called him stupid. He must have known we were coming back to the Land of the Thousand Cities this year. He didn't try to stop us by seizing Lyssaion. He couldn't stop us from landing up in Erzerum and heading south. If he knew we were coming, why isn't he here to meet us? That's what I want to know.»
«It is a proper question, an important question, your Majesty,» Bagdasares agreed gravely. «It is also a question to which my magic can give you no good answer. May I ask a question of my own in return?»
«Ask,» Maniakes told him. «Anything you can do to let Phos' light into what looks like Skotos' darkness would be welcome.» He drew the good god's sun-circle above his heart.
Bagdasares also sketched the sun-circle, saying, «I have no great and wise thoughts to offer, merely this: if, for whatever reason, Abivard chose to absent himself from the land between the Tutub and the Tib, should we not punish him for his error by doing all the harm we can in these parts?»
«That's what we've been doing,» Maniakes said. «That's what I aim to go on doing. If Abivard wants to go haring off on some business of his own, let him. Makuran will suffer on account of it.»
«Well said, your Majesty.»
Maniakes did not bother answering that. Everything he'd said made perfect sense—and not just to him, if Bagdasares had seized on it so readily. He'd told himself as much a good many times before he'd come seeking Bagdasares' sorcerous counsel. But if Abivard wasn't stupid, why had he left the almost certain scene of this year's action? What reason had he found good enough for him to do such a thing?
«No way to tell,» Maniakes murmured. Alvinos Bagdasares' eyebrows rose; no doubt he hoped to learn what was in Maniakes' mind. Not likely, not when Maniakes was far from sure himself. But whatever Abivard was up to, Maniakes had the feeling he'd find out, and that he wouldn't be overjoyed when he did.
As the Videssians did with temples to Phos, the Makuraners built shrines to the God not only in cities for the benefit of merchants and artisans but also out by the roadside in the country so peasants could pray and worship and then go back to work. Maniakes had been destroying those roadside shrines ever since he first entered the Land of the Thousand Cities. If nothing else, that inconvenienced the farmers, which in a small way would help the Videssian cause.
The God was usually housed in quarters less elaborate than Phos' temples. Some of the shrines were in the open air, with the four sides of the square altar facing in the cardinal directions, each one symbolizing one of the Makuraners' Four Prophets. As the Videssians came closer to Mashiz, the shrines grew more elaborate, as Maniakes had known to be the case from previous incursions into the land between the Tutub and the Tib.
And then, as the Videssian army approached the Tib, the soldiers came upon a shrine so extraordinary, they summoned the Avtokrator to see it. «We don't know what to do with it, your Majesty,» said Komentiolos, the captain of the company that had overrun the shrine. «You have to tell us, and before you can do you have to see it.»
«All right, I'll have a look,» Maniakes said agreeably, and dug his heels into Antelope's sides.
The shrine had walls and a roof. The walls were baked brick rather than plain mud brick, but that did not greatly surprise Maniakes: the Makuraners gave the God and the Four Prophets the best they had, as the Videssians did with Phos. The entranceway stood open. Maniakes looked a question to Komentiolos. The captain nodded. Maniakes went inside, Komentiolos following.
Maniakes' eyes needed a bit to adjust to the gloom within. There at the center of the shrine stood the usual foursquare Makuraner altar. Komentiolos ignored that, having seen its like many times before. He waved to the far wall, the one toward which the side of the altar honoring Fraortish, the eldest prophet, pointed.
Standing against that smoothly plastered wall was a statue of the God, the first such Maniakes had ever seen. The God was portrayed in the regalia of a Makuraner King of Kings. The sun and the moon were painted on the wall beside him in gold and silver. He held a thunderbolt in one hand and was posed as if about to hurl it against some miscreant. His plump face, mouth twisted into a rather nasty smile, said he would enjoy hurling it.
