An Emperor for the Legion Read online

  At last the weather relented. The north wind still blew moist and cool, but the sun was bright; it flashed dazzlingly off still-wet walls and made every lingering drop of water into a rainbow. And if it had not had enough time to dry every seat in Videssos’ huge Amphitheater, the people whose bottoms were dampened did not complain. The spectacle they were anticipating made up for such minor inconveniences.

  “Sure and there’s enough people,” Viridovix said, his eyes traveling from the legionaries’ central spine up and up the sides of the great limestone bowl. “The poor omadhauns in the last row won’t be after seeing what’s happening today till next week, so far away they are.”

  “More Celtic nonsense,” Gaius Philippus said with a snort. “I’ll grant you, though, we won’t be much bigger than bugs to them.” His own practiced gaze slid over the crowd. “Worthless, most of ’em, like the fat ones back home—” He meant Rome, and Marcus winced to be reminded. “—who come out on the feast days to watch the gladiators kill each other.”

  The tribune agreed with that assessment; the buzz of conversation floating out of the stands had a cruel undercurrent, and on the faces in the first few rows, the ones close enough to see clearly, the air of vulpine avidity was all too plain.

  He caught a glimpse of Gorgidas in the contingent of foreign envoys some little distance down the spine. As an aspiring historian, the Greek had wanted a close-up view of this day’s festivities, and preferred the ambassadors’ company to disguising himself as a legionary. He was listening to some tale from Arigh Arghun’s son and scribbling quick notes on a three-leafed wax tablet. Two more hung at his belt.

  Taso Vones, the ambassador from Khatrish, waved cheerily to the tribune, who grinned back. He liked the little Khatrisher, whose sharp, jolly wits belied his mousy appearance.

  Horns filled the Amphitheater with bronzen music. The crowd’s noise rose expectantly. Preceded by his retinue of parasol bearers, Thorisin Gavras strode into the arena. The applause was loud as he mounted the dozen steps that led up to the spine, but it fell short of the deafening tumult Scaurus had heard before in the Amphitheater. The Emperor, for once, was not what the populace had turned out to see.

  Each unit of troops Gavras passed presented arms as he went by; at Gaius Philippus’ barked command the Romans held their pila out at arm’s length ahead of them. Gavras nodded slightly. He and the senior centurion, both lifelong soldiers, understood each other very well.

  Not so the bureaucrats Thorisin passed on his way to the throne. They looked nervous as they bowed to their new sovereign; Goudeles, for one, was pale against his robe of dark blue silk. But Gavras paid them no more attention than he did to the clutter of a millenium and a half of heroic art that he passed: statues bronze, statues marble—some painted, some not—statues chryselephantine, even an obelisk of gilded granite long ago taken as booty from Makuran.

  The Emperor grew animated once more when he came to the foreign dignitaries. He paused for a moment to say something to Gawtruz of Thatagush, at which the squat, swarthy envoy nodded. Then Gavras included Taso Vones in the conversation, whatever it was. The Khatrisher laughed and gave a rueful tug at his beard, as unkempt as Gawtruz’.

  Even without hearing the words, Marcus understood the byplay. He, too, thought the fuzzy beard looked foolish on Vones, who could have passed for a Videssian without it. But his ruler still enforced a few Khamorth ways, in memory of his ancestors who had carved the state from Videssos’ eastern provinces centuries before, and so the little envoy was doomed to wear the shaggy whiskers he despised.

  Thorisin seated himself on a high stool at the center of the Amphitheater’s spine; the chair was backless so all the spectators could see him. His parasol bearers grouped themselves around him. He raised his right hand in a gesture of command; the crowd grew quiet and leaned forward in their seats, craning their necks for a better view.

  They all knew where to look. The gate that came open was the one through which, on most days, race horses entered the Amphitheater. Today the procession was much shorter: Thorisin Gavras’ deep-chested herald, two Videssian guardsmen gorgeous in gilded cuirasses, and a groom leading a single donkey.

  Ortaias Sphrantzes rode the beast, but it needed a guide nonetheless, for its saddle was reversed, and he sat facing its tail. Long familiar with their own idiom of humiliation, the watching Videssians burst into gaffaws. An overripe fruit came sailing out of the stands, to squash at the donkey’s feet. Others followed, but the barrage was mercifully short; Videssos had been under siege too recently for there to be much food to waste.

