Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (24 page)

He squatted beside the plainsman, who was just beginning to revive. The rest of the nomads hefted their bows in warning. “It’s no harm I mean him,” Viridovix said; they did not understand that any more than they had his previous speech, but relaxed somewhat when they saw him help their comrade sit. The barbarian moaned and held his head in his hands, still half unconscious.

One of the Khamorth tossed his bow to the man beside him, dismounted, and walked up to Viridovix, his empty hands spread in front of him. He pointed to the Celt. “You,” he said. Viridovix nodded; that was a word he knew. The nomad pointed to the string of steppe ponies the Gaul was leading. “Where?” he asked. He repeated it several times, with gestures, until Viridovix understood.

“Oh, it’s these beauties you’d be knowing about, is it? I stole ’em from Varatesh, indeed and I did,” the Celt said, proud of his exploit, not just because it had let him escape, but for its own sake as well. In Gaul as among the nomads, stock raiding was a sport, in fact almost an art.

“Varatesh?” Three of the Khamorth spoke the name at the same time; it was all they had caught of what Viridovix had said. Even their stunned leader jerked his head up, but let it fall with a groan. They hurled excited questions at the Gaul. He waved his hands to show he could not follow.

The dismounted nomad shouted his friends down. “You and Varatesh?” he asked Viridovix with a wide, artificial smile, then repeated the question, this time with a fearsome scowl on his face.

“Aren’t you the clever one, now?” the Celt exclaimed. “Me and Varatesh,” he said, and screwed up his face into the most terrible grimace he could imagine, slashing the air with his sword for good measure. Only then did he realize the nomads might be friendly to the outlaw. Well, no help for it, and a lie had the same chance of getting him into trouble as the truth.

But he got the answer right. The plainsmen broke into smiles for the first time. The dismounted one offered his hand for Viridovix to clasp. He took it warily, shifting his sword to his own left hand, but the Khamorth’s friendliness was genuine. “Yaramna,” he said, tapping himself on the chest. He pointed to his companions on their horses: “Nerseh, Zamasp, Valash,” then to his chief: “Rambehisht.”

“More sneeze-names,” Viridovix sighed, and gave his own. Then he had two inspirations, one on the other’s heels. He retrieved Rambehisht’s saber and gave it back to the plainsman. Rambehisht was hardly up to standing yet, let alone showing thanks, but his comrades murmured appreciatively.

Then the Gaul walked back to his horses, retrieving his trousers and tunic from the back of the one he had been riding. He used his sword to cut some of the animals’ leads, and presented each of the plainsmen with half a dozen beasts. The string he kept for himself had been Varatesh’s; in such matters he trusted the outlaw chief’s judgment.

He could not have picked a better friendship-offering from all the world’s wealth. All the Khamorth but Rambehisht crowded round Viridovix, wringing his hand, pounding his back, and shouting in their own language. Even their leader managed a wan smile, though it looked as if moving his face in any way hurt. Viridovix had tried to give him some of the best animals he had, not wanting to make a permanent enemy if he could help it.

With more gestures and the few words the Celt knew, Yaramna indicated they would soon be riding back to his clan-mates’ tents. “The very thing I was hoping you’d say,” Viridovix replied. Yaramna understood his grin and nod better. The Khamorth made a wry face at his failure to communicate; he finally made Viridovix realize that some men of his clan did speak Videssian. “We do the best we can, is all,” the Celt shrugged. He had already made up his mind to learn the plains tongue.

He laughed suddenly. Yaramna and the other Khamorth looked at him, puzzled. “Nay, it’s nought to do with you,” Viridovix said. He had never thought a day would come when he started to sound like Scaurus.

Varatesh’s hands were puffy and swollen still, the marks from the thongs Viridovix had used to bind him carved deep and red and angry on his wrists. If the Gaul had not missed the little knife he always carried in a slit pouch on the side of one boot, he would still be tied. But Khuraz had wriggled over through the mud to get it out and then, working back-to-back with Varatesh, managed to cut his bonds—and his wrists and hands, more than once.

The outlaw clenched painful fists and tried with little success to ignore the hoofbeats of agony in his skull. He did not like to lose at anything, least of all to a man who should have been his helpless prisoner. Nor did he relish the week or more of a hiking he and his comrades had ahead of them unless they could steal horses. And least of all he liked the prospect of explaining to Avshar how the fat partridge had slipped through his nets. Avshar’s anger would be bad enough, but to have the wizard-prince think him nothing but a thick-witted barbarian after all … he bit his lip in humiliated fury.

