“SURRENDER!” LANKINOS SKYLITZES BAWLED UP TO THE Yezda officer atop the mud-brick wall.
The Yezda put his hands on his hips and laughed. “I’d like to see you make me,” he said. He spat at the Videssian, who was interpreting for Arigh.
“Och, will you hear the filthy man, now?” Viridovix said. He shook his fist at the Yezda. “Come down here and be doing that, you blackhearted omadhaun!”
“Make me,” the officer repeated, still laughing. He gestured to the squad of archers beside him. They drew their double-curved bows back to their ears. The sun glinted off iron chisel-points; to Gorgidas every shaft seemed aimed straight at him. The Yezda said, “This parley is over. Pull back, or I will fire on you. Fight or not, just as you please.”
To give the warning teeth, one of the nomads put an arrow in the dirt a couple of feet in front of Arigh’s pony. He sat motionless, staring up at the Yezda, daring them to shoot. After a full minute, he nodded to his party and made a deliberate turn to show the town garrison his back. He and his comrades slowly rode off.
The moment they left the shade of the wall, the blasting heat of the river-plain summer hit them once more with its full power. Viridovix wore an ugly hat of woven straw to protect his fair skin from the sun, but he was red and peeling even so. The sweat that streamed down his face stung like vinegar. Armor was a chafing torment no amount of bathing could ease.
Arigh cursed in a low monotone until they were well away from the city, not wanting to give the Yezda officer the satisfaction of knowing his anger. The drawn-up lines of his army, banners moving sluggishly in the sweltering air, made a brave show. But without the siege train they did not have, assaulting a walled town with ready defenders would cost more than they could afford to lose.
“May the wind spirits blow that dog’s ghost so far it never finds its way home to be reborn,” Arigh burst out at last, bringing his fist down on his thigh in frustration. “It galls me past words not to watch him drown in his own blood for his insolence, crying defiance at me with his stinking couple of hundred men.”
“The trouble is, he knows what he’s about,” Pikridios Goudeles said. “We haven’t the ladders to go at the walls of this miserable, overgrown village, whatever its name is—”
“Erekh,” Skylitzes put in.
“A fitting noise for a nauseating town. In any case, we don’t have the ladders and we can’t do much of a job making them because the only trees in this bake-oven of a country are date palms, with worthless wood. To say nothing of the fact that if we sit down in front of a city instead of staying on the move, all the Yezda garrisons hereabouts will converge on us instead of each one being pinned down to protect its own base.”
“Are you a general now?” Arigh snarled, but he could not argue against the pen-pusher’s logic. “This will cost us,” he said darkly. When he drew closer to his assembled soldiers, he waved to the southwest and yelled, “We ride on!”
He gave the order first in the Arshaum speech for his own men, then in Videssian so Narbas Kios could translate it into Vaspurakaner for the Erzrumi. The mountaineers’ ranks stirred; it would have taken a deaf man to miss their resentful mutters. Some of the Erzrumi were not muttering. Part of the Mzeshi contingent shouted their fury at the Arshaum chief and at those of their own leaders content to remain with the plainsmen.
One of their officers advanced on Arigh. Dark face suffused with rage, he roared something at the Arshaum in his own strange language, then brought himself under enough control to remember his Vaspurakaner. His accent was atrocious; Narbas Kios frowned, trying to be sure he understood. At last he said, “He calls you a man of little spirit.” From the savage scowl on the Mzeshi’s face, Gorgidas was sure Narbas was shading the translation. The trooper went on, “He says he came to fight, and you run away. He came for loot, and has won a few brass trinkets his own smiths would be ashamed of. He says he was tricked, and he is going home.”
“Wait,” Arigh said through the Videssian soldier. He went through Goudeles’ arguments all but unchanged, and added, “We are still unbeaten, and Mashiz still lies ahead. That has been our goal all along; stay and help us win it.”
The Mzeshi frowned in concentration. Gorgidas thought he was considering what Arigh had said, but then he loudly broke wind. His face cleared.
“Not the most eloquent reply, but one of unmistakable meaning,” Goudeles remarked with diplomatic aplomb.
Smirking triumphantly, the officer trotted back to his followers and harangued them for a few minutes. They shouted their agreement, brandishing lances and swords. Their harness and chain mail jingled as they pulled away from their countrymen and started back to their mountain home. Several individual horsemen peeled away from the remaining men of Mzeh to join them.
Arigh had his impassivity back as they began to grow small against the sky. “I wonder who the next ones to give up will be,” he said. Already a good third of the Erzrumi had abandoned the campaign and turned back.
Viridovix blew a long, glum breath through his mustaches. “And it all started out so simple, too,” he said. Fanning out as they crossed the Tutub, the Arshaum had fallen on three or four towns before startled defenders realized an enemy was loose among the Hundred Cities. It was as easy as riding through open gates; there was next to no fighting and, in spite of Mzeshi complaints, they came away with their horses festooned with booty.
But it had not stayed easy long. Not only were the cities shut up against attack, Yezda raiders began the hit-and-run warfare they shared with the Arshaum. Two scouts were ambushed here, a forager there. The Yezda lost men, too, but they had the resources of a country to draw on. Arigh did not.
He gave his commands to the naccara drummer, who boomed them out for the whole army to hear. It shifted into traveling order, with what was left of the Erzrumi heavy cavalry in a long column in the center, flanked and screened by the Arshaum.
Gorgidas rode with Rakio, near the front of the Erzrumi formation. Most of the Sworn Fellowship was hurrying back to the Yrmido country; Khilleu did not relish giving up the campaign, but he did not dare leave his land unprotected when his unfriendly neighbors were going home. A fair number of “orphans” and a handful of pairs, mostly older men, stayed on.
The physician flattered himself that Rakio was still with the army for his sake. Certainly the Yrmido found no delight in the journey itself. “What strange country this is,” he said. He pointed. “What is that little hill, out of the flat plain rising? Several of them I have seen here.”
Gorgidas followed his pointing finger. It was truly not much of a hill, perhaps not even as tall as the walls around Videssos, but in the dead-flat river plain it stood out like a mountain, springing up so abruptly he did not think it could be natural.
Having no idea how it came about, he poised tablet and stylus before he called out the question to whoever might hear it. Skylitzes was not far away, talking with Vakhtang of Gunib. He raised his head. “It’s the funeral marker for a dead town,” he told the Greek. “You’ve seen how they build with mud brick hereabouts. They have to; it’s all there is in this country. No stone here to speak of, Phos knows. The stuff is flimsy, and the people don’t care for work any more than they do anywhere else. When a house or a tavern falls down, they rebuild on top of the rubble. Do it enough times, and there’s your hillock. That should be plain to anyone, I’d think.”
Gorgidas scowled at the officer’s patronizing tone. Skylitzes let out one of his rare, short laughs. “See how it feels to get a lecture instead of giving one,” he said. Ears burning, Gorgidas quickly stowed his tablet.
Rakio did not notice his lover’s discomfiture; he was still complaining about the countryside. “It looks like it leprosy has. What parts are in crop seem rich enough, but there are so many patches of desert, ugly and useless both.”
Overhearing him, Skylitzes said, “Those are new; blame the Yezda for them. They made them by—”
“Destroying the local irrigation works,” Gorgidas interrupted. He was not about to have his self-esteem tweaked twice running. “Without the Tutub and the Tib, this whole land would be waste. It only grows where their waters reach. But the Yezda are nomads—what do they care about crops? Their herds can live on thorns and thistles, and if they starve away the farmers here, so much the better for them.”
“Just what I would have said,” Skylitzes said, adding, “but at twice the length.”
“What are you arguing about?” Vakhtang demanded in the plains speech. When Skylitzes had translated, the Erzrumi advised Gorgidas, “Pay no attention to him. I have not known him long, but I see he bites every word to test it before he lets it out.”
“Better that way than the flood of drivel Goudeles spouts,” the officer said, not missing the chance to score off the man who was a political rival back in Videssos.
Vakhtang, though, favored the bureaucrat’s more florid style of oratory. “Meaning can disappear with not enough words as well as from too many.”
They hashed it back and forth the rest of the day as they rode through farmland and desert. It made for a good argument; there were points on both sides, but it was not important enough for anyone to take very seriously.
