Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Seeing the difficulties his men were having in closing with the Makuraner force, Maniakes summoned Ypsilantes. Engineers were made for situations ordinary soldiers found impossible. Over the cries of men, the shrieks of wounded horses, through the constant whistling hiss of arrows, Maniakes pointed to the barricade and said, «What can we do about that, excellent sir?»

  They're not fools, worse luck, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes answered. «They soaked the bushes well, so they won't be easy to set afire.» Only after Maniakes had nodded did he think to be surprised the chief engineer had already checked about such a tiny detail—but then, that sort of attention to detail was what made Ypsilantes chief engineer. He went on, «When you look at it, it's almost like storming a city wall. Some of the same tools should answer.»

  Maniakes had not thought of a fight on flat, open ground as being like the climax of a siege. Once the comparison was pointed out to him, it seemed obvious enough. He shook his head. A lot of things seemed obvious—once they were pointed out. «Your detachment is ready to do what needs doing?» he asked.

  «Aye, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes told him. «Shouldn't be that hard to bring off.» He sounded like a man studying an interesting position in the Videssian board game, not one speaking in the midst of a real war's chaos. Maniakes didn't know whether to admire him for that detachment or to be appalled by it.

  Whether his detachment was admirable or appalling, Ypsilantes rapidly proved to know what he was talking about. Under the cover of portable sheds of the sort usually used to bring a battering ram up close to a wall so it could pound away, parties of engineers approached the barricades and began clearing it. For them, the work was relatively easy. No one on this field was dropping great stones or boiling oil or melted lead down onto their shelter, which, having been designed to ward against such things, all but laughed at mere arrows raining down on it.

  The Makuraners also tried to shoot straight into the sheds. Soldiers standing with big, stout shields at the exposed end made that difficult. Before long, some of the enemy foot soldiers tried a more direct approach, rushing at the engineers to cut them down.

  But when they did that, their comrades, of necessity, had to leave off shooting at the shed. That let the Videssian cavalry dash forward through gaps already cleared to fight the foot soldiers. It was an uneven battle. The foot soldiers were brave enough and to spare, but against armored horsemen they went down in dreadful numbers.

  «You see, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes said.

  «Yes, I do,» Maniakes answered. «You've set the enemy commander a choice of the sort I'm glad I don't have to make. Either he can send his men out to try to keep the barricade from going down—and have them slaughtered; or he can hold his men back and let the barricade be cleared—and have them slaughtered.»

  «If you get into a fight like this, that's the chance you take,» Ypsilantes agreed. «The best answer is not to get into a fight like this.»

  «It would have been different if Abivard—» Maniakes made himself stop. He'd seen no sign of the Makuraner marshal, nor of the heavy cavalry Abivard had led in the last campaigning season. He didn't know where they were, but they weren't here. If Abivard hadn't shown up to support the foot soldiers, he couldn't be anywhere close by. That thought tried to touch off an echo in Maniakes' mind, but shouts from the front drowned it.

  The gaps in the thornbush barricade had grown wide enough for the Videssian horsemen to begin pouring through them and attacking the Makuraner army with sword and javelin as well as with arrows. Even now, though, the enemy foot soldiers continued to show spirit. Those from the farthest ranks rushed forward to the aid of their beset comrades. They used their clubs and shortswords as much against the Videssians' horses as against the imperials themselves. The more confusion they could create, the better for them.

  «Have we got enough men?» Maniakes asked the question more of Phos or of himself than of Ypsilantes, though the chief engineer sat his horse beside him.

  Ypsilantes did not hesitate over replying, regardless of whether the question had been meant for him: «Your Majesty, I think we do.»

  He proved a good prophet; little by little, the Videssians drove their foes back from what had been the line of the thornbush barricade. By then, the sun was sinking down toward the Dilbat Mountains. The fight had gone on most of the day. Maniakes sent messengers to the soldiers fighting at the front: «Press them with everything you have and they'll break.»

