Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (36 page)

He sat down, waiting for their response; they looked as pleased with the prospect of parting with their gold as he had expected. The fat
wine merchant spoke for them all when he said, “Pay us back? Aye, no doubt, just as the shearer gives the sheep back their wool.”

Privately, Marcus would have admitted he had a point; like any state, Videssos was happier to gather money than to spend it. What he said, though, was, “I have some influence at the capital, and I do not let the folk who help me be forgotten.” They understood that; the patron-client relationship was less formal in Videssos than in Rome, but no less real. But hereabouts they were the powerful men, unused to depending on anyone else, let alone a foreign mercenary.

Zonaras spoke up. “This one has a strange habit; when he says he’ll do something, he does it.” He told how the legionaries had held the Namdaleni out of the hills and organized the irregulars to carry the war to them in the lowlands. “And all that,” he said, “seemed a lot less likely than collecting from the treasury.”

“Nothing is less likely than collecting from the treasury,” the fat man insisted, drawing a short laugh. But he and his companions had listened attentively; because Zonaras was a Videssian, they were more inclined to believe him than the tribune.

One of the local nobles, a lean, nearly bald man whose back was bent with age, struggled to his feet, leaning on a stick. He stabbed a gnarled finger at Scaurus. “It was you, then, taught our farmers to be brigands, was it?” he shrilled. With his jutting nose and thin ruff of white hair, he looked like an old, angry vulture. “Two of my wells fouled, stock run off or killed, my steward kidnapped and branded. You brought this down on me?” He stood straighter in his outrage, brandishing the stick like a sword.

But from the back of the chamber someone called, “Oh, stifle it, Skepides. If you’d shown your tenants any fairness the past fifty years, you’d have nothing to moan about.”

“Eh? What was that?” Not catching the jibe, Skepides turned back to Scaurus. “I tell you this, sir, I’d sooner deal with the Namdaleni than a seditionary like yourself, Skotos take me if I wouldn’t. And I’ll have no more to do with this scheme of yours.” Slowly and painfully he made his way to the aisle. He hobbled out. Two or three of the Videssians followed him.

“Try to talk them round,” Marcus urged. “The more who share the cost, the less it falls on each of you.”

“And what will you do if none of us goes along?” another merchant asked. “Take our gold by force?”

The tribune had waited for that question. “By no means,” he said promptly. “In fact, if in your wisdom you choose not to help me, I intend to do nothing at all.”

His audience broke into confused babble, all but ignoring him. “He won’t compel us?” “Ha! What trick is this?” “To the ice with him! Let him buy his barbarians with his own money!” That last sentiment, or variations of it, had wide support. It was the plump winedealer who had the wit to ask the Roman, “What do you mean, you’d do nothing at all?”

“Why, just that.” Marcus was innocence itself. “I would simply take my troops back to the imperial city, as my job would be done here, or so it seems to me.”

That produced worse commotion among the Videssians than his first announcement had. “Then who’d save us from the Yezda?” someone yelled.

“Why should I care about that?”

“By Phos,” the man blustered, “you’ve used enough wind showing what a fine imperial you are.” Behind Scaurus, Gaius Philippus chuckled quietly. “Now when it comes down to protecting imperial citizens, you’d rather run away.” Merchants and nobles shouted agreement—all but the wine seller, who was looking at the tribune with the grudging respect one sharper sometimes gives another.

“If you are citizens, act like it,” Marcus growled, slamming his fist down on the table. “Your precious Empire has kept you fat and safe and prosperous for more years than any of you can reckon, and I doubt you have any complaint over that. But when trouble comes and it needs your help, what do you do? Bawl like so many calves looking for their mothers. By your Phos, gentlemen, if you aren’t willing to give aid, why should you get it? I tell you this—if I am one single goldpiece short ten days from now, I
will
pull out, and you can make your own bargain with Yavlak. And a very good day to you all.”

His officers trailing, he strode out of the audience chamber, leaving dead silence behind.

“Me, I would you thrash for so talking,” Gagik Bagratouni remarked
as they came out into the late afternoon sun. “But as you say, these fat so very long. They pay, I think.”

“I wouldn’t have had to browbeat you into it,” Marcus said. “Vaspurakan is frontier country, and borderers know what has to be done.” He sighed. “If I admire the Empire for keeping its people secure, I suppose I shouldn’t blame them for being selfish as well. They’ve never had not to be.”

