Swords of the Legion (Videssos)

by Harry Turtledove

  Khilleu had watched them closely; attitudes spoke for much, even if he could not follow their talk. He and Atroklo dropped into a low-voiced colloquy in the Yrmido tongue. The prince returned to Vaspurakaner. “I begin to believe you,” he said, looking straight at Arigh. “We too have suffered from the southern jackals, more than once. I ask you two questions: Would you have the Sworn Fellowship at your side? And will our charming neighbors,” he continued, irony lurking in that resonant bass, “bear with our coming?”

  “As for the first, why not? One Erzrumi slows us as much as a thousand, and you look to have good men. As for the other, Hamrentz of the Khakuli said you were no cowards.”

  “Among other things,” Atroklo guessed. His laugh and Khilleu’s did not sound amused.

  “Here’s another argument for you, then,” Sklyitzes put in. “These Arshaum here outnumber all the hillmen with us three to one.”

  “A point,” Khilleu said. He spread his hands. “In the end, what choice have I? You have not three, but ten times my numbers. Oh, we could hold out in our keeps if we would, but stop your passage? No.” Again, his chuckle was grim. “So I will leap on the snow leopard’s back, hold onto its ears, and pray to the Four to petition the kindly gods not to let it turn aside for my sheep.”

  Atroklo blew a different call on his horn; Gorgidas watched a vein pulse at his temple. He must have played the signal for truce. The Sworn Fellowship abandoned their defensive stand at the edge of the stream and formed up into a long column.

  “You will answer to me if you betray us,” Khilleu warned Arigh. “Tell that to Hamrentz and the rest, too; for all your numbers, I vow it.”

  “No,” Arigh said. “I will tell them they will answer to me.”

  “Spoken like a king!” Khilleu cried when Narbas translated. “I would have bid you to a feast at my keep this night for my own honor’s sake, but now I see I may enjoy the evening. Bring all these here. Invite my neighbor chiefs, too; some may come.” Wry mirth edged his voice. “There will be pleasures for every taste, not merely our own.”

  “I will eat with you outside your castle, but not in it,” Arigh answered. He did not need Goudeles’ hisses or Skylitzes’ surreptitious wave to make him wary of the squat, square pile of masonry toward which the Yrmido chief was pointing.

  Atroklo started an angry exclamation, but Khilleu cut him off. “Can’t say I blame you,” he told the Arshaum. “My Lio is a strong keep; if I intended mischief, I could hole up there for ten years. Outside it will be—at sunset? Good. Best your men camp here—not only, I admit, because there is good water, but also to keep as much distance between you and my people as we can.”

  He waited, watching Arigh narrowly, ready to judge his sincerity by how he reacted. “Till sunset,” was all the nomad said. He wheeled his horse, leaving Khilleu to make the best of the economical plains style.

  Hamrentz, whose respect for the Yrmido was grudging but real, agreed to banquet with them, as did Gashvili, who owned frankly that he knew nothing about them for good or ill. The other Erzrumi leaders said no, with varying degrees of horror. One, Zromi of the Redzh, took up his hundred horsemen and rode from home at the thought of the Yrmido joining the expedition. “Good riddance,” Skylitzes said. “We gain more here than we lose, seeing the last of his band of thieves.”

  Though troopers stayed on the walls of Lio, its drawbridge came down. Retainers kept scurrying in and out of the castle, running up trestle tables and benches outside the moat. Cookfires smoked in the castle forecourt. Along with the reek of the midden, the breeze brought the savory smell of roasting mutton. Viridovix’ nostrils twitched of their own accord; he patted his belly in anticipation.

  But appetite did not keep him from carefully inspecting the arrangements as Arigh’s party rode up through ripening fields of wheat and barley. He found himself satisfied. “If they were after mischief, now,” he said, tethering his horse, “they’d put us all together in a body instead of amongst their own. Then archers on the wall could hardly be missing us, e’en in sic torchlight as this. As is, they’d be apt to shoot holes in their chiefs, the which’d win ’em no thanks, I’m thinking.”

  “Hardly,” Gorgidas answered. He brushed a bit of lint from his embroidered tunic, wishing the grease spot on his trousers had come cleaner. He was in Videssian dress; the last thing he wanted tonight was for the Yrmido to take him for a steppe nomad.

