Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Lysia staggered out of the cabin the two of them shared. Maniakes ran toward her, signaling with his hands for her to go back inside. He pointed to the rope around his own midsection. Lysia nodded, thrust a pot in which she'd been copiously sick into his hands, and retreated.

  He poured the pot into the sea. Like everything else, its contents were scattered and swept away. He was so soaked, he hardly felt wet: it was almost as if he were immersed in a swimming bath. In the middle of summer, both sea and rain were warm, the sole blessing Maniakes could find in the present situation.

  One of the broad-beamed merchantmen carrying soldiers wallowed past. It rode lower in the water than it should have; sailors and soldiers both were bailing with might and main. Maniakes murmured a prayer that the ship would survive.

  Thrax came back up toward the Renewal's bow. The drungarios disdained an anchoring rope. Maniakes thought that disdain a foolish display of bravado, but held his tongue; he was not Thrax's nursemaid. At the top of his lungs, Maniakes bellowed, «How long will this storm last?»

  He had to repeat himself three or four times before Thrax understood. «Don't know, your Majesty.» the drungarios screamed back. He, too, did not make Maniakes hear him at the first try. When he was sure the Avtokrator had gotten his first sentence, he tried another: «Maybe it'll blow itself out by nightfall.»

  «That would be good,» Maniakes said—and said, and said. «How long till nightfall?»

  «To the ice with me if I know.» Thrax pointed up to the sky. One part of it was as gray and ugly and full of driving rain as the next. The only way they would be able to tell when the sun went down was by its getting dark—or rather, darker.

  Nor had Thrax promised the storm would end when night came. Maniakes, then, was faced with waiting an indefinite length of time for something that might not happen. He wished he saw a better alternative. The only alternative that came to mind, though, was drowning immediately. Compared to that, waiting was better. Not far away, a bolt of lightning lanced down out of the sky.

  Purple streaks dimmed Maniakes' vision. The lightning could as easily have struck the Renewal as not: one more thing about which the Avtokrator tried not to think.

  He tried not to think at all. In the storm, thinking did him no good. He was just another frightened animal here, trying to ride out the forces of nature. On dry land, in among his soldiers or in a sturdy fortress, he could fancy himself the lord of all he surveyed. Here he surveyed little, and could control none of it.

  A little while later, Rhegorios emerged from his cabin. A sailor gave him a safety line, which he accepted with some reluctance. «I thought you'd have been here on deck for the whole storm,» Maniakes said. «You're always wild for adventures like this.»

  His cousin grimaced. «I've been puking my guts up, is what I've been doing, if you really want to know. I always thought I was a decent sailor, but I've never been in anything like—» Instead of finishing the sentence, Rhegorios leaned over the rail. When the spasm passed, he said, «I wish they hadn't given me this cursed rope. Now it's harder for me to throw myself into the sea.»

  «It's not that bad,» Maniakes said, but all that meant was, it wasn't that bad for him. Rhegorios laughed at him—till he started retching again. Maniakes tried to hold the hair out of his face while he heaved.

  «Is it getting darker?» Rhegorios asked when he could speak again. «Or am I starting to die?»

  Maniakes hadn't paid much attention to the sky for a while, most likely because he'd come to assume the day would never end. Now he looked up. It was darker. «Thrax said the storm might blow itself out when night fell,» he shouted hopefully, over the roar of the wind.

  «Here's hoping Thrax is right.» Rhegorios' abused stomach rebelled again. Nothing came forth this time, but he looked as miserable as if something had. «I hate the dry heaves,» he said, adding, Bloody shame they're the only thing about me I can call dry.» Water dripped from his beard, from the tip of his nose, from his hair, from his sleeves, and from his elbows when he bent his arms. Maniakes, who had stayed on deck through most of the storm, was wetter still, but the distinction would be meaningless in moments.

  Darkness, having once made an appearance, quickly descended on the sea. The rain dropped from torrent to trickle; the wind ebbed. «Praise the good god, lads,» Thrax shouted to the crew. «I think we've come though the worst.»

  A couple of sailors took him literally, either reciting Phos' creed or sending their own prayers of thanks to the lord with the great and good mind. Maniakes murmured a prayer of his own, part thanks but more a fervent hope the storm really was over and would not resume with the dawn.

