Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (70 page)

However hardened they had grown to the saddle, neither Viridovix
nor Gorgidas could endure with the Arshaum, who rode as soon as they could walk. The long, hard ride chafed the physician’s thighs raw and left the Celt’s fundament sore as if he had been kicked. They both groaned as their horses jounced over a low rise and pounded toward another stream.

The drumming thunder of hoofbeats sent a cloud of waterfowl flapping skyward—ducks, geese, and orange-billed swans, whose great wings made a thunder of their own. Birds fell as the nomads started shooting at long range, but again it seemed almost all would evade the arrows.

Gorgidas saw Tolui’s devil-masked face turn toward Arghun. The khagan made a short, chopping motion with his right hand. The shaman began to chant; both arms moved in quick passes. He guided his horse with the pressure of his knees alone. A rider in the Greek’s world would have been hard-pressed to stay in the saddle thus, but stirrups made it easy for the Arshaum.

Black clouds boiled up over the stream as soon as his spell began, come from nowhere out of a clear sky. A squall of rain, a veritable curtain of water, pelted the escaping birds. It had been only seconds since they took flight, now the sudden deluge smashed them back to earth. Gorgidas heard squawks of terror through the sorcerous storm’s hiss.

As quickly as it had blown up, the rain stopped. Water birds lay all along the banks of the stream, some with broken wings, others half drowned, still others simply too stunned to fly. Raising a cheer for Tolui, the plainsmen swooped down on them. They clubbed and shot and slashed, grabbing up bird after bird.

“Roast duck!” Goudeles cried with glee as he bagged a green-winged teal. He thumbed his nose at Viridovix. “You’ll not hear that panegyric now!”

“No, nor miss it either,” the Gaul retorted. Skylitzes gave a single sharp snort of laughter.

They splashed through the muck Tolui’s storm had made. With a glance at the westering sun, Arghun picked up the pace. “We will need daylight for the final killing,” he called. His riders passed the word along.

Then Gorgidas heard cheers from the far left end of the line, where scouts stretched out ahead of the main band of hunters. A few minutes later they sounded from the right as well—Irnek’s half of the army was in sight. Moving with the smooth precision experience brings, the horsemen
on the flanks galloped forward from both parties to enclose the space between and finally trap all the animals in it.

That space grew smaller and smaller as the two lines approached. The beasts within were pressed ever more tightly: wolves, foxes, wildcats, rabbits bouncing underfoot, deer, wild asses, sheep, a few cows, goats. The nomads relentlessly plied them with arrows, pulling one quiverload after another from their saddlebags. The din, with the yelps and screeches and brays of wounded animals mixed with the frightened howls and lowing of those not yet hit and with the hunters’ cries, was indescribable.

Driven, hunted, and jammed together as they were, the terrified creatures’ reactions were nothing like they would have been in more normal circumstances. They ran this way and that in confused waves, seeking an escape they could not find. And some were desperate enough to surge out against the yelling, waving riders who ringed them all around.

A stag sprang between Gorgidas and Viridovix and was gone, bounding over the plain in great frightened leaps. Arigh whirled in the saddle to fire after it, but missed. Then he and everyone around him cursed in fury as a hundred panicked onagers made a shambles of the hunting line. Other animals of every sort swarmed through the gap.

Agathias Psoes’ horse was bowled over when a fleeing wild ass ran headlong into it. The Videssian underofficer sprang free as his mount crashed to the ground, then leaped for his life to dodge another onager. Only the knowledge he had earned with years on the steppe saved him. He frantically laid about him, yelling as loud as he could to make the stampeding beasts take him for an obstacle to be avoided and not a mere man ripe for the trampling. It worked, they streamed past him on either side. When an Arshaum rode close, he clambered up behind the nomad.

Guiding his pony with a skill he had not thought he owned, Gorgidas managed to evade the onagers. He was congratulating himself when Batbaian shouted a warning. The Greek turned his head to find a wolf, a huge shaggy pack leader, bounding his way. It sprang straight for him, jaws agape.

His months of weapon drill proved their worth; before he had time to think, he was thrusting at the snarling beast’s face. But his horse could not endure the wolf’s onset. It bucked in terror, ruining his stroke. Instead
of stabbing through the wolf’s palate and into its brain, his
gladius
scored a bloody line down its muzzle, just missing a blazing yellow eye.

