Their walls were still brick, though now mostly of fired brick, the better to resist siege engines. Better resistance was not the same as good resistance. Maniakes looked toward Qostabash the way a hungry hound was liable to look toward a butcher's shop.
But, as he approached, he discovered the town was not so defenseless as he had hoped. Its walls had not improved since the year before. But having an army between it and the Videssians did make it harder to seize.
«Well, well,» Maniakes said. «Isn't that interesting?» Interesting was not the word he had in mind, but it was a word he could bring out without blistering everyone within earshot.
«They are getting better at reacting to us, aren't they?» Rhegorios said. «Year before last, they let us get halfway across the flood-plain to Mashiz before they did anything much against us, and last year we got to have some fun when we came down from Erzerum, too. Not this time, though.»
«No.» Maniakes squinted, trying to sharpen his eyesight. The Makuraners were still too far away for him to be sure, but– «That's a good-sized force they have there.»
«So it is,» Rhegorios agreed. «They can afford to feed a good-sized force here a lot more easily than they could in the hill country.» Maybe he'd been paying attention to logistics after all. He glanced toward Maniakes. «Do we try to go through them or around them?»
«I don't know yet,» Maniakes answered. Hearing those words pass his lips was a sign of how far he'd come since the ecumenical patriarch had proclaimed him Avtokrator of the Videssians. He didn't charge ahead without weighing consequences, as he had only a few years before. «Let's see what the scouts have to say. When I know what's in front of me, I'll have a better chance of making the right choice.»
Off rode the scouts, down toward the waiting Makuraner army. The rest of the Videssian force followed the outriders.
Maniakes wished he had some better way than eyes alone of looking at the enemy army. His eyes didn't tell him so much as he would have wished, and he didn't altogether trust what they did tell him. But magic and war did not mix; the passions war engendered made sorcery unreliable. And so he waited for the scouts. He knew more than a little relief when one of them came riding back and said, «Your Majesty, it looks to be mostly an infantry army. They have some horsemen—a few rode out to skirmish with us and hold us away from the foot soldiers—but no sign of the boiler boys from the field army.»
«I thought I saw the same thing from here,» Maniakes said. «I wasn't sure I believed it. No boiler boys, eh? Isn't that interesting?» Now he'd used it twice when he meant something else. «Where is the heavy cavalry, then? Abivard's gone and done something sneaky with it. I don't like that.» He didn't like it at all. Not knowing where your enemy's best troops were made you look over your shoulder all the time.
He looked over his shoulder now. No force of heavy Makuraner cavalry came thundering out of the hills behind him. Had they been there, he would have discovered them.
Rhegorios rode up to hear what the scout had to say. He tossed his head «Well, cousin your Majesty brother-in-law of mine, I'll ask you the same question again: what do we do now?»
«If you were Abivard, what would you do with the field army?» Maniakes replied, answering question with question.
«If I were Abivard,» Rhegorios said slowly, thinking as he spoke, «I wouldn't know whether we were coming up from Lyssaion or down from Erzerum. I would know I could move a cavalry force faster than I could a bunch of foot soldiers. I could use infantry to slow down those cursed Videssians—» He grinned at Maniakes."—as soon as they got into the Land of the Thousand Cities, while I stayed back somewhere in the middle of the country so I could get to wherever I was going in a hurry.»
«Yes, that makes good sense,» Maniakes said, and then, after a moment's reflection, «in fact, it makes better sense than anything I'd thought of myself. It tells me what needs doing, too.» «That's good,» his cousin said. «What does need doing?»
Maniakes spoke with decision, pointing ahead toward the drawn-up Makuraner army. «I don't want to get bogged down fighting foot soldiers. If I do, I won't be able to maneuver the way I'd want to when Abivard comes after me. I want to beat the real Makuraner army, break past it, and strike for Mashiz. Abivard kept me from doing that last year. I don't aim to let him keep me from doing it again.»
