Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (46 page)

“A good choice,” the healer priest said, taking it from him. “Phos’ holiness aids any spell cast in a good cause, and the holy Nestorios, as you know, has a special affinity for the Namdaleni.”

“Just get on with it.” Scaurus’ voice was harsh.

“Remember, I have not tried this in many years,” Styppes warned. The ritual seemed not much different from one Nepos had used to seek a lost tax-document for the tribune at the capital. After prostrating himself before the icon, Styppes held it over his head in his right hand. He began chanting in the same ancient dialect of Videssian Phos’ liturgy used. His left hand made swift passes over a cup of wine, in which floated a long sliver of pale wood. One end of the sliver had been dipped in blue paint that matched his priestly robes.

His chant ended not with a strong word of command, as Nepos’ had, but imploringly; his hand opened in supplication over the cup. “Bless the Lord of the great and good mind!” Styppes breathed, for the chip of wood was swinging like a nail drawn toward a lodestone. “Southeast,” the healer-priest said, studying the blue-tipped end.

“Toward the coast, then,” Marcus said, almost to himself. Then, to Styppes once more, “You’ll ride with us, priest, and cast your spell every couple of hours, to keep us on the trail.”

Styppes looked daggers at him, but did not dare say no.

The pursuit party rode out near dawn, mounted on a strange assortment of animals: a couple of real saddle horses beside Senpat’s and Nevrat’s; half a dozen packhorses, two of which were really too old for this kind of work; and three brawny, great-hoofed plow horses. “A miserable lot,” Senpat said to Marcus, “but I had to scour four farms round to get ’em. Most folk use oxen or donkeys.”

“The islanders aren’t on racers either,” the tribune answered. The turmoil in the Roman camp had roused the farmer whose beasts were gone, and Scaurus’ ears were still ringing from his howls of outrage. Mixed with the curses, though, was a good deal of description; even with the inevitable exaggeration of his horses’ quality, Marcus doubted they would tempt the Videssian cavalry much.

The rain died away into fitful showers and finally stopped, though the stiff north wind kept whipping bank after bank of ugly gray-black clouds across the sky. Styppes, who had brought a goodly supply of wine with which to work his magic, nipped at it every so often to stay warm. It did nothing for his horsemanship; he swayed atop his plow horse like a ship on a stormy sea.

Marcus, taller and heavier than his men, also rode one of the ponderous work animals. Feeling its great muscles surge under him, he reflected that he was at last beginning to react like a Videssian. Styppes’ spell of finding was but another tool to grasp, like a chisel or a saw, not something to make a man gasp in lumpish terror. And for traveling quickly, a horse was better than shank’s mare.

Other thoughts bubbled just below the surface of his mind. He fought the anguish with his stoic training, reminding himself over and over that nothing befell a man which nature had not already made him fit to bear, that there was no point to being the puppet of any passion, that no soul should forfeit self-control of its own accord. The number of times he had to repeat the maxims marked how little they helped.

Whenever the legionaries rode past a herdsman or orchard keeper, the tribune asked if he had seen the fugitives. “Aye, ridin’ hard, they was, soon after dawn,” a shepherd said at mid-morning. “They done somethin’?”
His weather-narrowed eyes flashed interest from under a wool cap pulled low on his forehead.

“I’m not out for the exercise,” Scaurus retorted. Even as the herder gave a wry chuckle, he was booting his horse forward.

“We’re gaining,” Senpat Sviodo said. Marcus nodded.

“What will you do with Helvis when we catch them?” Nevrat asked him.

He tightened his jaws until his teeth ached, but did not answer.

A little later Styppes repeated his spell. The chip of wood moved at once, to point more nearly east than south. “There is the way,” the healer-priest said, sounding pleased with himself for having made the magic work twice in a row. He took a healthy swig from the wineskin as reward for his success.

As the coast grew near, the ground firmed under the horses’ hooves, with sand supplanting the lowlands’ thick, black, clinging soil. Terns soared overhead, screeching as they rode with wild breeze. The horses trotted past scrubby beach plums loaded with purple fruit, trampled spiky saltwort and marram grass under their feet.

