Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (6 page)

At the sight of the injured legionaries, Vourtzes made a choked sound of dismay. In spite of the soldiers with him, Marcus thought, he did not know much of war.

To the tribune’s surprise, the lean priest who had prayed at the Romans stooped beside a litter. “What’s he mucking about for?” Gorgidas said indignantly. “I want another doctor, not spells and flummeries.”

“You may as well let him do what he wants,” Gaius Philippus said. “Sextus Minucius won’t care.”

Looking at the moaning legionary, Marcus thought the senior centurion was right. A bandage soaked with blood and pus was wrapped over a spear wound in Minucius’ belly. From the scent of ordure, Scaurus knew his gut had been pierced. That sort of wound was always fatal.

Gorgidas must have reached the same conclusion. He touched Minucius’ forehead and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “A fever you could cook meat over. Aye, let’s see what the charlatan does for him. Poor bastard can’t even keep water down, so poppy juice won’t do him any good either. With the dark bile he’s been puking up, at most he only has a couple of bad days left.”

The wounded soldier turned his head toward the sound of the Greek’s voice. He was a big, strapping man, but his features bore the fearful, dazed look Marcus had come to recognize, the look of a man who knew he was going to die.

As far as the Videssian priest was concerned, all the Romans but Minucius might have disappeared. The priest dug under the stinking bandages, set his hands on the legionary’s torn belly, one on either side of the wound. Scaurus expected Minucius to shriek at the sudden pressure, but the legionary stayed quiet. Indeed, he stopped his anguished thrashing and lay still in the litter. His eyes slid shut.

“That’s something, anyhow,” Marcus said. “He—”

“Hush,” Gorgidas broke in. He had been watching the priest’s face, saw the intense concentration build on it.

“Watch your mouth with the tribune,” Gaius Philippus warned, but
halfheartedly—not being in the chain of command, Gorgidas had more liberty than a simple solider.

“It’s all right—” Scaurus began. Then he stopped of his own accord, the skin on his arms prickling into gooseflesh. He had the same sense of stumbling into the unknown that he’d felt when his blade met Viridovix’. That thought made him half draw his sword. Sure enough, the druids’ marks were glowing, not brilliantly as they had then, but with a soft, yellow light.

Thinking about it later, he put that down to the magic’s being smaller than the one that had swept him to Videssos, and to his being on the edge of it rather than at the heart. All the same, he could feel the energy passing from the priest to Minucius. Gaius Philippus’ soft whistle said he perceived it too.

“A flow of healing,” Gorgidas whispered. He was talking to himself, but his words gave a better name to what the priest was doing than anything Marcus could have come up with. As with the strange stars here, though, it was only a label to put on the incomprehensible.

The Videssian lifted his hands. His face was pale; sweat ran down into his beard. Minucius’ eyes opened. “I’m hungry,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

Gorgidas leaped at him like a wolf on a calf. He tore open the bandages the priest had disturbed. What they saw left him speechless, and made Scaurus and Gaius Philippus gasp. The great scar to the left of Minucius’ navel was white and puckered, as if it had been there five years.

“I’m hungry,” the legionary repeated.

“Oh, shut up,” Gorgidas said. He sounded angry, not at Minucius but at the world. What he had just witnessed smashed the rational, cynical approach he tried to take to everything. To have magic succeed where his best efforts had been sure failures left him baffled, furious, and full of an awe he would not admit even to himself.

But he had been around Romans long enough to have learned not to quarrel with results. He grabbed the priest by the arm and frogmarched him to the next most desperately hurt man—this one had a sucking wound that had collapsed a lung.

The Videssian pressed his hands to the legionary’s chest. Again Marcus, along with his comrades, sensed the healing current pass from priest
to Roman, though this time the contact lasted much longer before the priest pulled away. As he did, the soldier stirred and tried to stand. When Gorgidas examined his wound, it was like Minucius’: a terrible scar, but one apparently long healed.

Gorgidas hopped from foot to foot in anguished frustration. “By Asklepios, I have to learn the language to find out how he does that!” He looked as though he wanted to wring the answer from the priest, with hot irons if he had to.

Instead, he seized the Videssian and hauled him off to another injured legionary. This time the priest tried to pull away. “He’s dying, curse you!” Gorgidas shouted. The cry was in his native Greek, but when Gorgidas pointed at the soldier, the priest had to take his meaning.