  «Break out a torch, boys!» Thrax yelled. «Let's find out if we have any friends left on the ocean.»

  Maniakes would have bet a dry torch or, for that matter, any means of setting it alight, could not be found anywhere aboard the Renewal. He would have lost that bet, and in short order, too. Even in darkness, more than one sailor hurried for the torches wrapped in layer on layer of oiled canvas. And the cook had a firesafe, a good-sized pot in which embers were always smoldering. Thrax took the blazing torch and waved it back and forth.

  One by one, other torches came to life on the Sailors' Sea, some close by, others so far off they were hard to tell from stars near the horizon. But there were no stars, the sky still being full of clouds. The ships that had survived the storm crawled across the water toward one another. When they got within hailing range, captains shouted back and forth, setting forth the toll of those known lost and, by silences, of those missing.

  «It's not so bad as it looks, your Majesty,» Thrax said, somewhere getting on toward midnight. «More will join us tomorrow morning, and more still, blown so far off course that they can't see any torches at all, will make straight for the imperial city. Not everybody who isn't here is gone for good.»

  «Yes, I understand that,» Maniakes answered. «And some, like that one transport out there somewhere—» He pointed vaguely past the bow of the Renewal. «—can't show torches because they haven't got any fire left. I think it's Phos' own miracle so many of our ships have been able to make lights. But still—»

  But still. In any context, those words were ominous, implying lost gold, lost chances, lost hopes. Here they meant lost ships, lost men, lost animals—so many lost without any possibility of rescue, as when the dromon had broken up in the raging sea not far from the flagship.

  Not all the survivors had stories like that to tell, but too many of them did. Maniakes did what he could to piece together his losses, bearing in mind what Thrax had said. They came to somewhere not far from a quarter of the force with which he'd set out from Lyssaion. He hoped not too many of the ships Thrax reckoned scattered were in fact lost.

  «And speaking of scattered,» he said around a yawn, «where are we, anyhow?» He yawned again; now that the storm and the crises was for the moment past, he felt with full—perhaps with double– measure how tired and worn he was.

  «To the ice with me if I know exactly, your Majesty,» Thrax answered. «We'll sail north when morning comes, and we'll sight land, and we'll figure out what land we've sighted. Then we'll blow where we're at, and how far away from Videssos the city we are, too.»

  «All right,» Maniakes said mildly. He was no sailor, but he'd spent enough time at sea to know that navigation was an art almost as arcane as magecraft, and less exact. Knowing how to find out where they were was nearly as good as knowing where.

  He undid the rope that had been around his waist so long, he'd almost forgotten it was there. Nothing worse than gentle chop stirred the Renewal's deck under his feet as he walked to the cabin. He opened the door as quietly as he could. Lysia's soft snores did not break their rhythm. He lay down in wet robes on wet bedding and fell asleep himself.

  A sunbeam in his face woke him. For a moment, he simply accepted that, as he had clouds at sunset before. Then he sketched Phos' sun-circle over his heart, a sign of delight. He'd never known anything more welcome th
an a day of fair weather.

  Still in those wet robes, he went out on deck. Sailors were busy repairing storm damage to the railing, to the rigging of the square sail, and to rips in its canvas. They'd taken it down fast when the storm struck, but not fast enough.

  Thrax pointed north. «Land there, your Majesty. If I remember the shape of it aright, we're not so far from the imperial city as I would have guessed.»

  «Good,» Maniakes said. «Aye, that's good.» Spotting small sails on the sea between the fleet and shore, he pointed in his turn, off to the northwest. «Look. All the fishermen who weren't sunk yesterday are out after whatever they can get today.»

  «What's that, your Majesty?» Thrax hadn't noticed the sails. Now he did, and stiffened. «Those aren't fishermen, your Majesty. Those are cursed monoxyla, is what those are.» His voice rose to a bellow: «Make ready for battle!»

  V

  The fleet could hardly have been less ready to fight, battered by the storm as it was. All Thrax had wanted to do, all Maniakes had wanted to do, was limp into Videssos the city, unload the warriors and animals, and take a little while to figure out what to do next. Once again, the Avtokrator wasn't going to get what he wanted. The Kubratoi in their single-trunk boats were making sure of that.

