Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (6 page)

“Aye, belike you’re right, teacher; you’ve no need to lecture me on it.” Viridovix’ green eyes measured Gorgidas. “At least it’s not myself I’m running from.”

The doctor grunted. Viridovix’ remark had too much truth in it for comfort—he was a barbarian, but far from stupid. After Quintus Glabrio died under Gorgidas’ hands, his lifelong art came to look futile and empty. What good was it, he thought bitterly, if it could not save a lover? History gave some hope for usefulness without involvement.

He doubted he could explain that to the Gaul and did not much want to. In any case, Viridovix’ one sentence summed up his rationalizations too well.

Arigh Arghun’s son strolled across the deck to them and saved him from his dilemma. Even the nomad from the far steppe beyond the River Shaum had no trouble with his sea legs. “How is he?” he asked Gorgidas, his Videssian sharp and clipped with the accent of his people.

“Not very well,” the Greek answered candidly, “but if land’s in sight we’ll make Prista this afternoon. That should cure him.”

Arigh’s flat, swarthy face was impassive as usual, but mischief danced in his slanted eyes. He said, “A horse goes up and down, too, you know, V’rid’rix. Do you get horsesick? There’s lots of riding ahead of us.”

“Nay, I willna be horsesick, snake of an Arshaum,” Viridovix said. He swore at his friend with all the vigor in his weakened frame. “Now begone with you, before I puke on your fancy sheepskin boots.” Chuckling, Arigh departed.

“Horsesick,” Viridovix muttered. “There’s a notion to send shudders into the marrow of a man. Epona and her mare’d not allow it.”

“That’s your Celtic horse-goddess?” Gorgidas asked, always interested in such tidbits of lore.

“The same. I’ve sacrificed to her often enough, though not since I came to the Empire.” The Gaul looked guilty. “Sure and it might be wise to make amends for that at Prista, am I live to reach it.”

Prista was a town of contrasts, an outpost of empire at the edge of an endless sea of grass. It held fewer than ten thousand souls, yet boasted fortification stouter than any in Videssos save the capital’s. For the Empire it was a watchpost on the steppe from which the wandering Khamorth tribes could be played off against each other or cajoled into imperial service. The plainsmen needed it to trade their tallow, their honey, their wax, their furs and slaves for wheat, salt, wine, silk, and incense from Videssos, but many a nomad khagan had coveted it for his own—and so the stonework. Walls were not always enough to hold them at bay; Prista’s past was stormy.

Every sort of building could be found inside those walls. Stately homes of the local gray-brown shale in classical Videssian courtyard style stood next to rough-timbered shacks and houses built of slabs of sod from the plain. On unused ground, nomads’ tents of hides or brightly dyed felt sprang up like toadstools.

Though Prista held a Videssian governor and garrison, much of its population was of plains blood. The loungers on the dock were squat, heavy-set men with unkempt beards. Most of them wore linen tunics and trousers instead of the steppe’s furs and leathers, but almost all affected the low-crowned fur caps the Khamorth wore in cold weather and hot. And when Pikridios Goudeles asked one of them to help carry his gear to an inn, the fellow sat unmoving.

Goudeles raised an eyebrow in annoyance. “My luck to pick a deaf-mute,” he said and turned to another idler, this one baring his broad hairy chest to the sun. The man ignored him. “Dear me, is this the country of the deaf?” the bureaucrat asked, beginning to sound angry; in Videssos he was used to being heeded.

“I’ll make them listen, the spirits fry me if I don’t,” Arigh said, stepping
toward the knot of men. They glowered at him; there was no love lost between Arshaum and Khamorth.

Lankinos Skylitzes touched Arigh’s arm. The officer was a man of few words and had no liking for Goudeles. He was quite willing to watch the pen-pusher make an ass of himself. But Arigh could cause riot, not embarrassment, and that Skylitzes would not brook.

“Let me,” he said, striding forward in Arigh’s place. The dock-rats watched him, not much impressed. He was a large man with a soldier’s solid frame, but there were enough of them to deal with him and his comrades, too … and he kept company with an Arshaum. But their scowls turned to startled grins when he addressed them in their own speech. After a few seconds of chaffering, four of them jumped up to shoulder the envoys’ kits. Only Arigh carried his own—and seemed content to do so.

“What a rare useful thing it must be, to be able to bespeak the people wherever you go,” Viridovix said admiringly to Skylitzes. The Gaul was already becoming his usual exuberant self once more. Like the giant Antaios in the myth, Gorgidas thought, he drew strength from contact with the earth.

