Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

«Andzeratsik,» Maniakes told him, adding with a wry grin, hardly a fitting name for an Avtokrator of the Videssians, is it? My clan has some sort of distant marriage connection to his. Since he didn't win the civil war, it's not anything we talk about much.»

  «I can see that,» Ypsilantes agreed gravely. «Good enough, then—check with the wizard. See what he has to say.»

  «Bagdasares?» Maniakes rolled his eyes. «He always has a good deal to say. How much of it will have to do with the question I first ask him—that's liable to be another matter.» The crack was unfair if taken literally, but, like most unfair cracks, held a grain of truth.

  «What can I do for you, your Majesty?» Bagdasares asked after Maniakes had ridden Antelope over to his tent. The Avtokrator explained. Bagdasares plucked at his beard. «A spell much like the one we used to examine the passage of the fleet from the city to Lyssaion should serve here, I believe.»

  «Good enough,» Maniakes said, «but can you guarantee me that it won't show more than we want to know, as that one did?»

  «Could I guarantee what magic would reveal and what it would not, your Majesty, I should be Phos, or at the least Vaspur, the good god's sole perfect creation. The principal reason for casting a spell is to see what will happen, and by that I mean not only in the outer world but with the magic itself.»

  Having thus been put in his place, the Avtokrator spread his hands, conceding defeat. «Have it your way, then, excellent sir. Whatever your magecraft can show me, I shall be glad to view it.»

  Bagdasares proceeded briskly to work. He filled a bowl with dirt he dug up from close by where he was standing—"What better symbol for the local land than the local land?» He made a channel in it, and poured in water from the pitcher that rested by his bedroll—"How else to represent the water of the Tib than by the water of the Tib?»

  The landscape created, he used little twigs and chips of wood to symbolize the bridge of boats that would soon stretch across the river. «You want to know whether some flood is impending, not so?» «That's right,» Maniakes said.

  «Very well, then,» the wizard answered, more than a little absently: he was already gathering himself for the spell proper. He began to chant and make passes over the bowl. «Reveal!» he cried in Videssian, and then again in the Vaspurakaner tongue Maniakes had trouble following.

  The Avtokrator wondered if Makuraner mages were trying to interfere with Bagdasares' conjuration. He would not have been surprised to learn they were; knowing whether he could cross the Tib in safety was obviously important to him, and the magical method for determining the truth not too complex.

  But Alvinos Bagdasares gave him a straight answer. The Avtokrator watched the bridge extend itself toward the western bank of the model of the Tib, then saw little ghostly, glowing specks spring into being and cross the symbolic river from east to west.

  «Weather shall not hamper us, your Majesty,» Bagdasares murmured.

  «I see that,» Maniakes answered, still looking down into the bowl. And, as he had at his friend's earlier attempt to learn what lay ahead, he saw more than he had bargained for. Those ghostly specks suddenly recrossed the Tib, this time from west to east. «What does that mean?» he asked Bagdasares.

  This time, the mage had seen for himself what had happened, instead of needing to rely on his sovereign's description. «At a guess—and a guess is all it is—we are not destined to stay long in Mashiz, if indeed we succeed in reaching the seat of the King of Kings.»

  «That was my guess, too,» Maniakes said. «I was hoping yours would be more palatable.»

  «I'm sorry, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. «I do not know for a fact that what I say here is true, mind you, but all other interpretations strike me as less probable than the one I offered.»

  «They strike me the same way,» Maniakes said. «As I say, I'm just wishing they didn't.» He brightened. «Maybe the magic Means Sharbaraz will be so frightened after we cross the Tib, he'll Make peace on our terms. If he does that, we won't have to stay west of the river long.»

  «It could be so,» Bagdasares answered. «Trying by magic to learn what the King of Kings might do is hopeless, or as near as makes no difference, he being warded against such snoopery as you are. But nothing in the spell I have cast contradicts the meaning you offer.»

