An Emperor for the Legion (7 page)

The Vaspurakaner, not usually as cynical as his words suggested, looked contrite. But the last part of what Nepos had said made no sense to Scaurus. “What are you talking about?” he demanded of the priest.

Nepos scratched his head in confusion. He had not had any more chance than the Roman to shave, and the top of his skull was starting to get bristly. He said, “No need for modesty. Surely only a great-souled man would restore to trust and self-respect the soldier he himself ousted from the Imperial Guards.”

“What in the world do you—” Marcus began, and then stopped cold, remembering the pair of guardsmen he had had cashiered for sleeping at their posts in front of Mavrikios’ private chambers. Sure as sure, this was the elder of the two; Scaurus even recalled hearing his name, now that Nepos had made the association for him.

He also remembered the sullen insolence Blemmydes had shown when called to account and the way the snoozing guardsmen were ignominiously banished from the capital when their effort to shift the blame to him fell through. It was hard to imagine Blemmydes having any good will toward the Romans after that.

Which meant … The tribune shouted for a sentry. “Find the guide and bring him to me. He needs to answer some questions.” The legionary gave the closed-fist Roman salute and hurried away.

Nepos and Senpat Sviodo were both staring at Scaurus. The priest said, “You weren’t taking Lexos on faith, then?”

Pretending not to hear his disappointment, Marcus answered, “On faith? Hardly. The truth is, with everything that’s happened in the months since I saw him that once, I forgot the whoreson existed. Why didn’t you speak up a week ago?”

Nepos spread his hands regretfully. “I assumed you knew who he was, and thought the better of you for it.”

“Splendid,” muttered the tribune. He wondered if his lapse would cost the Romans, a worry that abruptly became a certainty when he saw the sentry returning alone. “Well?” he barked, unable to keep from lashing out to hold his own alarm at bay.

“I’m sorry, sir, he doesn’t seem to be anywhere about,” the legionary reported cautiously—unlike Gaius Philippus, the tribune usually did not take out his feelings on his men.

“That tears it,” Marcus said, smacking fist into palm in disgust. “Only a great-souled idiot would take in a man like that.” And if Blemmydes was gone, he must have thought he had his vengeance.

Marcus’ failure to follow up on his half recognition of the guide filled him with self-contempt. He could look at others’ mistakes with the easy tolerance his Stoic background gave him—they were, after all, only men, and perfection could not be expected from them. His own shortcomings, on the other hand, brought a black anger fiercer in some ways than the one he turned against battlefield foes.

With difficulty, he pulled himself free from that useless rage and began thinking what he had to do to set things right. First, plainly, he had to find out what the situation was. “Pa-khymer!” he called.

The Khatrisher appeared at his elbow. “I’ve gotten to know that tone of voice,” he said with a lopsided smile. “What’s gone wrong now?”

The tribune’s answering grin was equally strained. “Maybe nothing at all,” he said, not believing it for a minute. “Maybe quite a lot.” He quickly sketched what had happened.

Pakhymer heard him out without comment, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. “You think he’s buggered us, then?” he said at last.

“I’m afraid so, anyway.”

Pakhymer nodded. “Which is why you called me. I really should charge for this, you know.” But there was no malice in his words, only the amused mockery with which the Khatrishers so often faced life.

He went on, “All right, I’ll send some of the lads out to see what’s ahead—aye, and another bunch to track down your dear friend Blemmydes, if they can.” Seeing Scaurus wince, he added, “No one can think of everything, not even Phos—if he did, Skotos wouldn’t be here.”

That thought consoled the tribune but dismayed Nepos; the Khatrishers had a theology as free and easy as themselves. Pakhymer left before Nepos could put his protest into words. The priest was a good man, more tolerant than many of his colleagues, but there were limits his tolerance could not overstep.

Marcus wondered how Balsamon would have reacted to the Khatrisher’s remark. Likely, he thought, the patriarch of Videssos would have laughed his head off.

There was nothing to do but wait for the scouts’ return. The party sent out in pursuit of Blemmydes came back first, empty-handed. Marcus was not surprised. The terrain was
broken enough to give the disgruntled Videssian a hundred hiding places in plain sight of the camp.

The unusual comings and goings set tongues wagging, as Scaurus had known they would. For once, rumor might be an ally: if the men suspected trouble, they would be quicker to meet it. And if what the tribune was beginning to fear came true, speed would count soon.

