THE ARSHAUM CAMP WOKE WITH THE SUN. SWORDS flashed in the morning light outside one of the beehive-shaped felt tents; steel rang sweetly against steel. One of the fencers whooped and gave a great roundhouse slash. The other, a smaller man, ducked under it and stepped smartly forward. He stopped his thrust bare inches from his opponent’s chest.
“To the afterworld with you, you kern,” Viridovix panted, stumbling back and throwing his arms wide in surrender. The Gaul wiped the sweat from his face with a freckled forearm and brushed long coppery hair out of his eyes. “Sure and you must ha’ been practicing on the sly.”
Gorgidas studied him narrowly. “Are you sure you did not give me that opening?” Physician by training, historian by avocation, the Greek was no skilled swordsman. He had seen too much of war in his medical service with the Roman legions for it to draw him as it did Viridovix. But, having been forced to see he needed a warrior’s skills to survive on the steppe, he set about acquiring them with the same dogged persistence he gave to medical lore.
The big Celt grinned at him, green eyes crinkling with mirth. “And what if I did? You were after having the wit to take it, which was the point. Not bad, for a man so old and all,” he added, to see Gorgidas fume. Save for the beard the Greek had lately grown, which was streaked all through with white, he might have been any age from twenty-five to sixty; his lean body was full of a surprising spare strength, while his face did not carry much loose flesh to sag with the years.
“You don’t have to be so bloody proud. You’re no younger than I am,” Gorgidas snapped. Viridovix’ grin got wider. He preened, stroking the luxuriant red mustaches that hung almost to his shoulders. They were still unsilvered. He had scraped off the beard he grew earlier in the winter, but no gray had lurked there either.
“Boast over what you may,” the Greek said sourly, “but both of us wake up to piss oftener of nights then we did a few years ago, when we were on the lazy side of forty. Deny it if you can.”
“Och, a hit and no mistake,” Viridovix said. “And here’s another for you!” He sprang at Gorgidas. The physician got his gladius up in time to turn the Gaul’s blow, but it sent the shortsword—a gift from Gaius Philippus, and one he had never thought he’d use—spinning from his hand.
“Still not bad,” the Celt said, picking it up for him. “I’d meant to spank your ribs with the flat o’ my blade that time.”
“Bah! I should have held on.” Gorgidas opened and closed his fist several times, working flexibility into his numbed fingers. “You have a heavy arm there, you hulking savage.” He was too honest not to give praise where it was due, though his sharp tongue diluted it in the giving.
“Well, may you be staked out for the corbies, scoffer of a Greekling.” Viridovix swelled with mock indignation. Between themselves they spoke a bastard mix of Latin and Videssian. Each was the only representative of his people in this new world and each felt the pain of his own language slowly dying in him for want of anyone with whom to speak it. Gorgidas kept Greek alive by composing his history in that tongue. But only druids wrote the Celtic speech, so Viridovix was denied even that relief.
Around them the camp was coming to life. Some nomads were tending to their small, shaggy horses while others knocked down tents and rolled the fabric up around the sticks that formed their frameworks. Still more crouched round fires as they breakfasted; the morning was chilly. They mixed water with dry curds and spooned up the thick, soupy, tasteless mix; gnawed at slabs of salted and dried beef, mutton, goat, or venison; or speared horsegut-cased sausages on sticks and roasted them over the flames. Many of them did not have as much as they wanted; supplies were running low.
Mounted sentries trotted in from the perimeter, rubbing at eyes red and tired from their sleepless duty. Others rode out to take their place. The Arshaum grumbled at the tight watch their khagan Arghun kept. What if they were on the plains of Pardraya, east of the river Shaum, instead of in their own steppelands to the west? Their ancestors had smashed the Khamorth over the river to Pardraya half a century before; few believed the rival nomad folk would dare contest their passage.
For all that, though, the Arshaum were men who enjoyed fighting for its own sake, and Gorgidas and Viridovix were not alone in weapons play. Plainsmen thrust light lances and flung javelins both afoot and mounted. They fired arrows at wadded balls of cloth tossed into the air and at shields propped upright on the ground. Their double-curved bows, reinforced with sinew, sent barbed shafts smashing through the small, round targets—shafts that could pierce a corselet of boiled leather or chain mail afterwards.
A bowstring snapped just as an archer let fly, sending his arrow spinning crazily through the air. “Heads up!” the Arshaum yelled, and all around him nomads dove for cover.
“Why does he go shouting that, the which would do a man no good at all?” Viridovix said. “Riddle it out for me, Gorgidas dear.”
“He must have meant it especially for you, you unruly Celt,” the physician replied with relish, “knowing you always do the opposite of whatever you’re told.”
“Honh! See if I’m fool enough to be asking for another explanation from you any time soon.”
Not far away, a plainsman thudded into the dirt, flung over his wrestling partner’s shoulder; the Arshaum were highly skilled at unarmed combat. Their swordplay was less expert. Several pairs slashed away at each other with the medium-length curved blades they favored. The yataghans, heavy at the point, were all very well for quick cuts from horseback, but did not lend themselves to scientific fencing.
“Had enough?” Gorgidas asked, sheathing his sword.
“Aye, for the now.”
They wandered over to watch one of the dueling pairs, perhaps the unlikeliest match in the camp. Arghun’s son Arigh was going at it furiously with Batbaian, the son of Targitaus, their blades a silvery glitter as they met each other stroke for stroke.
They were both khagans’ sons, but there their resemblance ended. For looks, Arigh was a typical enough Arshaum: slender, lithe, and swarthy, with a wide, high-cheekboned face, short, almost flat nose, and slanted eyes. Only a few black hairs grew on his upper lip and straggled down from the point of his chin. But Batbaian was a Khamorth, with his people’s broad-shouldered frame, thick curly beard half hiding his heavy features, and a strong, fleshy beak in the center of his face. He would have been handsome but for the red ruin of a socket where his left eye had been.
