«We'll manage, never fear,» Ypsilantes repeated. «With no cavalry, they'll have trouble sallying against us, too, the way Smerdis' men did.»
«That's so,» Maniakes said. «I'd forgotten that sally till you reminded me of it. Makuraners popping out everywhere—I won't be sorry not to see that, thank you very much.»
The Makuraners did not sally. They did fling large stones from catapults in their fortresses. One luckless Videssian scout drew too close to one of those forts at exactly the wrong moment; he and his mount were both smashed to bloody pulps. That made Maniakes thoughtful. Even with his own stone– and dart-throwers set up to shoot back at the ones the Makuraners had in place, his army would have to run the gauntlet before breaking into Mashiz. It would be expensive, and he did not have all that many men he could spare; that he had any army that could stand against the Makuraners he took as something close to direct intervention from Phos, considering how many years of defeat Videssos had suffered.
He cast about for ways other than the most direct one to break into Mashiz. The riders he sent forth to spy out those others ways returned to him unmashed but less than optimistic: Sharbaraz had made sure getting into his capital would not be an easy business. He lacked the Cattle Crossing to hold foes away, but had done all he could with what he had.
«Straight on, then,» Maniakes said reluctantly. Ypsilantes nodded, now less enthusiastic than he had been. Even Rhegorios looked worried about the likely size of the butcher's bill. Maniakes also kept worrying about what Bagdasares' magic had meant. Should he go ahead, knowing—or thinking he knew—he could not stay west of the Tib for long?
With his usual unassuming competence, Ypsilantes readied the Videssian catapults to oppose those of the Makuraners. Maniakes mustered the army for what he hoped would be a quick, fierce descent on Mashiz. He was about to give the order for the attack to begin when a courier galloped up from out of the northeast, holding up a message tube and shouting, «Your Majesty! Your Majesty! The Makuraners are in Across, the whole great army of them, and they and the cursed Kubratoi have made common cause against Videssos the city. The city might fall, your Majesty.»
IV
For a long moment, Maniakes simply stared at the messenger as if he'd been spouting some incomprehensible gibberish. Then, all at once, the pieces seemed to make a new and altogether dreadful pattern. Keeping his voice under tight control, he asked, «When you say the Makuraners are back at Across, do you mean the main army under Abivard son of Godarz?»
«Aye, your Majesty, that's who I mean—who else?» the fellow answered. «Abivard and Romezan and stinking Tzikas the traitor, too. And all the boiler boys. And all the siege gear, too.» He pointed toward Ypsilantes' catapults to show what he meant.
Rhegorios said, «All right, the Makuraners are back at Across again. So what? They've been there before, for years at a stretch. They can't cross over to Videssos the city.»
But the messenger said, «This time, maybe they can, your highness, your Majesty. The Kubratoi have a whole great swarm of those one-trunk boats of theirs out on the water, and they've been going back and forth to the westlands. We can't stop all of that, as much as we wish we could.»
«By the good god,» Maniakes whispered in horror. «If they can get their stone-throwers and towers and such up against the walls of the city—»
«The walls are strong, your Majesty,» Rhegorios said, for once not bothering to ring playful changes on his cousin's title. «They've stood a long time, and nobody yet has found a way through them.»
«That's so,» Maniakes answered. «I can think of two drawbacks to it, though. For one, the Makuraners really know how to attack fortifications; they're at least as good at it as we are. We've seen that in the westlands, more times than I care to think about. And for the other, walls aren't what keep attackers out. Soldiers are. Where are the best soldiers in the Empire? No, to the ice with that. Where are the only soldiers in the Empire who've proved they can stand up to the Makuraners in battle?»
Rhegorios didn't say anything. Maniakes would have been astonished had his cousin said anything. The answer to the rhetorical question was only too obvious: he led the sole Videssian army that had proved itself against the foe. The rest of the Empire's forces, he feared, were still all too much like the armies that had lost to the boiler boys again and again and again. That would not be true in another two or three years—which, unfortunately, did him no good whatever now.
