Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (43 page)

The Romans were involved in little that deserved the name of fighting. The very heaviness of their panoplies, an advantage in close combat, made them slow and awkward on scaling ladders. The Emperor wisely did not use them thus until most danger was past. Khliat was largely in imperial hands by the time they entered it, a fact which brought advantages and disadvantages both. Their only casualty was a broken foot suffered when a legionary tripped and fell down a flight of stairs, but they found little loot, and some grumbled.

“Men are fools to complain over such things,” Gorgidas remarked, bandaging the injured soldier’s foot. “Think how much more booty there would be if the Yezda had killed everyone who got into the city before us, and how sorry we should be to have it.”

Gaius Philippus said, “For a man who’s followed the army a while, you’re trusting as a child. Most of these lads’d cheerfully sell their mothers if they thought the old gals would fetch more than two coppers apiece.”

“You may be right,” Gorgidas sighed, “though I still like to think otherwise.” Turning back to the Roman with the fracture, he said, “If you can, stay off that foot for three weeks. If you put your weight on it before it’s healed, it may pain you for years. I’ll change the dressings day after tomorrow.”

“I thank you kindly,” the legionary said. “I feel like a twit, falling over my own feet like that.”

Gorgidas checked to make sure the bandage was not tight enough to
risk necrosis in the Roman’s foot. “Enjoy your rest while you can get it—you’ll be back at your trade too soon to suit you, I promise you that.”

The bravado of the Yezda cracked when it became plain they could not hold Khliat. They began surrendering, first one by one and then in groups, and were herded together like cattle in the city’s marketplace. Some of the Videssians crowding round wanted to massacre the lot of them, but Mavrikios would hear none of it. In the glow of victory he was prepared to be merciful.

He threw a cordon of Halogai and Romans around the prisoners, then ordered the defeated enemy’s common soldiers disarmed and sent back to Soli under guard. There they could await disposition until he had finished beating their countrymen. Most of them fought for Yezd instead of Videssos only because their wanderings first brought them to that land.

The chieftains were another matter. They knew full well the master they served and did so with open eyes. Yet their choice of overlord did not make the Yezda officers any less dauntless. Mavrikios came up to their commander, who was sitting dejectedly on the ground not far from where Marcus stood.

That captain and a handful of men had holed up in a house and would not yield until the Videssians threatened to burn it over their heads. Looking at him now, Scaurus did not think him wholly of the steppe blood, as were most of the warriors he led. He was more slimly built and finer of feature than they, with large liquid eyes; perhaps there were native Makuraners in his ancestry.

Thorisin Gavras was at his brother’s side. “Rise for the Emperor, you!” he barked.

The Yezda did not move. “Were our positions reversed, I do not think he would rise for me,” he said. His Videssian was fluent and almost without accent.

“Why, you impudent—” The Sevastokrator was furious, but Mavrikios checked him with a gesture. Not for the first time, Marcus saw the respect the Emperor gave forthrightness.

Mavrikios looked down at his captive. “Were our places reversed, what would you do with me?”

The Yezda stared back unflinchingly. He thought for a moment, then said, “I believe I would have you whipped to death.”

“Keep a civil tongue in your head, filth!” said Zeprin the Red, hefting his axe. The Haloga officer tolerated the Romans treating Mavrikios with less than due ceremony; they were, after all, allies. This insolence from a prisoner he would not stomach.

The Emperor was unperturbed. He told the Yezda commander, “I will not be as harsh as you. You are a brave man—will you not renounce the evil you followed and join us in rooting it out?”

Something flickered in the Yezda’s expressive eyes. Perhaps it was temptation. Whatever it was, it was gone before Marcus was sure he’d seen it. “I can no more foreswear myself than you could, were you sitting in this dust,” the officer said, and won grudging nods of approval from both Thorisin Gavras and Zeprin the Red.

“As you wish,” Mavrikios said. The quality of the man he faced made the Emperor eager to win him to his side. “I will not cast you in prison, though I will ship you to an island for safekeeping until I’ve beaten your khagan and his sorcerous minister. Then, maybe, your mind will change.”

Scaurus thought the Yezda was, if anything, being treated too leniently, but the man only shrugged. “What you do to me does not matter. Avshar will dispose of me as he pleases.”