The eye he still had was the “mercy” of Avshar and Varatesh the bandit chief. They had taken a thousand prisoners when they crushed the army Targitaus raised against them, and then given those prisoners back to Batbaian’s father … all but fifty of them with both eyes burned away, the rest left with one to guide their comrades home. Seeing them so ravaged, Targitaus died of a stroke on the spot. Varatesh fell on his devastated clan three days later. As far as Viridovix knew, Batbaian was the only clansman left alive—save himself, whom Targitaus had adopted into the Wolves after he escaped Varatesh and his henchmen. The bandits missed them only because they were attending an outlying herd; they rode in at day’s end to find massacre laid out before them.
The Gaul’s features, usually merry, grew grim and tight as he fell into memory’s grip. Batbaian had had a sister—but Seirem was dead now, and perhaps that was as well, with what she met before she died. Part of Viridovix’ heart was dead with her; a tomcat by nature, he had come late to love and lost it too early.
The past winter he and Batbaian had lived the outlaw’s life, revenge their only goal. At last he thought to cross west into Shaumkhiil and seek aid from the Arshaum against Varatesh and Avshar, his puppet-master. Batbaian’s hate burned away his fear of the western nomads; where the Arshaum despised the Khamorth, the latter had almost a superstitious dread for the folk who had harried them east over the steppe.
Having traveled with the Arshaum force for weeks, though, Batbaian saw that they were men, too, not the near-demons he had thought. And he had earned their respect as well, for the hardships he had borne and for his skill with his hands. His burly build let him shoot farther than most of them, and if he was now giving ground to Arigh, his foe was fast and deceptive as a striking snake.
“The wind-spirits take it!” he cursed in his own guttural tongue, falling back again. In a mixture of bad Videssian—which Arigh understood, having served his father as envoy to the Empire—and worse Arshaum, he went on, “With only eye one, not able to tell how away far you are.”
Arigh’s grin was predatory, his teeth very white. “My friend, Varatesh’s men would not heed your whining, and I will not either.”
He pressed his attack, his slashes coming from every direction at once. Then he was staring at his empty hand; his sword lay on the ground at his feet. Batbaian leaped forward and planted a boot on it. He tapped Arigh on the chest with his blade. The watchers whooped at the sudden reversal.
“Why you dirty son of a flop-eared goat,” Arigh said without much rancor. “You suckered me into that, didn’t you?”
Batbaian only grunted. The summer before he had been hardly more than a boy, full of a boy’s chatter and bubbling enthusiasm for everything around him. These days he was a man, and a driven one. He spoke seldom, and his smile, which was rarer, never reached past his lips.
“Puir lad,” Viridovix murmured to Gorgidas. “A pity you canna unfreeze the spirit of him, as you did wi’ this carcass o’ mine.”
“I know no gift for that, save it come from within a man’s own soul,” the physician answered. Then he spread his hands and admitted, “For that matter, when I found you I thought I would have to watch you die, too.”
“A good thing you didn’t. My ghost’d bewail you for it.”
“Hmm. No doubt, if it takes after you in the flesh.” But the Greek could not stay flippant long, not where the healing he had worked on Viridovix was concerned.
Ever since he was swept into Videssos with the legionaries, he had studied its healing art, an art that relied not so much on herbs and scalpels as on mustering and unleashing the power of the mind to beat back disease and injury—call it magic, for lack of a better word. He had seen Phos’ healer-priests work cures on men he had given up for doomed, and chased after their skill like a hunter trailing some elusive beast.
But the stubborn rationality on which he prided himself would not let him truly accept that curing by mind alone was possible; it ran too much against all his training, all his deepest beliefs. And so for years he tried and, not genuinely believing he could succeed, never did. Only the lash of desperation at finding Viridovix freezing in a fierce steppe blizzard made him transcend his doubts and channel the healing energies through himself and into the Gaul.
He had healed again afterwards, closing and cleansing the bites an Arshaum took from a wolf that would not die with three arrows in its chest. Knowing he could heal made the second time easy. The nomad’s gratitude was wine-sweet, and the Greek accepted as a badge of honor the tearing weariness that always followed healing.
“Why for we standing round?” Batbaian demanded. “We should riding be.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned away from Arigh and went off to his string of horses to pick a mount for the day’s ride.
Behind him, Arigh shook his head. “That one would ride through fire for his revenge.”
The Arshaum around him nodded, sympathizing with Batbaian’s blood feud. But Viridovix started in alarm, whipping his head round to make sure the Khamorth had not heard the remark. “Dinna say that to him, ever,” he warned. “ ’Twas Avshar’s fires trapped him in the shindy, and all the rest, too.” The Gaul shuddered as he remembered those tall, arrow-straight lines of flame darting like serpents over the steppe at the evil wizard’s will.
There was compassion under the unfeeling veneer Arigh cultivated, though he often did not let it out. Even when he did, it was usually with a self-deprecating, “All that time in Videssos has left me soft.” But now he bit his lip, admitting, “I’d forgotten.”
A last delay held up the army’s departure a few minutes more. All the tents were down and stowed on horseback save the one shared by Lankinos Skylitzes and Pikridios Goudeles, Thorisin’s envoys to Arghun. Skylitzes was long since out and about; the tall imperial officer looked with dour amusement at the sign of his tentmate’s sleepiness.
He stuck his head inside the tent and roared, “Up, slugabed! Is this a holy day, for you to spend it all between the sheets?”
Goudeles emerged in short order, but mightily rumpled, tunic on back-to-front, and belt out of half its loops. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, the pen-pusher winced at the ironic cheer that greeted his appearance. “Oh, very well, here I am,” he said testily. He glowered at Skylitzes; the two of them were as cat and dog. “Mightn’t you have picked a less drastic way to rouse me?”
“No,” Skylitzes said. He was that rarity, a short-spoken Videssian.
