Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (75 page)

“My apologies for not being able to tell you more. I do not think you came here by chance alone, but that is a feeling for which I can offer no proof. I may say, however, that a certain historian with whom we are both acquainted shares my belief. We both wish you success in your trials; the Lord of the great and good mind willing, we shall see you again. Nepos.”

The tribune did not translate that last paragraph for Gaius Philippus, but felt a warm glow as he read it. Though Alypia had not had any chance to communicate with him directly, she was clever enough to realize his sword would probably come back to him and somehow got a message where it would do the most good.

He wadded up the parchment and tossed it into the sea.

Gaius Philippus asked a typical, bluntly pragmatic question: “What good does it do you to know how your sword’s magicked? You’re no wizard, to spell with it.”

“Too true. I wish I could, and singe Zemarkhos’ beard for him.”

“Well, you can’t,” Gaius Philippus said, “and if you don’t pay attention to using it as it should be used, you won’t live to face him anyway. So watch yourself!” He lunged at the tribune’s chest. Marcus sprang backward as he parried the veteran’s next thrust. Seamen crowded around to watch them fence.

T
HE STANDARD FLYING FROM THE UPTHRUST LANCE WAS BLACK AS
soot, an outlaws’ standard once, but now one to make all Pardraya tremble. More than bandits rode in Varatesh’s fighting tail now; even the most birth-proud khagans acknowledged him as head of the newly risen Royal Clan and sent their contingents to war at his side. Worse would befall them if they said him nay, and they knew it.

Scowling, Varatesh dug spurs into his pony’s flanks. The shaggy little horse squealed and sprang ahead. The great black stallion at its side paced it without effort. Varatesh’s frown grew deeper as his glance flicked to the white-robed rider atop the huge horse. Head of the Royal Clan—Royal Khagan—master of the steppe! So everyone proclaimed him, Avshar loud among them, but he and the wizard-prince knew the lie for what it was.

Puppet! The word rang inside his head, sour as milk gone bad. Without Avshar, he would still be a chieflet of renegades, a skulker, a raider—a flea, biting and hopping away before a hand came down to crush him. There were times he wished it were so. He was a killer many times over before Avshar found him, but he had not had any idea of what evil was.

He knew now. These days he never slept without seeing irons heating in the fires, without smelling burned flesh, without hearing men shriek as their eyes were seared away. And he had consented to it, had wielded an iron himself—his skin crept when he thought of it. But through that horror he had become Royal Khagan, had made his name one with fear.

Avshar chuckled beside him, a sound that reminded him of ice crackling on a winter stream. The wizard-prince’s mantlings streamed out behind him as his horse trotted southwest. He swaddled himself from head to foot.

“We shall shatter them,” the sorcerer said, and chuckled again at the
prospect. He spoke the Khamorth tongue with no trace of accent, though not a plainsman. As for what he was—alone on all the steppe, Varatesh had seen beneath his robes, and wished he had not.

“Shatter them,” Avshar repeated. “They will rue the insult they gave to Rodak and thus to you as well, my lord.” The wizard’s terrible voice held no sardonic overtone as he granted Varatesh the title, but the nomad was undeceived. Avshar went on, “Your brave warriors—and a sorcery I have devised for the occasion—shall break the fable of Arshaum invincibility once for all.”

Varatesh shivered at the cruel greediness in the wizard-prince’s manner, but could find no fault with what he said. The Arshaum were traversing Pardraya without his let—was he a lamb or a kid, for them to ignore as they pleased? “Do the omens promise success?” he asked.

Avshar turned his dreadful unseen stare on the plainsman. Varatesh flinched under it. With a freezing laugh, the wizard-prince replied, “What care I for omens? I am no
enaree
, Varatesh, no puling, effeminate tribesman peering timidly into the future. The future shall be as I make it.”

“Do the omens promise success?” Gorgidas asked Tolui. A longtime skeptic, he had scant belief in foretelling, but in this world he was coming to doubt his doubts.

“We will know soon,” the shaman said, his voice echoing and unearthly behind the madman’s smile of his devil-mask. He reached out for a thin wand of willow-wood; the welter of fringes on the arm of his robe dragged through the dust.

