An Emperor for the Legion (30 page)

“Avshar trapped? Trapped?” Nepos burst out when he was through. “Why are you wasting my time with talk?”

“He may be,” Marcus repeated, but Nepos was no longer listening. The priest turned and ran for the stairway, his blue robe flapping about his ankles. Marcus heard his sandals clatter on the stairs, heard him run into a descending Roman.

“Get out of my way, you rattlebrained, slouching gowk!” Nepos shouted, his voice squeaking up into high tenor in his agitation. There were brief shuffling sounds as he and the
trooper jockeyed for position, then he was past and clashing upward again.

When the legionary emerged from the stairwell he was still shaking his head. “Who stuck a pin in
him
?” he asked plaintively, but got no answer.

Alypia Gavra’s eyes came open. Nepos had hardly spared her a second glance; Avshar’s foul sorcery and Scaurus’ news that the wizard-prince might still be taken drove from his mind such trivia as the Emperor’s niece.

She sat slowly and carefully. Marcus was ready to help support her, but she waved him away. Though she was still very pale, her mouth twisted in annoyance. “I thought better of myself than this,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” the tribune answered. “The important thing is that you’re safe and the city’s in Thorisin’s hands.” Why, so it is, he thought rather dazedly. He had been too caught up in the fighting to realize this was victory at last. Excitement flooded through him.

“Oh, yes, I’m perfectly safe.” Alypia’s voice carried a weary, cynical undertone Marcus had not heard in it before. “My uncle will no doubt welcome me with open arms—me, the wife of his rival Avtokrator and plaything of—” She broke off, unwilling to bring even the thought to light.

“We all knew the marriage was forced,” Scaurus said stoutly. Alypia managed a wan smile, but more at his vehemence than for what he said. Some of his elation trickled away. There could be an uncomfortable amount of truth in Alypia’s worries.

He was distracted by the sound of Nepos coming down the spiral stairway. It was easy to recognize the priest by his footfalls; his sandals slapped the stone steps instead of clicking off them as did the Romans’ hobnailed footgear. It was also easy to guess his mood, for his descending steps were slow and heavy, altogether unlike his excited dash upwards.

The first glimpse of him confirmed the tribune’s fears; the light was gone from his eyes, while his shoulders slumped as if bearing the world’s weight. “Gone?” Marcus asked rhetorically.

“Gone!” Nepos echoed. “The stink of magic will linger for days, but its author is escaped to torment us further. Skotos drag him straight to hell, is there no limit to his strength? A spell of apportation is known to us of the Academy, but it
requires long preparation and will not let the caster carry chattels. Yet Avshar cast it in seconds and vanished, armor, sword, and all. Phos grant that in his haste he blundered and projected himself into a volcano’s heart or out over the open sea, there to sink under the weight of his iron.”

But the priest’s forlorn tone told how likely he judged that, nor could Scaurus make himself imagine so simple an end for Avshar. The wizard-prince, he was sure, had gone where he wanted to go and nowhere else—whatever spot his malice chose as the one that would harm Videssos worst. And with that thought, what was left of the taste of triumph turned sour in the tribune’s mouth.

V
IRIDOVIX SAID
, “I
T ONLY GOES TO SHOW WHAT
I
‘VE SAID
all along—there’s no trust to be put in these Videssians. The city folk stand by the Sphrantzai all through the siege and then turn on ’em after they’d gone and won it.”

“Things are hardly as simple as that,” Marcus replied, leaning back in his chair. The Romans had returned to the barracks they occupied last year before Mavrikios set out on campaign against the Yezda. The sweet scent of orange blossoms drifted in through wide-flung shutters; fine mesh kept nocturnal pests outside.

Gaius Philippus bit into a hard roll, part of the iron rations every legionary carried, as supplies inside the city were very short. He chewed deliberately, reached out to the low table in front of him for a mug of wine to wash the bite down. “Aye, the bloody fools brought it on themselves,” he agreed. “If Rhavas’—no, Avshar’s, I should say—brigands hadn’t been off plundering to celebrate beating us back, Zigabenos’ coup wouldn’t have had a prayer.”

“His and Alypia Gavra’s,” Marcus corrected.

