A CATAPULT THUMPED. A STONE BALL BIGGER THAN A MAN’S head hissed through the air, almost too fast for the eye to follow. It buried itself in the soft ground at the edge of the steppe. The wind blew away the puff of dust it raised.
Viridovix shook his fist at the fortress, which lay like a beast of tawny stone in the mouth of the pass that led south into Erzerum. Like fleas on the back of the beast, men scurried along the battlements. “Come out and fight, you caitiff kerns!” the Gaul shouted.
“That was a warning shot,” Lankinos Skylitzes said. “At this range they could hit us if they cared to.”
Pikridios Goudeles sighed. “We built too well, it seems, we and the Makuraners, the one time we managed to work together.”
Gorgidas touched his saddlebag. He had written that tale down a few days before, when Goudeles told it at camp. Centuries ago the two great empires saw it was in their joint interest to keep the steppe nomads from penetrating Erzerum and erupting into their own lands. The northern passes were beyond the permanent power of either of them, but Makuran had provided the original construction money to fortify them, with Videssos contributing skilled architects and an annual subsidy to the local princelings to keep the strong points garrisoned. Now Makuran was no more and the Videssian subsidy had ceased when the Empire fell on hard times these past fifty years, but the Erzrumi still manned the forts; they warded Erzerum as well as the lands farther south.
“Show parley,” Arigh ordered, and a white-painted shield went up on a lance. Trying to force one of the narrow passes would have been suicidal, and the great mountains of Erzerum, some in the distance still snow-covered though it was nearly summer, offered no other entranceways.
A postern gate opened; a horseman carrying a like truce sign and riding a big, rawboned mountain beast came toward the Arshaum. Arigh quickly chose a party to meet him: himself, Goudeles and Skylitzes—the one for his diplomatic talent, the other for his command of the Khamorth tongue, which anyone at the edge of Pardraya should know—and Tolui. At Goudeles’ suggestion, he added one of Agathias Psoes’ troopers who knew some Vaspurakaner; the “princes” had dealt with their northwestern neighbors before Videssos’ influence reached so far, and affected some of them greatly.
“May I come, too?” Gorgidas asked.
“Always looking to find things out,” Arigh said, half amused, half scornful. “Well, why not?” Viridovix asked no one’s leave, but rode forward with the rest, cheerfully pretending not to see Arigh’s frown.
The Erzrumi waved them to a halt at a safe distance. He looked much like a Vaspurakaner—stocky, swarthy, square-faced, and hook-nosed—but he trained his curly beard into two points. His gilded cuirass, plumed bronze helmet, and clinging trousers of fine silk proclaimed him an officer. He was within five years either way of forty.
He waved again, this time in peremptory dismissal. “Go back,” he said in the plains speech; he had a queer, hissing accent. “Go back. We will crush you if you come further. I, Vakhtang, second chief of the castle of Gunib, tell you this. Are we simpletons, to open our country to murderous barbarians? No, I say. Go back, and be thankful we do not slay you all.”
Arigh bridled. Goudeles said hastily, “He means less than he says. He has a Videssian style to him, though a debased one.”
“Videssian, eh? There’s a thought.” The Arshaum’s years at the imperial capital had given him a good grasp of the language. He used it now: “Why the high horse, fellow? We have no quarrel with you or yours. It’s Avshar we’re after, curse him.”
Vakhtang’s eyebrows rose to his hairline. “I know what that speech is, though I do not use it.” He seemed to take a first good look at the group in front of him. In their furs and leathers, Gorgidas, Goudeles, Skylitzes, and Psoes’ soldier—his name was Narbas Kios—might have been Khamorth, if odd ones. But Arigh and Tolui were something else again. And Viridovix, with his drooping mustaches, red hair spilling from under his fur cap, and pale freckled skin, was unlike any man the Erzrumi captain had seen. His careful composure deserted him. “Who are you people, anyway?” he blurted.
Goudeles nudged Narbas the trooper, who rode forward a couple of paces. “Make sure he understands you,” the pen-pusher said. Vakhtang showed fresh surprise when Narbas spoke hesitantly in the Vaspurakaner tongue, but stifled it. He gave a regal nod.
“Good,” Goudeles said. He paused; Gorgidas could see him discarding the florid phrases of Videssian rhetoric to stick with ideas Kios could put across. “Tell him Skylitzes and I are envoys of the Avtokrator of the Videssians. Tell him where the Arshaum are from, and tell him they’ve come all this way as our allies against Yezd. We only ask a safe-conduct through Erzerum so we can attack the Yezda in their own land. Here, give him our bona-fides, if he’ll take them.”
He produced the letter of authority Thorisin had given him, a bit travel-worn but still gorgeous with ink of gold and red and the sky-blue sunburst seal of the Videssian Emperors. Skylitzes found his letter as well. Holding one in each hand so he could draw no weapon, Narbas offered them to Vakhtang. The officer made a show of studying them. If he spoke no Videssian, Gorgidas was sure he could not read it, but he recognized the seals. Few men in this world would not have.
The Erzrumi gravely handed the letters back. He spoke again, this time in the throaty Vaspurakaner language. Narbas Kios translated: “Even this far north, he says, they know of Yezd, and know nothing good. They have never yet let a nomad army past their forts, but he will take what you said to the lord of Gunib.”
“Tell him we thank him for his courtesy,” Arigh said, and bowed from the waist in the saddle. Viridovix watched his friend with surprised respect; a roisterer in Videssos, the Arshaum was learning to be a prince.
Vakhtang returned Arigh’s compliment and turned to go back to the fortress. Before he got far, Tolui rode out of the parley group and caught him up. Vakhtang spun in alarm and started to reach for his sword, but stopped after a glance at the shaman; though not in his regalia, Tolui still had a formidable presence. He put his hand on the captain’s arm and spoke to him in the few words of Khamorth he had learned from Batbaian: “Not—fight you. Not—hurt you. Go through, is all. Oath.”
His broken speech seemed to have as much effect on Vakhtang as Goudeles’ arguments and letters both. Gorgidas saw the self-important bureaucrat redden as the officer gave Tolui what was plainly a salute, putting both clenched fists to his forehead. Then he clasped the shaman’s hand before releasing it and urging his horse into a trot. The postern gate swung open to readmit him.
“Now what?” Gorgidas asked.
“We wait,” Arigh said. Gorgidas and the Videssian fidgeted, but with nomad’s patience Arigh sat his horse quietly, ready to wait there all day if need be. After a while the main gate of the fortress of Gunib opened a little. “They trust us—some, at least,” Arigh said. “Now we do business.”