Economical even in gestures, Skylitzes gave a single nod.

That seemed to frustrate Viridovix, who turned to the Greek. “With your history and all, Gorgidas dear, would you no like to have these folk talk your own tongue so you could be asking them all the questions lurking in your head?”

Gorgidas ignored the sarcasm; Viridovix’ question touched a deep hurt in him. “By the gods, Gaul, it would give me pleasure if anyone in this abandoned world spoke my tongue, even you. Here the two of us are as closest kin, but I can no more use Hellenic speech with you than you your Celtic with me. Does it not grate you, too, ever speaking Latin and Videssian?”

“It does that,” Viridovix said at once. “Even the Romans are better off than we, for they have themselves to jabber with and keep their speech alive. I tried teaching my lassies the Celtic, but they had no thought for sic things. I fear I chose ’em only for their liveliness under a blanket.”

And so were you sated but alone, Gorgidas thought. As if to confirm his guess, the Gaul suddenly burst into a torrent of verse in his native tongue. Arigh and the Videssians gaped at him. The local bearers had
been stealing glances at him all along, curious at his fair, freckled skin and fiery hair. Now they shrank back, perhaps afraid he was reciting some spell.

Viridovix rolled on for what might have been five or six stanzas. Then he stumbled to a halt, cursing in Celtic, Videssian, and Latin all mixed together.

“Beshrew me, I’ve forgotten the rest,” he mourned and hung his head in shame.

After the imperial capital’s broad straight streets paved with cobblestones or flags and its efficient underground drainage system, Prista came as something of a shock. The main thoroughfare was hard-packed dirt. It zigzagged like an alley and was hardly wider than one. Sewage flowed in a channel down the center. Gorgidas saw a nomad undo his trousers and urinate in the channel; no one paid him any mind.

The Greek shook his head. In Elis, where he had grown up, such things were commonplace. The cry of “
Exito!
Here it comes!” warned pedestrians that a fresh load of slops was about to be thrown out. But the Romans had better notions of sanitation, and in their greater cities the Videssians did, too. Here on the frontier they did not bother—and surely paid the price in disease.

Well, what of it? Gorgidas thought; they have healer-priests to set things right. Then he wondered even about that. By the look of things, many of the Pristans kept their plains customs and probably did not follow Phos. He glanced toward the Videssian god’s temple. Its discolored stones and weather-softened lines proclaimed it one of the oldest buildings in the town, but streaks of tarnish ran down the gilded dome atop it. Skylitzes saw that, too, and frowned.

If Pikridios Goudeles felt any dismay at the temple’s shabby condition, he hid it well. But he grew voluble when he saw the inside of the inn the natives, through Skylitzes, had assured him was the best Prista offered. “What a bloody hole! I’ve seen stockyards with better-run pens.”

Two of the Pristans scowled; Gorgidas had thought they understood Videssian. In truth, the Greek was with Goudeles. The taproom was small, poorly furnished, and decades overdue for cleaning. Caked-on soot blackened the wall above each torch bracket. The place smelled of smoke, stale liquor, and staler sweat.

Nor was the clientele more prepossessing. Two or three tables were filled by loafers who might have been blood-brothers to the idlers on the docks. Half a dozen Videssians drank at another. Though most of them were in their middle years, they wore gaudy, baggy-sleeved tunics like so many young street ruffians; each looked to have a fortune in gold on his fingers and round his neck. Their voices were loud and sharp, their speech filled with the capital’s slang.

In Latin, Viridovix murmured, “Dinna be gambling with these outen your own dice.”

“I know thieves when I see them,” Gorgidas answered in the same language, “even rich thieves.”

If the taverner was one such, he spent his money elsewhere. A short, fat man, his sullen mouth and suspicious eyes belied all the old saws about jolly plump folk. The upstairs room he grudgingly yielded to the embassy was hardly big enough to hold the five straw-stuffed mattresses a servant fetched in.

Goudeles tipped the men with the party’s equipment. Once they had gone, he fell down onto a mattress—the thickest one, Gorgidas noted—and burst out laughing. At his companions’ curious stares, he said, “I was just thinking: if this is the best Prista has to offer, Phos preserve me from the worst.”

“Enjoy it while you may,” Skylitzes advised.

“No, the pudgy one is right,” Arigh said. Goudeles, unpacking a fresh robe, did not seem overjoyed at his support, if that was what it was. The Arshaum went on, “Even the finest of towns is a prison; only on the plains can a man breathe free.”

