An Emperor for the Legion (26 page)

“You’re a worse slave to land than to any human master,” Gaius Philippus retorted. “I joined the eagles to keep from starving at the miserable little stone-bound plot where I was born. You
want
to walk behind an ox’s arse from sunup to sundown, boy? You must be daft.”

But Glabrio only shook his head; his dream was proof against the senior centurion’s harsh memories, proof even
against his bond with Gorgidas. The physician looked like a soldier doggedly not showing a wound pained him, but he made no complaint against his companion’s decision, whatever his eyes might say. Marcus admired him the more, thinking of his own private fears and wondering how much they would sway his course.

The centurions were too well-disciplined and Gorgidas too polite to ask the obvious question, but Viridovix put it squarely: “And what does your honor intend to do?”

Scaurus had hoped some consensus might show itself in his comrades’ answers, but they were as divided among themselves as he was in himself. He stood silent a long while, feeling his inner balance sway now one way, now the other.

At last he said, “With this attack gone for nothing, I don’t think Gavras has any real chance to take the city, and without it he’ll lose the civil war. I’ll go to Namdalen, I think; under the Sphrantzai the Empire will fall, and in any case I would not serve them. The Yezda, almost, are better, for they wear no mask of virtue.”

Even with the decision made, he was far from sure it was right. He said, “In this I will give no man orders. Let each one do as he will. Gaius, my friend, my teacher, I know you’ll do gallantly with the men who feel as you do.” They embraced; Scaurus was shocked to see tears on the veteran’s cheeks.

“A man does what he thinks is right,” Gaius Philippus said. “A long time ago, when I was hardly more than a boy, I fought on Marius’ side in the civil war, while my closest friend chose Sulla. While the war lasted I would have killed him if I could, but years later I happened to meet him in a tavern, and we drank the place dry between us. May it be so with you and me one day.”

“May it be so,” Marcus whispered, and his own face was wet.

Viridovix was hugging Gaius Philippus now, saying, “The crows take me if I won’t miss you, you hard-shell runt!”

“And I you, you great hulking savage!”

With their long habit of discretion, what Gorgidas and Quintus Glabrio thought they kept to themselves.

“There’s no point in throwing the camp into an uproar tonight,” Marcus said. “Morning muster will be the right time to let the men know their choice; keep it to yourselves until then.”

There were nods all around. They walked slowly back to the palisade, not one picking up the pace, all thinking this might be the last time they were together. The raucous noises from behind the city’s walls were an intrusion on their thoughts. Things sounded as much like a riot as a celebration, the tribune thought bitterly. He cursed the Sphrantzai yet again, for forcing him to a decision he did not want to make.

The sentries drooped like flowers in a drought when their officers passed them by without a hint of what they had discussed. All through the camp, men stared toward them.

“Be damned to you!” Viridovix shouted. “I’ve not grown a second head, nor a crest of purple feathers either, so dinna be dragging your eyes over me so!” The Celt’s short temper was reassuringly normal; legionaries turned back to their food, their talk, or their endless games of chance.

Gorgidas said, “You’ll forgive me, I hope, but I have wounded to attend to, crude as my methods are.” Much to his own dismay, he still fought hurts with styptics and ointments, tourniquets and sutures. Nepos maintained he had the skill to learn Videssian healing arts, but his efforts bore no fruit. Scaurus suspected that was one reason, and not the least, he had decided to stay in Videssos.

Quintus Glabrio followed the physician, talking in a voice too low for Scaurus to hear; he saw Gorgidas dip his head in a Greek affirmative.

Someone hefted a skin of wine. Viridovix ambled toward it, drawn as surely as nails by a lodestone.

Helvis was sleeping when the tribune ducked into their tent. He touched her cheek, felt her stir. She sat up, careful not to wake Malric or Dosti. “It’s late,” she said, a sleepy complaint. “What do you want?”

Scaurus told her of her brother’s plan, speaking as tersely as he had to his officers. She said nothing for a full minute when he was through, then asked, “What will you do?” It was a curiously uninflected question, all emotion waiting on the answer.

He said only, “I’ll go.” Reasons did not matter now; the essence of the thing was the choice itself.

