Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (92 page)

The watch passed without incident; only the buzz of insects and a nightjar’s chuckling call broke the stillness. Videssos’ constellations, still alien to the tribune after nearly four years, rolled slowly across the heavens. Making idle talk with Njal, he learned the Halogai recognized constellations altogether different from the patterns the imperials saw in the sky. Wathiq, it turned out, had another set still.

It seemed a very long time before the late-watch squad came to relieve them. They shook their heads when Scaurus asked whether they knew how Gaius Philippus had done. “We sacked out soon as our tent was up,” one said for all. “Take more than a brawl to wake us, too—hate this bloody last watch of the night.”

As Marcus was yawning himself, he could hardly argue. Back at the camp, the fires had died into embers; even gossipers and men who had stayed up for a last cup or two of wine were long since abed. “Come morning you’ll know,” Njal consoled Scaurus as they slid into their bedrolls. The tribune fell asleep in the middle of a grumble.

Tahmasp announced the dawn not with trumpets, but with a nomad-style drum whose deep, bone-jarring beat tumbled men out of bed like an earthquake. Bleary-eyed, Marcus splashed water on his face and groped for his tunic. He was still mouth-breathing; his nose felt twice its proper size.

After the sweaty closeness of the tent, the smell of wheatcakes sizzling
was doubly inviting. Marcus stole one from the griddle with his dagger, then tossed it up and down till it was cool enough to hold. He devoured it, ignoring the cook’s curses. It was delicious.

A nudge in the ribs made him whirl. There stood Kamytzes, looking like a fox who had just cleaned out a henhouse. The troop leader handed him a couple of pieces of silver. “I made plenty more,” he said, “but this for the tip.”

“Thanks.” Marcus pocketed the coins. He looked round for Gaius Philippus, but Muzaffar’s half of the guard troop was billeted at the far end of the camp. Turning back to Kamytzes, he asked, “How did he do it?”

“They picked a big hulking bruiser to go at him, all muscles and no sense. From the way he came swaggering over, a blind idiot would have known what he had in mind. Your friend hadn’t had time to sit down to his supper yet. He made as if he didn’t notice what was going on until the lout was almost on top of him. Then he spun on his heel, cold-cocked the bugger, dragged him over to the latrine trench, and dropped him in—feet first; he didn’t want to drown him. After that he got his stew and ate.”

Scaurus nodded; the encounter had the earmarks of the senior centurion’s efficiency. “Did he say anything?” he asked Kamytzes.

“I was coming to that.” The cocky officer’s eyes gleamed with amusement. “After a couple of bites he looked up and said to nobody in particular, ‘If anything like that happens again, I may have to get annoyed.’ ”

“Sounds like him. I doubt he need worry much.”

“So do I.” Filching a wheatcake the same way Marcus had, Kamytzes bustled away to help Tahmasp get the caravan moving.

They were on the road by an hour and a half after sunrise—not up to the standard of the legions, but good time, the tribune thought, for a private band of adventurers. Tahmasp went up and down the line of merchants who traveled with him, blasphemously urging them to keep up. “What do you think you are, a eunuch in a sedan chair?” he roared at one who was too slow to suit him. “You move like that, we’ll fornicating well go on without you. See how fast you’ll run with Yezda on your tail!” The trader mended his pace; the caravaneer had no more potent threat than leaving him behind.

As they had the day before, they traveled west. Marcus waved to Tahmasp as he came by on his unceasing round of inspections. “What is it?” the flamboyant caravaneer asked genially. “Kamytzes tells me you carved yourself a place,” he said, chuckling, “though you’ll not gain favor by making your nose as big as mine.”

“As I wasn’t born with it that way, I’ll be as glad when it’s not,” the tribune retorted. Happy to find Tahmasp in a good mood, he asked when the caravan would swing north toward the Empire’s ports on the coast of the Videssian Sea.

Tahmasp dug a finger in his ear to make sure he had heard correctly. Then he threw back his head and laughed till tears streamed down his leathery cheeks. “North? Who’s ever said a word about north? You poor, stupid, sorry son of a whore, it’s Mashiz I’m bound for, not your piss-pot ports. Mashiz!” He almost choked with glee. “I hope you enjoy the trip.”

