Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (11 page)

“Good.” The Yezda dealt Marcus a tremendous roundhouse buffet, sending him lurching back with blood starting from the corner of his mouth. “Dog! Swine! Vile, crawling insect! Is it not enough I must dwell in this city of my foes? Must I also be subject to the insults of Videssos’ slaves? Jackal of a mercenary, it shall be your privilege to choose the weapon that will be your death.”

The feasting hall grew still. All eyes were on the Roman, who abruptly understood Avshar’s challenge. In an odd way he was thankful the Yezda had struck him; the blow and the rage that followed were burning the
wine from his blood. He was surprised at the steadiness of his voice as he answered, “You know as well as I, I spilled my wine on you by accident. But if you must take it further, sword and shield will do well enough.”

Avshar threw back his head and laughed, a sound colder and more cruel than any of the winter blizzards that had howled down on Imbros. “So be it—your doom from your own mouth you have spoken. Mebod!” he shouted, and a frightened-looking Yezda servant appeared at his side. “Fetch my gear from my chambers.” He gave the Roman a mocking bow. “The Videssians, you see, would not take it kindly if one who bears them no love were to come armed to a function where their precious Emperor was present.”

Taso Vones was plucking at Scaurus’ arm. “Have you lost your wits? That is the deadliest swordsman I have ever seen, the winner in a score of duels, and a sorcerer besides. Crave his forgiveness now, before he cuts a second mouth in your throat!”

“I asked his pardon once, but he hardly seems in a forgiving mood. Besides,” Marcus said, thinking of the potent blade at his side, “I may know something he doesn’t.”

Gaius Philippus was so drunk he could hardly stand, but he still saw with a fighting man’s knowledge. “The big son of a pimp will likely try to use his reach to chop you to bits from farther out than you can fight back. Get inside and let the air out of him.”

Marcus nodded; he had been thinking along those lines himself. “Send someone after my shield, will you?”

“Adiatun is already on his way.”

“Fine.”

While everyone waited for the fighters’ gear to be fetched, a double handful of high-ranking officers, like so many servants, shoved tables around, clearing a space for combat.

Wagers flew thick and fast. From the shouts, Marcus knew he was the underdog. He was pleased, though, when he heard Helvis’ clear contralto announce, “Three pieces of gold on the Roman!” Gawtruz of Thatagush covered her bet.

The Sevastokrator Thorisin Gavras called to Vardanes Sphrantzes, “Whom do you like, seal-stamper?”

The dislike on the Sevastos’ face covered Gavras, Avshar, and Scaurus
impartially. He rubbed his neatly bearded chin. “Though it grieves me to say so, I think it all too likely the Yezda will win.”

“Are you a hundred goldpieces sure?”

Sphrantzes hesitated again, then nodded. “Done!” Thorisin exclaimed. Marcus was glad to have the Sevastokrator’s backing, but knew the Emperor’s brother would have been as quick to favor Avshar if Sphrantzes had chosen him.

A cry rang out when the Yezda ambassador’s servant returned with his master’s arms. Marcus was surprised that Avshar favored a long, straight sword, not the usual scimitar of the westerners. His shield was round, with a spiked boss. The emblem of Yezd, a leaping panther, was painted on a background the color of dried blood.

Moments later, Adiatun was back with the tribune’s
scutum
. “Cut him into crowbait,” he said, slapping Scaurus on the shouder.

The Roman was drawing his blade when something else occurred to him. He asked Taso Vones, “Will Avshar not want me to shed my cuirass?”

Vones shook his head. “It’s common knowledge he wears mail himself, under those robes. He’s not the envoy of a friendly country, you know.”

Marcus spent a last second wishing he had not drunk so much. He wondered how much wine was in Avshar. Then it was too late for such worries. There was only a circle of eager, watching faces, with him and the Yezda in the middle of it—and then he forgot the watchers, too, as Avshar leaped forward to cut him down.

For a man so tall, he was devilishly quick, and strong in the bargain. Marcus caught the first slash on his shield and staggered under it, wondering if his arm was broken. He thrust up at Avshar’s unseen face. The Yezda danced back, then came on again with another overhand cut.

