Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

  «I'll watch you do it,» Maniakes said. «You I trust with my life, Bagdasares, but you're one of the few. Tzikas came too close to slaying me with sorcery for me to be easy about letting parts of myself, so to speak, get loose where other wizards might lay their hands on them.»

  «And right you are to be cautious,» Alvinos Bagdasares agreed. «Now, if I may—»

  Maniakes let him cut a bit of fingernail from his right index finger. The Avtokrator spat into a little bowl while Bagdasares bound the nail clipping to one end of a small stick with crimson thread. The mage filled the bowl into which Maniakes had spat with water from a silver ewer. He lifted the little stick with a pair of tongs and let it float in the water.

  «Think about Abivard, about wanting to learn in which direction from this place he is,» Bagdasares said.

  Obediently, Maniakes held the image of the Makuraner marshal in his mind. Bagdasares, meanwhile, chanted first in Videssian, then in the Vaspurakaner tongue Maniakes spoke only in snatches. Maniakes hoped the Makuraner mages weren't deliberately trying to keep him from learning his opponent's whereabouts. They probably were, just as Bagdasares and the other mages accompanying the Videssian army were doing their best to keep its location from their Makuraner counterparts. Of its own accord, the small stick began to twist in the water, sending small ripples out toward the edge of the bowl. Maniakes kept his eye on the thread tied to the nail clipping. That end of the little stick swung to the east and stayed there. Maniakes scratched his head. «I won't believe Abivard's left the Land of the Thousand Cities.»

  «That is what the magic suggests,» Bagdasares said.

  «Could the Makuraners have twisted it so that, say, the stick points in exactly the opposite direction to the proper one?» Maniakes asked.

  «I suppose it is possible, so I shall investigate,» the wizard replied. «I sensed no such deception, however.»

  «If it were done well, you wouldn't, though,» Maniakes said. «The Makuraners needed quite a while to figure out how you twisted that canal back on itself last year, for instance.»

  «That is so,» Bagdasares admitted. «And Abivard would like nothing better than to make us think he is in one place when in fact he is somewhere else.»

  «Somewhere else probably being a place from which he can breathe right down our necks,» Maniakes said.

  «No point in using such a magic unless you gain some advantage from it, now is there?» Bagdasares plucked at his beard as he thought. «Opposites, eh? Well, we shall see what we shall see.»

  He pulled the stick out of the water, removed Maniakes' fingernail clipping from it, and tossed the clipping into a brazier. He smeared the end of the stick with pitch, getting his fingers stuck together in the process. Then he took a silver Makuraner arket from his beltpouch and used an iron blade to scrape several slivers of bright metal from the coin. He affixed the slivers to the pitch-smeared stick and put it back into the water.

  «We shall use the bits of silver from the arket to represent Makuran's marshal in a somewhat different version of the spell,» he told Maniakes.

  «You know your business best,» the Avtokrator answered. «I don't much care how you do what you do, as long as you get the answers I need.»

  «Your Majesty's forbearance is beyond price,» Bagdasares said. The Vaspurakaner wizard once more began to chant and make Passes over the bowl in which the stick floated. The incantations this time, especially the ones in the Vaspurakaner tongue, were different from those he'd used before, though Maniakes would have been hard-pressed to say how.

  As it had during the previous incantation, the stick began to quiver in the water. And, as it had during the previous incantation, the end with the magical focus affixed swung toward the east. I Bagdasares looked from it to Maniakes and back again. «Unless I am utterly deceived, Abivard is indeed east of here.»

  «But that's mad,» Maniakes exclaimed. «It's utterly useless. Why on earth would Abivard—and the Makuraner field army with him, no doubt—go into the Videssian westlands? Makuran holds the westlands, except for a port here and there and some holdouts in the hills of the southeast. What can he possibly do there that he didn't do years ago? He's not about to take Videssos the city—not without ships he's not, and I don't care how many soldiers he has. And for anything less important than that, he'd have been wiser to stay here and fight me instead.»

  «Your Majesty, my magic can tell you what is so—or what I believe to be so, at any rate,» Bagdasares said. «Finding out why it is so—looking into the heart of a man that way—is beyond the scope of my art, or of any wizard's art. Often a man does not fully understand himself why he acts as he does—or have you not seen that?»