Flanked by a small bodyguard of lancers in scaled mail came Vakhtang and another, older man whose gear was even richer than his. Age spots freckled the backs of his hands, Gorgidas saw as he drew close, but there was strength in him. He had the eyes of a warrior, permanently drawn tight at the corners and tracked with red. He inspected the newcomers with a thoroughness Gauis Philippus might have used.
At last he said, “I am Gashvili, Gunib’s lord. Convince me, if you can, that I should give you leave to pass.” His voice was dry, his heavy features unreadable.
He heard the tale they had given Vakhtang, but in more detail. He kept interrupting with questions, always searching ones. His knowledge of Pardrayan affairs was deep, but not perfect; he knew of Varatesh’s rise to power and the magical aid Avshar had given him, but thought the latter a Khamorth sorcerer. When Arigh told how the wizard-prince had fled southward, Gashvili rammed fist into open palm and growled something sulfurous in his own language.
“Day before yesterday we let one through who answered to your account of him,” he said when he had control of a speech the men from the plains could follow. “He claimed he was a merchant beset by bandits on the steppe. As there was just the one of him and he was no Khamorth, we had no reason to disbelieve him.”
Suddenly all of Arigh’s party was shouting at once. For all their hopes, for all their anticipation, they had not run Avshar to earth. He must have had some magic to make his stallion run night and day, far past the normal endurance of any horse. The beast had gained steadily on the Arshaum, tireless in the saddle though they were. Then a rainstorm covered its tracks, and they lost the trail.
“Well, whatever is your honor waiting for?” Viridovix cried. “Why are you not after calling yourself’s men out to be riding with us to take the spalpeen, the which’d be worth a million years o’ this sitting on the doorstoop o’ nowhere.” The Gaul wanted to leap down from his pony and shake sense into Gashvili.
The noble’s mouth twitched in amusement. “Perhaps I shall.” He turned to Arigh. “You ask me to take a heavy burden on myself. What guarantees would I have from you that it shall be as you say, and that your army will not plunder our fair valleys once you get past me here? Will you give hostages on it, to be held in Gunib as pledge against bad faith?”
“As for pledges,” Arigh said at once, “I will swear my own people’s oath, and any that suit you. Are you a Phos-worshiper like the Videssians? He seems not a bad god, for farmer-folk.”
The Arshaum meant it as a compliment, though Skylitzes’ face was scandalized. Gashvili shook his head, setting silver curls bouncing under his gilded helm. “For all the blue-robes’ prating, I and most of mine hold to the old gods of sky and earth, rock and river. I am a stubborn old man, and they humor me.” His tone belied the self-mockery; he was proud his people followed his lead.
“No trouble there, then,” Arigh said. His manner abruptly harshened. “But what is this talk of hostages? Will you give me hostages in turn, so no man of mine will be risked without knowing that, if he dies from treachery, some Erzrumi’s spirit will go with him to serve him in the next world?”
“By Tahund of the thunders, I will, and more!” Gashvili spoke with sudden hard decision. “I and all but a skeleton garrison will ride with you. With the Khamorth in disorder, the pass will be safe this year. And,” he added, looking shrewdly at Arigh, “having watch-hounds along will no doubt encourage you to keep your fine promises.”
“No doubt,” Arigh said, so blandly that Gorgidas stared at him. This one, he thought, has nothing to fear from haughty Dizabul, however handsome Arghun’s younger son might be. Still mild, Arigh went on, “You’ll have to keep up with us, you know.”
The fortmaster chuckled. “You may know the steppe, but credit me with some idea of my business here. We’ll stick tight as burrs under your horses’ tails.” He rode to brush cheeks with Arigh. “We agree, then?”
“Aye. Bring on your oath.”
“It is better done by night.” Gashvili turned his head. “Vakhtang, go tell the men to get ready to—” But Vakhtang was already trotting back toward Gunib, waving to show all was well. Gashvili laughed out loud. “My daughter knew what she was about when she chose that one.”
The Arshaum and the Gunib garrison spent the afternoon warily fraternizing. No plainsman was invited into the fortress, and Gashvili made it clear his vigilance had not relaxed. Arigh was offended at that until Goudeles reminded him, “He is going against generations of habit in treating with you at all.”
Through Sklylitzes—who looked acutely uncomfortable as he translated—an Erzrumi priest, a wizened elder whose thick white beard reached his thighs, explained his people’s way of binding pledges to Tolui. The shaman nodded thoughtfully when he was done, saying, “That is a strong ritual.”
In a way, the Erzrumi oath-taking ceremony reminded Gorgidas of the one the Arshaum had used to pledge the Videssian party and Bogoraz of Yezd against threat to Arghun. At twilight the priest, whose name was Tzathmak, lit two rows of fires about thirty feet long and three or four feet apart. “Will he be walking through them, now?” asked Viridovix, who had heard about but not seen the Arshaum rite.
“No; the ways here are different,” Goudeles said.
In striped ceremonial robe, Tzathmak led one of the fort’s scavenger dogs out to the fires. Tolui joined him in his fringed shaman’s regalia and mask. Together they prayed over the dog, each in his own language. Tolui called to his watching countrymen, “The beast serves as a sign of our agreement.”
Normally nothing could have made the dog walk between the two crackling rows of flame, but at Tzathmak’s urging it padded docilely down them. “As the dog braves the fire, so may the peace and friendship between us overcome all obstacles,” Tolui said. Tzathmak spoke in his own tongue, presumably giving Gashvili’s men the same message.
At the far end of the fires stood a muscular Erzrumi, naked to the waist and leaning on a tall axe not much different from the sort the Halogai used. When the dog emerged, he swung the axe up in a glittering arc, brought it whistling down. The beast died without a sound, cut cleanly in two. All the Erzrumi cried out at the good omen.
“May the same befall any man who breaks this pact!” Tolui shouted, and the Arshaum, understanding, yelled their approval, too.
Gashvili could roar when it suited him. “Tomorrow we ride!” he cried in the Khamorth tongue. Both groups yelled together then—the Arshaum raggedly, for not all of them had even a smattering of Khamorth, but with high spirits all the same.
“Effective symbolism, that, if a bit grisly,” Goudeles remarked, pointing toward the sacrificed dog.
“Is that all you take it for?” Gorgidas said. “As for me, I’d sooner not chance finding out—I remember what happened to Bogoraz too well.”
“Gak!” the bureaucrat said in horror. He tenderly patted his middle, as if to reassure himself no axeblade, real or sorcerous, was anywhere near.
Viridovix squinted with suspicion at the new valley shimmering in the sultry heat-haze ahead. “Sure and I wonder what’ll be waiting for us here.”
