The messenger took the parchment, stuffed it into a waterproof tube of boiled, waxed leather, and, after prostrating himself to Maniakes once more, hurried out of the imperial residence. "May I see what the Makuraner general wrote, your Majesty?" Kameas asked.
"Yes, go ahead," Maniakes answered. Maybe Stavrakios had been bold enough to keep his vestiarios from knowing everything that happened to him. Few Avtokrators since had been. Maniakes certainly was not.
Kameas said, "He speaks you fair, no doubt of that. One thing the Makuraners have shown, though, is that their deeds don't commonly live up to the words they use to cloak them."
"Too true," Maniakes said. "The same holds true for the Kubratoi. The same held true for Videssos, too, during the reign of my late and unlamented predecessor. I, of course, am the very Milestone of truthfulness."
"Of course, your Majesty," Kameas said, so seriously that Maniakes doubted whether he had caught the intended irony. Then the vestiarios let out the smallest, most discreet snort imaginable.
"Go on, esteemed sir," Maniakes told him, starting to laugh. "Take yourself elsewhere."
"Yes, your Majesty," the vestiarios replied. "The good god grant that Abivard give you good news concerning the eminent Triphylles."
He turned and swept away, leaving Maniakes staring after him in astonishment. He hadn't seen what the Avtokrator had written; he hadn't been in the chamber then. "How did you know?" Maniakes asked. But by then Kameas was a long way down the hall. If he heard, he gave no sign.
Great pillars of smoke rose from Across, as they had when Abivard's forces entered the suburb the autumn before. Now they were leaving, giving Maniakes easy access to the westlands if he wanted to try conclusions with the Makuraners again this summer.
Wondering whether he did was only part of what worried him. He turned and put the other part to Rhegorios: "If he's leaving there, where in Phos' holy name is he going?"
"My cousin your Majesty, damn me to the ice if I know." Rhegorios spat on the ground in rejection of Skotos. "All I can say is, he's likely headed where he thinks he can do us the most harm."
"He could have done worse staying right where he was," Maniakes said, discontent in his voice. "Across was like the stopper in the jar; his holding it kept us out of the westlands. Now we can go back, if we dare. But what will happen to us if we do?"
"Can't tell that till we try it-if we try it," Rhegorios answered. "But I can tell you what happens if we don't: the Makuraners get to keep the countryside for another year and make it even harder for us to get it back when we do finally work up the nerve to try."
Maniakes grimaced. That his cousin was blunt did not mean he was wrong. Maniakes said, "I wish I thought our army was in better shape. We've worked hard this winter, but…" He let that hang.
"You could take Tzikas' advice," Rhegorios said with a curl of his lip. "If you stay right here in Videssos the city, you know, and only wait long enough, why, eventually every single fellow who opposes you now will die of old age, and then Videssos will be free to take back its own."
"Ha-ha," Maniakes said in a hollow voice. His cousin exaggerated Tzikas' cautious approach to war, but only slightly. "We have to fight the Makuraners, we have to do it in the westlands, and we have to do it on our own terms. We can't afford any more fiascoes like the one last summer. If we aren't in a position to go out there and win, we shouldn't fight."
"How do you propose to guarantee that?" Rhegorios asked. "Just about every time there's a battle, the bastards on the other side have a nasty habit of fighting back. You can't simply count on them to lie down and die, no matter how much you wish they would."
"To the ice with you," Maniakes said, laughing in spite of himself. "You know what I mean, no matter how clumsily I say it. I can't let myself get lured into situations where I don't have the advantage. The more of what's ours we take, the more men and resources we gather for the next step."
"If we can start by taking back Across, that will be something," Rhegorios said.
Take it back they did, after the dromons on endless patrol in the Cattle Crossing reported that Abivard and his horsemen had indeed abandoned the suburb. Soon after imperial soldiers reentered Across, Maniakes sailed over the strait to the westlands to see what the Makuraners had done to it.
His first impression was that what his men had taken was not worth having and that the Makuraners had abandoned it only because nothing was left to wreck. Most of what could burn had been burned; what hadn't been burned had been torn apart to get fuel for the fires made of the rest.
