«Mercy, your Majesty!» he cried, his face still pressed down against the paving stones. «Have mercy on your holy temple here, so long tormented by the savage invaders!»
«Rise, holy sir,» Maniakes said. «You are—?»
«I am called Domnos, your Majesty,» the priest replied, «and I have had the honor—and, I assure you, the trial—of being prelate of Amorion these past three years, after the holy Mavrikios gave up this life and passed to Phos' eternal light. It has not been an easy time.»
«Well, I believe that,» Maniakes said. «Tell me, holy Domnos—did you preach Vaspurakaner dogmas when the Makuraners ordered our priests to do that?»
Domnos hung his head. He blushed all the way up to the top of his shaven crown. «Your Majesty, I did,» he whispered. «It was that or suffer terrible torment, and I—I was weak, and obeyed. Punish me as you will.» He straightened, as if eagerly anticipating that punishment.
But Maniakes said, «Let it go. You'll preach a sermon on things you had to do under duress, and then you and your fellow priests will talk to the people who've accepted the Vaspurakaner doctrines as better than our own—I know you'll have some. We won't push them back into orthodoxy all at once. After that, you can go on with life as it was before the invasion.» He knew it wouldn't be that easy. If Domnos didn't know, he'd find out soon enough.
Now Domnos stared at the Avtokrator. He'd asked for mercy. Maniakes had given it to him, a large dose of it, but he didn't seem to want it as much as he'd claimed. «Yes, your Majesty,» he said, rather sulkily.
Maniakes, however, had more important things to worry about than a priest put out of temper. He chose a question touching on the most important of those things: «Has Tzikas, the former commander here, passed through this town in the last few days?»
Domnos' eyes widened. «No, your Majesty.» After a moment, he qualified that: «Not to my knowledge, at any rate. If he came here in secret, I might not know it, though I think I should have heard. But why would he have needed to come in secret?»
«Oh, he'd have had his reasons,» Maniakes answered, his voice drought-dry. He reflected that Amorion under Makuraner rule had been a town wrapped up in wool batting, a town caught in a backwater while the world went on around it. By the look on Domnos' face, he still thought of Tzikas as the stubborn general who had held Abivard away for so long, and he had no reason to think otherwise. Yes, sure enough, the world had passed Amorion by.
«You will know better than I, your Majesty,» Domnos said. «Will you come see the temple and learn the relief we need?»
«I'll come,» Maniakes said, and followed Domnos across the square.
He had not gone more than a couple of paces before his guardsmen, Videssians and Halogai both, formed a square around him. «No telling who or what all's waiting in mere, your Majesty,» a Videssian guard said, as if defying him to order the warriors to step aside. «Might even be this Tzikas item you're worrying about.» That comment, delivered in the streetwise dialect of Videssos the city, might have been one of Bagdasares' magic words, so effectively did it shut off any argument the Avtokrator might have made. The plain truth was, the guardsman was right. If Tzikas struck, it would have to be from ambush. What more unexpected place to set an ambush than one of Phos' holy temples?
Up the steps and into the exonarthex, Domnos led Maniakes. The priest pointed to a mosaic of a bygone Avtokrator presenting Amorion's temple to Phos as a pious offering. «Do you see, your Majesty?» the priest said. «The infidel Makuraners chiseled out every gold tessera from the costume of Metokhites II.»
«I do see.» Maniakes didn't know how much gold the Makuraners had realized from their chiseling, but they must have thought the results worth the labor.
In the next chamber in from the entrance, the narthex, Domnos sadly pointed out where silver lamps had been torn from the ceiling. «They took the great candelabrum, too,» he said, «thinking its polished brass gold. Even after they found they were wrong, they did not return it.»
«Brass is useful,» Maniakes said. He didn't need to say much to keep the conversation going. Domnos talked enough for any two ordinary people, or possibly three.
Tzikas had not lurked in the exonarthex or narthex. Maniakes' guardsmen preceded their charge into the main worship area. No renegade, no band of bravos, crouched in ambush behind the pews. The guards gave their permission for Maniakes to enter. He was sovereign in the Empire of Videssos, but hardly in his own household.
