Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (7 page)

The autumn rains began only a few days after the last of the harvest was gathered in. One storm after another came blustering down from the north, lashing the last leaves from the trees, turning every road and path into an impassable trough of mud, and pointing out all the failures of the Romans’ hasty carpentry. The legionaries cursed, dripped, and patched. They scoured the ever-encroaching rust from armor, tools, and weapons.

When the real cold came, the muddy ground froze rock-hard, only to be covered by a blanket of snow that lay in drifts taller than a man. Marcus began to see why, in a climate like this, robes were garments of ceremony but trousers the everyday garb. He started wearing them himself.

In such freezing weather, exercises were not a duty to be avoided, but something avidly sought to put warmth in a man’s bones. The Romans trained whenever they could. Gaius Philippus worked them hard. Except when the blizzards were at their worst, they went on a twenty-mile march every week. The senior centurion was one of the oldest men among them, but he fought his way through the snow like a youngster.

He also kept the Romans busy in camp. Once he’d learned enough Videssian to get what he needed, he had the locals make double-weight wicker shields and wooden swords for the legionaries to practice with. He set up pells, against which they continually drilled in the thrusting stroke. Trying to keep the men fresh and interested, he even detailed Adiatun to teach them the fine points of slinging.

The only traditional legionary exercise from which he excused the men was swimming. Even his hardiness quailed at subjecting his men to the freezing water under the ice that covered streams and ponds.

The legionaries did stage mock fights, with the points on their swords and spears covered. At first, they only worked against one another. Later, they matched themselves against the two hundred or so Halogai who made up Imbros’ usual garrison.

The tall northerners were skilled soldiers, as befitted their mercenary calling. But, like the Gauls, they fought as individuals and by clans, not in ordered ranks. If their first charge broke the Roman line they were irresistible but, more often than not, the legionaries’ large shields and jabbing spears held them at bay until they tired and the Romans could take the offensive.

In the drills Marcus was careful never to cross blades with Viridovix, fearful lest they and all around them be swept away again by the sorcery locked in their swords. His own weapon seemed utterly ordinary when he practiced with his fellow Romans. But when he was working against the garrison troops he left behind such a trail of shattered shields and riven chain mail that he gained a reputation for superhuman strength. The same, he noticed, was true of Viridovix.

The garrison commander was a one-eyed giant of a man named Skapti Modolf’s son. The Haloga was not young, but his hair was so fair it was hard to tell silver crept through the gold. He was friendly enough and, like any good fighting man, interested in the newcomers’ ways of doing things, but he never failed to make Scaurus nervous. With his long, dour features, rumbling voice, and singleminded concentration on the art of war, he reminded the Roman all too much of a wolf.

Viridovix, though, took to the Halogai. “It’s a somber lot they are,” he admitted, “and more doomful than I’m fond of, but they fight as men do, and they perk up considerable wi’ a drop of wine in ’em, indeed and they do.”

That, Marcus found a few days later, was an understatement. After a day and most of a night of drinking, the Gaul and half a dozen northern mercenaries staged a glorious brawl that wrecked the tavern where it happened and most of the participants.

One aftermath of the fight was a visit from Vourtzes to the Roman camp. Marcus had not seen much of him lately and would have forgone this occasion, too, when he learned the
hypasteos
wanted him to pay for all the damage the grogshop had taken. Annoyed, he pointed out that it was scarcely just for him to be saddled with all the charges when only one of his men was involved, as opposed to six or seven under the
hypasteos’
jurisdiction. Vourtzes let the matter drop, but Marcus knew he was unhappy.

“Maybe you should have compromised and saved trouble,” Gorgidas said. “If I know our Celtic friend, he raised more than his share of the ruction.”

“I shouldn’t be a bit surprised. But Vourtzes is the sort to bleed you to death a drop at a time if you let him. I wonder,” Marcus mused, “how he’d look as a newt.”

