«Good,» she said. «I'm supposed to. Isn't that what they call wifely duty?»
He smiled. «No, that's something else.» She tossed her head, flipping her black curls back from her face. «That's not a duty. Duties you endure. That—»
It was enjoyable, not least because she didn't look on it as a duty; he thought sadly of Niphone, who had looked on it so. Afterward, he slept soundly. The next morning, the army left Lyssaion, heading northwest.
II
Where the waters of the Xeremos reached, its valley was green and fertile. Where canals and underground channels in the style of those on Makuran's western plateau could not reach, it was desert. Here and there, the locals had thrown up walls of mud brick and stone, not against human foes but to hold encroaching sand dunes at bay. Here and there, the remains of such walls sticking up through sand told of fights that had failed.
This was the second time the farmers in the valley had seen the Videssian army sally forth to attack Makuran. The first time, two years before, they'd wavered between panic and astonishment; no Avtokrator had been seen in that out-of-the-way part of the Empire for centuries, if ever. They hadn't known whether the soldiers would plunder them of their few belongings. True, they and the soldiers owed allegiance to the same sovereign, but how often did that matter to soldiers?
Maniakes had kept his men from plundering back then, and also during the fall just past, when they'd withdrawn from the Thousand Cities by way of the Xeremos. Now the peasants waved from the fields instead of running from them.
When Maniakes remarked on that, Rhegorios said, «The farmers between the Tutub and the Tib won't be so glad to see us.»
«The peasants in the westlands—farmers and herders alike– haven't been glad to see the Makuraners, or to have their substance stolen, or to have to pay ruinous taxes to the King of Kings, or to have the way they worship deliberately disturbed to fuel feuds among them,» Maniakes returned.
«That's so, every word of it, cousin your Majesty brother-in-law of mine,» Rhegorios agreed, grinning one of his impudent grins. «But it won't make the peasants in the Land of the Thousand Cities glad to see us, no matter how true it is.»
«I don't want them to be glad to see us,» Maniakes said. «I want them to hate us so much—I want all of Makuran to hate us so much, aye, and to fear us so much, too—that they give over their war, give back our land, and settle down inside their own proper borders. If Sharbaraz offers to do that, as far as I'm concerned he's bloody well welcome to however many of the Thousand Cities that are left standing by then.»
He looked back over his shoulder. A good many of the wagons in the baggage train carried not fodder for the beasts or food for the men but stout ropes, fittings of iron and brass, and a large number of timbers sawn to specific lengths. The paraphernalia looked innocuous—till the engineers assembled the catapults from their component parts, which they could do much faster than most Makuraner garrison commanders realized.
The timbers that went into the siege engines were also useful in another way. Canals crisscrossed the flat floodplain between the Tutub and the Tib. To slow the Videssians, the Makuraners were not averse to opening the banks of the canals in their path and letting water flow out to turn roads and fields alike to mud. Plopped down into that mud, the timbers could make a passable way out of one that was not.
In a thoughtful voice, Rhegorios said, «I wonder what Abivard will try to do against us this year, now that he has some of the Makuraner boiler boys—» Videssian slang so named the fearsome Makuraner heavy cavalry, whose members did indeed swelter to the boiling point in the full armor that encased not only them but their horses, as well.'—to go with the infantry levies from the city garrisons.»
«I don't know.» Maniakes suspected he looked unhappy. He was certain he felt unhappy. «We would have done better the past two years if Sharbaraz had sent a worse general against us. I first got to know Abivard more than ten years ago now, and he was good then—maybe better than he knew, since he was just starting to lead campaigns. He's got better since.» His chuckle had a wry edge to it. «I hardly need say that, do I, since he's the one who conquered the westlands from us?»
«This army isn't so good as the one he used to do that,» Rhegorios said. «He hasn't got all the heavy horse with him, only a chunk of it, with the rest in the westlands or up in Vaspurakan. And do you know what? I don't miss the ones I won't see, not one bit I don't.»
«Nor I,» Maniakes agreed. They rode on in silence for a little while. Then he went on, «I wonder what Abivard thinks of me– how he plans his campaigns against me, I mean.»
«What you do—what you do that most people don't, I mean– is that you learn from your mistakes,» his cousin answered.
«Is that so?» Maniakes said. «Then why do I keep putting up with you?»
Rhegorios mimed being wounded to the quick, so well that his horse snorted and sidestepped under him. He brought it back under control, then said, «No doubt because you recognize quality when you see it.» That wasn't bragging, as it might have been from another man; Rhegorios, in fact, did not sound altogether serious. But the Sevastos continued in a more sober vein: «You do learn. Things that worked against you two years ago won't work now, because you've seen them before.»
«I hope so,» Maniakes said. «I know I used to rush ahead too eagerly, without looking to see what was waiting for me. The Kubratoi almost killed me on account of that, not long after I took the throne.»
«But you don't do that anymore,» Rhegorios said. «A lot of people keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. Take me, for instance: whenever I see a pretty girl, I fall in love.»
«No, you don't,» Maniakes said. «You just want to get your hands, or something, up under her tunic. It's not the same thing.»
«Without a doubt, you're right, O paragon of wisdom,» Rhegorios said with a comical leer. «And how many men ever learn that?»
He was laughing as he asked the question, which did not mean it wasn't a good one. «Eventually you get too old to care, or else your eyes get too bad to tell the pretty ones from the rest,» Maniakes replied.
«Ha! I'm going to tell my sister you said that.»
«Threatening your sovereign, are you?» Maniakes said. «That's lese majesty, you know. I could have your tongue clapped in irons.» This time, he leered at his cousin. «And if I do, the girls won't like you so well.»
Rhegorios stuck out the organ in question. It was easy to laugh now. The campaign was young, and nothing had yet gone wrong.
The Xeremos sprang from hilly country north and west of Lyssaion. Those same hills gave rise to the Tutub, which, with the Tib, framed the Land of the Thousand Cities. Instead of flowing south-east to the Sailors' Sea, the Tutub ran north through the floodplain till it emptied itself in the landlocked Mylasa Sea.
Having traveled quickly up the length of the Xeremos, Maniakes' army slowed in the rougher country that gave birth to the river. The soldiers had to string themselves out in long files to make their way along the narrow trails running through the hill country. A small force of Makuraner troops could have made life very difficult for the advancing imperials.
No such force, though, tried to block their advance. That roused Rhegorios' suspicions. «They might have held us up here for weeks if they really set their minds to it,» he said.
«Yes, but they might have had to wait for weeks to see if we were coming,» Maniakes replied. He waved to the poor, rock-ribbed country all around. «What would they eat while they were waiting?» Rhegorios grunted. As far as he was concerned, war meant fighting, nothing else but. He cared little for logistics. Maniakes could not make himself get excited about the details of keeping an army fed and otherwise supplied. But, whether those details were exciting or not, tending to them made the difference between campaigns that failed and those that won.
Maniakes went on, «You'd have to carry provisions not to starve in this country.» He exaggerated, but not by much. A handful of farmers plowed fields that often seemed to run nearly as much up and down as from side to side. A few herders pastured sheep on the hills. Again, because of the steepness of those hills, the black-faced animals often looked to be grazing on a slant. A few of the trees bore nuts. That was enough to keep the small local population going. An army that didn't carry its own supplies would have eaten the countryside empty in short order.