Still grumbling, Goudeles began to knock down the tent, but made such a slow, clumsy job of it that Skylitzes, with an exasperated grunt, finally pitched in to help. “You bungler,” he said, almost kindly, as he tied the roll of tent fabric and sticks onto a packsaddle.
“Bungler? I?” Goudeles drew himself up to his full height, which was not imposing. “No need to mock me merely because I was not cut out for life in the field.” He caught Gorgidas’ eye. “These soldiers have a narrow view of life’s priorities, do they not?”
“No doubt,” the Greek answered. As he was already mounted, he sounded a trifle smug. Goudeles looked hurt, one of his more artful expressions. In truth, the bureaucrat was a carpet knight, infinitely more at home in the elaborate double-dealing of Videssos the city than here on the vast empty steppe. But his gift for intrigue made him a sly, subtle diplomat, and he had done well in helping persuade Arghun to favor the Empire over Yezd.
He spent a few seconds trying to restore the point to his beard, but gave it up as a bad job. “Hopeless,” he said sadly. He climbed onto his own horse and patted his belly, still ample after close to a year on the plains. “Am I too late to break my fast?”
Skylitzes rolled his eyes, but Viridovix handed Goudeles a chunk of meat. The pen-pusher eyed it skeptically. “What, ah, delicacy have we here?”
“Sure and it’s half a roast marmot,” the Celt told him, grinning. “Begging your honor’s pardon and all, but I was after eating the last of my sausage today.”
Goudeles turned a pale green. “Somehow I find my appetite is less hearty than it was, though my thanks, of course, for your generosity.” He gave the ground squirrel back to Viridovix.
“Ride, then,” Skylitzes snapped. As Goudeles clucked to his horse, though, the officer admitted to Gorgidas, “I’m low myself; we should stop for a hunt soon.”
The Greek dipped his head in his people’s gesture of agreement. “So am I.” He shuddered slightly. “We could go on the nomad way for a while, living off our horses’ blood.” He did not intend to be taken seriously. The idea revolted him.
Not so Skylitzes; all he said was, “That’s for emergencies only. It runs the animals down too badly.” He had traveled the steppes before and was at home with the customs of the plainsmen, speaking both the Arshaum and Khamorth tongues fluently.
The Arshaum moved steadily over the Pardrayan plain, their course a bit east of south. Alternately walking and trotting, their ponies ate up the miles. The rough-coated little beasts were not much for looks, but there was iron endurance in them. Gorgidas blessed the wet ground and thick grass cover of approaching spring; later in the year the army would have kicked up great choking clouds of dust.
When afternoon came, the sun sparkled off the waters of the inland Mylasa Sea on the western horizon. Other than that, the steppe was all but featureless, an endless, gently rolling sea of grass that stretched from the borders of Videssos further west than any man knew. As a landscape, Gorgidas found it dull. He had grown up with the endless variety of terrain Greece offers: seacoast, mountains, carved valleys kissed by the Mediterranean sun or dark under forest, and flatlands narrow enough to walk across in half a day.
To Viridovix the limitless vistas of the steppe were not so much boring as actively oppressive. His Gallic woods cut down the sweep of vision, left a man always close to something he could reach out and touch. The plains made him feel tiny and insignificant, an insect crawling across a tray. He fought his unreasoning fear as best he could, riding near the center of the army to use the nomads around him as a shield against the vastness beyond.
Each day he looked south in the hope of seeing the mountains of Erzerum—the peaks that separated Pardraya from Yezd—shoulder their way up over the edge of the world. So far he had been disappointed. “One morning they’ll be peeping up, though, and none too soon for me,” he said to Batbaian. “It does a body good, knowing there’s an end to all this flat.”
“Why?” Batbaian demanded, as used to open space as Viridovix was to his narrow forest tracks. His companions also shook their heads at the Celt’s strange ways. As he usually did, Batbaian rode with the ten-man guard squad that had accompanied the Videssian embassy out from Prista. Except for Viridovix and Skylitzes, the troopers were the only ones with the army who spoke his tongue, and most of them had Khamorth blood.
The squad leader, Agathias Psoes, was a Videssian, but years at the edge of Pardraya had left him as at home in the language of its people as in the imperial tongue. “Country doesn’t matter one way or the other,” he said with an old soldier’s cynicism. “It’s the bastards who live on it that cause the trouble.”
Viridovix burst out laughing. “Here and I thought I was rid o’ Gaius Philippus for good and all, and up springs his shadow.” Psoes, who knew next to nothing of the Romans, blinked in incomprehension.
“What are the lot of you grunting about there?” an Arshaum asked. Viridovix turned his head to see Arghun the khagan and his younger son Dizabul coming up alongside the guardsmen. The men from Shaumkhiil spoke a smooth, sibilant tongue; the harsh gutturals of the Khamorth speech grated on their ears.
With Arghun, though, the teasing was good-natured. He led the Gray Horse clan, the largest contingent of the Arshaum army, more by guile and persuasion than by the bluff bluster Viridovix had used as a chief among the Lexovii back in Gaul.
The Celt translated as well as he could; he was beginning to understand the Arshaum language fairly well, but speaking it was harder. “And what do you think of that, red whiskers?” Arghun asked. Viridovix’ exotic coloring fascinated him, as did the Celt’s luxuriant mustaches. The khagan grew only a few gray hairs on his upper lip and frankly envied the other’s splendid ornament.
“Me? I puts it the other way round. People is people anywheres, but the—how you be saying?—scenery, it change a lot.”
“Something to that,” Arghun nodded, an instinctively shrewd politician for all his barbaric trappings.
“How can you tell, father?” Dizabul said, his regular features twisting into a sneer. “He talks so poorly it’s next to impossible to make out what he says.” With a supercilious smile, he turned to Viridovix, “That should be ‘I would put,’ outlander, and ‘people are people,’ and ‘scenery changes.’ ”
“I thank your honor,” the Gaul said—not at all what he was thinking. Dizabul struck him as Arghun’s mistake; the lad had grown up having his every whim indulged, with predictable results. He also loathed his brother and everyone connected with him, which added venom to the tone he took with Viridovix. “Spoiled as a salmon a week out of water,” the Gaul muttered in his own speech.
