Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (10 page)

The tribune returned it, but did not feel like emulating the Celt. Nor did the other groups attract him any more. The bureaucrats snubbed soldiers on principle, but Scaurus himself was not enough of a professional warrior to delight in discussing the fine points of honing a broadsword. And unlike Gorgidas, he could not turn his inquisitiveness to distant lands when he was still so ignorant of Videssos. Thus, while he spent a minute here and two more there in polite small talk, he was bored before the evening was very old.

Feeling like the spare wheel on a wagon, he drifted over to get more wine. He had just taken it when a voice behind him asked, “The music tonight is very fine, don’t you think?”

“Hmm?” He wheeled so fast the wine slopped in its cup. “Yes, my lady, it’s very fine indeed.” In fact he had no ear for music and had ignored the small tinkling orchestra, but a “no” would have ended the conversation, and that he suddenly did not want at all.

She was as tall as many of the men there. She wore her straight black hair bobbed just above the shoulder, a far simpler style than the elaborate piles of curls most of the women preferred, but one that suited her. Her eyes were very blue. Her gown was a darker shade of the same color, with a bodice of white lace and wide, fur-trimmed sleeves. A fine-looking woman, Marcus thought.

“You Romans”—He noticed she said the name correctly, despite the botched announcement at the door.—“are from quite far away, it’s said. Tell me, is your homeland’s music much like what’s played here?”

Wishing she would find another topic, Scaurus considered the question. “Not a great deal, my lady—?”

“Oh, I crave your pardon,” she said, smiling. “My name is Helvis. You are called Marcus, is that right?”

Marcus admitted it. “From Namdalen, are you not?” he asked. It was a reasonable guess. Her features were less aquiline than the Videssian norm, and she certainly did not bear a Videssian name.

She nodded and smiled again; her mouth was wide and generous. “You’ve learned a good deal about this part of the world,” she said, but
then, as the tribune had feared, she returned to her original thought. “In what ways do your music and ours differ?”

Scaurus grimaced. He knew little of Roman music and less of the local variety. Worse, his vocabulary, while adequate for the barracks, had huge holes when it came to matters musical.

At last he said, “We play—” He pantomimed a flute.

Helvis named it for him. “We have instruments of that kind, too. What else?”

“We pluck our stringed instruments instead of playing them with the thing your musicians use.”

“A bow,” Helvis supplied.

“And I’ve never seen anything like the tall box that fellow is pounding.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “You don’t know the clavichord? How strange!”

“He’s two days in the city, darling, and you’re tormenting him about the clavichord?” The guards’ officer Hemond came up to put his arm round Helvis’ waist with a casual familiarity that said they had been together for years.

“I wasn’t being tormented,” Scaurus said, but Hemond dismissed his protest with a snort.

“Don’t tell me that, my friend. If you let this one carry on about music, you’ll never get your ears back. Come on, love,” he said to Helvis, “you have to try the fried prawns. Incredible!” He was licking his lips as they walked off together.

Marcus finished his wine in one long gulp. He was bitter and resentful, the more so because he knew his feelings had no justifiable basis. If Helvis and Hemond were a pair, then they were, and no point worrying about it. It was only that she had seemed so friendly and open and not at all attached … and she really was beautiful.

Many Namdalener men, Hemond among them, shaved their scalps from the ears back so their heads would fit their helmets better. It was a remarkably ugly custom, the tribune decided, and felt a little better.

Sphrantzes the Sevastos came in a few minutes later. As if his arrival was a signal—and it probably was—servants leaped forward to remove the tables of hors d’oeuvres and wine, substituting long dining tables and gilded straight-backed chairs.

They worked with practiced efficiency and had just finished putting out the last place setting when the doorman cried, “His Majesty the Sevastokrator Thorisin Gavras and his lady, Komitta Rhangavve! Her Majesty the Princess Alypia Gavra!” Then, in the place his rank deserved, “His Imperial Majesty, Avtokrator of the Videssians, Mavrikios Gavras!”

Marcus expected the entire room to drop to the floor and braced himself to shock everyone in it. But as the occasion was social rather than formal, the men in the hall merely bowed from the waist—the Romans among them—while the women dropped curtsies to the Emperor.

