Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle) (29 page)

“Small enough for you, maybe,” one of the robbed legionaries muttered, but so softly the centurion could not tell which. He snorted and gave them all an impartial glare.

“Sure and that was quick of you, to stop the shindy or ever it started,” Viridovix said to Scaurus. “Was your honor not afraid it might set the spalpeens off altogether?”

“Yes,” Marcus admitted, “but I didn’t think we would be much worse off if it did. There wasn’t time to reason with them, or much hope of it, for that matter—not with that madman
of a monk egging them on. I thought I had to shock them, or make them laugh—by luck, I managed to do both at once. You helped a bit yourself, you know; you sing very well.”

“Don’t I, now?” the Celt agreed complacently. “Aye, there’s nothing like a good tune to make a man forget the why of his ire. There’s some fine songs in this Videssian tongue, too. That first one I sang reminds me of a ditty I knew at home—kine-stealing’s almost a game with us, for pride and honor’s sake, and we’re fond of singing over it.

“Or we were,” he added bleakly. For a rare moment, he let Marcus see the loneliness he usually hid so well.

Touched, the tribune reached out to clasp his shoulder. “You’re among friends, you know,” he said. It was true—there was not a Roman who had anything but liking for their former foe.

Viridovix knew that, too. “Aye,” he said, tugging at his long mustaches, “and glad I am of it, but there’s times when it’s scarce enough.” He said something in his own tongue, then shook his head. “Even in my ears the Celtic speech grows strange.”

The riots against Namdalen began in earnest the next day, incited, as Marcus had feared, by the monks. The day was one sacred to Phos. Processions of worshippers marched through the streets carrying torches and gilded spheres and discs of wood as they hymned their god. As the tribune learned much later, one such parade was wending its way down Videssos’ chief thoroughfare—the locals, with their liking for simple names, called it Middle Street—when it happened to pass a small temple where the Namdaleni were celebrating the holiday with their own rites.

Seeing a party of islanders enter the schismatic chapel infuriated the monks heading the procession. “Root out the heretics!” they cried. This time no jests or soft words distracted their followers. Phos’ torches torched Phos’ temple; believer slew believer, believing him benighted. And when the Namdaleni sallied forth from their smoke, as brave men would, Videssian blood, too, crimsoned the cobbles of Middle Street.

The mob, made brave only by numbers, was rabid when a few from among those numbers fell. “Revenge!” they
screamed, ignoring their own guilt, and went ravening through the city for Namdaleni to destroy. As riots will, this one quickly grew past its prime purpose. Burning, looting, and rape were sports too delightful to be reserved for the islanders alone; before long, the swelling mob extended their benefits to natives of the city as well. Nevertheless, the men of the Duchy remained chief targets of the rioters’ attention.

The mob’s distant baying and the black pillars of smoke shooting into the sky brought news of the tumult to the Romans. Scaurus was always thankful the city did not erupt until noon, Phos’ most auspicious hour. The early-rising legionaries had already finished their drill and returned to the palace complex before the storm broke. It could have gone hard for them, trapped in a labyrinth the Videssian rioters knew far better than they.

At first Scaurus thought the outbreak minor, on the order of the one that had followed his own encounter with Avshar’s necromancy. A few battalions of native soldiers had sufficed to put down that disturbance. The tribune watched the Videssians tramping into action, armed for riot duty with clubs and blunt-headed spears. Within two hours they were streaming back in disarray, dragging dead and wounded behind them. Their smoke-blackened faces showed stunned disbelief. Beyond the palace complex, Videssos was in the hands of the mob.

Sending inadequate force against the rioters proved worse than sending none. The howling pack, buoyed up by the cheap victory, grew bolder yet. Marcus had gone up onto the roof of the Roman barracks to see what he could of the city and its strife; now he watched knots of ill-armed men pushing through the lush gardens of the palace quarter itself, on the prowl for robbery or murder.

Still far away but terribly clear, he could hear the mob’s battle cry: “Dig up the bones of the Namdaleni!” The call was a bit of lower-class city slang; when Videssos’ thieves and pimps were displeased with someone, they wished him an unquiet grave. If the Roman needed further telling, that rallying-cry showed him who the rioters were.

