Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Bagdasares went on chanting. His right hand moved in swift passes above the bowl that held the little, toylike boats. Without his touching them, they moved into a formation such as a fleet might use traveling across the sea. A wind Maniakes could not feel filled their makeshift sails and sent them smoothly from one side of the bowl to the other.

  «The lord with the great and good mind shall favor us with kindly weather,» Bagdasares said.

  Then, although he did not continue the incantation, the boats he had used in his magic reversed themselves and began to sail back toward the side of the bowl from which they had set out. «What does that mean?» Maniakes asked.

  «Your Majesty, I do not know.» Bagdasares' voice was low and troubled «If I were to guess, I—»

  Before he could say more, the calm water in the center of the bowl started rising, as if someone had grabbed the rim and were sloshing the artificial sea back and forth. But neither Bagdasares nor Maniakes had his hand anywhere near the polished silver bowl.

  What looked like a spark that flew from two iron blades clashing together sprang into being above the little fleet, and then another. A faint mutter in the ear—was that what thunder might sound like, almost infinitely attenuated?

  One of the boats of the miniature fleet overturned and sank. The rest sailed on. Just before they reached the edge of the bowl, Maniakes had—or thought he had—a momentary vision of other ships, ships that looked different in a way he could not define, also on the water, though he did not think they were physically present. He blinked, and they vanished even from his perception.

  «Phos!» Bagdasares exclaimed, and then, as if that did not satisfy him, he swung back to the Vaspurakaner tongue to add, «Vaspur the Firstborn!»

  Maniakes sketched Phos' sun-circle above his left breast. «What,» he asked carefully, «was that in aid of?»

  «If I knew, I would tell you.» Bagdasares sounded like a man shaken to the core. «Normally, the biggest challenge a mage faces is getting enough of an answer to his question to tell him and his client what they need to know. Getting so much more than that—»

  «I take it we'll run into a storm sailing back to Videssos the city?» Maniakes said in what wasn't really a question.

  «I would say that seems likely, your Majesty,» Bagdasares agreed. «The lightning, the thunder, the waves—» He shook his head. «I wish I could tell you how to evade this fate, but I cannot.»

  «What were those other ships, there at the end of the conjuration?» Maniakes asked. With the interpretation less obvious, his curiosity increased.

  But Bagdasares' bushy eyebrows came down and together in a frown. «What 'other ships,' your Majesty? I saw only those of my own creation.» After Maniakes, pointing to the part of the bowl where the other ships had briefly appeared, explained what he had seen, the mage whistled softly.

  «What does this mean?» Maniakes asked. Then he chuckled wryly. «I have a gift for the obvious, I fear.»

  «Were the answer as obvious as the question, I should be happier—and so, no doubt, would you,» Alvinos Bagdasares said. «But questions about meaning, while easy to ask, have a way of being troublesome to wrestle with.»

  «Everything has a way of being troublesome,» Maniakes said irritably. «Very well. I assume you can't tell me everything I would know. What can you tell me?»

  «To meet your gift for the obvious, I would say it is obviously true my magic touched on something larger than I had intended.» Bagdasares replied. «As I said, you will have good weather sailing to Lyssaion. I would also say it is likely you will have bad weather sailing back.»

  «I didn't ask you about sailing back.»

  «I know that,» Bagdasares said. «It alarms me. Most times, magic does either what you want or less, as I told you a little while ago. When it does more than you charge it with, that is a token your spell has pulled back the curtain from great events, events with a power of their own blending with the power you bring to them.»

  «What can I do to keep out of this storm?» Maniakes asked.

  Regretfully, Bagdasares spread his hands. «Nothing, your Majesty. It has been seen, and so it will come to pass. Phos grant that the fleet pass through it with losses as small as may be.»

  «Yes,» Maniakes said in an abstracted voice. As Avtokrator of the Videssians, ruler of a great empire, he'd grown unused to the idea that some things were beyond his power. Not even the Avtokrator, though, could hope to bend wind and rain and sea to his will. Maniakes changed the subject, at least slightly: «What about those other ships I saw?»