He seemed to have as many arms as a spider and a sword in every hand. Within moments Marcus had a cut high up on his sword arm and another, luckily not deep, just above the top of his right greave. His shield was notched and hacked. Avshar wielded his heavy blade like a switch.

Fighting down desperation, Marcus struck back. Avshar turned the blow with his shield. It did not burst as the Roman had hoped, but at the contact Avshar gave back two startled paces. He swung his blade up in
derisive salute. “You have a strong blade, runagate, but there are spells of proof against such.”

Yet he fought more cautiously after that and, as the hard work of combat helped banish the wine from Scaurus’ system, the Roman grew surer and more confident of himself. He began to press forward, blade flicking out now high, now low, with Avshar yielding ground step by stubborn step.

The Yezda, who had kept silent while all around him voices rose in song, began to chant. He sang in some dark language, strong, harsh, and freezing, worse even than his laugh. The torchlight dimmed and almost died in a web of darkness spinning up before Marcus’ eyes.

But along the length of the Roman’s blade, the druids’ marks flared hot and gold, turning aside the spell the wizard had hurled. Scaurus parried a stroke at his face.

The episode could only have taken an instant, for even as he was evading the blow, a woman in the crowd—he thought it was Helvis—called out, “No ensorcelments!”

“Bah! None are needed against such a worm as this!” Avshar snarled, but he chanted no further. And now the tribune had his measure. One of his cuts sheared away the tip of Avshar’s shield-boss. The Yezda envoy’s robes grew tattered, and red with more than wine.

Screaming in frustrated rage, Avshar threw himself at the Roman in a last bid to overpower his enemy by brute force. It was like standing up under a whirlwind of steel, but in his wrath the Yezda grew careless, and Marcus saw his moment come at last.

He feinted against Avshar’s face, then thrust quickly at his belly. The Yezda brought his blade down to cover, only to see, too late, that this too was a feint. The Roman’s sword hurtled at his temple. The parry he began was far too slow, but in avoiding it, Scaurus had to turn his wrist slightly. Thus the flat of his blade, not the edge, slammed into the side of Avshar’s head.

The Yezda tottered like a lightning-struck tree, then toppled, his sword falling beside him. Scaurus took a step forward to finish him, then shook his head. “Killing a stunned man is butcher’s work,” he said. “The quarrel was his with me, not mine with him.” He slid his blade back into its scabbard.

In his exhaustion afterwards, he only remembered a few pieces of flotsam from the flood of congratulations that washed over him. Gaius Philippus’ comment was, as usual, short and to the point. “That is a bad one,” he said as Avshar, leaning on his servant, staggered from the hall, “and you should have nailed him when you had the chance.”

Her winnings ringing in her hand, Helvis squeezed and kissed the tribune while Hemond pounded his back and shouted drunkenly in his ear.

And Taso Vones, though glad to see Avshar humbled, also had a word of warning. “I suppose,” the mousy little man from Khatrish grumbled, “now you think you could storm Mashiz singlehanded and have all the maidens from here to there fall into your arms.”

Marcus’ mind turned briefly to Helvis, but Vones was still talking. “Don’t you believe it!” he said. “A few years ago Avshar was leading a raiding-party along the western marches of Videssos, and a noble named Mourtzouphlos handled him very roughly indeed. The next spring, the biggest snake anyone in those parts had ever seen swallowed Mourtzouphlos down.”

“Happenstance,” Marcus said uneasily.

“Well, maybe so, but the Yezda’s arm is long. A word to the wise, let us say.” And he was off, brushing a bit of lint from the sleeve of his brown robe as if amazed anyone could think there was a connection between himself and this outlander rash enough to best Avshar.

W
HEN HE RETURNED FOR
M
ARCUS
’
SHIELD
, A
DIATUN MUST HAVE
wakened the Romans in their barracks. Torches were blazing through the windows, everyone was up and stirring, and by the time Marcus got back to his quarters a good score of legionaries were fully armed and ready to avenge him.

