Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (65 page)

The twinkle was back in Balsamon’s eyes, a good sign. He said blandly, “She said you might be interested to learn that she had scheduled
an afternoon appointment with me three days from now, to pick my brains for what I recall of Ioannakis III, the poor fool who was Avtokrator for a couple of unhappy years before Strobilos Sphrantzes.”

“And so?” Alypia had been working on her history long before the Romans came to Videssos.

“Why, only that if she happened to go someplace else when she was supposed to be here, in my senility and decrepitude I don’t think I’d know the difference, and I’d babble on about Ioannakis all the same.”

The tribune’s jaw fell; amazed gladness shouted in him. Balsamon watched, all innocence. “I must say this senility and decrepitude of yours are moderately hard to see,” Marcus said.

Did one of the patriarch’s eyelids dip? “Oh, they come and go. For instance, I suspect I shan’t remember much of this little talk of ours tomorrow. Sad, is it not?”

“A pity,” Scaurus agreed gravely.

Then Balsamon was serious once more, passing an age-spotted hand in front of his face. “You had better deserve her and the risk she runs for your sake.” He looked the Roman up and down. “You just may. I hope you do, for your sake as well as hers. She always was a good judge of such things, but with what she suffered she cannot afford to be wrong.”

Marcus nodded, biting his lip. After Alypia’s father—Thorisin’s older brother Mavrikios—was killed at Maragha, young Ortaias Sphrantzes had claimed the throne and gone through the forms of marriage with her to help cement his place. But Ortaias’ uncle Vardanes was the true power in that brief, unhappy reign and took her from his nephew as a plaything. The tribune’s hands tightened into fists whenever he thought of those months. He said, “That once, I wished I were a Yezda, to give Vardanes the requital he deserved.”

Balsamon’s mobile features grew grave as he studied Scaurus. “You’ll do, I think.” He stayed somber. “You hazard yourself in this, too,” he said. The tribune began a shrug, but Balsamon’s eyes held him still. “If you persist, greater danger will spring from it than any you have ever known, and only Phos can guess if you will win free in the end.”

The patriarch’s gaze seemed to pierce the tribune; his voice went slow and deep. Marcus felt the hair prickle on his arms and at the nape of his neck. Videssian priests had strange abilities, many of
them—healing and all sorts of magery. The Roman had never thought Balsamon more than an uncommonly wise and clever man, but suddenly he was not so sure. His words sounded like foretelling, not mere warning.

“What else do you see?” Marcus demanded harshly.

The patriarch jerked as if stung. The uncanny concentration faded from his face. “Eh? Nothing,” he said in his normal voice, and Scaurus cursed his own abruptness.

After that, the talk turned to inconsequential things. Marcus found himself forgetting to be annoyed that he had not learned more. Balsamon was an endlessly absorbing talker, whether dissecting another priest’s foibles, discoursing on his collection of ivory figurines from Makuran—“Another reason to hate the Yezda. Not only are they robbers and murderous Skotos-lovers, but they’ve cut off trade since they began infesting the place.” And he swelled up in what looked like righteous wrath—or laughing at himself.

He picked at a bit of dried eggyolk on the threadbare sleeve of his robe, commenting, “You see, there is a point to my untidiness after all. Had I been wearing that—” He pointed to a surplice of cloth-of-gold and blue silk, ornamented with rows of gleaming seed pearls. “—when I was at breakfast the other day, I might have been liable to excommunication for soiling it.”

“Another reason for Zemarkhos,” Scaurus said. The fanatic priest, holding Amorion in the westlands in defiance of Yezda and Empire alike, had hurled anathemas at Balsamon and Thorisin both for refusing to acclaim his pogrom against the Vaspurakaners driven into his territory by Yezda raiders—their crime was not worshiping Phos the same way the Videssians did.

“Don’t twit me over that one,” Balsamon said, wincing. “The man is a wolf in priest’s clothing, and a rabid wolf at that. I tried to persuade the local synod that chose him to reconsider, but they would not. ‘Unwarranted interference from the capital,’ they called it. He reminds me of the tailor’s cat that fell into a vat of blue dye. The mice thought he’d become a monk and given up eating meat.”

