Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (11 page)

“Fine country,” Soteric repeated. “Too muggy in summer to be perfect, but the land’s fruitful enough to grow feathers on an egg. I can see what was in Drax’ mind when he decided to take it for his own.” He paused a moment, ran his fingers through his light-brown hair, almost the same color as Helvis’. Unlike many of his countrymen, he had a full head; he did not crop the back of his skull. “By the Wager, I wouldn’t mind settling here myself one day.”

He looked down at Scaurus from horseback, studying him. His eyes might be the same blue as his sister’s, the tribune thought, but they had none of her warmth. His high-arched nose put an imperious cast on all his features.

“No?” the Roman said, watching his brother-in-law as closely as he was being watched. Picking his words with care, he went on, “You don’t want to go back to the Duchy? Would you sooner take a farm here when your time with the Empire is done?”

“Aye, when my time is done,” Soteric said, chuckling silently. He kept scanning the tribune’s face. “That may not be so long now.”

Marcus did his best to hold a mask of bland innocence. “Really? I thought you’d taken service for a good many years—as I have.” He looked the Namdalener in the eye.

Soteric grimaced; his mouth thinned in irritation. “Well, I may be wrong,” he said. He jabbed his spurs into his horse’s flank so roughly that it started and tried to rear. He fought it down. Wheeling sharply, he trotted away. The tribune watched him go, full of misgivings. He wondered whether Utprand could hold the younger man in check—or whether he intended to try.

Sunset painted the western sky with blood. Somewhere in a nearby copse an owl, awake too soon, hooted mournfully. The army came to a halt and made camp. Confident they were still in friendly country, the Videssians and Namdaleni built sketchy palisades and ran up their tents higgledy-piggledy inside them. The Khamorth outriders were even less orderly; they stopped where they chose, to rejoin their comrades in the morning.

The legionaries’ camp, by contrast, was the usual Roman field fortification, made as automatically in safe territory as when an enemy was on their heels. Gaius Philippus chose a defensible spot with good water; after that the troopers carried on for themselves. Each man had his assigned duty, which never varied. Some dug out a protective ditch in the shape of a square; others piled the excavated dirt into a rampart; still others planted on the earthwork sharp stakes they carried along for that reason. Inside the campground, the legionaries’ eight-man tents went up in neat blocks, maniple by maniple, leaving wide streets between them.

No one grumbled at the work that went into a camp, even though it might only be used once and then abandoned forever. To the Romans, such fieldworks were second nature. The men who filled their ranks, for their part, had seen the legionary encampment’s value too many times to care to risk getting by with less.

So, for that matter, had Laon Pakhymer and his Khatrishers. Marcus was glad to invite them to share the campsite; they had done so often enough after Maragha. Moreover, they helped cheerfully with the work of setting up. Although not as practiced as the legionaries, they did not shirk.

“They’re a sloppy lot,” Gaius Philippus said, watching two Khatrisher privates get into a noisy argument with one of their officers. The shouting match, though, did not keep the three of them from filling a shield with dirt and hauling it to the rampart, then trotting back to do it again. The senior centurion scratched his head. “I don’t see how they get the job done, but they do.”

Khatrisher sentries kept small boys away from their strings of cantankerous little horses. Scaurus was not overjoyed at the presence of women and children in the camp, nor had he ever been. He was more adaptable than Gaius Philippus, but even to him it seemed almost too un-Roman to endure. Two summers before, he had excluded them as the legionaries marched west against the Yezda. But after Maragha’s disaster, safety counted for more than Roman custom. And it was little harder to turn cheese back into milk than to revoke a privilege once granted.

The tribune’s tent was on the main camp road, the
via principalis
, halfway between the eastern and western gates. Outside it, as Scaurus got there, Malric was playing with a small striped lizard he had caught. He seemed to be enjoying the sport more than the lizard did. “Hello, Papa,” he said, looking up. The lizard scuttled away and was gone before he thought about it again. He promptly began to cry and kept right on even after Marcus picked him up and spun him in the air. “I want my lizard back!”

As if in sympathy, Dosti started crying inside the tent. Helvis emerged, looking vexed. “What are you wail—” she began angrily, then stopped in surprise when she saw the tribune. “Hello, darling; I didn’t hear you come up. What’s the fuss about?”