He saw the Khatrishers come riding back out of the east, slide off their horses, and jog over to Pakhymer with their news, whatever it was. They said not a word to the soldiers who hurled questions at them. The horsemen might not have the Romans’ stiff discipline, but they were all right, the tribune decided for the hundredth time.

Their commander’s scarred face had no trace of his usual mirth as he came up to the tribune. “As bad as that?” Marcus asked, reading the trouble in his eyes.

“As bad as that,” Pakhymer agreed somberly. “The next valley east is crawling with Yezda; from what my boys say, they must have two or three times as many men as we do, the damned aillions.”

“It figures,” Scaurus nodded bitterly. “Blemmydes has his revenge, all right—he must have been looking for Yezda all along, and run off when he found a band big enough to sink us.”

Pakhymer tried to keep him from falling into despair. “The count’s not very fine, you understand—just a short peek over that ridge ahead to reckon up their tents and fires.”

“Fires, aye,” Marcus said—fires to eat the Romans up. But something else about fire teased at the back of his mind. The sensation was maddening and horribly familiar; he had felt it when he tried without success to remember where he’d seen Lexos Blemmydes. Now he stood stock-still, not forcing whatever it was, but letting it come if it would.

Pakhymer started to say something; seeing Scaurus abstracted, he was sensitive enough to keep silent a little longer.

The tribune drove his fist into his palm for the second time in less than an hour, but now in decision. “The gods be praised I learned to read Greek!” he exclaimed. It had no meaning for Laon Pakhymer, but he saw the Roman was himself again.

He started to leave, but Scaurus stopped him, saying, “I’ll
need your men again, and soon. They’re better herders and drovers than the legionaries ever will be.”

“And if they are?” The Khatrisher was mystified.

Marcus started to explain, but Gaius Philippus strode up, demanding, “By Mars’ left hairy nut, what’s going on? The whole camp is seething like a boiled-over pot, but nobody knows why.”

The tribune spelled it out in a few sentences; his second-in-command swore foully. “Never mind all that,” Scaurus said. Now that his wits were working again, haste drove him hard. “Get a couple of maniples out there with Pakhymer’s men. I want every cow in the valley down here at this end inside an hour’s time.”

Khatrisher and centurion stared at him, sure he’d lost his mind after all. Then Gaius Philippus doubled over with laughter. “What a wonderful scheme,” he got out between wheezes. “And we won’t be on the receiving end this time, either.”

“You’ve read Polybius too?” Scaurus said, indignant and amazed at the same time; the senior centurion found written Latin slow going, and Marcus had not thought he could read Greek at all.

“Who? Oh, one of your pet historians, is he? No, not a chance.” For once Gaius Philippus’ smile had none of the wolf in it. “There’s more ways to remember things than books, sir. Every veteran’s known that trick since Hannibal used it, and known his head would answer if he fell for it.”

“Will the two of you talk sense?” Pakhymer asked irritably, but the Romans, enjoying their common joke, would not enlighten him.

They did explain the scheme to Viridovix; Marcus had thought of a special role he could play, if he would. The Celt whooped when he’d heard them out. “Sure and I’d kill the man you tried to put in my place,” he said.

The herdsmen who had praised Scaurus to the skies while the sun still shone cursed his name in the darkness as, without mercy or explanation, their cattle were taken away. They carried spears and knives to protect themselves against tax-collectors and other predators, but were helpless in the face of the legionaries’ swords and mail shirts, and the Khatrishers’ horses and bows.

Lowing resentfully at the change in their routine, the cattle shambled down the valley, prodded along by their confiscators.
Some of the herd dogs, unreasoningly gallant, leaped to their defense, but reversed spearshafts drove them yelping back.

At the camp, Marcus found Gaius Philippus had been right. When he ordered the legionaries still there to chop the stakes of the palisade into arm-long lengths, they grinned knowingly and fell to like so many small boys involved in a mammoth practical joke. Their women and new non-Roman comrades watched with the same caution one gave any group of men suddenly struck mad.

The tribune did not need to give them the next set of orders. As fast as cattle arrived from the west, the Romans tied the newly made sticks to their horns.

“Marcus, if this is meddling I crave your pardon, but what on earth is going on?” Helvis asked.