  «Dart-thrower's going to be useless,» Thrax grumbled, pointing to the engine at the Renewal's bow. «Cords are sure to be too soaked to do any good.»

  Maniakes didn't answer at once. Till this moment, he'd never actually seen any of the vessels the Kubratoi had been using for years to raid his coast. They were, he discovered, more formidable than their name suggested. Each one might have been hewn from a single trunk, but the Kubratoi had taken forest giants from which to make their boats. Some of them looked to be almost as long as the Renewal, though of course they carried far fewer men. Along with their sails, which were made of leather, they were propelled by paddles—and propelled surprisingly fast, too.

  They had spotted the Videssian ships, either before they were seen themselves or at about the same moment. Maniakes had expected that would be plenty to make them flee. Instead, they swung toward the Videssians. The paddles rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. Yes, they could make a very good turn of speed.

  «We'll smash them,» Maniakes said.

  Now Thrax didn't reply right away. He looked distinctly less happy than Maniakes would have liked to see him. At last, he said, «Your Majesty, I'm not worried about the dromons. The transports are a different game, though.» He started shouting orders across the water. Trumpeters echoed his commands. The dromons slid toward the less mobile, less protected vessels they were shepherding to the imperial city. They were none too soon in doing so, either, for the Kubratoi had no more trouble figuring out the way the game needed to be played than did Thrax. Their monoxyla were also making for the slower, beamier ships in the Videssian fleet.

  «Maybe we ought to let them try to board one of the troop transports,» Thrax said. «I don't think they'd be glad they'd done it.»

  «Something to that,» Maniakes agreed, but neither one of them meant it seriously, as they both knew. Maniakes put that into words: «Too many things could go wrong. They might get lucky, or they might manage to start a fire—»

  «Wouldn't be easy, not today,» Thrax said, «not with the timbers soaked from yesterday's storm. But you're right, your Majesty: it could happen.»

  One of the dromons, oars slashing the water, rushed at a monoxylon. The Kubratoi not only managed to avoid the bronze-shod ram at the dromon's bow, they sprayed the Videssian ship with arrows. A sailor fell splash! into the sea.

  Another single-trunk vessel got up alongside a ship transporting horses. The Kubratoi didn't try swarming aboard the vessel, but, again, shot arrows at it as rapidly as if they were shooting at Videssian soldiers from horseback.

  Thrax pointed to that monoxylon. «They're so busy doing what they're doing, they aren't paying any attention to us.» He shouted to the oarmaster: «Build the stroke. Give us everything you have!»

  «Aye, lord,» the oarmaster replied. The drum that beat time for the rowers on the two-man sweeps speeded its rhythm. The rowers responded. The wake leaping out from under the Renewal's hull got thicker and whiter. Thrax ran back to the dromon's stern to take charge of one of the steering oars and yell directions to the man at the other.

  Maniakes, by contrast, hurried up toward the bow. He hadn't been in a sea fight since the one in the waters just off Videssos the city that let him enter the capital. This wasn't like fighting on land; ships carried a company's worth of men, but were themselves individual pieces, and valuable ones, on the game board.

  The Renewal had closed to within fifty yards before the Kubratoi realized the dromon was there. They were close enough for Maniakes to hear their shouts of dismay when at last they spied her. They threw down their bows then and snatched up their paddles, doing their best to escape the pointed, sea-greened beak aimed square at their stern.

  Their best was not good enough. They'd slowed to stay alongside the transport, and needed time to build up speed again—time they did not get. Thrax had a nice sense of aim and timing. He drove the ram home as the Kubratoi turned slightly broadside to his dromon.

  The ram did not hole the monoxylon, as it would have done to a Videssian vessel. Instead, the Renewal rode up and over the smaller Kubratoi craft, rolling and crushing it. The collision staggered Maniakes, who almost went into the sea. What it did to the Kubratoi—

  Heads bobbed in the sea, but surprisingly few of them. The Kubratoi were demons on horseback; Maniakes had never before had occasion to wonder how many of them could swim. The answer, ft seemed, was not many. Some, who might or might not have known how to swim, clung to paddles or other floating bits of wreckage.

