The Legion of Videssos (38 page)

No help for that—he was bound to go on with what he had devised. “Hear me, people of Garsavra,” he said; Styppes had been glad to help with
this
speech. “As traitors and rebels against his Imperial Majesty Thorisin Gavras, Avtokrator of the Videssians, these wretches deserve no less than death. Only my mercy spares them that.” But as his listeners began to brighten, he went on inexorably, “Yet as a mark of the outrage they have worked on the Empire, and as fit warning to any others who might be mad enough to contemplate revolt, let the sight of their eyes be extinguished and let them know Skotos’ darkness forevermore!” By Videssian reckoning, that constituted mercy, for it avoided capital punishment.

But a moan rose from the crowd, overtopped by Ansfrit’s bellow of anguish. The Garsavrans started to surge forward, but Roman
pila
snapped out in bristling hedgehog array to hold them off.

Inside the hollow square, the four Namdaleni jerked as if stung. “Blinded?” Drax howled. “I’d sooner die!” The islanders wrenched against their captors’ grip and, with panic strength, managed to tear free for an instant. But for all their struggles, the legionaries wrestled them to the ground and held them there, pulling away the hands with which they vainly tried to shield their eyes.

Tunelessly humming a hymn to Phos, the executioner put the tip of a thin pointed iron in the fire. He lifted it every so often to gauge its color; his thick gloves of crimson leather protected him from the heat. Finally he grunted in satisfaction and turned to Scaurus. “Which of ’em first?”

“As you wish.”

“You, then.” Bailli happened to be closest to the executioner, who went on, not unkindly, “Try to hold as steady as you can; ’twill be easier for you so.”

“Easier,” Bailli mocked through clenched teeth; sweat poured down his face. Then the iron came down, once, twice. Tight-jawed no longer, the snub-nosed Namdalener screamed and screamed. The scent of charring meat filled the air.

Pausing between victims to reheat his iron, the executioner moved on to Turgot and Drax, and then at last to Soteric. Helvis’ brother’s cries were all curses aimed Marcus’ way. He stood unmoved over the fallen Namdaleni and answered only, “You brought this upon yourselves.” The burned-meat smell was very strong now, as if someone had forgotten a roasting joint of pork.

The legionaries helped their groaning, sobbing prisoners sit, pulling thick black veils over their eyes to hide the hot iron’s work. “Show them to the people,” Scaurus commanded. “Let them see what they earn by defying their rightful sovereign.” The troopers who formed the hollow square opened lanes to let the crowd look on the Namdaleni.

“Now take them away,” the tribune said. No one raised a hand to stop the islanders from being guided back to their captivity in the governor’s hall. They stumbled against each other as they staggered between their Roman guards.

“Ansfrit,” Marcus called. The Namdalener captain approached, fear and rage struggling on his pale face. Scaurus gave him no time to compose himself: “Surrender your castle to me within the day, or when we take it—and you know we
can—everyone of your men will suffer the same fate as these turncoats. Yield now, and I guarantee their safety.”

“I thought you above these Videssian butcheries, but it seems the dog apes his master.”

“That’s as may be,” the tribune shrugged, implacable. “Will you yield, or shall I have this fellow—” He jerked his head toward the red-clad executioner. “—keep his irons hot?” Under his shiny leather mask, the man’s mouth shaped a smile at Ansfrit.

The Namdalener flinched, recovered, glared helplessly at Scaurus. “Aye, damn you, aye,” he choked out, and spun on his heel, almost running back toward the motte-and-bailey. Behind his retreating back, Gaius Philippus nodded knowingly. Marcus smiled himself. Another pair of troubles solved, he thought.

The druids’ marks on his blade flared into golden life, scenting wizardry, but it was scabbarded, and he did not see.

Far to the north, Avshar laid aside the black-armored image of Skotos he used to focus his scrying powers. A greater seer than any
enaree
, he cast forth his vision to overleap steppe and sea, as a man might cast a fishing line into a stream. The power in Scaurus’ sword was his guide; if it warded the hated outlander from his spells, it also proclaimed the Roman’s whereabouts and let Avshar spy. Though he could not see the tribune himself, all around him was clear enough.

The wizard-prince leaned back against a horsehair-filled cushion of felt. Even for him, scrying at such a distance was no easy feat. “A lovely jest, mine enemy,” he whispered, though no one was there to hear him. “Oh yes, a lovely jest. Yet perhaps I shall find a better one.”

