Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (82 page)

Accompanied by the crowd’s jeers, Ortaias and his guardians made a slow circuit of the Amphitheater, the herald all the while booming out his condemnation. Marcus heard more fruit splattering around Sphrantzes; the breeze brought him a rotten egg’s gagging stench.

Some of the hurled refuse found its target. By the time Ortaias Sphrantzes came back into the tribune’s sight, his robe was dyed with bright splashes of pulp and juice. The donkey he rode, Scaurus decided, had to be drugged. It ambled on placidly, pausing only to dip its head to
nibble at a fragment of apple in its path. Its leader jerked on the long guide rope, and it abandoned the tidbit to move ahead once more.

At last it completed the course and halted in front of the gate through which it had entered. The two guards came back and lifted Ortaias off his mount, then led him up before Thorisin Gavras.

When they released his arms, he went to the ground in a proskynesis. The Emperor rose from his stool. “We see your submission,” he said, speaking for the first time, and such were the acoustics of the Amphitheater that his words, though spoken in the tone of ordinary conversation, could be heard in the arena’s uppermost rows. “Do you then renounce, now and forever, all claim upon the sovereignty of our Empire, protected by Phos?”

“Indeed yes, I yield the throne to you. I—” The moment the answer Thorisin Gavras required was complete, he cut Ortaias off with the same imperious gesture he had used to summon him forth.

Gaius Philippus gave the ghost of a chuckle. “Some things never change. I’d bet the scrawny bastard just had a two-hour abdication speech nipped in the bud—and a good thing, too, says I.”

Thorisin spoke again. “Receive now the reward for your treachery.”

The guardsmen raised Ortaias to his feet. They quickly pulled the robe off over his head. The crowd whooped; Gaius Philippus muttered “Scrawny” again. One of the guards, the larger and more muscular of the pair, stepped behind the luckless Sphrantzes and delivered a tremendous kick to his bare backside. Ortaias yelped and fell to his knees.

Viridovix clucked in disappointment. “The Gavras is too soft by half,” he said. “He should be packing a wickerwork all full of this spalpeen and howsoever many followed him, and then lighting it off. There’d been a spectacle for the people to remember, now.”

“You and Komitta Rhangavve,” Marcus said to himself, slightly aghast at the Gaul’s straightforward savagery.

“ ’Tis what the holy druids would do,” Viridovix said righteously. That, Scaurus knew, was only too true. The Celtic priests appeased their gods by sacrificing criminals to them … or innocent folk, if no criminals were handy.

As Ortaias Sphrantzes, rubbing the bruised part, rose to his feet, one
of Phos’ priests descended from the Amphitheater’s spine and approached him, carrying scissors and a long, gleaming razor. The crowd fell silent; religion was always respected in Videssos. But Marcus knew no blood sacrifice was in the offing here. Another priest followed the first, this one bearing a plain blue robe and a copy of Phos’ sacred scriptures, glorious in its binding of enameled bronze.

Ortaias bowed his head to the first priest. The scissors flashed in the autumn sun. A lock of stringy brown hair fell at the deposed Emperor’s feet, then another and another, until only a short stubble remained. Then the razor came into play; Sphrantzes’ scalp was soon shiny bare.

The second priest stepped forward. Folding the monk’s robe over the crook of his arm, he held out the sacred writings to Ortaias and said, “Behold the law under which you shall live if you choose. If in your heart you feel you can observe it, enter the monastic life; if not, speak now.”

But Ortaias, with everyone else, was aware of the penalty for balking. “I will observe it,” he said. The great-voiced herald relayed his words to the crowd. There was a collective sigh. The creation of a monk was always a serious business, even when the reasons for it were blatantly political. Nor could faith and politics be neatly separated in the Empire; Scaurus thought of Zemarkhos in Amorion and felt his mouth compress in a thin, hard line.

The priest repeated the offer of admission twice more, received the same response each time. He handed the holy book to his colleague, then robed the new monk in his monastic garb, saying, “As the garment of Phos’ blue covers your naked body, so may his righteousness enfold your heart and preserve it from all evil.” Again the herald boomed out the petition.

“So may it be,” Ortaias replied, but his voice was lost in the thousands echoing his prayer. Despite himself Marcus was moved, marveling at Videssos’ force of faith. Almost there were times he wished he shared it, but, like Gorgidas, he was too well rooted in the perceptible world to feel comfortable in that of the spirit.