“Once your brother Soteric said my men had an advantage fighting in this world because we had a bundle of tricks no one here knows,” Scaurus answered elliptically. “It’s time to see if he was right.”

He probably would have given her the full explanation in another minute or two, but a Khatrisher scout brought him bad news: “Whatever you’re playing at, it had better work soon. A couple of Yezda just stuck their heads into the valley to see what all the ruckus is about here. I took a shot at them, but in the dark I missed.”

Scaurus gave his preparations a last look. Not so many cattle as he would have liked were festooned with sticks, but a good two thousand head were ready. “This is all fascinating,” Pakhymer said ironically. “Do you suppose the Yezda will run from a stampeding forest?”

“I doubt it. But they just might, from a forest fire.” The tribune took a burning piece of wood from a campfire’s edge and walked toward the cattle.

Pakhymer’s eyes got round.

“Strike them now, I say!”

“Rest easy, Vahush. They’ll be there in the morning.” The speaker, a stocky, middle-aged Yezda, pulled a spit from the campfire, and offered the sizzling meat on it to his nephew.

Vahush rejected it with an angry gesture. Hawk-nosed as any Videssian, he had a zealot’s narrow face and moved with the barely controlled grace of a beast of prey. “When you find
your foe, Prypet, smite him!” he snapped. “So says Avshar, and he speaks truly.”

“And so we will,” Prypet said placatingly. “It will be easy; if the scouts tell no lies, the imperials are running about like so many madmen. In any case, we outnumber them two to one at least.” He waved out into the darkness, where felt tents dotted the valley like toadstools.

The flocks would grow fat in this wide new land, Prypet thought. He pulled at a wine jug, another of the spoils of war. True, he mused, Avshar had won the battle that gave the nomads room to grow, but who had seen him since? In any case, he, Prypet, led the clan, not this wizard whose face no one knew … and not his own wife’s sister’s son, either.

Still, the lad showed promise and should not be squelched. “We’ve had hard riding, these past weeks. We’ll fight better for the night’s rest. Sit yourself down and relax. Have some bread.” He lifted the chewy, unleavened sheet from the light griddle that served the nomads in place of an oven.

“You listen too much to your belly, uncle,” Vahush said, his confidence in his own lightness driving soft words from him—and wrecking any hope of making the older man listen.

Prypet got deliberately to his feet, the mildness gone from his face. Nephew or not, Vahush could go too far. “If you like, boy, you can find a fight closer than the next valley,” he said quietly.

Vahush leaned forward. “Any time you—” He blinked. “Avshar’s black bow! What’s that?”

Beginning in the valley to the west, the low rumble could be felt through the soles of the feet as well as heard. Bass bellows of pain and terror accompanied it. Prypet snorted his contempt. “Get dry behind your ears, whelp. Don’t you know cows when you hear them?”

Vahush flushed. “Of course. Skotos, I’m edgy tonight.”

His uncle relaxed, seeing the fighting moment was past. “Don’t worry about it. Farmers never could handle kine—look at them letting a batch run loose like that. It might not be a bad idea for a few men to saddle up at that, you know, and round up the stragglers as they come through.”

“I’ll do that,” the younger man said. “It’ll let me work off my nerves.” He turned toward his horse, then stopped dead, horror on his face.

Prypet looked west, too, and felt ice leap up his back. The
thunder was louder now, pounding its way into the valley where the Yezda took their ease. Cattle? It was not, it could not be cattle, but the great reverberation of a rolling, chopping sea of flame washing toward them at the speed of a fast man’s run. And at the edge of the wave ramped a devil, his banshee wail loud through the roar. The shifting fire struck scarlet sparks from the sword he waved above the tide.

The clan leader was a warrior seasoned in countless fights, but this was magic beyond his courage to face. “Flee for your lives!” he screamed.

Yezda tumbled from their tents, glanced west, and leaped for their mounts in panic. “Demons! Demons!” they shrieked, and set spur to their horses without another backward glance. Like an upset mug, the valley emptied of nomads. The fiery sea rolled over their tents as if they had never been.

Vahush would have fled with his uncle and his clanmates, but for long minutes his terror, far worse than Prypet’s, held him motionless. You wanted to attack them, fool, his mind gibbered, when they’ve found a wizard who could blow Avshar out like a candle.