News somehow travels faster than men. When Scaurus got back to the legionary camp, Helvis met him with a shriek. “Animal! Worse than animal—foul, wretched, atrocious brute!” Her face was dead white, save for a spot of color high on each cheek.

Legionaries and their women pretended not to hear—a privilege of rank, Marcus thought. They would have gathered round to listen to any common trooper scrapping with his leman.

He took Helvis by the elbow, tried to steer her back toward their tent. “Don’t flare at me,” he warned. “I left them alive, and more than they deserved, too.”

She whirled away from him. “Alive? What sort of life is it, to sit in a corner of the marketplace with a chipped cup in your lap, begging for coppers? My brother—”

She dissolved in tears. The tribune managed to guide her into the tent, away from the camp’s watching eyes. Malric, he guessed, was out playing; Dosti, napping in his crib, woke and started to cry when his mother came in sobbing. Marcus tried to comfort her, saying, “There’s no need for that, darling. Here, I’ve brought a present for you.”

Helvis stared at him, wild-eyed. “So I’m your slut now, to be bought with trinkets?”

He felt himself reddening and damned his clumsy words; the Videssian oratory was turgid, but at least it could be rehearsed. This, now—“See for yourself,” he said brusquely, and tossed her a small leather pouch.

She caught it automatically, tugged the drawstring open. “This is a gift?” she stuttered, confusion routing fury for a moment. “Chunks of half-burned fat?”

“I hoped you might think so,” Scaurus said, “since each of your precious islanders—aye, your honey-mouthed brother, too—clapped them over his eyes as my troopers fought ’em in the dirt.”

Her mouth moved without sound, something the tribune had heard of but never seen. At last she whispered, “They’re not blind?”

“Not a bit of it,” Marcus said smugly, “though Turgot flinched and got an eyebrow seared off, the poor mournful twit. A pretty joke, don’t you think?” he went on, unaware he all but echoed his deadliest foe. “All the riots and plots in town have collapsed like a popped bladder, and Ansfrit’s panicked into giving up lest he earn what Drax got.”

But Helvis was not listening to him any more. “They’re not bl—” she started to scream, and then bit the palm of his hand as he clapped it over her mouth.

“You don’t know that,” he said, stern again. “You’ve never heard that. Apart from the legionaries who wrestled them down and a few others close enough to see what happened, the only one who knows is that butcher in his suit of blood,
and he’s well paid to keep quiet. D’you understand me?” he asked, cautiously taking his hand away.

“Yes,” she said in so small a voice they both laughed. “I’d pretend anything, anything, to keep Soteric safe. Oh, hush, you,” she added to Dosti, plucking him out of the crib. “Everything is all right.”

“All right?” Dosti said doubtfully, and followed it with a hiccup. Marcus scratched his head; every time he looked at his son, it seemed, Dosti had something newly learned to show him.

“All right,” Helvis said.

T
HE SIEGE TOWER RUMBLED ACROSS THE BOARD
. “G
UARD
your Emperor, now!” Viridovix said, scooping up a captured foot soldier—no telling when he might be useful, coming back into play on the Gaul’s side.

Seirem twisted her mouth in annoyance, blocked the threat with a silverpiece. He pulled the siege tower back out of danger. She advanced her other silverpiece a square, reaching the seventh rank of the nine-by-nine board. With a smile, she turned the flat piece over to reveal the new, jeweled character on its reverse. “Promote to gold,” she said.

“Dinna remind me,” he said mournfully; as a more powerful goldpiece, the counter attacked his prelate and a horseman at the same time. The prelate was worth more to him; he moved it. Seirem took the horseman. It was like the Videssians, Viridovix thought, to have money fight for them in their board game—and to grow more valuable deep in enemy territory.

He wondered how long the board and men had wandered with the nomads, an unplayed curiosity. No doubt some plainsman had brought the set back with him from Prista, taken by the rich grain of the oaken game board, by the inset lines of mother-of-pearl that separated square from square,
and by the ivory pieces and the characters on them, made from emeralds and turquoise and garnets. In Videssos the Gaul had learned the game on a stiff leather board, with counters crudely hacked from pine. He admired it tremendously, most of all because luck played no part in it.

In the Empire he had only been a fair player; here he was teaching the game, and still ahead of his pupils. Seirem, though, was catching on fast. “Too fast by half,” he muttered in his own Celtic speech; she had turned the captured horseman against him, with wicked effect.

