Videssos Besieged ttot-4

by Harry Turtledove

  «The others will end up short a hand, or maybe a head,» Maniakes broke in. «That will be what they deserve, and it'll help the better ones remember what they're supposed to be.»

  He put his horse through its paces. Antelope was glad to run, glad to rear and lash out with iron-shod hooves, glad to halt and stand steady as a rock while Maniakes shot half a quiver of arrows into a hay-bale target. Since other riders gave way for Maniakes, Antelope was convinced their horses gave way for him. For all Maniakes knew, they did.

  Maniakes enjoyed putting himself through his paces, too. As long as he was up on Antelope, using his body as he'd been trained to do from as far back as his memory reached, he didn't have to think about how best to shepherd the Makuraners out of the westlands. He didn't have to remember the scorn so much of the city mob and so much of the ecclesiastical hierarchy felt for him. He didn't have to do any thinking, and he didn't. His body did what needed doing without his worrying about it.

  He came back to himself some while later, returning to awareness when Antelope started breathing hard. His next conscious thought was startlement at how far the sun had moved across the sky. «Been at it for a bit,» he remarked to Immodios.

  «Yes, your Majesty, you have.» Immodios was a sobersides, and sounded full of somber approval. If he reckoned anything more important than readying himself for war, Maniakes didn't know what it was.

  Having stopped, the Avtokrator realized how tired he was. «I'll be stiff and sore tomorrow, too,» he grumbled, «even if it's not from being thrown all over the landscape. I don't do this often enough to stay in the shape I should.» After a moment's reflection– thought, once back, would not be denied—he added, «I'm not so young as I used to be, either.» He was tempted to start exercising again, to drive that thought away. But no. The alternative to getting older was not getting older, which was worse.

  Accompanied by a squad of guardsmen, Maniakes rode up to the Silver Gate and then back along Middle Street toward the palace quarter. The guards were there only to protect him. They took no special notice of the hot-wine sellers and the whores, the scribes and the thieves, the monks and the mendicants who filled the street But the crowds noticed them. They were the nearest thing to a parade Videssos the city had at the moment, which of itself made them worthy of attention.

  A few people, safely anonymous among others, shouted obscenities at the Avtokrator. He ignored them. He'd had plenty of practice ignoring them. Several men in the blue robes of the priesthood turned their backs on him, too. Agathios might have granted him his dispensation, but lacked the will for the ecclesiastical civil war enforcing it on the clergy would have required. Maniakes ignored the priests' contempt, too.

  And then, to his astonishment, a blue-robe standing under a colonnade bowed to him as he rode past. Some priests did acknowledge Agathios' dispensation, but few till this moment had been willing to do so publicly. The Avtokrator waited for some outraged rigorist, layman or priest, to chuck a cobblestone at this fellow.

  Nothing of the sort happened. Perhaps a furlong farther up Middle Street, someone shouted, «Good riddance to those Makuraner bastards, your Majesty!» The fellow waved to Maniakes.

  He waved back. He'd always hoped success in war would bring him acceptance. Till recently, he hadn't had enough success in war to put the idea to the test. Maybe, earlier appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was true after all.

  Someone yelled a lewd joke that suggested Lysia was his own daughter, not a cousin close to his own age. For a moment, he wanted to draw his sword and go after the ignorant loudmouth as fiercely as he'd practiced earlier in the day. But he surprised his bodyguards, and himself, too, by throwing back his head and laughing instead.

  «You are well, your Majesty?» one of the Halogai asked. «By the good god, I am well,» he answered. «Some of them still hate me, aye, but most of those are fools. The ones who know what I've done know I haven't done too badly.» It was, he thought, the first time he'd not only said that but also believed it.

  «How a man judges himself, this lies at the heart of things,» the northerner said with the certainty his people commonly showed. «A man who will let how others judge him turn how he judges himself—that is the man whose judgment is not to be trusted.»

