Swords of the Legion (Videssos) Read online

  Marcus chuckled, but the patriarch’s stubby fingers drummed on his knee; his mouth twisted in frustration. “I wonder how many he’s burned since power fell into his lap—and what more I could have done to stop him.” He sighed, shaking his head.

  In an odd way, his gloom reassured the tribune. After his own failures, it did not hurt to be reminded that even as keen a man as Balsamon could sometimes come up short.

  Saborios, certainly as efficient as a soldier if he was not one, had the door open for Scaurus even as he reached for the latch.

  * * *

  Alypia Gavra sat up in the narrow bed and poked Marcus in the ribs. He yelped. She touched the heavy gold of the necklace. “You are a madman for this,” she said. “It’s so beautiful I’ll want to wear it, and how can I? Where will I say it came from? Why won’t anyone have seen it before?”

  “A pox on practicality,” Scaurus said.

  She laughed at him. “Coming from you, that’s the next thing to blasphemy.”

  “Hrmmp.” The Roman leaned back lazily. “I thought it would look good on you and I was right—the more so,” he smiled, “when it’s all you’re wearing.”

  He watched a slow flush of pleasure rise from her breasts to her face. It showed plainly; she was fairer of skin than most Videssian women. He sometimes wondered if her dead mother had a touch of Haloga blood. Her features were not as sharply sculpted as those of her father or uncle, and her eyes were a clear green, rare among the imperials.

  Mischief danced in them. “Beast,” she said, and tried to poke him again. He jerked away. Once he had made the mistake of grabbing her instead and seen her go rigid in unreasoning panic; after Vardanes, she could not stand being restrained in any way.

  The sudden motion nearly tumbled both of them out of bed. “There, you see,” the tribune said. “That poking is a habit of mine you never should have picked up. Look what it brings on.”

  “I like doing things as you do,” she said seriously. That brought him up short, as such remarks of hers always did. Helvis had tried to push him toward her own ways, which only made him more stubborn in clinging to his. It was strange, hearing from a woman that those were worth something.

  He gave a sober nod, one suited to acknowledging something a legionary might have said, then grunted in annoyance, feeling very much a fool. He sat up himself and kissed her thoroughly. “That’s better,” she said.

  Chickens clucked and scratched below the second-story window, whose shutters were flung wide to let in the mild air. Marcus could see the ponderous bulk of Phos’ High Temple pushing into the sky not far away. He and Alypia had managed one meeting at this inn during the winter, so had it become a natural trysting place when she was supposed to be visiting Balsamon.

  The innkeeper, a stout, middle-aged man named Aetios, shouted at a stableboy for forgetting to curry a mule. The fellow’s eyes had sparked with recognition when Scaurus and the princess asked for a room, but the tribune was sure it was only because he had seen them before, not that he knew Alypia by sight. And in any case, with him, silver was better than wine for washing unpleasant memories away. His lumpish face came alive at the sweet sound of coins jingling in his palm.

  Alypia made as if to get up, saying, “I really should go see Balsamon, if only for a little while. That way neither he nor I can be caught in a lie.”

  “If you must,” Marcus said grumpily. With the ceremony that surrounded her as niece and closest kin of the Avtokrator, she could steal away but rarely, and the chance she took in doing so hung like a storm cloud over their meetings. He savored every moment with her, never sure it would not be the last.

  As if reading his thoughts, she clung to him, crying, “What will we do? Thorisin is bound to find out, and then—” She came to a ragged stop, not wanting to think about “and then.” In his short-tempered way, Thorisin Gavras was a decent man, but quick to lash out at anything he saw as a threat to his throne. After the strife he had already faced in his two and a half years on it, the tribune found it hard to blame him.

  Or he would have, had the Emperor’s suspicions affected anyone but him. “I wish,” he said with illogical resentment, “your uncle would marry and get himself an heir. Then he’d have less reason to worry about you.”

  Alypia shook her head violently. “Oh, aye, I’d be safe then—safe to be married off to one of his cronies. He dares not now, for fear whoever had me would use me against him. Let his own line be set, though, and I become an asset to bind someone to him.”