“Something different,” Gorgidas said confidently. At the first sight of the Arshaum army’s outriders, herders were rushing their flocks up into the hills and peasants dashing for the safety of their nobles’ fortresses. Other men, armored cavalry, were moving together in purposeful haste.
Viridovix snorted at the Greek. “Will you harken to the Grand Druid, now? That’s no foretelling at all, at all, not in this Erzerum place. Were you after saying ’twould be the same, the prophecy’d be worth the having.”
“With your contrariness, you should feel right at home,” the physician snapped. He clung to his patience and to the subject. “It makes perfectly good sense for every little valley here to be nothing like any of its neighbors.”
“Not to me, it doesn’t,” Viridovix and Arigh said in the same breath.
The Arshaum continued, “My folk range over a land a thousand times the size of this misbegotten jumble of rocks, but all our clans make up one people.” He looked haggard. Seven separate bands of Erzrumi were with the nomads, and as overall leader he had the thankless job of keeping them from one another’s throats. They used five different languages, were of four religions—to say nothing of sects—and were all passionately convinced of their own superiority.
“You have the right of it, Arigh dear,” Viridovix backed him. “In my Gaul, now, I’ll not deny the Eburovices, the tribe southwest o’ my own Lexovii, are a mangy breed o’ Celt, but forbye they’re Celts. Why, hereabouts a wight canna bespeak the fellow over the hills a day’s walk away, and doesna care to, either. He’d sooner slit the puir spalpeen’s weasand for him.”
Lankinos Skylitzes said, “We Videssians hold that Skotos confounded men’s tongues in Erzerum when the natives fell away from Phos’ grace by refusing to accept the orthodox faith.”
“No need to haul in superstition for something with a natural cause,” Gorgidas said, rolling his eyes. Seeing Skylitzes bristle, he demanded, “Well, how does your story account for the men of Mzeh riding with us? They’re as orthodox as you are, but the only Videssian they have is learned off by rote for their liturgy. Otherwise not even Gashvili can follow their dialect.”
The officer tugged at his beard in confusion, not used to the notion of testing ideas against facts. Finally he said, “What is this famous ‘natural cause’ of yours, then?”
“Two, actually.” The Greek ticked them off on his fingers. “First, the land. Size means nothing. Shaumkhiil and Gaul are open countries. People and ideas move freely, so it is no wonder they aren’t much different from one end to the other. But Erzerum? It’s all broken up with mountains and rivers. Each valley makes a bastion, and since none of the peoples here could hope to rule the whole land, they’ve been able to keep their own ways and tongues without much interference.”
He paused for a gulp of wine. Erzerum’s vintages were rough, but better than kavass. Down in the valley, behind a covering stream, the band of cavalry was moving two by two into position at the edge of the stream. Bright banners snapped above them.
Gorgidas put the wineskin away; he would rather argue. “Where was I? Oh, yes, the second reason for Erzerum’s diversity. Simple—it’s the rubbish-heap of history. Every folk beaten by Makuran, or Videssos, or even by Vaspurakan or the peoples of Pardraya, has tried to take refuge here, and a good many pulled it off. Thus the Shnorhali, who fled the Khamorth when they entered Pardraya who knows how long ago—their remnant survives here.”
“Isn’t he the cleverest little fellow, now?” Viridovix said, beaming at the Greek. “Clear as air he’s made the muddle, the which had me stymied altogether.”
“Clear as fog, you mean,” Skylitzes said. He challenged Gorgidas: “Does your fine theory explain why the Mzeshi are orthodox? You brought them up, now account for them. By your rules they should have taken their doctrine from the heretic Vaspurakaners, who were the first people close to them to follow Phos, even if wrongly.”
“An interesting question,” the physician admitted. After thinking a bit, he said slowly, “I would say they are orthodox for the same reason the Vaspurakaners aren’t.”
“There you go, speaking in paradoxes again,” Skylitzes growled.
“These Greeks are made for talking circles round a body,” Viridovix put in.
“To the crows with both of you. There is no paradox. Look, Vaspurakan liked Videssos’ religion, but was afraid the influence of the Empire would come with its priests. So the ‘princes’ worked out their own form of the faith, which satisfied them and kept the Empire at arm’s length. But Vaspurakan was to the Mzeshi what Videssos was to Vaspurakan: a land with attractive ideas to borrow, but maybe risky to their freedom, too. So they decided for orthodoxy. Videssos is too far away to be dangerous to them.”
Skylitzes wore a grimace of concentration as he worked that through, but Goudeles, who had been quiet till now, said, “I like it. It makes sense. And not only does it show why the Mzeshi are orthodox and the ‘princes’ not, it also makes clear why Khatrish, Thatagush, and Namdalen keep clinging to their own pet heresies.”
“Why, so it does,” Gorgidas said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Well, a good theory should be able to cover a wide range of cases.” He paused and waved back toward the varied groups of new allies. “Erzerum is a wide range of cases by itself.”
Arigh said, “To me this history of yours only makes so much fancy talk. I’m just glad the one thing all these hillmen can get together on is hating Yezd.”
“Right you are,” Skylitzes said, and the others nodded. Though most of the Yezda had roared east against Vaspurakan and Videssos, enough raiders had pushed north to rape and loot and kill among the Erzrumi valleys that the locals, whatever tiny nation they might claim, welcomed Yezd’s foes. That was the only reason Arigh could control them at all. Hitting back was too sweet a prospect to jeopardize with their own petty quarrels.
The Arshaum waved for a messenger. “Fetch me, hmm, let’s see, Hamrentz of the Khakuli. Let’s see what he can tell us about these horsemen ahead.” The riders were still deploying along their stream; through the dust their mounts kicked up, the sun glinted off spearpoints.
Hamrentz, whose holding lay a couple of days’ ride north, was a thin, gloomy man with enormous hands. He wore a mail coif, but the rest of his armor was a knee-length shirt of leather covered with bone scales. Though he spoke some Videssian, he followed the Four Prophets of Makuran and had lines from their writings tattooed on his forehead.
When Arigh put the question to him, his doleful features grew even longer; one of his verses almost disappeared in a deep fold of skin. “This is—how would you say?—the Vale of the Fellowship. So they call it here, let me say. They are no cowards. I give them so much. I have seen them fight. But to their neighbors they are the—” He used a guttural obscenity in his own language, adding an equally filthy gesture.
Arigh repeated the scurrility with a grin. It was one to fill the mouth and soothe the angry spirit. “I know that’s foul,” he said. “What exactly does it mean?”
“What it says, of course,” Hamrentz said. “In this language, I do not know the words.” He seemed offended. The rest of his answers were hardly more than grunts. “You will find out, and then you will understand,” he finished cryptically, and rode off.
Arigh looked at his advisors, who shrugged one by one. Goudeles said, “You might summon one of the others.”
