Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

  And so Maniakes endured the insult. It sometimes looked as if, even if he captured Mashiz, the capital of Makuran, and brought back the head of Sharbaraz King of Kings to hang on the Milestone in the plaza of Palamas like that of a common criminal or a rebel, a good many clerics would keep on thinking him a sinner shielded from Phos' light.

  He sighed. No matter what they thought of him while he was winning wars, they'd think ten times worse if he lost—to say nothing of what would happen to the Empire if he lost. He had to go on winning, then, to give the clergy the chance to go on despising him.

  Kameas the vestiarios said, «Your Majesty, supper is ready.» The eunuch's voice lay in that nameless range between tenor and contralto. His plump cheeks were smooth; they gleamed in the lamplight. When he turned to lead Maniakes and Lysia to the dining room, he glided along like a ship running before the wind, the little quick mincing steps he took invisible under his robes.

  Maniakes looked forward to meals with his kin, who were, inevitably, Lysia's kin, as well. They didn't condemn him for what he'd done. The only one of his close kin who had condemned him, his younger brother Parsmanios, had joined with the traitorous general Tzikas to try to slay him by magic. Parsmanios, these days, was exiled to a monastery in distant Prista, the Videssian outpost on the edge of the Pardrayan steppe that ran north from the northern shore of the Videssian Sea.

  Tzikas, these days, was in Makuran. As far as Maniakes was concerned, the Makuraners were welcome to him. Maniakes presumed Tzikas was doing his best to betray Abivard, the Makuraner commander. Wherever Tzikas was, he would try to betray someone. Treason seemed in his blood.

  Kameas said, «Your family will be pleased to see you, your Majesty.»

  «Of course, they will,» Lysia said. «He's the Avtokrator. They can't start eating till he gets there.»

  The vestiarios gave her a sidelong look. «You are, of course, correct, Empress, but that was not the subject of my allusion.»

  «I know,» Lysia said cheerfully. «So what? A little irrelevance never hurt anyone, now did it?»

  Kameas coughed and didn't answer. His life was altogether regular—without the distraction of desire, how could it be otherwise?—and his duties required him to impose regular functioning on the Avtokrator. To him, irrelevance was a distraction at best, a nuisance at worst.

  Maniakes suppressed a snort, so as not to annoy the vestiarios. He was by nature a methodical sort himself. He used to have a habit of charging ahead without fully examining consequences. Defeats at the hands of the Kubratoi and Makuraners had taught him to be more cautious. Now he relied on Lysia to keep him from getting too stodgy.

  Kameas strode out ahead of him and Lysia, to announce their arrival to their relatives. Somebody in the dining room loudy clapped his hands. Maniakes turned to Lysia and said, «I'm going to give your brother a good, swift kick in the fundament, in the hope that he keeps his brains there.»

  «With Rhegorios?» Lysia shook her head. «You'd probably just stir up another prank.» Maniakes sighed and nodded. Even more than Lysia—or perhaps just more openly—her brother delighted in raising ruckuses.

  Rhegorios flung a roll at Maniakes as the Avtokrator walked through the doorway. Maniakes snatched it out of the air; his cousin had played such games before. «Lese majesty,» he said, and threw it back, hitting Rhegorios on the shoulder. «Send for the headsman.» Some Avtokrators, not least among them Maniakes' predecessor, the late, unlamented Genesios, would have meant that literally. Maniakes was joking, and obviously joking at that. Rhegorios had no hesitation in shooting back, with words this time rather than bread: «Anyone who keeps us waiting and hungry deserves whatever happens to him.»

  «He's right,» the elder Maniakes declared, glaring at his son and namesake with a scowl too ferocious to be convincing. «I'm about to waste away to a shadow.»

  «A noisy, grumbling shadow,» the Avtokrator replied. His father chuckled. He was twice Maniakes Avtokrator's age, shorter, heavier, grayer, more wrinkled: when Maniakes looked at his father; he saw himself as he would look if he managed to stay on the throne and stay alive till he was seventy or so. The eider Maniakes, a veteran cavalry commander, also carried a mind well stocked in treacheries and deviousness of all sorts.