With empty fields all around, Gorgidas forgot he was at war. Rakio, though, knew at a glance what that emptiness meant. “They hide from us,” he said. “Peasants always do. In a week come, and the fields will be full of farmers.”
“No doubt you’re right,” the Greek sighed. It saddened him to think that to the locals he was only another invader.
“Yezda!” The peasant was short, stooped, and naked, with great staring eyes. He pointed to an artificial mound on the southern horizon, larger and better-preserved than the one Rakio had noticed a couple of days before. He rapidly opened and closed his hands several times to show that they were numerous.
Arigh frowned. “Our scouts saw nothing there this morning.” He glanced at the native, who repeated his gestures. “I wish you spoke a language some one of us could follow.” But the farmer had only the guttural tongue of the Hundred Cities, reduced to a patois by centuries of subjection to Makuran and the Yezda.
He smiled ingratiatingly at the Arshaum chief, pantomiming riders going up to tether their horses in the ruins. He pointed to the sun, waved it through the sky backwards. “This was yesterday?” Arigh asked. The local shrugged, not understanding. “Worth another look,” Arigh decided. He ordered a halt and sent a squad of riders out to examine the hillock.
It was nearly twilight when they came back. “Nothing around there,” their leader told Arigh angrily. “No tracks, no horseturds, no signs of fire, nothing.”
The peasant read the scout’s voice and fell to his knees in the dirt in front of Arigh. He was shaking with fear, but kept stubbornly pointing south. “What’s he sniveling about?” Gorgidas asked, walking up after seeing to his pony.
“He claims there are soldiers up on that hillock there, but he lies,” the Arshaum answered. “He’s cost us hours with his nonsense; I ought to cut off his ears for him for that.” He gestured so the native would understand. The local cringed and went flat on his belly, wailing out something in his own language.
Gorgidas scratched his head. “Why would he put himself in danger to lie to you? He has no reason to love the Yezda; see how well he lives under them.” Every rib of the farmer’s body was plainly visible beneath his dirty skin. “Maybe he’s just trying to do you a favor.” The Greek wanted to believe that; he did not like being put on the same level as the Yezda.
“Where are the warriors, then?” Arigh demanded, putting his hands on his hips. “If you tell me my scouts are going blind, you might as well cut your own throat now.”
“Blind? Hardly—we’d be dead ten times over if they were. But still …” He eyed the peasant, who had given up moaning and was gazing at him in mute appeal. The physician’s trained glance caught the faint cloudiness of an early cataract in the man’s left eye. His mind made a sudden leap. “Not blind—but blinded? Magic could hide soldiers better than rubble or brush.”
“That is a thought,” Arigh admitted. “If I’d taken this lout—” He stirred the peasant with his foot; the fellow groaned and covered his face, expecting to die the next instant. “—more seriously, I’d have sent a shaman to smell the place out.” He became the brisk commander once more. “All right, you’ve made your point. Get Tolui and round up a company of men, then go find out what’s going on.”
“Me?” the Greek said in dismay.
“You. This is your idea. Ride it or fall off. Otherwise I have no choice but to think Manure-foot here a spy, don’t I?”
Arigh, Gorgidas thought, was getting uncomfortably good at making people do what he wanted. “A concealment spell?” Tolui said when the doctor found the shaman eating curded mares’ milk. “You could well be right. That’s not battle magic; whoever cast it could not mind if it fell apart as soon as his men burst from ambush.”
He drew his tunic over his head and undid the drawstring of his trousers with a sigh. “In this weather the mask is a torment, and the robe is of thick suede. Ah, well, better by night than by day.”
“Round up a company,” Arigh had said, but Gorgidas had no authority over the nomads, who did not fancy taking orders from an outsider. Tolui’s presence finally helped the Greek persuade a captain of a hundred to lead out his command. “A hunt for a ghost stag, is it?” the officer said sourly. He was a broken-nosed man named Karaton, whose high voice ruined the air of sullen ferocity he tried to assume.
His men grumbled as they wolfed down their food and resaddled their horses. Karaton worked off his annoyance by swearing at Gorgidas when the physician was the last one ready. Still, it was not quite dark when they rode for the mound that had once been a city.
Rakio caught up with them halfway there. He gave Gorgidas a reproachful look as he trotted up beside him. “If you go to fight, why not me tell?”
“Sorry,” the physician muttered. In fact he had not thought of it; he always had to remind himself that his comrades did not share his distaste for combat. Rakio was as eager as Viridovix once had been.
The hillock was ghostly by moonlight. Atop it Gorgidas could see stretches of wall still untumbled; his mind’s eye summoned up a time when all the brickwork was whole and the streets swarming with perfumed men dressed in long tunics and carrying walking sticks, with veiled women, their figures robed against strangers’ glances. The place would have echoed with jangling music and loud, happy talk. It was silent now. Not even night birds sang.
Like a good soldier, Karaton automatically sent his men to surround the base of the hill, but his heart was not in it. He waved sarcastically. “Ten thousand hiding up there, at least.”
“Oh, stop squeaking at me,” Gorgidas snapped, wishing he had never set eyes on the peasant in the first place. He hated looking the fool. In his self-annoyance he did not notice Karaton stiffen with outrage and half draw his saber.
“Stop, both of you,” Tolui said. “I must have harmony around me if the spirits are to answer my summons.” There was not a word of truth in that, but it gave both men a decent excuse not to quarrel.
Karaton subsided with a growl. “Why call the spirits, shaman? A child of four could tell you this place is dead as a sheepskin coat.”
“Then fetch a child of four next time and leave me in peace,” Tolui said. Echoing from behind the devil-mask he wore, his voice carried an otherworldly authority. Karaton touched a finger to his forehead in apology.
Tolui drew from his saddlebag a flat, murkily transparent slab of some waxy stone, which was transfixed by a thick needle of a different stone. “Chalcedony and emery,” he explained to Gorgidas. “The hardness of the emery lets a man peering through the clear chalcedony pierce most illusions.”
“Give it to me,” Karaton said impatiently. He squinted up to the top of the mound. “Nothing,” he said—but was there doubt in his voice? Tolui took the seeing-stone back and handed it to Gorgidas. Things at the crown of the hillock seemed to jump when he put it to his eye, but steadied quickly.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “There was a flicker, but …” He offered the stone to Tolui. “See for yourself. The toy is yours, after all; you should be able to use it best.”
The shaman lifted the mask from his head and set it on his knee. He raised the stone and gazed through it for more than a minute. Gorgidas felt the backwash of his concentration as he channeled his vision to penetrate semblance and see truth.
The physician had never thought much about Tolui’s power as a sorcerer. If anything, he assumed the shaman was of no great strength, as he had been second to Onogun until Bogoraz poisoned Arghun’s old wizard because he favored Videssos. Since then Tolui’s magic had always been adequate, but the Greek, not seeing him truly tested, went on reckoning him no more than a hedge-wizard mainly interested in herbs, roots, and petty divinations.
He abruptly realized he had misjudged the shaman. When Tolui cried, “Wind spirits, come to my aid! Blow away the cobwebs of enchantment before me!” the night seemed to hold its breath.
A howling rose above the hillock, as of a storm, but no wind buffeted Gorgidas’ face. Then Karaton shouted in amazement while his men drew bows and bared swords. Like a curtain whisked away from in front of a puppet-theater’s stage, the illusion of emptiness at the crest of the hill was swept aside. Half a dozen campfires blazed among the ruins, with warriors sprawled around them at their ease.
The first arrows were in the air before Karaton could give the order to shoot. A Yezda pitched forward into one of the fires; another screamed as he was hit. A different scream went up, too, this one of fury, as the pair of wizards with the enemy felt their covering glamour snatched away.
“Up and take them!” Karaton yelled. “Quick, before they get their wits about them and go for weapons and armor!”
Shouting to demoralize the Yezda further, his men drove their ponies up the steep sides of the hill, then dismounted and scrambled toward the top on foot. Gorgidas and Rakio were with them, grabbing at shrubs or chunks of brick for handholds. Looking up toward the crest, the Greek saw the campfires and running figures of the Yezda shimmer and start to fade as their sorcerers tried to bring down the veil once more. But Tolui was still working against them, and the fear and excitement of their own men and the Arshaum ate at their magic as well. The fires brightened again.
