Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (13 page)

“Glad I am to see you,” Viridovix said, sweeping the pieces from the board. “Now I can tell our friend here ‘I would have got you in the end’ and there’s no way for him to make a liar of me.”

The tribune had seen how few of his own pieces the Celt had removed, and how many of Tzimiskes’. The Videssian had the game firmly controlled, and all three of them knew it—no, all four, if Apokavkos’ raised eyebrows meant anything.

Tzimiskes started to say something, but Viridovix interrupted him. “Where did you come by this scarecrow?” he asked, pointing at Apokavkos.

“There’s a bit of a story to that.” The Roman turned to Tzimiskes. “Neilos, I’m glad I found you. I want you to take charge of this fellow,” he named Apokavkos and introduced him to the other two, “feed him as much as he’ll hold, get him weapons—and clothes, too, for that matter. He’s our first honorary Roman. He—what is it? You look like you’re about to explode.”

“Scaurus, I’ll do everything you say, and you can tell me the wherefores later. The Emperor has been sending messengers here every hour on the hour since early this morning. Something to do with last night’s activities, I gather.”

“Oh.” That put a different light on matters. Whether or not he was a hero in the city, he realized the Emperor might have to take a dim view of one of his soldiers brawling with a neighboring land’s ambassador. “I wonder how much trouble I’m in. Phostis, go with Tzimiskes here. If I have to see the Emperor, I’d best get shaved”—He was still refusing to grow his beard.—“cleaned, and changed.”

The next imperial messenger arrived while Marcus was scraping the last whiskers from under his chin. He waited with ill-concealed impatience while the Roman bathed and donned a fresh mantle. “It’s about time,” he said when Marcus emerged, though he and the tribune both knew how quick the ablutions had been.

He led Scaurus past the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, past the looming Grand Courtroom with its incredible bronzework doors, past a two-story barracks complex—Namdaleni were wandering about here,
and Marcus looked for but did not see Hemond—and through a grove of cherry trees thick with sweet, pink blossoms to a secluded building deep within it—the private chambers of the imperial family, Marcus realized.

His worries lessened slightly. If Mavrikios was going to take strong action against him, he would do it publicly, so Yezd’s honor could be seen to be satisfied.

A pair of lazy-looking sentries, both Videssians, lounged by the entranceway of the private chambers. They had doffed their helmets so they could soak up the sun; the Videssians deemed a tanned, weathered look a mark of masculine, though not of feminine, beauty.

Scaurus’ guide must have been well-known to the guards, who did not offer even a token challenge as he led the tribune inside. It was not his job, though, to conduct Scaurus all the way to the Emperor. Just inside the threshold he was met by a fat chamberlain in a maroon linen robe with a pattern of golden cranes. The chamberlain looked inquiringly at the Roman.

“He’s the one, all right,” the messenger said. “Took long enough to find, didn’t he?” Without waiting for an answer, he was off on his next mission.

“Come with me, if you please,” the chamberlain said to Scaurus. His voice was more contralto than tenor, and his cheeks were beardless. Like many of the Videssian court functionaries, he was a eunuch. Marcus presumed this was for the same reason eunuchs were common in the oriental monarchies of his own world; being ineligible for the throne because of their castration, they were thought to be more trustworthy in close contact with the person of the ruler.

Like all such rules, the tribune knew, that one had its dreadful exceptions.

The long corridor down which the chamberlain led him was lit by translucent panes of alabaster set into the ceiling. The milky light dimmed and grew bright as clouds chased across the sun. It was, Marcus thought, a bit like seeing underwater.

And there was much to see. As was only natural, many of the finest gauds of a thousand years and more of empire were displayed for the pleasure of the Emperors themselves. The passageway was crowded with marble and bronze statuary, pottery breathtakingly graceful and painted
with elegant precision, busts and portraits of men Scaurus guessed to be bygone Emperors, religious images lavish with gold leaf and polished gems, a rearing stallion as big as Marcus’ hand that had to have been carved from a single emerald, and other marvels he did not really see because he had too much pride to swivel his head this way and that like a goatherd on holiday in the city. Even the floor was a bright mosaic of hunting and farming scenes.

In that company, the rusted, dented helmet on a pedestal of its own seemed jarringly out of place. “Why is this here?” he asked.

