The Legion of Videssos (29 page)

“If I’m not, why risk a parley with me? We’re enemies, true, but there’s no need to hate each other.”

“Go howl, you and your pretty talk,” Bailli said. “We took you and yours for honest mercenaries, men who’d do their best for him who pays them, aye, but not stoop to such foulness as you’re wading in. Murders in the night, tavern stabbings, maimed horses, thefts to drive a man mad—”

“Why blame us?” Marcus asked. “First off, you know we Romans don’t war like that—as I say, you must, or you’d not be here talking with me. And second, even if we did, we couldn’t, for it’s you who pinned us back in these hills.”

“Seems someone in the flatlands isn’t fond of you,” Gaius Philippus said, as casually as if remarking on the weather.

Bailli was near the bursting point. “All right! All right! Loose your stupid peasants, if that’s how you care to play this game. We’ll root them out if we have to chip down every tree and burn every cottage from here back to the city. And then we’ll come back to deal with you, and you’ll wish for what we gave your cowardly skulkers.”

Gaius Philippus said nothing, but an eyebrow twitched. To Bailli it could have meant anything; to Marcus, it showed he was not worried by the threat.

“Will there be anything more, Bailli?” the tribune asked.

“Just this,” the Namdalener officer said heavily. “At the Sangarios you fought your men as well as you could and as cleanly, too. Then afterwards in the talks over your exchange scheme, you were gracious even when they did not turn out as you wanted. So why this?”

The honest perplexity in his voice deserved a straight answer. Marcus thought for a moment, then said, “ ‘Doing me best,’ as you call it, is all very well, but it’s not my job. My job is to hold things together, and one way or another I intend to do it.”

He treasured the look of unreserved approval Gaius Philippus gave him, but knew he had made no sense to Bailli. Roman stubbornness was a trait without counterpart in this world; neither sly Videssians, happy-go-lucky Khatrishers, nor proud upstart Namdaleni fully appreciated it.

Yet Bailli was no fool. Just as Scaurus had quoted him, now he threw the tribune’s words back in his face. “ ‘One way or another,’ is it? How much thanks do you think you’ll win from the Empire’s nobles, outlanders, if you teach the assassin’s trade to peasants with manure between their toes?” He looked Zonaras in the eye. “And you, sirrah. When you go out to collect your rents, will you feel safe riding past any bush big enough for a man to hide behind?”

“Safer than when your bravoes set on me,” the Videssian retorted, but he tugged thoughtfully at his beard all the same.

“You remind me of the man in the story, who threw himself on the fire because he was chilly. On your head be it—and it probably will.” Bailli turned back to Scaurus. “We buried that northbound rider of yours—Antakinos, wasn’t it?”

If he knew the name, he was not bluffing. Marcus wondered how many couriers had been taken before they ever reached him. “Did you?” he said. “Well,
vale
—farewell!”

Bailli grunted, plainly hoping for some larger reaction. He nodded to his lieutenants, who had been glowering at the tribune and his comrades with even less liking than their leader showed. “Come on; we’ve given him his warning, and more than he deserves.” With almost legionary precision, the Namdaleni turned on their heels and tramped back to their waiting knights.

As Scaurus, Gaius Philippus, and Zonaras moved toward
Minucius’ guard squad, the senior centurion had all he could do to keep from smirking. “That one’ll be the best recruiter we ever had. There’s nothing like seeing your farm torn to bits and your neighbors killed to give you the idea of which side you should be on.”

“Aye, likely so,” Marcus said, but abstractedly. Bailli’s jab over the consequences of encouraging a guerilla among the Videssian peasantry troubled him more than he had shown the islander. When he gave Gaius Philippus a free hand, he had not thought past the immediate goal of making Drax’ life miserable. He was doing that, no doubt; Bailli’s spleen was a good measure of it. But the Namdalener, blast him, was right—the marauders who took up arms against the men of the Duchy would not magically unlearn their use once the war was done. How long before they realized a disliked landowner or imperial tax-agent bled as red as an islander?

Zonaras might have been reading his thoughts. He clapped the tribune on the back, saying, “I don’t expect to be bushwhacked tomorrow, Scaurus, no, nor next year either.”

