Legion of Videssos

by Harry Turtledove

  “Ahh,” said Arigh, taking the point. Goudeles seemed chagrined at missing it himself, while Gorgidas dipped his head, admiring Skylitzes’ subtlety.

  The officer saluted Arghun, plainly relieved he was not annoyed. “If I may ask straight out, then, how will you use it?”

  “I will hurt Yezd as much as I can,” Arghun said flatly. “Arigh is right, I think; the Khamorth will stand aside for us when they see we mean them no harm—or, if not, the worse for them. But the easiest way to Mashiz is through Pardraya, and that is the way I aim to take.” He bowed to the envoys from Videssos. “You will ride with us, of course.”

  “An honor,” Skylitzes said.

  Goudeles, on the other hand, looked like a man who had just been stabbed. Even more than Gorgidas, he longed for a return to the city and now saw it snatched away from him at the whim of this barbarian chief. “An honor,” he choked out at last.

  “Back to sword practice, Pikridios,” Skylitzes chuckled, understanding him perfectly. The pen-pusher did not quite stifle a groan.

  “This yurt will have to go, too,” Arigh said, grinning as he rubbed salt in Goudeles’ wounds. “Just a good string of horses, maybe a light shelter tent to keep the snow off at night.”

  “Snow?” Goudeles said faintly.

  “Speak my tongue, please,” Arghun grumbled; his son had dropped into Videssian to talk to the imperials. When he had caught up with the conversation, the khagan nodded in sympathy with Goudeles. “Yes, I know the snow is a nuisance. It will slow us up badly. But if we leave as soon as the clans have gathered, we should be nearing Yezd come spring.”

  “That’s not precisely what I was worrying about,” the bureaucrat said. He buried his face in his hands.

  The nomads rode through steppe winters every year, following their herds. Knowing it could be done did not make the prospect appetizing. Gorgidas said the first thing that came to his mind. “Arigh, I’ll need a fur cap like yours, one with—” He gestured, unsure of the word. “—ear flaps, by choice.”

  The plainsman understood him. “You’ll have it,” he promised. “That’s a good job of thinking ahead, too; I knew a man who froze his ears in a blizzard and broke one clean off without ever knowing it till they thawed.”

  “How delightful,” Goudeles muttered, almost inaudibly.

  Gorgidas remembered something else. “Avshar is still loose in Pardraya.”

  That sobered his Videssian colleagues, and even Arigh, but Arghun said, as others had before, “A wizard. We have wizards of our own.”

  “Keep them moving, curse it!” Valash shouted. Viridovix nodded; he stood tall in the saddle, flapped his arms, and howled Gallic oaths. The flock of sheep picked up its pace by some meaningless fraction. Snug in their thick coats of greasy wool, they were more comfortable in the cold fall rain than the men who herded them.

  The storms had come back two days ago, as Lipoxais foresaw, and made the nomads’ retreat that much worse. There were not enough men to drive the herds as fast as they could go, either. That Targitaus had put a lubber like Viridovix to work was a measure of his desperation. Women were riding drover, too, and boys hardly old enough to have their feet reach the stirrups.

  The Celt bullied a knot of sheep back into the main flock. He was glad Targitaus had any duty for him at all. It would have been easy to pile blame for the disaster on the foreigner—the more so as Batbaian had not returned with his father. Dead or captured, no one knew.

  But Targitaus said only, “Not your fault, you fought well.” If he did not want to see much of Viridovix after the fight, the Gaul found that easy to understand and kept his distance as best he could. It meant he could not spend much time with Seirem, but that would have been so anyhow. Targitaus drove his family no less than the rest of the clan; his daughter’s hands were chafed and blistered from riding with the animals.

  “Get along there, you gangling fuzz-covered idiot pile o’ vulture puke!” Viridovix roared at a ewe that kept trying to go off on its own. The black-faced beast bleated indignantly, as if it knew what he was calling it.

  Valash darted away from the Celt to keep more sheep in line. The young Khamorth’s face was drawn with fatigue as he rode back. “This job is too big for two,” he said. He shook his head; rainwater flew from his beard.