And then, to his astonishment, Rhegorios started laughing. Both Maniakes and the messenger looked at the Sevastos as if he'd lost his mind. «Beg your pardon, your Majesty,» Rhegorios said after a moment, «but we've been making jokes about what might happen if we took the Makuraners' capital at the same time as they took ours. Now the jokes have turned real. If that isn't funny, what is?»
«Nothing,» Maniakes said. Nothing struck him funny at the moment, that was certain. He felt like getting off his horse so he could kick himself. He'd been too headstrong again. With no sign of Abivard, he'd just charged ahead, worrying about what he himself was doing but not paying enough attention to what the enemy might be up to at the same time.
Videssos had been known to incite the steppe nomads against Makuran from time to time. He'd never expected the Makuraners to turn the tables so neatly. Etzilios, no doubt, had thirsted for revenge ever since the Videssians beat him three years before. And if Sharbaraz had somehow gotten an embassy to him… Maniakes hadn't thought the King of Kings possessed of such duplicity. How expensive would correcting that mistaken opinion prove?
Rhegorios said, «What happens if we do take Mashiz while they're sacking Videssos the city?»
Maniakes weighed that. The idea appalled him at first consideration. After he'd thought on it a little while, he liked it even less. If we take Mashiz,» he said, «the Makuraners fall back to their Plateau, and we have no hope of going after them there. But if they take the city, what's to stop them and the Kubratoi from flooding across all the land we have left? No mountains like the Dilbat chain, no great rivers—nothing.»
His cousin nodded. «I think you have the right of it. If we make that trade, we're ruined. The thing to do, then, is to keep from making it.»
«Yes.» Maniakes took a long look west toward Mashiz. He wondered when or if he would ever see the Makuraner capital again. Seeing his own again, though, suddenly counted for more. «We go back.»
Seeing the bridge the engineers had forced across the Tib still intact filled Maniakes with relief. He had thought it survived; consideration of what Bagdasares' magic had shown him made it seem likely the bridge survived. But Maniakes had long since received a forceful education on the difference between what seemed likely and what turned out to be true. Seeing the makeshift ugliness of that bridge with his own eyes was like his first sight of Lysia after returning to Videssos the city from beating the Kubratoi. Now he could breathe easier and get on with the rest of the things that needed doing.
Rhegorios must have been thinking along similar lines, for he said, «I guess this means the Makuraners didn't capture any couriers who tried to bring us news out of the east. If they'd known how much harm they could do us by burning this bridge, they would have tried it.»
«Can't argue with you there,» Maniakes said. How much time would he have lost had the foe tried trapping him on the west bank of the Tib? It wasn't a question with a precise answer, but too much tolled through his head like a bell with two mournful notes. Once the army had passed over the bridge, Ypsilantes pointed back to the structure his engineers had bled to build. «What do we do with it now?»
«Collect whatever timbers you need and burn the rest,» Maniakes snapped. «That won't matter much—the Makuraners have their own bridges of boats—but it may slow them some. And why should we make life easy for them?»
Flames crackled. Smoke rose into the sky, thick and black. When the Makuraners had gone over the Degird under Peroz King of Kings to attack the Khamorth nomads, they'd thrown a bridge across that river: Maniakes re
membered Abivard speaking of it. And once their survivors, the handful of them, had returned to Makuran, they'd burned that bridge. Now he understood how their engineers must have felt then.
Back on the west bank of the Tib, a few Makuraner soldiers stood watching the Videssians wreck the bridge. He wondered what they thought of his retreat. They hadn't beaten him. They hadn't come close to beating him. In the end, though, what did that matter? Regardless of the reason, he was quitting their land. If that didn't mean they had won and he had lost, he had no idea what it did mean.
«We want to move fast,» he told his warriors. «We don't want to give the Makuraners the chance to delay us with skirmishes or anything of the sort. We're faster than they are; that means we mostly get to choose when to engage and whether to engage—and the answer is going to be no unless we can't possibly help it. If they offer battle, we'll go around them if we find any way to do it. If we don't—» He shrugged. «—we go through 'em.» For the first couple of days on the move through the Land of the Thousand Cities, they saw only scouts and the peasants who worked the land. One of those looked up from the garden plot he was weeding and shouted, «Thought you thieves had gone on to afflict somebody else!»