He caught motion out of the corner of his eye, swung round on Gaius Philippus. “And what in the name of the gods are you up to?”

The senior centurion gave a guilty start and jerked his hands away from his dagger. The thin keen blade stayed where he had wedged it—between the drums of one of the columns by the entranceway of the governor’s hall. “I’ve wanted to do that for years,” he said defensively. “How many times have you heard toffs going on and on about columns so perfectly made you couldn’t get a knife blade between the drums? I always thought it was so much rubbish, and here I’ve proved it.” He retrieved the dagger.

Marcus rolled his eyes. “It’s a good thing Viridovix isn’t here to see you, or you’d never hear the last of it. Columns, now!” He smiled to himself all the way back to the legionary camp.

The next morning a very respectful Garsavran delegation appeared to announce they were having difficulty in allotting payments proportional to wealth. The stall was so blatant Marcus almost laughed in their faces. “Come along, my friends,” he said, and returned to the governor’s residence. After a winter’s struggle with the intricacies of the whole Empire’s tax structure at Videssos the city, the local receipts were child’s play. An hour and a half later he emerged from the records office and handed the nervously waiting Garsavrans a list of amounts due, down to the fraction of a goldpiece. Defeat in their eyes, they took it and slipped away.

He had all the payments within two days.

With the constant strain and motion of campaigning, he knew he had not given Helvis much time or attention the past couple of months. Sometimes he thought that pleased her just as well. If they were not together
much, they could not quarrel, and she still bitterly resented his loyalty to the Empire. And as her pregnancy progressed, her desire for him faded. The same thing had happened when she was carrying Dosti; he bore it as best he could.

Once they set down a long-term camp outside Garsavra, however, they could not keep ignoring each other—and Soteric’s captivity gave Helvis a new and urgent worry. The evening after Scaurus sent a heavily armed party to buy the Namdalener prisoners from Yavlak, she asked him, “What do you plan to do with them once you have them?”

She held her voice tight-reined, but he could hear the fear that rode it. Still, she urged no action on him, having learned that the easiest way to turn him against an idea was to push for it too strongly. In the lamplight her deep blue eyes were enormous as she waited for his reply.

“Nothing at once, past holding them and sending word to Thorisin. That choice is for him to make, not me.”

He braced for an explosion, but was startled when her eyes swam with tears, and she scrambled clumsily to her feet to embrace him, saying brokenly, “Thank you, oh, thank you!”

“Here, what’s this about?” he said, taking her shoulders and holding her at arm’s length so he could see her face. “Did you think I’d kill them out of hand?”

“How was I to know? After what you said in camp after the battle where—” She could not put a pleasant face on that, so she drew back quickly. “After the battle, I feared you might.”

Her gaze went to the image of the holy Nestorios atop her little traveling shrine. “Thank you,” she whispered to the saint, “for saving Soteric.”

Marcus stroked her hair. “I said that in the heat of rage. That does not excuse it; I’m not proud of it. But I haven’t the stomach for butchery. I thought you knew me better.”

“I thought I did, too.” She moved close to him, smiled when her belly touched him at the same time as her breasts. But her face grew sober again as she looked up and tried to read his. “Still, even after so long I think sometimes I don’t know you at all.”

His arms tightened around her. He often felt the same toward her and realized their recent isolation had done nothing to help that. Even
so, he did not tell her what was in his mind—that Thorisin Gavras, Avtokrator of the Videssians, was not apt to view captured rebel chiefs kindly. The holy Nestorios notwithstanding, Soteric was a long way from saved.

The note was in Latin, and ambiguous to boot: “We have your packages. Coming in three days.” Marcus read it twice before he noticed the Roman “d” was replaced by its Videssian equivalent. Little by little the Empire wore away at them all.

On the morning of the third day a Khatrisher messenger told the tribune the company he had sent out was within a couple of hours of Garsavra. “Very good,” he breathed, full of relief. So Yavlak had kept his bargain after all—one hurdle overleaped.

To intimidate the islanders still holed up in their fortress outside the town, Marcus paraded almost his entire army past the castle, leaving behind only enough men to hold the legionary camp against a sally. The men of the Duchy watched him from their walls of heaped-up earth. They would be getting hungry in there soon, he thought; time enough to deal with them then.

