Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (68 page)

“Had enough?” Gorgidas asked, sheathing his sword.

“Aye, for the now.”

They wandered over to watch one of the dueling pairs, perhaps the unlikeliest match in the camp. Arghun’s son Arigh was going at it furiously with Batbaian, the son of Targitaus, their blades a silvery glitter as they met each other stroke for stroke.

They were both khagans’ sons, but there their resemblance ended. For looks, Arigh was a typical enough Arshaum: slender, lithe, and
swarthy, with a wide, high-cheekboned face, short, almost flat nose, and slanted eyes. Only a few black hairs grew on his upper lip and straggled down from the point of his chin. But Batbaian was a Khamorth, with his people’s broad-shouldered frame, thick curly beard half hiding his heavy features, and a strong, fleshy beak in the center of his face. He would have been handsome but for the red ruin of a socket where his left eye had been.

The eye he still had was the “mercy” of Avshar and Varatesh the bandit chief. They had taken a thousand prisoners when they crushed the army Targitaus raised against them, and then given those prisoners back to Batbaian’s father … all but fifty of them with both eyes burned away, the rest left with one to guide their comrades home. Seeing them so ravaged, Targitaus died of a stroke on the spot. Varatesh fell on his devastated clan three days later. As far as Viridovix knew, Batbaian was the only clansman left alive—save himself, whom Targitaus had adopted into the Wolves after he escaped Varatesh and his henchmen. The bandits missed them only because they were attending an outlying herd; they rode in at day’s end to find massacre laid out before them.

The Gaul’s features, usually merry, grew grim and tight as he fell into memory’s grip. Batbaian had had a sister—but Seirem was dead now, and perhaps that was as well, with what she met before she died. Part of Viridovix’ heart was dead with her; a tomcat by nature, he had come late to love and lost it too early.

The past winter he and Batbaian had lived the outlaw’s life, revenge their only goal. At last he thought to cross west into Shaumkhiil and seek aid from the Arshaum against Varatesh and Avshar, his puppet-master. Batbaian’s hate burned away his fear of the western nomads; where the Arshaum despised the Khamorth, the latter had almost a superstitious dread for the folk who had harried them east over the steppe.

Having traveled with the Arshaum force for weeks, though, Batbaian saw that they were men, too, not the near-demons he had thought. And he had earned their respect as well, for the hardships he had borne and for his skill with his hands. His burly build let him shoot farther than most of them, and if he was now giving ground to Arigh, his foe was fast and deceptive as a striking snake.

“The wind-spirits take it!” he cursed in his own guttural tongue,
falling back again. In a mixture of bad Videssian—which Arigh understood, having served his father as envoy to the Empire—and worse Arshaum, he went on, “With only eye one, not able to tell how away far you are.”

Arigh’s grin was predatory, his teeth very white. “My friend, Varatesh’s men would not heed your whining, and I will not either.”

He pressed his attack, his slashes coming from every direction at once. Then he was staring at his empty hand; his sword lay on the ground at his feet. Batbaian leaped forward and planted a boot on it. He tapped Arigh on the chest with his blade. The watchers whooped at the sudden reversal.

“Why you dirty son of a flop-eared goat,” Arigh said without much rancor. “You suckered me into that, didn’t you?”

Batbaian only grunted. The summer before he had been hardly more than a boy, full of a boy’s chatter and bubbling enthusiasm for everything around him. These days he was a man, and a driven one. He spoke seldom, and his smile, which was rarer, never reached past his lips.

“Puir lad,” Viridovix murmured to Gorgidas. “A pity you canna unfreeze the spirit of him, as you did wi’ this carcass o’ mine.”

“I know no gift for that, save it come from within a man’s own soul,” the physician answered. Then he spread his hands and admitted, “For that matter, when I found you I thought I would have to watch you die, too.”

“A good thing you didn’t. My ghost’d bewail you for it.”

“Hmm. No doubt, if it takes after you in the flesh.” But the Greek could not stay flippant long, not where the healing he had worked on Viridovix was concerned.

Ever since he was swept into Videssos with the legionaries, he had studied its healing art, an art that relied not so much on herbs and scalpels as on mustering and unleashing the power of the mind to beat back disease and injury—call it magic, for lack of a better word. He had seen Phos’ healer-priests work cures on men he had given up for doomed, and chased after their skill like a hunter trailing some elusive beast.