Arghun shook his head at Dizabul in mild reproof. “I’d sooner hear good sense wearing words of old sheepskin than numskullery or wickedness decked out in sable.”
“Listen to him and welcome, then,” Dizabul snarled, bristling at even the suggestion of criticism. “I shan’t waste my time.” He flicked his horse’s reins and ostentatiously trotted away.
Gorgidas, who was deep in conversation with Tolui the shaman, glanced up as Dizabul rode past. His eyes followed the comely youth as another man’s might a likely wench. He was only too aware of the young princeling’s petulance and vile temper, but the sheer physical magnetism he exerted almost made them forgettable. He realized he had missed Tolui’s last couple of sentences. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
“When spring is far enough for the frogs to come out,” Tolui repeated, “there is a potion I intend to try on Arghun’s lameness. It should be only days now.”
“Ah?” said the Greek, interested again as soon as medicine was mentioned. His own knowledge had been enough to save the khagan’s life from a draft of hemlock Bogoraz of Yezd had given him when Arghun decided for Videssos, but the paralyzing drug left Arghun’s legs permanently weakened. Gorgidas had not been able to work the Videssian styly of healing then, and it did no good against long-established infirmities.
“I need nine frogs,” the shaman explained. “Their heads are pithed, and the yellow fluid that comes out is mixed with melted goat fat in a pot. The pot is sealed and left in the sun for a day and in a fire overnight. Then the oil that is left is dabbed on the afflicted joints with a feather. Most times it works well.”
“I’d not heard of that one before,” Gorgidas admitted, intrigued and a little nauseated. He thought of something else. “Lucky for you Arghun is no Khamorth, or you’d never get near him with that medicine.”
Tolui barked laughter. “True. Just another proof the Hairies—” He used his people’s contemptuous nickname for the heavily bearded natives of Pardraya. “—hardly rate being called men at all.”
“Tomorrow we will hunt,” Arghun declared, sitting by the campfire and spooning up the last of his miserable meal of curds and water. A few of his men still hoarded a bit of sausage or smoked meat, while others had knocked over hares or other small game while they traveled; but most were reduced to the same iron rations he carried, or to blood.
“About time. This Pardraya is a paltry place,” said Irnek, a tall nomad who led the Arshaum of the Black Sheep clan, next most numerous after the Gray Horses of Arghun and sometimes rivals to them. Puzzlement dwelt in the Arshaum’s eyes; he was a clever man, confused by what he was finding. He went on, “It should not be so. This land draws more rain than our Shaumkhiil and ought to support rich flocks. Not from what we’ve seen, though; I begin to forget the very look of a cow or sheep.”
Angry growls of agreement rose from the plainsmen who heard him. They had counted on raiding the herds of the Khamorth as they traversed Pardraya on their way to Yezd, but since they crossed the Shaum those herds were nowhere to be found. They took the occasional stray cow, goat, fat-tailed sheep, but came across none of the great flocks that were as vital to the nomads as a farmer’s crops to him.
For that matter, they had seen few Khamorth, not even scouts dogging their trail. The Arshaum took that as but another sign of cowardice, and joked about it. “What do the Hairies do when they see us coming?” to which the answer was, “Who knows? We never get the chance to find out.”
The men who traveled with them worried more. Viridovix knew from bitter experience that Avshar could track him by his blade. No magic would bite on it, but that very blankness made it detectable to the wizard-prince. “Sure and it’s no happen-so we’ve not had greetings from the spalpeen. Belike he’s brewing somewhat against us.”
“A greater concern,” Pikridios Goudeles said, “is why no great number of Khamorth have gone over to us. Living under Avshar can scarcely be pleasant.”
“A good point,” said Gorgidas, who had wondered the same thing.
“Two reasons,” Batbaian answered in his labored Videssian. “One, he rules through Varatesh, who is outlaw, yes, but from family of a khagan. He makes a good dog.” The plainsman’s eye narrowed in contempt.
“That one’s more than Avshar’s hound,” Viridovix disagreed. The time he had spent in Varatesh’s clutches made him thoroughly respect the outlaw chieftain’s talents.
“I say what I say,” Batbaian declared flatly. He stared at the Gaul, challenging him to argue further. Viridovix shrugged and waved for him to go on. “All right. Other reason is that most Khamorth worse afraid of Arshaum than of wizard. I was, so much I did not think of them till you say they might be help in revenge. May be lots of rebels hate Avshar but fear us here, too.”
“Something to that,” Skylitzes said. “He’s also had the winter to deal with uprisings. A lesson or two from him would make anyone thoughtful.”
“Thoughtful, forsooth!” Goudeles said. “Are you in a contest of understatement with me, Lankinos? Shall we go on to style this hateful winter just past ‘cool,’ Phos’ High Temple ‘large,’ and Erzerum ‘hilly’?”
Skylitzes’ mouth twitched in the grimace he used for a smile. “Fair enough. We could call you ‘gassy,’ while we were about it.”
The bureaucrat spluttered while his comrades laughed. Gorgidas made them serious once more when he asked, “If Avshar does assail us, how are we going to be able to resist him?”
“Fight him, crush him, kill him,” Batbaian growled. “Stake him out on plains for vultures to eat. Why else did V’rid’rish bring me here to join you?”
“Crush him, aye, but how?” the Greek persisted. “Many have tried, but none succeeded yet.”
Batbaian glared at him as he would have at anyone who questioned the certainty of vengeance. Skylitzes said, “These Arshaum are better warriors than the Khamorth, Gorgidas—and both sides think that’s true, which helps make it so.”
“What of it?” Gorgidas said. “Avshar need not have the finest soldiers to win. Look at Maragha, look at the battle on the steppe here last fall against Batbaian’s father. In both of them it was his magic that made his victory for him, not the quality of his troops.”
