Legion of Videssos

by Harry Turtledove

  He waited. She came to him slowly, almost defiantly, as if her body were a restive horse she controlled by main force. When he put his hands on her shoulders, she did not pull away, but lifted her face to him. It was a strange kiss; while her lips and tongue were alive against his, she stood so rigid he did not dare sweep her into a full embrace.

  She drew back, studying him in the near-darkness. “How does a soldier make so gentle a man?” she said.

  He did not think of himself so, but had learned she meant such questions seriously. With a shrug, he answered, “You know soldiering is not the trade I started with. And,” he added softly, “I am not at war with you.”

  “No, never,” she murmured. Then he did draw her close, and she came more readily into his arms. He stroked the back of her neck, brushed her hair aside to touch her ear. She shivered, but more from fear, he thought, than sensuality. She retreated a couple of steps, eyeing the bedding by the wall. “Please, you go first,” she said to Scaurus, turning her back again. “I’ll come to you in a minute.”

  As Safav had promised, the straw beneath the muslin ticking was fresh and sweet-smelling, the wooly fleeces thick and warm. Marcus lay facing the wall. Someone had scrawled a couple of words on it in charcoal, too smeared now to read in the faint red light.

  From behind him, Alypia said, “And patient, too,” with something close to her usual detached irony. There was a bit of silence, followed by a small, annoyed snort as a bone fastener on her dress refused to obey her fingers. The tribune heard the soft rustle of cloth sliding over skin. The mattress shifted as she let herself down onto it.

  As his mouth found hers, she whispered, “I hope you will not be too disappointed in me.”

  Some time later he stared into her eyes; in the near-dark they were as unreadable as the scribble on the wall. “ ‘Disappointed’?” he said, still dazed with delight. “You must be daft.”

  To his surprise, she twisted angrily in his arms. “You are kind, dear Marcus, but you need not pretend with me. I know my clumsiness for what it is.”

  “By the gods!” he said, startled into Latin for a moment. In Videssian he protested, “If that was clumsiness, I doubt I’d live through talent.” He laid her hand over his heart, still racing in his chest.

  She looked past his shoulder. Her voice was absolutely toneless. “He said there was no hope for me in such matters, but he would undertake to train me even so.” She did not, perhaps could not, force the name out, but Scaurus knew whom she meant. Of themselves, his hands folded into fists.

  She did not seem to notice; he might as well not have been there. “I fought him, oh, how I fought him, until one day he let me see he took pleasure from my struggles. After that,” she said bleakly, “he trained me—aye, like a dog or a horse. Small mercies when I learned something enough to suit him. When I failed …” She shivered into silence.

  “It’s over,” he said, and tasted the emptiness of words. Then he cursed foully in every tongue he knew. That did no good either.

  After a while, Alypia went on, “Whenever he finished with me, he would curl his lip in disgust, as if someone had offered him a plate of bad fish. To the end, he despised me as couch-partner. Once I dared to ask him why he came back over and over and over, if I did not satisfy him.” Marcus waited helplessly as she paused, remembering. “That was the only time I saw him smile, in all the months he kept me. He smiled and said, ‘Because I can.’ ”

  The tribune wished he had not wasted his curses before. He gathered her to him, hugged her close. “Listen to me,” he said. “Vardanes, Skotos take him, savored your suffering.”

  “The very word,” she said from against the side of his neck. “He was a connoisseur in all things, torment among them.”

  “Then why believe what he told you of yourself as a woman?” he demanded. “One more lie, to bring you affliction.” He ran his fingers down the curved column of her spine, a long slow caress; kissed her with soft brush of lips. “For it was a lie, you know.”

  “I pleased you?” she whispered, doubting still. “Really?”

  “If snow is ‘cool,’ or the ocean ‘moist,’ then yes, you ‘pleased’ me.”

  She gave a strangled hiccup of laughter, then burst into tears, clinging to him tightly. She wept against his shoulder for a long time. He simply held her, letting her cry herself out as he had with Senpat and Nevrat.