But the stubborn rationality on which he prided himself would not let him truly accept that curing by mind alone was possible; it ran too much against all his training, all his deepest beliefs. And so for years he
tried and, not genuinely believing he could succeed, never did. Only the lash of desperation at finding Viridovix freezing in a fierce steppe blizzard made him transcend his doubts and channel the healing energies through himself and into the Gaul.

He had healed again afterwards, closing and cleansing the bites an Arshaum took from a wolf that would not die with three arrows in its chest. Knowing he could heal made the second time easy. The nomad’s gratitude was wine-sweet, and the Greek accepted as a badge of honor the tearing weariness that always followed healing.

“Why for we standing round?” Batbaian demanded. “We should riding be.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned away from Arigh and went off to his string of horses to pick a mount for the day’s ride.

Behind him, Arigh shook his head. “That one would ride through fire for his revenge.”

The Arshaum around him nodded, sympathizing with Batbaian’s blood feud. But Viridovix started in alarm, whipping his head round to make sure the Khamorth had not heard the remark. “Dinna say that to him, ever,” he warned. “ ’Twas Avshar’s fires trapped him in the shindy, and all the rest, too.” The Gaul shuddered as he remembered those tall, arrow-straight lines of flame darting like serpents over the steppe at the evil wizard’s will.

There was compassion under the unfeeling veneer Arigh cultivated, though he often did not let it out. Even when he did, it was usually with a self-deprecating, “All that time in Videssos has left me soft.” But now he bit his lip, admitting, “I’d forgotten.”

A last delay held up the army’s departure a few minutes more. All the tents were down and stowed on horseback save the one shared by Lankinos Skylitzes and Pikridios Goudeles, Thorisin’s envoys to Arghun. Skylitzes was long since out and about; the tall imperial officer looked with dour amusement at the sign of his tentmate’s sleepiness.

He stuck his head inside the tent and roared, “Up, slugabed! Is this a holy day, for you to spend it all between the sheets?”

Goudeles emerged in short order, but mightily rumpled, tunic on back-to-front, and belt out of half its loops. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, the pen-pusher winced at the ironic cheer that greeted his appearance. “Oh, very well, here I am,” he said testily. He glowered at Skylitzes; the
two of them were as cat and dog. “Mightn’t you have picked a less drastic way to rouse me?”

“No,” Skylitzes said. He was that rarity, a short-spoken Videssian.

Still grumbling, Goudeles began to knock down the tent, but made such a slow, clumsy job of it that Skylitzes, with an exasperated grunt, finally pitched in to help. “You bungler,” he said, almost kindly, as he tied the roll of tent fabric and sticks onto a packsaddle.

“Bungler? I?” Goudeles drew himself up to his full height, which was not imposing. “No need to mock me merely because I was not cut out for life in the field.” He caught Gorgidas’ eye. “These soldiers have a narrow view of life’s priorities, do they not?”

“No doubt,” the Greek answered. As he was already mounted, he sounded a trifle smug. Goudeles looked hurt, one of his more artful expressions. In truth, the bureaucrat was a carpet knight, infinitely more at home in the elaborate double-dealing of Videssos the city than here on the vast empty steppe. But his gift for intrigue made him a sly, subtle diplomat, and he had done well in helping persuade Arghun to favor the Empire over Yezd.

He spent a few seconds trying to restore the point to his beard, but gave it up as a bad job. “Hopeless,” he said sadly. He climbed onto his own horse and patted his belly, still ample after close to a year on the plains. “Am I too late to break my fast?”

Skylitzes rolled his eyes, but Viridovix handed Goudeles a chunk of meat. The pen-pusher eyed it skeptically. “What, ah, delicacy have we here?”

“Sure and it’s half a roast marmot,” the Celt told him, grinning. “Begging your honor’s pardon and all, but I was after eating the last of my sausage today.”

Goudeles turned a pale green. “Somehow I find my appetite is less hearty than it was, though my thanks, of course, for your generosity.” He gave the ground squirrel back to Viridovix.

“Ride, then,” Skylitzes snapped. As Goudeles clucked to his horse, though, the officer admitted to Gorgidas, “I’m low myself; we should stop for a hunt soon.”

The Greek dipped his head in his people’s gesture of agreement. “So am I.” He shuddered slightly. “We could go on the nomad way for a
while, living off our horses’ blood.” He did not intend to be taken seriously. The idea revolted him.