“You don’t show much confidence in your commander,” he told them, trying to hide how pleased he was. They gave him a rousing cheer, then crowded close, asking for details of the duel. He told the story as best he could, peeling off his belt, corselet, and greaves while he talked. Finally he could not keep his sagging eyelids open any longer.

Gaius Philippus stepped into the breach. “That’s the nub of it. The rest you can all hear in the morning—early in the morning,” he half threatened. “There’s been nothing but shirking the past couple of days while we’ve got settled, but don’t get the notion you can make a habit of it.”

As the centurion had known it would, his announcement roused a chorus of boos and groans, but it also freed Scaurus from further questions. Torches hissed as they were quenched. The tribune, crawling under a thick woolen blanket, was as glad of sleep as ever he had been in his life.

It seemed only seconds later when he was shaken awake, but the apricot light of dawn streamed through the windows. Eyes still blurred with sleep, he saw Viridovix, looking angry, crouched above him. “Bad cess to you, southron without a heart!” the Gaul exclaimed.

Marcus raised himself onto one elbow. “What have I done to you?” he croaked. Someone, he noted with clinical detachment, had raced a herd of goats through his mouth.

“What have you done, man? Are you daft? The prettiest bit of fighting since we came here, and me not there to see it! Why did you not send
a body after me so I could watch the shindy my own self and not hear about it second hand?”

Scaurus sat up gingerly. While he had made no real plans for the morning, he had not intended to spend the time pacifying an irate Celt. “In the first place,” he pointed out, “I had no notion where you were. You had left some little while before I fell foul of Avshar. Besides, unless I misremember, you didn’t leave alone.”

“Och, she was a cold and clumsy wench, for all her fine chest.” It had been the serving maid, then. “But that’s not the point at all, at all. There’s always lassies to be found, but a good fight, now, is something else again.”

Marcus stared at him, realizing Viridovix was serious. He shook his head in bewilderment. He could not understand the Celt’s attitude. True, some Romans had a taste for blood, but to most of them—himself included—fighting was something to be done when necessary and finished as quickly as possible. “You’re a strange man, Viridovix,” he said at last.

“If you were looking through my eyes, sure and you’d find yourself a mite funny-looking. There was a Greek once passed through my lands, a few years before you Romans—to whom it doesn’t belong at all—decided to take it away. He was mad to see the way things worked, was this Greek. He had a clockwork with him, a marvelous thing with gears and pullies and I don’t know what all, and he was always tinkering with it to make it work just so. You’re a bit like that yourself sometimes, only you do it with people. If you don’t understand them, why then you think it’s them that’s wrong, not you, and won’t have a bit to do with them.”

“Hmm.” Marcus considered that and decided there was probably some justice to it. “What happened to your Greek?”

“I was hoping you’d ask that,” Viridovix said with a grin. “He was sitting under an old dead tree, playing with his clockwork peaceful as you please, when a branch he’d been ignoring came down on his puir foolish head and squashed him so flat we had to bury the corp of him between two doors, poor lad. Have a care the same doesn’t befall you.”

“A plague take you! If you’re going to tell stories with morals in them, you can start wearing a blue robe. A bloodthirsty Celt I’ll tolerate, but the gods deliver me from a preaching one!”

After his work of the previous night, the tribune told himself he was entitled to leave the morning drills to Gaius Philippus. The brief glimpse of Videssos the city he’d had a few days before had whetted his appetite for more. This was a bigger, livelier, more brawling town even than Rome. He wanted to taste its life, instead of seeing it frozen as he tramped by on parade.

Seabirds whirled and mewed overhead as he left the elegant quiet of the imperial quarter for the hurly-burly of the forum of Palamas, the great square named for an Emperor nine centuries dead. At its center stood the Milestone, a column of red granite from which distances throughout the Empire were reckoned. At the column’s base two heads, nearly fleshless from the passage of time and the attentions of scavengers, were displayed on pikes. Plaques beneath them set forth the crimes they had plotted while alive. Marcus’ knowledge of Videssos’ written language was still imperfect, but after some puzzling he gathered the miscreants had been rebellious generals with the further effrontery to seek aid for their revolt from Yezd. Their present perches, he decided, were nothing less than they deserved.