Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle) (48 page)

Gaius Philippus threw his hands in the air. “Just what I need now, being told I’m like some smockfaced philosopher. Tend to your wounded, doctor, and let me mind the lads on
their feet.” Ignoring Gorgidas’ injured look, he surveyed the Romans once more, shook his head in dissatisfaction.

“Pakhymer!” he shouted. The Khatrisher waved to show he’d heard. “Have your riders shoot the first man who bolts.” The officer’s eyes widened in surprise. Gaius Philippus said, “Better by far to lose a few at our hands than see a stampede that risks us all.”

Pakhymer considered, nodded, and threw the centurion the sharpest salute Marcus had seen from the easygoing Khatrishers. He gave his men the order. Talk of flight abruptly ceased.

“Pay Gaius Philippus no mind,” Quintus Glabrio told Gorgidas. “He means less than he says.”

“I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it, my friend,” the physician answered shortly, but there was gratitude in his voice.

“The soft-spoken lad has the right of it,” Viridovix said. “When he talks, that one—” He stabbed a thumb toward Gaius Philippus. “—is like a fellow who can’t keep his woman happy—things spurt out before he’s ready.”

The senior centurion snorted, saying, “I will be damned. This is the first time you’ve been on the same side of an argument as the Greek, I’ll wager.”

Viridovix tugged at his mustache as he thought. “Belike it is, at that,” he admitted.

“And so he should be,” Marcus said to Gaius Philippus. “You had no reason to turn on Gorgidas, especially since he was giving you the highest praise he could.”

“Enough, the lot of you!” Gaius Philippus exclaimed in exasperation. “Gorgidas, if you want my apology, you have it. The gods know you’re one of the few doctors I’ve seen worth the food you gobble. You jogged my elbow when I was in harness, and I kicked out at you without thinking.”

“It’s all right. You just paid me a finer compliment than the one I gave you,” Gorgidas said. Not far away, a legionary cursed as an arrow pierced his hand. The physician sighed and hurried off to clean and bandage the wound.

He had fewer injuries to treat now. With their battle won, the Yezda slipped beyond even Avshar’s control. Some still hunted Videssian stragglers, but more were looting the bodies of the dead or beginning to make camp among them; sunset
was already past and darkness coming on. Sated, glutted with combat, the nomads were no longer eager to assail those few companies of their foes who still put up a bold front.

Somewhere in the twilight, a man screamed as the Yezda caught up with him at last. Scaurus shivered, thinking how close the Romans had come to suffering the same fate. He said to Gaius Philippus, “Gorgidas had the right of it. Without you we’d be running for cover one by one, like so many spooked cattle. You held us together when we needed it most.”

The veteran shrugged, more nervous over praise than he had been when the fighting was hottest. “I know how to run a retreat, that’s all. I bloody well ought to—I’ve been in enough of them over the years. You signed on with Caesar for the Gallic campaign, didn’t you?”

Marcus nodded, remembering how he’d planned a short stay in the army to further his political hopes. Those days seemed as dim as if they had happened to someone else.

“Thought as much,” Gaius Philippus said. “You’ve done pretty well yourself, you know, in Gaul and here as well. Most of the time I forget you didn’t intent to make a life of this—you handle yourself like a soldier.”

“I thank you,” Scaurus replied sincerely, knowing that was as fulsome a compliment from the centurion as talk of Socrates was from Gorgidas. “You’ve helped me more than I can say; if I am any kind of soldier, it’s because of what you’ve shown me.”

“Hmp. All I ever did was do my job,” Gaius Philippus said, more uncomfortable than ever. “Enough of this useless chitchat.” He peered out into the dusk. “I think we’ve put enough distance between us and the worst of it to camp for the night.”

“Good enough. The Khatrishers can hold off whatever raiders we draw while we’re digging in.” Scaurus spoke to the buccinators, who trumpeted out the order to halt.

“Of course,” Pakhymer said when the tribune asked him for a covering force. “You’ll need protection to throw up your fieldworks, and they will shelter all of us tonight.” He cocked his head at the Roman in a gesture that reminded Scaurus of Taso Vones, though the two Khatrishers looked nothing like each other. “One of the reasons I joined my men to yours was
to take advantage of your camp, if we saw today end with breath still in us. We have no skill at fortcraft.”