The wolf bayed horribly and leaped again. An arrow whistled past Gorgidas’ cheek, so close he felt the wind of its passage. It sank between the wolf’s ribs. The beast twisted in midair, snapping at the protruding shaft. Bloody foam started from its mouth and nostrils. Two more arrows pierced it as it writhed on the ground; it jerked and died.

“Good shot!” Gorgidas called, looking round to see who had loosed the first arrow. Dizabul waved back at him; he too was busy fighting to keep his mount under control. The Greek tried to read the expression on the prince’s too-handsome face, and failed. Then Dizabul caught sight of a gray fox darting away and spurred after it, reaching behind him for another arrow to fit to his bow.

“Well, what about it?” Goudeles asked the physician a few minutes later, when the breakout was contained. The bureaucrat somehow managed to look jaunty even though his face was gray-brown with dust and tracked by streams of sweat. He gave Gorgidas a conspiratorial wink.

“What about what?” the Greek said, his mind back on the hunt.

“You don’t play the innocent well,” Goudeles told him; he had the Videssian gift for spotting duplicity whether it was there or not. But when he said, “Tell me you weren’t wondering whether that shaft was meant for the wolf or you,” Gorgidas had to toss his head in a Hellenic no. Dizabul had no reason to love him. He had backed Bogoraz until Gorgidas foiled the Yezda’s try at poisoning his father; his pride suffered for finding himself so drastically in the wrong. Then, too, he might well have become khagan if the poisoning had succeeded.…

“You’re not wrong,” Gorgidas admitted. The pen-pusher wet his finger and drew a tally-mark in the air, pleased at his own cleverness.

As the light began to fail, the nomads opened their lines and let the trapped beasts they had not slain escape. They dismounted, drove off the gathering carrion birds, and set about butchering their kills. “Faugh!” said Viridovix, wrinkling his nose. The slaughterhouse stench oppressed Gorgidas, too, but it was hardly worse than battlefields he had known.

The Arshaum set fires blazing in long straight trenches and began to smoke as much of the meat as they could. Arghun hobbled from one
to the next with Irnek, supervising the job. “A pity our women and yurts aren’t here,” Gorgidas heard him say.

“Aye, it is,” the younger plainsman agreed. “So many hides, so much bone and sinew wasted because we haven’t time to deal with them as we should.” Steppe life was harsh; not making the greatest possible use of everything they came across went against the nomads’ grain.

While the sweaty work went on, the hunters carved off choice gobbets and roasted them for their day’s meal. “Not a bit peckish, are they now?” Viridovix said, between bites of the plump goose he’d taken.

“You do pretty well yourself,” Gorgidas replied, gnawing on a leg from the same bird; the Celt had a good-sized pile of bones in front of him. But he was right; the nomads out-ate him without effort. Used to privation, they made the most of plenty when they had it. Seeing them somehow gulp down huge chunks of half-cooked meat reminded the Greek of a time when, as a boy, he had watched a small snake engulfing a large mouse.

Batbaian ate by himself, his back to the fires. As Gorgidas’ emptiness faded and he began to be able to think of other things than food, he got up to invite the Khamorth over to talk. When Viridovix saw where he was going, he reached out and held the physician back. “Let the lad be,” he said quietly.

Irritated, Gorgidas growled, “What’s your trouble? He’ll be happier here than brooding all alone.”

“That’s not so at all, I’m thinking. Unless I miss my guess, the blazes are after reminding him o’ the ones Avshar used to snare him. That they do me, and I wasna caught by ’em. If he has somewhat to say, he’ll be by, and never you fret over that.”

The Greek sat down again. “You may be right. You said something of the same thing to Arigh a few days ago, didn’t you?” He eyed Viridovix curiously. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be so careful of another’s feelings.”

Viridovix toyed with his mustaches, as if wondering whether his manhood was questioned. He finally said, “Hurting a body without call is Avshar’s sport, and after a bit o’ him, why, I’ve fair lost the stomach for it.”

“You’re growing up at last,” Gorgidas said, to which the Celt only snorted in derision. The physician thought of something else. “If Avshar
somehow does not know how large an army has crossed into Pardraya, these fires will give us away.”

“He knows,” Viridovix said with gloomy certainty. “He knows.”

Coincidence or not, two days later a Khamorth rode into the Arshaum camp under sign of truce, a white-painted shield hung from a lance. As he was brought before Arghun and his councilors, he looked about with an odd blend of arrogance laid over fear. He would flinch when the Arshaum scowled at him, then suddenly straighten and glower back, seeming to remember the might he himself represented.