  Nothing in the spell contradicted it, perhaps, but Maniakes had trouble believing it even though it came from his own mouth. The trouble was, however much he wanted to think it likely, it went dead against everything he knew, or thought he knew, of Sharbaraz's character. The next sign of flexibility the Makuraner King of Kings displayed would be the first. The envoy he had sent to negotiate with Maniakes had been sent not to make peace but to delay the Videssians till that army of foot soldiers could fall on them. Which meant…

  «Something's going to go wrong,» Maniakes said. «I have no idea what, I have no idea why, but something is going to go wrong.»

  He watched Bagdasares. The Vaspurakaner mage had been a courtier for a good many years now, and plainly wanted to tell him nothing could possibly go wrong with the plans of the ever-victorious Videssian army. The only trouble was, Bagdasares couldn't do that. Both he and Maniakes had seen plans go wrong before, had seen that the Videssian army was a long way from ever-victorious. Flattery worked a lot better when both sides were willing to ignore small details like truth. «Perhaps it won't go totally wrong,» Bagdasares said.

  «Aye, perhaps it won't,» Maniakes said. In an unsafe, imperfect world, sometimes that was as much as you could reasonably expect. He held up one finger. «No one save the two of us need know of this conjuration.» Bagdasares nodded. Maniakes figured he would tell Lysia, who could be relied upon not to blab. But if the army didn't know, maybe what the magic foretold would somehow fail to come true for them. Maniakes let out a silent sigh. He had trouble believing that, too.

  Engineers ran planks and chains from one boat to the next. One piece at a time, the bridge they were building advanced across the Tib. Ypsilantes glanced over at Maniakes and remarked, «It's all going very well.»

  «So it is,» the Avtokrator answered. He hadn't told Ypsilantes anything about the conjuration except that it showed the bridge could advance without fear of flooding. Too late, it occurred to him that too much silence might well have made the chief engineer draw his own conclusions, and that the conclusions were liable to be right. Whether Ypsilantes had his own conclusions or not, he carried out the orders Maniakes gave him.

  Foot soldiers were drawn up on the west bank of the Tib to harass the engineers and, Maniakes supposed, to resist the Videssians if that harassment failed. Thanks to magic, Maniakes knew it would. The Makuraners, being more ignorant, kept trying to make nuisances of themselves.

  They did a fair job of it, too, wounding several Videssian engineers once the end of the bridge moved into archery range. Not too troubled, Ypsilantes sent forward men with big, heavy shields: the same shields, in fact, that had protected the barricade-clearing engineers in the sheds in the recent battle with the Makuraners. Behind those shields, the bridge builders kept working. Surgeons tended the injured men, none of whom was hurt badly enough to need a healer-priest.

  Maniakes remembered Abivard's story about the Makuraners' building a bridge across the Degird River so they could cross it and attack the Khamorth out on the Pardrayan steppe. The Makuraner expedition had come to grief: indeed, to disaster, with Peroz King of Kings dying there on the plains. The Avtokrator hoped his own luck would be better than that. He had no way of knowing whether he would become one of the little points of light Bagdasares' magic had shown recrossing the Tib.

  After a while, Ypsilantes also sent archers out to the end of the bridge to shoot back at the Makuraners. The enemy, though, had more men on the bank than the chief engineer could place at the end of the bridge. Seeing that, he sent out boatloads of archers, too, and a couple of rafts with dart-throwers mounted on them. They pumped enough missiles into the unarmored Makuraner infantry, those from the dart-throwers beyond t
he range at which it could respond, to sow a good deal of confusion in the foot soldiers' ranks.

  «Here, let's do this,» Maniakes said, calling Ypsilantes over to him. The chief engineer grinned a nasty grin after they were done speaking together.

  Those boats with archers in them began going rather farther up and down the Tib, and making as if to land. That got the Makuraners running this way and that. A couple of boats did land Videssian bowmen, who stayed on the west bank of the Tib long enough to shoot a volley or two at the Makuraners, then reembarked and rowed back out onto the river.

  Meanwhile, the engineers kept extending the bridge of boats till it got quite close to the western bank of the Tib. Watching their Progress, Maniakes said to Rhegorios, «This is when I wouldn't mind having some Makuraner-style heavy cavalry of my own. I could send them charging over the bridge and scatter that infantry like this.» He snapped his fingers.