  “Aye, well, maybe not much longer to it, I’m thinking,” Viridovix said. “Sure and that son of a serpent Varatesh couldna be finding us the now, not with the rain and all to cover our trail.” There had been no serious pursuit after the battle, none of the harrying the Celt had dreaded. For what it was worth, Targitaus had brought off his retreat masterfully.

  Valash looked hopeful at the Gaul’s words, but as they left his mouth Viridovix cursed himself for a fool. Avshar could track him by his sword as easily as a man following a torch through the night. For a moment he thought of throwing it into the muck to break the trail. But before his hand touched the sword hilt he jerked it away and spat in defiance. “If the whoreson wants it, let him earn it.”

  Darkness came swiftly these fall nights, thick clouds drinking up the light almost before the sun they hid was set. The Khamorth traveled as long as they could see the way ahead, then ran up their tents, largely by feel. The camp was cheerless—so many men missing or dead, others wounded, and all, men and women alike, exhausted.

  Wrapped in a thick wool blanket, Viridovix huddled close to the cookfire in Targitaus’ tent. The khagan’s greeting was a grunt. He ate in gloomy silence, new lines of grief scored into his cheeks.

  The Gaul made a cold supper of cheese and smoked mutton sausage, declined the blackberries candied in honey that Seirem offered him. “Another time, lass, when I’m more gladsome than now. The sweet of ’em’d be wasted on me, I’m thinking.”

  Lipoxais the enaree ate greedily; the thick juice ran sticky down his chin. “How can you pig it so?” Viridovix asked him. “Does it not fair gag you, wi’ your folk in sic straits?”

  “I take the pleasures I can,” Lipoxais said shortly, his high voice expressionless, his jowly, beardless face a mask. Viridovix took a large bite of sausage and looked away, his own cheeks reddening. He had his answer about the enaree’s nature and found he did not want it.

  “I wasna after the shaming of you,” he muttered.

  The enaree surprised him by laying a pudgy hand on his arm. “I suspect I should be honored,” he said, a hint of a twinkle in his fathomless dark eyes. “How many times have you apologized for a clumsy tongue?”

  “Not often enough, likely.” Viridovix thought about it. “And I wonder whyever not? There’s no harm to me and maybe some good to the spalpeen I’m after slanging.”

  Lipoxais glanced over to Seirem. “You’re civilizing him.”

  “Honh!” Viridovix said, offended. “Am I a Roman, now? Who wants to be civilized?” After a while he realized the enaree had borrowed the Videssian word; it did not exist in the Khamorth speech. “Shows what he knows,” the Gaul said to himself, and felt better.

  “All right, I made a mistake!” Dizabul said, slamming his fist against the floor of the yurt. It hurt; he stared at it as if it had turned on him, too. He went on, “Is that any reason for everyone to treat me like a bald sheep? Is it?”

  Yes, Gorgidas thought, but he did not say so. Dizabul was at an age where yesterday receded into the mist and tomorrow was impossibly far away. It seemed monstrously unfair to him still to be held accountable for his choices after their results became clear. But the elders remembered, and treated him as they would anyone who backed the wrong side. It stung; he was used to acclaim, not snubs.

  He was, in fact, desperate enough to talk with the Greek, whom he had ignored before. Gorgidas did not suffer fools gladly, but Dizabul sometimes got off the subject of his own mistreatment and would answer questions about the history and customs of his clan. He was not stupid, only spoiled, and knew a surprising amount of lore. And his beauty helped the Greek tolerate his arrogance.

  He was, indeed, so striking a creature
that Gorgidas found himself tempted to play up to him with exaggerated sympathy. That made him angry at himself, and in reaction so short with Dizabul that the boy finally glared at him and shouted, “You’re as bad as the rest of them!” He stomped off into the rain, leaving Gorgidas to reflect on the uses of self-control.

  The Greek and Goudeles went into serious training for war. The pen-pusher never made even an ordinary swordsman, but Gorgidas surprised the Arshaum with his work with the gladius—at least on foot. “For the nomads,” he recorded, “accustomed as they are to cutting at their foes from horseback, employ a like style when not mounted and are thus confounded facing an opponent who uses the point rather than the edge.”

  He hung a merciful veil of silence over his own efforts with the saber and the slashing stroke.

