Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (84 page)

“May I come, too?” Gorgidas asked.

“Always looking to find things out,” Arigh said, half amused, half scornful. “Well, why not?” Viridovix asked no one’s leave, but rode forward with the rest, cheerfully pretending not to see Arigh’s frown.

The Erzrumi waved them to a halt at a safe distance. He looked much like a Vaspurakaner—stocky, swarthy, square-faced, and hook-nosed—but he trained his curly beard into two points. His gilded cuirass, plumed bronze helmet, and clinging trousers of fine silk proclaimed him an officer. He was within five years either way of forty.

He waved again, this time in peremptory dismissal. “Go back,” he said in the plains speech; he had a queer, hissing accent. “Go back. We will crush you if you come further. I, Vakhtang, second chief of the castle of Gunib, tell you this. Are we simpletons, to open our country to murderous barbarians? No, I say. Go back, and be thankful we do not slay you all.”

Arigh bridled. Goudeles said hastily, “He means less than he says. He has a Videssian style to him, though a debased one.”

“Videssian, eh? There’s a thought.” The Arshaum’s years at the imperial capital had given him a good grasp of the language. He used it now: “Why the high horse, fellow? We have no quarrel with you or yours. It’s Avshar we’re after, curse him.”

Vakhtang’s eyebrows rose to his hairline. “I know what that speech is, though I do not use it.” He seemed to take a first good look at the group in front of him. In their furs and leathers, Gorgidas, Goudeles, Skylitzes, and Psoes’ soldier—his name was Narbas Kios—might have been Khamorth, if odd ones. But Arigh and Tolui were something else again. And Viridovix, with his drooping mustaches, red hair spilling
from under his fur cap, and pale freckled skin, was unlike any man the Erzrumi captain had seen. His careful composure deserted him. “Who
are
you people, anyway?” he blurted.

Goudeles nudged Narbas the trooper, who rode forward a couple of paces. “Make sure he understands you,” the pen-pusher said. Vakhtang showed fresh surprise when Narbas spoke hesitantly in the Vaspurakaner tongue, but stifled it. He gave a regal nod.

“Good,” Goudeles said. He paused; Gorgidas could see him discarding the florid phrases of Videssian rhetoric to stick with ideas Kios could put across. “Tell him Skylitzes and I are envoys of the Avtokrator of the Videssians. Tell him where the Arshaum are from, and tell him they’ve come all this way as our allies against Yezd. We only ask a safe-conduct through Erzerum so we can attack the Yezda in their own land. Here, give him our bona-fides, if he’ll take them.”

He produced the letter of authority Thorisin had given him, a bit travel-worn but still gorgeous with ink of gold and red and the sky-blue sunburst seal of the Videssian Emperors. Skylitzes found his letter as well. Holding one in each hand so he could draw no weapon, Narbas offered them to Vakhtang. The officer made a show of studying them. If he spoke no Videssian, Gorgidas was sure he could not read it, but he recognized the seals. Few men in this world would not have.

The Erzrumi gravely handed the letters back. He spoke again, this time in the throaty Vaspurakaner language. Narbas Kios translated: “Even this far north, he says, they know of Yezd, and know nothing good. They have never yet let a nomad army past their forts, but he will take what you said to the lord of Gunib.”

“Tell him we thank him for his courtesy,” Arigh said, and bowed from the waist in the saddle. Viridovix watched his friend with surprised respect; a roisterer in Videssos, the Arshaum was learning to be a prince.

Vakhtang returned Arigh’s compliment and turned to go back to the fortress. Before he got far, Tolui rode out of the parley group and caught him up. Vakhtang spun in alarm and started to reach for his sword, but stopped after a glance at the shaman; though not in his regalia, Tolui still had a formidable presence. He put his hand on the captain’s arm and spoke to him in the few words of Khamorth he had learned from Batbaian: “Not—fight you. Not—hurt you. Go through, is all. Oath.”

His broken speech seemed to have as much effect on Vakhtang as Goudeles’ arguments and letters both. Gorgidas saw the self-important bureaucrat redden as the officer gave Tolui what was plainly a salute, putting both clenched fists to his forehead. Then he clasped the shaman’s hand before releasing it and urging his horse into a trot. The postern gate swung open to readmit him.

“Now what?” Gorgidas asked.

“We wait,” Arigh said. Gorgidas and the Videssian fidgeted, but with nomad’s patience Arigh sat his horse quietly, ready to wait there all day if need be. After a while the main gate of the fortress of Gunib opened a little. “They trust us—some, at least,” Arigh said. “Now we do business.”