A pail dropped with a crash and made Gaius Philippus jump. “Have a care there, you thumb-fingered oafs!” he shouted. The barracks were not in the same tidy shape the Romans had left them. During the siege they had held Khamorth and, from the smell and mess, their horses as well. Legionaries swept, scrubbed, and hauled garbage away; others made up fresh straw pallets to replace the filthy ones that had satisfied the nomads.

Reluctantly, the senior centurion returned to the topic at
hand. “Well, yes,” he said grudgingly to Scaurus, slow as usual to give a woman credit for wit and pluck.

But here credit was due, Marcus thought. Rumors still flew through Videssos; like cheese, they had ripened through the day and now at evening some were truly bizarre. But unlike most of the city, Scaurus had talked with some of the people involved in events and he had a fair notion of what had actually gone on.

“Lucky for us Alypia realized Thorisin would never take the city from outside,” he insisted. “The timing was hers, and it could hardly have been better.”

The princess and Mertikes Zigabenos—who had kept his post as an officer of the Imperial Guard—were plotting against the Sphrantzai before Thorisin’s siege even began. Alypia’s handmaiden Kalline made the perfect go-between; her pregnancy protected her from suspicion and, as it had resulted from a rape by one of Rhavas’ roughs, bound her to the plotters’ cause. But as long as it seemed Thorisin might capture Videssos, the conspiracy remained one of words alone.

After his assault failed, though, assault from inside the city suddenly became urgent. Alypia managed to get word to Zigabenos that Ortaias had closeted himself away in the isolation of the private imperial chambers to compose a victory address to his troops.

Gaius Philippus knew that part of the story, too. His comment was, “The lady could have sat tight one day more. If there wouldn’t have been a mutiny after that speech, I don’t know soldiers.” The senior centurion had endured more than one of Ortais Sphrantzes’ orations and exaggerated only slightly.

Most of the regiments of the Imperial Guard had been lost at Maragha. Though Mertikes Zigabenos kept his title, Outis Rhavas’ troopers actually warded the Sphrantzai. But the Romans had given them a hard tussle at the walls, and afterward most of them went on a drinking spree which quickly led to fist-fights and looting. Their victims, naturally, fought back, which brought more of them out of the palace complex to reinforce their mates—and gave Zigabenos his chance.

He only commanded three squads of men, but at the head of one of them he descended on Ortaias’ secluded retreat,
seized the feckless Avtokrator at his desk, and spirited him away to the High Temple of Phos; Balsamon the patriarch had long been well inclined toward the Gavrai.

The other two squads attacked the Grand Courtroom to rescue Alypia and use her as a rallying point for rebellion. Their luck did not match their commander’s. Kalline had been caught returning to her mistress. Rhavas himself questioned her; he soon tore through her protests of innocence.

“She started to scream an hour before midnight,” Marcus remembered Alypia saying, “and when she stopped, I knew the secret was lost. I never thought Rhavas was Avshar, but I was sure he was not one to let her die under torture till it suited him.” The princess’ would-be rescuers walked into ambush. None walked out again.

But Zigabenos was either a student of past coups or had a gift for sedition. From the High Temple he sent criers to every quarter of the city with a single message: “Come hear the patriarch!”

Everyone who claimed to be quoting Balsamon’s speech for Scaurus gave a different version. The tribune thought that a great pity. He could all but see Balsamon on the High Temple’s steps, probably wearing the shabby monk’s robe he preferred to his patriarchal regalia. The moment’s drama would have brought out the best in the old prelate—torches held high against the night, a sea of expectant faces waiting for what he would say.

Whatever his exact words were, they swung the city toward Thorisin Gavras in a quarter of an hour’s time. Marcus was sure the sight of Ortaias Sphrantzes trussed up and shivering at the patriarch’s feet had a good deal to do with that swing, as did Rhavas’ thieving band rampaging through the shops of Videssos’ merchants. Once given focus by Balsamon, the city mob was plenty capable of taking matters into its own hands.

“Almost you could feel sorry for Vardanes,” Viridovix said, wiping grease from his chin with the back of his hand; from somewhere or other in the hungry city he had managed to come up with a fat roast partridge. “The puppet master found he couldn’t be doing without his puppet after all.”

After what he had seen in the bedchamber over the throne room, there was no room in Marcus for pity over Vardanes
Sphrantzes, but the Celt’s observation was astute. Much like the Videssian army, the citizens of the capital found Ortaias’ foppish, foolish pedantry more amusing than annoying, and so his uncle had no trouble ruling through him. But the elder Sphrantzes, though a far more able man than his nephew, was himself quite cordially despised throughout the city. Once Ortaias was overthrown, Vardanes found no one would obey him when he gave orders in his own name.