  The herald, nimbly sidestepping a hurtling melon, cried out, “Behold Ortaias Sphrantzes, who thought to rebel against the rightful Avtokrator of the Videssians, his Imperial Majesty Thorisin Gavras!” The crowd shouted back, “Thou conquer-est, Gavras! Thou conquerest!”—as heartily, Marcus thought, as if they had forgotten that a week before they called Ortaias their lord.

  Accompanied by the crowd’s jeers, Ortaias and his guardians made a slow circuit of the Amphitheater, the herald all the while booming out his condemnation. Marcus heard more fruit splattering around Sphrantzes; the breeze brought him a rotten egg’s gagging stench.

  Some of the hurled refuse found its target. By the time Ortaias Sphrantzes came back into the tribune’s sight, his robe was dyed with bright splashes of pulp and juice. The donkey he rode, Scaurus decided, had to be drugged. It ambled on placidly, pausing only to dip its head to nibble at a fragment of apple in its path. Its leader jerked on the long guide rope, and it abandoned the tidbit to move ahead once more.

  At last it completed the course and halted in front of the gate through which it had entered. The two guards came back and lifted Ortaias off his mount, then led him up before Thorisin Gavras.

  When they released his arms, he went to the ground in a proskynesis. The Emperor rose from his stool. “We see your Submission,” he said, speaking for the first time, and such were the acoustics of the Amphitheater that his words, though spoken in the tone of ordinary conversation, could be heard in the arena’s uppermost rows. “Do you then renounce, now and forever, all claim upon the sovereignty of our Empire, protected by Phos?”

  “Indeed yes, I yield the throne to you. I—” The moment the answer Thorisin Gavras required was complete, he cut Ortaias off with the same imperious gesture he had used to summon him forth.

  Gaius Philippus gave the ghost of a chuckle. “Some things never change. I’d bet the scrawny bastard just had a two-hour abdication speech nipped in the bud—and a good thing, too, says I.”

  Thorisin spoke again. “Receive now the reward for your treachery.”

  The guardsmen raised Ortaias to his feet. They quickly pulled the robe off over his head. The crowd whooped; Gaius Philippus muttered “Scrawny” again. One of the guards, the larger and more muscular of the pair, stepped behind the luckless Sphrantzes and delivered a tremendous kick to his bare backside. Ortaias yelped and fell to his knees.

  Viridovix clucked in disappointment. “The Gavras is too soft by half,” he said. “He should be packing a wickerwork all full of this spalpeen and howsoever many followed him, and then lighting it off. There’d been a spectacle for the people to remember, now.”

  “You and Komitta Rhangawe,” Marcus said to himself, slightly aghast at the Gaul’s straightforward savagery.

  “ ‘Tis what the holy druids would do,” Viridovix said righteously. That, Scaurus knew, was only too true. The Celtic priests appeased their gods by sacrificing criminals to them … or innocent folk, if no criminals were handy.

  As Ortaias Sphrantzes, rubbing the bruised part, rose to his feet, one of Phos’ priests descended from the Amphitheater’s spine and approached him, carrying scissors and a long, gleaming razor. The crowd fell silent; religion was always respected in Videssos. But Marcus knew no blood sacrifice was in the offing here. Another priest followed the first, this one bearing a plain blue robe and a copy of Phos’ sacred scriptures, glorious in its binding of ena
meled bronze.

  Ortaias bowed his head to the first priest. The scissors flashed in the autumn sun. A lock of stringy brown hair fell at the deposed Emperor’s feet, then another and another, until only a short stubble remained. Then the razor came into play; Sphrantzes’ scalp was soon shiny bare.

  The second priest stepped forward. Folding the monk’s robe over the crook of his arm, he held out the sacred writings to Ortaias and said, “Behold the law under which you shall live if you choose. If in your heart you feel you can observe it, enter the monastic life; if not, speak now.”

  But Ortaias, with everyone else, was aware of the penalty for balking. “I will observe it,” he said. The great-voiced herald relayed his words to the crowd. There was a collective sigh. The creation of a monk was always a serious business, even when the reasons for it were blatantly political. Nor could faith and politics be neatly separated in the Empire; Scaurus thought of Zemarkhos in Amorion and felt his mouth compress in a thin, hard line.