«Been a good many years since an Avtokrator of the Videssians sacked Mashiz,» Rhegorios agreed in dreamy tones. Then he turned practical once more: «So you won't want to engage these fellows or to attack Qostabash, then? We'll get around them and look for more rewarding targets?»
«That's the idea,» Maniakes said. «Foot soldiers have trouble engaging us unless we choose to let 'em. I don't choose that here. Let them chase us. If they get out of line doing it, we double back and punish them. If they don't, we leave them eating our dust.»
Horns relayed his commands to the Videssian horsemen. In line of battle, they rode past the Makuraner army at a distance of about half a mile. That was plenty close to let his men hear the enemy shouting at them and probably calling them a pack of cowards for not coming closer and fighting.
To give the Makuraners something to yell about, he sent a few squadrons of scouts close enough to ply the mostly unarmored infantry with arrows. The enemy shot back. They put a lot more arrows in the air than had his scouts, but to less effect: they were aiming at small, armored moving targets. A couple of horses went down and one scout pitched from the saddle with an arrow in the face, but the Videssians gave better than they got.
The Makuraners also Cried to use their small force of cavalry to slow down the Videssians so their infantry could move forward and come to close quarters with them. Had the force been larger, that might have worked. As things were, the Videssians used horse archers and javelin men to send their foes reeling back in retreat. «Keep moving!» Maniakes called to his men after the Makuraner horse recoiled back onto their foot for protection. «We'll pick the field. They can't make us do it against our will.»
He'd grown used to raising a cheer from the army on going into battle. Raising a cheer on escaping battle was something else again, and almost a harking back to the bad old days when the Videssians had fled the Makuraners for no better reason than that they were Makuraners. But the resemblance to those bad old days was only superficial. His men could have attacked the Makuraners had he given them the order. He thought they would have beaten the foe.
But an army of foot soldiers was not the foe he wanted to beat, not the foe he needed to beat. He wanted Abivard's men, the best the King of Kings could throw against him. No lesser force deserved his notice.
He and his horsemen rode wide around Qostabash. On the walls of the city, more Makuraners watched. Maybe they, too, were foot soldiers. Maybe they were ordinary townsfolk imitating foot soldiers. The men of the Thousand Cities used all sorts of tricks to try to keep him from testing their inadequate walls. If this was a trick, it would work. He couldn't afford to assail Qostabash, not with that infantry army close on his heels.
On and on the Videssians went, now walking their horses, now trotting them. Maniakes dropped back to the rear guard and peered behind them. Their pursuers had dropped out of sight. He nodded to himself, well enough pleased.
When evening came, the army camped on irrigated land not far from the Tutub. The only enemies close by were mosquitoes and gnats, and they were impartial foes to all mankind. Maniakes looked east, back toward Videssos. No help would reach him from that direction, not with the Makuraners controlling the westlands. Messengers might be able to come up from Lyssaion in case of need, but the need would have to be urgent for them to risk capture by the men of Makuran. He had trouble imagining a need so urgent.
He walked over to the wagon in which Lysia had ridden. «Here we are, altogether surrounded by the foe,» he said with a melodramatic wave and an even more melodramatic pause. The pause over, he added, «Isn't it wonderful?»
Lysia laughed, understanding him perfectly. «It certainly is,»
she said.
The Makuraners wasted no time in trying to make his life difficult. When the army began to move the next morning, it soon encountered flooded fields that came from broken canals. He faced the problem with equanimity: they'd done the same thing each of the past two years. He had enough timbers along to corduroy a road to drier ground, at which point his engineers picked up the timbers and stowed them again. Sooner or later, those infantrymen would try to follow in his footsteps. They'd have a slow, wet, muddy time of it.
Up ahead, seemingly secure on its hillock, squatted one of the Thousand Cities. No large Makuraner army lurked nearby now. Maniakes pointed to the town, whose name he did not know. «We'll take it,» he said.
With practiced efficiency, engineers and soldiers went to work. The muddy timbers that had let the Videssian army make its way through muck now were reassembled as frames for catapults and rams. The catapults began lobbing big pots filled with pitch and other inflammable substances into the town. The engineers used oil-soaked rags as wicks for the pots. Before long, columns of smoke rose from burning roofs and awnings and boards inside the city.