A pony thundered downhill past Gorgidas. A daredevil Yezda, seeing his only road to safety, took that mad plunge in the dark and lived to tell of it. His horse reached level ground and streaked away. “That is a rider!” Rakio exclaimed. A crash and a pair of shrieks, one human, the other from a mortally injured pony, told of a horseman who tried the plummet and failed.
Several more mounted Yezda broke out down the path they would have taken to attack the Arshaum army. Most, though, stunned by the unexpected night assault, were still throwing saddles on their beasts or groping for sabers when Karaton’s men reached them.
As he gained the top of the mound, Gorgidas stumbled over an upthrust tile. An arrow splintered against masonry not far from his head. Rakio hauled him to his feet. “You crazy are?” he shouted in the Greek’s ear. “Get out your sword.”
“Huh? Oh, yes, of course,” Gorgidas said mildly, as if being reminded of some small blunder in a classroom. Then a Yezda was in front of him, shamshir whistling at his head. He had no room for fine footwork. He parried the stroke, then another that would have gutted him. The Yezda feinted low, slashed high. Gorgidas did not feel the sting of the blade, but warm stickiness ran down the side of his neck, and he realized his ear had been cut.
He thrust at the Yezda, who blocked and fell back awkwardly, confused by the unfamiliar stroke. Gorgidas lunged. At full extension he had a much longer reach than the nomad thought possible. His gladius pierced the Yezda’s belly. The man groaned and folded up on himself.
Most of the enemy, outnumbered two to one, drew back for a stand at a small courtyard whose ruined walls were still breast high. The Arshaum hacked at them over the bulwark and sent arrows and stones into their crowded ranks. Unable to stand that punishment for long, the Yezda surged out again and with the strength of desperation broke through their foes’ lines. Karaton squalled in outrage as Yezda hurled themselves down the hillside with no thought for broken bones or anything but escape.
Only a few got that far; the Arshaum cut down the greater part of them as they fled. One of the Yezda wizards, a shaman in robes hardly less fringed than Tolui’s, fell in that mad chase, a sword in his hand in place of the magic that had failed him.
The other sorcerer was made of different, and harsher, stuff. Gorgidas thought he saw motion down a narrow alleyway and called out in the Arshaum tongue, “Friend?” He got no answer. Gladius at the ready, he stepped into the rubble-choked lane.
A campfire flared behind him. The sudden brightness showed him that the alley was blind—and that it trapped no ordinary Yezda. For a moment the red robe and jagged tonsure meant nothing to the physician. Then ice walked up his spine as he recognized Skotos’ emblems.
The wizard’s face, Gorgidas thought, would have revealed his nature even in the absence of other signs. A man who knows both good and evil and with deliberate purpose chooses the latter will bear its mark. The eyes of the dark god’s votary gave back the fire like a wolf’s. The skin was drawn taut on his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth, pulling his lips back in a snarl of hate. But it was not directed at the Greek; he was sure the wizard wore it awake and asleep.
The physician edged forward. He saw the other had only a short dagger at his belt. “Yield,” he called in Videssian and the Khamorth tongue. “I would not slay you out of hand.”
As it focused on Gorgidas, the wizard’s sneer tightened. His hands darted out, his lips twisted in soundless invocation. Mortal fear lent his spell force enough to strike despite the chaos of battle. Gorgidas staggered, as if clubbed from behind. His sight swam; his arms and legs would not answer; the sword fell from his hand. The air rasped harshly in his throat as he struggled to breathe. He slipped to one knee, shaking his head over and over to try to clear it.
The spell had been meant to kill; perhaps only the discipline of the healer’s art gave the Greek strength of will enough to withstand it even in part. He was groping for his blade as the sorcerer came up to him. The dagger gleamed in the wizard’s hand, long enough to reach a man’s heart.
The wizard knelt for the killing stab, a vulpine smile stretched over his lean features. Gorgidas heard a dull thud. He thought it was the sound of the knife entering his body. But the Yezda sorcerer reeled away with a muffled grunt of pain. The power of the spell vanished as his concentration snapped.
Gorgidas sprang for the wizard, but someone hurtled by him. A sword bit with a meaty thunk. The Yezda thrashed and lay still; Gorgidas smelled his bowels let go in death.
“You crazy are,” Rakio said, wiping his blade on his sleeve. It was statement this time, not question. He seized the Greek by the shoulders. “Are you too stupid not to go wandering away from help and get caught alone?”
“So it would seem. I’m new to this business of war and don’t do the right thing without thinking,” Gorgidas said. He drew Rakio into a brief embrace and touched his cheek. “I’m glad you were close by, to keep me from paying the price of my mistake.”
“I would want you for me to do the same,” the Yrmido said, “but would you be able?”
“I hope so,” Gorgidas said. But that was no good answer, and he knew it. They heard an Arshaum shout not far away and rushed to his aid together.
Fewer than half the Yezda managed to get away or to hide well enough in the ruins to escape their enemies’ search. The rest, but for a couple saved to question later, were cut down; the Arshaum captured a good three dozen horses. The cost was seven dead and twice that many wounded.
“That was a true lead,” Karaton said to Gorgidas, the nearest thing to an apology he would give a non-Arshaum. He lay on his belly while the Greek stitched up a gash on the back of his calf. The wound was deep, but luckily ran along the muscle instead of across it; it did not hamstring him. A clean, freely bleeding cut, it did not require the healing art to mend.
Karaton did not flinch as the needle entered his flesh again and again, or even when the physician poured an antiseptic lotion of alum, verdigris, pitch, resin, vinegar, and oil into the wound. “You should have kept that wizard of theirs alive,” the commander of a hundred went on, his tone perfectly conversational. “He would have been able to tell us more than these no-account warriors we have.” Without liking the man, the Greek had to admire his fortitude.
“I was almost sorry for having lived through the encounter myself,” he told Viridovix much later that night. The Celt was yawning, but Gorgidas was still too keyed up to sleep. Having seen the peasant who had warned them loaded with gold and sent home, he kept hashing over the fight.
“The shindy would’ve been easier for you lads, I’m thinking, were you after having me along,” Viridovix interrupted. Most times he would have heard his friend out gladly, but his eyes were heavy as two balls of stone in his head.
“Aye, no doubt you would have stomped the hill flat with one kick and saved us the trouble of fighting,” Gorgidas said tartly. “I thought you over your juvenile love for bloodletting.”
“That I am,” the Gaul said. “But for one who prides himself on the wits of him, you’ve no call to be twitting me. If it was magic you suspected, now, couldna this glaive o’ mine ha’ pierced it outen the folderol and all puir Tolui went through?”
“A plague! I should have thought of that.” Hardly anything annoyed Gorgidas worse than Viridovix coming up with something he had missed. Sitting back combing his mustaches with his fingers, the Celt looked so smug Gorgidas wanted to punch him.
“Dinna fash yoursel’ so,” he said, chuckling. “Forbye, you won and got back safe, the which was the point of it all.” He laid a large hand on the Greek’s shoulder.
Gorgidas started to shrug it away in anger, but had a better idea. He gave a rueful laugh and said, “You’re right, of course. I wasn’t very clever, was I?” Viridovix’ baffled expression made a fair revenge.
The Yezda band slashed through Arigh’s cavalry screen, poured arrows into the Erzrumi still with his army, and fled before the slower-moving mountaineers could come to grips with them. Arshaum chased the marauders through the fields. Wounded men reeled in the saddle; as Gorgidas watched, one lost his seat and crashed headlong into the trampled barley. The locals, he thought, would find the corpse small compensation for the hunger those swathes of destruction would bring come winter.
As the last of the Yezda were ridden down or got away, their pursuers returned. A couple led new horses, while more showed off swords, boots, and other bits of plunder. Even so, Viridovix clucked his tongue in distress over the skirmish. “Och, the more o’ the Hundred Cities we’re after passing, the bolder these Yezda cullions get. ’Tis nobbut a running fight the last two days, and always the Erzrumi they’re for hitting.”
“It works, too.” Gloom made Pikridios Goudeles unusually forthright. Of the hillmen, all had seen enough of the lowlands, but for a couple of hundred adventurers from various clans and Gashvili’s sturdy band, who still reckoned themselves bound by oath. Casualties and desertions reduced their count by a few every day.
