«We'd better,» Romezan declared. «If we're going to try to break into Videssos the city, we'll need everything we have. Kardarigan's chunk won't be enough by itself. Tell me you think otherwise and I'll be very surprised.»
«I don't,» Abivard assured him. «But while we're in Videssos, Maniakes is going to be in the land of the Thousand Cities. And do you know who will have to keep him busy there and make sure he doesn't sack our capital while we're busy sacking his?»
«Somebody had better do that,» Romezan said. His eyes sparkled. «I know who—those foot soldiers you're so proud of, the city militiamen you trained into soldiers almost worth having.»
«They are worth having,» Abivard insisted. He started to get angry before he noticed that Romezan was grinning at him. «The proof of which is they'll be able to keep the Videssians busy here long enough for us to do what needs doing there.»
«They'd better, or Sharbaraz will want both our heads and likely Turan's, too: he'll be commanding them, I suppose, so he won't be able to escape his share of the blame,» Romezan said. He whistled a merry little tune he'd picked up in Videssos. «Of course, if your fancied-up city guards don't do their job, the King of Kings may not be able to take anybody's head, because Maniakes may not have left him with his. One way or another, the war ends next summer.»
«Not 'one way or another,'» Abivard said. «The war ends next summer: our way.»
Romezan, Tus, and Piran lifted their silver goblets of wine in a salute.
Prince Peroz stared up at Abivard, who in turn looked down at the little fellow who would one day rule him if he outlived Sharbaraz King of Kings. Peroz reached up and tried to grab hold of his beard. He hadn't taken that from bis own children; he wouldn't take it from his future sovereign, either.
«He's starting to discover that he has hands,» Abivard said to Denak, and then, «They change so fast when they're this small.»
«They certainly do.» His sister sighed. «I'd almost forgotten. It's been a while now since Jarireh was tiny. She's almost Varaz's age, you know.»
«Is she well? Is she happy?» Abivard asked. His sister hardly ever mentioned his eldest niece. He wondered if Denak thought of Jarireh and her sisters as failures because they had not been boys and thus had not cemented their mother's place among the women of the palace.
«She is well,» Denak said. «Happy? Who could be happy here at court?» She spoke without so much as glancing over at Ksorane, who sat in a corner of the room painting her eyelids with kohl and examining her appearance in a small mirror of polished bronze. Maybe, by now, Sharbaraz had heard all of Denak's complaints.
«If we take Videssos the city—» Abivard stopped. For the first time in a long while he let himself think about all the things that might happen if Makuran took Videssos the city. «If we take the city, Dhegmussa will offer up praise to the God from the High Temple and Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, will quarter himself in Maniakes' palaces. He should bring you with him, for without you he never would have had the chance.»
«I've given up thinking that what he should do and what he will do are one and the same,» Denak answered. «He'll go to Videssos the city, no doubt, to see what you've done for him and, as you say, to vaunt himself by taking over the Avtokrator's dwelling. But I'll stay here in Mashiz, sure as sure. He'll take women who… amuse him, or else he'll amuse himself with frightened little Videssians.» She sounded very sure, very knowing, very bitter.
«But—» Abivard began.
His sister waved him to silence. «Sharbaraz dreams large,» she said. «He always has—I give him that much. Now he's dreamed large enough to catch you up in his webs again, the way he did when the crown of the King of Kings was new on his head. But I'm not part of his dreams anymore, not in any real way.» She pointed to Peroz, who was beginning to yawn in Abivard's arms. «Sometimes I think he's a dream and, if I go to bed and then wake up, he'll be gone.» She shrugged. «I don't even know why Sharbaraz summoned me that one night.»
Ksorane set down the mirror and said, «Lady, he feared your brother and wanted a better bond with him if he could forge one.» Denak and Abivard both stared at her in surprise. The only previous time she'd spoken without being spoken to had been to keep them from touching each other. As if to pretend she hadn't done anything at all, she went back to ornamenting her eyelids.