  Even so, his progress satisfied Skylitzes. “No one would mistake you for a real soldier, true, but you’ve learned enough so you won’t be butchered like a sheep.…” The officer rounded on Goudeles, who was rubbing a knee he had twisted trying to spin away from the plainsman with whom he had been practicing. Skylitzes rolled his eyes. “Unlike this one, who might as well tattoo ‘rack of mutton’ on his forehead and have done.”

  “Hrmmp,” the bureaucrat said, still sitting in the mud. “I daresay I do better on the field than one of these barbarians would in the chancery. And what do you want from me? I never claimed a warrior’s skills.”

  “Neither did the Hellene,” Skylitzes retorted, startling Gorgidas, who had not realized the Videssian knew what his people called themselves.

  The officer’s praise did not altogether please him. He loathed war with the deep and sincere loathing of one who had seen too much of it too closely. At the same time, he was driven to do whatever he tried as well as he could. Having decided he needed the rudiments of the soldier’s trade, he set about acquiring them as conscientiously as he had his medical lore, if not with the same burning interest.

  He blinked, suddenly understanding how Gaius Philippus could see soldiering as just another trade, like carpentry or leatherworking. He would never like that perspective, but it was no longer alien to him.

  He had to laugh at himself. Who would have thought insight could come from learning butchery? He remembered what Socrates had told the Athenians: “For a human being, an unexamined life is not worth living.” And Socrates had fought in the phalanx when his polis needed him.

  He must have murmured the Greek aloud, for Goudeles asked, “What’s that?”

  He translated it into Videssian. “Not bad,” the pen-pusher said. “He was a secret agent, this Socrates?” Gorgidas threw his hands in the air.

  When they got back to the yurt, Gorgidas carefully scraped the dirt from his horsehide boots before going in. Goudeles and Skylitzes followed suit, having learned he was much easier to live with if they went along. As a result, the yurt was undoubtedly cleaner than it had been when it housed plainsmen.

  Goudeles cocked an eyebrow at the Greek. “What will you do when we move east, and it’ll be a tent over bare mud?”

  “The best I can,” Gorgidas snapped. He did not think he had to apologize for his fastidiousness. He had long since noticed that wounds healed better when kept clean and sick patients recovered faster in clean surroundings. He had taken that as a general rule and applied it all through his way of living, reasoning that what aided against ill health might also help prevent it.

  “Don’t mock him over this one, Pikridios,” Skylitzes said. He stretched full length on the rug with a grunt of pleasure. “Nothing wrong with coming back to something that’s dry and isn’t brown.”

  “Oh, no doubt, no doubt,” Goudeles allowed. “But I’ll never forget Tolui’s face when our friend here called him a filthy ball of horse droppings for tracking mud on the carpet.” Gorgidas had the grace to look shamefaced, the more so as the shaman had come to talk about the medicinal plants Arghun had given him.

  “Well, still and all, I think the yurt’s a more comfortable place now that he’s taken charge of it than it was when our wenches were still here,” Skylitzes said.

  “Have it any way you like.” The bureaucrat was working at his knee again and rolling up his sheepskin trousers for a look at it. It was already turning purple. Even so, he managed a leer. “You must admit, they had an advantage he lacks.”

  “First time I’ve heard it called that,” Skylitzes snorted.

  Gorgidas laughed, too, and not very self-consciously. With no other choice available, he had been more successful with women than he would have imagined possible. Hoelun had helped that immensely; her desire to please was so obvious it would have been difficult—to say nothing of churlish—not to respond in kind. He found himself missing her now she was gone. But he missed acting according to his own nature more.

  “Are you a crazy man, to come riding into our camp this way?” Targitaus demanded, glowering at the outlaw. “Put that fool white shield away—why should I care about your truce sign?” His hand twitched eagerly toward his sword.

  Varatesh’s rider matched the chieftain stare for disdainful stare. He was about forty, with a proud, hard face that might have been handsome but for his eyes, which were set too close together and, with their slitted lids, showed only cruelty. His horse and gear were of the finest, probably loot from the recent battle. He did not offer his name, but answered with a jeer, “Go ahead, kill me, and see what happens to your precious clansmen and their friends then.”