Even in the darkness he saw her eyes go wide. She had been braced for a no and for the explosion that would follow it. “You will? We will?” she said foolishly. Then she laughed in absolute delight, forgetting her sleeping children. She flung
her arms around the tribune’s neck, planted a lopsided kiss on his mouth.

Her joy did not make him any easier over his decision; somehow it only brought into sharper focus the doubts he felt. Caught up in that joy, she did not notice his somber mood. “When will we leave?” she asked, eager and practical at the same time.

“In three or four days, I’d guess.” Marcus answered with reluctance; putting a date to the departure made it painfully real.

Malric woke up, and crossly. “Stop talking so much,” he said. “I want to go back to sleep.”

Helvis scooped him up and hugged him. “We’re talking so much because we’re happy. We’re going home soon.”

Her words meant nothing to her son, who had been born in Videssos and known no life save that of the camp. “How can we go home?” he asked. “We
are
home.”

The tribune had to smile. “How do you propose to explain that to him?”

“Hush,” Helvis said, rocking the sleepy boy back and forth. “Phos be thanked, he’ll learn what the word really means. And thank you, my very dear, for giving him the chance. I love you for it.”

Scaurus nodded, a short, abrupt motion. He was still fighting his internal battle, and praise seemed suspect. But with his choice made, what need was there to load his qualms on her? Better, he thought, to hold them to himself.

He slid under the blanket; this day had drained him, and in another way the one upcoming would be worse. But it was a long time before he slept.

Turmoil outside woke him at first light of day. He knuckled his eyes, cursed groggily, and then sat bolt upright. The first cause for the uproar that crossed his mind was his men’s somehow learning what was afoot. He scrambled into his cloak and dashed out of the tent. It would be all too easy for hubbub to turn to riot.

But there was no sign of riot, though the legionaries were not standing to muster in front of their eight-man tents. Instead they were packed in a shoving, shouting mass against the western wall of the camp, peering and pointing over the
palisade in high excitement. More kept coming as the camp awakened.

The tribune pushed through the crowd; his men gave way with salutes as they recognized him. They were jammed so close together, though, that he took several minutes to work his way up to the palisade.

He did not have to be right by it—his inches let him see over the last couple of ranks of men. Someone next to him pounded him on the back: Minucius. The trooper’s eyes were alight with triumph, his strong features stretched in a grin. “Will you look at that, sir?” he exclaimed. “Will you just look at that?”

For a moment Marcus still did not know what he meant. There ahead was Thorisin’s earthwork and, beyond it, the capital’s fortifications, silently indomitable as always.

That sentence had no sooner taken shape than it echoed like a gong inside him. No wonder the great double walls seemed silent in the dawn—not a defender was on them.

He felt giddy, as if he had gulped down a jug of neat wine. “Step aside! Make room!” he cried, ramming his way to the very front—he had to see as much as he could, be as close as he could. Normally he would have been ashamed to use his rank so, but in his excitement he did not give it a second thought.

There were the Silver Gates straight ahead, the works that had beaten back everything his men could throw at them. They were wide open now, and in them stood three men with torches, almost hopping in their eagerness to wave the besiegers into Videssos. Their shouts came thinly across the no man’s land between the city and the siege-works: “Hurrah for Thorisin Gavras, Avtokrator of the Videssians!”

T
HE TORCH-WAVERS AND THEIR FRIENDS BEHIND THEM WERE
as unsavory a lot of ruffians as the tribune had ever seen. Gaudy in street finery—baggy tunics with wide, flopping sleeves and tights dyed in an eye-searing rainbow of colors—they swarmed around the orderly Roman ranks, flourishing cudgels and shorts words and shouting at the top of their lungs.

No matter who they were, though, their cries were what Scaurus most wanted to hear: “Gavras the Emperor!” “Dig up Ortaias’ bones!” “To the Milestone with the Sphrantzai, the dung-munching Skotos-lovers!”

As he looked north along the wall, the tribune saw Thorisin’s army loping by squads and companies through every wide-flung gate. The Namdaleni were moving up from their stretch of siege line along with all the rest. If Gavras was a winner after all, withdrawal suddenly looked foolish.