«You see?» Domnos said again. «Gold, silver, brass, semiprecious gems—all gone.»
«Yes,» Maniakes said. Even before the Makuraners had come, the temple here in Amorion had been a copy of the High Temple in the capital, but a poor man's copy. Despoiled by the invaders, it was, as Domnos had claimed, poorer still.
Maniakes glanced upward toward the dome in the central altar. The mosaic image of Phos in the dome was not perfectly stern in judgment, as it was in Videssos the city; here, he looked more nearly petulant. And the gold tesserae that had surrounded his image were gone, survived only by the rough gray cement in which they had been mounted. That made Phos' image seem even more lifeless than it would have otherwise.
«Aye, they even stripped the dome,» Domnos said, following Maniakes' gaze. With a certain somber satisfaction, he added, «And three of their workmen died in the doing, too; may Skotos freeze their souls forevermore.» He spat on the marble floor in rejection of the dark god.
So did Maniakes. He asked, «How much money do you think you'll need to restore the temple to the way it was?»
Domnos clapped his hand. A less senior priest in a plainer blue robe came running. «The accounts list,» the prelate snapped. His subordinate hurried off, returning shortly with three leaves of parchment held together at one corner by a small iron ring. Domnos took it from him, then presented it to Maniakes with a flourish. «Here you are, your Majesty.»
«Er—thank you,» Maniakes said. He flipped through the document. His alarm grew with every line he read. Domnos had the cost of full repairs calculated down to the last copper, in materials and labor both. The sum at which he'd finally arrived looked reasonable in light of the damage done to the temple—and altogether appalling in light of the damage done to the Empire's finances.
«Well, your Majesty?» Domnos said when Maniakes gave no sign of pulling goldpieces out of his ears.
«Well, holy sir, all I can say right now is that yours isn't the only temple to have suffered, and I'll have to see what other needs we have before I can think of paying you this entire sum.» Maniakes knew he sounded weak. He didn't know what else to say, though. Tzikas hadn't been lurking inside the temple, no, but he'd been ambushed just the same.
Domnos' acquisitive instincts aside, reestablishing Videssian control over Amorion proved easier than Maniakes had expected. Most of the locals who had collaborated with the Makuraner occupiers had fled with them. The ones who were left were loudly repentant. As he had elsewhere, Maniakes forgave more than he punished.
Being a good-sized town, Amorion had had its own small Vaspurakaner community before it fell to the Makuraners, a community with its own discreetly sited temple. That let the Avtokrator send the Videssian locals who had converted to Vaspurakaner usages during the occupation and now refused to abandon them to a place where they could continue to worship in the fashion they had come to find fitting.
«But, your Majesty,» Domnos protested, «the goal is to return them to orthodoxy, as you said, not to confirm them in their error. One Empire, one true faith: it is a law of nature.»
«So it is,» Maniakes said. «As time goes by, holy sir, I think almost all of them will return to orthodoxy. We make that the easier path, the preferred path, just as the Makuraners made the dogma of Vaspur the Firstborn the way to move ahead. You lay under the Makuraner yoke for years; you've been free a few days. Not everything happens at once.»
«I certainly see that, your Majesty,» Domnos said, and stalked off, robe swirling about him.
Rhegorios eyed his
retreat with amusement. «Do you know, cousin of mine, I don't think you're one of his favorite people right now.»
«I noticed that, thanks.» Maniakes made a sad clucking sound. «I wouldn't empty the treasury to repair the temple here this instant, and I wouldn't burn heretics without giving them a decent chance to come back to orthodoxy, either. See what a wicked fellow that makes me?»
«Sounds bloody wicked to me,» Rhegorios agreed. «Not giving someone all the money he wants the instant he wants it—why, if that doesn't rank right up there for wickedness with ordering your best general executed, I don't know what does.» He paused, looking thoughtful. «But since you're your own best general, that would complicate the whole business a bit, wouldn't it?»
