Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (29 page)

Nevertheless, he recalled the adage he’d mentally applied to Soteric when the islander proposed seizing Videssos in despite of the whole imperial army. He sought Gorgidas. “Who was it,” he asked the Greek, “who said, ‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad’? Sophokles?”

“Merciful Zeus, no!” Gorgidas exclaimed. “That could only be Euripides, though I forget the play. When Sophokles speaks of human nature, he’s so noble you wish his words were true. Where Euripides finds truth, you wish he hadn’t.”

The tribune wondered whose play he’d watched that afternoon.

T
HE FELLOW-FEELING
B
ALSAMON LABORED SO VALIANTLY TO CREATE
crumbled, as things would have it, under the fury of an outraged section of his own clergy—the monks. All too few had Nepos’ compassion or learning; most were arrogant in their bigotry. From their monasteries they swarmed forth like angry bees to denounce their patriarch’s call for calm and to rouse Videssos once more to hatred.

Marcus was leading a couple of Roman maniples back from the practice field when he found his way blocked by a large crowd avidly taking in one such monk’s harangue. The monastic, a tall thin man with a pocked face and fiery eyes, stood on an upended crate in front of a cheese merchant’s shop and screamed out his hatred of heresy to everyone who would listen.

“Whoever tampers with the canons of the faith sells—no, gives!—his soul to the ice below! It is Phos’ own holy words the foul foreigners pervert with their talk of wagers. They seek to seduce us from the way of truth into Skotos’ frigid embrace, and our great patriarch”—In his rage, he fairly spat the word—“abets them and helps the demon spread his couch.

“For I tell you, my friends, there is, there can be, no compromise with evil. Corrupters of the faith lead others to the doom they have chosen for themselves, as surely as one rotten pear will spoil the cask. Balsamon prates of toleration—will he next tolerate a temple to Skotos?” The monk made “tolerate” into an obscenity.

His voice grew shriller yet. “If the eastern barbarians will not confess the truth of our faith, drive them from the city, I say! They are as much to be feared as the Yezda—more, for they wear virtue’s mask to hide their misbelief!”

The audience he had built up shouted its agreement. Fists waved in
the air; there were cries of “Dirty barbarians!” and “The pox take Namdalen!”

“We may be having to break their heads to get through, if himself pushes the fire up any more,” Viridovix said to Marcus.

“If we do, we’ll set the whole city ablaze,” the tribune answered. But he could see his men loosening swords in their scabbards and taking a firmer grip on the staves they were carrying in lieu of spears.

Just then the monk looked over the heads of the throng before him and caught sight of the Romans’ unfamiliar gear. He probably would not have recognized a true Namdalener had he seen one, but in his passion any foreigner would serve. He stretched out a long bony finger at the legionaries, crying, “See! It is the men of the Duchy, come to cut me down before my truth can spread!”

“No, indeed!” Marcus shouted as the crowd whirled to face the Romans. Behind him he heard Gaius Philippus warning, “Whether the mob does or not, I’ll have the head of the first man who moves without orders!”

“What then?” the monk asked Scaurus suspiciously. The crowd was spreading out and edging forward, readying itself for a rush.

“Can’t you tell by looking? We’re the surveying party for that temple to Skotos you were talking about—do you know where it’s supposed to go?”

The monk’s eyes bulged like a freshly boated bream’s. The members of the would-be mob stopped where they stood, gawping at the Roman’s insolence. Scaurus watched them closely—would they see the joke or try to tear the Romans to pieces for blasphemy?

First one, then another, then three more in the crowd burst into guffaws. In an instant the whole fickle gathering was shrieking with laughter and running forward, not to attack the legionaries, but to praise their leader’s wit. Suddenly deserted by his audience, the monk, with a last malice-filled glance at Scaurus, clambered down from his makeshift podium and disappeared—to spread his hatred elsewhere, Marcus was sure.

That, though, left his former throng discontented. The monastic had entertained them, and they expected the same from Scaurus. The silence stretched embarrassingly; with the tribune’s one quip gone, his mind seemed blank.

Viridovix filled the breach in magnificent style, bursting into a borderer’s song about fighting the cattle-thieves from Yezd. Only Marcus’ thorough lack of interest in music had kept him from noticing what a fine voice Viridovix owned. Even his Gallic accent brought song to his speech. Someone in the crowd had a set of pipes; the Celt, the Videssians, and those Romans who knew the tune’s words sang it through at the top of their lungs.