Marcus explained the tragedy. “Come here, son,” she said, taking
Malric from him. “I can’t give you your lizard,” she said, adding parenthetically, “Phos be praised.” Malric did not hear that; he was crying louder than ever. Helvis went on, “Would you rather have a candied plum, or even two?”

Malric thought it over. A year ago, Scaurus knew, he would have screeched “No!” and kept howling. But after a few seconds he said, “All right,” punctuating it with a hiccup.

“That’s a good boy,” Helvis said, drying his face on her skirt. “They’re inside; come with me.” She sighed. “Then I’ll see if I can quiet Dosti down.” Cheerful again, Malric darted into the tent. Helvis and Marcus followed.

Though commander, Marcus did not carry luxuries on campaign. Apart from sleeping-mats, the only furniture in the tent was Dosti’s crib, a collapsible table, and a folding chair made out of canvas and sticks. Helvis’ portable altar to Phos sat on the grass, as did the little pine chest that held her private tidbits. Scaurus’, of darker wood, was beside it.

Helvis opened her chest to get Malric his sweets, then rocked Dosti in her arms and sang him to sleep. Her rich voice was smooth and gentle in a lullaby. “That wasn’t so bad,” she said in relief as she carefully put the baby back in the crib. Scaurus lit a clay olive-oil lamp with flint and steel and marked the day’s march on the sketch-map he carried with him.

After Malric had gone to sleep, Helvis said, “My brother told me he talked with you today.”

“Did he?” the tribune said without inflection. He wrote a note on the map, first in Latin and then, more slowly, in Videssian. So Soteric had ridden back to the women, had he?

“Aye.” Helvis watched him with an odd mixture of excitement, hope, and apprehension. “He said I should remind you of the promise you made me in Videssos last year.”

“Did he?” Scaurus said again. He winced; he could not help it. When Gavras’ siege of the city looked to be failing, he had been on the point of joining the Namdaleni in abandoning the Emperor and traveling back to the Duchy. Only Zigabenos’ coup against Ortaias kept the stroke from coming off. Helvis, he knew, had been more disappointed than not when, after unexpected victory, the Namdaleni and Romans stayed in imperial service.

“Yes, he did.” Determination thinned her full lips until her mouth was as hard as her brother’s. “I was a soldier’s woman before you, too, Marcus; I knew you could not do what you planned—” Scaurus grimaced again; it had not been his plan. “—once Thorisin sat the throne. Too often we do what we must, not what we want. But here is the chance come again, finer than before!”

“What chance is that?”

Her eyes glowed with anger. “You are no witling, dear, and you play one poorly. The chance to be our own again, at the call of no foreign heretic master. And better yet, the chance to take a new realm, like the founding heroes in the minstrels’ songs.”

She had it, too, the tribune thought, the Namdalener lust for Videssian land. “I don’t know why you’re so eager to pick the Empire’s bones,” he said. “It’s brought peace and safety to a great stretch of this world for so many years I grow dizzy thinking of them. It’s base to leap on its back when it’s wounded, like a wildcat onto a deer with a broken leg. Tell me, would you islanders do better?”

“Maybe not,” she said, and Scaurus had to admire her honesty. “But by the Wager, we deserve the chance to try! Videssos’ blood runs thin and cold; only her skill at trickery has kept us from what’s ours by right for so long.”

“By what right?”

She stepped forward, her right arm moving. Marcus raised his hands to catch a blow, but she seized his sword hilt instead. “By this one!” she said fiercely.

“The same argument the Yezda use,” he said; her fingers came away from the blade as if it had burned her. He hitched it away; he did not want anyone but himself touching this sword. “And how would you deal with
them
, here in your new Namdalen?”

In his mind’s eye he saw ceaseless petty wars: islander against Yezda, Videssians against nomads, two against one, alliances, betrayals, ambushes, surprise attacks, and the guiltless, prosperous farmers and townsmen of the westlands ground to powder under the iron horseshoes of endlessly marching armies. The picture revolted him, but Avshar, he knew, would laugh at it in chill delight.

He said that and watched Helvis flinch. “The trouble with your
brother, and what makes him deadly dangerous,” he went on, “is that he has enough imagination to be ruthless, but not enough to see the ruin his ruthlessness will cause.” Seeing her outrage, he went on quickly, “This is all quarreling over the reflection of a bone anyhow. It’s not Soteric who heads the Namdaleni, but Utprand.”

