Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 Read online

  “A plague take you! If you’re going to tell stories with morals in them, you can start wearing a blue robe. A bloodthirsty Celt I’ll tolerate, but the gods deliver me from a preaching one!”

  After his work of the previous night, the tribune told himself he was entitled to leave the morning drills to Gaius Philippus. The brief glimpse of Videssos the city he’d had a few days before had whetted his appetite for more. This was a bigger, livelier, more brawling town even than Rome. He wanted to taste its life, instead of seeing it frozen as he tramped by on parade.

  Seabirds whirled and mewed overhead as he left the elegant quiet of the imperial quarter for the hurly-burly of the forum of Palamas, the great square named for an Emperor nine centuries dead. At its center stood the Milestone, a column of red granite from which distances throughout the Empire were reckoned. At the column’s base two heads, nearly fleshless from the passage of time and the attentions of scavengers, were displayed on pikes. Plaques beneath them set forth the crimes they had plotted while alive. Marcus’ knowledge of Videssos’ written language was still imperfect, but after some puzzling he gathered the miscreants had been rebellious generals with the further effrontery to seek aid for their revolt from Yezd. Their present perches, he decided, were nothing less than they deserved.

  The people of Videssos ignored the gruesome display. They had seen heads go up on pikes before and expected these would not be the last.

  Scaurus, on the other hand, was anything but ignored. He had thought he would be only one among a thousand foreigners, but the mysterious network that passes news in any great city had singled him out as the man who beat the dreaded Avshar. People crowded forward to pump his hand, to slap his back, or simply to touch him and then draw back in awe. From their reaction to him, he began to realize how great an object of fear the Yezda was.

  It was next to impossible to get away. At every stall he passed, merchants and hucksters pressed samples of their wares on him: fried sparrows stuffed with sesame seeds; candied almonds; a bronze scalpel; amulets against heartburn, dysentery, or possession by a ghost; wines and ales from every corner of the Empire and beyond; a book of erotic verse, unfortunately addressed to a boy. No one would hear him say no and no one would take a copper in payment.

  “It is my honor, my privilege, to serve the Ronam,” declared a ruddy-faced baker with sweeping black mustachioes as he handed the tribune a spiced bun still steaming from his ovens.

  Trying to escape his own notoriety, Marcus fled the forum of Palamas for the back streets and alleyways of the city. In such a maze it was easy to lose oneself, and the tribune soon did. His wandering feet led him into a quarter full of small, grimy taverns, homes once fine but now shabby from neglect or crowding, and shops crammed with oddments either suspiciously cheap or preposterously expensive. Young men in the brightly dyed tights and baggy tunics of street toughs slouched along in groups of three and four. It was the sort of neighborhood where even the dogs traveled in pairs.

  This was a more rancid taste of Videssos than the tribune had intended. He was looking for a way back toward some part where he could feel safe without a maniple at his back when he felt furtive fingers fasten themselves to his belt. As he was half expecting such attention, it was easy to spin round and seize the awkward thief’s wrist in an unbreakable grip.

  He thought he would be holding one of the sneering youths who prowled here, but his captive was a man of about his own age, dressed in threadbare homespun. The would-be fingersmith did not struggle in his grasp. Instead he went limp, body and face alike expressing utter despair. “All right, you damned hired sword, you’ve got me, but there’s precious little you can do to me,” he said. “I’d have starved in a few days anyways.”

  He was thin. His shirt and breeches flapped on his frame and his skin stretched tight across his cheekbones. But his shoulders were wide, and his hands strong-looking—both his carriage and his twanging speech said he was more used to walking behind a plow than skulking down this alley. He had borne arms, too; Marcus had seen the look in his eyes before, on soldiers acknowledging defeat at the hands of overwhelming force.

  “If you’d asked me for money, I would gladly have given it to you,” he said, releasing his prisoner’s arm.

  “Don’t want nobody’s charity, least of all a poxy mercenary’s,” the other snapped. “Weren’t for you mercenaries, I wouldn’t be here today, and I wish to Phos I wasn’t.” He hesitated. “Aren’t you going to give me to the eparch?”