When it was done, one of the city men began another ditty, a ribald drinking song everyone in the crowd seemed to know. More legionaries could sing along with this one; Marcus himself had spent enough time in taverns to learn the chorus: “The wine gets drunk, but you get drunker!”

After two or three more songs it seemed as if the Romans and Videssians had been friends forever. They mingled easily, swapping names and stories. Marcus had no trouble continuing back to the barracks. A couple of dozen Videssians walked most of the way with the legionaries; every few blocks someone would think of a new song, and they would stop to sing it.

Once inside their hall at last, four of Scaurus’ men discovered their belt pouches had been slit. But even Gaius Philippus, who under most conditions would have gone charging back into the city after the thieves, took the loss philosophically. “It’s a small enough price to pay for dousing a riot,” he said.

“Small enough for you, maybe,” one of the robbed legionaries muttered, but so softly the centurion could not tell which. He snorted and gave them all an impartial glare.

“Sure and that was quick of you, to stop the shindy or ever it started,” Viridovix said to Scaurus. “Was your honor not afraid it might set the spalpeens off altogether?”

“Yes,” Marcus admitted, “but I didn’t think we would be much worse off if it did. There wasn’t time to reason with them, or much hope of it, for that matter—not with that madman of a monk egging them on. I thought I had to shock them, or make them laugh—by luck, I managed to do both at once. You helped a bit yourself, you know; you sing very well.”

“Don’t I, now?” the Celt agreed complacently. “Aye, there’s nothing
like a good tune to make a man forget the why of his ire. There’s some fine songs in this Videssian tongue, too. That first one I sang reminds me of a ditty I knew at home—kine-stealing’s almost a game with us, for pride and honor’s sake, and we’re fond of singing over it.

“Or we were,” he added bleakly. For a rare moment, he let Marcus see the loneliness he usually hid so well.

Touched, the tribune reached out to clasp his shoulder. “You’re among friends, you know,” he said. It was true—there was not a Roman who had anything but liking for their former foe.

Viridovix knew that, too. “Aye,” he said, tugging at his long mustaches, “and glad I am of it, but there’s times when it’s scarce enough.” He said something in his own tongue, then shook his head. “Even in my ears the Celtic speech grows strange.”

The riots against Namdalen began in earnest the next day, incited, as Marcus had feared, by the monks. The day was one sacred to Phos. Processions of worshippers marched through the streets carrying torches and gilded spheres and discs of wood as they hymned their god. As the tribune learned much later, one such parade was wending its way down Videssos’ chief thoroughfare—the locals, with their liking for simple names, called it Middle Street—when it happened to pass a small temple where the Namdaleni were celebrating the holiday with their own rites.

Seeing a party of islanders enter the schismatic chapel infuriated the monks heading the procession. “Root out the heretics!” they cried. This time no jests or soft words distracted their followers. Phos’ torches torched Phos’ temple; believer slew believer, believing him benighted. And when the Namdaleni sallied forth from their smoke, as brave men would, Videssian blood, too, crimsoned the cobbles of Middle Street.

The mob, made brave only by numbers, was rabid when a few from among those numbers fell. “Revenge!” they screamed, ignoring their own guilt, and went ravening through the city for Namdaleni to destroy. As riots will, this one quickly grew past its prime purpose. Burning, looting, and rape were sports too delightful to be reserved for the islanders alone; before long, the swelling mob extended their benefits to natives
of the city as well. Nevertheless, the men of the Duchy remained chief targets of the rioters’ attention.

The mob’s distant baying and the black pillars of smoke shooting into the sky brought news of the tumult to the Romans. Scaurus was always thankful the city did not erupt until noon, Phos’ most auspicious hour. The early-rising legionaries had already finished their drill and returned to the palace complex before the storm broke. It could have gone hard for them, trapped in a labyrinth the Videssian rioters knew far better than they.

At first Scaurus thought the outbreak minor, on the order of the one that had followed his own encounter with Avshar’s necromancy. A few battalions of native soldiers had sufficed to put down that disturbance. The tribune watched the Videssians tramping into action, armed for riot duty with clubs and blunt-headed spears. Within two hours they were streaming back in disarray, dragging dead and wounded behind them. Their smoke-blackened faces showed stunned disbelief. Beyond the palace complex, Videssos was in the hands of the mob.