Someone rapped politely on the door—a soldier. He had the half-Khamorth look of most folk here, being wide-shouldered, dark, and bushy-bearded. But he wore chain mail, instead of the boiled leather of the plains, and spoke good Videssian. “You are the gentlemen from the
Conqueror
, the envoys to the Arshaum?”

He bowed when they admitted it. “His excellency the
hypepoptes
Methodios Sivas greets you, then, and bids you join him at sunset tonight. I will come back then to guide you to his residence.” He dipped his head again, sketched a salute, and left as abruptly as he had come. His boots thumped on the narrow stone stairway.

“Is the
hyp
—whatever—a wizard, to be after knowing we’re here almost before we are?” Viridovix exclaimed. He had seen enough sorcery in the Empire to mean the question seriously.

“Not a bit of it,” Goudeles replied, chuckling at his naïveté. “Surely as Phos’ sun rises in the east, one of the leisured gentlemen of the harbor is in his pay.”

More sophisticated than the Gaul at governors’ wiles, Gorgidas had reasoned that out for himself, but he was not displeased to have it confirmed. This Sivas’ main function was to watch the plains for the Empire. If he kept them as closely surveyed as he did his own city, Videssos was well served.

Methodios Sivas was a surprisingly young man, not far past thirty. His outsized nose gave him an air of engaging homeliness, and he was boisterous enough to fit his frontier surroundings. He pounded Arigh on the back, shouting, “Arghun’s son, is it? Will you make me put sentries at the wells again?”

Arigh giggled, a startling sound from him. “No need. I’ll be good.”

“You’d better.” Making sure each of his guests had a full wine cup, Sivas explained, “When this demon’s sprig came through here on his way to the city, he threw a handful of frogs into every well in town.”

Lankinos Skylitzes looked shocked and then guffawed; Goudeles, Viridovix, and Gorgidas were mystified. “Don’t you see?” Sivas said, and then answered himself, “No, of course you don’t. Why should you? You don’t deal with the barbarians every day—sometimes I forget it’s me on the edge of nowhere, not the rest of the Empire. Here’s the long and short of it, then: all Khamorth are deathly afraid of frogs. They wouldn’t drink our water for three days!”

“Hee, hee!” Arigh said, laughing afresh at the memory of his practical joke. “That’s not all, and you know it. They had to pay a Videssian to hunt down all the little beasts, and then sacrifice a black lamb over each well to drive away the pollution. And your priest of Phos tried to stop
that
, quacking about heathen rites. It was glorious.”

“It was ghastly,” Sivas retorted. “One clan packed up an easy five
thousand goldpieces’ worth of skins and went back to the steppe with ’em. The merchants howled for months.”

“Frogs, is it?” Gorgidas said, scribbling a note on a scrap of parchment. The
hypepoptes
noticed and asked him why. Rather hesitantly, he explained about his history. Sivas surprised him with a thoughtful nod and several intelligent questions; sharp wits hid beneath his rough exterior.

The governor had other interests hardly to be expected from a frontiersman. Though his residence, with its thick walls, slit windows, and iron-banded oak doors, could double as a fortress, the garden that bloomed in the courtyard was a riot of colors. Mallows and roses bloomed in neat rows. So did yellow and lavender adder’s-tongues, which told Gorgidas of Sivas’ skill. The low plants, their leaves mottled green and brown, belonged in moist forests or on the mountainside, not here at the edge of the steppe.

As was only natural, Sivas, isolated from events in the capital, was eager to hear the news the embassy brought with it. He exclaimed in satisfaction when he learned how Thorisin Gavras had regained control of the sea from the rebel forces led by Baanes Onomagoulos and Elissaios Bouraphos. “Damn the traitors anyway,” he said. “I’ve been sending messages with every ship that sailed for the capital for the last two months; they must have sunk them all. That’s too long, with Avshar running loose.”

“Are you sure it’s himself?” Viridovix asked. The name of the wizard-prince was enough to distract him from his flirtation with one of the
hypepotes’
serving girls. A bachelor, Sivas had several comely women in his employ, even if their mixed blood made them too stocky to conform to the Videssian ideal of beauty.

He did not seem put out by the Celt’s trifling. Viridovix had obviously intrigued him from the moment he set eyes on him; men of the Gaul’s stature and coloring were rare among the peoples the Videssians knew, and his musical accent was altogether strange.