“Maybe not, but you ride like devils loosed. Put me on a horse and I’d break my backside, or more likely my neck.” The feeble jest aside, Marcus looked approvingly at the Khatrisher. It had taken a cool head to see ahead till nightfall in the chaos of the afternoon.

It was as well the Yezda did not press an attack while the camp was building. The Romans, dazed with fatigue, moved like sleepwalkers. They dug and lifted with slow, dogged persistence, knowing sleep would claim them if they halted for an instant. The stragglers who had joined them helped as best they could, hampered not only by exhaustion but also by inexperience at this sort of work.

Most of the non-Romans were merely faces to Scaurus as he walked through the camp, but some he knew. He was surprised to see Doukitzes busily fixing stakes atop the earthen breastwork the legionaries had thrown up. He would not have thought the skinny little Videssian whose hand he’d saved likely to last twenty minutes on the battlefield. Yet here he was, hale and whole, with countless tall strapping men no more than stiffening corpses … Tzimiskes, Adiatun, Mouzalon, how many more? Spying Marcus, Doukitzes waved shyly before returning to his task.

Zeprin the Red was here too. The burly Haloga was not working; he sat in the dust with his head in his hands, a picture of misery. Scaurus stooped beside him. Zeprin caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and looked up to see who had come to disturb his wretchedness. “Ah, it’s you, Roman,” he said, his voice a dull parody of his usual bull roar. A great bruise purpled his left temple and cheekbone.

“Are you in much pain?” the tribune asked. “I’ll send our physician to see to you.”

The northerner shook his head. “I need no leech, unless he know the trick of cutting out a wounded recall. Mavrikios lies dead, and me not there to ward him.” He covered his face once more.

“Surely you cannot blame yourself for that, when it had to be the Emperor himself who sent you from him?”

“Sent me from him, aye,” Zeprin echoed bitterly. “Sent me to stiffen the left after Khoumnos fell, the gods save a spot by
their hearthfire for him. But the fighting was good along the way, and I was ever fonder of handstrokes than the bloodless business of orders. Mavrikios used to twit me for it. And so I was slower than I should have been, and Ortaias the bold—” He made the name a curse. “—kept charge.”

Anger roughened his voice, an anger cold and black as the stormclouds of his wintry home. “I knew he was a dolt, but took him not for coward. When the horseturd fled, I wasn’t yet nearby to stem the rout before it passed all checking. Had I paid more heed to my duty and less to the feel of my axe in my hands, it might be the Yezda who were skulking fugitives this night.”

Marcus could only nod and listen; there was enough truth in Zeprin’s self-blame to make consolation hard. With bleak quickness, the Haloga finished his tale: “I was fighting my way back to the Emperor when I got this.” He touched his swollen face. “Next I knew, I was staggering along with one arm draped over your little doctor’s shoulder.” The tribune did not recall noticing Gorgidas supporting the massive northerner, but then the Greek would not have been easy to see under Zeprin’s bulk.

“Not even a warrior’s death could I give Mavrikios,” the Haloga mourned.

At that, Scaurus’ patience ran out. “Too many died today,” he snapped. “The gods—yours, mine, the Empire’s, I don’t much care which—be thanked some of us are left alive to save what we can.”

“Aye, there will be a reckoning,” Zeprin said grimly, “and I know where it must start.” The chill promise in his eyes would have set Ortaias Sphrantzes running again, were he there to see it.

The Roman camp was not so far from the battlefield as to leave behind the moans of the wounded. So many lay hurt that the sound of their suffering traveled far. No single voice stood out, nor single nation; at any moment, the listeners could not tell if the anguish they heard came from the throat of a Videssian grandee slowly bleeding to death or a Yezda writhing around an arrow in his belly.

“There’s a lesson for us all, not that we have the wit to
heed it,” Gorgidas remarked as he snatched a moment’s rest before moving on to the next wounded man.

“And what might that be?” Viridovix asked with a mock-patient sigh.

“In pain, all men are brothers. Would there were an easier way to make them so.” He glared at the Celt, daring him to argue. Viridovix was the first to look away; he stretched, scratched his leg, and changed the subject.

Scaurus found sleep at last, a restless sleep full of nasty dreams. No sooner had he closed his eyes, it seemed, than a legionary was shaking him awake. “Begging your pardon, sir,” the soldier said, “but you’re needed at the palisade.”