  She stared at nothing; her nails bit his shoulder. Through clenched teeth she said, as much to herself as to him, “I will die before I lie again with a man not of my choosing.”

  Scaurus did not doubt she meant exactly that. He ran a slow hand up the smooth column of her back, trying to gentle her. “If only I were a Videssian,” he said. That a princess of the blood could be given to an outland mercenary captain, even one more perfectly trusted than himself, was past thinking of in haughty Videssos.

  “Wishes, wishes, wishes!” Alypia said. “What good are they? All we can truly count on is our danger growing worse the longer we go on, and only Phos knows when we will be free of it.”

  The tribune stared; in Videssos he was never sure where coincidence stopped and the uncanny began. “Balsamon told me something much like that,” he said slowly, and at Alypia’s inquiring glance recounted the strange moment when the patriarch had seemed to prophesy.

  When he was done, he was startled to see her pale and shaken. She did not want to explain herself, but sat silent beside him. But he pressed her, and at last she said, “I have known him thus before. He gazed at you as if to read your soul, and there was none of his usual sport in his words.” It was statement, not question.

  “You have it,” Scaurus acknowledged. “When did you see him so?”

  “Only once, though I know the fit has taken him more often than that. ‘Phos’ gift,’ he calls it, but I think curse would be a better name. He has spoken of it to me a few times; that he trusts me to share such a burden is the finest compliment I’ve ever had. You guessed well, dear Marcus,” she said, touching his hand: “He sometimes has the prescient gift. But all he ever learns with it is of destruction and despair.”

  The Roman whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “It is a curse.” He shook his head. “And how much more bitter for a joyful man like him. To see only the coming trouble, and to have to stay steady in the teeth of it … He’s braver than I could be.”

  Alypia’s face reflected the same distress the tribune felt.

  “When was it you saw him?” he asked her again.

  “He was visiting my father, just before he set out for Maragha. They were arguing and trading insults—you remember how the two of them used to carry on, neither meaning a word of what he said. Finally they ran out of darts to throw, and Balsamon got up to leave. You could see it coming over him, like the weight of the world. He stood there for a few seconds; my father and I started to ease him back down to a chair, thinking he’d been taken ill. But he shrugged us away and turned to my father and said one word in that—certain—voice.”

  “I know what you mean,” Scaurus said. “What was it?”

  “ ‘Good-bye.’ ” Alypia was a good mimic; the doom she packed into the word froze the Roman for a moment. She shivered herself at the memory. “No use pretending it was just an ordinary leave-taking, though my father and Balsamon did their best. Neither believed it; I’ve never seen Balsamon so flat in a sermon as he was at the High Temple the next day.”

  “I remember that!” Marcus said. “I was there, along with the rest of the officers. It troubled me at the time; I thought we deserved a better farewell than we got. I guess we were lucky to have any.”

  “Was that luck, as it turned out?” she asked, her voice low. She did not wait for a reply, but rushed on, “And now he sees peril to you. I’ll leave you, I swear it, before I let you come to harm because of me.” But instead of leaving, she clung to him with somethin
g close to desperation.

  “Nothing the old man said made me think separating would matter,” said Scaurus. “Whatever happens will happen as it should.” The Stoic maxim did nothing to ease her; his lips on hers were a better cure. They sank back together onto the bed. The bedding sighed as their weight pressed the straw flat.

  Some time later she reached up to touch his cheek and smiled, as she often did, at the faint rasp of newly shaved whiskers under her fingers. “You are a stubborn man,” she said fondly; in a land of beards, the tribune still held to the smooth-faced Roman style. She took his head between her palms. “Oh, how could I think to leave you? But how can I stay?”

  “I love you,” he said, hugging her until she gave a startled gasp. It was true but, he knew too well, not an answer.

  “I know, and I you. How much safer it would be for both of us if we did not.” She glanced out the window, exclaimed in dismay when she saw how long the shadows had grown. “Let me up, dearest. Now I really must go.”