Even so short a distance west of Garsavra, the land began to slope sharply upwards toward the central plateau. The Arandos, slow and placid in the lowlands, bumped down over cataracts to reach them. The great boulders were almost lost in seething white foam. Its greatest tributary, the Eriza, flowed down from the north to meet it; Garsavra sat at their junction.

Scaurus’ guide clung to the southern bank of the Arandos, which surprised him not at all. On the plateau the rivers were the only sure source of water in summer.

He saw dust ahead, low, widespread cloud that meant men on foot—the light cavalry of the Yezda would have kicked it up in high, straight columns. He exchanged grins with the Khatrisher scout, who gave the thumbs-up gesture Pakhymer’s hand had picked up from the Romans.

Then Marcus spied the marching square of legionaries, flanked by a thin cordon of Khatrisher archers to hold off any raiders that might
appear—and to round up any Namdalener who somehow broke out of that hollow square.

Junius Blaesus saluted the tribune with the air of a man glad to lay down a heavy burden. “Here they are, sir, all the ones Yavlak had alive: three hundred and—let me see—seventeen. I set out with, ah, twenty-one who died on the march—they were badly wounded to start with, and I couldn’t see much the Yezda had done for ’em. I didn’t want to leave them behind, though,” he finished anxiously.

“You did right,” Marcus assured him, and watched his broad peasant face glow with pleasure. Earnest though Blaesus was, responsibility frightened him.

The tribune turned from the junior centurions to the Namdaleni in his charge. The islanders were a far cry from the proud, confident troops who had set out to wrest Videssos’ westlands from the Empire. Patchy beards straggled up their gaunt cheeks. Most walked with a forward list, as if drawing themselves up straight took more vigor than they had. Almost every man limped, some from wounds, the rest because the Yezda had stolen their boots and left them only cloths with which to wrap their feet. They wore tattered rags of surcoats and trousers; like the boots, their mail shirts were the nomads’ spoils. Their eyes were hollow and uncaring as they plodded along.

So this was victory, Scaurus thought. He felt like a captain of one of Crassus’ fire brigades back at Rome, turning a profit from the misfortune of others by buying burning property on the cheap.

Here and there a face, an attitude stood out from the general run of prisoners. Mertikes Zigabenos’ luxuriant black whiskers made him easy to pick out in the throng of new, scraggly beards. So did his expression of absolute despair, painful to see even among so much misery. He would not lift his head when Marcus called his name. Beside him walked Drax, whose short beard was startlingly red. The great count’s left arm in a filthy sling. He was not ashamed to meet Scaurus’ eye, but his own steady gaze was as unfathomable as ever.

Not all the Namdaleni had forgotten they were men. The veteran Fayard, who had been a member of Hemond’s squadron when Marcus arrived at Videssos the city, marched where the troopers around him shambled. He threw the tribune a sharp salute, followed it with a shrug,
as if to say he had thought they would meet again, but not like this. Somehow he had kept himself fit, making the best of whatever came his way.

Soteric, too, was straight as a plumb bob. That stubborn erectness was what first made Marcus know him; beard and haggardness added years to his looks, so he seemed older than the tribune when in fact he was not thirty. A half-healed, puckered scar seamed his forehead. He glared at his brother-in-law like a trapped wolf. With little sympathy in him, he expected none.

“Traitor!” Soteric shouted, and the tribune did not doubt he meant it. A strange word, he thought, after the fight at the Sangarios. But Helvis’ brother was so full of the righteousness of his cause that he was blind to any other. Some of that was in Helvis, too. Not as much, Marcus thought thankfully.

He turned to Styppes, saying, “Do what you can for their hurts.” Not all of those, he saw, had come in battle; some islanders carried the mark of the lash or worse.

The healer-priest had scant relish for his task. “You ask too much of me,” he said, sounding for once very much like Gorgidas. “Many I will not cure, for they have had long to fester. And these are heretics and enemies as well.”

“They fought for the Empire once,” Marcus pointed out, “and many will again, with your help.” Styppes scowled at him. Scaurus started to argue further, but found he was talking to the priest’s back. Styppes was pushing past Blaesus’ men to reach the wounded Namdaleni.