“Tomorrow will be worse,” Skylitzes said. Hard times loosened his tongue as they checked Goudeles’. “The Yezda have our measure now. They know which towns we can reach and which are safe from us. The garrisons are coming out to reinforce the bushwhackers who’ve dogged us all along.”
Viridovix did not like the conclusion he reached. “We’ll be fair nibbled to death, then, before too long. We havena the men to spare.”
“We should have,” Goudeles said. “But for the mischance of battle on the steppe and for the squabbles among the Arshaum themselves, we would be twice our present numbers.”
Skylitzes said, “I served under Nephon Khoumnos once, and he was always saying, ‘If ifs and buts were candied nuts, then everyone would be fat.’ ” His eyes traveled to Goudeles’ belly. “Maybe he was thinking of you.”
Reminding the bureaucrat of their political rivalry back in Videssos proved unwise. “Maybe,” Goudeles said shortly. “I’m sure the good general’s philosophy is a great consolation to him now.”
Appalled silence fell. Avshar’s wizardry had killed Khoumnos at Maragha. Goudeles reddened, knowing he had gone too far. He hurriedly changed the subject. “We’d also be better off if the Erzrumi had not proved summer soldiers, going home when things turned rough.”
Some truth lay in that, but after his gaffe his companions were not ready to let him off so easily. “That is unjust,” Gorgidas said, doubly irritated because of the implied slur on Rakio’s countrymen. “They came to fight for themselves, not for us, and we’ve seen how the Yezda keep singling them out for special attention.”
“Aye; to make them give up.” Goudeles was not about to abandon his point. “But when they do, they get off easy while we pay the price of their running out. Deny it if you can.” No one did.
Gorgidas’ side of the argument, though, received unpleasant confirmation later that afternoon. The bodies of several Erzrumi who had been captured in a raid the week before were hung on spears in Arigh’s line of march. With the time to work on them, the Yezda had used their ingenuity. Among other indignities, they had soaked their prisoners’ beards in oil before setting them alight.
Arigh buried the mistreated corpses without a word. If they were meant to intimidate, they had the opposite effect. In cold anger, the Arshaum hunted down a squad of Yezda scouts and drove them straight into the lances of the mountaineers still with them. The enemy horsemen did not last long. The evening’s camp held a grim satisfaction.
But the Yezda returned to the attack the next day. The iron-studded gates of one of the larger of the Hundred Cities, Dur-Sharrukin, swung open to let out a sally party, while two troops who had been shadowing the Arshaum nipped in from either flank.
They were still outnumbered and could have been badly mauled, but Arigh threw the bulk of his forces at Dur-Sharrukin’s gate. If he could force an entrance, the city was his. The Yezda gate-captain saw that, too. He was, unfortunately, a man of quick action. He put a shoulder to the gate himself and screamed for his troops to help. The bar slammed into place seconds before the Arshaum got there. Much of the garrison was trapped outside, but the town was secure.
The plainsmen milled about in confusion just outside Dur-Sharrukin. In their dash for the gate they had pulled away from the Erzrumi, and the Yezda flanking attack fell on the hillmen.
Gashivili’s company stopped one assault in its tracks. Used to clashing with the Khamorth at the edge of the steppe, the lord of Gunib’s veterans waited till the Yezda drew close enough to be hurt by a charge and then, with nice timing, delivered a blow that brought a dozen lightly armed archers down from their horses at the first shock and sent the rest galloping away for their lives.
On the other wing the combat went less well. The free spirits who had clung with the Arshaum acknowledged no single commander. They grouped together by nation or by friendship, and each little band did as it pleased. Lacking the discipline for a united charge, they tried to fight nomad-style, and the nomads had much the better of it.
“Stay close to me,” Rakio called to Gorgidas as the first arrows whipped past them. The Yrmido swung his lance down and roweled his big gelding. He thundered toward a Yezda who was restringing his bow. On a more agile mount, the other had no trouble eluding him, but his grin turned to a snarl as he saw Gorgidas bearing down on him behind Rakio.
The Greek rode a steppe pony himself and was thrusting at the Yezda as the latter snatched out his saber. A backward lean saved him from Gorgidas’ sword, but another “orphan” from the Sworn Fellowship speared him out of the saddle. All the remaining Yrmido, about fifteen of them, stuck close together; even now, few of the other Erzrumi would have anything to do with them.
They cut down a couple of Yezda more and took injuries in return. One was shot in the shoulder, another wounded in the leg by a sword stroke. His foe’s saber cut his horse as well. Crazed with pain, it leaped into the air and galloped wildly away, by good fortune toward Gashvili’s troops. One of their rear guard rode out to the hurt warrior, helped bring his beast under control, and hurried him into the safety of their ranks.
“That is well done,” Rakio said. “These men of Gunib decent fellows have themselves shown to be. Some here would let the Yezda take him.”
Back at Dur-Sharrukin, the Arshaum were reversing themselves and riding to help their allies. The Yezda, seeing that their advantage would soon be gone, battled with redoubled vigor, to do all the damage they could before they had to retreat.
The Yrmido took the brunt of that whirlwind assault, and, because they were who they were, the rest of the Erzrumi did not hurry to help them. Gorgidas parried blow after blow and dealt a few of his own. “Eleleleu!” he shouted—the Greek war cry.
He wished he could use a bow; arrows flew by him, buzzing like angry wasps. He noticed his left trouser leg was torn and wet with blood and wondered foolishly if it was his.
Through the tumult he heard Viridovix’ yowling battle paean. “Eleleu!” he yelled, and waved his hat to show the Celt where he was. The wild Gallic howl came again, closer this time. He thought he could hear Skylitzes’ cry as well; Goudeles was apt to be noisier before a fight than during.
Rakio shouted and flung both hands up in front of his face. A little kestrel stabbed claws into the back of one wrist, then screeched and streaked away to its Yezda master. Another Yezda landed a mace just above Rakio’s ear. The Yrmido slid bonelessly to the ground.
Gorgidas spurred his pony forward, as did the two or three men of the Sworn Fellowship who were not fighting for their own lives at that instant. But Rakio had got separated from them by fifty yards or so. Though Gorgidas burst between two Yezda before either could strike at him, more were between him and his lover, too many for him to overcome even had he had a demigod’s strength and Viridovix’ spell-wrapped blade.
He tried nonetheless, slashing wildly, all fencing art forgotten, and watched with anguish as a Yezda leaped down from his horse to strip off Rakio’s mail shirt. The Yrmido stirred, tried groggily to rise. The Yezda grabbed for his sword, then saw how weak and uncertain Rakio was. He shouted for a comrade. Together they quickly lashed Rakio’s hands behind him, then heaved him across the first warrior’s saddlebow. Both men remounted and trotted off toward the west.
The Yezda were breaking contact wherever they could as the Arshaum drew near. Gorgidas’ chase stopped as soon as it began. An arrow tore through his pony’s neck. The horse foundered with a choked scream. As he had been taught, the Greek kicked free of the stirrups. The wind flew from him as he landed in the middle of yet another trampled grain field, but he was not really hurt.
Viridovix was almost thrown himself as he stormed toward Gorgidas. He was spurring his horse so hard that blood ran down its barrel. At last it could stand no more and tried to shake him off. He clung to his seat with the unthinking skill a year’s waking time in the saddle had given him.
“Get on, ye auld weed!” he roared, slapping the beast’s rump. He saw its ears go back and slapped it again, harder, before it could balk. Defeated, it ran. “Faster now, or it’s forever a disgrace to sweet Epona you’ll be,” he said as he heard Gorgidas’ war cry ring out again. As if the Gallic horse goddess held power in this new world, the pony leaped forward.
The Celt shouted himself, then cursed when he got no answer. “Sure and I’ll kill that fancy-boy my ain self, if he’s after letting the Greek come to harm, him such a fool on the battlefield and all,” he panted, though he would sooner have been flayed than have Gorgidas hear him.
He hardly noticed the Yezda horseman in his path, save as an obstacle. One sword stroke sent the other’s shamshir flying, a second laid open his arm. Not pausing to finish him, Viridovix galloped on.