  He could not fault the way in which his men obeyed the order. They pressed the Makuraners, and pressed them hard. At last, after tough fighting—tougher than that at the center—Rhegorios broke through the obstacles in his path and delivered the flank attack Maniakes had awaited all day long.

  But the enemy did not break. He'd hoped for a slaughter, with the Makuraners fleeing every which way and his own men gleefully hunting them down like partridges. That was, perhaps, unsporting. He didn't care. Battle was not sport; if you went into it for any other reason than smashing the foe, you were a fool.

  Sullenly, the foot soldiers drew back toward the east, yielding the field to the Videssians. But they retreated in good order, holding their formation as best they could, and did not scatter and let Maniakes' army destroy them one piece at a time. Having made more fighting retreats than he cared to remember, the Avtokrator knew how hard they were to bring off.

  He did not pursue so vigorously as he might have. For one thing, daylight was leaking out of the sky. For another, he thought he'd beaten the foot soldiers from the Land of the Thousand Cities so badly, they would not try to renew the struggle anytime soon. That was what he'd hoped to accomplish. With that army of foot soldiers out of the picture, he could return to the business they'd interrupted: crossing the Tib and advancing on Mashiz.

  «We'll camp,» he said. «We'll tend to our wounded and men we'll get back to doing what we were doing before we had to turn around and fight: taking the war to Sharbaraz so he knows what a bad idea starting it was.»

  Ypsilantes nodded approval. So did Rhegorios, when he came into the camp with his soldiers as twilight was giving way to night. «They're good, that they are,» he told Maniakes. «A little more discipline, a little more flexibility in the way they shift from one line to the other, and they'll be quite good. If we can grab Mashiz, fine. That should end the war, so we don't have to go on teaching them how to be soldiers.»

  Maniakes said, «Aye.» He knew he sounded as if he'd been listening to his cousin with but half an ear. Unfortunately, that happened to be true. The noise on a battlefield just after the battle was done was apt to be more dreadful than what you heard while the fighting raged. All the triumph melted away with the battle itself, leaving behind only the pain.

  Men groaned and shrieked and shouted and cursed. Horses made worse noises still. Maniakes often thought on how unfair war was for horses. The men who had been hurt on the field that day had at least some idea of why they were fighting and how they had come to be injured. It was all a mystery to the horses. One moment they were fine, the next in torment. No wonder their screams tore at the soul.

  «Horseleeches and troopers went over the field, doing what they could for the animals. All too often, what they could was nothing more than a dagger slashed quickly and mercifully across a throat.

  By their cries, more than a few men would have welcomed such attention. Some of them got it: most of the enemy's wounded were left behind on the battlefield. That was hard, but it was the way wars were fought. A few Videssians, too, no doubt, those horribly wounded, were granted the release of a quick slide out of this He and toward eternal judgment.

  For the rest, surgeons whose skills were about on a level with those of the horse doctors aided men not desperately hurt, drawing arrows, setting broken bones, and sewing up gashed flesh with (prick stitches any tailor would have looked upon with distaste. Their attentions, especially in the short run, seemed to bring as much pain as they relieved.

  And a band of healer-priests wandered over the field,
looking for men badly wounded who might yet be saved if something like a miracle reached them. All healers were not only priests but magicians, but not all magicians could heal—far from it. The gift had to be there from the beginning. If it was, it could be nurtured. If it wasn't, all the nurturing in the world would not bring it forth.

  Heading the healers was a blue-robe named Philetos, who in tones of peace—in Maniakes' recent experience, a purely theoretical conception—taught experimental thaumaturgy at the Sorcerers' Collegium in Videssos the city. He had also, not quite coincidentally, performed the marriage ceremony uniting Maniakes and Lysia, ignoring the ecumenical patriarch's prohibition against the clergy's doing any such thing. Despite the later dispensation from Agathios, some rigorist priests still condemned Philetos for that.

