Without warning, the scene shifted. Again he saw mountains. These, at a guess, were in hotter, drier country than those of the previous vision: the hooves of the horses strung out in the line of march kicked up sand at every step. The soldiers atop those horses were unmistakably Videssians. Off in the distance—to the south?—the sun sparkled off a blue, blue sea filled with ships.
There was another shift of scene. He saw more fighting, this time between Makuraners and Videssians. In the middle distance a town with a mud-brick wall stood on a hill that rose abruptly from flat farmland. That's somewhere in the land of the Thousand Cities, Abivard thought. The settlements there were so ancient that these days they sat atop mounts built up of centuries' worth of accumulated rubble. Again, he might have been seeing the future or the past. Videssians under Maniakes had fought Smerdis' Makuraners between the Tutub and the Tib to help return Sharbaraz to the throne.
The scene shifted once more. Now he had come full circle, for he found his point of vision back at Across, staring over the Cattle Crossing toward Videssos the city. He could see none of the dromons that had held his army away from the imperial capital.
Suddenly, something flashed silver across the water. He knew that signal: the signal to attack. He would—
The wine in the bowl bubbled and roiled as if coming to a boil. Whatever it had been about to show Abivard vanished then; it was once more merely wine. Bozorg smacked his right fist into his left palm in frustration. «My scrying was detected,» he said, angry at himself or at the Videssian mage who had thwarted him or maybe both at once. «The God grant you saw enough to suit you, lord.»
«Almost,» Abivard said. «Aye, almost. You confirmed for me that the 'narrow sea' of a prophecy I had years ago is indeed the Cattle Crossing, but whether the prophecy proves to be for good or ill I still do not know.»
«I would hesitate before I sought to learn that, lord,» Bozorg said. «The Videssian mages will now be alerted to my presence and watchful lest I try to sneak another scrying spell past them. For now, letting them ease back into sloth is the wiser course.»
«Let it be as you say,» Abivard answered. «I've gone without knowing the answer to that riddle for a long time now. A little longer won't matter—if in fact I can learn it before the event itself. Sometimes foreseeing is best viewed from behind, if you take my meaning.»
Before, Bozorg had shown him flattery. Now the wizard bowed with what seemed genuine respect. «Lord, if you know so much, the God has granted you wisdom beyond that of most men. Knowing the future is different from being able to change it or even to recognize it until it is upon you.»
Abivard laughed at himself. «If I were as wise as all that, I wouldn't have asked for the glimpses you just showed me. And if you were as wise as all that, you wouldn't have spent time and effort learning how to show me those glimpses.» He laughed again. «And if the Videssians were as wise as all that, they wouldn't have tried to keep me from seeing those glimpses, either. After all, what can I do about them if the future is already set?»
«Only what you have seen—whatever that may be—is certain, lord,» Bozorg warned. «What happened before, what may come after—those are hidden and so remain mutable.»
«Ah. I understand,» Abivard replied. «So if I saw, say, a huge Videssian army marching on me, I would still have the choice of either setting an ambush against it or fleeing to save my skin.»
«Exactly so.» Bozorg's head bobbed up and down in approval. «Neither of those is preordained from what you saw by the scrying: they depend on the strength of your own spirit.»
«Even if I do set the ambush, though, I also have no guarantee ahead of time that it will succeed,» Abivard said.
Bozorg nodded again. «Not unless you saw yourself succeeding.»
Abivard plucked at his beard. «Could a man who was, say, both rich and fearful have a scryer show him great chunks of his life to come so he would know what dangers to avoid?»
«Rich, fearful, foolish men have indeed tried this many times over the years,» Bozorg said with a scornful curl of his lip worthy of Tzikas. «What good does it do them? Any danger they do so see is one they cannot avoid, by the very nature of things.»
«If I saw myself making what had to be a dreadful error,» Abivard said after more thought, «when the time came, I would struggle against that course with all my might.»
«No doubt you would struggle,» Bozorg agreed, «and no doubt you would also fail. Your later self, having knowledge that the you who watched the scryer lacked, would assuredly find some reason for doing that which was earlier reckoned a disaster in the making—or might simply forget the scrying till, too late, he realized that the foretold event had come to pass.»
