Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle) (30 page)

“That’s one side of things. Here’s the other: if your life is on the line, don’t spend it; if the choice is between you and a rioter, you count ten thousand times as much, so don’t take any stupid chances. We’re all the Romans there are here and all the Romans who ever will be here. Do your job, do what you have to do, but use your your heads.”

He knew as he gave it the advice was equivocal, but it accurately reflected his mixed feelings over the mission Khoumnos had given him. As the sun rose red through the city’s smoke, he said, “Let’s be off,” and marched his men away from their barracks, out of the palace complex, and into the strife-torn heart of the city.

Most times he savored Videssos’ early mornings, but not today. Smoke stung his eyes and stank in his nostrils. Instead of the calls of gulls and songbirds, the dominant sounds in the city were looters’ cries, the crack of glass and splintering of
boards as houses and shops were plundered, and the occasional sliding rumble of a fire-gutted building crashing down.

The legionaries stayed in a single body on their way to the harbor of Kontoskalion. Scaurus did not intend to risk his men before he had to and reckoned the sight of four hundred armored, shielded warriors tramping past would be enough to make any mob think twice.

So it proved; aside from curses and a few thrown stones, no one interfered with the Romans as they marched. But theirs was a tiny, moving bubble of order drifting through chaos. Videssos, it seemed, had abandoned law’s constraints for an older, more primitive rule: to the strong, the quick, the clever go the spoils.

Where there were few Namdaleni to hunt, the riot lost part of its savagery and became something of a bizarre carnival. Three youths pulled velvet-covered pillows from a shop and tossed them into the arms of a waiting, cheering crowd. Marcus saw a middle-aged man and woman dragging a heavy couch down a sidestreet, presumably toward their home.

A younger pair, using their clothes for padding, made love atop a heap of rubble; they, too, were cheered on by a rapt audience. The Romans passing by stared and shouted with as much enthusiasm as any Videssians. They clattered their-shields against their greaves to show their enjoyment. When the couple finished, they sprang to their feet and scampered away, leaving their clothes behind.

In madness’ midst, the occasional island of normality was strange in itself. Marcus bought a pork sausage on a bun from a vender plying his trade as if all were peaceful as could be. “Haven’t you had any trouble?” the tribune asked as he handed the man a copper.

“Trouble? Why should I? Everyone knows me, they do. Biggest problem I’ve had is making change for all the gold I’ve got today. A thing like this is good for the city now and again, says I—it stirs things up, a tonic, like.” And he was off, loudly crying his wares.

Two streets further south, the Romans came upon a double handful of corpses sprawled on the cobbles. From what could be seen through the blackened, congealed blood that covered them, some were Namdeleni while others had been city men. They were covered in little more than their blood; all the
bodies, alien and citizen alike, had been stripped during the night.

Soon the sound of active combat came to the Romans’ ears. “At a trot!” Scaurus called. His men loped forward. They rounded a corner to find four Namdaleni, two of them armed only with knives, trying to hold off what must have been three times their number of attackers. Another easterner was on the ground beside them, as were two shabbily dressed Videssians.

Their losses made the rioters less than enthusiastic about the fight they had picked. While the ones to the rear yelled, “Forward!” those at the fore hung back, suddenly leery of facing professional soldiers with weapons to hand.

The Videssians cried out in terror when they saw and heard the Romans bearing down on them. They turned to flee, throwing away their weapons to run the faster.

The men of the Duchy joyfully greeted their unexpected rescuers. Their leader introduced himself as Utprand Dagober’s son. He was not a man Marcus had seen before; the tribune guessed he must be one of the newly come Namdalener mercenaries. His island accent was so thick he sounded almost like a Haloga. But if the tribune had trouble with his shades of meaning, there was no mistaking what Utprand wanted.

“Are you not after the devilings?” he demanded. “T’ree of my stout lads they kill already—we had the misfortune to be near their High Temple when they set on us and we’ve crawled through stinking alleys since, trying to reach our mates. Do for them, I say!” The other islanders still on their feet snarled agreement.

