Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (59 page)

“And to you, Tatikios,” Marcus replied, wiping his feet on the rushes strewn inside the doorway. Tornikes beamed at him—the taverner was a stickler for cleanliness.

Scaurus liked the Dancing Wolf and its owner. So did most of his men. The only complaint he’d heard came from Viridovix: “May his upper lip go bald.”

The Celt had reason for envy. Going against usual Videssian fashion, Tatikios shaved his chin, but his mustachios more than made up for it. Coal-black as his hair, they swept out and up; the taverner waxed them into spiked perfection every day.

The tribune and Nepos, glad of the roaring fire Tatikios had going, sat down at a table next to it. A serving girl moved out from behind the bar to ask what they cared for.

Staring into the flames, Marcus hardly noticed her come up. His head jerked around as he recognized her voice. Someone had told him Damaris was working at the Dancing Wolf, he realized, but this was the first time he’d seen her here.

He frowned a little; for his money, Quintus Glabrio was well rid of the hellcat. Today, though, he felt too good to be petty. “Mulled wine, nice and hot,” he said. Nepos echoed him.

His nose twitched at the spicy scent. The handleless yellow cup stung his hands as he picked it up. The Dancing Wolf did things right. “Ahhh,” he said, savoring the hot cinnamon bite on his tongue. The wine slid down his throat, smooth as honey.

“That calls for another,” he said when the cup was empty, and Nepos nodded. Now that they were warmed inside and out, they could savor the second round at leisure. He waved for Damaris.

While she heated the wine, Tatikios wandered over to their table.
“What’s the news?” he asked. Like every taverner, he liked to be on top of things. Unlike some, he did not try to hide it.

“Precious little, and I wish I had more,” the tribune answered.

Tornikes laughed. “I wish I did, too. Things get slow, once winter sets in.” He went back behind the bar, ran a rag over its already gleaming surface.

“I wasn’t joking, you know,” Marcus said to Nepos. “I wish Senpat and Nevrat would get back with word of Thorisin Gavras, whether good or ill. Not knowing where we stand is hard to bear.”

“Oh, indeed, indeed. But friend Tatikios was perhaps lighter than he knew—everything moves slowly in the snow, the Vaspurakaners no less than other men.”

“Less than the nomads,” Scaurus retorted. He shook his head, smiled wryly. “I worry too much, I know. Likely the two of them are holed up in some distant cousin’s keep, making love in front of a fire just like this one.”

“A pleasant enough way to pass the time,” Nepos chuckled. Like all Videssian priests, he was celibate, but he did not begrudge others the pleasures of the flesh.

“It’s not what I sent them out for,” Marcus said, a little stiffly.

Carrying an enameled tray in one hand, Damaris took two steaming cups from it and set them down. “Why should you fuss over a man lying with a woman?” she said to Scaurus. “You’re used to worse than that.”

The tribune paused with the hot cup halfway to his mouth. His right eyebrow arched toward his hairline. “What might that mean?”

“Surely you don’t need me to draw you pretty pictures,” she said. The undertone in her voice sent a chill through him, crackling flames and warm wine notwithstanding.

Malice leaped into her eyes as she saw his confusion. “A man who uses a woman as he would a boy would sooner have a boy … or be one.” Wine slopped in Marcus’ cup as he grasped her meaning. She drove the knife home: “I hear my sweet Quintus has taken no new lover these past weeks—or has he?” Her laugh was vicious.

The tribune looked Damaris in the eye. The vindictive smile froze on her face. “How long have you been putting this filth about?” he asked. His voice might have been one of the winter winds gusting outside.

“Filth? This is true, it is—” As it had so often in arguments with Quintus Glabrio, her voice began to rise. Heads all round the tavern turned toward her.

But Scaurus was not Glabrio. He cut in: “If the slime you wallow in spreads widely, it will be the worse for you. Do you understand?” The quiet, evenly spaced words reached her when a shouted threat might have been ignored. She nodded, a quick, frightened movement.

“Good enough,” the tribune said. He finished his wine at leisure and held up his end of the conversation with Nepos. When they were both done, he pulled coppers from his belt-pouch, tossed them on the table, and strode out, Nepos at his side.

“That was well done,” the priest said as they walked back toward the Roman camp. “No rancor matches a former lover’s.”