“Why waste my time when I can see for myself? Come along, if you care to.” The Arshaum raised his voice. “Narbas, to us! The further south we get, the more of these people speak Vaspurakaner.”
They hoisted the truce sign and trotted down toward the stream. Behind them, several Erzrumi contingents erupted in hisses, catcalls, and the whistles some of the hillmen used for jeers. Viridovix scratched his head. “You’d think these Fellowship laddies the greatest villains left unkilled, sure and you would, the way the carry on. To see ’em, though, why, they’re better-seeming soldiers than half we have wi’ us.”
The troops drawn up on the far side of the little river were indeed disciplined-looking, well-horsed, and well-armored in crested helms, mail shirts under surcoats, and bronze greaves. They numbered archers as well as lancers. The Arshaum scouts, not wanting to start a war by accident, were keeping a respectful distance from the border stream.
A few of the locals nocked arrows or let their horses move a couple of paces forward as Arigh’s party drew close, but in the center of their line a black-bearded giant in an orange coat nodded to his companion, a younger man whose surcoat matched his. The latter blew three bright notes from a coiled horn. At once the horsemen settled back into watchful waiting.
Perhaps drawn by the action of the leaders, Viridovix ran an eye down the line. “Will you mark that, now? Pair by pair they are, matched by their coats.” The others saw he was right. One pair wore light green, the next scarlet, then ocher, then the deep blue of woad; remembering a tunic of that exact shade he had once owned, the Celt ached for his lost forests.
“How quaint,” Goudeles said, with the disdain he showed any non-Videssian custom. “I wonder what it might signify.”
Gorgidas felt himself go hot, then cold. He was suddenly sure he understood Hamrentz’s obscenity. In a way he hoped he did, in a way not; if not altogether satisfying, his life had been simple for some time now. Were he right, it might not long stay so.
He had only a moment to reflect; with a sudden toss of his head, the big man in orange spurred forward into the stream, which proved only belly-deep on his mount. Without a second thought, his comrade with the horn followed. Cries of alarm rang along the line. The big man shouted them down.
With his size and his horse’s—it was one of the big-boned mountain breed—he towered over Arigh. But the Arshaum, backed by a much bigger army, met his stare with a king’s haughtiness; he had learned a great deal, treating with the Erzrumi. The local gave a rumbling grunt of approval. He said something in his own language. Arigh shook his head. “Videssian?” he asked.
“No,” the black-bearded chief said; it seemed the only word he knew. He tried again, this time in throaty Vaspurakaner. Narbas Kios translated: “The usual—he wants to know who we are and what in the name of Wickedness we’re doing here.”
“They follow the Four Prophets, then,” Skylitzes said, recognizing the oath.
“In the name of Wickedness it is, with Avshar and all,” Viridovix said.
“Aye.” Arigh began to explain their goal. When he said “Yezd,” both the locals growled; the younger one reached for the spiked mace on his hip. Thanks to Gunib and the other forts in the passes, the only nomads they had seen were Yezda raiders from the south, and thought Arigh was identifying himself as one. They laughed when Kios made them understand their mistake. “All we ask is passage and fodder,” Arigh said. “You can see from the bands with my men that we did not plunder their countryside. We’ll all loot to glut ourselves in Yezd.”
Black-Beard jerked his chin toward the Erzrumi with the Arshaum. “I care not a turd for them. But,” he admitted, “they are a sign you tell some of the truth.” He could not keep a glow from his eyes, the glow that comes to any hillman’s face when he thinks of the booty to be taken in the flatlands below.
He shook himself, as if awaking to business from a sweet dream. “You have given your names; let it be a trade. Know me to be Khilleu, prince of the Sworn Fellowship of the Yrmido. This is Atroklo, my—” He dropped back into his own tongue. Atroklo, who by the fuzziness of his beard could not have been far past twenty, smiled at the prince when his name was mentioned.
Gorgidas knew that smile, had felt it on his own face years—a lifetime!—ago, before he left provincial Elis for Rome and whatever it might offer. No, he thought, his life would not be the same.
Khilleu was laughing in his beard; his face was heavy-featured but open, a good face for a leader. “So you’d poke the Yezda, eh? I like that, truly I do.”
Atroklo broke in in their language, his voice, surprisingly, not much lighter than his chieftain’s bass. Khilleu pursed his lips judiciously and gave an indulgent wave, as if to say, “You tell it.” Atroklo did, in halting Vaspurakaner: “That wizard you speak—spoke—of, I think he pass through here.”
From the way all eyes swung toward him, he might have been a lodestone. He reddened with the almost invisible flush of a swarthy man, but plowed ahead with his story. “Four days ago we find in field a black stallion, dead, that none of us knows.” He had given up on the past tense of his verbs. “It is a fine horse once, I think, but used to death. Used past death, I mean—never I see an animal so worn. A skeleton, lather long caked on sides, one hoof with no shoe and down to bloody nub. Cruel, I think then. Now I think maybe magic or desperate, or both. No tackle is with this dead horse, and next day our noble Aubolo finds two of his best beasts missing. Who thief is, he does not know then and does not know now.”
“Avshar!” Arigh’s companions exclaimed together; it was, Gorgidas thought, becoming a melancholy chorus. “Four days!” the Arshaum chief said bitterly. “See, we’ve lost another two to him. These Erzrumi can’t stay with us; they only slow us down.”
Khilleu had watched them closely; attitudes spoke for much, even if he could not follow their talk. He and Atroklo dropped into a low-voiced colloquy in the Yrmido tongue. The prince returned to Vaspurakaner. “I begin to believe you,” he said, looking straight at Arigh. “We too have suffered from the southern jackals, more than once. I ask you two questions: Would you have the Sworn Fellowship at your side? And will our charming neighbors,” he continued, irony lurking in that resonant bass, “bear with our coming?”
“As for the first, why not? One Erzrumi slows us as much as a thousand, and you look to have good men. As for the other, Hamrentz of the Khakuli said you were no cowards.”
“Among other things,” Atroklo guessed. His laugh and Khilleu’s did not sound amused.
“Here’s another argument for you, then,” Sklyitzes put in. “These Arshaum here outnumber all the hillmen with us three to one.”
“A point,” Khilleu said. He spread his hands. “In the end, what choice have I? You have not three, but ten times my numbers. Oh, we could hold out in our keeps if we would, but stop your passage? No.” Again, his chuckle was grim. “So I will leap on the snow leopard’s back, hold onto its ears, and pray to the Four to petition the kindly gods not to let it turn aside for my sheep.”
