The Shadow of Ararat (21 page)

A polite cough behind him heralded the entrance of his aide. Galen turned, taking care to show a slight smile and betray nothing of the sadness that now filled him.

"
Ave
, Augustus," Aetius said, bowing slightly. The boy was still a little stiff in his presence, a tendency made worse by the ritual of the Eastern court. Galen shook his head in dismay; had anyone ever been so young? Romulus Aetius Valens was the scion of one of the few patrician families left in Rome that still boasted numbers of sons. Nomerus Valens, the patriarch of the family, had been smugly pleased to obtain the appointment for his son, but from Galen's point of view there had been a paltry number of suitable candidates put forward. Of them Aetius was the best, even if his instinct was to bow at any occasion.

"Aetius, I am only a man, not a god. You need not bow and scrape before me." Galen's voice was gentle and filled with wry amusement. Aetius looked up and saluted again.

"Stand at ease, lad, and tell me the news."

Aetius saluted again, standing straight. His short brown hair was cropped in a severe line above his brows and his usually pale skin was beginning to brown in the Greek sun. He pulled two wax tablets from under his arm, placing them on the writing desk that stood between them. Galen sat down in his camp stool and perused the tablets. While he did so, Aetius reported:

"Augustus, the third and sixth cohorts of the Seventh Augusta, the
equites
of the Sixth Gemina, and four thousand Gothic
auxillia
have landed today at the harbor. With these men, the numbers of the Western
vexillation
here in the capital have grown to twenty-five thousand men. The quartermaster has requested that I inform you that we are out of places to put more troops. If, perhaps, you could discuss this with Emperor Heraclius..."

Galen waved off the rest of the statement. His men could double or triple bunk for the short time that the army would be in the Eastern capital. Now that both he and the Eastern Emperor were in the same place and able to meet face to face, the coordination of the great expedition had vastly improved. The use of the
telecast
had been intermittent and tremendously tiring to the sorcerers maintaining the link. The ancient devices still tended to lose focus and drift to other scenes or faraway lands. Though they had shown great promise, they were not a reliable mechanism. Galen had been forced to dismiss them from his calculations save as a means of emergency communications. The trouble now was not on the part of the Western Empire, but rather the East, for Heraclius was engaged in a power struggle with the great landowners that supplied the majority of his fighting men.

"Go on, what other news?"

"Resupply of the ships continues apace, though it seems backward that we should come here to bring on supplies when all of the supplies in the city are already brought in by boat." Aetius paused, but Galen did not respond to the implied question. Gamely the youth continued, "The word from the chamberlain of the palace is that the Khazar embassy has still not shown up, delaying that meeting and a letter came by messenger from the Duchess de'Orelio."

Galen raised an eyebrow at this last and put down the tablet. "Where is the letter?"

"In the hands of the messenger, Augustus. She informed me that she had been directed to deliver it in person." The boy, if anything, became stiffer. Galen shook his head—he was afraid that the boy's reaction would only be a small reflection of the trouble to come with the Easterners.

"She is here, then?"

Aetius nodded.

"Show her in then, lad, and stop looking like you'd swallowed a prune pit."

"
Ave
, Augustus!"

Aetius turned on his heel and marched to the door. A moment later the messenger entered and Galen raised an eyebrow in surprise. Rumor had held for some months that the notorious and "oriental" Duchess had finally decided to bring her mysterious ward out into the open. Though Anastasia had been the Imperial spymaster for three Emperors and had never given Galen any indication that she was anything but utterly loyal to the state, he was pleased to see some indication that she was mortal.

An Emperor required many spies and informers to serve his will and be his eyes throughout his domain. Over the last eleven years, the de'Orelio faction had gathered nearly all of those resources to themselves—first when the old Duke had been the spider, now that his widow was. Galen had taken pains in the last year to establish his own sources of information, ones that were not beholden to de'Orelio, but it was slow work. Most damnably, he had not found any
man
who could execute the covert strategies of the state as well as the Duchess. It galled him, though he felt no ill will toward de'Orelio, that she was so obviously his superior in this area.