  The priest repeated the offer of admission twice more, received the same response each time. He handed the holy book to his colleague, then robed the new monk in his monastic garb, saying, “As the garment of Phos’ blue covers your naked body, so may his righteousness enfold your heart and preserve it from all evil.” Again the herald boomed out the petition.

  “So may it be,” Ortaias replied, but his voice was lost in the thousands echoing his prayer. Despite himself Marcus was moved, marveling at Videssos’ force of faith. Almost there were times he wished he shared it, but, like Gorgidas, he was too well rooted in the perceptible world to feel comfortable in that of the spirit.

  Ortaias Sphrantzes left the Amphitheater through the same gate he had entered, arm in arm with the two priests who had made him part of their fellowship. Well satisfied with the day’s show, the crowd began to disperse. Venders took up their calls: “Wine! Sweet wine!” “Spiced cakes!” “Holy images to protect your beloved!” “Raiii—sins!”

  Unhappy to the end, Gausi Philippus grumbled, “And now he’ll spend the rest of his stupid days living the high life here in the city, but with a bald head and a blue robe to make it all right.”

  “Not exactly,” Marcus chuckled; Thorisin might be blunt, but he was hardly as naïve as that. The tribune thought it altogether fitting that Gennadios should gain some company in his monastery at Videssos’ distant frontier. He and the new Brother Ortaias, no doubt, would have a great deal to talk about.

  X

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, NO FUNDS ARE AVAILABLE?” THORISIN Gavras asked, his voice dangerously calm. His gaze speared the logothete as if that financial official were an enemy to be ridden down.

  The Hall of the Nineteen Couches grew still. Marcus could hear the torches crackling, hear the wind sighing outside. If he turned his head, he knew he would see snowflakes kissing the Hall’s wide windows; winter in the capital was not as harsh as in the westland plateaus, but it was bad enough. He pulled his cloak tighter round himself.

  The logothete gulped. He was about thirty, thin, pale, and precise. His name, Scaurus remembered, was Addaios Vourtzes; he was some sort of distant cousin to the city governor of the northeastern town of Imbros, He had to gather himself before going on in the face of the Emperor’s hostility.

  But go on he did, at first haltingly and then with more animation as his courage returned. “Your Majesty, you expect too much from the tax-gathering facilities available to us. That any revenues whatsoever have been collected should be praised as one of Phos’ special miracles. The recent unpleasantness—” Now there, thought the tribune, was a fine, bureaucratic euphemism for civil war. “—and, worse, the presence of large numbers of unauthorized interlopers—” By which he meant the Yezda, Marcus knew. “—on imperal soil, have made any accrual of surplusage a manifest impossibility.”

  What was he talking about? the tribune wondered irritably. His Videssian was fluent by now, but this jargon left him floundering.

  Baanes Onomagoulos’ translation was rough but serviceable. “By which you’re saying that your precious dues-takers pissed themselves whenever they thought they saw a nomad, and turned tail before they could find out if they were right.” The noble gave a coarse laugh.

  “That’s the way of it,” Drax the Namdalener agreed. He turned a calculating eye on Vourtzes. “From what I’ve seen of you pen-pushers, any excuse not to pay is a good one. By the Wager, you’d think the money came out of your purse, not the peasants’.”

  “Well said,” Thorisin exclaimed, his usual distrust for the islanders quenched when Drax echoed a sentiment he heartily shared. The count nodded his thanks.

  Vourtzes proffered a thick roll of parchment. “Here are the figures to support the position I have outlined—”

  Numbers in a ledger, though, meant little to the soldiers he faced. Thorisin slapped the scroll aside, snarling, “To the crows with this gibberish! It’s gold I need, not excuses.”

  Elissaios Bouraphos said, “These fornicating seal-stampers think paper will patch anything. That was why I put in with you, your Highness—I kept getting reports instead of repairs—and sick I got of them, too.”

  “If you will examine the returns I have presented to you,” Vourtzes said with rather desperate determination, “you will reach the inescapable conclusion that—”

  “—The bureaucrats are out to bugger honest men,” Onomagoulos finished for him. “Everyone knows that, and has since my grandfather’s day. All you ever wanted was to keep the power in your own slimy hands. And if a soldier reached the throne despite you, you starved him with tricks like this.”

  “There is no trickery!” Vourtzes wailed, his distress wringing a simple declarative sentence from him.