“S
URRENDER
!” L
ANKINOS
S
KYLITZES BAWLED UP TO THE
Y
EZDA OFFICER
atop the mud-brick wall.

The Yezda put his hands on his hips and laughed. “I’d like to see you make me,” he said. He spat at the Videssian, who was interpreting for Arigh.

“Och, will you hear the filthy man, now?” Viridovix said. He shook his fist at the Yezda. “Come down here and be doing that, you blackhearted omadhaun!”

“Make me,” the officer repeated, still laughing. He gestured to the squad of archers beside him. They drew their double-curved bows back to their ears. The sun glinted off iron chisel-points; to Gorgidas every shaft seemed aimed straight at him. The Yezda said, “This parley is over. Pull back, or I will fire on you. Fight or not, just as you please.”

To give the warning teeth, one of the nomads put an arrow in the dirt a couple of feet in front of Arigh’s pony. He sat motionless, staring up at the Yezda, daring them to shoot. After a full minute, he nodded to his party and made a deliberate turn to show the town garrison his back. He and his comrades slowly rode off.

The moment they left the shade of the wall, the blasting heat of the river-plain summer hit them once more with its full power. Viridovix wore an ugly hat of woven straw to protect his fair skin from the sun, but he was red and peeling even so. The sweat that streamed down his face stung like vinegar. Armor was a chafing torment no amount of bathing could ease.

Arigh cursed in a low monotone until they were well away from the city, not wanting to give the Yezda officer the satisfaction of knowing his anger. The drawn-up lines of his army, banners moving sluggishly in the sweltering air, made a brave show. But without the siege train they
did not have, assaulting a walled town with ready defenders would cost more than they could afford to lose.

“May the wind spirits blow that dog’s ghost so far it never finds its way home to be reborn,” Arigh burst out at last, bringing his fist down on his thigh in frustration. “It galls me past words not to watch him drown in his own blood for his insolence, crying defiance at me with his stinking couple of hundred men.”

“The trouble is, he knows what he’s about,” Pikridios Goudeles said. “We haven’t the ladders to go at the walls of this miserable, overgrown village, whatever its name is—”

“Erekh,” Skylitzes put in.

“A fitting noise for a nauseating town. In any case, we don’t have the ladders and we can’t do much of a job making them because the only trees in this bake-oven of a country are date palms, with worthless wood. To say nothing of the fact that if we sit down in front of a city instead of staying on the move, all the Yezda garrisons hereabouts will converge on us instead of each one being pinned down to protect its own base.”

“Are you a general now?” Arigh snarled, but he could not argue against the pen-pusher’s logic. “This will cost us,” he said darkly. When he drew closer to his assembled soldiers, he waved to the southwest and yelled, “We ride on!”

He gave the order first in the Arshaum speech for his own men, then in Videssian so Narbas Kios could translate it into Vaspurakaner for the Erzrumi. The mountaineers’ ranks stirred; it would have taken a deaf man to miss their resentful mutters. Some of the Erzrumi were not muttering. Part of the Mzeshi contingent shouted their fury at the Arshaum chief and at those of their own leaders content to remain with the plainsmen.

One of their officers advanced on Arigh. Dark face suffused with rage, he roared something at the Arshaum in his own strange language, then brought himself under enough control to remember his Vaspurakaner. His accent was atrocious; Narbas Kios frowned, trying to be sure he understood. At last he said, “He calls you a man of little spirit.” From the savage scowl on the Mzeshi’s face, Gorgidas was sure Narbas was shading the translation. The trooper went on, “He says he came to fight, and you run away. He came for loot, and has won a few brass trinkets
his own smiths would be ashamed of. He says he was tricked, and he is going home.”

“Wait,” Arigh said through the Videssian soldier. He went through Goudeles’ arguments all but unchanged, and added, “We are still unbeaten, and Mashiz still lies ahead. That has been our goal all along; stay and help us win it.”

The Mzeshi frowned in concentration. Gorgidas thought he was considering what Arigh had said, but then he loudly broke wind. His face cleared.

“Not the most eloquent reply, but one of unmistakable meaning,” Goudeles remarked with diplomatic aplomb.

Smirking triumphantly, the officer trotted back to his followers and harangued them for a few minutes. They shouted their agreement, brandishing lances and swords. Their harness and chain mail jingled as they pulled away from their countrymen and started back to their mountain home. Several individual horsemen peeled away from the remaining men of Mzeh to join them.

