Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (85 page)

“Women,” Gaius Philippus said, as if the word was enough to explain everything.

“Only take the time to know ’em, Roman dear, and you’ll find ’em not so strange,” Viridovix retorted. “And they’re great fun besides—isn’t that right, my dears, my darlings?” He swept all three of them into his arms; the way they snuggled close spoke louder than any words of agreement.

Gaius Philippus did his best to stay impassive; Marcus was probably the only one who noticed his jaw jet, saw his eyes narrow and grow hard. The Celt’s teasing, this time, had struck deep, though Viridovix himself did not realize it. When the Celt opened his mouth for another sally, the tribune stepped on his foot.

“Ow! Bad cess to you, you hulking looby!” Viridovix exclaimed, hopping. “What was the point o’ that?”

Scaurus apologized and meant it; in his hurry, he’d trod harder than he intended.

“Well, all right then,” the Gaul said. He stretched luxuriantly. “Indeed and the shindy was not a bad way to be starting the evening, if a bit tame. Let’s be off to another tavern and do it ag—och, you black spalpeen, that was no accident!” The tribune had stepped on his other foot.

Viridovix bent down and flung a handful of snow in his face. Cheeks stinging and eyebrows frosted white, Marcus retaliated in kind—as did Helvis, who had taken some of the snow that missed the Roman. In an instant everyone was pelting everyone else, laughing and shouting and cheering each other on. Marcus was just as well pleased; a snowfight was safer than most things Viridovix reckoned entertainment.

Sitting secure in Videssos, it was easy to imagine the Empire still master of all its lands—or it would have been, had Scaurus not been wrestling with the imperial tax rolls. In his office he had a map of the westlands
showing the districts from which revenues had been collected. Most towns and villages in the coastal lowlands had little bronze pins stabbed through them, indicating that imperial agents had taken what was due from them. The central plateau, though, the natural settling ground for nomads like the Yezda, showed virtually a blank expanse of parchment. Worse, a finger of that same ominous blankness pushed east down the Arandos River valley toward Garsavra. If the town fell, it opened the way for the invaders to burst forward all the way to the shore of the Sailors’ Sea.

Baanes Onomagoulos was as well aware of the somber truth as the imperial finance ministry. The noble’s estates were hard by Garsavra, and his patience with Thorisin, never long, grew shorter with every report of a new Yezda advance.

The Emperor knew the reason for Onomagoulos’ constant reproaches and knew there was some justice to them. He bore them with more self-control than Marcus had thought he owned. He committed such aid as he could to the Arandos valley; more, in Scaurus’ eyes, than Videssos, threatened all through the westlands, could readily afford to spend there. But at every session of the imperial council Onomagoulos’ cry was always for more men.

Thorisin’s patience finally wore thin. About six weeks after the midwinter fest, he told his captious marshal, “Baanes, I am not made of soldiers, and Garsavra is not Videssos’ only weak point. The nomads are pushing out of Vaspurakan toward Pityos and they’re raiding in the westlands’ south as well. And the winter’s cold enough to freeze the Astris, so the Khamorth’ll likely poke south across it to see if we poke back. The company I sent west ten days ago will have to be the last.”

Onomagoulos ran his fingers up over the crown of his head, a gesture, Marcus guessed, born when hair still covered it. “Two hundred seventy-five men! Huzzah!” he said sourly. “How many Namdaleni, aye, and these other damned outlanders, too,” he added with a glance at Scaurus, “are sitting here in the city, eating like so many hogs?”

Drax answered with the cool mercenary’s logic Marcus had come to expect from the great count: “Why should his Majesty throw my men away in a fight they’re not suited for? We’re heavier-armed than you Videssians care to be. Most times we find it useful, but in deep snow we’re slow and floundering, easy meat for the nomads’ light horse.”

“The same is true of my men, but more so, for we aren’t mounted,” Marcus echoed.

The quarrel might have been smoothed over there, for Onomagoulos was a soldier and recognized the point the others made. But Soteric happened to be at the council instead of Utprand, who was ill with a coughing fever. Scaurus’ headstrong brother-in-law took offense at Baanes’ gibe at the Namdaleni and gave it back in kind. “Hogs, is it? You bloody cocksure snake, if you knew anything about nomads you wouldn’t have let yourself get trapped in front of Maragha. Then you wouldn’t be sitting here carping about the upshot of your own stupidity!”

