Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle) (11 page)

He seemed to have as many arms as a spider and a sword in every hand. Within moments Marcus had a cut high up on his sword arm and another, luckily not deep, just above the
top of his right greave. His shield was notched and hacked. Avshar wielded his heavy blade like a switch.

Fighting down desperation, Marcus struck back. Avshar turned the blow with his shield. It did not burst as the Roman had hoped, but at the contact Avshar gave back two startled paces. He swung his blade up in derisive salute. “You have a strong blade, runagate, but there are spells of proof against such.”

Yet he fought more cautiously after that and, as the hard work of combat helped banish the wine from Scaurus’ system, the Roman grew surer and more confident of himself. He began to press forward, blade flicking out now high, now low, with Avshar yielding ground step by stubborn step.

The Yezda, who had kept silent while all around him voices rose in song, began to chant. He sang in some dark language, strong, harsh, and freezing, worse even than his laugh. The torchlight dimmed and almost died in a web of darkness spinning up before Marcus’ eyes.

But along the length of the Roman’s blade, the druids’ marks flared hot and gold, turning aside the spell the wizard had hurled. Scaurus parried a stroke at his face.

The episode could only have taken an instant, for even as he was evading the blow, a woman in the crowd—he thought it was Helvis—called out, “No ensorcelments!”

“Bah! None are needed against such a worm as this!” Avshar snarled, but he chanted no further. And now the tribune had his measure. One of his cuts sheared away the tip of Avshar’s shield-boss. The Yezda envoy’s robes grew tattered, and red with more than wine.

Screaming in frustrated rage, Avshar threw himself at the Roman in a last bid to overpower his enemy by brute force. It was like standing up under a whirlwind of steel, but in his wrath the Yezda grew careless, and Marcus saw his moment come at last.

He feinted against Avshar’s face, then thrust quickly at his belly. The Yezda brought his blade down to cover, only to see, too late, that this too was a feint. The Roman’s sword hurtled at his temple. The parry he began was far too slow, but in avoiding it, Scaurus had to turn his wrist slightly. Thus the flat of his blade, not the edge, slammed into the side of Avshar’s head.

The Yezda tottered like a lightning-struck tree, then toppled, his sword falling beside him. Scaurus took a step forward to finish him, then shook his head. “Killing a stunned man is butcher’s work,” he said. “The quarrel was his with me, not mine with him.” He slid his blade back into its scabbard.

In his exhaustion afterwards, he only remembered a few pieces of flotsam from the flood of congratulations that washed over him. Gaius Philippus’ comment was, as usual, short and to the point. “That is a bad one,” he said as Avshar, leaning on his servant, staggered from the hall, “and you should have nailed him when you had the chance.”

Her winnings ringing in her hand, Helvis squeezed and kissed the tribune while Hemond pounded his back and shouted drunkenly in his ear.

And Taso Vones, though glad to see Avshar humbled, also had a word of warning. “I suppose,” the mousy little man from Khatrish grumbled, “now you think you could storm Mashiz singlehanded and have all the maidens from here to there fall into your arms.”

Marcus’ mind turned briefly to Helvis, but Vones was still talking. “Don’t you believe it!” he said. “A few years ago Avshar was leading a raiding-party along the western marches of Videssos, and a noble named Mourtzouphlos handled him very roughly indeed. The next spring, the biggest snake anyone in those parts had ever seen swallowed Mourtzouphlos down.”

“Happenstance,” Marcus said uneasily.

“Well, maybe so, but the Yezda’s arm is long. A word to the wise, let us say.” And he was off, brushing a bit of lint from the sleeve of his brown robe as if amazed anyone could think there was a connection between himself and this outlander rash enough to best Avshar.

W
HEN HE RETURNED FOR
M
ARCUS’ SHIELD
, A
DIATUN MUST
have wakened the Romans in their barracks. Torches were blazing through the windows, everyone was up and stirring, and by the time Marcus got back to his quarters a good score of legionaries were fully armed and ready to avenge him.

“You don’t show much confidence in your commander,” he told them, trying to hide how pleased he was. They gave him a rousing cheer, then crowded close, asking for details of the duel. He told the story as best he could, peeling off his belt, corselet, and greaves while he talked. Finally he could not keep his sagging eyelids open any longer.

