Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

  «Cheer up,» Maniakes told a few of them. «This is just a little backwoods town. The sooner we get back to Videssos the city, the sooner you'll really be able to enjoy yourselves.» And the sooner you'll start fighting the Makuraners and the Kubratoi, he added to himself—but not to them.

  The horses didn't like boarding ship, either, but then horses never did. Their potential for trouble was much smaller than that of the men. In all of Videssian history, not one mutiny had ever been started by a horse.

  «Phos go with you and bring you victory,» Phakrases said. The hypasteos sounded worried, and well he might. If by some mischance Videssos the city fell, he would be city governor for a regime that, in effect, no longer existed. If Videssos the city fell, Lyssaion would, too, and then he would no longer be city governor at all.

  If Videssos the city fell, Maniakes would hardly be Avtokrator at all, either. The key, then, was making certain the city did not fall. So he reasoned as the fleet left the harbor and set out across the Sailors' Sea.

  As ships usually did, the fleet carrying Maniakes and his army back toward Videssos the city stayed within sight of land, even if, to give the ships room to maneuver when and if a storm struck them, Thrax had them sail out till the land was no more than a blur on the northern horizon. The prevailing westerlies drove them along, faster than they had gone heading out to Lyssaion.

  When night came, they anchored not far offshore. Had the shore been under their control, they would have beached the ships. As things were, no telling whether a Makuraner force might try to make trouble for them if they did No telling, for that matter, whether some of the locals might have tried to make trouble for them. The southern coast of the westlands had been a pirate haven till the imperial fleet crushed the raiders. If the Empire of Videssos collapsed, Maniakes was sure piracy would again start flourishing in these waters in a few years' time.

  He paced the deck of the Renewal during the day. «I hate this,» he said to Lysia not long after they began sailing east. «I can't do anything to change the way things are while I'm here. I can't do anything about Videssos the city because I'm far away, and I can't even do anything about how we get there because Thrax is the one in charge of the fleet.»

  «You've already done everything that needed doing about the fleet—you and your father, I should say,» she replied. «He made sure it was there to bring you back to the city if that was what you wanted, and you decided it was and sent the men back to Lyssaion. Past that, everything else is unimportant.»

  He sent her a grateful look. «You're right, of course. But I want to do things, and I can't. Waiting's not easy.»

  She set both hands on her belly. Her pregnancy didn't show yet, but would soon. She'd had practice waiting, nine months at a time.

  Maniakes suspected the folk who lived by the Sailors' Sea had practice waiting, too. Whenever the fleet drew near the limestone cliffs common there, whenever he spotted one of the inlets not big enough to support any kind of proper harbor but more than adequate as a base for a swift galley or two, he concluded that a lot of the locals were biding their time, as they had for generations. If ever Videssos grew weak, they would grow strong, and they had to know it.

  He also watched the weather with a careful and dubious eye. Every speck of cloud, no matter how small, no matter how fluffy, appeared to his worried gaze as a thunderhead loaded with rain and pushed along by winds that would whip the sea to fury. But the days went by, the little puffy clouds remained little puffy clouds, and the gentle swells under the keel of the Renewal were not enough to make even Lysia's sensitive stomach complain.

  They rounded the southeastern corner of the westlands and started the journey north toward Videssos the city. Now Maniakes stood in the bow of the Renewal, peering forward even though he knew the capital was still days away. He wondered if Bagdasares really was as good a wizard as he thought. «We'll find out,» Rhegorios replied when Maniakes asked that question out loud. The Sevastos was also looking north. «Nothing out there now but ocean. Plenty of time for a storm to blow up, if one has a mind to.»

  «Thank you, cousin of mine,» Maniakes said. «No one knows how to build my spirits the way you do.»

  Rhegorios bowed. «Your servant,» he said. Maniakes snorted, then laughed out loud. In a perverse way, his cousin's rampant pessimism had built his spirits, after all.