After some of the things he had seen in Videssos, Marcus was tempted to turn his men loose like so many wolves. Though it would do no good—and in the long run endless harm—it would be so satisfying. In this outburst the city folk had forfeited a great part of the respect he had come to feel for their state. He could also see the legionaries trembling to be unleashed.

He shook his head with regret, but firmly. “We were sent here to make matters better, not worse, and to form a cordon between you and the Videssians to let the riot burn itself out. It has to be so, you know,” he said, giving Utprand the same
argument he had used against Soteric. “If the imperial army moves against you with the mob, you’re doomed, do what you will. Would you have us incite them to it?”

Utprand measured him, eyes pale in a gaunt, smoke-blackened face. “I never thought I could want to hate a clear-thinking man. Curse you for being right—it gripes my belly like a green apple that you are.”

He and two of his men took up their fallen comrade and the dagger he had used in vain to defend himself. Marcus wondered where the dead man’s sword might be and who would take the dagger to his kin. The three started toward their camp by the harbor. The fourth islander, Grasulf Gisulf’s son, stayed behind with the Romans to point out the best places to seal off the harbor of Kontoskalion from the rest of the city.

The tribune posted his double squads where Grasulf recommended; most of them were stationed along major streets leading north and south. Scaurus had no reason to complain of Grasulf’s choices. The Namdalener had an eye for a defensible position.

As he’d known he might have to, Marcus gave his underofficers leave to split their commands in half to cover more ground. “But I want no fewer than ten men together,” he warned them, “and if you do divide your forces, stay in earshot of each other so you can rejoin quickly at need.”

The Romans worked their way steadily west. They passed from a district of small shops, taverns, and cramped, untidy houses into a quarter inhabited by merchants who had made their fortunes at Videssos’ harbors and still dwelt nearby. Their splendid homes were set off from the winding streets by lawns and gardens and warded further with tall fences or hedges of thorn. These had not always saved them from the mob’s fury. Several were burned, looted wrecks. Others, though still standing, had hardly a pane of glass left in their windows. Many had an unmistakable air of desertion about them. Their owners, knowing how easily rioters’ anger could turn from the foreign to the merely wealthy, had taken no chances and left for safety in the suburbs or on the western shore of the Cattle-Crossing.

By the time he had penetrated most of the way into this section of the city, Marcus had only a couple of units of legionaries still with him. He placed one between a temple of
Phos built solidly enough to double as a fortress and a mansion’s outreaching wall. Along with Grasulf and his last twenty men, he pressed on to find a good spot to complete the cordon. The sound of the sea, never absent in Videssos, was sharp in his ears; a final good position should seal Videssians and Namdaleni from each other.

A spot quickly offered itself. Sometime during the night, the rioters had battered a rich man’s wall to rubble and swarmed in to plunder his villa. The prickly hedge on the other side of the street still stood, unchallenged. “We can throw up a barricade here,” the tribune said, “and stand off troubles from either side.”

His men fell to work with the usual Roman thoroughness; a breastwork of broken brick and stone soon stretched across the roadway. Marcus surveyed it with considerable pride. Fighting behind it, he thought, the legionaries could stop many times their numbers.

That thought loosed another. The position the Romans had just made was so strong it did not really need twenty men to hold it. He could leave ten behind and push closer yet to the sea. It would be safe enough, he thought. This part of the city, unlike the turbulent portion he’d gone through before, seemed to be a no man’s land of sorts. Most of the property owners had already fled, and, after the storm of looting passed by, neither the men of the city nor those of the Duchy were making much use of these ways to reach each other.

Taking heart in that observation, Marcus divided his small force in two. “I know just the place for you,” Grasulf told him. He led the Romans to a crossroads between four mansions, each of them with strong outwalls at the edge of the street. The sea was very close now; along with its constant boom against the seawall, the tribune could hear individual waves slap-slapping against ships and pilings in the harbor of Kontoskalion.