Flanked by a small bodyguard of lancers in scaled mail came Vakhtang and another, older man whose gear was even richer than his. Age spots freckled the backs of his hands, Gorgidas saw as he drew close, but there was strength in him. He had the eyes of a warrior, permanently drawn tight at the corners and tracked with red. He inspected the newcomers with a thoroughness Gauis Philippus might have used.

At last he said, “I am Gashvili, Gunib’s lord. Convince me, if you can, that I should give you leave to pass.” His voice was dry, his heavy features unreadable.

He heard the tale they had given Vakhtang, but in more detail. He kept interrupting with questions, always searching ones. His knowledge of Pardrayan affairs was deep, but not perfect; he knew of Varatesh’s rise to power and the magical aid Avshar had given him, but thought the latter a Khamorth sorcerer. When Arigh told how the wizard-prince had fled southward, Gashvili rammed fist into open palm and growled something sulfurous in his own language.

“Day before yesterday we let one through who answered to your account of him,” he said when he had control of a speech the men from the plains could follow. “He claimed he was a merchant beset by bandits on the steppe. As there was just the one of him and he was no Khamorth, we had no reason to disbelieve him.”

Suddenly all of Arigh’s party was shouting at once. For all their hopes, for all their anticipation, they had not run Avshar to earth. He must have had some magic to make his stallion run night and day, far past the normal endurance of any horse. The beast had gained steadily
on the Arshaum, tireless in the saddle though they were. Then a rainstorm covered its tracks, and they lost the trail.

“Well, whatever is your honor waiting for?” Viridovix cried. “Why are you not after calling yourself’s men out to be riding with us to take the spalpeen, the which’d be worth a million years o’ this sitting on the doorstoop o’ nowhere.” The Gaul wanted to leap down from his pony and shake sense into Gashvili.

The noble’s mouth twitched in amusement. “Perhaps I shall.” He turned to Arigh. “You ask me to take a heavy burden on myself. What guarantees would I have from you that it shall be as you say, and that your army will not plunder our fair valleys once you get past me here? Will you give hostages on it, to be held in Gunib as pledge against bad faith?”

“As for pledges,” Arigh said at once, “I will swear my own people’s oath, and any that suit you. Are you a Phos-worshiper like the Videssians? He seems not a bad god, for farmer-folk.”

The Arshaum meant it as a compliment, though Skylitzes’ face was scandalized. Gashvili shook his head, setting silver curls bouncing under his gilded helm. “For all the blue-robes’ prating, I and most of mine hold to the old gods of sky and earth, rock and river. I am a stubborn old man, and they humor me.” His tone belied the self-mockery; he was proud his people followed his lead.

“No trouble there, then,” Arigh said. His manner abruptly harshened. “But what is this talk of hostages? Will you give me hostages in turn, so no man of mine will be risked without knowing that, if he dies from treachery, some Erzrumi’s spirit will go with him to serve him in the next world?”

“By Tahund of the thunders, I will, and more!” Gashvili spoke with sudden hard decision. “I and all but a skeleton garrison will ride with you. With the Khamorth in disorder, the pass will be safe this year. And,” he added, looking shrewdly at Arigh, “having watch-hounds along will no doubt encourage you to keep your fine promises.”

“No doubt,” Arigh said, so blandly that Gorgidas stared at him. This one, he thought, has nothing to fear from haughty Dizabul, however handsome Arghun’s younger son might be. Still mild, Arigh went on, “You’ll have to keep up with us, you know.”

The fortmaster chuckled. “You may know the steppe, but credit me with some idea of my business here. We’ll stick tight as burrs under your horses’ tails.” He rode to brush cheeks with Arigh. “We agree, then?”

“Aye. Bring on your oath.”

“It is better done by night.” Gashvili turned his head. “Vakhtang, go tell the men to get ready to—” But Vakhtang was already trotting back toward Gunib, waving to show all was well. Gashvili laughed out loud. “My daughter knew what she was about when she chose that one.”

The Arshaum and the Gunib garrison spent the afternoon warily fraternizing. No plainsman was invited into the fortress, and Gashvili made it clear his vigilance had not relaxed. Arigh was offended at that until Goudeles reminded him, “He is going against generations of habit in treating with you at all.”

Through Sklylitzes—who looked acutely uncomfortable as he translated—an Erzrumi priest, a wizened elder whose thick white beard reached his thighs, explained his people’s way of binding pledges to Tolui. The shaman nodded thoughtfully when he was done, saying, “That is a strong ritual.”

