An Emperor for the Legion (6 page)

“I fear you’re right. I wish we knew how Thorisin stands.”

“So do I—or
if
he stands. Too many Yezda westward, though, to swing back and find out.”

“I know.” Marcus clenched his fist. Now more than ever, he wished for any word of the slain emperor’s brother, but the choice he was forced to only made getting that word more unlikely. “We have to turn east, away from them.”

They had spoken Latin; when the tribune saw Pakhymer’s blank look, he quickly translated his decision into Videssian. “Sensible,” the Khatrisher said. He cocked his head at the Romans in a gesture his people often used. “Do any of you know where you’re headed? ‘East’ covers a lot of ground, and you’re not from these parts, you know.” In spite of his gloom, Marcus had to smile at the understatement.

Gaius Philippus said, “The Yezda can’t have run everyone off the land. There’s bound to be a soul or two willing to show us the way—if for no better reason than to keep us out of his own valley.”

Laon Pakhymer chuckled and spread his hands in defeat. “There you have me.
I
wouldn’t want this ragtag mob of ruffians camped near me any longer than I could help it.”

The senior centurion grunted. He might have been pleased at gaining the Khatrisher’s agreement, but hardly by his unflattering description of the legionaries.

*   *   *

The shrill sound of a squabble woke Marcus before dawn the next morning. He cursed wearily as he sat up in his bedroll, still worn from the previous day’s march through broken country. Beside him Helvis sighed and turned over, fighting to stay asleep. Malric, who never seemed to sleep when the tribune and Helvis wanted him to, did not stir now.

Scaurus stuck his head through his tent flap. He was just in time to see Quintus Glabrio’s companion Damaris stamp from the junior centurion’s tent. She was still shouting abuse as she angrily stode away: “—the most useless man I can imagine! What I saw in you I’ll never know!” She disappeared out of the tribune’s line of vision.

In fact, Scaurus was more inclined to wonder what had attracted the Roman to her. True, she was striking enough in the strong-featured Videssian way, with snapping brown eyes. But she was skinny as a boy and had all the temper those eyes foretold. She was, the tribune realized, as hotheaded as Thorisin’s lady Komitta Rhangawe—and that was saying a great deal. Nor did Glabrio have Thorisin’s quick answering contentiousness. It was a puzzler.

Glabrio, rather in the way of a man who pokes his head out the door to see if a thunderstorm is past, looked out to see which way Damaris had gone. He caught sight of Marcus, shrugged ruefully, and withdrew into his tent once more. Embarrassed at witnessing his discomfiture, the tribune did the same.

Damaris’ last outburst had succeeded in rousing Helvis, though Malric slept on. Brushing sleep-snarled brown hair back from her face, she yawned, sat up, and said, “I’m glad we don’t fight like that, Hemond—” She stopped in confusion.

Marcus grunted, his lip quirking in a lopsided smile. He knew he should not be bothered when Helvis absently called him by her dead husband’s name, but he could not help the twinge that ran through him every time she slipped.

“You might as well wake the boy,” he said. “The whole camp will be stirring now.” The effort to keep annoyance from his voice took all emotion with it, leaving his words flat and hard as a marble slab.

The unsuccessful try at hiding anger was worse than none at all. Helvis did as he asked her, but her face was a mask that
did as little to hide her hurt as had his coldly dispassionate tone. Looks like a fine morning already, just a fine one, the tribune thought as he laced on his armor.

He threw himself into his duties to take his mind off the almost-quarrel. His supervision of breaking camp was so minute one might have supposed his troops were doing it for the first time rather then the three-hundredth or, for some, the three-thousandth. He heard Quintus Glabrio swearing at the men in his maniple—something rare from that quiet officer—and knew he was not the only one with nerves still jangling.

The matter of guides went as Gaius Philippus had guessed. The Romans were passing through a hardscrabble country, with scores of rocky little valleys running higgledy-piggledy one into the next. The coming of any strangers into such a backwater would have produced a reaction; the corning of an army, even a small, defeated army, came close to raising panic.

Farmers and herders so isolated they rarely saw a tax collector—isolation indeed, in Videssos—wanted nothing more than to get the Romans away from their own home villages before pillage and rape broke loose. Every hamlet had a young man or two willing, nay, eager, to send them on their way … often, Marcus noted, toward rivals who lived one valley further east.

