Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Weighing that, Maniakes rather regretfully decided it made good sense. «So long as they stay alert, then, a sally's not worthwhile.»

  «That's what I'm telling you,» the elder Maniakes agreed.

  «Well, people on the wall will just have to keep their eyes open, that's all,» Maniakes said. «If the chance comes, I want to take it.»

  «Different matter altogether,» his father said.

  «It all depends on how you look at things,» Maniakes said, «same as anything else.» He made a face that suggested he'd been sucking on a lemon. «I must say, I am tired of people screaming at me that the siege is my fault because I married Lysia.»

  «Aye, I can see how you might be,» the elder Maniakes said steadily. «But that's not surprising, either, is it? You knew as soon as you decided to marry her that people would be yelling that sort of thing at you. If you didn't know it, it's not because I didn't tell you. The question you've had to ask yourself all along, same as if we were talking about sallying against the Kubratoi, is, does the trouble outweigh everything else you get from the marriage?»

  «Cold-blooded way of looking at things,» Maniakes remarked.

  «I'm a cold-blooded sort of fellow,» his father replied. «So are you, come to that. If you don't know what the odds are, how can you bet?»

  «It's been worth the trouble. It's been more than worth the trouble.» The Avtokrator sighed. «I had hoped, though, that things would die down over the years. That hasn't happened. That hasn't come close to happening. Every time anything goes wrong, the city mob throws my marriage in my face.»

  «They'll be doing the same thing twenty years from now, too,» the elder Maniakes said. «I thought you understood that by now.»

  «Oh, I do,» Maniakes said. «The only way I know to make all of them—well, to make most of them—shut up is to drive away the Makuraners and the Kubratoi both.» He pointed out toward the siege towers. «You can see what a fine job I've done of that.»

  «Not your fault.» The elder Maniakes held up a forefinger. «Oh, one piece of it is—you beat Etzilios so badly, you made him wild for revenge. But that's nothing to blame yourself about. We were trying to hit Sharbaraz where he lives, and now he's trying to return the favor. That makes him clever. It doesn't make you stupid.»

  «I should have worried more about why Abivard and the boiler boys had disappeared,» Maniakes said. Self-reproach came easy; he had been practicing all the way from the outskirts of Mashiz.

  «And what would you have done if you'd known he'd left the Land of the Thousand Cities?» his father asked. «My guess is, you'd have headed straight for Mashiz and tried to take it because you knew he couldn't stop you. Since that's what you did anyway, why are you still beating yourself because of it?» Maniakes stared at him. He'd found no way to forgive himself for failing to grasp at once what Abivard and Sharbaraz had plotted. Now, in three sentences, his father had shown him how.

  As if sensing his relief, the elder Maniakes slapped him on the back. «You couldn't have counted on this, son. That's what I'm saying. But now that it's here, you still have to beat it. That hasn't changed, not one single, solitary, miserable bit it hasn't.» Off in the distance, the Kubratoi were still hauling their siege towers back and forth, trying to learn how to use them and what to do with them. On another tower, one that wasn't moving, a crew of workmen nailed hides ever higher on the frame. Before long, that tower would be finished, too.

  «I know, Father,» Maniakes said. «Believe me, I know.»

  Splendid—perhaps even magnifolent, Maniakes thought wryly– in his silk vestments shot through with gold and silver thread and encrusted with pearls and other gems, Agathios the ecumenical patriarch paraded up Middle Street from the procession's starting Point close by the Silver Gate and the embattled land walls of Videssos the city. Behind him marched lesser priests, some swinging censers so the sweet-smelling smoke would waft the prayers of toe people up to the heavens and to the awareness of the lord with the great and good mind, others lifting trained voices in songs of Praise to Phos.

  Behind the priests came Maniakes, riding Antelope. Almost everyone cheered Agathios. Everyone without exception cheered the more junior priests. Though all of them had been chosen at least in part because they vigorously supported the dispensation Agathios had granted Maniakes for his marriage to Lysia, that was not obvious to the city mob. Priests who entertained them—anyone who entertained them—deserved praise, and got it.