“Too true,” Marcus agreed. A sudden, biting breeze blew snow into his face. “Damn, it’s cold,” he said, and pulled his cape up over his mouth and nose. He was not sorry for the excuse to keep still.

Once inside the ramparts of the camp, he separated from Nepos to attend to some business or other. He did not remember what it was five minutes later; he had other things on his mind.

He feared Damaris was not simply letting her spite run free, but had truth behind her slurs. Frightening her into silence was easier than quieting his own mind afterward. The charge she hissed out fit only too well with too much else he had noticed without thinking about.

The whole camp knew—thanks to Damaris and that shrill screech of hers—more about Glabrio’s choice of pleasures than was anyone’s business. In itself that might mean anything or nothing. But the junior centurion was sharing quarters with Gorgidas now, and the physician, as far as Scaurus knew, had no use for women. Recalling how nervous Gorgidas had seemed when he said he and Glabrio were joining forces, Marcus suddenly saw a new reason for the doctor’s hesitancy.

The tribune’s hands curled into fists. Of all his men, why these two, two of the ablest and sharpest, and two of his closest friends as well? He thought of the
fustuarium
, the Roman army’s punishment for those who, in their full manhood, bedded other men.

He had seen a
fustuarium
once in Gaul, on that occasion for an inveterate thief. The culprit was dragged into the center of camp and
tapped with an officer’s staff. After that he was fair game; his comrades fell on him with clubs, stones, and fists. If lucky, condemned men died at once.

Marcus visualized Gorgidas and Quintus Glabrio suffering such a fate and flinched away in horror from his vision. Easiest, of course, would be to forget what he had heard from Damaris and trust her fear of him to keep her quiet. Or so he thought, until he tried to dismiss her words. The more he tried to shove them away, the louder they echoed, distracting him, putting a raw edge to everything around him. He barked at Gaius Philippus for nothing, swatted Malric when he would not stop singing the same song over and over. The tears which followed did nothing to sweeten Scaurus’ disposition.

While Helvis comforted her son and looked angrily at the tribune, he snatched up a heavy cloak and went out into the night, muttering, “There are some things I have to deal with.” He closed the door on her beginning protest.

Stars snapped in the blue-black winter sky. Marcus still found their patterns alien and still attached to the groupings the names his legionaries had given them more than a year ago. There was the Locust, there the Ballista, and there, low in the west now, the Pederasts. Scaurus shook his head and walked on, sandals soundless on snow and soft ground.

Like most cabins, the one Glabrio and Gorgidas shared was shut tight against the night’s chill. Wooden shutters covered its windows, the spaces between their slats chinked tight with cloth to ward off the freezing wind. Only firefly gleams of lamplight peeped through to hint that the thatch-roofed hut was occupied.

The tribune stood in front of the door, his hand upraised to knock. He bethought himself of the Sacred Band of Thebes, of the hundred fifty pairs of lovers who had fought to their deaths at Chaeronea against Macedón’s Philip and Alexander. His hand did not fall. These were not Thebans he led.

But he hesitated still, unable to bring his fist forward. Through the thin walls of the cabin, he heard the junior centurion and the physician talking. Though their words were muffled, they sounded altogether at ease with each other. Gorgidas said something short and sharp, and Glabrio laughed at him.

As Marcus stood in indecision, the image of Gaius Philippus rose unbidden to his mind. The senior centurion was talking to him just after he brought Helvis back to the barracks: “No one will care if you bed a woman, a boy, or a purple sheep, so long as you think with your head and not with your crotch.”

Where dead Greek heroes had not stayed his hand, a Roman’s homely advice did. If ever two men lived up to Gaius Philippus’ standard, they were the two inside. Scaurus slowly walked back to his own hut, at peace with himself at last.

He heard a door open behind him, heard Quintus Glabrio call softly, “Is someone there?” By then the tribune was around the corner. The door closed again.

On his return, Scaurus took the scolding he got as one who deserves it, which only seemed to irk Helvis more; sometimes acceptance of blame is the last thing anger wants. But if absentminded, the tribune’s apologies were genuine, and after a while Helvis subsided.

Malric took his undeserved punishment in stride, Marcus was thankful to see; he played with his adopted son until the boy grew drowsy.

The tribune was almost asleep himself when he happened to recall something he was sure he had forgotten: the name of the founder of Thebes’ Sacred Band. It was Gorgidas.

