Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (110 page)

“It turned out right enough,” Viridovix said, wiping his blade clean. “Here’s two less o’ the omadhauns to be taking the blackheart’s side come the day, and he’s not likely to try flunkies again with his own self so close and all.”

“Closer than we thought.” Marcus relayed what Thorisin had told him.

“Good. It’ll soon be over then, one way or t’other.” With a faint scrape of metal against metal, Viridovix ran his sword into its sheath.

It was not yet dawn the next morning when a Vaspurakaner legionary stuck his head into the tribune’s tent and woke him. “There a messenger is for you outside the
porta principalis dextra
,” he said, mangling his Videssian and Latin about equally. “After what happens yesterday, I no want him to let into camp.”

“You did right,” Scaurus mumbled. He groped for tunic and trousers. Under his breath he complained, “At least Gavras gave me a whole night’s sleep.” He slid the tunic over his head, splashed water on his face. Through splutters, he asked the sentry, “Whose messenger is it?”

“He say he from the imperials’—how you say?—chief priest.” The Vaspurakaner spat; after Zemarkhos, he had no liking for anyone in the Videssian clerical hierarchy. “You ask me, he can wait forever.”

Marcus pushed past him. A summons from Balsamon carried almost as much weight as one from the Emperor.

The
porta principalis dextra
got its name from its position as seen by the encamped legionaries. But the commander’s tent was on the other side of the
via principalis;
Scaurus turned left into the camp’s main way and hurried to the gate.

He recognized the blue-robed priest waiting for him, though not with any pleasure. His voice came out as a growl: “What do you want with me, Saborios?”

Balsamon’s attendant priest, despite his tonsured pate, bore himself like the soldier he had been. “To bring you to my master, of course,” he replied crisply. He looked Scaurus straight in the face. “Hold whatever grudge you care to. My first concern is for his Imperial Majesty.”

“Bah,” Marcus said, but the wind was gone from his sails. His own strong sense of duty answered too readily to that of Saborios.

The sun rose as they marched into Amorion. The town had suffered since the tribune last saw it. Many buildings bore the scars of fighting, whether in the riots Scaurus had touched off or later, when Zemarkhos’ remaining fanatics had been rash enough to oppose the professional skill of the legionaries and Khatrishers.

Other buildings were simply deserted, weeds growing up at the base of walls, courtyard gates opening onto forlorn emptiness. Some of the city’s
finest houses stood thus. “The owners are long fled,” Saborios said, following Marcus’s gaze. “Some ran from your troopers, others for fear of the Yezda—or of the Emperor’s justice.”

A few homes had been reoccupied, by one squatter family or six. More newcomers crowded the town marketplace, which was half filled by a squalid collection of tents and crackerbox shacks. “Refugees from the tender mercy of the Yezda,” Saborios explained unnecessarily.

“More will come in front of Avshar,” Marcus predicted.

“I know. We have trouble feeding the ones here now. Of course, some of those will run again and even the balance a bit.” Saborios spoke with the certainty of a man who had seen such things before.

Balsamon was dwelling in the cottage that had been Zemarkhos’, close by the main temple of Amorion. Like most chief shrines in provincial towns, that was a smaller, clumsier copy of Phos’ High Temple in Videssos. Marcus and Saborios walked in the shadow of its dome as they came up to the little building behind it. The tribune saw old bloodstains on its whitewashed walls.

Balsamon himself opened the door to greet them. “Welcome, welcome!” he said, beaming at Scaurus. “An unlooked-for guest is worth a dozen of the ordinary kind.” He wore a look the tribune knew well, as if inviting him to share some secret joke.

But that droll expression was almost all that was left of the prelate Marcus had known in the capital. He had wondered at Balsamon’s health then; now the patriarch was visibly failing. He had lost a great deal of flesh, so that his beloved threadbare old robe was draped in loose folds around him. His skin sagged unhealthily at his cheeks and jowls; he had to support himself by leaning against the doorpost.

Ill or not, he missed very little. He laughed at the dismay Marcus could not hide. “I’m not dead yet, my friend,” he said. “I’ll last as long as need be, never fear. Come in, come in. We have much to talk about, you and I.”