  The spirit seemed to go out of Targitaus. His shoulders sagged; Viridovix, watching, would have sworn his cheeks slumped, too. “Say on,” he said, and his voice suddenly quavered like an old man’s.

  “Thought you’d see sense,” the outlaw said. He was enjoying his mission; he rubbed his hands together as he got down to business. “Now that we’ve seen a new Royal Clan come to be, it’s time the rest of the steppe recognized what’s what—starting with you and yours.”

  As nothing else could have, that stung Targitaus back to life. His face purpled with fury. He roared, “You bastard, you cheese-faced crock of goat piss, you frog!” It was the deadliest Khamorth insult, and the outlaw’s lips skinned back from his teeth in anger. Targitaus paid no attention, storming on, “You go tell Varatesh he can lick my arse, for I’ll not lick his!” The clansmen around him shouted their approval.

  The tumult gave Varatesh’s man the time he needed to recover his temper; the renegade chief had not chosen foolishly. As the yells died down to mutters, the outlaw spread his hands in conciliation and spoke as mildly as he could. “Who spoke of licking arses? You know Varatesh is stronger than you. He could crush you as a boy squeezes a newt in his fist.” Viridovix scowled at the heartless comparison, which let him see into the outlaw’s soul, soft words or no. “But he does not. Why should he? One way or another, you will be his subjects. Why not willingly?”

  “And put the Wolf under your bandits’ black flag? Never.”

  “All right, then,” the outlaw said, with the air of a man beaten down by hard bargaining. “He will even make you a present.”

  Targitaus spat in contempt. “What gift would I take from him?”

  “He will give you back all the prisoners he holds and ask no ransom for them.”

  “You toy with me,” Targitaus said. But he saw the terrible, haunted hope on the faces of his people, and when he repeated, “Toy,” doubt was in his voice.

  “By my sword, I do not,” Varatesh’s man said. The nomads fell silent and looked at each other, for among their warrior folk the worst renegade would think three times before he broke that oath.

  Unable to check himself, Targitiaus burst out, “Is Batbaian among them?”

  “Aye, and luckier than most. By my sword I swear it.”

  Dismay filled Viridovix as he heard Targitaus heeding the bandit. He cried, “Sure and your honor canna take the omadhaun’s lies for truth, can you now? What’s the word of a Varatesh worth, or an Avshar?” A few heads bobbed in agreement, but not many.

  With his
son in Varatesh’s hands and a straw to grasp, the nomad chief answered, “V’rid’rish, I followed your path once, and see what it gained me.” The Gaul’s jaw fell at the reversal, and at the unfairness of it, but Targitaus went on with worse: “So where do you find the brass to urge a course on me now?”

  “But—”

  Targitaus overrode him with a slashing gesture. “Be grateful your neck is not the price asked for, for I would trade you for Batbaian and my clansmen.” The Celt bowed his head; he had no reply to that.

  Having decided to treat with his foes, Targitaus dickered with all his skill and wrung the most from his wretched bargaining position. He argued concession after concession from Varatesh’s man, making the renegade agree that, as he took the risk of halting his clan, none of Varatesh’s men should be allowed to approach the camp with the column of prisoners.

  “You understand the captives will be unarmed and afoot,” the outlaw warned.

  “Aye, aye,” the chieftain said impatiently. “Had we won, we’d have plundered you.” Once his mind was made up, he moved ahead at full speed. He exchanged oaths with the outlaw, calling on the spirits to avenge any transgressions in the terms agreed upon.

  Viridovix watched morosely from the edge of the crowd of Khamorth. Few of them would speak to him; for the first time in weeks he felt himself once more an alien among them. Seirem’s smile said she had not forgotten him, but he wondered how long he would enjoy it now that her father had turned against him. In a way, the couple of sentences Rambehisht ostentatiously gave him cheered him more. “Maybe it’s not me that’s crazy after all,” he said to himself, tugging at his mustache.

  The agreement went forward regardless. “Ride hard,” Targitaus told Varatesh’s man. “Truce or no truce, we will not stay here long.”

  The renegade nodded. He kicked his shaggy dun pony into a trot, lifted his shield of truce on his lance so none of Targitaus’ patrolling pickets would attack him on his return to his master. A stray breeze brought back his laughter as he rode out of camp.