Sometimes the tribune’s men got a friendlier reception. Bands of Yezda, with their nomadic hardiness and mobility, had penetrated even this inhospitable territory. When a timely arrival let the Romans appear as rescuers, nothing their rustic hosts owned was too fine to lavish on them.

“Now this is the life for me, and no mistake,” Viridovix said after one such small victory. The Celt sprawled in front of a campfire. A mug of beer was in his right hand, a little mountain of well-gnawed pork ribs at his feet. He took a long pull at the mug, belched, and went on, “You know, we could do a sight worse than kinging it here for the rest of our days. Who’d be caring enough to say us nay?”

“I, for one,” Gaius Philippus answered promptly. “This place is yokeldom’s motherland. Even the whores are clumsy.”

“There’s more to life than your prick, you know,” the Celt said. His righteous tone drew howls from everyone who heard
him; Gaius Philippus mutely held out a hand with three upraised fingers. With the ruddy firelight and his permanently sunburned skin, it was impossible to tell if Viridovix blushed, but he did tug at his sweeping mustaches in chagrin.

“But still,” he persisted, “doesn’t all this—” He reached out a foot and toppled the pile of bones. “—make munching marching rations a thought worth puking on? Dusty porridge, stale bread, smoked meat with the taste of a herd of butchered shoes—a day of that would gag a buzzard, and we eat it week after week.”

Gorgidas said, “You know, my Gallic friend, there are times you’re naïve as a child. How often do you think this miserable valley can supply feasts like this?” He waved out into the dark, reminding his listeners of the poor, small, rocky fields they’d come through, fields that sometimes seemed to go straight up a mountainside.

“I grew up in country like this,” the doctor went on. “The folk here will eat poorer this winter for feasting us tonight. If they did it two weeks running, some would starve before spring—and so would some of us, should we stay.”

Viridovix stared at him without comprehension. He was used to the lush fertility of his northern Gallic homeland, with its cool summers, mild winters, and long, gentle rains. Cut firewood sprouted green shoots there; here in the Videssian uplands, rooted trees withered in the ground.

“There are more reasons than Gorgidas’ for going on,” Marcus said, disturbed that the idea Viridovix put forward half jokingly was getting serious attention. “However much we’d like to forget the world, I fear it won’t forget us. Either the Yezda will flatten the Empire—which looks all too likely right now—or Videssos will somehow drive them back. Whoever wins will stretch their rule all through this land. Do you think we could stand against them?”

“They’d have to find us first.” Senpat Sviodo gave Viridovix unexpected support. “To judge from the run of guides we’ve had, even the locals don’t know the land three valleys over.”

There were rumbles of agreement to that from around the campfire. Gaius Philippus muttered, “To judge from the run of guides we’ve had, the locals don’t know enough to squat when they crap.”

No one could dispute that, either. Glad to see the argument
diverted, Scaurus said, “This last one is better,” and the centurion had to nod. The Romans’ latest guide was a solidly built middle-aged man with a soldier’s scars; his name was Lexos Blemmydes. He carried himself like a veteran, too, and his Videssian had lost some of its original hill-country accent. Marcus had a nagging feeling he’d seen Blemmydes before, but the guide’s face did not seem familiar to any of his men.

The tribune wondered if Blemmydes was one of the refugees from Videssos’ shattered army. The man had attached himself to the Romans a few days before, coming up to their camp one evening and asking if they needed a guide. Whoever he was, he certainly knew his way through this rocky maze. His descriptions of upcoming terrain, villages, and even village leaders ahead were unfailingly accurate.

He was, in fact, so much superior to earlier escorts that Scaurus looked from one campfire to the next until he spotted Blemmydes shooting dice with a couple of Khatrishers. “Lexos!” he called, and then repeated more loudly when the Videssian did not look up. The guide’s head whipped around; Marcus waved him over.

He picked himself up from the game, though he still had his stiff gambler’s face on when he came to the tribune’s side. “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked. His voice had the resigned patience of any common soldier’s before an officer, but the dice muttered restlessly to themselves in his closed right fist.

“Not much, really,” Marcus said. “It’s only that you know so much more of this country than other guides we’ve had, and we’re wondering how you learned it so well.”

Blemmydes could not have been said to change expression, but his eyes grew wary. He answered slowly, “I’ve made it my business to know the best ways through the land I travel. I wouldn’t want to be caught napping.”

