miss his Roman toga; the Empire’s winters demanded warmth.

  The cherry trees surrounding the imperial family’s personal quarters sent bare branches reaching skeletal fingers into the sky—no fragrant blooms at this season of the year. A squad of Halogai stood guard at the doorway, their two-handed axes at the ready. In fur robes of otter and white bear and fox and snow leopard over gilded cuirasses, the big blond men seemed perfectly at ease. And why not, the tribune thought—they were used to worse weather than this. They eyed
him curiously; he looked as much like one of them as like an imperial. They discussed him in their own guttural language as the chamberlain led him by; he caught the word “Namdalen” spoken in a questioning tone.

  The entrance hall still showed scars from the fighting this past spring, when Baanes Onomagoulos had slipped a murder-squad into the city to try to do away with Thorisin. The legionaries, opportunely returning from a practice march, had foiled that. Scaurus glanced at a portrait of the great conquering Emperor Laskaris, now seven and a half centuries dead. As always, the tribune thought Laskaris looked more like a veteran underofficer than Avtokrator of the Videssians, but now a bloodstain marred the lower left quadrant of his image, and sword strokes had chipped at the hunting scenes of the floor mosaics over which the tribune walked.

  The chamberlain paused. “Wait here. I will announce you.”

  “Of course.” As the eunuch bustled down the passage, Marcus leaned against a wall and studied the alabaster ceiling panels. They were dark now, of course, but the translucent stones were cut so thin that during the day they lit the hall with a pale, shifting, pearly light.

  The imperial servitor vanished round a corner, but he did not go far. Scaurus heard his own name spoken, heard Thorisin’s impatient reply: “Well, fetch him.” The eunuch reappeared, beckoned Marcus on.

  The Emperor was leaning forward in his chair, as if willing the Roman into the room. On a couch beside him sat his niece; Marcus’ heart gave a painful thump to see her. As was often true, especially since her torment at the hands of Vardanes Sphrantzes, Alypia’s face wore an abstracted expression, but warmth came into her fine green eyes as Marcus entered.

  Remembering his etiquette, the tribune bowed first to Thorisin, then to the princess. “Your Majesty. Your Highness.” The eunuch frowned when he did not prostrate himself, but Thorisin, like Mavrikios before him, had always tolerated that bit of republican Roman stubbornness.