Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (19 page)

When the tribune squelched up onto the south bank of the river, the Videssian peasant greeted him with outstretched palm. Scaurus eyed him meditatively as he fumbled in his wet belt-pouch. “How do I know you’ll not sell the secret of the ford to the first Namdaleni who ride by?”

If he expected some guilty start, he was disappointed. With mercenary candor, the fellow answered, “I’d do it, excepting they wouldn’t buy. Why would they? They hold the bridges.” His regret was perfectly genuine.

“Listen to the man!” Senpat Sviodo exclaimed. He was checking to make sure his pandoura had taken no harm during the crossing. “Is it any wonder these Videssians are ever at strife with themselves?”

“Probably not.” Marcus paid his guide, who examined each coin carefully, biting a couple of them to see if they were real soft gold.

“Not bad,” the farmer remarked. “I could’ve broken a tooth on that one of Ortaias’ you gave me, but it’s only the one.” In lieu of anywhere else to carry them, he popped the coins into his mouth; his left cheek sagged under their weight. “Much obliged to you, I’m sure,” he said blurrily.

“Likewise,” Scaurus answered. Children were squealing and splashing each other as their mothers and the legionaries carried them across the stream. Some of the women got carried, too: the very short ones, and those whom pregnancy had made awkward. Helvis, tall and strong, made the passage on her own. She brought Dosti herself; a trooper carried Malric. Her linen blouse and long, heavy wool skirt clung to her magnificently as she came out of the water.

With regret, the tribune pulled his eyes away and looked down along the riverbank to where several of Gagik Bagratouni’s men were sitting glumly, mourning their drowned comrade. The sight made him ask the peasant, “Why not drive a row of stakes into the riverbed so the ford would be safe?”

“And let everyone know where it’s at?” The local shook his head in amazement. “Thank ye, nay.”

“What do you use it for that’s so secret?” Marcus asked, but when he saw the Videssian’s hand come out he said hastily, “Never mind. I don’t want to know enough to pay for it.”

“Thought not.” The farmer waited until the last legionaries were done with the ford, then waded back into the Arandos. When he got to the north bank he discovered someone had made off with his tunic. Peering across the river, Marcus waited for an angry outburst. There was none. Mother-naked, the Videssian disappeared into the brush that crowded close to the stream.

“Why should he care?” Senpat said. He bulged his own cheek out comically. “He’s still ahead nine goldpieces and change, even without the old rag.”

There were Namdaleni on the far side of the Arandos. The legionaries were two days south of the river when they came headlong onto a pair
of the islanders, sitting their mounts with the easy arrogance of men who feel themselves lords of all they survey. That arrogance vanished like smoke in the wind when they came out from behind a stand of scrubby oaks and spied Scaurus’ column. He saw them exchange horrified glances. Then they were riding madly across a wheat field, spurring their heavy horses like racing steeds as they dashed toward the river.

For a moment Marcus rocked back on his heels, as startled by the encounter as the men of the Duchy. Then he remembered he, too, had horsemen, a good score of Zigabenos’ men. “After them!” he shouted.

The Videssians moved hesitantly at first, as if fighting had not occurred to them. The foot soldiers’ cheers, though, put fresh heart in them, as did the sight of the Namdaleni in full flight. The islanders were a bare hundred yards ahead of their pursuers when they disappeared over a low rise.

The imperials soon returned, trotting proudly now. They led one horse and held up a pair of fine mail shirts and two conical helms with bar nasals. “Where’s the other beast?” someone called.

“We had to shoot it,” one of them said.

“Idiots!” “Bunglers!” “A pack of damned incompetents, the lot of you!” The Videssians accepted the good-natured chaffing for the praise it was.

“That’s all to the good,” Gaius Philippus said. “They feel like men again; we’ll get some use out of them.”

“You’re right,” Marcus said. “But how many men does Drax have, anyway? I’d hoped he was just holding the line of the Arandos against whatever the Videssian grandees south of the river could scrape up to throw at him, but he looks to be coming right at them. Whatever you say about him, he doesn’t think small, does he?”

“Hmm.” The senior centurion considered that. “If he spreads himself too thin, the Yezda will see to him, whether we do nor not.”

“That’s so,” Marcus admitted, disquieted. He had not even seen one of the invading nomads for almost a year and a half; it was easy to forget them in the tangles of the Empire’s civil wars. Yet without them, those wars would not have happened, and they roamed the highlands like distant thunderheads.

