The Legion of Videssos (31 page)

Inspiration failing him, Gorgidas stowed tablet and stylus
and stuck his head out the flap of the yurt. Agathias Psoes, riding beside the felt tent on wheels, nodded a greeting; he kept his squad on alert, not relying on the nomads to keep Bogoraz and his handful of retainers from mischief.

The Greek turned to the young plainsman guiding the yurt’s team of horses. “May your herds increase,” he said in polite greeting, using up a good deal of what he had learned of the sibilant Arshaum tongue.

“May your animals be fat,” the nomad replied. Like most of his people, he was short and lean, with a wiry strength to him. He was flat-faced, swarthy, and almost without a beard; a fold of skin at the corner of each eye gave them a slanted look. When he smiled, his teeth were very white.

Suede fringes and brightly dyed tassels of wool ornamented his sheepskin trousers and leather coat. He wore a curved sword and dagger and a quiver on his back; his bow was beside him on the wooden seat. He smelled strongly of the stale butter he used to oil his straight, coarse black hair.

It was later than Gorgidas had thought. The sun was sliding down the sky toward a low range of hills that barely serrated the western horizon. They were the first blemishes on the skyline he had seen for weeks. Beyond them was only more steppe.

Two riders came out of the west, one straight for the Videssian embassy’s yurt, the other peeling off toward that of Bogoraz. Yezd’s banner, a leaping panther on a field of brownish red, fluttered above it. It was a nice touch; Gorgidas wished the Empire had been as forethoughtful.

The messenger said something in his own language to the Greek, who tossed his head to show he did not understand. The nomad shrugged, tried again in bad Khamorth; only a few Ashaum knew Videssian. Gorgidas ducked inside the tent and shook Skylitzes awake; the officer spoke the local tongue fluently.

Grumbling, Skylitzes went out and talked with the messenger for a few minutes. “We’re to meet the clan’s shamans tonight,” he reported to his companions. “They’ll purge us of any evil spirits before we’re taken to the khagan.” Though he had experience with the customs of the steppe peoples, his unsmiling features were more dour than usual. “Pagans,” he said under his breath, and made the sign of Phos’ sun on his
breast. Goudeles, by contrast, did not seem unduly perturbed at the prospect of going through a foreign ritual.

Outside, the messenger was still talking with the yurt driver, who clucked to his horses. The ungreased axles screeched as the wagon swung southward. Gorgidas looked a question at Skylitzes, who said, “He’s taking us to where the shamans are.”

An hour or so later the yurt rumbled down into a broad valley. Looking out, the Greek saw that Bogoraz’s wain was a couple of hundred yards behind. Twoscore Arshaum horsemen rode between the yurts, making sure Psoes’ troopers did not mix it with the Yezda soldiers who guarded Bogoraz. The rest of the wagons with which both parties had been traveling had gone on ahead to Arghun.

A lone tent on wheels stood in the valley, its horses grazing around it. A man got down from it, torch in hand; Gorgidas was too far away to see more than that his costume was strange. Then the yurt-driver said something to the Greek. “Come inside,” Skylitzes said. “He says it ruins the magic if we see the sacred fires lit.” Gorgidas obeyed with poor grace; how could he learn if he was not allowed to observe?

The yurt drove up close enough for him to hear the crackle of flames; he heard Bogoraz’ rolling into place beside it. The driver called out to someone. The reply came back in a reedy tenor, an old man’s voice. “We can go out now,” Skylitzes said. He turned to stare at Goudeles. “Phos’ name, are you still working on that rubbish you spew?”

“Just finding the proper antithesis to balance this clause here,” the bureaucrat replied, unruffled. He ostentatiously jotted another note, watching Skylitzes fume. “This will have to suffice,” he said at last. “So much is wasted in translation, in any case. Well, come along, Lankinos—it’s not I who’s keeping them waiting now.” And sure enough, the pen-pusher was out the tent flap first.

Bogoraz was alighting from his yurt as well, but Gorgidas hardly noticed him; his attention was riveted on the shamans of the Arshaum. There were three of them, two straight and vigorous, the third stooped with age—he must have answered the Videssian party’s driver. They were dressed in ankle-length robes of suede, covered with so many long shaggy fringes sewn on that they seemed more
beasts than men. All three wore snarling devil-masks of wood and leather painted in hideous greens, purples, and yellows, adding to their inhuman aspect. Silhouetted against the fires they had set, they capered about, calling out to each other now and then. Their voices echoed, hollow, inside their masks.