  Bagdasares looked no happier. «I do not know, so I cannot tell you. I do not know if they be friends or foes, whether they come to rescue the ships from your fleet that passed through the storm or to attack them. I do not know whether the rescue or the attack succeeds or fails.»

  «Can you try to find out more than you do know?» Maniakes said.

  «Aye, I can try, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. «I will try. But I make no guarantees of success: indeed, I fear failure. I was not granted the vision, whatever it might have been. This suggests it might well have been meant for you alone, which in turn suggests reproducing, grasping, and interpreting it will be extraordinarily difficult for anyone but yourself.»

  «Do what you can,» Maniakes said.

  And, for the next several hours, Bagdasares did what he could. Some of his efforts were far more spectacular than the relatively uncomplicated spell Maniakes had first requested of him. Once, the chamber glowed with a pure white light for several minutes. Shadows appeared on the walls with nothing to cast them. Words in a language Maniakes did not understand came out of thin air.

  «What does that mean?» he whispered to Bagdasares.

  «I don't know,» the wizard whispered back. A little while later, he gave up, saying, «Whatever lies ahead is beyond my ability to unravel now, your Majesty. Only the passing of time can reveal its fullness.»

  Maniakes clenched his fists. If he'd been willing to wait for the fullness of time, he wouldn't have asked Bagdasares to work magic. We sighed. «I know the army will get to Lyssaion without any great trouble,» he declared. «For now, I'll cling to that. Once I get there, once I punish the Makuraners for all they've done to Videssos, then I'll worry about what happens next.»

  «That is the proper course, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. His large, dark eyes, though… his eyes were full of worry.

  What looked at first glance like chaos filled the harbor of Kontoskalion. Soldiers filed aboard some merchantmen; grooms and cavalrymen led unhappy, suspicious horses up the gangplanks of others. Last-minute supplies went onto still others.

  «The lord with the great and good mind bless you, your Majesty, as you go about your holy work,» the ecumenical patriarch Agathios said to Maniakes, sketching Phos' sun-sign above his heart. «I thank you, most holy sir,» the Avtokrator answered, on the whole sincerely. Since granting the dispensation recognizing his marriage to Lysia as licit, Agathios had shown himself willing to be seen with them and to pray with them and for their success in public. A good many other clerics, including some who accepted the dispensation as within the patriarch's power, refused to offer such open recognition of it.

  «Smite the Makuraners!» Agathios suddenly shouted in a great voice. One thing Maniakes had noted about him over the years was that, while usually calm, he could work himself up to rage or down to panic with alarming speed. «Smite them!» he cried again. «For they have tried to wipe out and to pervert Phos' holy faith in the lands they have stolen from the Empire of Videssos. Now let our vengeance against them continue.»

  A good many soldiers, hearing his words, made the sun-sign themselves. Maniakes had punished the Land of the Thousand Cities for the outrages the Makuraners had visited upon the Videssian westlands, for the temples pulled down or burned, for the Vaspurakaner doctrine forcibly imposed upon Videssians who reckoned it heretical, for the priests tormented when they would not preach the Vaspurakaner heresy.

  Maniakes recognized th
e irony there, even if he did not go out of his way to advertise it. He himself inclined toward what the Videssians called orthodoxy, but his father stubbornly clung to the doctrines so loathed in the westlands.

  He'd gone out of his way to wreck shrines dedicated to the God the Makuraners worshiped. Having begun a war of religion, they were now finding out what being on the receiving end of it was like.

  Agathios, fortunately for Maniakes' peace of mind, calmed as quick as he inflamed himself. Moments after bellowing about the iniquities of the Makuraners, he said, in an ordinary tone of voice, «If the good god is kind, your Majesty, he will let you find a way to put an end to this long, hard war once and for all.»

  «From your lips to Phos' ear,» Maniakes agreed. «Nothing would make me happier than peace—provided they restore to us what they've stolen. And nothing would make them happier than peace– provided they keep what they took when Videssos was weak. You do see the problem, most holy sir?»

