Legion of Videssos

by Harry Turtledove

  The imperials soon returned, trotting proudly now. They led one horse and held up a pair of fine mail shirts and two conical helms with bar nasals. “Where’s the other beast?” someone called.

  “We had to shoot it,” one of them said.

  “Idiots!” “Bunglers!” “A pack of damned incompetents, the lot of you!” The Videssians accepted the good-natured chaffing for the praise it was.

  “That’s all to the good,” Gaius Philippus said. “They feel like men again; we’ll get some use out of them.”

  “You’re right,” Marcus said. “But how many men does Drax have, anyway? I’d hoped he was just holding the line of the Arandos against whatever the Videssian grandees south of the river could scrape up to throw at him, but he looks to be coming right at them. Whatever you say about him, he doesn’t think small, does he?”

  “Hmm.” The senior centurion considered that. “If he spreads himself too thin, the Yezda will see to him, whether we do nor not.”

  “That’s so,” Marcus admitted, disquieted. He had not even seen one of the invading nomads for almost a year and a half; it was easy to forget them in the tangles of the Empire’s civil wars. Yet without them, those wars would not have happened, and they roamed the highlands like distant thunderheads.

  “Not distant enough,” Gaius Philippus said when Scaurus spoke his conceit aloud.

  The stand of oaks was bigger than the tribune had guessed. It went on for miles. Part of some noble’s estate? he wondered. Half-ripe acorns, dirty green with tan, ribbed tops, nestled between sharp-lobed leaves. He heard a boar grunting somewhere out of sight among the trees; all pigs loved acorns.

  The legionaries scuffed through the gray-brown, tattered remnants of last autumn’s fallen leaves. The sound was soothing, like surf on a beach.

  Discordant footfalls ahead roused Scaurus to alertness once more. A man burst round a corner of the forest path. His chest heaved with his exertion; blood splashed his tunic and the dust of the road from a great cut across his forehead. The terror on his face turned to disbelieving joy as he recognized the Videssian horsemen with the legionaries.

  “Phos be praised!” he gasped. His words stumbled over each other in his urgency: “A rescue! Quick, my lord, the outland devils—murder!”

  “Namdaleni?” Marcus demanded—was there no end to them? At the fellow’s nod, he snapped, “How many?”

  The man spread his hands. “A hundred, at least.” He hopped up and down, ignoring his wound. “Phos’ mercy, hurry!”

  “Two maniples,” the tribune decided. Gaius Philippus nodded in grim agreement; the men of the Duchy were no bargain. In the same breath, Scaurus went on, “Blaesus, your men; aye, and yours, Gagik!” Bagratouni understood the order, though it was in Latin. He shouted in his own throaty tongue; his Vaspurakaners yelled back, clashing their spears on their shields. The nakharar’s contingent was oversized for a proper maniple; a hundred Namdaleni would be outnumbered three to one.

  Gaius Philippus shook the wounded Videssian, who was wobbling now that he had stopped his dash for life. “Which way, man?” the veteran demanded.

  “Left at the first fork, then right at the next,” the man said. He daubed at his forehead with his sleeve, staring in disbelief at the bright blood. Then he doubled over and was sick in the road. Gaius Philippus grunted in disgust, but shouted out the directions for all the troopers to hear.

  Marcus pulled his sword free. “At a trot!” he said, and added, “The shout is ‘Gavras!’ ” The legionaries pounded after him.

  The first fork was only a furlong or so down the forest track, but the second was a long time coming. Feeling the sweat running itchily under his corselet, Scaurus began to wonder if he’d missed it. But the Videssian’s gory trail told him he had not. The blood in the roadway was still fresh and unclotted; the man must have run as if the Furies nipped his heels.

  The Romans were not as fast, but the pace they set was enough to make their Vaspurakaner comrades, most of them heavy-set, rather short-legged men, struggle to keep up. “There up ahead, past the rotten stump,” Gaius Philippus said, pointing; sure enough, the path did split. The senior centurion’s voice was easy; he could jog along far longer than this without growing winded.

  As the fork neared, Marcus heard shouts and the clash of steel on steel. “Gavras!” he yelled, the legionaries echoing him. There was a startled pause ahead, then the cry came back in Videssian accents, along with roars of anger and dismay from Namdalener throats.

