A couple of days into the badlands, a scout came riding back toward the Avtokrator from up the track by which the army would be moving. He shouted, «Your Majesty, I've found the headwaters of the Tutub!»
«Good news!» Maniakes dug in the pouch he wore on his belt, pulled out a goldpiece, and tossed it to the soldier. Grinning, the man tucked away the coin. Maniakes wondered what the soldier would have done had he known the goldpiece was minted to a standard slightly less pure than the Videssian norm. So far as Maniakes knew, nobody outside the mint suspected that; it was one way of making his scanty resources stretch further. If he ever got the chance, he intended to return to the old standard as soon as he could Cheapening the currency was a dangerous game.
By the look on the scout's face, he wouldn't have minded too much. It was still one goldpiece more—well, actually, almost one goldpiece more—than he would have had otherwise.
«All downhill from now on, boys!» Maniakes called, which got a cheer from the soldiers who heard him. If that proved true of the campaign as well as the line of march, he would be well pleased. The next easy campaign he had as Avtokrator would be his first. The Makuraners, now, they'd had easy campaigns, seizing the westlands while Videssos, under the vicious and inept rule of Genesios, writhed in the throes of civil war like a snake with a broken back instead of coming together to resist them.
As the army made its way through the hill country toward the Land of the Thousand Cities, it found more and larger villages. It did not find more people in them. It found hardly any people in them at all. Scouts or herders must have brought word the Videssians were coming. If he'd had that word in good time, Maniakes would have fled before his army, too.
He ordered the villages burned. He sent cavalry squadrons out to either side of his line of march, with orders to burn the more distent villages, too. Since he'd begun campaigning in Makuran, he'd done his best to make the enemy feel the war as sharply as he could. Sooner or later, he reasoned, either Sharbaraz would get sick of seeing his land destroyed or his subjects would get sick of it and revolt against the King of Kings.
The only trouble was, it hadn't happened yet.
Almost imperceptibly, the hills leveled out toward the flat, canal-pierced, muddy soil of the floodplain between the Tutub and the Tib. Peering north and west, Maniakes could see a long, long way. The nearest of the Thousand Cities, Qostabash, lay ahead.
He'd bypassed Qostabash the autumn before. He'd been retreating then, with Abivard's army harrying him as he went. He hadn't enjoyed the luxury of a few days' time in which to stop and sack the place. He promised himself it would be different now.
Qostabash, like a lot of the Thousand Cities, stuck up from the smooth land all around it like a pimple sticking up from the smooth skin of a woman's cheek. It hadn't been built where it was for the sake of the hillock on which it perched. When it was first built, that hillock hadn't been there. But the Thousand Cities were old, old. They'd sprung up between the Tutub and the Tib before Videssos the city was a city, perhaps before it was even a village. Over the long stretch of years, their own rubble—collapsed walls and houses and buildings of mud brick, along with centuries of slops and garbage—had made a hill where none had been before.
Their walls were still brick, though now mostly of fired brick, the better to resist siege engines. Better resistance was not the same as good resistance. Maniakes looked toward Qostabash the way a hungry hound was liable to look toward a butcher's shop.
But, as he approached, he discovered the town was not so defenseless as he had hoped. Its walls had not improved since the year before. But having an army between it and the Videssians did make it harder to seize.
«Well, well,» Maniakes said. «Isn't that interesting?» Interesting was not the word he had in mind, but it was a word he could bring out without blistering everyone within earshot.
«They are getting better at reacting to us, aren't they?» Rhegorios said. «Year before last, they let us get halfway across the flood-plain to Mashiz before they did anything much against us, and last year we got to have some fun when we came down from Erzerum, too. Not this time, though.»
«No.» Maniakes squinted, trying to sharpen his eyesight. The Makuraners were still too far away for him to be sure, but– «That's a good-sized force they have there.»
«So it is,» Rhegorios agreed. «They can afford to feed a good-sized force here a lot more easily than they could in the hill country.» Maybe he'd been paying attention to logistics after all. He glanced toward Maniakes. «Do we try to go through them or around them?»