During the winter, Aptos’ sheltered valley learned but slowly what passed in the world outside. News of Amorion came, of all things, from a fugitive band of Yezda. The nomads, after a quick reconnaissance, had decided the town was a tempting target. It had no wall, was empty of imperial troops, and should make easy meat.

The Yezda suffered a rude awakening. Zemarkhos’ irregulars, blooded in the Vaspurakaner pogrom, sent the invaders reeling off in defeat—and what they did to the men they caught made it hard to choose between their savagery and the Yezda’s.

After listening to the tale spun by the handful of half-frozen nomads, Gagik Bagratouni rumbled low in his throat, “Here is something in my life new: to tenderness feel toward Yezda. I would much give, to see
Amorion burn, and Zemarkhos in it.” His great, scarred hands gripped empty air; the brooding glow in his eyes gave him the aspect of a lion denied its prey.

Scaurus understood his vengefulness and took it as a good sign; time was beginning to heal the Vaspurakaner lord. Yet the tribune did not altogether agree with Bagratouni. In this winter of imperial weakness, any obstacle against the Yezda was worth something. Zemarkhos and his fanatics were a nasty boil on the body of Videssos, but the invaders were the plague.

Near midwinter day, an armed party of merchants made its way northwest from Amorion to Aptos, braving weather and the risk of attack in hope of reaping higher profits in a town where their kind seldom came. So it proved. Their stocks of spices, perfumes, fine brocades, and elaborately chased brass-work vessels from the capital sold at prices better than they could have realized in a city on a more traveled route.

Their leader, a muscular, craggy-faced fellow who looked more soldier than trader, contented himself with remarking, “Aye, we’ve done worse.” Even with his double handful of guardsmen close by, he would not say more. Too many mercenary companies made a sport of robbing merchants.

He and his comrades were more forthcoming on other matters, sharing with anyone who cared to listen the news they had picked up on their travels. To his surprise, Marcus learned Baanes Onomagoulos still lived. The Videssian general had been badly wounded just before Maragha. Till now, Scaurus had assumed he’d perished, either of his wounds or in the pursuit after the battle.

But if rumor was to be trusted, Onomagoulos had escaped. Some sort of army under his command beat back a Yezda raid on the southern town of Kybistra, near the headwaters of the Arandos River.

“Good for him, if it’s true,” was Gaius Philippus’ comment, “but the yarn came a long way before it ever got to us. Likely as not, he’s ravens’ meat himself, or else was a hundred miles away bedded down with something lively to keep the cold away. Good for him if that’s true, too.” He sounded wistful, as odd from him as diffidence from Gorgidas.

Like towns all through the Empire, Aptos celebrated the days after the winter solstice, when the sun at last turned north again. Bonfires
burned in front of homes and shops; people jumped over them for luck. Men danced in the streets in women’s clothing, and women dressed as men. The local abbot brought his monks down through the marketplace, wooden swords in hand, to burlesque soldiers. Tatikios Tornikes turned the tables by leading a dozen shopkeepers in a wicked parody of fat, drunken monks.

Aptos’ celebration was rowdier than the one the Romans had seen the year before in Imbros. The latter was a real city and tried to ape the sophisticated ways of Videssos the capital. Aptos simply celebrated, and cared not a fig for the figure it cut.

The town had no theater or professional mime troupe. The locals put on skits in the streets, making up with exuberance what they lacked in polish. Like the ones at Imbros, their sketches were topical and irreverent. Tatikios did a quick change with one of the monks and came out dressed as a soldier. The rusty old mail shirt he had squeezed into was so tight it threatened to burst every time he moved. Marcus took a while to recognize his headgear. It might have been intended for a Roman helmet, but the crest ran from ear to ear instead of front to back—

Beside him, Viridovix chortled. Gaius Philippus’ jaw was tightly clenched. “Oh, oh,” Marcus muttered. The senior centurion wore a transversely crested helm to show his rank.

Tatikios had eyes only for a tall, fuzzy-bearded man who wore a fancy gown much like one Nerse Phorkaina was fond of. Every time the mock-noblewoman looked his way, though, he pulled his cloak over his eyes, shivering with fright.

“I’ll kill that whoreson,” Gaius Philippus ground out. His hand was on the hilt of his
gladius;
he did not sound as though he was joking.