“Barbarian bastard!” Onomagoulos shouted. His chair crashed over backward as he tried to leap to his feet; his hand darted for his sword hilt. But his crippled leg buckled, and he had to grab for the council table to keep from falling. He had taken the laming wound in the fight Soteric named, and the Namdalener laughed at him for it.

“Will you watch that polluted tongue of yours?” Scaurus hissed at him. Drax, too, put a warning hand on his arm, but Soteric shook it off. He and Utprand bore the count no love.

Onomagoulos regained his feet. His saber rasped free. “Come on, baseborn!” he yelled, almost beside himself with rage. “One leg’s plenty to deal with scum like you!”

Soteric surged up. Marcus and Drax, sitting on either side of him, started to grab his shoulders to haul him down again, but it was Thorisin’s battlefield roar of “Enough!” that froze everyone in place, Roman and great count no less than the combatants.

“Enough!” the Emperor yelled again, barely softer. “Phos’ light, the two of you are worse than a couple of brats fratching over who lost the candy. Mertikes, get Baanes’ chair—he seems to have mislaid it.” Zigabenos jumped to obey. “Now, the both of you sit down and keep still unless you’ve something useful to say.” Under his glower they did, Soteric a bit shamefaced but Onomagoulos still furious and making only the barest effort to hide it.

Speaking to Gavras as if to a small boy, the Videssian noble persisted, “Garsavra must have more troops, Thorisin. It is a very important city, both of itself and for its location.”

The Emperor bridled at that tone, which he had heard from Onomagoulos
for too many years. But he still tried for patience as he answered, “Baanes, I have given Garsavra twenty-five hundred men, at least. Along with the retainers you muster on your estates, surely enough warriors are there to hold back the Yezda till spring. They don’t fly over the snow themselves, you know; they slog through it like anyone else. When spring comes I intend to hit them hard, and I won’t piddle away my striking force a squad here and a company there until I have nothing left.”

Onomagoulos stuck out his chin; his pointed beard jutted toward Gavras. “The men are needed, I tell you. Will you not listen to plain sense?”

No one at the table wanted to meet Thorisin’s eye while he was being hectored so, but all gazes slid his way regardless. He said only, “You may not have them,” but there was iron in his voice.

Everyone heard the warning except Onomagoulos, whose angry frustration made him exclaim, “Your brother would have given them to me.”

Marcus wanted to disappear; had Baanes searched for a year, he could not have found a worse thing to say. Thorisin’s jealousy of the friendship between Mavrikios and Onomagoulos was painfully obvious. Imperial dignity forgotten, Gavras leaned forward, bellowing, “He’d have given you the back of his hand for your insolence, you toplofty runt!”

“Unweaned pup, your eyes aren’t open to see the world in front of your face!” Baanes was not yelling at the Avtokrator of the Videssians, but at his comrade’s tagalong little brother.

“Clod from a dungheap! You think your precious estates are worth more than the whole Empire!”

“I changed your diapers, puling moppet!” They shouted insults and curses at each other for a good minute, oblivious to anyone else’s presence. Finally Onomagoulos rose once more, crying, “There’s one more man Garsavra will have, by Phos! I won’t stay in the same city with you—the stench of you curdles my nose!”

“It’s big enough,” Thorisin retorted. “Good riddance; Videssos is well shut of you.”

By now, Scaurus thought, I should be used to the sight of people stalking out of Thorisin’s councils. Baanes Onomagoulos’ stalk was in
fact a limp, but the effect remained the same. As he reached the polished bronze doors of the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, he turned round for a final scowl at the Emperor, who replied with an obscene gesture. Onomagoulos spat on the floor, as Videssians did before wine and food to show their rejection of Skotos. He hobbled out into the snow.

“Where were we?” the Emperor said.

Marcus expected Baanes to be restored to Thorisin’s good graces; the Emperor’s temper ran high at flood but quickly ebbed. Onomagoulos’ anger, though, was of a more lasting sort. Two days after the stormy council he kept the promise he’d made there, sailing over the Cattle-Crossing and setting out for Garsavra.

“I mislike this,” the tribune said when he heard the news. “He’s flying in the face of the Emperor’s authority.” Though he was in the Roman barracks, he looked round before he spoke and then was low-voiced—the price of living in the Empire, he thought discontentedly.

“You’re right, I fear,” Gaius Philippus said. “If I were Gavras, I’d haul him back in chains.”