  Finally she was spent and lay quiet in his arms. He tilted her face up to his. He had intended a gentle kiss, of understanding and sympathy rather than passion. But she responded with an intensity not far from desperation. A proverb he had heard somewhere, from the Namdaleni perhaps, briefly ran through his mind: “Tear-filled eyes make sweet lips.” Then thought was lost, for Alypia clung to him once more, with a new kind of urgency.

  They both gasped when it began again, gentleness forgotten. His lips bruised hers and were bruised in turn; her nails scored his back. She tore her mouth free, said half-sobbing into his ear, “What wonder, to want!” When she cried out in amazed joy, he followed an instant later.

  After that, it was some time before either of them cared to move. At last Alypia said, “You’re squashing me, I’m afraid.”

  “Sorry.” Marcus shifted his weight; sweat-slick skin slid. They both laughed. “Who would have thought anyone could sweat in this hailstone of a room?”

  “Who would have thought …” She let her voice trail away. She set her hand on his side, but did not speak.

  “What, love?”

  Alypia smiled, but answered, “Nothing.” That was so patently untrue it hung in the air between them. She amended it at once. “Or nothing I know how to say, at any rate.” He mimed scratching his head; she made a face at him. “Witling!”

  She was serious, though, as he soon saw. “All I knew of man and woman was cruel sport. But Marcus, you have met with better than that. When you and—” She stopped, gestured in self-mockery. “The romances say one should never seek comparisons.”

  The romances, Marcus thought, knew what they were talking about. He realized he had scarcely thought of Helvis since fleeing the Amphitheater. Now he could no longer avoid it. Alypia stirred beside him; he saw his silence was frightening her. He said slowly, “The only comparison that matters is that you are here and want to be, while she—is in Namdalen by now, I suppose.”

  She sighed and snuggled against him. Her whisper sounded like, “Thank you.”

  But once reminded, he kept slipping back to the stepson he had come to care for, to his own son, to the child Helvis was carrying—or would it be born now? probably—and to the way that had been taken from him. “One thing more, after all,” he said harshly. “You would never use your body as a weapon against me.”

  Her hand clenched on his upper arm, hard enough to hurt. She willed it open. “No,” she said. “Never that.”

  She sat up. The brazier’s faint red light softened her features, blurring her resemblance to her father, but she had her own measure of Mavrikios Gavras’ directness. “Where do we go from here?” she asked Marcus. “If it pleases you that this should be the affair of an evening, to be forgotten come light, I will understand. That surely is safest.”

  The tribune shook his head violently, almost as frightened as she had been before. He had seen his life uprooted, all he relied on snatched away, and the prospect of abandoning this gladness filled him with worse dread than the familiar terrors of the battlefield. He and Alypia had cared for each other since not long after the Romans came to Videssos; this was no sudden seduction, to be enjoyed and then thrown aside.

  She waved his stumbling explanation aside as soon as she had its drift, bent to kiss him. “I would not force myself on you, either, but I would have grieved to see what might have been, cut short.” She abruptly turned practical again. “It won’t be easy. You know I am hemmed in by ceremony and servants; chances to slip away will come too seldom. And you must run no risks for my sake. My uncle, did he know, would come after you not with a horsewhip, but
the headsman’s axe.”

  “By his lights, it would be hard to blame him,” Scaurus said soberly. A mercenary captain—especially one with as alarming a record as the Roman’s—the paramour of a childless Emperor’s niece? Thorisin could not afford to ignore such a thing, not in Videssos where only intrigue rivaled theology as the national passion.

  The tribune thought of the executioner’s hot irons, back at Garsavra. He might come to beg for the axe, after a while.

  That was the thought of a moment, though. He laughed and stroked Alypia’s smooth shoulder.

  “What is it, my astonishing, desirable beloved?” she asked, half-embarrassed by the endearments but proud of them as well.

  “I was just remembering that a year ago this time, near enough, I was reaming Viridovix up one side and down the other for carrying on with Komitta Rhangavve and here I am playing the same mad game.”

  “Viridovix?” She frowned in brief puzzlement. “Oh yes, the big copper-haired wild man in your service—a ‘Kelt’ he called himself, did he not?” Not for the first time, Marcus was impressed by her memory for detail, sharpened, no doubt, by her historical research. He wondered what the Gaul would say about being in Roman service. Something memorable, he was sure.