  The legionaries charged down the right fork of the path, which opened out into a clearing in the oak woods. A double handful of Videssians, four mounted and the rest on foot, were pushed into a compact, desperate circle by hard-pressing Namdalener horsemen. Men were down on either side; the islanders looked to be gathering themselves for a last charge to sweep their enemies away.

  As his maniple deployed into battle line, pila ready to cast, even stolid Junius Blaesus burst out laughing. “A hundred?” he said to Scaurus. “Looks to me, sir, like we’ve brought a mountain to drop on a fly.”

  If the little clearing held thirty islanders, the tribune would have been surprised. The men of the Duchy gauped as legionaries kept pouring out of the woods. Finally the fellow Marcus took to be their commander because of his fine saddle and horse and the gold inlay on his helm threw back his head and laughed louder than Blaesus had. “Down spears, lads,” he called to his knights. “They have us, and no mistake.”

  The Namdaleni followed his order, warily in the case of those still fronting their intended victims. But the Videssians, as surprised as their foes by their deliverance, were content to lean on their weapons and sob in great breaths of air; they were in no condition to attack.

  The mercenary captain rode slowly up to Scaurus. The Romans around the tribune raised javelins threateningly, but the islander paid them no mind. He held his shield out to Scaurus. “Give me a blow for my honor’s sake,” he said, and Marcus tapped the metal facing with his sword. “Well struck! I yield me!” He took off his helmet to show he had surrendered. His men followed suit.

  Under the helm the Namdalener had a smiling, freckled face and a thick head of light brown hair; like most of his countrymen, he shaved the back of his head. As had been true of the islanders in the motte-and-bailey fort north of the Sangarios, he did not seem disturbed at yielding; these things were part of a professional soldier’s life.

  His squadron was as casual; one of them said, quite without rancor, to the imperials they had just fought, “We’d have had you if these whoreson Romans hadn’t come along.” Having served side-by-side with them in the capital, the Namdaleni knew more about the legionaries than did the Videssians they had saved.

  Scaurus set his troopers to disarming the islanders, then walked over to salute the Videssian leader. The man’s highbred horse and the air of authority he wore like a good cloak made him easy to pick out. He must have been nearly sixty, but a vigorous sixty. His hair and close-trimmed beard were iron gray, and, while his middle was thick, his shoulders did not sag under the weight of armor.

  His eye held a twinkle of irony as he returned Marcus’ salute. “You do me too much honor. The weaker should bow and scrape, not the stronger. Sittas Zonaras, at your service.” He bowed in the saddle. “My rank is spatharios, for all that tells you.”

  Even as the tribune gave his name, he decided he liked this Zonaras. In the cloud-cuckoo-land of Videssian honorifics, spatharios was the vaguest, but few imperials would poke fun at their own pretensions.

  “I’ve heard of you, young fellow,” Zonaras remarked, apparently adding the last phrase to see if Scaurus would squirm. When he got no response, he probed harder. “Baanes Onomagoulos had things to say about you, none of which I’d care to repeat to you face-to-face.” One of the noble’s retainers shot him an alarmed look.

  “Did he?” Marcus said, alert beneath his casual mask. It was not surprising Zonaras knew the late rebel; this was the country from which Onomagoulos came. That he
would admit knowing him was something else, an extraordinary gesture of trust when offered to a man who served Baanes’ foe.

  “Onomagoulos rarely said much good about anyone,” the tribune said, and Zonaras nodded, his own face impassive now, as if wondering whether he had made a mistake. His eyes cleared as Marcus went on, “I think being lamed embittered him. He wasn’t so sour before Maragha.”

  “That’s so,” the Videssian said. As if relieved to back away from a dangerous subject, he glanced toward the men of the Duchy. “What will you do with them? They think they own the country for no better reason than their bandit chief’s say-so.”

  After the Sangarios, Marcus thought gloomily, they had better reason than that. He thought for a few seconds. “Perhaps Drax will exchange them for Mertikes Zigabenos.”