Thorisin Gavras’ companion was an olive-skinned beauty with flashing black eyes, well matched to the hot-blooded Sevastokrator. She quite outshone the Princess Alypia, Mavrikios’ only surviving child by a long-dead wife. Her lineage was likely the reason Alypia was still unwed—she was a political card too valuable to play at once. She was not unattractive, with an oval face and eyes of clear green, rare among the Videssians. But her attention appeared directed inward, and she walked through the dining hall scarcely seeming to notice the feasters in it.

Not so her father. “The lot of you have been standing around munching while I’ve had to work,” he boomed, “and I’m hungry!”

Scaurus had thought he and his men would be seated with the other mercenary captains, well down the ladder of precedence. A eunuch steward disabused him of the notion. “This festivity was convened in your honor, and it would be less than appropriate were you to take your place elsewhere than at the imperial table.”

As his knowledge of elegant Videssian manners was small, the tribune would willingly have forgone the distinction, but, of course, the gently irresistible steward had his way. Instead of soldiers, the tribune found himself keeping company with the leading nobles and foreign envoys in Videssos’ court.

The straight-backed chairs were as hard as they looked.

Marcus found himself between the skinny little fellow with whom Gorgidas had been talking and the tall dour man who looked like a Videssian in Haloga clothing. The latter introduced himself as Katakolon Kekaumenos. Going by the name, the tribune asked, “You are of Videssos, then?”

“Nay, ’tis not so,” Kekaumenos replied in his archaic accent. “I am
his Majesty King Sirelios of Agder’s embassy to Videssos; in good sooth, his blood is higher than most in this mongrel city.” The man of Agder looked round to see if anyone would challenge his statement. The smaller fragment of the Empire of old had learned more from its Haloga neighbors than wearing snow-leopard jackets: its ambassador spoke with a bluntness rare in the city. He was also taciturn as any northerner, subsiding into moody silence after speaking his piece.

Marcus’ other seatmate nudged him in the ribs. “You’d think old Katakolon had a poker up his arse, wouldn’t you?” he stage-whispered, grinning slyly. “Ah, you don’t know who I am, do you, to get away with such talk? Taso Vones is my name, envoy of Khagan Vologes of Khatrish, and so I have a diplomat’s privilege. Besides, Kekaumenos has reckoned me daft for years—isn’t that right, you old scoundrel?”

“As well for you I do,” Kekaumenos rumbled, but his stern features could not hide a smile. Evidently he was used to making allowances for Vones.

The fast-talking ambassador gave his attention back to Scaurus. “I saw you admiring my beard a few minutes ago.”

That was not the emotion Marcus had felt for the untidy growth. “Yes, I—”

“Horrible, isn’t it? My master Vologes thinks it makes me look a proper Khamorth, instead of some effete Videssian. As if I could look like that!” He pointed across the table at the emissary of the Khaganate of Thatagush. “Ha, Gawtruz, you butterball, are you drunk yet?”

“Not yet I am,” Gawtruz replied, looking rather like a bearded boulder. His Videssian was heavily accented. “But will I be? Haw, yes, to be sure!”

“He’s a pig,” Taso remarked, “but a pleasant sort of pig, and a sharp man in the bargain. He can also speak perfectly good Videssian when he wants to, which isn’t often.”

A trifle overwhelmed by the voluble little Khatrisher, Marcus was glad to see the food brought in. The accent was on fish, not surprising in a coastal town like Videssos. There were baked cod, fried shark, lobsters and drawn butter, a tangy stew of clams, crab, and shrimp, as well as divers other delicacies, among them oysters on the half-shell.

Viridovix, a few chairs down from the tribune, took one of these
from the crushed ice on which it reposed. After a long, dubious look he gulped it down, but seemed less than pleased he’d done so. With a glance at the girl by his side, he said to Marcus, “If you’re fain to be eating something with that feel to it, it’s better warm.”

Scaurus,
sans
oyster, gulped himself. He was wondering why the Celt had not stopped conversation in its tracks all along the table when the Princess Alypia, who was sitting almost directly across from him, asked, “What does your comrade think of the shellfish?” and he realized Viridovix had spoken Latin.

Well, fool, he said to himself, you thought music a poor topic. How do you propose to cope with
this
? His answer unhesitatingly sacrificed the spirit to the letter: “He said he would prefer it heated, your Highness.”

“Odd, such an innocent comment making you start so,” she said, but to his relief she did not press him further.