Like the rest of the Empire of Videssos, Imbros celebrated the passing of the winter solstice and the turning of the sun to the north once more. Special prayers winged their way heavenward from the temples. Bonfires
blazed on street corners; the townsfolk jumped over them for luck. There was a huge, disorderly hockey match on the surface of a frozen pond. Falling and sliding on the ice seemed as much a part of the game as trying to drive the ball through the goal.

A troupe of mimes performed at Imbros’ central theater. Marcus saw he was far from the only Roman there. Such entertainments were much like those his men had known in Italy, and the fact that they had no dialogue made them easier for the newcomers to understand.

Venders climbed up and down the aisles, crying their wares: good-luck charms, small roasted birds, cups of hot spiced wine, balls of snow sweetened with syrups, and many other things.

The skits were fast-paced and topical; a couple in particular stuck in Scaurus’ mind. One showed an impressive-looking man in a cloth-of-gold robe—the Emperor Mavrikios, the tribune soon realized—as a farmer trying to keep a slouching nomad from running off with his sheep. The farmer-Emperor’s task would have been much easier had he not had a cowardly son clinging to his arm and hindering his every move, a fat son in a robe of red brocade …

The other sketch was even less subtle. It involved the devastation of Imbros itself, as carried out in a totally inadvertent and unmalicious fashion by a tall, skinny fellow who wore a red wig and had a huge fiery mustache glued over his upper lip.

Viridovix was in the audience. “ ’Twas not like that at all, at all!” he shouted to the mummer on stage, but he was laughing as hard as anyone around him.

Venders of food and drink were not the only purveyors to circulate through the crowd. Though exposed flesh would have invited frostbite, women of easy virtue were not hard to spot. Paint, demeanor, and carriage made their calling clear. Marcus caught the eye of a dark-haired beauty in a sheepskin jacket and clinging green gown. She smiled back and pushed her way toward him through the crowd, squeezing between a couple of plump bakers.

She was only a few feet from Scaurus when she abruptly turned about and walked in another direction. Confused, he was about to follow when he felt a hand on his arm. It was the angular prelate who had blessed and healed the Romans when they first came to Imbros.

“A fine amusement,” he said. Scaurus was thinking of a better one, but did not mention it. This priest was a powerful figure in the city. The man continued, “I do not believe I have seen you or many of your men at our shrines. You have come from afar and must be unfamiliar with our faith. Now that you have learned something of our language and our ways, would it please you to discuss this matter with me?”

“Of course,” Marcus lied. He had a pair of problems as he walked with the hierarch through the frosty, winding streets of Imbros toward its chief temple. First, he was anything but anxious for a theological debate. Like many Romans, he gave lip service to the veneration of the gods, but wasted little serious belief on them. The Videssians were much more earnest about their cult and harsh with those who did not share it.

Even more immediate was his other dilemma; for the life of him, he could not recall his companion’s name. He kept evading the use of it all the way to the doorway of Phos’ sanctuary, meanwhile flogging his memory without success.

The sweet savor of incense and a choir’s clear tones greeted them at the entrance. Scaurus was so bemused he hardly noticed the cleric who bowed as his ecclesiastical superior came in. Then the young priest murmured, “Phos with you, elder Apsimar, and you as well, outland friend.” The warmth and gratitude Marcus put into his handclasp left the little shaven-headed man blinking in puzzlement.

A colonnade surrounded the circular worship area, at whose brightly lit center priests served the altar of Phos and led the faithful in their prayers. Apsimar stayed in the semidarkness outside the colonnade. He led Marcus around a third of the circle, stopping at an elaborately carved door of dark, close-grained wood. Extracting a finger-long iron key from the pouch at his belt, he clicked the door open and stood aside to let the Roman precede him.

The small chamber was almost pitch-dark until Apsimar lit a candle. Then Marcus saw the clutter of volumes everywhere, most of them not the long scrolls he was used to, but books after the Videssian fashion, with small, square pages bound together in covers of wood, metal, or leather to form a whole. He wondered how Apsimar could read by candlelight and have any sight left at his age, though the priest had given no sign of failing vision.