Though the physician was in nomad leathers, the Celt recognized him from behind by the straight sword in his hand and by the set of his shoulders, a slump the self-confident Arshaum rarely assumed. “ ’Twill be the other way round, then,” the Gaul said to himself, “and bad cess to me for thinking ill o’ the spalpeen when he’s nobbut a dead corp.”
But when he dismounted to offer such sympathy as he could, Gorgidas blazed at him: “He’s not dead, you bloody witless muttonhead. It’s worse; the Yezda have him.”
Having seen the grisly warning in the army’s path, Viridovix knew what he meant. “No help for it but that we get him back, is there now?”
“How?” Gorgidas demanded, waving his hand toward the retreating Yezda. As was their habit, they were breaking up and fleeing every which way. “He could be anywhere.” Clenching his fists in despair, the physician turned on Viridovix. “And what is this talk of ‘we’? Why should you care what happens to my catamite?” He flung the word out defiantly, as if he would sooner hear it in his own mouth than the Gaul’s.
Viridovix stood silent for a moment. “Why me? For one thing, I wouldna gi’ over a dead dog to the Yezda for prisoner. If your twisty Greek mind must have its reasons, there’s one. For another, your friend,” he emphasized, turning his back on the hateful word, and on his own thoughts of a few minutes before, “is a braw chap, and after deserving a better fate. And for a third,” he finished quietly, “didn’t I no hear you tried to chase north over Pardraya all alone, the time Varatesh took me?”
“You shame me,” Gorgidas said, hanging his head. Memory of Rakio’s remarks when the Yrmido had saved him came scalding back.
“Och, I didna aim to,” Viridovix said. “If kicking the fool arse o’ you would ha’ worked the trick, it’s that I’d have done, and enjoyed it the more, too.”
“Go howl!” The physician could not help laughing. “You fox of a barbarian, no doubt you have the rescue planned already.”
“That I don’t. Your honor has made the name for being the canny one. Me, I’d sooner brawl nor think—easier and less wearing, both.”
“Liar,” Gorgidas said. But his wits, once the Gaul had dragged him unwilling from despondency, were working again. He said briskly, “We’ll need to see Arigh for soldiers, then, and Tolui, too, I think. What better than magic for tracking someone?”
To their surprise and anger, Arigh turned them down flat when they asked him for a squad. None of their arguments would change his mind. “You’ve chosen a madman’s errand,” he declared, “and one I do not expect you to come back from. Kill yourselves if you must, but I will not order any man to follow you.”
“Is that the way a friend acts?” Viridovix cried.
“It is how a chief acts,” the Arshaum returned steadily. “What sort of herdsman would I be if I sought a lost sheep by sending twenty more to meet the wolves? I have all my force to think of, and that is more important than any one person. Besides, if the Erzrumi is lucky he is dead by now.” He turned away to discuss the evening’s campsite with two of his commanders of a hundred.
That what he said had a great deal of truth in it did not help. Gorgidas was coldly furious as he went looking for Tolui. He found the shaman and learned that Arigh had preceded him. When he put his request to Tolui, the nomad shook his head, saying, “I am ordered not to accompany you.”
“Och, and what’s a wee order, now?” Viridovix said airily. “They’re all very well when you’d be doing what they tell you with or without, but a bit of a bother otherwise.”
Tolui raised an eyebrow. “My head answers for this one.” Seeing Gorgidas about to explode, he stopped him with an upraised hand. “Softly, softly. I may be able to help you yet. Do you have anything of your comrade’s with you?”
From his left wrist the physician drew off a silver bracelet stamped with the images of the Four Prophets. “Handsome work,” Tolui remarked. He reached behind him, took the staring devil-mask of his office from his saddlebag, and lowered it over his head. “Aid me, spirits!” he called softly, his voice remote and disembodied. “Travel the path between the possession and the man and show the way so the journey may be made in this world as well as in your country.”
He cocked his head as if listening. With an annoyed toss of his head, he got out his fringed oval summoning drum. “Aid me, aid me!” he called again, more sharply, and tapped the drumhead in an intricate rhythm. Gorgidas and Viridovix started when an angry voice spoke from nowhere. Tolui laid his command on the spirit, or tried to, for it roared in protest. With drum and voice he brought it to obedience and flung out his hands to send it forth.
“They have your view of orders,” he said to Viridovix.
“Honh!” The Celt waited with Gorgidas for the spirit’s return. Watching the Greek’s set features, all the more revealing in their effort to conceal, he knew what pictures his friend was imagining. He had his own set, and it was not hard to substitute Rakio’s face for Seirem’s.
Tolui repeated that odd, listening pose, then grunted in satisfaction and handed the bracelet back to Gorgidas. Accepting it, the physician was puzzled until he noticed the faint bluish glow crowning the head of the leftmost prophet. Answering the unspoken question, the shaman said, “There is your guide. As the direction of your search changes, the light will shift from figure to figure, from west to north to east to south; it will grow brighter as you near your goal.”
He waved aside thanks. Gorgidas and Viridovix hurried away; the sun was low in the west, and the army slowing as it prepared to camp. Somewhere the Yezda would be doing the same, Gorgidas thought—if they had not made a special stop already.
As they rode away, someone shouted behind them. Viridovix swore—was Arigh going to stop them after all? He lay his sword across his knees. “If himself wants to make a shindy of it, I’ll oblige him, indeed and I will.”
Their pursuer, however, was no Arshaum, but one of the Yrmido, a quiet, solid man named Mynto. “I with come,” he said in broken Vaspurakaner, of which the Greek and Celt had picked up a handful of words. He was leading a fully saddled spare horse. “For Rakio.”
Viridovix smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “What a pair o’ cullions the two of us make! We’d have had the poor wight riding pillion, and belike wrecking our horses for fair.”
Gorgidas was marshaling what Vaspurakaner he knew. “Big danger,” he said to Mynto. “Why you come?”
The Yrmido looked at him. “Same reason you do.”
The answer was one the physician might have been as glad not to have, but there could be no arguing Mynto’s right to join them. “Come, then,” the physician said. Viridovix managed to swallow a grin before the Greek turned his way.
The peaks of Dilbat hid the sun. The day’s vicious heat subsided a little. Night in the land of the Hundred Cities had a beauty missing from the flat, monotonous river plain by day. The sky was a great swatch of blue-black velvet, with the stars’ diamonds tossed carelessly across it.
The horsemen, though, had little chance to enjoy the loveliness. Swarms of mosquitoes rose, humming venomously, from the fields and the edges of the irrigation channels to make the journey a misery. The riders slapped and cursed, slapped and cursed. Their mounts’ tails switched back and forth as they did their best to whisk the bugs away. Gorgidas was reminded of the fight between Herakles and the Hydra; for every insect he mashed, two more took its place.
The mosquitoes particularly tormented Viridovix, whose face in the starlight was puffed and blotchy. “Dogmeat I’ll be before long,” he said sadly, waving his arms in a futile effort to frighten the biters away.
Thanks to a swollen bite over one eye, Gorgidas had to squint to see the bracelet that was steering them. “North,” he said after a bit, as the blue radiance began to shift, and then, a little later, “More west again.” He had no doubt the glow was stronger than it had been when they set out.
As well as they could, the three of them tried to decide what they would do when they found Rakio. More than language hindered them; much depended on how many enemies held the Yrmido and what they would be doing to him when the rescuers arrived. Viridovix made the key point: “We maun be quick. Any long fight and we’re for it, and no mistake.”
They skirted one Yezda camp without being spotted; the bracelet was still guiding them northwest. Soon after, a squadron of Yezda rode past them only a couple of hundred yards away. No challenges rang out; the squad leader must have taken them for countrymen. “No moon—good,” Mynto whispered.
“Bloody good,” Gorgidas said explosively once the Yezda were out of earshot.
He was hiding the bracelet in his sleeve to conceal its brightness when he and his companions passed the mound that marked yet another abandoned city. As they came round it they saw several fires ahead and men moving in front of them. When the physician checked the bracelet, its glow almost dazzled him. “That must be it.”
“Yes.” Mynto pointed. He was farsighted; they had to draw closer before the unmoving figure by one of the fires meant anything to the Greek. He caught his breath sharply. No wonder the man did not move—he was tied to a stake.