  Maniakes found Philetos crouched beside a soldier who had a wound in his chest and bloody froth bubbling from his mouth and nose. The Avtokrator knew the surgeons would have been powerless to save the fellow; if that wound did not prove rapidly fatal, fever would take the man in short order.

  «Is there any hope?» Maniakes asked. «I think so, your Majesty,» the healer-priest answered. He had already stripped off the soldier's mail shirt and hiked up the linen tunic he wore under it to expose the wound itself. As Maniakes watched, Philetos set both hands on the injury, so that the soldier's blood ran out between his fingers.

  «You must know, your Majesty, that direct contact is necessary for this healing to succeed,» he said. «Yes, of course,» Maniakes said.

  He was not sure whether Philetos heard him or not. «We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind,» the healer-priest intoned, «by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.» Philetos repeated the formula again and again, partly as a prayer, partly as a tool to lift himself out of his usual state of consciousness and onto the higher plane where healing might take place.

  The moment when he reached that other plane was easy enough to sense. He seemed to quiver and then grow very firmly planted on the ground, as if fixed there by a power stronger than any merely mortal. Maniakes, standing a few feet away, felt the current of healing pass from Philetos to the wounded soldier, though he could not have said with which of his senses he felt it. He sketched the sun-circle and murmured Phos' creed himself, filled with awe at the power for which Philetos was the conduit.

  The healer-priest grunted. All at once, his eyes focused on the merely mundane world once more. He took his hands away from the arrow wound and wiped them on the soldier's tunic, then used the tunic to scrub away the rest of the blood on the man's chest. Instead of a hole through which more blood came, only a white, puckered scar remained there, as if the fellow had suffered the injury years before.

  He opened his eyes and looked up at Philetos. «Holy sir?» he said in tones of surprise. His voice might have been that of any young man, certainly not that of a young man who had just taken an arrow in the lung. Memory filled his face with pain, or rather with the recollection of pain. «I was shot. I fell. I couldn't breathe.» His eyes widened as he realized what must have happened. «You healed me, holy sir?»

  «Through me, the good god healed you.» Philetos' voice came out as a harsh croak. His face was haggard, the skin stretched tight across his cheekbones. «Phos was kind to you, lad.» He managed a weary chuckle. «Try not to stop any more arrows with your chest, eh?»

  «Yes, holy sir.» The soldier, at the point of death a few minutes earlier, scrambled to his feet. «Phos bless you.» He hurried away; but for the blood still round his mouth and nose, no one would have known he'd been hurt.

  Philetos, by contrast, looked about to fall over. Maniakes had seen that reaction in healer-priests before; using their talent drained them dry. The Avtokrator snouted for food and wine. Philetos gobbled and gulped, downing enough for two ordinary men. Maniakes had seen that before, too.

  «Where is the next one?» the healer-priest said, still wearily but with some restored vigor. A healer-priest of extraordinary talent, such as he was, could heal two, three, sometimes even four men who would have died without his attentions. After that, the effort grew too great, and the would-be healer collapsed before being able to establish the conduit with the force that flowed through him.

  «You don't want to kill yourself, you know,» Maniakes told him. «I've heard that can happen if you push yourself too hard.»

  «Where is the next one?» Philetos repeated, taking no notice of him. But when no answer was immediately forthcoming, the healer-priest went on, «Because we can do so little, your Majesty, honor demands we do all we can. The healing art is a growing thing; heal-as of my generation can do more at less cost to themselves than was so in my great-grandfather's day, as surviving chronicles and texts on the art make plain. In days to come, as research continues, those who follow us will accomplish still more.»

  «Which is all very well,» Maniakes said, «but which doesn't keep you from killing yourself if you do too much.»

  «I shall do all I can. If I die, it is as Phos wills,» Philetos answered. He suddenly looked not just exhausted but thoroughly grim. «As is also true of those whom we try but fail to heal.»

