The Legion of Videssos (49 page)

“All right, then, I’ll go my ain self,” the Celt growled, fighting to steady the beast enough to let him climb down. But Varatesh chose that moment to loose a hoarded arrow at him. It missed, but sank deep into his horse’s rump. The beast squealed and leaped into the air, almost throwing him. It bolted away, out of control. That was, perhaps, as well for Viridovix; goaded by pain, the steppe pony outran the bandits pursuing it. Avshar’s vengeful laughter burned in the Gaul’s ears.

When he finally made his horse obey him, he could only join the fragments of Targitaus’ shattered army in their retreat.
The renegades and their allies let them go. They were hovering like carrion flies round Avshar’s prisoning walls of fire, which burned on, fierce as ever, long after the grass that should have been their only fuel was gone.

Black as despair, smoke filled all the autumn sky.

Krobyz bowed low in the saddle as Varatesh rode by. Exhausted as he was, the outlaw chief flushed with pleasure at the acknowledgement of his prowess from a legitimate khagan. This, he told himself, was what he had been reaching toward for so many years. At last he had earned the place which belonged to him by right, and that despite the foes he did not deserve. His lip curled—they had seen his might today.

The crackling flames ahead reminded him the triumph had not been entirely his. As if to reinforce that reminder, Avshar came up beside him. But the wizard-prince only waved toward the warriors trapped in his blazing cells. “What is your pleasure with them?”

Varatesh was ready to be magnanimous in victory. “Let them surrender, if they will.”

Shrugging, Avshar called to the plainsmen in the nearest fiery box. “Yield yourselves to Varatesh, grand khagan of the Royal Clan of Pardraya!” The unexpected title made the outlaw chieftain blink. Why, so I am, he thought proudly.

The box held Oitoshyr and his three or four surviving clansmen, their white fox caps dark with dust and soot. Oitoshyr was wounded, but not ready to quit. “Bugger Varatesh, the grand pimp of the plains,” he shouted, “aye, and you, too, you hulking turd!”

The wizard-prince looked a question to Varatesh. Furious at the rebuff, he spat in the dirt. Avshar took that as answer and gestured with his left hand. One wall of flame holding the White Foxes turned transparent, then died. Varatesh waved a hundred bandits in. Grinning, they set about the butchery they had been waiting for. Oitoshyr took a long time to die.

After that, surrenders came one on the other. Varatesh was staggered by the victory he had won. No bard sang of, no
enaree
remembered, a battle with so many prisoners taken. There must have been a thousand in all; as each flame pocket opened, his men swarmed over them like locusts, taking
weapons, armor, and horses as spoils of war. He wondered how long he could feed them.

“Why should you?” Avshar said. “Give them back to their own worthless clans.”

“And have them take up arms against me again the next day? I did not think you such a trusting soul.”

The sorcerer laughed, deep in his throat. “Well said! But if you could get them off your hands, and at the same time prove your supremacy to every petty chief on the steppe?” He paused, waiting for Varatesh’s response.

“Go on,” the plainsman urged, intrigued.

Avshar laughed again and did.

“I thank you, but no,” Gorgidas told Arghun for what must have been the twentieth time. “When the imperial embassy goes back to Videssos, I intend to go with it. I am a man made for cities, just as you belong here on the plain. I could no more be happy following the flocks than you could in the Empire.”

“We will speak of this again,” the khagan said, as he did each time Gorgidas declined to stay with the Arshaum. Arghun leaned back against a pile of cushions in the Videssian embassy’s yurt and stretched a blanket of rabbit fur over his legs. Feeling had returned to them, but not full use. The khagan needed two sticks to walk and still could not sit a horse.

His gratitude for his life, though, knew no bounds. He had showered the Greek with presents: a knee-length coat of marten’s fur so soft it almost did not register to the fingers; a string of fine horses; a falcon with blood-colored eyes—no hawker, Gorgidas had been able to decline that in good conscience; a splendid bow and twenty arrows in a quiver covered in gold leaf, which he discreetly passed on to Skylitzes, who could use it; and, perhaps at Tolui’s urging, a supply of all the herbs the nomads reckoned medicinal, each in a little bone jar with a stopper carved from horn.

“You are starting to speak our language well,” Arghun went on.