“I’m glad,” Marcus answered. He consoled himself by thinking that in Videssos, as in Rome, the great landowners were too powerful. Their grip needed loosening. The Empire had been stronger when it relied on its freeholding peasantry than now, with the provincial nobles at odds with the pen-pushers in the capital, and with the state’s defenses in the hands of unreliable mercenaries like the Namdaleni—or the Romans.

But that evening Pakhymer laughed at him when he retorted what Bailli had said. “And you were the one who got huffy at me for doing what needed doing with the Yezda.”

“There’s a difference,” Marcus insisted.

“In a pig’s arse,” the Khatrisher said cheerfully; the tribune had known he would not see it. “You load your side of the Balance as heavily as you can, then hope for the best.” Orthodox Videssian thought held that Phos would one day vanquish his wicked rival Skotos. Pakhymer’s folk, whose very nation sprang from the chaos of barbarian invasion, were not so optimistic. In their view the fight between good and evil was evenly matched, thus the metaphor of the balance. To the imperials, even to the Namdaleni, it was foul heresy. Independent as always, the Khatrishers clung to it regardless.

Marcus was glad he was indifferent to theology.

Gaius Philippus had come to respect Pakhymer’s opinions; the pockmarked little cavalry commander had a habit of being right. Picking a bit of raisin out from between his teeth, he said to Scaurus, “You’re the one who keeps track of these cursed imperial politics, sir. Will they see us as ogres for using their clients to fight the islanders?”

“Only the ones who are ogres themselves, is my guess. They’re the ones who have something to fear.” Marcus eyed the veteran curiously; such worries were unlike him. “Why should it trouble you?”

“No reason, really,” the senior centurion said, but his sheepish smile rang false. Marcus waited. Gaius Philippus stumbled on, “After all, what with the Yezda and Zemarkhos’ fanatics between here and Aptos, likely no trouble from this would ever reach there.”

“Aptos?” The Romans had wintered there after Maragha, but it was more than a year since they left the small town, and Scaurus had hardly thought of it since.

Gaius Philippus seemed to regret opening his mouth in the first place. The tribune thought he was going to clam up, but he plunged ahead: “The local noble’s widow there—what was her name? Nerse Phorkaina, that was it—is a fine lady. What with raising up her son, and the Yezda, and Zemarkhos’ holy war against everything, I’d rather she didn’t think we’d given her a new headache. That would be a poor return for good guesting.”

“So it would,” Marcus agreed solemnly. What was her name, indeed, he thought. He was sure Gaius Philippus remembered everything there was to remember about Phorkos’ widow, down to what stones she favored in her rings. But the senior centurion was so used to despising women that Scaurus doubted he would ever admit feeling otherwise, even to himself.

The short-hafted axe bit into the black mulberry’s trunk again and again. Chips flew. Bryennios the woodcutter grunted in satisfaction as the tree began to totter. Long years of use had polished the axe handle smooth as a maiden’s skin beneath his callused palms. He walked round to the other side of the mulberry, deepened his undercut with a few strokes,
then went back to the main cut. He grunted again. Sure enough, he’d be able to drop the tree in the space where the old alder had stood until the storm three winters past. That would make chopping it into timber so much easier.

The breeze shifted, bringing with it the sharp odor of wood smoke. Bryennios made another wordless noise, this one anything but pleasant—it was not Tralles the charcoal-burner at work. Houses in his hamlet were going up in flames. He could hear women wailing in the distance, and Namdaleni shouting to each other.

As if thinking of the men of the Duchy had conjured them up, three came riding toward him down the forest track. “You, there!” one shouted; his lazy island accent swallowed the last
r
. Bryennios sneered, but to himself. The Namdaleni were all armored and carried their long lances at the ready. The woodcutter swung his axe again. The mulberry groaned. A few more strokes and it would fall.

“Belay that!” the islander shouted. The seaman’s word meant nothing to Bryennios, who had seen no water greater than a pond, but the sense was plain. He lowered the axe.

Pretending not to, he eyed the Namdaleni as they approached. Two might have been Videssians for looks had they not shaved; the third was fair-haired, with eyes of a startling green. All of them were big, strapping men, overtopping him by half a head or more, but his shoulders were wider than theirs, his arms thick with muscle from his trade.

“What do you want of me?” he asked. “I have work to do—more work, thanks to the lot of you.” He did not bother hiding his bitterness.