Gaius Philippus stepped into the breach. “That’s the nub of it. The rest you can all hear in the morning—early in the morning,” he half threatened. “There’s been nothing but shirking the past couple of days while we’ve got settled, but don’t get the notion you can make a habit of it.”

As the centurion had known it would, his announcement roused a chorus of boos and groans, but it also freed Scaurus from further questions. Torches hissed as they were quenched. The tribune, crawling under a thick woolen blanket, was as glad of sleep as ever he had been in his life.

It seemed only seconds later when he was shaken awake, but the apricot light of dawn streamed through the windows. Eyes still blurred with sleep, he saw Viridovix, looking angry, crouched above him. “Bad cess to you, southron without a heart!” the Gaul exclaimed.

Marcus raised himself onto one elbow. “What have I done
to you?” he croaked. Someone, he noted with clinical detachment, had raced a herd of goats through his mouth.

“What have you done, man? Are you daft? The prettiest bit of fighting since we came here, and me not there to see it! Why did you no send a body after me so I could watch the shindy my own self and not hear about it second hand?”

Scaurus sat up gingerly. While he had made no real plans for the morning, he had not intended to spend the time pacifying an irate Celt. “In the first place,” he pointed out, “I had no notion where you were. You had left some little while before I fell foul of Avshar. Besides, unless I misremember, you didn’t leave alone.”

“Och, she was a cold and clumsy wench, for all her fine chest.” It had been the servingmaid, then. “But that’s not the point at all, at all. There’s always lassies to be found, but a good fight, now, is something else again.”

Marcus stared at him, realizing Viridovix was serious. He shook his head in bewilderment. He could not understand the Celt’s attitude. True, some Romans had a taste for blood, but to most of them—himself included—fighting was something to be done when necessary and finished as quickly as possible. “You’re a strange man, Viridovix,” he said at last.

“If you were looking through my eyes, sure and you’d find yourself a mite funny-looking. There was a Greek once passed through my lands, a few years before you Romans—to whom it doesn’t belong at all—decided to take it away. He was mad to see the way things worked, was this Greek. He had a clockwork with him, a marvelous thing with gears and pullies and I don’t know what all, and he was always tinkering with it to make it work just so. You’re a bit like that yourself sometimes, only you do it with people. If you don’t understand them, why then you think it’s them that’s wrong, not you, and won’t have a bit to do with them.”

“Hmm.” Marcus considered that and decided there was probably some justice to it. “What happened to your Greek?”

“I was hoping you’d ask that,” Viridovix said with a grin. “He was sitting under an old dead tree, playing with his clockwork peaceful as you please, when a branch he’d been ignoring came down on his puir foolish head and squashed him so flat we had to bury the corp of him between two doors, poor lad. Have a care the same doesn’t befall you.”

“A plague take you! If you’re going to tell stories with morals in them, you can start wearing a blue robe. A bloodthirsty Celt I’ll tolerate, but the gods deliver me from a preaching one!”

After his work of the previous night, the tribune told himself he was entitled to leave the morning drills to Gaius Philippus. The brief glimpse of Videssos the city he’d had a few days before had whetted his appetite for more. This was a bigger, livelier, more brawling town even than Rome. He wanted to taste its life, instead of seeing it frozen as he tramped by on parade.

Seabirds whirled and mewed overhead as he left the elegant quiet of the imperial quarter for the hurly-burly of the forum of Palamas, the great square named for an Emperor nine centuries dead. At its center stood the Milestone, a column of red granite from which distances throughout the Empire were reckoned. At the column’s base two heads, nearly fleshless from the passage of time and the attentions of scavengers, were displayed on pikes. Plaques beneath them set forth the crimes they had plotted while alive. Marcus’ knowledge of Videssos’ written language was still imperfect, but after some puzzling he gathered the miscreants had been rebellious generals with the further effrontery to seek aid for their revolt from Yezd. Their present perches, he decided, were nothing less than they deserved.

The people of Videssos ignored the gruesome display. They had seen heads go up on pikes before and expected these would not be the last.