  «I have,» Maniakes said. «But this still perplexes me. Abivard is a great many things, but no one has ever called him stupid. He must have known we were coming back to the Land of the Thousand Cities this year. He didn't try to stop us by seizing Lyssaion. He couldn't stop us from landing up in Erzerum and heading south. If he knew we were coming, why isn't he here to meet us? That's what I want to know.»

  «It is a proper question, an important question, your Majesty,» Bagdasares agreed gravely. «It is also a question to which my magic can give you no good answer. May I ask a question of my own in return?»

  «Ask,» Maniakes told him. «Anything you can do to let Phos' light into what looks like Skotos' darkness would be welcome.» He drew the good god's sun-circle above his heart.

  Bagdasares also sketched the sun-circle, saying, «I have no great and wise thoughts to offer, merely this: if, for whatever reason, Abivard chose to absent himself from the land between the Tutub and the Tib, should we not punish him for his error by doing all the harm we can in these parts?»

  «That's what we've been doing,» Maniakes said. «That's what I aim to go on doing. If Abivard wants to go haring off on some business of his own, let him. Makuran will suffer on account of it.»

  «Well said, your Majesty.»

  Maniakes did not bother answering that. Everything he'd said made perfect sense—and not just to him, if Bagdasares had seized on it so readily. He'd told himself as much a good many times before he'd come seeking Bagdasares' sorcerous counsel. But if Abivard wasn't stupid, why had he left the almost certain scene of this year's action? What reason had he found good enough for him to do such a thing?

  «No way to tell,» Maniakes murmured. Alvinos Bagdasares' eyebrows rose; no doubt he hoped to learn what was in Maniakes' mind. Not likely, not when Maniakes was far from sure himself. But whatever Abivard was up to, Maniakes had the feeling he'd find out, and that he wouldn't be overjoyed when he did.

  As the Videssians did with temples to Phos, the Makuraners built shrines to the God not only in cities for the benefit of merchants and artisans but also out by the roadside in the country so peasants could pray and worship and then go back to work. Maniakes had been destroying those roadside shrines ever since he first entered the Land of the Thousand Cities. If nothing else, that inconvenienced the farmers, which in a small way would help the Videssian cause.

  The God was usually housed in quarters less elaborate than Phos' temples. Some of the shrines were in the open air, with the four sides of the square altar facing in the cardinal directions, each one symbolizing one of the Makuraners' Four Prophets. As the Videssians came closer to Mashiz, the shrines grew more elaborate, as Maniakes had known to be the case from previous incursions into the land between the Tutub and the Tib.

  And then, as the Videssian army approached the Tib, the soldiers came upon a shrine so extraordinary, they summoned the Avtokrator to see it. «We don't know what to do with it, your Majesty,» said Komentiolos, the captain of the company that had overrun the shrine. «You have to tell us, and before you can do you have to see it.»

  «All right, I'll have a look,» Maniakes said agreeably, and dug his heels into Antelope's sides.

  The shrine had walls and a roof. The walls were baked brick rather than plain mud brick, but that did not greatly surprise Maniakes:
the Makuraners gave the God and the Four Prophets the best they had, as the Videssians did with Phos. The entranceway stood open. Maniakes looked a question to Komentiolos. The captain nodded. Maniakes went inside, Komentiolos following.

  Maniakes' eyes needed a bit to adjust to the gloom within. There at the center of the shrine stood the usual foursquare Makuraner altar. Komentiolos ignored that, having seen its like many times before. He waved to the far wall, the one toward which the side of the altar honoring Fraortish, the eldest prophet, pointed.

  Standing against that smoothly plastered wall was a statue of the God, the first such Maniakes had ever seen. The God was portrayed in the regalia of a Makuraner King of Kings. The sun and the moon were painted on the wall beside him in gold and silver. He held a thunderbolt in one hand and was posed as if about to hurl it against some miscreant. His plump face, mouth twisted into a rather nasty smile, said he would enjoy hurling it.