  The parade would not have come off at all had Maniakes not instigated it. The city mob paid no attention to that. Some people booed and heckled him because the Kubratoi and Makuraners had laid siege to Videssos the city. Those were the ones who remembered nothing earlier than the day before yesterday. Others booed and heckled him because they reckoned his union with his cousin Lysia to be incestuous. They were the ones, almost as common as the other group, who remembered everything and forgave nothing.

  And a few people cheered him. «You beat the Kubratoi,» someone shouted as he rode by, «and you beat the Makuraners. Now you get to beat them both together.» More cheers followed, at least a few.

  Maniakes turned to Rhegorios, who rode behind him and to his left. «Now I get to beat them both together. Doesn't that make me a lucky fellow?»

  «If you're a lucky fellow, you will beat them both together,» his cousin returned. «It's what happens if you aren't lucky that worries me.»

  «You're always reassuring,» Maniakes said, to which Rhegorios laughed.

  When the chorus wasn't chanting hymns to the crowd, Agathios called an invitation to the people on the colonnaded sidewalks who stood and stared at the procession as they would have stood and stared at any entertainment: «Come join us in the plaza of Palamas! Come join us in praying for the Empire's salvation!»

  «Maybe we should have done this at the High Temple, after all,» Maniakes said. «It would have given the ceremony a more solemn air.»

  «You want solemn air, find a polecat,» Rhegorios said, holding his nose. «Only the nobles and a handful of ordinary people can get into the High Temple. Everyone else has to find out secondhand what happened in there. This way, all the people will know.»

  «That's so,» Maniakes said. «If everything goes well, I'll say you were right. But if things go wrong, all the people will know about that, too.»

  As far as he was concerned, the ecumenical patriarch was doing his best to make things go wrong. «Come pray for the salvation of the Empire!» Agathios cried again. «Come beg the good god to forgive our sins and make us pure again.»

  «I'll purify him,» Maniakes muttered. «I'll bake him for two weeks, till all the grease runs out of him.» When the patriarch spoke of forgiving sins, to what were the minds of the people likely to turn? To their own failings? Maniakes let out a snort of laughter. Not likely. They would think of him and Lysia. He would have suspected anyone else of deliberately inciting the people against him. He did suspect Agathios, in fact, but only briefly. He'd seen that the ecumenical patriarch was as a sucking babe when it came to matters political.

  He wondered what sort of crowd they would draw to the plaza of Palamas, which was not commonly made the scene of religious gatherings. While wondering, he looked back over his shoulder. Behind the Imperial Guards, behind a couple of regiments that had distinguished themselves in the Land of the Thousand Cities, came a swelling tide of ordinary Videssians intent on hearing what the patriarch and the Avtokrator had to say. The plaza would be full.

  The plaza, in fact, was packed. Agathios had trouble making his way to the platform that had been set up for him, a platform more often used by emperors to address the city mob. Maniakes looked back over his shoulder again. This time he waved. The guardsmen came trotting up through the ranks of the priests. Efficiently using elbows, spear shafts, and sheathed swords to clear a path, they got the patriarch to the platform in minimum time while also leaving people minimally angry—no small feat in Videssos the city, where everyone was touchy even when not under siege.


  «We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind,» Agathios intoned, «by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.» Reciting the good god's creed was the blandest thing the patriarch could possibly have done. Picking the blandest thing to do was altogether in character for him.

  As he must have known they would, the crowd joined him in the creed; many of them sketched Phos' sun-circle above their hearts as they prayed. Sometimes the blandest choice was also the wisest. Agathios had his audience as receptive as he could have hoped to get them for whatever else he planned to say.

  «We need to come together, to remember we all follow Phos and we are all Videssians,» the ecumenical patriarch declared. Maniakes' lips moved along with Agathios'. He knew the sermon to come at least as well as the patriarch did: not surprising, since he'd written most of it. Agathios had not argued it was unsound doctrine. A good thing, too, Maniakes thought. I wouldn't want to have to change patriarchs at a time like this.