  «I do indeed.» The ecumenical patriarch let out a long, sad sigh. «Would it were otherwise, your Majesty.» He looked embarrassed. «You do understand, I hope, that I speak as I do in the interest of Videssos as a whole and in the interest of peace rather than that of the temples.»

  «Of course,» Maniakes answered. He'd had so much practice at diplomacy—or perhaps hypocrisy was the better word—that Agathios didn't notice his sarcasm. Back when the fight against the Makuraners had looked as black as the gaping emptiness of the imperial treasury, he'd borrowed gold and silver vessels and candelabra, especially from the High Temple but also from the rest, and melted them down to make the gold and silver coins with which he could pay his soldiers—and with which he could also pay tribute to the Kubratoi so he could concentrate what few resources he had on fighting the Makuraners. With peace, the temples would– might—be repaid.

  Thinking about the Kubratoi made him glance eastward. He was not up on the walls of Videssos the city now; he could not see the Kubrati scouts who had come down near the imperial city to see what he was doing. But he hadn't forgotten them, either. The nomads had never before sent out spies so openly. He wondered what they had in mind. Etzilios had been very quiet in the nearly three years since he'd been trounced… till now.

  While Maniakes was musing thus, Agathios raised his hands toward the sun and spat down onto the planks of the wharf to show his rejection of Skotos. «We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind,» he intoned, «by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.»

  Maniakes joined him in Phos' creed; so, again, did many of the sailors and soldiers. That creed linked worshipers of the good god in distant Kalavria, almost at the eastern edge of the world, with their coreligionists on the border with Makuran—or rather, on what had been the border with Makuran till the westerners began taking advantage of Videssos' weaknesses after Genesios killed Likinios and his sons.

  Agathios bowed low. «May good fortune go with you, your Majesty, and may you come back wreathed with fragrant clouds of victory.» Maniakes had been trained as a soldier, not as a rhetorician, but he knew a mixed metaphor when he heard one. Agathios seemed to notice nothing out of the ordinary, adding, «May the King of Kings cower like the whipped ox you have for your slaves.» And, bowing again, he departed, sublimely unaware he had left meaning behind along with Maniakes.

  Thrax waved from the Renewal. Maniakes waved back and hurried down the wharf toward his flagship. His red boots, footgear reserved for the Avtokrator alone, thudded on the gangplank. «Good to have you aboard, your Majesty,» Thrax said, bowing. «Will the Empress be along soon? When everyone's here, we don't have anything left to hold us in the city.»

  «Lysia will be along shortly,» Maniakes answered. «Do you mean to tell me Rhegorios is already aboard?»

  «That he is.» Thrax pointed aft, to the cabins behind the mast. On most dromons, only the captain enjoyed the luxury of a cabin, the rest of the crew slinging their hammocks or spreading blankets on the deck when they spent one of their occasional nights at sea. A ship that habitually carried the Avtokrator, his wife, and the Sevastos, though, carried them in as much comfort as was to be found in the cramped confines of a war galley.

  Maniakes knocked at the door to the cabin his cousin was using. When Rhegorios opened it, Maniakes said, «I didn't expect you to be on board ahead of me and Lysia both.»

  «Well, life is full of surprises, isn't it, cousin your Majesty brother-in-law of mine?» Rhegorios said, stringing together with reckless abandon the titles by which he might address Maniakes. He had a habit of doing that, not least because it sometimes flustered Maniakes, which amused Rhegorios no end.

  Today, though, the Avtokrator refused to rise to the bait. He said, «Lysia and I have our own reasons for wanting to be out of Videssos the city, but you're popular here. I'd think you'd want to stay as long as you could.»

  «Any fool with a big smile can be popular,» Rhegorios said with an airy wave of his hand. «It's easy.»

  «I haven't found it so,» Maniakes answered bitterly.

  «Ah, but you're not a fool,» Rhegorios said. «That makes it harder. When a fool goes wrong, people forgive him; he isn't doing anything they didn't expect. But if a man with a reputation for knowing what he's doing goes astray, they're on him like a pack of wolves, because he's let them down.»