The city was still troubled. New smokes rose into the noonday sky, and from afar came the sound of fighting. Scaurus wondered if the mob was battling Namdaleni, the Videssian army, or itself. He also wondered how long and how much it would take before Nephon Khoumnos—or, by rights, the Emperor himself—decided to teach the city’s explosive populace a lesson it would remember.
In this momentary backwater it was easy to forget such things. The Romans stood to arms for the first couple of hours at their post, but when nothing more frightening came by than a stray dog and a ragpicker with a great bag of scraps slung over his back, the tribune did not see anything amiss in letting them relax a bit. While three men took turns on alert, the others sat in the narrow shade of the southern wall. They shared food and wine with Grasulf. The Namdalener puckered his lips at their drink’s bite, though to Scaurus it was still too sweet.

Shadows were beginning to lengthen when the distant commotion elsewhere in Videssos grew suddenly louder. It did not take Marcus long to decide the new outbreak was due east of his position—and, from its swelling volume, heading west at an uncomfortable clip.

His men climbed to their feet at his command, grumbling over leaving their shadows for the sunshine’s heat. As any good soldiers would, they quickly checked their gear, making sure their short swords were free in their scabbards and their shield straps were not so frayed as to give in action.

Videssos’ twisting, narrow streets distorted sound in odd ways. The mob’s roar grew ever closer, but until it was all but on him Scaurus did not think he was standing in its path. He was ready to rush his men to another Roman party’s aid when the first rioters turned the corner less than a hundred yards away and spotted his little detachment blocking their path.

They stopped in confusion. Unlike the monk a few days before, they knew the warriors in front of them were not Namdaleni and had to decide whether they were foes.

Taking advantage of their indecision, Marcus took a few steps forward. “Go back to your homes!” he shouted. “We will not harm you if you leave in peace!” He knew how colossal the bluff was, but with any luck the mob would not.

For a heady second he thought he had them. A couple of men at the head of the throng, plump middle-class types who looked badly out of place among the rioters, turned as if to retreat. But then a fellow, behind them, a greasy little weasel of a man, recognized Grasulf for what he was. “An islander!” he yelled shrilly. “They’re trying to keep him from us!” The rioters rushed forward in a ragged battle line, brandishing a motley collection of makeshift or stolen weapons.

“Oh, bugger,” one of the legionaries beside Marcus muttered as he drew his sword. The tribune had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. More and more Videssians kept rounding that cursed comer. The Romans were professional soldiers, true, but as a professional Scaurus knew enough to mislike odds of seven or eight to one against him.

“To me, to me!” he shouted, wondering how many Romans he could draw to his aid and whether they would come too late and be swallowed up band after band by the mob.

Grasulf touched his arm. “Bring my sword home, if you can,” he said. And with a wild cry the Namdalener charged forward against the mob. His blade swung in two glittering arcs; a pair of heads bounced from rioters’ shoulders to the ground. Had his success gone on, he might have singlehandedly cowed his foes. But the same little sneakthief who had first spied him now darted up to plunge his dagger through the Namdalener’s mail shirt and into his back. Grasulf fell; howling in triumph as they trampled his corpse, the mob stormed into the Romans.

The legionaries were well trained and heavily armed. They wore chain mail and greaves and carried their metal-faced semicylindrical shields. But their foes had such weight of numbers pushing them on that the Roman line, which by the nature of things could only be three men deep here, cracked almost at once. Then the fighting turned into a series of savage combats, in each of which one or two Romans were pitted against far too many opponents.

In his place at the legionaries’ fore, Marcus had three men slam into him at once. One was dead as he hit, the tribune’s sword twisting in his guts to make sure of the kill. But his momentum and that of his two living comrades bowled Scaurus to the ground. He pulled his shield over him and saved himself from the worst of the trampling as the mob passed over him, but it was only luck that no one aimed anything more deadly at him than a glancing blow from a club.

Striking out desperately in all directions with his sword, he managed to scramble to his feet after less than a minute on the cobblestones, to find himself alone in the midst of the mob. He slashed his way toward a wall that would cover his back. To judge from the noise and the flow of the action, the other Romans yet on their feet were doing the same.