The sea, gray and threatening as the sky, leaped frothing up the beach; Scaurus licked his lips and tasted salt. No tracks marred the coarse yellow sand. “Which way now?” he called to Styppes, raising his voice above the booming of the surf.

“We will see, won’t we?” Styppes said, blinking owlishly. Marcus’ heart sank as he watched the priest’s lurching dismount. The wineskin flapped at his side like a crone’s empty dug. He managed to pour the last few drops into his cup, but a fuddled smile appeared on his face as he tried to remember his magic. He held the icon of the holy Nestorios over his head and gabbled something in the archaic Videssian dialect, but even the tribune heard how he staggered through, fluffing half a dozen times. His passes, too, were slow and fumbling. The sliver of wood in the wine cup remained a mere sliver.

“You worthless sot,” Scaurus said, too on edge to hold his temper. Muttering something that might have been apology, Styppes tried again, but only succeeded in upsetting the cup. The thirsty sand drank up the wine. The tribune cursed him with the weary rage of hopelessness.

Titus Pullo gestured southward. “Smoke that way, sir, I think!” Marcus followed his pointing finger. Sure enough, a windblown column was rising into the sky.

“We should have spied that sooner,” Senpat Sviodo said angrily. “A pox on these clouds; they’re hardly lighter than the smoke themselves.”

“Come on,” Marcus said, swinging himself back into the saddle. He thumped his heels against the plow horse’s ribs. With a snort of complaint, it broke into a jarring canter. The tribune turned his head at a shout; Styppes was still struggling to climb aboard his horse. “Leave him!” Scaurus said curtly. Sand flying, the pursuit party rode south.

They rounded a headland and saw the bonfire blazing on the beach less than a mile away. Marcus’ pulse leaped. There were horses round that fire, and others walking free not far away, grazing on whatever shore plants they could find. Senpat whooped. “Gallop!” he shouted, and spurred his horse forward. The others followed.

Jouncing up and down, his eyes tearing from the wind of his passage, Scaurus had all he could do to hold his seat. The legionary Florus could not, and went rolling in the sand while his horse thundered away. Vorenus jeered as he rode by the helpless trooper, then almost joined him when his packhorse stumbled.

Because the Romans had to give all their attention to their horsemanship, Nevrat Sviodo was first to spot the warship lying offshore. Its broad, square sail was tightly furled in the stiff breeze; small triangular topsail and foresail held it steady in the water. Its sides and decking were painted sea green, to make it as near invisible as could be.

The color reminded Marcus of Drax’ tokens. He knew with sudden sick certainty that this was no imperial craft, but one of the Namdalener corsairs hunting in Videssian waters.

A moment after Nevrat cried out, the tribune spied the longboat rowing out to meet its parent vessel. He saw the wind catch a woman’s hair and blow it in black waves round her face. A smaller shape sat to either side of her. She was looking toward the beach and pointed back at the oncoming legionaries. She called out something at the same time; though he could not hear the words, Scaurus knew that sweet contralto. The rowers picked up their stroke.

The boat was hardly two hundred yards from shore. Fitting an arrow
to his bow, Senpat Sviodo rode out till his horse was belly-deep in the sea. He drew the shaft to his ear, let fly. Marcus muttered a prayer, and did not know himself whether or not he asked for Senpat’s aim to be true.

He saw the arrow splash a few feet to one side of the longboat. The rowers pulled like men possessed. Senpat nocked another shaft, then swore vilely as his bowstring snapped when he drew it back. Nevrat rushed forward to hand him her bow, but it was a lighter one that did not quite have the other’s range. Senpat fired; the arrow fell far short of its mark. He shot again, to prove to himself the first had been no fluke, then shook his head and gave Nevrat back her bow. Knowing they were safe, the oarsmen eased up.

Scaurus’ cheeks were wet. He thought the rain had started again, then realized he was weeping. Mortified, he tried to stop and could not. He stared at the sand at his feet, his eyes stinging.

