Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (66 page)

He spoke with the same determination he might have shown when facing a difficult case, but Marcus saw he had not impressed Gaius Philippus. What happened after his own end was of no concern to the senior centurion. He sensed, however, that he had chaffed Gorgidas about as much as he could. In his rough way he was fond of the doctor, so he shrugged and gave up the argument, saying, “All this gabbing is a waste of time. I’d best go drill the men; they’re fat and lazy enough as is.” He strode off, still shaking his head.

“The Videssians will be interested in your work, I think,” Marcus said to Gorgidas. “They have historians of their own; I remember Alypia Gavra saying she read them, and I think—though I’m not sure—she might have been taking notes for a book of her own. Why else would she have been at Mavrikios’ council of war?” Something else occurred to the tribune. “She might be able to help you get yours translated.”

He saw gratitude flicker in the doctor’s eyes, but Gorgidas was prickly as always. “Aye, so she might—were she not on the far side of the Cattle-Crossing, married to the wrong Emperor. But who are we to boggle at such trivia?”

“All right, all right, your point’s made. I tell you this, though—if Alypia were on the far side of the moon, I’d still want to see that history of yours.”

“That’s right, you read some Greek, don’t you? I’d forgotten that.” Gorgidas sighed, said ruefully, “Truly, Scaurus, one reason I started the thing in the first place was to keep myself from losing my letters. The gods know I’m no, ah, what’s-his-name?” The physician’s chuckle had a hollow ring. “But I find I can put together understandable sentences.”

“I’d like to see what you’ve done,” Scaurus said, and meant it. He had always found history, with its dispassionate approach, a more reliable
guide to the conduct of affairs than the orators’ high-flown rhetoric. Thucydides or Polybios was worth twenty of Demosthenes, who sold his tongue like a woman her virtue and sometimes composed speeches for prosecution and defense in the same case.

Gorgidas broke into his musing. “Speaking of Alypia and the Cattle-Crossing,” he said, “did Gavras say anything of how he planned to pass it by? I’m not asking as a historian now, you understand, merely as someone with certain objections to being killed out of hand.”

“I have a few of those myself,” Marcus admitted. “No, I don’t know what’s in his mind.” Still thinking in classical terms, he went on, “Whatever it is, it may well work. Thorisin is like Odysseus—he’s
sophron
.”

“
Sophron
, eh?” Gorgidas said. “Well, let’s hope you’re right.” The Greek word meant not so much having superior wits but getting the most distance from those one had. Gorgidas was not so sure it fit Gavras, but he thought it a fine description for Scaurus himself.

Black-capped terns wheeled and dipped, screeching their disapproval at the armed men scrambling down a splintery ladder into the waist of a fishing boat that had seen better days. “A pox on you, louse-bitten sea crows!” Viridovix shouted up at them, shaking his fist. “I like the notion no better than yourselves.”

All along the docks and beaches of Videssos’ western suburbs, troops were boarding by squads and platoons as motley a fleet as Marcus had ever imagined. Three or four grain carriers, able to embark a whole company, formed the backbone of Thorisin Gavras’ makeshift armada. There were fishing craft aplenty; those the eye could not pick out at once were immediately obvious to the nose. There were smugglers’ boats, with great spreads of canvas and lines greyhound-lean. There were little sponge-divers’ vessels, some hardly more than rowboats, with masts no thicker than a spearshaft. There were keel-less barges taken from the river trade; how they would act on the open sea was anyone’s bet. And there were a great many ships whose functions the tribune, no more nautical than most Romans, could not hope to guess.

He helped Nepos down onto the fishing boat’s deck. “I thank you,” the priest said. Nepos sagged against the boat’s raised cabin. Timbers
creaked under his weight, but he made no move to stand free. “Merciful Phos, but I’m tired,” he said. His eyes were still merry, but there were dark circles under them and his words came slowly, as if getting each one out took effort.

“Well you might be,” Scaurus answered. Aided by three other sorcerers, the priest had spent the past two and a half weeks weaving spells round the odd assortment of boats Thorisin had gathered from up and down the western coastlands. Most of the work had fallen on Nepos’ shoulders, for he held a chair in sorcery at the Videssian Academy in the capital while his colleagues were local wizards without outstanding talent. At its easiest, sorcery was as exhausting as hard labor; what the priest had accomplished was hardly sorcery at its easiest.