“My thanks,” Gorgidas said, rather insincerely. Like most Greeks, he thought his own supple, subtle tongue the one proper speech for a civilized man. Learning Latin had been a concession to serving in the Roman army, Videssian a necessity
in this new world. In a generous moment, he might have admitted each had a few virtues. But the Arshaum speech was fit only for barbarians. As he had written, “It is a tongue with more words for the state of a cow’s hoof than for that of a man’s soul. No more need be said.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance; Arghun curled his fingers in a protective sign. Rain pounded against the yurt’s tight-stretched felt. In a normal year, the plainsmen would have been moving toward their winter pastures. This fall, though, the flocks went south with boys and graybeards, while warriors gathered to avenge the attack on the Gray Horse khagan.

A pony splashed up to the yurt, which slowed to let the rider swing himself up onto it. Dripping, Arigh slithered through the tent flap. He sketched a salute to his father. “The standard is ready,” he reported.

Goudeles cocked a sly eyebrow at Gorgidas. “Here’s something for your history, now; you can style this the War of Bogoraz’ Coat.”

The Greek rubbed his chin; he hardly noticed the feel of his whiskers any more. “You know, I like that,” he said. He rummaged in his kit for tablet and stylus, then scribbled a note in the wax. To unite the Arshaum clans, they had chosen to fight, not behind any tribal banner, but under the symbol of their reason for going to war.

The exchange had been in Videssian, but Arghun, catching the Yezda’s name, asked to have it translated. When Arigh rendered it into the plains speech, his father let out a short, grim laugh. “Ha! If any more of him was left, that would go up on a lance instead of his coat.”

“And rightly so,” Lankinos Skylitzes said. He hesitated, then went on carefully, “You are building a potent army here, khagan.”

“Yes,” Arghun said, pride in his voice. “Are you not glad to have friends so strong?”

The imperial officer looked uncomfortable. “Er, of course. Yet traveling to Prista in such force might alarm the Pardrayan Khamorth—”

“As if that mattered,” Arigh snorted. He drew a finger across his throat and made a ghastly gurgling noise. “This to them if they dare turn on us. I hope they try.”

Skylitzes nodded, but he was a dogged man and plowed on
with his chain of thought. “And should such an army reach Prista, it would be hard to find shipping enough to transport it easily to Videssos.”

Angry and baffled, Arigh said, “What’s chewing on you, Lankinos? You come all this way for men and now you have them and don’t want them.”

But Arghun was eyeing Skylitzes with new respect. “Ride lightly on him there, son.”

“Why should I?” Arigh looked resentfully at the Videssian.

“Because he knows his business.” Seeing his son still mutinous, Arghun began to explain: “He came to us for soldiers for his own khagan.”

“Well, of course,” Arigh broke in. “What of it?”

“This army here is
mine
, as he sees. He has the right to wonder how I will use it, and if it might be more dangerous to him than the enemies he already has.”

“Ahh,” said Arigh, taking the point. Goudeles seemed chagrined at missing it himself, while Gorgidas dipped his head, admiring Skylitzes’ subtlety.

The officer saluted Arghun, plainly relieved he was not annoyed. “If I may ask straight out, then, how will you use it?”

“I will hurt Yezd as much as I can,” Arghun said flatly. “Arigh is right, I think; the Khamorth will stand aside for us when they see we mean them no harm—or, if not, the worse for them. But the easiest way to Mashiz is through Pardraya, and that is the way I aim to take.” He bowed to the envoys from Videssos. “You will ride with us, of course.”

“An honor,” Skylitzes said.

Goudeles, on the other hand, looked like a man who had just been stabbed. Even more than Gorgidas, he longed for a return to the city and now saw it snatched away from him at the whim of this barbarian chief. “An honor,” he choked out at last.

“Back to sword practice, Pikridios,” Skylitzes chuckled, understanding him perfectly. The pen-pusher did not quite stifle a groan.

“This yurt will have to go, too,” Arigh said, grinning as he rubbed salt in Goudeles’ wounds. “Just a good string of horses, maybe a light shelter tent to keep the snow off at night.”

“Snow?” Goudeles said faintly.

“Speak my tongue, please,” Arghun grumbled; his son had dropped into Videssian to talk to the imperials. When he had caught up with the conversation, the khagan nodded in sympathy with Goudeles. “Yes, I know the snow is a nuisance. It will slow us up badly. But if we leave as soon as the clans have gathered, we should be nearing Yezd come spring.”

“That’s not precisely what I was worrying about,” the bureaucrat said. He buried his face in his hands.