Abivard chewed on that for a while, then gave it up with a shake of his head. «Too complex for my poor, dull wits. We might as well be a couple of Videssian priests arguing about which of the countless ways to worship their Phos is the single right and proper one. By the God, good Bozorg, I swear that one flyspeck on a theological manuscript of theirs can spawn three new heresies.»
«They know not the truth and so are doomed to quarrel endlessly over how the false is false,» Bozorg said with a distinct sniff, «and to drop into the Void once their foolish lives have passed.»
Abivard was tempted to lock Bozorg and Artanas the hierarch in a room together to see which—if either—came out sane. Sometimes, though, one had to sacrifice personal pleasure for the good of the cause.
Bozorg bowed. «Will there be anything more, lord?»
«No, you may go,» Abivard answered. «Thank you for your service to me.»
«It is my pleasure, my privilege, my honor to serve a commander of such great accomplishment, one who excites the admiration of all who know of him,» Bozorg said. «Truly you are the great wild boar of Makuran, trampling down and tearing all her foes.» With a final bow the wizard reassembled his sorcerous paraphernalia, loaded it back into the saddlebags in which it had traveled from Mashiz, and took his leave.
As soon as his footsteps faded down the hall, Abivard let out a long sigh. This sorcerer wasn't a Tanshar in the making, either, being both oily as what the Videssians squeezed from olives and argumentative to boot. Abivard shrugged. If Bozorg proved competent, he'd overlook a great deal.
Abivard's marshals sprang to their feet to greet him. He went down their ranks accepting kisses on the cheek. A couple of his subordinates were men of the Seven Clans; under most circumstances he would have kissed them on the cheek, not the other way around. They might even have given him trouble about that had he been placed in command of them—were his sister not Sharbaraz' principal wife. As brother-in-law to the King of Kings, he unquestionably outranked them. They might resent that, but they could not deny it.
Romezan was a scion of the Seven Clans, but he had never given Abivard an instant's trouble over rank. Thick-shouldered rather than lean like most Makuraners, he was a bull of a man, the tips of whose waxed mustaches swept out like a bull's horns. All he wanted was more of Videssos than Makuran had yet taken. As he did at every officers' gathering, he said, «How can we get across that miserable little stretch of water, lord?»
«I could piss across it, I think, if I stood on the seashore there,» another general said. Kardarigan was no high noble; like Abivard, he was a dihqan from the Northwest, one of so many young men forced into positions of importance when their fathers and brothers had died on the Pardrayan steppe.
Romezan leered at him. «You're not hung so well as that.» Laughter rose from the Makuraner commanders.
«How do you know?» Kardarigan retorted, and the laughter got louder. The generals had reason to make free with their merriment. Up to the Cattle Crossing they'd swept all before them. Sharbaraz might be unhappy because they'd not done more, but they knew how much they had done.
«We must have marble in our heads instead of brains,» Abivard said, «not being able to figure out how to beat the Videssians, even if only for a little while, and get our men and engines
across to the eastern shore. Can we but set our engines against the walls of Videssos the city, we will take it.» How many times had he said that?
«If that accursed Videssian traitor had built us a navy instead of stringing us along with promises, we might have been able to do it by now,» Romezan said.
That accursed Videssian traitor. Abivard wondered what Tzikas would have done had he heard the judgment against him. Whatever he thought, he wouldn't have shown it on the outside. It would nave to hurt, though. The Makuraners might use him, but he would never win their trust or respect.
A messenger, his face filthy with road dust, came hurrying up to Abivard. Bowing low, he said, «Your pardon, lord, but I bear an urgent dispatch from the marzban of Vaspurakan.»
«What does Vshnasp want with me?» Abivard asked. Up till then Sharbaraz' governor of Vaspurakan had done his best to pretend that Abivard did not exist.
He accepted the oiled-leather message tube, opened it, and broke the wax seal on the letter inside with a thumbnail. As he read the sheet of parchment he'd unrolled, his eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. When he was through, he raised his head and spoke to his expectantly waiting officers: «Mikhran marzban requests—begs our aid. Vshnasp marzban is dead. The Vaspurakaners have risen against him and against the worship of the God. If we don't come to his rescue at once, Mikhran says, the whole province will be lost.»