  Agathios gestured out beyond the wall. «There, encircling us, lie the tents of the Makuraners, who revere their false God and who have forced Phos' temples in the lands they have stolen from Videssos to conform to the erroneous usages of the Vaspurakaners; and there, also encircling us, lie the tents of the Kubratoi, who worship only their swords and the murderous power of sharpened iron. May the good god keep our disunion from granting our foes victory against us, for such victory would surely extinguish the light of our true faith throughout the world.»

  Applause started close by the platform and rippled outward. Maniakes and Rhegorios exchanged an amused glance. At functions of this sort, you didn't want to leave anything to chance. A couple of dozen men with goldpieces in their belt pouches could create a good deal of enthusiasm and transmit it to the crowd.

  Telling Agathios about such chicanery would have been– pointless was the word Maniakes found. If the ecumenical patriarch was gratified at the response he received, he would preach better. So the Avtokrator told himself, at any rate.

  And so it proved. Voice all but oozing sincerity, Agathios went on: «And so, fellow seekers after truth and after Phos' holy light and the enlightenment springing therefrom, let us for the time being exercise the principle of economy and agree to disagree. Let us lay aside all issues now dividing us until such time as they may be considered without also considering the threat of imminent extermination under which we now lie.»

  Again, the paid claque began the applause. Again, it spread beyond the claque. As far as Maniakes was concerned, Agathios was only talking plain sense. How Videssos, on the edge of falling to its foes, could be exercised about whether he'd married within limits proscribed by the temple hierarchy was beyond him.

  It was not, however, beyond some Videssians. «Traitor!» they shouted, safe in the anonymity of the crowd. «Capitulator!»

  «Better to die in the sack and go to Phos' light than to live in sin and pass eternity in Skotos' ice!» They shouted things at Maniakes, too, and at Lysia—who was not there—things for which he would have drawn sword had he known upon whom to draw it.

  He took a couple of steps toward Agathios. Rhegorios set a hand on his arm. «Careful,» the Sevastos warned. «Are you sure you know what you're doing?»

  «I'm sure,» the Avtokrator growled.

  His tone made his cousin look more worried still. «Whatever it is, are you sure you won't be sorry about it this time tomorrow?»

  «I'm fairly sure,» Maniakes said, sounding more like his usual self. Rhegorios, still looking unhappy, had no choice save stepping aside and letting his sovereign do whatever he would do.

  Agathios looked surprised to see the Avtokrator approaching; had things gone according to plan, Maniakes would not have spoken till after the patriarch had finished. Well, Maniakes thought, things don't always go according to plan. If they did, I'd be in Mashiz right now, not here.

  As the Sevastos could not restrain him, so the ecumenical patriarch could not keep him from speaking now, since he had shown the desire to do so. «Your Majesty,» Agathios said, and, bowing, withdrew.

  Maniakes stood at the edge of the platform and looked west. The crowd packing the plaza of Palamas filled his vision, but there at the far side of the plaza was Middle Street, up which the procession had come from close to the land walls of the city. And out beyond the walls, apparently discounted by many city folk, remained the Kubratoi and the Makuraners.

  For a couple of minutes, Maniakes simply stood in the place that had been Agathios'. A few taunts flew his way, but most of the throng waited to hear what he would say. That made the jeers seem thin and empty, isolated flotsam of sound on a sea of silence.

  At last, the Avtokrator did speak, pitching his voice to carry as if on the battlefield. «I don't much care whether you love me or not.» That was a thumping lie, but it was also armor against some of the things people had called him and Lysia. «What you think of me is your concern. When my soul walks the bridge of the separator and I face the lord with the great and good mind, I'll do it with a clear conscience.