Gorgidas watched the display with interest, Skylitzes with active suspicion. But Pikridios Goudeles bowed to the eldest shaman with the same deep respect he might have shown Balsamon, the patriarch of Videssos. The old Arshaum bowed creakily in return and said something.

“Well done, Pikridios,” Skylitzes said grudgingly. “The geezer said he didn’t know whether to take us or the Yezda first, but your good manners made up his mind for him.”

Goudeles bowed again, as deeply as his plump form would allow. The pen-pusher was self-indulgent and bombastic, Gorgidas thought, but he was a diplomat, too.

So, in his way, was Bogoraz. He saw at once he would not be able to change the shaman’s decision and so did not try, folding his arms over his chest as if the entire matter was beneath his notice.

Again, Gorgidas watched him out of the corner of his eye. The shamans were busy at their fire, chanting incantations and throwing fragrant frankincense into the flames. The old man rang a bronze bell while his two assistants kept chanting. “Driving away demons,” Skylitzes reported.

Then the elder drew out a small packet from beneath his long coat, tossed its contents over the fire. The flames flared up in pure white heat, dazzling Gorgidas’ sight and making sweat start on his brow. A blot of darkness against the glare, the shaman approached the Videssian party and spoke. “What?” Skylitzes barked in Videssian. Collecting himself, he spoke in the Arshaum tongue. The shaman repeated himself, gesturing as if to say, “It’s all quite simple, you know.”

“Well?” Goudeles demanded.

“If I understand him, and I’m afraid I do,” Skylitzes said, “he wants us to prove we mean Arghun no harm by walking through the bonfire there. If our intentions are good, he says, nothing will happen. If not—” the officer hesitated, finished, “the fire does what fire does.”

“Suddenly being first is an honor I would willingly forego,” Goudeles said. Skylitzes, unshakable in the face of physical danger, seemed close to panic at the idea of trusting his safety to a heathen wizard’s spell. Gorgidas, who did his best to disbelieve in anything he could not see or feel, wondered why he was not similarly afraid himself. He realized he had been watching the old shaman as closely as if he were a patient; the man glowed with a confidence as bright as the blaze he had called up.

“It will be all right, I think,” he said, and was rewarded with matched unhappy looks from Goudeles and Skylitzes, the first time they had agreed with each other in days. Then the old Arashaum grasped at last that the Videssian group had doubts. Waving to reassure them, he took half a dozen backward strides—and was engulfed by flames. They did not burn him. He danced a few clumsy steps in the heart of the fire, while Goudeles’ party—and Bogoraz, off to one side—stared at him. When he emerged, not a fringe on his fantastic costume was singed. He waved again, now in invitation.

Goudeles had his own peculiar form of courage. Visibly pulling himself together, he said to no one in particular, “I did not fall off the edge of the map to work an injury on a nomad.” He walked briskly up to the edge of the flames. The old shaman patted him on the back, then took his hand and escorted him into the bonfire. The blaze leaped up around them.

Lankinos Skylitzes was biting his lip when Goudeles’ voice, full of relief and jubilation, rose above the crackle of the fire. “Quite whole, thank you, and no worse than medium rare,” he called. Skylitzes set his jaw and stepped forward. Unnervingly, the old shaman appeared from out of the flames. The officer made Phos’ sun-sign over his heart once more, then reached to take the shaman’s outstretched hand.

“Here,” Skylitzes called a few moments later, laconic as usual. Then the shaman was beckoning to Gorgidas. For all his confidence, the Greek felt a qualm as he came up to the bonfire. He narrowed his eyes to slits against the glare and wondered how long it would be before Goudeles’ feeble joke turned true.

The old Arshaum’s hand, though, was cool in his, gently urging him into the flames. And as soon as he stepped into the
fire, the sensation of heat vanished; it might have been any summer’s evening. He was not even sweating. He opened his eyes. The white light surrounded him, but no longer blinded. He looked down at the coals over which he walked and saw they were undisturbed by his passage. Beside him the shaman hummed tunelessly.

Darkness ahead, total after the brilliance that had bathed him. A sudden blast of heat at his back told him he was past the spell. He stumbled away from the fire. Goudeles caught and steadied him. As he regained his vision, he saw Skylitzes gazing back at the blaze like a man entranced. “All light,” the officer murmured, awe-struck. “Phos’ heaven must be thus.”

Goudeles was more practical. “If it has anything to do with Phos, it’ll fry that rascal of a Bogoraz to a crackling and do the Empire a great service.”