When the wave of black anger passed, he found he could think again, despite the pain. He reached inside his tunic for the crystal charm Avshar had given him. Holding it carefully in clumsy fingers, he watched the orange mist suffuse its depths.

“East,” he grunted in surprise, peering at the clear patch the orange would not enter. “Why is the worthless dog moving east?” He wondered if the crystal had gone awry, decided it had not. But when captured, the red-haired stranger had been heading west, and in company with an Arshaum. Varatesh tugged at his beard. He distrusted what he did not understand.

“Who gives a sheep turd where he’s going?” Bikni asked from the ground. “Good riddance, says I,” Akes echoed, also sitting in the wet dirt. Varatesh’s three surviving followers were all sick and shaken from Viridovix’ bludgeoning. So was their chief, but his will drove him, while they were content to lie like dogs in their own vomit.

“Avshar will care,” he answered; battered as they were, his henchmen flinched. “And I care,” he added. He had made sure to get the knife back from Khuraz and showed it now.

“It’s a long walk back to our mates,” Bikni whined. “No horses, no food, no arms—and you know what your bloody toy dagger is worth, Varatesh. Not much.”

“So we walk. I will get home if I have to eat all three of you along the way. And,” Varatesh said very softly, “I will be even.”

When he strode north, the other three Khamorth, moaning and lurching and grumbling, followed, just as a lodestone will draw dead iron in its wake.

Prevails, Haravash’s son, came galloping back toward the embassy party from his station at point. “Something up ahead,” the young trooper called.

“ ‘Something,’ ” Agathias Psoes muttered, rolling his eyes. The under-officer shouted, “Well, what is it?”

At that point they both dropped into the Videssian-Khamorth lingua franca used at Prista, and Gorgidas lost the thread of their conversation. After days with no more than an occasional herd on the horizon, anything would be a relief, simply to break the boredom of travel. Arigh claimed the Shaum river, the great stream that marked the border between the Khamorth and his own Arshaum, was close. The Greek had no idea how he knew. One piece of the endless steppe was identical to the next.

“What are they jabbering about?” Goudeles said impatiently. The bureaucrat from the capital could no more follow the bastard frontier dialect than could Gorgidas.

“Your pardon, sir,” Psoes said, returning to the formal imperial speech. “There’s a nomad encampment in sight, but it doesn’t seem right somehow.”

“Where are their flocks?” Skylitzes asked. He turned to Prevails. “This place of many tents, where is?” He was at home in the jargon Videssians and nomads used together.

“You’ll see it as soon as you top the next rise,” the trooper answered,
smiling as he switched styles so Goudeles, Arigh, and Gorgidas could understand.

Skylitzes’ habitual frown deepened. “That close? Then where
are
their bloody flocks?” He looked this way and that, as if expecting them to pop out of thin air.

Just as Haravash’s son had said, the encampment was visible when the embassy party rode to the top of the gentle swell of land ahead. Recalling the bright tents of the Yezda he had seen too often in Vaspurakan and western Videssos, Gorgidas was looking for a similar gaudy spectacle. He did not find one. The camp seemed somber and quiet—too quiet, the Greek thought. Even at this distance, he should have been able to see cookfires’ smokes against the sky and horsemen riding from one tent to the next, if as no more than fly-sized specks.

“A plague?” he wondered aloud, remembering his Thucydides, and Athens wasted at the start of the Peloponnesian War. His scalp prickled. Plagues were beyond any doctor’s power to cure—though who knew what wonders a healer-priest could work?

Goudeles, who should have known, said, “The expedient course, to my mind, would be to take a broad detour and avoid the risk.” For some obscure reason, it comforted Gorgidas that the Videssian feared disease as much as he.

“No,” Lankinos Skylitzes said. Goudeles started a protest, but the officer cut through it: “Plague might have killed the plainsmen’s herds, or it might have left them untouched. It would not have made them run away.”

“You’re right, Empire man,” Arigh said. “Plagues only make people run.” His slanted eyes mocked Goudeles.

“As you wish, then,” the bureaucrat answered, doing his best to show unconcern. “If the fever melts the marrow inside my bones, at least I know I shall be dying in brave company.” Still an awkward horseman, he urged his mount into a trot and rode past Arigh toward the encampment. Looking less sly and smug than he had a few seconds before, the Arshaum followed, with the rest of the embassy behind them.