Marcus chuckled, but the patriarch’s stubby fingers drummed on his knee; his mouth twisted in frustration. “I wonder how many he’s burned
since power fell into his lap—and what more I could have done to stop him.” He sighed, shaking his head.

In an odd way, his gloom reassured the tribune. After his own failures, it did not hurt to be reminded that even as keen a man as Balsamon could sometimes come up short.

Saborios, certainly as efficient as a soldier if he was not one, had the door open for Scaurus even as he reached for the latch.

Alypia Gavra sat up in the narrow bed and poked Marcus in the ribs. He yelped. She touched the heavy gold of the necklace. “You are a madman for this,” she said. “It’s so beautiful I’ll want to wear it, and how can I? Where will I say it came from? Why won’t anyone have seen it before?”

“A pox on practicality,” Scaurus said.

She laughed at him. “Coming from you, that’s the next thing to blasphemy.”

“Hrmmp.” The Roman leaned back lazily. “I thought it would look good on you and I was right—the more so,” he smiled, “when it’s all you’re wearing.”

He watched a slow flush of pleasure rise from her breasts to her face. It showed plainly; she was fairer of skin than most Videssian women. He sometimes wondered if her dead mother had a touch of Haloga blood. Her features were not as sharply sculpted as those of her father or uncle, and her eyes were a clear green, rare among the imperials.

Mischief danced in them. “Beast,” she said, and tried to poke him again. He jerked away. Once he had made the mistake of grabbing her instead and seen her go rigid in unreasoning panic; after Vardanes, she could not stand being restrained in any way.

The sudden motion nearly tumbled both of them out of bed. “There, you see,” the tribune said. “That poking is a habit of mine you never should have picked up. Look what it brings on.”

“I like doing things as you do,” she said seriously. That brought him up short, as such remarks of hers always did. Helvis had tried to push him toward her own ways, which only made him more stubborn in clinging to his. It was strange, hearing from a woman that those were worth something.

He gave a sober nod, one suited to acknowledging something a legionary might have said, then grunted in annoyance, feeling very much a fool. He sat up himself and kissed her thoroughly. “That’s better,” she said.

Chickens clucked and scratched below the second-story window, whose shutters were flung wide to let in the mild air. Marcus could see the ponderous bulk of Phos’ High Temple pushing into the sky not far away. He and Alypia had managed one meeting at this inn during the winter, so had it become a natural trysting place when she was supposed to be visiting Balsamon.

The innkeeper, a stout, middle-aged man named Aetios, shouted at a stableboy for forgetting to curry a mule. The fellow’s eyes had sparked with recognition when Scaurus and the princess asked for a room, but the tribune was sure it was only because he had seen them before, not that he knew Alypia by sight. And in any case, with him, silver was better than wine for washing unpleasant memories away. His lumpish face came alive at the sweet sound of coins jingling in his palm.

Alypia made as if to get up, saying, “I really should go see Balsamon, if only for a little while. That way neither he nor I can be caught in a lie.”

“If you must,” Marcus said grumpily. With the ceremony that surrounded her as niece and closest kin of the Avtokrator, she could steal away but rarely, and the chance she took in doing so hung like a storm cloud over their meetings. He savored every moment with her, never sure it would not be the last.

As if reading his thoughts, she clung to him, crying, “What will we do? Thorisin is bound to find out, and then—” She came to a ragged stop, not wanting to think about “and then.” In his short-tempered way, Thorisin Gavras was a decent man, but quick to lash out at anything he saw as a threat to his throne. After the strife he had already faced in his two and a half years on it, the tribune found it hard to blame him.

Or he would have, had the Emperor’s suspicions affected anyone but him. “I wish,” he said with illogical resentment, “your uncle would marry and get himself an heir. Then he’d have less reason to worry about you.”

Alypia shook her head violently. “Oh, aye, I’d be safe then—safe to be married off to one of his cronies. He dares not now, for fear whoever
had me would use me against him. Let his own line be set, though, and I become an asset to bind someone to him.”

She stared at nothing; her nails bit his shoulder. Through clenched teeth she said, as much to herself as to him, “I will die before I lie again with a man not of my choosing.”

Scaurus did not doubt she meant exactly that. He ran a slow hand up the smooth column of her back, trying to gentle her. “If only I were a Videssian,” he said. That a princess of the blood could be given to an outland mercenary captain, even one more perfectly trusted than himself, was past thinking of in haughty Videssos.