  «It could be worse,» said Symvatios, Lysia's father and the elder Maniakes' younger brother. «We could all be in the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, lying on those silly things propped up on one elbow while from the elbow up our arms go numb.» He chuckled; he was both handsomer and jollier than the elder Maniakes, just as his son Rhegorios was handsomer and jollier than Maniakes Avtokrator.

  «Eating reclining is a dying ceremony,» Maniakes said. «The sooner they wrap it in a shroud and bury it, the happier I'll be.»

  Kameas' beardless face was eloquent with distress. Reproachfully, he said, «Your Majesty, you promised early in your reign to suffer long-standing usages to continue, even if they were not in all ways to your taste.»

  «Suffer is just what we do when we eat in the Hall of the Nineteen Couches,» Rhegorios said. He was not shy about laughing at his own wit.

  «Your Majesty, will you be gracious enough to tell your brother-in-law the Sevastos that his jests are in questionable taste?»

  Using the word taste in a context that included dining was asking for trouble. The gleam in Rhegorios' eye said he was casting about for the way to cause the most trouble he could. Before he could cause any, Maniakes forestalled him, saying to Kameas, «Esteemed sir—» Eunuchs had special honorifics reserved for them alone. «—I did indeed say that. You will—occasionally—be able to get my family and me to eat in the antique style. Whether you'll be able to get us to enjoy it is probably another matter.»

  Kameas shrugged. As far as he was concerned, that old customs were old was reason aplenty to continue them. That made some sense to Maniakes—how could you keep track of who you were if you didn't know who your grandparents had been?—but not enough. Ritual for ritual's sake was to him as blind in everyday life as it was in the temples.

  «This evening,» Kameas said, «we have a thoroughly modern supper for you, never fear.»

  He bustled out of the dining room, returning shortly with a soup full of crabmeat and octopus tentacles. The elder Maniakes lifted one of the tentacles in his spoon, examined the rows of suckers on it, and said, «I wonder what my great-grandparents, who never set foot outside Vaspurakan their whole lives long, would have said if they saw me eating a chunk of sea monster like this. Something you'd remember a long time, I'll wager.»

  «Probably so,» his brother Symvatios agreed. He devoured a length of octopus with every sign of enjoyment. «But then, I wouldn't want to feast on some of the bits of goat innards they'd call delicacies. I could, mind you, but I wouldn't want to.»

  Rhegorios leaned toward Maniakes and whispered, «When our ancestors first left Makuran and came to Videssos the city, they probably thought you got crab soup at a whorehouse.» Maniakes snorted and kicked him under the table.

  Kameas carried away the soup bowls and returned with a boiled mullet doused with fat and chopped garlic and served on a bed of leeks, parsnips, and golden carrots. When he sliced the mullet open, his cuts revealed roasted songbirds, themselves stuffed with figs, hidden in its body cavity.

  A salad of lettuces and radishes followed, made piquant with crumbly white cheese, lemon juice, and olive oil. «Eat hearty, to revive your appetites,» Kameas advised.

  Maniakes glanced over at Lysia. «It's a good thing you're not feeling any morning sickness yet.»

  She gave him a dark look. «Don't mention it. My stomach may be listening.» Actually, she'd gone through her first two pregnancies with remarkable equanimity, which, considering that she'd been on campaign through a good part of each of them, was just as well.

  Mutton chops followed the salad, accompanied by a casserole of cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, and more cheese. Candied fruit finished off the meal, along with a wine sweeter than any of those that had accompanied the earl
ier courses. Maniakes raised his silver goblet. «To renewal!» he said. His whole clan drank to the toast. It wasn't merely the name he'd given his flagship, but what he hoped to accomplish for the Empire of Videssos after Genesios' horrific misrule.

  It would have been ever so much easier had the Makuraners not taken advantage of that misrule to steal most of the westlands and had the Kubratoi not come within inches of capturing and killing Maniakes a few years before. He'd since paid the Kubratoi back. Avenging himself on Makuran, though, was proving a harder fight.

  The commander of the garrison on the wall of Videssos the city was a solid, careful, middle-aged fellow named Zosimos. You wanted a steady man in that job; a flighty soul subject to the vapors could do untold harm there. Zosimos filled the bill.