  «If only it were so easy,» Maniakes said with a sigh. The Haloga stared at him, pale eyes wide in perfect incomprehension. For him, it was that easy; to the Halogai, the world seemed a simple place. Maniakes saw it as much more complex than he could ever hope to understand. In that, even if not in blood, he was very much a Videssian.

  The Haloga shrugged, visibly putting the matter out of his mind. Maniakes worried about it and worried at it all the way back to the imperial residence. There, he supposed, both he and his guardsman were true to the pictures they had built up of their world. But which of them was right? And how could you judge? He didn't know.

  Videssian soldiers began filing out of merchantmen onto the beaches near Across. Sailors began persuading horses to leave barges and ships they'd persuaded the animals to board not long before. They'd had trouble getting the horses on; they had trouble getting them off. Curses, some hot as iron in a smith's forge but more resigned, floated into the morning sky.

  Not far away, a detachment of Makuraner heavy cavalry stood waiting, watching. When Maniakes, Lysia on his arm and Rhegorios behind him, walked down the gangplank from the Renewal to the sandy soil of the westlands, the Makuraners swung up their lances in salute.

  Rhegorios let out a soft whistle. «Here we are, landing in the westlands with the boiler boys watching,» he said in slow wonder.

  «I never thought it would be like this,» Maniakes agreed.

  «No,» Lysia said. «Otherwise, you would have made me stay in the Renewal till you'd beaten them back from where you landed.»

  Was that resentment? Probably, Maniakes thought. He glanced over at his wife's bulging belly. «You wouldn't be at your best right now, not shooting the bow or flinging javelins from horseback,» he remarked.

  «I suppose not,» Lysia admitted. In tones suggesting she was trying to be just, she went on, «You use that sort of excuse less than roost men, from all I've seen and heard. You don't leave me behind when you go on campaign.»

  «I never wanted to leave you behind, going on campaign,» he answered.

  A single Makuraner in full armor rode toward the Videssians. All Maniakes could see of his flesh were the palms of his hands, his eyes, and a small strip of forehead above those eyes. Iron and leather encased the rest of him, from gauntlets extending up over his fingers to a chain-mail veil protecting most of his face.

  Coming up to Maniakes, he spoke in his own language: «Majesty, you know that Tzikas the traitor fled our encampment, accompanied by two others he suborned to treason.»

  «Yes, I know that,» Maniakes answered. Emerging from behind that metal veil, the Makuraner's voice took on iron overtones, too. And hearing his words without seeing his lips was disconcerting; it was almost as if he were disembodied and reanimated by sorcerous arts. But all that paled before the possible import of his message. «I know that,» Maniakes repeated. «Are you telling me you've caught the son of a whore?»

  «No, Majesty. But one of the patrols sent out by Abivard King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase—» Though Abivard did not yet claim the Makuraner royal title, this soldier was doing it for him. «—did run down a confederate of his. The wretch now stands before the God for consignment to the Void.» «That's good news, though not so good as I would have hoped,» Maniakes said.

  «Wait,» Rhegorios put in. «This patrol caught only one of the men who went west with Tzikas?» «Just so, lord,» the Makuraner messenger replied.

  Maniakes saw the import there as readily as his cousin. «They've split up to make it harder for your men to catch them,» he said, «and easier for them to get the word through to Sharbaraz. That is not good.» Tzikas had a way of making his life—and evidently Abivard's life, too—difficult.

&n
bsp; «Abivard judges this in the same way,» the Makuraner said. «His view is that he will reckon himself rid of Tzikas for good when he sees the traitor's head on a pole—provided it does not answer when he speaks.»

  «Mm, yes,» Maniakes said. «If anyone could bring that off, Tzikas is the man. Your task is the same, either way, though: whether or not Tzikas gets to Mashiz ahead of you, you still have to beat Sharbaraz.»

  «This is also true, Majesty,» the messenger agreed. «But I can swim the Tutub naked, or I can swim it, or try to swim it, in my corselet here. Swimming it naked is easier, as taking Sharbaraz unawares is also easier.»

  Now Maniakes nodded, yielding the point. «The faster Abivard moves, then, the better his chances of doing that.»