Certainly his bow before the khagan was perfunctory enough to fetch black looks from the plainsmen. He ignored them, asking in his own language, “Does anyone here speak this tongue and yours both?”

“I do.” Skylitzes took a long step forward.

The Khamorth blinked at finding an imperial at Arghun’s side, but recovered well. He was perhaps forty-five, not handsome but shrewd-looking, with eyes that darted every which way. Half of one of his ears was missing. By steppe standards, he wore finery; his cap was sable, his wolfskin jacket trimmed with the same fur, his fringed trousers of softest buckskin. A red stone glittered in the heavy gold ring on his right forefinger; his horse’s trappings were ornamented with polished jet.

“Well, farmer,” he said, putting Skylitzes in his place with the nomad’s easy contempt for folk who lived a settled life, “tell the Arshaum I am Rodak son of Papak, and I come to him from Varatesh, grand khagan of the Royal Clan and master of all the clans of Pardraya.”

The Videssian officer frowned at the insult, but began to translate. Batbaian broke in, shouting, “You filthy bandit, you drop dung through your mouth when you call Varatesh a khagan, or his renegades a clan!” He would have sprung for Rodak, but a couple of Arshaum grabbed him by the shoulders and held him back.

Rodak had presence; he looked down his prominent nose at Batbaian, as if noticing him for the first time. Turning back to Arghun, he said, “So you have one of the outlaws along, do you? Well, I will make nothing of it; he’s been marked as he deserves.”

“Outlaw, is it?” Batbaian said, twisting in the grip of the Arshaum.
“What did your clan, your
real
clan, outlaw
you
for, Rodak? Was is man-slaying, or stealing from your friends, or just buggering a goat?”

“What I was is of no account,” Rodak said coolly; Skylitzes translated both sides of the exchange. “What I am now counts.”

“Yes, and what are you?” Batbaian cried. “A puffed-up piece of sheep turd, making the air stink for your betters. Without Avshar’s black wizardry, you’d still be the starving brigand you ought to be, you vulture, you snake-hearted lizard-gutted cur, you green, hopping, slimy frog!”

That was the deadliest affront one Khamorth could throw at another; the men of Pardraya loathed and feared frogs. Rodak’s hand flashed toward his saber. Then he froze with it still untouched, for two dozen arrows were aimed at him. Moving very slowly and carefully, he drew his hand away.

“Better,” Arghun said dryly. “We have experience with treacherous envoys; they do not go well with weapons.”

“Or with insults,” Rodak returned. His lips were pale, but from anger this time, Gorgidas thought, not fear.

“Insult?” Batbaian said. “How could I make you out fouler than you are?”

“That is enough,” Arghun said. “I will settle what he is.” Batbaian held his tongue; Arghun framed his orders mildly, but expected them to be obeyed. The khagan returned to Rodak. “What does your Varatesh want with us?”

“He warns you to turn round at once and go back to your own side of the river Shaum, or face the anger of all the clans of Pardraya.”

“Unless your khagan makes a quarrel with me, I have none with him,” Arghun said. At that, Batbaian cried out again. “Be silent,” Arghun told him, then turned to Rodak once more. “My quarrel is with Yezd—this is but the shortest road to Mashiz. Tell that to Varatesh very plainly, yes, and to your Avshar as well. So long as I am not attacked, I will not look for trouble with you Khamorth. If I am …” He let the sentence trail away.

Rodak licked his lips. The wars with the Arshaum were burned into the memory of his people. “Avshar comes from Yezd, they say, and is adopted into the Royal Clan; indeed, he stands next to Varatesh there.”

“What is that to me?” Arghun’s voice was bland. Batbaian suddenly
smiled, not a pleasant sight; Viridovix was reminded of a wolf scenting blood. Arghun continued, “You have my answer. I will not turn back, but I make war on Yezd, not on you, unless you would have it so. Take that word to your master.”

Skylitzes hesitated before he rendered the khagan’s last sentence into the Khamorth speech. “How would you have me translate that?”

“Exactly as I said it,” Argun said.

“Very well.” The word the Videssian used for “master” meant “owner of a dog.”

Rodak glowered at him and Arghun from under heavy brows. “When my chief—” He came down hard on the proper term. “—hears of this, we will see how funny he finds your little joke. Think on one-eye here; before long you may be envying his fate.”