He sighed, shrugged, and stooped. But when he thrust his hands under the Roman’s bandages, he began to shake, as with an ague. Marcus thought he felt the healing magic begin, but before he could be sure, the priest toppled in a faint.

“Oh, plague!” Gorgidas howled. He ran after another blue-robe and, ignoring the fellow’s protests, dragged him over to the line of wounded soldiers. But this priest only shrugged and regretfully spread his hands. At last Gorgidas understood he was no healer. He swore and drew back his foot as if to boot the unconscious priest awake.

Gaius Philippus grabbed him. “Have you lost your wits? He’s given you back two you never thought to save. Be grateful for what you have—look at the poor wretch, too. There’s no more help left in him than wine in an empty jar.”

“Two?” Gorgidas struggled without success against the veteran’s powerful grip. “I want to heal them all!”

“So do I,” Gaius Philippus said. “So do I. They’re good lads, and they deserve better than the nasty ways of dying they’ve found for themselves. But you’ll kill that priest if you push him any more, and then he won’t be able to fix ’em at all. As is, maybe he can come back tomorrow.”

“Some will have died by then,” Gorgidas said, but less heatedly—as usual, the senior centurion made hard, practical sense.

Gaius Philippus went off to start the legionaries setting up camp for the night. Marcus and Gorgidas stood by the priest until, some minutes later, he came to himself and shakily got to his feet.

The tribune bowed lower to him than he had to Vourtzes. That was only fitting. So far, the priest had done more for the Romans.

That evening, Scaurus called together some of his officers to hash out what the legionaries should do next. As an afterthought, he added Gorgidas to Gaius Philippus, Quintus Glabrio, Junius Blaesus, and Adiatun the Iberian. When Viridovix ambled into the tent, he did not chase the Gaul away either—he was after as many different viewpoints as he could find.

Back in Gaul, with the full authority of Rome behind him, he would have made the decision himself and passed it on to his men. He wondered if he was diluting his authority by discussing things with them now. No, he thought—this situation was too far removed from ordinary military routine to be handled conventionally. The Romans were a republican people; more voices counted than the leader’s.

Blaesus raised that point at once. “It grates on me, sir, it does, to have to hire on to a barbarian king. What are we, so many Parthians?”

Gaius Philippus muttered agreement. So did Viridovix; to him, even the Romans followed their leaders too blindly. He and the senior centurion looked at each other in surprise. Neither seemed pleased at thinking along with the other. Marcus smiled.

“Did you see the way the local bigwig was eyeing us?” Quintus Glabrio put in. “To him,
we
were the barbarians.”

“I saw that too,” Scaurus said. “I didn’t like it.”

“They may be right.” That was Gorgidas. “Sextus Minucius would tell you so. I saw him in front of his tent, sitting there mending his tunic. Whatever these Videssians are, they know things we don’t.”

“Gaius Philippus and I already noticed that,” Marcus said, and mentioned the iron riding-aids and horseshoes on Tzimiskes’ mount. Glabrio nodded; he had spotted them too. So had Viridovix, who paid close attention to anything related to war. Blaesus and Adiatun looked surprised.

“The other problem, of course, is what happens to us if we don’t join the Videssians,” Glabrio said. The junior centurion had a gift for going to the heart of things, Scaurus thought.

“We couldn’t stay under arms, not in the middle of their country,” Gaius Philippus said with a reluctant nod. “I’m too old to enjoy life as a brigand, and that’s the best we could hope for, setting up on our own. There aren’t enough of us to go conquering here.”

“And if we disarm, they can deal with us piecemeal, turn us into slaves or whatever they do to foreigners,” Marcus said. “Together we have power, but none as individuals.”

Ever since they’d met Tzimiskes, he had been looking for a more palatable answer than mercenary service and failing to find one. He’d hoped the others would see something he had missed, but the choice looked inescapable.

“Lucky we are they buy soldiers,” Adiatun said. “Otherwise they would be hunting us down now.” As a foreign auxiliary, he was already practically a mercenary; he would not earn Roman citizenship till his discharge. He did not seem much upset at the prospect of becoming a Videssian instead.