  Lysia boarded the Renewal then, which should have distracted Maniakes but didn't. A great many people in Videssos the city reckoned he had gone wrong by falling in love with his cousin. The feeling would have been less powerful had it been more rational. Getting away from the capital, getting away from the priests who still resented the dispensation he'd haggled out of Agathios, was nothing but a relief.

  Thrax shouted orders. Longshoremen ran out to cast off lines. Sailors nimbly coiled the ropes in snaky spirals. They stowed the gangplank behind the cabins; Maniakes felt the thud through the soles of his feet when it crashed down onto the deck planking.

  A drum began to thud, setting the pace for the rowers. «Back oars!» the oarmaster shouted. The oars dug into the water. Little by little, the Renewal slid away from the wharf. Maniakes inhaled deeply, then let out a long, glad sigh. Wherever he went, and into whatever sort of battle, he would be happier than he was here.

  Coming into Lyssaion was like entering another world. Here in the far southwest of the Videssian westlands, the calendar might still have said early spring, but by all other signs it was summer outside. The sun pounded down out of the sky with almost the relentless authority it held in the Land of the Thousand Cities. Only the Sailors' Sea kept the weather hot rather than intolerable.

  But even the sea here was different from the way it looked in Videssos the city. Back by the capital, the seawater was green. Off Kalavria, in the distant east, it was nearer gray. You could ride out from Kastavala over to the eastern shore, and look across an endless expanse of gray, gray ocean toward the end of the world, or whatever lay beyond vision. No ship had ever come out of the east to Kalavria. Over the years, a few ships had sailed east from the island. None of them had come back, either. Here, now… here the water was blue. It was not the blue of the sky, the blue enamel-makers kept trying and failing to imitate in glass paste. The blue of the sea was darker, deeper, richer, till it almost approached the color of fine wine. But if, deluded, you dipped it up, you found yourself with only a cup of warm seawater.

  «I wonder why that is,» Rhegorios said, having made the experiment.

  «To the ice with me if I know.» Maniakes spat in rejection of Skotos, whose icy hell held the souls of sinners in eternal torment.

  «Phos is a better wizard than all the mages ever born put together,» Rhegorios said, to which his cousin could only nod.

  Against bright sky and rich blue sea, the walls of Lyssaion, and the buildings that showed over them, might have been cast of shining gold. They weren't, of course; such a test of man's cupidity could never have been built, nor survived long if by some miracle
it had been. But the yellow-brown sandstone shone and sparkled in the fierce sunlight till the eye had to look away lest it be dazzled.

  Till two years before, Lyssaion had been nothing but a sleepy little town that baked in the summer, mostly stayed warm through the winter, and, in times of peace, sent goods from the west and occasional crops of dates to Videssos the city. The palm trees on which the dates ripened grew both near and even within the city, as they did in the Land of the Thousand Cities. Maniakes found them absurd; they put him in mind more of outsized feather dusters than proper trees.

  Lyssaion had been so unimportant in the scheme of things that the Makuraners, when they overran the Videssian westlands, hadn't bothered giving it more than a token garrison. The thrust of their invasion had been toward the northeast, toward Videssos the city. Towns on the way to the capital lay firmly under their thumb. Other towns…

  «They didn't pay enough attention to other towns,» Maniakes said happily as his men and horses left their ships and filed into Lyssaion.

  «They certainly didn't,» Rhegorios agreed, also happily. «And now they're paying for it.»

  Looking at Lyssaion, though, Maniakes thought the Makuraners could have done little to keep him from seizing it as a base no matter how much they wanted to do exactly that. It had a stout wall to hold off enemies approaching by land, but none to keep ships from drawing near. Without ships, the place had no reason to exist. Fishing boats sailed out from it; in peacetime it enjoyed modest prosperity from its dates and as a transshipment point between Makuran and Videssos. Wall off the harbor to hold out a fleet: the town would die, the people would flee, and who would feed a garrison then?