His messengers had hurried out of the palace with orders for the regiments on the walls to put down the rising. But some of those messengers deserted as soon as they were out of sight, others were waylaid by the mob, and those who carried out their missions found themselves ignored. The Sevastos’ Videssian troops liked him no better than did their civilian cousins, and his mercenaries thought of their own safety before his—Gavras would likely pay them, too, if he sat on the throne.

In the end, only Rhavas’ bandits and murderers stood by Sphrantzes. All hands were raised against them, just as they were against him; neither they nor he could afford fussiness.

“Vardanes got what he deserved,” the tribune said. “There at the last he was more Avshar’s puppet than even Ortaias had been his.” Fish on a hook might be a better comparison yet, he thought.

Gorgidas said, “If Rhavas and Avshar are one and the same, we probably know why Doukitzes met the end he did.”

“Eh? Why?” Marcus said foolishly, stifling a yawn. Two days of hard fighting left him too tired to follow the doctor’s reasoning.

Gorgidas gave him a disdainful look; to the Greek, wits were for use. “As a threat, of course, or more likely a promise. You know the wizard has hated you since you bested him at swords that night in the Hall of the Nineteen Couches. He must have wished that were you under his knife, not just one of your men.”

“Avshar hates everyone,” Scaurus said, but Gorgidas’ words carried an unpleasant ring of truth in them. The tribune had had the same thought himself and did not care for it; to be a viciously skilled mage’s personal enemy was daunting. He was suddenly glad of his exhaustion; it left him numb to worry.

*   *   *

Despite the reassurances he had given himself that morning, Marcus was not eager to confront Helvis with the obvious fact that they were staying in Videssos. He put off the evil moment as long as he could, talking with his friends until his eyelids began gluing themselves shut.

The cool night air did little to rouse him as he walked to the barracks hall he had assigned to partnered legionaries. It was not the same one of the Romans’ four they had used the year before. That hall, with its partitions for couples’ privacy, had been primarily a stable to the Khamorth, and the tribune wished Hercules were here to run a river through it.

Though the hall he had chosen for partnered men was tidier than that, he found Helvis busily cleaning, not satisfied with the job the legionaries had done. “Hello,” she said, pecking him on the cheek as she swept. “On campaign I don’t mind dirt, but when we’re settled, I can’t abide it.”

Under other circumstances that speech might have gladdened Scaurus, who was fairly fastidious himself when he had the time. But Helvis’ voice was full of challenge. “We
are
going to be settled here, aren’t we?” she pursued.

The tribune wished he had fallen asleep where he sat. Worn out as he was, he did not want a quarrel. He spread his hands placatingly. “Yes, for the time—”

“All right,” Helvis said, so abruptly that he blinked. “I’m not blind; I can see it would be madness to leave Videssos now.”

Marcus almost shouted in relief. He had hoped her years as a soldier’s woman would make her understand how the land lay, but hadn’t dared believe it.

She was not finished, though. The blue of her eyes reminded Scaurus of steel as she went on, “This time, well enough. But the next, we do what we must.”

There was no doubt in the tribune’s mind what she meant by that, but he was content to let it go. The issue was dead anyway, he thought; with the civil war done, defection would not come up again. He stripped off his armor and was asleep in seconds.

Thorisin Gavras was Avtokrator self-proclaimed for nearly a year; with Ortaias Sphrantzes beaten, no one disputed his
claim. Yet he remained a pretender in the eyes of Videssian law until his formal coronation.

As with any other aspect of imperial life, formality implied ceremony. Gavras was hardly inside the city before the chamberlains took charge of him; the Empire’s topsy-turvy politics had made them experts at preparing coronations on short notice. Thorisin, for once, did not squabble with them—his legitimacy as Emperor was too important to risk.

Thus Scaurus found himself routed from bed far earlier than would have suited him, given hasty instructions on his role in the upcoming ceremonial by a self-important eunuch, and placed at the head of a maniple of Romans close behind the sedan chair that would carry Thorisin from the palace compound to the High Temple of Phos, where Balsamon was to anoint and crown him Emperor of the Videssians.