“The two of you make no sense,” Viridovix complained. “It was the Gavras who gave him leave to go—or ordered him, more like.”

“Ordered him to drop dead, perhaps,” Gorgidas said, “but not to go off and fight his own private war.” He lifted an ironic eyebrow at the Gaul. “When will you learn words can say one thing and mean another?”

“Och, you think you’re such a tricksy Greek. This I’ll tell you, though—if it was my home in danger, I’d go see to it, and be damned to any who tried to stop me, himself included.” The Gaul folded his arms across his chest, as if daring the doctor to disagree.

It was Gaius Philippus, though, who snorted at him. “Likely you would, and maybe lose your home and all your neighbors’ in the bargain. Think of yourself first and your mates last and that’s what happens. Why else do you think Caesar’s been able to fight one clan of Celts at a time?”

Viridovix gnawed at his drooping mustache; the senior centurion’s gibe was to the point. But he replied, “ ’Twon’t matter a bit in the end. Divided or no, we’ll be whipping the lot of you back home with your tails tucked into their grooves.”

“Not a chance,” Gaius Philippus said, and the old dispute began again. Ever since the Romans came to Videssos, he and Viridovix had been arguing over who would win the fighting in Gaul. They both took the question seriously, although—or perhaps because—they could never answer it.

Not much caring to listen, Marcus left for his desk in the pen-pushers’ wing of the Grand Courtroom. The problems there were new ones, but they did not seem to have solutions more definite than his friends’ debating topic.

Pandhelis fetched him ledgers and reports in an unending stream. They further confused issues about as often as they settled them. Videssian bureaucrats, with their rhetorical training, took pride in making their meaning as obscure as possible. Trying to thread his way through a thicket of allusions he barely understood, Scaurus wondered why he had ever wanted a political career.

He slept at his desk that night, stupefied by a pile of assessment documents written in a hand so tiny as to defy the eye. The legionaries were already at the practice field when he got back to the barracks. He walked down Middle Street to join them, breakfasting on a hard, square rye-flour roll dipped in honey, that he bought in the plaza of Palamas.

It was another chilly day, with little flurries of snow blowing through the streets. When the tribune came up to a bathhouse with an imposing façade of golden sandstone and white marble, his enthusiasm for practice abruptly disappeared. He wrestled his conscience to the mat and went in. Falling asleep to the press of work, he told himself, was enough to make anyone feel grimy.

The bathhouse’s owner took his copper at the door with a broad smile, waving him forward into the undressing chamber. He gave another copper to the boy there to make sure his clothes would not be stolen while he was bathing, then shed his sheepskin coat, tunic, and trousers with a sigh of relief.

The sounds of the bath drew him on. As was true at Rome, Videssian baths were as much social places as ones devoted to cleanliness. Hawkers of sausages, wine, and pastries were crying their wares; so was the hair-remover, for those men who affected such fastidiousness. He fell silent for a moment, then Scaurus heard his client yelp as he began to pluck an armpit.

Usually the tribune, with Stoic abstemiousness, limited himself to a cold bath, but after coming in out of the snow that was intolerable. He sweated for a while in the steam bath, baking the winter out. Then the cold plunge seemed attractive rather than self-tormenting. He climbed out of the pool when the icy water began to bite, stretching himself on the tiles to relax for a few minutes before going on to soak in the pleasantly warm pool beyond.

“Scrape you off, sir?” asked a youth with a curved strigil in his hand.

“Thank you, yes,” the tribune said; he’d brought along a little money for small luxuries like this, as it was next to impossible for a bather to scrape all of himself. He sighed at the pleasant roughness of the strigil sliding back and forth over his flesh.

Around him plump middle-aged men puffed as they exercised with weights. Masseurs pummeled grunting victims, now clapping hands down on their shoulders, now cupping them to produce an almost drumlike beat. Three young men played the Videssian game called
trigon
, throwing a ball unexpectedly from one to the next. They feinted and shouted; whenever one dropped the ball the other two would cry out as he lost a point. Off in a corner, a handful of more sedentary types diced the morning away.

There was a tremendous splash as someone leaped into the warm pool in the hall beyond, followed closely by cries of annoyance from the nearby people whom he’d drenched. The splasher came up not a whit dismayed. After blowing the water out of his mouth and nose, he started to sing in a resonant baritone.