The room’s walls were as crowded with religious images as its shelves were with books. The dominant theme was one of struggle: here a warrior in armor that gleamed with gold leaf felled his foe, whose mail was black as midnight; there, the same gold-clad figure drove its spear through the heart of a snarling black panther; elsewhere, the disc of the sun blazed through a roiling, sooty bank of fog.

Apsimar sat in a hard, straight chair behind his overloaded desk, waving Scaurus to a more comfortable one in front of it. The priest leaned forward. He said, “Tell me, then, somewhat of your beliefs.”

Unsure where to begin, the Roman named some of the gods his people followed and their attributes: Jupiter the king of heaven, his consort Juno, his brother Neptune who ruled the seas, Vulcan the smith, the war god Mars, Ceres the goddess of fertility and agriculture …

At each name and description Apsimar’s thin face grew longer. Finally he slammed both hands down on the desk. Startled, Marcus stopped talking.

Apsimar shook his head in dismay. “Another puerile pantheon,” he exclaimed, “no better than the incredible set of miscegenating godlets the Halogai reverence! I had thought better of you, Roman; you and yours seemed like civilized men, not barbarians whose sole joy in life is slaughter.”

Marcus did not understand all of that, but plainly Apsimar thought little of his religious persuasions. He thought for a moment. To his way of looking at things, Stoicism was a philosophy, not a religion, but maybe its tenets would please Apsimar more than those of the Olympian cult. He explained its moral elements: an insistence on virtue, fortitude, and self-control, and a rejection of the storms of passion to which all men were liable.

He went on to describe how the Stoics believed that Mind, which among the known elements could best be equated with Fire, both created and comprised the universe in its varying aspects.

Apsimar nodded. “Both in its values and in its ideas, this is a better creed, and a closer approach to the truth. I will tell you the truth now.”

The tribune braced himself for a quick course on the glory of the divine sun, kicking himself for not mentioning Apollo. But the “truth,” as Apsimar saw it, was not tied up in heliolatry.

The Videssians, Marcus learned, viewed the universe and everything in it as a conflict between two deities: Phos, whose nature was inherently good, and the evil Skotos. Light and darkness were their respective manifestations. “Thus the globe of the sun which tops our temples,” Apsimar said, “for the sun is the most powerful source of light. Yet it is but a symbol, for Phos transcends its radiance as much as it outshines the candle between us.”

Phos and Skotos warred not only in the sensible world, but within the soul of every man. Each individual had to choose which he would serve, and on this choice rested his fate in the next world. Those who followed the good would gain an afterlife of bliss, while the wicked would fall into Skotos’ clutches, to be tormented forever in his unending ice.

Yet even the eternal happiness of the souls of the deserving might be threatened, should Skotos vanquish Phos in this world. Opinions over the possibility of this differed. Within the Empire of Videssos, it was orthodox to believe Phos would emerge victorious in the ultimate confrontation. Other sects, however, were less certain.

“I know you will be traveling to the city,” Apsimar said. “You will be meeting many men of the east there; fall not into their misbelief.” He went on to explain that, some eight hundred years before, nomadic barbarians known as the Khamorth flooded into what had been the eastern provinces of the Empire. After decades of warfare, devastation, and murder, two fairly stable Khamorth states, Khatrish and Thatagush, had emerged from the chaos, while to their north the Kingdom of Agder was still ruled by a house of Videssian stock.

The shock of the invasions, though, had caused all these lands to slip into what Videssos called heresy. Their theologians, remembering the long night of destruction their lands had undergone, no longer saw Phos’ victory as inevitable, but concluded that the struggle between good and evil was in perfect balance. “They claim this doctrine gives more scope to the freedom of the will.” Apsimar sniffed. “In reality, it but makes Skotos as acceptable a lord as Phos. Is this a worthwhile goal?”