Atroklo blew a different call on his horn; Gorgidas watched a vein pulse at his temple. He must have played the signal for truce. The Sworn Fellowship abandoned their defensive stand at the edge of the stream and formed up into a long column.
“You will answer to me if you betray us,” Khilleu warned Arigh. “Tell that to Hamrentz and the rest, too; for all your numbers, I vow it.”
“No,” Arigh said. “I will tell them they will answer to me.”
“Spoken like a king!” Khilleu cried when Narbas translated. “I would have bid you to a feast at my keep this night for my own honor’s sake, but now I see I may enjoy the evening. Bring all these here. Invite my neighbor chiefs, too; some may come.” Wry mirth edged his voice. “There will be pleasures for every taste, not merely our own.”
“I will eat with you outside your castle, but not in it,” Arigh answered. He did not need Goudeles’ hisses or Skylitzes’ surreptitious wave to make him wary of the squat, square pile of masonry toward which the Yrmido chief was pointing.
Atroklo started an angry exclamation, but Khilleu cut him off. “Can’t say I blame you,” he told the Arshaum. “My Lio is a strong keep; if I intended mischief, I could hole up there for ten years. Outside it will be—at sunset? Good. Best your men camp here—not only, I admit, because there is good water, but also to keep as much distance between you and my people as we can.”
He waited, watching Arigh narrowly, ready to judge his sincerity by how he reacted. “Till sunset,” was all the nomad said. He wheeled his horse, leaving Khilleu to make the best of the economical plains style.
Hamrentz, whose respect for the Yrmido was grudging but real, agreed to banquet with them, as did Gashvili, who owned frankly that he knew nothing about them for good or ill. The other Erzrumi leaders said no, with varying degrees of horror. One, Zromi of the Redzh, took up his hundred horsemen and rode from home at the thought of the Yrmido joining the expedition. “Good riddance,” Skylitzes said. “We gain more here than we lose, seeing the last of his band of thieves.”
Though troopers stayed on the walls of Lio, its drawbridge came down. Retainers kept scurrying in and out of the castle, running up trestle tables and benches outside the moat. Cookfires smoked in the castle forecourt. Along with the reek of the midden, the breeze brought the savory smell of roasting mutton. Viridovix’ nostrils twitched of their own accord; he patted his belly in anticipation.
But appetite did not keep him from carefully inspecting the arrangements as Arigh’s party rode up through ripening fields of wheat and barley. He found himself satisfied. “If they were after mischief, now,” he said, tethering his horse, “they’d put us all together in a body instead of amongst their own. Then archers on the wall could hardly be missing us, e’en in sic torchlight as this. As is, they’d be apt to shoot holes in their chiefs, the which’d win ’em no thanks, I’m thinking.”
“Hardly,” Gorgidas answered. He brushed a bit of lint from his embroidered tunic, wishing the grease spot on his trousers had come cleaner. He was in Videssian dress; the last thing he wanted tonight was for the Yrmido to take him for a steppe nomad.
There was courtesy, if no more, in the greeting Khilleu and Atroklo gave their guests. The two of them seemed inseparable friends. They rose together to bow the newcomers to their places. Viridovix found himself between a chunky Yrmido a few years older than he was and a lean one a few years younger. The one knew a couple of words of Khamorth, the other none. Both were politely curious about his strange looks, but went back to their wine when they found they could not understand him.
He raised his pewter mug and a serving girl filled it. He watched her hips work as she moved away. After Seirem he had vowed he would stay womanless for life, a promise easy enough to keep in the Arshaum army as it traveled across the plains. But time wore away at grief, and his body had its own demands. When a wench among the Mzeshi made her interest plain, he had not backed away. Half a night behind a haystack was a small thing; it could not erase what he had known before.
No women of quality sat with the men. Most of the Erzrumi held to that custom, perhaps borrowed from Makuran. Used to the freer ways of the nomads, Viridovix missed them. Just by being there, they livened a gathering.
Gorgidas also noted their absence and drew his own conclusions from it. There was a pair of Yrmido to either side of him, one set somber in black slashed with silver, the other gaudy in scarlet and yellow. None of them shared a language with him. He sighed, resigning himself to a long evening. The maid who served him wine smiled invitingly. His answering look was so stony that she tossed her head in disdain.
Unexpectedly, one of the men across the table spoke in accented Videssian: “May I this tongue on you practice? When I a lad was, I served two years as hired soldier in the Empire before my brother died and I his holding inherited. I Rakio am called.”
“Glad to know you,” Gorgidas said heartily, and gave his own name. Rakio, he judged, was in his late twenties. Neither handsome nor the reverse, his face had character to it, with a beard trimmed closer than the usual Yrmido style, a chipped tooth his smile showed, and a nose whose imperious thrust was offset by an eyebrow that kept quirking whimsically upward. Pleasant fellow, the Greek thought.
Then the food appeared, and he forgot Rakio for some time. His year on the steppe had made him all too used to lamb and goat, though it was enjoyable to have them broiled with cloves of garlic rather than hastily roasted over a dung fire. But peas, spinach, and steamed asparagus were luxuries he had almost forgotten, and after months of flat, chewy wheatcakes, real bread, still soft and steaming from the ovens, brought him close to ecstasy.
He let his belt out a notch. “That was splendid.”
Rakio was grinning at him. “I once had to eat with a squad of Khamorth,” the Yrmido said. “I how you feel know.”
The Greek poured a small libation on the ground and raised his mug high. “To good food!” he cried, and drank. Laughing, Rakio emptied his own cup. So did Goudeles, a couple of tables away. The plump bureaucrat’s ears were as sharp as his pleasure in eating.
A minstrel wandered among the feasters, accompanying his songs with the plangent notes of a pandora. A juggler kept half a dozen daggers in the air, his hands a blur of speed. Someone tossed him a coin. He caught it without dropping a knife. Two dancers carrying torches leaped back and forth over upturned swords.
When the girl with the wine came past again, Viridovix slid an arm around her waist. She did not pull away, but smiled down at him. She put out a forefinger to stroke his fiery mustache, not the first time his coloring had drawn a woman’s eye in these dark-haired lands. He nibbled at her fingertip. She snuggled closer.
Khilleu boomed something in Vaspurakaner. The men who spoke that tongue shouted agreement. Narbas Kios said to the Gaul, “He asks you not to take her away for tumbling until she’s emptied her jug.”
“Only fair, that.” Viridovix patted the girl’s rump. “Soon, my pretty,” he murmured. Without a word in common, she understood him. Arigh had already contrived to disappear into the night with the buxom wench who had fetched meat to his table. Gashvili and Vakhtang were gone, too. Khilleu looked on benignly, glad his guests were contented. No Yrmido had left.