  Alypia suddenly giggled as she made a connection. “So that’s why he disappeared off onto the plains with Goudeles and the Arshaum—Arigh.” She found the name.

  “Aye. He and Komitta quarreled, and she went crying rape to Thorisin. He didn’t care to wait to find out whether she’d be believed.”

  Alypia’s nostrils flared in an unmistakable sniff. “Komitta would quarrel with Phos as he came to bear her soul to heaven. And as for the other, your friend was hardly the first to know her favors—or the last. I think in the end my uncle was glad she grew flagrant enough to give him the excuse to be rid of her.” She giggled again. “Truly, without it I don’t think he’d have had the nerve.”

  Having seen some of Komitta Rhangavve’s rages, Scaurus could well believe that. “What happened to her after she was caught with the Haloga?” he asked, recalling the first skit he’d watched in the Amphitheater.

  “Thorisin packed her off to a convent outside the city—and a tidy sum he had to pay the reverend mother to take her, too; her reputation was there ahead of her. The northman—Valthjos his name was, called Buttered-Bread after their fashion of giving nicknames—had to sail for home. He was supposed to be in disgrace, but he carried a gold-inlaid axe and a jewel-set scabbard I know he didn’t have when he got to Videssos.”

  The rough justice in that sounded like Thorisin, and the story explained more of the pen-pushers’ jokes, but Marcus was grimly certain he would not escape so lightly if discovered with Alypia. She was no mistress of whom the Emperor had tired; until Thorisin bred himself an heir, she was the channel through which the Gavras line would descend.

  Thinking along with him, Alypia said, “We must make sure you’re not found out.” She rose from the bed and walked over to the dress which lay carelessly crumpled on the floor. Her nipples stood up with cold; that icy draft was defeating the brazier. Scaurus admired her economical movements as she dressed, then he threw the sheepskins to one side and started to retrieve his own clothes.

  “Wait,” she said. “Best I go back alone.” When he frowned, she said, “Think it out. I’ll simply say I fell asleep over my scrolls. Everyone will believe that and pity me for it. Whereas if I returned with you at whatever hour this is, eyebrows would fly up no matter how innocent we were.”

  He put out his hands palm up, defeated. “You’re right. You generally are.”

  “Hmm. I’m not quite sure I like that.” She quickly ran a comb through her hair. “Anyway, no great hardship for you here. The bed is comfortable.”

  “Not half so much, without you in it.”

  “A courtier born,” she said, but her eyes were warm. She dimpled. “What would your Viridovix say if he found out you’d been bundling with an Emperor’s daughter?”

  “Him? He’d congratulate me.”

  “Good for him, then.” Alypia hugged the tribune, kissed him hard and quick. “Sleep warm and think of me.” They walked to the door together. He unbarred it. Her hand on the latch, she looked up and said softly, “This is but a beginning, I promise you.”

  “I know that.” He opened his mouth, shut it, and shook his head. “There doesn’t seem to be anything else to say.” She nodded and slipped out the door. He closed it after her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Harry Turtledove was born in Los Angeles in 1949. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles. He is also an award-winning full-time writer of science fiction and fantasy. His alternate history works have included several short stories and novels, including The Guns of the South, How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks; the American Empire novels: Blood and Iron and The Center Cannont Hold. He is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

  Visit www.delreybooks.com—the portal to all the information and resources available from Del Rey Online.

  • Read sample chapters of every new book, special features on selected authors and books, news and announcements, readers’ reviews, browse Del Rey’s complete online catalog and more.

  • Sign up for the Del Rey Internet Newsletter (DRIN), a free monthly publication e-mailed to subscribers, featuring descriptions of new and upcoming books, essays and interviews with authors and editors, announcements and news, special promotional offers, signing/convention calendar for our authors and editora, and much more.

  To subscribe to the DRIN: send a blank e-mail to

  sub_Drin-dist@info.randomhouse.com or you can

  sign up at www.delreybooks.com

  The DRIN is also available at no charge for your PDA devices—go to www.randomhouse.com/partners/avantgo

  for more information, or visit www.avantgo.com and search for the Books@Random channel.

  Questions? E-mail us

  at delrey@randomhouse.com

  www.delreybooks.com