  «Again I think you speak the truth,» the Makuraner said. «The bulk of his army has already headed west.» He waved back to his comrades. «We are a guard of honor for your men—and a force that can harm you if you go against the agreement you have made. You are Videssians, after all.»

  «We are your comrades in this, since it works for our good as well as yours,» Maniakes said.

  The Makuraner nodded; that was logic he could understand. «And we are your comrades. Know, comrade, that we shall always watch you to make sure we stay friends and you do not try to move into a position where you can harm us.»

  Maniakes smiled at him, none too sweetly. «Even after you drove our armies out of the westlands, we've always watched you. We'll keep on doing it. And tell Abivard for me that I am not the one who has harmed him and I am not the one who intends to harm him.»

  «I shall deliver your words, just as you say them.» The Makuraner rode back toward the force of heavy cavalry waiting for him.

  Lysia sighed. «I wish we could come to trust each other.»

  «We've come further now than we ever did before,» Maniakes answered. «If I had to guess, I'd say we've come about as far as we can. Abivard is welcome to keep an eye on me, I'll keep an eye on him, and maybe we can stretch two generations of peace out of that instead of one. Worth hoping for, anyhow.» In earnest of that hope, he sketched the sun-circle over his heart.

  Close by Across, the countryside had been fought over several times, and looked it. Many little farming villages were nothing but charred ruins, many fields full of nothing but weeds because the peasants who should have worked them were dead or fled. Seeing the wreckage of what had been prosperous farmland saddened Maniakes without surprising him.

  What did surprise him was how normal things seemed as soon as his army moved away from areas war had ravaged. The Videssian force traveled behind and a bit north of Abivard's army; had it followed directly in back of the Makuraners, it would have found the land largely eaten bare before it arrived.

  As things were, the quartermasters attached to the Videssian army had a harder time keeping it fed than they'd expected. «The cursed peasants get word we're on the way, your Majesty,» one of them said indignantly, «and they light out for the nearest hills they can find. And what's worse, they lead all their livestock with them and bury their grain in the ground in jars. How are we supposed to find it then?»

  «Magic?» Maniakes suggested.

  The quartermaster shook his head. «We've tried it, your Majesty. It does no good. Passion is magic's foe. When the peasants hide their food, they aren't thinking kind thoughts about the people from whom they're hiding it—» «I wonder why that is,» Maniakes said.

  «I don't know,» the quartermaster answered, showing he was better suited to counting sacks of beans than to understanding the people who grew them. «The net result, though, is that we haven't got as much as I wish we did.»

  «Have we got enough?» Maniakes asked. «Oh, aye, a sufficiency,» the quartermaster sniffed, «but we should do better than that.» Even in matters of supply, he wanted to turn a profit.

  «A sufficiency will, uh, suffice,» Maniakes said. «After all, if everything goes as we want, after this campaign—which isn't even a fighting campaign, at that—we'll have the westlands back. If we can't get a surplus with the whole Empire restored, that will be time enough for worry.» The quartermaster's nod was reluctant, but it was a nod.

  Everything went smoothly till the army came to Patrodoton, a good-sized village a couple of days' ride east of the Eriza, a south-flowing tributary of the Arandos, the biggest river in the westlands. Patrodoton, though not large enough to boast a city wall, had hosted a Makuraner garrison, a couple of dozen men who'd made sure the local peasants gave a share of their crops and animals, and the handful of local merchants a share of their money, to support the Makuraner occupation.

  Getting the garrison to leave Patrodoton was not the problem. The Makuraners had already pulled out by the time Maniakes' outriders neared the village. Three of the occupiers had married Videssian women, apparently intending to settle down in the area for good. Two of those brides headed back toward Makuran with their husbands, and the father of one of them left with the garrison, too. That was the start of the problem, right there.

  The village ypepoptes, or headman, was a gray-bearded miller named Gesios. After performing a proskynesis before Maniakes, he said, «It's a good thing you're here, your Majesty, to settle all the treason that's gone on in this town while the heathen Makuraners were running things. If Optatos hadn't run off with Optila and the heathen she gave herself to, I expect you'd already have shortened him by a head. He was the worst, I reckon, but he's a long way from the only one.»

