Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (20 page)

“Aye, belike, and an elephant’s plump,” Gaius Philippus said.

Marcus had known intellectually of the broad estates and peasant villages Videssian grandees controlled. Only now did he start to feel what that control meant. Around the capital, brawling city life replaced the nobles’ holdings, and in the westlands’ central plateau the soil was too poor to allow a concentration of wealth such as Zonaras enjoyed.

His acres included fine vineyards and gardens; a willow plantation by the stream that ran past him home; meadows where horses and donkeys, cattle, sheep, and goats grazed; forests for timber and animal fodder; poor grapevines climbing up hillside trees; and the oak woods where he had met first the Namdaleni and then Scaurus, which yielded acorns not only to be the wild boar he hunted, but also to his own herd of pigs.

On the march the tribune had seen no fewer than five presses for squeezing out olive oil. There were herders in the fields with the flock; the chief herdsman, a solid, middle-aged man without the least touch of servility, had warily come up to greet Zonaras after the noble assured him at some distance that the long column of legionaries behind him was friendly.

“Glad of it, sir,” the man had answered, “else I’d have raised the countryside against ’em.” He tore up a scrap of parchment with something written on it; probably the numbers and direction of the intruders, Marcus thought. He was not surprised the herder chief knew his letters. In Rome, too, a man with such a responsible job would have to be able to read and write.

And while the legionaries who heard the fellow’s promise to his lord snickered at it, Scaurus suspected it should not be taken lightly. Nor was Gaius Philippus laughing. Unlike most of the Romans, he knew the
other side of irregular warfare. “All the folk in all these villages we’ve passed through seem plenty fond of Zonaras here,” he said to the tribune. “It’d be no fun having them bushwhack us and then fade off through the woods or into the hills before we could chase ’em.” He spoke Latin, so Zonaras caught his name but no more.

Marcus understood the senior centurion’s logic and also suddenly understood why the bureaucrats back in Videssos the city so hated and feared the provincial nobles. It would literally take an army to make Zonaras do anything he did not care to do, and there were scores of nobles like him.

Indeed, even an army might not have sufficed to bring Zonaras back to obedience. He could defend with more than an armed peasantry. As the legionaries discovered when they reached his family seat, the noble kept a band of half a hundred armed retainers. They were not quite professional troops, as they made most of their living by farming, but what they lacked in spit and polish they made up for with unmatched knowledge of the area and the same strong devotion to their lord the chief herdsman had shown.

Once, Scaurus knew, the farmer-soldiers’ first loyalty had been to the Empire. But years of harsh taxes made them seek protection from the grandees against the central government’s greed. The local nobles, ambitious and powerful, were glad to use them to try to throw off the bureaucrats’ yoke once for all. To survive, the pen-pushers in the capital hired mercenaries to hold them in line … and so, Marcus thought as the legionaries planted stakes on their rampart, these endless civil wars, first an Onomagoulos rebelling, then a Drax. He grunted. Without Videssos’ civil strife, the Yezda would be out beyond the borders of Vaspurakan, not looking down like vultures over Garsavra.

“Well, what of it?” Helvis responded when he remarked on that. “If Videssos used no mercenaries, the two of us would not have met. Or would that thought please you these days?” There were challenge and sadness both in her voice; the question was not rhetorical.

“No, love,” he said, touching her hand. “The gods know we’re not perfect, but then only they are. Or Phos, if you’d rather,” he amended quickly, seeing her mouth tighten. He cursed his clumsy tongue; he had no real belief in the Roman gods, but spoke merely from habit.

Gaius Philippus had also heard the tribune’s first comment. “Hrmp,” he said. “If the Videssians didn’t hire mercenaries, they’d have killed the lot of us as soon as we came into this crazy world.”

“There is that,” Scaurus admitted. Gaius Philippus nodded, then hurried off to swear at a Vaspurakaner who had been foolish enough to start to relieve himself upstream from the camp. The luckless trooper found himself with a week of latrine duty.

Marcus was left thoughtful. Gaius Philippus rarely broke in when he and Helvis were talking. Was the senior centurion trying in his gruff way to keep things smooth between them? Considering his misogynism, the notion was strange, but the tribune was strapped for any other explanation. He murmured a sentence in archaic, rhythmic Greek. Helvis looked at him strangely.

“ ‘Everything you say, my friend, is to the point,’ ” he translated. Everything was in Homer somewhere.