«I don't know yet,» Maniakes answered. Hearing those words pass his lips was a sign of how far he'd come since the ecumenical patriarch had proclaimed him Avtokrator of the Videssians. He didn't charge ahead without weighing consequences, as he had only a few years before. «Let's see what the scouts have to say. When I know what's in front of me, I'll have a better chance of making the right choice.»
Off rode the scouts, down toward the waiting Makuraner army. The rest of the Videssian force followed the outriders.
Maniakes wished he had some better way than eyes alone of looking at the enemy army. His eyes didn't tell him so much as he would have wished, and he didn't altogether trust what they did tell him. But magic and war did not mix; the passions war engendered made sorcery unreliable. And so he waited for the scouts. He knew more than a little relief when one of them came riding back and said, «Your Majesty, it looks to be mostly an infantry army. They have some horsemen—a few rode out to skirmish with us and hold us away from the foot soldiers—but no sign of the boiler boys from the field army.»
«I thought I saw the same thing from here,» Maniakes said. «I wasn't sure I believed it. No boiler boys, eh? Isn't that interesting?» Now he'd used it twice when he meant something else. «Where is the heavy cavalry, then? Abivard's gone and done something sneaky with it. I don't like that.» He didn't like it at all. Not knowing where your enemy's best troops were made you look over your shoulder all the time.
He looked over his shoulder now. No force of heavy Makuraner cavalry came thundering out of the hills behind him. Had they been there, he would have discovered them.
Rhegorios rode up to hear what the scout had to say. He tossed his head «Well, cousin your Majesty brother-in-law of mine, I'll ask you the same question again: what do we do now?»
«If you were Abivard, what would you do with the field army?» Maniakes replied, answering question with question.
«If I were Abivard,» Rhegorios said slowly, thinking as he spoke, «I wouldn't know whether we were coming up from Lyssaion or down from Erzerum. I would know I could move a cavalry force faster than I could a bunch of foot soldiers. I could use infantry to slow down those cursed Videssians—» He grinned at Maniakes.'—as soon as they got into the Land of the Thousand Cities, while I stayed back somewhere in the middle of the country so I could get to wherever I was going in a hurry.»
«Yes, that makes good sense,» Maniakes said, and then, after a moment's reflection, «in fact, it makes better sense than anything I'd thought of myself. It tells me what needs doing, too.» «That's good,» his cousin said. «What does need doing?»
Maniakes spoke with decision, pointing ahead toward the drawn-up Makuraner army. «I don't want to get bogged down fighting foot soldiers. If I do, I won't be able to maneuver the way I'd want to when Abivard comes after me. I want to beat the real Makuraner army, break past it, and strike for Mashiz. Abivard kept me from doing that last year. I don't aim to let him keep me from doing it again.»
«Been a good many years since an Avtokrator of the Videssians sacked Mashiz,» Rhegorios agreed in dreamy tones. Then he turned practical once more: «So you won't want to engage these fellows or to attack Qostabash, then? We'll get around them and look for more rewarding targets?»
«That's the idea,» Maniakes said. «Foot soldiers have trouble engaging us unless we choose to let 'em. I don't choose that here. Let them chase us. If they get out of line doing it, we double back and punish them. If they don't, we leave them eating our dust.»
Horns relayed his commands to the Videssian horsemen. In line of battle, they rode past the Makuraner army at a distance of about half a mile. That was plenty close to let his men hear the enemy shouting at them and probably calling them a pack of cowards for not coming closer and fighting.
To give the Makuraners something to yell about, he sent a few squadrons of scouts close enough to ply the mostly unarmored infantry with arrows. The enemy shot back. They put a lot more arrows in the air than had his scouts, but to less effect: they were aiming at small, armored moving targets. A couple of horses went down and one scout pitched from the saddle with an arrow in the face, but the Videssians gave better than they got.
The Makuraners also Cried to use their small force of cavalry to slow down the Videssians so their infantry