It took a sharp struggle before he finally subdued her, trapping her emperor in a corner with his siege tower, prelate, and a goldpiece. She frowned, more thoughtfully than in anger. “Yes, I see,” she said. “It was a mistake to weaken the protection around him to throw that attack at you. You held me off, and there I was in the open with no help around to save me.” Her fingers reset the board. “Shall we try again? You take first move this time; my defense needs work.”

“Och, lass, for the wee bit you’ve played, you make a brave show of it.” He advanced the foot soldier covering a silverpiece’s file, opening the long diagonal for his prelate. Seirem frowned again as she considered a reply.

Watching her concentrate, he thought how different she was from Komitta Rhangavve. Once he had managed to steal a whole day with Thorisin Gavras’ volcanic mistress; the gameboard was a pleasant diversion between rounds. Or it should have been, but the Celt had never learned the courtier’s art of graceful losing. One game Komitta beat him fairly; the next he managed to win. She’d screeched curses and hurled the board, pieces and all, against a wall. He never did find one of the spearmen.

Here was Seirem, by contrast, paying the price of trouncings to learn the game, her fine dark eyes full of thought while she waited for his next move. She also had a sweet, low voice and was equally skilled with the pipes and the light women’s bow. Yet Komitta, with her passion for rank, would have called her barbarian, or worse. “Honh!” the Celt snorted, again in his own language. “The bigger fool her, the vicious trull!”

“Will you be all night?” Seirem asked pointedly.

“Begging your pardon, lass; my wits were wandering.” He
moved a foot soldier and promptly regretted it. He tugged at his mustaches. “Sure and that was a rude thing to do!”

From the fireside where she was gossiping with a couple of other women, Borane glanced over at the game-players. She recognized the tone Viridovix used toward her daughter, perhaps better than he did; after so many casual amours, he was not ready to admit to himself that he might feel something more for Seirem. But for those with ears to hear, his voice gave him away.

Targitaus stamped into the tent, face like thunder. He, too, was bright enough to see how Seirem had become the outlander’s favorite partner at the gameboard. But when he growled, “Put your toys away!” and followed that with an oath that made Borane’s friends giggle, the Gaul was not panic-stricken; he had seen this fury before.

“Who’s said us nay the now?” he asked.

“Krobyz, the wind spirits blow sleet up his arse! May his ewes be barren and his cows’ udders dry. What did you call his clan, V’rid’rish, the Hamsters? You were right, for he has the soul of a hamster turd in him.” He spat into the fire in absolute disgust.

“What excuse did he offer?” Seirem asked, trying to pierce her father’s anger.

“Eh? Not even a tiny one, the shameless son of a snake and a goat.” Targitaus was not appeased. “Just a no, and from what Rambehisht says, he counts himself lucky not to come back with a hole in him for his troubles.”

Viridovix grimaced as he helped Seirem put the pieces away, hardly noticing that their hands brushed more than once. “That’s not good at all. Every one o’ these spalpeens should be seeing the need to put the fornicating bandits down, and too many dinna for me to think the lot of ’em fools. A pox on Varatesh, anyhow; the omadhaun’s too clever by half. Belike he’s got his hooks into some o’ the nay-sayers.”

“You have it, I think,” Targitaus said heavily. “The rider I sent to Anakhar said the whole clan was shaking in their boots to move against the outlaws. I doubt we’ll see help from them, any more than from Krobyz. We have better luck with the clans east of the Oglos, where fear of the whoreson doesn’t reach. That Oitoshyr, of the White Foxes, fell all over himself promising help.”

“Easy enough to promise,” the Gaul said. “What he does’ll count for more. He’s far enough away to say, ‘Och, the pity of it. We didna hear o’ the shindy till too late,’ and have no one to make him out a liar.”

Targitaus scaled his wolfskin cap across the tent, grunted in somber satisfaction when it landed on the leather sack nearest the pile of bedding. “A point. Should I thank you for it?”

Lipoxais the
enaree
, who had been quietly grinding herbs with a brass mortar and pestle, spoke up now. “Think of the animal’s tail as well as its head.” A Videssian would have said, “Look at the other side of the coin,” Viridovix mused. The
enaree
went on, “Oitoshyr runs less risk of you dominating him if you win than your neighbors do, because he is far away. That should make him more likely to join us.”