Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle) (7 page)

Viridovix, though, took to the Halogai. “It’s a somber lot they are,” he admitted, “and more doomful than I’m fond of, but they fight as men do, and they perk up considerable wi’ a drop of wine in ’em, indeed and they do.”

That, Marcus found a few days later, was an understatement. After a day and most of a night of drinking, the Gaul and half a dozen northern mercenaries staged a glorious brawl that wrecked the tavern where it happened and most of the participants.

One aftermath of the fight was a visit from Vourtzes to the Roman camp. Marcus had not seen much of him lately and would have forgone this occasion, too, when he learned the
hypasteos
wanted him to pay for all the damage the grogshop had taken. Annoyed, he pointed out that it was scarcely just
for him to be saddled with all the charges when only one of his men was involved, as opposed to six or seven under the
hypasteos
’ jurisdiction. Vourtzes let the matter drop, but Marcus knew he was unhappy.

“Maybe you should have compromised and saved trouble,” Gorgidas said. “If I know our Celtic friend, he raised more than his share of the ruction.”

“I shouldn’t be a bit surprised. But Vourtzes is the sort to bleed you to death a drop at a time if you let him. I wonder,” Marcus mused, “how he’d look as a newt.”

Like the rest of the Empire of Videssos, Imbros celebrated the passing of the winter solstice and the turning of the sun to the north once more. Special prayers winged their way heavenward from the temples. Bonfires blazed on street corners; the townsfolk jumped over them for luck. There was a huge, disorderly hockey match on the surface of a frozen pond. Falling and sliding on the ice seemed as much a part of the game as trying to drive the ball through the goal.

A troupe of mimes performed at Imbros’ central theater. Marcus saw he was far from the only Roman there. Such entertainments were much like those his men had known in Italy, and the fact that they had no dialogue made them easier for the newcomers to understand.

Venders climbed up and down the aisles, crying their wares: good-luck charms, small roasted birds, cups of hot spiced wine, balls of snow sweetened with syrups, and many other things.

The skits were fast-paced and topical; a couple in particular stuck in Scaurus’ mind. One showed an impressive-looking man in a cloth-of-gold robe—the Emperor Mavrikios, the tribune soon realized—as a farmer trying to keep a slouching nomad from running off with his sheep. The farmer-Emperor’s task would have been much easier had he not had a cowardly son clinging to his arm and hindering his every move, a fat son in a robe of red brocade …

The other sketch was even less subtle. It involved the devastation of Imbros itself, as carried out in a totally inadvertent and unmalicious fashion by a tall, skinny fellow who wore a red wig and had a huge fiery mustache glued over his upper lip.

Viridovix was in the audience. “ ’Twas not like that at all,
at all!” he shouted to the mummer on stage, but he was laughing as hard as anyone around him.

Venders of food and drink were not the only purveyors to circulate through the crowd. Though exposed flesh would have invited frostbite, women of easy virtue were not hard to spot. Paint, demeanor, and carriage made their calling clear. Marcus caught the eye of a dark-haired beauty in a sheepskin jacket and clinging green gown. She smiled back and pushed her way toward him through the crowd, squeezing between a couple of plump bakers.

She was only a few feet from Scaurus when she abruptly turned about and walked in another direction. Confused, he was about to follow when he felt a hand on his arm. It was the angular prelate who had blessed and healed the Romans when they first came to Imbros.

“A fine amusement,” he said. Scaurus was thinking of a better one, but did not mention it. This priest was a powerful figure in the city. The man continued, “I do not believe I have seen you or many of your men at our shrines. You have come from afar and must be unfamiliar with our faith. Now that you have learned something of our language and our ways, would it please you to discuss this matter with me?”

“Of course,” Marcus lied. He had a pair of problems as he walked with the hierarch through the frosty, winding streets of Imbros toward its chief temple. First, he was anything but anxious for a theological debate. Like many Romans, he gave lip service to the veneration of the gods, but wasted little serious belief on them. The Videssians were much more earnest about their cult and harsh with those who did not share it.

Even more immediate was his other dilemma; for the life of him, he could not recall his companion’s name. He kept evading the use of it all the way to the doorway of Phos’ sanctuary, meanwhile flogging his memory without success.