The Arshaum leaders leaned forward in their circle round him. He drew a dagger from his belt and sliced the wand in half lengthwise. “Give me your hand,” he said to Arghun. The khagan obeyed without question, and did not draw back when the shaman cut his forefinger. Tolui smeared Arghun’s blood on one half of the split willow wand, saying, “This will stand for our army.” He stabbed the other half into the soil of Pardraya, so that it came up black with mud. “This serves for the Khamorth.”

“I would have my blood you given,” Batbaian said.

Even amusement sounded eerie through the mask’s unmoving lips.
“The Khamorth who are our enemies, I should have said,” Tolui explained. Batbaian flushed. Tolui went on: “Enough now. Let us see what knowledge the spirits will grant, if they see fit to answer me.”

The shaman picked up a drum with an oval head; its sides were as heavily fringed as his robe. He rose, tapping the drum softly. Its tone was deep and hollow, a fitting accompaniment to the wordless, crooning chant he began. He danced round the two wands, his steps at first slow and mincing, then higher, faster, more abandoned as he darted now this way, now that, paying no heed to the officers and princes who scattered before him.

A hoarse voice cried out in a nameless tongue ten feet above his head. Another answered, high and girlish. Gorgidas jumped; Lankinos Skylitzes, pale round the mouth, drew Phos’ sun-circle on his breast. Gorgidas thought of ventriloquism, but then both voices shouted at once—no trickster could have worked that.

Tolui was dancing furiously. “Show me!” he cried. Drumbeats boomed like thunder. “Show me!” He shouted again and again. The second voice shouted with him, pleading, demanding. The first voice answered, but roughly, in rejection.

“Show me! Show me!” Now a whole chorus of voices joined the shaman’s. “Show me!” Then came an angry bellow that all but deafened Gorgidas, and sudden silence after.

“Ah!” said Irnek, and at the same time, Viridovix: “Will you look at that, now!”

The two wands, one red with Arghun’s blood, the other dark and dirty, were stirring on the ground like live things. They rose slowly into the air until they reached waist height. All the Arshaum watched them tensely. Viridovix gaped in awe.

Like a striking snake, the muddy wand darted at the one that symbolized Arghun and his men. That one attacked in turn; they both hovered as if uncertain. Then they slowly sank together, still making small lunges at each other. The bloodstained one came to rest atop the other. The Arshaum shouted in triumph, then abruptly checked themselves as it rolled off.

They cried out again, this time in confusion and dismay, as the blood suddenly vanished from the red-smeared wand, which split into three
pieces. Their eyes were wide and staring; Gorgidas guessed this was no ordinary divination. Then the wand representing the Khamorth broke into a dozen fragments. Several of those burst into flame; after perhaps half a minute, the largest disappeared.

Tolui pitched forward in a faint.

Gorgidas dashed to his side, catching him before he hit the ground. He pulled the mask from the shaman’s head and gently slapped his cheeks. Tolui moaned and stirred. Arigh stooped beside the two of them. He thrust a skin of kavass into Tolui’s mouth. The shaman choked as the fermented mare’s milk went down his throat, spraying it over Gorgidas and Arigh. His eyes came open. “More,” he wheezed. This time he kept it down.

“Well?” Irnek said. “You gave us a foretelling the likes of which we’ve never seen, but what does it mean?”

Tolui passed a hand over his face, wiped sweat away. He was pale beneath his swarthiness. He tried to sit, and did at the second try. “You must interpret it for yourself,” he said, shaken to the core. “Beyond what you saw, I offer no meanings. More magic than mine, and stronger, is being brewed; it clouds my vision and all but struck me sightless. I feel like a ferret who set out after mice and didn’t notice a bear till he stumbled over its foot.”

“Avshar!” Gorgidas said it first, but he was only half the name ahead of Viridovix and Batbaian.

“I do not know. I do not think the magician sensed me; if he had, you would be propping up a corpse. It was like no wizardry I have touched before, like black, icy fog, cold and dank and full of death.” Tolui shuddered. He wiped his face again, as if to rub off the memory of that touch.

Then Skylitzes cried out a name. “Skotos!” he exclaimed, and made the sun-sign again. Goudeles, not normally one to call on his god at every turn, joined him. Gorgidas frowned. He did not follow the Videssian faith, but there was no denying that Tolui’s description bore an uncanny resemblance to the attributes the imperials gave Phos’ evil opponent.