Scaurus put a maniple of battle-ready legionaries around his soldier’s barracks. Whether the bared steel they carried
deterred the mob or the Videssians simply had no quarrel with the Roman force, no rioters tested them.

Sunset was lurid; it seemed grimly appropriate for Phos’ symbol to be reduced to a ball of blood disappearing through thick smoke.

Like dragons’ tongues, flames licked into the night sky. In their island of calm the Romans passed the hours of darkness at full combat alert. Marcus did not think the Videssians would use his men against the rioters, judging from their past practice, but he was not nearly so sure the mob would keep giving immunity to the legionaries.

The tribune stayed on his feet most of the night. It was long after midnight before he decided the barracks probably would not be attacked. He sought his pallet for a few hours of uneasy sleep.

One of his troopers roused him well before dawn. “What is it?” he asked blearily, only half-awake. Then he jerked upright as full memory returned. “Are we under assault?”

“No, sir. It’s almost too quiet, what with the ruction all around us, but there’s no trouble here. Nephon Khoumnos says he needs to speak with you; my officer thinks it sounds important enough for me to get you up. If you like, though, I’ll send him away.”

“Who’s out there? Glabrio?”

“Yes, sir.”

Marcus trusted that quiet young centurion’s judgment and discretion. “I’ll see Khoumnos,” he said, “but if you can, hold him up for a couple of minutes to let me get my wits together.”

“I’ll take care of it,” the legionary promised and hurried away. Scaurus splashed water on his face from the ewer by his bed, ran a comb through his sleep-snarled hair, and tried to shake a few of the wrinkles from his cloak before putting it on.

He could have omitted his preparations, sketchy as they were. When the Roman guardsman led Nephon Khoumnos into the barracks hall, a glance was enough to show that the Videssian officer was a man in the last stages of exhaustion. His usual crisp stride had decayed into a rolling, almost drunken gait; he seemed to be holding his eyes open by main
force. With a great sigh, he collapsed into the chair the Romans offered him.

“No, no wine, thank you. If I drink I’ll fall asleep, and I can’t yet.” He yawned tremendously, knuckling his red-tracked eyes at the same time. “Phos, what a night!” he muttered.

When he sat without elaborating, Marcus prompted him, “How are things out there?”

“How do you think? They’re bad, very bad. I’d sooner be naked in a wood full of wolves than an honest man on the streets tonight. Being robbed is the best you could hope for; it gets worse from there.”

Gaius Philippus came up in time to hear him. Blunt as always, he said, “What have you been waiting for? It’s only a mob running wild, not an army. You have the men to squash it flat in an hour’s time.”

Khoumnos twisted inside his shirt of mail, as if suddenly finding its weight intolerable. “I wish things were as simple as you make them.”

“I’d better turn around,” Gaius Philippus said, “because I think you’re about to bugger me.”

“Right now I couldn’t raise a stand for the fanciest whore in the city, let alone an ugly old ape like you.” Khoumnos drew a bark of laughter from the senior centurion, but was abruptly sober again. “No more could I turn the army loose in the city. For one thing, too many of the men won’t try very hard to keep the mob from the Namdaleni—they have no use for the islanders themselves.”

“It’s a sour note when one part of your fornicating army won’t help the next,” Gaius Philippus said.

“That’s as may be, but it doesn’t make it any less true. It cuts both ways, though: the men of the Duchy don’t trust Videssian soldiers much further than they do any other Videssians.”

Scaurus felt like turning around himself; he had caught Nephon Khoumnos’ drift, and did not like it. The imperial officer confirmed the tribune’s fears with his next words. “In the whole capital there are only two bodies of troops who have the respect of city-folk and Namdaleni alike: the Halogai, and your men. I want to use you as a screen to separate the mob and the easterners, while Videssian troops bring the city as a
whole under control. With you and the Halogai keeping the main infection cordoned off, the riot should lose force quickly.”

The tribune was anything but eager to use his troops in the street-fighting that wracked Videssos. He had already learned the mercenary commander’s first lesson: his men were his capital, and not to be spent lightly or thrown away piecemeal in tiny, meaningless brawls down the city’s back alleys. Unfortunately, what Khoumnos was proposing made sense. Without the excitement of heretic-hunting, riot for the sake of riot would lose much of its appeal. “Are you ordering us into action, then?” he demanded.