Denak shrugged again. «Maybe she's right,» she told Abivard, still as if Ksorane weren't there listening. «But whether she is or isn't, it doesn't matter as far as my going to Videssos the city. Peroz is part of Sharbaraz' dreams, but I'm not. I'll stay here in Mashiz.» She was utterly matter-of-fact about it, as if foretelling the yield from a plot of land near Vek Rud stronghold. Somehow that made the prediction worse, not better.
Abivard rocked his nephew in his arms. The baby's eyes slid shut. His mouth made little sucking noises. Ksorane came up to take him and return him to his mother. «Wait a bit,» Abivard told her. «Let him get a little more deeply asleep so he won't start howling when I hand him to you.»
«You know something about children,» Ksorane said.
«I'd be a poor excuse for a father if I didn't,» he answered. Then he wondered how much Sharbaraz King of Kings knew about children. Not much, he suspected, and that saddened him Some things, he thought, should not be left to servants.
After a while he did hand the baby to Ksorane, who returned it to Denak. Neither transfer disturbed little Peroz in the least. Looking down at him, Denak said, «I wonder what dreams he'll have, many years from now, up there on the throne of the King of Kings, and who will follow them and try to make them real for him.»
«Yes,» Abivard said. But what he was wondering was whether Peroz would ever sit on the throne of the King of Kings. So many babies died no matter how hard their parents struggled to keep them alive. And even if Peroz lived to grow up, his father had for a time lost the throne through disaster and treachery. Who could say now that the same would not befall the babe? No one, as Abivard knew only too well. One thing he had seen was that life did not come with a promise that it would run smoothly.
By the standards with which Abivard had become familiar while living in Vek Rud domain, Mashiz enjoyed a mild winter. It was chilly, but even the winds off the Dilbat Mountains were nothing like the ones that blew around Vek Rud stronghold. Those seemed to take a running start on the Pardrayan steppe and to blow right through a man because going around him was too much trouble.
They got mild days in Mashiz, as opposed to the endless, bone-numbing chill of the far Northwest. Every so often the wind would shift and blow off the land of the Thousand Cities. Whenever it did that for two days running, Abivard began to think spring had arrived at last. He could taste how eager he was for good weather that wasn't just a tease of the sort a dancing girl would give to a soldier who lusted after her but whom she wanted to annoy rather than bed.
As the sun swung northward from its low point in the sky, the mild days gradually came more often. But every time Abivard's hopes began to rise with the sap in the trees, a new storm would claw its way over the mountains and freeze those hopes once more.
Abivard did send messages both to the field army, ordering it to ready to move out when the weather permitted, and to Turan, ordering him to prepare to defend the land of the Thousand Cities with foot soldiers from the city garrisons alone. He did not go into more detail than that in his message. In peacetime the Thousand Cities had a flourishing trade with Videssos. That news of what he intended might reach the Avtokrator struck him as far from impossible.
Varaz knew what Sharbaraz intended. He had even less patience than Abivard, being wild to leave the foothills for the flatlands to the east, the flatlands that were the gateway to Videssos. «You need to wait,» his father told him. «Leaving too soon doesn't get us anywhere—or not soon enough, anyhow.»
«I'm sick of waiting!» Varaz burst out, a sentiment with which Abivard had more than a little sympathy. «I've spent the last three winters waiti
ng here in the palace. I want to get out, to get away. I want to go to the places where things will happen.»
Pretty soon, Abivard thought, Varaz would be old enough to make things happen rather than just watching them happen. He was taller than his mother now. Before long, his beard would begin to grow and he would make the discovery every generation finds astounding: that mankind includes womankind and is much more interesting on account of it.
Abivard hadn't cared for being cooped up three winters running, either, even if conditions had improved from one winter to the next. He had borne it more easily than had his son, though. But Varaz was going to escape from Mashiz, to return first to the land of the Thousand Cities, then to Across, and then, if the God was willing, to enter Videssos the city.
«Count yourself lucky,» Abivard told his elder son. «Your cousin Jarireh may never leave the palace till the day she marries.»