  Marcus had no love for the harried logothete, but he recognized sincerity when he heard it. “I think there may be something in what this fellow claims,” he said.

  Thorisin and his marshals stared at the Roman as if disbelieving their ears. “Whose side are you on?” the Emperor demanded. Even Addaios Vourtzes’ look of gratitude was wary. He seemed to suspect some trap that would only lead to deeper trouble for him.

  But Alypia Gavra watched the tribune alertly; her expression was masked as usual, but Scaurus could read no disapproval in it. And unlike the Videssian military men, he had had civilian as well as warlike experience, and knew how much easier it was to spend money than to collect it.

  Ignoring Thorisin’s half-accusation, he persisted, “Gathering taxes could hardly have been easy this past year. For one thing, sir, your men and Ortaias’ both must have gone into some parts of the westlands, with neither side getting all it should. And Baanes has to be partly right—with the Yezda loose, parts of the Empire aren’t safe for tax collectors. But even where there are no Yezda at any given moment, the lands they’ve ravaged still yield no cash—you can’t get wool from a bald sheep.”

  “A mercenary with comprehension of basic fiscal realities,” Vourtzes said to himself. “How extraordinary.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Thank you,” to the tribune.

  The Emperor looked thoughtful, but Baanes Onomagoulos’ face grew stormy; Scaurus, watching the noble’s bare scalp go red, suddenly regretted his chance-chosen metaphor.

  Alypia took another jab at Baanes. “Not all arrears are the tax collectors’ fault,” she said. “If big landowners paid what they owed, the treasury would be better off.”

  “That is very definitely the case,” Vourtzes said. “Legitimately credentialed agents of the fisc have been assaulted, on occasion even killed, in the attempt to assess payments due on prominent estates, some of them properties of clans represented in this very chamber.” While he named no names, he, too, was looking at Onomagoulos.

  The noble’s glare was hot enough to roast the bureaucrat, Marcus, and Alypia Gavra all together. The tribune, seeing Alypia’s eyebrows arch, nodded almost imperceptibly in recognition of a common danger.

  As he had in Balsamon’s library, Elissaios Bouraphos tried to ease Onomago
ulos’ wrath, putting a hand on his shoulder and talking to him in a low voice. But the admiral was himself a possessor of wide estates, and said to Thorisin, “You know why we held back payments to the pen-pushers—aye, you did the same on your lands before your brother threw Strobilos out. Why should we give them the rope to hang us by?”

  “I won’t say you’re wrong there,” the Emperor admitted with a chuckle. “Since I’m not a pen-pusher, though, Elissaios, surely you’ll pay in everything you owe without a whimper?”

  “Surely,” Bouraphos said. Then he whimpered, so convincingly that everyone at the table burst into laughter. Even Addaios Vourtzes’ mouth twitched. Marcus revised his estimate of the admiral, which had not included a sense of humor.

  Utprand Dagober’s son spoke up for the first time, and the somber warning in his voice snuffed out the mirth. “You can wrangle all you like over who pays w’at. W’at needs to be settled is who pays me.”

  “Rest easy,” Thorisin said. “I don’t see your lads on the streets begging for pennies.”

  “No,” Utprand said, “nor will you.” That was not warning, but unmistakable threat. The great count Drax looked pained at his countryman’s plain speaking, but Utprand ignored him. They did not care much for each other; Scaurus suspected the Namdaleni were not immune to the disease of faction.

  Gavras, for his part, was one to appreciate frankness. “You’ll have your money, outlander,” he said. Seeing Addaios Vourtzes purse his lips to protest, he turned to the logothete. “Let me guess,” he said sourly. “You haven’t got it.”

  “Essentially, that is correct. As I have attempted to indicate, the precise situation is outlined—”

  The Emperor cut him off as brusquely as he had Ortaias Sphrantzes in the Amphitheater. “Can you bring in enough to keep everyone happy till spring?”

  Faced with a problem whose answer was not to his precious accounts scroll, Vourtzes grew cautious. His lips moved silently as he reckoned to himself. “That is dependent upon a variety of factors not subject to my ministry’s control: the condition of roads, quality of harvest, ability of agents to penetrate areas subject to disturbances …” From the way the bureaucrat avoided it, Marcus began to think the word “Yezda” made him break out in hives.