“Wishes, wishes, wishes!” Alypia said. “What good are they? All we can truly count on is our danger growing worse the longer we go on, and only Phos knows when we will be free of it.”

The tribune stared; in Videssos he was never sure where coincidence stopped and the uncanny began. “Balsamon told me something much like that,” he said slowly, and at Alypia’s inquiring glance recounted the strange moment when the patriarch had seemed to prophesy.

When he was done, he was startled to see her pale and shaken. She did not want to explain herself, but sat silent beside him. But he pressed her, and at last she said, “I have known him thus before. He gazed at you as if to read your soul, and there was none of his usual sport in his words.” It was statement, not question.

“You have it,” Scaurus acknowledged. “When did you see him so?”

“Only once, though I know the fit has taken him more often than that. ‘Phos’ gift,’ he calls it, but I think curse would be a better name. He has spoken of it to me a few times; that he trusts me to share such a burden is the finest compliment I’ve ever had. You guessed well, dear Marcus,” she said, touching his hand: “He sometimes has the prescient gift. But all he ever learns with it is of destruction and despair.”

The Roman whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “It is a curse.” He shook his head. “And how much more bitter for a joyful man like him. To see only the coming trouble, and to have to stay steady in the teeth of it … He’s braver than I could be.”

Alypia’s face reflected the same distress the tribune felt.

“When was it you saw him?” he asked her again.

“He was visiting my father, just before he set out for Maragha. They
were arguing and trading insults—you remember how the two of them used to carry on, neither meaning a word of what he said. Finally they ran out of darts to throw, and Balsamon got up to leave. You could see it coming over him, like the weight of the world. He stood there for a few seconds; my father and I started to ease him back down to a chair, thinking he’d been taken ill. But he shrugged us away and turned to my father and said one word in that—certain—voice.”

“I know what you mean,” Scaurus said. “What was it?”

“ ‘Good-bye.’ ” Alypia was a good mimic; the doom she packed into the word froze the Roman for a moment. She shivered herself at the memory. “No use pretending it was just an ordinary leave-taking, though my father and Balsamon did their best. Neither believed it; I’ve never seen Balsamon so flat in a sermon as he was at the High Temple the next day.”

“I remember that!” Marcus said. “I was there, along with the rest of the officers. It troubled me at the time; I thought we deserved a better farewell than we got. I guess we were lucky to have any.”

“Was that luck, as it turned out?” she asked, her voice low. She did not wait for a reply, but rushed on, “And now he sees peril to you. I’ll leave you, I swear it, before I let you come to harm because of me.” But instead of leaving, she clung to him with something close to desperation.

“Nothing the old man said made me think separating would matter,” said Scaurus. “Whatever happens will happen as it should.” The Stoic maxim did nothing to ease her; his lips on hers were a better cure. They sank back together onto the bed. The bedding sighed as their weight pressed the straw flat.

Some time later she reached up to touch his cheek and smiled, as she often did, at the faint rasp of newly shaved whiskers under her fingers. “You are a stubborn man,” she said fondly; in a land of beards, the tribune still held to the smooth-faced Roman style. She took his head between her palms. “Oh, how could I think to leave you? But how can I stay?”

“I love you,” he said, hugging her until she gave a startled gasp. It was true but, he knew too well, not an answer.

“I know, and I you. How much safer it would be for both of us if we did not.” She glanced out the window, exclaimed in dismay when she
saw how long the shadows had grown. “Let me up, dearest. Now I really must go.”

Marcus rolled away; she scrambled to her feet. He admired her slim body for a last few seconds as she raised her arms over her head to slide on the long dress of deep gold wool; geometrically decorated insets of silk accented her narrow waist and the swell of her hips. “It suits you well,” he said.

“Quite the courtier today, aren’t you?” She smiled, slipping on sandals. She patted at her hair, which she wore short and straight. With a woman’s practicality, she said, “It’s lucky I don’t fancy those piled-up heads of curls that are all the rage these days. They couldn’t be repaired so easily.”

She wrapped an orange linen shawl embroidered with flowers and butterflies around her shoulders and started for the door. “The necklace,” Marcus said reluctantly. He was out of bed himself, fastening his tunic closed.