  As far as Maniakes was concerned, Videssian craftsmen depicted Phos in a far more artistic and awe-inspiring way. Phos, now, Phos was portrayed as a god worth worshiping, very much unlike this petulant—

  Abruptly, Maniakes realized the face the Makuraner sculptor had given the statue was not intended to be an idealized portrait of the God, as images of the lord with the great and good mind were rightly idealized. This portrait was intended to show the features of a man, and of a man the Avtokrator knew, even if he had not seen him for ten years and more.

  Maniakes turned his head away from the statue. He did not want to look at it; even thinking of it gave him the feeling of having just taken a big bite of rotten meat.

  «Isn't that the most peculiar excuse for a shrine you ever saw, your Majesty?» Komentiolos said. «There's a chamber back there with a lot of metal drums and stones, to make it sound like the statue of the God is thundering at whatever he's taken a mind to disliking.»

  «It's not a statue of the God, or not exactly a statue of the God,» Maniakes answered. «What it is, exactly, is a statue of Sharbaraz King of Kings.»

  For a moment, Komentiolos didn't understand. Then he did, and looked as sickened as Maniakes felt. «It's a statue of Sharbaraz King of Kings as the God,» he said, as if hoping Maniakes would tell him he was wrong.

  However much Maniakes wished he could do that, he couldn't. «That's just what it is,» he said.

  «But don't the Makuraners—» Komentiolos spread his hands in helpless disbelief. «—don't they think this is blasphemy, too?»

  «I don't know. I hope so,» Maniakes told him. «But I do know one thing: Sharbaraz doesn't think it's blasphemy.»

  Back when he'd known Sharbaraz, more than a decade before, the King of Kings—or, as he was then, the claimant to the title of King of Kings—would never have had such a building erected. But Sharbaraz-then was not Sharbaraz-now. Through all the intervening years, he'd been unchallenged sovereign of Makuran. Everyone had sought his favor. No one had disagreed with him. The result was… this.

  Sketching the sun-circle over his heart, Maniakes murmured, «It could have been me.» The sycophancy in the court of Videssos was hardly less than that in the court of Makuran. Thanks to his father, Maniakes had taken with a grain of salt all the flattery he'd heard. Sharbaraz, evidently, had lapped it up and gone looking for more.

  Komentiolos said, «Now that we've got this place, your Majesty, what do we do with it?»

  «I wish I'd never seen it in the first place,» Maniakes said. But that was not an answer. He found something that was: «We bring some Makuraner prisoners in here, so they can see it with their own eyes. Then we let them go, to spread the tale as they will. After that, we let some of our soldiers see it, too, to give them the idea of what sort of enemy we're fighting. Then we let them wreck the statue. Then we let them wreck the building. Then we burn it. Fire purifies.»

  «Aye, your Majesty. I'll see to all of that,» Komentiolos said. «It sounds good to me.»

  None of it sounds good to me,» Maniakes said. «I wish we weren't doing it. I wish we didn't have to do it. By the good god, I wish this shrine had never been built.»

  He wondered how Abivard, who had always fought him as one soldier against another, no more, no less, could bear to serve under a man who was coming to believe himself on a par with his god. He wondered whether Abivard knew this place existed and, if so, what he thought of it. He filed that last question away, as possibly worth exploring later.

  First things first. «Gather up the prisoners and send them through here, quick as you can. Then turn our men loose on this place. The longer it stands, the greater the abomination.»

  «You're right about that, your Majesty,» Komentiolos said. «I'll see to it, I promise you.»

  «Good.» Maniakes tried to imagine portraying himself as Phos incarnate on earth. Absurd. If the good god didn't strike him down, his outraged subjects would. He hurried out of the shrine, feeling a sudden need for fresh, clean air.

  Maniakes looked back toward the southeast, toward Lyssaion. He couldn't see the Videssian port now, of course. He couldn't even see the hills that were the watershed between the Xeremos and the Tutub. The only hillocks making the horizon anything but flat were the artificial ones upon which perched the Thousand Cities.

  His chuckle was sheepish. Turning to Lysia, he said, «When I'm back in Videssos the city, I can't wait to get away. Once I am away, I wish I had news of what's going on there.»