  There was courtesy, if no more, in the greeting Khilleu and Atroklo gave their guests. The two of them seemed inseparable friends. They rose together to bow the newcomers to their places. Viridovix found himself between a chunky Yrmido a few years older than he was and a lean one a few years younger. The one knew a couple of words of Khamorth, the other none. Both were politely curious about his strange looks, but went back to their wine when they found they could not understand him.

  He raised his pewter mug and a serving girl filled it. He watched her hips work as she moved away. After Seirem he had vowed he would stay womanless for life, a promise easy enough to keep in the Arshaum army as it traveled across the plains. But time wore away at grief, and his body had its own demands. When a wench among the Mzeshi made her interest plain, he had not backed away. Half a night behind a haystack was a small thing; it could not erase what he had known before.

  No women of quality sat with the men. Most of the Erzrumi held to that custom, perhaps borrowed from Makuran. Used to the freer ways of the nomads, Viridovix missed them. Just by being there, they livened a gathering.

  Gorgidas also noted their absence and drew his own conclusions from it. There was a pair of Yrmido to either side of him, one set somber in black slashed with silver, the other gaudy in scarlet and yellow. None of them shared a language with him. He sighed, resigning himself to a long evening. The maid who served him wine smiled invitingly. His answering look was so stony that she tossed her head in disdain.

  Unexpectedly, one of the men across the table spoke in accented Videssian: “May I this tongue on you practice? When I a lad was, I served two years as hired soldier in the Empire before my brother died and I his holding inherited. I Rakio am called.”

  “Glad to know you,” Gorgidas said heartily, and gave his own name. Rakio, he judged, was in his late twenties. Neither handsome nor the reverse, his face had character to it, with a beard trimmed closer than the usual Yrmido style, a chipped tooth his smile showed, and a nose whose imperious thrust was offset by an eyebrow that kept quirking whimsically upward. Pleasant fellow, the Greek thought.

  Then the food appeared, and he forgot Rakio for some time. His year on the steppe had made him all too used to lamb and goat, though it was enjoyable to have them broiled with cloves of garlic rather than hastily roasted over a dung fire. But peas, spinach, and steamed asparagus were luxuries he had almost forgotten, and after months of flat, chewy wheatcakes, real bread, still soft and steaming from the ovens, brought him close to ecstasy.

  He let his belt out a notch. “That was splendid.”

  Rakio was grinning at him. “I once had to eat with a squad of Khamorth,” the Yrmido said. “I how you feel know.”

  The Greek poured a small libation on the ground and raised his mug high. “To good food!” he cried, and drank. Laughing, Rakio emptied his own cup. So did Goudeles, a couple of tables away. The plump bureaucrat’s ears were as sharp as his pleasure in eating.

  A minstrel wandered among the feasters, accompanying his songs with the plangent notes of a pandora. A juggler kept half a dozen daggers in the air, his hands a blur of speed. Someone tossed him a coin. He caught it without dropping a knife. Two dancers carrying torches leaped back and forth over upturned swords.

  When the girl with the wine came past again, Viridovix slid an arm around her waist. She did not pull away, but smiled down at him. She put out a forefinger to stroke his fiery mustache, not the first time his coloring had drawn a woman’s eye in these dark-haired lands. He nibbled at her fingertip. She snuggled closer.

  Khilleu boomed something
in Vaspurakaner. The men who spoke that tongue shouted agreement. Narbas Kios said to the Gaul, “He asks you not to take her away for tumbling until she’s emptied her jug.”

  “Only fair, that.” Viridovix patted the girl’s rump. “Soon, my pretty,” he murmured. Without a word in common, she understood him. Arigh had already contrived to disappear into the night with the buxom wench who had fetched meat to his table. Gashvili and Vakhtang were gone, too. Khilleu looked on benignly, glad his guests were contented. No Yrmido had left.

  Gorgidas let his own serving wench pass by again. Rakio’s eyebrows rose. “She does not you please? You would prefer another? Fatter? Thinner? Younger, perhaps? We would not you have lonely.” His concern sounded real.

  “My thanks, but no,” the physician said. “I do not care for a woman tonight.”