Ortaias Sphrantzes left the Amphitheater through the same gate he had entered, arm in arm with the two priests who had made him part of their fellowship. Well satisfied with the day’s show, the crowd began to
disperse. Vonders took up their calls: “Wine! Sweet wine!” “Spiced cakes!” “Holy images to protect your beloved!” “Raiii—sins!”

Unhappy to the end, Gaius Philippus grumbled, “And now he’ll spend the rest of his stupid days living the high life here in the city, but with a bald head and a blue robe to make it all right.”

“Not exactly,” Marcus chuckled; Thorisin might be blunt, but he was hardly as naïve as that. The tribune thought it altogether fitting that Gennadios should gain some company in his monastery at Videssos’ distant frontier. He and the new Brother Ortaias, no doubt, would have a great deal to talk about.

“W
HAT DO YOU MEAN, NO FUNDS ARE AVAILABLE
?” T
HORISIN
G
AVRAS
asked, his voice dangerously calm. His gaze speared the logothete as if that financial official were an enemy to be ridden down.

The Hall of the Nineteen Couches grew still. Marcus could hear the torches crackling, hear the wind sighing outside. If he turned his head, he knew he would see snowflakes kissing the Hall’s wide windows; winter in the capital was not as harsh as in the westland plateaus, but it was bad enough. He pulled his cloak tighter round himself.

The logothete gulped. He was about thirty, thin, pale, and precise. His name, Scaurus remembered, was Addaios Vourtzes; he was some sort of distant cousin to the city governor of the northeastern town of Imbros. He had to gather himself before going on in the face of the Emperor’s hostility.

But go on he did, at first haltingly and then with more animation as his courage returned. “Your Majesty, you expect too much from the tax-gathering facilities available to us. That any revenues whatsoever have been collected should be praised as one of Phos’ special miracles. The recent unpleasantness”—Now there, thought the tribune, was a fine, bureaucratic euphemism for civil war—“and, worse, the presence of large numbers of unauthorized interlopers”—By which he meant the Yezda, Marcus knew—“on imperal soil, have made any accrual of surplusage a manifest impossibility.”

What was he talking about? the tribune wondered irritably. His Videssian was fluent by now, but this jargon left him floundering.

Baanes Onomagoulos’ translation was rough but serviceable. “By which you’re saying that your precious dues-takers pissed themselves whenever they thought they saw a nomad, and turned tail before they could find out if they were right.” The noble gave a coarse laugh.

“That’s the way of it,” Drax the Namdalener agreed. He turned a calculating eye on Vourtzes. “From what I’ve seen of you pen-pushers, any excuse not to pay is a good one. By the Wager, you’d think the money came out of your purse, not the peasants’.”

“Well said,” Thorisin exclaimed, his usual distrust for the islanders quenched when Drax echoed a sentiment he heartily shared. The count nodded his thanks.

Vourtzes proffered a thick roll of parchment. “Here are the figures to support the position I have outlined—”

Numbers in a ledger, though, meant little to the soldiers he faced. Thorisin slapped the scroll aside, snarling, “To the crows with this gibberish! It’s gold I need, not excuses.”

Elissaios Bouraphos said, “These fornicating seal-stampers think paper will patch anything. That was why I put in with you, your Highness—I kept getting reports instead of repairs—and sick I got of them, too.”

“If you will examine the returns I have presented to you,” Vourtzes said with rather desperate determination, “you will reach the inescapable conclusion that—”

“—The bureaucrats are out to bugger honest men,” Onomagoulos finished for him. “Everyone knows that, and has since my grandfather’s day. All you ever wanted was to keep the power in your own slimy hands. And if a soldier reached the throne despite you, you starved him with tricks like this.”

“There is no trickery!” Vourtzes wailed, his distress wringing a simple declarative sentence from him.

Marcus had no love for the harried logothete, but he recognized sincerity when he heard it. “I think there may be something in what this fellow claims,” he said.

Thorisin and his marshals stared at the Roman as if disbelieving their ears. “Whose side are you on?” the Emperor demanded. Even Addaios Vourtzes’ look of gratitude was wary. He seemed to suspect some trap that would only lead to deeper trouble for him.

But Alypia Gavra watched the tribune alertly; her expression was masked as usual, but Scaurus could read no disapproval in it. And unlike the Videssian military men, he had had civilian as well as warlike experience, and knew how much easier it was to spend money than to collect it.