  Marcus rolled away; she scrambled to her feet. He admired her slim body for a last few seconds as she raised her arms over her head to slide on the long dress of deep gold wool; geometrically decorated insets of silk accented her narrow waist and the swell of her hips. “It suits you well,” he said.

  “Quite the courtier today, aren’t you?” She smiled, slipping on sandals. She patted at her hair, which she wore short and straight. With a woman’s practicality, she said, “It’s lucky I don’t fancy those piled-up heads of curls that are all the rage these days. They couldn’t be repaired so easily.”

  She wrapped an orange linen shawl embroidered with flowers and butterflies around her shoulders and started for the door. “The necklace,” Marcus said reluctantly. He was out of bed himself, fastening his tunic closed.

  Her hand flew to her throat, but then she let it drop once more. “Balsamon can see it before I tuck it into my bag. After all, what other chance will I have to show it, and to show how thoughtful—to say nothing of daft—you were to give it to me?”

  He felt himself glow with her praise; he had not heard much—nor, to be fair, given much—as he and Helvis quarreled toward their disastrous parting. Alypia gasped at the kiss he gave her. “Well!” she said, eyes glowing. “A bit more of that, sirrah, and Balsamon will get no look at my bauble today.”

  The tribune stepped back. “Too dangerous,” he said with what tatters of Roman hardheadedness he had left. Alypia nodded and turned to go. As she did, something rattled inside her purse. Marcus laughed. “I know that noise, I’ll wager: stylus and waxed tablet. Who was it the patriarch said, Ioannakis II?”

  “The third; the second is three hundred years dead.” She spoke with perfect seriousness; the history she was composing occupied a good deal of her time. When Scaurus caught her eye, she said, “There are pleasures and pleasures, you know.”

  “No need to apologize to me,” he said quickly, and meant it. Were it not for her active wit and sense of detail, the two of them could not have met even half so often as they did, and likely would have been discovered long since.

  “Apologize? I wasn’t.” Her voice turned frosty on the instant; she would not stand being taken lightly over her work.

  “All right,” he said mildly, and saw her relax. He went on, “You might want to compare notes with my friend Gorgidas when the embassy to the Arshaum comes back from the steppe.” With a sudden stab of loneliness, he wondered how the Greek physician was faring; despite his acerbic front, he was what Homer called “a friend to mankind.”

  Many Videssians would have raised an eyebrow at the idea of learning anything from outlanders, but Alypia said eagerly, “Yes, you’ve told me how the folk in the world you came from write history, too. How valuable it will be for me to have such a different view of the art—we’ve been copying each other for too long, I fear.”

  She looked out the window again, grimaced in annoyance. “And now for a third time I’ll try and go. No, say not one word more; I really must be gone.” She stepped into his arms, kissed him firmly but quickly, and slipped out the door.

  Marcus stayed behind for a few minutes; they chanced being seen together as little as they could. Meeting more than once at the same place was a risk in itself, but the inn’s convenience to the patriarchal residence weighed against the danger—and Aetios, once paid, asked no questions.

  To spin out the time, the tribune went downstairs to the taproom and ordered a jack of ale; sometimes he preferred it to the sweet Videssian wine. Aetios handed him the tall tarred-leather mug with a knowing smirk, then grunted when the Roman stared back stonily, refusing to rise to the bait. Muttering to himself, the innkeeper went off to serve someone else.

  The taproom, almost empty when Scaurus had come to the inn early in the afternoon, was filling as day drew to a close. The crowd was mostly workingmen: painters smeared with paint; bakers with flour; carpenters; tailors; a barber, his mustaches and the end of his beard waxed to points; bootmakers; an effeminate-looking fellow who was probably a bathhouse attendant. Many of them seemed regulars and called greetings to each other as they saw faces they knew. A barmaid squeaked indignantly when the barber pinched her behind. One of the painters, who was guzzling down wine, started a song, and half the tavern joined him. Even Marcus knew the chorus: “The wine gets drunk, but you get drunker.”