  And so, when he came seeking an audience with the Avtokrator, Maniakes not only granted it at once but prepared himself to listen carefully to whatever the officer had to say. Nor did Zosimos waste any time in saying it: «Your Majesty, my men have spotted Kubratoi spies from the wall.»

  «You're sure of that, excellent sir?» Maniakes asked him. «They've been quiet since we beat them going on three years ago now. For that matter, they're still quiet; I haven't had any reports of raids over the border.»

  Zosimos shrugged. «I don't know anything about raids, your Majesty. What I do know is that my men have seen nomads keeping an eye on the city. They gave chase a couple of times, but the Kubratoi got away.»

  Maniakes scratched his head, «That's—peculiar, excellent sir. When the Kubratoi come down into Videssos, they come to raid.» He spoke as if setting forth a law of nature. «If they're coming to spy and nothing more… Etzilios is up to something. But what?»

  He made a sour face. The khagan of Kubrat was an unwashed barbarian. He was also a clever, treacherous, and dangerous foe. If he was up to something, it would not be something that benefited Videssos. If Etzilios was making his horsemen forgo their usual looting and robbery, he definitely had something large in mind.

  «I'd better have a look at this for myself.» Maniakes nodded to Zosimos. «Take me to where the Kubratoi have been seen.»

  Even a journey out to the walls of Videssos the city was inextricably intertwined with ceremony. Not only guardsmen accompanied the Avtokrator, but also the twelve parasol-bearers suitable to his rank. He had to argue with them to keep them from going up onto the wall with him and announcing his presence to whoever might be watching. Reluctantly, they admitted secrecy might serve some useful purpose.

  Zosimos had taken Maniakes further south than he'd expected, most of the way down to the meadow outside the southern end of the wall that gave Videssian horse and foot a practice ground.

  Are they spying on our exercises or on the city?» Maniakes asked.

  «I cannot say,» Zosimos answered. «If I could see into a barbarian's mind, I would be well on the way to barbarism myself.»

  «If you don't look into your enemy's mind, you'll spend a lot of time retreating from him,» Maniakes said. Zosimos stared at him, not following that at all. Maniakes sighed and shrugged and ascended the stairs to the battlements of the inner wall.

  Once up on that wall and looking out beyond Videssos the city, Maniakes felt what almost all his predecessors had felt before him: that the imperial capital was invulnerable to assault. The crenelated works on which he stood were strong and thick and eight or nine times as high as a man. Towers—some square, some round, some octagonal—added still more strength and height. Beyond the inner wall was the outer one. It was lower, so that arrows from the inner walls could not only clear it and strike the foe beyond but also could rake it if by some unimaginable mischance it should fall. It, too, boasted siege towers to make it still more commanding. Beyond it, hidden from the Avtokrator's view by its bulk, was a wide, deep ditch to hold engines away from the works.

  A couple of soldiers pointed toward a stand of trees not far from the practice grounds. «That's where we spied 'em, your Majesty,» one of them said. The other one nodded, as if to prove he hadn't been brought before his sovereign by mistake.

  Maniakes looked out toward the trees. He hadn't expected to see anything for himself, but he did: a couple of riders in furs and leathers, mounted on horses smaller than Videssians usually rode. «We could cut them off,» he said musingly, but then shook his head. «No—they haven't come down by themselves, surely. If we snag these two, the next bunch further north will know we have 'em, and that's liable to set off whatever Etzilios has in mind.»

  «Letting 'em find out whatever they're after is liable to do the same thing,» one of the soldiers answered.

  That, unfortunately, was true. But Maniakes said, «If Etzilios is willing to sneak around instead of coming right out and invading us, I'm willing to let him be sneaky for another year longer. The lesson we gave him three years ago has already lasted longer than I thought it would. After we settle with the Makuraners once and for all, which I hope to do this year, then I can try to show Etzilios that the lesson he got was only the smaller part of what he needs to learn.»

  He'd done some learning himself, in the years since he'd taken the throne. The hardest thing he'd had to figure out was the necessity of doing one thing at a time and not trying to do too much at once. By the time he had mastered that principle, he had very little empire left from which to apply it.