Zonaras’ wife was a competent, gray-haired woman named Thekla. His widowed sister Erythro lived with them. Several years younger than Sittas, she was flighty and talkative, and had a gift for puncturing the calm front he cherished.

Erythro was childless; her brother and Thekla had had a daughter and three sons. The girl, Ypatia, reminded Marcus a little of Alypia Gavra in her quiet intelligence. She was betrothed to one of the nobles in the hills to the south. The man stood to inherit Zonaras’ estates, for his only surviving son, Tarasios, was a pale, consumptive youth. He bore his illness with courage and laughed at the coughing fits that wracked his thin frame, but death’s mark was on him. Along with many men of lower rank from the holding, his two brothers had fallen at Maragha, fighting under Onomagoulos.

Despite that, Zonaras had not supported his neighbor’s rebellion against Thorisin Gavras. “As Kalokyres says, in civil war the prudent man sits tight.” Scaurus smothered a smile when he heard that; the last man he had known who was fond of quoting the Videssian military writer was Ortaias Sphrantzes, a miscast soldier if ever there was one.

Framed in black, portraits of the grandee’s dead sons hung in his
dining hall. “They’re crude daubs,” Erythro told Marcus in the confidential manner she liked to affect. “I’ll have you know my nephews were handsome lads.”

“All your taste is in your mouth, darling sister,” Sittas Zonaras rumbled. He and Erythro argued constantly, with great enjoyment on both sides. If she spoke well of wine, he would drink ale for the next fortnight to irritate her, while she kept urging him to drown all the cats on the estate—but stroked them when he was not there to see it.

Actually, Scaurus agreed with Erythro here. By the standards of the capital, the paintings were the product of a half-schooled man, no doubt a local. Still, they gave Marcus an idea. A couple of days after the legionaries encamped by Zonaras’ villa, he went to Styppes, saying, “I’d ask a favor of you.”

“Ask,” Styppes grunted, ungracious as usual. At least, thought the tribune, he was sober.

“I’d like you to paint an icon for me.”

“For you?” Styppes’ eyes narrowed within their folds of flesh. “Why should an unbeliever want a holy image?” he asked suspiciously.

“As a gift for my lady Helvis.”

“Who is a heretic.” The healer-priest still sounded surly, but Scaurus had his arguments ready; he had played this game with Videssians before. It took some time and some shouting, but after a while Styppes sullenly admitted that right devotion could lead even heretics toward the true faith—his own. “Which holy man would you have me depict, then?”

The tribune remembered the temple in Videssos Helvis had been visiting when rioting broke out against the Namdaleni in the city. “I don’t know the name of the saint,” he said, as Styppes curled his lip, “but he lived on Namdalen before it was lost to the Empire—Kalavria, it was called, wasn’t it? He has a shrine dedicated to him in the capital, not far from the harbor of Kontoskalion.”

“Ah!” the healer-priest said, surprised Scaurus had a choice in mind. “I know the man you mean: the holy Nestorios. He is portrayed as an old bald man with his beard in two points. So the heretics of the Duchy revere him yet, do they? Very well, you shall have your icon.”

“My thanks.” Marcus paused, then felt he had to add, “A favor for a
favor. When I find time, I’ll pose for your image of the holy—what did you call him?—Kveldulf, that was it.”

“Yes, yes, that’s good of you, I’m sure,” Styppes said, abstracted. The tribune thought he was already starting to plan the icon, but as he turned to go he heard the priest mutter under his breath, “Phos, I’m thirsty.” Not for the first time, he wished jolly, capable Nepos preferred life in the field to his chair in theoretical thaumaturgy at the Videssian Academy.

Over the next few days Scaurus was too busy to give Styppes or the icon much thought. Zonaras’ villa and his little private army were well enough to face a rival grandee, but the tribune had few illusions about their ability to withstand Drax’ veterans. The legionaries dug like badgers, strengthening the place as best they could, but his worries only deepened. The best, he knew, was none too good; he simply did not have enough men.

He used Zonaras’ retainers and his other Videssian horsemen to spy out the Namdaleni. Every day they reported more islanders south of the Arandos, but not the great column of knights the tribune feared. The men of the Duchy began building a motte-and-bailey fort a couple of hours’ ride north of Zonaras’ oak woods. “Drax is busy somewhere and doesn’t want us interfering,” Gaius Philippus said.