Scaurus, on the other hand, was anything but ignored. He had thought he would be only one among a thousand foreigners, but the mysterious network that passes news in any great city had singled him out as the man who beat the dreaded Avshar. People crowded forward to pump his hand, to slap his back, or simply to touch him and then draw back in awe. From their reaction to him, he began to realize how great an object of fear the Yezda was.

It was next to impossible to get away. At every stall he passed, merchants and hucksters pressed samples of their wares on him: fried sparrows stuffed with sesame seeds; candied almonds; a bronze scalpel; amulets against heartburn,
dysentery, or possession by a ghost; wines and ales from every corner of the Empire and beyond; a book of erotic verse, unfortunately addressed to a boy. No one would hear him say no and no one would take a copper in payment.

“It is my honor, my privilege, to serve the Ronam,” declared a ruddy-faced baker with sweeping black mustachioes as he handed the tribune a spiced bun still steaming from his ovens.

Trying to escape his own notoriety, Marcus fled the forum of Palamas for the back streets and alleyways of the city. In such a maze it was easy to lose oneself, and the tribune soon did. His wandering feet led him into a quarter full of small, grimy taverns, homes once fine but now shabby from neglect or crowding, and shops crammed with oddments either suspiciously cheap or preposterously expensive. Young men in the brightly dyed tights and baggy tunics of street toughs slouched along in groups of three and four. It was the sort of neighborhood where even the dogs traveled in pairs.

This was a more rancid taste of Videssos than the tribune had intended. He was looking for a way back toward some part where he could feel safe without a maniple at his back when he felt furtive fingers fasten themselves to his belt. As he was half expecting such attention, it was easy to spin round and seize the awkward thief’s wrist in an unbreakable grip.

He thought he would be holding one of the sneering youths who prowled here, but his captive was a man of about his own age, dressed in threadbare homespun. The would-be fingersmith did not struggle in his grasp. Instead he went limp, body and face alike expressing utter despair. “All right, you damned hired sword, you’ve got me, but there’s precious little you can do to me,” he said. “I’d have starved in a few days anyways.”

He
was
thin. His shirt and breeches flapped on his frame and his skin stretched tight across his cheekbones. But his shoulders were wide, and his hands strong-looking—both his carriage and his twanging speech said he was more used to walking behind a plow than skulking down this alley. He had borne arms, too; Marcus had seen the look in his eyes before, on soldiers acknowledging defeat at the hands of overwhelming force.

“If you’d asked me for money, I would gladly have given it to you,” he said, releasing his prisoner’s arm.

“Don’t want nobody’s charity, least of all a poxy mercenary’s,” the other snapped. “Weren’t for you mercenaries, I wouldn’t be here today, and I wish to Phos I wasn’t.” He hesitated. “Aren’t you going to give me to the eparch?”

The city governor’s justice was apt to be swift, sure, and drastic. Had Scaurus caught one of the street-rats, he would have turned him over without a second thought. But what was this misplaced farmer doing in a Videssian slum, reduced to petty thievery for survival? And why did he blame mercenaries for his plight? He was no more a thief than Marcus was a woodcutter.

The tribune came to a decision. “What I’m going to do is buy you a meal and a jug of wine. Wait, now—you’ll earn it.” He saw the other’s hand already starting to rise in rejection. “In exchange, you’ll answer my questions and tell me why you mislike mercenaries. Do we have a bargain?”

The rustic’s larynx bobbed in his scrawny neck. “My pride says no, but my belly says yes, and I haven’t had much chance to listen to it lately. You’re an odd one, you know—I’ve never seen gear like yours, you talk funny, and you’re the first hired trooper I’ve ever seen who’d feed a hungry man instead of booting him in his empty gut. Phostis Apokavkos is my name, and much obliged to you.”

Scaurus named himself in return. The eatery Phostis led them to was a hovel whose owner fried nameless bits of meat in stale oil and served them on husk-filled barley bread. It was better not to think of what went into the wine. That Apokavkos could not afford even this dive was a measure of his want.

For a goodly time he was too busy chewing and swallowing to have much to say, but at last he slowed, belched enormously, and patted his stomach. “I’m so used to empty, I near forgot how good full could feel. So you want to hear my story, do you?”

“More now than I did before. I’ve never seen a man eat so much.”