  Rhegorios said, «I think the horsemen we have will be plenty to do the job.»

  «I think you're right,» Maniakes said. Bagdasares' magic went a long way toward persuading him his cousin was right. How much good his being right would do in the end was a different question, one Maniakes didn't want to think about. Sometimes acting was easier than thinking. He assembled a force of horsemen with javelins near the eastern edge of the bridge, ready to move when the time came.

  It came that afternoon: one of the engineers repotted, «Your Majesty, the water under the bridge is only three or four feet deep now.»

  «Then we're going to go.» Maniakes shouted orders to the trumpeters. Their horn calls sent the horsemen thundering down the bridge toward the Makuraner foot soldiers. It also sent the Videssian engineers and shieldmen leaping off the bridge into the warm, muddy waters of the Tib.

  He'd succeeded in surprising the Makuraners and their commander. The horses splashed down into the water, then, urged on by their riders, hurried toward the foe. Some of the cavalrymen flung their javelins at the infantry awaiting them, while others imitated the Makuraner boiler boys and used the light spears as if they were lances.

  The Videssians gained the riverbank and began to push the foremost Makuraners back. That threw the ranks of the Makuraner infantry into worse disorder than they had already known, and let the Videssians gain more ground still. At Maniakes' orders, more imperials rode over the almost-completed bridge to aid their comrades. «You're a sneaky one,» Rhegorios shouted. «They figured the bridge would have to be finished for us to use it.»

  «You don't want to do the thing they expect,» Maniakes answered. «If they know what's coming, they're most of the way to knowing how to stop it. If they haven't seen it before, though—» He watched avidly as his men carved out a bridgehead on the western bank of the Tib. The riders who had used up their javelins slashed at the Makuraners with swords. Whoever was commanding this enemy army lacked the presence of mind of the infantry general who'd given battle against the Videssians a few days before. When he saw his troops wavering, he pulled them away from their opponents. That made them waver even more. The Videssians, sensing victory, pushed all the harder.

  Little by little, Makuraner foot soldiers began to flee, some to the north, some to the south, some to the west. Once serious resistance had ended, the Videssians did not pursue as hard as they might have. Instead, they formed a perimeter behind which the engineers finished the bridge of boats. Maniakes rode across to the west bank of the Tib without having himself or Antelope get wet.

  «Mashiz!» the soldiers shouted. «On to Mashiz!» They knew what they had done, and knew also what they wanted to do. Had Mashiz been only an hour's gallop distant, it might have fallen. But it was a couple of days away, and the sun was sliding down behind the Dilbat Mountains. Maniakes judged he had taken enough risks, or maybe more than enough. He ordered the army to halt for the night.

  Having done that, he wondered whether he should dispense with leaving a garrison behind to protect the bridge of boats. He was tempted not to bother after all, the magic had shown his army would come back safe over the Tib. After some thought, though, he decided idiocy might be stronger than sorcery, and so warded what obviously needed warding.

  «On the far bank at last,» he told Lysia once his pavilion had been set up. «Didn't come close two years ago, came close but didn't make it last year. Now—we see what we can do.»

  She nodded, then said, «I wish you hadn't had Bagdasares cast that spell. I'd be more hopeful than I am. Can we take Mashiz so quickly? If we do, why would we turn back so soon? What could go wrong?»

  «I don't know the answers to any of those questions,» he said. That's why we're going ahead and moving on Mashiz: to find out what can go wrong, I mean.»

  Lysia made a face at him. «What if nothing goes wrong? What if we go in, seize the city, and capture Sharbaraz or kill him or make him run away?»

  «For one thing, Bagdasares will be very embarrassed,» Maniakes answered, which made Lysia look for something to throw at him. He caught a hard roll out of the air and went on, «I don't know what then, except that I'd be delighted. I've been trying to go ahead as if I thought that was what would happen, but it's not easy. I keep wondering if something I do will make whatever is going to go wrong, go wrong.»