“What? Why?” the tribune mumbled, rubbing at sticky eyes and wishing the Roman would go away and let him rest.

The answer he got banished sleep as rudely as a bucket of cold water. “Avshar would have speech with you, sir.”

“What?” Without his willing it, Marcus’ hand was tight round his swordhilt. “All right. I’ll come.” He threw on full armor as quickly as he could—no telling what trickery Yezd’s wizard-prince might intend. Then, blade naked in his hand, he followed the legionary through the fitfully slumbering camp.

Two Khatrisher sentries peered out into the darkness beyond the watchfires’ reach. Each carried a nocked arrow in his bow. “He rode in like a guest invited to a garden party, your honor, he did, and asked for you by name,” one of them told Scaurus. With the usual bantam courage of his folk, he was more indignant over Avshar’s unwelcome arrival than awed by the sorcerer’s power.

Not so his comrade, who said, “We fired, sir, the both of us, several times. He was so close we could not have missed, but none of our shafts would bite.” His eyes were wide with fear.

“We drove the whoreson back out of range, though,” the first Khatrisher said stoutly.

The druids’ marks graven into Marcus’ Gallic blade glowed yellow, not fiercely as they had when Avshar tried spells against him, but still warning of sorcery. Fearless as a tiger toying with mice, the wizard-prince emerged from the darkness that was his own, sitting statue-still atop his great sable horse. “Worms! You could not drive a maggot across a turd!”

The bolder-tongued Khatrisher barked an oath and drew back his bow to shoot. Scaurus checked him, saying, “You’d waste your dart again, I think—he has a protecting glamour wrapped round himself.”

“Astutely reasoned, prince of insects,” Avshar said, granting the tribune a scornful dip of his head. “But this is a poor welcome you grant me, when I have but come to give back something of yours I found on the field today.”

Even if Marcus had not already known the quality of the enemy he faced, the sly, evil humor lurking in that cruel voice would have told him the wizard’s gift was one to delight the giver, not him who received it. Yet he had no choice but to play Avshar’s game out to the end. “What price do you put on it?” he asked.

“Price. None at all. As I said, it is yours. Take it, and welcome.” The wizard-prince reached down to something hanging by his right boot, tossed it underhanded toward the tribune. It was still in the air when he wheeled his stallion and rode away.

Marcus and his companions skipped aside, afraid of some last treachery. But the wizard’s gift landed harmlessly inside the palisade, rolling until it came to rest at the tribune’s feet. Then Avshar’s jest was clear in all its horror, for staring sightlessly up at Scaurus, its features stiffened into a grimace of agony, was Mavrikios Gavras’ head.

The sentries did shoot after the wizard-prince then, blindly, hopelessly. His fell laugh floated back to tell them how little their arrows were worth.

With his gift for scenting trouble, Gaius Philippus hurried up to the rampart. He wore only military kilt and helmet, and carried his
gladius
naked in his hand. He almost stumbled over Avshar’s gift; his face hardened as he recognized it for what it was. “How did it come here?” was all he said.

Marcus told him, or tried to. The thread of the story kept breaking whenever he looked down into the dead Emperor’s eyes.

The senior centurion heard him out, then growled, “Let the damned wizard have his boast. It’ll cost him in the end, you wait and see. This—” He gave Mavrikios a last Roman salute. “—doesn’t show us anything we didn’t already know. Instead of wasting time with it, Avshar could have been finishing
Thorisin. But he let him get away—and with a decent part of army, too, once they start pulling themselves together.”

Scaurus nodded, heartened. Gaius Philippus had the right of it. As long as Thorisin Gavras survived, Videssos had a leader—and after this disaster, the Empire would need all the troops it could find.

The tribune’s mind went to the morning, to getting free of the field of Maragha. The legionaries’ discipline would surely pay again, as it had this afternoon; overwhelming triumph left the Yezda almost as disordered as defeat did their foes. Now he had the Khatrisher horse, too, so he could hope to meet the nomads on their own terms. One way or another, he told himself, he would manage.

He stared a challenge in the direction Avshar had gone, said quietly, “No, the game’s not over yet. Far from it.”

Harry Turtledove
was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After flunking out of Caltech, he earned a PhD. in Byzantine history from UCLA. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and he has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles.