The document was not long, nor did it need be. In four convoluted sentences it proclaimed Mertikes Zigabenos rightful Avtokrator of the Videssians, named the great count Drax his “respected commander-in-chief and Protector of the Realm,” urged all citizens and “soldiery whether Videssian or foreign” to support the newly declared regime, and threatened outlawry and destruction for any who resisted. Drax’ signature, in fancy script with a great flourish underneath, completed the proclamation; Zigabenos’ was conspicuously absent.
Marcus read it all through again, damning the great count at every word. The man had to be a genius at intrigue, to do so much damage in so little space. By working through a Videssian puppet, he took away the stigma of being an invader and permanently compromised Zigabenos in Thorisin Gavras’ eyes. The rightful Emperor could not be sure Zigabenos was not willingly cooperating with Drax. And Zigabenos, no mean machinator himself, would see that for himself—and might really help the great count from fear of what would happen to him if Drax’ revolt failed. The tribune’s head started to ache. The more he thought, the worse things looked.
He rolled up the parchment to hand it back to Bailli. The two pieces of Drax’ seal fit neatly together, edge to edge. In his choice of emblem, at least, Scaurus thought, he was a Namdalener; the men of the Duchy loved to gamble.
Bailli sniggered when he remarked on that. “Look again.”
The tribune did, then swore and threw the parchment to the floor, for what were dice in a wine cup but loaded dice?
VI
“TELL ME,” VARATESH SAID TO VIRIDOVIX AS HE HELPED HIS prisoner dismount after another long day of travel, “why did you dye your hair and mustache that hideous shade? And why have you grown the mustache but no beard? By the spirits, you stand out more among plainsmen this way than as you were.”
“Will you give over havering anent my looks? It’s no beauty y’are your own self.” He tried to smooth his long mustachioes, sadly draggled by days of steady rain. With a rawhide strap binding his wrists, he made a clumsy job of it.
“Do not toy with me,” Varatesh said, mild-voiced as usual. “I will only ask my question once more.” The outlaw chief made no threats, as his riders would have. His cruelty was subtler, letting the Gaul find his own terrors to imagine.
“A pox take you, man. My own face this is on the front o’ my head, and nought but.” Viridovix glared at the Khamorth, afraid and exasperated at the same time. “What is it I’m supposed to look like, anyway?” he demanded.
“As Avshar set you forth,” Varatesh said, and Viridovix felt a chill at the wizard-prince’s name. Every day the roughgaited steppe pony he unwillingly rode brought him closer to a meeting he did not want.
“Well, how is that, you kern? I’m not likely to be reading the villain’s mind, nor wanting to, either.”
Kubad snarled at the insults and fingered his knife in its sheath. What Videssian he understood was mostly vile, just as Viridovix could curse in the plains speech. But Varatesh waved his rider to silence. When he was on the trail of something, such trifles were like false scents to a hunting hound, distractions to be screened out. “As you wish,” he said to the Celt. “Your height matches Avshar’s picture of you, but he makes your hair out to be dark yellow, not this roan of yours, and calls you clean shaven, though that, I know, means not much. Nor do you look like any imperial I’ve seen, and he said you might be a Videssian but for fair hair and light eyes.”
“Sure and I’d never be that, Varatesh dear,” Viridovix said, and then laughed in the Khamorth’s face.
“What do you find so funny?” The outlaw chief’s tone was dangerous; like most men habitually unsure of themselves, he could not stand being mocked.
“Only that your puir soft-noodled wizard sent you off chasing fish, fur, or virgin’s milk. I ken the man you mean, and he’s no friend of Avshar, Scaurus isn’t, nor a bad wight for all he’s a Roman.” The alien names meant nothing to Varatesh, who waited with angry impatience. Enjoying himself for the first time since he was taken, the Gaul went on, “If it’s the Scaurus you’re after, lad, you’ve a farther ride than the one you took to nab me, for he’s still back in the Empire, indeed and he is.”
“What?” Varatesh barked. He did not doubt his prisoner’s word; the relish Viridovix took in making him look a fool was too obvious. His men were shouting questions at him. With poor grace, he translated what the Celt had said. That his own men lost respect for him was worse than Viridovix’ glee; who cared what an enemy thought?
“Avshar won’t be pleased,” Kubad said, a remark that hung in the air like the smell of lightning.
It was Denizli’s turn to half draw his dagger. He smiled evilly. “If this son of a spotted mare’s no one Avshar wants, we can have our sport with him here and now.” He did pull the knife free, held it under Viridovix’ eyes.
“Loose my hands and do that, hero,” the Celt growled.
“What does he say?” Denizli said. When Varatesh told him, his smile grew wider. “Tell him I will loose his hands for him—one finger at a time.” He stepped toward Viridovix again.
Varatesh nearly let him have his way, but a sudden thought made him cry, “No! Wait!” and knock his rider’s blade to one side. Twice now in days he had robbed Denizli of the pleasure of the kill. The renegade sprang at him with an oath, dagger slashing out. But it bit only empty air; Varatesh, who seemed impossible to surprise, had already danced aside. His own knife leaped into his hand. The other Khamorth—Kubad and his comrades Khuraz, Akes, and Bikni—made no move to interfere. In their brutal world, strength alone gave the right to lead.
Varatesh took a cut arm, but a moment later Denizli was writhing in the mud, shrieking as he clutched his hands to his gashed belly. Varatesh stooped over him and cut his throat, as a merciful man would.
Viridovix caught his eye. “Well fought,” he said. “I wish it had been me to do it.” He meant the compliment; he took fighting too seriously for idle flattery. Varatesh was fast and supple as a striking snake.
The Khamorth shrugged. “Bury this garbage,” he said to the four remaining riders. Obeying with no back answers, they stripped the corpse and started to dig; the sodden ground made the work easy. Varatesh turned back to the Gaul. “Riddle me this: if you are not the man my comrade Avshar seeks, how did his magic lead me to you? How did his sleeping-charm not fell you? And how is it you bear a sword like the one this—what was his name?—Scaurus carries?” His Khamorth accent made it sound like “Skrush.”
“Begging your pardon and all, but if I’m not the man himself is after, how should I know the answers to your fool questions?”
Varatesh smiled, but thinly. “Just what Avshar will ask you, I think. I will leave it to him, then.” For the first time Viridovix was glad of the rain. It hid the sweat that sprang out on his forehead. That sword—he wished he knew more about the sorceries the druids had laid in it. But the Celtic priests revealed their secrets to no one outside their caste. Initiates spent up to twenty years memorizing their lore, for they would not commit it to writing … and now they were a world away, and a lost world, to boot.
“Your honor!” he called as Varatesh started to leave. When the Khamorth paused, he went on, “Now that that pig’s bladder of a Denizli is after having no further use for his cloak, could I sleep under it tonight? A dry snooze’d be a rare pleasure after this cursed soppy weather.” The nomads’ cloaks, of greasy wool, shed the rain like ducks’ feathers, while the Gaul, in his cloth, had been constantly sodden. Luckily it was warm; a chill likely would have put a fever in his lungs.
“Well, why not? You do have the look of a drowned pup.” Varatesh gave his men the order. There were a couple of startled looks, and Kubad quickly spoke up in protest, but Varatesh’s answer seemed to satisfy the nomad. The outlaw leader said to Viridovix, “You’ll take Kubad’s instead. It has a hole in it, and he’ll keep Denizli’s for himself.”
“That will do me, and I thank you.”
The Khamorth u
ntied his hands so he could eat, but, as always, kept him covered while loose and rebound them with a fresh strip of rawhide as soon as he was done. When he asked to go out to answer a call of nature, they also bound his ankles together so he had to take tiny hobbling steps. Again, an archer accompanied him.
He had not gone far when he slipped and fell with a splash into a man-sized puddle. His guard laughed and made no effort to help him up. Suspecting a trap, he watched from a safe distance, bow drawn, as the Celt floundered. At last Viridovix struggled back onto his feet. If he had been wet before, he was drenched now. “Och, for a copper I’d piss on you,” he said to the nomad, but in Gaulish. Recognizing the tone if not the words, the Khamorth kept on laughing. Viridovix glowered at him. “Well, you blackguard, you’re not so smart as you think y’are,” he said, and his guard laughed even more.