“Ready for sport, are they, the omadhauns?” Viridovix said. “We’ll give them summat o’ sport.”
They made plans in low mutters, then almost had to scrap them at once when a sentry called a challenge from out of the darkness. “Not so much noise, there,” Viridovix hissed at the Yezda in the Khamorth speech they shared, doing his best to imitate the fellow’s accent. “We’ve a message for your captain from the khagan himself. Come fetch it, an you would; there’s more stops for us after the one here.”
The sentry rode forward, not especially suspicious. He was only a few feet away when he exclaimed, “You’re no—” His voice cut off abruptly as Mynto hurled half a brick at his face. He went over his horse’s tail.
They waited tensely to see whether the noise would disturb the Yezda in the camp. When it was clear the enemy had not noticed, Viridovix said, “Here’s how we’ll try it, then,” and shifted into his lame Vaspurakaner, eked out with gestures, so Mynto could follow.
“That place is mine,” Gorgidas protested when the Gaul came to his own role.
“No,” Viridovix said firmly. “Mynto has his chain-mail coat, and I this whopping great blade and all the practice using it. Each to the task he’s suited for, or the lot of us perish, and Rakio, too. Is it aye or nay?”
“Yes, damn you.” Having lived his life by logic and reason, the physician wished he could forget them.
“You’ll get in a lick or two, that you will,” Viridovix promised as they moved in. They kept their horses to a walk, advancing as quietly as they could. The Yezda around the fires went about their business. One walked up to Rakio and slapped him across the face with the casual cruelty so common among them. Several others laughed and applauded.
Gorgidas could hear them plainly. With his comrades, he was less than fifty yards from the campfires before one of the Yezda turned his head their way—close enough for them to see his eyes go big and round and his mouth drop open in astonishment.
“Now!” Viridovix bellowed, snatching the reins of the spare horse from Mynto. Spurring their beasts, they stormed forward.
They were at a full gallop when they crashed down on the startled Yezda, shouting at the top of their lungs. In the first panic-filled moments, they must have seemed an army. The Yezda scattered before them. Men screamed as lance pierced or pounding hooves trampled. One soldier dove into a fire to escape a swing of Viridovix’ sword and dashed out the other side with his coat ablaze.
Gorgidas swerved sharply toward the ponies tethered beside the camp. Viridovix had been right; already a couple of Yezda were there, clambering onto their horses. He cut them down, then rode through the rearing snorting animals, cutting lines and slashing at the horses themselves. He screeched and flapped his arms, doing everything he could to madden the beasts and make them useless to their masters.
Cries of fright turned to rage as the Yezda realized how few their attackers were. But Mynto in their midst was working a fearful slaughter, alone or not. His charger’s iron-shod feet cracked ribs and split skulls; his spear killed until the clutch of a dying warrior wrenched it from his grasp. Then he pulled his saber free and, bending low in the saddle, slashed savagely at a pair of Yezda rushing toward him. One spun and fell, the other reeled away with a hand clapped to his slit nose.
In the chaos Viridovix made straight for Rakio. He sprang down from his horse beside the Yrmido. The Yezda had not really begun to enjoy themselves with their prisoner. He was bruised and battered, one eye swollen shut, a trickle of blood starting from the corner of his mouth where the last slap had landed. His mail shirt, of course, had gone for booty. His undertunic, ripped open to the waist, showed that his captors had tested their daggers’ edges on his flesh.
But he was conscious, alert, and not begging to die. “Sorry your evening to disrupt,” he said, moving his wrists so Viridovix could get at his bonds more easily. The Celt sliced through them and stooped to free his ankles. As he did so, a sword bit into Rakio’s post just above his head. He half rose, bringing his dagger up in the underhanded killing stroke of a man who knows steel. A Yezda shrieked, briefly.
Rakio staggered once the thongs that bound his feet were cut. When Viridovix steadied him, he turned his head and kissed the Gaul square on the mouth. “I am in your debt,” he said.
Sure his face was redder than his hair, Viridovix managed to grunt, “Can ye ride?”
“It is ride or die,” the Yrmido said.
Viridovix helped him onto the horse Mynto had brought and set his feet in the stirrups. Hands still too numb to hold the reins, Rakio clasped them round the horse’s neck.
Viridovix seized the lead line and vaulted aboard his own pony. With a wild howl of triumph, he dug his spurs into its flanks and slapped its muzzle when it turned to bite. Neighing shrilly, it bolted forward. A Yezda leaped at Rakio to tear him from the saddle, but spied Mynto bearing down at him and thought better of it. A crackle of excited talk ran between the two Sworn Fellows.
The Gaul’s screech cut through the turmoil as easily as his knife tore flesh. With a skill he had not had till he went to the steppe, Gorgidas used the reins, the pressure of his knees, and a firm voice to steer his pony through the loosed animals that plunged and kicked all around him. He pounded after his comrades.
By the time he caught up with them, Rakio was in control of his own horse and Viridovix had let the lead line go. He rode close to the Yrmido and reached out to clasp his hand. “As I said I would be, I am here,” he said.
Eyes shining, Rakio nodded, but winced at the Greek’s touch; his hand was still puffy from trapped blood. “Sorry,” Gorgidas said, the physician’s tone and the lover’s inseparable in his voice. “Are you much hurt?”
“Not so much as in another hour I would have been,” Rakio said lightly. “All this looks worse than it is.” He reached out himself, carefully, and ruffled the Greek’s hair. “You were brave to come looking for me; I know that you are no warrior born.” Before Gorgidas could say anything to that, he went on, “How did you find me?”
“Your gift.” Gorgidas lifted his arm to show Rakio the bracelet, its light now vanished. He explained Tolui’s magic.
“You have a greater one me given,” the Yrmido said. With equestrian ability Gorgidas still could not have matched, he leaned over to embrace the physician.
“Och, enough o’ your spooning, the twa o’ ye,” Viridivox said, the memory of Rakio’s kiss making him speak more gruffly than he had intended. He was far too set on women for it to have stirred him, but it had not revolted him, either, as he would have expected. He pointed back to the Yezda camp. “Pay attention behind. They’re coming round, I’m thinking. Bad cess for us they’re so quick about it.”
The confused cries and groans of the wounded were fading in the distance, but Gorgidas could also hear purposeful orders. When he turned his head, he saw the first pursuing riders silhouetted against the campfires. He cursed himself for not doing a better job of scattering their horses.
Viridovix brought him up short. “Where was the time for it? Nought to be gained worrying now, any road.”
More familiar with the ground than their quarry, the Yezda closed the gap. An arrow clattered against a stone somewhere behind them. It was a wild, wasted shot, but others would come closer before long. Viridovix bit his lips. “The sons o’ pigs’ll be overhauling us, the gods send ’em a bloody flux.”
“Up the mound, then?” Gorgidas said unhappily. They had agreed the dead city would make a refuge at need, but had hoped they would not have to use it. “We’ll be trapping ourselves there.”
“I ken, I ken,” the Gaul replied. “But there’s no help for it, unless your honor has a better notion. Sure as sure they’re running us down on the flat. In the ruins we’ll make ’em work to winkle us out, at least, and maybe find a way to get off. It’s a puir chance, I’m thinking, but better than none.”
Having seen the Yezda caught in a similar position, Gorgidas knew just how slim the chance was, but some of them had indeed escaped. And without cover, he and his comrades could not shake off their pursuers; Viridovix was right about that, too. The physician jerked on the reins, changing his pony’s direction. The others were already making for the artificial mound.
Shouts from behind said their swerve had been marked. By then they were reining in sharply, slowing their beasts to a walk as they picked their way up the steep, cluttered sides of the mound. Mynto, heaviest in his armor, dismounted and climbed on foot, leading his horse. His companions soon had to follow his example.
Rakio came up side by side with Viridovix. Fighting through brush and shattered masonry that shifted under his feet at every step, the Celt paid little attention until Rakio nudged him. He turned. Even by starlight, the puzzlement was plain on Rakio’s face. “Why are you here?” he asked, softly so Gorgidas and Mynto could not overhear. “I thought you my enemy were.”
Once he had untangled that, Viridovix stared at the Yrmido. “And would you be telling me whatever gave ye sic a daft notion, now?”