A gray-haired servant tapped the Roman on the shoulder. Setting a small enamelware dish before Marcus, he murmured, “Herrings in wine sauce, my lord, courtesy of his Highness the Sevastos. They are excellent, he says.”

Recalling only too vividly his idle thought of the day before, Marcus looked down the table to Vardanes Sphrantzes. The Sevastos raised his glass in genial salute. Scaurus knew he had to take the dainty and yet could not forget the veiled look of menace he had seen in Sphrantzes’ eyes.

He sighed and ate. The herrings were delicious.

Alypia noticed his hesitation. “Anyone watching you would say you thought that your final meal,” she said.

Damn the observant woman! he thought, flushing. Would he never be able to tell her any truth? It certainly would not do here. “Your Majesty, I could not refuse the Sevastos’ gift, but I fear herring and my innards do not blend well. That was why I paused.” The tribune discovered he had only told half a lie. The spicy fish
were
making his stomach churn.

The princess blinked at his seeming frankness, then burst into laughter. If the Roman had seen the slit-eyed look Sphrantzes sent his way, he would have regretted the herrings all over again. That it might be
dangerous for a mercenary captain to make a princess of the blood laugh had not yet occurred to him.

Although the Sevastokrator Thorisin stayed to roister on, the Emperor and his daughter, having arrived late, left the banquet early. After their departure things grew livelier.

Two of the desert nomads, relegated to a far table by the insignificance of their tribes, found nothing better to do than quarrel with each other. One of them, a ferret-faced man with waxed mustaches, screamed a magnificent guttural oath and broke his winecup over his rival’s head. Others at the table pulled them apart before they could go for their knives.

“Disgraceful,” Taso Vones said. “Why can’t they leave their blood-feuds at home?”

Snatches of drunken song floated up throughout the Hall of the Nineteen Couches. Viridovix began wailing away in Gaulish, loud enough to make the crockery shiver. “If you can’t hit the damned notes, at least scare them as they go by,” Gaius Philippus growled. The Celt pretended not to hear him.

Several Khamorth were singing in the plains speech. Lifting his face from his cup, Gawtruz of Thatagush looked up owlishly and joined them.

“Disgraceful,” Taso said again; he, too, understood the plainsmen’s tongue. “You can’t have Khamorth at a feast without them getting sozzled and calling on all sorts of demons. Most of them follow Skotos in their hearts, you know; cleaving to the good is too dull to be tolerable.”

The wine was starting to go to the Roman’s head; he was losing track of how many times he had filled his goblet from the silver decanter in front of him. On his left, Katakolon Kekaumenos had left some time ago. Marcus did not miss him. The strait-laced northerner’s disapproving gaze could chill any gathering.

Viridovix was also gone, but not by himself. Scaurus could not remember if he’d left with the talkative brunette who’d sat beside him or the statuesque serving maid who had hovered over him all evening long. A bit jealous, the Roman took a long pull at his wine. His own contacts
with women tonight had been less than successful, from any point of view.

He climbed slowly to his feet, filling his glass one last time to keep him warm on the ten-minute walk back to the barracks. Vones stood too. “Let me accompany you,” he said. “I’d like to hear more about your leader—Kizar, was it? A fascinating man, from what you’ve told me.”

Marcus hardly remembered what he’d been saying, but Vones was good company. They made their way down toward the end of the imperial table. There someone had spilled something greasy on the mosaic floor; the tribune slipped, his arms waving wildly for balance. He kept his feet, but the wine he was carrying splattered the white robes of Yezd’s ambassador.

“I beg your pardon, my lord—” he began, then stopped, confused. “Your pardon twice—I do not know your name.”

“Do you not?” A fury the more terrible for being cold rode the Yezda’s words. He rose in one smooth motion, to tower over even the Roman’s inches. So thick was his veiling that his eyes were invisible, but Scaurus knew he was seen; the weight of that hidden gaze was like a blow. “Do you not, indeed? Then you may call me Avshahin.”

Taso Vones broke in with a nervous chuckle. “My lord Avshar is pleased to make a pun, calling himself ‘king’ in Videssos’ language and his own. Surely he will understand my friend meant no offense, but has seen the bottom of his winecup perhaps more often than he should—”

Avshar turned his unseen stare on the Khatrisher. “Little man, this does not concern you. Unless you would have it so …?” His voice was still smooth, but there was menace there, like freezing water under thin ice. Vones, pale, flinched and shook his head.