Skylitzes’ logic only partly reassured Gorgidas; what if a pestilence had struck some time before, and the nomads’ animals wandered off in the interim? But when his comrades exclaimed in alarm as three or four
ravens and a great black vulture flapped into the sky on spying the oncoming horsemen, the Greek leaned back in his high-cantled saddle in relief. “When did death-birds become a glad sign?” Psoes asked.

“Now,” Gorgidas replied, “for they mean there is no plague. Scavengers either shun corpses that die of pestilence or, eating of them, fall victim to the same disease.” Unless, of course, the fearful part of his mind whispered, Thucydides had it wrong.

But as the embassy party came closer, it grew clear no pestilence had brought the camp low—or none save the pestilence of war. Wagons were gutted shells, some tilting drunkenly with one wheel burned away. Tent-frames held only charred remnants of the felts and leathers that had stretched across them. The tatters waved in the wind like a skeleton’s fleshless fingers; death had ruled long here.

A few more carrion birds rose as the riders entered the murdered encampment—not many, for the best pickings were mostly gone. The stench of death was fading; more bone than rotted flesh leered sightlessly up at the newcomers, as if resenting life’s intrusion into their unmoving world.

The bodies of men and women, children and beasts lay strewn about the tents. Here was a plainsman with the stub of his blade in his hand, the rest a few feet away. Broken, it was not worth looting. An axe had cleaved the man’s skull. Close by him was what once had been a woman. Her corpse was naked, legs brutally spread wide. Enough flesh clung to her to let Gorgidas see her throat had been slashed.

With the legions and then in Videssos, the Greek had known more violent death than he liked to remember, but here he saw a thoroughness, a wantonness of destruction for its own sake that had made his flesh crawl. He looked from one of his companions to the next. Goudeles, who knew little of war, was pale and sickened, but he was not alone. Psoes’ soldiers, Skylitzes, even Arigh, who seemed to pride himself for hardness—what they saw shocked them all.

No one seemed able to speak first, to break the silent spell of horror. At last Gorgidas said, as much to himself as to the rest, “So this is how they wage war, here on the plains.”

“No!” That was Skylitzes, Agathias Psoes, and three of his troopers all together. Another raven cawed indignantly at the near-shout and
waddled away, too stuffed to fly. Psoes, quicker-tongued than Skylitzes, went on, “This is not war, outlander. This is madness.” To that Gorgidas could only dip his head in agreement.

“Even the Yezda are no worse than this,” the Greek said, and then, his agile mind leaping: “And they, too, came off the steppe—”

“But it was in Makuran—Yezd, now—they learned to follow Skotos,” Psoes said, and all the Videssians spat in rejection of the dark god. “The plainsfolk are heathen, aye, but fairly clean as heathens go.” Gorgidas had heard otherwise in Videssos, but then Psoes was closer to the Khamorth than men who lived in the Empire proper. He wondered whether that intimacy made the underofficer more reliable or less. The Greek tossed his head. History was proving as maddeningly indefinite as medicine.

The brief moment of abstraction was shattered when his sharp eyes spied the symbol hacked into the shattered side of a cedar box. He had seen those paired side-by-side three-slash lightning bolts too often in the ruins of Videssian towns and monasteries to fail to recognize Skotos’ mark now. He pointed. Psoes followed his finger, jerked as if stung; he, too, knew what the mark meant. He spat again, sketched Phos’ sun-circle on his breast. Skylitzes, Goudeles, and the Videssian troopers followed suit.

Arigh and the Khamorth, though, were puzzled, wondering why their companions chose to excite themselves over a rude carving in the midst of far worse destruction.

“I would not have thought it,” Skylitzes and Psoes said in the same breath. Skylitzes dismounted, squatted beside the profaned chest. The pious officer spat yet a third time, this time directly on the mark of Skotos. Pulling flint and steel from his belt, he cracked them together over a little pile of dead grass. The fire did not want to catch; the grass was still a bit damp from the recent rain.

“Varatesh’s renegades. It must be,” Psoes said over and over while Skylitzes fumed and his fire did not. The underofficer sounded badly shaken, as if searching for any explanation he could find for the butchery all around him. “Varatesh’s renegades.”