After riding past the irate farmer, Rhegorios snapped his fingers in annoyance. «Oh, a pestilence!» he burst out. «I should have told him it was his turn again. It would have been worth it, just to see the look on his face.»
«Nice to know you don't always think of the right thing to say when you need to say it,» Maniakes told him. «But I tell you this—you're not going to turn around and go back for the sake of watching his jaw drop. Nobody goes back for anything, not now.»
Sooner than Maniakes had hoped, the Makuraner forces in the Land of the Thousand Cities realized the Videssian army was withdrawing. The enemy began trying to obstruct the withdrawal, too. That irked him; he had hoped they would be content to see him go and not seek to delay him and let him do more damage to the floodpiain.
His captains took renewed skirmishing and floods ahead of them almost as a personal affront. «If they so badly want us to stay, we ought to go back to thrashing them, the way we have the past couple of years,» Immodios said angrily.
«I don't think anyone in the Land of the Thousand Cities wants us to stay,» Maniakes answered. «I think the King of Kings is the one who wants us stuck here. If we're fighting here between the Tutub and the Tib, even if we're beating everything they throw at us, we aren't heading back to Videssos the city and defending it against Abivard. Delaying us here helps the enemy there.»
Immodios considered that, then nodded. «Sharbaraz has a long reach and a sure one, if he can keep his mind on what he does here and far away at the Cattle Crossing, both at the same time.»
«This year, Sharbaraz has shown me more than in all the time before this I've had on the throne,» Maniakes replied, genuine regret in his voice. «Making an alliance with Kubrat against us—no King of Kings ever thought of anything like that before. He's a good deal more clever than I dreamed he could be. But he's not so clever as he thinks he is, not if you think back to that shrine we found, the one where he was made out to be the Makuraner God. He doesn't live at the very center of the world and have it all spin round him, no matter what he thinks.»
«Ah, that shrine. I'd forgotten that.» Immodios sketched Phos' sun-circle above his heart. «You're right, your Majesty. Anyone who's foolish enough to think of himself as a god, well, it doesn't matter how smart he is other ways. Sooner or later, he's going to make a bad mistake. Another bad mistake, I should say.»
«Sooner or later,» Maniakes echoed. «I think you're right. No, I know you're right. It would be nice, though, with things as they are, to have the mistake come sooner. We could use it.»
His army crossed the major north-south canal between the Tutub and the Tib. Getting over it made him smile; Bagdasares' magic had done a good job of delaying the Makuraners there the year before. Then Maniakes' smile congealed on his face. Abivard was supposed to have a Videssian wizard with him, someone he'd scooped up as he conquered the westlands. Absent that, the magic of the Voimios strap might have held the Makuraners at bay even longer than it had done.
When he'd left Videssos the city, Maniakes had been content– had been more than content, if less eager than Lysia—to leave behind reports of and from the imperial capital. Now that he moved toward the city once more, he hungered for news about it. Was he rushing back toward a town already fallen to the foe? What would he do if that turned out to be so? He did not want such macabre imaginings loose in his mind, but felt reluctant to dismiss them. If they stayed, he might come up with answers for them.
He'd been concentrating on how to go about attacking Mashiz when the messengers brought word first of the Kubratoi invasion of Videssos and then of Abivard's joining forces with the nomads. He'd seen no messengers since. Had the Makuraners captured them before they ever got to him? If they had, they would know more than he about what was going on at the heart of the Empire. Or had his own people—Phos! his own family—not sent out more men, either because they were too pressed or because they could not? Anxiety on account of his ignorance ate at him.
One day when the army was a little more than halfway across the Land of the Thousand Cities, Rhegorios rode up next to him and asked, «If you were the Makuraner commander and you knew we were leaving this country, what would you do to make things hard for us?»
«What the enemy is doing, more or less,» the Avtokrator answered, «skirmishes and floods and anything else that would slow us up.»
Rhegorios nodded, but then went on, «That's true, but it's not what I meant, or not all of what I meant, anyhow. What's he going to do with the men he doesn't have skirmishing with us now?»