Ignoring Thorisin’s half-accusation, he persisted, “Gathering taxes could hardly have been easy this past year. For one thing, sir, your men and Ortaias’ both must have gone into some parts of the westlands, with neither side getting all it should. And Baanes has to be partly right—with the Yezda loose, parts of the Empire aren’t safe for tax collectors. But even where there are no Yezda at any given moment, the lands they’ve ravaged still yield no cash—you can’t get wool from a bald sheep.”

“A mercenary with comprehension of basic fiscal realities,” Vourtzes said to himself. “How extraordinary.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Thank you,” to the tribune.

The Emperor looked thoughtful, but Baanes Onomagoulos’ face grew stormy; Scaurus, watching the noble’s bare scalp go red, suddenly regretted his chance-chosen metaphor.

Alypia took another jab at Baanes. “Not all arrears are the tax collectors’ fault,” she said. “If big landowners paid what they owed, the treasury would be better off.”

“That is very definitely the case,” Vourtzes said. “Legitimately credentialed agents of the fisc have been assaulted, on occasion even killed, in the attempt to assess payments due on prominent estates, some of them properties of clans represented in this very chamber.” While he named no names, he, too, was looking at Onomagoulos.

The noble’s glare was hot enough to roast the bureaucrat, Marcus, and Alypia Gavra all together. The tribune, seeing Alypia’s eyebrows arch, nodded almost imperceptibly in recognition of a common danger.

As he had in Balsamon’s library, Elissaios Bouraphos tried to ease Onomagoulos’ wrath, putting a hand on his shoulder and talking to him in a low voice. But the admiral was himself a possessor of wide estates, and said to Thorisin, “You know why we held back payments to the pen-pushers—aye, you did the same on your lands before your brother threw Strobilos out. Why should we give them the rope to hang us by?”

“I won’t say you’re wrong there,” the Emperor admitted with a chuckle. “Since I’m not a pen-pusher, though, Elissaios, surely you’ll pay in everything you owe without a whimper?”

“Surely,” Bouraphos said. Then he whimpered, so convincingly that everyone at the table burst into laughter. Even Addaios Vourtzes’ mouth
twitched. Marcus revised his estimate of the admiral, which had not included a sense of humor.

Utprand Dagober’s son spoke up for the first time, and the somber warning in his voice snuffed out the mirth. “You can wrangle all you like over who pays w’at. W’at needs to be settled is who pays me.”

“Rest easy,” Thorisin said. “I don’t see your lads on the streets begging for pennies.”

“No,” Utprand said, “nor will you.” That was not warning, but unmistakable threat. The great count Drax looked pained at his countryman’s plain speaking, but Utprand ignored him. They did not care much for each other; Scaurus suspected the Namdaleni were not immune to the disease of faction.

Gavras, for his part, was one to appreciate frankness. “You’ll have your money, outlander,” he said. Seeing Addaios Vourtzes purse his lips to protest, he turned to the logothete. “Let me guess,” he said sourly. “You haven’t got it.”

“Essentially, that is correct. As I have attempted to indicate, the precise situation is outlined—”

The Emperor cut him off as brusquely as he had Ortaias Sphrantzes in the Amphitheater. “Can you bring in enough to keep everyone happy till spring?”

Faced with a problem whose answer was not to his precious accounts scroll, Vourtzes grew cautious. His lips moved silently as he reckoned to himself. “That is dependent upon a variety of factors not subject to my ministry’s control: the condition of roads, quality of harvest, ability of agents to penetrate areas subject to disturbances …” From the way the bureaucrat avoided it, Marcus began to think the word “Yezda” made him break out in hives.

“There’s something he’s leaving out,” Baanes Onomagoulos said, “and that’s the likelihood the damned seal-stampers are pocketing one goldpiece in three for their own schemes. Oh, yes, they show us this pile of turds.” He pointed contemptuously at Vourtzes’ assessment document, “But who can make heads or tails of it? That’s how they’ve kept their power, because no one who hasn’t grown up in their way of cheating knows he’s swindled until it’s too late for him to do anything about it.”

Vourtzes sputtered denials, but Thorisin gave him a long, measuring
stare. Even Alypia Gavra nodded, however reluctantly; she might despise Onomagoulos, but she did not make the mistake of thinking him a fool.

“What’s needed then,” Marcus said, “is someone to watch over these functionaries, to make sure they’re doing what they say they are.”