“You had been sleeping with Gorgidas for a year.” Rakio set out what seemed to him too obvious to need explaining. “It only natural is for you to be jealous, with me taking him away from you. Why you aren’t?”
All that kept the Gaul from laughing out loud was that it would draw the Yezda. “Och, what a grand ninny y’are. ’Twas nobbut sleeping in the tent of us, that and some powerful talk. A finer friend nor the Greek there couldna be, for all his griping, but the next man’s arse I covet’ll be the first.”
“Really?” It was Rakio’s turn for amusement. No matter what he knew intellectually of other peoples’ ways, emotionally the Sworn Fellowship’s customs were the only right and proper ones to him. “I am sorry for you.”
“Why are you sorry for him?” Gorgidas asked; Rakio had forgotten to keep his voice down.
“Never you mind,” Viridovix told him. “Just shut up and climb. The losels ahint us’ll be here all too quick.”
But when the Greek looked back to see how close the Yezda were, he watched, dumfounded, as they trotted east past the mound. From their shouts to one another, they still thought they were in hot pursuit of Rakio and his rescuers. Mynto said something in the Yrmido tongue. Rakio translated: “A good time for them to lose their wits, but why?”
The question was rhetorical, but answered nonetheless. From the top of the hillock a thin voice called, “Come join me, my friends, if you would.” At first Gorgidas thought he was hearing Greek, then Videssian. From the muffled exclamations of the others, he was sure they felt the same confusion; Viridovix gave a startled answer in his musical Celtic speech. In whatever language they heard the summons, none of them thought of disobeying, any more than they might a much-loved grandfather.
Before long they had to tether their horses and help each other with the last rugged climb to the hill’s crest. The same jumble of eroded mud-brick walls and buildings Gorgidas had seen at the would-be Yezda ambush presented itself here, made worse because no fires lit it. The voice came again: “This way.” They stumbled through the ruins of what might once have been the town marketplace and came at last to work that was not ancient—a lean- to of brush and sticks, propped against a half-fallen fence.
There was motion as they approached. A naked man emerged, at first on hands and knees before painfully getting to his feet. He raised his left hand in a gesture of blessing that was new to Gorgidas and Viridovix, but which Rakio and Mynto returned. “In the names of a greater Four, I welcome the four of you.”
Gorgidas wondered how the hermit knew their number; his eyes were white and blind. But that wonder was small next to the physician’s amazement that he could stand at all. He was the most emaciated human being the Greek had ever seen. His thighs were thinner than his knees; the skin fell in between his sharply etched ribs, or what could be seen of them behind a matted white beard. But for his blindness, his face might once have been princely; now he resembled nothing so much as a starved hawk.
While Gorgidas was taking the measure of the physical man, Viridovix penetrated at once to his essence. “A holy druid he is,” the Gaul said, “or more like one nor any priest I’ve yet found here.” Bowing to the hermit, he asked respectfully, “Was it your honor kept the Yezda from chasing us here?”
“A mere sending of phantoms,” the other said. Or so the Celt understood him; watching, he did not see the holy man’s lips move.
He was surprised when the hermit bowed to him in turn, then looked him full in the face with that disconcerting, empty gaze. He heard, “I have broken my rule of nonintervention in the affairs of the world for your sake; you carry too much destiny to be snuffed out in some tiny, meaningless scuffle.”
They were all looking at Viridovix now, the two Yrmido in bewilderment, Gorgidas appraisingly. He could feel the truth emanating from the man. So could Viridovix, who protested, “Me? It’s nobbut a puir lone Celt I am, trying to stay alive—for the which I maun thank you, now. But wish no geases on me.”
Gorgidas cut in, “What destiny do you speak of?” This was no time, he thought, for Viridovix to have an uncharacteristic fit of modesty.
For the first time the hermit showed uncertainty. “That I may not—and cannot—tell you. I do not see it clearly myself, nor is the outcome certain. Other powers than mine cloud my view, and the end, for good or ill, is balanced to within a feather’s weight. But without this stranger, only disaster lies ahead. Thus I chose to meddle in the ways of man once more, though this is but one of the two required pieces.”
“Och, a druid indeed,” Viridovix said, “saying more than he means. Is it so with your oracles, too, Greek?”
“Yes,” Gorgidas said, but he caught the nervousness in the Gaul’s chuckle.
Rakio spoke in the Yrmido language; with his gift of tongues, the holy man understood. Gorgidas caught only a couple of words; one was “Master,” the title priests of the Four Prophets bore. The physician waited impatiently for the hermit’s reply.
“I have made this hill my fortress against temptation since before the Yezda came,” he said, “seeking in negation the path the sweet Four opened to a better life ahead. But I failed; my faith tottered when the murderers swept out of the west and laid waste my land and my fellow believers with no sign of vengeance being readied against them. Often I wondered why I chose to remain alive in the face of such misery; how much easier it would have been to let go my fleshly husk and enjoy bliss forever. Now at last I know why I did not.”
He tottered forward to embrace Viridovix. The Celt had all he could do to keep from shying; not only was it like being hugged by a skeleton, but he did not think the holy man had washed himself since he took up his station a lifetime ago. Still worse, that confident touch told again of the holy man’s certainty about his fate. He was worse afraid than in any battle, for it tore his freedom from him as death never could.
He pulled away so quickly the hermit staggered. Mynto righted the old man, glaring at the Celt. “Begging your honor’s pardon,” Viridovix said grudgingly. He looked to his comrades. “Should we not be off with us the now, with the Yezda so befooled and all?”
They started to agree, but the holy man quivered so hard Viridovix thought he would shake himself to pieces. He grasped the Celt’s arm with unexpected strength. “You must not go! The fiends yet prowl all about, and will surely destroy you if you venture away. You must stay and wait before you try to return to your friends.”
Mynto and Rakio were convinced at once. Gorgidas shrugged at Viridovix’ unvoiced appeal. “Whatever else the man may be,” the physician pointed out, “we’ve found him wizard enough to outfox the Yezda. Dare we assume he doesn’t know what he’s talking about?”
“Put that way, nay,” the Gaul sighed, “but och, I wish we did.”
Had he known the wait would stretch through four days, Gorgidas would have taken his chances on the Yezda. With Mynto there, he did not feel easy with Rakio, the more so because Rakio seemed to enjoy teasing him by playing up to his onetime lover. Nor was Viridovix, kicking against what the holy man insisted was to be his destiny, any better company. The Gaul, by turns somber and angry, either moped about in moody silence or snarled defiance at the world.
That left the hermit. Gorgidas did his best to draw the man out, but he was as faith-struck as the most fanatical Videssian priest. The Greek learned more than he really wanted to know about the cult of the Four Prophets, as much by what the hermit did not say as by what he did. Like Rakio and Mynto, he never mentioned his god or gods, reckoning the divinity too sacred to pollute with words, but he would drone on endlessly about the Prophets’ attributes and aspects. Caught for once without writing materials, Gorgidas tried to remember as much as he could.
The first morning they were there, he asked the holy man his name, to have something to call him by. The hermit blinked, in that moment looking like an ordinary, perplexed mortal. “Do you know,” he answered, “I’ve forgotten.” He did not seem to mind when Gorgidas followed Rakio’s usage and called him “Master.”
He refused in horror to share the field rations the Greek and his comrades had with them. With ascetic zeal, he ate only the roots and berries he grubbed from the ground himself. His water came from the one well that had not fallen in since the dead city he lived in was abandoned. It was warm, muddy, and gave all four of his guests a savage diarrhea.
“No wonder the wight’s so scrawny,” Viridovix said, staggering up the hill after a call of nature. “On sic meat and drink I’d be dead in a week, beshrew me if I wouldn’t.”
Despite everything, though, the Celt did not urge his fellows to leave before the hermit said it was safe. For the first two days, Yezda constantly trotted past the mound. One band had a red-robed sorcerer with it. Gorgidas’ heart was in his mouth lest the wizard penetrate the defenses of the place, but he rode on.
When the holy man finally gave them leave to go, the physician felt he was being released from gaol. And, like a warden cautioning freed prisoners against new crimes, the hermit warned: “Ride straight for the main body of your companions and all will be well with you. Turn aside for any reason and you will meet only disaster.”