“Utprand? Talk of cold, will you? Utprand eats ice and breathes fog.” Her scorn weakened but could not destroy the aptness of the image. A startled laugh jerked from Scaurus.

Helvis was still watching him, with the air of someone studying a waterclock that had once worked but now refused to run. “Tell me one thing,” she said. “How is it, if you love this Empire so much—” The scorn was there in her voice again. “—that you would have gone to Namdalen last year?”

Marcus remembered his Stoic teacher, a consumptive Greek named Timanor, wheezing, “If it’s not right, boy, don’t do it; if it’s not true, don’t say it.” Timanor or no, he wished he had a lie handy.

Because he did not, he sighed and followed his master’s advice. “Because then I thought my staying would make the war between Thorisin and Ortaias longer and worse, and help tear Videssos to pieces.”

Even in the lamplight he saw the color fade from her cheeks. “Because it would tear Videssos—?” she whispered, as if the words were in some language she did not understand well. “Videssos?” Her voice rose like the tide. “Videssos? Not a thought for me, not a thought for the children, but this moldy, threadbare Empire?”

She was almost screaming; Dosti and Malric both woke, frightened, and began to cry. “Go away, get out!” she shouted at Scaurus. “I don’t want to look at you, you flint-hearted, scheming marplot!”

“Out? This is my tent,” the tribune said reasonably, but Helvis was furious far past reason.

“Get out!” she screamed again, and this time she did swing at him. He threw up his arms; her nails clawed his wrist. He swore, grabbed her hands, and tried to hold her still, but it was like holding a lioness. He pushed her away and strode into the night.

Few legionaries met his eye as he walked past the row of officers’ tents. The same thing had happened to some of them, but they did not have a commander’s dignity to protect.

Gaius Philippus was talking with a couple of sentries at the palisade. “Thought you’d turned in,” he said when he saw the tribune.

“Argument.”

“So I see.” The senior centurion whistled softly, spying the deep scratches on Marcus’ arm. “You can doss with me tonight, if you care to.”

“Thanks. Later, maybe.” Marcus was too keyed up from the fight to want to sleep.

“I hope you flattened her?”

The tribune knew his lieutenant was trying to show sympathy, but the rough advice did not help. “No,” he answered, “it was my fault at least as much as hers.”

Gaius Philippus snorted, unbelieving, but Scaurus tasted his own words’ bitter truth. He went off to pace round the perimeter of the camp. He knew his past actions had let Helvis—and Soteric with her—believe he would take the islanders’ side against the Empire. Saying otherwise would only have touched off a quarrel, and he had thought the question would never arise.

And now he had question and quarrel both, both of them worse for his tacit untruth. He laughed without mirth. Old Timanor proved no donkey after all.

“You snore,” the tribune accused Gaius Philippus the next morning.

“Do I?” The veteran bit into an onion. “Well, who’s to care?”

Sandy-eyed, Scaurus watched the legionaries break camp, watched their women, chattering with each other, make their way back to their place in the center of the army’s line of march. Helvis was already gone; his tent had seemed strangely deserted when he knocked it down. He wondered if she would be back or choose to stay with Soteric and her own people.

It was good to forget such worries as his soldiers shook themselves out into traveling order. Straightforward questions yielded straightforward answers: Blaesus’ maniple should march in front of Bagratouni’s Vaspurakaners, not behind them; this road looked better than that one; Quintus Eprius should lose three days’ pay for gambling with loaded dice.

A Khamorth scout came trotting back past the legionaries toward Mertikes Zigabenos, whose Videssians brought up the rear of the column. In a few minutes another rode by. Wondering if something was in the wind, Marcus called after him. The nomad ignored his hail. “Bastard,” Gaius Philippus said.

“We’ll find out soon enough, anyway.”

“I know,” the senior centurion answered gloomily.

An hour or so later, he squinted down the road and said, “Hello! I don’t remember passing
that
the last time we were on our way to Garsavra.” The veteran’s scowl deepened with every forward step he took. “It’s a bloody fornicating fortress, that’s what it is.”

The castle sat athwart the main road south; if the imperial army was to go any farther, it would have to be dealt with. As the legionaries approached, Scaurus watched Namdalener defenders running about on the palisade, and others atop the tower inside. Thin in the distance, he heard the islanders shouting to each other.