A gloomy silence fell. There was no denying the physician was right; he usually was. At last Viridovix said, “Very good, your generalship, sir, you’ve gone and named the problem for us. Are you after having somewhat in mind for solving it, or is it you want the rest of us grumpy as your ain self?”
“To the crows with you,” Gorgidas said, nettled at the teasing. “What do I know of ordering battles and such? You were the great war-chieftain back there in Gaul—what would you do?”
Viridovix suddenly grew bleak. “Whatever the unriddling may be, I dinna ken it. For fighting the whoreson straight up, I was, and see how well that worked.”
Cursing his clumsy tongue, Gorgidas started an apology, but Viridovix waved it away. “It was a question fairly put. The now, the best I know to do is find my bedroll and hope some good fairy’ll whisper me my answer whilst I sleep.”
“Fair enough.” The Greek’s eyes were getting sandy, too.
When morning came Viridovix was still without his solution. “Och, it’s no luck the puir fairies ha’. They must wear out the wings of ’em or ever they get to this wretched world, the which is so far away and all,” he said sadly.
His disappointment was quickly forgotten, though, in amazement over the Arshaum hunt. “Not ones to do things by halves, are they now?” he said to Gorgidas.
“Hardly.” The entire Videssian embassy party made up a small part of one wing of the Arshaum army which, led by Arghun, spread out in a long east-west line across the steppe. The other half of the force, under Irnek’s command, rode south. Sometime near noon they would also spread out, and then move north as Arghun’s followers came down to meet them, the two lines trapping all the game between them.
The Khamorth did not stage such elaborate hunts; Batbaian was astonished to watch the Arshaum deployment. “This might as well war be,” he said to Arigh.
“Why not?” the other returned. “What harder foe than hunger? Or do you enjoy the feel of your belly cozying up to your backbone?” It took a good deal to make the grim young Khamorth smile, but his lips parted for a moment.
When Arghun saw his line in position and judged Irnek had taken the rest of the nomads far enough south to shut in a good bag of game, he raised the army’s standard high above his head. Fluttering on the end of a lance was Bogoraz’s long wool caftan, all that was left of the treacherous ambassador. Like the Videssian party, he had sworn an oath to Arghun’s shamans that he meant the khagan no harm and walked through their magic fire as surety for it. When he broke his pledge, the fire claimed him.
With the lifting of the standard, the line rolled forward. The Arshaum who had them pounded on drums, tooted pipes and bone whistles, winded horns. The rest yelled at the top of their lungs to scare beasts from cover.
Trotting along with the rest, Viridovix threw back his head and let out the unearthly wailing shriek of a Gallic war cry. “I don’t know about the bloody animals,” Gorgidas said with a shudder, “but you certainly frighten me.”
“And what good is that, when you’re nobbut skin and bones? Och, look, there goes a hare!” An Arshaum shot the little creature at the top of its leap. Backed by his potent bow, the arrow knocked it sideways. It kicked a couple of times and lay still. The plainsman leaned down from his saddle, grabbed it by the ears, and tossed it into a sack.
Viridovix howled again. “Something worthwhile for me to do, then; it’s no dab hand at the bow I make, not next to these lads.”
“Nor I,” the Greek replied. He flapped his arms, bawled out snatches of Homer and Aiskhylos. Whether or not it was his antics that flushed it, another rabbit broke cover in front of him. Instead of running away, the panicked little beast darted straight past his horse. He cut at it with his sword, far too late. The nomad next to him shook his head derisively, mimed drawing a bow. He spread his hands in rueful agreement and apology.
Something went “Honk! Ho-onkk!” a couple of hundred feet down the line. Gorgidas saw a shape running through the grass, a couple of plainsmen in hot pursuit. Then it suddenly bounded into the air, flying strongly on short, stubby wings. The sun shone, metallic, off bronze tail feathers and head of iridescent red and green. “Pheasant!” Viridovix whooped. A storm of arrows brought the bird down. The Gaul fairly drooled. “Age him right, braise him with mushrooms, wild thyme, and a bit o’ wormwood to cut the grease—”
“Remember where you are,” Gorgidas said. “You’ll be lucky if he gets cooked.” Crestfallen, Viridovix gave a regretful nod.
A nomad shouted and his horse screamed in terror as a furiously spitting wildcat sprang at them. It clawed the horse’s flank, sank its teeth into the Arshaum’s calf, and was gone before anyone could do anything about it. The cursing plainsman bound up his leg and rode on, ignoring his comrades’ jeers. Gorgidas reminded himself to look at the wound when the hunt was gone. Untended animal bites were almost sure to fester.
More arrows leaped into the sky as the hunters splashed through a small, chilly stream and sent geese and ducks up in desperate flight. Viridovix greedily snatched up a fat goose that had tumbled to earth with an arrow through its neck. “I’ll not let anyone botch this,” he said, as if challenging the world. “All dark meat it is, and all toothsome, too. O’ course,” he went on with a pointed glance Gorgidas’ way, “I might enjoy the sharing of it, at least with them as dinna mock me.”
“I’m plainly doomed to starve, then,” the Greek said. Viridovix made a rude noise.
Goudeles said, “If it’s praises you seek, outlander, I’ll gladly compose a panegyric for you in exchange for a leg of that succulent fowl.” He struck a pose—not an easy thing to do on horseback for such an indifferent rider—declaiming, “Behold the Phos-fostered foreigner, magnificent man of deeds of dought—”
“Oh, stifle it, Pikridios,” Skylitzes said. “You’re still fatter than the damned bird is, and slipperier than goose grease ever was.” Not a bit offended, the bureaucrat went right on, the course best calculated to annoy Skylitzes.
“I wish we could bag more of these birds,” Gorgidas said. “Too many are getting away.”
“We will,” Arigh promised, “but there aren’t enough to be worthwhile this time.” He pointed. “See? Tolui is ready when we come on a big flock.”