“We scarcely would do anything else,” Rakio remarked as the hillock grew smaller behind them. “In this flat, ugly land there precious few distractions are.” Perhaps seeking one, he winked at Mynto. Gorgidas ground his teeth and pretended not to see.
Following the Arshaum army did not rate the name of tracking. War’s flotsam was guide enough: unburied men and horses swelling and stinking under the merciless sun, trampled canal banks where scores of beasts had drunk, a burnt-out barn that had served as a latrine for a regiment, discarded boots, a broken bow, a stolen carpet tossed aside as too heavy to be worth carrying.
The four riders drove their horses as hard as they dared; the Arshaum, unburdened now by many allies, would be picking up the pace. They saw no Yezda, save as distant specks. “You had the right of it,” Viridovix admitted to Gorgidas. “Himself knew whereof he spoke. But for the draff and all, we might be cantering in the country.”
The next morning rocked their confidence in the hermit’s powers. Dust warned of the approaching column before it appeared out of the south, but they were in a stretch of land gone back to desert after the Yezda wrecked the local irrigation works, and the baked brown earth offered no cover. The column swerved their way.
“Out sword!” Viridovix cried, tugging his own free. “Naught for it but to sell oursel’s dear as we may.”
Mynto drew his saber, a handsome weapon with gold inlays on the hilt. He patted the empty boss on the right side of his saddle and said something to Rakio. “He wishes he had his spear,” Rakio translated. Irrepressible, he added an aside to Gorgidas: “It was a long one.”
“Oh, a pest take Mynto and his spear, and you with them,” the physician snapped. He could feel his sweat soaking into the leather grip of his gladius. The shortsword fit his hand as well as any surgical knife, and he was beginning to gain some skill with it. But the size of the oncoming troop only brought despair at the prospect of a hopeless fight.
He could see men in armor through the swirling dust, their lances couched and ready. What that meant escaped him until Viridovix let out a wordless yowl of glee and slammed his blade into its sheath. “Use the eyes of you, man,” he called to the Greek. “Are those Yezda?”
“No, by the dog!” Along with his comrades, Gorgidas booted his horse toward the Erzrumi.
Rakio identified them. “It is Gashvili’s band from Gunib.”
Though he kept shouting and waving to show the mountain men he was no enemy, trepidation stirred in Viridovix. Frightful oaths had bound Gashvili to ride with the Arshaum. If he was forsaking them, would he leave witnesses to tell of it? The Gaul did not draw his sword again, but he made sure it was loose in the scabbard.
His alarm spiked when the men of Gunib almost rode him and his companions down in spite of their cries of friendship. Only as the Erzrumi finally pulled up could he see them as more than menacing figures behind their lanceheads. They were reeling in the saddle, red-eyed with fatigue; every one was filthy with the caked dust of hard travel. Scraps of grimy cloth covered fresh wounds. Clouds of flies descended to gorge on oozing serum or new blood. Most of the troopers did not bother slapping them away.
“They’re beaten men,” the Celt said softly, in wonder. He looked in vain for Gashvili’s gilded scale-mail. “Where might your laird be?” he asked the nearest Erzrumi.
“Dead,” the fellow replied after a moment, as if he had to force himself to understand the Khamorth tongue Viridovix had used.
“The gods smile on him when he meets them, then. Who leads you the now?”
Vakhtang made his way through his men toward the newcomers. He surveyed them dully. “I command,” he said, but his voice held no authority. He was a million miles from the coxcomb who had come out to confront Arigh’s men in front of Gunib. His two-pointed beard made an unkempt tangle down the front of his corselet, whose gilding was marred by sword stroke and smoke and blood. The jaunty feather was long gone from his helm. Out of a face haggard and sick with defeat his eyes stared, not quite focused, somewhere past Viridovix’ right ear.
He was worse than beaten, the Gaul realized; he was stunned, as if clubbed. “What of your oath to Arigh?” he growled, thinking to sting the ruined man in front of him back to life. “Gone and left him in the lurch, have you now, mauger all the cantrips and fine words outside your precious castle?”
As lifelessly as before, Vakhtang said, “No. We are not forsworn.” But in spite of himself, his head lifted; he met Viridovix’ eyes for the first time. His voice firmed as he went on. “Arigh himself and his priest Tolui absolved us of our vow when the army began to break up.”
“Tell me,” Viridovix said, overriding cries of dismay from Gorgidas and then in turn from Rakio and Mynto as Vakhtang’s words were rendered into Videssian and the Yrmido speech.
The story had an appalling simplicity. Yezda in numbers never before seen had come rushing up out of the south to repeat on a vastly larger scale the pincer tactics they had tried in front of Dur-Sharrukin. They were better soldiers than the Arshaum had seen before, too; a prisoner boasted that Wulghash the khagan had picked them himself.
All the same, Arigh held his own, even smashing the Yezda left wing to bits against a tributary of the Tib. “No mean general, that one,” Vakhtang said, growing steadily more animated as he talked. But his face fell once more as newer memories crowded back. “Then the flames came.”
Viridovix went rigid in the saddle. “What’s that?” he barked. He jerked at a sudden pain in his hands. Looking down, he willed his fists open and felt his nails ease out of his flesh.
He did not need the Erzrumi’s description to picture the lines of fire licking out to split apart and trap their makers’ foes; Avshar had shown him the reality in Pardraya. As Vakhtang continued, though, he saw that Arigh had not had to face the full might of the spell. The noble said, “It was battle magic; our priests and shamans fought it to a standstill, in time. But it was too late to save the battle; by then our position was wrecked past repair. That was when your Arshaum gave us leave to go. The gods be thanked, we mauled the Yezda enough to make them think twice about giving chase.”
“Begging your pardon, I’m thinking you saw nobbut the second team,” Viridovix said. “Had himself been working the fires and not his mages—a murrain take them—only them as he wanted would ever ha’ got clear.”
“As may be,” Vakhtang said. A few of his men bristled at the suggestion that less than Yezd’s best had beaten them, but he was too worn to care. “All I hope now is to see Gunib again. I am glad we came across you; every sword will help on our way home.”
Gorgidas and then Rakio finished translating; silence fell. The two of them, the Gaul, and Mynto looked at each other. Wisdom surely lay with retreat in this well-armed company, but they could not forget the hermit’s warning that changing course would bring misfortune. In the end, though, that was not what shaped Viridovix’ decision. He said simply, “I’ve come too far to turn back the now.”
“And I,” Gorgidas said. “For better or worse, this is my conflict, and I will know how it ends.”
As nothing else had, their choice tore the lethargy from Vakhtang. “Madmen!” he cried. “It will end with an arrow through your belly and your bones baking under this cursed sun.” He turned to the two Yrmido, his hands spread in entreaty, and spoke to them in the Vaspurakaner tongue.
Mynto gave a sudden, sharp nod. He and Rakio got into a low-voiced dispute; from what little Gorgidas could follow, he was echoing Vakhtang’s arguments. Rakio mostly listened, indecision etched on his features. When at last he answered, Mynto’s lips thinned in distress. Rakio shifted to Videssian: “I will travel south. To disregard the words of the holy hermit after he his gifts from the Four has shown strikes me as the greater madness.”
When Mynto saw he could not sway his countryman, he embraced him with the tenderness any lover would give his beloved. Then he rode forward to join the men of Gunib. Vakhtang brought both fists to his forehead in grateful salute.
“I wish you the luck I do not expect you to have,” he told the other three. He waved to his battered company. They started north on their lathered, blowing horses, the jingle of their harness incongruously gay.
Soon dust and distance made Mynto impossible to pick out from the men of Gunib around him. Rakio let out a small sigh. “He is a fine, bold fellow, and I him will miss,” he said. His eyes danced at Gorgidas’ expression.
Viridovix caught the byplay. He rounded on the Ymrido. “Is it a puss-cat y’are, to make sic sport? Finish the puir wight off or let him be.”
“Will you shut up?” Gorgidas shouted, scarlet and furious.
Laughing, Rakio looked sidelong at the Gaul. “You are sure it is not jealousy?” He went on more seriously: “Should I tell Mynto all my reasons for going with you two? That only would hurt him to no purpose.”
Having reduced both his companions to silence, he set out south along the trail Vakhtang’s men had left. They followed. Neither met the other’s eye.