Gorgidas had nursed that same hope, but a few minutes later the shaman came through the fire with the Yezda envoy in hand. At last the Greek had to pay him attention. If he had hoped Wulghash, the khagan of Yezd, would send out some half-barbarous chieflet, he saw at once he was to be disappointed.

Bogoraz was plainly of the old stock of Makuran, the state that had treated with Videssos as an equal for centuries until the Yezda swarmed down from the steppe to conquer it. In his late middle years, he stood tall and spare. He turned for a moment to look at the old shaman; outlined against the flames, a strong hooked nose gave him the brooding profile of a hawk.

His sight clearing, Wulghash’s ambassador noticed the Arshaum party and came up to them with a mocking half bow. “An interesting experience, that,” he remarked; he spoke the imperial tongue with old-fashioned phrasing but only the faintest hint of his native accent. “Who would have thought these barbarians had such mages among them?”

His eyes were hooded, again like a hawk’s; Gorgidas could make out nothing in their black depths. The rest of his face had a lean power in it that was in good accord with his build. His chin was strong and jutting, his cheekbones sharply carved. A thick graying beard, tightly curled like his hair, covered his jaw and cheeks; he let his mustaches grow long
enough to hide most of his upper lip. It was a good mouth to keep concealed, wide, with full lips that could easily wear either harshness or sensuality.

The Yezda’s presence roused Skylitzes from his golden dream. He touched the hilt of his sword, growling, “I should take care of what the fire bungled.”

Bogoraz met him glare for glare, unafraid. The envoy of Yezd carried no weapons; he toyed with the bright brass—or were they gold?—buttons on his coat of brown wool, cut longer behind than before. Under the coat he wore a caftan of some light fabric, striped vertically in muted colors. “Why do you think me less pure of heart than yourself?” he asked, gesturing in sardonic amusement. Gorgidas was struck by his hands, which were slim and elegant, with long tapering fingers—a surgeon’s hands, the Greek thought.

“Because you bloody well are,” Skylitzes said, ignoring subtleties.

“Softly, my friend.” Goudeles laid a hand on the officer’s arm. “The truth must be that this is a wizard himself, though shy of admitting it, with spells to defeat the flames.” Though he still spoke to Skylitzes, he watched Bogoraz for any telltale response to his probe.

But Bogoraz would not rise for it. “What need have I of magic?” he asked, his smile showing no more of his thoughts than a shaman’s mask might. “Truly I wish this Arghun no harm—so long as he does what he should.” The mask slipped a trifle, to show the predator behind it.

Viridovix sipped from the skin of kavass. Beside him Targitaus, who had passed it to him, belched loudly and patted his belly. “That is a well-made tipple,” he said, “smooth and strong at the same time, like the hindquarters of a mule.”

“A mule, you say?” Viridovix needed Lipoxais’ translations less each day; he was beginning to understand the Khamorth tongue fairly well, though he still answered in Videssian when he could. “Sure and it tastes like a mule’s hind end. I miss my wine.”

Some of the plainsmen chuckled, others frowned to hear their traditional drink maligned. “What did he say?” asked Targitus’ wife Borane; like most of the women, she had no Videssian. The nomad chieftain explained. Borane rolled her
eyes, then winked at the Celt. She was a heavy-featured woman, losing her looks and figure to middle age; as if to turn aside the advancing years, she affected a kittenishness that went poorly with her girth.

Her daughter Seirem showed her one-time beauty like a mirror reflecting an image twenty years gone. “If our blood-cousin does not care for kavass,” Seirem said to Targitaus, “maybe he would enjoy the felt tent.”

“What was that last?” Viridovix asked Lipoxais; he had caught the words, but not the meaning behind them.

“ ‘The felt tent,’ ” the
enaree
translated obligingly. He took the phrase too much for granted to think it needed explaining.

“By my prize bull’s pizzle,” Targitaus said, “he doesn’t know the felt tent!” He turned to his servants. “Kelemerish! Tarim! Fetch the hangings, the cauldron, and the seeds.”

The servants rummaged with alacrity in the leather sacks on the northern side of the tent. Tarim, the younger of the two, brought Targitaus a two-eared round cauldron of bronze, full almost to the top with large flat stones. Targitaus sat it in the cookfire to heat. Kelermish gave his chieftain a fist-sized leather bag with a drawstring top. He opened it and poured a nondescript lot of greenish-brown stems, seeds, and crushed leaves into the palm of his hand.