  «But that doesn't matter, as I say. When Midwinter's Day comes around, you can rail at me however you like. And you will. I know you, people of the city—you will. Go ahead. In the meanwhile, we have to make certain that we can celebrate Midwinter's Day in the Amphitheater. You need not love me for that to happen—soldiers need not love their captain, only do what he requires of them and keep from making things worse. After we've defended the city, we can attack one another to our hearts' content. Till then, we'd be wiser to wait.»

  Silence. From the whole crowd, silence. A few members of the paid claque applauded, but their clapping seemed as lost in emptiness as the earlier jeers had been. Maniakes thought he'd won abeyance, suspension of judgment, if not acceptance. He would gladly have settled for that. And then, out of the silence, a cry: «Phos will let the city fall, on account of your sin.» And after that, more cries, hot, ferocious, deadly.

  Were the worse enemies outside the walls, or within? He wanted to cry out himself, to scream for the soldiers to slaughter the hateful hecklers. But, having done that, what matter if he threw back the Makuraners and Kubratoi? Over what would he rule then, and how?

  He held up a hand. Slowly, silence returned. «If the city does not fall, then, the holy ecumenical patriarch's dispensation must be valid. And the city shall not fall.» Silence again, now lingering. Challenge. Accepted.

  VI

  Out beyond the walls, a horn blew. Maybe, once upon a time, it had been a Videssian horn. The Kubrati who winded it, though, knew nothing of Videssian notions of music. What he wanted was to make noise with the horn, as much noise as he could, as a child will make noise to hearten his army of wooden soldiers when they march out to war.

  But only in a child's imagination will wooden soldiers charge and fight and, of course, bravely sweep all before them. What the Kubrati called into being was real, so real and so frightening that he might almost have been sorcerer rather than mere horn player.

  Yelling like demons, the Kubratoi burst from their encampments and rushed toward Videssos the city, some mounted, others afoot. They started shooting arrows at their foes atop the walls even before they were in range, so that the first shafts fell into the ditch at the base of the great stone pile and the ones coming just after smacked the stone and mostly shivered.

  But, like raindrops at the start of a storm, those were only the first among many. Soon as could be, the arrows walked up the side of the outer wall and flew among the defenders at the top. One hummed past Maniakes' face and then down to strike the inner wall near its base.

  Not all shafts flew among defenders. Not twenty feet from the Avtokrator, a man tumbled to the walkway, writhing, weeping, cursing, screaming. A couple of his comrades, braving more arrows themselves when they could have crouched behind crenelations, hustled him to a siege tower. Surgeons waited inside there to do what they could for the wounded. Healer-priests waited, too, to fling their own fai
th and strength against the wounds of war.

  A catapult bucked and thudded. A dart flew out, flat and fast. It a nomad's leg to his horse. The horse fell as if poleaxed, pinning the fellow's other leg between its kicking corpse and the ground. The Kubrati's cries, if he raised them—if he lived—were lost, buried, forgotten in the tumult.

  Stone-throwers on the wall cast their fearful burdens at the attackers, too. A man hit by a stone weighing half as much as himself and traveling like an arrow ceased to be a man, becoming instead in the twinkling of an eye a red horror either lying still, smeared along the ground, or wailing like a broken baby bereft of breast, bereft of brother, bereft of hope.

  And Maniakes, seeing what he would have mourned had it befallen one of his own subjects, even one who hated him as an incestuous tyrant, clapped his hands with glee and shouted to the crew that had launched the fatal stone: «Give 'em another one just like that, boys!»

  And the crew did their best to obey, and cried out in fury and disappointment when their next missile fell harmlessly to earth. Maniakes moaned when that happened, too. Only later did he think on what a strange business war was.

  He had no leisure for such thoughts in any case, for some of the Kubratoi, instead of pausing at the ditch in front of the outer wall, dropped down into it along with ladders tall enough to reach from that depression to the top of the wall. Not many of those ladders ever went up, though. A stone dropped straight down rather than flung from a catapult crushed a man as thoroughly, if not so spectacularly, as one actually discharged from a stone-thrower. The Videssian defenders also rained arrows and boiling water down on the heads of the Kubratoi directly below them.