  Rakio gave a comic shrug, as if to say the foreigner was mad, but perhaps harmlessly so. Gorgidas stared down at his hands. He knew what he wanted to say, but had no notion of how to say it without risking grave offense. Yet he was so sure.…

  He gave up on the dilemma for the moment when another servitor brought a tray of candied fruit. But that was soon done. The thing could be avoided no longer, unless he had not the nerve to broach it at all.

  He felt his heart pound as though he were a nervous youth. Through a dry mouth he said, as casually as he could, “There are many fine pairs of your men here tonight.”

  Rakio caught the faint emphasis on “pairs.” This time the eyebrow went up like a warning flag. “Most foreigners would say that we foul vices practice.” The Yrmido regarded Gorgidas with the suspicion years of outsiders’ despisal had in-gained in his people.

  “Why should that be?” Remembering Platon’s golden words, Gorgidas gave them back as well as he was able: “If the man who loves is caught doing something ugly, he would sooner be caught by anyone, even his father, than by his lover. And because lovers, feeling this way, would do anything rather than show cowardice before each other, and would do their best to spur each other on in battle, an army of them, however small it was, might conquer the world.”

  It was said. With bleak courage, the Greek waited to be wrong, waited for Rakio to scorn him. The Yrmido’s jaw dropped. He shut it with a snap and broke into excited speech in his own tongue. Then the men in black and silver on Gorgidas’ left and the bright peacocks on his right were clasping his hand, pounding his back, pressing food and wine on him and shouting noisy toasts.

  Relief washed over him like sweet rain. He disentangled himself from a bear hug, then jumped as someone he had not heard coming up behind him tapped him on the shoulder. Viridovix grinned down at him. “Friendlier they are to you than they were for me, and you such a sobersides and all.”

  Gorgidas nodded at the girl on the Gaul’s arm, who was plainly impatient at the delay. “To each his own.”

  “Och, aye, and this one’s mine. Are you not, my sweet colleen?” She shrugged at his words, but giggled when he nuzzled her neck. He led her away from the feast, then let her find a quiet spot for the two of them. There was a stand of apple trees just out of bowshot from the castle of Lio and in the middle of it, the Gaul discovered, a small grassy patch. He spread his cloak with a flourish; the grass was soft as any bed, and sweeter-smelling.

  The girl—he thought her name was Thamar—was eager as he. They helped each other off with their clothes; she was smooth and soft and warm in his arms. They sank together to the cloak, but when he rose on knees and elbows to mount her she shook her head vehemently and let loose a torrent of incomprehensible complaint.

  Finally, with gestures, she made him understand the Yrmido did not favor that style of lovemaking. “Well, whatever suits you, then,” he exclaimed, spreading his hands in acquiescence. “I’m ever game for summat new.”

  She rode him reversed, her hands at either side of his calves. A drop of sweat fell on his thigh. It was, the Gaul thought, a different view of things. “Though indeed,” he muttered to himself, “one a pederast might be finding more gladsome than I.”

  Then suddenly everything the Gaul had seen in the Yrmido country came together. He shouted laughter, so that Thamar looked back at him in mixed surprise and indignation. “Nay, lass, it’s nought to do with you,” he said, stroking her ankle.

  But he was still chuckling. “Sure and I see why you’re after doing it this way, is all,” he said, as if she could understand his speech. “Och, that Gorgidas, the puir spalpeen! Puir like the cat that fell in the cream jar, I’m thinking. Where were we, now?” He applied himself with a will.

  Gorgidas had got his hosts to grasp that he was no Videssian and told them something of how he had come to the Empire and of the customs of his lost homeland. Naturally, most of their questions centered on one area. With the contempt their neighbors had heaped on them for centuries, they found it astonishing past belief that an outsider could see them with sympathy.

  The Greek spoke of the military companionships of Sparta, of Athens’ more genteel ways, and at last of the Sacred Band of Thebes, whose hundred-fifty pairs of lovers had fallen to the last man against Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great.

  That account brought his listeners, whose number had grown as the night wore on, close to tears. “How then?” asked Rakio, who had been interpreting. “Did they show outrage to their bodies?”