Gorgidas let his own serving wench pass by again. Rakio’s eyebrows rose. “She does not you please? You would prefer another? Fatter? Thinner? Younger, perhaps? We would not you have lonely.” His concern sounded real.
“My thanks, but no,” the physician said. “I do not care for a woman tonight.”
Rakio gave a comic shrug, as if to say the foreigner was mad, but perhaps harmlessly so. Gorgidas stared down at his hands. He knew what he wanted to say, but had no notion of how to say it without risking grave offense. Yet he was so sure.…
He gave up on the dilemma for the moment when another servitor brought a tray of candied fruit. But that was soon done. The thing could be avoided no longer, unless he had not the nerve to broach it at all.
He felt his heart pound as though he were a nervous youth. Through a dry mouth he said, as casually as he could, “There are many fine pairs of your men here tonight.”
Rakio caught the faint emphasis on “pairs.” This time the eyebrow went up like a warning flag. “Most foreigners would say that we foul vices practice.” The Yrmido regarded Gorgidas with the suspicion years of outsiders’ despisal had in-gained in his people.
“Why should that be?” Remembering Platon’s golden words, Gorgidas gave them back as well as he was able: “If the man who loves is caught doing something ugly, he would sooner be caught by anyone, even his father, than by his lover. And because lovers, feeling this way, would do anything rather than show cowardice before each other, and would do their best to spur each other on in battle, an army of them, however small it was, might conquer the world.”
It was said. With bleak courage, the Greek waited to be wrong, waited for Rakio to scorn him. The Yrmido’s jaw dropped. He shut it with a snap and broke into excited speech in his own tongue. Then the men in black and silver on Gorgidas’ left and the bright peacocks on his right were clasping his hand, pounding his back, pressing food and wine on him and shouting noisy toasts.
Relief washed over him like sweet rain. He disentangled himself from a bear hug, then jumped as someone he had not heard coming up behind him tapped him on the shoulder. Viridovix grinned down at him. “Friendlier they are to you than they were for me, and you such a sobersides and all.”
Gorgidas nodded at the girl on the Gaul’s arm, who was plainly impatient at the delay. “To each his own.”
“Och, aye, and this one’s mine. Are you not, my sweet colleen?” She shrugged at his words, but giggled when he nuzzled her neck. He led her away from the feast, then let her find a quiet spot for the two of them. There was a stand of apple trees just out of bowshot from the castle of Lio and in the middle of it, the Gaul discovered, a small grassy patch. He spread his cloak with a flourish; the grass was soft as any bed, and sweeter-smelling.
The girl—he thought her name was Thamar—was eager as he. They helped each other off with their clothes; she was smooth and soft and warm in his arms. They sank together to the cloak, but when he rose on knees and elbows to mount her she shook her head vehemently and let loose a torrent of incomprehensible complaint.
Finally, with gestures, she made him understand the Yrmido did not favor that style of lovemaking. “Well, whatever suits you, then,” he exclaimed, spreading his hands in acquiescence. “I’m ever game for summat new.”
She rode him reversed, her hands at either side of his calves. A drop of sweat fell on his thigh. It was, the Gaul thought, a different view of things. “Though indeed,” he muttered to himself, “one a pederast might be finding more gladsome than I.”
Then suddenly everything the Gaul had seen in the Yrmido country came together. He shouted laughter, so that Thamar looked back at him in mixed surprise and indignation. “Nay, lass, it’s nought to do with you,” he said, stroking her ankle.
But he was still chuckling. “Sure and I see why you’re after doing it this way, is all,” he said, as if she could understand his speech. “Och, that Gorgidas, the puir spalpeen! Puir like the cat that fell in the cream jar, I’m thinking. Where were we, now?” He applied himself with a will.
Gorgidas had got his hosts to grasp that he was no Videssian and told them something of how he had come to the Empire and of the customs of his lost homeland. Naturally, most of their questions centered on one area. With the contempt their neighbors had heaped on them for centuries, they found it astonishing past belief that an outsider could see them with sympathy.
The Greek spoke of the military companionships of Sparta, of Athens’ more genteel ways, and at last of the Sacred Band of Thebes, whose hundred-fifty pairs of lovers had fallen to the last man against Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great.
That account brought his listeners, whose number had grown as the night wore on, close to tears. “How then?” asked Rakio, who had been interpreting. “Did they show outrage to their bodies?”
“In no way,” Gorgidas answered. “When Philip saw that all of them had taken their death wounds in front, he said, ‘Woe to those who think evil of such men.’ ”
“Ahh,” said all the Yrmido when Rakio was done translating. They bent their heads in a moment of silent respect for the men almost three hundred years dead. Moved past speech himself, Gorgidas shared it with them.
After a time his unquenchable curiosity reasserted itself. He said, “You’ve listened to me. May I ask you in return how your own Sworn Fellowship came to be?”
Rakio scratched his head. “Came to be? Always it was. Since before the time of Fraortish, first of the blessed Four, it was.”
That, Gorgidas knew, was another way of saying forever. He sighed, but not too deeply; there were more vital things than history. He said to Rakio, “Is your Sworn Fellowship all pairs, as the Theban Scared Band was? So it would seem, but for you, from the feasters here.”
“More closely look. See over there—Pidauro and Rystheu and Ypeiro. They are a three-bond—and their wives with them, it is said. Another such there is, though tonight they are on patrol in the south. And there are a fair number such as myself. ‘Orphans’ we are named. I no life-partner yet have, but because I am my father’s eldest son, I still when I reached manhood became a member of the Fellowship.”
“Ah,” the Greek said, annoyed at himself—seeing Rakio alone should have answered that for him. To hide his pique, he took a long drink of wine. It sent recklessness coursing through him. He said, “Will you not take offense at a personal question from an ignorant foreigner?” Rakio smiled for him to go on. He asked, “Are you an ‘orphan’ because you, ah, do not care to follow all the ways of the Fellowship?”
Rakio frowned in thought, then realized what Gorgidas, as an outsider, had to be trying to say. “Do I only like women, mean you?” He translated the question into his own language. All the Yrmido hooted with glee; someone threw a crust of bread at him. “I only am slow settling down,” he said unnecessarily.
“So I gather,” Gorgidas said, dry as usual.
That eyebrow of Rakio’s was twitching again. This time, a look of frank speculation was on the Yrmido’s face. Gorgidas dipped his head, then remembered how little that gesture meant to non-Greeks. He nodded slightly. When the torches round the feasting table guttered low, he and Rakio left hand in hand.
From the top of the pass the Erzrumi called the Funnel, the Arshaum and their allies could spy in the southwestern distance the river Moush. It sparkled like a silver wire, reflecting the afternoon sun. Beyond the green fertile strip along the bank of the stream lay the dun-colored flatlands where the Yezda ruled.