The Emperor grew irritated for the first time. “You are under my control now, not your wizard-prince’s.” The Yezda shrugged again. Mavrikios spun angrily on his heel and strode away.

The next morning he sent men to take charge of the officer and ship him east. They found him dead, his lips burned from the poison he had swallowed. His stiff fist still clutched a tiny glass vial.

The news raised an unpleasant question in Marcus’ mind. Had the Yezda killed himself for fear of the vengeance he thought Avshar would take on him, or was his suicide itself that vengeance? The implications were distasteful in either case.

Despite the questionable omen, the next two weeks went well for the imperial forces. Using Khliat as a base of operations, Mavrikios captured
several other Yezda-held towns: Ganolzak and Shamkanor to the north, Baberd in the southeast, and Phanaskert due south of Khliat.

None of them put up a prolonged or difficult resistance. The Yezda were far more formidable on horseback than confined inside city walls, and the Videssian siege train proved its worth time and again. Moreover, the Vaspurakaners inside the towns hated their nomadic oppressors and betrayed them to the imperial forces at every opportunity. Large numbers of prisoners went trudging unhappily into the east; Videssian garrisons took their place.

Marcus noticed that Mavrikios Gavras was using troops of doubtful worth or loyalty to hold the newly captured cities, and appointing as garrison commanders officers whose allegiance he suspected. Gaius Philippus saw the same thing. He said, “He’s stripping us down for the real action, right enough. Better to put the fainthearts where they might be useful than have them turn tail and run when he really needs them.”

“I suppose so,” Marcus agreed. Still, he could not help recalling the grief he’d come to by dividing his Romans on riot duty in Videssos.

Phanaskert was a good-sized city, though badly depopulated by the raids of the Yezda and their occupation. When Mavrikios took the rest of his forces back to Khliat, he left more than half his Namdaleni behind to hold the town’s long circuit of walls against possible counterattack from the west.

Soteric was one of the islanders ordered to garrison duty. He invited his sister and Scaurus to share an evening meal with him before the bulk of the Videssian army returned to its base. Over captured Vaspurakaner wine—even thicker and sweeter than Videssian vintages—the Namdalener said to Marcus, “You see now what I meant outside the Emperor’s tent. By one trick or another, Mavrikios finds ways to be rid of us.”

Pretending not to take his meaning, the tribune answered, “Are you unhappy with your assignment? Holding a town from the inside strikes me as softer duty than fighting your way into one.”

Soteric exhaled in exasperation at the Roman’s dullness, but Helvis was coming to know him well enough to realize when he was dissembling. She said, “Must you always speak the Emperor fair? You have to see that the only reason he has for using the men of the Duchy so is his fear for our faithfulness.”

Marcus usually dismissed Soteric’s complaints over the Emperor’s policies as the products of a slightly obsessed mind, but the more he thought about this one, the more likely it seemed. He knew Mavrikios thought along the lines Soteric was sketching; the Emperor had said as much himself, when talking of Ortaias Sphrantzes.

The tribune suddenly laughed out loud. Even people who always thought themselves persecuted could be right sometimes.

The joke fell flat when he made the mistake of trying to explain it.

Scaurus was drilling his men outside the walls of Khliat when he spied a horseman approaching the town from out of the west. “A nomad he is, from the look of him,” Viridovix said, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun. “Now, will he be one of ours, or a puir lone Yezda struck from his wits by the heat and out to kill the lot of us at once?”

The rider was not hostile. He had ridden long and hard; his horse was lathered and blowing, and caked sweat and dust begrimed his clothes. Even so, he was so urgent to deliver his news that he reined in as he came up to the exercising Romans. He gave Marcus a tired wave that was evidently meant as a salute.

“Artapan son of Pradtak I am, a scout of Baan Onomag’s army,” he said, clipping the general’s name in plainsman fashion. “I am not of the west—our watchword is ‘Phos’ light.’ ”

Onomagoulos had pushed west ten days before with a quarter of Mavrikios’ remaining troops to seize the city of Maragha, which sat athwart the army’s way into Yezd. “What word do you bring?” the tribune asked.