«She's a girl, though,» Varaz said. Had Roshnani heard the tone in which he said it, she probably would have boxed his ears. He went on, «Besides, her baby brother's going to be King of Kings.»
«That won't help her get out and see the world—or at least I don't think it will,» Abivard said. «It will make picking someone for her to marry harder than it would be, though.»
«Marriage—so what?» Varaz said, nothing but scorn in his voice—he remained on the childish side of the great divide. «Your family picks someone for you, the two of you go before the servant of the God, and that's it. That's how it works most of the time, anyhow.»
«Are you making an exception for your mother and me?» Abivard asked dryly.
«Well, yes, but the two of you are different,» Varaz said. «Mother goes out and does things, almost as if she were a man; she doesn't stay in the women's quarters all the time. And you let her.»
«No,» Abivard said. «I don't 'let' her. I'm glad she does. In a number of ways she's more clever than I am. I'm only lucky in that I'm clever enough to see she is more clever.»
«I don't follow that,» Varaz said. He quickly held up a hand. «I probably wouldn't follow it in Videssian, either, no matter how logical it's supposed to be, so don't bother trying.»
Thus forestalled, Abivard threw his hands in the air. Varaz escaped from his presence and went dashing down a palace hallway. Watching him, Abivard sighed. No, waiting was never easy.
But even Sharbaraz had been forced to wait for his ambassadors to return. In another sense he'd had to wait more than a dozen years after the Empire of Videssos had fallen into civil strife to be able to assail its capital with any hope of success. In still another sense Makuran as a whole had been waiting centuries for this opportunity to come around.
Abivard snapped his fingers. Lands didn't wait—people did. And, like his son, he was very tired of waiting.
Pashang clucked to the horses and flicked the reins. The wagon rattled away from Mashiz. Abivard rode beside it on a fine black gelding, the gift of Sharbaraz King of Kings. Romezan rode another that might have been a different foal of the same mare.
Around them, almost as splendidly mounted, trotted a company of heavy cavalry, their armor and that of their horses stowed in carts or on packhorses since they were traveling through friendly territory and were not expecting to fight. One proud young horseman carried the red war banner.
Off to one side, with the group but not of it, rode Tzikas.
Abivard had been warned of all the horrid things that would happen to him if anything at all happened to Tzikas. He was still trying to work out whether those horrid things were deterrent enough. For the moment they probably were. Once Videssos the city fell, Tzikas would be expendable. And if by some misfortune Videssos the city failed to fall, Sharbaraz would be looking for a scapegoat.
Tzikas no doubt was thinking along similar lines. Abivard glanced over toward him and wasn't surprised to find the Videssian renegade's eyes already on him. He stared at Tzikas for a little while, nothing but challenge in his gaze. Tzikas looked back steadily. Abivard let out a silent sigh. Enemies were so much easier to despise when they were cowards. Yet even though Tzikas was no coward, Abivard despised him anyhow.
He turned in the saddle and said to Romezan, «We're riding in the right direction now.»
«How do you mean that?» Romezan returned. «Away from the palace? Out into the field? Toward the war?»
«Any of those will do,» Abivard said. «They'll all do.» If he had to pick one, away from the palace probably would fit his thought best. In the palace he was slave to the King of Kings, for all his achievements hardly higher in status than sweepers or captive Videssian pedagogues. Away from the palace, away from the King of Kings, he was a marshal of Makuran, a great power in his own right. He had grown very used to that, all those years he'd spent extending the power of Makuran through the Videssian westlands till it reached the Cattle Crossing. Being yanked back under Sharbaraz' control would have been hard on him even had the King of Kings not seen treason lurking under every pillow and behind every door.
Romezan did not dwell on the past. He looked ahead to the cast. Dreamily, he said, «Do you suppose we'll lay Videssos low? How many hundred years have they and we warred? Come this fall, will the fight be over at last?»
«If the God is kind,» Abivard answered. They rode on a while in silence. Then Abivard said, «We'll muster as far forward as we can. As soon as we have word that Maniakes has landed, whether down in Lyssaion or in Erzerum, we move.»