  The city governor’s justice was apt to be swift, sure, and drastic. Had Scaurus caught one of the street-rats, he would have turned him over without a second thought. But what was this misplaced farmer doing in a Videssian slum, reduced to petty thievery for survival? And why did he blame mercenaries for his plight? He was no more a thief than Marcus was a woodcutter.

  The tribune came to a decision. “What I’m going to do is buy you a meal and a jug of wine. Wait, now—you’ll earn it.” He saw the other’s hand already starting to rise in rejection. “In exchange, you’ll answer my questions and tell me why you mislike mercenaries. Do we have a bargain?”

  The rustic’s larynx bobbed in his scrawny neck. “My pride says no, but my belly says yes, and I haven’t had much chance to listen to it lately. You’re an odd one, you know—I’ve never seen gear like yours, you talk funny, and you’re the first hired trooper I’ve ever seen who’d feed a hungry man instead of booting him in his empty gut. Phostis Apokavkos is my name, and much obliged to you.”

  Scaurus named himself in return. The eatery Phostis led them to was a hovel whose owner fried nameless bits of meat in stale oil and served them on husk-filled barley bread. It was better not to think of what went into the wine. That Apokavkos could not afford even this dive was a measure of his want.

  For a goodly time he was too busy chewing and swallowing to have much to say, but at last he slowed, belched enormously, and patted his stomach. “I’m so used to empty, I near forgot how good full could feel. So you want to hear my story, do you?”

  “More now than I did before. I’ve never seen a man eat so much.”

  “If the hole is big, it takes a deal to fill it.” He took a pull at his wine. “This is foul, isn’t it? I was too peckish to notice before. I grew better grapes than this my own self, back on my farm—

  “That’s a good place to start, I guess. I had a steading in the province of Raban, not far from the border with Yezd—do you know the country I mean?”

  “Not really,” Marcus admitted. “I’m new to Videssos.”

  “Thought you were. Well, then, it’s on the far side of the Cattle-Crossing, about a month’s foot-travel from here. I should know—I did the hike, fool that I was. Anyway, that farm had been in my family for longer than we could remember any more. We weren’t just peasants, either—we’d always been part of the provincial militia. We had to send a man to war if the militia got called and to keep up a horse and gear ready to fight any time, but in exchange we got out of paying taxes. We even got paid sometimes, when the government could afford it.

  “That’s how my grandfather told it, anyhow. It sounds too good to be real, if you ask me. It was in granddad’s day the Mankaphas family bought out about every farm in the village, us included. So we served the Mankaphai instead of the government, but things still weren’t bad—they kept the tax collectors off our backs well enough.”

  Marcus thought of how it was in Rome, with retiring soldiers depending not on the Senate but on their generals for land allotments on mustering out. All too familiar with the turmoil his own land had endured, he could guess Apokavkos’ next sentence before it was spoken.

  “Of course, the pen-pushers weren’t happy over losing our taxes, and the Mankaphai were even less happy about paying in our place now that they owned the land. Five years ago Phostis Mankaphas—I’m named for him—rebelled along with a fair pile of other nobles. That was the year before Mavrikios Gavras raised a ruction big enough to work, and we were swamped,” Ap
okavkos said bleakly; the tribune noted how he took his patron’s side without hesitation. He also learned for the first time that the reigning Emperor held his throne thanks to a successful rebellion.

  “The pen-pushers broke up the Mankaphas estates and said things would be like they were in granddad’s time. Hah! They couldn’t trust us for militia no more—we’d fought for the nobles. So in came the taxmen, wanting everything due since the days when Phostis’ great-grandfather bought our plot in the first place. I stuck it out as long as I could, but once the bloodsuckers were through, I couldn’t keep the dirt under my feet, let alone anything growing on it.