  «Wait.» Maniakes held up a warning hand. «I tell you right now, a lot of this I don't and won't want to hear about. Once the westlands are in our hands again, we're all going to have to live with one another. If someone turned his neighbors over to the Makuraners to be killed, that's treason, and I'll listen to it. If people went on quietly living their lives, I'm going to let them keep on doing it. Have you got that?»

  «Aye, your Majesty.» Gesios sounded more than disappointed. He sounded angry. «What about the priest, then? These past years, Oursos has been preaching the worst nonsense you ever did hear, about Vaspur the Firstborn and all sorts of heresy, enough to make your beard curl. Boiler boys made him do it.»

  Maniakes didn't bother mentioning that his own father still clung to the Vaspurakaner beliefs that Makuraners had tried to impose on Videssos. What he did say was, «Now that the boiler boys are gone, will the holy Oursos return to the orthodox faith? If he will, no one will punish him for what he preached under duress.»

  «Oh, he will,» Gesios said. «He's already done it, matter of fact. Thing of it is, though, he's been preaching the other way for so long now, about one in four has decided it's the right way to believe.»

  You could plunge a burning torch into a bucket of water. That would put out the fire. What it wouldn't do was restore the torch to the way it had been before the fire touched it. And having the Makuraners pull out of the westlands would not restore them to what they had been, either. They'd been tormented for years. They Wouldn't heal overnight.

  «Have the holy Oursos talk with them,» the Avtokrator said with as much patience as he could find. «The good god willing, he'll bring them back to orthodoxy in a while. And if he doesn't—well, that's something to worry about later. Right now, I've got more to worry about than I can hope to handle, and as for later—» He laughed, though he didn't think Gesios saw the joke.

  Not only he, but also Rhegorios and nearly every other officer above the level of troop leader, was bombarded with claims from the locals while the army spent the night outside Patrodoton. The officers dismissed a lot of claims out of hand—which meant Maniakes found out about them only afterward, and was sure he never found out about them all—but some got passed up the line till they came to him.

  Next morning, he looked at the villagers, all of them in the best tunics that were too often the worst and only tunics they owned. «I am not going to punish anyone for fraternizing with the Makuraners,» he said. «I wish that hadn't happened, but the boiler boys were here for years because we were so weak
. So—if those are the complaints you have to make, go home now, because I will not hear them.»

  An old man and his wife left. Everyone else stayed. Maniakes listened to charges and countercharges and to peasants calling one another liars till long after he should have been in bed. But that was the price that came with the return of Videssian authority, and he was Videssian authority personified.

  The hardest and ugliest case involved a man named Pousaios and his family. What made it even harder and uglier than it would have been otherwise was that he was obviously the richest man in Patrodoton. By the standards of Videssos the city, he would have been a small fish, but Patrodoton was farther from Videssos the city than the few days' travel getting from one to the other took. That had been true before the Makuraners seized the village, and was all the truer now.

  Everyone loudly insisted Pousaios had got his wealth by licking the occupiers' boots or some other, more intimate, portions of their persons. As loudly, the prosperous peasant denied it. «I didn't do anything the rest of you didn't,» he insisted.

  «No?» Gesios questioned. «What about those two troopers—our troopers—who rode into town in the middle of the night six or eight years ago? Who told the Makuraners which house they were hiding in? Who's living in that house today, because it's finer than the one he used to have?»

  Pousaios said, «Blemmydes was my wife's cousin. Why shouldn't I have moved into his house after he died?»

  That produced fresh outcry. «He didn't just die,» Gesios said shrilly. «A boiler boy killed him, and nobody ever saw those two soldiers again.»

  «I don't know anything about it,» Pousaios insisted. «By Phos the good god, I swear I don't. Nobody ever proved a thing, and the reason's simple: nobody can prove a thing, because there's nothing to prove. Your Majesty, you can't let them do this to me!»