Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (119 page)

Thorisin looked up from the stack of papers he so despised. With Videssos’ enemies bested for the moment, he had to start paying attention to the business of running the Empire again. He shoved the parchments to one side with a grunt of relief, waited for Marcus to bow, and overlooked, as usual, the tribune’s omitting the prostration. “What now?” he asked in a neutral voice.

“Perhaps—” Marcus began, and was mortified to have the word come out as a nervous croak. He steadied himself and tried again: “Perhaps it might be better if we talked under the rose.” Gavras frowned; the tribune flushed, realizing he had rendered the Latin phrase literally. He explained.

“ ‘Under the rose,’ eh? I rather like that,” the Emperor said. He dismissed Glykas, then turned back to Scaurus, his expression watchful now. “And so?” he prompted, folding his arms across his chest. Even in the ordinary linen tunic and baggy wool breeches he was wearing, he radiated authority. He’d had three years to grow into the imperial office, and it fit him.

Marcus felt his power, though he was not so intimidated as a Videssian would have been. He took a deep breath, then, as if to beat back his trepidation, and plunged straight ahead. “As we agreed in Videssos, I’d
like you to think about me as a husband for your niece—if Alypia wishes it, of course.”

The Emperor steepled his fingers, making Scaurus wait. “Did we have such an agreement?” he asked lazily. “As I recall, there were no witnesses.”

“You know we did!” the tribune yelped, appalled. Denial was the last tack he had foreseen Gavras taking. “Phos heard you, if no one else.”

“You win nothing with me for using the good god’s name; I know you for a heathen,” Thorisin jeered. But he went on musingly, “To be just, you never tried that trick, either. Don’t tell me so stubborn a one as you has actually changed his mind?”

The squabbling among Phos’ sects still struck Marcus as insane, and he had no idea how to pick the true creed—if there was one—from the baying pack. But after his experience on the field, he could no longer ignore the Empire’s faith. “I may have,” he said, as honest a reply as he could find.

“Hrmmp. Most men in your shoes would come see me festooned with enough icons to turn a lance, or singing hymns, if they had the voice for it.”

The tribune shrugged.

“Hrmmp,” Thorisin repeated. He pulled at his beard. “You don’t make it easy, do you?” He gave a short snort of laughter. “I wonder how many times I’ve said that, eh, Roman?” He grinned as if they were conspirators.

Marcus shrugged again. The Emperor was drifting into that unfathomable sportive mood of his. Marcus realized that any response he made might be wrong. He cast about for arguments to prove to Gavras that he was no danger to him, but stood mute.

Gavras slammed the palms of his hands down, hard. His papers jumped; one rolled-up scroll fell off the desk. His voice came muffled from behind it as he leaned over to pick up the parchment. “Well, all right, go ahead and ask her.”

Triggered by the silence breaking, Marcus gabbled, “As a foreigner, I’d be no threat to the throne because the people would never accept—” He was nearly through the sentence before his brain registered what his ears had heard. “Ask her?” he whispered. The Avtokrator had not invited
him to sit, but he sank into the nearest chair. It was that or the floor; his knees would not hold him up.

Tossing the scroll back onto the desktop, Thorisin ignored the breach of protocol. “I said so, didn’t I? After Zemarkhos, Avshar—Avshar!—and even a peace of sorts with Yezd, I could hardly refuse you. And besides—” He turned serious in an instant. “—if you know anything about me, you’d best know this: I keep my bargains.”

“Then the argument was a sham, and you were going to say yes to me all along?”

The sly grin came back to Gavras’ face. “What if I was?”

“Why, you miserable bastard!”

“Who’s a bastard, you cross-eyed midwife’s mistake?” Thorisin roared back. They were both laughing now, Marcus mostly in relief. The Emperor found a jug of wine, shook it to see how much it held—enough to suit him. He uncorked it, gulped, put the stopper back, and tossed it to Scaurus. As the tribune was drinking, he went on. “Admit it, your heart would’ve stopped if I’d told you aye straight out.”

Marcus started to say something, swallowed wrong, and sputtered and choked, spraying wine every which way. Thorisin pounded him on the back. “Thanks,” he wheezed.

He stood and clasped the Emperor’s hand, which was as hard and callused as his own. “My heart?” he said. “This would be the first time you’d ever shown a counterfeit copper’s worth of care for my health if that were true.”

“So it would,” Gavras said calmly, unashamed at being caught out. “Would it make you feel better if I admitted I was enjoying every second of the charade?”