  “I knew it was hopeless there and I thought it might not be here, so a year ago I left. Fat lot of good it did me. I’m not much for lying or cheating; all I know is fighting and farming. I commenced to starve just as soon as I got here and I’ve been at it ever since. I was getting right good at it, too, till you came along.”

  Scaurus had let Apokavkos spin his tale without interruption. Now that he was through, the Roman found he’d raised as many questions as he’d answered. “Your lord’s lands were on the border with Yezd?”

  “Near enough, anyway.”

  “And he rebelled against the Emperor. Did he have backing from the west?”

  “From those dung-eaters? No, we fought them at the same time we took on the seal-stampers. That’s one of the reasons we lost.”

  Marcus blinked; the strategy implied was not of the finest. Something else troubled him. “You—and I suppose a good many like you—made up a militia, you said?”

  “That’s what I told you, all right.”

  “But when you revolted, the militia was broken up?”

  “Say, you did listen, didn’t you?”

  “But—you’re at war with Yezd, or as close as makes no difference,” the tribune protested. “How could you disband troops at a time like that? Who took their place?”

  Apokavkos gave him an odd look. “You ought to know.”

  A great many things suddenly became clear to Scaurus. No wonder the Empire was in trouble! Its rulers had seen its own warriors used by power-hungry nobles against the central government and decided native troops were too disloyal to trust. But the Empire still had foreign foes and had to quell revolts as well. So the bureaucrats of Videssos hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, a cure the tribune was certain would prove worse than the disease.

  Mercenary troops were fine—as long as they got paid regularly and as long as their captains did not grow greedy for power rather than money. If either of those things happened … the mercenaries had been hired to check the local soldiery, but who would put them down in turn?

  He shook his head in dismay. “What a mess! Oh, what a lovely mess!” And we Romans in the middle of it, he thought, disquieted.

  “You are the most peculiar excuse for a mercenary I ever did see,” Apokavkos observed. “Any of them other buggers would be scheming like all get out to see what he could squeeze out of this for him and his, but from the noises you’re making, you’re trying to figure out what’s best for the Empire. I do confess to not understanding.”

  Marcus thought that over for a minute or two and decided Apokavkos was right. How to explain it, though? “I’m a soldier, yes, but not a mercenary by trade. I never really planned to make a career of war. My men and I are from farther away than you—or I, for that matter—can imagine. Videssos took us in, when we could have been slain out of hand. As much as we have one, the Empire has to be our home. If it goes under, we go under with it.”

  “Most of that I could follow and I like the sound of it. What do you mean, though, when you’re talking of how far you’re from? I already said you were a new one on me.”

  So now for perhaps the twentieth time the tribune told of how the Romans—and a cantankerous Gaul—had come to Videssos. By the time he was through, Apokavkos was staring at him. “You must be telling the truth; no one would make up a yarn like that and figure to be believed. Phos above, there’s thousands could tell my story or one about like it, but in all my born days I never heard any to come close to yours.” His hand sketched the sun-disc over his breast.

  “That’s as may be,” Scaurus shrugged. “There still remains the problem of what to do with you.” He had taken to this strangely met acquaintance, appreciating his matter-of-factness in the face of trouble. Even if he knew it would not be good enough, Apokavkos would give his best. In that, Marcus mused, he’s like most of my own men.

  The thought gave him his answer; he snapped his fingers in satisfaction. The few seconds of his deliberation had been bad ones for Apokavkos, with new-found hope struggling against the visions of misfortune he had learned to expect.

  “I’m sorry,” Scaurus said, for all this was painfully clear on the Videssian’s face. “I didn’t mean for you to worry. Tell me, how would you like to become a Roman?”

  “Now I know I don’t follow you.”

  “That’s what you will do—follow me. I’ll take you back to our barracks, get you some gear, and quarter you with my men. You’ve soldiered before; the life won’t come hard for you. Besides, you haven’t done any too well as a Videssian, so what do you have to lose?”

  “I’d be a liar if I said I’d be much worse off,” Apokavkos admitted. His unhappy stay in the capital had given him a share of big-city cynicism, for his next question was, “What do you get out of the deal?”