The older of the two dark Namdaleni, their spokesman, wiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his green surcoat. Soot and rusty sweat came away in a short clean streak. The rest of his face was filthy. “You want to be spared such visits, eh?” he said.

Bryennios looked at him as at any idiot. “Who would not?”

“A point.” The islander smiled thinly. “Well, we aren’t pleased to have a supply wagon torched and two guards knocked over the head. Have any ideas about whose clever scheme that was? We’d pay well to learn his name.”

The woodcutter shrugged, spread his hands. The Namdalener snarled in disgust, mockingly imitated his gesture. “You
see how it is, then. If we can’t find out who these rebels are, we have to teach everyone the price of sheltering them.” Bryennios shrugged again.

“You mi’ as well talk to the clot’s axe,” the blond islander said. “It’d tell you more.” His emerald stare stabbed at Bryennios; the down-pointing bar nasal on his helmet gave him the aspect of a brooding falcon. At last he jerked hard on his horse’s reins, wheeling the beast around. His comrades followed.

Bryennios attacked the mulberry again. After a few savage swings it fell just where he had known it would. He stepped forward to lop off the bigger branches. He muttered a short prayer of thanks that the men of the Duchy had not taken the blond knight’s sour advice and examined his axe. The dark red crusted stain at the top of the handle did not come from sap.

“Why are they pulling out? I haven’t a clue,” the Khatrisher scout said to Scaurus, as cheeky as any of his people. “You want whys, see a magician. Whats I’m pretty good at, and I tell you the Namdaleni are breaking camp.”

The tribune fumbled in his pouch, tossed the horseman a goldpiece. “Whatever the reason, good news deserves a reward.” The Khatrisher made it disappear before Marcus thumped his forehead at his folly. “After Kyzikos, you should be paying me.”

“It won’t go to waste, even so.” The Khatrisher grinned smugly.

The tribune rode back to his vantage point with him. No great horseman, Scaurus blessed the stirrups that gave him a fighting chance to stay on the large, unreliable beast between his thighs.

A glance from the hilltop crag told him the scout was right. Bailli’s Namdaleni had used the legionary camp by Zonaras’ villa as their own main base. Now it lay deserted; Marcus reached the observation post in time to see the last of the Namdalener column ride north out of the valley. Even at some distance, he could see how tightly bunched they were—a hostile countryside was the best argument against straggling.

Watching the retreat as he was, he took a while to notice that a garrison still held Zonaras’ strong-walled home. So it proved over the next few days all along the line the islanders
had set up to contain the legionaries. Their striking force was gone, but they still stood strongly on the defensive.

When the riders who did sneak past the Namdalener forts reported that the main body of islanders was hurrying northwest toward Garsavra, Laon Pakhymer looked so pleased with himself that Marcus wanted to throttle him. “You see, even the Yezda can be useful,” the Khatrisher general said. “One man’s trouble is the next fellow’s chance.”

“Hmmp,” Scaurus said. He still hoped the men of the Duchy would smash the Yezda, though he had to admit he would not be brokenhearted to see them weakened in the smashing. He did not mean to sit idly by while they battled. If a couple of the islanders’ motte-and-baileys fell, the way would open for the legionaries to go down into the coastal plain once more. The hills made a good refuge, but nothing would be decided here—and the lush lowlands were much better able to feed any army. He was sick of barley and lentils, and even those were running low.

Naturally, Zonaras wanted his villa to be the first strong point freed, but the tribune had to tell him no—its approaches were too open, and the building itself too strong. The elderly noble shook his head ruefully. “There’s praise I could do without.”

Marcus chose several more likely targets to attack. For himself he picked a fort that was new Namdalener construction, a few miles west of Zonaras’ holding. The valley it sat in was a guerilla center; strife between them and the islander garrison had made many of the local peasants flee, and the men of the Duchy were working their fields. Looking out from between the branches of an almond grove, the tribune thought they were doing a good job of it, too.

There was no signal. When he judged the moment ripe, Pakhymer sent a few dozen horsemen riding hell-for-leather into the valley. They trampled through the rich green fields, slashing the growing grain with their sabers to leave as wide a track of destruction as they could. Some carried smoking torches, which they hurled here and there. Others darted toward the small flock of sheep grazing just outside the motte and started driving them into the hills.