In ever-growing streams, people emerged from the ruins to spin him tales of woe and horror. He listened to them sympathetically but without much surprise; he knew how armies treated a countryside populated by enemies. The Makuraners had done nothing out of the ordinary. Robberies and rapes were part of the long, sad litany of man's inhumanity to man-and to woman.
"But, your Majesty," said an aggrieved merchant whose stock of fine boots now adorned Makuraner feet, "aren't you going to chase after those thieving heathens and make 'em pay for what they done?" By his tone, he expected Maniakes to set a properly itemized bill before Abivard the next time he saw him.
"I'll do everything I can," Maniakes said evasively; he didn't care to answer that just being in the westlands this year was as much as he had hoped for.
"Consolidating my position here comes first, though. After all, we don't want the Makuraners back, do we?"
"What we want and what we get aren't always the same thing," the merchant answered, his voice sour. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he seem to realize they might be taken as criticism of Maniakes. A moment after that, he had made himself scarce. Maniakes ruefully shook his head. It wasn't as if the same thought hadn't crossed his mind a time or twelve.
Engineers surveyed the ground west of Across, seeking the best line on which to establish field fortifications. The suburbs on the far side of the Cattle Crossing from Videssos the city had been unwalled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Who could have imagined an enemy dangerous enough to penetrate to the very heart of the Empire? Imagined or not, the Makuraners had been here; the evidence of that was only too obvious.
The chief engineer, a stocky, dour man named Stotzas, said, "I can lay you out the sites for some fine works, your Majesty. I see one trouble, though-no, two." He was the sort who saw more troubles the longer he looked at something.
Maniakes had no trouble seeing these for himself. He held up his thumb. "Where am I going to find the men to build the works you lay out?" He stuck up his index finger beside thumb. "Where am I going to find soldiers to put in the works even if you do manage to build them?"
"You've just rolled Phos' little suns," Stotzas said. His big, blunt-featured head bobbed up and down as he nodded. "Mind you, your Majesty, I'll do everything I can for you, but…" His voice trailed away. He didn't flee, as the merchant had, but he didn't look delighted about speaking the whole truth, either.
"But there's liable not to be much you can do, what with manpower being the way it is," Maniakes suggested.
Stotzas nodded, glad for the respite. He said, "At that, I've got it easy. Brick and stone don't argue back. The lord with the great and good mind may know what to do about the mess with the temples, but I'm bound for the ice if I do."
"Nor I," Maniakes answered, feeling a good deal less than impudent. "Whoever came up with the idea of forcing priests in places the Makuraners hold to adopt Vaspurakaner usages was a fiendishly clever man. Some of the priests will have done it sincerely, others to curry favor with the invaders, others just to survive. Sorting out who did what for which reasons is liable to take years, especially when everybody's busy calling everybody else a liar."
"Like I said, bricks and stone, they keep quiet," Stotzas replied. "Shave a man's head and put a blue robe on him and it doesn't seem like he'll ever shut up."
That wasn't altogether fair. A great deal of the monastic life, for instance, was passed in prayerful sile
nce. But the chief engineer had a point. In defending themselves and accusing their neighbors, the clerics who jostled for audience with Maniakes did the reputation of the temples no good.
After listening to one set of denunciations and counter-denunciations, all of them backed with documents-each side insisting the documents of the other were forgeries-Maniakes burst out, "A pox take the lot of you, holy sirs!" That wasn't the way a good and pious ruler was supposed to address his clerics, but he was too fed up to care. "You may send this whole great mound of tripe to the most holy Agathios, to let him deal with it as he will. Until such times as he decides the case, I command you to live at peace with one another and to respect one another as orthodox, regardless of who may have done what to whom while the Makuraners were here."
"But, your Majesty," one blue-robe cried, "these wretches reveled in their lapse into heresy, glorying in the chance to bring the temples into disrepute."
A priest of the other faction shouted, "You're the ones who dragged the good name of the temples through the wineshops and bathhouses with your shameless pandering to the invaders."