The nomads rode through steppe winters every year, following their herds. Knowing it could be done did not make the prospect appetizing. Gorgidas said the first thing that came to his mind. “Arigh, I’ll need a fur cap like yours, one with—” He gestured, unsure of the word. “—ear flaps, by choice.”

The plainsman understood him. “You’ll have it,” he promised. “That’s a good job of thinking ahead, too; I knew a man who froze his ears in a blizzard and broke one clean off without ever knowing it till they thawed.”

“How delightful,” Goudeles muttered, almost inaudibly.

Gorgidas remembered something else. “Avshar is still loose in Pardraya.”

That sobered his Videssian colleagues, and even Arigh, but Arghun said, as others had before, “A wizard. We have wizards of our own.”

“Keep them moving, curse it!” Valash shouted. Viridovix nodded; he stood tall in the saddle, flapped his arms, and howled Gallic oaths. The flock of sheep picked up its pace by some meaningless fraction. Snug in their thick coats of greasy wool, they were more comfortable in the cold fall rain than the men who herded them.

The storms had come back two days ago, as Lipoxais foresaw, and made the nomads’ retreat that much worse. There were not enough men to drive the herds as fast as they could go, either. That Targitaus had put a lubber like Viridovix to work was a measure of his desperation. Women were riding drover, too, and boys hardly old enough to have their feet reach the stirrups.

The Celt bullied a knot of sheep back into the main flock. He was glad Targitaus had any duty for him at all. It would
have been easy to pile blame for the disaster on the foreigner—the more so as Batbaian had not returned with his father. Dead or captured, no one knew.

But Targitaus said only, “Not your fault, you fought well.” If he did not want to see much of Viridovix after the fight, the Gaul found that easy to understand and kept his distance as best he could. It meant he could not spend much time with Seirem, but that would have been so anyhow. Targitaus drove his family no less than the rest of the clan; his daughter’s hands were chafed and blistered from riding with the animals.

“
Get
along there, you gangling fuzz-covered idiot pile o’ vulture puke!” Viridovix roared at a ewe that kept trying to go off on its own. The black-faced beast bleated indignantly, as if it knew what he was calling it.

Valash darted away from the Celt to keep more sheep in line. The young Khamorth’s face was drawn with fatigue as he rode back. “This job is too big for two,” he said. He shook his head; rainwater flew from his beard.

“Aye, well, maybe not much longer to it, I’m thinking,” Viridovix said. “Sure and that son of a serpent Varatesh couldna be finding us the now, not with the rain and all to cover our trail.” There had been no serious pursuit after the battle, none of the harrying the Celt had dreaded. For what it was worth, Targitaus had brought off his retreat masterfully.

Valash looked hopeful at the Gaul’s words, but as they left his mouth Viridovix cursed himself for a fool. Avshar could track him by his sword as easily as a man following a torch through the night. For a moment he thought of throwing it into the muck to break the trail. But before his hand touched the sword hilt he jerked it away and spat in defiance. “If the whoreson wants it, let him earn it.”

Darkness came swiftly these fall nights, thick clouds drinking up the light almost before the sun they hid was set. The Khamorth traveled as long as they could see the way ahead, then ran up their tents, largely by feel. The camp was cheerless—so many men missing or dead, others wounded, and all, men and women alike, exhausted.

Wrapped in a thick wool blanket, Viridovix huddled close to the cookfire in Targitaus’ tent. The khagan’s greeting was a grunt. He ate in gloomy silence, new lines of grief scored into his cheeks.

The Gaul made a cold supper of cheese and smoked mutton sausage, declined the blackberries candied in honey that Seirem offered him. “Another time, lass, when I’m more gladsome than now. The sweet of ’em’d be wasted on me, I’m thinking.”

Lipoxais the
enaree
ate greedily; the thick juice ran sticky down his chin. “How can you pig it so?” Viridovix asked him. “Does it not fair gag you, wi’ your folk in sic straits?”

“I take the pleasures I can,” Lipoxais said shortly, his high voice expressionless, his jowly, beardless face a mask. Viridovix took a large bite of sausage and looked away, his own cheeks reddening. He had his answer about the
enaree
’s nature and found he did not want it.

“I wasna after the shaming of you,” he muttered.

The
enaree
surprised him by laying a pudgy hand on his arm. “I suspect I should be honored,” he said, a hint of a twinkle in his fathomless dark eyes. “How many times have you apologized for a clumsy tongue?”