“What if it is?” said Arghun, to whom Skotos and Phos were mere names. “What business does a spirit you Videssians worship have on the steppe? Let him look out for himself here. This is not his home.”

“We do not worship Skotos,” Skylitzes said stiffly, and began explaining the idea of a universal deity.

Gorgidas cut him off. “Avshar is no god, nor spirit, either,” he said. “When Scaurus fought him in Videssos, he cut him and made him bleed. And beat him, too, in the end.”

“That’s so,” Arigh said. “I was there—that was when I met you, remember, V’rid’rish? Two big men, both good with their swords.”

“I didna stay for the shindy, bad cess for me,” the Gaul said. “I went off wi’ a wench instead, and not one to waste such a braw fight over, either, the clumsy quean.” The memory still rankled.

Irnek scratched his head. “I do not like going ahead blind.”

“Finding meaning in foretellings that have to do with battles is always chancy,” Tolui said, “though it is worth trying. Men’s passions cloud even the spirits’ vision, and dark spells surround this struggle and veil it more thickly in shadows. Soon we will not need to wonder. We will know.”

Arghun’s far-flung scouts picked up the approaching army while it was still more than a day’s ride northeast of the Arshaum. Against most foes they would have gained an advantage from such advanced warning, but with Avshar’s sorcery they were themselves not hidden.

The Arshaum turned to meet Varatesh’s horsemen, shaking out into battle order as they rode. They were, Viridovix saw, more orderly in their warfare than the Khamorth. The latter fought by clan and by band or family grouping within the clan, with each family patriarch or band leader a general in small. Though the Arshaum also mustered under their khagans, each clan was divided into squads of ten, companies of a hundred, and, in the large clans, regiments of a thousand. Every unit had its appropriate officer, so that commands passed quickly through the ranks and were executed with a precision that astonished the Gaul.

“They might as well be legionaries,” he said to Gorgidas, half complaining, as a company of Arghun’s plainsmen thundered by, broke into squads, and then re-formed. They carried out the evolution in perfect silence, taking their cues from black and white signal flags their captain carried.

The Greek grunted something in reply. He had been in more battles than he cared to remember, but always as a physician, fighting only in self-defense, relying on the legionaries for protection. The Arshaum, however well organized they were by nomad standards, had no place for such noncombatants. Even Tolui and his fellow shamans would take up bows and fight like any of their people once their magicking was done.

Thorough as usual, Gorgidas checked his equipment with great care, making sure his
gladius
was sharp, that his boiled-leather cuirass and small round shield had no weak spots, that all the straps on his horse’s tackle were sound and tight. “You’ll make a warrior yet,” Viridovix said approvingly. He was careless in many ways, but went over his gear as exactingly as the Greek had.

“The gods forbid,” Gorgidas said. “But there’s no one to blame but me, should anything fail.” He felt a curious tightness in his belly, half apprehension, half eagerness to have it over, one way or another—a very different feeling from the one he had known as a legionary physician. Then his chief reaction to battle had been disgust at the carnage. This twinge of anticipation made him ashamed.

When he tried to exorcise it by speaking of it aloud, Viridovix nodded knowingly. “Och, indeed and I’ve felt it, the blood lust, many’s the time. Hotter than fever, stronger than wine, sweeter than the cleft between a woman’s thighs—” He broke off, his smile going grim as he remembered Seirem and how she died. After a few seconds he went on, “And if your healing could find a cure for it, now, that’d be a finer thing nor any other I could name.”

“Would it?” Gorgidas tossed his head. “Then how would those cured ever resist the outrages of wicked men?”

The Celt tugged at his mustaches. “To the crows with you, you carper! Here we’ve gone and chased ourselves right round the tree, so you’re after saying there’s need for warring, and it’s me who’d fain see the end of it. Gaius Philippus, the sour auld kern, would laugh himself sick to hear us.”

“You’re probably right, but he’d think the argument was over the shadow of an ass. He’s not much for rights or wrongs; he takes what he finds and does what he can with it. Romans are like that. I’ve often wondered if it’s their greatest wisdom or greatest curse.”

A couple of companies of Arshaum trotted ahead of the main body, to skirmish with the Khamorth and test their quality. Some of the plainsmen bet that the sight of them alone would be enough to scatter Varatesh’s followers. Batbaian glowered, unsure whether to hope they were right or be angry at hearing his people maligned.