An Emperor for the Legion (Videssos Cycle) Read online

  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 counter-spells 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 h
anded 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 foredeck, 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:

  “Lit-tle bird with a yellow bill

  Sat outside my windowsill—”

  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.

  “Aye, a splendid job,” he said expansively to Nepos. “Puts the whole war in hailing distance of being won.”

  Like all of Phos’ priests, Nepos was pledged to humility. He flushed under Scaurus’ praise. “Thank you,” he said shyly. He was academic as much as priest and so went on, “This success will take an important new charm out of the realm of theory and into the practical sphere. The research, of course, was the work of many; it’s mere chance that makes me the one to execute it. It—”

  The priest lurched and turned purple: no blush of modesty this, but a darkening as if strangler’s hands were round his neck. Marcus and Gorgidas darted toward him, both afraid the fat little man’s labor had brought on a fit of apoplexy.

  But Nepos was suffering no fit, though tears rolled down his cheek to lose themselves in his thicket of beard. His hands moved in desperate passes; he whispered cantrips fast as his lips could shape them.

  “What’s toward?” Gaius Philippus barked. Doubly out of his reckoning on the sea and treating with magic, he nonetheless knew trouble when he saw it. His hand snaked to his sword hilt, but the familiar gesture brought him no comfort.

  “Counterspell!” Nepos got out between his quickly repeated charms. He was shaking like a man with an ague. “A vicious one—aimed at me as much as my spell. And strong—Phos, who at the Academy can it be? I’ve never felt such strength—almost struck me down where I stood.” He had been incanting between sentences, sometimes between words, and returned wholly to his sorcery once the gasped explanation was through.

  The priest’s skill was enough to save himself, but could not keep his spell intact. Still at his miserable perch over the rail, Viridovix cried out, “Och, we’re for it now! The cat’s after kenning there’s mice in the cupboard!”

  Including Corsair Breaker, there were seven galleys in Marcus’ sight. He could hardly imagine how Sphrantzes’ ship captains and sailors must have felt, with the ocean full of their enemy’s ships. Their reaction, though, was nothing like the palpitations the tribune had jokingly wished on them a few minutes before. They went charging against the small craft all around them like so many bulls rampaging through a herd of sheep.

  Scaurus’ heart leaped into his mouth to see one of the cruel-beaked ships bearing down on the rearmost barge, a craft that was, to his horror, filled with legionaries. But the bireme’s captain, at least, was unnerved enough by his foes’ apparition to make a fatal error of judgment. Instead of trusting to his vessel’s ram, his port oars swept up and out of the way as he came gracefully alongside and demanded the barge’s surrender.

  In his pride, though, he forgot there was more to the bargain than his sleek ship against the slow-moving, clumsy river scow: there were men as well. Ropes snaked up to catch on belaying pins and the steering oar, binding ship to ship tight as a lover’s embrace. And up those ropes and over the galley’s low gunwales swarmed the Romans, whooping with wolfish glee. They pitched the handful of marines on board over the side; those splashes marked their end for, not true sailors, they wore cuirasses which now were fatal, not protecting.

  Seeing his ship taken from under him, the captain fled to the high stern. He, too, wore armor: gilded, in token of his rank. It flashed brilliantly for a moment as he leaped into the sea to drown, too proud to outlive his folly.

  That mattered little, as far as the outcome went. The Romans, no sailors themselves, laid hold of the bireme’s pilot and put a sword against his throat. Thus encouraged, he bawled orders to the crew. Oars came raggedly to life; the sail spread and billowed. Like a race horse among carters’ nags, the galley sprinted for the beach.

  Elsewhere, things went not so well. Warned by their comrade’s blunder, Ortaias’ warships made no further unwise moves. A fishing boat kissed by their sharp bronze simply ceased to be, save as sodden canvas, splintered timbers, and men struggling in the warm blue waters of the strait. Worse still, alarm bells were ringing in the city, and through the boom of surf off sea walls Marcus could hear officers shouting their men aboard fresh galleys.

  But all that needed time, and the Sphrantzai had little time to spend. Already Gavras’ boats were beginning to beach, soldiers jumping from them as fast as they could scramble. And each attack run stole precious minutes from the warships, for their targets jinked and dodged with all the desperate skill their crews could summon. Even after a ram bit home, there was more delay as the triumphant bireme backed oars to pull itself free of its prey. Unspining was a delicate task, lest the warships, like bees, were to leave stings behind in their wounds, and with results as damaging to themselves.

  Marcus shouted himself hoarse to see what seemed a surely fatal stroke go wide. He was so intent on the sprawling seafight that he almost did not hear the helmsman’s frightened cry: “Phos have mercy! One o’ the buggers is on our tail!”

  “Come a point north,” the captain ordered instantly, gauging wind, coast, and pursuer in one comprehensive glance.

  “Twill lose us so
me of our wind,” the helmsman protested.

  “Aye, but it’s a shorter run to the beach. Steer so, damn you!” Pale beneath his sun-swarthied skin, the helmsman obeyed.

  Scaurus bit his lip, not so much from fright but frustration. His fate was being decided here, and not a thing he could do but impotently wait. If that sea-bleached fishing captain knew his business, the boat might come safe through it; if not, surely not. But either way, there was nothing the tribune could do to help or hurt. His skills were worthless here, his opinions of no value.

  The shore seemed nailed in place before him, while from behind the galley came rushing up, shark-sure and swift. Too fast, too fast, he thought; Achilles would surely catch this tortoise.

  Gaius Philippus was making the same grim calculation. “He’ll be up our arse before we ground,” he said. “If we shed our mail shirts now, we have hope to swim it.”

  Abandoning armor was an admission of defeat, but that was not what set Marcus against it. There were archers on that cursed bireme; already a couple of shafts had whistled past, more swift and slender than any flying fish. To be shot swimming defenselessly in the sea was not an end he relished.

  If the bireme was in arrow range the end of the chase could not be far away. With sick fascination, the tribune watched the imperial pennant stiff in the breeze at the warship’s bow. Below it was another, this one crimson with five bronze bars, the drungarios’ emblem. So, Marcus thought, it was Taron Leimmokheir himself who’d sink him. He would willingly have forgone the honor.

  But another ship was racing up alongside the imperial vessel, not so big, but packed to the gunwales with armed men … and also flying the imperial banner. “Go on, Leimmokheir, go on, you sneaking filthy knife in the night!” Thorisin Gavras roared across the narrowing space of water, his furious bellow like song in Scaurus’ ears. “Ram, and then you face me! You haven’t the stones in your bag for it!”