«Complicate? That's one way to put it, anyhow.» Maniakes sighed. «Here's Amorion back under Videssian rule. I didn't have to fight to get it back, so the town isn't burned or wrecked any worse than it was before I got here. The Makuraners didn't take anybody with them who didn't want to go. And what thanks do I get? I haven't made everything perfect right away, so of course I'm nothing but a tyrant.»
Rhegorios plucked at his beard. «If it's any consolation, cousin your Majesty brother-in-law of mine, I'll bet the people here were grumbling about the Makuraners the same way till the day the boiler boys pulled out.» His voice rose to a high, mocking falsetto: « 'The nerve of that cursed Abivard. To the ice with him, anyway! He has gall, he does, going off to try and conquer Videssos the city when his supply wagons have left such big potholes in our streets.' « He looked and sounded like an indignant chicken.
Maniakes opened his mouth to say something, but he'd already started laughing by then, and almost choked to death. When he could speak, he pointed an accusing forefinger at his cousin: «You, sirrah, are a demon from a plane of being the Sorcerers' Collegium hasn't yet stumbled onto, the reason being that it's too absurd for such calm, careful men to contemplate.»
«Why, thank you, your Majesty!» Rhegorios exclaimed, as if the Avtokrator had just conferred a great compliment upon him. From his point of view, maybe Maniakes had done just that.
«It's a good thing Uncle Symvatios passed all the silliness in his line of the family down to you and not to Lysia,» Maniakes said.
«Oh, I don't know about that.» Rhegorios studied him. «My sister puts up with you, doesn't she?»
Maniakes considered. «You may have something there,» he said at last, and flung his arm over his cousin's shoulder. They walked back to the epoptes' residence together.
While Maniakes settled affairs in Amorion to his satisfaction, if not always to that of the town's inhabitants, Abivard kept marching steadily to the west, and took a good-sized lead on the Videssian force that had been following him. On the day when Maniakes was finally ready to head west from Amorion himself, a courier from Abivard brought a message to the Avtokrator.
«Majesty,» the fellow said, «the general has decided to swing up a bit to the northwest, to pick up some detachments on garrison duty in Vaspurakan. It won't cost but a couple of days of time, and will add some good soldiers to his army.»
«Whatever he thinks best,» Maniakes said, though he would not have been diverted from the shortest road to Mashiz. «I hope the soldiers turn out to be worth the delay.»
«Through the Prophets Four, we pray the God they so prove,» the messenger replied, and rode back toward Abivard's army. Maniakes stared after him.
So did Rhegorios, who said, «I wouldn't have done that. I'd have gone for Sharbaraz's throat with what I have here.»
«I was thinking the same thing,» Maniakes agreed. «That's what I'd have done. So would my father. I have no more doubt of that than I do of the truth of Phos' holy creed. And yet—» He laughed ruefully. «When Abivard and I have met each other on the battlefield, he's come off the winner as often as I have, so who's to judge which of us is wiser?»
«Something to that—I hope,» his cousin said. «The other side of the goldpiece is, if Abivard has swung to the northwest, we're going to have to swing farther northwest than we thought we would, or else we'll be feeding ourselves from the crumbs the Makuraners leave behind.»
«That's so,» Maniakes said. «You've thought of it sooner than I did, for which I thank you. I'll change the marching orders. You're right; we'd get hungry in a hurry if we came straight down the path the Makuraners had just used.»
The first settlement of decent size northwest of Amorion was Aptos, which, like Patrodoton farther east, lay on the border between town and village. Unlike Patrodoton, Aptos knew it wanted to be a town: when Maniakes and the Videssian army arrived, the folk of the area had started running up a rammed-earth core for what would be a wall around it.
The headman, a baker named Phorkos, was proud of the initiative his town was showing. «Your Majesty, we never imagined the Makuraners would come so far or stay so long,» he said. «If that ever happens again—which Phos prevent—they won't find us so ripe for going into their oven.»
«Good,» Maniakes said. «Excellent, in fact. I have to tell you, I don't have a lot of money right now. I'll do what I can to help you pay for your work, but it won't be much and it may not be soon.»
«We're taking care of it, your Majesty,» Phorkos said. «One way or another, we'll manage.»