  The coastal lowlands were the most fertile section of the Empire of Videssos, rivaling even the Land of the Thousand Cities for abundance. This far from Videssos the city, they were not heavily garrisoned by the Makuraners. Indeed. Videssian dominance at sea had maintained a stronger imperial presence along the coasts than almost anywhere else in the westlands. All the same, the fleet did not enter any harbors or beach itself on any inviting stretches of sand. A Makuraner force might have been prowling through the countryside, looking for trouble. Wrecking the fleet carrying Videssos' best army certainly counted as trouble in Maniakes' mind.

  The next day, a lookout shouted, «The Key! The Key off the starboard bow!»

  Maniakes turned to see the island for himself. The Key had got its name because its position, south and east of Videssos the city, made it crucial for holding the capital in any naval campaign—any naval campaign fought by Videssian ships, anyhow. The Makuraners and Kubratoi seemed to have come up with a different idea.

  Though it was merely a smudge on the horizon, seeing it also reassured him because of its two excellent harbors, Gavdos in the south and Sykeota in the north. If the storm did come, they would give the fleet more places to shelter.

  They had other uses, too. Thrax came up to Maniakes and said, «By your leave, your Majesty, I'd like to put in at Gavdos, draw food there, and refill the water casks, too. We've spent more time at sea all at once than I think I've ever done, and we're lower on supplies than I'd like.»

  Maniakes frowned. Having come so far, he grudged any delay. But good food and water and keeping the ships and their sails in top condition counted, too. «Go ahead,» he told Thrax, and did his best not to show the stop bothered him.

  «We'll pick up news of the capital there,» Lysia said after he'd confessed he was going to grant Thrax's request. One corner of her mouth twitched up in a wry smile. «You don't need to tell me in the tone of voice you'd use to let me know you were unfaithful.»

  «Oh, yes, I've had a lot of chances for that during this campaign,» he said, holding up his hand. « 'Stop the battle, please, and bring me the latest wench.' «

  The cabin they shared was cramped for two; the cabin they shared would have been cramped for one. Maniakes couldn't escape when Lysia reached out to poke him in the ribs. «Who is this latest wench?» she asked darkly.

  «Right now, she's carrying my child,» he answered, and took her in his arms. The cabin did have a door, and shutters over the windows, but sailors still walked past it every minute or so. That meant, for dignity's sake, they had to be very quiet. To his surprise, Maniakes had found that sometimes added something. So did the gentle motion of the Renewal on the sea—for him, at least. Lysia could have done without it.

  «Get off me,» she whispered when they had finished. She looked slightly green, which made Maniakes obey her faster than he might have otherwise. She gulped a couple of times, but things stayed down. She started to dress. As she pulled her undertunic on over her head, she said in reflective tones, «It's just as well my belly will stop you from getting on top after a while. My breasts are sore, too, and you squashed them.»

  «I'm sorry,» he answered. He'd said that during each of her pregnancies. She believed it each time—believed it enough to stay friendly, and more than friendly, at any rate. A good thing, too, he thought. Without her, he would have felt altogether alone against the world, as opposed to merely overmatched.

  Behind Gavdos rose the mountains in the center of the Key. Thrax let out a small laugh. «I remember the first time I brought the Renewal into this port, your Majesty.»

  «So do I. I'm not likely to forget,» Maniakes answered. He'
d been a rebel then and had managed to bring part of the fleet that sailed from the Key over to his side. Had the rest of that fleet not gone over to him after he sailed into Gavdos… had that not happened, Genesios would still be Avtokrator of the Videssians.

  Maniakes' mouth twisted into a thin, bitter line. Everything Genesios did had been a catastrophe—but when Maniakes overthrew him, Videssos had still held a good chunk of the westlands, and the lord with the great and good mind knew no Makuraners had come over the Cattle Crossing to stare up close at the walls of Videssos the city with hungry, clever eyes.

  He cursed Genesios. He'd spent a lot of time cursing Genesios, these past half-dozen years. The incompetent butcher had left him nothing—less than nothing—with which to work.

  And yet… Just before he'd taken Genesios' head, the wretch had asked him a question that had haunted him ever since: «Will you do any better?» So far, he could not say with certainty the answer was yes.