Suddenly intent, Scaurus leaned forward. Almost he remembered where this frozen-faced soldier had crossed his path before. But Gaius Philippus was chuckling at Blemmydes’ reply. “Your business and no one else’s, hey? Well, fair enough. Go on, get back to your game.” Blemmydes nodded, still unsmiling, and strode off. Marcus’ half memory stayed stubbornly dark.

The senior centurion was still amused. “He’s probably some sort of smuggler, or a plain horse thief. More power to
him, says I; anyone with the imagination to get himself a fifteen-hundred-man armed guard to cover his tracks deserves to do well.”

“I suppose so,” Scaurus sighed, and shelved the matter.

That night the weather finally broke, a reminder summer would not, after all, last forever. The wind shifted; instead of the seemingly endless westerly from the baking plains of Yezd, it blew clean and cool off the Videssian Sea to the north. There was fog in the early morning, and the low gray clouds did not burn away until almost noon.

“Well, hurrah!” Viridovix exclaimed when he emerged from his tent and saw the murky daylight. “My puir roasted hide won’t fry today. No more slathering myself with Gorgidas’ stinking goo, either. Hurrah!” he said again.

“Aye, hurrah,” Gaius Philippus echoed, with a morose look at the sky. “Another week of this and it’ll start raining; and it won’t let up till it snows. I don’t know about you, but I’m not much for slogging my way through mud. We’ll be stuck in the boondocks till spring.”

Marcus heard that with disquiet, still loath to be isolated while uncertainty—and Ortaias Sphrantzes—reigned in Videssos. But Quintus Glabrio remarked, “If we can’t move, odds-on no one else can either.” The manifest truth there cheered the tribune, who had been thinking of his men as an entity unto themselves and forgetting that nature laid its hand on all alike—Roman, Videssian, Namdalener, or Yezda.

As requested, Lexos Blemmydes led Scaurus’ band southeast toward Amorion. The tribune wanted to reach the town on the Ithome River before the fall rains made travel hopeless. Amorion controlled much of the west central plateau and would give him a base for the trouble he expected come spring—if Thorisin Gavras still lived to brew it.

Gorgidas all but held Nepos prisoner. The priest used his healing art on the legionaries and did his best to teach it to the Greek. But his efforts there were fruitless, which drove Gorgidas to distraction. “In my heart I don’t believe I can do it,” he moaned, “and so I can’t.”

Scaurus came to rely on Blemmydes more and more. The guide had an uncanny knowledge of which ways were open. Not only was he intimately familiar with the ground himself, but he also questioned everyone whose path he crossed—the few traders still abroad, village headmen, farmers, and
herders. Sometimes the route he chose was roundabout, but it was always safe.

At evening a couple of days later, the Romans reached a place where what had been a single valley split into two. The rivers that carved them were dry now, but Marcus knew the fall downpour would soon make torrents of them.

Blemmydes cocked his head down each gap, as if listening. He paused a long time, longer than any similar decision had taken him before. Scaurus gave him a curious glance, waiting for his choice. “The northern one,” he said at last.

Gaius Philippus also noticed the delay and looked a question at the tribune. “He’s been right so far,” Marcus said. The senior centurion shrugged and sent the Romans down the path Blemmydes had chosen.

Scaurus thought at first the guide had betrayed them. The valley was full of lowing cattle and their herdsmen—Yezda, or so they seemed. Dogs followed their masters’ shouted commands, nipping at the cows’ heels and driving them up the rocky mountainsides as the herdsmen saw the column of armed men coming toward them.

But the Romans’ alarm proved unfounded. The herdsmen were Videssians who had taken Marcus’ soldiers for invaders. Once they learned their mistake, they fraternized with the newcomers, though warily. Imperial armies could plunder as ruthlessly as any nomads. But when Scaurus actually paid for some of their beasts, the herders came close to geniality.

“This isn’t the sort of thing you want to do too often,” Senpat Sviodo remarked, watching money change hands.

“Hmm? Why not?” The tribune was puzzled. “The less we take by force, the better we should get along with the locals.”

“True, but some may die from the shock of not being robbed.”

Marcus laughed, but Nepos did not approve. The priest had finally managed to get away from Gorgidas for a few minutes and was wandering about watching the Romans run up their camp. He said to Senpat, “It’s never good to mock a generous heart. Our outland friend shows here the same kindness he used in giving a disgraced man a chance to redeem himself.”