  “In no way,” Gorgidas answered. “When Philip saw that all of them had taken their death wounds in front, he said, ‘Woe to those who think evil of such men.’ ”

  “Ahh,” said all the Yrmido when Rakio was done translating. They bent their heads in a moment of silent respect for the men almost three hundred years dead. Moved past speech himself, Gorgidas shared it with them.

  After a time his unquenchable curiosity reasserted itself. He said, “You’ve listened to me. May I ask you in return how your own Sworn Fellowship came to be?”

  Rakio scratched his head. “Came to be? Always it was. Since before the time of Fraortish, first of the blessed Four, it was.”

  That, Gorgidas knew, was another way of saying forever. He sighed, but not too deeply; there were more vital things than history. He said to Rakio, “Is your Sworn Fellowship all pairs, as the Theban Scared Band was? So it would seem, but for you, from the feasters here.”

  “More closely look. See over there—Pidauro and Rystheu and Ypeiro. They are a three-bond—and their wives with them, it is said. Another such there is, though tonight they are on patrol in the south. And there are a fair number such as myself. ‘Orphans’ we are named. I no life-partner yet have, but because I am my father’s eldest son, I still when I reached manhood became a member of the Fellowship.”

  “Ah,” the Greek said, annoyed at himself—seeing Rakio alone should have answered that for him. To hide his pique, he took a long drink of wine. It sent recklessness coursing through him. He said, “Will you not take offense at a personal question from an ignorant foreigner?” Rakio smiled for him to go on. He asked, “Are you an ‘orphan’ because you, ah, do not care to follow all the ways of the Fellowship?”

  Rakio frowned in thought, then realized what Gorgidas, as an outsider, had to be trying to say. “Do I only like women, mean you?” He translated the question into his own language. All the Yrmido hooted with glee; someone threw a crust of bread at him. “I only am slow settling down,” he said unnecessarily.

  “So I gather,” Gorgidas said, dry as usual.

  That eyebrow of Rakio’s was twitching again. This time, a look of frank speculation was on the Yrmido’s face. Gorgidas dipped his head, then remembered how little that gesture meant to non-Greeks. He nodded slightly. When the torches round the feasting table guttered low, he and Rakio left hand in hand.

  From the top of the pass the Erzrumi called the Funnel, the Arshaum and their allies could spy in the southwestern distance the river Moush. It sparkled like a silver wire, reflecting the afternoon sun. Beyond the green fertile strip along the bank of the stream lay the dun-colored flatlands where the
Yezda ruled.

  The plainsmen raised a cheer to see their goal at last, but Viridovix was not sorry when they started down the southern slope of the Funnel and that bare brown terrain disappeared once more. “A worse desolation it looks than the Videssian plateau,” he said, “the which I hadna thought possible.”

  “It’s desert away from water,” Goudeles admitted, “but where the land is irrigated it can be fantastically rich. You’ll see that, I’d say, in the valleys of the Tutub and the Tib—they raise three crops a year there.”

  “I dinna believe it,” the Gaul said at once. Thinking of his own land’s cool lush fruitfulness, he could not imagine this bake-oven of a country outdoing it, water or no.

  But Skylitzes backed his countryman, saying, “Believe as you will; it’s true regardless. They call the land between the Tutub and the Tib the Hundred Cities because it can support so many people. Or could, rather; it’s fallen on evil times since the Yezda came.”

  “Honh!” Viridovix said through his nose. He changed the subject, asking “Where might Mashiz be, once we’re after sacking these Hundred Cities o’ yours?”

  “It might be on the far side of the moon,” Goudeles said, adding mournfully, “but it’s not, worse luck. The cursed town is nestled in the foothills of the mountains of Dilbat, just west of the Tutub’s headwaters.”

  When the army camped that night, the Celt drew lines in the dirt to help him remember what he had learned. He explained his scratchings to Gorgidas, who copied them on wax with quick strokes of his stylus. “Interesting.” The Greek snapped his tablet closed. He said, “I’m off to the Yrmido camp. Their customs promise to make a worthwhile digression for my history.”

  “Do they now?” Viridovix tried not to laugh at how transparent his friend could be. The physician had used the same excuse three nights running. Twice he had not come back till past midnight; the other time he spent the whole night with the Sworn Fellowship.