“That is the helmet of King Rishtaspa of Makuran—we would say ‘Yezd’ now—taken from his corpse by the Emperor Laskaris when he sacked Mashiz seven hundred and—let me think a moment—thirty-nine years ago. A most valiant warrior, Laskaris. The portrait above the helmet is his.”

The painting showed a stern-faced, iron-bearded man in late middle life. He wore gilded scale-mail, the imperial diadem, and the scarlet boots that marked the Emperors of Videssos, but for all that he looked more like a senior centurion than a ruler. His left hand was on the hilt of his sword; in his right was a lance. The spear carried a pennant of sky-blue, with Phos’ sun-symbol large on its field.

The chamberlain continued, “Laskaris forcibly converted all the heathen of Makuran to the true faith but, as Videssos proved unable to establish lasting rule over their land, they have relapsed into error.”

Marcus thought that over and liked none of his thoughts. War for the sake of religion was a notion that had not crossed his mind before. If the people of Makuran were as resolute about their faith as Videssians were for the worship of Phos, such a struggle would be uncommonly grim.

The eunuch was ushering him into a small, surprisingly spare chamber. It held a couch, a desk, a couple of chairs but, save for an image of Phos, was bare of the artwork crowding the hallway. The papers on the desk had been shoved to one side to make room for a plain earthen jug of wine and a plate of cakes.

Seated on the couch were the Emperor, his daughter Alypia, and a big-bellied man of about sixty whom Marcus had seen but not met the night before.

“If you will give me your sword, sir—” the chamberlain began, but Mavrikios interrupted him.

“Oh, run along, Mizizios. He’s not out for my head, not yet, anyway—he doesn’t know me well enough. And you needn’t stand there waiting for him to prostrate himself. It’s against his religion, or some such silly thing. Go on, out with you.”

Looking faintly scandalized, Mizizios disappeared.

Once he was gone, the Emperor waved a bemused Scaurus in. “I’m in private now, so I can ignore ceremony if I please—and I do please,” Gavras said. This was Thorisin’s brother after all; though Thorisin’s fiery impetuosity was banked in him, it did not fail to burn.

“You might tell him who I am,” the aging stranger suggested. He had an engagingly homely face; his beard was snow streaked with coal and reached nearly to his paunch. He looked like a scholar or a healer, but from his robes only one office could be his; he wore gem-strewn cloth-of-gold, with a large circle of blue silk on his left breast.

“So I might,” the Emperor agreed, taking no offense at his aggrieved tone. Here, plainly, were two men who had known and liked each other for years. “Outlander, this tub of lard is called Balsamon. When I took the throne I found him Patriarch of Videssos and I was fool enough to leave him on his seat.”

“Father!” Alypia said, but there was no heat in her complaint.

As he bowed, Marcus studied the patriarch’s features, looking for the fanaticism he had seen in Apsimar. He did not find it. Wisdom and mirth dominated Balsamon’s face; despite his years, the prelate’s brown eyes were still keen and among the shrewdest the tribune could recall.

“Bless you, my heathen friend,” he said. In his clear tenor the words were a friendly greeting with no trace of condescension. “And do sit down. I’m harmless, I assure you.”

Quite out of his depth, Marcus sank into a chair. “To business, then,” Gavras said, visibly reassuming part of his imperial dignity. He pointed an accusing finger at the Roman. “You are to know you are reprimanded for assaulting the ambassador of the Khagan of Yezd and offering him gross insult. You are fined a week’s pay. My daughter and the patriarch Balsamon are witnesses to this sentence.”

The tribune nodded, expressionless; this was what he had expected.
The Emperor’s finger dropped and a grin spread across his face. “Having said that, I’ll say something else—good for you! My brother came storming in here to wake me out of a sound sleep and show me every thrust and parry. Wulghash sent Avshar here as a calculated insult, and I’m not sorry to see his joke turn and bite him.”

He grew sober once more. “Yezd is a disease, not a nation, and I intend to wipe it from the face of the earth. Videssos and what was once Makuran have always fought—they to gain access to the Videssian Sea or the Sailors’ Sea, we to take their rich river valleys, and both sides to control the passes, the mines, and the fine fighting men of Vaspurakan between us. Over the centuries, I’d say, honors were evenly divided.”