The shaman was not wearing his usual garb, which differed not at all from that of the rest of the plainsmen: fur cap with ear flaps, tunic of sueded leather, heavy sheepskin jacket—some wore wolf, fox, or otter—leather trousers, and soft-soled boots. Instead, he had donned the fantastic regalia of his calling. Long fringes, some knotted to trap spirits and others dyed bright colors, hung from every inch of his robe and streamed behind him as he rode. A lurid, leering mask of hide stretched over a wooden framework hid his face. Only the sword that swung at his belt said he was human, not some demon’s spawn.
Skylitzes followed Arigh’s pointing finger, too. The Videssian officer made Phos’ sun-sign against evil, muttering a prayer as he did so. Gorgidas caught part of it: “… and keep me safe from heathen wizardry.” Unafraid of worldly dangers, Skylitzes had all his faith’s pious suspicion of other beliefs.
Gorgidas gave a wry laugh; he was in no position to sneer at the soldier. He mistrusted magic, too, of every sort, for it flew straight against the logical set of mind with which he had faced the world since he was a beardless youth. That he worked it himself made him no more easy with it.
He must have been thinking aloud, for Viridovix turned his head and said, “Sure and this is a new world, or had your honor never noticed, being so busy scribbling about it and all? Me, now, I take things as they come, the which is more restful nor worrying anent the wherefore of ’em.”
“If you’re pleased to be a cabbage, then be one,” the Greek snapped. “As for me, I’d sooner try to understand.”
“A cabbage, is it? Och, well, at the least you credit me for a head, which is kindlier than you’ve sometimes been, I’m thinking.” Viridovix grinned impishly; just as Goudeles’ bombast made Skylitzes growl, his own blithe unconcern irritated Gorgidas more than any angry comeback.
A herd of onagers galloped away from the oncoming riders. The small-eared wild asses could almost have been miniature horses, but for their sparsely haired tails and short, stiff, brushy manes. Three wolves coursed beside them, not hunters now but hunted, fleeing before the Arshaum as from a fire on the steppe.
However hardened they had grown to the saddle, neither Viridovix nor Gorgidas could endure with the Arshaum, who rode as soon as they could walk. The long, hard ride chafed the physician’s thighs raw and left the Celt’s fundament sore as if he had been kicked. They both groaned as their horses jounced over a low rise and pounded toward another stream.
The drumming thunder of hoofbeats sent a cloud of waterfowl flapping skyward—ducks, geese, and orange-billed swans, whose great wings made a thunder of their own. Birds fell as the nomads started shooting at long range, but again it seemed almost all would evade the arrows.
Gorgidas saw Tolui’s devil-masked face turn toward Arghun. The khagan made a short, chopping motion with his right hand. The shaman began to chant; both arms moved in quick passes. He guided his horse with the pressure of his knees alone. A rider in the Greek’s world would have been hard-pressed to stay in the saddle thus, but stirrups made it easy for the Arshaum.
Black clouds boiled up over the stream as soon as his spell began, come from nowhere out of a clear sky. A squall of rain, a veritable curtain of water, pelted the escaping birds. It had been only seconds since they took flight, now the sudden deluge smashed them back to earth. Gorgidas heard squawks of terror through the sorcerous storm’s hiss.
As quickly as it had blown up, the rain stopped. Water birds lay all along the banks of the stream, some with broken wings, others half drowned, still others simply too stunned to fly. Raising a cheer for Tolui, the plainsmen swooped down on them. They clubbed and shot and slashed, grabbing up bird after bird.
“Roast duck!” Goudeles cried with glee as he bagged a green-winged teal. He thumbed his nose at Viridovix. “You’ll not hear that panegyric now!”
“No, nor miss it either,” the Gaul retorted. Skylitzes gave a single sharp snort of laughter.
They splashed through the muck Tolui’s storm had made. With a glance at the westering sun, Arghun picked up the pace. “We will need daylight for the final killing,” he called. His riders passed the word along.
Then Gorgidas heard cheers from the far left end of the line, where scouts stretched out ahead of the main band of hunters. A few minutes later they sounded from the right as well—Irnek’s half of the army was in sight. Moving with the smooth precision experience brings, the horsemen on the flanks galloped forward from both parties to enclose the space between and finally trap all the animals in it.
That space grew smaller and smaller as the two lines approached. The beasts within were pressed ever more tightly: wolves, foxes, wildcats, rabbits bouncing underfoot, deer, wild asses, sheep, a few cows, goats. The nomads relentlessly plied them with arrows, pulling one quiverload after another from their saddlebags. The din, with the yelps and screeches and brays of wounded animals mixed with the frightened howls and lowing of those not yet hit and with the hunters’ cries, was indescribable.
Driven, hunted, and jammed together as they were, the terrified creatures’ reactions were nothing like they would have been in more normal circumstances. They ran this way and that in confused waves, seeking an escape they could not find. And some were desperate enough to surge out against the yelling, waving riders who ringed them all around.
A stag sprang between Gorgidas and Viridovix and was gone, bounding over the plain in great frightened leaps. Arigh whirled in the saddle to fire after it, but missed. Then he and everyone around him cursed in fury as a hundred panicked onagers made a shambles of the hunting line. Other animals of every sort swarmed through the gap.
Agathias Psoes’ horse was bowled over when a fleeing wild ass ran headlong into it. The Videssian underofficer sprang free as his mount crashed to the ground, then leaped for his life to dodge another onager. Only the knowledge he had earned with years on the steppe saved him. He frantically laid about him, yelling as loud as he could to make the stampeding beasts take him for an obstacle to be avoided and not a mere man ripe for the trampling. It worked, they streamed past him on either side. When an Arshaum rode close, he clambered up behind the nomad.
Guiding his pony with a skill he had not thought he owned, Gorgidas managed to evade the onagers. He was congratulating himself when Batbaian shouted a warning. The Greek turned his head to find a wolf, a huge shaggy pack leader, bounding his way. It sprang straight for him, jaws agape.