II
Abivard stormed through the corridors of his residence. Venizelos started to say something to him but got a good look at his face and flattened himself against the wall to let his master pass.
Roshnani was embroidering fancy flowers on a caftan of winter-weight wool. She glanced up when Abivard came into the chamber where she was working, then bent her head to the embroidery once more.
«I told anyone who would listen that we should have left the Vaspurakaners to their own misguided cult,» he ground out. «But no! We have to ram the God down their throats, too! And now look what it's gotten us.»
«Yes, you told anyone who would listen,» Roshnani said. «No one back in Mashiz listened. Are you surprised? Is this the first time such a thing has happened? Of course it's not. Besides, with Vshnasp over them, it's no wonder the Vaspurakaner princes decided to revolt.»
«All the Vaspurakaners style themselves princes—the God alone knows why,» Abivard said, a little less furious than he had been a moment before. He looked thoughtfully at his wife—his principal wife, he supposed he should have thought, but he'd been away from the others so long that he'd almost forgotten them. «Do you mean the Vaspurakaners would have rebelled even if we hadn't tried to impose the God on them?»
Roshnani nodded. «Aye, though maybe not so soon. Vshnasp had a reputation in Mashiz as a seducer. I don't suppose he would have stopped that just because he was sent to Vaspurakan.»
«Mm, likely not,» Abivard agreed. «Things were better with the old ways firmly in place, don't you think?»
«Better for men, certainly,» Roshnani said, unusual sharpness in her voice. «If you ask the wives who spent their lives locked away in the women's quarters of strongholds and saw no more of the world than what the view out their windows happened to give, you might find them singing a different tune.» She gave him a sidelong smile—she had never been one to stay in a bad humor. «Besides, husband of mine, are you not pleased to be on the cutting edge of fashion?»
«Now that you mention it, no,» Abivard answered. Roshnani made a face at him. Like it or not, though, he and Sharbaraz were on the cutting edge of fashion. Giving their principal wives leave to emerge on occasion from the women's quarters had set long-frozen Makuraner usage on its ear. At first, ten years ago now, men had called noblewomen who appeared in public harlots merely for letting themselves be seen. But when the King of Kings and his most successful general set a trend, others would and did follow it.
«Besides,» Roshnani said, «even under the old way, a man determined enough might find out how to sneak into the women's quarters for a little while, or a woman to sneak out of them.»
«Never mind that,» Abivard said. «Vshnasp won't sneak in now, nor women out to him. If such sneakings were what touched off the Vaspurakaner revolt, I wish some of the princes had caught him inside and made him into a eunuch so he would stay there without endangering anyone's chastity, including his own.»
«You are angry at him,» Roshnani observed. «A man says he wants to see another man made a eunuch only when his rage is full and deep.»
«You're right, but that doesn't matter, either,» Abivard answered. «Vshnasp is in the God's hands now, not mine, and if the God should drop his miserable soul into the Void…» He shook his head. Vshnasp didn't matter. He had to remember that. The hideous mess the late marzban of Vaspurakan had left behind was something else again.
As she often did, his wife thought along with him. «How much of our force here in the westlands will you have to take to Vaspurakan to bring the princes back under the rule of the King of Kings?» she asked.
«Too much,» he said, «but I have no choice. We ought to hold the Videssian westlands, but we must hold Vaspurakan. We draw iron and silver and lead from the mines there and also a little gold. When times are friendlier than this, we draw horsemen, too. And if we don't control the east-west valleys, Videssos will. Whoever does control them has in his hands the best invasion routes to the other fellow's country.»
«Maniakes has Vaspurakaner blood, not so?» Roshnani said.
Abivard nodded. «He does, and I wouldn't be the least surprised to find the Empire behind this uprising, either.»
«Neither would I,» Roshnani said. «It's what I'd do in his sandals. He doesn't dare come fight us face to face, so he stirs up trouble behind our backs.» She thought for a moment «How large a garrison do you purpose leaving behind here in Across?» Her voice was curiously expressionless.