  Videssian sailors shot arrows at the struggling Kubratoi. From what Maniakes could see, they scored few hits. It didn't matter. Either the Kubratoi would drown, or some Videssian ship would capture them once the sea fight was done. They might well have preferred to drown.

  «Well done!» Thrax bellowed. «Now let's get another one.» He steered the Renewal in the direction of the next closest monoxy-ton. «Keep us going there, oarmaster!» he added. The thudding drum that pounded out the strokes never faltered.

  Unlike the Videssian fleet, the Kubratoi must have stayed ashore during the storm. That meant they had no trouble getting fires started. Several single-log craft bobbed in the waves near another transport. Smoke trails through the air showed they were shooting fire arrows at it.

  Maniakes wished he could have seen more of how that came out, but the Renewal was bearing down on the monoxylon Thrax had chosen as his new target. This one, unlike the first, was not taken unawares, and the Kubrati commanding it was doing everything he could to get away. The little leather sail was raised and full of air; the paddles beat the water to froth as the nomads worked for all they were worth. «Prepare to ram!» This time, Thrax had the courtesy to shout the warning a couple of seconds before his dromon crunched into the single-log boat. Again, Maniakes staggered at the impact. Again, the Renewal went right over the monoxylon. This time, though, that was a slower, more grinding business, because the difference in speed between the two vessels was much smaller than it had been before.

  Again, Kubratoi spilled into the water. Again, many of them quickly sank to their deaths. But a few managed to catch hold of the Renewal's planking and scramble up onto the deck.

  They were dripping. By the look in their eyes, they were half-stunned and more. But none of them seemed in any mood to surrender. They wore swords on their belts. Drawing them, they rushed at the Videssian sailors—and one of them came straight for Maniakes.

  He was so startled, he almost left his own sword in its scabbard till too late. He yanked it out just in time to turn aside a fierce cut at his head. The Kubrati then chose a low line, slashing at his shins. He parried again, and hopped back. The fellow might not have been an outrageously good swordsman, but enough grim energy for at least three
men filled him.

  One sailor was down and screaming. Others, though, fought the Kubrati with swords and bows and clubs. Once the first surprise at being boarded began to fade, they realized how greatly they outnumbered their assailants. The fight on deck did not last long after that.

  Somebody clubbed the Kubrati who was fighting Maniakes. The fellow groaned and staggered. Maniakes' sword ripped his belly open. The Avtokrator twisted his wrist to make sure it was a killing stroke. The Kubratoi did not scream or clutch at himself; the blow to the side of his head must have dazed him and given him an easy death.

  He had been almost the last of his people still upright. Maniakes pulled his sword free, grabbed the Kubrati by the heels, and said, «Let's throw this carrion overboard,» to the sailor with the bludgeon. The Kubrati's body splashed into the Sailors' Sea.

  Thrax pointed. «Ahh, the filthy bastards, they did manage to burn one,» he shouted. In spite of wet timbers, flames were spreading on one of the transports. Videssian soldiers and sailors leapt into the water. Like the Kubratoi from sunken and capsized monoxyla they grabbed for anything they could reach to keep themselves afloat a little longer. «Shall we pick them up or pursue the foe, your Majesty?»

  Thrax asked. The monoxyla still unsunk had clearly had enough of the unequal fight with the Videssian dromons. Under sail and paddle, they were heading off to the east as fast as they could go.

  Maniakes hesitated not even a heartbeat. «We make pickup,» he said. «Then we head on to the imperial city. To the ice with the Kubratoi; let 'em go.»

  «Aye, your Majesty,» Thrax said. He bawled the needed orders, then turned back to the Avtokrator with a puzzled look on his face.

  «You usually want to finish the foe when you find the chance.»

  «Yes, usually.» Maniakes fought hard to hold in his exasperation. Thrax sometimes had trouble seeing past the end of his nose.

  «Now, though, the most important thing we can do is get back to Videssos the city and make sure it doesn't fall. Those single-trunk boats were sailing straight away from it. We're not going to waste time going after them.»