Once the longboat and its occupants were recovered, the islanders unreefed their mainsail. It seized the breeze like a live thing. When the tribune raised his head again, there was a white wake under the ship’s bow. The steersmen at the stern leaned hard against their twin steering oars. The corsair heeled sharply away from land, driving east with the wind at its beam. No one on deck looked back.

Afterward, Marcus remembered little of the next two days; perhaps mercifully, grief, loss, and betrayal left them blurred. He must have returned the horses, both stolen and appropriated, for he was afoot when he entered the capital’s chief suburb on the western shore of the Cattle-Crossing, the town the Videssians simply called “Across.”

What stuck in his mind most, oddly, should have been least likely to remain. Senpat and Nevrat, trying to free him from his black desperation, bought a huge amphora of wine and, carrying it together, hauled it up the stairs to the cubicle he had rented over a perfumer’s shop. “Here,” Senpat said, producing a mug. “Drink.” His brisk tenor permitted no argument.

Scaurus drank. Normally moderate, this night he welcomed oblivion. He poured the wine down at a pace that would have left Styppes
gasping. Though they did not match him cup for cup, his Vaspurakaner friends soon sat slack-jointed on the floor of the bare little room, arms round each other’s shoulders and foolish smiles on their faces. Yet he could not reach the stupor he sought; his mind still burned with terrible clarity.

The wine did loose deep-seated memories he had thought buried forever. As the returning rain pattered on the slates of the roof and slid through shutter slats to form a puddle by his bed, he paced up and down declaiming great stretches of the
Medea
of Euripides, a play he had learned when studying Greek and hardly thought of since.

When he first read the
Medea
, his sympathies were with the heroine of the play, as its author intended. Now, though, he had committed Jason’s hubris—maybe the worst a man can fall into, taking a woman lightly—and found himself in Jason’s role. He found, too, as was often the case in Euripides’ work, that misery was meted out equally to both sides.

Senpat and Nevrat listened to the Greek verses in mixed admiration and bewilderment. “That is poetry, truly,” Senpat said, responding to sound and meter with a musician’s ear, “but in what tongue? Not the one you Romans use among yourselves, I’m sure.” While he and his wife knew only a little Latin, they could recognize it when they heard it.

The tribune did not answer; instead he took another long pull at the wine, still trying to blot out the reflections that would not cease. The cup shook in his hand. He spilled sticky purple wine on his leg, but never noticed. Even Medea, he thought, had not seduced Jason before she worked her murders and fled in her dragon-drawn chariot.

“Was any man ever worse used by woman?” he cried.

He expected no answer to that shout of despair, but Nevrat stirred in her husband’s arms. “As for man by woman, I could not say,” she said, looking up at him, “but turn it round, if you will, and look at Alypia Gavra.”

Marcus stopped, staring, in mid-stride. He hurled the half-empty wine cup against a wall, abruptly ashamed of his self-pity. The ordeal Mavrikios Gavras’ daughter had endured outshone his as the sun did the moon. After Ortaias Sphrantzes’ cowardice cost her father his life at Maragha, Ortaias—whom flight had saved—claimed the throne when
he made his way back to the capital; the Sphrantzai, the bureaucratic family supreme, had produced Emperors before. And to cement his claim, Alypia, whose house opposed everything his stood for, had been forced into marriage with him.

But Ortaias Sphrantzes, a foolish, trivial young man with more bombast than sense, was only a pawn in the hands of his uncle Vardanes. And Vardanes, whose malignance was neither mediocre nor trivial, had coveted Alypia for years. Dispossessing his feckless nephew of her, he kept her as slave to his lusts throughout Ortaias’ brief, unhappy reign. When the Sphrantzai fell, Scaurus had seen her thus and seen her spirit unbroken despite the submission forced from her body.

Turning his back on the spattered wall, he knelt clumsily beside Nevrat Sviodo and touched her hand in gratitude. When he tried to speak his thanks, his throat clogged and he wept instead, but it was a clean weeping, with the beginning of healing in it. Then at last the wine reached him; he did not hear Nevrat and her husband when they rose and tiptoed from the room.