Anywhere else, the catapults would also have flung heavy stones at the wall. In the land between the Tutub and the Tib, heavy stones were hard to come by. Forcing breaches, then, was the work of the rams. Under leather-covered wooden frames, they inched up the slope of the artificial hillock toward the city. The defenders on the wall shouted defiance at them and shot at the men who carried the frames and would swing the rams.
Anywhere else, the defenders would have dropped heavy stones down onto the frames, trying to break them and either render the rams useless or at least tear openings through which the boiling water and red-hot sand they poured down onto the attackers could find their way. Again, though, heavy stones were few and far between in the Land of the Thousand Cities.
Videssian archers filled the air with shafts, doing their best to keep the men of the city garrison from interfering with the rams. Thud! The pointed iron tip of one of them slammed into the wall. Maniakes was standing just out of bowshot from the foes. The ground quivered beneath his feet, as if at a small earthquake. Thud! Another blow, another little tremor transmitted up through the soles of his shoes.
Thud! That one was smaller still. Off on the other side of the city, halfway round the circuit of the walls, another ram had gone into action. Now the defenders would have two things to worry about at the same time. Maniakes wondered which ram would first make the wall give way.
It proved to be the closer one. With a rumble that seemed almost like a tired sigh, some of the brick masonry came tumbling down. Through it, the screams of the defenders who came tumbling down with the wall rang high and shrill. Videssians rushed into the breach.
Surviving city garrison men met them and, for some little while, fought fiercely enough to hold them in check. But the city garrison was small, and its men neither well trained nor well armed. When a couple of its officers fell, the men began to lose heart. A few of them fell back from the breach, and then a few more. That could not go on long, not if they intended to hold back their enemies. And then, with cries of «Phos with us!» the Videssians began jumping down into the city. The defense was over. The sack had begun. A captain asked Maniakes, «The usual rules, your Majesty?»
«Aye, the usual, Immodios,» he answered. «Wreck the town, men may plunder and burn as they like, but no attacks against anyone who doesn't attack first, no murdering women and children for the sport of it. Any shrine to the Makuraner God you find, tear it down.»
«As you say, your Majesty.» Immodios saluted, right fist over his heart, then hurried off to spread the news.
As methodically as they had breached the wall, the Videssians went about the business of knocking down the city. A couple of the blue-robed priests who had accompanied the army urged them on, shouting, «Phos will bless you for the vengeance you inflict on his foes and the false god they worship.»
Maniakes listened to that fiery talk with some regret, but made no effort to stop it. The Makuraners had turned the war into a religious struggle, not only by wrecking Phos' temples all over the Westlands but also by forcing the people in the lands they occupied to follow Vaspurakaner usages rather than Videssian orthodoxy. Calling the counterattack a holy war made his men fight harder than they would have otherwise.
Eventually, the Avtokrator supposed, peace might come to Videssos and Makuran. The bitterness of the war they were fighting now would not make that peace any easier to find. Maniakes knew that. But he also knew he did not want peace to come to Videssos if it was dictated by Sharbaraz King of Kings.
With the garrison overcome, the Videssians threw open the gates and let people stream out of the city and down toward the floodplain. After a while, they would probably come back and start rebuilding. By then, of course, the rubble left from the sack would raise the artificial hillock on which the city stood another palm's breadth or so, making it that much harder for the next Videssian Avtokrator who campaigned here, ten years from now, or fifty, or five hundred, to take the place.
Well, Maniakes thought, that will be for my successor to worry about, not me. My job is to make sure I have a successor who one day will be in a position to worry about it.
Lysia came up to him when the sack was nearly over. Much as he loved her, he would sooner not have seen her at that moment. He knew what she was going to say. Sure enough, she said it: «I pray the lord with the great and good mind will forgive our soldiers for what they're doing to the women here. War is a filthy business.»
«War is a filthy business,» Maniakes agreed. «This one was forced upon us.»