Sodden as he was, the sheepskin cloak did nothing to keep him dry. He curled under it nonetheless. Four of the five nomads slept; Varatesh drew first watch. After his stint was done he woke Akes, who sat grumpily in the rain waiting until it was time for him to rouse Kubad. Every so often, as Varatesh had done, he would glance over at Viridovix, but the Celt was no more than an unmoving lump in the darkness.
For all his pretended sleep, Viridovix was frantically if quietly busy under the sheepskin. His thrashings in the puddle had not been accidental; he had thoroughly soaked the rawhide straps that tied him. Wet, the hide had far more stretch in it than it did dry. Ever so slowly and carefully, not daring to risk detection, he moved his wrists back and forth, up and down, until at last—it was halfway through Kubad’s watch—he hooked a thumb under the edge of the hide strip and worked it up over his hands. He clenched his fists over and over, trying to get full feeling back.
Kubad had a skin of kavass with him to help while away the time. All the better, Viridovix thought. The top of the cloak hid his smile. He yawned loudly and half sat, making sure he kept his arms behind him. He looked around as if just locating the sentry he had been anxiously watching all the while.
At the motion Kubad eyed him, but the nomad knew his captive was safely tied. He lifted the skin to his mouth. “How about a nip for me, too, Khamorth darling?” Viridovix called. He kept his voice very low; he hardly wanted to wake Kubad’s mates—least of all Varatesh. Varatesh smelled trouble as a bear smelled honey.
But Kubad ambled over and squatted by the Gaul. “You wake thirsty, eh?” he said, holding the skin to Viridovix’ lips.
As he drank, Viridovix felt a tiny twinge of guilt at betraying the nomad’s friendly act. He stifled it—how friendly had Varatesh’s bandits been when they kidnapped him?
“Another?” Kubad asked. The Gaul nodded. The nomad bent closer to present the skin again, and Viridovix lunged forward to take him by the throat. The skin of kavass went flying. By good fortune, it landed on the wool cloak so it did not splash and give the Celt away.
Kubad was an experienced fighter, but he was taken by surprise and made a mistake that proved fatal. Instead of reaching for his dagger, his first, instinctive reaction was to try to break Viridovix’ grip on his neck. But the Gaul had desperation’s strength, his strangling fingers pressing up under the angle of Kubad’s jaw. Too late the nomad remembered the knife. It was his last thought, and his hands would not obey him, falling limp at his sides.
Viridovix let the corpse down into the mud. He took the dagger himself—a curved weapon with a heavy, lozenge-shaped pommel—and cut the strip of hide that bound his ankles. He made himself wait until the aches and tingles of returning circulation were gone before he moved. “You’ve only the one chance, now, so don’t go wasting it from impatience,” he muttered.
The rain drumming down masked his noise as he slid toward the nomads; here was revenge for the taking. But he paused as he stooped over the first of them. Kubad had been a fair fight, but he could not bring himself to murder sleeping men. Eighty-nine kinds of a fool Gaius Philippus’d call you, he said to himself as he sheathed the weapon. Reversed, it would do for a club.
Three times he struck—none of them gentle, for he did not intend to have any of the Khamorth wake with a howl. That left Varatesh.
The outlaw chief woke with a blade tickling his throat. Self-possessed as usual, he sent his right hand slithering toward his belt-knife, hoping the motion would be invisible under the thick cloak. “Dinna try it,” Viridovix advised. He held a second dagger, sheathed and reversed, in his left hand. “Sure and I’ll slit your weasand for you or ever you get it out.” Varatesh considered, decided he was right, and seemed to relax. Viridovix was undeceived.
“Not knowing how hard-pated your lads are, I’ll make the farewells brief,” the Gaul said.
That startled Varatesh as the reversal of fortunes had not. “You’re free and did not kill them?”
“Kubad’s dead,” Viridovix answered matter-of-factly, “but the rest’ll have no worse than the fierce sore head you gave me. As will you,” he added, and clubbed the outlaw chief. Varatesh slumped.
Thinking the Khamorth might be shamming, Viridovix drew back warily, but his left-handed blow had been strong enough. Working quickly, he tied all four of the unconscious plainsmen. One wasn’t, quite, and had to be flattened a second time. He took all their weapons he could find, loaded them onto a packhorse, then buckled on his own sword. It made a pleasant weight at his hip.