  Oarsmen guided the Renewal alongside a quay. Sailors leapt up onto it and made the dromon fast. More sailors set the gangplank in place, to let people go back and forth more readily. When Maniakes set foot on the wharf, he wondered if he'd arrived in the middle of an earthquake: the planks were swaying under his feet, weren't they? After a moment, he realized they weren't. He'd never spent so long at sea before, and found himself without his land legs.

  Waiting to greet him was the drungarios of the fleet of the Key, a plump, fussy-looking fellow named Skitzas who had a reputation for aggressive seamanship that belied his appearance. «Hello, your Majesty,» he said, saluting. «Good to see you're here and not there.» He pointed west.

  «I wish I were there and not here, and my army, too,» Maniakes answered. «But, from the messages that got through to me, Sharbaraz and Etzilios have made that a bad idea.»

  «I'm afraid you're right,» Skitzas said. «The Kubratoi are playing it smart, may Skotos drag them down to the eternal ice. Their monoxyla aren't a match for dromons: they've learned that the hard way. So they aren't even trying to fight us. They just keep sneaking across to the westlands, mostly at night, and carrying Makuraners back toward Videssos the city. After a while, they'll have a good many of them on the side where they don't belong.»

  «Makuraners don't belong on either side of the Cattle Crossing,» Maniakes said, and Skitzas nodded. The Avtokrator went on, «What are you doing about it?»

  «What we can,» the officer answered. «Every so often, we'll meet up with a one-trunk boat in the water and put paid to it. We've been scouring the coast north and east of Videssos the city, too, doing everything we can to catch the monoxyla beached. We've burned a good many.» He made a sour face. «Trouble is, the cursed things are easy to drag up well out of the water and hide. Once the masts are off them, they're only tree trunks, after all. We aren't having all the luck we ought to, I own that.»

  «All right,» Maniakes said, and then held up a hand. «All right that you've given me a straight answer, I mean; I needed one. What's going on by the city isn't all right, not even a little bit.»

  «I know that, your Majesty,» Skitzas said. «The one thing we and the fleet in Videssos the city have done is, we've managed to keep the Kubratoi from getting a big flotilla of monoxyla over to the westlands and ferrying the whole Makuraner army over the Cattle Crossing in one swoop. To the ice with me if I ever thought I'd be happy about delaying the enemy instead of beating him, but that's how it is right now.»

  «They caught us with our drawers down,» Maniakes said, which wrung a grunt of startled laughter out of Skitzas. «Delaying them counts; I was wondering if I'd come back only to find the city Men.»

  «The good god forbid it.» Skitzas sketched the sun-circle. «Anything I can do to help you along—»

  «I think Thrax has that well in hand,» Maniakes said. The drungarios of the fleet was bellowing instructions at the officers who had advanced to see what he required. He told them in alarming detail. When he had a chance to prepare in advance, he was a nonpareil.

  Before long, laborers started carrying sacks of flour, sacks of beans, barrels of salted beef, and jars of wine aboard the ships of his fleet. Others brought coils of rope, canvas, casks of pitch, and other nautical supplies. By the time the sun went down, the fleet was in better shape than it had been since the day after it sailed out of Lyssaion.

  Sunset turned clouds in the west the color of blood. Maniakes noted that, at first made nothing of it, and then turned back to look at the sunset again. He hadn't seen clouds in the west for a good long while now. Were they harbingers of the storm Bagdasares had predicted?

  If they were, could he wait out the storm here at Gavdos and then sail on to Videssos the city undisturbed? He wished he thought the answer to that were yes. But he had the strong feeling that, if this was a coming storm and he waited it out, another would catch him as soon as he put to sea. He'd gain nothing that way, and lose precious time.

  «We'll go on,» he said aloud. «Whatever my fate is, I'll go to meet it; I won't wait for it to come to me.»

  The Renewal bounced and shook in the waves as if it were a toy boat in a washbasin inhabited by a two-year-old intent on splashing all the water in the basin onto the floor before his mother could finish washing him. Rain drummed against Maniakes' face. The wind howled like a whole pack of hungry wolves. Thrax screamed something at him. The drungarios of the fleet stood close by Maniakes, but he had no idea what his naval commander was saying. The rain plastered Thrax's thick pelt of white hair against his skull, giving him something of the look of an elderly otter.