The plainsmen raised a cheer to see their goal at last, but Viridovix was not sorry when they started down the southern slope of the Funnel and that bare brown terrain disappeared once more. “A worse desolation it looks than the Videssian plateau,” he said, “the which I hadna thought possible.”
“It’s desert away from water,” Goudeles admitted, “but where the land is irrigated it can be fantastically rich. You’ll see that, I’d say, in the valleys of the Tutub and the Tib—they raise three crops a year there.”
“I dinna believe it,” the Gaul said at once. Thinking of his own land’s cool lush fruitfulness, he could not imagine this bake-oven of a country outdoing it, water or no.
But Skylitzes backed his countryman, saying, “Believe as you will; it’s true regardless. They call the land between the Tutub and the Tib the Hundred Cities because it can support so many people. Or could, rather; it’s fallen on evil times since the Yezda came.”
“Honh!” Viridovix said through his nose. He changed the subject, asking “Where might Mashiz be, once we’re after sacking these Hundred Cities o’ yours?”
“It might be on the far side of the moon,” Goudeles said, adding mournfully, “but it’s not, worse luck. The cursed town is nestled in the foothills of the mountains of Dilbat, just west of the Tutub’s headwaters.”
When the army camped that night, the Celt drew lines in the dirt to help him remember what he had learned. He explained his scratchings to Gorgidas, who copied them on wax with quick strokes of his stylus. “Interesting.” The Greek snapped his tablet closed. He said, “I’m off to the Yrmido camp. Their customs promise to make a worthwhile digression for my history.”
“Do they now?” Viridovix tried not to laugh at how transparent his friend could be. The physician had used the same excuse three nights running. Twice he had not come back till past midnight; the other time he spent the whole night with the Sworn Fellowship.
“Well, yes,” Gorgidas answered seriously. “Their account of the first Yezda incursion into Erzerum, for example—confound it, what are you smirking about?”
“Me?” The Celt aimed for a look of wide-eyed innocence, an expression which did not suit his face. He gave up and chortled out loud. “Sure and it’s nae history alone you’re finding with the Yrmido, else you’d not be sleeping like a dead corp and wearing that fool grin the times you’re awake.”
“What fool grin?” Viridovix’ parody made the Greek wince. He threw his hands in the air. “If you already know the answer, why ask the question?”
“Begging your pardon I am,” Viridovix said quickly, seeing the alarm that always came to Gorgidas when his preference for men was mentioned by someone who did not share it. “All I meant by it was that it’s strange for fair, seeing a sour omadhaun like your honor so cheery and all.”
“Go howl!” From long habit, the physician searched Viridovix for the sort of killing scorn the Yrmido met from all their neighbors. He did not find it, so he relaxed; it was not as though the Gaul had just discovered the way his habits ran.
Viridovix slapped him on the back, staggering him a little. On his face was honest curiosity. “Might you be telling me now, how do you find it after a year with women?”
“After a year my way, how would you find a wench?”
The Gaul whistled. “I hadna thought of it so. I’d marry her on the spot, beshrew me if I didn’t.”
“I’m in no danger of that,” Gorgidas said, and they both laughed. There was more than one kind of truth in his words, though, the physician thought. Rakio would never come close to filling the place Quintus Glabrio had in his heart.
True, the Yrmido, like most of his countrymen, was brave to a fault, and he had the gift of laughter. But he was hopelessly provincial. Despite his travels in Videssos, he cared for nothing beyond his own valley, while for Gorgidas the whole world seemed none too big. And where Glabrio and Gorgidas had shared a common heritage, Rakio’s strange syntax was the least reminder of how different his background was from the Greek’s. Finally, the Yrmido openly scoffed at fidelity. “Faithfulness for women is,” he had said to Gorgidas. “Men should enjoy themselves.”
Enjoying himself the physician was. Let it last as long as it would; for now it was good enough.
With their speed, the Arshaum expected to swarm over the river Moush and into Yezd before its defenders were ready to receive them. There again, they reckoned without Avshar. The wizard-prince, still ahead of his enemies, had given his followers warning. The boat-bridges leading north into Erzerum had been withdrawn. Squadrons of nomad horse patrolled the Moush’s southern bank. Better-drilled troops, men of Makuraner blood, guarded the river’s ford with catapults.
Against the advice of all the Erzrumi commanders, Arigh tried to force one of the river-crossings in the face of the Yezda artillery and was repulsed. The stonethrowers reached across the Moush, which even his nomads’ bows could not. And the catapults shot more than stones. Jugs of incendiary mix crashed among he Arshaum, splashing fire all about. Horses and men screamed; there was nearly a panic before the plainsmen drew back out of range.
Arigh shouldered the blame manfully, saying, “I should have listened. They know more of this fighting with engines than I do.” He scratched at the pink, shiny scars on his cheek. “From now on I will stay with what we do best. Let the Yezda have to figure out how to meet me.”
“That is a wise general speaking,” said Lankinos Skylitzes, and the Arshaum’s eyes lit.
He proved as good as his word, taking advantage of the plainsmen’s mobility and skill at making do. Under cover of night he sent a hundred Arshaum over the widest part of the Moush, swimming with their horses and carrying arms and armor in leather sacks tied to the beasts’ tails. As soon as they were across and starting to remount, the rest of their countrymen followed.
By sheer bad luck, a single Yezda spied the forerunners just as they were coming out of the river. He raised the alarm and managed to escape in the darkness. The Yezda were steppemen themselves; they reacted quickly. The fight that blew up was no less fierce for being fought half-blind. The Arshaum struggled to expand their perimeter, while their opponents battled to crush them and regain control of the riverbank before the bulk of the army could cross.
Viridovix stripped naked and splashed into the Moush just after the advance force. Some of the Arshaum hooted at him. “What good will a sword do, when you can’t see what to hit?” someone called.
“As much good as a bow,” he retorted, “or are your darts after having eyes of their own?”
When his pony clambered up onto the southern bank of the Moush, he let go of its neck and armed himself with frantic haste. Not long ago he would have gone to a fight sooner than to a woman, most times, but that was gone forever. Yet the Yezda ahead were obstacles between him and Avshar. For that he would kill them if he could.
He could hear them shouting ahead as he mounted his pony and spurred toward the fighting. He understood their cries, or most of them; the dialect they spoke was not that far removed from the Khamorth tongue of Pardraya.
A rider appeared ahead of him, indistinct in the starlight. “Can you bespeak me, now?” he called in the speech he had learned in Targitaus’ tent.
“Aye,” the other horseman said, reining in. “Who are you?”