His months of weapon drill proved their worth; before he had time to think, he was thrusting at the snarling beast’s face. But his horse could not endure the wolf’s onset. It bucked in terror, ruining his stroke. Instead of stabbing through the wolf’s palate and into its brain, his gladius scored a bloody line down its muzzle, just missing a blazing yellow eye.
The wolf bayed horribly and leaped again. An arrow whistled past Gorgidas’ cheek, so close he felt the wind of its passage. It sank between the wolf’s ribs. The beast twisted in midair, snapping at the protruding shaft. Bloody foam started from its mouth and nostrils. Two more arrows pierced it as it writhed on the ground; it jerked and died.
“Good shot!” Gorgidas called, looking round to see who had loosed the first arrow. Dizabul waved back at him; he too was busy fighting to keep his mount under control. The Greek tried to read the expression on the prince’s too-handsome face, and failed. Then Dizabul caught sight of a gray fox darting away and spurred after it, reaching behind him for another arrow to fit to his bow.
“Well, what about it?” Goudeles asked the physician a few minutes later, when the breakout was contained. The bureaucrat somehow managed to look jaunty even though his face was gray-brown with dust and tracked by streams of sweat. He gave Gorgidas a conspiratorial wink.
“What about what?” the Greek said, his mind back on the hunt.
“You don’t play the innocent well,” Goudeles told him; he had the Videssian gift for spotting duplicity whether it was there or not. But when he said, “Tell me you weren’t wondering whether that shaft was meant for the wolf or you,” Gorgidas had to toss his head in a Hellenic no. Dizabul had no reason to love him. He had backed Bogoraz until Gorgidas foiled the Yezda’s try at poisoning his father; his pride suffered for finding himself so drastically in the wrong. Then, too, he might well have become khagan if the poisoning had succeeded.…
“You’re not wrong,” Gorgidas admitted. The pen-pusher wet his finger and drew a tally-mark in the air, pleased at his own cleverness.
As the light began to fail, the nomads opened their lines and let the trapped beasts they had not slain escape. They dismounted, drove off the gathering carrion birds, and set about butchering their kills. “Faugh!” said Viridovix, wrinkling his nose. The slaughterhouse stench oppressed Gorgidas, too, but it was hardly worse than battlefields he had known.
The Arshaum set fires blazing in long straight trenches and began to smoke as much of the meat as they could. Arghun hobbled from one to the next with Irnek, supervising the job. “A pity our women and yurts aren’t here,” Gorgidas heard him say.
“Aye, it is,” the younger plainsman agreed. “So many hides, so much bone and sinew wasted because we haven’t time to deal with them as we should.” Steppe life was harsh; not making the greatest possible use of everything they came across went against the nomads’ grain.
While the sweaty work went on, the hunters carved off choice gobbets and roasted them for their day’s meal. “Not a bit peckish, are they now?” Viridovix said, between bites of the plump goose he’d taken.
“You do pretty well yourself,” Gorgidas replied, gnawing on a leg from the same bird; the Celt had a good-sized pile of bones in front of him. But he was right; the nomads out-ate him without effort. Used to privation, they made the most of plenty when they had it. Seeing them somehow gulp down huge chunks of half-cooked meat reminded the Greek of a time when, as a boy, he had watched a small snake engulfing a large mouse.
Batbaian ate by himself, his back to the fires. As Gorgidas’ emptiness faded and he began to be able to think of other things than food, he got up to invite the Khamorth over to talk. When Viridovix saw where he was going, he reached out and held the physician back. “Let the lad be,” he said quietly.
Irritated, Gorgidas growled, “What’s your trouble? He’ll be happier here than brooding all alone.”
“That’s not so at all, I’m thinking. Unless I miss my guess, the blazes are after reminding him o’ the ones Avshar used to snare him. That they do me, and I wasna caught by ’em. If he has somewhat to say, he’ll be by, and never you fret over that.”
The Greek sat down again. “You may be right. You said something of the same thing to Arigh a few days ago, didn’t you?” He eyed Viridovix curiously. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be so careful of another’s feelings.”
Viridovix toyed with his mustaches, as if wondering whether his manhood was questioned. He finally said, “Hurting a body without call is Avshar’s sport, and after a bit o’ him, why, I’ve fair lost the stomach for it.”
“You’re growing up at last,” Gorgidas said, to which the Celt only snorted in derision. The physician thought of something else. “If Avshar somehow does not know how large an army has crossed into Pardraya, these fires will give us away.”
“He knows,” Viridovix said with gloomy certainty. “He knows.”
Coincidence or not, two days later a Khamorth rode into the Arshaum camp under sign of truce, a white-painted shield hung from a lance. As he was brought before Arghun and his councilors, he looked about with an odd blend of arrogance laid over fear. He would flinch when the Arshaum scowled at him, then suddenly straighten and glower back, seeming to remember the might he himself represented.
Certainly his bow before the khagan was perfunctory enough to fetch black looks from the plainsmen. He ignored them, asking in his own language, “Does anyone here speak this tongue and yours both?”
“I do.” Skylitzes took a long step forward.
The Khamorth blinked at finding an imperial at Arghun’s side, but recovered well. He was perhaps forty-five, not handsome but shrewd-looking, with eyes that darted every which way. Half of one of his ears was missing. By steppe standards, he wore finery; his cap was sable, his wolfskin jacket trimmed with the same fur, his fringed trousers of softest buckskin. A red stone glittered in the heavy gold ring on his right forefinger; his horse’s trappings were ornamented with polished jet.
“Well, farmer,” he said, putting Skylitzes in his place with the nomad’s easy contempt for folk who lived a settled life, “tell the Arshaum I am Rodak son of Papak, and I come to him from Varatesh, grand khagan of the Royal Clan and master of all the clans of Pardraya.”