Marcus took another drink, this time successfully. “Nothing,” he said, “could make me feel better than I do now.”

The imperial army was breaking camp, shaking itself into marching order for the return to the capital, and Gaius Philippus had not returned. “No need for you to come with us,” Arigh told Scaurus. “My lads’ll find him, never fear.” He rode at the head of a company of Arshaum.

“Me, I’d bet on us,” Laon Pakhymer said; he had a band of his own
horsemen behind him. “The old hardcase’s ghost would haunt us for spite if we didn’t do everything we could for him.” The Khatrisher would head into dangerous country after Gaius Philippus before letting on that he liked him.

Marcus paid no attention to either of them, but methodically saddled his horse. He mounted, then turned from one man to the other. “Let’s go.”

They trotted through the battlefield. The stench of the unburied horses and Yezda was beginning to fade; scavengers had reduced many of them to bare bones. Raw mounds of earth topped the mass graves of the fallen imperial soldiers. Broken weapons and bits of harness were starting to get dusty; whatever was worth looting had long since been taken.

Behind the search party, someone let out a yowl. Scaurus turned to see Viridovix galloping after them. “Why did ye no tell me you were for chasing down t’auld man?” he complained to the tribune once he had caught up. Mischief gleamed in his eyes. “Och, what a show—himself in love. Strange as a wolf growing cabbages, I warrant.”

“Maybe so, but I’d be careful twitting him over it,” Marcus advised.

“That I ken.”

Stretches of ground pocked with hoofprints showed where Avshar’s camp, and Wulghash’s, had lain. Not far past them, a Khatrisher scout whooped and pointed. Marcus peered ahead, but his eyes were not good enough to pick out the rider the scout had spotted before the fellow went to earth, letting his horse run free. The search party hurried ahead, but short of firing the scrubby brush by the side of the road or sending in dogs, no one was going to find the suspicious traveler in a hurry.

But when he heard his name shouted, Gaius Philippus cautiously emerged from cover. Recognizing Scaurus, Viridovix, and then Pakhymer, he lowered his
gladius
.

“What’s all this about?” he growled. “Where I come from, they don’t send this many out after parricides.”

“A vice of yours we hadn’t known,” Laon Pakhymer said, drawing a glare. It did not bother him, which only annoyed Gaius Philippus more. “And you’ll pay for that pony if it’s come to any harm,” the Khatrisher added; three of his troopers and a couple of Arshaum were chasing the beast down.

Marcus cut through the senior centurion’s obscenities to explain why they had gone searching for him. Gaius Philippus relaxed, a little. “It’s nice of you, I’m sure, but sooner or later I’d have turned up.”

“Not a bad brag,” Arigh said, which touched him off all over again. Scaurus did not think he had been boasting. If anyone could travel the westlands alone, it was Gaius Philippus.

After his curses ran down, he reclaimed his horse and headed back with the search party, still grumbling that they had wasted their time. Both to distract him and out of curiosity, Marcus asked, “Did you manage to get all the way up to Aptos?”

“Said I was going to, didn’t I?”

“And?”

“Not a whole lot left of the town,” Gaius Philippus said, frowning. “The Yezda did go through with Avshar, and wrecked the place. The keep held out, though, and Nerse was able to save a lot of the townsfolk. Some others got away to the hills. If there’s a calm spell, they can rebuild.”

“Nerse, you say? Ho, now we come down to it,” Viridovix exclaimed.

Gaius Philippus tensed; his face went hard and suspicious. Marcus wanted to kick the Celt and waited helplessly for him to come out with some crudity—here as nowhere else, Gaius Philippus was vulnerable.

But Viridovix, who had known loss of his own, was not out to wound. He asked only, “And will you be needing groomsmen, too, like Scaurus here?”

Even that simple, friendly question was almost too much. The senior centurion answered in a low-voiced growl. “No.” He turned to Marcus. “Groomsmen, eh? Nice going—you pulled it off. I hope I’ll be one of them.”

“You’d better be.” Gaius Philippus’ smile was such an obvious false front that the tribune asked gently, “She turned you down?”

“What?” The veteran looked at him in surprise. “No. I never asked her.”