Scaurus chewed on a cake as he listened. It was excellent, full of nuts and raisins and dusted over with cinammon, and went very well with the spiced wine in the jug. The tribune tried to forget the stale slop he’d drunk before, in the Videssian slums.

“Forty years ago, though,” the Emperor went on, “The Yezda from the steppe of Shaumkhiil sacked Mashiz, seized all of Makuran, and rammed their way through Vaspurakan into the Empire. They kill for the sport of it, steal what they can carry, and wreck what they can’t. And because they are nomads, they gleefully lay waste all the farmland they come across. Our peasants, from whom the Empire gets most of its taxes, are murdered or driven into destitution, and our western cities starve because no peasants are left to feed them.”

“Worse yet, the Yezda follow Skotos,” Balsamon said. When Marcus made no reply, the patriarch cocked a bushy gray eyebrow at him in sardonic amusement. “You think, perhaps, this is something I would be likely to say of anyone who does not share my creed? You must have seen enough of our priests to know most of them do not take kindly to unbelievers.”

Marcus shrugged, unwilling to commit himself. He had an uneasy feeling the patriarch was playing a game with him and an even more uncomfortable certainty that Balsamon was much the smarter.

The patriarch laughed at his noncommital response. He had a good laugh, inviting everyone within earshot to share the joke. “Mavrikios, it is a courtier, not a solider!”

His eyes still twinkling, he gave his attention back to the Roman. “I am not a typical priest, I fear. Time was when the Makurani gave reverence
to their Four Prophets, whose names I forget. I think their faith was wrong, I think it was foolish, but I do not think it damned them or made them impossible to treat with. The Yezda, though, worship their gods with disemboweled victims writhing on their altars and summon demons to glut themselves on the remains. They are a wicked folk and must be suppressed.” If anything convinced Marcus of the truth in Balsamon’s words, it was the real regret his voice bore … that, and the memory of Avshar’s chill voice, incanting as they fought.

“And suppress them I shall,” Mavrikios Gavras took up the discussion. In his vehemence he pounded right fist into left palm. “The first two years I held the throne, I fought them to a standstill on our borders. Last year, for one reason and another”—He did not elaborate and looked so grim that Marcus dared not ask for details.—“I could not campaign against them. We suffered for it, in raids and stings and torments. This year, Phos willing, I will be able to hire enough mercenaries to crush Yezd once and for all. I read your arrival here as a good omen for that, my proud friend from another world.”

He paused, awaiting the Roman’s reply. Scaurus recalled his first impression of this man, that giving him the truth served best. “I think,” he said carefully, “you would do better to restore the peasant militias you once had than to spend your coin on foreign troops.”

The Emperor stared, jaw dropping. Sneaking a glance at Balsamon, Marcus had the satisfaction of knowing he’d managed to startle the patriarch as well. The princess Alypia, on the other hand, who so far had held herself aloof from the conversation, looked at the tribune in appraisal and, he thought, growing approval.

The patriarch recovered before his sovereign. “Be glad this one is on your side, Gavras. He sees things clearly.”

Mavrikios was still shaking his head in wonder. He spoke not to Scaurus, but to Balsamon. “What is he? Two days in the city? Three? There are men who have been in the palaces longer than he’s been alive who cannot see that far. Tell me, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus”—It pleased but did not surprise the tribune that Gavras knew his full name—“how did you learn so much about our woes so quickly?”

Marcus explained how he had met Phostis Apokavkos. He did not mention the peasant-soldier’s name or what he had done about him.

By the time the Roman was done, the Emperor was angry. “May Phos fry all pen-pushers! Until I took the throne, the damned bureaucrats ruled the Empire for all but two years of the last fifty, in spite of everything the nobles in the provinces could do against them. They had the money to hire mercenaries and they held the capital, and that proved enough for the puppet-Emperors they raised to keep their seats. And to ruin their rivals in the power struggle, they turned our militiamen into serfs and taxed them to death so they couldn’t fight for their patrons. A plague on every one of them, from Vardanes Sphrantzes on down!”

“It’s not as simple as that, Father, and you know it very well,” Alypia said. “A hundred years ago the peasantry was really free, not bound to our nobles. When magnates began buying up peasant land and making the farmers their dependents, it cost the central government dear. Would any Emperor, no matter how simple, want private armies raised against him, or want to see the taxes rightfully his siphoned into the hands of men who dream of the throne themselves?”