For the life of him, Marcus could not see what that “much” was, but he stepped forward. Then he stopped and turned. As Saborios had before, he met the tribune’s eye without flinching. “The Emperor knows you are here,” he said steadily. “I shan’t be listening at the keyhole.”

Scaurus had to be satisfied with that. Balsamon moved aside to let
him come in. Walking slowly and painfully, the patriarch made his way to the closest one of the three stiff-backed chairs that, but for a small table, were the only furnishings in the little room. The ascetic barrenness had to be a legacy of Zemarkhos.

Balsamon sat with a soft grunt of relief. Marcus said angrily, “What right did Thorisin have to drag you away from Videssos like this?”

“The best right of all: he is the Avtokrator, Phos’ viceregent on earth,” the patriarch replied. He surprised Scaurus by speaking in perfect seriousness; to the Videssians, the Emperor’s power was very real. Balsamon went on, “To be exact, he ordered me here to preside over the dissolution of Zemarkhos’ schism. I have attended to that with pleasure—you saw for yourself the hatred he preached.”

“Yes,” the tribune admitted. “But why you? Is it regular practice to send the patriarch out of the city to attend to such things?”

“The last one to leave Videssos, to my knowledge, was Pothos, three hundred fifty years ago. He was sent to Imbros to help uproot an outbreak of the Balancer heresy.” Balsamon’s tired eyes managed a twinkle. “I think I managed to provoke my Emperor quite a bit more than Pothos did his.”

Knowing what had roused Gavras’ wrath, Marcus lowered his head in embarrassment. Balsamon laughed out loud. “Phos preserve me, I’ve abashed the man of stone.” That only served to fluster the tribune worse. The patriarch continued, “By the bye, man of stone, I have a message for you—a trifle late, as you were not in Amorion when you were expected to be, but perhaps of interest all the same.”

“Go on,” Scaurus said. He knew from whom he wanted the message to be, but after Balsamon’s sly teasing he was not about to give the patriarch the satisfaction of showing anxiety or eagerness.

His studied composure seemed to amuse the prelate about as much as excitement would have. “I was speaking of stones, wasn’t I?” Balsamon said in the allusive, elusive Videssian style. “Well, there is someone who would have me tell you that there are certain stones with which you may be familiar which that person has worn continuously since the last time you two saw each other, and that person will continue to do so until your next meeting, whenever that may be.”

Let Saborios make something of that, Marcus thought; he assumed
Balsamon’s attendant had his ways of knowing what was going on with his nominal master, whether he listened at keyholes or not. But the tribune only wasted a moment on Saborios. Alypia’s making a token of the necklace he had given her warmed him clear through.

Seeing that Balsamon knew he understood, all he said was, “My thanks. I hope I’ll be able to answer that myself.”

“So does the person who entrusted it to me.” The patriarch paused, as if not sure how to change the subject. Then he said, “You traveled much further than Amorion.”

“I hadn’t planned to, and I didn’t need to,” Scaurus said, still chagrined at fleeing west with Tahmasp at the very moment his men were pounding to his rescue.

“Never be certain of that too soon,” Balsamon said. “One of the things I’ve seen, both as a priest and, before that, as a scholar seeking the world’s wisdom, is that the web of affairs is always bigger than it seems to the fly struggling in one corner.”

“There’s a pretty picture.”

“Is it not?” the patriarch said blandly. He gave that odd hesitation again, before going on, “I am given to understand that you, ah, had considerable to do with the leaders of Yezd.”

“Yes.” Marcus was not surprised that Balsamon had his sources of information; knowing the Videssians, he would have been startled if the prelate did not. He spoke of his encounter with Wulghash. Balsamon listened politely, but without much interest.

Once Scaurus mentioned Avshar, though, the patriarch’s attitude changed. His eyes bored into the Roman’s; his expression and bearing grew so intense that he and Marcus both forgot his infirmity. He snapped questions at Scaurus as he might have at some none-too-bright student in a classroom at the Videssian Academy.