«I know,» Lysia said; they had this argument whenever one of the Thousand Cities fell. «That doesn't mean we have to make it filthier.»
Maniakes shrugged. «If they'd surrendered instead of trying to fight, they could have all left undisturbed; you know I would have let them do that. But they chose to make a fight of it. Once they did, that changed the rules and what the soldiers expected. Next time—»
«Phos forbid a next time,» Lysia broke in, sketching the sun-circle above her left breast. «I've heard too many stories about all the horrid things the Makuraners did when they took our cities in the westlands; I don't want them telling horrid stories about us.»
«I wish there were no need for them to tell horrid stories about us,» Maniakes answered. «That's not quite the same thing, though. They've made themselves frightful to us. If we make ourselves frightful to them in return, sooner or later they'll get the idea that they can't afford to fight us anymore. That's what I'm after.»
«I know that's what you're after.» Lysia's face stayed troubled. «The good god grant you find it, that's all.»
«What I really want to find,» Maniakes said, «is Abivard's army. Once I beat him, the whole of this country falls into my hands and I can push straight for Mashiz. Taking his capital, by Phos—that would be a revenge worth having.»
Now Lysia did smile, ruefully. «I don't think you've heard a word I've said. I can understand that, I suppose. I can even see that Videssos may be better off on account of what you're doing. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.» She walked off, leaving him scratching his head.
From the hillock where yet another of the Thousand Cities went up in flames behind him, Maniakes peered out over the floodplain. He could see a long way from here, but seeing far was not the same as seeing clearly. Turning to Rhegorios, he said, «Drop me into the ice—» He spat in rejection of Skotos. «—if I know where Abivard and the cursed Makuraner field army are. With what we've been doing hereabouts, I thought they'd surely have come to pay us a visit by now.»
«So would I,» his cousin agreed. «But no sign of them so far. Outside of these worthless little city garrisons, the only Makuraner army we've seen is the one that's been following in our footsteps ever since Qostabash.»
«And they're foot soldiers.» Maniakes stated the obvious. «What they are, in fact, is the same kind of force Abivard u
sed to fight us year before last. They're probably garrison troops themselves, though they've had so much action the past couple of years, they might as well be regular infantry.»
«They're not the worst fighters around,» Rhegorios allowed. «When they were working alongside the boiler boys, they made pretty good fighters.» Now he looked around, too. «Where are the boiler boys?»
«If I could find them, I'd tell you,» Maniakes said. «Since I can't find them, I'm going to talk with someone who can, or at least who may be able to: I'm going to see what Bagdasares can do.»
«Can't hurt,» Rhegorios said. «It may even do some good. Why not?»
«That's why you go see wizards,» Maniakes answered, «to find out why not.»
Dubious recommendations notwithstanding, he did go to consult the mage from Vaspurakan. «You have been in close contact with Abivard for years,» Bagdasares said. «That will help.» He looked thoughtful. «Have you got anything of his we might use as a magical source to find him?»
«I don't think so.» Maniakes suddenly barked laughter. «It almost makes me wish Tzikas were in camp. He's been back and forth between me and Abivard so many times, each of us could use him as a magical source against the other.»
«Contact and affinity are not necessarily one and the same.» Bagdasares observed.
«The only person Tzikas has an affinity for is Tzikas,» Maniakes said. «I should have taken the traitor's head when Abivard gave him back to me. Even if I did get some use out of him, I never slept easy with him around. That's why I said I almost wish he were back, not that I wish he really was. He's with Abivard again, and Abivard is welcome to worry about him or kill him, whichever he pleases.»
«Aye, your Majesty.» Bagdasares ran a hand through his thick, curly beard as he contemplated ways and means. «You have clasped his hand, not so?» Maniakes nodded. The wizard produced a small knife. «Let me have a bit of nail from a finger of your right hand, then. And you have spoken to him, so I shall ask for a few drops of your spittle.» He quickly sketched the sun-sign over his heart. «By the lord with the great and good mind, I shall destroy these by fire when my magic is completed.»
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