Arigh had his impassivity back as they began to grow small against the sky. “I wonder who the next ones to give up will be,” he said. Already a good third of the Erzrumi had abandoned the campaign and turned back.

Viridovix blew a long, glum breath through his mustaches. “And it all started out so simple, too,” he said. Fanning out as they crossed the Tutub, the Arshaum had fallen on three or four towns before startled defenders realized an enemy was loose among the Hundred Cities. It was as easy as riding through open gates; there was next to no fighting and, in spite of Mzeshi complaints, they came away with their horses festooned with booty.

But it had not stayed easy long. Not only were the cities shut up against attack, Yezda raiders began the hit-and-run warfare they shared with the Arshaum. Two scouts were ambushed here, a forager there. The Yezda lost men, too, but they had the resources of a country to draw on. Arigh did not.

He gave his commands to the
naccara
drummer, who boomed them out for the whole army to hear. It shifted into traveling order, with what was left of the Erzrumi heavy cavalry in a long column in the center, flanked and screened by the Arshaum.

Gorgidas rode with Rakio, near the front of the Erzrumi formation. Most of the Sworn Fellowship was hurrying back to the Yrmido country; Khilleu did not relish giving up the campaign, but he did not dare leave his land unprotected when his unfriendly neighbors were going home. A fair number of “orphans” and a handful of pairs, mostly older men, stayed on.

The physician flattered himself that Rakio was still with the army for his sake. Certainly the Yrmido found no delight in the journey itself. “What strange country this is,” he said. He pointed. “What is that little hill, out of the flat plain rising? Several of them I have seen here.”

Gorgidas followed his pointing finger. It was truly not much of a hill, perhaps not even as tall as the walls around Videssos, but in the dead-flat river plain it stood out like a mountain, springing up so abruptly he did not think it could be natural.

Having no idea how it came about, he poised tablet and stylus before he called out the question to whoever might hear it. Skylitzes was not far away, talking with Vakhtang of Gunib. He raised his head. “It’s the funeral marker for a dead town,” he told the Greek. “You’ve seen how they build with mud brick hereabouts. They have to; it’s all there is in this country. No stone here to speak of, Phos knows. The stuff is flimsy, and the people don’t care for work any more than they do anywhere else. When a house or a tavern falls down, they rebuild on top of the rubble. Do it enough times, and there’s your hillock. That should be plain to anyone, I’d think.”

Gorgidas scowled at the officer’s patronizing tone. Skylitzes let out one of his rare, short laughs. “See how it feels to get a lecture instead of giving one,” he said. Ears burning, Gorgidas quickly stowed his tablet.

Rakio did not notice his lover’s discomfiture; he was still complaining about the countryside. “It looks like it leprosy has. What parts are in crop seem rich enough, but there are so many patches of desert, ugly and useless both.”

Overhearing him, Skylitzes said, “Those are new; blame the Yezda for them. They made them by—”

“Destroying the local irrigation works,” Gorgidas interrupted. He was not about to have his self-esteem tweaked twice running. “Without the Tutub and the Tib, this whole land would be waste. It only grows
where their waters reach. But the Yezda are nomads—what do they care about crops? Their herds can live on thorns and thistles, and if they starve away the farmers here, so much the better for them.”

“Just what I would have said,” Skylitzes said, adding, “but at twice the length.”

“What are you arguing about?” Vakhtang demanded in the plains speech. When Skylitzes had translated, the Erzrumi advised Gorgidas, “Pay no attention to him. I have not known him long, but I see he bites every word to test it before he lets it out.”

“Better that way than the flood of drivel Goudeles spouts,” the officer said, not missing the chance to score off the man who was a political rival back in Videssos.

Vakhtang, though, favored the bureaucrat’s more florid style of oratory. “Meaning can disappear with not enough words as well as from too many.”

They hashed it back and forth the rest of the day as they rode through farmland and desert. It made for a good argument; there were points on both sides, but it was not important enough for anyone to take very seriously.

With empty fields all around, Gorgidas forgot he was at war. Rakio, though, knew at a glance what that emptiness meant. “They hide from us,” he said. “Peasants always do. In a week come, and the fields will be full of farmers.”