“Reprieve,” Gaius Philippus said, and Marcus nodded, feeling relief like a cool wind in his mind. He blessed the mixed emotions that had made him hesitate before announcing the pullout to his men. Never had he come to a decision more reluctantly and never was he gladder to see events overturn it.

Helvis would be disappointed, but victory paid all debts. She would get over it, he told himself.

The news grew wilder with every step he took into the city, until he had no idea what to believe. Ortaias had abdicated, taken refuge in the High Temple, fled the city, been overthrown, been killed, been torn into seven hundred pieces so even his ghost would never find rest. The rebellion had started because of food riots, treachery among Ortaias’
backers, and anger at the excesses of Outis Rhavas’ men, of the great count Drax, or of the Khamorth. Its leader was Rhavas, Mertikes Zigabenos—whom Scaurus vaguely remembered as Nephon Khoumnos’ aide—the Princess Empress Alypia, Balsamon the patriarch, or no one.

“They don’t know what’s happening any more than we do,.” Gaius Philippus said in disgust as he listened to the umpteenth contradictory tale, all of them told with passionate conviction. “You might as well shut your ears.”

That was not quite true. On one thing, at least, all rumors came together—though the rest of Videssos had slipped from their hands, the Sphrantzai still held the palace quarter. Unlike much of what he heard, that made sense to Scaurus. Many buildings in the palace complex were fortresses in their own right, perfect refuges for a faction beaten elsewhere.

It also decided Scaurus’ course of action. The Silver Gate opened onto Middle Street, the capital’s main thoroughfare, which ran directly to the palaces with but a single dogleg. The tribune told the buccinators, “Blow double-time!” Above the blare of horns he shouted, “Come on, boys! We’ve waited long enough for this!” The legionaries raised a cheer and quickstepped down the slate-paved street at a pace that soon left most of the rowdies gasping far behind them.

The tribune remembered the Romans’ parade along Middle Street the day they first came to the capital. Then it had been slow march, with a herald in front of them crying, “Make way for the valiant Romans, brave defenders of the Empire!” The street had cleared like magic. Today pedestrians got no more warning than the clatter of iron-spiked sandals on the flagstones and, if Phos was with them, a shouted “Gangway!” After that it was their own lookout, and more than one was flung aside or simply run down and trampled.

Just as they had on that first day, the sidewalks filled to watch the troops go by; to Videssos’ fickle, jaded populace, even civil war could become entertainment. Farmers and tradesmen, monks and students, whores and thieves, fat merchants and sore-covered beggars, all came rushing out to see what the new spectacle might be. Some cheered, some called down curses on the Sphrantzai, but most just stood and stared, delighted the morning had brought them this diversion.

Marcus saw an elderly woman point at the legionaries, heard her screech, “It’s the Gamblers, come to sack Videssos!”
She used city slang for the Namdaleni; even in the language of insult, theology came into play.

Curse the ignorant harridan, thought Scaurus. The crowds had just left off being a mob; they could become one again in an instant. But the leader of the street toughs, a thick-shouldered bear of a man named Arsaber, was still jogging along beside the legionaries and came to their rescue now. “Shut it, you scrawny old bitch!” he bellowed. “These here ain’t Gamblers, they’re our friends the Ronams, so don’t you give ’em any trouble, hear?”

He turned back to the tribune, grinning a rotten-toothed grin. “You Ronams, you’re all right. I remember during the riots last summer, you put things down without enjoying it too much.” He spoke of riots and the quelling thereof with the expert knowledge someone else might show on wine.

Thanks to a bungling herald’s slip at the imperial reception just after the Romans came to Videssos, much of the city still mispronounced their name. Marcus did not think the moment ripe for correcting Arsaber, though. “Well, thanks,” he said.

The plaza of Stavrakios, the coppersmiths’ district—already full of the sound of hammering—the plaza of the Ox, the red-granite imperial office building that doubled as archives and jail, and a double handful of Phos’ temples, large and small, all flashed quickly by as the legionaries stormed toward the palaces.

Then Middle Street opened out into the plaza of Palamas, the greatest forum in the city. Scaurus flicked a glance at the Milestone, a column of the same red granite as the imperial offices. There must have been a score of heads mounted on pikes at its base, like so many gruesome fruit. Nearly all were fresh, but terror had not been enough to keep the Sphrantzai on the throne.