“Water first, I beg. This past half-day I rode with dry canteen,” Artapan said, showing Marcus the empty waterskin at his belt. He swallowed the warm stale water from Scaurus’ canteen as if it were chilled wine of ancient vintage, then wiped his mouth. “May the spirits be kind to you for that. Now you must take me into the city—Onomag is attacked, is pinned down less than a day’s march from Maragha. We cannot go forward; no more can we go back. Without more men, we perish.”

“Awfully bloody eager, isn’t he?” Gaius Philippus said suspiciously.
“If I were setting a trap, he’s sprouting the very story I’d use to send an army running pell-mell into it.”

Marcus considered. The Yezda might well have had the chance to pick off an outrider and torture the password from him. Still—“There must be men inside Khliat who know this fellow, if he is in imperial service. He’d be a fool to think he wouldn’t have his story checked. And if it’s true—if it’s true,” the tribune said slowly, “then Mavrikios has done just what he hoped he would, and made the Yezda stand and fight.”

In some excitement, he turned back to Artapan, but the nomad was no longer there. Impatient with the colloquy in a language he did not understand—for both the centurion and Scaurus had spoken Latin—he had booted his horse into a worn-out trot for the city.

“Out of our hands now,” Gaius Philippus said, not altogether displeased at being relieved of the responsibility of choice. “Still, it’s as you say—Mavrikios is too canny by half to sit down without looking first to see whether he’s plunking his tail onto an anthill.”

That the Emperor took Artapan’s message seriously soon became clear. Marcus had been back from drills less than an hour when an orderly summoned him to an urgent officer’s council.

“The Khamorth
is
genuine, then, sir,” Quintus Glabrio guessed. The same enthusiasm that had gripped the tribune before was now beginning to run through his men.

Doing his best to present the calm front befitting a senior officer, Scaurus shrugged, saying merely, “We’ll know soon enough, either way.”

For all his efforts at impassiveness, he could not help feeling a tingle of excitement when he saw Artapan Pradtak’s son seated close by the Emperor in what had been the main hall of Khliat’s
hypasteos
or city governor. Another nomad, this one with a bandaged shoulder, was next to Artapan.

Scaurus and Gaius Philippus slid into chairs. Their curiosity, fired by the earlier meeting with the Khamorth scout, made them among the firstcomers. Their seats were the light folding type of canvas and wood, obviously from the imperial camp, not part of the hall’s original furnishing.

The table at which they sat was something else again, being massively
built from some heavy dark wood and looking as if it had held its place for centuries. It had the stamp of a Vaspurakaner product, calling to mind Gagik Bagratouni’s fortress of a dwelling back in Amorion. The “princes” had become so used to life at bay that their very arts reflected their constant search for protection and strength.

The Yezda must have used the
hypasteos’
office as their headquarters before the Videssians drove them from Khliat, for the table was scarred with swordcuts and crude carvings. One symbol recurred constantly: twin three-pronged lightning bolts. Marcus thought nothing of them until Nephon Khoumnos sat down beside him and cursed when he saw them. “Filthy swine,” he said, “putting Skotos’ brand everywhere they go.” The tribune remembered the dark icon in Avshar’s suite at the capital and nodded in understanding.

Mavrikios brusquely called the meeting to order by slamming his palm down on the table. The low-voiced buzz of conversation disappeared. Without further preamble, the Emperor declared, “Baanes Onomagoulos has run into a nestful of Yezda a bit this side of Maragha. Without help, he says, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to hold out for long.”

Heads jerked up in surprise—the Emperor had not announced the purpose of the meeting he was calling. Marcus felt smug at not being caught unawares.

“How did you learn that?” someone asked.

Gavras pointed to the nomad scouts. “You can thank these two—they slipped through the invaders to bring word. Spatakar”—That was the bandaged Khamorth—“came in just now with a written report of situation from Onomagoulos. The seals it bears have been checked—they’re genuine. Not only that, both Spatakar and his fellow Artapan here are well known to their clansmen here in Khliat. This has also been checked. In short, gentlemen, this is what we’ve waited for.”

Gaius Philippus touched Marcus’ arm and whispered, “You were right.” He need not have been so discreet. The whole room was in an uproar, with everyone talking at once, some exclaiming to their neighbors, others shouting questions at the Emperor.