Marcus spread his hands in bewilderment. Not all of what the Namdalener count did made sense. “No, all it does is work,” the senior centurion replied. A good Roman, he valued results more than methods.

The tribune released one of his Namdalener prisoners at the edge of the woods, using him as a messenger to offer Drax the exchange of his fellows for Mertikes Zigabenos. Their freckled captain, who called himself Persic Fishhook from a curved scar on his arm, said confidently, “No problem. We’ll be free in a week, is my guess. Thirty of us are worth a Videssian general any day, and then some.” While they waited to be swapped, the islanders cheerfully fetched and carried for the legionaries; even as captives, they and the Romans got on well.

When he got back to Zonaras’ holding, Marcus was intrigued to find Styppes on his hands and knees in the garden by the villa, turning up lettuce leaves. “What are you after?” he called to the healer-priest, wondering what sort of medicinal herbs grew along with the salad greens.

He blinked when Styppes answered, “I need a good fat snail or two. Ah, here!” The priest put his catch in a small burlap bag.

“Now I understand,” the tribune laughed. “Snails and lettuce make a good supper. Will you boil some eggs with them?”

Styppes grunted in exasperation as he got to his feet. He brushed once at the mud on the knees of his blue robe, then let it go. “No, lackwit. I want them to let me finish the image of the holy Nestorios.” He made Phos’ sun-sign over his heart.

“Snails?” Marcus heard his voice rise in disbelief.

“Come see then, scoffer.” Wondering whether Styppes was playing a prank on him, the Roman followed him to his tent. They squatted together on the dirt floor. Styppes lit a tallow candle that filled the tight space with the smell of burning fat. The priest rummaged in his kit, finding at last a large oyster shell. “Good, good,” he said to himself. He took one of the snails from his bag, held it over the candle flame. The unfortunate mollusc bubbled and emitted a thick, clear slime. As it dripped, Styppes caught it in the oyster shell. The other snail suffered the same fate. “You see?” the healer-priest said, holding the shell under Scaurus’ nose.

“Well, no,” the tribune said, more distressed at the snails’ torment than he had been in several fights.

“Bah. You will.” Styppes poured the slime onto a hand-sized marble slab and added powdered gold. “You will pay me back, and not in new coin,” he warned Scaurus. Next came a little whitish powder—“Alum”—and some sticky gum, then he stirred the mix with a brass pestle. “Now we are ready—you will admire it,” he said. He took out a pair of badger-fur brushes, one so fine the hairs were fitted into a goosequill, the other larger, with a wooden handle.

Marcus drew in a breath of wonder when he saw the icon for the first time. Styppes’ sketches had shown him the priest had a gift, but they were only sketches. The delicate colors and fine line, the holy Nestorios’ ascetic yet kindly face, the subtled shadings of his blue robe, his long, thin hands upraised in a gesture of blessing that reminded the tribune of the awesome mosaic image of Phos in the High Temple in the capital … “Almost I believe in your god now,” he said, and knew no higher praise.

“That is what an image is for, to instruct the ignorant and guide them toward its prototype’s virtues,” the healer-priest replied. His plump
hand deft as a jeweler’s, he dipped his tiny feather-brush in the gold pigment on his piece of marble. Though he held the icon close to his face as he worked, his calligraphy was elegant; the gilding, even wet, shone and sparkled in the dim candlelight. “Nestorios the holy,” Marcus read. Styppes used the larger brush to surround the saint’s head with a gleaming circle of gold. “Thus we portray Phos’ sun-disk, to show the holy man’s closeness to the good god,” he explained, but the tribune had already grasped the halo’s meaning.

“May I?” he said, and when Styppes nodded, he took the wooden panel into his own hands. “How soon will it be ready for giving?” he asked eagerly.

Styppes’ smile, for once, was not sour. “A day for the gilding to dry, then two coats of varnish to protect the colors underneath.” He scratched his shaved head. “Say, four days’ time.”

“I wish it were sooner,” Marcus said. He was still not won over to this Videssian art of symbol and allegory, but there was no denying that in Styppes’ talented hands its results were powerfully moving.

The priest reclaimed the icon and set it to one side to dry undisturbed. “Now,” he said with an abrupt change of manner, “where did I toss those snails? Your supper idea wasn’t half bad, outlander; have you any garlic to go with them?”