Gorgidas descended, graceful as a cat; a moment later Gaius Philippus came down beside him, planting himself on the gently rocking deck as if daring it to shake him.

“Viridovix!” It was a soft hail from the next boat down the dock, a lateen-rigged fishing craft even smaller and grubbier than the one the Celt was sharing with the Roman officers.

“Aye, Bagratouni?” Viridovix called. “Is your honor glad to be on the ocean, now?” Coming from landlocked Vaspurakan, Gagik Bagratouni had professed regret that he knew nothing of the sea.

The
nakharar
’s leonine features were distinctly green. “Does always it move about so?” he asked.

“Bad cess to you for reminding me,” Viridovix said, gulping.

“Use the rail, not my deck,” warned the fishing boat’s captain, a thin, dark, middle-aged man with hair and beard sun- and sea-bleached to the grayish-yellow color of his boat’s planking. The Gaul’s misery mystified him. How could a man be sick on an all but motionless boat?

“If my stomach decides to come up, now, I’ll use whatever’s underneath me, and that without a by-your-leave,” Viridovix said, but in Latin, not Videssian.

“What now?” Marcus asked Nepos, waving out to the patrolling galleys, their broad sails like sharks’ fins. “Shall we be invisible to them, like the Yezda for a few moments during the great battle?” He still sweat cold every time he thought of that, though Videssian sorcerers had quickly worked counterspells that brought the nomads back into sight.

“No, no.” The priest managed to sound impatient and weary at the same time. “That spell is all very well against folk with no magic of their own, but if any opposing wizard is nearby one might just as well light a bonfire at the bow of the boat.” The captain’s head whipped round; he wanted no talk of bonfires aboard his ship.

Nepos continued, “Besides, the invisibility spell is easy to overcome, and if it were broken with us on the sea, the slaughter would be terrible. We are using a subtler measure, one crafted in the Academy last year. We will, in fact, be in full sight of the galleys all the way to the eastern shore of the Cattle-Crossing.”

“Where’s the magic in that?” Gaius Philippus demanded. “I could swim out there and accomplish as much, though I’d have little joy of it.”

“Patience, I pray you,” Nepos said. “Let me finish. Though we’ll be in plain sight of the foe, he will not see us. That is the artistry; his eye will slide over us, look past us, but never light on us.”

“I see,” the senior centurion said approvingly. “It’ll be like when I’m hunting partridges and walk past one without ever noticing it because its colors blend into the brush and woods where it’s hiding.”

“Something like that,” Nepos nodded. “Though there’s rather more to it. We don’t blend into the ocean, you know. The eye, yes, and the ear as well, have to be tricked away from us by magic, not simple camouflage. But it’s a gentler magic than the invisibility spell and nearly impossible to detect unless a wizard already knows it’s there.”

“There’s the signal now,” the fishing captain said. Thorisin Gavras’ flagship, a rakish smugglers’ vessel almost big enough to challenge one of Ortaias’ warcraft, was flying the sky-blue Videssian imperial pennant. The steady northwesterly breeze whipped it out straight, showing Phos’ sun bright in its center.

A sailor undid the mooring lines that held the fishing boat to the dock at stern and bow, tossed them aboard, and leaped nimbly down into the boat. At the captain’s quick orders, his four-man crew unreefed the single square-rigged sail. The sailcloth was old, sagging, and much patched, but it held the wind. Pitching slightly in the light chop, the boat slid out into the Cattle-Crossing.

Scaurus led his companions to the bow, both to be out of the sailors’ way and to see what lay ahead. The western part of the channel was as
full of boats as an unwashed dog with fleas, but not one of the biremes ahead paid them the slightest heed. So far, at least, Nepos’ magic held. “What will you do if your spell should fail in mid-crossing?” Marcus asked the priest.

“Pray,” Nepos said shortly, “for we are undone.” But seeing it was a question seriously meant and not asked only to vex him, he added, “There would be little else I could do; it’s a complex magic, and not one easily laid on.”

As always, Viridovix was lost in a private anguish from the moment the little fishing boat began to move. Knuckles white beneath freckles from the desperation of his grip, he clutched the boat’s rail, leaning over it as far as he could. Gaius Philippus, who did not suffer from seasickness, said to Nepos, “Tell me, priest, is your conjuring proof against the sound of puking?”