The sweet savor of incense and a choir’s clear tones greeted them at the entrance. Scaurus was so bemused he hardly noticed the cleric who bowed as his ecclesiastical superior came in. Then the young priest murmured, “Phos with you, elder Apsimar, and you as well, outland friend.” The warmth and gratitude Marcus put into his handclasp left the little shaven-headed man blinking in puzzlement.

A colonnade surrounded the circular worship area, at
whose brightly lit center priests served the altar of Phos and led the faithful in their prayers. Apsimar stayed in the semidarkness outside the colonnade. He led Marcus around a third of the circle, stopping at an elaborately carved door of dark, close-grained wood. Extracting a finger-long iron key from the pouch at his belt, he clicked the door open and stood aside to let the Roman precede him.

The small chamber was almost pitch-dark until Apsimar lit a candle. Then Marcus saw the clutter of volumes everywhere, most of them not the long scrolls he was used to, but books after the Videssian fashion, with small, square pages bound together in covers of wood, metal, or leather to form a whole. He wondered how Apsimar could read by candlelight and have any sight left at his age, though the priest had given no sign of failing vision.

The room’s walls were as crowded with religious images as its shelves were with books. The dominant theme was one of struggle: here a warrior in armor that gleamed with gold leaf felled his foe, whose mail was black as midnight; there, the same gold-clad figure drove its spear through the heart of a snarling black panther; elsewhere, the disc of the sun blazed through a roiling, sooty bank of fog.

Apsimar sat in a hard, straight chair behind his overloaded desk, waving Scaurus to a more comfortable one in front of it. The priest leaned forward. He said, “Tell me, then, somewhat of your beliefs.”

Unsure where to begin, the Roman named some of the gods his people followed and their attributes: Jupiter the king of heaven, his consort Juno, his brother Neptune who ruled the seas, Vulcan the smith, the war god Mars, Ceres the goddess of fertility and agriculture …

At each name and description Apsimar’s thin face grew longer. Finally he slammed both hands down on the desk. Startled, Marcus stopped talking.

Apsimar shook his head in dismay. “Another puerile pantheon,” he exclaimed, “no better than the incredible set of miscegenating godlets the Halogai reverence! I had thought better of you, Roman; you and yours seemed like civilized men, not barbarians whose sole joy in life is slaughter.”

Marcus did not understand all of that, but plainly Apsimar thought little of his religious persuasions. He thought for a
moment. To his way of looking at things, Stoicism was a philosophy, not a religion, but maybe its tenets would please Apsimar more than those of the Olympian cult. He explained its moral elements: an insistence on virtue, fortitude, and self-control, and a rejection of the storms of passion to which all men were liable.

He went on to describe how the Stoics believed that Mind, which among the known elements could best be equated with Fire, both created and comprised the universe in its varying aspects.

Apsimar nodded. “Both in its values and in its ideas, this is a better creed, and a closer approach to the truth. I will tell you the truth now.”

The tribune braced himself for a quick course on the glory of the divine sun, kicking himself for not mentioning Apollo. But the “truth,” as Apsimar saw it, was not tied up in heliolatry.

The Videssians, Marcus learned, viewed the universe and everything in it as a conflict between two deities: Phos, whose nature was inherently good, and the evil Skotos. Light and darkness were their respective manifestations. “Thus the globe of the sun which tops our temples,” Apsimar said, “for the sun is the most powerful source of light. Yet it is but a symbol, for Phos transcends its radiance as much as it outshines the candle between us.”

Phos and Skotos warred not only in the sensible world, but within the soul of every man. Each individual had to choose which he would serve, and on this choice rested his fate in the next world. Those who followed the good would gain an afterlife of bliss, while the wicked would fall into Skotos’ clutches, to be tormented forever in his unending ice.

Yet even the eternal happiness of the souls of the deserving might be threatened, should Skotos vanquish Phos in this world. Opinions over the possibility of this differed. Within the Empire of Videssos, it was orthodox to believe Phos would emerge victorious in the ultimate confrontation. Other sects, however, were less certain.