  «Better in that case not to have had the magic,» Lysia said. «I know,» Maniakes answered. «I've had that thought before, every now and then. Knowing the future, or thinking you know the future, can be more of a curse than a blessing.» He gave a wry shrug. «I didn't want to know as much as the spell showed me; it did more than I asked. And, of course, not knowing the future can be more a curse than a blessing, too.»

  «Life isn't simple,» Lysia said. «I wonder why that isn't a text for the ecumenical patriarch to preach on at the High Temple. It doesn't work out the way you think it will. No matter how much you know, you never understand as much as you think you do.»

  «That's true,» Maniakes said. He glanced over at her. She was glancing over at him, too. For most of their lives, they'd never expected to be married to each other. Many things would have been a good deal simpler had they not ended up married to each other. The only problem was, life wouldn't have been worth living. «How do you feel?» he asked her.

  She knew what he meant when he asked that question; of itself, her left hand went to her belly. «Pretty well,» she answered. «I'm still sleepy more than I would be if I weren't going to have a baby, but I haven't been sick very much this time, for which I thank the lord with the great and good mind.»

  Maniakes let his fancy run away with him. He knew he was doing it; it wasn't, he thought, as if he were deluding himself. «Wouldn't it be fine if we did run Sharbaraz King of Kings out of Mashiz and if Bagdasares did turn out wrong? We could spend the rest of the campaigning season there, and maybe even the winter, too. We could have a prince—or a princess—of the Videssian imperial house born in the capital of Makuran.»

  «No, thank you,» Lysia said at once, her voice sharp. «I know that sounds very grand, but I don't care. I want to go home to have this baby. If we go home after we've beaten the Makuraners, that's wonderful—better than wonderful, in fact. But beating the Makuraners isn't reason enough for me to want to stay here. If you decide to do that, well and good. Send me back to Videssos the city.»

  In marriage as in war, knowing when to retreat was not the least of virtues. «I'll do that,» Maniakes promised. He scratched at his beard while he thought. «Meanwhile, though, I have to figure out how to arrange the triumph after which I get to send you home.» He snapped his fingers. «Should be easy, shouldn't it?» Lysia laughed. So did he.

  For the next few days, Maniakes wondered whether he had magical powers to put those of Bagdasares to shame. One snap of the fingers seemed to have been plenty to rout all the opposition the Makuraners had mustered against his men. The foot soldiers, who had put up such a persistent fight for so long, now began melting away rather than resisting as they had.

  Every now and then, some of them would try to hold back the Videssi
ans, while others broke canals open. But these men seldom stood in place as the other, larger, force west of the Tib had done so often over the past couple of years; it was as if his crossing the river had taken the spirit out of them.

  And opening the canals was less effective west of the Tib than it had been in the heart of the Land of the Thousand Cities. As was true east of the Tutub, there was land beyond that which the network of canals irrigated. Instead of having to slog through fields made all but impassable by water and mud, the Videssians simply wait around them, and once or twice scooped up good-sized bands of foes in the process.

  Far more easily than Maniakes had imagined possible, his men neared the approaches to Mashiz. There their advance slowed. The usurper Smerdis had fortified those approaches against Sharbaraz. Once Sharbaraz won the civil war between them and became King of Kings himself, he'd rebuilt and improved the fortification, though no obvious enemy threatened his capital.

  «We helped break these works once,» Maniakes said to Ypsilantes, «but they look a good deal stronger than they did then.»

  «Aye, that's so, your Majesty,» the chief engineer said, nodding. «Still, I expect we'll manage. Smerdis, now, he had horsemen who would fight for him, and that made life hard for us, if you'll recall. The walls and such are better now, I'll not deny, but so what? The troops in and around 'em count for more; men are more important than things.»

  «Do you know,» Maniakes said, «I've had a bard tell me just that. He said that as long as the people in his songs were inter-esting the settings mattered little—and if the people were dull, the finest settings in the world wouldn't help.»

  «That makes sense, your Majesty—more sense than I'd expect from a bard, I must say. When you get down to the bottom of anything you can think of, near enough, it's about people, isn't it?» Ypsilantes looked at the fortifications ahead. «People who huddle behind thick stone are more difficult, worse luck.»

  «If they're trying to keep us from doing what we need to do, I should say so.»