  He finished his ale and picked his way out through the growing crowd. He heard someone say to a tablemate, “What’s the dirty foreigner doing here, anyway?” but his size—to say nothing of the yard-long Gallic sword that swung on his hip—let him pass unchallenged.

  He bore the blade wherever he went. He might have laughed at the power of the druids when he was serving with Caesar’s army, but their enchantments, wrapped in his sword and Viridovix’, had swept the legionaries from Gaul to Videssos. And in Videssos, with sorcery a fact of life, the two enchanted weapons showed still greater power. Not only were they unnaturally strong in the attack, cleaving mail and plate, but the druids’ marks stamped into the blades turned aside harmful magic.

  The great golden globes on spires above the High Temple glowed ruddily in the light of the setting sun. After a brief glance their way, Marcus turned his back and walked south toward Middle Street. His progress was slow; traffic clogged Videssos’ twisting lanes: people afoot; women on donkeys or in litters; men riding mules and horses; and carts and wagons, some drawn by as many as half a dozen beasts, full of vegetables, fruits, and grain to keep the ever-hungry city fed. Animals brayed; teamsters clapped hands to belt-knives as they wrangled over a narrow right-of-way; ungreased axles screeched.

  “Well, go ahead, walk right past me. I’ll pretend I don’t know you either,” said an indignant voice at the tribune’s elbow.

  He spun around. “Oh, hello, Taso. I’m sorry; I really didn’t see you.”

  “A likely story, with this mat of fuzz on my chin.” The ambassador from Khatrish sniffed. A small, birdlike man, Taso Vones would have looked perfectly Videssian except that, instead of trimming his beard as did all imperials save priests, he let it tumble in bushy splendor halfway down his chest. He loathed the style, but his sovereign the khagan insisted on it as a reminder that the Khatrisher ruling class ultimately sprang from Khamorth stock. That they had been intermarrying with their once-Videssian subjects for something close to eight hundred years now was not allowed to interfere with the warrior tradition.

  Vones cocked his head to one side, reminding Scaurus more than ever of a sparrow: bright, perky, unendingly curious. “You haven’t been out and about much, have you? Thorisin finally let you off the string, eh?” he guessed shrewdly.

  “You might say so,” the Roman answered, casting about for a story that would cover him. Whatever it was going to be, he knew he would have to work it into the conversation naturally; just throwing it out would make the envoy take it for a lie and, being gleefully cynical about such things, call him on it at once.

  But Vones did not seem much interested in Marcus’
answer; he was full of news of his own. “Had we not met this way, I’d have come to see you in the next day or two.”

  “Always a pleasure.”

  “Always a nuisance, you mean,” the Khatrisher chuckled. Marcus’ denials were, on the whole, sincere; Taso’s breezy frankness was a refreshing relief from the Videssian style, which raised innuendo to a high art. Even Vones, though, hesitated before going on. “I’ve news from Metepont, if you care to hear it.”

  Scaurus stiffened. “Do you?” he said in as neutral a tone as he could manage. Metepont lay on the west coast of the island Duchy of Namdalen; more to the point, it was Helvis’ town. Sighing, the tribune said, “You’d best give it to me. I’d sooner have it from you than most other people I could think of.”

  “For which praise I thank you.” Vones looked faintly embarrassed, an expression the Roman had not seen on him before. At last he said, “You have a daughter there. My news must be weeks old by now, but from all I know, mother and child were both doing well. She named it Emilia. That’s not a Namdalener name; does it come from your people?”

  “Hmm? Yes, it’s one of ours,” Marcus said absently. No reason to expect the Khatrisher to remember his gentile name, not when he’d only heard it a couple of times years ago. He wondered whether Helvis was twisting the knife further, or thought of it as some sort of apology. He shook his head. A child he would never see … “How did you learn about it?”

  “As you might expect—from the great count Drax. He’s hiring mercenaries again, to replace the regiment you broke up for him last year. He had a message of his own for you, too—said he’d like to have you on his side for a change, and he’d make it worth your while to switch.”