“Not distant enough,” Gaius Philippus said when Scaurus spoke his conceit aloud.

The stand of oaks was bigger than the tribune had guessed. It went on for miles. Part of some noble’s estate? he wondered. Half-ripe acorns, dirty green with tan, ribbed tops, nestled between sharp-lobed leaves. He heard a boar grunting somewhere out of sight among the trees; all pigs loved acorns.

The legionaries scuffed through the gray-brown, tattered remnants of last autumn’s fallen leaves. The sound was soothing, like surf on a beach.

Discordant footfalls ahead roused Scaurus to alertness once more. A man burst round a corner of the forest path. His chest heaved with his exertion; blood splashed his tunic and the dust of the road from a great cut across his forehead. The terror on his face turned to disbelieving joy as he recognized the Videssian horsemen with the legionaries.

“Phos be praised!” he gasped. His words stumbled over each other in his urgency: “A rescue! Quick, my lord, the outland devils—murder!”

“Namdaleni?” Marcus demanded—was there no end to them? At the fellow’s nod, he snapped, “How many?”

The man spread his hands. “A hundred, at least.” He hopped up and down, ignoring his wound. “Phos’ mercy, hurry!”

“Two maniples,” the tribune decided. Gaius Philippus nodded in grim agreement; the men of the Duchy were no bargain. In the same breath, Scaurus went on, “Blaesus, your men; aye, and yours, Gagik!” Bagratouni understood the order, though it was in Latin. He shouted in his own throaty tongue; his Vaspurakaners yelled back, clashing their spears on their shields. The
nakharar’s
contingent was oversized for a proper maniple; a hundred Namdaleni would be outnumbered three to one.

Gaius Philippus shook the wounded Videssian, who was wobbling now that he had stopped his dash for life. “Which way, man?” the veteran demanded.

“Left at the first fork, then right at the next,” the man said. He daubed at his forehead with his sleeve, staring in disbelief at the bright blood. Then he doubled over and was sick in the road. Gaius Philippus grunted in disgust, but shouted out the directions for all the troopers to hear.

Marcus pulled his sword free. “At a trot!” he said, and added, “The shout is ‘Gavras!’ ” The legionaries pounded after him.

The first fork was only a furlong or so down the forest track, but the second was a long time coming. Feeling the sweat running itchily under his corselet, Scaurus began to wonder if he’d missed it. But the Videssian’s gory trail told him he had not. The blood in the roadway was still fresh and unclotted; the man must have run as if the Furies nipped his heels.

The Romans were not as fast, but the pace they set was enough to make their Vaspurakaner comrades, most of them heavy-set, rather short-legged men, struggle to keep up. “There up ahead, past the rotten stump,” Gaius Philippus said, pointing; sure enough, the path did split. The senior centurion’s voice was easy; he could jog along far longer than this without growing winded.

As the fork neared, Marcus heard shouts and the clash of steel on steel. “Gavras!” he yelled, the legionaries echoing him. There was a startled pause ahead, then the cry came back in Videssian accents, along with roars of anger and dismay from Namdalener throats.

The legionaries charged down the right fork of the path, which opened out into a clearing in the oak woods. A double handful of Videssians, four mounted and the rest on foot, were pushed into a compact, desperate circle by hard-pressing Namdalener horsemen. Men were down on either side; the islanders looked to be gathering themselves for a last charge to sweep their enemies away.

As his maniple deployed into battle line,
pila
ready to cast, even stolid Junius Blaesus burst out laughing. “A hundred?” he said to Scaurus. “Looks to me, sir, like we’ve brought a mountain to drop on a fly.”

If the little clearing held thirty islanders, the tribune would have been surprised. The men of the Duchy gauped as legionaries kept pouring out of the woods. Finally the fellow Marcus took to be their commander because of his fine saddle and horse and the gold inlay on his helm threw back his head and laughed louder than Blaesus had. “Down spears, lads,” he called to his knights. “They have us, and no mistake.”

The Namdaleni followed his order, warily in the case of those still fronting their intended victims. But the Videssians, as surprised as their foes by their deliverance, were content to lean on their weapons and sob in great breaths of air; they were in no condition to attack.

The mercenary captain rode slowly up to Scaurus. The Romans
around the tribune raised javelins threateningly, but the islander paid them no mind. He held his shield out to Scaurus. “Give me a blow for my honor’s sake,” he said, and Marcus tapped the metal facing with his sword. “Well struck! I yield me!” He took off his helmet to show he had surrendered. His men followed suit.