On firm ground such sarcasm would have sparked a quarrel with the Celt, but he only moaned and held on tighter. Then he suddenly straightened, amazement ousting distress. “What was that, now?” he exclaimed, pointing down into the water. The others followed his finger, but there was nothing to see but the cyan-blue ocean with its tracing of lacy white foam.

“There’s another!” Viridovix said. Not far from the boat, a smooth, silver-scaled shape flicked itself into the air, to glide for fifty yards before dropping back into the sea. “What manner of fairy might it be, and what’s the meaning of it? Is the seeing of it a good omen, or foul?”

“You mean the flying fish?” Gorgidas asked in surprise. Children of the warm Mediterranean, he and the Romans took the little creatures for granted, but they were unknown in the cool waters of the northern ocean that was the only sea the Gaul knew.

And because they were so far removed from anything he had imagined, Viridovix would not believe his friends’ insistence that these were but another kind of fish, not even when Nepos joined his assurances to theirs. “The lot of you are thinking to befool me,” he said, “and rare cruel y’are, too, with me so sick and all.” His bodily woes only served to make him ugly; his voice was petulant and full of hostility.

“Oh, for the—!” Gaius Philippus said in exasperation. “Bloody fool
of a Celt!” Flying fish were skipping all around the boat now, perhaps fleeing some maruading albacore or tuna. One, more intrepid but less lucky than its fellows, landed on the deck almost at the centurion’s feet. As it flopped on the planks, he took his dagger, still sheathed, from his belt and, reversing the weapon, struck the fish smartly behind the head with the pommel.

He picked up the foot-long, broken-backed fish and handed it to the Gaul. The broad gliding fins hung limply; already the golden eyes were dimming, the ocean-blue back and silver belly losing their living sheen and fading toward death’s gray. “You killed it,” Viridovix said in dismay, and threw it back into the sea.

“More foolishness,” the centurion said. “They’re fine eating, butterflied and fried.” But Viridovix, still distressed, shook his head; he had seen a dream die, not a fish, and to think of it as food was beyond him.

“You should be grateful,” Gorgidas observed. “With your interest in the flying fish, you’ve forgotten your seasickness.”

“Why, indeed and I have,” the Celt said, surprised. His quick-rising spirits brought a grin to his face. Just then a wave a trifle bigger than most slapped against the fishing boat’s bow. The light craft rolled gently and Viridovix, eyes bulging and cheeks pale with nausea, had to seek the rail once more. “Be damned to you for making me remember,” he choked out between heaves.

Some of Thorisin’s boats were by the patrolling galleys now, and still no sign they had been seen. As it sailed toward the agreed-upon landing point a couple of miles south of the capital, the vessel Marcus rode passed within a hundred yards of a warship of the Sphrantzai.

Spell-protected or not, it was a nervous moment. The tribune could clearly read the name painted in gold on the ship’s bow:
Corsair Breaker
. Her sharp bronze beak, greened by the sea, came in and out, in and out of view. There were white patches of barnacles on it and on those timbers usually below the waterline. A dart-throwing engine was on her fore-deck, loaded and ready to shoot; the missile’s steel head blurred in bright reflection.

Corsair Breaker
’s two banks of long oars rose and fell in smooth unison. Even a lubber like Scaurus could tell her rowers were a fine crew;
indifferent to the wind, they drove her steadily north. Over the creak of oars in their locks and the slap of them in the sea came the bass roar of song they used to keep their rhythm:

The Videssian army sang that song, too, and the Romans with them as soon as they’d learned the words. There were, it was said, fifty-two verses to it, some witty, some brutal, some obscene, and most a mix of all three.

The hoarse ballad faded as
Corsair Breaker
’s superior speed swept the bireme away on her patrolling path. Under-officers stood at the twin steering oars at her stern; a lookout was atop her mast to cry danger at anything untoward. Marcus swallowed a smile. If Nepos’ magic suddenly disappeared, the poor fellow likely would have heart failure.

The tribune’s smile returned—and not swallowed, either—as he watched his Emperor’s mismatched excuse for a fleet sneak its way over the Cattle-Crossing under the nose of the imperial navy. Some of the faster boats were almost to the shore; even the slow, awkward barges were past the galleys loyal to Ortaias. With fortune, Videssos the city should be too much stunned at the sight of Gavras’ army appeared from nowhere under its walls to put much thought to resistance.