Sending inadequate force against the rioters proved worse than sending none. The howling pack, buoyed up by the cheap victory, grew bolder yet. Marcus had gone up onto the roof of the Roman barracks to see what he could of the city and its strife; now he watched knots of ill-armed men pushing through the lush gardens of the palace quarter itself, on the prowl for robbery or murder.

Still far away but terribly clear, he could hear the mob’s battle cry: “Dig up the bones of the Namdaleni!” The call was a bit of lower-class city slang; when Videssos’ thieves and pimps were displeased with someone, they wished him an unquiet grave. If the Roman needed further telling, that rallying-cry showed him who the rioters were.

Scaurus put a maniple of battle-ready legionaries around his soldiers’ barracks. Whether the bared steel they carried deterred the mob or the Videssians simply had no quarrel with the Roman force, no rioters tested them.

Sunset was lurid; it seemed grimly appropriate for Phos’ symbol to be reduced to a ball of blood disappearing through thick smoke.

Like dragons’ tongues, flames licked into the night sky. In their island of calm the Romans passed the hours of darkness at full combat
alert. Marcus did not think the Videssians would use his men against the rioters, judging from their past practice, but he was not nearly so sure the mob would keep giving immunity to the legionaries.

The tribune stayed on his feet most of the night. It was long after midnight before he decided the barracks probably would not be attacked. He sought his pallet for a few hours of uneasy sleep.

One of his troopers roused him well before dawn. “What is it?” he asked blearily, only half-awake. Then he jerked upright as full memory returned. “Are we under assault?”

“No, sir. It’s almost too quiet, what with the ruction all around us, but there’s no trouble here. Nephon Khoumnos says he needs to speak with you; my officer thinks it sounds important enough for me to get you up. If you like, though, I’ll send him away.”

“Who’s out there? Glabrio?”

“Yes, sir.”

Marcus trusted that quiet young centurion’s judgment and discretion. “I’ll see Khoumnos,” he said, “but if you can, hold him up for a couple of minutes to let me get my wits together.”

“I’ll take care of it,” the legionary promised and hurried away. Scaurus splashed water on his face from the ewer by his bed, ran a comb through his sleep-snarled hair, and tried to shake a few of the wrinkles from his cloak before putting it on.

He could have omitted his preparations, sketchy as they were. When the Roman guardsman led Nephon Khoumnos into the barracks hall, a glance was enough to show that the Videssian officer was a man in the last stages of exhaustion. His usual crisp stride had decayed into a rolling, almost drunken gait; he seemed to be holding his eyes open by main force. With a great sigh, he collapsed into the chair the Romans offered him.

“No, no wine, thank you. If I drink I’ll fall asleep, and I can’t yet.” He yawned tremendously, knuckling his red-tracked eyes at the same time. “Phos, what a night!” he muttered.

When he sat without elaborating, Marcus prompted him, “How are things out there?”

“How do you think? They’re bad, very bad. I’d sooner be naked in a wood full of wolves than an honest man on the streets tonight. Being robbed is the best you could hope for; it gets worse from there.”

Gaius Philippus came up in time to hear him. Blunt as always, he said, “What have you been waiting for? It’s only a mob running wild, not an army. You have the men to squash it flat in an hour’s time.”

Khoumnos twisted inside his shirt of mail, as if suddenly finding its weight intolerable. “I wish things were as simple as you make them.”

“I’d better turn around,” Gaius Philippus said, “because I think you’re about to bugger me.”

“Right now I couldn’t raise a stand for the fanciest whore in the city, let alone an ugly old ape like you.” Khoumnos drew a bark of laughter from the senior centurion, but was abruptly sober again. “No more could I turn the army loose in the city. For one thing, too many of the men won’t try very hard to keep the mob from the Namdaleni—they have no use for the islanders themselves.”

“It’s a sour note when one part of your fornicating army won’t help the next,” Gaius Philippus said.

“That’s as may be, but it doesn’t make it any less true. It cuts both ways, though: the men of the Duchy don’t trust Videssian soldiers much further than they do any other Videssians.”