«Ah, I see what you're saying.» Maniakes' thick eyebrows came down together in a frown. When you asked the question as Rhegorios had, you also indicated the answer: «He's going to put them where they'll do the best job of blocking us: down by Qostabash and maybe in the hill country where the Tutub rises.»
His cousin nodded. «That's what I thought, too. I was hoping you would tell me this heat has melted the brains right out of my head. How are we going to get through them if they do that?»
As long as we and they are on the floodplain, it won't matter so much, because we'll be able to outmaneuver them. Up in those hills, though—» Maniakes broke off. «I'm going to have to think about that.»
«Always happy to hand you something to take your mind off your worries,» Rhegorios said, so blithely that Maniakes had only a little trouble fighting down the urge to punch him in the face.
Maniakes did think about what Rhegorios had suggested. The more he thought, the less he liked it. He went to check with Ypsilantes, who had such maps of the Land of the Thousand Cities as the Videssians had been able to put together, along with others dating back to an invasion several centuries before. After studying the maps for a while, he took counsel with Rhegorios, Ypsilantes, and Immodios.
He pointed to his cousin. «This is your fault, you know. It's what you get for complicating my life—no, not my life, all our lives.»
«Thank you,» Rhegorios said, which was not the answer Maniakes had been looking for but not one to surprise him, either.
To Ypsilantes and Immodios, Maniakes said, «His Highness the Sevastos there—the one with the tongue hinged at both ends—made me realize we ought to get to the hill country between the headwaters of the Tutub and those of the Xeremos as fast as we can.» He explained why, then went on, «Unless I'm dead wrong, going back by way of Qostabash isn't the best route, either.»
«Then why have we been doing it?» Immodios asked. «Going back by way of Qostabash, I mean.»
Maniakes tapped two parchment maps, one new, one old. «As near as I can tell, the answer is, force of habit. Here, look: the trade route down to Lyssaion runs through Qostabash nowadays.» He ran his finger along the red squiggle of ink showing the route. Then he traced it on the other map, the old one. «It's been
running through Qostabash for a long time. But just because the trade route runs through Qostabash, that doesn't mean we have to go that way ourselves.»
He traced another path with his finger, this one running well east of the town that was the southern gate to the Land of the Thousand Cities. «If we take this route, we save ourselves a day or two of travel—and, with luck, we don't have so many enemies waiting for us at the other end of it.»
Immodios frowned. He had a face made for frowning, with tight, almost cramped features. «I don't follow all of that, your Majesty. Yes, we reach the hill country faster by your route, which is to the good. But what's to keep the Makuraners from shifting forces from Qostabash—if they have them there—to the east to try to block us? That would eat up the time we save.»
«What's to keep them from doing it?» The smile Maniakes wore was broad but felt a little unnatural, as if he were trying too hard to be Rhegorios. «You are.»
«Me?» Immodios looked splendidly surprised; no wonder, Maniakes thought, his cousin had so much fun in life.
«You,» the Avtokrator said. «You're going to take a regiment, maybe a regiment and a half, of soldiers and you're going to ride to Qostabash as if you had the whole Videssian army with you. Burn the fields as you go, set out lots of fires at night, make as big a nuisance of yourself as you can.» «If you want a nuisance, you should send me,» Rhegorios said.
«Hush,» Maniakes told him. «You're a nuisance by yourself; for this job, I want someone who takes a little more professional approach.» He turned back to Immodios. «Your task is to keep the Makuraners too busy noticing you to pay any attention to the rest of us as we slide south. Have you got that?»
«I think I have, your Majesty.» Immodios pointed to one of the imperial banners, gold sunburst on sky blue, that floated not far away. «Let me have my fair share and more of those, so anyone who sees my detachment will think you're with it.»
«All right,» Maniakes said, fighting down misgivings. He wondered whether he shouldn't have given Rhegorios the assignment after all. If Immodios failed and the banners were captured, Videssos would be embarrassed. And if Immodios decided that bearing imperial banners gave him the right to other imperial pretensions, Videssos would be worse than embarrassed: the Empire would have a new civil war on its hands.
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