  The legionaries must have outmarched news of the battle, for Zonaras blinked in amazement, and his men exclaimed in alarm. “Drax holds the guards commander?” Zonaras said. “Grave news. Tell it me.”

  Scaurus set it forth. Zonaras listened impassively until he spoke of the desertion of the Namdaleni who had marched with the Imperial Army, then cursed in black anger. “Skotos freeze all treachers’ privates,” he growled, and from that moment on the tribune was sure he had taken no part in Onomagoulos’ revolt. When Marcus was done, Zonaras sat silent a long while. At last he asked, “What will you do now?”

  “What I can,” the tribune answered. “How much that may be, I don’t know.”

  He thought Zonaras might snort in contempt, but the Videssian noble gave a sober nod. “You carry an old man’s head on your shoulders, to fight shy of promising Phos’ sun when you don’t carry it on your belt.” Zonaras scratched his knee as he watched Scaurus. “You know, outlander, you shame me,” he said slowly. “It is not right for hired troops to be more willing to save Videssos than her own men.”

  Marcus had thought that since his first weeks in the Empire, but few Videssians agreed. Long used to their power, they took it for granted—or had, until Maragha. The Roman, whose homeland had grown mighty only in the century and a half before his birth, was not so complacent.

  Zonaras broke into his thoughts, reaching down to take his hand. “What I and mine can do for you, we will,” he pledged, and squeezed with a strength that belied his years. Scaurus returned the clasp, but wondered how much help one backwoods noble was likely to give.

  The next day’s march was a revelation to the tribune, not least because all of it was over Sittas Zonaras’ land. Toward evening the legionaries made camp beside his sprawling villa, which nestled in a narrow valley. The setting sun shone purple off the highlands to the south and east. “We’ve done well,” Zonaras said with no little pride.

  “Aye, belike, and an elephant’s plump,” Gaius Philippus said.

  Marcus had known intellectually of the broad estates and peasant villages Videssian grandees controlled. Only now did he start to feel what that control meant. Around the capital, brawling city life replaced the nobles’ holdings, and in the westlands’ central plateau the soil was too poor to allow a concentration of wealth such as Zonaras enjoyed.

  His acres included fine vineyards and gardens; a willow plantation by the stream that ran past him home; meadows where horses and donkeys, cattle, sheep, and goats grazed; forests for timber and animal fodder; poor grapevines climbing up hillside trees; and the oak woods where he had met first the Namdaleni and then Scaurus, which yielded acorns not only to be the wild boar he hunted, but also to his own herd of pigs.

  On the march the tribune had seen no fewer than five presses for squeezing out olive oil. There were herders in the fields with the flock; the chief herdsman, a solid, middle-aged man without the least touch of servility, had warily come up to greet Zonaras after the noble assured him at some distance that the long column of legionaries behind him was friendly.

  “Glad of it, sir,” the man had answered, “else I’d have raised the countryside against ’em.” He tore up a scrap of parchment with something written on it; probably the numbers and direction of the intruders, Marcus thought. He was not surprised the herder chief knew his letters. In Rome, too, a man with such a responsible job would have to be able to read and write.

  And while the legionaries who heard the fellow’s promise to his lord snickered at it, Scaurus suspected it should not be taken lightly. Nor was Gaius Philippus laughing. Unlike most of the Romans, he knew the other side of irregular warfare. “All the folk in all these villages we’ve passed through seem plenty fond of Zonaras here,” he said to the tribune. “It’d be no fun having them bushwhack us and then fade off through the woods or into the hills before we could chase ’em.” He spoke Latin, so Zonaras caught his name but no more.

  Marcus understood the senior centurion’s logic and also suddenly understood why the bureaucrats back in Videssos the city so hated and feared the provincial nobles. It would literally take an army to make Zonaras do anything he did not care to do, and there were scores of nobles like him.

  Indeed, even an army might not have sufficed to bring Zonaras back to obedience. He could defend with more than an armed peasantry. As the legionaries discovered when they reached his family seat, the noble kept a band of half a hundred armed retainers. They were not quite professional troops, as they made most of their living by farming, but what they lacked in spit and polish they made up for with unmatched knowledge of the area and the same strong devotion to their lord the chief herdsman had shown.