The messenger planted her feet and stood at parade rest before the writing desk. Galen noted with interest that she was both as young as had been reported and as beautiful. Too, she wore simple garb, most reminiscent of a Legion scout. Tall worn leather boots, light-green cotton breeches in the Gothic style, a loose tunic of weathered brown with piping at the collar and cuffs. A dark-gray cloak was pulled back a little off of broad shoulders. Her hair, a rich gold-red, was braided back from her head. Gray-green eyes surveyed him calmly, even as he looked upon her.

"
Ave
, Augustus Caesar. Thyatis Julia Clodia, centurion, Legio Second Italia, at your service," she said, handing him a scroll tube. "Greetings from my mistress, the Duchess Anastasia de'Orelio. She hopes that you are well and that your venture is blessed with success. I am to tell you that if there are any questions, I am to answer them."

Galen nodded at the politeness, breaking the thick wax seal at the end of the tube. Within were thick sheaves of finely rolled papyrus sheets. They were covered with the spidery writing, in dark ink, that de'Orelio favored. He began reading but put the report aside after the first page. Much of it was routine business and the other he would go over in private. The messenger interested him more than the message. He gestured that she should sit on one of the stools facing the desk. With only a minute hesitation, she did so.

"Aetius, could you go and get something for me to eat. Something light. And wine, but not the Greek, something we brought with us."

The boy bowed and hurried out, closing the door behind him. Galen smiled again and scratched his ear, looking sidelong at the young woman sitting across from him.
How to approach this?
He realized with a rueful chagrin that he had never had a "business" conversation with a woman save the Duchess. De'Orelio had always made him nervous, though she did not give him heart palpitations as she did the Senate. Galen realized that the foremost reason he trusted the Duchess was the effect she had on the senatorial class.

He shook his head slightly, then decided to dispense with the usual politeness that obtained between women and men in his social circles. This was one of his officers, for all that she was a woman, and he had work for her to do. Being polite and following convention would not speed things up or make them more efficient.

"Clodia, you are a bit of a puzzle for me, given that you are, to my knowledge, the only woman officer that I have on this expedition, indeed, the only woman soldier that I have in my army. I have discussed you and your situation, and your talents, with the Duchess on more than one occasion and I will be blunt. I did not think that you could do the work that she set you to. In fact, I was entirely opposed to the concept of this... 'special'...
contubernia
when she proposed it to me."

Thyatis was very still, not even blinking. Galen paused a moment, seeing if he could gauge her reaction. She waited patiently, so he continued.

"I did not interfere, however, when she pressed ahead with your team on her own initiative, and I understand from her reports that you have been successful. She took great pleasure in relating to me the events of your pursuit in the Subura. I am, I was, pleased by your success. You have proved your ability enough to win you and your men a place here, on this expedition."

Now the girl cracked the smallest of smiles. Galen did not smile back; he was not finished.

"Our situation here is different. I have noted in my admittedly limited time here in the city that the Eastern officers are even more traditionally minded, more constrained in their thinking than mine. I do not believe that you are going to be useful here in an... open way."

Galen held up a hand to still the young woman's incipient protest.

"In the rolls of the expedition, you are listed as one of my couriers, a member of my staff. I am uneasy at bringing you to the general meeting tonight, but I do not want you to be unfamiliar with the other officers. I put this question to you. Can your
optio
, Nikos, go in your stead?"

Storm clouds gathered in Thyatis' gray eyes. Only the ceaselessly drummed lessons of Krista and Anastasia kept her from launching into a stream of invective suitable to a sailor. Instead, she breathed deeply and seriously considered the Emperor's request. "Augustus Caesar, Nikos is a steady man with many useful skills, but he is not the leader of my team, I am. The men follow me because I have won their respect and fear. If he goes in my stead, then my authority will be challenged and I will lose that respect. I urge you to reconsider your decision."