Varatesh’s eyes opened while the Celt was still tying the horses’ lead lines together. He started working at his bonds at once, making no effort to disguise it—had Viridovix intended to kill him, he would have been dead by now. “We’ll meet again, outlander,” he promised.
“Aye, belike, but not soon, I’m thinking, e’en once you do get loose,” Viridovix said, finishing his work with the animals. “You’d look the proper set o’ mooncalves, now, chasing after me afoot, and me with your horses and all.”
Varatesh paused, looked at him with grudging respect. “I hoped you would not think of that; many southrons would not have.” He started to shake his head, then winced and gave it up as a bad job.
“And besides,” Viridovix went on, grinning, “you’ll have the demons’ own time finding a trail in this muck.” The Khamorth scowled, remembering how he had said that to Kubad about Viridovix’ comrades. Now the shoe was on his foot and it pinched. So would his boots, soon enough, he thought sourly.
The Gaul swung himself into the saddle. “A pox on your skimpy stirrup leathers,” he grumbled; with his long legs, his knees were nearly under his chin. He dug a heel into the steppe pony’s ribs, cuffed it when it tried to buck. “None o’ that, now!” One by one, as their leads went taut, the nomads’ three dozen horses followed the beast he rode. The lilting air was whistling came straight from the Gallic forests. And why not? he thought, there’s just myself the now, so I can be me—aye, and like it, too, with none to say they don’t understand.
He whistled louder.
Gorgidas muttered an obscenity as a raindrop hit him in the eye, blurring his vision for a few seconds. “I thought we were done with this cursed weather,” he complained.
“Why wait till now to carp?” Lankinos Skylitzes asked. “We’ve been out from under the worst of it almost all day. If you’d ridden north instead of west, you’d still be soaking it up like a sponge.”
Arigh nodded. “It’ll get drier the further west you go. In Shaumkhiil, my people’s land, these week-long summer storms don’t happen much. Winter, now, is another tale.” He shuddered at the thought of it. “Videssos has spoiled me.”
“I wonder why that’s so,” Gorgidas said, curious in spite of himself. “Perhaps your being further from the sea has something to do with it. But no—how could you have wet, snowy winters if that were so?” He thought briefly, then asked. “Or is there some other sea to the north, from which your winter storms could gather moisture?”
“Never heard of one,” Arigh said without much interest. “There’s the Mylasa Sea between the plains and Yezd, but that’s south of my folk, not
north, and hardly more than a big lake anyhow.”
Surprisingly, Goudeles said to Gorgidas, “Well reasoned, outlander. The Northern Sea does run some distance west of the Haloga lands, how far no man knows, but cold and drear throughout.” He gave an elegant grimace of distaste. “It must be the cause of the harsh weather good Arigh mentions.”
“How do you know that, Pikridios?” Skylitzes challenged. “Far as I’ve heard, you never set foot outside Videssos till now.”
“A fragment of poetry I came across in the archives,” the bureaucrat replied blandly. “Written by a naval officer—a Mourtzouphlos, I think; they’re an old family—not long after Stavrakios’ time, when the Halogai still minded their manners. Quite an arresting little thing, really; one is quite taken with the strangeness of it, almost as if the author were portraying another world. Rocks and ice and wind and odd, bright-beaked shore birds with some flatulent name he must have borrowed from the local barbarians: ‘auks,’ I think it was.”
“Well, auks to you, too,” Skylitzes said, defeated by the pen-pusher’s barrage of detail. Goudeles dipped his head in a smug half-bow. Gorgidas thought he heard Skylitzes grind his teeth.
“Your pardon, gents,” Agathias Psoes broke in, practical as a Roman, “but that looks to be a good place to camp, there up ahead by the stream.” The underofficer pointed; as if at the motion, a small flock of ducks came quacking down from the gray sky. Psoes smiled like a successful conjurer; his men unshipped their bows. Gorgidas’ stomach rumbled at the thought of roast duck.
But the first bird that was shot let out a loud squawk, and its flockmates took wing, evading the fusillade of arrows the troopers aimed at them. “Shut up in there,” the Greek said as his belly growled again. “It’s cheese and wheatcakes after all.”
Legion of Videssos Page 17