When the tribune somehow dredged the name Skopentzana from his memory, Balsamon sagged back against his unyielding chair. Then Marcus could see how old and sick and tired he was. The patriarch sat still and silent so long that Scaurus thought he had fallen asleep with his eyes open, but at last he said, “Much is now explained.”

“Not to me,” the tribune said pointedly.

“No?” Balsamon quirked a tufted eyebrow. “Avshar was ours once,
long centuries ago. Why else would he loathe Videssos so, and mock our every creation with his own?”

Marcus slowly nodded. Both the skill with which the sorcerer-prince used the language of the Empire and his antique turn of phrase argued for Videssian as his birth tongue. And thinking of the temple to Skotos in Mashiz, and of the dark-god’s red-robed priesthood, Scaurus saw what the patriarch meant.

“How did Skopentzana tell you that?” he asked. “What is it, anyhow? I’ve never heard of it, save that once in Avshar’s mouth.”

“These days, Skopentzana means nothing,” Balsamon said. “All that remains of it is ruins, hovels, and, in season, nomads’ tents. It lies in what is now Thatagush. But when Avshar had only a man’s years, the province was Bratzista, and Skopentzana the third city of the Empire, or maybe the second. Of golden sandstone it was built, and the river Algos ran singing to the gray sea, or so an ancient poet says.”

“And Avshar?”

“Was its prelate. Does that really surprise you so much? It shouldn’t. He was truly a prince as well, a distant cousin of the Avtokrator in the glorious days when Videssos held sway from the borders of Makuran in a grand sweep all the way to the frozen Bay of Haloga. He was highborn, he was able—one day he expected to be patriarch, and he might have been a great one.”

“Ruins, Thatagush—” Marcus made a connection. “That was when the Khamorth invaded the Empire, wasn’t it?”

“So it was.” From the way Balsamon eyed him, perhaps he had some hope as a student after all. “A civil war weakened the frontier, and in they poured. They cast down in a decade three hundred years of patient growth and civilization. Along with so many other lesser towns, Skopentzana fell. In a way, Avshar was lucky. He lived. He made his way down the Algos to the sea, eventually he came home to Videssos the city. But the horrors he had seen and endured twisted his thoughts into a new path.”

The tribune remembered what Avshar had said, that dreadful day in the courtroom at Mashiz. “He turned from Phos to Skotos then?”

His mark had just gone up again, he saw. Balsamon said, “Just so. For he reasoned that good could have no power in a world where such evil
dwelt, and that the dark god was its true master. And when he reached the capital, he saw it as his duty to convert all the hierarchy to his views.”

A Videssian indeed, Scaurus thought. But he said, “They’re stupid views. If your house burns down, do you go live in the bushes forever after? More sensible to make the best of whatever comes and rebuild as you can.”

“So say you; so say I. But Skotos’ cult is like poisoned wine, sweet till the dregs. For without good, don’t you see, there is no guilt; why not kill a man, force a woman, do anything for pleasure or power?”

The ultimate egotism—a heady wine indeed. In a way, it reminded Marcus of the Bacchic rites the Roman senate had banned a century before his birth. But at their wildest, the Bacchic rituals were a temporary, constrained release from the real world. Avshar would have made lawlessness a way of life.

The tribune said so, adding, “Didn’t people realize that? Without rule and custom, everyone is at the mercy of the strongest and most cunning.”

“So declared the synod that condemned Avshar,” Balsamon said. “I have looked at the acts of that synod; they are the most frightening thing I ever read. Even after he turned toward the false he was brilliant and terrible, like a thunderbolt. His arguments against deposition are preserved. They have a vicious clarity that chills the blood to this day.

“And if,” the patriarch mused, “in worshipping the dark he found a means to preserve himself to our own time and to seek to lay low the Empire that first gave him favor and then damned him—”

“Not to lay it low, but to conquer it, and rule it as he would,” Scaurus broke in.

“That is worse. But it being so, much of what has passed in the intervening centuries makes better sense—just as one example, the savage behavior of the Haloga mercenary troop that crossed the Astris in the reign of Anthimos II? five hundred years ago—though I would still say Anthimos’ antics had much to do with the success they enjoyed until Krispos gained the throne a few years later.”