The two sides started calling each other liars and apostates again, just as they had when they first came before Maniakes. He slammed his open palm down on the table in front of him. The small thunderclap of noise made clerics from both sides momentarily fall silent in surprise.
"Perhaps you misunderstood me, holy sirs," Maniakes said into that brief silence. "You may respect one another as orthodox until the ecumenical patriarch renders his decision on your cases, or you may call one another heretics to your hearts' content-in gaol. Which will it be?"
The clerics weren't screaming at one another when they left his presence, which represented progress of a sort. When they were gone, he slumped back in his chair and covered his face with his hands. Rhegorios came over and thumped him on the shoulder. "Cheer up, my cousin your Majesty. You'll have cases like that in every town we reconquer from the Makuraners."
"No, I won't, by the good god," Maniakes burst out. "Agathios will, and we'll find out what-if anything-the most holy sir is made of and what he's good for." Given what he had seen of Agathios, that wasn't apt to be much. He screwed his face up, as if he had tasted wine gone into vinegar. "You've given me the first decent argument I've heard for letting the Makuraners keep the westlands."
Rhegorios laughed, as if he had made a joke.
From Across, Videssian forces cautiously pushed south and west. It was by no means a reconquest of the westlands but a slow, wary reoccupation of territory Abivard had, for the time being, abandoned. In somewhat bolder style, Maniakes ordered a few bands of horsemen deeper into the westlands to see if they could nip in behind big Makuraner forces and wreck the supply columns that kept them stocked with arrows and spear-points and iron splints for their cuirasses.
He ordered his men not to attack the Makuraner field armies. "Not this year," he said. "First we learn to hurt them in other ways. Once we know we can do that, we think about facing them in open battle again. Meanwhile, let's see how they like moving through a hostile countryside."
The short answer was, the Makuraners didn't like it. They started burning villages to show they didn't like it. Maniakes didn't know whether to mourn or cheer when he got that news. It would depend on whether the Makuraners cowed the westlands or infuriated them.
In response, he sent for more raiding parties, many of them aboard ship to go to the northern and southern coasts of the westlands and strike inland from there. "Maybe, just maybe," he told his father, "we'll be able to force the boiler boys off balance for a change. The one place where they can't match us is on the sea."
"That's so," the elder Maniakes agreed. He plucked a long white hair from his beard and held it out at arm's length so he could see it clearly. After he let it fall to the ground, he looked sidelong at his son and asked, "Have you got a naval captain whose head you wouldn't mind seeing up on the block?"
"I could probably come up with one," Maniakes allowed. "Why would I want to, though?"
His father's eyes twinkled. "The Kubratoi can't match us on the sea, either. Those monoxyla of theirs are all very well-until they run up against a dromon. After that, they're wreckage with butchered meat inside. I was just thinking you could send a captain up along the coast of Kubrat to raid and then, when Etzilios screamed blue murder, send him the fellow's head and say it was his idea all along."
Maniakes gaped, then laughed till the tears came. "By the good god, Father, now you've gone and tempted me. Every time I look north, I'm going to think of doing just what you said. It might not even make the khagan go back to war with us; he's clever enough, curse him, to see the joke."
"If you weren't at war with Makuran…" the elder Maniakes said.
"And if I had a ship's captain I really wanted to be rid of," the Avtokrator added. "It would hardly be fair to an up-and-coming officer."
"That's true," the elder Maniakes said. "He wouldn't be up-and-coming afterward; he'd be down-and-going, or rather gone."
They both laughed then, long and hard enough that Kameas stuck his head into the chamber to find out what was going on. After they had explained-each more sheepish than the other-the vestiarios said, "In times like these, any cause for mirth, no matter how foolish, is to be cherished."
"He's right," Maniakes said after Kameas left. "Between the way the war is going and losing Niphone, the imperial residence has been a gloomy place."
"A man who's happy without reason is likely either a fool or a drunk, or else both," his father answered. "We'll get back down to business soon enough. I'm sure of that."