Galen frowned. The girl, no—the
centurion
, was all too right. He would not undermine the authority of any of his other officers in such a way. Though it would cause trouble with the Eastern officers, he could see no way to avoid taking the minotaur by the horns.

"I don't suppose you can be unobtrusive?" he asked, resigned to an even longer and more contentious staff meeting than usual.
If she proves too much trouble,
he thought,
I'll send her back to Italia.

Thyatis suddenly smiled and the room, to Galen's surprise, seemed suddenly brighter.

"Imperator," she said, "you won't even notice that I'm there."

True to Thyatis' suspicion, the quarters that she and her men were assigned were in no way "royal." Beneath the Palace of Justinian were a series of great vaulted cisterns, now long dry and replaced in function by the cistern of Philoxenus, beyond the Hippodrome. Now they were crowded with engineers, servants, great heaps of equipment, wicker baskets of grain, and other goods. At the back of the far chamber, in stuffy darkness, she found Nikos and the rest of her detachment. The rest of the interview had gone well, the Emperor finally becoming just a harried and overburdened army commander to her, rather than a suspicious near enemy. Unlike some who had gone before, this Emperor was irritated by the practices of the court and seemed more of a provincial landowner like one of her uncles than a living god.

She couldn't help grinning to herself. Her right hand flexed unconsciously and drifted to the hilt of her sword. The mechanics of a plan, the hundreds of options and possibilities inherent to violent action, swam in her mind, rising and falling in a lake of possibilities. As they had always done since she was a little girl, her thoughts coalesced into a strategy and intent. She slapped her hand against her thigh in delight.

Nikos had not been idle while waiting for her return. The men were quartered behind a great pile of wicker baskets in a corner of the vast room. Most were inspecting their gear for rust or broken links when she walked up; the others were huddled in a corner of the little camp, engrossed in the rattle of dice. The
optio
looked up, then cleared off the overturned crate that he had been using to fletch arrows on. Thyatis grunted and slid the whole smoked ham off her left shoulder. It made a meaty
thwack
on the wood.

Nikos grinned. "Been to the kitchens, I see. Was there wine as well?" His dark eyes glittered in the light of the nearest lamp.

Thyatis snorted in amusement. "By the example of the Divine Julius, the favored drink of the legionnaire is vinegar."

Nikos rolled his eyes and pulled a wineskin from under the crate. "No matter, I've my own. Was there trouble at the commander's office?"

Thyatis shook her head, "No, we got along fine. He was concerned that my delicate nature would be offended by attending the general staff meeting tonight, with the officers in the Eastern army. He wanted you to go instead."

Nikos paled. The prospect of hobnobbing with more than a hundred officers, nearly all of them of noble birth, filled him with dread. Better a thousand screaming woad-blue Picts charging your position than a general staff meeting. Thyatis was still smiling though, so it couldn't be that bad.

"Settle down," she said, pulling a knife from her belt and spinning the blade around its point on the top of the crate. "I disagreed, politely, and promised to be unobtrusive. There seems to be trouble brewing between the two armies. He doesn't want to rock the galley right now."

Nikos rubbed his nose, thinking.

"How are you going to avoid notice?" he asked, thinking of her with her looks and hair and attitude among the bearded nobles of the East or the stiff-backed Western officers. There was surely going to be trouble of it. The word that the Legion commanders were at each other's throats was all over the city. Brawling between the soldiers only one incident away. Though neither Heraclius nor Galen had affected to notice it yet did not make it go away.

Much of the problem sprang from the simple fact that while the Western Empire had clung tenaciously to the military organization of the early Empire, the East had not. Where the Western forces were in the numerical minority, they had a clearly defined chain of command. The Eastern army that was gathering was more a collection of personal retainers, each under its own warlord, than a professional army. The Western officers expected there to be a single overall commander, preferably their own Emperor, while the Eastern lords all demanded a voice in the course of the expedition. The Western troops and officers spoke Latin, the Easterners Greek or Aramaic. This was just the beginning of the difficulties, mused Nikos, watching his commander with a worried eye.