“I know you will be traveling to the city,” Apsimar said. “You will be meeting many men of the east there; fall not into their misbelief.” He went on to explain that, some eight hundred years before, nomadic barbarians known as the Khamorth
flooded into what had been the eastern provinces of the Empire. After decades of warfare, devastation, and murder, two fairly stable Khamorth states, Khatrish and Thatagush, had emerged from the chaos, while to their north the Kingdom of Agder was still ruled by a house of Videssian stock.

The shock of the invasions, though, had caused all these lands to slip into what Videssos called heresy. Their theologians, remembering the long night of destruction their lands had undergone, no longer saw Phos’ victory as inevitable, but concluded that the struggle between good and evil was in perfect balance. “They claim this doctrine gives more scope to the freedom of the will.” Apsimar sniffed. “In reality, it but makes Skotos as acceptable a lord as Phos. Is this a worthwhile goal?”

He gave Marcus no chance to reply, going on to describe the more subtle religious aberration which had arisen on the island Duchy of Namdalen in the past couple of centuries. Namdalen had escaped domination by the Khamorth, but fell instead, much later, to pirates from the Haloga country, who envied and aped the Videssian style of life even as they wrested away Videssian land.

“The fools were seeking a compromise between our views and the noxious notions which prevail in the east. They refuse to accept Phos’ triumph as a certainty, yet maintain all men should act as if they felt it assured. This, a theology? Call it, rather, hypocrisy in religious garb!”

It followed with a certain grim logic that, as any error in belief gave strength to Skotos, those who deviated from the true faith—whatever that happened to be in any given area—could and should be brought into line, by force if necessary. Accustomed to the general tolerance and indeed disregard for various creeds he had known in Rome, Marcus found the notion of a militant religion disturbing.

Having covered the main variants of his own faith, Apsimar spoke briefly and slightingly of others the Videssians knew. Of the beliefs of the Khamorth nomads still on the plains of Pardraya, the less said the better—they followed shamans and were little more than demon-worshipers. And their cousins who lived in Yezd were worse yet; Skotos was reverenced openly there, with horrid rites.

All in all, the Halogai were probably the best of the heathen.
Even if incorrect, their beliefs inclined them to the side of Phos by fostering courage and justice. “Those they have in abundance,” Apsimar allowed, “but at the cost of the light of the spirit, which comes only to those who follow Phos.”

The barrage of strange names, places, and ideas left Marcus’ head spinning. To get time to regain his balance, he asked Apsimar, “Do you have a map, so I may see where all these people you mention live?”

“Of course,” the priest said. As with his theological discussion, he gave Scaurus more than the tribune had bargained for. Apsimar gestured toward one of the crowded bookshelves. Like a called puppy, a volume wriggled out from between its neighbors and floated through the air until it landed gently on his desk. He bent over it to find the page he wanted.

The tribune needed those few seconds to try to pull his face straight. Never in Mediolanum, never in Rome, never in Gaul, he knew, would he have seen anything to match that casual flick of the hand and what came after it. Its very effortlessness impressed him in a way even the healing magic had not.

To Apsimar it was nothing. He turned the book toward Marcus. “We are here,” he said, pointing. Putting his face close to the map, the tribune made out the word “Imbros” beside a dot.

“My apologies,” Apsimar said courteously. “Reading by candlelight can be difficult.” He murmured a prayer, held his left hand over the map, and pearly light sprang from it, illuminating the parchment as well as a cloudy day.

This time, Scaurus had all he could do not to flee. No wonder, his mind gibbered, eyestrain did not trouble Apsimar. The priest was his own reading lamp.

As the first shock of amazement and fear faded, a deeper one sank into the tribune’s bones. The map was very detailed: better, by the looks of it, then the few Marcus had seen in Rome. And the lands it showed were utterly unfamiliar. Where was Italy? No matter how crude the map, the shape of the boot was unmistakable. He could not find it, or any of the other countries he knew.

Seeing the curious outlines of the Empire of Videssos and its neighbors, reading the strange names of the seas—the
Sailors’ Sea, the Northern Sea, the almost landlocked Videssian Sea, and the rest—drove home to the tribune what he had feared since the two swords swept him and his legionaries here, had suspected since Apsimar’s first sorcery. This was a different world from Rome’s, one from which he could never go back.