The Videssian officer frowned at the insult, but began to translate. Batbaian broke in, shouting, “You filthy bandit, you drop dung through your mouth when you call Varatesh a khagan, or his renegades a clan!” He would have sprung for Rodak, but a couple of Arshaum grabbed him by the shoulders and held him back.
Rodak had presence; he looked down his prominent nose at Batbaian, as if noticing him for the first time. Turning back to Arghun, he said, “So you have one of the outlaws along, do you? Well, I will make nothing of it; he’s been marked as he deserves.”
“Outlaw, is it?” Batbaian said, twisting in the grip of the Arshaum. “What did your clan, your real clan, outlaw you for, Rodak? Was is manslaying, or stealing from your friends, or just buggering a goat?”
“What I was is of no account,” Rodak said coolly; Skylitzes translated both sides of the exchange. “What I am now counts.”
“Yes, and what are you?” Batbaian cried. “A puffed-up piece of sheep turd, making the air stink for your betters. Without Avshar’s black wizardry, you’d still be the starving brigand you ought to be, you vulture, you snake-hearted lizard-gutted cur, you green, hopping, slimy frog!”
That was the deadliest affront one Khamorth could throw at another; the men of Pardraya loathed and feared frogs. Rodak’s hand flashed toward his saber. Then he froze with it still untouched, for two dozen arrows were aimed at him. Moving very slowly and carefully, he drew his hand away.
“Better,” Arghun said dryly. “We have experience with treacherous envoys; they do not go well with weapons.”
“Or with insults,” Rodak returned. His lips were pale, but from anger this time, Gorgidas thought, not fear.
“Insult?” Batbaian said. “How could I make you out fouler than you are?”
“That is enough,” Arghun said. “I will settle what he is.” Batbaian held his tongue; Arghun framed his orders mildly, but expected them to be obeyed. The khagan returned to Rodak. “What does your Varatesh want with us?”
“He warns you to turn round at once and go back to your own side of the river Shaum, or face the anger of all the clans of Pardraya.”
“Unless your khagan makes a quarrel with me, I have none with him,” Arghun said. At that, Batbaian cried out again. “Be silent,” Arghun told him, then turned to Rodak once more. “My quarrel is with Yezd—this is but the shortest road to Mashiz. Tell that to Varatesh very plainly, yes, and to your Avshar as well. So long as I am not attacked, I will not look for trouble with you Khamorth. If I am …” He let the sentence trail away.
Rodak licked his lips. The wars with the Arshaum were burned into the memory of his people. “Avshar comes from Yezd, they say, and is adopted into the Royal Clan; indeed, he stands next to Varatesh there.”
“What is that to me?” Arghun’s voice was bland. Batbaian suddenly smiled, not a pleasant sight; Viridovix was reminded of a wolf scenting blood. Arghun continued, “You have my answer. I will not turn back, but I make war on Yezd, not on you, unless you would have it so. Take that word to your master.”
Skylitzes hesitated before he rendered the khagan’s last sentence into the Khamorth speech. “How would you have me translate that?”
“Exactly as I said it,” Argun said.
“Very well.” The word the Videssian used for “master” meant “owner of a dog.”
Rodak glowered at him and Arghun from under heavy brows. “When my chief—” He came down hard on the proper term. “—hears of this, we will see how funny he finds your little joke. Think on one-eye here; before long you may be envying his fate.”
He wheeled his horse and rode away. Behind him, Arigh yipped like a puppy. A chorus of laughing Arshaum took up the call, yapping and baying Rodak out of camp. He roweled his horse savagely as he galloped northeast. Batbaian walked over to Arigh and slapped him on the back in wordless gratitude. Chuckling nomads kept barking at each other until it was full dark.
But back at the tent he shared with Viridovix, Gorgidas was less cheerful. He scrawled down what had happened at Rodak’s embassy, noting, “The Khamorth are caught between two dreads, the ancient fear of their western neighbors and the new terror raised by Avshar. As the one is but the memory of a fright and the other all too immediate, the force of the latter, I think, shall prevail among them.”
As he sometimes did, Viridovix asked the Greek what he’d written. “You’re after thinking the shindy’s coming, then?”
“Very much so. Why should Avshar let Yezd be ravaged if he can block the attack with these plainsmen, who are but tools in his hand? And I have no doubt he will be able to move them against us.”
“Nobbut a tomnoddy’d say you’re wrong,” Viridovix nodded. He drew his sword, checked the blade carefully for rust, and honed away a couple of tiny nicks in the edge—as tame a reaction to the prospect of a fight as Gorgidas had seen from him. Since Seirem had perished in the massacre of Targitaus’ camp, the big Gaul saw war’s horror as well as its excitement and glory.
When he was satisfied with the state of the blade, he sheathed it again and stared moodily into the fire. At last he said, “We should thrash them, I’m thinking.”
“Then sound as if you believed it, not like a funeral dirge!” Gorgidas exclaimed in some alarm. The mercurial Celt seemed sunk in despair.
“You ha’ me, for in my heart I dinna,” he said. “Indeed and we’re the better fighters, but what’s the use in that? Yourself said it a few days ago: it’s Avshar’s witchering wins his battles for him, not his soldiers.”
Gorgidas pursed his lips, as at a bad taste. All Avshar’s troops needed to do was hold fast, draw their foes in until they were fully engaged, and the wizard-prince’s magic would find a weakness or make one. To hold fast … his head jerked up. “Autò ékhō!” he shouted. “I have it!”
Viridovix jumped, grumbling crossly, “Talk a language a man can understand, not your fool Greek.”
“Sorry.” Words poured from the physician, a torrent of them. He forgot himself again once or twice and had to backtrack so the Gaul could follow him. As Viridovix listened, his eyes went wide.
“Aren’t you the trickiest one, now,” he breathed. He let out a great war whoop, then fell back on his wolfskin sleeping blanket, choking with laughter. “Puddocks!” he got out between wheezes. “Puddocks!” He dissolved all over again.
Gorgidas paid no attention to him. He was already sticking his head out the tent flap. “Tolui!” he yelled.