His prophecy was fulfilled a couple of days later, when a messenger delivered a dispatch from Abivard, brought to Videssian-held territory behind a shield of truce. Maniakes drew it out of its boiled-leather tube. Like the one the Makuraner general had sent before, it was written in Videssian, though not in the same hand as the earlier missive had been: Abivard general to Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, to Maniakes styling himself Avtokrator of the Videssians: Greetings. In reply to your recent communication regarding the status of the man Triphylles whom you sent as embassy to the good, pacific, and benevolent Sharbaraz, favorite of the God, beloved of the Prophets Four, I am bidden by his puissant majesty to inform you that the aforesaid man Triphylles, in just punishment for his intolerable insolence, has been confined to prison outside Mashiz to ponder his folly.
The message stopped there. Maniakes' eyes kept going for a couple of lines' worth of blank parchment, as if to force more meaning from the sheet he held.
"He can't do that," the Avtokrator exclaimed-to whom, he could not have said.
"Your Majesty?" The messenger hadn't the slightest idea what Maniakes was talking about.
"He can't do that," Maniakes repeated. "Sharbaraz can't just throw an ambassador into jail because he doesn't fancy the way he talks." If that were the only criterion, Moundioukh, for instance, would never see the outside of a cell again. Maniakes went on, "It violates every law of civilized conduct between empires."
"Why should Sharbaraz care a fig about anything like that?" the messenger said. "For one thing, he's a cursed Makuraner. For another, he's winning the war, so who's going to stop him from doing whatever he pleases?"
Maniakes stared at him without answering. The fellow was right, of course. Who would-who could-stop Sharbaraz King of Kings from doing whatever he pleased? Maniakes had proved singularly unable to pull off the trick.
"Is there a reply, your Majesty?' the messenger asked.
"Yes, by the good god." Maniakes dipped a pen in a pot of ink and began to write on a sheet of parchment he had been about to use to authorize more expenditures for repairing the walls of Imbros. This was more urgent-unless, of course, Etzilios decided to break the truce for whose extension Maniakes had just paid.
"Maniakes Avtokrator of the Videssians to Abivard general of Makuran: Greetings." The pen scratched gently as it raced over the writi
ng surface. "I am shocked and dismayed to learn that Sharbaraz King of Kings would so forget the law of nations as to imprison my ambassador, the eminent Triphylles. I demand his immediate release." How? On pain of war? his mind jeered. You're already at war-and losing. "I further demand proper compensation for the outrage he has suffered, and his immediate return to Videssos the city, where he may recuperate from his travail. I do not judge you guilty in this matter. Pass my letter on to your sovereign, that he may act on it in all possible haste."
He called for sealing wax from Kameas and closed the letter in on itself before giving it to the messenger. "How much good this will do, Phos alone knows," the Avtokrator said, "but Phos also knows no good at all can come unless I do protest."
After the messenger departed, Maniakes spent a little while calling curses down on Abivard's head. Had the Makuraner general not urged the course upon him, he never would have sent Triphylles off to Sharbaraz. He had assumed the King of Kings would not mistreat an envoy, and also that Sharbaraz would be interested in extracting tribute money from Videssos.
But Sharbaraz was already extracting money from Videssos. With enough plunder coming in, he cared nothing for tribute. Maniakes kicked at the floor. For an angry moment, he wished Kourikos and Triphylles had never come to Kastavala. Niphone would still be alive if they had stayed in Videssos the city, and it was hard to see how the empire could have been in worse shape under Genesios than it was now under his own rule. And he himself would still have been back on the island of Kalavria with his mistress and his bastard son, and none of the catastrophes befalling his homeland would have been his fault.
He sighed. "Some people are meant to start fires, some are meant to put them out," he said, though no one was there to hear him. "Genesios started this one, and somehow or other I have to figure out how to pour water on it."
He sat down and thought hard. Things were better now than they had been the year before. Then he had tried to match the Makuraners at their own game. It hadn't worked; Videssos had been-and remained-in too much chaos for that. Now he was trying something new. He didn't know how well his strategy of raids and pinpricks would work, but it could hardly fare worse than what had gone before it. With luck, it would rock Abivard back on his heels. The Makuraners in the westlands hadn't had even that much happen to them for a long time.
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