Harry Turtledove [The V

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differences in way of life. "He right, too."
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"There's something to it," Marcus agreed, and smiled back. By Thorisin's
standards, though, Helvis hardly counted as excitable. The truce between her
and Scaurus, brittle at first, had firmed as winter passed. If there were
things they no longer spoke of, the tribune thought, surely that was a small
enough price to pay for peace.
Any peace with a price on it, part of his mind said for 'the hundredth time,
is too dearly bought. For the hundredth time, the rest of him shouted that
part down.
The plainsman had said something while he was in his reverie. "I'm sorry?"
The disdain was back on the nomad's face; what good was this fellow, if he
would not even listen? Scaurus felt himself flush. Speaking as if to an idiot
child, the Khamorth repeated, "You be ready to break camp, three days' time?
Thorisin, his men, so far behind me. I ride west meet them, bring here to you
to join. You be ready?"
Excitement boiled in the tribune. Three days' time, and he would be cut off
from the world no longer. Three days' time to break a camp that had housed his
men for a season? If the Romans could not do it, they did not deserve their
name.
"We'll be ready," he said.
The plainsmen swept a skeptical eye over ditch, palisade, and the townlet that
had grown up inside them. To him and his, getting ready to leave a place was a
matter of minutes, not hours or days. "Three days' time," he said once more.
He made it sound like a warning.
Without waiting for an answer, he wheeled his little horse and trotted away.
From his attitude, he had already wasted enough of this fine riding day on
fanner folk.
A Khatrisher posted at the eastern end of Aptos' valley waved his fur cap over
his head. Close by Marcus, Laon Pakhymer waved back to show the signal was
understood. Thorisin Gavras' outriders were in sight. The picket came
galloping back.
"Form up!" the tribune yelled. The buccinators' trumpets and comets echoed his
command. His foot soldiers, Romans and newcomers together, quick-marched to
their positions behind the nine manipular standards, the signa. Even after a
year and a half without it, Scaurus still missed the legionary eagle his
detachment had not rated.
Beside the infantry assembled the Khatrisher horsemen. Pakhymer did not try to
form them into neat ranks. They looked like what they were: irregulars, longer
on toughness than order.
Most of Aptos' population lined the road into town. Fathers carried small boys
and girls pickaback so they could see over the crowd Phos alone knew when next
an Emperor, even one with so uncertain a right to that title, would come this
way.
From the talk he'd heard since the Khamorth scout appeared, Marcus knew half
the rustics were wondering whether the hooves of Thorisin's horse would touch
the ground. Those who knew better, like Phorkos' widow Nerse, were there, too.
"Ahhh!" said the townsmen. Still small in the distance, the first pair of
Thorisin Gavras' cavalry came into view. They carried parasols, and Scaurus
knew them for the Videssian equivalent of Rome's lictors with axes and bundles
of fasces, the symbols that power resided here. Another pair followed, and
another, until a dozen bright silk flowers bloomed ahead of Gavras' men the
full imperial number, right enough.
Straining his eyes, the tribune saw Thorisin himself close behind them,
mounted on a fine bay horse. Only his scarlet boots made any personal claim to
rank; the rest of his gear was good, but no more than that. Not even assuming
the imperium could make him fond of its trappings.
His army rumbled down the road behind him, almost all cavalry, as was the
Videssian way. Of all the nations the Empire knew, only the Halogai preferred
to fight afoot; Roman infantry tactics had been an eye-opener here. Gavras'
troops were about evenly divided between Videssians and Vaspurakaners no
wonder he had coined money to the "princes'" standard of weight.
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"Good-looking men," Gaius Philippus remarked, and Scaurus nodded. The
unconscious arrogance with which they rode said volumes about the confidence
Thorisin had drilled into them. After the disaster in front of Maragha, that
was no mean feat. Marcus' spirits rose.
He tried to gauge how many warriors accompanied Gavras as they came toward
him. Maybe a thousand in the valley so far... now two ... three thousand no,
probably not that many, for they had a good-sized baggage train in their
midst. Say twenty-five hundred.
A good, solid first division, the tribune thought. In a moment the rest of the
army would show itself, and then he would have a better idea of its real
capabilities. Thorisin spotted him in front of his assembled troops and gave
him quite an un-imperial wave. Wanned inside, he waved back.
It was certainly taking enough time for the next unit's van to appear. Marcus
reached up to scratch his head, felt foolish as fingers rasped on the iron of
his helmet.
"Hercules!" Gaius Philippus muttered under his breath. "I think that's all of
them."
Marcus wanted to laugh or cry, or, better, both at once. This was Thorisin
Gavras' all-conquering horde, with which he would reclaim Videssos from the
usurper and drive the Yezda out of the Empire? Counting Pakhymer's few
hundred, he had almost this many men himself.
Yet as Gavras' parasol bearers rode past the assembled inhabitants of Aptos,
they bowed low to give honor to the Emperor. And as Thorisin brought his
forces up to the troops Marcus had drawn up in review, Laon Pakhymer went to
his knees and then to his belly in a full proskynesis, giving him formal
reverence as sovereign. So did Gagik Bagratouni and Zeprin the Red, who stood
near Scaurus.
The Roman, true to his homeland's republican ways, had never prostrated
himself for Mavrikios. He did not do so now, contenting himself with a deep
bow. He remembered how furious the younger Gavras had been the first time he
failed to bend the knee to the Emperor. Now Thorisin reined in his horse in
front of the tribune and said with a dry chuckle, "Still stubborn as ever,
aren't you?"
Directly addressed, Marcus lifted his head to study the Emperor at close
range. Thorisin still sat his stallion with the same jauntiness that had
endeared him to Videssos' citizenry when he was but Mavrikios' brother, still
kept the ironic gleam in his eye that made one ever uncertain how seriously to
take him. But there was a harder, somehow more finished look to him than the
Roman remembered; it was very much like Mavrikios come again.
"Your Majesty, would you recognize me any other way?" Scaurus asked. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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