«What if he doesn't land?» Romezan said, looking eastward gain, as if he could span the farsangs and see into the palaces in distant Videssos the city. «What if he decides to stay home for a year? Maniakes never ends up doing what we think he will.»
That was true. Even so, Abivard shook his head. «He'll come,» be said. «I'm sure of it, and Sharbaraz was dead right to assume it.» Hearing him agree so emphatically with the King of Kings was enough to make Romezan dig a finger into his ear as if to make sure it was working as it should. Chuckling, Abivard went on. «What's Maniakes' chief advantage over us?» He answered his own question: «He commands the sea. What has he been doing with that command? He's been using it to take the war out of Videssos and into the realm of the King of Kings. How can he possibly afford not to keep on doing what he's done the past two years?»
«Put that way, I don't suppose he can,» Romezan admitted.
«The real beauty of Sharbaraz' scheme—» Abivard stopped. Now he wondered if he was really talking about the King of Kings that way. He was, and in fact he repeated himself: «The real beauty of Sharbaraz' plan is that it uses Maniakes' strengths against him and Videssos. He takes his ships, uses them to bring his army back to the land of the Thousand Cities, and gets embroiled in fighting well away from the sea. And while he's doing all that, we steal a march and take his capital away from him.»
Romezan thought for a while before nodding. «I like it.»
«So do I,» Abivard said.
«He liked it better by the day. He and his escort made their way through the land of the Thousand Cities toward Qostabash. Peasants were busy in the fields, bringing in the spring harvest. Here and there, though, they were busy at other things, most notably the repair of canals wrecked in the previous fall's fighting and soon to be needed to cope with the sudden rush of water from the spring floods of the Tutub and the Tib and their tributaries. And here and there, across the green quilt of the floodplain, fields went untended, unharvested. Some of the cities that had perched on mounds of their own rubble were now nothing but rubble themselves. Maniakes had made the land of the Thousand Cities pay a terrible price for the many victories Makuran had won in Videssos over the past decade.
Whenever he stopped at one of the surviving Thousand Cities, Abivard examined how well the city governor had kept up the local garrison. He was pleased to find most of those garrisons in better shape than they had been two years earlier, when the Videssians had first entered the floodplain. Before then both city governorships and slots in the city garrison had been the nearest thing to
sinecures: but for flood or drought, what ever went wrong among the Thousand Cities? Invasion was not an answer that seemed to have occurred beforehand to many people.
Romezan paid the revived city garrisons what might have been the ultimate compliment when he said, «You know, I wouldn't mind taking a few thousand of these foot soldiers along with us when we go into the Videssian westlands. They really can fight. Who would have thought it?»
«That's not what you said when you came to my aid last summer,» Abivard reminded him.
«I know,» Romezan answered. «I hadn't seen them in action then. I was wrong. I admit it You deserve a lot of credit for turning them into soldiers.»
Abivard shook his head. «Do you know who deserves the credit for turning them into soldiers?»
«Turan?» Romezan snorted dismissively. «He's done well with them, aye, but he's still only a jumped-up captain learning how to be a general.»
«He's done very well, as a matter of fact, but I wasn't thinking of him,» Abivard answered. «The one who deserves the credit for turning them into soldiers is Maniakes. Without him they'd just be the same swaggering bullies they've been for the God only knows how many years. But that doesn't work, not against the Videssians. The ones who are still alive know better now.»
«Something to that, I expect,» Romezan said after a reflective pause.
«It's also one reason why we're not going to take any of those foot soldiers into Videssos,» Abivard said. Romezan's dark, bushy brows pulled down and together in confusion. Abivard explained: «Remember, we want the Videssians heavily engaged here in the land of the Thousand Cities. That means we're going to have to leave behind a good-sized army to fight them, an army with good fighting men in it. Either we leave behind a piece of the field army—»
«No, by the God!» Romezan broke in.
Abivard held up a placatory hand. «I agree. The field army is the best Makuran has. That's what we send against Videssos the city, which will need the best we have. But the next best we have has to stay here to keep Maniakes in play while we move against the city.»
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