  Once, Scaurus knew, the farmer-soldiers’ first loyalty had been to the Empire. But years of harsh taxes made them seek protection from the grandees against the central government’s greed. The local nobles, ambitious and powerful, were glad to use them to try to throw off the bureaucrats’ yoke once for all. To survive, the pen-pushers in the capital hired mercenaries to hold them in line … and so, Marcus thought as the legionaries planted stakes on their rampart, these endless civil wars, first an Onomagoulos rebelling, then a Drax. He grunted. Without Videssos’ civil strife, the Yezda would be out beyond the borders of Vaspurakan, not looking down like vultures over Garsavra.

  “Well, what of it?” Helvis responded when he remarked on that. “If Videssos used no mercenaries, the two of us would not have met. Or would that thought please you these days?” There were challenge and sadness both in her voice; the question was not rhetorical.

  “No, love,” he said, touching her hand. “The gods know we’re not perfect, but then only they are. Or Phos, if you’d rather,” he amended quickly, seeing her mouth tighten. He cursed his clumsy tongue; he had no real belief in the Roman gods, but spoke merely from habit.

  Gaius Philippus had also heard the tribune’s first comment. “Hrmp,” he said. “If the Videssians didn’t hire mercenaries, they’d have killed the lot of us as soon as we came into this crazy world.”

  “There is that,” Scaurus admitted. Gaius Philippus nodded, then hurried off to swear at a Vaspurakaner who had been foolish enough to start to relieve himself upstream from the camp. The luckless trooper found himself with a week of latrine duty.

  Marcus was left thoughtful. Gaius Philippus rarely broke in when he and Helvis were talking. Was the senior centurion trying in his gruff way to keep things smooth between them? Considering his misogynism, the notion was strange, but the tribune was strapped for any other explanation. He murmured a sentence in archaic, rhythmic Greek. Helvis looked at him strangely.

  “ ‘Everything you say, my friend, is to the point,’ ” he translated. Everything was in Homer somewhere.

  Zonaras’ wife was a competent, gray-haired woman named Thekla. His widowed sister Erythro lived with them. Several years younger than Sittas, she was flighty and talkative, and had a gift for puncturing the calm front he cherished.

  Erythro was childless; her brother and Thekla had had a daughter and three sons. The girl, Ypatia, reminded Marcus a little of Alypia Gavra in her quiet intelligence. She was betrothed to one of the nobles in the hills to the south. The man stood to inheri
t Zonaras’ estates, for his only surviving son, Tarasios, was a pale, consumptive youth. He bore his illness with courage and laughed at the coughing fits that wracked his thin frame, but death’s mark was on him. Along with many men of lower rank from the holding, his two brothers had fallen at Maragha, fighting under Onomagoulos.

  Despite that, Zonaras had not supported his neighbor’s rebellion against Thorisin Gavras. “As Kalokyres says, in civil war the prudent man sits tight.” Scaurus smothered a smile when he heard that; the last man he had known who was fond of quoting the Videssian military writer was Ortaias Sphrantzes, a miscast soldier if ever there was one.

  Framed in black, portraits of the grandee’s dead sons hung in his dining hall. “They’re crude daubs,” Erythro told Marcus in the confidential manner she liked to affect. “I’ll have you know my nephews were handsome lads.”

  “All your taste is in your mouth, darling sister,” Sittas Zonaras rumbled. He and Erythro argued constantly, with great enjoyment on both sides. If she spoke well of wine, he would drink ale for the next fortnight to irritate her, while she kept urging him to drown all the cats on the estate—but stroked them when he was not there to see it.

  Actually, Scaurus agreed with Erythro here. By the standards of the capital, the paintings were the product of a half-schooled man, no doubt a local. Still, they gave Marcus an idea. A couple of days after the legionaries encamped by Zonaras’ villa, he went to Styppes, saying, “I’d ask a favor of you.”

  “Ask,” Styppes grunted, ungracious as usual. At least, thought the tribune, he was sober.

  “I’d like you to paint an icon for me.”

  “For you?” Styppes’ eyes narrowed within their folds of flesh. “Why should an unbeliever want a holy image?” he asked suspiciously.