“All bets are off if we find out where Rome is, though,” Gaius Philippus said. Everyone nodded, but with less hope and eagerness than Scaurus would have thought possible a few days before. Seeing alien stars in the sky night after night painfully reminded him how far from home the legionaries were. The Videssian priest’s healing magic was an even stronger jolt; like Gorgidas, the tribune knew no Greek or Roman could have matched it.

Gaius Philippus was the last one to leave Scaurus’ tent. He threw the tribune a salute straight from the drill fields. “You’d best start planning to live up to it,” he said, chuckling at Marcus’ bemused expression. “After all,
you’re
Caesar now.”

Startled, Marcus burst out laughing, but as he crawled into his bedroll he realized the senior centurion was right. Indeed, Gaius Philippus had understated things. Not even Caesar had ever commanded all the Romans there were. The thought was daunting enough to keep him awake half the night.

The market outside Imbros was established over the next couple of days. The quality of goods and food the locals offered was high, the prices
reasonable. That relieved Marcus, for his men had left much of their wealth behind with the legionary bankers before setting out on their last, fateful mission.

Nor were the Romans yet in the official service of Videssos. Vourtzes said he would fix that as soon as he could. He sent a messenger south to the capital with word of their arrival. Scaurus noticed that Proklos Mouzalon disappeared about the same time. He carefully did not remark on it to Tzimiskes, who stayed with the Romans as an informal liaison despite Vourtzes’ disapproval. Faction against faction …

Mouzalon’s mission must have succeeded, for the imperial commissioner who came to Imbros ten days later to inspect the strange troops was not a man to gladden Vourtzes’ heart. No bureaucrat he, but a veteran warrior whose matter-of-fact competence and impatience with any kind of formality reminded Marcus of Gaius Philippus.

The commissioner, whose name was Nephon Khoumnos, walked through the semipermanent camp the Romans had set up outside Imbros’ walls. He had nothing but admiration for its good order, neatness, and sensible sanitation. When his inspection was done, he said to Marcus, “Hell’s ice, man, where did you people spring from? You may know the tricks of the soldier’s trade better than we do, you’re no folk we’ve set eyes on before, and you appear inside the Empire without seeming to have crossed the border. How does this happen?”

Scaurus and his officers had been spending every free moment studying Videssian—with Tzimiskes, with Vourtzes’ scribes, and with the priests, who seemed surprised the tribune wanted to learn to read and at how quickly he picked up the written language. After working with both the Roman and Greek alphabets, another script held no terrors for him. He found following a conversation much harder. Still, he was beginning to understand.

But he had little hope of putting across how he had been swept here, and less of being believed. Yet he liked Khoumnos and did not want to lie to him. With Tzimiskes’ help, he explained as best he could and waited for the officer’s disbelief.

It did not come. Khoumnos drew the sun-sign on his breast. “Phos!” he muttered, naming his people’s god. “That is a strong magic, friend Roman; you must be a nation of mighty sorcerers.”

Surprised he was not being laughed at, Marcus had to disagree. Khoumnos gave him a conspiratorial wink. “Then let it be your secret. That fat slug of a Vourtzes will treat you better if he thinks you may turn him into a newt if he crosses you.”

He went on, “I think, outlander, the Imperial Guards could have use for such as you. Maybe you can teach the Halogai”—he named the blond northerners who made up Vourtzes’ honor guard, and evidently much of the Emperor’s as well,—“that there’s more to soldiering than a wild charge at anything you don’t happen to like. And I tell you straight out, with the accursed Yezda—may Skotos take them to hell!—sucking the blood from our westlands, we need men.”

Khoumnos cocked an eye to the north. Dirty gray clouds were gathering there, harbingers of winter storms to come. He rubbed his chin. “Would it suit you to wait until spring before you come to the city?” he asked Marcus. By the slight emphasis he laid on “the,” Scaurus knew he meant the town of Videssos itself. “That will give us time to be fully ready for you …”

Time to lay the political groundwork, Marcus understood him to mean. But Khoumnos’ proposal suited him, and he said so. A peaceful winter at Imbros would allow his men a full refit and recovery, and let them learn their new land’s ways and tongue without the pressure they would face in the capital. When Khoumnos departed, they were on the best of terms.

Rhadenos Vourtzes, Marcus noted, was very polite and helpful the next few days. He was also rather anxious and spent much of the time he was near the Roman looking back over his shoulder. Scaurus liked Nephon Khoumnos even more.