  «I don't miss the city,» Lysia said. «We haven't heard much from it the past couple of summers, and what news they did bring us here wasn't worth having.»

  She spoke with great certainty, and with more than a little anger in her voice. The mockery and disapproval she'd taken in the capital for becoming her cousin's consort wore more heavily on her than they did on Maniakes. He'd already seen that, as Avtokrator, nothing he did was going to make everybody happy. That let him take scorn philosophically… most of the time.

  «Not easy to get messengers through, anyway,» he said, as if consoling himself. «Not hearing doesn't have to mean anything. They wouldn't send out dispatches unless the news was important enough to risk losing men to make sure it got to me.»

  «To the ice with news, except what we cause,» Lysia said positively. «To the ice with Videssos the city, too. I'd give it to the Makuraners in a minute if doing that wouldn't wreck the Empire.»

  Yes, she'd let her resentment fester where Maniakes had shrugged– most of—his off.

  He stopped worrying about news from home and looked west instead. The horizon was jagged there, with the peaks of the Dilbat Mountains shouldering themselves up into view above the nearer flatlands. In the foothills of those mountains lay Mashiz. He'd been there once, years before, helping to install Sharbaraz on his throne. If he reached Mashiz again, he'd cast Sharbaraz down from that throne… and from his assumption of divinity. Destroying that shrine was something Maniakes had been delighted to do.

  Closer than the Dilbats, closer than Mashiz, was the Tib. Canals stretched its waters out to the west. Where the canals failed, as at the eastern margins of the Tutub, irrigation failed. Irrigation, though, was only marginally in his mind now. He concentrated on getting over the river. It wasn't so wide as the Tutub, but ran swifter, and was no doubt still in spring spate. Crossing it wouldn't be easy; the Makuraners would do everything they could to keep him from gaining the western bank.

  He didn't expect to capture a bridge of boats intact; that would be luck beyond any calculation. Whatever soldiers the foe had on the far side would mass against him. If they delayed him long enough, as they might well, the Makuraner infantry army he'd left behind would catch up to him. With so many soldiers mustered against his men, with the river limiting the directions in which he could move, all that might prove unpleasant.

  When he grumbled about the difficulties of getting over the Tib, Rhegorios said, «If we have to, you know, we can always turn south toward the source of the river and either ford it where it's young and narrow or go round it altogether and come up along the
west bank.»

  «I don't want to do anything like that,» Maniakes said. «It would take too long. I want to go straight at Mashiz.»

  His cousin looked at him without saying anything. Maniakes felt his cheeks grow hot. In the early days of his reign, his most besetting fault had been moving too soon, committing himself to action without adequate preparation or resources. Rhegorios thought he was doing it again.

  On reflection, though, he decided he wasn't. «Think it through,» he said. «If we turn south, what will the fellow in charge of the foot soldiers from Qostabash do? Is he likely to chase us? Can he hope to catch us, foot pursuing horse? If he has any sense, what he'll do is cross the Tib himself and wait for us at the approaches to Mashiz. If you were in his sandals, isn't that what you'd do?»

  Rhegorios did think it through, quite visibly. Maniakes gave him credit for that, the more so as his young cousin was inclined to be headstrong, too. «Cousin your Majesty brother-in-law of mine, I think you're likely to be right,» the Sevastos said at last. «Revolting how doing something simple will spill the chamber pot into the soup of a complicated plan.»

  «We have to find a way to get across ourselves, once we do reach the river,» Maniakes said. «The trouble is, if the defenders are even half awake, that's almost as hard a job as getting over the Cattle Crossing has been for the Makuraners. They've been trying to figure out how to manage that for years, and they haven't come close yet, Phos be praised.»

  «I know what you need to do,» Rhegorios said suddenly. «Have Bagdasares turn the whole Tib into a Voimios strap and flip it about so that all at once we're on the west side and the cursed Makuraners are on the east.»

  Maniakes laughed out loud. «You don't think small, do you, cousin of mine? Except for the detail that that sounds like a magic big enough to burn out the brain of every wizard in Videssos, it's a splendid notion.»