That was too much for Viridovix. “You didna ask her?” he howled, clapping a hand to his forehead. “Are y’unhinged? You went gallivanting on up a couple days’ ride, likely near got yoursel’ killed a time or two …”
He paused, but Gaius Philippus’ bleak expression neither confirmed nor denied. “And you stopped in for a mug o’ wine and a how-do-ye-do, then took off again? Och, the waste of it, man, the waste! If it were me, now—”

“Shut up,” the senior centurion said with such cold anger that the Gaul actually did. “If it were you, you’d’ve talked her ear off and made her love every minute of it. Well, I haven’t your tongue, loose at both ends, and I haven’t anything much to offer her, either. She’s a landed noble, and what am I? A mercenary who owns a sword and a mail shirt and precious little else.” He glanced toward Pakhymer. “I had to hit up Laon here for a horse to make the trip.”

Viridovix did not reply in words, merely pointed at Scaurus. Gaius Philippus turned brick red, but said stubbornly, “He’s him; I’m me.”

“Honh!” Viridovix said. Only the warning in Gaius Philipus’ eyes kept him from going further.

The sad thing, Marcus thought, was that the veteran was right; he had grown too set in his ways to know how to change even when he wanted to. “You got there and back all right; that’s what counts.” He bobbed his head at Arigh. “Let’s head back.”

“Took you long enough,” the Arshaum said. Like Pakhymer, he had waited halfway between boredom and irritation while the Romans and Viridovix talked, for they still favored Latin among themselves.

Everyone rode in silence for some time. They were nearly back to camp when Gaius Philippus said, “You know, Celt, you might have something after all. Maybe one of these days I’ll get back to Aptos again and do the talking I should have done this time.”

“Sure and you will,” Viridovix said consolingly, but Marcus heard the melancholy edge to his voice. Gaius Philippus had no trouble making plans when he was moving directly away from his goal. Carrying them out was something else.

Thorisin Gavras had not known of the search party. Only a rear guard was left at the campsite, a garrison to hold the gap in the hills against Yezda raiders. But the main body of troops had hardly traveled a mile; Scaurus could still see companies of men and horses through the inevitable cloud of dust they kicked up.

“Let’s race it!” Pakhymer shouted, spurring his pony ahead. “First
one to the baggage train collects a silverpiece from everybody else!” He had given himself a head start, but his lead did not last long; an Arshaum shot past him almost before the wager was out of his mouth.

Galloping along in the middle of the laughing, shouting pack, Marcus knew he was going to lose his money. He did not care. Ahead lay Amorion, and beyond it Videssos the city. He was going home.

L
AST NIGHT
’
S RAIN STILL DRIPPED FROM OVERHANGING EAVES AND
trickled out of drainpipes, but the storm had finally blown through the capital. The day was clear and brisk, more like early spring than autumn.

“About time,” Marcus said, eyeing the bright sunshine and crisp-edged shadows with relief. “If we’d had to put things off again, I think I would have screamed.”

Taso Vones reached up to pat him on the shoulder. “Now, now,” he said. “The people are entitled to their spectacle. A wedding procession isn’t nearly as much fun if you have to get wet to watch it.”

Nepos the priest shook a finger at the Khatrisher diplomat. “You have a cynical view of the world, friend Taso.” He did his best to sound reproachful but his plump face was made for mirth, and he could not help smiling.

“I, cynical? Not at all, sir; merely realistic.” Vones drew himself up, the caricature of affronted dignity. “If you want cynicism, look to this one.” He pointed Scaurus’ way. “Why else would he have chosen you for a groomsman, if not to get at least one Videssian into the party?”

“Oh, go howl, Taso,” Marcus said, nettled. “I chose him because he’s a friend. Besides, there’s Goudeles over there, and Lemmokheir. And Skylitzes would be here, too, if he were up to it.” Among other battle wounds, the dour imperial officer had suffered a broken thigh when his horse was killed and crushed him beneath it. He was mending, but could hardly hobble yet, even with two canes.

Still, as it did more often than not, Vones’ sly needling held a germ of truth. Almost all the men gathered together in the little antechamber off the Grand Courtroom were not Videssians. Their various versions of finery gave them a curiously mismatched look.

Gaius Philippus was in full military gear, from hobnailed
caligae
to crested helm; his scarlet cape of rank hung from his shoulders. Marcus wished he could remember everything the veteran had called some officious chamberlain who tried to persuade him to don Videssian ceremonial raiment.

Viridovix wore a burnished corselet. Below it, a pair of baggy Videssian trousers made a fair substitute for the tighter breeches his own nation favored. His head was bare, the better to display his ruddy locks, which he had washed with lime-water until they stood up stiff as a lion’s mane. “Gi’ the lassies summat to look at,” he was saying to Gorgidas.