In a way, the Erzrumi oath-taking ceremony reminded Gorgidas of the one the Arshaum had used to pledge the Videssian party and Bogoraz of Yezd against threat to Arghun. At twilight the priest, whose name was Tzathmak, lit two rows of fires about thirty feet long and three or four feet apart. “Will he be walking through them, now?” asked Viridovix, who had heard about but not seen the Arshaum rite.

“No; the ways here are different,” Goudeles said.

In striped ceremonial robe, Tzathmak led one of the fort’s scavenger dogs out to the fires. Tolui joined him in his fringed shaman’s regalia and mask. Together they prayed over the dog, each in his own language. Tolui called to his watching countrymen, “The beast serves as a sign of our agreement.”

Normally nothing could have made the dog walk between the two crackling rows of flame, but at Tzathmak’s urging it padded docilely down them. “As the dog braves the fire, so may the peace and friendship between us overcome all obstacles,” Tolui said. Tzathmak spoke in his own tongue, presumably giving Gashvili’s men the same message.

At the far end of the fires stood a muscular Erzrumi, naked to the
waist and leaning on a tall axe not much different from the sort the Halogai used. When the dog emerged, he swung the axe up in a glittering arc, brought it whistling down. The beast died without a sound, cut cleanly in two. All the Erzrumi cried out at the good omen.

“May the same befall any man who breaks this pact!” Tolui shouted, and the Arshaum, understanding, yelled their approval, too.

Gashvili could roar when it suited him. “Tomorrow we ride!” he cried in the Khamorth tongue. Both groups yelled together then—the Arshaum raggedly, for not all of them had even a smattering of Khamorth, but with high spirits all the same.

“Effective symbolism, that, if a bit grisly,” Goudeles remarked, pointing toward the sacrificed dog.

“Is that all you take it for?” Gorgidas said. “As for me, I’d sooner not chance finding out—I remember what happened to Bogoraz too well.”

“Gak!” the bureaucrat said in horror. He tenderly patted his middle, as if to reassure himself no axeblade, real or sorcerous, was anywhere near.

Viridovix squinted with suspicion at the new valley shimmering in the sultry heat-haze ahead. “Sure and I wonder what’ll be waiting for us here.”

“Something different,” Gorgidas said confidently. At the first sight of the Arshaum army’s outriders, herders were rushing their flocks up into the hills and peasants dashing for the safety of their nobles’ fortresses. Other men, armored cavalry, were moving together in purposeful haste.

Viridovix snorted at the Greek. “Will you harken to the Grand Druid, now? That’s no foretelling at all, at all, not in this Erzerum place. Were you after saying ’twould be the same, the prophecy’d be worth the having.”

“With your contrariness, you should feel right at home,” the physician snapped. He clung to his patience and to the subject. “It makes perfectly good sense for every little valley here to be nothing like any of its neighbors.”

“Not to me, it doesn’t,” Viridovix and Arigh said in the same breath.

The Arshaum continued, “My folk range over a land a thousand
times the size of this misbegotten jumble of rocks, but all our clans make up one people.” He looked haggard. Seven separate bands of Erzrumi were with the nomads, and as overall leader he had the thankless job of keeping them from one another’s throats. They used five different languages, were of four religions—to say nothing of sects—and were all passionately convinced of their own superiority.

“You have the right of it, Arigh dear,” Viridovix backed him. “In my Gaul, now, I’ll not deny the Eburovices, the tribe southwest o’ my own Lexovii, are a mangy breed o’ Celt, but forbye they’re Celts. Why, hereabouts a wight canna bespeak the fellow over the hills a day’s walk away, and doesna care to, either. He’d sooner slit the puir spalpeen’s weasand for him.”

Lankinos Skylitzes said, “We Videssians hold that Skotos confounded men’s tongues in Erzerum when the natives fell away from Phos’ grace by refusing to accept the orthodox faith.”

“No need to haul in superstition for something with a natural cause,” Gorgidas said, rolling his eyes. Seeing Skylitzes bristle, he demanded, “Well, how does your story account for the men of Mzeh riding with us? They’re as orthodox as you are, but the only Videssian they have is learned off by rote for their liturgy. Otherwise not even Gashvili can follow their dialect.”

The officer tugged at his beard in confusion, not used to the notion of testing ideas against facts. Finally he said, “What is this famous ‘natural cause’ of yours, then?”