“No friend,” Viridovix said, and slashed out. The Yezda fell with a groan.
An arrow snarled past the Gaul’s ear. He cursed; it had come from behind him. “Have a care there, ye muck-brained slubberers!” he roared, this time in the Arshaum language. The cry in the alien tongue drew another Yezda to him. They fenced half by guess. Viridovix took a cut on his left arm and another above his knee before a double handful of Arshaum came galloping up and the Yezda fled.
His mates were beginning to give ground all along the line. The company that had happened to be close by was big enough to face Arigh’s first wave, but more and more Arshaum were emerging, dripping, from the Moush and going into action. It was not the nomad way to fight a stand-up battle against superior numbers. The Yezda scattered, saving themselves but yielding the position.
It was too dark for signal flags. The naccara drum boomed. Arigh’s messengers rode orders up and down the line: “Hurry west for the ford!” Picking their way over unfamiliar ground, the Arshaum obeyed. Their Erzrumi allies paced them on the far side of the Moush. The heavily armored mountaineers could not cross the river as easily as the plainsmen; it was up to the Arshaum to win them safe passage.
Viridovix hoped they would take the guards at the ford by surprise, but they did not. A ring of bonfires made the space round the enemy camp bright as day. Catapult crews stood to their weapons; darts, stones, and jars of incendiary were piled high by the engines. Cavalry in ordered rows waited for the Arshaum. The firelight gleamed from their corselets and lances. No irregulars these, but seasoned troops of the same sort Videssos produced, Makuraner contingents fighting for their land’s new masters.
Arigh’s white grin was all there was to see of him. “This will be easy—only a couple hundred of them. We can flatten them before they get reinforced.” He confidently began deploying his men.
As he was sending messengers here and there, a single figure from the enemy lines rode out past the bonfires toward the Arshaum. He loomed against the flames, tremendous and proud. Viridovix’ heart gave a painful leap; he was sure that huge silhouette had to belong to Avshar. Then the horseman turned his head and the Gaul saw his strong profile. A mere man, he thought, disappointed; the wizard-prince’s mantlings would have hidden his face.
The rider came closer, brandishing his spear. He shouted something, first in a language Viridovix did not understand but took to be Makuraner, then in the tongue of Vaspurakan, finally in the Yezda dialect. The Celt could follow him there: “Ho, you dogs! Does any among you dare match himself against me? I am Gusnaph, called with good reason the Feeder of Ravens, and fourteen men I have struck down in the duel. Who among you will join them?”
He rode back and forth, arrogant in his might, crying his challenge again and again. The Arshaum murmured among themselves as those who understood translated for the rest. No one seemed eager to answer Gusnaph. Aboard his great horse, armored head to foot, he might as well have been a tower of iron. He laughed scornfully and made as if to return to his own lines.
Viridovix whooped and dug his heels into his pony’s flanks. “Come back, you idiot!” he heard Skylitzes yell. “He has a lance to your sword!” The Gaul did not stop. Even with a won battle, he had leaped to fight Scaurus; had he not, the fleeting thought went by, he would still be in Gaul. But he had not hesitated then and did not now. An enemy leader slain was worth a hundred lesser men.
Gusnaph turned, swung up his lance in salute, then lowered it and thundered at the Celt. He grew bigger with terrifying quickness. The spear was fixed unerringly on Viridovix’ chest, no matter which way he swerved.
At the last instant the Gaul feinted again, and again Gusnaph met the move—too well. The lancepoint darted past the Celt’s shoulder as their horses slammed together in collision.
Both men were thrown. They landed heavily. Viridovix scrambled to his feet. He was faster than Gusnaph, whose armor weighed him down. His lance lay under his thrashing horse. He reached for a weapon at his belt—a shortsword, a mace, a dagger; Viridovix never knew which. The Gaul sprang forward. Gusnaph was still on one knee when his sword crashed down. The Makuraner champion fell in the dirt.
Following the custom of his own nation, Viridovix bent, chopped, and raised Gusnaph’s dripping head for the rest of the enemy to see. He let out a banshee wail of triumph. There was an awful stillness on the other side of the fires.
With the resilience of the nomad breed, Viridovix’ pony was on its feet and seemed unhurt, though Gusnaph’s charger was screaming enough to make the Celt think it had broken a leg. The steppe animal shied from the smell of blood when he approached it with his trophy.
He set the head down. “I’ve no gate to nail it to, any road,” he said to himself. The pony side-stepped nervously, but let him mount. He waved his sword to the Arshaum, who were erupting in a cloudburst of cheers. “Is it summat else you’re waiting for, then?” he shouted.
The plainsmen advanced at the trot. Their foes hardly waited for the first arrows to come arcing out of the night, but fled, abandoning their tents, the catapults, and the ford. The first hint of morning twilight was turning the sky pale when Arigh stood on the bank of the Moush and waved to the Erzrumi to cross.
They came over band by band, the water at the ford lapping at their horses’ flanks. Gorgidas crossed with the Sworn Fellowship, just behind Rakio. In his boiled leather, armed only with a gladius, he felt badly out of place among the armored Yrmido, but he had discovered Platon was right. He would do anything before he let his lover think him afraid.
The Yezda managed a counterattack at dawn, nomad archers fighting in the familiar style of the plains. But as they had only faced the Arshaum during the night, the Erzrumi took them by surprise. They shouted in dismay as the plainsmen’s line opened out and the big mountain horses crashed down on them.
With the Yrmido, Gorgidas was at the point of the wedge. There were a few seconds of desperate confusion as the Sworn Fellowship and the rest of the Erzrumi speared Yezda out of the saddle and overbore their light mounts. Some fell on their side, too; an Yrmido just in front of the physician flew from his horse, his face bloodily pulped by a morningstar. His partner, tears steaming down his cheeks, killed the nomad who had slain him.
The Greek slashed at a Yezda. He thought he missed. It did not much matter. The advance rolled ahead.
Gashvili shouted something in Vaspurakaner to Khilleu. The lord of Gunib had a dent in his gilded helmet, but was undismayed. Khilleu, grinning, gave back an obscene gesture. “What was that?” Gorgidas asked Rakio, who was tying up a cut on the back of his hand.
“Says Gashvili, ‘You damned fairies can fight.’ ”
“He’s right,” the Greek said with a burst of pride.
“Why not?” To Rakio, war came as naturally as breathing. He touched spurs to his horse, driving against the Yezda. Gorgidas’ steppe pony snorted in affront when he spurred it, but followed.
Then, quite suddenly, the enemy was reeling away, each man fleeing to save himself, with no thought of holding together as a fighting force. The Arshaum and Erzrumi cheered each other till they were hoarse. The way clear before them, they pushed into Yezd.