  Whatever my fate is, I'll go to meet it. Maniakes savored the stupidity of the words. He'd been overeager again. That was easy enough to see, in retrospect. There were storms, and then there were storms. In his haste to get back to Videssos the city, he'd put the fleet in the way of a bad one.

  Thrax tried again, but whatever he'd bellowed got buried in a thunderclap that made Maniakes' ears ring. The Renewal nosed down into a trough between two waves. It nosed down steeply, for the waves were running very high. Maniakes staggered, but managed to keep his feet. Thrax stayed upright without apparent effort. Whatever his shortcomings, he was a seaman.

  Well off the starboard bow, another dromon fought its way northward. The rowers were keeping the bow into the wind and making what progress they could, as were those of the Renewal. At the moment, Maniakes worried little about progress. All he wanted to do was stay on top of the water till the storm decided to blow past and churn up some other part of the Sailors' Sea. Somewhere beyond the weeping gray clouds floated Phos' sun, chiefest symbol of the good god's light. He hoped he'd live to see that symbol again.

  Suddenly, without warning, the other galley broke its back. One of those surging waves must have struck it exactly wrong. It went from a ship almost identical to the Renewal to floating wreckage in the space of half a minute. The two halves of the hull filled with water almost at once. Here and there, scattered across the ocean, men clung to planks, to oars, to anything that would bear even part of their weight for a little while.

  Maniakes pointed toward the survivors. «Can we save them?» he yelled to Thrax. At first, he thought the drungarios hadn't heard him. Thrax made his way back to the stern of the Renewal and bawled in the ears of the men at the steering oars, pointing in the direction of the wrecked galley as he did so. The Renewal swung toward the struggling men.

  Sailors tied themselves to the rail before throwing lines out into the heaving sea in hope some of the men who floundered there might catch hold of them. And some of those men did catch hold of them, and were pulled half-drowned from the water that had tried to take their lives.

  And some of the crew from the smashed dromon could not be saved in spite of all that the men from the Renewal did. One luckless sailor let go of the spar to which he had been clinging to grab for a rope. A wave slapped him in the head before his hand closed on the line. He went under.

  «Come up!» Maniakes shouted to him. «Curse you, come up!» But he
did not come up.

  Other men lost hold of whatever they were using to keep their heads above water before the Renewal got close enough to pluck them from the sea. Maniakes groaned every time he saw that happen. And he knew other sailors—too many other sailors—had already drowned.

  A wave broke over the Renewal's bow. For a hideous moment, bethought the dromon was going to imitate the one that had broken up. The ship's timbers groaned under his feet. Another, bigger wave hit her—and hit him, too. The wall of water knocked him off his feet. He skidded across the deck, fetched up hard against the rail—and started to go over, out into the foaming, roaring sea.

  He grabbed at the rail. One hand seized it. He hung on with everything he had, knowing he would not live above a minute if his grip failed.

  A hand closed on his wrist. A sailor with a silver hoop in one ear hauled him back aboard the Renewal. The fellow shouted something at him. Wind and storm blew the words away. Then the sailor offered him a length of line. He tied one end around the rail, the other around his waist. That done, he shook a fist at the sky, as if defying it to do its worst.

  It seemed to take up his challenge. The wind blew harder than ever. Rain came down in sheets. Only by tasting whether the water on his lips was sweet or salt could Maniakes be sure whether storm or sea buffeted him.

  A sailor pointed off to port. More wreckage drifted there, along with human forms. Maniakes started to bellow for more lines to be cast, but stopped with the words unspoken. Those luckless fellows would be walking the bridge of the separator now, to see whether their souls tumbled down into Skotos' icy hell or spent eternity bathed in Phos' light.

  Maniakes turned and looked southeast, back toward the Key.

  They'd cleared Sykeota some while before, and he could not see very far in any case. He didn't think they would be dashed against the shore, and realized he wouldn't find out for certain till too late to stay disaster if it came.