«I wonder if you could go down to Amorion and talk with Domnos the priest for a while,» Maniakes murmured. Phorkos' blank look said he didn't know what the Avtokrator was talking about. That, Maniakes decided, was probably as well: if Phorkos did talk with Domnos, the priest was liable to persuade him he deserved an enormous subsidy.
That Phorkos and his fellow townsfolk were undertaking this labor on their own, that they'd presented Maniakes with what they were doing rather than asking permission of him to do it, said they'd got used to being out from under the stifling weight of Videssian bureaucracy, one of the first good things the Avtokrator had found to say about the Makuraner invasion. He didn't think he'd come up with many more.
From Aptos, the army continued northwest for another couple of days to the town of Vryetion. Vryetion, already having a wall, was what Aptos aspired to be. Having a wall, however, had not kept it from falling to the Makuraners. Maybe it had made seizing the place more difficult, and cost the boiler boys more wounded and dead. Maniakes hoped so.
He lodged in what had been the epoptes' residence, a house a medium-sized linen dealer in Videssos the city would have rejected as inadequate. The Makuraner garrison commander had made his home there during the occupation, and left several graffiti expressing his opinion of the place. So Maniakes guessed, at any rate, though he didn't read the Makuraner language. But the scribbled drawings accompanying a couple of the inscriptions were anything but complimentary.
Like it or not, though, that garrison commander had been forced to make the best of it. So did Maniakes, who spent a day hearing petitions from the locals, as he'd done in other towns through which he passed.
Those were, for the most part, straightforward. As had happened in other towns farther east, few collaborators were left; however many there had been, they'd fled with the Makuraner garrison. The officer who'd led that garrison seemed to have done a more conscientious job than many of his peers, and the folk of Vryetion tried to get the Avtokrator to overturn only a couple of his rulings.
'To the ice with me if I know whether I like that or not,» Maniakes said behind his hand to Rhegorios. «He didn't torment them, and most of them were as happy with him in charge as with one of their own.»
«He's gone now,» Rhegorios answered, to which Maniakes nodded.
A woman a few years younger than the Avtokrator came before him along with her son, who was a little older than the eldest of his own children. She and the boy both prostrated themselves, a bit more smoothly than any of the other locals had done.
«Rise,» Maniakes said. «Tell me your name, and how I may help you.»
«My name is Zenonis,» the woman said. She looked from Maniakes to Rhegorios and back again. She would have be
en attractive—she might even have been beautiful—had she not been so worn. «Forgive me, your Majesty, but why is my husband not with you?» «Your husband?» Maniakes frowned.
«Who is your husband?» Zenonis' eyebrows flew upward. He'd either astonished or insulted her, maybe both. Probably both, from her expression. «Who is my husband, your Majesty? My husband is Parsmanios—your brother. And this—» She pointed to the boy. «—this is your nephew Maniakes.»
Beside the Avtokrator, Rhegorios softly said, «Phos.» Maniakes felt like making the sun-sign himself. He didn't, schooling himself to stillness. Parsmanios had mentioned that he'd married in Vryetion, and mentioned his wife's name as well. But Parsmanios had not been anyplace where he could speak to Maniakes for four years and more, and the Avtokrator had spent all that time trying to forget the things his younger brother had told him. He'd succeeded better than he'd guessed.
«Why is Parsmanios not here with you?» Zenonis asked again. She probably had some Vaspurakaner blood in her—not surprising, this close to the princes' land—for she was almost as swarthy as Maniakes and Rhegorios. Beneath that swarthiness, she went pale. «Is my husband dead, your Majesty? If he is, do not hide it from me. Tell me the truth at once.» Her son, who looked quite a bit like Likarios, started to cry.
«By the good god, lady, I swear Parsmanios is not dead,» Maniakes said. He got reports from Prista, on the peninsula depending from the northern shore of the Videssian Sea, several times a year. When last he'd heard, at any rate, his brother had been well.
Zenonis' smile was as bright as her frown had been dark. «Phos be praised!» she said, sketching the sun-circle and then hugging little Maniakes. «I know how it must be: you have left him back in the famous city, in Videssos the city, to rule it for you while you take the westlands back from the wicked Makuraners.»
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