  That made Maniakes' mouth twist, too. Philetos had tried to heal his first wife, Niphone, after she'd had to be cut open to allow Likarios to be born. She'd been on the point of death when the surgery was attempted, but Philetos still blamed himself for failing to bring her back.

  «You don't work miracles,» the Avtokrator said.

  Philetos dismissed that with a wave of his hand, as if it weren't worth refuting. «What I do, your Majesty, is I work, with no qualifiers tacked onto the end of it.» His head went this way and that, taking in as much of the field as he could, looking for one more man he might restore to vigor before his own strength failed him.

  «Healer!» Faint in the distance, the cry rose. Someone—maybe a surgeon, maybe just a soldier out for loot—had come across a wounded man the special power of the healer-priests might save.

  «By your leave, your Majesty,» Philetos said. But he wasn't really asking leave; he was telling Maniakes he was leaving. And leave he did, at a dogged trot. He might have been tired unto death, he might have been courting it himself—perhaps to make amends for Niphone and the rest of his failures—but he would fight it in others as long as he had breath in him.

  Maniakes watched him go. He could have ordered the healer-priest to stop and rest. One thing he had learned, though: the most useless order was one given without any hope of its being obeyed.

  «Let's see,» Ypsilantes said, peering across the Tib at the foot soldiers on the western bank, «weren't we here a few days ago?»

  «I think we might have been,» Maniakes said. «Something or other interrupted us, though, or we'd have been busy trying to cross by now.»

  Both men laughed. Their humor had a touch of the macabre to it; the air was thick with the stench of corruption from the battle Maniakes had offhandedly called something or other, as if he couldn't remember why the attempted crossing had been delayed. He suspected Makuraners and Kubratoi cracked those same jokes. If you wanted to stay in your right mind, you had to.

  Ypsilantes made a clucking noise that put Maniakes in mind of a chicken examining a caterpillar trying to decide whether it was one that tasted good or one of the horrid kind. «I don't quite like the way the river looks,» the chief engineer said. «It might have one more flood surge left in it.»

  «So late in the year?» Maniakes said. «I can't believe that.»

  «It would be more likely if we were talking about the Tutub,» Ypsilantes admitted. «You can't trust the Tutub. But I think the Tib here is fuller in its banks and has bigger ripples than a couple of days ago.»

  Maniakes examined the Tib. «Looks remarkably like a river to me,» he said, thereby showing the extent of his professional knowledge.

  «It's a river, all right, and any river can be trouble,» Ypsilantes said. «I'd hate to try to cross and have our brid
ge and such swept away with half the army on this side of the river and the other half on that one.»

  «Could be embarrassing,» Maniakes agreed, again with that dry lack of emphasis: he might not have been a professional engineer, but he was a professional soldier, and, like a lot of men in that calling, used language that minimized the sorts of things that might happen to him.

  «Maybe we should wait a few days before we go looking to cross,» Ypsilantes said. «Hate to say that—»

  «I hate to hear it, too,» Maniakes broke in. «We've already had to wait longer than I would have liked, what with having to forage for timber and boats, and what with the attack the Makuraners brought home on us.»

  Ypsilantes' jaw tightened. «I own, your Majesty, I don't know for certain the river is going to rise. If you want to say I'm being a foolish old woman and order me to go ahead, no one can tell you you're wrong. You're the Avtokrator. Tell me to move and I'll obey.»

  «And we'll both be looking over our shoulders every minute, even if no trouble comes,» Maniakes said unhappily. «You can't know what's going to happen, I can't know what's going to happen…» He paused. «But Bagdasares might be able to know what's going to happen.»

  «Who?»

  «Alvinos, you might know him as,» the Avtokrator answered. «He knows I've got Vaspurakaner blood in me, so when we talk he usually goes by the name he was born with, not the one he uses with ordinary Videssians.»

  «Oh, one of those,» Ypsilantes said, nodding. «Puts me in mind of that rebel a hundred and fifty years ago, the Vaspurakaner chap who would have ruled as Kalekas if he'd won. What was his real name? Do you know?»