  Scaurus grinned. “For one thing, a good fighting man—I am a mercenary, remember? There’s more to it than that, though. Your scales have got weighted on the wrong side, and it hasn’t been your fault. Somehow it seems only fair to even them a little if I can.”

  The displaced farmer clasped Marcus’ hands in a grip that still held the promise of considerable strength. “I’m your man,” he said, eyes shining. “All I ever wanted was an even chance and I never came close to one till now. Who would have thought it’d be a foreigner to give it to me?”

  After the Roman paid the taverner’s score—an outrageous one, for food and drink so vile—he let Apokavkos lead him from the unsavory maze into which he’d wandered. They were not long out of it before the Videssian said, “It’s your turn now. That rat’s nest is the only part of the city I really know. I never had the money to see the rest.”

  With some fumbling and the help of passers-by, they made their way back to Palamas’ forum. There, to his annoyance, Marcus was promptly recognized again. Apokavkos’ mouth fell open when he found his companion had bested the fearsome Avshar with swords. “I saw the son of a snake in action once or twice, leading part of King Wulghash’s army against us. He’s worth half an army all by his lonesome, ’cause he’s as strong as he is sly, which is saying a lump. He beat the boots off us.”

  The gardens, grounds, and buildings of the palace quarter awed the rustic even more. His comment was, “Now I know what to look forward to, if I’m kindly judged when I die.” Another thought struck him. “Phos’ light! I’ll be bedded down right in the middle of it all! Can you imagine that? Can you?” Marcus was sure he was talking to himself.

  When they reached the Roman barracks, they found Tzimiskes and Viridovix outside, a game board between them. Many of the Romans—and the Gaul as well—had become fond of the battle game the Videssians played. Unlike the ones they had known before, it involved no luck, only the skill of the player.

  “Glad I am to see you,” Viridovix said, sweeping the pieces from the board. “Now I can tell our friend here ‘I would have got you in the end’ and there’s no way for him to make a liar of me.”

  The tribune had seen how few of his own pieces the Celt had removed, and how many of Tzimiskes’. The Videssian had the game firmly controlled, and all three of them knew it—no, all four, if Apokavkos’ raised eyebrows meant anything.

  Tzimiskes started to say something, but Viridovix interrupted him. “Where did you come by this scarecrow?” he asked, pointing at Apokavkos.

  “There’s a bit of a story to that.” The
Roman turned to Tzimiskes. “Neilos, I’m glad I found you. I want you to take charge of this fellow,” he named Apokavkos and introduced him to the other two, “feed him as much as he’ll hold, get him weapons—and clothes, too, for that matter. He’s our first honorary Roman. He—what is it? You look like you’re about to explode.”

  “Scaurus, I’ll do everything you say, and you can tell me the wherefores later. The Emperor has been sending messengers here every hour on the hour since early this morning. Something to do with last night’s activities, I gather.”

  “Oh.” That put a different light on matters. Whether or not he was a hero in the city, he realized the Emperor might have to take a dim view of one of his soldiers brawling with a neighboring land’s ambassador. “I wonder how much trouble I’m in. Phostis, go with Tzimiskes here. If I have to see the Emperor, I’d best get shaved”—He was still refusing to grow his beard.—“cleaned, and changed.”

  The next imperial messenger arrived while Marcus was scraping the last whiskers from under his chin. He waited with ill-concealed impatience while the Roman bathed and donned a fresh mantle. “It’s about time,” he said when Marcus emerged, though he and the tribune both knew how quick the ablutions had been.

  He led Scaurus past the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, past the looming Grand Courtroom with its incredible bronzework doors, past a two-story barracks complex—Namdaleni were wandering about here, and Marcus looked for but did not see Hemond—and through a grove of cherry trees thick with sweet, pink blossoms to a secluded building deep within it—the private chambers of the imperial family, Marcus realized.

  His worries lessened slightly. If Mavrikios was going to take strong action against him, he would do it publicly, so Yezd’s honor could be seen to be satisfied.