«I've been chewing on that,» Abivard answered. The face he made said that he didn't like what he'd been chewing. «I don't think I'm going to leave anyone. We'll need a good part of the field force to put down the princes, and on the far side of the Cattle Crossing the Videssians have soldiers to spare to gobble up any small garrison I leave here. Especially after they beat the Kubratoi earlier this summer, I don't want to hand them a cheap victory that would make them feel they can meet us and win. It's almost sorcery: if they feel that, it's halfway to being true.»
He waited for Roshnani to explode like a covered pot left too long in the fire. She surprised him by nodding. «Good,» she said. «I was going to suggest that, but I was afraid you'd be angry at me. I think you're right—you'd be throwing away any men you leave here.»
«I thnk I'll name you my second in command,» Abivard said, and that got him a smile. He gave it back, then quickly sobered. «After we leave, though, the Videssians will come back anyhow. One of my officers is bound to write to Sharbaraz about that, and Sharbaraz is bound to write to me.» He rolled his eyes. «One more thing to look forward to.»
A wagon rolled up in front of the residence that had belonged to the Videssian logothete of the treasury. Abivard's children swarmed aboard it with cries of delight. «A house that moves!» Shahin exclaimed. None of them remembered what living in such a cramped space for weeks at a time was like. They'd find out Roshnani did remember all too well. She climbed into the wagon with much less enthusiasm than her offspring showed.
Venizelos, Livania, and the rest of the Videssian servants stood in front of the house. The steward went to one knee in front of Abivard. «The lord with the great and good mind grant you health and safety, most eminent sir,» the steward said.
«I thank you,» Abivard answered, though he noted that Venizelos had not prayed that Phos grant him success. «Perhaps one day we'll see each other—I expect so, at any rate.»
«Perhaps,» was all Venizelos said. He did not want to think about the Makuraners' return to Across.
Abivard handed him a small heavy leather sack, gave Livania another, and went down the line of servants with mo
re. Their thanks were loud and effusive. He could have forced them to go along with him. For that matter, he could have had them killed for the sport of it The coins inside the sack were silver arkets of Makuran, not Videssian goldpieces. The servants would probably grumble about that once he was out of earshot Again, though, he could have done far worse.
He swung up onto his horse, a stalwart bay gelding. With knees and reins, he urged the animal into a walk. The wagon driver, a skinny fellow named Pashang, flicked the reins of the two-horse team. Clattering, its ungreased axles squealing, the wagon rattled after Abivard.
Abivard's soldiers had broken camp many times. They were used to it. The loose women they'd picked up and the Videssian servants they'd swept up were another matter altogether. The army was late setting out. Abivard willingly forgave that on the first day. Afterward, he'd start jettisoning stragglers. He also suspected that the racket his force made could be heard in Videssos the city on the far side of the Cattle Crossing.
That didn't much worry him. If Maniakes couldn't hear the Makuraner army departing, he'd be able to see it. If he didn't watch personally, the captains of those accursed dromons would notice that the camp at the edge of Across had been abandoned.
Abivard had thought about leaving men behind to light fires and simulate one more night's occupancy. What point was there to it, though? Already, very likely, men were slipping into little row-boats they'd hidden from the Makuraners and hurrying across the strait to tell the Avtokrator everything they knew. He wouldn't have been a bit surprised to learn that Venizelos was one of those men.
At last, far more slowly than he'd hoped, his force shook itself out into something that approximated its future line of march. Light cavalry, archers riding unarmored horses and wearing no more protection than helms and leather jerkins themselves, formed the vanguard, the rear guard, and scouring parties to either flank.
Within that screen of light cavalry rode the heavy horsemen who made the red lion of Makuran so feared. Neither riders nor horses were armored now, for Abivard did not expect battle any time soon. The weight of iron warriors and beasts carried into battle was plenty to exhaust the horses if they tried bearing it day in, day out. The riders still bore their long lances in the sockets on the right side of their saddles, though, even if their armor was wrapped and stored in the supply wagons.
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