Under the helm the Namdalener had a smiling, freckled face and a thick head of light brown hair; like most of his countrymen, he shaved the back of his head. As had been true of the islanders in the motte-and-bailey fort north of the Sangarios, he did not seem disturbed at yielding; these things were part of a professional soldier’s life.

His squadron was as casual; one of them said, quite without rancor, to the imperials they had just fought, “We’d have had you if these whoreson Romans hadn’t come along.” Having served side-by-side with them in the capital, the Namdaleni knew more about the legionaries than did the Videssians they had saved.

Scaurus set his troopers to disarming the islanders, then walked over to salute the Videssian leader. The man’s highbred horse and the air of authority he wore like a good cloak made him easy to pick out. He must have been nearly sixty, but a vigorous sixty. His hair and close-trimmed beard were iron gray, and, while his middle was thick, his shoulders did not sag under the weight of armor.

His eye held a twinkle of irony as he returned Marcus’ salute. “You do me too much honor. The weaker should bow and scrape, not the stronger. Sittas Zonaras, at your service.” He bowed in the saddle. “My rank is spatharios, for all that tells you.”

Even as the tribune gave his name, he decided he liked this Zonaras. In the cloud-cuckoo-land of Videssian honorifics, spatharios was the vaguest, but few imperials would poke fun at their own pretensions.

“I’ve heard of you, young fellow,” Zonaras remarked, apparently adding the last phrase to see if Scaurus would squirm. When he got no response, he probed harder. “Baanes Onomagoulos had things to say about you, none of which I’d care to repeat to you face-to-face.” One of the noble’s retainers shot him an alarmed look.

“Did he?” Marcus said, alert beneath his casual mask. It was not surprising Zonaras knew the late rebel; this was the country from which Onomagoulos came. That he would admit knowing him was something
else, an extraordinary gesture of trust when offered to a man who served Baanes’ foe.

“Onomagoulos rarely said much good about anyone,” the tribune said, and Zonaras nodded, his own face impassive now, as if wondering whether he had made a mistake. His eyes cleared as Marcus went on, “I think being lamed embittered him. He wasn’t so sour before Maragha.”

“That’s so,” the Videssian said. As if relieved to back away from a dangerous subject, he glanced toward the men of the Duchy. “What will you do with them? They think they own the country for no better reason than their bandit chief’s say-so.”

After the Sangarios, Marcus thought gloomily, they had better reason than that. He thought for a few seconds. “Perhaps Drax will exchange them for Mertikes Zigabenos.”

The legionaries must have outmarched news of the battle, for Zonaras blinked in amazement, and his men exclaimed in alarm. “Drax holds the guards commander?” Zonaras said. “Grave news. Tell it me.”

Scaurus set it forth. Zonaras listened impassively until he spoke of the desertion of the Namdaleni who had marched with the Imperial Army, then cursed in black anger. “Skotos freeze all treachers’ privates,” he growled, and from that moment on the tribune was sure he had taken no part in Onomagoulos’ revolt. When Marcus was done, Zonaras sat silent a long while. At last he asked, “What will you do now?”

“What I can,” the tribune answered. “How much that may be, I don’t know.”

He thought Zonaras might snort in contempt, but the Videssian noble gave a sober nod. “You carry an old man’s head on your shoulders, to fight shy of promising Phos’ sun when you don’t carry it on your belt.” Zonaras scratched his knee as he watched Scaurus. “You know, outlander, you shame me,” he said slowly. “It is not right for hired troops to be more willing to save Videssos than her own men.”

Marcus had thought that since his first weeks in the Empire, but few Videssians agreed. Long used to their power, they took it for granted—or had, until Maragha. The Roman, whose homeland had grown mighty only in the century and a half before his birth, was not so complacent.

Zonaras broke into his thoughts, reaching down to take his hand. “What I and mine can do for you, we will,” he pledged, and squeezed
with a strength that belied his years. Scaurus returned the clasp, but wondered how much help one backwoods noble was likely to give.

The next day’s march was a revelation to the tribune, not least because all of it was over Sittas Zonaras’ land. Toward evening the legionaries made camp beside his sprawling villa, which nestled in a narrow valley. The setting sun shone purple off the highlands to the south and east. “We’ve done well,” Zonaras said with no little pride.