Not so Skylitzes; all he said was, “That’s for emergencies only. It runs the animals down too badly.” He had traveled the steppes before and was at home with the customs of the plainsmen, speaking both the Arshaum and Khamorth tongues fluently.

The Arshaum moved steadily over the Pardrayan plain, their course a bit east of south. Alternately walking and trotting, their ponies ate up the miles. The rough-coated little beasts were not much for looks, but there was iron endurance in them. Gorgidas blessed the wet ground and thick grass cover of approaching spring; later in the year the army would have kicked up great choking clouds of dust.

When afternoon came, the sun sparkled off the waters of the inland Mylasa Sea on the western horizon. Other than that, the steppe was all but featureless, an endless, gently rolling sea of grass that stretched from the borders of Videssos further west than any man knew. As a landscape, Gorgidas found it dull. He had grown up with the endless variety of terrain Greece offers: seacoast, mountains, carved valleys kissed by the Mediterranean sun or dark under forest, and flatlands narrow enough to walk across in half a day.

To Viridovix the limitless vistas of the steppe were not so much boring as actively oppressive. His Gallic woods cut down the sweep of vision, left a man always close to something he could reach out and touch. The plains made him feel tiny and insignificant, an insect crawling across a tray. He fought his unreasoning fear as best he could, riding near the center of the army to use the nomads around him as a shield against the vastness beyond.

Each day he looked south in the hope of seeing the mountains of Erzerum—the peaks that separated Pardraya from Yezd—shoulder their way up over the edge of the world. So far he had been disappointed. “One morning they’ll be peeping up, though, and none too soon for me,” he said to Batbaian. “It does a body good, knowing there’s an end to all this flat.”

“Why?” Batbaian demanded, as used to open space as Viridovix was to his narrow forest tracks. His companions also shook their heads at the Celt’s strange ways. As he usually did, Batbaian rode with the
ten-man guard squad that had accompanied the Videssian embassy out from Prista. Except for Viridovix and Skylitzes, the troopers were the only ones with the army who spoke his tongue, and most of them had Khamorth blood.

The squad leader, Agathias Psoes, was a Videssian, but years at the edge of Pardraya had left him as at home in the language of its people as in the imperial tongue. “Country doesn’t matter one way or the other,” he said with an old soldier’s cynicism. “It’s the bastards who live on it that cause the trouble.”

Viridovix burst out laughing. “Here and I thought I was rid o’ Gaius Philippus for good and all, and up springs his shadow.” Psoes, who knew next to nothing of the Romans, blinked in incomprehension.

“What are the lot of you grunting about there?” an Arshaum asked. Viridovix turned his head to see Arghun the khagan and his younger son Dizabul coming up alongside the guardsmen. The men from Shaumkhiil spoke a smooth, sibilant tongue; the harsh gutturals of the Khamorth speech grated on their ears.

With Arghun, though, the teasing was good-natured. He led the Gray Horse clan, the largest contingent of the Arshaum army, more by guile and persuasion than by the bluff bluster Viridovix had used as a chief among the Lexovii back in Gaul.

The Celt translated as well as he could; he was beginning to understand the Arshaum language fairly well, but speaking it was harder. “And what do you think of that, red whiskers?” Arghun asked. Viridovix’ exotic coloring fascinated him, as did the Celt’s luxuriant mustaches. The khagan grew only a few gray hairs on his upper lip and frankly envied the other’s splendid ornament.

“Me? I puts it the other way round. People is people anywheres, but the—how you be saying?—scenery, it change a lot.”

“Something to that,” Arghun nodded, an instinctively shrewd politician for all his barbaric trappings.

“How can you tell, father?” Dizabul said, his regular features twisting into a sneer. “He talks so poorly it’s next to impossible to make out what he says.” With a supercilious smile, he turned to Viridovix, “That should be ‘I would put,’ outlander, and ‘people are people,’ and ‘scenery changes.’ ”

“I thank your honor,” the Gaul said—not at all what he was thinking. Dizabul struck him as Arghun’s mistake; the lad had grown up having his every whim indulged, with predictable results. He also loathed his brother and everyone connected with him, which added venom to the tone he took with Viridovix. “Spoiled as a salmon a week out of water,” the Gaul muttered in his own speech.

Arghun shook his head at Dizabul in mild reproof. “I’d sooner hear good sense wearing words of old sheepskin than numskullery or wickedness decked out in sable.”