As far as Maniakes was concerned, Videssian craftsmen depicted Phos in a far more artistic and awe- inspiring way. Phos, now, Phos was portrayed as a god worth worshiping, very much unlike this petulant—
Abruptly, Maniakes realized the face the Makuraner sculptor had given the statue was not intended to be an idealized portrait of the God, as images of the lord with the great and good mind were rightly idealized. This portrait was intended to show the features of a man, and of a man the Avtokrator knew, even if he had not seen him for ten years and more.
Maniakes turned his head away from the statue. He did not want to look at it; even thinking of it gave him the feeling of having just taken a big bite of rotten meat.
«Isn't that the most peculiar excuse for a shrine you ever saw, your Majesty?» Komentiolos said. «There's a chamber back there with a lot of metal drums and stones, to make it sound like the statue of the God is thundering at whatever he's taken a mind to disliking.»
«It's not a statue of the God, or not exactly a statue of the God,» Maniakes answered. «What it is, exactly, is a statue of Sharbaraz King of Kings.»
For a moment, Komentiolos didn't understand. Then he did, and looked as sickened as Maniakes felt. «It's a statue of Sharbaraz King of Kings as the God,» he said, as if hoping Maniakes would tell him he was wrong.
However much Maniakes wished he could do that, he couldn't. «That's just what it is,» he said.
«But don't the Makuraners—» Komentiolos spread his hands in helpless disbelief. «—don't they think this is blasphemy, too?»
«I don't know. I hope so,» Maniakes told him. «But I do know one thing: Sharbaraz doesn't think it's blasphemy.»
Back when he'd known Sharbaraz, more than a decade before, the King of Kings—or, as he was then, the claimant to the title of King of Kings—would never have had such a building erected. But Sharbaraz-then was not Sharbaraz-now. Through all the intervening years, he'd been unchallenged sovereign of Makuran. Everyone had sought his favor. No one had disagreed with him. The result was… this.
Sketching the sun-circle over his heart, Maniakes murmured, «It could have been me.» The sycophancy in the court of Videssos was hardly less than that in the court of Makuran. Thanks to his father, Maniakes had taken with a grain of salt all the flattery he'd heard. Sharbaraz, evidently, had lapped it up and gone looking for more.
Komentiolos said, «Now that we've got this place, your Majesty, what do we do with it?»
«I wish I'd never seen it in the first place,» Maniakes said. But that was not an answer. He found something that was: «We bring some Makuraner prisoners in here, so they can see it with their own eyes. Then we let them go, to spread the tale as they will. After that, we let some of our soldiers see it, too, to give them the idea of what sort of enemy we're fighting. Then we let them wreck the statue. Then we let them wreck the building. Then we burn it. Fire purifies.»
«Aye, your Majesty. I'll see to all of that,» Komentiolos said. «It sounds good to me.»
None of it sounds good to me,» Maniakes said. «I wish we weren't doing it. I wish we didn't have to do it. By the good god, I wish this shrine had never been built.»
He wondered how Abivard, who had always fought him as one soldier against another, no more, no less, could bear to serve under a man who was coming to believe himself on a par with his god. He wondered whether Abivard knew this place existed and, if so, what he thought of it. He filed that last question away, as possibly worth exploring later.
First things first. «Gather up the prisoners and send them through here, quick as you can. Then turn our men loose on this place. The longer it stands, the greater the abomination.»
«You're right about that, your Majesty,» Komentiolos said. «I'll see to it, I promise you.»
«Good.» Maniakes tried to imagine portraying himself as Phos incarnate on earth. Absurd. If the good god didn't strike him down, his outraged subjects would. He hurried out of the shrine, feeling a sudden need for fresh, clean air.
Maniakes looked back toward the southeast, toward Lyssaion. He couldn't see the Videssian port now, of course. He couldn't even see the hills that were the watershed between the Xeremos and the Tutub. The only hillocks making the horizon anything but flat were the artificial ones upon which perched the Thousand Cities.
His chuckle was sheepish. Turning to Lysia, he said, «When I'm back in Videssos the city, I can't wait to get away. Once I am away, I wish I had news of what's going on there.»
«I don't miss the city,» Lysia said. «We haven't heard much from it the past couple of summers, and what news they did bring us here wasn't worth having.»