Had Nephon Khoumnos given him an imperious yes, he probably would have refused him outright—in the city’s confusion, Khoumnos could not have enforced the order. But the Videssian was a soldier of many years’ standing and knew the ways of mercenaries better than Scaurus himself. He had also come to know the tribune accurately.

“Ordering you?” he said. “No. Had I intended to give you orders, I could have sent them through a spatharios. I came to ask a favor, for the Empire’s sake. Balsamon put it better than I could—the fight against Yezd makes everything else trivial beside it. No matter what the idiot monks say, that’s true. That fight can’t go forward without peace here. Will you help bring it?”

“Damn you,” Scaurus said tiredly, touched on the weak spot of his sense of duty. There were times, he thought, when a bit of simple selfishness would be much sweeter than the responsibility his training had drilled into him. He considered how much of his limited resources he could afford to risk.

“Four hundred men,” he decided. “Twenty squads of twenty. No units smaller than that, unless my officers order it—I won’t have a solitary trooper on every corner for the young bucks to try their luck with.”

“Done,” Khoumnos said at once, “and thank you.”

“If I said you were welcome, I’d be a liar.” Shifting into Latin, Scaurus turned to Gaius Philippus. “Help me find the men I’ll need. Keep things tightly buttoned here while we’re gone and in the name of the gods don’t throw good men after bad if we come to grief. Even if we should, you’d still have
better than a cohort left; that’s a force to reckon with, in this world of useless infantry.”

“Hold up, there. What’s this talk about you not coming back, and what I’d have if you didn’t?” the centurion said. “I’m going out there myself.”

Marcus shook his head. “Not this time, my friend. I have to go—it’s by my orders we’re heading into this, and I will not send men into such a stew without sharing it with them. Too many officers will be out in the city as is; someone here has to be able to pick up the pieces if a few of us don’t come back. That’s you, I fear. Curse it, don’t make this harder than it is; I don’t dare risk both of us at once.”

On Gaius Philippus’ face discipline struggled with desire and finally threw it to the mat. “Aye, sir,” he said, but his toneless voice accented instead of concealed his hurt. “Let’s get the men picked out.”

The colloquy between Khoumnos, the tribune, and Gaius Philippus had been low-voiced, but once men were chosen to go out into Videssos and they began to arm themselves, all hope for quiet vanished. As Scaurus had feared, Viridovix woke up wildly eager to go into the city and fight.

The tribune had to tell him no. “They want us to stop the riot, not heat it further. You know your temper, Viridovix. Tell me truly, is that the task you relish?”

Marcus had to give the big Gaul credit; he really did examine himself, chewing on his mustaches as he thought “A plague on you for a cruel, hard man, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, and another for being right. What a cold world it is, where a man knows himself too hot-blooded to be trusted with the breaking of heads.”

“You can stay here and wrangle with me,” Gaius Philippus said. “I’m not going either.”

“What? You?” Viridovix stared at him. “Foosh, man, it’d be the perfect job for you—for a good soldier, you’re the flattest man ever I’ve met.”

“Son of a goat,” the centurion growled, and their long-running feud was on again. Scaurus smiled inside himself to hear them; each, he knew, would take out some of his disappointment on the other.

When the selection was done, and while the legionaries
chosen were readying themselves for action, the tribune asked Khoumnos, “Where are you sending us?”

The Videssian officer considered. “There’s a lot of newly come Namdaleni in the southern harbor district, especially round the small harbor; you know, the harbor of Kontoskalion. My reports say the fighting has been vicious there—city people murdering islanders, and islanders murdering right back when the odds are in their favor. It’s a running sore that needs closing.”

“That’s what we’ll be there for, isn’t it?” Marcus said. He made no effort to pretend an enthusiasm he did not feel. “The harbor district, you say? Southeast of here, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Khoumnos agreed. He started to say more, but the tribune cut him off.

“Enough talk. All I want is to get this worthless job over. Soonest begun, soonest done. Let’s be at it.” He strode out of the barracks into the predawn twilight.

As the legionaries came to attention, he walked to the head of their column. There were a couple of warnings he felt he had to give his men before he led them into action. “Remember, this is riot duty, not combat—I hope. We want the least force needed to bring order, not the most, lest the riot turn on us. Don’t spear someone for throwing a rotten cabbage at you.