  Now he reminded himself not to expect too much even if he was ever free to loose the Empire's full strength against Kubrat. No doubt, somewhere in one of the dusty archives of Videssos the city, maps a century and a half old showed the vanished roads and even more thoroughly vanished towns of the former imperial province that was presently Etzilios' domain. But Likinios Avtokrator had loosed Videssos' full strength against Kubrat, and all he'd got for it was the rebellion that had cost him his throne and his life.

  Maniakes looked out toward the Kubratoi one last time. He wondered if any Videssian Avtokrator would ever again bring under imperial control the land the nomads had stolen. He hoped he would be the one, but had learned from painful experience that what you hoped and what you got too often differed.

  «All right, they're out there,» he said. «As long as they don't do anything to make me notice them, I'll pretend I don't. For the time being, I have more important things to worry about.»

  Videssos had the most talented sorcerers in the world and, in the Sorcerers' Collegium, the finest institution dedicated to training more of the same. Maniakes had used the services of those mages many times. More often, though, he preferred to work with a wizard he'd first met in the eastern town of Opsikion.

  Alvinos was the name the wizard commonly used to deal with Videssians. With Maniakes, he went by the name his mother had given: Bagdasares. He was another of the talented men of Vaspurakan who had left the mountains and valleys of that narrow country to see what he could do in the wider world of Videssos.

  Since he'd kept Maniakes alive through a couple of formidable sorcerous assaults, the Avtokrator had come to acquire a good deal of respect for his abilities. Coming up to the mage, he asked, «Can you tell me what the weather on the Sailors' Sea will be like when we travel to Lyssaion?»

  «Your Majesty, I think I can,» Bagdasares answered modestly, as he had the past two years when Maniakes had asked him similar questions. He spoke Videssian with a throaty Vaspurakaner accent. Maniakes could follow the speech of his ancestors, but only haltingly; he was, to his secret annoyance, far more fluent in the Makuraner tongue.

  «Good,» he said now. «When you warned of that storm last year, you might have saved the whole Empire.»

  «Storms are not hard to see,» Bagdasares said, speaking with more confidence. «They are large and they are altogether natural– unless some mage with more pride than sense tries meddling with them. Weather magic is not like love magic or battle magic, where the passions of the people involved weaken the spells to uselessness. Come with me, Emperor.»

  He had a small sorcerous study next to his bedchamber in the imperial residence.
One wall was full of scrolls and codices; along another were jars containing many of the oddments a wizard was liable to find useful in the pursuit of his craft. The table that filled up most of the floor space in the little room looked to have been through several wars and perhaps an uprising or two; sorcery could be hard on the furniture.

  «Seawater,» he muttered under his breath. «Seawater.» Maniakes looked around. He saw nothing answering that description. «Shall I order a servant to trot down to the little palace-quarter harbor with a bucket, eminent sir?»

  «What? Oh.» Alvinos Bagdasares laughed. «No, your Majesty, no need for that. I was thinking out loud. We have fresh water, and I have here—» He plucked a stoppered jar from its niche on the wall. «—sea salt, which, when mixed with that fresh water, gives an excellent simulacrum of the sea. And what is the business of magic, if not simulacra?»

  Since Maniakes did not pretend to be a mage, he let Bagdasares do as he reckoned best. That, he had found, was a good recipe for successful administration of any sort: pick someone who knew what he was doing—and picking the right man was no small part of the art, either—then stand aside and let him do it.

  Humming tunelessly, Bagdasares mixed up a batch of artificial seawater, then, praying as he did so, poured some of it into a low, broad silver bowl on the battered table. Then he used a sharp knife with a gold hilt to cut several roughly boat-shaped chips off an oak board. Twigs and bits of cloth gave them the semblance of rigging. «We speak of the Sailors' Sea,» he explained to Maniakes, «and so the ships must be shown as sailing ships, even if in literal truth they use oars, as well.»

  «However you find out what I need to know,» the Avtokrator answered.

  «Yes, yes.» Bagdasares forgot about him in the continued intense concentration he would need for the spell itself. He prayed, first in Videssian and then in the Vaspurakaner tongue to Vaspur the Firstborn, the first man Phos ever created. To the ear of a Videssian steeped in orthodoxy, that would have been heretical. Maniakes, at the moment, worried more about results. In the course of his troubles with the temples, his concern for the finer points of orthodoxy had worn thin.